Morris weather:
-23°C (-8°F), -36°C (-32°F) with windchill
It’s been this way all weekend. I lost all feeling in my fingers in the few minutes walking from the garage to my front door when I took off my gloves and was fumbling with my keys. Those dang metal keys are dangerous in this weather.
It’s hard to explain this to the people who actively avoid thinking, but the problem is global warming.
Stupid wiggily jet stream, letting all that cold air freeze me.
I feel like Libertarians have been keeping a low profile for the last few years, after learning that airing their ridiculous views gets them almost as much ridicule as “sovereign citizen” declarations (I think there is a lot of overlap between the two groups, though.) The existence of laws and regulations is a slap in their faces, and they believe that if only they could get rid of those meddling, interfering restrictions they could live in an Edenic paradise. So a group of independent thinkers decided to build a suburb in Arizona while ignoring the need to provide water. Water? It falls out of the sky and flows on the ground, we don’t need no stinkin’ pipelines. In the desert.
Arizona law requires homebuilders in active management areas to secure a reliable source of water expected to last at least a hundred years. However, there’s a loophole: the law only applies to subdivisions of six homes or more. You can guess what some clever developers do: they simply build lots of “subdivisions” each consisting of only five homes.
These so-called “wildcat” communities are all over the state. They’re miniature havens of freedom, perfect for stubbornly independent libertarians who want to get out from under the thumb of government bureaucrats telling them where they can and can’t live. Rio Verde Foothills is one such.
But then they made an awful discovery. It turns out, even when you find a way to skirt regulations about water… humans still need water.
Curse you, physical laws of the universe! How dare you disrupt my fantasies with harsh realities?
Suddenly, these people faced what every Libertarian dreads most: consequences.
…because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.
In my limited experience with life in the dry Eastern Washington state, residents have to pay attention to things like aquifers and reservoirs and irrigation, especially if you’re in a resource-intensive occupation like farming, and those are communal resources with strict rules about how they may be shared. Everyone has to work together to get access to the water they need. These developers decided to just ignore those rules for their own selfish gain.
But let’s not just blame Libertarians and developers. Everyone in the desert Southwest has to recognize that their environment imposes limitations on their growth.
A Jewish history teacher in Israel, Meir Baruchin, dared to criticize Israeli action in Gaza on Facebook.
“Horrific images are pouring in from Gaza. Entire families were wiped out. I don’t usually upload pictures like this, but look what we do in revenge,” said a message on 8 October, below a picture of the family of Abu Daqqa, killed in one of the first airstrikes on Gaza. “Anyone who thinks this is justified because of what happened yesterday, should unfriend themselves. I ask everyone else to do everything possible to stop this madness. Stop it now. Not later, Now!!!”
It was the day after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel, when the country was reeling from the slaughter of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 240.
He’s made many posts in a similar vein, but that’s all he has done, to rightly criticize the excesses of the Israeli government and their genocidal actions. That’s all. He has written comments in a public forum decrying bad, counterproductive policies and demanding an end to the violence.
You can imagine how that turned out in a fascist state.
An unlikely charge of intent to commit treason landed Meir Baruchin, a grey-haired, softly spoken history and civics teacher, in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s notorious “Russian Compound” prison in early November.
The evidence compiled by police who handcuffed him, then drove to his apartment and ransacked it as he watched, was a series of Facebook posts he’d made, mourning the civilians killed in Gaza, criticising the Israeli military, and warning against wars of revenge.
I bet you didn’t know that “STOP KILLING PEOPLE” was such a dangerous and seditious thing to say.
Ten days after that Facebook message, he was fired from his teaching job in Petach Tikvah municipality. Less than a month later he was in a high-security jail, detained to give police more time to investigate critical views he had never tried to hide.
Inside Israel, veteran journalists, intellectuals and rights activists say, there is little public space for dissent about the war in Gaza, even three months into an offensive that has killed 23,000 Palestinians and has no end in sight. “Make no mistake: Baruchin was used as a political tool to send a political message. The motive for his arrest was deterrence – silencing any criticism or any hint of protest against Israeli policy,” the long-established Haaretz newspaper said in an editorial.
Yeah, I don’t think an “investigation” was necessary. He was jailed for openly saying things, not for sneaking around with treacherous view he wasn’t airing.
Finally, this might be one of the rare times when using the phrase “witch hunt” is appropriate.
“This story is much bigger than my personal story, or Yael’s personal story. It is a time of witch hunts in Israel, of political persecution,” he said. “I became a ‘Hamas supporter’, because I expressed my opposition to targeting innocent civilians.”
He said he’d received hundreds of private messages of support from fellow teachers and students who were too frightened to go public, and showed several to the Observer.
“The message is crystal clear: keep silent, watch out,” he says, adding that they strengthened his own conviction about speaking out. “I thought to myself, when I retire, I might conclude this is the most significant lesson I ever gave in civics.”
As usual, as always, one must rush to clearly state that one does not support Hamas. We can deplore the violence and genocidal intent of the terrorists and simultaneously deplore the brutal state-sponsored violence and ongoing genocidal frenzy of the retaliation. Most of us learned in kindergarten that two wrongs don’t make a right.
I know it’s MLK day, and that this is a day off for my university, and it’s also the day of the meaningless Republican caucuses in Iowa (bugger Iowa, I don’t care what that state does,) but it’s also the day before classes resume. That means I must now stop slacking. I have to focus, get my act together, and go in to work and get prepared for another long semester. How do I feel about that?
Can I do both, screaming and staring?
This semester is also going to be a huge change. I’m not teaching any labs at all, which feels a bit strange, and I also have only one hour of classroom time every day, at precisely 1:00. That’s it! You might be thinking that sounds pretty slack, too, except that two of my classes are writing classes, which entail a massive amount of grading, and the third, my eco-devo class, is going to involve a heck of a lot of reading. I promise, I won’t be sleeping in until noon and closing up shop and going home mid-afternoon. I’ve got the first 3 weeks queued up and ready to fire into the brains of the students, while I try to get ready for the next few weeks.
I’m thinking I should get both models. I can spend the first half of the term staring into the void, but I’m sure I’ll be screaming in the last half.
Yeah, you. He wants to shoot you.
Because he’s a Republican.
Republicans are religious zealots who want to expand the power of government to control your personal private life…and create a white nationalist fascist state. Greg Abbot, the Texas governor, dreams of killing people of the wrong color and wrong ideology.
Appearing on The Dana Show last week, Abbott declared: “We are using every tool that can be used from building a border wall to building these border barriers, to passing this law that I signed that led to another lawsuit by the Biden administration where I signed a law making it illegal for somebody to enter Texas from another country…. The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Oh, dear. He spoke the quiet part out loud.
I’ve been at home, rarely stepping out, other than to visit an empty university and a lab populated entirely and exclusively by spiders. And I like it that way! Alas, it all changes on Tuesday, when the students return and I have to mingle with them 5 days a week. I have my masks, and I’ve been thoroughly vaccinated, but I’m also aware that there are plague demons among us. People like Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, and accomplice to the fast-fading fascist, Ron DeSantis.
It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.
That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.
This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”
He’s basing this sweeping dismissal on ONE (1) swiftly debunked paper by an anti-vax crank.
It’s not just COVID, though. I’m concerned about that as I prepare to share an atmosphere with students again, but also because we’ve got idiots like Ladapo everywhere who are disrupting basic public health with their absurd ideas.
Then there’s the public health context: As COVID infections have been surging coast to coast, advisories from public health authorities to resume masking and take other protective measures, such as making sure you’re up to date on vaccinations, are almost invisible.
Even more worrisome, the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases may be rising. As many as nine cases of measles have been reported in Philadelphia, some associated with an infection started at a daycare center with a family that violated quarantine rules.
Among the victims, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, are “an infant who was too young to get vaccinated, an unvaccinated older child and the older child’s unvaccinated parent.”
Nine cases may not sound like a lot — 41 were reported nationwide in 2023 — but they could be a harbinger of worse to come, in clusters in which anti-vaccine propaganda has taken hold.
The “invisible” aspect of public health advisories is notable — my university used to have a big bold link on the main web page that pointed to the status of the pandemic on campus, with recommendations for protecting oneself. It’s gone. You have to dig to find any updates on COVID. I guess someone thinks COVID-19 is over.
And then, undermining public confidence in such basic principles of good preventive medicine, such as vaccines and hygiene, as Ladapo is doing, is going to do long-lasting harm. I don’t want to die of COVID, but I also don’t want to die of polio, or measles, or the bubonic plague, or some exotic new disease that springs up in the rotting flesh of some Republican ignoramus. Ladapo and all of these conservative know-nothings are making that more probable.
How do these morons get any power at all in government, I’d like to know.
“Ma’am, is that your husband in the sack of kitchen scraps and half-digested body parts?”
Not a happy morning — that Steatoda borealis I paired up earlier is no longer a pair. I guess she got a hungry.
Well, this is a bother. That was my last adult male — I’ve got about two dozen juvenies growing up in the incubator — and this has been a chronic problem. Every winter, all the spiders start eating less, lose all interest in sex, and stop laying eggs, despite my efforts at fooling them with temperature and a July-like light schedule. Last summer I’d come in an find fresh egg sacs every day; this winter, they dry up and even start dying.
I guess this just means I really have to do the bulk of my research in the summer…or maybe I’ll have to spend the winter trying to figure out how wild spiders survive the cold.
Apparently, all the students, faculty, and staff were warned to stay away from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus this morning. I didn’t hear about it until all the danger had passed. Some fool named Joseph Rongstad threatened to go on a rampage and start killing students.
The notice did not offer any specifics about the threat or how it was communicated, but Olson told the Star Tribune that the suspect went on an hours long threat-filled rant on his landscape company’s Facebook page. Some of the postings included a specific family as an intended target.
“Here we go AMERICA,” the last of his many postings read. “I am heading out … to the U of M Minneapolis mn to start killing kids. … if I can’t get the USA military to [come] talk to me face to face then I’m going for it to try defend your freedom America. … I may have been played … on this brain reading technology but today I find out for sure.”
The posting then warned, “IM COMING FOR YA KIDS AND ITS GOING TO GET BLOODY.”
A previous posting from the man also made a threat against Iranian students, saying, “If this government don’t have the total lock down of ALL university’s of Minnesota by this morning sun up watch out PARENTS … Kids will die for real amongst them u of m students.”
Other postings from the man made explicit threats to Sheriff Olson, and Chippewa County judges Thomas Van Hon and Keith Helgeson. In 2016, Van Hon ordered the man civilly committed for six months as mentally ill and chemically dependent.
What I find a bit irritating about this is that the was in Watson, MN which is about an hour away from Morris, while the Twin Cities campus is almost 3 hours away, and we didn’t get an email notification until after Rongstad was confined and we were all out of danger. He did specifically mention the Minneapolis branch, but also threatened “ALL university’s of Minnesota” and we were the closest potential target. We got notified well after the SWAT teams had shut down the town of Watson for this ranting kook.
I’m just saying it would be nice if we all got the warning, not just the big city campus.
I have no confidence in an industry that allows this to happen
I grew up sucking at the teat of the Boeing company — like most people living in the Seattle area. So I pay attention when Boeing makes the news in a bad and terrible way, since there was a time when that would have been catastrophic for my family, would probably mean we’d have to move to a smaller, more run-down house, and I wouldn’t be getting any dentistry done for a while. That was the reality of living in a company town. It’s weird to think we’d be happy when Boeing sold a couple of more planes, which would be front page news in the paper.
I felt a faint frisson when I heard about the door panel blowing out on a 737 in flight, and it was peculiar because my first thought wasn’t about the terrified passengers, which would have been more appropriate, but…uh-oh, is my family back in Seattle going to feel the consequences? Boeing has made a lot of bad decisions in the decades since I moved away, and the worst has been the shift from putting the engineers first and at the top of the decision tree and instead promoting all the suits, the MBAs who don’t give a fuck about these machines except as a way to squeeze more money out of the customers. It’s profit uber alles.
A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.
Yep, that’s about it. I’ve known a few engineers in my time, and they’re a bunch of persnickety, demanding people who would have cut a suit dead if they dared to suggest cutting corners on a basic safety issue to save a few bucks. They can be pretty obnoxious that way, daring to rebut such plans with math and analyses and outrage at the temerity of some damn business guy daring to tell them how to make a hunk of metal fly better.
Let’s also blame the airlines. They’re not about safety or even reliable transportation — I’ve had so many bad experiences with airlines that I’m not going to fly unless the situation is pretty dire. Last summer I had scheduled a flight to a science conference, and instead of getting to Syracuse, I spent two days sitting in an airport until they finally just canceled the whole trip beneath me…and offered me a $300 travel voucher to repeat the same bad experience with the same goddamn airline.
After subjecting their passengers to a horrific terror-ride on their improperly maintained airplane, Alaska Airlines offer their traumatized customers a refund and $1500. $1500! Would you take a $1500 offer to fly on a plane that was going to blow out midflight?
I guess in the future I’ll (1) simply not fly anywhere, or (2) if I’m faced with essential travel, book on Airbus, or (3) take a train, if possible, which it often isn’t in America. I’m suddenly sympathizing with Richard Lewinton, who was infamous for refusing to fly. I think it wasn’t because he was a scaredy-cat, but because the state of air travel in this country is deplorable.
I’m blaming capitalism.
Paleoconservatives are such an odd and scary group. They tend to be delusional, they’re often (but not necessarily Catholic), and they use lots of old, tired, dead arguments, so they aren’t even very entertaining. They also aren’t very stable. I was laughing at arguments from a group calling itself “Intellectual Takeout” years ago, but they’re gone now; they got absorbed by a right-wing think-tank called the Rockford Institute, which also splintered to form the Howard Center for Family, Religion (you can guess what they’re about), which has renamed itself the Charlemagne Institute. They were big supporters of Pat Buchanan, which should help focus their goals in your mind, because they sure are hard to track, they’re so busy covering their trails with new names and new organizations.
Anyway, they publish online something called Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. They’re probably not worth following unless you’re the SPLC and are tracking neo-Confederates or are just a connoisseur of stupid.
I’m the latter. How could I resist an article titled A Stand-Up Comic Stands Up for God: Evan Sayet Obliterates the Atheist Origin Myth, which is purportedly a review of the book illustrated on the right? The review starts thusly:
To be on the left is to be humorless. This makes sense when you consider how the left views the world as a perpetual occasion for an oppression fest, where the clock is ticking on their quest to free all the world’s intersectional victims before the climate apocalypse kills everyone. Sure, in line with their Manichean, comic-book ideology, they take an adolescent delight in hypocritically bullying everyone who dissents from their disordered views, and they equally detest and fear those opponents who give back in return to them more than they get. This is especially so if the opponent uses humor to buttress the case for dissent with ridicule.
I do appreciate the irony of a criticism that uses “Manichean” as an insult while simultaneously splitting the world into Left and Right and characterizing the entirety of the Left as a humorless monoculture. I was going to point out that a lot of great comedians, like George Carlin and Janeane Garofolo and Sarah Silverman and David Cross, etc. etc. etc., are godless liberals, while the conservatives limp along with the likes of Greg Gutfeld and Steven Crowder and Dennis Miller, etc. etc. etc., but then I realized that no one from the Charlemagne Institute would find George Carlin funny at all, so that argument would be pointless. Humor is a matter of personal taste.
But sure, open your review by levying baseless accusations at people you don’t like. It’ll rally the troops on your side.
Then we get to the meat of the review.
It is why the left loathes and fears people like Evan Sayet.
Who? Never heard of him.
It is with good reason. Consider his remarks about his latest book, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, and Horny Aliens from Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth: “Trying to litigate against atheism is like trying to litigate against the Emperor’s clothes; atheism needs to not just be disproved but ridiculed for the patent absurdity that it is.”
Uh-oh. The book title gives the game away: Evan Sayet is an anti-evolutionist. Like the reviewer, he is going to mischaracterize the thing he doesn’t like, in this case science, and presumably he’s going to do it with jokes, because right-wing creationists are far funnier than left wing bullies who are competing in the oppression olympics, obviously. I hope the book is funny, although the title isn’t, and Sayet’s bona fides aren’t exactly promising.
A stand-up comic who has written for television shows such as Politically Incorrect w/Bill Maher,
A very bad sign, that.
Evan Sayet has tested and proven his mettle as a political observer and activist. Behind the scenes, Sayet has counseled and penned speeches for presidential candidates and, eventually, a president. Further, risking his livelihood in the leftist-controlled entertainment industry, Sayet has courageously and continually expressed his trenchant insights on television and with the written word. He has not shied away from rich targets for his pointed wit, no matter how powerful.
Wait wait wait — I thought it was lefties who were involved in an oppression fest
, but now we’re told that Evan Sayet has been oppressed by a leftist-controlled entertainment industry
? And simultaneously he has been counseling a president (I can guess which one)? It must be Schrodinger’s Oppressor. He’s everywhere on all sides all at once.
So what’s his argument?
Sayet refuses to let the atheists off the intellectual hook, even skewering them with science to salt the wound. Starting with teleological arguments of Intelligent Design and “Fine-Tuning,” and, ultimately, in his own inimitable fashion moving on to St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (Quinque Viae from the Summa Theologiae): (1) argument from motion, (2) argument from efficient cause, (3) argument from necessary being, (4) argument from gradations of goodness, and (5) argument from design. Sayet employs all of these methods and more to demonstrate the existence of God.
Great. As is typical, a conservative site considers the philosophical arguments of a 13th century theologian to be definitive. We’ve been soaking in that nonsense for eight centuries, and it’s been unpersuasive to everyone other than shallow poseurs.
(1) The unmoved mover could be a physical agent, a singularity or Big Bang, not your peculiar and specific god-thing. We don’t need to propose the Unmoved Mover was any kind of god at all.
(2) Likewise, the first cause could have been a hiccup in the firmament, a twitch in the fabric of space-time, and invoking a sentient, humanoid entity is superfluous.
(3) Again, the problem is that you think you know who the ‘necessary being’ was, and how its mind worked (if it even had one), and its intent. It could have been a cosmic fart, for all any of us know.
(4) “Goodness” is a matter of human perception. It is not a universal force. The universe, in general, seems to be a pretty nasty place, so why you would think there must be a Supreme Good Guy is a mystery.
(5) The argument from design boils down to pointing at complicated things you don’t understand and announcing that someone smarter than you must have made it. This is trivially refuted by revealing that dumb processes can make some pretty complex things.
None of those arguments demonstrate the existence of God,
a concept, I note, they don’t bother to define, probably because they just assume that God is the body of superstitious theological assumptions they already believe. Like I said, these are just old, tired, dead arguments that we’ve heard time and again; Sayet is incredibly unoriginal and uninteresting.
Thus, does Sayet proceed to plumb the shallow depths of militant atheists’ theological Sitz bath, and he drowns them with the proofs for God’s existence.
Whoa, I started reading this article warned that I was going to be obliterated, and we instead end up relaxing in a Sitz bath? How nice. It’s kind of hard to drown in a Sitz bath, you know. I suppose it could be done if you contort yourself and use it improperly, but I’ll leave the twisty delusional distortions to the Christians.
