Just before we got shut down, I posted a video by Shaun that condemned all the atrocities committed by both sides in Israel and Gaza (it didn’t dissuade the Islamist fanatic who got us censored). Now I’m going to do it again. Cody thoroughly documents the genocide and lies perpetrated by the Israeli government.
It’s depressing. Don’t watch it you don’t want to be outraged by injustice.
It just affirms my concern that Israel has become an evil rogue nation. And we still send them arms?
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I’m doing in my Eco Devo class is to throw more of the burden of learning on the students. It would be too easy for me to just get up and lecture, telling them what they should know, and it is often hard for me to just shut up and let the students talk. I’ve split up the course so that Monday is when I start talking and dominate the classroom, Wednesday I ask the students to answer questions about Monday’s lecture and the book chapter, and on Fridays they’re given a paper to analyze.
This week’s paper is Morphological plasticity of the coral skeleton under CO2-driven seawater acidification by Tambutté and others. The context is that we’ve been talking about cellular physiology and development, and responses to environmental stresses, so I figured a primary research article about the effect of rising CO2 levels would be appropriate.
(Answer: more CO2 is not good for corals. Decreasing pH leads to a cnidarian version of osteoporosis.)
(a) Representative longitudinal sections; (b) transverse sections. pH treatment is indicated in the top left corner of each image. Scale bar, 1 mm.
Freethoughtblogs is suddenly and unexpectedly restored! It must be because I refused to pray all week long. Or it could have been about emailing the parent company for Bluehost, Endurance International Group. Or it could have been the result of posting a 1 star review on TrustPilot, which got the attention of their PR flack.
I just got off the phone with them, and that bad review is what finally kicked them into gear. Now I know what corporations dread, at least.
Why? Watch this 1.5 hour video by Shaun to see why.
Some lawyer named Jonathan Turley has published a bitter diatribe against Joe Biden. Ho hum, don’t care, I’ve got complaints about the guy myself — particularly his unthinking support for Israel — and anyone can write screeds and get them posted somewhere. However, this one tells me more about Turley than Biden. He’s going to turn the power of evolutionary theory against Biden, he thinks, except that he doesn’t understand it at all.
The Bidens have shown a legendary skill at evading legal accountability. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, Biden family members often marshal political allies and media to kill investigations or cut sweetheart deals.
The Bidens swim in scandal with the ease and agility of a bottlenose dolphin. From his own plagiarism scandal to his brother’s role in killing a man to his son’s various federal crimes, Bidens have long been a wonder in Washington.
It turns out that it may be something of a family trait acquired through generations of natural selection.
A historian recently discovered that Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather, Moses J. Robinette, was accused and found guilty of attempted murder. The case followed a strikingly familiar pattern.
I don’t consider Biden particularly scandal-ridden. The whole system is scandalous, putting politicians in the hands of lobbyists and moneyed special interest groups, but he’s not egregiously bad, especially compared to, for example, Clarence Thomas or anyone with the last name Trump. His son is a major sleaze, but Biden is not his son. Or is he?
Because Turley is clearly committed to the idea of familial criminality. Shades of the Jukes and Kallikaks! Turley is going further and claiming that Biden has inherited the sins of his great-great-grandfather.
The whole article is a recounting of the crime of Moses Robinette, committed in the civil war era, and that’s it. It tries to tar the great-great-grandson with one crime of one of his ancestors. It calls it a “family trait”. It’s pseudo-science. It’s irrelevant libel.
I eagerly await Turley’s next effort to demonstrate the unsuitability of Biden by a detailed phrenological analysis of the bumps and hollows of his skull. Or perhaps he’ll find a distant relative who is willing to submit to some cranial fondlings — that’s close enough, right?
Our hosting company has received a complaint that freethoughtblogs.com has been engaging in fraudulent activities by scamming individuals out of their money and personal information
. They provide no specifics.
Also, they name of the complainant is Deathlord Al-Zawahiri
. I tremble in fear.
I do not see how Bluehost could possibly take this bullshit seriously, but now I get to try and resolve the potential problem. If we suddenly go offline, blame Deathlord Al-Zawahiri
.
The Nazis are taking over the Republican party. Are you shocked?
Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.
Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.
But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.
At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Also, they’re theocrats who hate democracy.
In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“Satire.” Heh. Right. A good question to ask when anyone makes the “satire” defense is “What were they satirizing?”
Today I learned that caffeine is more toxic than formaldehyde. You know, I’ve got kilograms of formaldehyde in my lab, I guess I know where to go to get an easy substitute when I’m out of coffee.
I’m also gratified that spider venoms rank so high on the scale.
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.
