Hallelujah!

The Minneapolis city council has committed to dismantling the police department!

“Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis Police Department cannot be reformed and will never be accountable for its actions,” they said. “We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.”

While some council members have provided hints of what the changes might mean — sending mental health professionals or social workers to respond to certain emergencies, for example — the group did not present a single, unified vision for how they would replace policing in Minneapolis.

Organizers with Black Visions said they too don’t have all the answers about what would replace the police department, but they said police can’t be reformed through initiatives like training and body cameras. This is the beginning of the process of putting together a “police-free future,” they vowed, by investing in more community initiatives like mental health and having community members respond to public safety issues.

I’m not sure what that’ll look like, but any organization that you can call for help that does not immediately dispatch armored thugs with guns will be preferable.

Also, the state of Minnesota has filed charges against the MPD for civil rights violations. They haven’t got a friend in the world, other than a few deranged Republicans.

Breaking news: young white men…also bad

I forgot about the incels! I guess every generation has people who suck. In this case, Cole Carini decided to murder women because they were attractive. Cole himself was not at all unattractive in appearance. I say “was” because now he looks like he’d been trying to turn his face into a colander.

A Virginia man inspired by notorious “incel” mass shooter Elliott Rodger fantasized about blowing up a shopping mall and killing “hot cheerleaders,” according to an FBI affidavit.

On June 2, Cole Carini of Richlands, Virginia, showed up at the Clinch Valley Medical Center with a missing hand. Several fingers on Carini’s other hand were also gone, and he had shrapnel wounds to the neck and throat. A local sheriff’s deputy arrived to interview Carini, who claimed his gruesome injuries were the result of a gardening accident.

Alas for that alibi, the lawn had not been mowed in some time, and on investigating his house, they found explosives, a blown apart container, and rusty nails, along with a little story he’d written.

He casually walked through the shopping mall, his jacket concealed deadly objects, the letter read, parts of which were illegible. He was doing it and was assured it must be done. Even if he died this statement was worth it! He had… of tension that would come and go as he approached the stage of hot cheerleaders… A dead seriousness sank in as he realized he was truly passing the point of no return! He decided I will not back down I will not be afraid of the consequences no matter what I will be heroic I will make a statement like Elliott Rodgers [sic] did he thought to himself.

Instead of killing “hot cheerleaders”, all he managed to do was blow off both of his hands, the only parts of a human body that loved him. The scars wouldn’t necessarily hurt his love life in the future, but the hatred for women is really going to ruin his future dating chances.

True equality at last: white women are as bad as white men

Not NOW. Don’t tell me that the National Organization for Women has become yet another regressive establishment institution. Apparently, speaking at NOW about the inclusion of minority women triggers the white ladies in the audience.

That’s how Weeks found herself in front of a sea of older white women at the Colors Lounge in Melbourne, Florida, in June 2017, addressing the Brevard County NOW chapter. Her voice broke as she spoke about what motivated her to run, and the conversations she’d had with her mother about the importance of fighting for both women and people of color.

“It’s important because we need to give a voice to those most oppressed in order to make everybody better,” Weeks told the audience, many of whom were around her mother’s age. “That’s women of color, that’s disabled people, that’s LGBTQ people.”

She was about to move on to the most relevant part of her stump speech—how NOW could help do all this—when she was interrupted by a white woman in the audience.

“White women, too!” the woman yelled.

“And then yeah, don’t forget the white women,” Weeks replied evenly.

“Just the women with the pussies!” another woman called out, in what seemed to be a reference to trans women. In video obtained by The Daily Beast, you can hear an audience member groan.

“It’s OK,” Weeks said, attempting to press on. “It is important to include all women.”

The rot doesn’t stop at the rank-and-file level. The Daily Beast investigation found a racism and transphobia epidemic everywhere in management of the organization.

In interviews with The Daily Beast, nearly a dozen members, employees, and visitors recalled women of color being heckled, silenced, or openly disparaged at NOW meetings and offices. The behavior culminated at the 2017 conference where, witnesses say, members dismissed Fortson-Washington, a black woman, as “angry” and entitled, and accused Weeks of being a “hot-headed Latina.” On the last day of the conference, more than a dozen women marched around a conference room to protest racism inside the organization.

But the problem didn’t stop there. Internal emails, documents and interviews obtained by the Daily Beast reveal that allegations of racism reached the highest levels of the organization after Weeks and Fortson-Washington’s loss. More than a dozen employees at the national headquarters signed onto a letter accusing President Toni Van Pelt of sidelining and disparaging women of color, and the previous vice president has filed a federal racial discrimination suit.

It seems to be rampant among white women of a certain age, my age. Is this the National Organization for Women, or the National Organization for Karens? I didn’t think they’d need a professional association to represent them.

Speaking of older women behaving badly, there’s been a J.K. Rowling flare-up.

That’s one of her milder tweets. She’s madly digging to defend her implication that somehow you undermine sex when you recognize that menstruation isn’t the defining property of womanhood you are erasing sex and the reality of women. She says that “my life has been shaped by being female”, which is certainly true, but she’s unable to appreciate that many factors affect everyone’s life experience, and that trans men and women can share many aspects of their identity — even with cis men and women.

But then, she’s old, she’s rich, she’s got some terrible new books to promote (while I appreciate that Harry Potter motivated a lot of kids to read, including my own, I have to state that they were derivative and repetitive and contained a lot of problematic attitudes), so she’s got to keep jabbering and all the plates spinning, exposing her own inner Karen.

I shake my shaggy head at yet another creationist

I know that I need a haircut, and I was losing my voice here, and that this Matt Powell character is an awful little pipsqueak who doesn’t deserve any attention, but I wanted to throw together a little video because I was bemused by the fact that he was using those claims about aliens by Wickramasinghe to condemn all of evolutionary since. When he started incredulously yelling that “THIS IS WHAT EVOLUTION TEACHES,” that squid piggy-backed on asteroids to populate the planet, I just had to point out that this is most definitely not what evolution teaches, and that it was plain bad science.

I think I’m far more pissed off at those phonies affiliated with panspermia, and their long-running infiltration of the science establishment, than I am with a not-very-bright loudmouthed kid babbling about Jesus.

And if I’m mad at those wackos, you can’t imagine how furious I get with those frauds promoting evolutionary psychology.

I’m a backslider!

I’m uploading a new video right now which will be posted first to Patreon, and tomorrow to everyone else, and it chewed up my whole day. I futzed around way too long trying to do the editing under Linux, and was tearing my hair out — I’m not exactly skilled at the video editing thing at the best of times, but trying to use all new software which was full of Linux geekiness was just too much. So I gave up and did it on my Mac. The whole workflow is so much simpler and more comfortable there for an amateur.

I’ll continue to try and master my Linux-fu, but I’m not quite there yet on the video front.

So that’s what the University of Minnesota is doing in the fall?

It’s a plan suggested by our board of regents, I guess.

We recommend the resumption of in-person instruction and opening of residence halls, dining facilities and other campus services in a manner consistent with public health guidance. This will include adjusting capacity levels for classroom occupancy, residence halls and dining capacity, and other inperson experiences.

While faculty retain the autonomy to determine the modality of their teaching, and how to best achieve their learning objectives, classroom capacity constraints will limit how many classes may be offered inperson and when. Faculty will be strongly encouraged to develop courses that are multi-modal, to accommodate the flexibility described above, and will be provided support to aid in this development.

Labs and other experiential learning components of classes may be “front-loaded” in order to ensure they can be completed in-person in case of an outbreak or an early pivot. We have developed, and are committed to offering, a fully-distanced first-year curriculum for international students who might not be able to arrive on campus in the Fall, or for other incoming students who prefer to advance their education in that manner.

So we assume everything is normal, but we have to stand ready to shut down labs and switch to online teaching at a moment’s notice. I’ll probably enforce distancing in seating in the lecture hall, and request that students wear masks in lab (I’ll wear one too), though. I’ll prepare online lectures, just in case.

I have a feeling this whole plan might fall apart even before the start of the term, but we’ll see. The board is more confident than I am.

They’re also planning to adjust the academic calendar so the semester is over by Thanksgiving. I’ll have to see what that looks like — we have a fall break (2 days) and Labor Day (1 day), but turning those into work days won’t quite get us to the end. Finishing by 25 November leaves us 10 teaching days short of the scheduled end of classes on 11 December. We’re going to have to find an extra week and a half in the calendar, I guess. Start classes a week early? Add in some teaching on Saturday? Steal the Time-Turner from Hermione? It’s going to get interesting.

Treacherous physicality

I’ve got plans. Big spider plans, involving day trips to rough country. Unfortunately, one of my knees has decided to rebel and flatten me out. My right knee, you know, the sneaky one as opposed to the left knee, which is the wicked one, is all swollen and sore and gimpy. So no tromping about the rolling hills and lakes of Western Minnesota is on hold until maybe next week.

Stupid joints.

Yes. I need more limbs.

When we were talking to my daughter the other evening, she was struggling to manage a phone in one hand and a busy baby in the other, and I told her she just needed a third. Surprise! Science provides with a wearable robotic “third arm” that can punch through a wall. The “punch through a wall” feature seems particularly useful in the context of child care. Except, I’m sorry, the video makes it less than useful.

Nice gadget, but it requires one person to wear it, and a second person with two arms to control it remotely, effectively requiring four arms to enable three-armed activity, in which one of the three arms is rather clumsy. It’s going to require a better control mechanism, something with a neurological link to the wearer. As long as we’re doing that, why stop at three? Why not…eight? I am ready for my robotic exoskeleton that will let me climb walls and punch through walls and destroy walls any day now.

Oh, and do more efficient childcare, I guess.

Liberal Arts FTW!

Never tell me that an art history degree is useless.

Art history doesn’t usually have much to offer in the way of practical, directly actionable lessons. But Sarah Parcak, a renowned professor of Egyptology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, recently plumbed humanity’s cultural past to offer some very concrete advice. On Sunday, she posted detailed, step-by-step instructions on Twitter (including a helpful diagram) for how to tear down an obelisk, culled from her research into ancient Egypt. (For every 10 feet of monument, you need 40 or more people; use rope attached to a chain; everyone should wear gloves; pull hard in unison from either side.)

After she shared the sketch, she added, “There might be one just like this in downtown Birmingham! What a coincidence. Can someone please show this thread to the folks there.”

You’d be surprised at what you can learn with a little education.

Also, while protesters failed to totally destroy the monument, the mayor of Birmingham promised to finish the job, which has prompted the state of Alabama to sue the city. Don’t worry! Liberal arts students are also fearless!