LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW STUFF

I was fascinated by this article for two reasons: first, because it clearly explains how ventilators work, and what some of the complex parameters of their operation are. There is information here. They need, for instance, to be able to sense the patient’s natural breathing rhythm and follow it, rather than just simply imposing a robotic rhythm of their own. This stuff is difficult.

But the second interesting thing is the clear explanation of how Boris Johnson and the UK government barreled ahead, deciding to harness the power of British industry to build ventilators, just as they built Spitfires in WWII. Unfortunately, the job was put in the hands of bureaucrats who didn’t have the slightest idea of what the medical requirements were, so they issued contradictory and invalid specifications that led to wasted effort and failure.

The author is on Twitter and explains some of the underlying concepts. The article itself is formally written, but Twitter lets him say what he really feels.

“LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW STUFF” is something the US government also needs to do.

We’re always buried in books & papers, why are you complaining now?

Oh lord. I cringed so hard at this op-ed in Inside Higher Ed I think I might have pile-drived my cervical vertebrae right into the lumbar. Ouch. The author, Kristie Kiser, is giving advice to faculty about how to compose themselves for this new era of Zooming online.

In a world where conversations around us are terrifying, a student who has perceived Dr. Jones as a strong female role model, who is polished and eloquent at all times in the classroom, may be quite alarmed indeed to find Dr. Jones wearing her Pokémon pajamas with disheveled, unwashed hair, lamenting the added workload associated with social distancing. Your piles of unattended laundry are not trophies for the amount of time you are putting into your coursework. They are distractions, signs of disorganization and, quite frankly, unsightly and off-putting. Educators, please rethink your approach to your students. In these trying times, the last thing that they need to see is their adult, professional, highly educated instructor falling apart at the seams.

You see, if we don’t wash our hair, we’re falling apart at the seams. We’ve been driven out of our university offices, but it’s unprofessional if you post video from your bedroom. Don’t be unsightly. So what if your workload has abruptly doubled and you’ve found yourself in completely unfamiliar territory — for the honor of your institution, which is not paying you any extra for extra work, you must also perform all the superficial cosmetic stuff, because you must also look as poised and polished as if you’re appearing in the university’s recruiting brochures.

Heck, I don’t meet those standards under normal conditions. One of the painful realities of these committee meetings in zoom is that I get to see all my younger, better-looking colleagues in the gallery, and my face is also right there, to make the comparison easy to see. Yeah, I’m the homely sludge-beast squatting in the corner of your screen. I’m not brochure-quality at the best of times, and this is the worst of times. I can console myself that students are supposed to be taking in the quality of the information I can deliver, not the quality of my eyeliner nor my lean, muscular physique, but then the Pretty Police show up in the education journals, and the lies I tell myself all crumble.

Oh, well. All I’m seeing around my corner of the web is Kiser getting dunked on. See SkepChick for a complete tear-down, as deserved.

It’s been so thorough that I’m feeling sorry for Kristie Kiser. This is not to say she doesn’t deserve it, but she’s young — a doctoral student — and of an academic rank that requires guidance. Someone should have looked at that article submission, blanched, and said “You can’t possibly be planning to shame your colleagues for their appearance at this difficult time, can you?”, but instead…they published it. They might as well have nailed her up on a wall and provided baskets of stones. Now I’m wondering which would be worse: that an editor accepted it with a vicious smile and the knowledge that they’d be chumming the academic community with her blood, or that the editor actually agreed that their slovenly peers needed to be chastised. Either way, the editors were assholes and should be called out as well.

David Brooks is still writing columns?

Why? What the fuck is wrong with the NY Times? (I know, I seem to have spent the last couple of decades asking that question, but I still haven’t had a good answer.)

Fortunately, Driftglass reads him, so I don’t have to.

Mr. Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago) after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since. Brooks is America’s most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred and has made his a career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes truly it can be said (and has been said, once or twice) that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation — from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song — there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Fucking Brooks.

I haven’t read the column, and I don’t plan to, so I don’t have direct observations to determine the accuracy of this summary, but I’ve read enough David F. Brooks to assume that the gist is correct.

First, I’m sorry Brooks’ kids no longer speak to him because he dumped their mother for an intern, and passive-aggressively lashing out at them via the op-ed page of The New York Times is the only way Brooks’ knows how send them a message, but honestly, that sounds like a “David Brooks” problem, and not a “the rest of us” problem.

Second, this is every bit the Brooks-brand wretchedly oblivious moral hectoring that you imagine it to be.

And third, in the interest of self-care during these dark times, you shouldn’t read it. After all, that’s my job.

I repeat, why does the NY Times still shovel money at that worthless blot of privileged rancidness? Driftglass would do a better job, and he’d probably work for less while deserving more.

Mission accomplished

I blazed through the local grocery store and stocked up on various staples — also cat food (she snick’d her claws at me as I was going out the door, and I know what’s good for me), coffee, cheap cheese, onions, carrots, etc. I noticed that the toilet paper aisle was still an empty wasteland, which I don’t get at all; why are y’all pooping so much? Other points of absence were the dried beans, which I totally understand, that makes sense, and ramen was nearly all gone, unless you like the pork flavor.

I only saw one worker at the store wearing a mask, and no other customers were wearing one, although there weren’t very many in there at 7:30am, so that was a small sample. Now I think I can stay home for another two weeks. Only two weeks of classes left, too!

Ready to venture into the apocalyptic wasteland

Tomorrow, I’m planning on a brief excursion to the grocery store — just in and out, grabbing a few basics, and then escaping before the ‘rona gets me. But I have no mask! Skatje made me a nice shimmery green one, but she’s in Colorado under stay-at-home orders herself, and hasn’t been able to send it to me yet. So I improvised one, cut up an old t-shirt, and will line it with coffee filters. Will also wear a hat, scarf, and glasses.

I think I look like a low-budget 19th century highwayman. May hold up a coach as I assault the store, as well.

CFI has learned nothing

After the embarrassment of firing Kavin Senapathy and removing all of her previous contributions, it finally got through to the board that that was unethical and they have restored her articles. This being CFI, though, they couldn’t let it go and sent out a memo insulting Senapathy and asserting that they were not a racist organization because they knew some brown people.

Gah.

So of course Senapathy has fired back.

Speaking of caricatures, they boast that they work alongside “a vast array” of non-white people. As someone who has been committed to learning about the legacies of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism over the past few years, I quickly saw the dehumanization in this statement — whether or not it was intentional, this is tokenism. Do not refer to minorities as “a vast array.” And do not parade associations with non-white people as if it’s praiseworthy. Period. (Not to mention that this is a gross exaggeration; they don’t actually work with many non-white folks.)

Where has CFI used its platform to expose these fallacies? How? Evidence suggests otherwise. For instance, CFI let the African Americans for Humanism domain expire. As I observed in Undark, their magazine Skeptical Inquirer published a one-off “race issue” with articles written exclusively by white men. Contrary to their claim that they are “committed to diversity and to bring more people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds into its community of secular people and skeptics” they have refused several generous and well-referenced attempts to convince them to take the basic step of adopting a formal Diversity & Inclusion policy.

Some of the influential white men who shape the policies of CFI get serious criticism.

Dawkins does not remotely confine his criticism of Islam to sexism, homophobia, or any other injustice that might plausibly demonstrate altruistic intent. Instead, it is often frivolous, gratuitous, and designed to insult rather than reform. Dawkins’ shallow argument that he isn’t stoking Islamophobia and racism because “Islam is not a race” is a reductionist and disingenuous argument that has been thoroughly refuted time and again. As a brown American who was raised Atheist, I know firsthand the effects of people like Dawkins labeling Islam as “evil” — Islam is not a race, but I’ve been called slurs due to the assumption that my brown skin and dark hair mean I could be Muslim. I can only imagine what it’s like to be a hijabi woman in America. Based on hate crimes against Muslims alone (and racist hate crimes that wrongly target non-Muslims, like the Sikh temple shooting), it’s clear that Islamophobia stokes racism. And it’s frankly nauseating that the so-called “Center for Inquiry” continues to defend this.

Then let’s get into the consequences of CFI’s long-term neglect of social justice issues. We’re in a crisis situation right now, where American racism has made the problems worse, and you would have thought a leading organization dedicated to scientific skepticism would appreciate the importance of the issues…but all they provide is a few token statements while firing one of the few writers they had who had taken race seriously.

We agree on one thing — scientific thinking is crucial during this pandemic. It’s too bad that CFI’s efforts to help address this pandemic will be hindered by its dire lack of understanding of how Black communities and other non-white communities in the U.S. were already been dealing with epidemic levels of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and a slew of other conditions, beginning at birth. They don’t try to understand the sociopolitical factors that will influence the development and deployment of treatment and prevention strategies, including vaccines. They haven’t begun to understand the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, and the history of racist pseudoscience that’s alive and well today — a history that runs a direct line to how the pandemic has run its course. Gestures like Skeptical Inquirer deputy editor Ben Radford writing that “it’s important to recognize that the measures taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus in America and around the world — while necessary and effective — have taken a disproportionate toll on minorities” hardly make a dent.

CFI has simply lost all credibility.

The zombies have finally risen

They’re pounding on the walls and windows, trying to get in! Don’t let them!

That was the scene in Ohio, where people in MAGA hats and waving US and Confederate flags were protesting the restrictions that are supposed to save their lives. They were also shrieking in Michigan over the discomfiture of isolation.

These people were representative.

He’s blubbering because he needs his lawn fertilizer. She needs to get her roots done. Jesus.

They’ve got middle-class suburbanite syndrome real bad. I’ve seen this before. It’s a kind of virtue signaling — you have to keep your lawn green and uniform and well-tended, or the neighbors will look down on you. He’s terrified that he might lose the most superficial, trivial form of status. These are complacent, pathetic people who are not prepared to sacrifice anything for their community.

Zombies, every one.

The iridescence is pretty, anyway

Here’s what I do. I sit in my office in front of my computer with a pile of textbooks open to my left, and sometimes I have committee meetings over Zoom, or meetings with students over Zoom, and my eyeballs are generally locked on the screen. But I also have a window to my right which looks out over the bird feeder in my yard, and I keep my camera close at hand, and sometimes some feathered beast distracts me for a bit.

Today was a grackle day. They were all over the place. I don’t like grackles much, but I do appreciate the shiny iridescence.

Also, the chickadees are challenging me. They flit in, I raise my camera, they immediately flit away. They are hyperactive little twits who won’t pause long enough for me to get a picture, even at 1/800th of a second. This is the best I’ve gotten so far, and look at it — it’s getting ready to take off barely after it’s landed. I think they’re doing touch-and-gos on the feeder.

At least they’re keeping me semi-sane.