Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

Dick Cheney

Begin your day with a glad heart, everyone! The monster has dropped dead, those lips will no longer lie, those hands will no longer pull a trigger, that heart (which wasn’t the one he was born with) will no longer pump poison. Now he gets to rot, just like the hundreds of thousands, at least, he was responsible for murdering.

We get to suffer for a little while with the long-winded excuses and praises the media will deliver in the next few days. Just look forward to the time when he will be forgotten. It won’t be long.

Fuck that guy.

A little wisdom from Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés

Heinmot Tooyalaket

He was a smart guy and gave the only good argument against education I’ve ever heard.

In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools.
“Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked.
“They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered.
“Do you not want churches?”
“No, we do not want churches.”
“Why do you not want churches?”
“They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”

I can respect that, but I think it would be better understood as an argument against dogma. Do not impose your unwarrantedly confident dogma on me!

All you have to do is go on YouTube and look at a few atheist channels, and it’s infuriating: most of them are dealing with the idiocy of religious certainty, explaining that the apologists have no evidence for their god, over and over, with occasional intrusions by thick-skulled dickwits who make stupid and extravagant claims while disregarding what atheists actually say. I wouldn’t want to attend a school led by William Lane Craig or John Lennox or Lee Strobel or Gary Habermas either.

Keep education secular.

He’s a sleazy furniture salesman at heart

In a sane country, this latest brag would be the kiss of death for his entire party.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is standing by President Donald Trump’s latest, and most eyebrow-raising, renovation yet: a full-blown marble makeover of a White House bathroom. Posting on social media Friday afternoon, Leavitt gushed over the president’s flashy revamp, writing, “President Trump is making the People’s House more elegant and beautiful for generations of Americans to come!”

While we’re in the midst of a government shutdown, while we’re expected to support a budget that destroys health care and brings great profit to insurance companies and billionaires or starve the poor (or both!), Trump is focused on interior decorating and remodeling a bathroom, and on tearing down part of the White House and building a lavish ballroom.

While I agree that the original institutional green bathroom looked dated, I A) expect the president of the United States to be focused on more significant issues, and B) and think the boring, ticky-tacky idea of slapping marble and gold all over everything is no less cliched. I’d say I want the next president of the USA to bring on a wrecking ball and strip out all the gold plated fittings, except that what really should happen is that they will instead focus on repairing all the deep structural damage done to the country, cleaning up the raging corruption and firing the carpetbaggers reigning over our institutions.

Does the current president have nothing better to do?

I don’t know if I’m ready to teach genetics again

I always wonder where they get their unwarranted confidence from. This person seems to have confuse the Y chromosome with the entire genetic complement, or something. I don’t want to have to untangle their thinking right now.

That’s not how DNA works. Your brother would have his father’s DNA and his mother’s DNA. You, as a girl, would have your mother’s DNA and your father’s mother’s DNA. You have only half of your father’s DNA. You do not have your father’s father’s DNA.
And this is why (if one’s father has any brothers) it’s difficult to prove a girl’s paternity. All the brothers would have the same X chromosome so any brother could be the father. It’s been pivotal in the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemmings controversies.

You don’t necessarily have the same X chromosome as your brother. It’s not hard to figure out a girl’s paternity because there are all these autosomes. I think someone got a vague hint of how sex is inherited and garbled everything up beyond that. But they still get to tell someone else they don’t understand how DNA works!

Post-Hallowe’en shopping day

I made a quick run to St Cloud today, to visit Spirit Halloween after Hallowe’en, when they are busy dumping everything left over at half price. Get out there quick! Like any mysterious fantasy shop, it’s going to vanish, leaving only a dusty empty space off an abandoned alleyway — our local stores disappear on November 3rd. I stocked up on weird fake spider crap for next year’s celebration.

More importantly, my wife sent me on a mission to get a new vacuum cleaner, because our old one is busted.