Bankrupt fascist thugs

I'm following this federal civil trial in VA closely because I see it as a bellwether for the future of fascism in the USA. The defendants are the neo-Nazi organizers of the riot that killed Heather Heyer and maimed and injured dozens more, most of whom have so far escaped federal criminal law because the justice department was led by Trump appointees at the time. If they lose, they'll be bankrupted and in hock for a long long time, if not for life, and the deterrence effect will be salubrious. 

But it's worth a minute to explore again just why fascism is so evil. Let's study why the allies fought WW2 for a minute. Bear with me. I'm an academic after all. History is one of my things. And after all, the British Empire was still in being at the time, a racist and oppressive institution by definition. Stalin had just gotten away with the Ukrainian Holodomor and went on to purge his entire officer corps. And the US lynched and other wise murdered and oppressed Black and Hispanic and Native people with regularity and enforced Jim Crow. None of the allies had clean hands when it came to oppression and murder. 

But we fought German fascism. Why? Some kind of peace could probably have been made in the early 1940s. The answer is because it was evil, and that Roosevelt and Churchill knew that evil would spread eventually, coming back again to attack the allies because evil can't be trusted. 

How evil? The Hitler regime imprisoned and murdered all it's enemies, not only the millions of Jewish people and communists we usually hear about. It also killed innocent people and children just because they had birth defects or mental illness. The deaths were not easy ones either. Can you imagine a gas van full of terrified children, suffocating with the exhaust from the engine? They punished and even executed kids for reading the wrong books and distributing pamphlets. They forced women, including "Aryan" German women, to have sex with soldiers and in some cases to bear their children, sometimes multiple children. And they enslaved most of Europe, forcing the conquered people of Europe to work for them for no pay and meager food. 

If you are one of my former students and you still didn't get the message I tried to teach you, over and over over, that oppression and slavery and murder are wrong, and you're still fondling your guns, dreaming of the new civil war, having wet dreams about shooting libs, just understand that unleashing forces as evil as this means they will some day come for the people you love and even for you, just as they came for our people during WW2. Oh, yes, one last thing I couldn't say when I was employed to be your teacher: Just fucking grow up. You may not like the Dems because you're afraid of losing your sexy guns, but that's no excuse for supporting racists and calling for violence in the streets. It's not rocket science. Go out and find a decent politician who will support the second amendment without also supporting fascism and civil war.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/04/charlottesville-lawsuit-nazis-heimbach-trial/?fbclid=IwAR1HonltoZNt7FzHewJCE_I61NKRXhvW1Iovf8rNNwi1IPP5-GSOwvDksKs

Some good old pictures from the good old days (2009)

What did you do with your semester? This is a cross section of what my students were doing. These are in reverse chronological order. What these pictures have in common is that they are all "action shots" and unposed, although some of the subjects knew they were being photographed at the time and struck funny or silly poses. You can click on an image to enlarge. Narrow or widen your browser window to make captions line up with photos. "Dead-eye Dierdre," ready to shoot. Snorri, the Womerlippi Farm rental ram, ramming it up for the camera. Me, working on the decibel-linked anemometer for the Fox Islands Wind project Ervin, one of our local Amishmen, climbs his turbine. He needs to get a safety harness. Ervin concentrates on some welding Kaylee and Heather board some boarding boards SAR team students on a mock evacuationTeaching the horizontal lower using the tandem system. My favorite classroom setting Getting ready for the lowerLearning to rappel Spreading "mud" for the barn foundation: a dance choreography Tough customers: Who you lookin' at? A trenchant Unity character. Cody on the tower at our Charleston wind assessment site Et moi Worm's eye view of a Freedom turbine An Aaron in the wet

The case of the disappearing professors

At nine am on that fateful August day when the college kindly notified us (via email – the formality of old fashioned paper termination letters being apparently passé) that it would lay off all of its most uppity faculty – including Aimee and I as suspect ringleaders – all as a prelude to becoming an (almost) entirely online, virtual, and essentially stateless institution, it gave us three hours’ notice and then terminated said email accounts at noon that day. 

No courtesy mail forwarding for us! And a recent inquiry from a former student suggests that there may not even be automatic notices stating that the person emailed no longer works at the college. That alum, who also happens to be an uppity academic, was forced to resort to old fashioned snail mail. 

I can obviously test that notion, just to be sure and will. 

But if you have been trying to find us, you may have been emailing a ghost. A ghost of a college and a non-existent professor. I’m a civilian now. Again. In case you didn't know. The correct emails for the both of us are appended below. 

Mind you, they were probably wise to fire us. We would never have allowed them to become purely online, had we had any faculty power left. The power grab happened in small pieces over the preceding few years. It was a work of art in terms of coups d'état – the CIA itself could not have snuck up any better, as far as many of our shocked colleagues were concerned. 

More cynical, neither Aimee nor I were shocked. Aimee, in fact, had been predicting it for several years. I'd been making plans to pursue other ways of making a living and other interests. 

It will be interesting to see what the NECHE visiting team makes of all this in the coming months, as the time for the ten year accreditation review draws near. Word of the coup has of course, gotten out. Do the Board and the administration not understand that academics know other academics and frequently talk to one another? 

If you want to talk to us, student or visitor, here we are: womersleymick8984@gmail.com aimee.phillippi@yandex.com

Fire, fuel, compression

Someone on our local community assistance FB page couldn't start their car. I wrote this to help. 

There is a sequence of basic tests to do to repair a non-starting vehicle or any gas piston engine. You do them in order and do them thoroughly, so that you are sure you've eliminated each cause as you go. The mnemonic is "fire, fuel, compression." 

Fire means spark. You remove a spark plug from a cylinder, lay it somewhere metal on the engine where you can see it and you're sure it's grounded, crank briefly with the help of a friend if your arms are short, and hope to see a spark. If there isn't a spark, try very hard to check that it was grounded just to be sure. 

Still no? Problem is "fire." You then need to troubleshoot the ignition system. There are too many possibilities under the category of "bad ignition" to go into over FB, but with high miler cars it's often the spark plugs that are so worn that the spark gap is too large. The gap should be around 30 thousands of an inch, which is about the thickness of thin cardboard. No spark and a large gap, change the plugs. 

If there is spark, move to "fuel." The easiest test is to spray starter fluid in the intake manifold, replacing the gas experimentally. If the car fires, you know by logical elimination that it was fuel, so troubleshoot the fuel system. 

For compression you need a compression tester and the knowledge to use it, but most mechanics can tell if an engine has very bad compression in one cylinder by turning the engine over by hand with a wrench on the crankshaft pulley or by using the belt, comparing the compression resistance between cylinders. 

Don't be tempted to jump to random causes. It's necessary to use a logical troubleshooting scheme to fix the problem.

Building stuff as pedagogical strategy

I believed and believe that action is helpful to learning. This is part of the Hahnian pedagogy we practised at the old, true, Unity College. We put it into action. We built barns, solar systems, grease vehicles, wind turbines, electronic gizmos of all kinds, we fixed cars and trucks, and grew food. Why? Because it works. It overcomes the boredom and disengagement that young people feel after a decade or more of formal schooling. Don't believe me? Read the blog. It's all there, going back to 2007. Or just read this article.

Update to Hansen et al 2016

Although I'm no longer employed as a climate professional, I still monitor the climate science news and cherry-pick the latest papers. In particular, I look for progress that would or would not confirm the primary hypothesis in Hansen et al 2016, "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous."

This is the paper that turned my professional life upside down. It took me three weeks to read it carefully, annotate it, and follow up on the primary literature cited therein. It's a very dense eighty-some pages. But I had a feeling then and still do that I was witnessing the emergence of the best prediction for the fate of the earth, and its consequences, all in real time, and that nearly everything I had done as an environmental activist, scholar, and teacher would become moot as a result.

Seems like the kind of thing you would want to keep track of. Especially if you have a six year old daughter.

In the years after Hansen and his colleagues published this tome, I tried to teach it. I was responsible for general education classes that included a climate change module, as well as a senior-level climate science class that taught the general science and the basics of climate modeling. It seemed my responsibility to give them this paper. But I failed badly in the attempt to teach it. 

It's just too complex a proposition. 

Not "if a then b," which is what most undergraduates can handle in terms of logic problem, essentially linear cause and effect, but "if a and b and c, then d might happen and e will perhaps ensue and then f is a distinct possibility if we cross threshold g and reach set point h, and hypothetical feedbacks i, j and k set in, and we have evidence of varying quality for a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, and k, and if we get to f then a total catastrophe will drown all major cities within seventy years and set off storms that can flatten Florida, but you have to be an expert to understand the evidence and by the way, even you, the professor, is probably too stupid to understand any of this."

I have to admit I took a certain morbid and masochistic satisfaction trying to teach it. I could spend a lifetime just learning to teach this one paper. But this is what science is about for me: struggling with logic and reason and consequences.

Anyway. Updates, right? They have been fairly scarce and not written for the lay person.

Dr. Hansen has finally published an informal update of sorts here. It is intended to be a foreword to a book, but looks to me more like an attempt to put forming thoughts about updating H2016 on paper.

As such, I would expect it to either disappear or appear later in some other format. But for now it's very interesting. I plan to follow up on the literature as soon as I can get a draft copy of Chapter 48 of his new book, which is where he says to go next.

Here's a thought..

If all you really could think of to do with your life was to put into practice some educational idea you'd cooked up for your PhD, and you had absolutely nothing better to do with that life (like for instance saving the planet), then the right way to go about it would be to start an institution dedicated to that purpose.

That would have saved an awful lot of grief on the part of the people that loved the institution you crapped on and climbed all over and finally dropped in the toilet to get your dream accomplished, wouldn't it?