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From a comment thread over at Panda's Thumb blog: "Deities and religion were early attempts at explaining the world by the only means that early humans had; namely, by projection of their inner thoughts about themselves onto the world around them. Powerful, authoritarian deities then became a means of using fear and punishment to impose the wills of some humans on others "There are literally hundreds of religions and sectarian subcultures; and they are a reflection of the natures of the people who are attracted to them."

Boycott Eventbrite. Don't support racism and sedition. "Eventbrite, the event planning and ticket sales website, is hosting and profiting off of Proud Boys founder and violent white supremacist Gavin McInnes’ comedy tour. McInnes and some of his extremist pals are using the website to promote and sell tickets for their shows, dubbed “The Cognitive Dissidents Tour.” "The tour seems likely to violate Eventbrite’s community guidelines regarding events that espouse “hateful, dangerous, or violent content or events.” Eventbrite receives a percentage of ticket sale proceeds." https://www.mediamatters.org/gavin-mcinnes/eventbrite-hosting-and-profiting-violent-white-supremacists-comedy-tour

There are only two things that could prevent a planetary climate disaster and resource wars by 2050: carbon capture and geoengineering. While this carbon capture project is minuscule, it's a start (and way ahead of fusion, which is still ten years off): "For context, Project Bison will remove about the same amount of carbon from the air as the average output of Nicaragua. That’s if it all goes to plan. While single projects like this barely make a dent in the global output of carbon, it is promising to see that carbon capture technology is starting to make a presence in our ever-warming world." https://www.iflscience.com/world-s-biggest-carbon-capture-project-has-set-its-sight-on-wyoming-65488?fbclid=IwAR3ThjimuZ0WEx2GaXqYjq_2BBxXVMxERdA86xeoqwKw314V47ez9Qy2UvY

Tax cuts for the wealthy *never* work to grow the economy. They work to put more money in the pockets of the wealthy. The job creators are the middle class and working class. Econ 101, peeps. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62966306

“Demagogue: The life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” by Larry Tye is a particularly timely read as the nation continues in the grip of another political bully, Donald Trump. The parallels in their methods are striking and the degree to which McCarthy held the nation in thrall during the 1950s mirrors the fealty of the Trumpenproletariat today. We know how the McCarthy story ended, and it offers hope that the nation will eventually turn its back on Trump and move on. Whether it learns the lesson is unclear, since in many ways Trumpism is a reincarnation of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy was raised a midwestern farm boy and got his start in business raising chickens. He had to drop out of high school, and when he returned much older than his classmates, he finished all four grades in a single year. But he never outgrew his envy and resentment of people with more affluent and elite backgrounds. He was a war hero (though not in all the ways he later claimed), but the experience gave hi...

In “The Music Man,” the huckster Professor Harold Hill claims he has a revolutionary new method called the “think system,” where you don’t bother with the formality of music lessons and just think your way to performing. It seems that the huckster Donald Trump has a revolutionary new method for declassifying documents that is his personal think system. He just has to think documents into declassification and it’s true, even if nobody can see the evidence. Oddly, he never employed this think system when he was actually, you know, president, and instead relied on a more formal and overt, documented system. But in justifying how pilfered classified federal property ended up hidden in his Mar-a-Lago golf resort, Trump invoked his think system. Perhaps it’s a superpower only possessed by twice-impeached former presidents named Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE8xJpqazOM

I see where a three judge appeals court, with two judges appointed by Trump, found unanimously in favor of the DOJ claim that it needed to resume review of documents taken by Trump to Mar-a-Lago as part of a criminal investigation. This really should have been a no-brainer. The justifications used by Judge Cannon (a Trump appointee) to halt the DOJ review had no basis in law. I suspect that the government overclassifies documents, in come cases to avoid embarrassment. But on national security issues, the null hypothesis must be that classification is justified until it is found not to be. If any other private citizen besides Trump were found to have hidden classified government documents from the government, denying their existence, they would already have been indicted. It is a testament to the deference that Trump receives as a national cult leader that he isn't in jail or out on bail. Here's the nut grafs from a paywalled post (no link) by Josh Marshall over at TPM: "Th...

The latest anti-asylum-seeker depravity by the governors of Texas and Florida should result in criminal charges for human trafficking. Abbot and Desantis should go to prison, but they won’t for the same reason that Trump will never wear a prison jumpsuit that matches his complexion: they are all too powerful. Prison is for the little people. “These persons have contacted US authorities and have initiated an appeal for asylum, which will then wend its way through the judicial system. They were in severe danger in their homelands, often dictatorships supported behind the scenes by the US government. Asylum-seekers are not undocumented immigrants– they are fully documented, it is just that their fate is as yet unknown. It is these traumatized and abused people from anti-US dictatorships such as Venezuela that these Republican governors trafficked for the sake of a sound bite.” It’s not only that helpless asylum seekers (who are in the country legally while awaiting a decision on their app...

Apparently, DHS was complicit in the political exploitation of innocent immigrants who were in the country legally. "Migrants in the group said they’d agreed to fly to Massachusetts on the promise of jobs and assistance but didn’t realize they were bound for Martha’s Vineyard. No one on the island knew they were coming and, according to their attorneys, they’d been given falsified U.S. addresses by immigration officials, perhaps ensuring that they’d be deemed in the country illegally." Shame. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article265894561.html?fbclid=IwAR0EJcTCVh5RMFqejgt05L8Xa54tcVwbhK-ziMH_dVxUwcEdBx4oiZrTlAQ

I first learned about Steve Pick from his concert reviews in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, back when it was a real newspaper. I didn't attend many concerts, but I always looked forward to reading his reviews the way I looked forward to Pauline Kael's film reviews in the New Yorker, even though I rarely watched movies. Steve is now blogging on substack. Here's his take on an Elvis film I haven't seen. While Elvis was certainly part of the soundscape of my youth (he died during my honeymoon), I was never a fan. But Steve is, and he helps us understand why. I recommend this review, whether or not you see the film. https://stevepick.substack.com/p/elvis?utm_source=facebook&sd=pf&fbclid=IwAR0sfzh3Zc2h_subTTNDGf3C1JTpFIpgzi9C1xS6pBHfJZ14uJam_zkm0D4

  The list of things we needed to do as new RI immigrants got significantly shorter yesterday. Around noon, we finally got the Police station in East Providence to issue an official VIN number check for each of the cars we brought with us. Then, Linda noticed a couple of openings in the DMV office schedule later in the afternoon and signed us up. Freshly equipped with our VIN number certificates, we drove down to the palatial DMV office in Cranston, where we were able to get Rhode Island plates and Rhode Island titles for each car, Rhode Island drivers licenses for each of us, and as a bonus, we’re now registered voters in Rhode Island. There’s still lots to do before we can really settle in, but that was a lot to accomplish in one cool and sunny day in Rhode Island.

  To recap: a section of our cast iron stack pipe draining the second floor had a 5 foot crack. Yesterday, a master plumber and his son came in and replaced that section and the cast iron lines above it with PVC. Post-mortem imaging revealed ca. 95% occlusion in the horizontal line draining the toilet, sink and shower out to the stack pipe, which had also been replaced with PVC. These repairs should last longer than me. The master plumber was savvy enough to recognize the slow draining of the shower and to replace the line connecting to the stack pipe. On about a dozen occasions in the past week, we’ve been told that this plumber is a third generation plumber. As a geneticist, I received this information as an assertion that plumbing expertise is inherited as an autosomal dominant trait. Regardless of the mode of transmission (pending genome sequencing), I was deeply impressed by his knowledge and his ability to explain exactly his reasoning and his patience with questions. They re...

I was attracted to science in the belief that scientists use facts and evidence, uncolored by beliefs or prejudice, as guides to action and how the world works. With the benefit of 40 years as a PhD scientist, I can attest to the fact that scientists are people, too, and are prey to all the weaknesses of human flesh. Yes, genuine debate occurs at scientific meetings and the peer review process does impose some guardrails on what can and can’t be said in print. But the fact is that I and my peers all operate with certain assumptions when confronting new and unexpected data. And scientists are devilishly clever people; they can think up any number of missing controls and additional experiments that would have to be done before they’d change their minds. Kevin Drum frames this a bit differently, but the ability to change minds using facts and evidence alone depends not only on the skill of those offering the information, but the intellectual versatility of their audience. “Formal debate i...

As the Beatles famously observed "Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl." I greeted the news of her passing with sadness for the personage but none for the office. England doesn't need a queen (or king) and isn't particularly well-served by continuing the idea of a royalty. But it seems like Elizabeth was, overall, a pretty decent sort, and so I'm a little sad at her death, although she led a long and prosperous life. In contrast, I wasn't the least bit sorry to learn of the deaths of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The world is poorer because they lived. They only earned my contempt.

I read Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz after reading Steve Pick ’s review of the book. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in literature, which, second only to Steve ’s endorsement, was a good reason to pick up the book. The story is of a family in Cairo right at the end of World War I. The family patriarch is a rigid, dogmatic man who rules his home with an iron fist but leads a separate life of drunkenness and lechery that he pursues out of view of family and friends. His sons and daughters fear, and yet strangely admire, their father. We come to know all the family as flawed human beings who are nevertheless bound together by family loyalty. Their Muslim faith helps provide a sort of cohesion to their fractious relationships. In the second half of the book, the setting in post-war Cairo injects an external political dimension to a story dominated by domestic tension. How the various family members respond to a world that their father has tried to isolate them from drives the narrative arc of ...

  Steve Bannon surrendered to NY authorities today after having been charged with diverting about a million buck that were promised to build a wall on the Southern border to his and other's personal use. This is based on the same charges that he accepted Trump's pardon for, thus admitting guilt. In standard right-wing fashion, he's trying to make this about political persecution over the wall project, but if the funds had *actually* been used to build a wall, there would have been no federal or state indictments. Meanwhile, Trump's PAC has raked in hundreds of millions that were donated to help him and other Trump cult candidate campaigns, but are largely unspent and can be converted legally to Trump's personal use. Strangely, the Trumpenproletariat is fine with being fleeced and the party is largely silent as donor "gave at the office" to such grifts and turn down legitimate campaign requests. How long before Republican voters finally wise up and realize ...

After spending four years in college, I went directly to a PhD program in genetics. Throughout that time, I was often asked how long it would take to get my PhD. Eventually, I came up with the formula that I’d be surprised if I finished in less than four years and I’d be disappointed if it took longer than six years. In the event, it took exactly five years from the day I arrived in Chapel Hill until the day I left for a postdoc position in St. Louis. A few years later, I found a table in the Chronicle of Higher Education showing that the median time in a PhD program in Life Sciences was seven years. The median time from bachelors to PhD was nine years, since many people work for a couple of years before starting a PhD program. In retrospect, five years was pretty good, but when you’re in your 20s, it seems like a long time. And most of the work in my dissertation was done in my final year. Pro tip: If you know someone in a PhD program, ask them about their project, not how long ...

Until I was in my late 20s, I was a pretty regular reader of fiction. Particularly from elementary school (Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Jules Verne) through junior high (Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov) and high school (Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner) and in college, when I took several lit courses that required essays based on novels and short stories. It tapered off in grad school, when there was just so much science I needed to read to get up to speed. One of the few fiction books I’ve read twice is Lord of the Rings; once in junior high and again in college. A few years ago, I saw the film realization, which I thought was pretty good. Now, it seems, there is an Amazon Prime series based on the Tolkien fantasy, and some folks have their knickers in a twist because the ethnicity of the characters doesn’t conform to their bleached Anglo-Saxon ideal complexion. “American white nationalism has attempted to appropriate certain cultures, times and places as quintessentially “white,” and s...

Growing up in East Tennessee, there were a couple of destinations for kids: east to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee, or west to Petros and Brushy Mountain State Prison. When I was in high school, my mom was in the Prisoner’s Aid Society, and encouraged me to go on one of their sponsored trips to the prison. Maybe it was a warning. No, I didn’t meet James Earl Ray. Years later, the prison was closed. I was just reading an article about prison closures, and how some have been repurposed. It mentioned that Brushy Mountain has been repurposed as a distillery. If I ever find myself in those parts, perhaps I’ll take a little excursion out to Morgan County and taste their wares. Might be a fun place for a high school reunion field trip. https://www.brushymtndistillery.com/

For my first 20 years at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, my lab was on the second floor of Doisy Hall. Occasionally, a sulfurous odor would appear in the lab, which I eventually learned was associated with the crematorium. Cadavers that had been used by medical students and residents for dissections and practice operations were cremated in an adjacent building and due to faulty tuckpointing, the smoke would escape into the air conditioning intakes to be distributed among several labs in Doisy Hall. Human Anatomy was for many years the first course in medical school at SLUSOM, and was notoriously a source of much anxiety and some suicidal ideation among first years. So much so that about 10 years ago, it was moved to later in the first semester so that the first course was somewhat easier (the cell and molecular biology course I co-directed). SLUSOM has remained among the diminishing number of US medical schools that still rely on donated cadavers to teach human anatomy. “Pre...

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was famous for vocalizing while he played, which made it hard to record his keyboard performances. I’m listening to some keyboard transcriptions of Wagner orchestral works written and performed by Gould. Inside the record jacket is also a transcript of an interview Gould did with Ken Haslam of the CBC. An excerpt: KH: Well, now, before you wrote out your transcription, how did you navigate the [last three minutes of Meistersinger] in performance at home? GG: By the simple expedient of leaving out one or other of the principal voices and adding a Sing-along-with-Mitch-style descant. KH: Of which there is already quite enough on your records as they stand, if I may say so, Mr. Gould! GG: Your comments noted and filed, Mr. Haslam.

I see where Caribou Barbie lost the election to finish the sole House term for Alaska. There will be a do-over in November for the full term. A Democrat won in this bright red state, which is a testament not only to the staleness of the Palin brand but also to the diminished superpowers of Trump, who endorsed her. Look, Sarah Palin has the intellectual firepower of a gumball machine. Her chief appeal was to address John McCain’s geriatric liabilities. For anyone who extols McCain’s patriotism and gravitas, Palin is Exhibit A in falsifying that branding. Seriously? Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency of the most powerful nation on the planet? Palin was McCain’s cry for help. It didn’t work. Tina Fey’s scriptwriters on SNL had little or nothing to do; Palin’s own words were more absurd than anything they could invent. It ain’t over till it’s over, but Palin’s loss doesn’t portend well for her fortunes in November. She hasn’t aged well, Trump’s endorsements will mean less as ...