He always chickens out. Good.

Trump talked to some Pakistani leaders, and that was good enough. He has announced a ceasefire.

President Donald Trump said he’d agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday, less than two hours before his 8 p.m. deadline to destroy a “whole civilization.”

Trump said the ceasefire agreement was made on the condition that Iran agree to reopen the critical Strait of Hormuz.

Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!, Trump posted on Truth Social.

The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East, Trump wrote.

See? He thinks he won already. Iran said nothing.

How about if we just ignore him from now on and focus on the Epstein files and getting him out of office?

I’ve had few opportunities to photograph spiders

I haven’t been showing off my spiders much lately. There’s a reason for that. They still think it’s winter, so they’re all hunkered down in their mossy, silk-covered nests, and they don’t come out much, and when they do, they’re shy and not very photogenic. Here’s the best black widow shot I could get today.

I didn’t do myself any favors by providing them with a fairly cluttered environment, but they seem to like a space where they can hide and only come out to grab some food, and then retire quickly back into their refuge. They’re very retiring little ladies.

Minnesota is warming up, though. The snow is mostly gone, and I occasionally see jumping spiders sunning themselves, so I’m hoping to go hunting native spiders again soon.

He’s absolutely, utterly insane, and a danger to the world

I hope TACO Trump chickens out by 7pm Central time, but right now he’s blustering and posturing even more than usual.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. | don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Right. God bless the people of Iran while threatening to obliterate them. He’s either steeling his nerve to pull the trigger on an action that will make him even more of a criminal in the eyes of the civilized world, or he’s hoping for something revolutionarily wonderful to act as a pretext to back off. I don’t think he’s going to get one. Iran despises him, and by association, the rest of the United States, so I suspect they’re going to do nothing, in expectation that he’ll waste another few billion dollars in futile destruction.

I don’t know what will happen tonight, but one thing I do know: Iranian civilization will still exist tomorrow, and Trump will look like an impotent, hateful fool.

Are you relieved, Canada?

A biographer for Queen Elizabeth, John Hardin, recounts the story of his meeting with Donald Trump. Trump talked about annexing Canada, but backed off when it was explained that Canada still recognizes the king as head of state — he has a weird respect for royalty. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the same respect for history or the rule of law, because he still wants to redraw the US-Canada border.

After Hardman confirmed the British monarch remains Canada’s head of state, Trump went on to complain about Canada’s “terrible politicians.”

“They’re nice to my face and then they say bad things behind my back,” Trump told Hardman, who then writes the U.S. president noted a majority of Canadians live just above the Canada-U.S. border due to the cold weather in northern Canada.

“The problem is some guy drew that straight line to make a border,” Hardman says Trump told him. “He should just have drawn it 50 miles further north and then there wouldn’t be a problem.”

However, Hardman writes that Trump conceded redrawing that border would be a difficult task to achieve during his final term as president, and acknowledged Canada’s history and sovereignty.

“I suppose Canadians have got 200 years of history and all that, ‘Oh, Canada’ thing,” Trump told Hardman. “You can’t deal with that in three-and-a-half years. I guess it’s not going to happen!”

Come on, Canada. He just wants a 50 mile wide strip of Canada — there wouldn’t be a problem if he just took it over. He’s not going to do it because Canada has a king, and it’s too much trouble to take it in the remaining three years of his term. You can breathe a sigh of relief.

We can’t, here on the American side, because we’re still stuck with a fucking moron for a president.

Far, far away

Farther away than anyone has gone before.

The Orion spacecraft is now in the lunar sphere of influence, meaning the moon’s gravity has more pull on the vehicle than the Earth. At 1:57 p.m. ET, the crew surpassed the record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth by humans, which was set by the Apollo 13 mission at 248,655 statute miles from Earth. At 2:45 p.m., the crew will begin making observations of the surface of the moon during the flyby.

Pretty good. Fly on!

Dr Dunsworth is good at this

Holly Dunsworth is doing a page-by-page reading of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. She has more stamina than I do.

When that book came out, it got a lot of praise, so I picked a copy off the shelf at the bookstore and started browsing through it. I did not buy it, because I could see, just from skimming the first chapter that it was shallow trash written by someone with only a superficial knowledge of the subject. How did people fall for this? It was just another example of the enshittification of everything, in this case of evolutionary science.

She doesn’t hate the book, though. She’s just correcting all the petty and annoying mistakes in a book that, so far, is sort of generally true. That’s a useful service.

Personally, I couldn’t bear reading the book, but it’s worth reading the Dunsworth commentaries.

I’m in show business!

This past weekend, I was trained in the movie business. Our local theater is run as a co-op, I’m a member of the board, and I bravely volunteered to assist in occasionally assisting in running the theater. This meant going in to operate the projector and help with the concessions. Easy, right? Push a few buttons, relieve some of our helpful volunteers, no sweat.

Except it turns out to be a non-trivial exercise. The theater is an old building that has been clumsily revamped to handle a modern movie projection system. The first step is running around to various closets and hidey-holes to flip circuit breakers on, power up various computers and devices, gather up a pair of cash boxes and count money and deliver them to the ticket booth and concessions, and turn on the two projectors, and wait. These are run by old computers that take ages to start up and feature antique Windows software to run everything.

The projector software really does everything for you. It shows all the ads and movies on a tight schedule, and once it’s running you can just ignore the projection until the movie is done. That sounds great, but it’s more like the autopilot on a private plane. It does the job it’s designed to do, but before you can push the button to switch on the autopilot, you still have to do all the pre-flight checks and turn on the engine and get the plane down the runway and into the air. It’s much more complicated than I imagined.

So I’ve gone through the procedure once — it wasn’t enough. I’m going to have to do more run throughs under supervision before I can fly solo.

I didn’t have a chance to watch the movies. I was able to catch the end of The Bride, which was confusing and loud. The star of the weekend was Super Mario Galaxy, which was packing the house — we had a record attendance. I did learn the most of the money made is from concessions, which I’ll have to learn how to do next. This is the first time in my entire life that I’ve worked in retail, and I’m mystified by it.

But the glamor!

I would have forgotten that today is Easter, if the president hadn’t reminded me

I thought Xians were supposed to celebrate with colored eggs and church services and a nice family dinner. I was wrong. They celebrate it with threats of bombings and cursing and mocking religions. Good to know.

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J.
TRUMP

I think I’ll pass on the whole fuckin’ holiday.

Making babies with a computerized sperm storage site

I put together a rambling video about the final project in my genetics class, and about the responsibility of modern geneticists to deal with the terrible bad ideas of the past — eugenics. I give you a few examples of bad genetics, one relatively benign, and another actively evil (as you might guess, the evil example is Donald Trump.)

The gentler example is Fairfax Cryobank, which provides a good, useful, and even necessary service, sperm storage. I’ve visited their St Cloud branch, not as a client, but leading a field trip for a class on modern reproductive technologies, and they seem like good people with a lot of dewars. You can browse their catalog of sperm donors, and it’s a real trip. It’s more like reading the submissions to a dating site…a dating site where you’ll never meet the person whose profile you’re reading, but if you’re lucky and spend a few thousand dollars, you might get a frozen vial of sperm in the mail.

Here, for example, is one profile among many.

Donor 7587 is an easy going individual that takes pride in his fitness and his heritage. He can be a reserved man but once he feels comfortable with someone, you can see how funny, charming, and talkative he is. He has maintained an active lifestyle since he was a child by pursuing sports like soccer, tennis, and snowboarding. He loves to travel and has especially fond memories of a trip to Spain when he was little. Donor 7587 carries himself with quiet confidence. His dark, thick hair is always impeccably styled, each strand seemingly in place with effortless precision, giving him a polished, put-together look at all times. His fair skin provides a striking contrast to his bold features, especially his full, well-shaped lips that add a subtle softness to his overall appearance.

They’ve all got cute little baby pictures, since you won’t meet the adult. This is all for the benefit of clients, who will pick a vial of sperm based on vibes, but almost everything in that description is not heritable. You won’t get a vial filled with “funny, charming, and talkative,” because those are things that family, friends, and experience will generate. My objection is that it perpetuates the myth of simple inheritance of traits for everything, and misleads the client. But all of reproduction is a misleading game, as far as the traits of your child are concerned.

I would recommend adding a more appropriate button to the website: a “RANDOM CHOICE” button. Click it, they’ll send your doctor a completely random arbitrary vial from their vast collection. You’ll be surprised! But no more surprised than if you carefully choose the father of your child based entirely on a profile on a website.

The man is insane

Trump has proposed a 2027 budget. Here’s the bottom line.

The budget would increase funding for presidential priorities – such as the military, which would receive US $1.5 trillion, a 44% increase – while reining in spending on many domestic programmes.

A few details:

If you thought last year’s science budget was bad, this year’s is the annihilation of American science. If you’re celebrating the accomplishment of the Artemis 2

NASA faces a 23% cut to its total budget and a 47% drop in funding for its science division. More than 40 projects would be terminated. “It’s an extinction-level event for science,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization in Pasadena, California, that advocates for space exploration. “It would undermine and prevent NASA from being the world leader in space exploration.” NASA declined to comment on Dreier’s statement.

It’s not just NASA!

The proposal would eliminate funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. It would also shutter three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centres – those focusing on minority health and disparities, international research and alternative medicine.

The worst, to me, is cutting the NSF budget to less than half. That’s what funds most of the basic science in biology (biomedicine is a little different, that’s NIH, which has also been cut.)

And what, pray tell, are the president’s priorities? He’s going to tell us, while also addressing Russell Vought, the Project 2025 guy.

Not daycare, not Medicare, not Medicaid, none of the “little things”, which includes science — we can’t afford anything but war. We’re too busy paying for wars.

We have one little glimmer of hope. The president does not have the power to set the budget — everything he has said is a “recommendation”. Congress sets the budget. This will be negotiated next fall, starting in October, at a time when many congresspeople are thinking about the 2027 elections, and we have to put the fear of the electorate in their minds, starting now. Trump wants to tax people more and cut essential services to fund more war, and I don’t think that’s a winning election message. Throw them out!