Since this is what it means to be a religious Christian:
“We are a religious state. We are going to fight to keep that (LGBTQ) filth out of the state of Oklahoma, because we’re a Christian state.”
He makes a good case for keeping Christians out of the state government. That’s a very un-American sentiment, to claim that our government is sectarian and religious.
Reminder: here’s the “LGBTQ filth” he wants to eradicate.
Potholer54 always does skepticism well. Here, he’s looking into the claim that whale deaths are correlated with the presence of wind farms, and the answer, in short, is “no.” Although industrial noise is uncomfortable/stressful for whales, it’s not just wind farms that we should be looking into.
It’s also a thorough exposé of Michael Shellenberger. Shellenberger doesn’t understand what “correlation” means, he’s selective in his choice of causes (windfarms bad, oil exploration good), and he’s an expert in the conservative shell game of hiding the sources of his funding. Don’t trust a thing that man says.
You will not be surprised to learn that he is currently the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin. Yeah, that University of Austin. He claims to be an “environmental activist,” but he’s not — he’s a right-wing shill for the oil industry.
It’s beginning to look like just being a Republican is an admission of guilty participation in a scam that netted millions of dollars. Justice has taken a small step in giving Wayne LaPierre of the NRA what he deserves.
After a bitterly fought six-week civil trial, a New York jury on Friday found ex-National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre liable for improperly spending millions of dollars of the pro-gun group’s money on luxuries such as private jet flights, extravagant vacations, and sun-soaked stays on private yachts.
LaPierre’s profligate ways violated his fiduciary duties and cost the NRA some $5.4 million, the jury determined. He has reimbursed the organization $1.5 million, thus far.
Jurors deliberated for five days before returning their verdict on the state’s allegations of brazen corruption by the 74-year-old LaPierre. In court, prosecutors from the New York State Attorney General’s Office laid out a broad array of evidence to demonstrate what they described as a high-living chief executive using the NRA as his own personal slush fund.
LaPierre delivered the most unlikely justification for his years of theft.
When questioned on the stand about receiving luxurious gifts including Italian suits worth nearly $300,000, LaPierre insisted he considered the clothes to have been “work items.”
“I did all the television for the NRA,” he testified, explaining that his publicist wanted him to look good onscreen.
Seriously, dude? You’re the most Lon Chaney looking motherfucker on the planet. You always looked like a raging lunatic, and you thought you were looking good?
For comparison purposes:
But seriously, he shouldn’t be penalized for being a funny-looking guy (neither should I!), and being convicted of embezzling is the least of his crimes. He should be imprisoned for his long career of promoting mass murder and irresponsible gun ownership.
Oh, look. Another bogus claim by an extremist conservative.
The point of sex is to create children — this is natural, normal, and good.
No, that is one of the purposes of sex. One of many. Do he and his wife only have sex when they intend to have children?
Masturbation is perfectly natural. So is every sex act I can imagine. I’d like to know which ones are unnatural or supernatural…list them for us, Chris. I’m sure it would be educational.
I don’t have procreative sex. Am I not normal? Is everyone who has sex after menopause or after sterilization abnormal? What about people who are naturally sterile?
If Rufo’s attitude is “good,” how do we account for all the oppressive, puritanical harm done to people in its name?
His whole schtick isn’t about natural, normal, or good. It’s all about control and punishing people who don’t follow his sick, sad ideology.
We have a new villain (same as the old villain): librarians. West Virginia wants to make them liable to prosecution.
The West Virginia House of Delegates debated the merits of removing protections for public librarians and school librarians from criminal prosecution in the off chance a minor encounters books and content some consider to be obscene.
The House passed House Bill 4654 – removing bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums from the list of exemptions from criminal liability relating to distribution and display to a minor of obscene matter – in a 85-12 vote Friday, sending the bill to the state Senate.
HB 4654 would lift criminal liability exemptions from schools in the presentation of local or state-approved curriculum, and public libraries and museums displaying obscene matter to a minor when the child is not accompanied by a parent/guardian.
Are you surprised? Those nefarious librarians are probably plotting to commit evil acts like stocking children’s books that present sexuality in an informative and non-threatening way, and maybe they’ll even bring in people wearing women’s clothing to entertain kids and encourage reading. It’s all part of their wicked plan.
This prescient cartoon from more than 20 years saw the whole conspiracy developing.
It’s easy enough to generate these names, the uncomfortable part is imagining what behaviors are associated with each. I spent the last few minutes inventing all kids of new kinks (kanks, kenks, konks, kunks.)
Here’s a list of organizations you must not ever trust:
Look at those names! How can you not support them? Those titles are all lies, though — these are fronts for quacks and medicine denialists that are raking in millions of dollars promoting anti-vaccine bullshit. They are busily undermining health care in this country, and somehow they avoid the criminal charges they deserve. They’re big money sinks used to spread misinformation, and perhaps the only salvation we have is that they’re all run by venal grifters who siphon off much of their money to pay themselves overblown salaries.
One of the most prominent grifters is Joseph Ladapo, the stunningly incompetent Florida Surgeon General. Florida is experiencing a measles outbreak — a serious, potentially disfiguring and even fatal disease that is extremely contagious — and Ladapo is basically doing nothing.
Amid an outbreak of measles at a Florida elementary school, the state’s surgeon general has defied federal health guidance and told parents it’s up to them whether they want to keep their unvaccinated child home to avoid infection.
In a letter to parents of children attending Manatee Bay Elementary school in Weston, where six cases of measles have already been reported, Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
That advice runs counter to what Ladapo acknowledged in his letter was the “normal” recommendation that parents keep unvaccinated children home for up to 21 days — the incubation period for measles.
This is not the first time that Ladapo has challenged health recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Last month, he called for halting the use of COVID vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.
Ladapo is supported by Republican conservatives who fast-tracked him into his current position, and…he has an MD and PhD from Harvard! Harvard seems to be losing what reputation they had as a prestigious university, and are fast becoming the MAGA equivalent of a diploma mill.
You know how the secret to getting rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels? Well, I’m going to be ready when this alpha male plan takes off.
I am going to have to ramp up production by a lot.
I was curious to know who was running the Alabama Supreme Court after that ridiculous ruling that embryos are human children from conception. The chief justice is a man named Tom Parker, who is a rabid Christian Nationalist and QAnon fanatic.
During a recent interview on the program of self-proclaimed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker indicated that he is a proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.
Enlow is a pro-Trump “prophet” and leading proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a “quasi-biblical blueprint for theocracy” that asserts that Christians must impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in U.S. life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.
Enlow has also repeatedly pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, sometimes even connecting it to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Per Right Wing Watch, Enlow has claimed that world leaders are “satanic” pedophiles who “steal blood” and “do sacrifices” and that “there is presently no real democracy on the planet” because over 90 percent of world leaders are involved in pedophilia and are being blackmailed.
How do such delusional Christian zealots rise to power? He was elected by the good people of Alabama.
Confederate Outfitters issued a slate of Dixie-friendly candidates a couple years ago. It put it like this:
Tom Parker – Friend of Confederates – Ideal Candidate.
There you go. Make America Gray Again. Or at least the uniforms.
I don’t usually write opinion about candidates this close to elections. I don’t pick or endorse candidates. I don’t trust any of them because as soon as you say something nice about one they turn into somebody else.
…
But there are exceptions to rules, and if Tom Parker is anything, he’s exceptional.He’s more Roy Moore than Roy Moore. Parker is an activist judge who made his name campaigning against activist judges. Judges who disagree with his view, as Parker put it, should be considered terrorists like al Qaeda.
Tom Parker is not qualified to judge traffic court. He’s a good ol’ boy Southern bigot, and his biases make him anti-science.
Shhh. Don’t let my university administrators know about this post. It’s secret.
The University of Minnesota Morris has a new scheme for recruiting called Degree In Three. It’s promoting the idea that you can graduate in 3 years, rather than four. It’s all empty PR.
They aren’t lying. It’s true. It’s possible to complete your bachelor’s degree in three years at UMM.
What they’re not saying is that this is not a new program, students have always been able to do this. UMM allows considerable flexibility — there’s never been any kind of fixed year by year requirements where there is a necessary fourth year component to the degree. I was advising students 20 years ago about ways to finish an accelerated program. It just required either coming in with a buttload of college credits (entirely possible, Minnesota has Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) where advanced high school students could get college credits), or you could just take overloads every semester. It wasn’t fun or easy, but it was doable. I usually tried to dissuade students from going that route, but now it’s an advertising gimmick.
Where I object is that nothing has changed. We certainly haven’t reduced graduation requirements. You still have to complete 120 credits; you can do that by taking 20 credits every semester for three years, or, as they suggest, 16 credits every semester + 8 credits of summer courses every year. So, basically, our Degree in Three program is about telling students to work harder faster.
One obstacle to this plan is that we don’t have the staffing to provide every course every semester, so students will have to plot a very specific path through the available courses to complete all the requirements. For instance, we don’t offer ecology in the spring here, because normally it’s so cold and snowy as to preclude any fieldwork — if you thought you’d just take it in spring of your third year, nuh-uh, you’re going to have to take it in a fourth year anyway. It also limits flexibility. Your schedule is so tight that if you fail to get in to a necessary course one year, the cascade of failed prerequisites may screw all of your plans. No, we’re not hiring additional faculty to cope with this problem.
A course overload is serious business. I’ve often had to advise students who sign up for too many courses at once, confident that they could handle it, and then they get sick one week or a relative dies and kaboom, suddenly, no they can’t handle it. I try to recommend that my students take only two lab courses at once, because they’re already a big time-suck, but I’ve had some students try to take three…they just disappear for a semester. It’s a miserable amount of work. Our students are ambitious over-achievers, so they’ll try and some will succeed, but I’m not here to crack whips.
The whole program is antithetical to the liberal arts experience. Students are supposed to have the opportunity to explore the world of ideas, taking classes in a specific degree-granting program, but also being able (even required and expected) to take a variety of courses outside that program. Oh, you’re trying to get a degree in biochemistry, but you’ve discovered that you love poetry and literature? So sorry, you don’t have time to take those courses before we trundle you out the door at an accelerated pace.
I get a fair number of prospective students coming to visit me (maybe not so many after you leak this to the administration) and I know I’m going to meet parents and students in a hurry who will ask me about this program. I will tell them that sure, I can advise them on how to speed-run through college, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The four year plan is much more comfortable and will allow you to enjoy college and develop a breadth of interests. I also know that some of those ambitious students will be back in my office in their second year panicking because they failed an o-chem exam and now think that revising their graduation plan will cost them that $20,000 that they imagined “saving” thanks to the Degree in Three plan.
I repeat, there’s nothing dishonest about the Degree in Three plan. It’s just nothing new, costs the university absolutely nothing, and is just about telling the students they can graduate faster if they work much harder. It’s not a great selling point, if you ask me.
They didn’t ask me, of course. I’ve been at faculty meetings where we irrelevant faculty make these same points, but hey, the advertising campaign is in the works.
