Why are tour buses from Quebec always so motherfucking sleek and luxurious?

My jaw dropped when I read this absurd piece of garbage printed this week in Science. It’s yet another whiny-ass titty-baby diatribe concerning NIH’s attempts to level the playing field for New/Early-Stage Investigators by paying some of their grants outside the nominal payline. I’m not gonna quote the whole thing, but here is a fisking of some of the most egregious nonsense.

Increasing the grants funded below the quality cutoff to nearly one-fifth of all funded grants will not serve the goal of helping new investigators. If such applicants are not held to the stringent process of producing a grant that meets R01 quality requirements, what will happen to them when they are no longer new investigators and are then subject to the same rigors as the rest of the field?

How many motherfucking times do idiots like this fuckwit have to have it explained to them that the NIH peer review system is by necessity incapable–as is any peer review system–of distinguishing the “quality” of the top 10% and the second 10% of grants (between which is where current nomial paylines reside). This is because there simply exist no objective differences in anything that one could identify as “quality” among the top 20% of grants.

This practice is reminiscent of the R23 and its replacement, the R29 First Independent Research Support and Transition (FIRST) award (2). However, these two early-investigator programs were discontinued by NIH because of unacceptable differences between these awards and R01s, including evidence that awardees of the R29 were less likely to secure subsequent R01 funding than were early-career investigators starting with an R01. The R29 mechanism was also under-resourced.

Way to just casually slip in the fact that the R29 mech was under-resourced, as if that was just a minor contributor to the difficulties its awardees faced subsequently, and not the main fucking reason. Yeah, those R29 awardees did poorly later on because they were scientific losers in the first place who never should have got grants in the first place.

Senior faculty often contract junior faculty to conduct at least part of their research. Instead of providing special funding directly to new faculty, we should make sure that they receive sufficient mentoring as they work on the projects of more experienced investigators. I propose a new type of grant: the Senior Mentor-initiated Academic Research Training (SMART) award. To obtain this funding, senior faculty must apply to recruit junior faculty or new investigators and groom them for future independent work. If the university or the equivalent research institute provides a fostering environment and scientific resources, NIH should match the SMART funding.

BRILLIANT!!!!!!!! Let’s create yet another way for senior faculty to build empires on the backs of junior faculty, and further delay their genuine independence. Forty-two motherfucking years old as the average age of award of the first R01 is way too young! These whippersnappers need more “mentoring” from senior faculty! And what better way to get it than to work on the senior faculty’s own projects!!!!

Excuse me while I fucking puke.

Twisty’s post today reminded me of how good this bit is:

It is morally and politically unserious to conclude that a single individual motivated by religious hatred who goes on a killing spree in the United States is mentally disturbed and not evidence that American muslims are a fifth column that seeks to kill American jews and christians, but it is totes serious to completely ignore the moral and political dimensions of the christianization of the American military and the fact that United States has wasted trillions of dollars and countless lives bombing the living shit out of multiple predominantly muslim nations.

You’re down by a touchdown, it’s fourth down with about three minutes left in the game, and you go for (and make) a motherfucking 52 yard field goal!?!?!?!?!?!? Are you fucking kidding me!?!?!?

THERE IS NO “E” FOR EFFORT IN FOOTBALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLAY TO WIN, DUMBASS!!!!

Matsui-san and Mo for co-MVP!!!!1!11!1!!!1!!ELEVENTY!!!111!!!1!!

UPDATE: MATSUI-SAN MVP!!!!!!!!! And he’s SMILING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

David Hubel has an opinion piece in the current issue of Neuron that is a total complete pile of hoary bullshit whiny-ass moaning and groaning about the “good old days” and how today’s PIs don’t perform “the real science”. Here is but a small sample of the steaming pile of tedious glurge:

I have no illusions that biological science is likely to return overnight to the system that prevailed a generation ago, but I believe a start could be made in that direction. If I were 40 years younger and a group leader and found myself imprisoned in an office most of the time, I would adopt a 5-year plan to change my scientific style. I would choose a project to share with one partner, put aside a lab bench that I could call my own, and submit a research proposal to fund that project. I would encourage any postdocs in my lab to do the same, with their own funding and independent projects. I would give advice gently and sparingly, realizing that strongly worded advice from a senior person can be hard to ignore and that in science making one’s own mistakes can be an important part of learning. I would limit my committee assignments to one or two and encourage my more senior postdocs to do the same. (I vividly remember asking George Wald, of visual-pigment fame, how he managed to avoid all the wasted time on committees. He answered: “It’s simple: I accept all committee assignments, and never show up for a meeting.”) I would make it a rule that a name on a paper means that one has actually sat at the bench twisting the dials. I would continue to teach because I enjoy teaching and think I do it well. One has to learn to teach and to develop one’s teaching style, and for that reason I would give everyone in my group the chance to try it. [emphasis added]

Yeah, only knob-twiddling counts as real science. What a fucking joke. You’d think a scientist as distinguished as Hubel would have taken a scientific approach to his naked assertions, and presented some motherfucking evidence that science practiced as he lionizes actually works better than the current model. It is also disconcerting that Neuron wasted page space on this kind of completely unsupported blithering.

Tenured Radical hits one out of the park in her review of a new book by Stanley Fish:

I particularly like the idea of administrators doing their job well so that I can pay close attention to what I was educated for: teaching, scholarship and providing sane advice on who we ought to hire, not shadowing and carping at administrators. Like Fish, the older I get the less attached I am to shared governance. In part this is because I don’t think there are many examples of faculties who have exercised it effectively and usefully, and in part, I don’t think it exists except as something we gesture towards. I prefer a clear set of regulations that are effectively and fairly enforced by objective parties who are truly interested in what is going on at the level of the department and willing to intervene when people are being screwed. I would prefer pay equity. I would prefer a union. I would also prefer, as Fish suggests, to get all the information possible, to make the preferences and reasons for those preferences known, and then to forget about it while a set of competent administrators settles the issue in a way that is fair.

A-FUCKING-MEN!!!11!1!ELEVENTY!11!

If I had a dollar for every minute I have sat in faculty meetings listening to washed-up tenured deadwood fuckwads who can’t even successfully manage a research laboratory containing half a dozen scientists blither on and on and on about all the bad decisions the dean of our medical school is making and how if they were the dean everything would be totally unicorns and rainbows flying out of all of our asses, I’d be a motherfucking bajillionaire!

The Fatal Conceit:

Human beings tend to be overconfident. Thus, we should continue to give the greedfuck ultra-rich corporate oligarchs who spent the last 10 years utterly destroying the United States economy complete unfettered free motherfucking rein to continue feasting on the blood, sweat, and tears of the other 99.9% of American citizens.

Oh, this is so, so sweet!!!!!!!!

GO MOTHERFUCKING YANKEES!!!11!!11!1!!!