Now I understand why the biggest billionaires all seem to get into the space game. It explains so much.
Don’t tell them how easy it would be to push someone out an airlock.
The heartbreak of a breakup is worse when you get the news secondhand. Putin has parted ways with Trump.
More than a month later than most world leaders, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joe Biden for his victory in the election, a delayed recognition that could set the tone for icy relations.
“In his message Vladimir Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which bear special responsibility for global security and stability, can, despite their differences, effectively contribute to solving many problems and meeting challenges that the world is facing today,” the Kremlin said in a statement.
I knew all along that the relationship would never work out — it was a friendship of convenience between two spoiled, selfish people who would only stick together while they thought they could get something from one another. Oh well, Donald still has a few potential dates for the prom on Saturday.
Putin was one of the last heads of state to acknowledge Biden’s win; Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un are other holdouts.
I can see where Bolsonaro and Kim have a lot in common with the loser-in-chief, but I was baffled by Obrador. Shouldn’t Mexico be happy to see a bigoted basher out of office? But here’s a brief explanation:
Few expected López Obrador, elected in July 2018, to openly embrace Trump and his hard-line border policies after all the dirt thrown. But that’s just what happened.
At heart, the two men are nationalists more concerned with domestic business than foreign affairs, experts say.
“I think we need to understand that AMLO has an uncommon worldview,” said Duncan Wood, director of the nonpartisan Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute in Washington, D.C. “He is much more focused on what happens internally than what happens in the United States. He wants the world to know he isn’t beholden to the United States.”
OK, I can respect that — it’s not so much an affection for Trump as it is a need to stand independent of the US, no matter who holds the office.
Time to crash down into reality. Meet Bob Good, the newly elected congressvermin from Virginia.
You think electing Biden made everything all better? Think again.
Huh. The US didn’t suddenly become smarter on 4 November. I guess the work has only just begun.
The electoral college has met, and Biden is now officially and without a doubt the president elect (not that it’s been seriously in questions since the election). There has been no surprising defection of electors. The court cases have all gone down in flames. We ought to be done.
Who believes the delusional narcissist will now concede?
My local state representative, Jeff “Goose Poop” Backer*, was begging Minnesota to join in that ludicrous Texas lawsuit to invalidate the elections in 4 states that didn’t go the way Republicans wanted — you know, the lawsuit that collapsed yesterday.
Below is the letter I sent to our Attorney General stating our support of MN joining the Texas lawsuit. We must protect the integrity of this and all future elections to ensure your constitutional rights are protected. ~ Jeff
“Elections belong to the People.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
**********************************************************
Honorable Attorney General Ellison
I urge you to protect my constituent’s constitutional voting rights by joining the U.S. Supreme Court suit with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against defendant states that violated the U.S. Constitution during the 2020 presidential election.
The actions of these states, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, have violated the election requirements of the Constitution resulting in an illegitimate vote of the Electoral College.
Again, I urge you to join suit with Texas AG Paxton to protect my Constituent’s constitutional rights. His lawsuit can be found here: https://www.scribd.com/…/TX-v-State-Motion-2020-12-07….
Sincerely
Jeff Backer, State Representative 12A
701-361-1909
I am amused at the Lincoln quote — his goal is to erase the voters in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. I guess their elections didn’t belong to them. They belonged to the Republican party.
The claim that their position is the constitutional one seems to be a common one among the Trumpers. I don’t get how they can say that about 50 lawsuits that have all been dismissed by multiple courts, some of which were even rejected by a Supreme Court that has been packed with Republican troglodytes?
This episode has revealed once again the motivated reasoning of Republicans. Only votes for their candidates are valid, everyone must march in lockstep behind their choice, even if it’s someone as hateful and incompetent as our soon-to-be ex-president.
*He earned the nickname by opposing legislation to limit agricultural runoff, blaming the poisons polluting our rivers on the fact that we’re on a major migratory flyway. It wasn’t herbicides and pesticides we needed to worry about, it’s all the goose poop! He’s awful.
That Texas lawsuit to invalidate the election results of 4 other states and just give the presidency to Trump? Rejected.
Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.
Gosh. How will Texas Republicans react? They suggest that they and 17 other states should form their own union, a Confederacy if you will, and go their own way.
Texas GOP chair says in light of Supreme Court tossing out Texas case, "Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.” pic.twitter.com/j84IKPrwqy
— Ben Wermund (@BenjaminEW) December 12, 2020
This sure sounds awfully familiar. The last time they tried that, it didn’t turn out so well for Texas.
Also, those 106 “congressman” [sic]? Traitors, every one. Kick them out.
It’s that season.
“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. It’s all getting hard to believe, isn’t it?
Death row inmate Brandon Bernard has been executed in Indiana after last-minute clemency pleas were rejected by the US Supreme Court.
Bernard, 40, was convicted of murder in 1999 when he was a teenager, and is the youngest offender to be executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years.
Bernard told the family of the couple he killed he was sorry, before dying by lethal injection on Thursday.
Four more executions are planned before the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.
This administration is rushing to murder as many people as they can before a new administration, that might be slightly more reluctant to murder people (only slightly!), comes to power. It’s very strange. Who are these people who are so eager to kill before someone can tell them “NO!”?
JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. Interesting fictions.
We should have known. We’ve heard it for so long. Creationists love the Argument from Big Numbers — if we chain together a whole series of improbabilities and multiply them, we can get a really big exponent, therefore God. This approach is so familiar there’s a FAQ by Ian Musgrave on the errors in the calculations of the evolution of proteins.
Problems with the creationists’ “it’s so improbable” calculations
1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a “modern” protein, or even a complete bacterium with all “modern” proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.
2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.
4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.
5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.
We’ve seen it all. People seem to be fundamentally statistically innumerate and, without training, incapable of grasping the basic principles. There are whole books about innumeracy and its consequences.
So I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw that the Texas Attorney General had filed a lawsuit claiming there was a less than one in a quadrillion
chance that Biden could have honestly won the Texas election, and that it’s based on a familiarly stupid argument. Also unsurprising: that an old talk.origins compatriot, Wesley Elsberry, would jump on the faulty reasoning. We’ve all been here before.
Texas filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four other states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia). Others have already weighed in on how unserious a lawsuit this apparently is.
But I want to have a look at something that is a bit more approachable, which is the statistics opinion that Texas Attroney General Ken Paxton relied upon in crafting the lawsuit. It makes some remarkable claims:
The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the
four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—
independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m.
on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four
States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one
in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004). See Decl.
of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. (“Cicchetti Decl.”) at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31 (App. 4a-7a,
9a).
Read Wesley’s post for a thorough deconstruction (or this thread for a similar take), so I’ll keep it simple. What kills Paxton’s claims are the assumptions: he assumes that voters should have voted exactly as they did in 2016, that people who voted early on election day would have the same statistical preferences as those who voted later, that people who voted in person would vote the same way as those who voted by mail, and that different precincts would show no change in their preferences over time. He doesn’t seem to realize that what he has shown is not that Biden couldn’t have won, but that his assumptions were all wrong.
Now this has gotten me thinking about genetics, and it’s too early — this is my break, people — and the very first cross we’re going to do. It’s a boring cross to get heterozygotes out of two true-breeding strains, just a preliminary to the real experiment, but I have the students do observations to test their assumption that they’ll get half males and half females. They never do, and the statistics all say it’s a significant difference, with more females than males. Further, when you sample the population at different times after eclosion, it changes, with more females eclosing early. You don’t get to say, “it’s supposed to be 50:50!” and pretend your results are wrong — you’re supposed to question your assumption that sex is a random binary choice. There are a lot of factors that bias the outcome!
This story about Diane Feinstein makes me sad. She’s exhibiting signs of severe cognitive decline, and is hindering progress by Democrats in the Senate with her inability to function.
In a hearing on November 17th, Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, at eighty-seven, is the oldest member of the Senate, grilled a witness. Reading from a sheath of prepared papers, she asked Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, whether his company was doing enough to stem the spread of disinformation. Elaborating, she read in full a tweet that President Trump had disseminated on November 7th, falsely claiming to have won the Presidential election. She then asked Dorsey if Twitter’s labelling of the tweet as disputed had adequately alerted readers that it was a bald lie.
It was a good question. Feinstein seemed sharp and focussed. For decades, she has been the epitome of a female trailblazer in Washington, always hyper-prepared. But this time, after Dorsey responded, Feinstein asked him the same question again, reading it word for word, along with the Trump tweet. Her inflection was eerily identical. Feinstein looked and sounded just as authoritative, seemingly registering no awareness that she was repeating herself verbatim. Dorsey graciously answered the question all over again.
She’s a symptom. The whole Senate is sclerotic with these ancient, decrepit geezer. It’s how we ended up with a 78 year old Democratic president, and a senate full of old people shaking their canes at each other.
Meanwhile, the Feinstein situation has triggered the latest round in a larger generational fight in the Democratic Senate caucus. Unlike the Republican leadership in the Senate, which rotates committee chairmanships, the Democrats have stuck with the seniority system. Some frustrated younger members argue that this has undermined the Democrats’ effectiveness by giving too much power to elderly and sometimes out-of-touch chairs, resulting in uncoördinated strategy and too little opportunity for members in their prime.
A glimpse of the discontent became visible last month, when Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, who at sixty-five is considered a younger member, challenged the claim of Richard Durbin, the seventy-six-year-old senator from Illinois, a long-serving member of the Party’s leadership, to be next in line to fill Feinstein’s seat as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
That’s depressing. I’m 63 and I’d be a young babe in that place, and that just isn’t right.
I am not suffering any kind of cognitive decline (I think, but then I wouldn’t know, would I?) but I am suddenly thinking that I should be considering retirement. I’ve never seriously thought about it before, just assuming I’d keep going and going until I dropped dead in front of a class (also not something I think is imminent), and retirement was not something that would ever be an option for me. But now, I’m contemplating it, not just because Feinstein is setting a bad example, but because this stupid pandemic has been traumatic, and I wouldn’t want to keep teaching this way. It would probably serve the students better if I were replaced with a younger, more up-to-date person (not much hope of that, either, with university finances being hit hard recently, so if I left, I’d probably be replaced with nobody).
Anyway, I’m putting my retirement on the agenda. At some point. I should start squinting at the calendar. And my finances. All I’m saying is that if I’m still at UMM when I’m 70, you all have the job of yelling at me to stop being selfish.
Oh, and if I do take the option of dropping dead before retiring, yell at my corpse even harder that I was so selfish.
Get ready, you’re going to hear that question a lot from the Republicans in coming years. Just keep this in mind:
The fossil fuel lobby has actively worked in many countries to protect their subsidies and avoid the imposition of carbon taxes. Doing so protects their profits.
US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education
Funny how cutting oil subsidies and defense never end up on the chopping block.
