I am pleased to announce that not only have I gotten all my lectures/discussions planned out for this week, I have completed all grading to date. On Canvas, my to-do list is completely empty, for now.
I was scheduled for jury duty for tomorrow (one of the reasons I was striving to get all caught up), and the case was settled out of court.
Now what? Is there something people do when they’ve finished all their work by mid-afternoon of Sunday? Or are all of you swamped right now too?
I guess we’ve fixed everything in this state, because the DFL has stuck a provision in our latest funding bill that prohibits beaver eating. It’s only under special circumstances, though: you can’t eat “nuisance beavers” that you killed to stop them from flooding your farm with their dams, but if you killed them because you trap them for their fur, yeah, go ahead, you can chow down on that fine furry beaver. Nuisance beavers can still be used for fur, castor oil, or taxidermy, just no eating allowed.
It’s a very peculiar law, because nobody can explain why this rule has been inserted. The Republicans are rightly peeved at this goofy and unnecessary regulation, and the DFL is being evasive and not explaining the purpose.
…a Senate DFL spokesperson issued a statement saying the conference committee dealt with “multiple provisions related to beavers coming from both chambers. This language emerged from many conversations between the House, Senate, DNR, and governor’s office.’’
It sounds like there was a lot of concern about beavers, and I wonder if maybe there might have been more significant issues to address. Apparently not; Minnesota has achieved policy perfection.
Why beavers? I have two hypotheses. One is that it was to give Minnesota Republicans something to do — it’s a distraction. They’re busy right now bragging about how they’ve all eaten beaver.
“I eat beaver. It’s fine,’’ Wesenberg said. “No one is going to get in trouble for doing it. I don’t know why it’s in the bill.’’
OK, dude, I’m happy for you.
My other hypothesis is that this is a cunning anti-Catholic ploy. The Catholic Church decided beaver was a fish and therefore you were allowed to eat all the beaver you want during Lent. This law will deny good Catholic farmers a traditional dish, apparently on a whim.
Don’t say I never criticize Democrats. This is a useless law that accomplishes nothing (they even say it won’t be policed or enforced) and justifies complaints that they’re going to pad the legal system with stupid regulations.
This is nice because it focuses mainly on deep evolutionary history, talking about how, contrary to common opinion, spiders are not particularly closely related to insects.
They’re all crunchies together, rather than squishies. Isn’t that enough to combine them in an evolutionary taxonomy?
(Nope.)
I thought that Americans were generally opposed to aristocracy and the concept of nobility. We even had the sentiment written into our Constitution!
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
Some of us have that principle imbedded in our generally held principles, but to be real about it, there have always been Americans who desire and envy the label of an unearned title. They’re generally conservative and rich, but those snobs are honestly American. They’re just wrong.
So what kind of person would happily accept a title of nobility from a foreign organization? Would you believe it would be arch-“originalist”, worshipper of their interpretation of the Constitution, Founding Father cultist, and Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito?
The Intelligencer has a story today that actually happened several years ago but — not unlike Alito’s Upside-Down Flag nonsense — didn’t register with the public at the time. As we noted last week, Alito has been taking expensive gifts — as the conservative Supreme Court justices are wont to do! — from a right-wing German princess, but it turns out he’s been cultivating more ties to the European aristocracy.
It turns out the last time Donald Trump was president, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision setting women’s health care back a few centuries, added a knighthood to his own résumé, pledging an oath to the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. The knighthood, bestowed in 2017, wasn’t widely reported at the time, but the order’s website was updated in July with Alito’s investiture on the front page.
Cool. I can see where Alito would find the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George appealing — it’s an extremely Catholic organization that fawns over the Papacy. It has only 3000 members and seems to be mainly about grandiloquent cosplaying with elaborate symbols and rituals (they also have a charitable angle of providing food aid to stricken communities in Europe, to their credit). It’s mostly harmless and just a kind of stupid posturing, but sheesh, a Supreme Court justice ought to avoid flagrantly violating the letter of the Constitution…
Oh. Wait. Our current crop of Supreme Court justices are all about partisan bias and shredding the egalitarian principles of the Constitution.
Never mind.
My mother’s house just went on the market, which meant the asking price has gone public. As part of the probate process, the names of all of the heirs were publicly posted a while back. There are skeevy people who are tracking that kind of information, who instantly swoop in and contact the heirs, asking if they’d like a fast advance on their inheritance, for the price of a small, tiny, hardly even mentionable fee, so small that they don’t even mention it, and you won’t know about it until after the estate is settled.
It’s like a payday loan scam run by funeral-chasing ghouls. I think I’ve just learned about a whole ‘nother industry full of people I hate.
My whole family is about to get junkmail from these horrible people who promise painless advances on their inheritance, except for the big bite they take out of it (one company was going to skim off 20%) and the nuisance to the executor (me) and his lawyer. I’m just telling everyone to be patient, we’re making good progress on the estate, and I’m hoping we can get everything cleared up by Christmas, so I only have one complicated tax year.
(In good news, we’ve already had 3 people tour the house, so maybe it’ll go fast.)
Here’s a doozy from the always reliable source of an anonymous far right nobody pontificating on Twitter.
If Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit – there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy – this economy propped up with debt (generating asset bubbles) and artificially suppressed wages (as a result of illegal immigration). Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on a sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.
Elon Musk says “Sounds about right”
The first part might be right — the economy will be devastated by a Trump victory followed by mass deportations and firings. The last bit? Where the economy will be magically restored by people realizing this will be good for us? That’s pure fantasy, wishful thinking, nothing but moonshine. But hey, the belief in an all-powerful head of state with total control of everyone’s lives worked for North Korea, so maybe we should give it a shot. It’s not as if Republicans haven’t given us sound financial advice since the Reagan years.
