Let soldiers celebrate what they are fighting for

Behold! The superior white master race!

I’ve had conversations with my son, a Major in the army, where he has lamented the difficulty of recruiting any more. It’s tough working with under-strength units, I guess. I’ll have to ask him what he thinks of Paul Gosar’s explanation, next time we talk.

Far-right congressman Paul Gosar is losing sleep over how few white people are enlisting in the army these days.

“The number of white recruits has plummeted,” Gosar wrote in an unhinged fundraising email sent out Thursday, with the subject line, “dismantling woke marxist ideologies.” “[It’s] a casualty of this cultural skirmish that has left our Army beleaguered and besieged by ‘woke’ ideologies.”

“This is not merely a crisis of numbers,” Gosar added. “It is a crisis of spirit.”

Gosar was responding to a recent investigation by Military.com that found that the number of white armymilitary recruits has been on a downward trajectory for the last half decade.

“Spirit”? “Woke ideologies”? That’s not the impression I get. I got to listen in to a big convo the leadership had with enlisted soldiers and their families (I’m family, I count). What I heard was enthusiastic officers discussing a deployment with enthusiastic troops, answering questions about how families were going to be taken care of while they were overseas. They discussed security issues and timetables. Is that what “woke” is?

Far-right commentators quickly pounced on those findings, and claimed they were “proof” that the armed forces had become overrun by “Marxists” who are forcing “wokeness” on its ranks—and, as a result, alienating prospective white recruits.

In recent years, supposed “wokeness” in the military has been a growing point of obsession among right-wing commentators, lawmakers, and culture warriors. That’s been driven, in part, by the Pentagon adopting LGBTQ-inclusive policies over the last decade. In 2011, the Pentagon rescinded the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, meaning gay and lesbian service members could serve openly. In 2021, a ban on transgender people serving openly was officially lifted. Growing LGBTQ acceptance in the military has inspired far-right memes painting American soldiers in rainbow flags, suggesting that they are “soft” compared to their global counterparts (images of Russia’s military, particularly when they first invaded Ukraine in early 2022, are often used side-by-side as comparison).

I would have been impressed if that meeting had been a Marxist dialectic. It wasn’t. It was pretty much nothing but pragmatic answers about an assigned mission. Everyone was professional and disciplined about it, except me and my wife sitting quietly at home worrying about our little boy going off to a distant country with a side-arm and armor.

The disrespect I see is coming entirely from the far-right who want to compound enlistment problems by rejecting women and gay enlistees who are all contributing to the effectiveness of the military. If you’re concerned about racial differences in enlistment rates, don’t be a Republican who is enacting policies that increase the division between the poor and wealthy, and that selectively holds back black Americans. Fewer people sign up when the economy is good and when they have other opportunities at home, you know, because being in the military is a dangerous option.

A soldier with a rainbow badge on their backpack is still a soldier, you know. I would hope they wouldn’t be fighting for whatever Paul Gosar represents.

All hat and no cattle

Look at this man. Does the phrase “all hat and no cattle” jump into your brain? It does mine.

That’s Oklahoma state representative Justin Humphrey in a suit and hat too big for him trying to justify his bill that would require women to get permission from their father in order to get an abortion. He is promoting a new and exciting law for his state.

Students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries at school shall not be allowed to participate in school curriculum or activities. The parent or guardian of a student in violation of this section shall pick the student up from the school, or animal control services shall be contacted to remove the student.

He thinks this is a pressing issue because he heard second-hand that some kids were meowing at a school. That’s it. He is so quick to address rumors with legislative action that I think someone ought to tell him a few stories, true stories, about children hiding from school shooters. I’m sure he’d rush to pass gun control legislation in addition to his important furry control work.

It’s been a Monday, boys and girls

Mondays are going to suck all semester long. For every Monday, I have to put together a shiny new lecture, and I have to assemble a set of thought-provoking, sophisticated questions to accompany that lecture, which students will think about during the talk and discuss afterwards. That was my day, and then I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class, which is not ready yet, but will be by 9am. Wednesday will be easier, because I’ll have done all the prep work to get that discussion going.

At least now I’m home and tired and ready to take a shower and then read in bed before succumbing to fatigue. I’ve more or less front-loaded every week with lots of work so I can coast through to the weekend…except that my writing class is going to produce lots of stuff I’ll have to grade, and I’m not sure where I’ll wedge that in yet.

I still can’t believe I get no sabbatical next year, and that I probably have 4-7 years go on my sentence, before I can retire. Maybe I’ll drop dead sooner and surprise everyone.

DeSantis is DeSintegrated

Remember that brief moment?

The man has dropped out.

…15 months later, after botching his presidential campaign launch, throwing about $130 million dollars down the drain, and sustaining ruthless attacks from Trumpworld, it’s brutally clear that DeSantis was on the precipice of a different political fate: hubris.

On Sunday, two days before the New Hampshire primary, DeSantis ended his presidential campaign in a taped message he posted to X, the same social media platform where he started his campaign with a host of technical difficulties.

The Republicans must now embrace the reality that a corrupt serial rapist and wanna-be dictator is going to be their candidate (no one believes Nikki Haley is going to pull off an upset.) The rest of us have to focus on defeating the orange turdblossom.

Not the best way to endear oneself to SF fans

They incinerated Uhura and Scotty!

Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke’s ashes were on board a private US lunar lander that, after a failed moonshot, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Friday and burned-up on the way down. The intention had been to leave the ashes, among those from around 70 individuals including actors James Doohan (aka Scotty) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), on the moon’s surface following a successful landing. Rodenberry’s ashes have previously been a part of other space missions.

Don’t worry — they were pre-incinerated. It was a PR stunt in the first place. Celestis, the company playing this game, launches one gram of cremains from a person willing to pay the price of $13,000 to splat a little bit of ash on the Moon (Bonus! Send 3 grams for only $26,000!). One of the bonuses of this grift is that they can launch bits of individuals in multiple expensive missions, like Gene Rodenberry’s. The poor guy’s ashes seem to be a staple to send in tiny doses to outer space.

Although to put the whole enterprise into the proper context of dignity and reverence, also lost on this failed mission was a sample of a powdered soft drink. Yes, a tiny bit of Arthur C. Clarke was mixed with a bit of Kool-Aid, set on fire, and spewed into the atmosphere. Breathe deep!

I hope it was cherry flavored author, that’s my favorite.

No matter what, he still fails any test for common decency

Trump is still bragging about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test — you know, that Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. bullshit he announced as a validation of his brilliance a while back. Only it’s not, and has never been, any kind of intelligence test. And worse, he gets it wrong, he had forgotten the words and order the day of the test, and in every retelling since he is changing the words and exaggerating the difficulty of the test. Now he claims that was asked to multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3. Not only do I not believe it, I doubt that he could solve it himself.

But he almost certainly wasn’t asked to repeat Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

But, much like the phantom whale, Nasreddine said the words in the cognitive testing sequence are supposed to be unrelated, so the MoCA would never have a pair of connected words like “woman” and “man,” or “camera” and “TV.”

Ooops. Flunked it.

It’s designed to be a trivial test to detect serious impairments. No one would celebrate passing it — it’s like expecting to be applauded when an examining doctor finds a heartbeat.

She [Dr Ganguli, an actual physician] added that she did not recall a patient who celebrated passing the test, let alone publicly proclaimed it. “It’s treated with gravitas,” Ganguli said. “If anything, I see the opposite — people disappointed with how they performed.”

Have you ever witnessed someone you love struggle to pass the MoCA test? I have. It’s heartbreaking. Yet here’s this colossal asshole, who my loved one was smart enough to never vote for, acting as if he’s King Shit and claiming he was amazing at it. Even someone with incipient dementia can see right through him.

“Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program”

A quack found a gullible market.

A midwife in New York administered nearly 12,500 bogus homeopathic pellets to roughly 1,500 children in lieu of providing standard, life-saving vaccines, the New York State Department of Health reported yesterday.

Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. She obtained the pellets from a homeopath outside New York and sold them as a series called the “Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program.”

The program falsely claimed to protect children against deadly infectious diseases covered by standard vaccination schedules, including diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (covered by the DTaP or Tdap vaccine); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); polio; chickenpox; meningococcal disease; Haemophilus influenzae disease (HiB); and pneumococcal diseases (PCV).

Ms. Breen is a crook who deserves to have the book thrown at her — she has been fined $150,000, so I think she got off easy. I would point out, however, that you know the people who took the stupid pills knew exactly what they were doing, explicitly and knowingly avoiding giving their kids a real prophylactic, and that they ought to at least get a token slap. Their kids have been kicked out of school, punishing the victims, until the parents provide genuine proof of vaccination.

Cops kill

It must be a grisly Friday, because look at the story that just popped up in my newsfeed.

The gruesome discovery of 215 bodies buried in unmarked graves behind a jail outside of Jackson, Mississippi, has left a community in disbelief.

The families are angry their loved ones were buried in so-called pauper’s graves marked by just a metal rod and a number and families were never notified of their deaths. The startling revelation came months after the mother of 37-year-old Dexter Wade filed a missing persons report last March. It wasn’t until August when Bettersten Wade learned her son had been hit by a police car and killed, then buried in that same cemetery.

This takes ACAB to a whole new level. The Jackson, Mississippi police committed vehicular homicide, and then buried the body in a field behind the jail and didn’t bother to tell anyone? They’ve dug up the body since, and he had a wallet with full identification in his pocket, but no one was notified? And there are 215 bodies hidden in that field?

No, that last bit is wrong.

We know, based on the records from the coroner’s office, that, since 2016, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that were buried behind that jail, and their families have not been notified.

Furthermore, Mr. Wade was number 672. That means there are 671 other people buried behind that jail marked with only a number.

Hey. Hey! Remember? Remember when some of us were talking about disbanding police departments, and all the conservatives and centrists were talking down at us all for being so unrealistic, and others were flying “thin blue line” flags and getting indignant and insisting that civilization would crumble without the cops to protect us, and nothing happened?

Remember?

Fuck those people.

Don’t donate your body to Harvard

I’d long considered donating my body to science, once I’m done with it. Now I’m having second thoughts after learning about the Harvard morgue scandal.

I’m not at all concerned about the fact my body would be chopped up — I’d be dead, and the alternative is rotting or getting burned up — but what would bother me when signing the donation papers is that morbid ghouls like this bunch would be making tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars off my donation.

All told, prosecutors say tens of thousands of dollars changed hands in this gruesome years-long scheme: One indictment states that Pauley sent Taylor more than $40,000; Lampi paid Pauley more than $8,000; and Pauley paid Lampi more than $100,000. Sarah estimates that her ex made a couple hundred thousand dollars in total.

That money should go to the grieving dependents, not some random creep with a sick fetish!