I would have forgotten that today is Easter, if the president hadn’t reminded me

I thought Xians were supposed to celebrate with colored eggs and church services and a nice family dinner. I was wrong. They celebrate it with threats of bombings and cursing and mocking religions. Good to know.

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J.
TRUMP

I think I’ll pass on the whole fuckin’ holiday.

Making babies with a computerized sperm storage site

I put together a rambling video about the final project in my genetics class, and about the responsibility of modern geneticists to deal with the terrible bad ideas of the past — eugenics. I give you a few examples of bad genetics, one relatively benign, and another actively evil (as you might guess, the evil example is Donald Trump.)

The gentler example is Fairfax Cryobank, which provides a good, useful, and even necessary service, sperm storage. I’ve visited their St Cloud branch, not as a client, but leading a field trip for a class on modern reproductive technologies, and they seem like good people with a lot of dewars. You can browse their catalog of sperm donors, and it’s a real trip. It’s more like reading the submissions to a dating site…a dating site where you’ll never meet the person whose profile you’re reading, but if you’re lucky and spend a few thousand dollars, you might get a frozen vial of sperm in the mail.

Here, for example, is one profile among many.

Donor 7587 is an easy going individual that takes pride in his fitness and his heritage. He can be a reserved man but once he feels comfortable with someone, you can see how funny, charming, and talkative he is. He has maintained an active lifestyle since he was a child by pursuing sports like soccer, tennis, and snowboarding. He loves to travel and has especially fond memories of a trip to Spain when he was little. Donor 7587 carries himself with quiet confidence. His dark, thick hair is always impeccably styled, each strand seemingly in place with effortless precision, giving him a polished, put-together look at all times. His fair skin provides a striking contrast to his bold features, especially his full, well-shaped lips that add a subtle softness to his overall appearance.

They’ve all got cute little baby pictures, since you won’t meet the adult. This is all for the benefit of clients, who will pick a vial of sperm based on vibes, but almost everything in that description is not heritable. You won’t get a vial filled with “funny, charming, and talkative,” because those are things that family, friends, and experience will generate. My objection is that it perpetuates the myth of simple inheritance of traits for everything, and misleads the client. But all of reproduction is a misleading game, as far as the traits of your child are concerned.

I would recommend adding a more appropriate button to the website: a “RANDOM CHOICE” button. Click it, they’ll send your doctor a completely random arbitrary vial from their vast collection. You’ll be surprised! But no more surprised than if you carefully choose the father of your child based entirely on a profile on a website.

The man is insane

Trump has proposed a 2027 budget. Here’s the bottom line.

The budget would increase funding for presidential priorities – such as the military, which would receive US $1.5 trillion, a 44% increase – while reining in spending on many domestic programmes.

A few details:

If you thought last year’s science budget was bad, this year’s is the annihilation of American science. If you’re celebrating the accomplishment of the Artemis 2

NASA faces a 23% cut to its total budget and a 47% drop in funding for its science division. More than 40 projects would be terminated. “It’s an extinction-level event for science,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization in Pasadena, California, that advocates for space exploration. “It would undermine and prevent NASA from being the world leader in space exploration.” NASA declined to comment on Dreier’s statement.

It’s not just NASA!

The proposal would eliminate funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. It would also shutter three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centres – those focusing on minority health and disparities, international research and alternative medicine.

The worst, to me, is cutting the NSF budget to less than half. That’s what funds most of the basic science in biology (biomedicine is a little different, that’s NIH, which has also been cut.)

And what, pray tell, are the president’s priorities? He’s going to tell us, while also addressing Russell Vought, the Project 2025 guy.

Not daycare, not Medicare, not Medicaid, none of the “little things”, which includes science — we can’t afford anything but war. We’re too busy paying for wars.

We have one little glimmer of hope. The president does not have the power to set the budget — everything he has said is a “recommendation”. Congress sets the budget. This will be negotiated next fall, starting in October, at a time when many congresspeople are thinking about the 2027 elections, and we have to put the fear of the electorate in their minds, starting now. Trump wants to tax people more and cut essential services to fund more war, and I don’t think that’s a winning election message. Throw them out!

NASA is going to pull an Apollo 8 on us, aren’t they?

I was enthused about the Artemis 2 lunar flyby mission. I was. My interest is cooling fast, though, and I fear the worst for NASA’s weekend.

I was turned off by this article about Victor Glover, one of the Artemis 2 astronauts. It was published in the Daily Citizen, which in case you didn’t know, is a rag produced by Focus on the Family…right away you know, it’s going to be all about evangelical Christianity (I don’t recommend that you read further in that publication, a lot of it is about trans-hatred.)

It starts off OK.

After spending six months aboard the ISS, he returned to Earth and praised NASA for allowing him to take communion each week.

“I was able to worship in space,” he said, adding, “[NASA] supported me and my family’s desire to continue to worship and to continue our faith walk even while I was off the planet. That was really important to me.”

You don’t need to praise NASA for “allowing” him to practice his religion. That’s the default. Christians like to believe they are prosecuted for their faith, which sometimes means they pretend to be surprised that they get to pray, when no one, not even atheists like me, are saying that they shouldn’t be allowed to do the innocuous practices of their religion. Go ahead, pray! Take communion! Sing hymns! We aren’t going to complain unless you force your superstitions on us.

If an astronaut wants to wear their lucky socks or carry a rabbit’s foot on board, I can’t imagine NASA complaining. Matters of personal belief are not issues that should be disallowed, although we should also be free to regard rabbit’s feet and communion wafers as silly.

Glover goes on to brag about another silly practice, prayer.

My career is fed by my faith, and you know, anytime I do something that’s pretty risky, I pray — before I fly, every time I fly. Definitely when you go sit on top of a rocket ship.

I have to shrug — yeah, go ahead and pray, just leave me out of it. I’m not impressed with sitting on top of a rocket ship, either. I think you owe more to the engineers who designed and built the machine, than to an imaginary being who played no role in its construction, and isn’t going to help you if something goes wrong.

But he just can’t shut up and has to blurt out a stupid saying.

“In the military, there’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.”

Well, fuck you too, Victor Glover. There are and have been atheists in foxholes, and on top of rockets, too — but in our Christian country, their existence is ignored, if not belittled. Courage is not an exclusive property of soldiers and astronauts, and many of us feel no need for the crutch of superstition.

Every human being is mortal, and is guaranteed to experience events in their life that carry the threat of their imminent demise, without having to be on top of a rocket. I’d be more scared of riding in an automobile, since more people are going to have traumatic, terrifying events in one of those. Some may pray, some may call out to God, Allah, or their mother, but others will feel helpless acceptance or struggle to escape their situation without the magic mumbo-jumbo. I’ve had a few near-death experiences (I anticipate more in the distant (I hope) future as I get older, and there will ultimately be one that will require dropping the “near-“) but never have I given any thought to a divine being. It’s just not part of the way my mind works.

I’m not going to deny Victor Glover’s mind the ability to flit to thoughts of supernatural salvation when he’s frightened, and he shouldn’t be telling us how other people’s minds will work. Let us instead consider a counter-example, the astronaut John Young, who had an exceptionally accomplished career that makes Victor Glover look like a rookie.

John W. Young, now retired, had the longest career as an astronaut. He’s the only person to have been commander of four classes of spacecraft. He was part of the first two-man space mission. He’s the first person to have orbited the Moon alone. One of three people to have flown to the Moon twice. The list goes on and on. Oh, he’s also one of the 12 people in human history to ever walk on the Moon.

Young was asked about God, and he gave the kind of answer I would give, too.

Interviewer: Did you discovered God up there?

Young: No. I don’t think so.

Interviewer: No sense of awe? Wonder?

Young: No.

Interviewer: Why not?

Young: Because I think that the way things are in space are the way they are and I think that’s a good thing. I think that if people have to go into space to discover God, they have some other kind of problem.

According to Victor Glover, John Young shouldn’t have gone to the Moon. I repeat, fuck you, Victor Glover.

The writer for the Daily Citizen went further and opined even more idiotically.

Indeed, modern science increasingly supports Christian theism. Scientists have discovered that our universe is fine-tuned to support life – and many creatures within it appear intelligently designed. There is also increasing evidence that our universe began at a finite point in the past – raising the question of what – or Who – caused the universe to come into being.

No. Science does not support theism, Christian or otherwise. The fine tuning argument is bullshit — why presuppose “tuning” at all, the universe is what it is, and what life exists within it is by necessity compatible with its physical nature. We do not appear “intelligently designed,” we are constructs of chance and a few billion years of natural selection. Our universe is the product of the expansion of a singularity and we don’t know enough about the properties of that event to say anything about causation, or whether the universe is finite, so don’t bother pretending that science is propping up your creation myth.

Focus on the Family has no control over NASA, but I am concerned about the propaganda NASA will put out this weekend. It’s Easter weekend. They’re sending a ship on a flyby of the Moon. I remember in 1968, NASA sent another manned mission on a flyby of the Moon over Christmas, and they broadcast a reading of the book of Genesis. Having to watch that was one of the nails in the coffin of my religious upbringing, a gross disappointment that radicalized me and made Christianity look even more ridiculous.

Right now, the USA is an embarrassment to the world for a variety of reasons. NASA won’t be helping if they make a goofy-ass evangelical Christian the centerpiece of a major scientific mission, even if only for a day. I’m cringing at the thought that an astronaut is going to preach at us about a resurrection and an empty tomb on Sunday.

I won’t be listening. Victor Glover is reinforcing the spam-in-a-can stereotype, and will further diminish American prestige, what little of it is left. But at least when he lands he can announce that he’s going to Answers in Genesis! They love dumb-ass astronauts there.

Lessons I probably shouldn’t use in my classes

I subscribe to the Oglaf patreon. I find the comic amusing, and via the patreon, I get extra content, sporadically. Recently, Trudy and Doug posted “A bunch of ideas we had that didn’t quite turn into strips but that we also couldn’t quite let go of,” and there was one that I also found irresistible. It’s mildly scatological and definitely profane, and also biological, so I have to post it here.

Matthew 6:28-29

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.

Flowers of the field are shitty with Matthew.

What? We aren’t working because we’re not running a bakery or some shit?

We’re processing carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbohydrates, storing that energy, growing roots and leaves, drawing water and nutrients from the soil, deploying defenses against climate and pests, constantly battling for reproduction and survival.

Fuck you.

Let’s see you attract appropriate pollinators with scent and colour and then tell us we don’t work, you anthrocentric shit.

I post it here because, tragically, I cannot use it in my classes, no matter how appropriate the point is.

Yay! The war is over!

The President says so!

Donald Trump used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.

In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.

“We are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world,” Trump said in the 19-minute speech, delivered from Cross Hall of the White House. “We have all the cards. They have none.”

If you believe that, you are so gullible you probably voted for Trump.

A lot of people with a lot of money didn’t believe him, since the S&P 500 declined in real time over the course of the speech.

(I do wish to complain: not basing the Y-axis on zero tells me this segment of the chart was selected to emphasize the drop.)

So what’s next?

Ticking through a list of claimed achievements, Trump said Iran’s navy and air force had been decimated, leaving the country weak and “no longer a threat” to the US and the world. He, however, said the US would continue to hit Iran “extremely hard” for next several weeks.

“We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said, even as he said “discussions were ongoing”.

The war is nearly over, so now is the time to throw even more bombs, and the goal is to send a nation of over 90 million people back to the stone age. That’s not a reasonable conclusion, and says we aren’t at all interested in the welfare of the citizens of Iran. More bombs also won’t rescue his terrible poll numbers with the citizens of the USA, which is his real goal.