The latest corruption scandal in Minnesota

There’s a sleepy little town, Appleton, just a few miles south of Morris. I’ve visited it a few times to check out the spiders there — there’s no other reason to go there, it’s not much of a tourist attraction. Population 1400, no particular businesses there, they had a defunct prison that was shut down 16 years ago, and many residents were concerned about the loss of employment opportunities. I’d like to see more good jobs there, too, but reopening a prison, or setting up concentration camps for immigrants isn’t high on my list of “good” jobs.

But right now if I look at broadcast tv or TUBI, they’re saturated with ads for GOOD JOBS in Appleton. They want nurses and educators and guards that they’ll hire with good pay, and the ads run annoyingly non-stop. The Appleton prison is open for business! Yay?

CoreCivic, the private prison company that owned the place, had previously offered to sell the prison to the state of Minnesota for the price of $75 million. The state turned it down. It was too pricey, required too much renovation, and would require far too much investment in building housing for workers. It was impractical.

The state ultimately decided against the deal at the time on the basis that it might be difficult to staff Prairie Correctional given its remote location – a nearly three-hour drive from Minneapolis-St. Paul – and costly to build new homes to accommodate the approximately 500 employees required to run it, concerns seemingly not shared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Hey! I live 3 hours from Minneapolis-St Paul! Looking at it from my perspective, that’s rather insulting, that this side of the state isn’t worth the investment, but OK — I should see this as a declaration that prisons aren’t worth spending money on.

So who bought it now? It was sold by CoreCivic to ICE. For $495 million.

Cool business strategy bro. It turns out that CoreCivic had donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee, and then ICE turned around and gave CoreCivic a half billion dollars for an old neglected building in a remote part of the country. So in that sense it was good return on investment, just corrupt and criminal.

It’s ironic that Minnesota has been the focus of a corruption scandal — $250 million was skimmed off pandemic recovery funds. That corruption benefited Somali people, though, so clearly bad. Benefitting wealthy white Republicans is not a crime. Minnesota investigated our local scandal and found that the chief perpetrator, Aimee Bock, was guilty and sentenced her to 40 years in prison. One can only hope that the instigators of the Appleton grift get an equivalent sentence.

We had our first trick-or-treaters of the evening

Three little kids, the youngest no more than 3 years old…and our evil cat tried to kill them. Seriously: hissing, spitting, snarling, clawing at them, and I just managed to intercept the attack with my foot. After they escaped, she was prowling by the door, evil in her eye, waiting for her next victim.

She has now been locked in a back room. No candy for her. If I should die tonight, warn any people who come to my house that there is a dark wickedness lurking behind one of the doors, and to beware.

I’ve been telling you for years that this cat is literally evil. Do you believe me yet?

By the way, I’ve added potatoes to the candy bowl this year. Some kids are incredibly excited about getting a potato for Hallowe’en.

A long long night at the motion picture show

We’re strapped for volunteers at the Morris Theater because it’s Hallowe’en and there are so many events going on, so last night I did a triple-shift, sort of. The first show was The Other Mommy, which has received such dire reviews that I didn’t bother to watch it — and neither did anyone else, apparently. Attendance was zero people. The second show was the last gasp of our run of Clayface, which had an audience of three people. We can’t keep the theater alive with so few tickets, people!

Then we had the traditional midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the end of the shift I signed on for, and it could have been a discouraging end to the night, but about a hundred people showed up! And almost all were in costume! So I hung around to enjoy the spectacle, and helped a tiny bit at the candy counter, and then decided, what the heck, I’ll stay for the movie. The first time I saw Rocky was over 50 years ago, and one person admitted that they were a Rocky virgin and had never seen it, so I figured I had to stay to represent the whole range of experience properly. Also, how could I not honor the memory of the late Tim Curry?

It was a fun experience to see the movie with the full interactive audience experience, but I’m old, so now I’m very tired. I was thinking that next year I could go as Dr Everett Scott, the most straight-laced and boring member of the ensemble. I already have the wheelchair (which, fortunately, I don’t need to use any more.) Although I’m too old for even that part anymore!

People I’d never heard of

I think I mostly hang out with the right people (although, I was associating with a bad crowd when I was active in that New Atheist thing), because the news keeps popping up with all these horrible people I knew nothing about until they committed their crimes. Which is not surprising, since that’s how news works.

The first nobody is someone going by the moniker “Front Row Joe”, actual name Adam Radogna. His claim to fame is his membership in a cult.

Radogna is a loud and proud “Front Row Joe”—a small subset of Trump fanatics who spend days camping to secure prime spots at a presidential event.
In 2024, he told NJ.com that he had been to more than 40 rallies.
“We have members from all over the country. It’s no more than 30 or 40 of us and we just love to support Donald Trump,” he said at the time. “He knows who we are and we’ve all met him.”

Yikes. We already know there is something wrong with that man, but the police have found something even wronger.

Adam Radogna, a 37-year-old Ohio restaurant owner, was indicted by a grand jury for possessing dozens of images containing child sexual abuse material, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office announced Tuesday.
A search warrant was executed at Radogna’s home in Brook Park, a working-class neighborhood southwest of Cleveland, after a joint federal and state investigation identified his residence as a potential location for child sexual abuse material. The search yielded multiple troubling files on Radogna’s devices, the prosecutor’s office said.

These are Trump’s people.

Another cult group I don’t follow are the evangelical Christians — there’s something wrong with all of those people. Seth and Heather Thompson Day were “popular” (again, not with me, I never heard of them before) Seventh Day Adventist proselytizers. They are firm believers in Christian love.

According to the newly released documents, the Days’ daughter had told local hospital staff that on September 22, the same day of the alleged physical assault, “[Seth Day] engaged in sexual intercourse with [her] on her bed.”

While describing the alleged incident to investigators, the complaint states that she “was very timid about details and stipulated to the details of the sexual assault as ‘yucky.’” She also described the location of a bottle of lubricant her father used in the assault.

“Yucky”. Yes, very yucky. But there’s more!

The daughter alleged her father had repeatedly physically abused her. On Sept. 22, according to the affidavit, Seth Day allegedly struck his daughter with her cell phone, “causing lacerations and multiple areas of bruising on her face.”

“She also advised there was a bruise on her chest,” according to the affidavit.

The injuries were documented by the investigating officer. The daughter also told police the abuse had happened repeatedly in the past, leading to Texas Child Protective Services Investigations, and the daughter alleged the family moved homes because of those reports.

Just say no to cult behavior. These are people I never wanted to know about, and will happily go back to my state of ignorance…except that I will have to worry generically about all the nobodies who will erupt into my awareness with other horrible acts.

Pre-Hallowe’en festivity

I’m volunteering at the theater tonight — I’ve got a long shift, from 7-11, leading into the traditional Hallowe’en event, the showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. If you’re in Morris tonight at 11, this will be the happenin’ place.

I tried to think of some way to contribute to the Hallowe’en party mood, and came up with one: I’m giving all my students a midterm exam! I’m sure this will put me in the history books as an excellent “fun” science professor!

Maybe I should celebrate the holiday by torturing you all with biochemistry questions? For fun?

MAGA=racist

Do you think the Kent GOP regrets providing a backdrop for those disgusting remarks?

Maybe it’s not fair to equate all of MAGA with racism; it may be a deeper issue. Maybe they are all just deeply, profoundly, irrationally stupid. RFK jr was demonstrating both racism and stupidity in Michigan, campaigning for Mike Rogers against Abdul El-Sayed, where, rather than addressing politics and policy, he instead launched a bigoted rant against all Muslims, and to do so he had to ignore all the facts and evidence.



There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science,they don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature. They used to produce — they were the first to make books, and they, in the 13th century, typical Muslim princes had more books in their libraries than existed in all of Europe, and all of that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood. They have created stagnant societies, that do one of two things, hatred and war and victimization.

Jeez. I’ve long despised RFK jr for his bad science, but now I have to hate him even more for his over-the-top racism. His claims are garbage through and through. You can’t equate Muslim with Arab; most Muslims are not Arabs. The claim that Muslims (or Arabs, it’s not clear who he is insulting) haven’t won any Western-defined prizes for great science and literature isn’t true, and the Associated Press has compiled a long list of examples. Telling us that they haven’t won prizes established by Western and colonial nations is not only false, but that Muslims have competed in a rigged game and succeeded is evidence that they have great ability. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, and you’re claiming that this relatively marginal organization has destroyed the Muslim intellectual tradition in less than a century? Remarkable.

It’s minor but amusing that he said Muslims only do one of two things, and then he listed three. I guess RFK jr doesn’t do math, just like he doesn’t do science or history. This could be the basis of a comedy skit, but Monty Python has already done it. It also wouldn’t be funny, since hatred and war and victimization are the foundational principles of the modern Republican party.

Those remarks ought to completely destroy his career, but I fear they won’t. The Zionists and the Republican party in general apparently agree with him.

Please, please put O’Keefe in jail

It’s about time.

A Minnesota prosecutor on Wednesday charged conservative provocateur James O’Keefe and influencer Cam Higby with felony counts of unlawful voting and identity theft after they misrepresented themselves at polling places in August using the names of registered voters.
…
The pair of influencers disguised themselves and recorded themselves going undercover using hidden cameras at the polling places. They posted videos capturing their interactions on social media in August. O’Keefe said in a post on X that they dressed in “Muslim garb” — including, for one of them, a full-face veil known as a niqab — and their goal was to “expose the sheer lunacy of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system.”
…
Police interviewed the registered voters whose names O’Keefe and Higby used, said Moriarty, who added that they also used names of deceased voters. Asked where they obtained those names, Moriarty said “We don’t know that.”

Once again, every accusation by a Republican is a confession.

It’s going to be a busy day and weekend

I spent the morning making up reagents for multiple student experiments — this is the start of a series of lab exercises where the students are in charge, and I am just the lowly lab assistant, a lackey who gets the chemistry prepared. It just means my lab prep time for the next few weeks has tripled.

I’m doing a major review in lecture of all the stuff we covered in the last few weeks — photosynthesis, mitosis/meiosis, DNA replication. That’s because they’re getting a big exam, Exam #3, on Friday.

Then the lab will consume my afternoon, as I do my Igor impersonation.

I cap it all off with a theater board meeting. Tomorrow is a campus assembly meeting. And lots of frantic scribbling to assemble exam 3. And oh yeah, another lab I have to prepare for. After all that, I get to coast for a while, until the weekend.

And Sunday we’re going to be in St Cloud, because my son’s partner is going to be induced to deliver our new grandson on Hallowe’en. That’s absolutely no work on my part, being a grandparent is the easiest job in the world.