All finals graded, grades submitted to the registrar, I’m gonna go take a walk. Later, y’all.
(I still have 4 term papers for the writing class to evaluate, but two of them earned an A in my preliminary assessment, so those are easy, and the other two will require a somewhat more thorough review. After I get some fresh air.)
I’ve been through a lot of commencement ceremonies, and they all run together in my brain. It would be nice to say yesterday’s was exceptional, but it wasn’t — it was a joyous occasion, but it was much like many other well-run, appropriately managed events, and that’s good, because what you want out of this is respect and acknowledgement and a great send-off to all the students who are, we hope, going off to happy and successful lives.
As you might expect from a progressive liberal arts college, the program was pretty darned woke. The student body president, Dylan Young, is an American Indian from the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, and he gave an upbeat speech which touched on some of the unpleasantness of the last four years — the pandemic, an ugly incident in which conservatives plastered anti-gay and anti-trans posters all over campus, and the recent regent who whined about how we were “too diverse” — but emphasized student resilience. Our commencement speaker was Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, and he talked up liberal arts and small towns and hope for the future. The one I dreaded, the obligatory speech from a member of the Board of Regents (generally a stuffy lot of boring business people), was a pleasant surprise. Mike Kenyanya seemed to actually like and appreciate what the campus was all about. Maybe the regents aren’t all bad, after all.
It could have been so much worse. The University of Wyoming brought in Senator Cynthia Lummis as a commencement speaker, and she proceeded to give a god-soaked speech, dwelling on the Creator
of the Declaration of Independence and fundamental scientific truths, such as the existence of two sexes
…and got booed loudly. She was clearly taken aback.
Good work, students of the University of Wyoming. I don’t think our liberal students at a liberal university in a liberal state could have done a better job of expressing their displeasure. The only difference is that I think our administrators wouldn’t have brought in a disingenuous, dishonest loon like Lummis.
Yep, it’s that time of the year when I have to dress up in black.
You know, the inevitable dumb one.
If there are more than two sexes, name a third one.
The correct answer is, obviously, “Your mom.”
But seriously, if I tell you something is a range or continuum, you don’t refute me by telling me I have to name every shade. When I was a child, I learned that there are 7 colors, precisely 7, in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Then when I got older I learned that there are hundreds of wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. And then when I got older still I learned that color is the product of combinations of wavelengths, like chords, and the numbers got larger still. And then I learned about photoreception and color vision, and discovered that colors were a property of visual processing derived from context and relative distinctions in illumination and intensity, and there’s nothing fixed about them. I read David Marr in the 1980s, you know.
Then someone comes along and insists that the stuff they learned in kindergarten is the absolute rock solid truth.
Hey, I bet you this person is also one of those who mocks the abbreviation LGBTQIA+ because there are too many letters in it and we keep adding more.
Calm down, he’s not dead yet. At his age, though, he’s probably contemplating his future successor. Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, is a blithering goober, and the other people at the top of his organization are women, so naturally they’re out of the running. Andrew Snelling, Terry Mortenson, Danny Faulkner? Negative charisma. Tim Chaffey? He’s tall, that’s about it. Nathaniel Jeanson? An insufferable twit.
Apparently, Ken has been recruiting back in the homeland of Australia, and he has landed a real winner: Martyne Iles. He’s perfect. He’s young. He’s loud. He’s a confirmed hater: he doesn’t want anything to do with the gays or the transes, he despises the idea of climate change, he hates commies. He’s a cerfiable culture warror, and his ideology lines up nicely with Ken Ham’s.
And now he’s been hired as Chief Ministry Officer for Answers in Genesis.
Also interesting: he was formerly the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, but he was kicked out. The apparent cause was that the ACL, under his leadership, was flopping badly. Australians kept passing those danged liberal laws anyway. He was ineffective and obnoxious.
The ACL grew rapidly under Iles – its membership tripled, Iles said – but its size wasn’t the board’s problem. It was struggling for political impact. In a few short years, it recorded losses on virtually every single key issue: same-sex marriage was legalised in 2017, just months before Iles took the post; almost every state in the country has loosened laws on abortion and voluntary assisted dying; and major steps against gay conversion therapy have been made in Victoria, WA and NSW. And faced with the potential for a multi-term Labor government that saw the group as – at best – irrelevant, the Australian Christian Lobby needed a major strategic reset.
So now he has left Australia to a country that if more favorable ideologically. He’s just like Ken Ham!
They have one other thing in common: they’re both abominably stupid. Here’s Iles’ “evidence for god”.
No one ever thought that intricacy could come out of simplicity or that order could come out of chaos in anything except creation.
Also, beautiful sunsets
. Fanaticism and banality, such a great combination.
It’s a match made in heaven.
Elon Musk has announced that he has found a replacement CEO for Twitter, currently rumored to be an ad executive name Linda Yaccarino. That could change. Musk is a dorky flibbertigibbet who might change his mind depending on how the rumor is received.
It doesn’t matter, though. Nothing will improve.
I feel pity for anyone who gets lured into this position, although, given the kind of person who’d willingly associate with Elon Musk, I suspect any sympathy would evaporate after their first day on the job.
Oh, actually, this announcement is a distraction. Quick, focus on the Twitter noise, not the costly recall of Tesla cars in China!
Tesla will recall more than 1.1 million cars in China due to potential safety risks, the country’s top market regulator said on Friday.
Starting May 29, the US company will take back 1,104,622 vehicles that were produced between January 12, 2019, and April 24, 2023, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said in a statement, citing a plan filed by Tesla (TXLZF) with the regulator.
That’s nearly equivalent to Tesla’s total sales in mainland China during the four-year period. From 2019 to March 2023, Tesla sold about 1.09 million vehicles in the country, according to CNN calculations based on figures from China’s state-backed industry associations.
We’ll be talking about moderation. I’m pro-moderation — where do you stand on it?
It’s the last day of finals week. I have two final exams and a term paper due — and I foolishly made everything due at 6pm this evening. Everything. All at once. I am smart, S-M-R-T.
A few students have submitted their work early so I can try to get a leg up on all the grading. Grades are due on Monday, so there’s an absolute deadline to finishing up this semester.
Last night, CNN hosted a town hall for Trump. I didn’t watch it. My trust in the that news outlet was already low, but after they announced they were going to host this debacle, I’m writing the network off. The town hall was a catastrophe for the truth.
Donald Trump’s long-awaited return to CNN went off the rails almost immediately on Wednesday night, with the former president using the exclusive town hall event to repeatedly lie, mislead viewers, and steamroll CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins—all to the delight of a Trump-adoring crowd.
From the very first seconds of the town hall, Trump was lying. When Collins opened the event with a softball—“Why should Americans put you back in the White House?”—Trump immediately leaned into his normal election lies. He repeated debunked theories and passionately argued the election was stolen.
When he got his first question from the crowd—Will you suspend the “polarizing” talk about election fraud?—a question that had already been answered in the first minute of the town hall, Trump just pushed forward with more disproven election falsehoods.
Collins, by the way, was recruited from Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. The CNN executives had to know she was a poor choice, on top of knowing that Trump was going to lie non-stop, and that his audience was going to love it. They figured it out partway through (I knew what was going to happen last week when I heard about this nonsense — put me in charge of CNN, already, I’m smarter than anyone there.)
Halfway through the town hall, CNN staffers were acknowledging the event was a disaster for the truth.
“This is so bad,” one of CNN’s on-air personalities told The Daily Beast before the first commercial break. “I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism… it is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.”
“One of the worst hours I’ve ever seen on our air,” another CNN staffer told The Daily Beast.
And yet another on-air commentator for CNN was clear this wasn’t a good night for the cable news channel. “I’m floored by this whole evening,” this person said.
Right now, analysts at the network are reading over the viewership stats, and if this hour of non-news and MAGA propaganda was popular, you can expect to see lots more of it for the next year and a half.
Wait, I just realized the presidential race has already begun, and is going to go on interminably. Another reason to turn CNN off.
Fuck all of these guys.
Started a big project today — we have a fate in mind for all these spiders my lab is churning out. It will be an interesting fate for me, but alas, not at all healthy for the spiders. I’ll be keeping my Patreon followers informed, the rest of you will have to wait until the Fall.
I’m going to be redoubling my spider farming efforts for a while. I literally had baby spiders nesting in my beard this morning, and I just now had one crawl out of my shirt cuff. It’s a good thing I like the little fellas. Which makes it sad that this kind of a meatgrinder project. I’m going to be the Cruella DeVille of spiders.
