How long until we get to Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Someone asked Elon Musk when we’d be landing people on Mars.

His answer: 2029. In seven years.

I’d like to know when everyone finally realizes that Musk is completely out of touch with reality. The current big project his hired engineers are working on is the Starship (such hubris…) heavy lifter — they’re making bigger and bigger rockets, and that is supposed to take off this year. But that isn’t even touching the real problem of getting people to Mars. It’s a 7-9 month one-way trip! 21 months if you plan to bring them back home…not that I’m at all confident that Musk would care about that, he’s not going, after all. He’s nowhere near working out the problems of sustained life support in an incredibly hostile environment, where the crew would be completely isolated from any chance of aid, and where they’ll be soaking in radiation. No one is going to be ready in seven years. The tech won’t be here.

I’ll remind you that we got to the Moon six times, with astronauts hopping around for a few days each time, and that was it. We haven’t gone back. It’s doable, I could imagine people could make a few more trips in the 2030s to the Moon, but that’s trivial in comparison to going to Mars.

I’ll also remind you of the history of Musk’s grand projects. He was going to solve traffic with tunnels, remember.

It turned out to be a pitiful short, but expensive, tube that a few cars at a time could drive through. When Musk promises, expect something far short of the dream.

He might be vaguely aware of that.

That first comment is a lie. He doesn’t love humanity — maybe he has a few idealistic fantasies about his vague vision of “humanity”, but he’s an out of touch billionaire who is totally isolated from the herd. That’s why he hates traffic and mass transit, he wants to live in a bubble.

That last bit though, that oh-look-a-squirrel moment, is perfect. Yeah, I believe he’s capable of marketing pez dispensers.

I get email (Phillip edition)

If you experience difficulties typing exclamation points in a comment here, it’s because Phillip Jones has been hogging them all. I just discovered a vast stagnant pool of missives from him deep in the bowels of my university email account, which has a lot of filters on it to prioritize messages from students and colleagues, so email from outside those groups tend to languish in neglect there. He seems to go on a rage jag every few weeks and dump a lot of repetitive invective, with numerous exclamation points, typically including links to his own posts on Twitter or Facebook, as if they are authoritative sources.

But lately he’s raging on Gettr, the right-wing pro-Trump Twitter look-alike, because his Twitter account has been suspended. Poor man. At least his emails are getting shorter.

https://gettr.com/post/p1a8bdj013f https://gettr.com/post/p1a8cis02f9 I’m going to contact the police and ask them to arrest you! And I’m going to contact UNMM and ask the to fire you!

Now I want to ask my local police if they’ve been contacted by a very emphatic kook — that was sent last night, so if the cops knock on my door and drag me away in handcuffs today, you’ll know why.

He’s going to have a tough time contacting my employer at UNMM, though. I don’t even know what that is!

Jordan Peterson can’t see any holes in his argument

But I can!

The Bible is true in a very strange way. It’s true in that it provides the basis for truth itself. And so it’s like a metatruth, without it there couldn’t even be the possibility of truth. And so maybe that’s the most true thing, the most true thing isn’t some truth per se. It’s that which provides the precondition for all judgements of truth. I can’t see any holes in that argument. And I can’t see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either, because I think we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem.

Oh, yeah, the familiar is/ought problem. I agree with the last sentence above, but what I don’t see is Peterson’s solution. So we should derive ethical direction from a collection of contradictory, incoherent myths in a specific holy book? Why should I accept the precondition of the Bible’s rules instead of some other holy book, or instead of a framework of empiricism? That’s all he’s saying, is that ethical action requires a standpoint and a goal, but he doesn’t even try to justify the mish-mash of primitive ideas in the Bible as that good perspective needed to drive ethical behavior.

Why should I consider the ravings of a Jungian weirdo with bizarre dietary beliefs to be representative of a “scientific perspective”?

In his tweet, he seems to be claiming that “the west” should have a different precondition for truth than the rest of the world. Is this relativism? Or maybe it’s post-modernism. I have no idea what philosophical mumbo-jumbo he’s drawing this claim from — I think it might just be what you get emerging from a drug-addled, overly-entitled brain.

Nice suit, though. It drapes well even when its contents are empty.

Quite possibly the worst commencement speech ever

The students of the University of Wyoming deserved better. Their commencement speaker was an awful Republican who said stupid things.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) was resoundingly booed on Saturday while giving a commencement address at the University of Wyoming after she said it is a “fundamental scientific truth” that there can only be males and females.

“There are those in government who believe not that the creator endowed us with inalienable rights … but that government created those rights,” Lummis said in her speech. “And the government should redefine those rights, including our rights to freedom of speech, religion, property, assembly and to keep and bear arms. Even fundamental scientific truths — such as the existence of two sexes, male and female — are subject to challenge these days.”

Students erupted in boos and jeers after that last sentence — and they continued on for nearly 30 seconds as Lummis stood awkwardly smiling onstage.

You can watch the moment here, starting right around the 49:40 mark.

Good for the students booing her. She seems to think that Jesus created “rights”, that they weren’t the product of human beings writing rules down. She thinks “two sexes” is a scientific truth, when the science she excludes and doesn’t understand says that sex is much more complicated and diverse than she imagines.

If you just listen to that short segment, though you’ll miss the other lunacies in her speech. A minute or two before that, she was plugging Bitcoin. After her “two sexes” bit, she talks about her favorite contemporary non-fiction author, who is…Eric Metaxas? Well, there’s the problem right there. She thinks a conservative evangelical pundit who writes children’s books supporting Donald Trump, with titles like Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp, who writes bad biographies praising Christian leaders, whose writing is full of nothing but god-talk, who is an anti-vaxxer, is an example of a non-fiction author.

Lummis is a deluded, ignorant fool. Wyoming is a conservative state, so I can understand how she got elected, but I used to expect a university to promote just the best and brightest, and the University of Wyoming failed on that point.

Also, as of February of this year, Lummis owns about $200,000 worth of Bitcoin. I don’t know what that’s worth now (I hope much less), but using a commencement speech to shill for your personal profit is kind of gross.

Bloody Republicans

I guess today we all get to learn about “replacement theory”, which isn’t a legitimate theory but more a reactionary conspiracy theory held by kooks. You know, big name, rich kooks like Tucker Carlson.

The “great replacement” theory has been a favorite of Carlson’s for some time now. This particular paranoid hypothesis is deeply rooted in neo-Nazi and other white nationalist circles. A cabal of rich Jewish people, the theory holds, has conspired to “replace” white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control. Carlson doesn’t actually say “Jews,” and generally blames the sinister plan on Democrats, socialists or unspecified “elites,” but otherwise has kept the conspiracy theory intact. (Antisemitism remains the mix by singling out individual Jewish people especially Soros, as the alleged ringleaders.) It’s not like Carlson only invokes this narrative on occasion. As Media Matters researcher Nikki McCann Ramirez has documented, Carlson is obsessed with this idea that the people he calls “legacy Americans” — a not-so-veiled euphemism for white Christians of European ancestry — are under siege from shadowy forces flying the banner of diversity. He uses anodyne terms like “demographic change” to make the point, but has gotten bolder more recently, using the word “replacement” to make it even clearer that he’s borrowing his ideas from the white-supremacist fringe.

According to a New York Times analysis, in fact, Carlson has invoked the “great replacement” theory in over 400 episodes of his show, one of the most popular cable news shows in the country.

We have to remember, though, that it’s not just Carlson — getting him canceled wouldn’t change the fact that he has a huge audience of gullible Average Americans who all lean racist. He ought to be fired, of course, but we’ve got to somehow reach those people whose brains he has tainted. Before they kill us.

Rolling Stone also explains what “replacement” means in the minds of racists.

Five years ago, when white supremacists walked down the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and carrying tiki torches, few people understood their intent – the fact that they were referring to replacement theory. The idea seemed outlandish, even incomprehensible; at the time, it was a fairly obscure rallying cry, based around a 2012 book by French novelist Renaud Camus fearmongering about a nonwhite-majority Europe, absorbed into the fetid stew of white-supremacist cant, where it acquired a vicious antisemitism. For many white supremacists, it is Jews who are orchestrating the “reverse colonization,” as Camus put it, of white countries, in order to more easily manipulate a nonwhite and therefore more malleable general populace. In Gendron’s manifesto, after explaining in detail why he picked the particular supermarket he did — it was in a majority-Black neighborhood with a majority-Black clientele — he felt the need to explain why he did not choose to attack Jews. “[Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now, it is a matter of survival we destroy them first,” he wrote, before listing his weaponry in detail with price points included — a manual for future murders. While Gendron’s choice to engage in mass slaughter puts him on the radical fringe of those who enforce their beliefs with bullets, and his overt antisemitism differs slightly from vaguer blame of “elites,” “Democrats” and “globalists,” his fixation on white birthrates and demographic change are neither fringe nor particularly unusual. The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.

The Washington Post chose to talk about a Southern Democrat, Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator who pushed the same notion. I don’t think it was to place equal blame on both parties (especially since a Southern Democrat in the 1940s was equivalent to any Republican in the years since Reagan) but to point out that even the most conservative people in the country found him repugnant.

But while the great replacement theory has inspired horrific violence in the past five years, it’s a lot older than that. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization.

Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat, had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History.

An equal-opportunity racist, he addressed some of his letters with slurs against Italians and Jews, depending on the recipient. But the bulk of his loathing and fear was reserved for Black Americans, as spelled out in his 1947 book “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.”

Despite the fact that he was despised, though, the only thing that expelled him from the senate was oral cancer and death. I can’t sit here and wish the same would happen to Carlson — cancer is too evil.

I can sit here and say that “replacement theory” is stupid. It draws on the conceit that your personal immortality is built on your children, that biology is destiny, that when you procreate, you are creating little copies of yourself who will have the same goals as yourself. It doesn’t work that way, as anyone with kids can tell you. As I explain to students every year, mitosis is a process that allows a cell to perpetuate itself and make identical copies. We don’t reproduce by mitosis, though, but by meiosis…and what meiosis does is generate diversity, and the fusion of two gametes produces more diversity. There is no white race that is going to be preserved if you repudiate miscegenation. That reduces the pool of genes your progeny can draw from, and isn’t going to help you propagate, it’s just going to delay the mingling of your genes to a later generation which can see the folly of your racist schemes.

Also, I don’t share much in common culturally with the kinds of white people who believe in “replacement theory”. I sure hope my kids don’t marry any of them!

Unfortunately, the Republicans of today have picked up the banner of “replacement theory” and are running with it. It’s just another example of conservatives losing touch with reality.

That’s an interesting way to lose tenure

Michael Palmer was an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo who was promoting some seriously cranky conspiracy theories. Here he is explaining that the pandemic was fake, that the virus was artificial and was supposed to be more lethal, that the tests were all fake, the vaccines are toxic, and that the entire scientific/medical literature has been corrupted. He’s a loon.


Palmer.mp4 from Joe Smith on Vimeo.

But, you know, professors are allowed to spout nonsense — it’s all part of the principle of academic freedom. Sure what he’s saying is complete bullshit, but you can’t get fired over that.

On the other hand, announcing that you will not follow any of the safety regulations set by the university is substantive grounds for concern.

This letter is to inform you that I categorically refuse to comply with any of the COVID vaccine-related mandates imposed on its employees by the University of Waterloo:

  1. I will not declare my COVID vaccination status, although you may be able to guess (see also point 3 below).
  2. I will not attend any of the virtual COVID re-education camps organized by UW’s or the province’s quack doctors and public health shamans in-chief. As an MD with board certification in medical microbiology, I consider myself sufficiently informed on the subject.
  3. I will not let myself be injected with any of the ineffective and poisonous concoctions that are misrepresented to the public as COVID vaccines.
  4. I will not ask for any “accommodation” or “exemption,” because doing so would only legitimize the lawless measures imposed by UW officials.
  5. I will not play for time by asking for medical leave due to distress or anxiety. I thankfully am in good health and retain my usual capacity for work.

I fully expect that my decision will result in sanctions against me, as spelled out in the weekly reminder so thoughtfully sent out by “UW Communications:”

Expectations met: he has been fired. Good riddance!

Also, an interesting addition from Jeffrey Shallit:

Palmer wrote a whole book on it, which you can read online. I don’t understand why it would have been faked, since we clearly had the technology, horrible as it is, and the US had clearly shown no hesitation in creating massive civilian casualties. I skipped to the end of his book to find his rationale…and it’s all a gigantic failed conspiracy to create one world government, just like the 9/11 attacks, which, by the way, were actually perpetrated by the CIA and Mossad. Did you know Oppenheimer came from a Jewish family, but he seems to have been preoccupied with oriental religious ideas? Also, Japan colluded in the effort to fake the atomic bomb.

Firing Palmer was clearly a win:win for the University of Waterloo. Again, you can’t fire a tenured professor for writing a schlocky book about an imaginary conspiracy theory, but when you proudly announce that will flout all health precautions, it’s goodbye Michael. He’s not going to get another job as a chemist anywhere, but at least he has now achieved martyrdom and will be hopping on the grifter’s gravy train.

Seriously, Georgia? Is this the man you want representing you?

Herschel Walker is trying to win the Republican nomination to the senate from Georgia. He’s popping into churches to reach his electorate.

Ooops, wrong clip.

He actually said that. Walker trotted out the most busted-ass, dead stupid, ignorant pony in their whole stable of broken-on-arrival, crippled, brain-damaged nags the creationists have, and the pastor praised him for getting too smart for his audience.

At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not? Walker asked Chuck Allen, lead pastor of Sugar Hill Church, during Sunday’s event.

Every time I read or hear that, I think to myself, ‘You just didn’t read the same Bible I did,’ Allen replied.

Walker continued: Well, this is what’s interesting, though. If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.

You know, now you’re getting too smart for us, Herschel, Allen responded.

“You know, morons,” I finished for him.

He’s probably going to win the nomination.

The standard of humor on YouTube must be really low

A guy decided to do a “prank” in a university classroom, I presume to get clicks. I was curious to see the level of humor behind this prank, and here it is:

He walks into a lecture hall as if he is an enrolled student (he isn’t), pulls out a typewriter, and starts banging on it while occasionally yelling at the professor to speak up.

After leaving the lecture hall to retrieve his typewriter, Adams then entered the room a second time. He continued to type loudly and shouted, “Professor can you repeat that last part real quick?” A woman speaking from the front of the room, whom The Harvard Crimson identified as a professor named Hopi E. Hoekstra, could be seen telling Adams, “You’re being incredibly disrespectful and incredibly disruptive of this class.”

Adams’ bag and typewriter were confiscated again by the professor, and when Adams left the room, he was told by a second man that university police had been called to the scene.

Adams could then be seen walking outside the building when he encountered a man who appeared to be a campus police officer. The man asked Adams if he was a student at Harvard. When Adams said he wasn’t, the man said, “You shouldn’t enter any Harvard buildings if you’re not affiliated.”

The Harvard Crimson reported that Berry asked staff to call the Harvard University Police Department, who arrived after the YouTuber had left the lecture hall.

At the end of the video, Adams said, “I feel like that went as horrible as it could have and also as best as it could have,” adding, “I literally didn’t do nothing. I mean, I guess I was being annoying, but I’m always annoying.”

That’s it. Is that funny? It sounds like a guy disrupting a class, nothing more. It barely even constitutes a “prank”.

I found his video about this “prank” on YouTube.

3 million views.

Fuck me. It’s just monetized assholery.

Texas is racing Florida to the bottom of the slime pit

While Florida is eager to out vulnerable kids, the Texas Attorney General has decided to deny them health care.

Attorney General Ken Paxton has issued a new interpretation of state law that says medical care for transgender children is abuse, a dramatic change contrary to medical standards that could make Texas one of the most aggressive states in targeting trans youth access to health care.

On Monday, Paxton issued an opinion stating his office believes gender-affirming health care for transgender youth – including common treatments like hormone therapy and puberty blockers – is a form of child abuse. The move comes despite opposition from the top medical and child welfare groups, who for months have urged Paxton not to take this step.

That last bit…yes, all the doctors and experts say this is a bad move, but Texas Republicans are going to go ahead and do it anyway. Why? It’s politics.

Paxton’s opinion comes as Republican politicians, jockeying for power ahead of one of the most competitive re-election seasons in years, increasingly put transgender children under the spotlight.

How else can Republicans demonstrate their evil bona fides other than by torturing small children who are a little bit different from their aryan Christian ideal? They’ve got to make sure they keep the hater voter focused on supporting them.