Transmillennial

 Turning Point USA love lists. They have a long-standing list of faculty who have not hewn to the conservative way, either by writing stuff unfavorable to Donald Trump, or teaching things conservatives don't want to hear. So, in the spirit of listing and transparency, these are their current members at UNL.  This group funded some of the terrorists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Alexander Burkhard Andrew Shelburn Benjamin Terry (their faculty advisor, from the College of Engineering) Carson Scott Christian Simmons Christine Stulken Christine Discenza Dan Mathews Dawson Coudriet Dominic Naughtin Eleanor Kenkel Ethan Nelson Faith Santana Garrett Cantrell Grant Carstens Hayley Brakefield Izzy Rosegrant Jack O'Dell Jackson Towne Jacob Benton Jordan Minderman Josie Dostal Kaitlyn Nein Kevin Coffey Kiara Kearney Kirby Hughes Madison Talbert Matthew Berringer Nancy Nguyen Ryan Barragan Sam Gilbert Sarah Pagano Sierra Schroeder Sofia Heggem Taylor Tunnison Willia...

I have known of Dan Whitney, Larry the Cable Guy , longer than most people have. In the car on the way into work at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, we used to listen to one of the usual mostly-talk rock radio shows. Larry would quite regularly call in. His accent fascinated me. Probably because I’ve lived in so many places, I like to try to place accents. Larry the Cable Git's accent was vaguely southern, or was meant to be southern, but I couldn’t place it anywhere in particular in the South. In any case, he’d distorted it so much you could make out only half of what he was saying.  What he was saying was mumbled, consciously transgressive hate.  Later on, I discovered he was was born and grew up in Pawnee City Nebraska, until his preacher daddy hauled him down to Florida. It’s a long story… (1) Daddy issues Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, was born on February 17, 1963 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, to the Reverend ...

Jacob Siegfried and his wife Eva, and a family of one boy, also named Jacob, and several girls, emigrated to the US through Texas, from Saratov, on the Volga River, in 1908. Though they came from Russia, they spoke German. They settled in Logan Township, just outside Enid, Oklahoma.  Volga Germans had been encouraged to immigrate to Russia by Catherine the Great, in the hopes of civilizing her still mostly barbarous country, and remained until Tsar Nicholas started to revoke their privileges. Then many of them came here. During WWI, they were driven out. Germans were not welcome in much of the United States. So they made the long trek up to Saskatchewan, where there was a community of Volga Germans. We have record of Jacob and family crossing the border legally in August 1918. Since there was wartime internment of German immigrants in Canada, it's a little unclear why Saskatoon was a safe haven for them. Possibly it was just remote from the nonsense happening in Ontario. Or possibl...

 Ryan Hamilton was named Executive Director of the Nebraska Republican Party on March 13, 2019 . Let me say right away that I do not think Ryan is a very nice human being. We used both to contribute to a Lincoln Nebraska politics forum which had strict rules about civility. This did not prevent Ryan from dragging up some obviously phony teaching evaluations of me from a student revenge site, because he lost an argument. His twitter handle is @ryanmfhamilton ( what does mf stand for, mom? ), although he doesn't want you reading his Twitter feed. So let's review Ryan's history. He's 35 years old, He comes from Nevada. He attended Chaparral High School in Las Vegas, and Catholic University of America in Washington DC from 2004-2009, and then took a Masters' in Journalism and Media Studies from 2011-2014. A nice Catholic boy, you might say. He's devoted a lot of time to Nevada Boys' State, from back when he was in high-school. Before he came here, he worked for ...

A young Nebraskan's epic quest for the perfect piece of meat Chapter 1: More than a snack, but not quite a meal On May 17, a Monday morning, final examinations and 19th birthday over, Jordan Petersen set out, with a backpack full of clothes, and a brand new and unstamped Nebraska Beef Passport, to find adventure, Real Nebraska, and meat. Until now, the student's life had been uneventful, calm, boring even. The child of vegetarian parents, raised on beans, dairy, and (recently) something called Beyond Meat , Jordan had never tasted animal flesh. No chicken, pork, fish or lamb had passed the 19 year old's lips. Beyond Meat was a pale imitation of the beef of the teenager's dreams -- beef, succulent, dripping with juices, filling the mouth with its moist, thick texture. No, it made no sense to go 'beyond' meat, before one had fully experienced meat.  And, by a stroke of luck, Nebraska's governor had just announced the Nebraska Beef Passport program. One could...

 Conor Friedersdorf, a reactionary wolf in classical liberal sheep's clothing, is shocked, shocked! What this actually was was a 'panel discussion' between DeSantis, Scott Atlas , and the three authors of the Great Barrington declaration , trying to justify their repulsive actions during the COVID epidemic: the scientifically unfounded claim that one could reach 'herd immunity' via infection alone, along with abandonment of almost all public health measures to combat the disease, and a callous acceptance of a million deaths in the US alone.  The declaration, as is usual with such attacks on the scientific consensus, once drafted, was signed mostly by people with no experience in the field, with dubious qualifications if not a record of quackery, and a religious or political act to grind. Previous petitions that attacked the theory of evolution and anthropogenic climate change served as a model. DeSantis, whose record on COVID is disgraceful, was happy to get on bo...

 I used to tell my students that the fate of bad science is not to be refuted, but to be ignored. We ignore it, because to refute it takes time that could be used for more worthwhile endeavors, and refuting it also makes enemies. In fact, on one of the rare occasions I felt it necessary to publish a refutation of some particularly bad science,  one of a referee's major criticisms was that I was paying any attention to the work at all. That is one of the nice things about the scientific consensus.  I submit this formula no longer works, in an era when the bad actor can go on Fox News and spew their garbage to the world, or take a job with a Republican administration and put the lives of thousands in jeopardy.  This is why I'm calling out John Ioannidis. Ioannidis is often called an iconoclast, but I maintain iconoclast is one of those nouns that declines. My iconoclast is your bombthrower is his kook . When Ioannidis published  Why Most Published Research Findi...