I can relate to this National Park Service message.
Our favorite part of spring is walking into spider webs and screaming every time. What’s yours?
I wish. I haven’t seen any webs yet, although I have spotted some individual strands of silk. Warm weather is coming, though!
I’m up early, I look out the window, and what do I see? Snow.
It has been warm and pleasant, except for the last few days, which have been chilly and windy. I was starting to see spiders around the yard again, but now — they’re probably huddled deep in crevices and whatever shelter they can find, waiting out this doggedly persistent winter.
They won’t have long to wait. The forecast is for 31°C on Wednesday.
Well, this is a fine how-de-do. Clarence Thomas is arguing for theocracy.
Thomas, 77, the Court’s longest-serving conservative member, laid the blame at the feet of
intellectualsand the nation’s colleges and universities, which he said have allowed founding values tofall out of favor.He did not reference specific political figures or contemporary events.
He also did not reference specific values, but only platitudes. He simply took the time to condemn intellectuals, colleges, and universities — I guess he was corrupted by his time spent getting a JD from Yale.
Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government, Thomas said.
[It] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.
Hang on there, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, do I need to explain to you that our form of government was specified by the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence? That document was a dramatic announcement of our grievances and intent to sever our subservience with a colonial power, England. The Declaration does have some wording about “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, but it is otherwise a secular document focused on civil complaints and disagreements with a government. Officials do not swear to uphold the Declaration of Independence, which would be a weird thing to do, since a list of 18th century grievances is not relevant to a 21st century state.
It’s our Constitution you should care about. You know, the document that starts out
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
You know, the document that says our government comes from the people. Not god. It doesn’t even mention god or religion except in the first amendment, where it says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But now a Supreme Court Justice has decided that no, our rights come from a god, on the basis of reading the wrong document? And by ignoring entirely a wholly secular document that is the actual source of any authority he might have?
“Progressivism,” whatever that means in his decrepit brain, does not require subservience and weakness
, nor is it dependent on a transcendent origin of our rights
. Some of the founding fathers he reveres weren’t particularly religious and didn’t need a clerical excuse to see a reason for establishing a government. You can be an atheist and support the Constitution!
Thomas also took aim at officials in Washington, he said, who lack commitment to
righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety or to the original meaning of the Constitution.
Yes, do take aim at government officials. I don’t think Donald Trump is at all pious, and is more committed to corruption than to free enterprise or righteousness, and he’s filled the upper levels of government with selfish hacks like himself. He’s also appointed several of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s peers. Any complaints should be rightfully directed at the institution he represents.
And hey, does taking bribes from wealthy conservatives count as a righteous cause?
Fuck your traditional morality, Clarence. It’s more like a traditional venality.
Yesterday, I said I was looking for reasons to tamp down excessive cheerfulness. No such assistance needed this morning!
Louisiana has taken care of it.
Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives took the dangerous step of voting in favor of a truly disgusting anti-homeless bill. This bill is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation peddled by the Palantir-funded, billionaire-backed Cicero Institute. In addition to making it a crime to sleep outside, this bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment.
But it gets worse.
This bill requires homeless people to pay for the very treatment they are forced into. And if the person cannot pay the cost of treatment, this bill requires them to perform unpaid labor for the government or a community organization to pay off their debt. Louisiana has a long history – and present – of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.
It’s a very 19th century approach to dealing with a social problem.
I learned about this horror from Greta Christina: there are networks of websites that host videos of men raping their partners. These sickos drug women without their knowledge, record themselves assaulting these unconscious women, do live video streams where they take suggestions on what to do to them, and thousands of men log in for the thrill of watching rape.
While the platforms vary, inside such groups, video is king. Some users advertised livestreams, showing the abuse of drugged women in real time, for $20 per viewer, with cryptocurrency the preferred means of payment.
Of course, these are human beings being abused for the entertainment of strangers, but sometimes they get even.
When Zoe Watts learned that her husband of 16 years had been crushing her son’s sleeping medicine into her tea and raping her while she was passed out, it shattered her world.
“We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street, or who’s even friending us on Facebook. You know, we worry about going to our car late at night in a car park, but we don’t worry about who you lie next to. I didn’t realize I had to,” Watts said.
Her then husband’s confession came on an otherwise ordinary Sunday in 2018, after the couple – who share four children – had returned from church.
“He reeled off a list of his wrongdoings… as if it was, you know, a shopping list,” Watts said, speaking to CNN at her house in Devon, England.
He told her the abuse had been going on for years.
Telling her after church was a nice touch. Her response was appropriate: she turned him in to the police, all the evidence was right there on video, and he is currently serving an 11 year prison sentence.
Good.
Now let’s get all the other participants in this criminal activity — these sites had 62 million visits — arrested, and shut down all these facilitating web sites.
Chased this one down in the shrubbery.
I lost all respect for Matt Ridley years ago, when I wrote:
Matt Ridley is definitely a smart guy, and he also writes well. I enjoyed some of his earlier books, like The Red Queen and Genome, but I became less appreciative as he became more openly libertarian, and espoused a Whiggish view of the world that was only a rationalization for why he was so wealthy and privileged (he’s kind of the British version of Pinker, only worse). He’s the 5th Viscount Ridley, don’t you know, he is to the manor born (Blagdon Hall, Northumberland, specifically), he’s a member of the House of Lords, he endorsed Brexit, he owns coal mines, he used to own a bank, but he ran it into the ground and it was taken away from him and nationalized. On climate change, he’s argued that global warming is going to be a net benefit, increasing rainfall and the growing season, and that human ingenuity will overcome any minor disruptions. He even coauthored a book with Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg and a host of the usual denialist suspects, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, which ought to alarm anyone who wants to think he’s just being objective. I guess that comes of owning coal mines and being an enthusiastic endorser of fracking — when your prosperity is a product of spewing as much fossil carbon into the atmosphere as you can, your very smart brain will work very hard to find excuses.
At this point, he is an irredeemable kook — but a well-connected and wealthy one, who gets invited to all kinds of events hosted by the corrupt, criminal kooks in charge of the US government. He was recently invited to address the NIH on the “lab leak” hypothesis, the discredited conspiracy theory that China intentionally engineered the COVID virus to wreak havoc on the West, but accidentally released into their home territory of Wuhan. It’s absurd. No one who knows anything about virology or molecular genetics thinks it is at all plausible, or credits it as valid in the face of all the evidence that it originated naturally from wild populations, or zoonosis.
Nevertheless, Ridly got invited to present his innuendo, lack of evidence, and leaps of illogic at a major meeting of the formerly prestigious NIH.
Must Trump get his face put front and center of everything?
Don’t trust me that the “lab leak” is a garbage hypothesis? Larry Moran and Lindsay Beyerstein both shredded these “lab leak” claims years ago, but conspiracy theories seem to be invulnerable to little things like evidence and reason.
Add another critic to the long list of knowledgeable scientists who find Ridley risible: Angela Rasmussen. She gives five really strong reasons why the “lab leak” nonsense is wrong, and also seems to have even less respect for Ridley and Bhattacharya than I do.
I don’t know Ridley’s motivation besides being a pompous literal coal baron who led the UK into the 2007 financial crisis with the first run on a British bank in 130 years, and who expects to be taken seriously despite the fact that he seems like a foppish secondary antagonist in a forgettable Dr. Who episode. Unfortunately, Ridley is taken seriously by his fellow pompous, insubstantial windbags, and even more unfortunately, they are the windbags in charge who invited him.
It is no mystery why Podcast Jay [Bhattacharya] rolled out the red carpet for the distinguished Viscount despite his lack of qualifications or relevant expertise on the topic. He knows that Matt Ridley is writing fiction. He shows up to launder conspiracist lies through an indignant upper class British accent in service of Bhattacharya’s ultimate goal: to declare all NIH research reckless, dangerous, and absolutely the worst thing we could possibly do. Better redirect the money for these irresponsible Alzheimer’s, HIV, and diabetes treatments to the White House. President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will know what to do with all those funds.
I don’t see enough news and criticisms of Bhattacharya — he’s in charge of the NIH, he’s an idiot, he’s busy dismantling the American scientific institutions, but mostly what gets into the press are the disastrous decisions of the bigger fools in the cabinet. Make no mistake, though, he’s one of the nastier parasites gnawing at the foundations of our science establishment.
And now he invited Ridley to speak. The Ridley who makes these kinds of ludicrous accusations:
You can tell what kind of man he is by the people he lumps together as enemies with Hamas: a couple of credible, qualified scientists and trans people. His right-wing politics are showing.
I needed a morning shot of cynicism, so naturally I turned to stderr, where I learned all about bunkers.
As a former security guy, it’s hard to imagine an end-user who’s worse than the current dumbass-in-chief. He’s the kind of idiot who would post photos including the GPS co-ordinates. Not because he’s a 5G warfare expert, but because he’s 6G stupid. The 5G AIs are still cycling in tight loops printing “brain hurts brain hurts brain hurts brain …” over and over.
So, it looks like Turnip has completely blown the cover of an extremely expensive op that was going to be concealed as a ballroom with cost and labor overruns, while building a new continuity of government/nuclear bunker AKA “bolthole for the idiots who started a nuclear war.” This all started to go into overdrive during the Eisenhower administration. That was when Camp David was turned into a nuclear bunker (or, more precisely, the golf course covers a nuclear bunker). You can learn a lot more about this in the book [wc] Raven Rock, which does not talk much about Raven Rock, but talks a lot about Mt Weather, and Camp David and The Greenbrier. The Greenbrier, now, is mostly declassified and you can even visit it. It’s on my list of things to do, someday, but I am trying to find suitable company – you can’t go to that kind of place alone, you need someone with you who can look at the hinges you are pointing to and nod and whisper, “overpressure relief.”
I can appreciate that. I’d want Marcus Ranum as my tour guide at any government facility. Go read the rest to learn more about these depressing monuments to smug futility.
I needed more — it’s warm, the sun is shining, but my knees are aching and I need the grimness so I don’t try to dance — so I read about the wedding industry on TikTok. If you really want to harsh your mellow, it’s a tossup whether nuclear war bunkers or wedding influencers are worse.
There are a few industries that prey on emotion particularly brazenly. The funeral industry is one. The wedding industry is another. I knew this going in. I thought I could defeat hundreds of years of socially ingrained pressure backed by a multi-billion dollar consumer machine. No problem.
That got me thinking…if I really want regular reminders that the world sucks, I just need to tickle the algorithm just right. There’s no way I could convince TikTok or Instagram that I’m a blushing bride, but hey, I could easily induce funeral TikTok to lavish some attention on me.
If you suddenly see my instagram feed filling with posts about death and funeral planning, don’t worry — I’m feeling fine. I’ll be teasing the ghouls, nothing more.
If you have suggestions for better topics to fuel a morbid streak, do let me know. Not politics — I already know what a graveyard of hope that is right now.
A few Democrats have grown a spine. They’ve filed articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth. There is a long list of good reasons to kick his evil ass out of office.
The House Democrats also pointed at a growing number of boat strikes in the Caribbean. The military has repeatedly sought to frame individuals on the vessels as “narco-terrorists”.
House Democrats also accused Hegseth of compromising national security through “careless and improper conduct”, citing an episode where classified information was shared on Signal in 2025.
The defense secretary was embroiled in controversy last year after the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat about a planned airstrike on Houthi fighters in Yemen. Hegseth, vice-president JD Vance, and CIA director John Ratcliffe were also in the chat.
The articles also continued on to include Hegesth’s “efforts to withhold material facts relating to civilian casualties and operational conduct in Iran and Venezuela”; his attempt to punish the senator Mark Kelly, a retired US navy captain, for reminding service members that they can refuse illegal orders; and forcing transgender service members from the military.
“Pete Hegseth did not follow his oath to the US constitution,” Ansari told the reporter Pablo Manríquez. “He committed a war crime in Iran with the attack on a school that killed over 160 children. So not only do we need to end this war, but we need to hold accountable and prosecute anyone in the US administration who may have committed war crimes.”
Not to mention that he’s an incompetent boob who only got the appointment because he was a suck-up to Trump.
This motion will go nowhere, because the Democrats don’t have the votes, yet. It is encouraging, though, that some of them are stirring themselves to fight back against this outrageous and wicked administration, and it will highlight all those Republicans who so conscientiously neglect to recognize the deep harm their party has done to the country.
Zebra jumper on our window screen, with dinner.
