Gun-fondlers reach a new low

There exists a real group of gun nuts who virtue-signal to each other by posting photos of themselves holding guns to their crotches — loaded guns. I’m not sure why. It seems to violate basic principles of gun safety, for one thing.

The predictable event has occurred: one of these happy-go-lucky twits has shot himself in the testicles. Before you read the link, ask yourself what lesson the gun-ballers should take from this, and how the other participants in the “game” should respond. If you want to guess right, begin by assuming these people are already colossal idiots.

Yes. They made the victim of the self-inflicted wound the president of the group. After all, he shot himself in the balls with a .45, so he’s clearly presidential material. Very American. I am so proud to be a member of this species.

You have two things to look forward to this weekend

It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.

Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!

I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!

It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

This is not a conspiracy theory

The sitting president of the United States is scheming to steal the next election. This ought to be on the top of our minds as we are all looking forward to exercising our democratic rights, that just as Congress has stood by unwilling (rather, actively participated in the corruption) to act as the executive branch goes wild and as the judicial branch has been poisoned for a generation, Donald Trump is looking at the polls, seeing his only option is cheating.

The US Postal Service has issued a warning that they can’t make the delivery schedule for ballots in two states, so far.

The U.S. Postal Service has warned at least two states — Washington and the battleground state of Pennsylvania — that some mail-in ballots are at risk of not being delivered on time to be counted in the November general election because the states’ deadlines are too tight for its “delivery standards.”

Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of USPS, expressed the agency’s concern regarding this “mismatch” in two separate letters to Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, and Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state. The Philadelphia Inquirer was the first to report on the letters, which were dated July 29 and July 31, respectively.

Marshall warned in the letters that some of the states’ deadlines concerning mail-in ballots were “incongruous” and “incompatible” with the Postal Service’s delivery standards. “This mismatch,” he wrote, “creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted under your laws as we understand them.”

Trump has openly declared that he won’t support mechanisms to allow continued voting during the pandemic.

President Trump on Thursday said he opposes both election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, putting at risk the nation’s ability to administer the Nov. 3 elections.

Trump has been attacking mail balloting and the integrity of the vote for months, but his latest broadside makes explicit his intent to stand in the way of urgently needed money to help state and local officials administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic. With nearly 180 million Americans eligible to vote by mail, the president’s actions could usher in widespread delays, long lines and voter disenfranchisement this fall, voting rights advocates said.

Trump said his purpose is to prevent Democrats from expanding mail-balloting, which he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.

He’s doing this in plain sight. He is brazenly opposing free and fair elections because he knows he would be deposed.

What are we going to do about it?

I remember the helplessness when the Supreme Court handed a presidential election to George W. Bush — we all let it happen because we had faith in the rule of law and democratic institutions. That faith is gone now, completely demolished by the actions of the Republican party and the passivity of the Democrats. Now we have a president who intends to deny huge numbers of people the right to vote, all because a fair election would damage his evil party.

What are we going to do about it when the rule of law fails?

Finally, a reporter asks a necessary question

That’s S.V. Dáte, of the Huffington Post. When will the rest of those reporters get that kind of spine?

By the way, Trump is now Just Asking Questions about Kamala Harris’s eligibility to run for office. We knew that would be coming: she’s black, she’s a woman, she can’t possibly be qualified. Screw Newsweek for thinking this was an issue worth raising.

Hey, Donald Trump keeps blithering about his Scot and German ancestry. I think we need to consider the possibility that he’s a foreign agent.

Trump is already interfering in the election

We just voted by mail in the Minnesota elections, but it may be more difficult in November: Trump is openly trying to suppress votes.

President Trump says the U.S. Postal Service is incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because it cannot access the emergency funding he is blocking, and made clear that requests for additional aid were nonstarters in coronavirus relief negotiations.

Trump, who has been railing against mail-in balloting for months, said the cash-strapped agency’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.” Speaking Wednesday at his daily pandemic news briefing, Trump said he would not approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs.

The only reason it’s “cash-strapped” is that Republicans have been ham-stringing the postal service for decades, and now they’re preparing to simply destroy the whole institution so they can rig the vote. They really hate democracy, don’t they?