America, where corrupt criminals are just funny characters on a TV show

I have never watched this show, The Masked Singer, in which celebrities are dressed up in silly costumes to sing songs, and then celebrity judges try to guess their identities. It sounds insipid. From the few short clips I have now suffered through, it is deeply, painfully, agonizingly stupid. Do they pay the audience to put on over-the-top expressions and squeal excitedly over banalities, or is it just that the kind of people who get tickets to see the show are selected for idiocy?

Anyway, they unmasked one “singer” in the most recent show. It was Rudy Giuliani.

Is this the new path for rehabilitating the reputations of deplorables, letting them caper and dance like court jesters for the mob?

Fuck that evil clown. Fuck that show.

The Florida brain drain begins now

Not content with denying the existence of gay people, or policing the kindergartens, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is going after the universities. He wants to abolish tenure.

Every five years, he said, tenured faculty would be required to go before their university’s board of trustees, which could part ways with them. The text of the bill does not give that level of specificity but rather states a five-year review would take place to be determined by the state Board of Governors. Each state university already requires tenured professors to take part in an annual review.

“Tenure was there to protect people so that they could do ideas that may cause them to lose their job or whatever, academic freedom — I don’t know that’s really the role it plays, quite frankly, anymore,” DeSantis said. “I think what tenure does, if anything, it’s created more of an intellectual orthodoxy. For people that have dissenting views, it becomes harder for them to be tenured in the first place and then, once you’re tenured, your productivity really declines, particularly in certain disciplines.”

House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the legislation a way to prevent “indoctrination.”

Here we go. Here’s where they reveal their real agenda.

He also said it would increase transparency with a provision that would require course syllabuses to be posted online, preventing attempts by professors to “smuggle in ideology and politics.” Sprowls said it would prevent students from signing up for a class on “socialism and communism” when they thought they were signing up for “Western democracy” and classes about “what it means to be an actual American.”

How dare those professors “smuggle in ideology and politics”…into political science courses. How dare they teach about other political systems than Republican-approved ideologies! That’s what this is really about, not to protect dissenting views, but to enforce their ideology.

The tenure system as it currently stands absolutely does not allow one to be denied or stripped of tenure for political reasons — you cannot fire someone for voting Republican. DeSantis plans to change that so you can fire someone for being a Democratic activist, or for teaching about “socialism and communism”. Tenure is specifically about keeping political biases out of the hiring & firing process. Florida Republicans are aiming to inject those biases back in.

Florida faculty are trying to fight back.

Currently, the boards of trustees must approve all faculty who receive tenure, Gothard said, adding it is not a lifetime appointment. Faculty can still be fired with cause.

”Tenure allows for due process and a hearing and has typically protected people from being fired for political reasons,” he said. ”From where we stand, the only indoctrination happening right now is coming from Tallahassee.”

Tim Boaz, president of the University of South Florida’s faculty senate, said he believed the legislation resulted from misconceptions about higher education.

The Republicans are also trying to jigger the accreditation agencies, forcing the universities to change agencies every few years. That is insane. Accreditation is already a bureaucratic nightmare, with outside regulators demanding a complete accounting of every detail of the university’s machinery — which is a necessary nightmare, and making universities accountable is good practice. But right now we go through the cycle and we get suggestions from the agency about what needs to be improved, and get goals to implement before the next cycle, and we can use prior recommendations in our next review to show that we’ve been addressing the criticisms. Pull the rug out from under us and change agencies, and you’ll be greatly increasing that bureaucratic workload.

Also, you know where this is going: suddenly switching in the American Bible College Accreditation agency for a secular agency is going to wreak havoc.

Good luck, Floridians. I wouldn’t recommend taking a tenure track job in Florida to anyone anymore. The universities are going to be packed with Liberty University graduates from now on, and they suck.

It’s not real, Ted

Ted Cruz thinks we have to worry about “space pirates”. Really. I’m not making this up.

During a Tuesday hearing of the Senate’s subcommittee on Aviation and Space discussing space policy, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) cited the threat of space pirates as a reason to back Trump’s unpopular “space force” idea. Cruz is the chair of the committee.

Discussing threats to commercial and governmental space assets, Cruz then veered off course into the realm of the fantastic.

“Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea, nations have recognized the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors,” Cruz said. “Pirates threaten the open seas and the same is possible in space.”

The threat of space piracy, Cruz said, now means America must recognize “the necessity of a space force.”

He’s quite annoyed that those danged Leftists are making fun of him, and is trying to defend his argument.

The threat of nations destroying commercial resources in space is not space piracy. The pirates he’s talking about were independent, lawless adventures robbing ships of cargo. There are no people living in space who might decide to start looting passing spaceships; there is no significant commercial cargo transport in space.

Coincidentally, the video game No Man’s Sky has just come out with a new update called “Outlaws” in which you have to fight off the depradations of space pirates. I’ve found that if you upgrade your phase beam and positron ejector they’re easily fought off.

Also, it’s a game. It’s not real, Ted.

Fighting back

Lana Theis: a horrible person who shouldn’t be in politics.

This is inspiring. Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow was accused by another politician, Lana Theis, of being a pedophile and a groomer — get used to it, this is the preferred tactic of Republicans everywhere, and every Democrat is going to get labeled “groomer” in the next campaign season. McMorrow decided to fight back with a fierce rebuke, which I think is the best strategy. It’s analogous to another great reply to Joseph McCarthy by Joseph Welch, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It ought to be our standard reaction when a Republican lifts their slimy head up from the muck they wallow in.

I sat on it for a while wondering why me?

Then I realized…

I’m the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of “parental rights” if another parent is standing up and saying no.

So you dehumanize and marginalize ME. You say I’m one of THEM. You say she’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.

Here’s a little background on who I really am.

Growing up my family was active in our church. I sang in choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church’s expectations, b/c she was divorced, and because he didn’t see her w us at mass every Sunday.

Where was my mom on Sunday?

She was at a soup kitchen. With me.

My mom taught me at a young age that Christianity and faith was about being a part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we could to be of service to others –

especially people who were marginalized, targeted, who had less…often unfairly.

I learned that SERVICE was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing “Christian” in your Twitter bio and using it as a shield to target and marginalize already-marginalized people.

I also stand on the shoulders of people like Father Ted Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame who was active in the civil rights movement, who recognized his power and privilege as a white man, a faith leader, and the head of an influential and well-respected institution – and who saw Black people in this country being targeted and discriminated against and beaten, and reached out and locked arms with Dr. Martin Luther King when he was alive, when it was unpopular and risky, and marching with them to say, “We got you.” To offer protection and service and allyship, to try to right wrongs and fix the injustice in the world.

So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.

No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one is this room is responsible for slavery.

But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. We decides what happens next, and how WE respond to history and the world around us.

We are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, or deny people their very right to exist.

I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.

I want every child to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted if they are not straight, white, and Christian.

People who are different are not the reason our roads are in bad shape, or healthcare costs are too high, or teachers are leaving the profession.

We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they’re not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact peoples lives.

I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.

And I want to be very clear right now:

Call me whatever you want. I know who I am. I know what faith and service mean, and what it calls for in this moment.

We will not let hate win.

I’m glad that Christians like McMorrow exist, but I fear that there are a great many wretched, hate-filled, repressive Christians like Lana Theis. I hope that the people of Michigan make Theis’s political career a short one.

In recovery mode, bring more spiders

Yesterday was a lost day. After my booster shot, I experienced the usual phenomena accompanying a challenge to the immune system: aching eyeballs, aching bones, fever, muscle weakness, etc. Man, my immune system was angry and spoiling for a fight, so SARS-CoV-2, I’m warning you, don’t come around here or you’re going to get a whuppin’.

I’m feeling a little less battered today, so here’s something to cheer everyone up: a whole page of charming and cute spider pics. As you might guess from the adjectives, these are all “cute”, which means they’re almost all jumping spiders. Everyone likes jumping spiders. Appreciation of the terrible beauty of, say, Latrodectus is something that has to be learned.

Did anyone get the license number of that bus?

It somehow ran over me in bed. It might have something to do with whatever was in that needle yesterday. I think the problem is compounded by the fact that Mary cheerfully offered up her left deltoid for the shot, and I unthinkingly did the same…forgetting that I sleep on my left side. I was waking up sporadically all night long as I rolled on that painful shoulder.

Today I’m booked up with appointments until 7pm.

Stupid bus.

Boosted again

Mary & I got our second booster shot this afternoon, a Moderna chaser to our previous Pfizer shots. We better be safe against COVID now! I also think that if we get one more, making 5 injections, we ought to either get a free coffee refill, or we should start to transform.

You’re not going to get a tan from red light — it’s also not going to make you more manly

Tucker Carlson is a sucker. Here he is promoting “infrared therapy”, or testicle tanning, which basically means shining red lights on your scrotum to supposedly increase your testosterone levels.

Tanning is induced by UV light — that is, high energy, short-wavelength light. Red or infrared light is weak or low energy, long wavelength light. It’s going to gently warm your balls, and that’s about it. Warming is going to actually reduce your sperm count, demonstrated here by the effects of a sauna:

Semen was collected at weekly intervals for 3 wk before and 10 wk after the sauna exposure at 85 degrees C for 20 minutes. The numbers, morphology, ultrastructure, motility, viability and metabolism of the sperm was assessed. Sperm numbers fell within one wk and slowly returned to normal in 5 wk. The earliest ultrastructural change was swelling of the plasma membrane, followed by an increase in the number of immature forms and disorganization of the arrangement of the mitochondria. Motility, glucose utilization and lactic acid accumulation of the sperm rose temporarily immediately after sauna.

A little glowing red light might have a slight warming effect (hey, maybe it feels nice!), but I doubt that it’ll do much at all for your testosterone levels. Besides, testosterone levels in normal, healthy men varies widely with no detectable effect — extremes can have serious effect. This is just another example of the right wing’s bizarre obsession with the trappings of masculinity.

That’s what the wealthy trust-fund goon is promoting now in a video.

Heh. It’s pushing that bogus “hard times create hard men” bullshit. Just what I’d expect from a fascist wanna-be.