Sunday morning at 6am Central I’m going to have a “This is your life, Adnan Oktar!” show, reviewing this guy’s ugly history. Afterwards, maybe we can chat a bit about the differences and similarities with American creationists. I know how to really piss off Ken Ham!
Sometimes, I don’t.
An “exceptional” atmospheric river, rated Category 5, is drenching the Pacific Northwest, unleashing a fire hose of moisture — heavy, flooding downpours, along with mudslides and strong winds in parts of coastal Oregon and Washington. Up to 10 inches of rain are possible, with multiple feet of snow in the high elevations. And signs point to another atmospheric river targeting the region late in the week.
Unfortunately, the left over bits of PNW storms often end up here in Minnesota as blizzards.
Oh man. Rudy Giuliani is wearing a wacky filter over his glasses — look at this bizarre comparison he made:
Earlier this month the New York Mayor whipped up a crowd of angry Trump-supporters shortly before they marched the Capitol in Washington DC, telling them ‘let’s have trial by combat!’ Speaking about the comment, which referenced challenging Democratic election officials attempting to count the votes and confirm Joe Biden as president, Giuliani said he was instead referencing the HBO series and its character Tyrion Lannister (played by Peter Dinklage). He told The Hill’s White House reporter Brett Samuels: ‘I was referencing the kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England. ‘When Tyrion, who is a very small man, is accused of murder. He didn’t commit murder, he can’t defend himself, and he hires a champion to defend him.’
I’m trying to wrap my head around the phrase “documentary about fictitious medieval England”. None of that works. Game of Thrones not a documentary, nor does it claim to be, and while loosely assembled from scattered bits of Western European history, it’s not about England. But what do I know, I’ve only been to that country like 4 times, which is not an adequate sampling. Maybe I just happened to miss the dragons, and I’ve only made a couple of forays north of Hadrian’s wall, are there gangs of wildings and zombies up there?
But that’s not even the most delusional thing he said.
Trying to make his comments seem any better, Giuliani – who went on to claim that antifa was behind the violence and that Mr Trump bears ‘no responsibility’ for the events – attempted to explain he meant a combat ‘between machines’ and not people. He went on: ‘It incited no violent response from the crowd. None.
‘The crowd didn’t jump up saying, “Lock him up, throw him to jail, go to hell.” I’ve had speeches where people jump up and say, “lock him up.” It was not an emotional — it was not an emotion-inspiring part of the speech.’
There was no violent response from the crowd, except that right after his speech they marched on the capitol, crashed through the fences, smashed windows, dragged policemen into the crowd and beat them, and killed a guy. Yeah. Not violent.
This has been a common assertion by right-wing news liars. Ben Shapiro has claimed it, so has Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, it’s a common refrain. But we’ve all seen the videos — that was a violent, angry mob, shrieking and wrecking and looking for blood. Read this harrowing account of the insurrection in the New Yorker.
“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” one man yelled. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another man, wearing a do-rag that said “fuck your feelings,” told his friend, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over. It’s gonna come to that. Next week, Trump’s gonna say, ‘Come to D.C.’ And we’re coming heavy.”
Later, I listened to a woman talking on her cell phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”
Although the only shot fired on January 6th was the one that killed Ashli Babbitt, two suspected explosive devices were found near the Capitol, and a seventy-year-old Alabama man was arrested for possessing multiple loaded weapons, ammunition, and eleven Molotov cocktails. As the sun fell, clashes with law enforcement at times descended into vicious hand-to-hand brawling. During the day, more than fifty officers were injured and fifteen hospitalized. I saw several Trump supporters beat policemen with blunt instruments. Videos show an officer being dragged down stairs by his helmet and clobbered with a pole attached to an American flag. In another, a mob crushes a young policeman in a door as he screams in agony. One officer, Brian Sicknick, a forty-two-year-old, died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. Several days after the siege, Howard Liebengood, a fifty-one-year-old officer assigned to protect the Senate, committed suicide.
…
During Trump’s speech on January 6th, he said, “The media is the biggest problem we have.” He went on, “It’s become the enemy of the people. . . . We gotta get them straightened out.” Several journalists were attacked during the siege. Men assaulted a Times photographer inside the Capitol, near the rotunda, as she screamed for help. After National Guard soldiers and federal agents finally arrived and expelled the Trump supporters, some members of the mob shifted their attention to television crews in a park on the east side of the building. Earlier, a man had accosted an Israeli journalist in the middle of a live broadcast, calling him a “lying Israeli” and telling him, “You are cattle today.” Now the Trump supporters surrounded teams from the Associated Press and other outlets, chasing off the reporters and smashing their equipment with bats and sticks.
No violent response from the crowd, my ass.
It’s been a long day, I’ve made significant progress on my classes, so now I get to play a game, in about an hour.
I have my first week of classes all set up: lectures ready to go, assignments posted, the first lab exercise all laid out. I am prepared! It’ll all disintegrate into a shambles the second week, but I’ll start out well.
I do have a lot of bottles to wash, still, but my excuse is that it’s lightly blizzarding today, so I have to stay home.
I’m a little surprised: Minnesota is the best state for coronavirus testing. There are good reasons for that.
Minnesota isn’t the biggest state or the wealthiest. But it has a progressive governor, a budget surplus that’s allowed it to supplement federal funding and spend about $150 million on testing so far, and a well-functioning pandemic task force. It’s home to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, one of the nation’s best public research institutions. All those advantages may explain why it’s one of the few states to implement a testing strategy that the federal government should have adopted, one that helped Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan avoid the worst of the pandemic’s ruin, and that doesn’t require dramatic scientific advances or carry any potential health risks. “I love what Minnesota is doing,” says Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “We need a lot more of that.”
One of the points the article makes is that this is also a long term investment opportunity. The state made a deal with a biotech company to put together a testing center, which is going to be a part of a biotech hub with the equipment and trained employees left behind after the pandemic is over. This is something I wish more people would recognize: building an infrastructure to deal with the current crisis gives you the tools to fight other problems. This is true of global climate change — building alternative energy sources isn’t just an expense right now, it’s an opportunity for the future.
The state leased the space for the lab and paid for the equipment—$4.7 million in total. Infinity BiologiX set it up in eight weeks. When the day comes that Minnesota no longer needs it, Infinity BiologiX will keep the equipment—the Chemagic 360 machines named Shelly, Randy, Timmy, and Jimmy, after characters from South Park; and the QuantStudio 5s named Morticia and Gomez, after The Addams Family. In the meantime, Minnesota receives discounted prices on the tests themselves and a promise from the companies to process as many as 30,000 a day and make results available within 48 hours after the samples arrive at the lab. Minnesota has set aside at least $30 million for the program. Feldman says Michigan, New Mexico, and Wyoming also want Infinity BiologiX labs, but this winter, with federal funding uncertain, they haven’t had the budget.
One more thing that explains our situation here in Morris — the big testing place here in town is the National Guard Armory, although you can also get tested at the local clinic. I thought it was weird to see the recommendations in the paper to go to the Armory for your medical test. It makes sense, though.
Minnesotans swarmed the 10 community testing sites as soon as they began saliva collection in late October, “tailgating for testing in the parking lot before we opened,” says Vadis. Vault brought in people from Walt Disney Co. with experience in line management. It trained members of the National Guard to oversee the collection process. Many of them are medical practitioners of some sort, says Feldman, though they don’t have to be. It takes about 30 minutes to learn how to supervise the spitting and package the specimen. There’s also cultural training. “We’re teaching the guards to be super approachable, so no one is intimidated,” Feldman says. Minnesota is home to sizable populations of Somalis and Hmong, and finding enough staff who can translate medical terms in their languages has proved challenging.
Also, otherwise my only association with the armory is that’s where the traveling circus is held when they come to town. The Armory has this cavernous huge space (I have no idea what it’s used for at other times) with bleachers where events like that can be held.
The insurrectionists are back-pedaling frantically. Charlie Kirk is claim now that it was “stupid” and “unwise” to invade the capitol, but not criminal. They didn’t mean it! Another benefit of the collapse of Parler (and it’s sloppy coding) is that their plans in the runup have been exposed, and while I can agree that they are “stupid”, the intent is transparent. A sampling:
Is anyone surprised that Amazon and Apple removed all support for Parler?
What I find ominous, though, is that only a few in that sample mention the 6th of January — most were focused on the 20th, the day of the inauguration. Next week. Will the Washington DC police finally take these threats seriously? Will the bad guys try to sneak in by mingling with the inauguration crowds? Are some of the planning acts of terrorism against random people?
Maybe they just want to make sure that the inauguration is even smaller than Trump’s. Mission accomplished, I suspect: I wouldn’t recommend attending.
I sure won’t. That’s the day after my classes begin!
The son of my niece has made a stop-motion Lego Batman movie, so I’m doing my part to make him slightly famous.
The goal: let’s seem him get more traffic than my YouTube channel does (I believe in setting achievable goals here).
Now you can! I saw that I can easily visualize the hearts beating in my baby spiders.
It made me think of those Pro-Life Across America billboards that show a picture of a cute baby and declare “My heart began to beat at 18 days!”, as if that was a significant event. So I take it anti-choicers who see this video will forever after be kind to spiders?
I guess I’m going to tend to the spiders in the lab for a while until the 80 kph winds come howling across the prairie. I expect the sidewalks to be completely drifted over so I won’t be going in tomorrow.
