It’s happening again. I’m falling behind on the grading, and today I have to give another exam because the syllabus says so. The exam is ready to go, but I’m not.
I’m going to go hang out in the lab for a while and relax.
Must think soothing thoughts, don’t want to break down. Just buckling down, trying to get all the work done, eyes on next week when it all comes to a close.
Also, thinking thoughts of revenge.
See? A positive mindset will get me through this.
Why is Tucker Carlson still on the air? He’s spreading criminal misinformation and encouraging his viewers to sic the cops on people wearing masks.
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson thinks people wearing masks are “repulsive” and told his viewers last night that they should even call the cops when they see children wearing masks.
And knowing the yearning, empty vessels that make up the bulk of his viewing audience, you know it will happen. 911 operators will be diverted from actual emergencies so the intellectually lazy prep school boy can revel in the extent of his power.
Mind you, it’s children wearing masks in Walmart that so disgusts him. Not the oppositional defiance bunch that so proudly sports semi-automatic weapons in Walmart.
“Masks have always been incompatible with a free society. We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals, transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us and alienate us to shut us off from one another, they prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you.”
You want America to become another India? Because that’s how you get India.
So what went wrong? Experts cite the spread of the U.K. variant and frequent large events with unmasked crowds. State election rallies have gone ahead, and a Hindu festival drew millions of people to the Ganges River this month—leading to more than 1,000 new cases. But the emergence of a more contagious Indian strain seems to be the biggest factor. In March, a government statement warned of new variants that “confer immune escape and increased infectivity.” In fact, the Indian strain may have been circulating as early as October.
Shamika Ravi, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Foreign Policy that both the new strain and the increasing number of people leaving their homes explain the current surge. She said the high mobility rate may also indicate why more young people are getting infected in the current wave: They are the ones exposing themselves by leaving their homes for work and leisure. Mobility rates for older people have been lower during the pandemic.
This is what I dread. We’re taking a cautious approach at my university — some easing of restrictions, but I’m still going to be doing online teaching primarily next Fall — and I want this over. But it’s not over yet, and too many people are acting as if it is, which will only make it worse. As Margaret Sullivan puts it, Tucker Carlson’s latest idiocy on masks is dangerous and hypocritical even by his usual standards. It’s going to kill people. It’s going to empower more lunatics. And yet Fox News blithely encourages him.
Watch the spectacle of a petulant, gibbering liar straining to fuel the outrage that keeps him on the air, if you can stomach it.
This is terrible. I pre-ordered Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries Book 6) ages ago, and it crawled into my Kindle app overnight and is sitting there, tempting me.
There’s no way I can read it now. I don’t have the time.
But…on the day I turn in my final grades in mid-May, the sun will be shining, the weather will be balmy, and I will be relaxing on the deck, reading this book, free of all stress, every muscle unkinking, brow unfurrowed.
And the day after that I’ll be scouring the countryside for spiders.
I’m coming around to Iris‘s point of view. I have a bird feeder just outside my office window. It’s supposed to be squirrel-proof (nothing is squirrel-proof).
Birds are constantly coming by. Our cat sits there twitching, watching them.
Unfortunately, these big meaty monster squirrels keep climbing up on it, terrifying the birds. There’s a bar for the birds to perch on, to the right, but it’s hinged so that when a heavy rodent climbs on it, it folds down, closing access to the seeds inside. So far, so good.
Only now what the squirrels have figured out is that they can climb onto that silver roof and twist that red handle until it unlatches, and then get on the bar and pop the roof off, allowing them to climb right in and wallow in bird seed. It’s very annoying to find the roof removed and a brushy-tailed rat inside, indulging in gluttony.
I’m trying something different now. I’ve put a line of sriracha sauce all around the roof, and also dabbed it on the latch. We’ll see how well that dissuades the thieves. Otherwise, I wonder if a line of squirrel skulls would work.
Anyone else have other suggestions?
I’m home alone, and in addition to taking care of the evil cat, I have a mealworm colony in the dining room. Mary set it up and usually feeds them — it’s not a big deal, just throw a slice of apple in there every once in a while — and I just scoop up a handful every few weeks to feed the spiders.
We do not have 10,000 mealworms. I’d have to be raising a thousand spiders for that to make sense. But I can dream!
(We do not have guests over for dining now…pandemic, you know. If we did, we might move the colony to another room, even though they are quite quiet and well-behaved.)
The “liberal” news media <snort>. Watch this and try not to throw anything heavy across the room.
CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture" pic.twitter.com/EMxOEYDbg7
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 26, 2021
There it is. There’s the great American myth. We are a nation that coalesced out of nothingness around two ideas: FREEDOM (for white landowners) and CHRISTIANITY (oh, judeo-Christianity) and the Ten Commandments and Jesus, despite none of those appearing in our constitution. Meanwhile, the people who were already living here were just sitting around slack-jawed and drooling, not a single thought in their heads, no art, no culture, no religion, no technology, no music, no traditions, so it was OK to slaughter them. It’s one grand smug lie, repeated over and over, and the rich white people sit there and lap it up.
The fact that that slimy fraud hasn’t been canceled and has in fact been prospering is all the evidence you need that cancel culture does not exist.
It gives me some slight satisfaction that I lived at a time in Pennsylvania when I could vainly vote against that horrible human being.
Should I be envious? Look at these scores that Bruce Conforth of the University of Michigan got on RateMyProfessor. This may be the first time in years that I’ve so much as glanced at that hellsite (no, don’t tell me what my score is, I don’t want to know), but I heard all the news about what an inspiring, award-winning instructor he was, so I had to check.
Yeah, “all the news”. You know something awful has happened, because you don’t get national attention for being really good at your job. So let’s get the whole story.
Several sexual assault allegations surfaced Friday against former University of Michigan American Culture lecturer Bruce Conforth, who won the 2012 Golden Apple Award for most outstanding U-M instructor, according to the New York Times.
Conforth, a musician and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, retired in early 2017. His retirement came after three women reported to the University in 2008 and 2016 that Conforth had attempted to engage in sexual relationships with them as students, according to the Times.
Now, six former students have filed legal papers with the intent of suing both Conforth for sexual misconduct and the University of Michigan for failing to provide Conforth with consequences or protect the victims with further investigation and action.
Conforth’s allegations of sexual harassment include unsolicited messages and rape.
Warning: the article gives more detailed accounts of his behavior. It was hard to read through to the end, where you discover that six other professors and administrators at the University of Michigan have been committing unrelated sex crimes in recent years, and the university has only reluctantly acted on them. I guess it’s easier to hand out awards.
We get an idea of the university’s policies from the timeline.
The University claimed to have taken action against Conforth by setting restrictions on him after the first report of sexual assault in 2008, and planned to conduct an investigation after the second two reports in 2016, if Conforth did not agree to retire in 2017.
So…you rape one student, and the U wags a finger at you and gives you a major teaching award a few years later; you have to rape three students before you’re asked to quietly retire and collect your pension. No wonder they’ve accumulated an impressive collection of sex offenders on their faculty.
But he was so popular and enthusiastic in his lectures, you know…
I’ll be OK! I’ve managed to plow through that massive pile of student essays by the simple expedient of getting up at 3:30am on Sunday and working through midnight, and I got them all read and sprinkled them with comments. I’m not quite done: now that I’ve got a good idea of their relative merit, I’m grinding through them all again and assigning grades, and uploading electronic copies that I can send to the remote black rectangles I affectionately regard as my students. I should be able to complete this final stage by mid-afternoon and put this one behind me.
Good thing, too, because I’m handing out another take-home exam on Wednesday, which they’ll return to me on Saturday. The hamster wheel is spinning fast, folks! I think the axle is glowing cherry red, but I’m hoping it’ll last a little longer. The next exam, I have decided, will be a series of genetics problems where the answers are just pure, simple, clean numbers — they’ll turn in a page with 10 numbers on it, and they’re either right or wrong, and I just go down the list and check them off. I should be able to survive next weekend, right? And have time to compose the comprehensive final exam they’ll get the week after?
Then tonight I burn the midnight oil again to finish up this stack of lab reports.
Oh yeah, I also have a second class I have to finish up by tomorrow, and they get another exam on Thursday.
I have a long to-do list in front of me, but don’t worry, I’ve penciled “sleep” in for a few hours on Friday, right after “spiders”.
Imagine, this whole university is full of highly-trained Ph.D.s who are going to be bleeding from the eyeballs for the next couple of weeks, and we’re all going to crash spectacularly on approximately the 16th of May, when we can finally close the books on this semester.
Once again, it’s cold and nasty out there, unfit weather for any arachnid, so I’m going to be frustrated a while longer. Fortunately, a reader sent me a link to a page documenting the spiders of Portugal, and lovely spiders they are. Spiders are the international language!
I think this means I have to book a flight to Lisbon right away. It’s a mensagem de Deus!
Hey, everyone! It’s Saturday night, during a pandemic, and I home alone with a cat that hates me, so it’s a perfect time for a pity party. I walked out to the liquor store and got some cheap whisky, and I’ve already downed a couple of shots, so you better get to work to catch up. I have many things to be miserable about, and I wanted to get a head start.
Myers is a bitch. And she was bitchslapped long time ago by almost everyone in the atheist community and made a pariah [he’s right, you know–pzm]. Thoroughly deserved given the damage that C*unt did.
Once upon a time I thought atheists would be more rational than theists. Boy was I wrong!
Have you see this?
Access the article by clicking on the address way below.
Notice that the tranny within AA, Alison Gill,
is coming down hard on Dawkins.
Dawkins is not perfect but I’ll take him any day over Alison Gill.
Dawkins’ main problem is that he doesn’t speak “American.”
I think he means well but he doesn’t come across very well
to Americans. But he is basically correct.Rumor is that the Humanist organization
has also been taken over by LGBTQ people.
I wrote back to tell her to stop sending me her poisonous crap. Like my usual trolls, she didn’t stop.
PZ, This is not hateful and this is not poisonous.
You know me better than that.
These people (LGBTQ) have taken over AA and
the Humanist organizations.
“Tranny” is a well-known nickname for transgender people,
which is a mouthful to type. It is not meant negatively.Dawkins is correct. The right wing fundamentalists
are using the “transgender issue”as a Trojan horse to get at us.
We need to separate the transgender issue from atheism.
We are science oriented.
You do not become a woman by amputating your male genitals.
But if they want to do that, they are free to do so in America
but don’t connect it with atheism.
THAT IS ALL WE ASK.
Depressing, isn’t it? I don’t want to be associated with these people any more. And she doesn’t know me at all.
Fuck it, party is over.
