Boeing gets another black mark

This shiny new Boeing spacecraft, the Starliner, went up to the ISS in June. They were supposed to return on 14 June. It is now August. It’s beginning to look like the Starliner is too unreliable to make the return trip, and NASA is going to have to ask SpaceX to rescue the crew. This is another embarrassing failure for Boeing. On my recent trip to Seattle, I flew on a 737, but it was OK, it was one of the older models, built before the disastrous takeover by incompetent MBAs.

Maybe the astronauts should have prayed harder?

You can call me weird, I don’t mind

We’ve got to be careful about the whole “weird” thing. I saw this story about a
man in Oklahoma who raises spiders and felt a moment of self concern.

His life’s mission is to save spiders for a greater purpose. Edmond resident Nick Krueger said spiders are important to the environment and science.

He sends the spiders he collects to researchers worldwide to help solve problems. Inside Krueger’s home, people would discover a whole new world.

“There’s always something new to learn,” said Krueger, inside his “spider room. “Most people hear that you do that, and they say, ‘What? Why?’”

He uses the words “weird and enthusiastic” to describe his hobby, but Krueger loves being unique.

“It’s fun to be weird,” Krueger said. “Being normal is boring.”

Some people might think I am weird, and I really don’t mind. Maybe I would if I were running for high office. I still think it’s a good tactic to label this current crop of Republicans as weird, though. I remember the Republicans way back, when their schtick was that they were staid, sober, strait-laced, boring conservatives who wanted no nonsense and just wanted to get the job done…the job of making money. They were bankers and shop-keepers. They didn’t like Communists. That was their whole image, and they rode that reputation into office, promising stability and restraint.

Now they’ve morphed into creeps who obsess over bathrooms and want to ban books and are upset about non-white people having civil rights. Their whole rep rests on being the boring guys wearing suits, and it’s fair to point out that no, they’re not that any more at all, they’re fanatical freaks who are trying to control other people’s lives.

And they’re not cool enough to raise spiders in their living room.

It’s worth pointing out that where, once upon a time, the Republican agenda was mainstream and entirely comfortable for the typical middle-class family, they have evolved into this weird alien anti-American freak show that is “at odds with the average American’s life”.

They have become the party of the wealthy elites, out of touch with the day-to-day reality of the people. Thomas Paine wrote about what happened to the French nobility, and it’s exactly how to make them hurt.

The more aristocracy appeared, the more it was despised; there was a visible imbecility and want of intellects in the majority, a sort of je ne sais quoi, that while it affected to be more than citizen, was less than man. It lost ground from contempt more than from hatred; and was rather jeered at as an ass, than dreaded as a lion. This is the general character of aristocracy, or what are called Nobles or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.

We know this. Mel Brooks spelled it out.

You know that Trump hates being made to look like a fool. Keep it up.

Blood quantum is back, baby

First of all…Mike Lindell has a TV station? He’s got something called “Lindell-TV,” anyway, which seems to be nothing but a streaming channel on an off-brand service. The costs for a kook to get online and make noise just gets lower and lower.

Anyway, one of the babblers on that network wants Kamala Harris to take a DNA test.

A host on Mike Lindell’s television network called on Vice President Kamala Harris to take a DNA test to prove a demonic spirit wasn’t prompting her to say she was Black.

During his daily “Let’s Talk About It” program on Lindell TV, host Will Johnson defended former President Donald Trump’s claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”

What does demon DNA look like? How would we tell?

But Johnson suggested Thursday that Harris was lying about her race and should take a DNA test.

“How about we get Kamala Harris to do a DNA test like him and like Elizabeth Warren?” Johnson said. “Then we’ll put it to rest. She comes back, and she’s a little bit more Black than Elizabeth Warren is Indian, then we’ll, OK, go, she can be Black half the time.”

“Why not do that?” he asked. “And then they say we are the weird ones — we’re the weird ones because we don’t want to go along with the insanity.”

Elizabeth Warren was negligibly Indian, and most importantly, did not have any cultural connection to any tribe. Harris has a father who is black, so she’s roughly half black genetically, but what matters more is that she grew up with black and Indian heritage. You don’t get to tell her what her background is. She’s black and Indian. That the Republicans are diving into this weird obsession with inventing criteria for people’s cultural and genetic heritage is creepy.

Mr Johnson is the insane weird guy who wants to quantify how “black” a person is allowed to be. It doesn’t make any sense — if 23andme comes back and says she is 43.5% black, how does one “be” black 43.5% of the time?

I’ve had 23andme analyze my DNA, and this is what it tells me.

I guess I’m 2/3 Scandinavian. What does that mean for my allowed behavior? So two of my 3 meals per day should be matpakke, herring, or kjøttkaker, and the other meal should be pasties, bangers and mash, or mushy peas? Since I’m an atheist, I’m probably fractionally demonic, so my snacks should probably be demonic.

This is what we mean by calling these bozos “weird” — they have this twisted idea that people must conform to the stereotypes rattling around in their heads.

As we all know, real women lose at sports

As usual, the conservatives have found an absurd issue at the Olympics to have a screaming fit over. First it was an opening ceremony that they thought mocked the Last Supper (it didn’t, unless you think Jesus’ last meal was a wild bacchanal), and now it’s a women’s boxing match that the transvestigators have decided was unfair because the winnner was a man.

She wasn’t.

The inaccurate statements about her identity were boosted by prominent anti-trans individuals like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, as well as politicians like US Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and conservative Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Their statements stirred up a storm of anger on the right despite the fact that Khelif is a cisgender woman.

As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos has explained, there aren’t any transgender athletes at the Olympics this year who are competing outside of the sex they were assigned at birth, though IOC rules don’t bar their inclusion so long as they meet certain eligibility criteria. “There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman,” International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesperson Mark Adams told reporters. “The question you have to ask yourself is, are these athletes women? The answer is yes.”

Imane Khelif is not trans, and was assigned female at birth. She’s a cis woman! But somehow, because she’s strong and can punch hard, attributes any woman who becomes an Olympic boxing competitor would share, her sex and gender are called into question.

That reaction has since spawned scrutiny of Khelif, who was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman. False claims that she is a trans person or that she is a man pretending to be a woman quickly spread thanks to reports she was disqualified from a 2023 International Boxing Association event and the resurfacing of comments by the president of that organization suggesting that her elimination was because she failed a hormone test.

She probably has some unusual physiological characteristics that confused officials of the IBA, but every Olympic competitor is a genetic freak, or they wouldn’t be operating at such a high level of performance. Simone Biles is way out there on the edge of human capability; Michael Phelps has an unusual morphology that made him a strong swimmer. Shall we disqualify them because they don’t have average athletic ability? That’s the whole point of the Olympics, to single out people with exceptional physical characteristics! You don’t get to whine that it’s unfair when an athlete at that level is amazingly good at what they do…or even worse, call into question their identity or history or social role or sexual preferences because you don’t like that they win.

There’s another ugly side to this whole affair.

Beyond questions of sex, there are racial dynamics at play in the perceptions of this match. Female athletes of color — particularly those of African and African American descent — have long been accused of being men when they’ve beaten white women in competition. This happened most notably with tennis phenom Serena Williams and track star Caster Semenya, both of whom endured tropes that cast Black women as more masculine and threatening.

I guess conservatives just want to police women’s behavior. Surprise.

I guess Ken Ham won’t be voting for Kamala Harris

I do appreciate it when people catch Ken Ham in those moments when he thinks he’s preaching to the faithful. He abandons all political caution and lets his freakish creepy views hang out. Here’s an Instagram video of Ken Ham preaching against that wicked Kamala Harris. He starts like this:

Like to see Kamala Harris’ latest embarrassment? Excuse me, it’s with a group of drag queens, and that’s why everything is in pink as well.

He then shows a brief (very brief, like a second or two) clip of Harris smiling and clapping. Where’s the embarrassment? We’re supposed to see this as a horror, I guess.

That tells you something about the state of this nation. You should judge that against scripture.

I mean, so evil.

Oooh, so evil. So embarrassing. Then we get another blip of Harris saying,

We trust women to make decisions about their own body!

Oh, she needs to learn some science, because a fertilized egg is not part of a woman’s body. It’s totally separate, and it’s a unique individual made in the image of god, and so she’s calling for the murder of many humans as she can in the mother’s womb.

My brain blacked out momentarily, hearing Ham declare that someone else needs to learn some science.

Uh, no, a zygote is genetically distinct from the woman’s cells, but it is part of a woman’s body. It divides to generate a trophectoderm, literally a feeding structure, that develops into a placenta that infiltrates and interdigitates with the woman’s uterine lining, intimately sharing her blood and nutrients for 9 months, inseparable from her tissues. I should think a woman ought to be able to make decisions about her health, her metabolism, her body, all these things that are profoundly affected by a pregnancy.

But Ken Ham is a creepy lying twerp. He then shows this bizarre image.

What is it with far-right cartoonists and their desperate need to slap labels on their metaphors? Do they lack the confidence in their art, and fear that it might be misinterpreted? This is Ben Garrison levels of a lack of faith in the intelligence of their readers.

I expect him to consider “evolution” as one of the storm of evils besetting the nice, “normal” family out rafting on their Bible, but “gender” is bad now? And “male and female restrooms”? I guess the last one sort of makes sense if you’re sufficiently regressive — after all, it was businesses providing women toilet facilities, rather than just for men, that allowed 19th century women the freedom to enter the market place. I wonder if Republicans are considering a ban on women’s restrooms?

I do think that having the presumably Christian characters in the cartoon clinging to an anchor in a storm is a good metaphor. I notice they didn’t feel the need to label that one.

He seemed surprised that the attendees at the National Association of Black Journalists were black

I have never witnessed so much deflection, evasion, and dishonesty…and I’ve debated creationists. I had to run to the bathroom twice during this video!*

I was surprised to see his line of criticism of Kamala Harris was to accuse her of not actually being black. That degree of racism was…novel? It’ll be interesting to see how that works for him in a debate.

*Admittedly, there were other circumstances.