It’s another Incitatus moment

The Roman emperor Caligula threatened to make his favorite horse, Incitatus, a consul. Historians agree he didn’t actually accomplish that, it was more of a demeaning joke against the aristocracy and a way to brag about his power, but still…that’s one of the many stupid, hateful things we remember him for. Caligula has not fared well in history. Historians can argue down to this day that Caligula was the worst Roman emperor of all time, for his capriciousness, his venality, his narcissism, his greed, his ineffectiveness as a leader.

Does that sound familiar?

At least Trump has actually done the thing he claimed he was going to do: he has signed an Executive Order declaring that Lake Ontario is to be renamed Lake America.

resident Donald Trump on Thursday signed an ‌Executive Order instructing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” ​

The change is set to take effect immediately, he said. Trump earlier in the week had floated the idea of a new moniker for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

It is absurd. Not only is it not going to happen, but it also highlights the fact that Executive Orders as a tool for governing have been corrupted and are totally useless. No one except brain-dead MAGA clowns are going to call it “Lake America”.

“The name is more than 400 years old, pre-dating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” said Carney on Thursday. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”

Insisting that Canadians are aware of the “naming reality,” Carney rejected Trump’s directive for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has also rejected the whole idea.

History and the world are going to be laughing at our idiot president for a long time to come. You might say that at least he hasn’t put a horse in the Senate, but I think a lot of the candidates he has endorsed, and all of the nitwits in his cabinet, would serve us better if they were horses. Put Burgum in harness and run him in the Kentucky Derby, he’d be more useful there than as Secretary of the Interior.

It’s over, Mike

The Mike Lindell saga in Minnesota is over. He had been throwing his familiar temper tantrum over losing the primary election, which is his right, and it was also his right to demand a recount, if he was willing to pay for it.

He was not willing to pay for it.

Lindell failed to formally request and pay for a recount by a Monday deadline. He went to the high court to seek a more-expansive recount than a state-approved plan. He objected to the structure in which only votes for him and Lisa Demuth would be counted by name and all others would be combined in a third pile.

Therefore, it is settled: Lindell lost. The election for governor in November will be between Demuth and Klobuchar. Lindell can go cry into his pillows.

Oh no — I’m an ineffective brainwasher!

The evidence is in. We liberal professors are doing a bad job at indoctrination — it’s not our hard work that is persuading students, we’re just coasting on a general trend that education liberalizes.

We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.

Damn. Are the Democrats going to cut my Professional Indoctrinator stipend now? I’ve been saying for years that I don’t teach political perspectives in my classes, but nobody believed me, and they kept passing those big checks to me.

Eat it, Republicans!

Remember this?

A video circulating widely on social media Sunday appears to show President Donald Trump announcing that the United States will buy Argentine beef while dismissing concerns about struggling American farmers.

He had a plan. Meat prices were climbing fast, so he thought he’d pander to consumers (but not beef producers) by importing 15 tons of cheap Argentine beef. And he did, and he distributed it to his most devoted followers in Florida and Texas.

How’s that going?

Nearly 30,000 pounds of raw beef have been recalled at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) highest warning level due to an import violation.

Corte Argentino USA LLC, a Florida-based beef company, recalled approximately 29,628 pounds of raw beef imported to the U.S. from Argentina without reinspection, according to an announcement from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) on Aug. 7.

The agency classified the recall as Class I, meaning that it’s a “high or medium risk” recall entailing “a health hazard situation” with “a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death,” per the FSIS.

As a vegetarian living in a state that hates Donald Trump and will never receive his toxic largesse, I can laugh. While eating my cyclospora-infested produce.

We can’t win.

If the electorate were rational…

We wouldn’t have these problems. Everyone has to see that Trump is insane, right?

He’s picking a trade war with Canada, our ally and partner. <a href=”https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/trump-lake-ontario-lake-america-name-change-trade-war-canada-escalates/6539930>Canada is retaliating. We’re going to feel it in the form of toilet paper shortages soon. If he doesn’t get his way, he’s threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center — and he’ll do it, just like he tore down the East Wing. Most petty of all, he threatens to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Since when does the US president have authority over geography? He doesn’t.

These events are just the latest in his history of idiotic, self-defeating policy decisions by an incompetent bully. When will it become obvious to the other branches of the so-called distributed balance of federal power? Oh, wait, they know. The Senate and Supreme Court are enabling it.

But we really have to blame the American voter. Latest example: they’ve made Darline Graham* the Republican nominee to replace her dead brother. She’s not qualified. Her only ‘virtue’ is blood, and she got elected solely because she’s a member of the tribe. That tribal thinking is what’s going to get more Republicans elected in November.

We are so screwed.

*My mother’s name was Darlene, with an “e”. I’m not happy to see it dragged through the news attached to that smooth-brained Southern dingleberry.

Another right-wing hater squashed by Minnesota

This state is a magnet for the worst of the worst. Jake Lang, in a repeat visit to the state, discovered how we handle these creeps.

Hundreds of people were outside of the Minneapolis City Hall for a counter protest against Lang at noon.

Lang arrived in Minneapolis on Saturday to advocate for a Rochester woman who called a Black autistic child a racial slur, according to a profane-ridden post on his X account. In a post on X earlier this week, Mayor Jacob Frey told people to stay away from the rally.

“Let this lame-ass racist rally fall flat and fade into irrelevance,” he wrote.

No, Jacob, let him face the state’s wrath. Also, Jacob Frey can shut the fuck up about “both sides.”

January 6th rioter and far-right instigator Jake Lang held another “hate rally” on Saturday, and it was quickly drowned out by crowds of Minneapolis counterprotesters, including the city’s own Spider-Man.

Minneapolis police (MPD) and protesters clashed after Lang drove along a sidewalk in front of City Hall, and MPD and private security seemed to shield Lang.

Lang first tried to hold an anti-Muslim rally on Jan. 18, which was also met by Minneapolis protesters and eventually led to him being chased out of the area. He announced last month on social media that he would be returning to City Hall to lead a “peaceful Freedom of Speech” rally, though Saturday’s attempt at a rally was no different from January’s, with over 100 counterprotesters already holding their own demonstration in front of City Hall during the time Lang was scheduled to be there.

In total, fewer than a dozen individuals showed up for Lang’s scheduled rally. Lang and six others, including far-right activist Jayden Scott, showed their faces briefly when they decided to drive along the sidewalk that was initially barricaded.

The decision caused chaos, as crowds of protesters gathered around the cars to attack Lang before pepper spray was deployed by a man dressed as a law enforcement officer who appeared to be working for Lang. Protesters threw water balloons, bottles, glitter, and more at the group, as they tried to pull the offensive signs away from the instigators.

At one point, a man dressed as Spider-Man jumped onto the back of Lang’s truck and began attacking Lang before the superhero impersonator was pulled away. Lang was later photographed being arrested by Minneapolis police.

The mayor and the police are pretty much useless, but at least we’ve got Spider-Man on our side.

Here is the best photo of the event.

Yay Minnesota Spider-Man!

Where should Paloma go to college?

This is the notorious professionalized liberal making machine

The Secretary of the US Department of Transportation is an airhead lawyer and former reality-TV “star” with no qualifications in transportation, Sean Duffy, but hey, you knew because he has a high appointment in the Trump administration that he was unqualified and incompetent. At least it’s better than his previous sinecure as the acting administrator of NASA! The last I heard about Duffy he was advising us to take advantage of the long delays at airports by doing calisthenics in the terminals. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

What I didn’t know is that he roped in a bunch of corporate sponsors who wanted to curry favor with the Trump administration, like Boeing, Toyota, Shell, United Airlines, Comcast, Royal Caribbean, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Lyft to fund his summer vacation. He, his wife, and his 9 kids got into a gigantic RV with a following camera crew to drive all around the US for 6 weeks or so. Boeing and Toyota each coughed up a million dollars to pay for the extended joy ride.

I haven’t had a vacation in years. Maybe I’d be able to if just one of those corporations gave me a million dollars. Unfortunately, I’m not a corrupt opportunist like Duffy, and don’t have any influence on our government.

So anyway, one of the purported justifications for this trip was to visit colleges, for his kids who were of age to enter college. They visited Harvard. His daughter Paloma wants to go to school there. Duffy has opinions.

After declaring that they were a highly conservative family and that they had raised their kids in a strictly Catholic environment, he announces that she cannot go to Harvard because he didn’t believe that Harvard offers a well-rounded education.

His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, declares We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they are steeped in faith and values, so the idea of dropping her off at a place where they would undermine that or undo all those things makes me worried.

Because he is a profoundly stupid man, Sean chimes in And again I don’t want them to get one viewpoint, I want them to get a lot of different viewpoints, but I don’t want them fed only one viewpoint that is contrary to the way my kids were raised, completely oblivious to the fact that he has just contradicted his wife and himself in one sentence. Because he is truly, deeply, stupid and unthinking. He then claims that Harvard has professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls and corrupt their minds.

Uh, I’m not the greatest fan of Harvard (I think they are over-rated and too rich for their own good, and that we have numerous great institutions of higher education all over the country), but Harvard is not particularly liberal, and they are not a machine with the goal of churning out liberal students. The liberalism is a side-effect of getting a lot of different viewpoints. Harvard has a lot of prestige, a lot of money, and has a privileged status in the world; if any of my kids had had the opportunity to go there, I would have encouraged them, although it probably would have bankrupted us. Duffy wouldn’t have that problem. He’s just an ignorant goober attached to an administration that hates education.

I am wondering about poor Paloma. What shithole school would Sean and Rachel like to ship their daughter off to? I hope it’s not Liberty University, but that’s probably not Catholic enough for them. Sean is a graduate of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, a private Catholic college which I wouldn’t describe as a shithole, but it probably doesn’t have the status the Duffys would want. Notre Dame? Bad news there, they expose their students to a healthy diverse student body, and she’d probably end up learning about feminism and equality and reason, all those things the Duffy family opposes.

I’d recommend that she attend the University of Minnesota Morris, if Harvard is off the table. We don’t have a professionalized liberalizing process here, we just let students be who they want to be, and help them get the education they need. Paloma might just fit in perfectly here.

The lesson of apples

I grew up in Washington state, and many of my relatives worked the apple orchards in season — they were good, hardworking fruit pickers. But I hadn’t even thought about where apples came from. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been the Yakima valley, and of course I knew of the legend of Johnny Appleseed, but wouldn’t have been able to even guess what their origin was.

It turns out they’re from Kazakhstan.

What I thought was most interesting in the video is that it mentions Nikolai Vavilov, and his famous hypothesis — so famous that we take it for granted in any discussion of human origins.

The origin of any cultivated plant can be found where its wild relatives grow with the greatest diversity.

Awesome! I’m going to have expand my discussion of extreme heterozygosity and centers of origin in my Spring semester genetics class (but not now, I have to focus on cell bio for next week). I read this most excellent review, Human-driven evolution of cultivated plants and the origin of early civilizations: The concept of Neolithic revolution in the works of Nikolai Vavilov and found it enlightening.

The concept of centers of origin of cultivated plants (crop biodiversity hotspots) developed by Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943) is essential for understanding the origin and evolution of human civilization. Vavilov formulated the principles of the Neolithic agricultural revolution and substantiated the basic patterns for the emergence of agricultural civilizations. He established that the center of speciation of the plants that have a potential for cultivation determines the origin of primary civilization. Humans actively performed the selection of plants with valuable properties, which led to the formation of new cultivated species and varieties, while the starting point for such unconsciously human-directed evolution was the presence of potentially useful traits due to the increased genetic diversity in the center of origin. The spreading of agriculturally important cultivars from the center of their origin led to the propagation of beneficial farming technologies over large areas. The establishment of human civilization resulted from the dynamic quasi-symbiotic relationship between humans and domesticated plants and animals, which human-driven evolution became an essential factor for the transformation and dynamics of human societies.

Here’s all the human history you need. (I exaggerate slightly.)

Fig. 5 summarizes the proposed views on the development of agricultural civilizations and phytospreading during the Holocene. The phytospreading process became to a major extent human-driven in the Holocene, which resulted in intensive biomass formation related to the production of crops. Centers of origin of cultivated plants determined the rise of early civilizations, which in turn facilitated the spreading of wild, cultivated, and weed species to higher latitudes. The process of phytospreading in the Holocene was described by Vavilov for the origin and distribution of cultivated plants. He identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants as the hotspots of genetic diversity for the plants potentially having agricultural importance. In these spots, the series of parallel variability (described as Vavilov’s law of homologous series) were very intense.

Fig. 5. Schematic illustration of the development of agricultural practices, spreading of cultivated plants, and social evolution of human civilization.

The law of homologous series is a very evo-devo concept. It’s the idea that similar variations can be found in members of the same genus, the same family, that is, that there seems to be something in the ancestral form that recurs spontaneously in later descendant forms, that the feature is an intrinsic property that can pop up in multiple branches of a lineage. These are brilliant observations rooted in Vavilov’s extensive study of native populations. Yes, he visited Kazakhstan and studied the apples there.

It’s especially impressive that he was doing this work that merged the disciplines of evolutionary biology and genetics in the 1920s.

You may have heard Vavilov’s name in another context: he was hated by the anti-science ideologue Trofim Lysenko, who eventually had him arrested and condemned to death in 1940. Vavilov died in prison in 1943, all because he recognized the scientific validity of Mendelian genetics, and opposed the nonsensical delusions and wishful thinking of Lysenko (delusions that led to the death of millions by famine). I can’t help but notice the similarities in the conflict between American science and the lies of MAHA and our modern Lysenko, RFK jr.

Vavilov’s mugshot

Thank goodness no scientists are being harassed in show trials and threatened with prison here! How many great scientists are going to wither on the vine thanks to the current radical politicization of science in this country?

Election denial is a psychological disorder

Remember this guy? He ought to be forgotten already.

Despite a glowing endorsement from Trump, Lindell was defeated by Demuth by roughly 11 percentage points in the Republican primary for governor on 11 August, a margin far beyond the 0.25% threshold that would trigger an automatic state-funded recount.

He lost by 11 percent. This was not a photo finish, he was clearly repudiated by the Republican electorate. Without question, Mike Lindell is OUT. However, he still refuses to concede, and is demanding a recount.

Because the gap is wider than the threshold, Lindell would need to formally request the recount and cover its cost himself.

The announcement comes after Lindell refused last week to concede the Republican gubernatorial primary, despite trailing by a double-digit margin. The Associated Press called the race for Demuth, the Minnesota House speaker, late on election night.

Lindell’s campaign alleged “irregularities identified in election-night electronic reporting data” in the news release.

Minnesota law allows a manual recount if the loser pays for it themself, in this case at the cost of over $800,000. He’s planning to pay it, despite his pillow business being in a shambles and his bankruptcies.

Just wait until the general election! MAGA is going to go nuts.

James O’Keefe still likes to play dress-up

If you thought James O’Keefe was washed up and would vanish in the sewage outlet of history after his exposure and disgrace, guess again. He attempted to meddle in the Minnesota primary by dressing up as a “muslim”, putting on a poor “muslim” accent, and attempting to vote illegally, to show that Minnesota election laws were leaky and would allow for significant election fraud.

Veritas founder James O’Keefe, along with reporter Cam Higby, impersonated Muslims and went to multiple Twin Cities polling places during the Aug. 11 primary.

“During Minnesota’s Primary on August 11, 2026, members of a widely discredited Florida-based political group visited several polling places in Minneapolis impersonating Minnesota voters,” Simon said in a news release.

“Dressed in what they called ‘Muslim’ costumes, and imitating foreign accents, they falsely claimed to be registered Minnesota voters. The group used concealed cameras to record their interactions with poll workers, releasing a heavily edited video of their encounters. Their apparent goal was to cast doubt on one or more Minnesota election laws that have been in force for over fifty years. Instead, they revealed their ignorance of how those laws actually work – while putting themselves in legal jeopardy.”

According to Higby, their goal was to see if they’d be allowed to vote without showing identification, and whether they’d be allowed to vouch for people who aren’t registered to vote.

He failed, but he still went ahead and spliced together a very bad video that purported to show Muslim election fraud. O’Keefe has a kink for putting on cheap costumes and posing in racist one-act plays. Isn’t it past time to throw out this piece of trash?