Except that that would be a big mistake. We’ve got a great many dagger moth caterpillars nibbling on some of our trees.
Mary brought in a branch with several of these things to show me. I had to recoil and tell her to get them out of the house.
They’re beginning to metamorphose.
Mary also took a photo of the same chrysalis, with her iPhone. Hers came out a little nicer, with more context, and shadows that weren’t as dramatic.
In my defense, it was very low to the ground beneath a stony overhang, and it was killing my knees to try to get that low.
None of the above! These are actual posters from the US Department of Labor.
To be honest, the Soviet propaganda had a lot more style and sincerity. The modern American stuff just looks like AI slop.
Put this post by Donald Trump on Truth Social front and center when he’s tried for treason.
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning…”
Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR
He thinks it is amusing to threaten an American city of almost 3 million people with apocalyptic destruction. He’s a criminal despot.
His pretext is that crime is too high in Chicago. Unfortunately for that excuse, invading the city to deport a subset of people whose primary “crime” is being brown and speaking Spanish would not address that problem, the statistics show that crime has been declining already, and Chicago is not the most crime-ridden city in the country. That distinction belongs to cities in red states.
The four cities of populations larger than 100,000 with the highest murder rates in 2024 are in Republican states: Jackson, Mississippi (78.7 per 100,000 residents), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), St Louis, Missouri (54.1) and Memphis, Tennessee (40.6).
…Chicago is bracing to be the next city targeted by the Trump administration. To date this year, 278 people have been killed in Chicago, 118 fewer people killed when compared with 2024. It is at pace for 412 deaths for the year, which would be a rate of about 15 per 100,000 residents. The rate is likely to be lower still than that, because homicide rates increase during summer months.
The Windy City ranked 37th in homicide rate in 2024 for cities larger than 50,000 residents in the United States. For cities with more than 100,000 residents, it placed 14th. This year, it is likely to slide farther down the list, even as violence falls to 60-year lows.
What are the National Guard going to do in Chicago, anyway? Stand around on street corners, eat deep dish pizza, guard the Bean in Millennium Park, visit the Field Museum? Trump is putting on a show, the same as renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War was an empty gesture.
Wait, no, that’s not true — the Republicans are gunning for everyone who is tolerant of other people’s sexual orientation. The gays are just next in line.
This is reminding me of the 80s, when Ronald Reagan was leading an affable campaign of hatred. Rand Paul is a hardcore anti-gay crusader, always has been, but in the current political climate he’s more free to expose himself.
One of the people who resigned in opposition to the destruction of the CDC was Demetre Daskalakis, who Paul has decided was unfit for his position anyway.
Asked about the resignations on Tuesday (2 September), Sen. Paul said: “One of the guys that is the biggest proponent of doing all this is the guy who describes the risky behaviour that he and his lifestyle involve.
“A guy that is so far … out of the mainstream, I think most people in America would discount his opinion because of the things he said in the past. He does not represent the mainstream of anything in America,” he went on.
“He should have never had a position in government. He brags about his lifestyle, you know, this whole idea of bondage and, you know, multiple partners and all that stuff. He brags about that stuff, but he’s got no business being in government. It’s good riddance.”
Being out of the mainstream in one’s personal preferences and behavior has never (or should never) be a criterion in determining one’s expertise in doing science. I thought Paul was a Libertarian? To be honest, being a Libertarian should disqualify you from ever holding office, but fortunately I don’t have the power to make that decree.
Even worse, there is a candidate running to replace Dan Crenshaw, which normally I’d approve of — he’s poison. But the person running against him is Valentina Gomez, a woman who is upset that there are lesbians in the WNBA, who wants to take a flamethrower to books that “groom” children.
When I’m Secretary of State, I will 🔥BURN🔥all books that are grooming, indoctrinating, and sexualizing our children. MAGA. America First🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/m8waKi3yhP
— Valentina Gomez (@ValentinaForUSA) February 6, 2024
The video ends with an image of Gomez smiling into the camera, holding an AR-15 with an ammunition holder tied around her waist in front of a Tesla Cybertruck.
Charming. Fortunately, she has little hope of getting elected — she previously ran for the Secretary of State of Missouri, and came in 6th place with 8% of the vote. That’s more than she deserved, but it tells you about the power of being rabidly anti-gay.
Tomorrow at 2pm Pacific Time, the crew here at Freethoughtblogs are going to talk about some of the books we’ve read, with a focus on what we can learn for our own societies from them.
(Note: I’ve been really terribly sick today, but I think it’s one of those 24 hour things, so I hope I’ll be in shape to participate. Should be.)
RESCHEDULED: We’ll host this podcast on Saturday, 13 September instead.
They’re coming to take away the guns!
“In the wake of the Minneapolis Catholic church shooting, senior Justice Department officials are weighing proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms,” CNN reports.
“Such a move would represent a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s fight against the rights of transgender Americans.”
Interesting. The majority of trans people are not mass murderers, so this is a plan to punish the innocent for one person’s actions. As long as we’re going down this road, I must point out that 98% of the perpetrators of these shootings are men, and further, that the majority are white men.
Obviously, the most effective approach would to limit white men’s right to possess firearms. It’s the only statistically sensible plan.
It’s another anatomical atrocity from the bowels of the internet. Be amazed at the magnitude of the physical differences between men and women (although I hope this was exaggerated by some online comedian.)
I had no idea that women’s larger hips were all filled with an enlarged bony structure, contrary to my limited experience, or that women’s feet evolved specifically for wearing high heels.
I’d heard a few rumors about this program, Chorus, in which pro-Democrat ‘influencers’ formed a bloc to coordinate their support for liberal policies, which superficially sounded like a good idea, except for how it is implemented. Members had to swear secrecy, promise to never criticize their fellow Chorus members, and get their opinions vetted by their paymasters. This sounds an awful lot like the secret deal Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson made with Russians, except that the pay was much lower, $8000/month rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars. I consider transparency to be a significant value, so Chorus goes directly against that.
Rebecca Watson summarizes the story for us.
I’m convinced now that I shouldn’t trust Brian Tyler Cohen and David Pakman, because they are unable to be forthright about their perspective or who is paying them. I like my sources to be open and unconstrained by big money.
So much of the nonsense about the gender binary is projection, and imposition of cultural biases on top of biology. Case in point: this very silly post that claims that putting feathers on dinosaurs is a woke attempt to make them more feminine.
Male and female birds and dinosaurs had feathers, it wasn’t like a drag queen draping themselves in a feather boa. Also, the change in size is, I think, an echo of the Jurassic Park velociraptors, which were portrayed as much larger than the fossils showed — it was a case of Spielberg making them bigger to be more threatening, most definitely not scientists shrinking them down to make them more feminine.
Whoever was trying to make this case has not raised chickens, which given the right temperament can be utterly terrifying in their ferocity, despite being small and feathered.
