Archive for 2019

LOOK. THEY CITE THE GREEN NUDE HEEL AS A GOOD IDEA. WHEN I FEEL LIKE GIVING CONSEQUENCE TO PEOPLE WHO BY RIGHTS SHOULD BE LOCKED IN A PADDED CELL, I’LL LET YOU KNOW:  March for Our Lives Issues Gun Grabbing Manifesto.

ABSOLUTELY RIGHT:  Republics.

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS INCLUDE NAUSEA, WEIGHT GAIN, SWELLING ANKLES, AND A LIFETIME OF WORRYING ABOUT THE KIDS, EVEN AFTER THEY MOVE OUT:   Why sperm is actually good for women: study.

On the other hand, you’ll also feel you created a bit of the future. So there’s that.

LOOK, WE TRIED TO KEEP THIS FROM INCOMERS, BUT IT’S TIME TO LEVEL WITH YOU GUYS:

If you came to Colorado recently, particularly if you’re a liberal and/or from California? Yeah, Colorado is a horrible state. It’s not just the cute groundhogs who carry plague. The squirrels do too. and there’s hantavirus in those cute little mice that infest your yard. And that’s not counting our extreme weather and the altitude. Everything in Colorado can kill you. Go back while you can. Sauve qui peut:  Plague-ridden prairie dogs pose danger to Colorado tourists.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: I’m A Professor, And I Carry A Gun On Campus. Here’s Why.

Meanwhile, some good sense from Prof. Erik Gilbert: Stop Worrying About Guns in the Classroom. They’re Already Here.

If you work at a Texas college and are worried by the prospect of having guns in your classroom, relax. The new campus-carry law changes your risk of gun violence very little. I can almost guarantee that if you have a few semesters of teaching under your belt, at some point there have been students with guns in your classroom. If those illegally armed students were not moved to violence by the content of your course or the statements of their fellow students, it seems highly improbable that a new group of legally armed students will prove to be more volatile or violence-prone than their scofflaw peers.

If you really think that there are no guns on college campuses in Texas, or elsewhere, because there is a law that forbids having guns on campus, you are mistaken. On my own campus in Arkansas, despite a strict prohibition on guns, in the last decade there has been at least one accidental discharge of a gun in a dorm room, several students who have been found to have guns in their cars, and at least one faculty member who was caught with a gun in on-campus faculty housing. And those are just people in “casual” possession of guns with no intention of causing harm or mischief who ran afoul of the campus police because they were foolish or indiscreet with them.

And here he is talking about it on NRA News.

FAKE NEWS? This New York Times story about Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to the MIT Media Lab includes this about Marvin Minsky:

Mr. Epstein may have had ties to people in leadership positions at the lab before meeting Mr. Ito. In a deposition unsealed this month, a woman testified that, as a teenager, she was told to have sex with Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, on Mr. Epstein’s island in the Virgin Islands. Mr. Minsky, who died in 2016 at 88, was a founder of the Media Lab in the mid-1980s.

Minsky is dead and can’t defend himself, but physicist/SF author Greg Benford, who I know and am inclined to trust, writes:

Typical Crap Journalism from NYT:

“In a deposition unsealed this month, a woman testified that, as a teenager, she was told to have sex with Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, on Mr. Epstein’s island in the Virgin Islands. Mr. Minsky, who died in 2016 at 88, was a founder of the Media Lab in the mid-1980s.”

Note, never says what happened. If Marvin had done it, she would say so. I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. She saw us talking and didn’t approach me.

Just for the record.

ON THIS DAY IN 1959, HAWAII OFFICIALLY BECAME A STATE: There was dancing in the streets that day.

Some members of Congress were especially keen to bring Hawaii into the union, because it was seen as a successful multi-racial society. Alas, things haven’t looked quite as good on that front in the last 15 years or so.  The link is to some testimony I gave 10 years ago.  There have been some twists and turns since then, but the basic story discussed in the testimony is still worth knowing about.

OPEN THREAD: Talk, talk.