Fooled again

Dammit. I haven’t been to the movie theater in months, and I succumbed to temptation and went out last night. Unfortunately, it was Marvel movie time.

This one is about people shrinking into the “quantum realm,” which the writers interpreted to mean like a teeny tiny kingdom full of weird stuff and ants. It’s basically 100% CGI. It’s a Marvel movie, so the conclusion involves saving the multiverse with a punchy-kicky hand-to-hand fistfight.

I couldn’t enjoy it because the whole time I was watching the subatomic-sized people running around I couldn’t help but wonder, “what are they breathing?”

Someday I’ll learn that these movies aren’t worth anyone’s time.

It looks like a good day to just give up

Snow is coming down somewhat heavily right now, and the temperature is -10°C. It’s supposed to let up soon, but tomorrow through Thursday is the big storm, with this threat of “Heavy snow with total snow accumulations of 12 to 18 inches possible. Winds could gust as high as 45 mph late Wednesday into Thursday.”

Today is also the day I have to start teaching an additional class on top of my usual course load, and I foolishly volunteered to participate in a session for visiting prospective students. The administration accepted my offer! What were they thinking? I’m going to be showing high schoolers and their parents a room full of spiders! If attendance declines next year, it may be my fault.

I teach labs on Tuesday and Thursday. I’m already planning accommodations for all those students who’d rather not step out into a blinding blizzard.

Mary is in Wisconsin, and planning to drive across the state before the storm hits and the roads become impassable tomorrow. I get to spend the day in a state of anxiety.

Can we just cancel the whole week? All in favor say “aye.”

Why not just skip ahead and try them for witchcraft?

A few people in the state of Idaho really want to arrest doctors and nurses.

Two Idaho lawmakers have introduced a bill to charge those who administer mRNA vaccines with a misdemeanor.

Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, and Rep. Judy Boyle, R-Midvale, sponsored HB 154. It was introduced in the House Health & Welfare Committee on Feb. 15 by Nichols. According to the bill text, “A person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state.”

Nichols has an associates degree in business administration; Boyle has attended college, no mention of a degree, and lists her occupation as “rancher.” Neither knows a lick about biology, obviously, but they’re trying to pass a law to criminalize a useful medical tool.

It goes without saying that they’re Republican. Also batshit nuts and ignorant.

I do appreciate that they added that “or any other mammal” clause to their law. At least they’re admitting that people belong to the mammalian taxonomic class! I suspect they just threw that in to make their wacky law sound sciencey.

They’re lying to us: news at 11

Fox News is being sued for $1.6 billion by Dominion voting systems for their lies about voter fraud. Mano has the story of how Fox News memos reveal that they knowingly lied. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were presenting absolute lunatic Sydney Powell as a credible source on air, while saying behind the scenes that she was “lying,” “unguided missile,” “dangerous as hell,” “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” “completely BS,” and “a complete nut.” Then they’d publicly treat her as a respectable source. They knew. They lied.

Also disgraceful: Maria Bartiromo, unhinged Trump fanatic, knew a few things about her sources.

“Powell’s source … explained that she gets her information from experiencing something ‘like time-travel in a semi-conscious state,’ allowing her to ‘see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear,’ and she received messages from ‘the wind,'” stated the lawsuit.

Real journalists, on hearing that their witness got their information from someone who claimed to have traveled in time while snoozing, would just close their notebooks, hang up or walk out, and refuse to use anything from that source ever. Not Bartiromo! She went live with it, not bothering to acknowledge that she got it all from a trippin’ loon.

Remember, nothing out of Fox News is journalism, it’s all dishonest propaganda. I hope they lose their lawsuit. Losing $1.6 billion would sting, but realistically, their wealthy billionaire backers will cover the loss and they’ll keep on poisoning the country with lies. We’re never going to pop that bubble as long as inequity allows the rich to trample the truth.

Or as long as one of our political parties is corrupt and willing to cover up the facts. Here’s an ugly local story about a Minnesota state representative.

According to the police reports, Grossell, 53, appeared intoxicated when he walked into the hotel bar at the Best Western Plus Capitol Ridge, known as the Kelly Inn, on St. Anthony Avenue near the state Capitol shortly after midnight on May 4. Like many lawmakers from Greater Minnesota, Grossell rented a room there while the Legislature was in session. [Hey, I’ve stayed at that hotel several times — I had no idea it was infested with politicians! –pzm]

After three more drinks, the bartender told police, Grossell slumped over a table. A hotel security guard was called over, and, according to a video footage reviewed by police, Grossell shoved the security guard five times, the fifth time being a two-handed shove that caused the guard to lose his balance. A “grapple” ensued, police reports state. The guard later said Grossell slapped him at one point but he was uninjured. The guard allowed Grossell to go to his hotel room.

The hotel called police. The guard said he wanted to press assault charges, and officers said hotel staff wanted Grossell evicted.

Officers found Grossell kneeling on the floor of his room. He was “unable to fully communicate.” Unsure if Grossell was having a medical episode, and believing he was unable “to care for himself,” a St. Paul police sergeant decided to have Grossell taken to Regions.

After investigators viewed security footage and interviewed witnesses, they cited Grossell for disorderly conduct.

According to the police reports, Grossell became “belligerent” at the hospital on several occasions, leading to an escalating situation that resulted in police arresting him for trespassing.

A nurse reported that Grossell was being “so disruptive in the pod that visitors and patients were being disturbed from their care, coming out of their rooms to see what had been going on,” one officer wrote. A doctor had concluded there was no medical reason to keep him there, and they needed him to leave so that other patients in the waiting room could be seen. Grossell was offered cab fare to take him home, but he refused.

The nurse told the officer that “Grossell referred to her as a ‘sick b—-‘ and told her to ‘get your head out of your ass.’”

This unsavory and unpleasant person has been elected to state office twice. He serves on the House Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform committee. He is, of course, a Republican. Notice how the state party responds to this news.

Grossell, who sits on the House Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform committee, among others, has faced no formal repercussions within the state Legislature. On Wednesday, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, declined to comment. As head of the Republican caucus, Daudt could effectively “discipline” Grossell by getting him removed from committees. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, has the ultimate power over such things. She declined to comment Wednesday.

The Republicans have no integrity or honor. Hortman, a Democrat, is also letting him escape with no consequences. And this is how we run the country?

Gender Critical logic

Graham Linehan went fishing on ChatGPT to find someone who would agree with him. Unfortunately, not even a bullshit fountain would play his game.

Where is a person’s ‘gender identity’ located? is such a goddamn stupid question. What is he, a phrenologist? The brain is a big messy association engine — you feed it a simple little word, like “woman”, and stuff is going to be firing all over the cortex, with signals ping-ponging all over the place. There isn’t a tight little kernel for each concept that can be localized to one discrete spot.

Even a dumb mindless text generator like ChatGPT can’t find a way to answer that question, so it does its usual game of pulling up and splicing together snippets of information, failing to find any sense in it. So Linehan refines his question — usually good idea, but in this case more revealing of his own biases than anything constructive. How do we know we have a gender identity if we cannot locate it in the brain?

OK, Graham, how do you know where your car keys are, if you don’t know where the map is located in your brain? How do you know how old you are if you can’t find the perceptual clock in your cortex? Quick, tell me where the Irish accent is located — if you can’t give me a set of stereotaxic coordinates, then it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, he eventually found something to feed his sense of outrage.

This reminded me of a short ‘conversation’ I had on Twitter, where someone — a philosophy professor, no less — exposed how ignorant of logic he was.

1. The sexes–male and female–have been around since before Saturn had rings.

2. Societies have not.

3. If something predates societies, then it cannot be a social construct.

4. So, the sexes–male and female– cannot be social constructs.

Let’s take that apart.

1. I don’t know how old Saturn’s rings are — apparently, there’s a lot of uncertainty — but fine, this is a philosopher’s way of saying sex is really old. I’d agree, yeast have sexes, which is defined by a single mating type locus in the genome. So sex is at least as old as eukaryotes.

2. Now we are already getting on shaky ground. Define “societies”. Primates have cultures, patterns of behavior that are passed on by education and learning from generation to generation. We are plagued by the fuzziness of that “before Saturn had rings” nonsense, but to get around the difficulty of dealing with his even more poorly defined term of “societies”, I’ll agree, even though it might be that primate societies might be older than Saturn’s rings, we’ll have to wait for the astronomers to figure out. At least I can definitely agree that societies, broadly defined, are definitely younger than sexual reproduction and meiosis.

3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.

Sure, you can get me to agree in general with points 1 and 2, but with point 3 you’re suddenly endorsing the idea that Victorian ideas about sex and sex roles, for example, cannot possibly be social constructs because ancient eukaryotes could carry out meiosis. You think you’ve crafted an inescapable syllogism and have caught me, but really, you’re the one trapped.

4. False.

My conversation with Mr Bogardus did not last long, in particular because he was spectacularly dishonest for someone who teaches philosophy for a living. I told him a couple of times that my disagreement was with point #3, to which he would respond with ‘oh, so you don’t think #2 is true?’, which was infuriating. He didn’t care what I said, he had a logic trap he wanted to force me into, and any time I pointed out the hole in his reasoning, he’d try to invent a new conflict.

But then, that’s the way TERFs work: stupidity and lies are all they’ve got.

I went to a party last night

It has been a long, long time, and I don’t think my brain can process it. I was a quiet little lump all night, like usual, but the sensory overload of a half dozen conversations going on at once always leaves me dizzy. I also stayed up later than usual, and slept in until 7:30. So this is what sybaritic decadence feels like…

I had made a big pot of jambalaya for the party, using my usual method. Oh, this requires peppers? Chop up every pepper in the house and throw it in. Onions? Same approach. Add two teaspoons of Cajun spice…are you mad? Heaping tablespoons. That’s not much, so double it.Then the usual Law of Garlic, you can’t add too much. Cooked it all up with a pound of rice and some Impossible Sausage (so it’s still vegetarian). Don’t forget the red pepper flakes and cayenne!

It came out pretty well — good flavor, a little bit of a kick but still mostly acceptable to a room full of Minnesotans. Not too acceptable, I guess, because there were plenty of leftovers, but that’s OK. Guess what I’m having for breakfast this morning? It’s mighty fine, and it will wake a fellow up.

It better wake me up good, because I have an exam to grade, a problem set to assemble, one lecture to write and another to figure out what it’s talking about, spiders to feed and snuggle, and lots of dishes to do, both at home and in the lab. I’m home alone while Mary gets to frolic with a four-year-old, so it’s all on me.

Totally random, but I found this excellent summary of social media this morning.

Looks like you might have me to kick around for a while

This morning was my yearly checkup, and I’m afraid everything was normal. Cholesterol was down, blood pressure 120/70, not a hint of prostate cancer, probably going to live for a little while longer.

There was some funny business with my thyroid, so I have to go in next week for an ultrasound. Also I get to get another colonoscopy in the summer of 2024.

I’m home briefly, but I have to go teach a new class. Oh boy. And then I’m coming home again to cook for a potluck this evening.

Science apologizes

We all knew William Shockley was a disgusting racist, using bad biology to argue for bad goals, but he was the co-inventor of the transistor! He won a Nobel prize for his work in a field unrelated to biology! So while my friends and I were willingly calling him out as a fraud, a liar, and a racist while we were out for beers, all the major scientific publications were more mealy-mouthed and ingratiating, which was annoying. It was partly out of misplaced politeness, but also that a lot of the white male old guard were probably sympathetic to his ideas.

Maybe that’s changing. Science has published an editorial apologizing for their past indifference/support for Shockley, and promising to do better. They’re calling out the racists and phonies.

Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Like Shockley, Seitz carried out his nonphysics work through op-eds and conservative think tanks, not through the accepted mechanism of peer review that he used in doing physics. Seitz was not, at least publicly, as overtly in favor of eugenics as was Shockley, but he was a strong advocate for genetic determinism, even claiming at the behest of the cigarette industry that tobacco itself was not harmful because genetics determined whether smokers would ultimately contract lung cancer.

Sound familiar? There are many ‘scientists’ getting checks from right-wing think tanks right now, although most of them are now busy with careers in vaccine and climate change denialism. The words have changed but the song is much the same. Let’s see Science start calling out more of the living hucksters and propagandists for the far right. But for now, I’m reasonably happy with their apology for propping up a dead one.

Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes.
Looking back, it’s clear that what was intended as an attempt to make room for dissent and discussion only served to abet Shockley and his cohorts in their effort to build support for eugenics. Science gave them a platform and inadequate scorn. The lesson is that we at Science need to make more effort to think about everything that we do, not only from the standpoint of communicating science to the public, but also as an organization that above all, supports all of humanity. The process of science is one of continual revision, but it’s also one that must have a conscience.
It was only a few months ago, in a commentary on racism in science by Ebony Omotola McGee, that Shockley was described in our pages in the terms he deserved. But as recently as 2001, Science described him simply as a “transistor inventor and race theorist.” That won’t cut it anymore. As of today, a link to this editorial will appear along with any mention of Shockley in this journal.
Make no mistake. Shockley was a racist. Shockley was a eugenicist. That’s all.

That’s a pretty good apology: admitting the mistake, taking the blame for it, and planning an action to correct their error. Not that it will stop all the modern ‘race realists’ from relying on old boobs like Shockley and Rushton in their arguments.