Where’s his white hood?

He’s always been this revoltingly racist, but somehow he got elected, because a lot of the citizenry are revoltingly racist.

Trump lied. Back in 2018, it was reported that he used the phrase “shithole countries” to describe various nations of brown people, and he denied it, claiming that he [n]ever said anything derogatory about Haitians. He was quite vehement about it, issuing repeated denials, claiming that this was another Democratic effort to discredit him.

That was then. Now, in 2025, open racism is fine and popular.


Trump, Dec. 9: I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.

Audience member: Shithole.

Trump: I didn’t say shithole, you did. [Laughter.] Remember, I said that to the senators. They came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So, they came in, and they said this is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We wanted to be honest, because our country was going to hell, and we had a meeting and I say, “why is it we only take people from shithole countries,” right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden — just a few — let us have a few, from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.

Two things about that speech. I avert my eyes from Trump typically, because I despise him so much and am sick of seeing him every goddamn day, and I instead focus on the gawping baboons in the claque behind him. Where do these people come from? What is wrong with them, that they would laugh and cheer at such ignorant remarks? These are the people who would attend a lynching and pose for photographs with the corpse afterwards. They are the monsters in our own backyard. We’ve got all this facial recognition technology that is currently used to track down people who oppose fascism; every one of these videos ought to be labeled with the names of the people performing hatefully in them: like, “at 1:18, Ralph Goonburger of Altoona, PA howls joyfully at a racist remark,” just so future generations can appreciate the contributions these otherwise unnamed citizens are making to the culture.

The other thing is that I, personally, am descended from immigrants from Norway and Sweden (and also England). Much of the history of my family in the 19th century was generation after generation of people from Norway bringing in new wives from Sweden and raising big families on frigid farms far from the mainstream population, creating kids with thick accents to work as farm laborers. We managed to avoid the worst of the general bigotry because it was displaced to more obvious targets — African and Asian peoples — but we had much in common in our circumstances with the Somalis and Hmong who followed along later. The only grounds for singling us out as “nice people” (we are nice people!) is the color of our skin. I cringe to see my tribe brought to the front of the room to be presented to the class as one of the good ones, setting us in opposition to our fellow, equally worthy, equally valuable citizens as somehow better. We aren’t. They aren’t lesser.

It’s ironic that he’s been complaining bitterly about Minnesota lately, a state where we acutely aware of and proud of our makeup as a blending of Scandinavian and German immigrants, with a good population of Native Americans (who we are embarrassed to say were treated shamefully by the state), which has been welcoming to other immigrant populations from Africa and Asia. We do have horrible racists living here, but generally, we’re conscious of them and try to do better.

What he was saying was simply blatant bigotry. That’s our president, the racist-in-chief.

It must be because of his German ancestry. We should work harder to keep those people out.

Famine fears allayed

I’ve got all these spiders getting to a size where fruit flies don’t cut it anymore, and unfortunately, my mealworm colony crashed, I tried buying live critters online but they’re expensive and half of them died en route thanks to the bitter cold, so I was panicking that this new generation of black widows might go hungry. This is not good. I was planning to start breeding in the next week or so, and hungry females are more likely to feed than to…ummm, mate.

Ice fishing season to the rescue, just in the nick of time! This time of year a popular bait is the lowly wax worm, so I was able to get a few dozen quite cheaply at the local bait shoppe.

Spiders love these things, but I can only get them during ice-fishing season. Fortunately, that lasts until April/May, so by then my mealworms should be back on track.

Good to know the administration has its priorities straight

Little Marco Rubio has taken decisive action and ended an oppressive policy.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
…
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

Yay! I feel lighter and freer already — Calibri is a woke font, after all.

Unfortunately, Calibri is a Microsoft font that isn’t automatically installed on Mac systems, so I guess I won’t be sending any diplomatic messages in the near future.

Sympathy for Samantha Fulnecky

The Algorithm keeps throwing articles and videos about this bad essay that was written by OU student Samantha Fulnecky. I can understand that — there is so much content being generated over the terrible writing by this student, because the internet is full of educated people who in many cases have professional expertise in evaluating writing. I’m going to be teaching a class in writing scientific papers this Spring, so I’m familiar with the work. Here’s an example:

If you didn’t watch it, that’s OK, you can find hundreds of similar examples on the internet. And that’s the problem!

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of student papers, and some of them have been atrocious and earned zeroes. But I would never drag a student publicly, I would never shame a student’s lack of rigor or talent or ability on the internet. We have strict rules about that — I would get dragged into the division chair’s office, and get a few phone calls from the university’s lawyers, and face disciplinary action if I did that, no matter how badly the essay I was mocking was written.

However, in this case, Samantha Fulnecky exposed herself — she gave her awful essay to Turning Point USA, and they cruelly posted it online with full attribution, and invited the brutal savaging she is getting. I cringe a little bit deep inside every time I see these dissections of her paper, because normally a teacher would do that in confidence, one on one, with the goal of helping the student learn and get better, not to rip her apart in a public display.

I experienced this myself. The first essay I wrote in graduate school was for a physiology class, and I apparently expressed a view on the role of synapse structure that the professor did not like, so he spent an entire class hour going over it line by line and telling the entire class how stupid and wrong I was. It was not a good learning experience, except that I did learn that this one professor was an asshole.

Now, even worse, the entire internet is shredding Fulnecky’s paper, and probably millions of people are wallowing in schadenfreude over this one student’s disgraceful inability to make a coherent argument. What has Samantha Fulnecky learned? Probably only that she has to be more careful about letting people see how she expresses herself.

I also suspect that I’m seeing so much criticism of Fulnecky’s paper because she made herself fair game for the dammed up resentment so many of us have for the bad papers we have to routinely read in detail. Finally, we get to explode at this garbage we have to carefully evaluate, rather than being professional and courteous!

Racist old fool trash-talks Minnesota

Worst president ever.

Mr. President, thank you. Um, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is saying that he’s actually proud to have the largest Somali community in the country. And his police chief,
he’s a fool.
Well, his police chief is also saying,
I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian. Look at their nation. Look how bad their nation is. It’s not even a nation. It’s just a people walking around killing each other. Look, uh, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. They’ve taken billions and billions of dollars. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. [Not true]It’s a fraud. She tries to deny it now, but you can’t really deny it because, you know, just happened. She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.[Why? Because she’s black and a member of the opposition party?] And I’m sure people are looking at that. And she should be thrown the hell out of our country. And most of those people, man, they have destroyed Minnesota.[Cool. I’m looking out my window at the snow coming down. Doesn’t seem to be destroyed] Okay, Minnesota, you have an incompetent governor. You have a crooked governor. He’s crooked as hell, but he’s incompetent. [no evidence given]
Uh Waltz is he’s should be ashamed. That beautiful land, that beautiful state, it’s a hell hole right now. [I don’t know about that. I kind of like it here] And the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain. [Isn’t that what Donald is doing here?] You have her. She’s always talking about the Constitution provides me with uh go back to your own country and figure out your constitution. [She’s an American citizen, she is talking about her constitution. Donald just doesn’t like the American constitution] All she does is complain about this country and without this country she would not be in very good shape. She probably wouldn’t be alive right now. So Somalia is considered by many [When a student hands in an essay with this kind of vague handwaving and evidence free claim, I fail them] to be the worst country on earth. I don’t know. I’ve I haven’t been there. I won’t be there anytime soon. I hope. But uh what Somalia what the Somalian people have done to Minnesota is is not even believable. It’s not even believable. [Correct. What the president says about Minnesota is not believable] And a lot of it starts with the governor. A lot of it starts with Barack Hussein and Obama because that’s when people started coming in. And you have to have people come in that are going to love our country, cherish our country. They want to kiss our country good night. They talk about our country. We want them to pray for our country. This is not the people living in Minnesota. And she’s a disaster. She should not be and her friends shouldn’t be allowed. Frankly, they shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people. Okay? They shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people because they don’t represent the interests of our country. [She represents my interests well. Trump? Not so much] Anybody else? There you are.

That’s just appalling. He just rambles on lying, and dumbass people accept it.

Are the Washington press corps going to just stand there and take it? Trump needs to be deposed and leave office immediately.

For the capitalist parasites: they’re asking for it

The right-wingers are fighting among themselves again, inspired by Hegseth’s bombing of boats. Claire Lehmann, the terrible racist founder of Quillette, starts the bickering by complaining about the sinking…not that she opposes murdering random people from South American countries, but that it doesn’t look good and you should be more quiet about the slaughtering:

This is really grotesque.
(And look I get it that sometimes hard men need to do ugly things. But if you’re going to do this, don’t broadcast it, & don’t brag about it. FFS)

Billionaire Joe Lonsdale responds. If you’ve forgotten who he is, he made his fortune by starting out under Peter Thiel at PayPal, and then got really rich with Palantir, the company that profits from spying on your internet usage all around the world. Later, he was one of the founders of the University of Austin, the fake college for far-right and libertarian freaks. He wants more publicity for extra-judicial murder.

She’s just wrong. Leftist schoolmarm leaders cause violence and evil in our civilization.
Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals.
Killing bad guys is DoW job. He should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.

He’s a good example: bold, virtuous men failed to deter Joe Lonsdale. He might be on to something here, that maybe it’s time to hang a few billionaires to teach a lesson to those greedy parasites. He wants more than killing a few “narcoterrorists” (who haven’t been tried and convicted of anything), just public hanging for lots of crimes.

If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law.
We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.
Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.

For future reference, this is how billionaires want to run their utopia, in a “masculine” fashion with lots of public violence. I say we should hang them first. Viva la revolución! Give them what they want.

No nervous system interference there at all, thank you very much

Remember this guy? A local chiropractor put up signs all around town touting “The Cancer Cure” (but taking care not to promise one, since he’s only a chiropractor). Those signs suddenly disappeared shortly after I complained, but it’s typical of these fringe wellness quacks — publicly veiling their promises while implying miracles. These guys are still in operation, of course, and still making bizarre claims, like that chiropractic allows the body to heal itself by removing any nervous system interference.

You won’t be surprised to learn that, on the national scale, chiropractors are generally big fans of Robert Felching Kennedy Jr.

When Kennedy ran an anti-vaccine non-profit before running for president, chiropractors were hefty donors. In 2019, for instance, they donated nearly half a million dollars to the cause — about a sixth of the organization’s revenue that year. When Kennedy created the MAHA Alliance super PAC for his presidential candidacy, more than half of its initial donors were chiropractors. And when Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS seemed like it was on the rocks, a raft of chiropractors signed a letter of support for him.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 13: U.S. President Donald Trump, shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alongside Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner (L) after Trump signed the "Fostering the Future" executive order the East Room of the White House on November 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Many of Kennedy’s most ardent chiropractic supporters are now at the forefront of his Make America Healthy Again movement, posting on social media and finding TikTok virality in a bid to spread his agenda to a larger audience and recruit more disciples. Their passion for Kennedy is palpable.

To be fair, not all chiropractors are on the MAHA train.

“RFK Jr. is a natural fit, because those people who believe in that vertebral subluxation myth are the same ones who think, ‘No, you don’t need vaccines because we can just align your spine so that your body can heal itself,’” says Aaron Kubal, a chiropractor based in Minnesota who does not subscribe to the spine theory and has gone viral online for his videos debunking MAHA-aligned chiropractors.

“align your spine so that your body can heal itself” sounds like what our local chiropractor, Christopher Wollner, preaches. I wonder if he’s a MAGA/Trump voter? Because that kind of unscientific idiocy meshes perfectly with that brand of political idiocy. It’s totally free of any nervous system interference, after all.