You missed nothing in last night’s Republican debate

Here’s a sample. It’s unintelligible madness as these guys yell at each other, and meanwhile, off in his own private world Ben Carson talks about the fruit salad of life.

You know, I also hear a lot of nonsense on the Democratic side, about how this candidate or that candidate can’t win against one or the other of these bozos. I don’t care. You can’t say that yet. The serious discussions can’t even begin until the Republican clowns stop with the slapstick and settle down, and then the Democrats can get serious about how to defeat them, and in a pragmatic sense, either of the two Democratic contenders ought to be able to clobber the Republican circus.

“Ought to” does not mean “will.” Democrats have a grand history of screwing up, and Republicans have their catalog of dirty tricks — gerrymandering and voter suppression, to name a few — to claw their way to the top. But we can’t begin to address these problems until the field has been winnowed.

We don’t mean literal trigger warnings

A Texas law is going to allow students to open-carry guns into the classroom, so the University of Houston administration is doing the responsible thing, and informing instructors how to deal with armed students. Tell me if this sounds like good advice to you.

teachingwithguns

  • Be careful discussing sensitive topics
  • Drop certain topics from your curriculum
  • Not “go there” if you sense anger
  • Limit student access off hours

Good thing there are no sensitive topics in biology. No one gets upset about evolution, or reproductive biology, or biotechnology, or vaccines, or chemotherapy, or birth defects, or bioethics, or heritable traits, or…hey! If the administration ever tells me to drop controversial topics from my curriculum, I’ll be on easy street! I’ll just stroll in to every class, say “Let’s rap”, and we’ll just talk about non-stressful events on everyone’s minds, because all the subjects I teach have the potential to be controversial. This being Minnesota, we’ll just talk about the weather every day.

I feel for you people who teach political science, or sociology, or psychology, or any of those harder topics that everyone gets upset about. I’ve got it easy.

I think professors ought to consider some kind of class action lawsuit (with the reservation that I am not a lawyer). It sounds criminal to turn our profession into a dangerous occupation to the point where administrators advise us to not do our jobs.

Standing in a weird place on the Democratic nomination

Well, this is awkward. I don’t particularly like Hillary Clinton, but most of her supporters seem cool. I very much like Bernie Sanders, but a lot of his supporters seem to be assholes. So what am I to do?

The latest incident is that Sanders’ followers shouted Dolores Huerta off the stage when she offered to help translate at a Nevada caucus. Dolores Huerta? Civil rights and labor leader? The so-called Democratic Socialists chanted “English only!” at a woman who is a prominent activist for unions, equal rights for women and minorities, and for a more just immigration system?

Who the fuck are these people?

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Lazy looters and incompetent exploiters

The Bundy case is shaping up to be loads of fun. The pretrial detention memorandum for ol’ Cliven has been released, and in addition to making the case that he was a lawless, violent criminal, it explains that he was a terrible “rancher”.

While Bundy claims he is a cattle rancher, his ranching operation – to the extent it can be called that – is unconventional if not bizarre. Rather than manage and control his cattle, he lets them run wild on the public lands with little, if any, human interaction until such time when he traps them and hauls them off to be sold or slaughtered for his own consumption. He does not vaccinate or treat his cattle for disease; does not employ cowboys to control and herd them; does not manage or control breeding; has no knowledge of where all the cattle are located at any given time; rarely brands them before he captures them; and has to bait them into traps in order to gather them.

Nor does he bring his cattle off the public lands in the off-season to feed them when the already sparse food supply in the desert is even scarcer. Raised in the wild, Bundy’s cattle are left to fend for themselves year-round, fighting off predators and scrounging for the meager amounts of food and water available in the difficult and arid terrain that comprises the public lands in that area of the country. Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery. At the time of the events giving rise to the charges, Bundy’s cattle numbered over 1,000 head, straying as far as 50 miles from his ranch and into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (“LMNRA”), getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway (causing accidents on occasion) – foraging aimlessly and wildly, roaming in small groups over hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands that exist for the use of the general public for many other types of commercial and recreational uses such as camping, hunting, and hiking.

I used to spend some time every summer at my uncle’s horse and cattle ranch in eastern Washington, and what I remember was all the work: up early in the morning, walking the irrigation ditches and watering the fields, taking hay out to the cows, and there was this tiring ritual of walking the fields and picking up rocks. None of that for the Bundys! Neglect the animals, do nothing to care for the land, just let everything run loose until you feel like going out and killing a few cows.

I’m unimpressed.

Doesn’t the Bible say something about good stewardship? Maybe they should take a look at that holy book they pay lip service to — it doesn’t look good for the Bundys.

The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Isaiah 24:5

And the Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful. Luke 12:42-46

They should count their blessings, though. Being cut into pieces isn’t a permissible punishment under federal law.

Mary Lou Bruner might even get elected

Now that’s a terrifying thought. Bruner is a retired teacher (!) running for the Texas School Board (!!) with a set of beliefs about science that ought to have gotten her fired long, long ago. Instead, she’ll probably find herself in that nest of loons with influence over textbooks all around the country.

Bruner, in fact, has written about the extinction of dinosaurs. When the flood waters subsided and rushed into the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. . . . The dinosaurs on [Noah’s ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce. . . . After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age.

Meanwhile, Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate, it’s all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea. It took time to ‘condition’ the people so they would believe such a HOAX!

We haven’t even gotten to her political beliefs, which are just about as nutty.

bruner

That a few kooks exist and think they’re qualified for high office is never surprising. What’s troubling is that there are a significant number of people who will vote for her.

Why can’t we prosecute people for gun incompetence?

It’s another of those stories.

Det. Sgt. Troy Gilleylen of the Battle Creek Police Department said Babick and her 25-year-old boyfriend, whose name was not released, were in their upstairs bedroom at the time of the shooting, lying on their bed watching television. The boyfriend’s .45-caliber handgun was on the bed, after it had just been cleaned and loaded.

Babick got up from the bed to answer the telephone, the boyfriend told police, and when she got back in bed, the gun discharged, sending a bullet through her left rib cage.

She staggered downstairs and collapsed in the living room, where she died.

That’s tragic and terrible. But this is what also makes me furious.

The man told police she may have lain on top of the gun, or somehow hit it with her hand when she got back on the bed, causing it to discharge. Gilleylen said the distraught man has been “100 percent cooperative” with police and he has not been charged in the incident.

Wait. He’s lounging about with a loaded handgun in bed, and it goes off and kills a woman, and the police do nothing? Isn’t there a charge like negligent homicide that would be appropriate here?

This man is an idiot who killed another human being with stupidity. At the very least, he ought to have his privilege to carry guns around taken away, especially since there are two children living there. Do we have to wait until an ‘accident’ kills one of them?

Nah. As we all know, a gun-fondlers right to be a danger to others may not be infringed.

Stop the beatification of Scalia

I’ve been seeing so many articles praising Scalia, now that he’s dead. He was a consistent jurist; he was enthusiastic and lively; he was best friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg; he was steadfast and sincere in his beliefs.

I don’t give a fuck.

For me, this is what defines Scalia: his dissenting opinion in Edwards v. Aguillard. The man was a confident ignoramus.

The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific “fact,” since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or “guess.”… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a “myth.”

The core of his argument was that the creationists said they were teaching the scientific evidence, and gosh, they sure seem sincere when they insist there is no religious purpose to teaching that the world was created in 6 days and there was a big flood and a boat, so who am I to question them? His originalism and insistence on a strict literal interpretation of what was said was a disingenuous sham that he hypocritically adopted whenever he saw a conclusion he wanted to reach for.

It’s also ironic that he was an affirmative action hire. Maybe he should have been appointed to a lesser court, except that I don’t believe any court in our country would be well-served by a racist dumbass.

Obama will nominate a competent legal scholar to the Supreme Court

yandle

I’m seeing lots of rumors that Obama has made his choice for Scalia’s replacement (but no good confirmation), and that he’ll make the formal announcement on Thursday. Her name is Staci Michelle Yandle, and she is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.

For some reason, the rumor sites are all emphasizing the fact that she is a black lesbian woman, rather than the real shocker, that Obama isn’t installing another far right wackaloon in the slot.

I don’t know that I trust this rumor, but if true, it would show that Obama is completely out of fucks, which would be awesome.

Sorry to confuse you all — there is no good evidence for any specific choice anywhere. I’m just amused at the headlines that all babble about “black lesbian woman”, and you know that when Obama does deliver a choice, unless it’s a “white heterosexual man”, the headlines will all be entirely about the person’s color, sexual orientation, and gender.