Let’s hope he isn’t made a martyr to his cause

We shouldn’t forget who Shinzo Abe, good friend of Donald Trump, is.

Two of Abe’s Cabinet appointees were associated with Japan’s Nazi Party and several of his comrades wrote laudatory blurbs for a book called Hitler’s Election Strategy, published in 1994, and written by a member of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The book was banned after international criticism.

Comparisons with the Nazis are hard to brush off if your Cabinet members are looking up to them as role models.

Let’s not forget that Abe appointed an unrepentant racist, Eriko Yamatani, associated with the internationally condemned Zaitokukai, to oversee the National Police Agency. Neither the prime minister nor any of his senior Cabinet members openly opposed the discrimination against Japan’s Korean residents. Last month, the Cabinet announced in an approved written response to an opposition party’s question on the usage of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as teaching material in classrooms that it was completely acceptable.

After a public outcry, they made the obligatory comment that “if it were used as a tool to promote racism… that would be inappropriate.”

Initially, criticism erupted all over the country but the mainstream media practiced self-censorship and didn’t touch the issue until the outcry forced their hand as well.

Cabinet ministers this year also announced support for reintroducing the kamikaze-inspiring Imperial Rescript on Education back into the classroom. It was issued originally by the Meiji Era emperor in 1890 and advised citizens that the greatest moral good was to give their life for him or his successors. It was later used as part of the ideology that had Japan send soldiers out to die in airplanes as kamikaze pilots, die in small submarines as human torpedoes, and force Okinawans to commit mass suicide. After the war, the edict was declared null and void by Japan’s parliament in 1948, with a statement that it “clearly undermines basic human rights and calls into question Japan’s international fidelity.” Now, it’s on its way back. Indeed, it has been a good year for those nostalgic for prewar Japanese militarism. Bayonet practice will be making a comeback in education as well.

Absolutely none of that justifies murdering Abe, especially since he was out of power. Assassination ought to always be off the table.

Shootings in general are extraordinarily rare in Japan, thanks to their strict gun laws. The assassin here had to construct his own handmade weapon to carry out the evil deed.

Some are more equal than others

This could never happen in America!

Or…could it?

The witches have targeted Brett Kavanaugh, who was just trying to eat his expensive steak dinner, and their protests so disturbed him that he was able to have dessert and had to sneak out the back. Politics should not trample the freedom to congregate and have dinner!

The restaurant announced that Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency. You know DINNER is not like the privilege of getting respectful treatment at a health clinic, or something.

I’m expecting a decision at the next court session protecting the sacred constitutional right of unelected officials appointed for life to never hear a contrary word ever, followed by a group of unelected christo-fascists with lifetime sinecures deciding that burning at the stake is not a cruel and unusual punishment.

Did UATX increase their status, or did Dawkins diminish his?

I think you know the answer.

This is not a joke.

Somebody really needs to take him aside and explain that he’s making a lot of really bad decisions lately.

Gorillas have very small testicles, you know

Why am I not surprised that Elon Musk sleeps with his employees?

Elon Musk Secretly Fathered Twins With Neuralink Executive, Report Says

Elon Musk had twins in November with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, according to court records obtained by Insider on Wednesday, bringing the number of known living children fathered by the world’s richest man to nine.

The twins were born a few weeks before his partner, Grimes, had a child through a surrogate.

Three kids within a month? I’m sure Elon was overwhelmed with his fatherly obligations at that time. Right?

Man, it must be exhausting having to run all these grifting companies AND assert your masculine dominance by fucking your executives, and then having to keep your offspring secret.

Meet me in St Louis — in 3 weeks!

FORTY SEVEN days until classes resume. These aren’t tears, these are drops of pure plasma oozing from my eyeballs.

Happier countdown: TWENTY TWO days until Skepticon. That’s better. I’ll try not to think about how I’ll only have 25 days to get my teaching act together when the meeting starts.

I hope you’ll all be joining me there. The con has put out a call for workshops, so you can participate too! Go ahead, apply, it’s not like I’m looking forward to my talk, I want to hear what everyone else has to say.

Also, you can still (until 15 July) get a discounted room rate at St Louis’ Union Station Hotel using the code SKP22. Do it soon! Like right now!

If you can’t go, but do want to support a progressive conference, especially at this time of regressive politics, you can just DONATE to keep it going.

Speaking of which, I have received email from a couple of people who say they want to go and would be willing to go, except they’re not going to spend money in a horrible Republican state like Missouri. I sympathize, and respect that decision. All I can say is that Skepticon is a beacon of light in a very dark part of the country that needs all the illumination they can get. Unfortunately, the organizers are local to St Louis, so I can understand why they would build the event there, in their home. Maybe we can persuade them to relocate to a more liberal midwestern state (like, say, Minnesota, hint hint) in the future.

One last important and virtuous note: the con requires attendees to have proof of vaccination and to wear masks. Yay! It makes no sense that so many events other than this one are for plague rats.

Did anyone bring a hook? Get him off the stage.

A succinct summary of Boris Johnson’s concession speech:

Johnson says the government has much more to do. He wants to level up, because he believes talent is evenly spread.

He says he has tried to persuade colleagues that changing leader would be “eccentric”.

But he failed to persuade them, he admits – even though the party has a “vast mandate” and is only “a handful of points behind in the polls”.

He says in politics “no one is remotely indispensable”.

The “Darwinian” electoral system will produce a new leader, he says.

He knows there will be people who will be disappointed. And he says he is “sad to be giving up the best job in the world”.

He thanks his wife Carrie and his family, civil servant and staff who have helped him – referring to being “here at Chequers”, before he corrects himself. And he thanks his protection team – the one group who do not leak, he says.

He ends by saying the future is golden.

OK, fuck off now, Boris.

I didn’t like the “Darwinian” reference at all. His views are more crudely Spencerian than Darwinian, I think.

I prefer this summary, too.

Who woulda thought Popeye was so precious to Republicans?

Randy Milholland, creator of the webcomic Something Positive, has busted into the big leagues and is now responsible for the Sunday Popeye strips. He’s doing a fine job!

I hates debate trolls, too! He’s also refreshing a few things about the strip.

After nearly a hundred years in existence, the Popeye comic strip is reportedly getting a woke makeover, with the strip’s latest cartoonist promising more ethnic diversity and “more characters who aren’t heterosexual.”

Cartoonist Randal K. Milholland described the Popeye character as being “gender fluid,” citing old episodes in which the plot required Popeye to dress in drag.

“I [want] to bring in more characters who aren’t heterosexual,” Milholland said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News. “I don’t live in that purely straight white world, and I don’t think a lot of other people do either.”

Good news, I would think. Unfortunately, that quote is from Breitbart, where talking about “a woke makeover” is like waving a strip of red meat at a very stupid and confused bull who has forgotten what a normal diet is and thinks an all-meat meal is exactly what real bulls eat. The comments section is bizarre — the idea that a comic strip might include non-straight characters enrages them.

It’s got 600 comments and they’re all as detached from reality as that sample! Did you know that having a gay character in a comic strip represents the Neo-Maoist erasure of history and destruction of culture? They also kind of lose the plot somewhere in there and start ranting about black characters in comic books, all while periodically quoting the Bible. I don’t think any of them are very tightly moored to reality.

Congratulations to the UK

Buh-bye, Boris!

I hear you’re finally getting rid of that wretched boob, Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson is to resign as Conservative leader but will push to stay on as prime minister until the autumn, prompting a backlash from some Tory MPs who say he has to go now.

Johnson’s decision came after an extraordinary standoff with his cabinet, which ended after Nadhim Zahawi, his new chancellor, told him to quit. By that point, more than 50 ministers had walked out, citing his mishandling of a string of scandals and failure of ethics.

So that’s what a collapsing government looks like.

There are things I don’t understand here. So he’s going to resign from leadership of his political party, but he wants to stay on as prime minister of his country for a few more months? How does that work? His scandals and ethical failures are just too much for the oh-so-ethical Conservative party, but are entirely satisfactory for the leadership of the United Kingdom? He’s like the lingering stink of a pungent fart, he’s going to cling to whatever wisps of power he can grip, in spite of near-universal dislike. We’ve experienced that over here, with a criminal ex-president pretending to be in important figure of influence, but hey, at least the UK didn’t have a mob of yahoos storming Downing Street.

Oh, and he’s going to be replaced by Dominic Raab? Isn’t that just more of the same? All of your Tories seem to be as repugnant as our Republicans.

Logistics are so important

I can’t really compete with Marcus and Charly in the big time construction and crafting projects, but I did make something that worked really well today. I made a fly-shaker. You know, like a salt shaker, only you shake flies out of it.

I’ve got a lot of spiders right now, all housed in individual vials, and I’ve got many more on the way. In particular, I’ve got 40+ baby spiderlings, with maybe a 100 more waiting to emerge any day now. I really want to keep them well fed so they’ll grow rapidly (and to Great Size, I hope), which means I’m feeding them every other day. This has been a clumsy process in which I put a few hundred wingless flies in a wide mouth cup, then cover it with a lid, and go down a line of spider vials using a paint brush to flick a few individuals into the loving arms of my babies. This is messy and awkward, because as soon as I open the lid to flick out a couple of flies, they all swarm to escape.

It takes 45 minutes to an hour to feed everyone, and it’s sloppy and a fair number of flies escape…to die, because there’s nothing for them to eat in the lab, and there are also escaped spiders that are thriving on their futile attempts to get away.

My fly shaker is simple: a plastic water bottle with a very small, fly-sized hole drilled in the top. I tape over the hole, use a funnel to dump a lot of flies into the bottle, and then open up all the spider containers. The spiders are well-behaved and will quietly rest in their web. Then I remove the tape from the fly shaker, invert it, and tap it once on each vial. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-etc. I did the whole bunch in less than 5 minutes! Then I was free to sit back and watch the gladiatorial spectacle as my spiderlings went into a frenzy.

I’ve been inefficient and working too hard. Now I can grow this spider army far more easily.