Dear Sweet Filthy World

Sunny today. I should have gone outside. Our high was 87F.

I was awake this morning at 4:30 a.m., and then up at 5. I finished reading The Year Without Summer. At 6 a.m., I began writing, and I did another 1,074 words on "The Moment Under the Moment." I expect I will finish it tomorrow. After the writing, I began reading paleontologist Donald R. Prothero's When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano.

Later, Kathryn and I began discussing how to make to University of Kansas trip happen. Mike Polcyn called and, as I said on Twitter, "A long phone conversation about premaxillary dental irregularities in Platecarpus, anomalous squamate tooth counts, anguimorph deformities, and Hox genes. It's Thursday morning." It was a good talk. He came up with yet another very excellent project for me to work on, but I think there's no time to shoehorn it in. Do people still know what shoeshorns are? Anyway, then I talked with Jun, and I'm going into the Museum on Monday, as my reward for finsihing "The Moment Under the Moment." Also, I signed the contracts for Polish editions of the Tinfoil Dossier books.

I spent part of the afternoon working on Winifred the tylosaur.

Here's something you should take a few minutes to read, a new interview with Richard Dawkins by someone who was trying really hard to trap Dawkins into this, that, or the other corner, but failed miserably. To answer the article's title question, "Was New Atheism a Mistake?" The answer is no.

Substack is proving a wonderland of sanity. Today I discovered biologist Colin Wright's "Reality's Last Stand," and I cannot recommend it enough. There's a free subscription option, by the way. Lately, I feel as if I spend at least fifty percent of my time reading, divided between books, scientific papers, and Substack. With Colin Wright's site, I would like to point you, in particular, to this piece, "Six Books for Students of Evolutionary Biology: Books That Encapsulate the History, Marvel, and Debates Within the Field."

And here is a thought that came to me this afternoon, and I put down the fossil bone I was working on and scribbled it on a neon green post-it note: In most ways, as mammals, as vertebrates, humans are unremarkable. Except there's this one unbelievable thing that we do. We create culture. This makes culture the most important thing that humans do. Indeed, so far as I am concerned, it is not the individual human being that interests me. It's what we do as a species. Humans live short lives and die, but our culture persists, unless someone sets out to destroy it. And yeah, I know, we're talking lots of individuals acting in concert, but I know, too, what I mean. This makes culture as sacred as anything actually can be. That's about all that would fit on the post-it, even writing very tiny, and then I went back to work on the tylosaur.

Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. All sales are much appreciated. And I leave you with a photo of the best root beer on the planet.

Wait! Also! Spooky's birthday is in a mere sixteen days, and she has an Amazon wishlist. Please, please, please go have a look at it. Thank you.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




1:46 p.m.

Overcast much of the day. The high was 90F.

I was up at 6, and I did another 1,017 words on "The Moment Under the Moment (1994)." Later, I worked on Winifred.

Uremarkable day.

Late last night, unable to sleep, I watched Clark Gable in 1949's Command Decision, directed by Sam Wood. A very good war film, based on William Wister Haines' 1947 novel of the same name. And speaking of film, I'm so excited right now about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer it's hard to think about any other film (based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer).

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer (24 October 1949)

Freeom of inquiry, that's kind of on the ropes these days, isn't it?

But here's a cool thing. Richard Dawkins is going to begin a subscription-based service on Substack presenting his poetry, which is actually quite good: Science is the Poetry of Reality. This article is also at his Substack (free), "Evidence-Based Life." You should have a look.

Anyway, please have a look at the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thank you kindly.

(And how the hell did I wind up with so many communists and anarchists following me on Twitter? That's just...weird.)

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




11:12 a.m.


* Thanks to Bill Landrex and Neil for the title of this entry.

Sunny today. Our high was 88F.

What the fuck happened today? Oh, the writing. I did 1,074 words on "The Moment Under the Moment. (1994)" Kathryn seems very taken with this story; I don't know what to think. Anyway, as soon as this is done, it's back to The Night Watchers, which I intend to have finished for Subterranean Press by the end of the summer. And yes, Bradbury Weather preorders will begin soon. Keep watching the skies.

Mosaasaur-wise, I'm just about done prepping that cervical, and I'm moving on to a postorbitofrontal (part of the roof of the skull). And I did a little work on the pterosaur paper.

Our armadillo roadkill, dubbed Armie the Dead Dillo by Spooky, rots apace. A family of crows ate enough that it never bloated. See the photo below. Taphonomy galore.

God asked me should he ought to put his world on the left, no.
God asked me should he oughta put his world on the right, no.
I said it doesn't really matter where you put your world,
Someone will come along and move it.
And it's always been the same.
It's just a complicated game.
It's just a complicated game.
It's just a complicated game.
Just a complicated game.
It's just a complicated game. ~ XTC (1979)

Plesase visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks.

I think that's all I'm up for tonight. I'll leave the scary stuff for later.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




(Does it really matter what time of day this was taken?)

Another sunny day; the humidity was much higher. The high temperature was 88F.

I wake up angry; I go to sleep angry.

I was sick all night, even for my sick nights, but at 6:30 a.m. I tried to make some progress on "The Moment Under the Moment." I did a measly 449 words. But I also realized that this has to be more than another Mother Hydra/Dagon/Cthulhu outing. It has to be a story about shit I'm dealing with, the shit that makes it ever more impossible to get out of bed and that has led to me rarely leaving the house. This time, the monsters are metaphors. I also worked on that cervical of Winifred's, the second after the atlas/axis complex.

Currently, I'm trying the plan an important paleo' related trip to the University of Kansas, and I have permission to study the collection, but just trying to arrange the transportation is proving insurrmountable.

On this day in 2012, Ray Bradbury died at age 93.

This morning on Facebook I had the gall to ask, "Think how much we could accomplish if we stopped wasting energy on this obbsession with punishing dead people?" There were a lot of good replies. My favorite is author Craig Spector's brief but poignant, "The beauty of punishing dead people is that they can't fight back." Yes, indeed. It's a whole new sort of bullying. Or maybe it isn't new at all.

Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks.

-----

In the midst of the insanity of Woke, there are things that are so stupid and evil and so at odds with their intended purpose that they quiet literally take my breath away. For example, these two signs posted, for only a short time in 2020, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. I will put them behind a cut, just to make this post manageable, but take the time to read them all the way through:


( Collapse )

Yes, that genuinely racist shit was actually posted by a department of the Smithsonian, in this pellmell tumble by white folks to prove we are as utterly evil as possible, even if it means telling black folks that maybe all the sterotypes were right after all, but that's okay. Seriously, that's exactly what it says. Shiftless and lazy and dumb? Who are we to judge? It is evil that we should expect more of anyone. In the face of things like this, I find myself all but speechless. But fortunately, Dr. John McWhorter - a (black) American linguist who has repeatedly condemed "Critical Race Theory" (see his excellent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, 2021) - has taken the "infographic" to task. I will quote (as I usually do):

Yes, this was real – from people who surely bemoan the stereotype of black people as dumb and lazy! Again, only a mental override could explain why the people responsible for this display would allow that emblazonment of precisely the stereotypes lobbed at black people for centuries. Tarring whites as imposers of alien values felt more important than considering that the poster depicted black people as gorillas – and was created by a white woman!

And because this was enshrined at America’s flagship museum of black history, we can’t say that this sort of thing is just “woo-woo” sidebar nonsense. The museum yanked it down when the media got a sniff, but they had made a highly indicative statement in having hung it in the first place. Namely, they subordinated logic – that black people should not embrace being semiliterate, unanalytical and tardy – to the religious score of identifying racism regardless of logic (as in, here, the racism of whites expecting blacks to in any way be “like them”). Let us pray.

Let us pray, indeed.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




3:23 p.m.

Very sunny today. A high of 89F, with fairly low humdity, 34%.

I woke at 4:30 a.m., was up at 5, and at 5:30 I began work on "The Moment Under the Moment." I did 1,023 words. Then I lay back down and slept another hour. Later, I worked on one of Winifred cervicals.

I'm now reading William K. and Nicholas P. Klingaman's The Year Without a Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History.

The dead armadillo is still right where it was yesterday.

Today on Facebook, I posted this bit of Tolkien, which seems very relevant to what is happening to both America and Europe at the moment (and yes, I use America as a synonym for the U.S.):

"Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?"

My thanks to Mike Hunter, who matched it with this very complimentary passage from Yeat's "The Second Coming":

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Yes, I say this a lot. But these days, a decent amount of our income comes by way of that shop. So, thank you.

-----

This thing with the government of New Zealand treating the traditional lore of the Māori (Mātauranga) as somehow remotely comparable to Western science just gets weirder and weirder...and weirder. To quote Jerry Coyne:

There is some empirical knowledge in MM, but also a heap of legend, oral tradition, religion, morality, and rules for life. MM, on the whole, is not equivalent to science, but contains science, just as the Bible contains some real history. Yet the interpretation of the Treaty as making all things Māori almost sacred is holding back science in a big way. So the words "stewardship" and "stakeholders" are, to me at least, code words that this endeavor too will be "decolonized."

Anyway, now we get New Zealand trying to shoehorn this mess into space exploration and astronomy. Again, I quote, this time from the NZ National Space Policy:

Mātauranga Māori and space are deeply connected, with space representing whakapapa (genealogical links to the beginning of the universe), wairuatanga (the spiritual connection between Earth and the universe, derived from Māori cosmology), and tātai arorangi (Māori knowledge of astronomy). The New Zealand government encourages inclusive collaborations with individuals or groups who are currently underrepresented in the space sector (including, but not limited to, Māori); and for these collaborations to work toward sustainable outcomes. The New Zealand government will also strive to further understand and assess representation across the space sector, to best direct inclusive collaboration opportunities.

And, again, I quote Coyne's response:

The treaty is quoted again, and this means that not only will equity apply to the whole policy, but indigenous people will get piles of money to give their take on the policy. More distressing is the dissimulation of the last paragraph, which simply lies when it says that "Mātauranga Māori and space are deeply connected". What they've done here, as usual, is make an analogy between science (space exploration) and aspects of Māori society that have almost nothing to do with space (whakapapa and wiruatanga are spiritual and moral concepts). The one exception, tātai arorangi, involved learning enough about the positions of celestial bodies to navigate across the south Pacific and, later, judge the seasons for planting or hunting. But the space bit of MM is no longer a pressing concern to anybody in the country except those whose ancestry may help them get jobs or money.

You can read Jerry Coyne's entire piece here. But yes, this is crazy. This is inflicting mythology on science. This is guilt-tripping/gaslighting a whole nation into bad science and pseudoscience. This is exactly like NASA consulting creationists. Scientifically, it is exactly like that. No matter how horribly the Māori were treated by European colonists, suffering does not magically convey knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, physics, engineering, and all the other shit relevant to space exploration. Look up Māori mythology. See how it meshes with Western science. This is that word I keep coming back to when I speak of the mania of wokeness - this is lunacy.

And on that note, I leave you with something thay doesn't make my head hurt, Lydia on her sixth birthday.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




10:17 a.m.

Sunny today. Our high was 91F.

I tossed out what I'd written on "Where There Should Be Something, There Is Nothing" and began something else called "The Moment Under the Moment." And I might have made some decent progress, but I'd slept less than three hours. Which kind of set the tone for the whole damn day. It was all depression, exhaustion, anger, and anxiety.

I spent some time cleaning my paleo' workspaces at home. And I watched crows trying to eat a freshly dead armadillo in the driveway. And it was Lydia's sixth birthday.

On Facebook I said:

Expunging marxist-leninist doctrine/indoctrination from the US educational system, both secondary and college, by any means necessary. This will be at the top of my priorities in the coming presidential edlection. How the fuck did it come to this? (Rhetorical question.)

Oh, and quoted the Walker Bros. (1966):

"Emptiness is the place you're in.
There's nothing to lose but no more to win.
The sun ain't gonna shine anymore.
The moon ain't gonna rise in the sky..."

Because I couldn't get the lyrics out of my head.

On Twitter I prognosticated:

I predict that, at most, we have six months until we face an AI crisis that will threaten many lives.

I think I was being optimistic.

And here, Douglas Murray writes on John Keats ~ "Things Worth Remembering: An Ode to a Delicate Soul."

Jonathan Turley writes about the woke's "war on comedy":

For the most part, the war on comedy is working. For nearly a decade, many leading comedians have avoided performing on college campuses because they simply have no material that will avoid triggering one group or another. Six out of ten students in a 2020 survey said offensive jokes can constitute hate speech.

Activists are converting much of the world into their own humorless, ticked-off image. It is hard to enrage others through identity politics if some comedian is making fun of different identities. So the message has become that there’s nothing funny about identity. Satire is now viewed by some as a vehicle for objectification, subjugation and alienation.

These are the modern versions of the Puritans and Victorians, imposing their own rigid demands on artists and writers to conform to their own social values.

Please visit the Dreaming Squid shop. Thanks.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




1:51 p.m.

Sunny today. Our high was 88F.

That's getting summery.

I slept too much, which is highly unusual, and threw the whole day off. I got nothing written, except a simple email I've been trying to get around to for weeks.

I did finish reading John Farrier's very excellent Foot Prints: In Search of Future Fossils, and that ought to count for something.

My anger at stupidty, and how that stupidty is has begun to eat away at the integrity of the sciences, that's not helping. I spend my days and nights angry. I go to sleep angry. I wake angry.

Please have a look at the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks.

---
1. I saw something that struck me as both odd and infuriating. From SkyNews, "Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges has accused British Cycling of 'furthering a genocide' after the organisation said it would prevent transgender women from competitive female events." Now, this is patently absurd, and, wosre yet, it is a horrific insult to actual victims of genocide. Genocide is generally defined as the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the intent of obliterating that nation or group. It is not telling someone they cannot compete in a cycling competition because, truthfully, they have an unfair advantage over other participants. Ms. Bridges is not dead, last I heard. She is free to compete with those over whom she does not have an unfair advantage, and she owes a lot of people an apology. Oh, she also referred to those who excluded her as "literal Nazis, conspiracy theorists," which, of course, calls her understanding of the English language still further into doubt and leads to the need for additional apologies. Moral: Don't be silly.

2. It's papers like this that have me considering walking away from science altogether (and more and more of them appear every day): "Interdisciplinary approaches to advancing anti-racist pedagogies in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology" (Sorry; the paper will be paywalled for most of you, and the link only gets you to the abstract). Jerry Coyne (I know, I talk about him a lot, with good reason; read his books and blog) has called it "the most extreme incursion of ideology into ecology and evolution I've ever seen." And it is a genuinely appalling paper. And yet it made it past peer review and into print. But...it makes these claims, and I quote:

a.) Ecology and evolution are thoroughly permeated by racism - structural racism that is deeply embedded in the way we still do science.

b.) We (here I mean "people not of color") are all complicit in this racism, and we must constantly ponder our bigotry and persistently try to rid ourselves of it.

c.) Our curriculum is thoroughly "Eurocentric" and has to be "decolonized" for the good of all.

d.) Ecology and evolution cannot be taught properly without continually emphasizing the racism of the fields, racism said to be a big source of inequity in STEM. We must infuse all of our courses with a strong emphasis on the history and reality of racism, showing our students how the field was and is complicit in the creation of present inequities.

It would be entirely truthful to say "bullshit," laugh, and walk away from a mess like this. Sadly, that's not going to stop the destruction of science by wokers. Maybe nothing will. Anyway, Coyne takes it all apart with his usual deftness. Please read his reply. But in short, we are seeing lies and hyperbole sold as science.

I was going to write more, but...frankly, reading back over the mess with the ecology paper made me ill. So, whatever.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




3:38 p.m.

Sunny today. So far, our high has been 85F, but I expect higher before sunset.

I was awake at 4:30 a.m. with a piece of story in my head, and at 5 I got up and made a halting beginning to what I am calling "Where There Should Be Something, There Is Nothing." This would be for Sirenia Digest 206. I only did 461 words in about an hour and a half, incredibly slow for me, but it has promise. I'm going back to the sea with this one, and back to Lovecraft, with whom I have not spent time in a while. I miss the Old Gentleman.

I also talked with Bill at SubPress about Living A Boy's Adventure Tale. I had to decide where the illustrations will go, and the color of the cloth binding and endpapers. I also had emails to end to Mike Polcyn, and also to Megan Elayne Sims at the University of Kansas. So writing and paleontology.

I'm starting this early today, my entry, so I'll take my time, but looking at it now, maybe it won't require so much time.

Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundies shop. Spooky's getting new tie dye up. I am especially find of this one.

-----

1. Over at the NYT, there's a sorta quiz, sorta (but not really) article, about the newspeak of wokerism and how people feel about it, with a quiz right up front. I gotta say, "chestfeeding" is one of the most absurd things I have ever heard, as if there are human organs besides breasts that produce milk. Oh, and apparently "master bedroom" is racist. Or sexist. Or something. Anyway, there's that. The quiz and some fluffy soundbytes by...people. We can stll say people, right?

2. Then, once more at the NYT, Pamela Paul writes about the wokers' lack of humor. "Political Correctness Used to Be Funny. Now It’s No Joke". On the one hand, yes, they are an almost unspeakably humorlorless lot, especially when it comes to ever laughing at themslves. Jerry Coyne does a sorta postmortem of the article here. Coyne writes:

But Paul's correct in saying that things have changed. Mockery may be sparser, but what has really changed is that you are now automatically demonized as the enemy (i.e. someone on the Right) for mocking "politicial correctness"...

~ and ~

The extreme Left is more extreme than it used to be, and that’s led to more emotional fragility. Its members thus tend to strike out at those who oppose them, demonizing them even though they’re on the same half of the political spectrum. (It may not be irrelevant that surveys show that mental illness is more pervasive on the extreme Left than on the extreme Right). Emotional fragility leads to extreme behavior—remember how Nicholas Christakis was attacked by unhinged Yale students simply because his wife sent an email to the students in their “house” saying that adults could choose their own Halloween costumes? This is emotional fragility in action (on the part of some students, not Christakis)

3. Coyne writes on the question the legality of mandated DEI statements, which are beginning to undergo hardcore scrutiny, thank goodness, as they clearly constitute a form of compelled speech. This past year, there were new DEI statements I had to sign when renewing my memberships to the Society of Vertebrtae Paleontology and the Paleontological Society. The latter was especially egregious, to a degree that I may decide not to renew either next year. Now, in the case of SVP, I have been a member since 1983, and it is almost unthinkable, leaving the organization. But it looks less and less like the SVP I once knew. I'm gonna write more about this later.

Anyway...

This is the face of a shattered society.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




12:39 p.m.

The last day of May 2023. It feels ominous.

A very bright day, early summer. Sunny and our high was 80F (heat index 81F).

Tomorrow, I start writing again. Last night I slept for shit. Otherwise, I have begn reading John Farrier's very excellent Foot Prints: In Search of Future Fossils. I'm going to go back to work on some of the Pleistocene cave sediment collected in the 1980s (see photo below), picking it for microfossils. I have plenty to do with my writing and mosasaur work...but there's also more time that the ambitious can fill.

I imagine maybe five people read this journal regularly. Some days, I think that's a good thing.

Oh, yesterday the post brought Weird Tales No. 367, a special "cosmic horror" issue, which includes my new story "Night Fishing." I will say, I am starting to feel that "cosmic horror" is becoming as meaningless and overused as "steampunk." Cosmic horror is not a genre or subgenre; it is an element present in weird fiction.

I forgot to mention that the 27th, the day after my birthday, was the 109th anniversary of the birth of my Grandma Mary E. Ramey (nee Satterfield). We used to celebrate our birthdays together, plus a Memorial Day bbq. I am grateful she did not have to live to see this world.

Please have a look at the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. I am especially fond of this piece by Kathryn.

----

1. Right now, everywhere you look, science, intellectual rigor, and meritocracy is in more trouble than it has been at any point in my life. It quickly becomes overwhelming. For example, the mess in New Zealand, hegemony of Mātauranga Māori in secondary-school science classes. A distinctly non-scientific "way of knowing" is being foisted on students as though it possesses an empiracal explanatory power that is in anyway comparable to that of scinece. Appples and kiwis, but who gives a shit. It bolsters the DEI cred of the perpetrators. As for the actual scientists in New Zeaalnd, they're afraid to speak out against it, as scientists the world over - in places where DEI is dismantling science - are afraid to speak out. But it raises an intereting question, one that I am waiting for educators somewhere to have to face. Certainly here in America.

If the Mātauranga Māori is given equal time in class rooms, and if other "indigineous ways of knowing" are treated likewise, then we absolutely have to accord that same right to those so-called "scientific creationists." That they are mostly white and mostly of European descent, that's irrelevant. That it arises from Christianity and not "marginalized" indigenous belief systems is irrelevant. It's one way or the other. Because creationism is every bit as scientific as the Mātauranga Māori. Period.

2. Meanwhile, in India, well...more lunacy. India has not only struck evolutionary theory from their sceince curriculum, but also the periodic table...and lots of other stuff. See this article in yesterday's Nature and this entry at Jerry Coyne's blog. A brief excerpt from the Nature article:

The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.

Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year starting in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked.

I should hope so. Few countries will be as disproportionately affected by climate change, future pandemics, and such like than will India. And the country has decided to meet those challenges by gutting science education. For reasons no one can quite discern, though Hinduism is likely at the root of it.

3. Closer to home, high-school debate club isn't what it used to be (I loved debate class). But, read this: At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed. At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.

“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”

No, really. This woman is allowed near children. She is apparently a 2019 national debate champion, "Lila Lavender." Also, "revolutionary proletarian science" is a meaningless phrase if ever there were one. Or...do you mean like Trofim Lysenko, whose pseudoscience, the USSR's reaction to the evil "capitalist" Darwin, led directly the famine and the starvation of tens of millions in Russia and China?

Unfortunately for students and their parents, there are countless judges at tournaments across the country whose biased paradigms disqualify them from being impartial adjudicators of debate. From “I will drop America First framing in a heartbeat,” to “I will listen to conservative-leaning arguments, but be careful,” judges are making it clear they are not only tilting the debate in a left-wing direction, they will also penalize students who don’t adhere to their ideology.

4. And there are two very good opinion pieces at the Wall Street Journal:

a) A Scientist’s Sexuality Shouldn’t Matter. If you earn a doctorate, a federal agency wants to know if you’re gay, trans, ‘queer’ or ‘genderqueer.’

b) Do Scientists Regret Not Sticking to the Science? Taking political stands squanders the credibility of experts.

I may try, tomorrow, to spend more time on both of these.

----

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




3:18 pm.

Mostly sunny today. Our high (so far) was 81F.

No writing. I hope to be back to it by Thursday morning.

The afternoon's movie was Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010).

Creationism is truly as durable as any vampire. Supersition and ignorance is far more durable than what can be gleaned of the world by reason, if only because superstition and ignorance are so often far more comforting. I know I will never see an end to these idiots, but it drags me down.

Oh, and "I believe everything evolved except mankind" is every bit as ignorant as any other brand of creationism.

Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks. Spooky's got new tie dye up.

Last night, we watched the Season 2 finale of Yellowjackets. I've been on the fence about this series, but last night's episode blew me away. I am now a fan. And we watched the final episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel again.

Today's photo is a delightful baby Red-eared Slider (Trachemys picta elegans) Spooky photographed on Friday, from a turtle-filled stream near the house.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




12:45 (Friday)