The gays have conquered space!

According to Lifesite News (as we all know, a highly reliable site), Outer space to be solely the dominion of gays and trans. Now it sounds spectacularly fun, but I guess I’m excluded, not being either. They really are discriminating against us cis-het folk! I’m also curious about the sexual orientation of Branson and Bezos.

The story goes on:

According to a growing number of astronomers, physicists, and major scientific journals, anyone who is not sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ should be denied a presence in the cosmos. 

There is a movement afoot within NASA to rename the much anticipated, $8.8 billion yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Why? As a State Department official in the 1950s, James Webb opposed employing gays and lesbians, viewing them as security risks susceptible to blackmail.     

Webb went on to become in 1961 the head of NASA, where he oversaw the Apollo program.   

Because the race to beat the USSR to the moon was viewed as integral to winning the Cold War, the Apollo program had to be protected against vulnerabilities to Soviet interference.  Webb was responsible for implementing federal policy that included purging gays and lesbians from the NASA workforce.    

That’s rather thin gruel of evidence for the extraordinary claim that all the straight people will be denied a presence in the cosmos. It’s a bit of a grand leap from suggesting that large space projects shouldn’t be named after bigots to whining that the straights have been banned from outer space.

You do know that the reason gay people were considered vulnerable to Soviet interference is because good ol’ American bigots would use information about people’s sexuality to find common cause with the nefarious Russkies and wreck our own programs, right? All they had to do was recognize that gay people could also be patriotic Americans to negate the threat, but Webb willingly went along with a plan to discriminate against gay folk, which suggests he shared that bigotry. It’s the presence of homophobes, like everyone at Lifesite news, that is the problem.

They also make the claim that LGBT corruption: Making the hard sciences soft, squishy, citing the fact (which is a fact) that statements about, for instance, the biology of men and women are more complicated to interpret than a simplistic, dishonest TERF can comprehend.

Scientific American regularly publishes articles that are political, not scientific, where LGBT ideology trumps intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research. Recent editorial headlines include Why Anti-Trans Laws Are Anti-Science, A Nationwide Ban Is Needed for “Anti-Gay Therapy,” and Gender-Affirming Health Care Should Be a Right, Not a Crime — all of which belong in the opinion sections of The Advocate or LGBTQ Nation, not a science journal. 

Nature has appended notices to articles and social media postings, declaring, “Nature recognizes that sex and gender are neither binary nor fixed,” or some variation on that theme.  

Science and policy are intertwined, so of course a science journal is going to take a stand on the intersection of science with politics. It is true that “intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research” support the idea that anti-trans laws are anti-science, because they are, and that “anti-gay therapy” doesn’t work and does more harm than good, and fucking of course gender-affirming health care should be provided to everyone who needs it. What is wrong with these people that think respecting the diversity of human identities should be a crime? It is anti-science to think it’s bad that scientific evidence repudiates their narrow-minded views.

As for Nature…it is entirely reasonable that they would qualify statements about the nature of men’s and women’s sexual and gender nature with a reminder that those properties are more fluid and complex. They are rightly concerned that, for instance, actuarial statistics that classify people into male and female categories will be misinterpreted as evidence that sex is rigidly binary by, for instance, bigoted readers like Lifesite News.

Case in point: they try to discredit the petition to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope by implying that the people behind it are a bunch of weirdos.

The name-change petition was launched by the four astronomers, including one who identifies as ‘non-binary,’ an astrophysicist who uses the pronouns ‘she/they,’ and a professor of physics and astronomy who is also a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies who identifies as “queer and agender.”  The petition now has amassed 1,250 signatories, according to Nature.  

But that makes the point for those scientists! These non-binary astronomers exist, and are speaking out and demanding respect as human beings; they are saying that you don’t get to pretend they can only be pure, ideologically conservative men and pure, ideologically conservative women. They are different, and don’t fit into the traditional pair of bins, and they are protesting the fact that people like them were discriminated against! Meanwhile, Lifesite News is not contesting the fact of discrimination, implicitly acknowledging that Webb was biased against them, instead just trying to justify it because we were in a space race against the Soviet Union.

It was a stupid race, anyway. Think what we could have accomplished with less competition and more cooperation, and with the assistance of more brilliant minds that just happened to have sexual preferences James Webb, and other hidebound administrators, didn’t like.

One day’s doting to do today

It’s a travel day for me! I have to drive to Wisconsin to fetch my wife back and to say hello to a cute little ragamuffin for a bit, and then tomorrow I come back. I’m thinking once classes start and I have to deal every day with a swarm of potential plague carriers I’m going to have to throttle back time spent with unvaccinated grandchildren.

While I’m on the road, though, at least I can leave you a pretty diamond squid to look at, and you can always converse among yourselves on The Infinite Thread.

They’re kind of like wet spiders, aren’t they?

Walmart is smarter and more responsible than my university

It’s true. Walmart and Disney are requiring vaccinations.

“The pandemic is not over, and the delta variant has led to an increase in infection rates across much of the U.S.,” Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon said in a memo Friday. “We have made the decision to require all campus office associates and all market, regional and divisional associates who work in multiple facilities to be vaccinated by Oct. 4, unless they have an approved exception.”

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota is half-assing it.

The university is not requiring vaccinations. The reason? “The state of Minnesota’s law concerning requiring vaccination has a broad exemption clause that includes people willing to provide a notarized statement that they have conscientiously held beliefs against vaccination.” Right. All you have to do is say you don’t believe in vaccinations in front of a notary, and you’re exempt. It’s not as if we could say that’s fine, no jab, no classes…oh, wait, we could.

They also say, “As the situation evolves, a mandate may be considered.” OK then, the situation has evolved, consider it. Consider it right fucking now.

They’ve also dropped the face-mask requirement. “If you are fully vaccinated, no masks are required in any University building, venue, or outdoors.” But if you’re not vaccinated, “the University expects you to wear a mask indoors”. Can we ask if students are vaccinated? No, of course not.

No one (other than myself and a few others) are wearing masks on campus. Classes start in less than a month — perhaps more importantly, student parties and the bar scene start up in less than a month, with a significant fraction of the student body unvaccinated and flaunting the perceived immortality of youth. Yet if you poll the students, they’ve got concerns.

I’ve got concerns. I’ve been told I must teach an in-person class in the fall; I’ve asked the university administration if I can at least require masks in my classes, and have only heard silence.

I’ve written to both the president of the University of Minnesota warning them that they’re failing to meet their responsibilities, and to the chancellor of my campus to let them know that they’re compromising the safety of students and staff. There has been no response.

I’m just saying, if you send your child to the university, and they come down with a serious, debilitating illness (or worse), and you’ve got a lawyer looking for witnesses who told the university administrators in advance that their policies were inadequate and dangerous, well, you’ve got my name. But let’s all hope it doesn’t come to that.

Please stop dithering, CDC and everyone

It’s driving me nuts. We are in a serious pandemic, and authorities everywhere are acting as if the best strategy is to pretend we’re already back to normal, full speed ahead, don’t deviate from the pretense that everything is just dandy. Yet…

The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must “acknowledge the war has changed.”

Public schools are opening in a few weeks, as is my university. No one is acknowledging that the war has changed. Instead, we’re all planning to march right into the maw of the pandemic.

My prediction: they’re all going to be frantically backpedaling by October. I fully expect my school to shut down in-person classes by the middle of the semester.

I could be wrong, and I would be very happy if I were — we could have a gentle, delightful Fall with brightly colored leaves and soft snows and a world that embraces love and peace, and all the homeless would be given homes, and all the sick cared for, the QAnoners could all wake and look at each other and say “What are we doing?” and go home to their families, and peace could reign across all the lands. Sure. It could happen. But only if we struggle to make it all happen. And that’s what I’m not seeing, a will to change and do what needs to be done.

The CDC isn’t helping, either. They keep dithering. Recommendations change at the first breeze of new data, and change back a few weeks later. There is a difference between being responsive to new information, and being too quick to accept new suggestions in the face of uncertainty; it’s also important to build the public trust with consistent messages.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

Right. So the appropriate message from the very beginning should have been conservative, assuming the worst and establishing a consistent policy. I want to hear the words, “It wasn’t as bad as we feared, now that we’ve got solid evidence from three months of hard science we can think about easing some restrictions,” rather than “Oh, I guess we shouldn’t have told everyone to have orgies, you’ve all got three months to live.”

Be decisive for a change. I wrote to my university president urging her to take a stronger stand, but I’ll make another bold prediction: she’ll dither. It’s all the rage.

Important qualifier to the CDC’s “ebola” comment:

You know, it’s becoming really obvious that the CDC is very bad at science communication, at a time when we need the science communicated effectively.

Waking up to haze and smoke again

The first odd thought to cross my mind was that I hope my fellow cissies haven’t been up to shenanigans again. With big chunks of the western US and Canada, which are populated with idiots (just like the rest of the world), you never know when someone may have decided to celebrate the identification of bits of differentiating tissue in an embryo by setting off explosives in tinder-dry terrain. You know, like the El Dorado Fire last year.

The fire started from a gender reveal party, authorities said last September. The couple used a smoke bomb, Anderson said.

A firefighter died in that conflagration, but you know, it was important that a sacrifice be made to the genitals of the fetus. I don’t quite get it; when we were having kids in the 1980s, we generally didn’t care whether we had a boy or a girl, and if we were asked, we just used our tongue and teeth and lips and vocal cords to make complex sounds associated with statements about bodies. I don’t think we ever set anything on fire over it. Especially since the consequences of igniting the landscape are so dire.

Refugio and Angela Jimenez are charged with one felony count of involuntary manslaughter, three felony counts of recklessly causing a fire with great bodily injury, four counts of recklessly causing a fire to inhabited structures, and 22 misdemeanor counts of recklessly causing fire to property of another, Anderson said. They pleaded not guilty to charges, he said. The prosecution requested a $50,000 bail, but the couple was released on their own recognizance.

“Not guilty”? I’d be really interested to hear the reasoning behind that one. The people who lost their homes and the family of the firefighter who died might also be curious.

The conflagration, which authorities call the El Dorado Fire, started in the park of the same name on September 5, 2020, near Yucaipa, California, according to officials. It burned 22,680 acres, and killed Charlie Edward Morton, who worked with the San Bernardino National Forest for 14 years. Five homes and 15 structures were destroyed; four residences were damaged. The wildfire also resulted in 13 injuries. Two firefighters were hurt, Anderson said.

Behold, our philosophical overlord wanna-bes

I don’t even know who most of these smug pasty-faced motherfuckers are.

Except for Nick Bostrom, the second from the left. He’s a philosophical dingleberry who is far more widely known than he deserves, simply because he has wacky ideas that appeal to filthy rich libertarians, Dark Enlightenment cockroaches, and transhumanists who dream of the day they can have their heads permanently grafted up their colons. Phil Torres seems to be making a useful career of dissecting “rationalists”, though, and has written up a good exposé.

For a long time, I’ve noticed that anything associated with Bostrom is pure poison — he is a wicked con artist who is great at coming up with bad ideas that serve the self-interest of wealthy, privileged elites. It’s a great racket. It used to be you had to invent a religion, but Bostrom…wait, no, his schemes actually are a novel technocratic religion.

This has roots in the work of philosopher Nick Bostrom, who coined the term “existential risk” in 2002 and, three years later, founded the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) based at the University of Oxford, which has received large sums of money from both Tallinn and Musk. Over the past decade, “longtermism” has become one of the main ideas promoted by the “Effective Altruism” (EA) movement, which generated controversy in the past for encouraging young people to work for Wall Street and petrochemical companies in order to donate part of their income to charity, an idea called “earn to give.” According to the longtermist Benjamin Todd, formerly at Oxford University, “longtermism might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far.”

Longtermism should not be confused with “long-term thinking.” It goes way beyond the observation that our society is dangerously myopic, and that we should care about future generations no less than present ones. At the heart of this worldview, as delineated by Bostrom, is the idea that what matters most is for “Earth-originating intelligent life” to fulfill its potential in the cosmos. What exactly is “our potential”? As I have noted elsewhere, it involves subjugating nature, maximizing economic productivity, replacing humanity with a superior “posthuman” species, colonizing the universe, and ultimately creating an unfathomably huge population of conscious beings living what Bostrom describes as “rich and happy lives” inside high-resolution computer simulations.

It’s all about future potential. If killing a beggar in the street means that maybe, hypothetically two scions of an Oxford don might be able to each buy a second yacht in the future, then murder away! The net benefit to the economy, and therefore all of human happiness (which is, of course, entirely a product of a healthy economy) is greater for the loss of a parasite and the enhancement of the capitalist class. Never mind that the benefits are entirely imaginary and work to the advantage of nonexistent people, or that we could also imagine that beggar has the potential to cure all diseases given the opportunity, no, just fantasize a benefit for someone you like, and all harm is justified.

This is the kind of thinking that spawned Roko’s Basilisk, you know.

Anyway, billionaires love these guys. That ought to be enough to tell you that they are literally evil.

I blame Canada

In addition to being hot and humid (but less so than it was yesterday), the whole of Morris is hazy and smells of burning wood. Canada is on fire! Also, Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, and Idaho. Minnesota, at least, is not on fire, we’re just downwind from the conflagration. I woke up this morning wondering if the house was on fire, but no, stepping outside was enough to show me that this is a shared misery.

So how are all you Westerners holding up? I half-expect to see screaming citizens wreathed in flames to come staggering across the Dakota border.

I remember Anita Bryant!

She was an attractive pop-singer in the 1970s who became the face of intolerant homophobia. I don’t remember any of her songs, but I sure remember how much she was a running joke among the kinds of liberal hippies I hung out with.

(Oh, right, the “your watch is on backwards” thing. You see, back in the Old Days, we wore timepieces called “watches” on our wrist, and most normal people wore them with the face on the dorsal side, so you’d hold your arm straight out to see the time; some people wore them with the face on the ventral side, so you’d bend your wrist back when you wanted to know what time it is. This is a difficult difference to grasp for people who may not know what a watch is.)

But really, I did not know anyone who didn’t think Anita Bryant was a creepy fanatic. She had her fans, obviously, but she was equivalent of a TERF nowadays — yeah, she has her following, she was promoting awful laws, but we were sure she was on the wrong side of history. It’s nice to see that confirmed.

She’s an old lady of 81 now, still just as rigid in her thinking (definitely not a cool grandma), and still a committed homophobe. It’s satisfying to know that she lived long enough to see her granddaughter, Sarah Green, come out to her face.

Toward the end, Green talks about her relationship with Bryant, who was a doting grandmother; Green says she once thought Bryant didn’t really hate LGBTQ+ people, but she started to look at her grandmother differently when Green realized as a teen that she herself was gay.

She had no intention of coming out to Bryant, but she was spurred to do so on her 21st birthday. Bryant sang “Happy Birthday” to her granddaughter on the phone and told her that if she had faith, the right man would come along. “And I just snapped and was like, ‘I hope that he doesn’t come along, because I’m gay, and I don’t want a man to come along,’” Green recalls.

Bryant responded by telling Green that homosexuality is a delusion invented by the devil and that her granddaughter should focus on loving God, because that would make her realize she’s straight.

“It’s very hard to argue with someone who thinks that an integral part of your identity is just an evil delusion,” Green says.

And now Sarah Green has had the joy of announcing her engagement to another young woman!

Bryant knows Sarah is engaged to a woman, said Robert Green Jr., Sarah Green’s father and Bryant’s son, says on the podcast. When he told his mother, he notes, “All at once, her eyes widened, her smile opened, and out came the oddest sound: ‘Oh.’ Instead of taking Sarah as she is, my mom has chosen to pray that Sarah will eventually conform to my mom’s idea of what God wants Sarah to be.”

Sarah Green says she doesn’t hate Bryant but feels sorry for her. “I just kind of feel bad for her,” she says. “And I think as much as she hopes that I will figure things out and come back to God, I kind of hope that she’ll figure things out.”

That’s even better than a pie in the face.

(Also cool: “four young homosexuals from Minneapolis” were responsible.)