Madison Cawthorn was too busy virtue signaling to do his job

This is the first time I learned about the Burn Pits problem.

During the live recorded meeting, which ran close to three hours, politicians listened to veteran advocacy groups discuss how uniformed military personnel have been exposed to dangerous toxins when ordered to stand by burn pits—an ill-conceived method of burning trash at military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

That grimy duty usually fell to low-ranking soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, some of whom developed heart, lung, and digestive ailments after hours of standing over smoke from the burning plastics, rubber, and paper envelopes from families back home.

That’s bad on a couple of levels: bad for the environment, bad for the people living there, bad and wasteful of resources. I can see why it’s an important issue, and I didn’t even listen to the testimony, but I hadn’t heard anything about it before. That I now have we can thank Madison Cawthorn for being such a colossal, posturing asshole, so I guess his bad behavior did one good thing. He was on the committee, and instead of paying close attention, he used that time to…play with his gun? I guess he was bored. Other members of the panel noticed how little attention he paid to a life-or-death issue for veterans.

Rosie Lopez Torres, the cofounder of Burn Pits 360, told The Daily Beast that she did not notice that Cawthorn was working on his gun. She only recalled that he seemed distracted at times. But when she saw the picture of what he was doing, she was livid.

“Oh wow,” she said. “That is insane. Total disregard and disrespect to America’s war fighters. He was so bored with the topic. Those that are sick and dying and the widows in his district should see how much he cares about the issue.”

Don’t worry. Cawthorn has an excuse.

The Daily Beast asked Cawthorn’s office if the congressman thought this an appropriate time to clean his firearm. His communications director, Luke Ball, responded: “What could possibly be more patriotic than guns and veterans?”

That’s a problem right there, that anyone thinks guns are “patriotic”.

I kinda think dedicated civil service is more patriotic than guns.

Meat Loaf is dead

We’ve lost an epic heldentenor — Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, has died. He was such a fierce, athletic, passionate performer, and has in the past collapsed on stage a few times, due to dehydration…but really it was because he threw himself into his work so thoroughly and exhausted himself. I’ll consider his actual cause of death to be that he was always going full throttle and couldn’t just slow down and take it easy, ever.

By the way, his obituary unfortunately seems to think his weight was a salient point to make repeatedly. Nah. He was a big man, but that was the least important part of his identity.

Abraham Lincoln, socialist

Today I learned that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx corresponded…and that Lincoln was sympathetic to many of Marx’s ideas (that strange squelching sound you hear in the distance is the sound of generations of zombie Republicans rising up from their TV chairs to slobber and point an accusing finger at me.) The Red Scare of the middle of the last century sure managed to destroy a lot of good ideas and reasonable history with the scorching heat of fanaticism. It’s sad how much we lost in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Lincoln was not, of course, a Communist. And yet some of the ideas he absorbed from Marx’s Tribune writings — many of which would later be adapted for the first volume of Capital — made their way into the Republican Party of the 1850s and 60s. That party, writes Brockell, was “anti-slavery, pro-worker and sometimes overtly socialist,” championing, for example, the redistribution of land in the West. (Marx even considered emigrating to Texas himself at one time.) And at times, Lincoln could sound like a Marxist, as in the closing words of his first annual message (later the State of the Union ) in 1961.

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” the country’s 16th president concluded in the first speech since his inauguration. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” That full, 7,000 word address appeared in newspapers around the country, including the Confederate South. The Chicago Tribune subtitled its closing arguments “Capital vs. Labor.”

Oh my god. Do you remember when the United States had a pro-labor political party? Neither do I.

Here’s how the Democratic party reacted to teachers voting to demand remote teaching options.

When Chicago teachers voted to work remotely last week to protest COVID-19 safety protections in the nation’s third-largest school district, Democratic Party officials leapt into action.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed for a quick end to the job action and helped secure rapid tests to entice teachers back to the classroom. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the teachers “abandoned their posts” in “an illegal walkout.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki stressed that students should be in school. The standoff ended with a tentative agreement late Monday.

“Leapt into action”…to get teachers back into the classroom, to continue unsafe pandemic practices, to put more students and their families at risk, all in defiance of what medical experts have been advising. Keeping the schools open is so important to Democrats that they’d oppose the teacher’s union to get the back to work.

At least that’s not as bad as the recommendation of asshole conservative Henry Olsen (why does that guy get published in the Washington Post, our supposedly liberal paper? Maybe because it’s not as liberal as they want you to think.)

Teachers unions are in the wrong on covid-19. Democrats must force them back to work.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s vote to return to remote learning over what it says are unsafe conditions due to covid-19, forcing the city’s schools to close on Wednesday, not only defies reason; it’s also an assault on the well-being of children. City, state and national Democrats should act to bring vaccinated teachers back to work and prevent future unjustified work stoppages.

Let’s hope the Democratic party doesn’t ever listen to Henry Olsen, and why the hell is Henry Olsen trying to advise the Democrats in the first place?

Those are the two poles of the politics of the labor movement in America: on one side, Republicans who would be fine with sending workers into their workplaces at gunpoint, if necessary, and on the other side, Democrats who will more gently pressure unions to obey the dictates of the bosses, exactly the same outcome the Republicans want.

Poor Abraham.

Hospital bed decreases were a precondition to the pandemic

Here’s a chilling statistic.

But there are important questions that are attracting little attention: Why does America not have enough hospital beds to deal with this emergency? Why does an increase in 155,000 patients, about 3,000 additional patients per state, push the system to its breaking point?

The answer is that there are far fewer hospital beds in the United States today than there were just a few decades ago. In 1975, when the United States had 113 million fewer people, there were 1.5 million hospital beds in the United States. Today, there are just over 900,000.

That seems backwards. Why would one of the richest countries in the world start stripping itself of healthcare facilities before the pandemic hit? Read the link, it goes on at length about the processes that led to a reduction in hospital services, in short:

Vertical and horizontal consolidation means there is little competition for hospitals and related services that hospitals also own. By 2016, “90 percent of all metropolitan areas had highly concentrated hospital markets.” The lack of competitors has allowed hospitals to raise prices for outpatient services “four times faster than what doctors charge.”

In other words, hospitals are getting rid of hospital beds because they are making more money diverting patients elsewhere. The focus on the bottom line applies both to for-profit and non-profit hospital networks, which operate nearly identically.

I can be even shorter: because capitalism. The purpose of hospitals is to make money for their owners, don’t you know.

Wacked again

Kent Hovind featured me on his wack-an-athest segment last night on YouTube. It was the same ol’. As usual, he never listens to anyone, so he spent a bunch of time telling me that I really do believe I came from a rock, and then he skipped through a few pages of Campbell Biology, reading excerpts from their short history of the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, condensation of the Earth, etc., to declare that that textbook also says we came from a rock. He also said he’s been in 260 debates, and that he has won every one of them, and that even the professors and atheists all agreed that he had defea-Ted his opponents, while his Igor, Matt Powell, nodded vigorously over his shoulder and his claque jeered in the background.

The man is delusional and insane, and he’s got a cult who believes his every word. He invited me to come on down to his Alabama compound again, but who in his right mind would do that?

I won’t link to him, you’ll have to look it up on YouTube yourself, but only if you’ve been very naughty and feel the need to be punished. Hint: he misspelled my name as Meyers in the title, because of course he did.

Oh, cool. Now Brett Keane is piling on. I’m being dragged down into the slime for sure.

Jordan Peterson quits!

Good news, everyone! Jordan Peterson has resigned from the University of Toronto.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online.

Uh, that was the only reason. He’s got a huge and gullible audience, and he’s raking in the cash. Why stick with that honorable and difficult job of teaching, when grifting pays so much better? Most of his article is about making excuses, though, none plausible.

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked.

This is nonsense. Universities are still hiring a majority of heterosexual white people. Shall we look at the statistics from the NSF?

The share of academic doctoral positions held by women with SEH doctoral degrees increased from 26.4% in 1999 to 38.5% in 2019. Underrepresented minorities also hold a larger share of these positions than they did in 1999, although their share remains small (8.9%) and is considerably less than their share of the population, which is about a third of the U.S. population ages 18–64. The share of those in academic doctoral positions with one or more disabilities increased to 9.1%, slightly less than their share in the population (10.5%)

So a third of the minority population of the US belong to a minority, but less than 9% of the academic population are a minority. I don’t think you can argue that white students have a negligible chance of employment because black people or women are hired to the exclusion of white men. That’s obvious. Even an ignoramus like Peterson should be able to figure it out.

It’s really because they’re out to get him personally.

My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

That’s a bit more plausible. Still, if a Peterson student applied for a position at my university, we’d first look at the work they have done, not the work of their mentor. That’s the first and most important criterion. If what they learned from Peterson was to swagger into the interview and bluster about how the trans and gay folks are prejudiced against him, then maybe that would affect their employment possibilities.

If you thought that excuse was bad, wait until you see #2.

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job.

Whoa. That’s kind of the same as #1 — his white male students can’t get employed — with the added poison of the assumption that the BIPOC hires are utterly unqualified for the job. And if you disagree with him, then you aren’t even remotely truthful! Peterson is a bigot, plain and simple.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

It’s true: I can and have crafted such statements, where I promise that I won’t discriminate against women or minority students. It’s easy to do. I can honestly and accurately say that I will give equal opportunity to all of my students. I guess Jordan Peterson is unable to do that.

I have also taken anti-bias training, and it is required by my university before I can be on a hiring committee! However, these Human Resources personnel are supremely qualified to do that, and have an expertise that I lack. It is amazingly arrogant that Peterson would so ignorantly dismiss them.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here.

Yes? So? The purpose of the training is to remove roadblocks to hiring minority faculty. We’re not trying to abruptly change the prejudices of existing faculty, we want to make everyone aware of bias for the benefit of potential employees. Once again, Peterson is an uncomprehending buffoon.

Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation.

Oh, gosh. Other than Peterson’s knee-jerk reaction to the phrase “social justice”, what’s wrong with expecting an accredited psychology program to pay attention to social justice? So as a non-psychologist, I had to look up what that means.

According to Goodman et al. (2004), a social justice approach can be defined as “scholarship and professional action designed to change societal values, structures, politics and practices such that disadvantaged groups gain increased access to these tools of self-determination.”

Jordan wouldn’t want to give disadvantaged groups self-determination. He’s a bigot, after all!

Then we get his real bete noir. We can’t have those non-heterosexual people running around!

That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy.

Conversion therapy doesn’t work. Not allowing clinicians to commit conversion therapy on patients is no more a violation of trust and privacy than is banning lobotomies.

Then he goes charging off to indict Hollywood.

And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former [emphasis on former] NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s [fuck Bari Weiss] Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

Right. That’s why there are no movies with white actors in them.

This guy is so patently ludicrous that it’s astounding he gets published. He closes his screed by telling us that Vladimir Putin agrees with him.

Congratulations, University of Toronto! You got rid of that asshole.

Go, prime minister

I’m a little envious that, in the UK, you have an opposition that’s willing to stand up and tell Boris Johnson to resign. We had a president who was just as bad and our opposition party just whined about the difficulty of scraping up support for an impeachment, while the Republicans lined up in lockstep behind the buffoon.

This could be really interesting. Will BoJo’s ego even allow him to resign? I suspect not. He’s going to have to be pried out of his chair with a no confidence vote.

It me

This survey doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Earlier this fall, a McMaster University research team published the findings of a broad survey that sought to take the temperature of the university and college workplace almost a year-and-a-half into the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the major findings won’t come as a surprise to academic staff: many of the 475 respondents reported that the COVID-19 distancing restrictions had eroded productivity, as labs closed, field research activities ceased and parents of young children, particularly women, found themselves juggling domestic and professional duties.

But two other findings offered a more somber and textured look at the impact of the pandemic. More than half of those surveyed said they thought more or much more about death than they had before the World Health Organization declared a global state of emergency in March 2020.

I didn’t always have to fake enthusiasm about going in to work; I am in my dream job. Right now, though, the only things keeping me going are the students — they’re a good bunch who deserve my full attention. I just have to work to make sure they get it.