Tina Turner has died

One of the most energetic voices of my youth is no more.

In a statement on Wednesday night, a representative said: “Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”

Who is going to run the Thunderdome in the absence of Aunty Entity?

They tried. They failed

Look at that stupid gomer.

Texas tried to pass a blatantly unconstitutional ten commandments law.

Texas lawmakers are scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state, part of a newly energized national effort to insert religion into public life.

Supporters believe the Supreme Court’s ruling last summer in favor of a high school football coach who prayed with players essentially removed any guardrails between religion and government.

OK, with our current Korrupt/Konservative Kourt, maybe it would have flown. But Texas Democrats didn’t let them have the opportunity!

That’s what we all need to do from now on, stop these disgraceful bill before the Supreme Court can endorse them.

Compare two states

For those not familiar with upper midwestern geography, Minnesota is right next to North Dakota. The largest city in North Dakota is squished up right next to the border, with Moorhead, Minnesota paired up right next to it. North Dakota is extremely conservative (although Fargo is less so), while Minnesota is fairly liberal. This leads to interesting situations.

Fargo hosted popular Pride events for many years. But no more!

A contentious political climate coupled with safety concerns and summer construction has prompted two Pride events historically held in Fargo to move to Moorhead.

Both Pride in the Park and the Pride Parade, noted as the area’s largest rural Pride celebrations, are set to begin in August and will be held in Minnesota and will not enter downtown Fargo.

Don’t worry. The organizers are not abandoning North Dakota, but have simply made a pragmatic decision that Minnesota is safer.

“Logistically, we are still finalizing event details, but we are excited to hold two of our major community events in Minnesota this year,” Diederich said. “With that said, we belong in North Dakota and we are not leaving. We will still hold events in private event spaces in the community where many of us work and live.”

Compare and contrast

Here’s the Republican party:

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Democratic party is actually being effective. Follow that link for the long, long list of progressive accomplishments we got just this past year. Democrats who actually fought for labor and education and immigrants and gun control and abortion and trans rights? Unheard of!

This is not a blanket approval for the national Democratic party, however. The article points out how other state parties have failed.

All told, it’s quite the record of accomplishment—all done in less than half a year, and with a governor, Walz, who was not notably progressive in his prior career in Congress. One wonders why it is so difficult to get anything even remotely similar done in solid-blue states like New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has been faceplanting on minor things like getting a state judge confirmed or passing moderate housing reform to bring down her state’s sky-high rents.

I suspect the difference is that Minnesota Dems had to run on a serious progressive agenda to win. By all accounts, the backlash to Dobbs was especially important in the 2022 midterms. Where New York Democrats generally win easily, and so the Democratic establishment focuses above all on maintaining its control of the party machine and associated patronage, Minnesota Democrats have to actually represent their constituents. It turns out when a political party has a coherent agenda that it actually tries to carry out, it can get a lot done.

Oh, a coherent agenda and also a sense that they have to live up to their promises. Those sound like good things for a political party. One of our American afflictions is parties whose main mission is to simply get re-elected year after year.

I think I saw this guy on Dr Strangelove

Michael Flynn (remember him? Former security advisor to Trump, couldn’t keep his mouth shut talking to the Russians, now a QAnon-loving, Christian Nationalist wacko?) has a new grift. He’s one of the founders of a site called 4thePure, which is dedicated to helping people who haven’t been vaccinated. It’s a combination dating site, blood bank, sperm and egg donation site, location for weird webinars with Q creeps, and most importantly, a vector for misinformation. And it only costs $2500 for a lifetime membership, which will give you a 25% discount on overpriced merch (which doesn’t exist yet…coming soon!).

General Jack D. Ripper is real! Now I’m worried about the Doomsday Machine.

I think Kat Abu is too young to make the Dr Strangelove connection.

All it takes is a one-vote majority to do great things

Here’s a Twitter thread worth reading. Minnesota done good.

Pay attention, Democratic parties everywhere:

Among the many things accomplished, some were of personal interest: they increased education spending by 10%, and also made college tuition at our public colleges (like the one I work at!) free to all Minnesota families with income under $80K.

Bill Donohue is mad again

You knew this would set ol’ Bill’s non-existent hair on fire: the Los Angeles Dodgers invited a drag group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, to a baseball game, and even apologized for a previous disinvitation. Cue a Catholic League tirade.

In a statement released to the press, the Dodgers said they had “much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” On May 22, the “Sisters” met with Kasten and LGBTQ organizations, as well as local government officials.

There was no indication that Catholic leaders, clergy or lay, were invited to participate in these “honest conversations.” Only one side was listened to—the side that sponsors hate speech. The fact that gay and trans leaders agree with the vulgar anti-Catholic rhetoric and behavior of the “Sisters” means they now have no moral leg to stand on when asking for an end to bigotry against them.

Knowing full well how the ruling class in this country can no longer be trusted, I told my staff yesterday that it wouldn’t surprise me if MLB and the Dodgers reversed course. To that end, I personally went through our files on the “Sisters” and prepared a report on them.

Cool. So now the Catholic League claims that their bigotry is warranted, because the Catholic church was not invited to a conversation between a baseball team and a LGBTQ advocacy group. Why would anyone expect Catholic leaders to be invited to everything?

Two things intrigued me, though: one is that he told his “staff” something. He has a staff? What is it, one part-time secretary and the building custodian? He’s another of those people with a history of amplifying his constituency with a fax machine and a bullhorn, like Moms for Liberty, Libs of Tik-Tok, and Mel and Norma Gabler.

But the second thing…Bill has a dossier on the the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? Of course he does. And it makes me like them even more.

SISTERS OF PERPETUAL INDULGENCE
Bill Donohue

1979: This was the beginning of the Sisters. In San Francisco’s Castro
District three men dressed in traditional nun’s habit walked the streets.
One of them carried a machine gun. Then they went to a nude beach. It
was then that they adopted the name the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
1982: A year after AIDS was discovered, the Sisters were upset, but they
did not complain about the lethal sex practices that gave rise to AIDS;
rather, they complained about the “fear and prejudice” that it was
engendering. “Sr. Florence Nightmare” and “Sr. Roz Erection”
addressed the issue.
1987: The Sisters were granted a tax-exempt status after trashing Pope
John Paul II’s visit to San Francisco. The Sisters held an “exorcism” and
a “Condom Savior Mass” in Union Square. At the event, they featured
“the Latex Host” and referred to Jesus as “the Condom Savior.” They
also burned the Pope in effigy.
1987: They staged a “Hunky Jesus” contest, something they do every
year on Easter Sunday.
1989: On their tenth anniversary, they held many events, including one
with “Sr. Psychedelia’s” rise from the dead, and “Pope Dementia’s
Altered Boys.” They wore “only thongs and smiles.”
1989: At the “Condom Savior Mass,” the Sisters read from a text of the
“Condom Savior Consecration.” It said, “The Latex Host is the flesh for
the life of the world. Just as the Creator who has life sent us, we have life
because of the Condom Savior. Those who feed on this latex will have
life because of it. This is the bread that comes down from Heaven, and,
unlike those who eat not and therefore die, those who feed on this bread
shall live forever!”
1990: A staff writer for the Miami Herald said the Sisters were noted for
“carrying a 20-foot replica of a penis” at its street events.
1992: At a rally in Sacramento at the Capital Christian Center, the Sisters
held signs of the Cross with a pink inverted triangle in the place of Jesus;
the inscription read, “Stop Crucifying Queers.”
1992: “On Parade,” a publication of the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay
Freedom Day Parade and Celebration Committee, published an article by
“Sister Dana Van Iquity” which said the motto of the Sisters is “Encroach
not on my crotch!” and “Leave my loins alone.” He described the day’s
events, including “Dykes on Bikes” and “Dykes with Tikes on Trikes.”
1993: At another rally at the Capital Christian Center, protesters held a
sign, “Queer Alert: Fighting for Freedom From Religion.”
1993: Twelve years after AIDS hit, they demonstrated in Washington,
“reeling in anger and despair” over five of their members who died of the
sexually transmitted disease.
1993: The Sisters were banned from the March on Washington’s stage
for being “too controversial and not the appropriate image” for C-Span
and “the movement.”
1993: The Sisters are seen as so offensive that they incur the wrath of
Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, the authors of a landmark book on
gays, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of
Gays in the 90s. They say of the Sisters, “‘Fringe’ gay groups ought to
have the tact to withdraw voluntarily from public appearance at gay
parades, marches, and rallies, but they don’t care whether they fatally
compromise the rest of us.”
1994: They served “holy communion wafers and tequila” to the
congregation at a mock Mass.
1999: On the cover of the April 1, 1999 edition of the San Francisco Bay
Times there was a full-page picture of a Sister superimposed on a crosslike photo with his hands stretched out, imitating Jesus on the Cross.
2000: In San Francisco, they held a Good Friday event where they
sponsored a fetish fashion show that provided “a chance to get spanked
and free “Sticky Buns.” Dr. Carol Queen held her “Good Vibrations
Dildo Fashion Show.”
2001: I petitioned the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of the Sisters,
citing multiple examples of “vulgar, obscene and bigoted material against
the Catholic Church and its members.”
2002: They celebrated Easter with an “Indulgence in the Park” event that
featured a “clown-drag-nun” fundraiser, along with the annual “Hunky
Jesus” contest.
2004: They spent the entire month of December bashing Christmas in
Los Angeles.
2008: San Diego House of the Sisters—The Asylum of the Tortured
Heart, which was founded in 2005, held a “Midnight Confessional
Contest” that gave prizes to those with the “hottest confessions.” It was
held in a gay bar.
2009: They held a block party in San Francisco where some of the men
danced naked in the street.
2010: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts winter gala, the Sisters
were asked to perform six musical acts in a “Nunway Noir” drag fashion
show where attendees could “bask in the bloody gore of occult film
screenings.”
2011: In a Daily Beast column, gay writer Andrew Sullivan called the
Sisters’ “Hunky Jesus” event a form of “blasphemy.” He was so angry at
them that he said, “This makes me feel like Bill Donohue.”
2018: The Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon hosted “Drag
Queen Storytime with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” despite their
history of anti-Catholicism. The event explicitly targeted kids 2-6.
2022: The Sisters gave an award for featuring Lil Hot Mess, “a man who
dresses as a woman for children and one of the leading activists behind
Drag Queen Story Hour.”
2023: A Sister won the “Free Choice Mary” pro-abortion award. The
man, dressed with a nun’s veil, wearing a bra and panties, was featured
holding a baby doll with a sign, “I Had A Choice.”

I gotta appreciate that not only did they raise the ire of Bill Donohue, but they outraged Andrew Sullivan.

I’m also amused that their great crime in 2004 was spending the entire month of December bashing Christmas in Los Angeles.

I like it!

They’re learning

Finally, the whales have had enough. Orcas have sunk 3 boats off the coast of Spain. All it took was one innovative revolutionary who decided she’d had enough, and then her fellows took notice and realized they don’t have to take it.

Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a “critical moment of agony” — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. “That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,” López Fernandez said.

Orcas are social creatures that can easily learn and reproduce behaviors performed by others, according to the 2022 study. In the majority of reported cases, orcas have made a beeline for a boat’s rudder and either bitten, bent or broken it.

I’m surprised that whales of all species hadn’t taken action centuries ago, when humans started exterminating them wholesale.

Unfortunately, the next lesson they’ll learn is that humans are vengeful and vicious and don’t take kindly to anything challenging their dominion.

The insufferable pettiness of Anna Krylov

I just discovered an op-ed from 2021 written by Anna Krylov, the crusader against political correctness whose terrible paper I criticized on YouTube. It’s also a terrible opinion piece, but it is evidence that she is trying to launch a career that would appeal to the right wing, and also that she isn’t very thoughtful.

The piece is called The Politicization of Science and it’s the same ol’, same ol’. She starts off by giving her personal history — she grew up in the Soviet Union, in a town that was renamed multiple times in response to the shifting political rule, and she knew people who were denied educational opportunities because they weren’t sufficiently deferential to the powers-that-be. It’s deplorable stuff, and the stupid whims of the political class wrecked many aspects of Russian science. I can see where Krylov is sensitive to the problems.

Unfortunately, after the history lesson, it goes off the rails. She thinks the US is following the same path (and it may, but not for the reasons she cites.)

Fast forward to 2021–another century. The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiastically imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.

Wait, wait, wait: I had to stop at that claim that “Social Justice” (capitalized) has little in common with “social justice” (lower case.) That’s weird. I followed her citations to see where that’s coming from, and it’s all Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and John McWhorter — sources that despise the idea of social justice, and have, shall we say, a rather uninformed and biased perspective. But now I was eager to learn about Western censorship.

Her examples are underwhelming.

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect. In some schools, physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum. A comment in Nature calls for replacing the accepted technical term “quantum supremacy” by “quantum advantage”. The authors regard the English word “supremacy” as “violent” and equate its usage with promoting racism and colonialism. They also warn us about “damage” inflicted by using such terms as “conquest”. I assume “divide-and-conquer” will have to go too. Remarkably, this Soviet-style ghost-chasing gains traction. In partnership with their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion taskforce, the Information and Technology Services Department of the University of Michigan set out to purge the language within the university and without (by imposing restrictions on university vendors) from such hurtful and racist terms as “picnic”, “brown bag lunch”, “black-and-white thinking”, “master password”, “dummy variable”, “disabled system”, “grandfathered account”, “strawman argument”, and “long time no see”. “The list is not exhaustive and will continue to grow”, warns the memo. Indeed, new words are canceled every day–I just learned that the word “normal” will no longer be used on Dove soap packaging because “it makes most people feel excluded.”

What does it mean that Newton was “canceled”? How? We still learn about his work, Newton still gets a prominent place in the history of science, and calling the laws he discovered “fundamental” seems more important than calling them “Newton’s.”

She cites a letter published in Nature expressing an opinion — you know, like Krylov is doing in the Journal of Physical Chemistry letters — that suggests some of the terminology used in computing is poor. In the 17 December 2019 issue of Nature, Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Leonie Mueck & Divya M. Persaud say:

We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.

The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.

Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.

OK, if I were working in the field of quantum computing I’d take that into account, and I can see their point. All it is, though, is a strong suggestion in a scientific journal, exactly equivalent (although far less wordy) to what Krylov was doing…but she is oblivious to the comparison. It’s terrible that anyone would talk about the uses of language, but only when the interpretations differ from Anna Krylov’s.

Another example she gives is a set of recommendations from the “Words Matter” Task Force at the University of Michigan. I confess, there’s a lot in there that I find silly and pointless, such as discouraging the use of the phrase “brown bag lunch” (yeah, that’s what color paper bags are!), but others are worthwhile, such as avoiding the word “crippled” to refer to broken systems, or let’s call “man-hours” “person-hours”. It’s all very bureaucratic, but it’s not censorship or oppression.

That a capitalist company would not want to alienate potential customers by implying that they might be abnormal is also not censorship. She should be far more concerned that I’ve been trying to avoid the use of the “normal” word in my classes, replacing it with less judgmental words like “typical” or “common”. Is color-blindedness not normal? Should I imply that a few students in my class are abnormal because they’re not trichromatic? Krylov is even sillier than that U. Michigan list.

That’s the real problem here. Some people, mostly conservatives and Republicans, are trying to distract us with trivial, petty nonsense as far more serious problems are taking over this country. Sure, go ahead and complain that you’ll continue to defy the tyranny of the Left trying to rename “brown bag” lunches — but meanwhile, the Right is banning books, firing teachers who dare to mention that they’re not heterosexual, outlawing women’s health procedures, and making life a living hell for trans people. Those concerns don’t get mentioned by Krylov. Instead, she wants to damn anyone who tries to expand education to historically deprived groups by removing biases. All in the name of saving humanity.

The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society–the free and uncensored exchange of ideas–and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.

Remember: the Unilever corporation removing the word “normal” from their beauty products is an example of “EXTREME LEFT IDEOLOGY.” Ron Desantis dismantling academic freedom and appointing a Discovery Institute hack to control a liberal arts college…eh, no big deal.

There’s a flaw in his argument

Ken Ham has declared that he cannot respect other people’s pronouns. The reason: that would be lying.

As believers, we cannot in good conscience use transgendered pronouns—no matter our intentions—because, in doing so, we are lying. When we use she/her (or Miss or Mrs.) for a man or he/him (or Mr.) for a female, we are participating in the lie that sex/gender is on a spectrum or that a man can be a woman and a woman a man. Or if we use “they/them” (or Mx., etc.) or the myriad of other “pronoun” options today, we are participating in the lie that humans are not innately sexed as either male or female. We’re participating in the lie that humans can choose to be or are naturally androgenous or ambiguous, when that is not true because God has created us either male or female.

One problem with his excuse is that Ken Ham has never been reluctant about lying, whether it’s to get tax breaks on his con game or his claims about science. He’s also lying here: it’s not about preserving his honesty at all, or he’d just come out and plainly state that it’s because he thinks gay and trans people should burn in hell.