It’s knee day

I’m going in to the local hospital this morning to plan my ambulatory future. I’m getting some X-rays of my knees done, and meeting with an orthopedic surgeon to, I hope, schedule arthropedic surgery to patch up a torn meniscus. This has been pending for over a year — a long, miserable year of aching knees — but my initial treatment was canceled when I had a broken blood vessel in my eye. Clearly, it was too dangerous to operate on my knee!

So, fingers crossed. I really want this surgery to restore my mobility, all of my summer plans hinge on it. This doctor seems to be pretty quick to put off work on the slightest pretext, though, so I don’t have a tremendous amount of confidence that I’m going to be restored soon. I’ll know in a few hours.

It was a successful meeting: I am scheduled for knee surgery on the 16th of May. Hip hip hooray! Or should that be knee knee hooray?

Capitalism has lost the plot

Stephanie Stirling has been right all along. She’s always insisted that video game company CEOs were heartless, greedy monsters, and now one of them has stepped forward go confirm their well-deserved reputation. The CEO of a company called Ustwo, Maria Sayans, made a speech declaring what she thinks is the future of her business.

We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.

There’s the capitalist ideal: the company is an empty shell that houses CEOs who get extravagant salaries, but no employees. The actual work, the output the company produces, is to be farmed out to external contractors on the cheap. A game, the purported purpose and product of this company, is to be produced by an executive with an MBA who has no artistic talent, no creative talent, and definitely no ability to code.

Instead of getting rid of the employees, how about firing all the CEOs?

Ken Ham is easily triggered

A few months ago, I wrote a short post forwarding information that Daniel Phelps had sent to me. Answers in Genesis is shrinking, with declining attendance at his dismal little theme park. Furthermore, more of the labor of writing for their website is falling on Ken Ham’s shoulders, which is peculiar given that he’s getting pretty old and ought to be thinking of the succession — as someone of roughly that age, I can say that we ought to be planning our retirement and thinking of fun and relaxation in our sunset years (call me, Ken, we can plan a retirement party!) But no, Bodie Hodge has sailed away, and Martyn Iles lost little time bailing out. Recently, their “paleontologist”, Gabriela Hynes, jumped ship abruptly, leaving AiG for ICR. The Ark is looking a bit leaky and wobbly, as Phelps has documented, and there must be all kinds of drama behind the scenes.

Ken Ham completely ignored the meat of my post and instead wrote a long entry obsessing over one thing I said. He quoted my final paragraph and didn’t bother to link to it, which is unsurprising. He never links to his critics. I wrote,

That’s a problem with authoritarian cults. They are ruled for life by unpleasant, weird people who alienate everyone around them, and maybe instill in them the ambition to be in charge on their own. I hope I outlive Ken Ham, because I’d really like to see the chaos that will follow on his death.

We’re already seeing hints of the chaos, because Ken is an unpleasant, weird person, and it will get worse if he dies. I think that fact makes him uncomfortable.

Instead of addressing the uneasy state of his legacy and discussing the stability of AiG, Ken was more concerned with my mention of our mortality and my hope to outlive him, so he fulminates at me and fires a bunch of Bible verses at me.

As we know, God’s Word states that,

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die. (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2)

So when any one of us dies is not up to what some atheist professor wants. God is in control of both Myers’ life and ours.

I disagree. God has nothing to do with it. Genetics and lifestyle and chance are what will bring us both down, eventually. I do agree that I will not have anything to do with Ken Ham’s inevitable death.

But this pagan university professor, who has continually blasphemed and mocked God and Christians, needs to wake up and take note of God’s warning:

And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment. (Hebrews 9:27 LSB)

And if Myers continues in his willing ignorance and rebellion against God, he will suffer a second death after the first death:

But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and sexually immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. (Revelation 21:8 LSB)

Cowardly? Not particularly. Not especially brave, either.

Unbelieving? Yes! Score one point for ol’ Ken.

Abominable? I get along fine with most people. Ken has the prerogative to find me personally loathsome, if he’d like.

Murderer? Nope, never have.

Sexually immoral? I’m sorry, I’m more sexually conventional and always have been.

Sorcerer? Very cool. I wish, but no.

Idolater? I worship no one or no thing. Another miss.

Liar? I won’t lie and say I’ve never lied, but it’s not a particularly prominent feature of my personality.

But Ken…are you planning to gloat about your violent god setting me on fire? That’s not very nice.

I would ask us to all pray for P.Z. Myers as he is well on his way to a Christless eternity. He is 68 years old (younger than me), but God could end his earthly life at any second.

We all live in a Christless universe, so that threat has no muscle behind it at all. I agree that any of us could die at any second, but it won’t be at the hand of Ham’s impotent, faceless, invisible god.

Hey Ken: rather than raging at me with your imprecatory Bible quoting, maybe address the issues I brought up: is your throne listing uneasily? Are you struggling with an internal mutiny?

A stifling ignorance

I have been privileged to witness the abrupt destruction of higher education in America. It’s been dramatic and dizzying — federal scientific institutions taken over by crackpots, research funding cut, politics inserted into the university system (well, it’s always been there, but not quite so overt), and condemnation of open-minded analysis in favor of puritanical, religious, cult-like dogma. I would rather not be seeing this.

The cool thing about it all is that it is quantifiable. We can measure the repression of our universities! The Academic Freedom Index assessed the autonomy of universities worldwide — universities are increasingly constrained by political demands. The US in particular is being hit hard.

Institutional Autonomy, Development for the US and the Average Peer Country in Western Europe and North
America from 2015 to 2025.

I don’t think we’ve hit bottom yet. It’s going to get worse, I predict.

For a crystal clear example of an oppressive reduction of university autonomy, we can look to Texas. This may be the future fate of the rest of the country, which really should be looking on Texas with horror.

A new memo at Texas Tech University establishes a sweeping and draconian censorship policy toward LGBTQ+ people, creating a campus equivalent of “Don’t Say Gay” in one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university. The memo bars professors from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core and lower-level courses and eliminates entire fields of study across the five-university system. It even requires that if an industry-standard textbook includes content on sexual orientation or gender identity, instructors must skip over it and avoid discussion around it. Most troubling, however, is that the censorship regime extends beyond professors to students themselves: the memo states that “no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI [Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity] topics,” a total ban on LGBTQ+ mentions in dissertations or graduate thesis work.

The memorandum, which was issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton—a former Republican state senator who authored Texas’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities and a campus protest restriction law that a federal judge blocked as unconstitutional—went out to the presidents of all five universities in the Texas Tech University System this month. The system serves approximately 64,000 students across Texas Tech University, Angelo State University, Midwestern State University, and two Health Sciences Centers. Under the new policy, all majors, minors, certificates, and graduate degrees “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity will be eliminated. Provosts at each university must identify every affected program and submit finalized lists to the chancellor’s office by June 15, 2026, at which point an immediate admissions freeze will take effect—no new students will be allowed to enroll in or declare any of the targeted programs. Currently enrolled students will be allowed to finish their degrees through a teach-out process, but once the last of them graduates, the fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely.

I repeat, by authoritarian dictat, “fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely”. Entire domains of research will be eradicated, not because the evidence makes them invalid, but because the narrow religious dogma of a small number of conservative zealots, and the social pressure from a deluded, ill-informed public, has decreed that they do not exist. The rest of the world will continue to study, measure, and analyze these very real sociological and psychological and biological phenomena, but Texas will close its eyes and ears and punish anyone who dares to acknowledge their existence.

Spiders in Spaaaaaaaace!

A pair (not really a pair, they were of two different species) spent a few months on the International Space Station. The article about them says “Two ‘spidernauts’ were studied to see how they adapted to microgravity – with surprising results,” but doesn’t bother to say what the surprise was.

WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 29:at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on November 29, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Nefertiti, the Johnson jumping spider, has found a new home at the Insect Zoo in the Museum of Natural History, after a 100 day voyage in space as a resident aboard the International Space Station. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

I think the surprise was that there was no surprise — they adapted to microgravity easily, which is what I’d expect. These are two animals who go through life constantly tethering themselves to their environment with a silken dragline. Of course they were able to cope with a space environment. They orient themselves with tactile senses, and were probably just surprised at how much easier and more effective their jumping was.

Sadly, they did not last long on return.

The mission set a record for longest time spent in space by a spider (100 days). While Cleopatra died on returning to Earth, Nefertiti would also become the first spider to survive the voyage home, and successfully readjusted to gravity.

After her marathon mission, she was destined for a long, cosy retirement. She was put on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, where she was placed in a custom enclosure and died four days later.

Again, this is not surprising. Jumping spiders are not long-lived species even when not launched up into orbit on a rocket.

However, I do not appreciate hearing about death shortly after retirement, with my own retirement only a year away.

Learning about birds

I learned about an interesting bird this morning, the American Dipper, a freshwater diving bird. I didn’t know they existed.

It was particularly fascinating to me because the narrator looks so much like my late brother, when he was younger. Also, he has a pleasantly casual narrative style — I’d recommend him to replace David Attenborough, in part because he sounds nothing like him.