Among my earliest complaints was about their editor, Jodi Wilgoren (now Rudoren), who was always waffling over ‘both sides’ in the creation/evolution debate. Those complaints are so old, back 20 years and more, that they were posted when this blog was just a little personal endeavor posted on an old Macintosh in my lab, and you can’t get to them anymore. Wilgoren infuriated me with comments like this one, after she’d dedicated a huge amount of time ‘reporting’ creationist claims about the Grand Canyon.

I don’t consider myself a creationist. I don’t have any interest in sharing my personal views on how the canyon was carved, mostly because I’ve spent almost no time pondering my personal views — it takes all my energy as a reporter and writer to understand and explain my subjects’ views fairly and thoroughly.

So what was she doing writing science articles for the NYT, if she’d never thought about the science?

Anyway, I was reminded of that by this recent comic.

This has always been the way of the NYT. All through the Bush years, the Iraq War, every political issue, the New York Times always been the banner carrier for the passive voice and both-siderism. It’s just the worst.

Wilgoren/Rudoren is now the editor of The Forward, where she has won awards from, among others, the Religious News Association, which is no surprise. It is not clear if she has yet started thinking.

Let’s get this out of the way: Biden is old. He’s slow and halting in his speech, he sounds like an old man. I’d rather we had a younger candidate running, but he’ll get the job done.

His opponent, on the other hands, sounds like he’s damaged mentally. He has a fucked up brain, and it’s obvious that there’s something more going on than just an age-related slow-down. Here’s a diagnosis by Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

• Changes in speech patterns with many fewer and simpler words (decline in vocabulary) with fewer adjectives and adverbs.
• A decline in cognitive focus on speech subjects with incomplete sentences and an inability to focus on a topic long enough to complete a sentence when not reading from a teleprompter.
• Difficulty pronouncing words, word substitution and nonsense words – known as paraphasia
• Tangential thinking where the topic switches mid-sentence to some unrelated topic.
• Frequent repetition of words and phrases as if his mind is stuck in a loop.
• Disinhibition and an inability to control verbal outbursts.
• Socially inappropriate behavior – mocking a man with muscular dystrophy, disrespecting fallen soldiers as losers.
• Lack of self-awareness in that he apparently cannot see how inappropriate his behavior has become and use his judgment to stop himself.
• Changes in movement and gait. His walk appears wide-based and he has developed a swing of his right leg. He appears glued to the floor when he “dances” for his audience. If caught on camera standing still, he appears unnaturally immobile.
• The changes in judgment and impulse control have uncovered and perhaps worsened underlying personality traits that others have characterized as narcissistic and antisocial. The changes have led some experts to suggest a diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.”

All of that is apparent. This isn’t just picking a biased doctor to invent a diagnosis — that’s all stuff we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears. His fanatical voters don’t care, the media doesn’t care, he plans to shamble into office like a rot-brained zombie.

I thought this was one of the worst fathers ever: remember the Canadian farmer who moved his whole family to Russia? Arend and Anneesa Feenstra, who dragged their ten kids to an uncertain future, are being told to leave because who knew, they were expected to learn the Russian language, and Arend didn’t have time. Why he didn’t have time is a mystery, since his wife, by his own admission, was doing all the childcare and housework and editing the YouTube videos that were their sole source of income.

That’s a deeply stupid dad who is letting his ideology destroy his whole family.

But then there’s a dad that’s even worse. Stewart Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers and is now serving an 18-year federal sentence for conspiring to overthrow the government. You might suspect he didn’t have the happiest home life. Now we know how bad it was: his son has come out and told all.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Adams revealed his abusive upbringing at the hands of Stewart Rhodes, and the new path that he seeks to chart.

He said living with Rhodes was a constant process of moving around and starting over, as the Yale-educated militant convinced his family the government was spying on them and the end of days was imminent.

“We lived in extreme isolation in one particular cultural bubble in increasingly paranoid and militant right-wing political spheres everywhere we moved in the country, until eventually we ended up in Montana,” Adams said.

When his mother divorced Rhodes in 2018, Adams was able to move out of the shadow he cast on their family. Rhodes severely undercut Adams’ and his seven siblings’ schooling and barred them from publicly talking about their home lives. Adams couldn’t complete a times table until he was 19 and has spent the last several years trying to catch up on his education—recently enrolling in several college courses.

Yikes. Dakota Adams has his revenge, though. He’s running for the Montana state house…as a Democrat!

“It served as a sobering wake-up call in terms of how much danger we are truly in and how the Republican Party enabled a president to become an active danger to this republic,” he said. “I was forced to reevaluate a lot of beliefs and face hard questions about what I really stood for.”

He has plans to sell the body armor and guns he once wore to protest the government alongside his father, and he had some strong thoughts on guns and gun culture.

“American gun culture needs to be rehabilitated from an egotistical and vanity-based, hyper-individualist ego trip culture to civil service and solemn responsibility to the community,” he said. He still opposes total bans on firearms—he believed they could be necessary for the self-defense of vulnerable groups.

Many of his direct policy concerns are about making Montana livable for middle- and lower-income people. Most of the voters in his area are strongly conservative, and Adams tries to avoid sweeping cultural and social issues. He would rather focus on the challenges directly facing Montana residents.

I’d vote for him.

It’s something I’ve always felt, so this is an interesting illustrative example. I’ve thought that the only way to cultivate empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded children is to give them an empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded upbringing. The authoritarian parents, like Rhodes and Feenstra not only make their kids’ lives a living hell, it drives them away from their ideology. I suspect some of the commenters here have similar stories, of being brought up in an oppressive environment and now rebounding towards a more progressive approach to life. That’s one of the strengths of the Left.

It’s an ever-retreating target. I’ve been worried about the loss of income and the sudden increase in health care costs, so I’ve been deferring it, which is no favor to my students given how ancient I am (or, alternatively, it’s a benefit because if I were to leave, the administration wouldn’t replace me for years, if at all.) I might as well give up on the fantasy, if the Republicans get their way.

Note that Trump recently threatened social security and medicare.

The Trump campaign was in full damage control last week after the former president called in to CNBC and suggested making cuts from Medicare and Social Security, which offer financial care to retired Americans or those with a disability.

But, you say, that was just Trump, who is insane, and his campaign is backpedaling fast.

Except that the Republican party is pushing for the same thing!

A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.

The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.

I’m eligible to retire right now, but maybe in a few years I won’t be old enough. It won’t be because I’m getting younger — time doesn’t work that way.

There is chaos in Gaza — people are starving, they’re being bombed and shot, and the US has so far been disgustingly passive about it all. We need positive ideas and new tactics to change the situation, so let’s get advice from…Donald Trump’s son-in-law? I admit, Jared Kushner is looking at Israel through a different lens.

His remarks at Harvard gave a hint of the kind of Middle East policy that could be pursued in the event that Trump returns to the White House, including a search for a normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods, Kushner told his interviewer, the faculty chair of the Middle East Initiative, Prof Tarek Masoud. Kushner also lamented all the money that had gone into the territory’s tunnel network and munitions instead of education and innovation.

It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up, Kushner said. But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.

Masoud replied that there was “a lot to talk about there”.

Jesus. Exactly what you’d expect from a developer and slumlord — every piece of land is a property to be seized and exploited. Gaza is a chunk of ocean front without casinos and high rise hotels, let’s fix it!

He doesn’t seem to have put much thought into the people who live there. You know, the ones who had other things to do with their money than pay out exorbitant rents to a landlord.

Kushner also said he thinks Israel should move civilians from Gaza to the Negev desert in southern Israel.

He said that if he were in charge of Israel his number one priority would be getting civilians out of the southern city of Rafah, and that with diplomacy it could be possible to get them into Egypt.

But in addition to that, I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there, he said. I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.

He reiterated the point a little later, saying: I do think right now opening up the Negev, creating a secure area there, moving the civilians out, and then going in and finishing the job would be the right move.

Finish the job? Finish what job? The extermination of the Palestinians? Sure, just bulldoze a patch of desert and move them there. This is insane.

I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now, Kushner said. And I’m looking at the situation and I’m thinking: what would I do if I was there?

I’m thinking: why the hell was Jared Fucking Kushner, that incompetent hack, invited to Harvard to opine on Israel?

Go away, libertarian/fascist/racist profiteer.

If we don’t get a “red wave,” will you move back to South Africa?

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Oh, wait, is the “red wave” what Trump was referring to in his recent “blood bath” comments?

In May of 1933, Nazis stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and walked off with cartloads of books from their library, which they then burned, publicly. This is one of the most famous photographs of the pre-war period, illustrating their process for purging “Jewish” literature from Germany.

On May 6, 1933, Nazi demonstrators raided the libraries of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a German name that roughly translates to the Institute of Sexology. The Institute was a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality. More than 20,000 books were taken from shelves and burned days later in the streets by Nazi youth groups.

A book publisher named Rubin Mass afterwards found a few scorched pages that survived the fire, and preserved them to remember the criminality of the right-wing mob.

They were from Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie. Hirschfeld was Jewish, gay, and a scholar, so of course he was hated by Nazis. Most people who know anything about the rise of Hitler’s regime know this — it’s common knowledge that the Nazis regarded anything to do with deviations from a Christian heterosexual norm as degenerate. You have to be soaking in the anti-intellectual, ahistorical circle-jerk of right-wing apologetics to be totally unaware of these facts.

Cue JK Rowling.

J.K. Rowling is once again making ignorant and anti-trans comments online. On Wednesday, the Harry Potter author’s name began trending on X thanks to an ill-advised post in which she denied the claim that Nazis burned “books on trans healthcare and research.”

“I just… how?” Rowling wrote above a screenshot of a nameless user’s post. “How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?””

I wish the murder of six million Jews, gays, transexuals, Romany, and political opponents had been nothing but a “fever dream,” but it wasn’t. It was a horrible reality that now a famous author of children’s fantasy books would like to bring back.

I’m ashamed to say that I contributed to her coffers years ago, by buying several of her books for my kids. That was before she grew the invisible toothbrush mustache and started openly courting fascists, though. At least I never paid to see any of those Harry Potter movies, and never will.