Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 26, 2024, and and National Cake Day. How about a cake in a milkshake, available only at Portillo’s in Chicago and suburbs?. I haven’t yet had one but I must, and soon:
It’s also Good Grief Day, explained in this way:
“Good grief!” is a phrase often used by Charlie Brown, the main character from Charles Schulz’s comic strip, Peanuts. Schulz was born on this day in 1922, and today is dedicated to both him and his enduring comic strip. Peanuts ran almost fifty years—from October 2, 1950, until February 13, 2000, which was one day after Schulz’s death. Schulz created all aspects of the comic, from the script to the art and lettering. Today, reprints of Schulz’s comic appear in many U.S. newspapers.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 26 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Trump has picked three more apparently unqualified people to run the nation’s healthcare agencies, in this case the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
If confirmed by the Senate, the trio of doctors would oversee two of the nation’s key health agencies and command some of the most influential pulpits in public heath.
. . . The three announcements, made separately, hit on similar themes: Trump criticized federal agencies’ past work, said they’d lost Americans’ trust and called for leaders to refocus on chronic disease — a priority of his ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Makary and Nesheiwat have been Fox News contributors, an emerging theme in Trump’s selections across the government. The president-elect has picked at least seven people who have been hosts or frequent commentators on the conservative TV channel.
The CDC and FDA picks bore the imprint of Kennedy, whom Trump has tapped to serve as the nation’s top health official and who has laid out a “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Weldon and Makary were recommended by Kennedy’s advisers, according to a person familiar with the choices who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
Make sure your health insurance is up to date!
*The College Fix, a right-wing site that monitors academic missteps, has a piece called “Biden-Harris admin’s NSF spent over $2 billion imposing DEI on scientific research: Senate report“. Click below to see the full report (h/t Anna):
An excerpt (and remember that the report comes from a Senate subcommittee). Have a look at the report and the grants awarded in the areas of social justice, environmental justice, gender, and race.
The federal government has spent over $2 billion dollars over the last three years infusing and embedding diversity, equity and inclusion concepts into scientific research – tainting the efforts with ideology and diminishing discoveries — according to the recently published findings of a report commissioned by a Senate subcommittee.
The National Science Foundation has awarded taxpayer dollars “to projects that divide Americans and support investigations or publications that are of questionable scientific value,” the 43-page report states.
A leading critic of the encroachment of DEI into STEM, Anna Krylov, said the findings illustrate a misuse of public funds by the NSF.
“[I]nstead of funding science, they dump money into pseudoscience, miseducation, and ideological indoctrination,” she said in an email to The Fix.
Published in October by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the Senate report traces the problem to the “beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.”
The National Science Foundation under this leadership, the report states, “increasingly funded research and programs that color scientific investigation and engagement projects through the lens of political ideology, undermining objective hard science disciplines…in which facts and theories can be precisely measured, tested, and independently reproduced.”
From January 2021 through April 2024, the NSF awarded 3,483 grants amounting to more than $2.05 billion to “questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle,” the report states.
If you think this is pure Republican grandstanding, you’re mistaken. Look at some of the grants that were awarded (on YOUR money if you’re American) and then regret all the real science that wasn’t funded because of the big push to turn the NSF into an ideological grant-dispensing machine.
Apropos, I just saw an article in Canada’s National Post by Lawrence Krauss called, “Get the DEI out of science funding, Elon.” His conclusions are pretty much the same as the ones from the Senate report. This is how many of us who see ourselves as liberal wind up in bed with conservative institutions and publications: the Left has moved further left, putting us left-centrists closer to the Right. And here’s an article on the same topic, reaching the same conclusions, from The Free Press.
*Also at the Free Press, Democrat Seth Moultin (reviled for implying that trans women aren’t women and criticizing his party by concentrating too much on trans issues), has a profile called “Rep. Seth Moulton: Democrats are wearing an ‘ideological strait jacket’” (article archived here).
In a parallel universe, progressives would be rallying around Democratic congressman Seth Moulton. They would respect his courage for saying what so many of them have been thinking since Donald Trump thumped Kamala Harris in the presidential election. They would be urging him—publicly—to run for president. A billionaire, probably in Silicon Valley or New York, would have launched a super PAC called “Moulton 2028,” calling the congressman “the voice America needs.” They would love him.
But in this universe, the one we actually inhabit, they hate him.
“We’ve worked so hard at becoming tolerant that we’ve become intolerant,” Moulton, who represents the suburbs north of Boston, told me Wednesday.
The hate started exactly two weeks ago, when Moulton told The New York Times, in an article explaining why Kamala Harris lost, that the Democratic Party had become overly focused on trans issues.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton’s daughters are 6 and 3, and he told me he was talking about team sports they might play when they’re older. When I asked what prompted him to make comments that he must have known would antagonize his fellow Democrats—who have long adhered to the orthodoxy that trans women are women who should be able to compete in women’s sports—he replied: “I was speaking authentically as a dad about a concern that I know other dads share, and we just ought to be able to debate it.”
Now look at all the trouble he’s in!:
Since then, progressives have called him a “Nazi cooperator,” “transphobic,” and “offensive.” Democrats have said he should resign. His campaign manager has stepped down. Massachusetts Democratic governor Maura Healey, who is gay, attacked Moulton for “playing politics.” Even Jake Auchincloss, who, like Moulton, is a former Marine and now a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, has distanced himself from Moulton’s trans remarks. (Moulton declined to comment on Auchincloss.)
Meanwhile, the chair of Tufts University’s political science department threatened to bar students from interning in Moulton’s office, which prompted the college’s high command to assure the congressman they still like him (Tufts is a major recipient of National Institutes of Health grants; probably not wise to lash out at a member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation.) Which prompted the editorial board at The Tufts Daily, predictably, to condemn Moulton.
“[W]e believe that cutting ties with Moulton’s office is not a suppression of speech,” the board wrote. “In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is our way of expressing our disgust with Moulton’s brazen scapegoating of an already oppressed community.”
All this despite the fact that 66 percent of Americans oppose trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams, and that Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you” campaign ad was one of the most widely watched (and effective) of his reelection bid.
Tufts is disappointing. Get a load of this doublespeak: “cutting ties with Moulton’s office is not a suppression of speech. . . it is our way of expressing our disgust with Moulton’s [words].” If that’s not suppression of speech I don’t know what is: he is being punished and ostracized because he didn’t go along with ideologically “correct” speech. And THAT is suppression of speech.
*The use of drones has revealed hundreds more “Naza Lines,” a series of lines and pictures in the Peruvian desert made over a thousand years ago, and visible only from above. (NYT article archived here). When I was younger I traveled around Peru with my girlfriend, making my way to Nazca, where for the munificent sum of $30 US, we hired a small plane to take us up to see the Nazca lines. They were stunning. I presume you can still do that, but it’ll be way more expensive now.
Here, from Wikipedia, are two aerial views:
“The hummingbird”
“The astronaut”:
The significance of these lines is still a mystery, but here’s a summary from the NYT article:
Gouged into a barren stretch of pampa in southern Peru, the Nazca Lines are one of archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries. On the floor of the coastal desert, the shallow markings look like simple furrows. But from the air, hundreds of feet up, they morph into trapezoids, spirals and zigzags in some locations, and stylized hummingbirds and spiders in others. There is even a cat with the tail of a fish. Thousands of lines jump cliffs and traverse ravines without changing course; the longest is bullet-straight and extends for more than 15 miles.
The vast incisions were brought to the world’s attention in the mid-1920s by a Peruvian scientist who spotted them while hiking through the Nazca foothills. Over the next decade, commercial pilots passing over the region revealed the enormousness of the artwork, which is believed to have been created from 200 B.C. to 700 A.D. by a civilization that predated the Inca.
“It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative geoglyphs,” said Masato Sakai, an archaeologist at Yamagata University in Japan who has studied the lines for 30 years.
Dr. Sakai is the lead author of a survey published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found 303 previously uncharted geoglyphs in only six months, almost doubling the number that had been mapped as of 2020. The researchers used artificial intelligence in tandem with low-flying drones that covered some 243 square miles. Their conclusions also provided insights into the symbols’ enigmatic purpose.
. . . Among the depictions were plants, people, snakes, monkeys, cats, parrots, llamas and a grisly tableau of a knife-wielding orca severing a human head. Of the new figures, 244 were suggested by the technology, while the other 59 were identified during the fieldwork unaided by A.I.
The Nazca people carved the designs into the earth by scraping back the pebbled, rust-colored surface to expose the yellow-gray subsoil. Little is known about the shadowy culture, which left no written record. Aside from the etchings, pretty much all that exists of the civilization are pieces of pottery and an ingenious, still functioning irrigation network.
And their meaning?
Dr. Sakai said that geoglyphs were drawn near pilgrimage routes to temples, which implies that they functioned as sacred spaces for community rituals, and could be considered planned, public architecture. The newly discovered geoglyphs are mainly located along a network of trails that wound through the pampa. They were most likely made by individuals and small groups to share information about rites and animal husbandry.
But, but. . . they can be fully seen only from far above, so how could the information be shared? I am dubious about the explanation, but if you get to Peru, go to Nazca and see them for yourself. You’ll need a plane.
*And speaking of DEI, the Wall Street Journal has a news article called “Christopher Rufo has Trump’s ear and wants to end DEI for good.”
The first time then-President Donald Trump asked Christopher Rufo to come to Washington for a meeting with his team, the result was a 2020 executive order banning race or sex stereotyping in the federal government.
Now Rufo has an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, where he will present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they don’t pull back on diversity measures. It is the latest chapter in Rufo’s quest to end activities that he says divide Americans and foster bias against different groups, including white men.
From his perch outside Seattle, the 40-year-old documentary filmmaker and writer has become one of the country’s most influential—and effective—culture warriors, waging public fights against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in schools, businesses and government.
Rufo exposed plagiarism in the academic scholarship of Harvard President Claudine Gay and in the writings of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. His reports played a role in Gay’s subsequent resignation in January of this year and damaged Harris’s campaign. He has also taken aim at diversity practices in large companies, most recently at Boeing.
A father of four who relishes throwing rhetorical grenades at the progressive left, he said he isn’t pursuing a role in the Trump administration but wants to help shape its agenda.
JD Vance, among many others in the new Trump administration, is listening.
Vance views Rufo as “a leading voice in the movement to restore merit and excellence” to universities, a spokeswoman said, adding that the vice president-elect believes Rufo “recognizes schools and universities exist to equip American students to face tomorrow’s challenges, not to indoctrinate them with the fringe beliefs of the far left.”
. . . . Rufo said he is meeting with members of the Trump administration next month. He has said he thinks colleges and universities have been taken over by the left, and he wants to recapture them by cutting federal money to schools that continue to engage in DEI practices. He also wants to excise race-based affirmative action from any institution with which the federal government does business.
He has a particular animus toward elite universities, which he says traded merit and rigor for neo-Marxism and discrimination against white and Asian people.
“It’s time to really put the hammer to these institutions and to start withdrawing potentially billions of dollars in funding until they follow the law,” he said.
Just a few years ago Rufo was a fairly obscure figure, largely written off by liberals as a conservative activist. And indeed, that’s what he is, but his ascendancy has been quick, and he has a great deal of power. Despite his being on the right, I do have some sympathy with his aim of getting rid of DEI, which has become an ideologically motivated vehicle for circumventing federal law and imposing an ideological agenda on colleges. DEI is going to have a hard time in the next four years!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a hankering for birds:
Hili: The migrating birds have flown away, only ours are left.Andrzej: So what?Hili They are also difficult to catch.
Hili: Ptaki wędrowne odleciały, są tylko te nasze.Ja: I co?Hili: Też je trudno złapać.
*******************
From Science Humor:
From Stacy:
From The 2024 Darwin Awards!!!/Epic Fails:
From Masih; a girl cries when forced by her school principal to put on her headscarf:
Watching this video broke me. It brought back the painful memories of my childhood in Iran. I cried seeing that little girl bullied by her principal, forced to put on her compulsory veil over and over again, with no mercy.
This isn’t just about a piece of cloth; it’s about how… pic.twitter.com/fEu0hMjwrh
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 25, 2024
From Jay, a Monty Python sketch 45 years ahead of its time. Almost every word is apposite:
And a follow-up tweet about Cleese’s defending leaving the scene in when people tried to delete it from the stage version.
And some people tried to delete that very scene from the stage version, but John Cleese dug his heels in. pic.twitter.com/bnW2pAMTUq
— Ralph Kaladin (@Navarre2001) November 23, 2024
A bodega cat from Barry:
— Bodega Cats (@bodegacats.bsky.social) 2024-11-23T14:25:13.052Z
From my feed, a seemingly happy fox:
Red fox in winter 🦊🌨️
This lad grew up to be President of the U.S.:
A young Barack Obama spending time on the beach with his grandfather, 1963 pic.twitter.com/tUw9t28FXn
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) November 24, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial:
A French Jewish boy murdered by cyanide gas upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was four.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-11-26T12:15:21.178Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a tuxedo cat in Morocco (the thread has more of this cat and others in tourist destinations):
Climed to the top of Aït Ben Haddou, the spectacular fortified village in Morocco dating back to at least the 11th century, where they filmed Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, Game of Thrones etc. It’s an incredible place, but the thing I want to tell you is that I met this cat #ProofOfCat
— Alex von Tunzelmann (@alexvont.bsky.social) 2024-11-24T06:02:00.119Z
Do watch this video to see what these weird things are. I’m not gonna tell you! (Matthew said, “Who knew?”)
I'm sorry, WHAT NOW?TIL – Mares' Eggs exist. Trust me – this is worth 1:47 min of your time.Only in Oregon, folks (well *almost* only in Oregon) 🤯Seriously – if you're a biology nerd…or any kind of nerd – watch this NOWvideo.cascadepbs.org/show/oregon-…
— Cri 🕊🐝🐜📝🎭⚽😷 (@crawlieswithcri.bsky.social) 2024-11-24T04:29:52.115Z
Safe travels Thursday. Years ago, my family and I did an early Thanksgiving morning non-stop flight from Virginia to Ohio. It was great with almost nobody in the Norfolk, VA terminal at 0600, a half, at most, filled DC-9, and a very quiet Cincinnati airport on landing, followed by no early morning traffic from the airport to my brother in law’s house.
Wishing you the same lovely, lonely Thanksgiving Day airports I had way back when.
On the topic of DEI, a major new study (thread and link here) shows that DEI training is counter-productive, increasing division and hostility.
Yes that’s a clever experiment: reading Kendi or DiAngelo causes the reader to infer racism in a scenario where no racism is described. Work from Lee Jussim’s lab at Rutgers and Pamela Paresky from the Pinker lab at Harvard.
Does it surprise anyone? People were calmly living their lives, and race relations were improving. Career prospects for revolutionaries were grim. Solution: the revolutionaries told people that if they interact with minorities, they potentially: 1. hurt them, 2. are guilty. Result: social isolation of minorities from mainstream is increasing, and revolutionaries got hired to keep exacerbating the problem. Mission accomplished!
I am very surprised that there were (and maybe still are?) undiscovered Nazca lines. I would have thought that area had been combed over ‘in search of’ them.
When talking about the qualifications of Trump’s nominees, one has to remember that Trump isn’t looking for technocrats, he’s looking for disruptors. He wants to shake up and potentially eliminate departments and agencies. The people who are credentialed members of the establishment are the least likely to fulfill that role.
It’s also worth remembering that it is unlikely that anyone Trump picked would be met with approbation. As the story of Seth Moultin, above, illustrates, the professional left has very low tolerance for differing viewpoints. If Trump’s appointees were “qualified”, they would still be defamed for some sin, real or concocted.
DrB, correct. Can you imagine any universe in which Trump cabinet picks would not be criticized? It was a predictable response that they would so I tend to ignore those stories. There was a time that I was taken in by this, and about that time I happened to read Scott Alexander’s predictions for the coming year at SlateStarCodex (now AstralCodexTen).
My family did the same thing and then we made 30 predictions for the coming year, with percent likelihood, and then at the end of the year was brutally honest on whether they came true or not (I used the % as the point scale; a prediction at 70% was worth 0.7 if true, 0 if not). For example, if I predicted that the Supreme Court would ban gay marriage, and at the end of the year they did not, that was a 0 – it was not a “well, they would have if a case had been brought so really I was right”. We did this for 3 years, and found that it helped us to realize that it’s easy to predict gloom and doom, but that scenario hardly ever occurs. Plus, it also made me realize that all these pundits who say “Trump is hitler and is going to lock up journalists” or “Obamacare will result in Death Panels” make these claims without any consequence and serve only to cause fear and worry among their readers for the benefit of clicks and profit for themselves without serving any positive purpose. I recommend to anyone out there fearful of the coming four years to do the same: write down exactly what you think will occur and score the results at the end of the year. For example, if you think RFK Jr. will ban vaccines, put it on paper and score it.
Note: the other positive thing that comes from this is a calibrating of your opinions. It’s easy to say “Trump is going to lock up everyone at MSNBC” now, but when you calibrate your results next year, you say “hmmm, that didn’t happen” and rethink your positions for the coming year. It’s similar to CBT in some ways.
Fascinating. Almost all Canadian Cabinet picks — indeed that’s the case in all Westminster Parliaments — are also singularly unqualified for their jobs. By the conventions of Responsible Government, Cabinet Ministers have to have been elected as MPs to a seat in the House of Commons (the legislature)*, which in Canada limits the talent pool to just 152 individuals. (The Speaker of the House doesn’t sit or vote as a government MP.) By Prime Ministerial fiat, half the Cabinet must be female no matter how many women are in that 152.
Almost none of them have any experience or training that qualifies them to run the complex content-heavy bureaucracies of their Departments, not even key portfolios like Finance and Justice. (Defence is mostly irrelevant in Canada. Getting shuffled to Defence means your career is over.) The only criteria are ideological conformity and absolute loyalty to the Prime Minister. (The latter is essential because the Prime Minister’s eventual replacement as party leader, if he loses an election, is likely to be a sleeper agent germinating in the Cabinet, emboldened by the boss’s weakness. Keep winning elections and suppress usurpers and you can stay Prime Minister for life. JT is only 53 next month.) Yet the country stumbles on in a kind of genteel mediocracy of weaponized niceness.
Bring on the disruptors! You won’t find a disruptor or original thinker in the entire Canadian political class.
(There are dodges that test the rule that we needn’t worry about here, except that those exceptions are the only way to get a highly talented individual into Cabinet who for whatever reason can’t get himself elected to a seat. But this is rarely done because such a maverick is likely to clash with the PM and be suspected of disloyalty.)
It’s very discouraging. That’s why I’m hoping to see some success from Trump. A shakeup south of the border would have cultural ramifications that would spread beyond the US.
Of course we’d have to rid of Trudeau and the Liberals but they’re polling pretty badly now.
I bet the Liberals will form the next government and Justin Trudeau will remain Prime Minister. My reasons are perhaps too arcane for a general multinational audience. But I will say that against the PM’s personal unpopularity, Canadians fundamentally like leftist Liberal governments as the source of All Good Things and will forgive it many sins. (Will mass immigration be the unforgiveable sin? We’ll see…) Justin Trudeau is not by any measure an intelligent man but he is possessed of a low animal cunning (Forsyth, The Dogs of War) which makes him a formidable politician on the hustings. Don’t count him out. (Unless of course he wants to be out of office and let a Conservative Government own the economic calamity inflicted on us by a vindictive American President.) Don’t forget his father, loathed across the country, was PM for 20 years and did a stint in Opposition himself. In a Parliament with five parties anything can happen. Even the two seats currently held by the Greens could make a difference if they keep them.
This may be a bit off-topic for today but Jerry did invite Canadian prognostications yesterday. On anti-semitism, I think Mr. Trudeau panders to it to get Muslim voters to elect the Liberal MPs he needs to govern. I don’t think he drives it or is personally responsible for it, despite how quick he is to criticize Israel. Nothing is likely to change if he ever does leave office except that if the Liberals are defeated those Muslim Liberal MPs who survive will be on the Opposition side where they can do less damage. And Muslim Conservative MPs will take their seats on the Government side.
There are certain now-permanent flaws in the Canadian social fabric due to mass immigration from truly awful countries who bring their sectarian conflicts with them (and often go back home to foment them) and the leftist, anti-semitic capture of our elites promoting the myth of genocide in Canada and in Gaza. This was all in the name of “niceness”, which was surely enabled and abetted by the Prime Minister’s “Sunny Ways.”
I’m so sick for Canada I’m pretty much sick of it.
I can’t argue with much there. I think Trudeau’s been terrible. In my city (Victoria, BC) housing is so expensive that young people are completely cut off from buying and most can’t even afford rent.
I’ve never seen it like this and I’m 73.
This is all due to too much legal immigration too fast. You run out of housing.
People are furious here. I’ll vote against him even if the Conservatives can’t fix the problem. I want to see him gone.
Huh? Musk is the very definition of a technocrat; what makes you think Trump isn’t looking for technocrats? Regardless, Trump is creating his cast of characters for “The MAGA Show 2.0.” These aren’t serious picks for the most part and they’re not serious people. But some of them are serious, and those are the ones he’s appointing to enact Project 2025. Vought is the perfect example, as is Miller. I guess you can portray many of these appointees as “disrupters” and Trump is certainly disrupter-in-Chief, but I don’t think the majority of economic-driven Trump voters want the chaos of disruption; they want cheaper groceries. That being said, Trump certainly doesn’t have a mandate to disrupt the government like he and the 2025 people want to do.
The new DEI: people aren’t chosen to fill cabinet and advisory posts because of merit or because they are qualified, but because they are Disruptors, Elons, and Ignoramuses.
Comment by Greg Mayer
The NSF-DEI report is not “a report commissioned by a Senate subcommittee” as the College Fix puts it; rather it is a report of “The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff” (i.e. the Republican staff, who work for Ted Cruz, the ranking Republican on the committee). The report defines the “minority staff” to be the “Committee”, but saying that doesn’t make it so.
The report appears to be undated, although there is a footnote reference to a website visited on Sept. 3, 2024. That it refers throughout to the “Biden-Harris administration” is a sure sign that it was produced after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president and for political purposes. Actual congressional committee reports are published in a different way, and include both majority and minority views.
The above doesn’t mean that what the report says isn’t true, just that it must be taken with a grain of salt. It is akin to a legal brief– the minority staff are, after all, zealous advocates for the views of the ranking member.
GCM
Interesting, thanks Greg.
There is a sad, deep, and dangerous connection between Congressman Seth Moultin’s treatment and the garbage science alleged in the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation report. This is what happens when ideology trumps reality. Science doesn’t get done, and legitimate questions and concerns—and the people who voice them—are viciously canceled.
I wonder if any NSF money was spent to produce this gem. It has no biology content but lots of pseudobiology context, especially the sex lives of sea monkeys in the Great Salt Lake.
“Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’”
doi.org/10.1007/s10806-024-09934-0
The author is Polish (maybe Jerry can meet they/them on his trip next week?) but collaborates with the American ecosexual artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens at UC Santa Cruz
https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu
A quick search of the NSF awards database didn’t turn up anything 🙁
But Sprinkle & Stephens have been prolific. Their most recent academic scholarship in the field of queer feminist blue ecosexuality includes “The earth is a big badass butch dyke in menopause” (Journal of Lesbian Studies, doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2395223).
The University of California Santa Cruz, everyone.
Forgot to say that I saw the sea monkey paper in a Colin Wright tweet
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1861269865417339156
About 20 years ago Annie Sprinkle had a one woman show on the Lower East Side. It was excellent. Hilarious and thoughtful and insightful. Best I’d seen in years.
D.A.
NYC
Ha yes a terrific performance artist perhaps (I’ve not had the pleasure). Terrible scholarship imho. Butlerian.
Jerry, you are being unfair to The College Fix calling them right-wing. I’ve read a lot of their articles and they are rather neutral in tone — and of remarkably good quality for an outlet dominated by student writers. I think they are dead-center. They cover issues that the woke media won’t touch — like DEI in funding — but that does not make them right-wing.
As far as I remember, they were antievolution, too, and that is not a position of the left wing. Here’s one article with that tenor–written by a correspondent from Liberty University!
Here’s another article by the editor of the site, Jennifer Kabanny, about a Yale computer scientist giving up belief in evolution. Big whoop! They have always been anti-evolution and, in other articles, pro Republican. I disagree with you.
I can’t find any example more recent than 2019 that’s anti-evolution.
Perhaps they’ve rethought that.
I agree they’d be classified as conservative leaning though. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing given how bad the left has become.
I’ve been reading it for about a year and never seen anything about evolution or anti-science.
The Monty Python clip is priceless.
I was always a huge Monty Python fan and that movie was (is) brilliant. I remember the scenes with that little gang of “leftist” agitators, and in particular the “Loretta” scene where one of them (Reg) actually acknowledges reality, unlike his comrades.
But now, that scene will almost certainly result in calls for the show’s cancellation. Hateful and transphobic, intended to “erase” trans people from existence, or some such drivel. Good for John Cleese, who we know is no conservative, for refusing to capitulate.
To complain that the scene is offensive is to miss the point that being offensive was always part of Monty Python’s approach to comedy. Taboos–whether about sex, violence (the Black Knight in “Holy Grail”), race (one sketch featured a character gratuitously named Mrs. Niggerbaiter), scatology, death (the “Undertaker” sketch), religion–existed to be knocked down. “Anything but mindless good taste,” in John Cleese’s words.
I find it interesting that there are always taboos in comedy (“I can take a joke, but THAT goes too far!”), but the list of which subjects are taboo changes over time. When “Brian” was first released, it was picketed in some places and banned in others. Why? Because it mocked religion. Today, I don’t hear anyone objecting to the show on the grounds that it is blasphemous; rather, it is transgenderism that is off-limits as a subject for jokes. Is “The Lumberjack Song” next?
One of the Pythons (Graham Chapman) was an out-of-the-closet gay. He clearly had no objection to the troupe doing gay jokes.
Regarding the Trump cabinet picks, it looks to me that he’s picking people who are good communicators. Let’s assume that DOGE is able to enact big cuts – people with good communication skills will be needed to explain the “why” to both staff as well as to the general public.
I don’t recall these same sources questioning why the mayor of a medium-sized town with no applicable experience was made head of a department with a $75 billion budget and responsibility for the safety of all means of travel in the US.
https://x.com/Evolutionistrue/status/1861392535253623040 🐱✨
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamagata_University
https://youtu.be/j7BZnjalNoE
Yamagata University in Japan is studying the “Nazca Lines”. 🇯🇵🏫🇵🇪
https://x.com/Evolutionistrue/status/1861392535253623040 🐱✨
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamagata_University
https://youtu.be/j7BZnjalNoE
Yamagata University in Japan is studying the “Nazca Lines”. 🇯🇵🏫🇵🇪