The Marjorie Taylor Greene disease

There she goes again, opening her mouth and saying stupid shit.

Appearing before the Dalton, Georgia, City Council on June 15, 2020, Greene complained about the movement to remove statues of the pro-slavery Confederacy and Christopher Columbus.

We’re seeing situations where Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all kinds of statues are being attacked, said Greene. It seems to be just an effort to take down history.

She went on to note, And whether I see a statue that may be something that I would fully disagree with, like Adolf Hitler, maybe a statue of Satan himself, I would not want to say take it down, but again, it’s so that I can tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did, and what they may be about.

I don’t believe for a moment that a statue of Hitler is something she would fully disagree with.

Also, the problem isn’t “attacking” statues, it’s attacking the ideas that those statues represent. We put up statues of famous men and then ignore the flaws in those people, so it’s the opposite of teaching history to idolize individuals. What am I supposed to teach children when we stroll by a statue of Hitler in the park? That you aren’t supposed to feel sick to your stomach, that you should respect the principles he stood for?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is stupid and demented. And she doubled down!

Over the weekend, Greene had said during an interview that COVID-related mask rules in the House of Representatives are reminiscent of a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.

A mask is a functional item that benefits the wearer, and most importantly, the people around them. It discriminates against respiratory viruses, nothing else. But maybe she’d like to erect statues to coronaviruses?

It’s not just one loon babbling, either. The whole dang Republican party seems to support her.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy released a statement describing Greene’s newest comments about the Holocaust as “wrong” but also attacking Democrats.

At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he wrote.

Boy, they really hate Nancy Pelosi. But that’s all backwards — the Republicans are where we find the white nationalists and white supremacists and the people who are trying to restrict democracy and oppose immigration. And they call the Democrats anti-Semitic?

I think what they’re referring to is that there are more Democrats willing to recognize the authoritarian oppression of Palestinians by Israel. That’s not anti-Semitism. That’s opposition to genocide by Israeli “defense” forces. It’s also weak sauce, since the Democrats haven’t been particularly effective in opposing the violence.

But the Republicans will just go on propping up the kind of antic poison that will rip this country apart.

I’d join the misanthropy club, but I would probably detest the members

Early on, one of the things that led me to atheism was that so many Christians insisted on things that were patently wrong. Why did I leave the church at a young age? This would horrify Ken Ham, but they lost me precisely because of the anti-science and specifically anti-evolution slant.

Then the racists lost me because they insisted that black people were a parallel (and inferior!) evolutionary line that looked more like gorillas than white people do. I knew a fair bit about other primates, and no, that’s definitely false. It’s absurdly false. So nope, the racists will not persuade me, especially since now I have even deeper knowledge of the subject than I did as a child.

And then there are the anti-feminists.

It is incomprehensible to me how anyone committed to an evidence-based perspective can be opposed to feminism. You hang out with a few anti-feminists and they’re just oozing with bullshit, which was one of the features leading me to part ways with the atheist movement. This stuff is damaging to any social organization, and if you let it thrive, I want no part of you.

Like this:

At that link, there’s a whole series of dumbass assertions by ignorant idiots about biology. Ick. They’re all from those hives of villainy, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. And I realized that my problem isn’t just with Christianity, or atheism, or racism, or misogyny — it’s with all of humanity. Or, at least, that part of humanity that gravitates towards social media. And with that, my heart shrank two sizes that day.

Save our spiders!

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an article about how we need to talk about spider conservation. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue, since spiders are basically the charismatic megafauna of the invertebrate world — where you might think of something like tigers and wolves as the mammalian superstars, spiders fill a similar role among the arthropods.

“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. “Nightmares, anxieties and fears are very frequent reactions in ‘normal’ people,” he concedes.

Perhaps that’s why spiders remain under-represented across the world’s endangered-species conservation plans. Average people don’t think much about them, relatively few scientists study them, and conservation groups and governments don’t act enough to protect them.

That’s a major gap in species-protection efforts — one that has wide repercussions. “Efforts in conservation of spiders are particularly meaningful for nature conservation,” Isaia points out. Spiders, he says, have enormous ecological value as food for birds and other animals. They’re also important to people, both as predators of pest species and as inspiration for medicines and engineering.

My first spider project, started a couple of years ago, was a survey of spider populations in people’s outbuildings — garages and sheds — that I argued would be a useful proxy for studying invertebrate populations. Counting chironomids would be way too daunting, but counting the smaller number of chironomid predators would be much easier. At least that was the plan. We spent one summer knocking on doors, getting permission to invade their storage spaces and sweep for spiders, and I have a little pile of folders and species counts that I’ve assembled into a nice baseline measure…but then this damned pandemic hit, and I haven’t been able to do the follow-up measurements. Maybe next summer I’ll be able to resume it.

It’s a lovely project for undergrads. You don’t need to know anything about spiders, other than to be able to recognize one, so day one you can collect data. I hope we can continue it in 2022, and then I’ll just have to figure out how to deal with a big gap in the series.

I was doing it as a study of the health of the invertebrate population in general, but there are a lot of things we don’t know about spiders in general.

“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.”

This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae. (And perhaps tellingly, it’s worth noting that the Gibraltar funnel-web spider has not currently been assessed for the IUCN Red List.)

I found that about 10 species covered the great majority of spiders in a narrowly defined environment — but if you think about it, 10 different species in the 60 square meters of a large garage is rather impressively diverse. What are all those different spiders doing in that environment? And we’d often also find some other species in any one space that wasn’t universal. Then if we stepped outside into the garden, or walked down by the river, or looked in a barn that had been abandoned for fifty years, yet more species would show up.

I have no idea if any are endangered, because no one else in this area has been looking. More research is required!

I’m losing confidence in the “intelligence” community

I’m not saying it was the CIA, but it was the CIA.

We’re suffering from a spate of UFO reports…endorsed by the CIA and the military. This is a bit like hearing that the president believes the Earth is flat, or senators babbling about how evolution is false.

Oh. I guess that last bit happens fairly regularly.

Anyway, suddenly there are all kinds of unconvincing videos from military planes flooding media. I’ve looked at a few — they are garbage. It’s as if people who are supposed to be good at distinguishing camera artifacts from actual stuff on the ground or in the sky have lost the ability to see common noise and optical problems. I saw one video where the supposed UFO was just plain old ordinary bokeh. You don’t have to be super-sophisticated to debunk this stuff, which means, I guess, that CIA directors aren’t particularly knowledgeable.

Late last year, former CIA director John Brennan, appearing on a podcast hosted by George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen, said it was “a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.”

Yes? I believe there is almost certainly other forms of life in the universe. The hard-to-swallow bit is the idea that they’re here.

And last month, former CIA director R. James Woolsey said in an interview with the Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal sightings, that he wasn’t “as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly, but something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.”

I’ve known a few pilots. Nothing about their occupation requires particularly deep intelligence (nor is it antithetical to being smart). Even if they were super-geniuses, you should still be skeptical of the reports. Have none of these people even read Feynman?

Hey, why is a former CIA director giving interviews on “a website that collects paranormal sightings”?

The authenticity of the videos has been confirmed by Pentagon officials. Some of them were recently featured on “60 Minutes.”

I have looked at these videos, and they actually truly are videos, rather than hallucinations. There. Confirmed.

I suppose this could also mean they have confirmed the sources, and they weren’t made by guys photographing pie plates thrown in their backyard. What they haven’t confirmed is that they are videos of alien spaceships.

“I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots,” Brennan said, “and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them.” He added, “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

Right. Bokeh. Lens reflections. Sensor artifacts. Brennan doesn’t understand optics. There is almost always an alternative, mundane explanation that doesn’t involve faster-than-light travel by intelligent aliens who are cruising our planet in flotillas of glowing spaceships, yet somehow are incredibly concerned about not being seen, which is why they look like flares dropped from airplanes.

Of course, eventually we figure out why all these people are being gullible and foolish. It’s about money. All it takes is a few easily fooled people with access to government funds to open the purse strings and fuel all kinds of nonsense.

It only took about 10 minutes to persuade his colleagues, Stevens and Inouye, to support approximately $22 million in funds for the Pentagon to start a program to investigate. Stevens was a particularly easy sell, [former Senate Majority leader Harry] Reid recalled, because as an Air Force pilot during World War II he had seen some pretty weird stuff, including an object that didn’t appear to be a plane that mimicked his movements in the air.

Here on planet Earth we call those objects “reflections”.

All right, for $22 million I’d be willing to highlight ambiguous videos, shrug, and declare in interviews that “well, it could be aliens.”

Would you pay me $2.2 million for the service?

$220,000, cheap.

Very well then, $22, but you also have to buy me lunch.

I’m not gonna believe what isn’t there

This is cute. What’s the difference between politicians and scientists?

There are at least two ways to look at that, though. My first assumption was that gosh, politicians are simply innumerate. But another perspective would be that politicians have an agenda and interpret data to fit a desired conclusion.

And then I read all the nonsense about attempts to pin the pandemic on an intentional conspiracy. The latest news is that workers at Wuhan labs were coming down sick before the pandemic hit.

A State Department fact sheet released by the Trump administration in January said that the researchers had gotten sick in autumn 2019 but did not go as far as to say they had been hospitalized. China reported to the World Health Organization that the first patient with Covid-like symptoms was recorded in Wuhan on December 8, 2019.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the intelligence surrounding the earlier hospitalizations.
Importantly, the intelligence community still does not know what the researchers were actually sick with, said the people briefed, and continues to have low confidence in its assessments of the virus’ precise origins beyond the fact that it came from China. “At the end of the day, there is still nothing definitive,” said one of the people who has seen the intelligence.

That last paragraph is the important one. I can believe that people were sloppy, that the labs may have been poorly managed, or that they were secure, but employed human beings who could get sick for reasons that had nothing to do with their work. But I have yet to see any evidence that the disease was engineered. There is no evidence that the workers had COVID-19. There is no reason to think this virus was the consequence of anything other than chance variation.

But that wouldn’t fit the teleological imperative!

Christ, Texas.

Florida is pretty bad, and Arizona is working its way down the rankings, but I’m going to say it: Texas is the very worst. It’s a shithole state run by horrible people. I’m sorry if you live there, you’re either going to have to flee or elect better representatives.

The latest example of Texan villainy: their house of representatives passed a law to silence teachers.

Republicans in the Texas House passed a bill Tuesday that effectively bans public school teachers from talking about racism, white supremacy or current news events.

The bill, which is being fast-tracked to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to sign into law, states that social studies and civics teachers aren’t allowed to discuss the concept that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or the idea that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

It also states that social studies and civics teachers “may not be compelled to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” as part of a course.

Oh, also…

The legislation also states that teachers don’t have to take professional training ― like cultural proficiency and equity training ― if it makes them feel any “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or gender.

If you’re a white man, you can’t be allowed to feel any guilt about your race and gender’s role in American history. At least it’s something that they know they should feel shame, so they have to pass laws to prevent anyone from confronting them.

Just this week, Philosophy Tube posted an appropriate video on ignorance and the state sponsorship thereof. She’s very timely.

Speaking of fleeing Texas, I have one son who has been living there…but he’s getting out this very week to move to the much more progressive state of Washington. A wise move — and I really am sorry for all of you stuck down there in America’s rectum.

I get email

It’s not much, but I’m getting ready to head out the door for my long trek home, so it’s all you’re going to get.

By the way, they sent a link, but it’s just that butchered Ray Comfort interview from years ago. You can skip it.

You love Satan but he hates you!
Just spotted you acting all sophisticated and claiming to be atheist on this youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaReWoUyyQ.

Why don’t you grow up, get a copy of Darwin’s Worms book and try reason through that irrefutable fact he established – WORMS MAKE TOPSOIL AT THE RATE OF ONE INCH PER FIVE YEARS.

You seem to have sufficient intelligence to read the Worms book so why don’t you do it and stop promoting Satan?

Uh, OK. I have read the worm book. It doesn’t refute evolution — you know there are multiple processes at work in creating topsoil, including erosion taking it away, right? — and I presume this person is playing some weird game about the thickness of the soil supporting their young earth delusion.

By the way, you note that I said I’m an atheist. Perhaps this will shock you, but atheists don’t believe in Satan, either.

Besides, I only worship spider gods now.

Universities are not “liberal”, they are prisoners of capitalism

Once again, we must turn to the pages of Teen Vogue to find intelligent commentary. Oh, and this is a good one: do you think universities are liberal bastions? They’re not.

Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus, nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.

Yes, I can look to my peers and see almost entirely politically liberal folk — but it’s not a factor in what we teach, and it’s not even a topic we discuss much. I knew enough that few of us, if any, were going to vote for Trump, but otherwise I had no idea of who everyone’s preferred candidate was, and didn’t have any compelling reason to dig deeper into the details of their political interests. I work in a department full of environmentalists, and that was enough. Which party was going to work against the interests of the environment? That’s all you needed to know.

All of us also take care to not make partisanship a direct factor in our classes. We’re working with rural midwestern students, we know that setting up an antagonistic relationship with conservative students in the classroom is not a productive way to teach.

So what’s happening? Why do I feel so little connection with the interests of those who administer the university? We have become corporate entities.

But from the mid-1970s on, as the historian Larry Gerber writes, shared governance was supplanted as the dominant model of university administration as boards of trustees and their allies in the offices of provosts and deans took advantage of public funding cuts to higher education and asserted increasing control over the hiring of the professoriate. They imported business models from the for-profit corporate world that shifted the labor model for teaching and research from tenured and tenure-track faculty to part-time faculty on short-term contracts, who were paid less and excluded from the benefits of the tenure system, particularly the academic freedom that tenure secured by mandating that professors could only be fired for extraordinary circumstances.

At the same time, Gerber details, the makeup of university boards of trustees became stacked with members from corporate backgrounds who made opposition to academic labor organizing part of the contemporary university’s governance model. These boards exercise enormous power: controlling senior administrative appointments, approving faculty hiring, dictating labor policies, and, most importantly, controlling the university’s annual budget and setting tuition and fees. (Case in point: The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees recently declined to appoint Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones to a tenure-track position following conservative outcry over her work on the 1619 project, documenting the history of slavery in the U.S. As one board member told NC Policy Watch, “This is a very political thing. …There have been people writing letters and making calls, for and against. But I will leave it to you which is carrying more weight.”)

Right. Those controlling boards do not resemble in any way the makeup of the academic units they control. There is a ladder to climb in university administration, if you want, but it doesn’t actually lead to a position on the elements that actually have real financial power. Sure, you can dream of being a university president or chancellor (I don’t!), but the ultimate power rests in the hands of political appointees. If you want to get there, you need to have a career that makes you extremely rich…which isn’t an academic career.

At Harvard, the “corporation” that exercises significant sway over administrative appointments and policy includes six MBAs and only four Ph.Ds. Harvard’s “Board of Overseers,” which is charged with safeguarding “Harvard’s overarching academic mission and long-term institutional interests,” includes, among artists and doctors, senior leaders from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey & Company, Google, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. It’s likely that boards with a substantial number of corporate managers regard “long-term institutional interests” as including vehement opposition to unionization by graduate workers and a sluggish response to students and alumni calling for divestment of Harvard’s assets from fossil fuels. (Teen Vogue has reached out to Harvard for comment.)

My university is not unionized. It’s amazing how little interest the faculty has in joining a union.

(The article has a section at the end for these institutions to comment. You want to see examples of corporate double-speak and vapidity, check it out. My favorite bit? The University of Oklahoma defends their board of regents by saying, Each member has a proven track record on how to lead a successful business. Exactly. That’s the problem. That’s how universities get turned into businesses.)

The article has some suggestions for how to break this pattern of bad management.

What is the left to do about the corporate capture of the modern university? First and foremost, it must support and spread labor organizing across the country, building on the momentum established this spring with the strike by graduate workers at Columbia University. Second, relentlessly push the Biden administration toward canceling all student debt and supporting free public college for all. Third, assert shared governance on campus and work toward building a democratic university that secures labor protections and fair wages for all faculty, especially contingent and graduate workers. If we don’t act, the corporatization of universities will destroy American higher education.

That second point is essential. It would thoroughly demolish the poisonous idea that the purpose of the university is to make a profit for…who? I don’t know. There are probably lawyers making bank somewhere out of this mess, but it sure isn’t the faculty, or the students, or even the university administrators.

I am inclined to suspect that no one is winning, that this inefficient, wrongly-directed chaos is driven more by fanatical capitalist ideologues in state legislatures who have a deep, misguided belief that everything must be run as a for-profit business, so they shoe-horn education into a badly fitting model to the detriment of all.