Have you been wondering what Ken Ham thinks of Dolly Parton?

No? I don’t blame you. He’s a rather repellent character who always gets everything wrong.

In case you don’t bother to watch that video (you are very wise), he cites the fact that she was a Christian, but one who tolerates LGBT people, and even wishes them happiness. God hates gays! That’s not an interpretation, according to Ham, it’s literally a commandment.

Conversely, I found Parton’s simple Christianity to be silly, but that didn’t matter. She lived a life of joy and kindness, and if that wasn’t enough to get her into Christian heaven, then that’s just another reason Christianity is wrong.

Who would you choose to represent your beliefs, Ken or Dolly? The answer ought to be clear.

Oh no — I’m an ineffective brainwasher!

The evidence is in. We liberal professors are doing a bad job at indoctrination — it’s not our hard work that is persuading students, we’re just coasting on a general trend that education liberalizes.

We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.

Damn. Are the Democrats going to cut my Professional Indoctrinator stipend now? I’ve been saying for years that I don’t teach political perspectives in my classes, but nobody believed me, and they kept passing those big checks to me.

Eat it, Republicans!

Remember this?

A video circulating widely on social media Sunday appears to show President Donald Trump announcing that the United States will buy Argentine beef while dismissing concerns about struggling American farmers.

He had a plan. Meat prices were climbing fast, so he thought he’d pander to consumers (but not beef producers) by importing 15 tons of cheap Argentine beef. And he did, and he distributed it to his most devoted followers in Florida and Texas.

How’s that going?

Nearly 30,000 pounds of raw beef have been recalled at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) highest warning level due to an import violation.

Corte Argentino USA LLC, a Florida-based beef company, recalled approximately 29,628 pounds of raw beef imported to the U.S. from Argentina without reinspection, according to an announcement from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) on Aug. 7.

The agency classified the recall as Class I, meaning that it’s a “high or medium risk” recall entailing “a health hazard situation” with “a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death,” per the FSIS.

As a vegetarian living in a state that hates Donald Trump and will never receive his toxic largesse, I can laugh. While eating my cyclospora-infested produce.

We can’t win.

I detest bad writing

I have received a long-winded, weasely, vague threat from someone demanding that I confirm receipt of his fuzzy undefined accusation. This is that confirmation.

Hi, id: 2026-08-26-02:05:21:987t
I’m reaching out directly in connection with content posted on your channel. I’ve found content that appears to originate from work I created, and I wanted to get in touch with you first before making any decision to raise the matter through the platform’s formal process.
I haven’t submitted a report at the moment. Before moving forward, I’d like to hear what you have to say and better understand your position about the use of this material.
When I hear back from you, I can give you the specific information regarding the material and explain what concerns me regarding the content I’ve noticed. If there’s additional context or an explanation from your side, I’ll take any relevant context into account.
My first preference is to address the situation directly and see if we can resolve it without using the platform’s formal process. From my perspective offers both of us enough opportunity to consider the matter before taking additional action.
If we can’t find a reasonable way forward, I may then consider raising the matter formally and including the appropriate information for consideration through the platform’s review process.
Before anything further, please confirm that you’ve seen my communication and are prepared to discuss the matter. When I hear from you, I’ll provide the information I’ve identified so we can determine how best to proceed.
Thank you for reading this. Hopefully we can work this out directly.
All the best.

I dread the moment he explains what the fuck he wants to complain about, because if this is an example of his circuitous writing style, it’s going to be painful to read. I think he thinks he’s a lawyer, a bad lawyer, who can’t be forthright.

I’ll let you know when he manages to shake the soggy cornmeal out of his head and tells me what he thinks I’ve plagiarized, since that’s what he’s actually accusing me of.

If the electorate were rational…

We wouldn’t have these problems. Everyone has to see that Trump is insane, right?

He’s picking a trade war with Canada, our ally and partner. <a href=”https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/trump-lake-ontario-lake-america-name-change-trade-war-canada-escalates/6539930>Canada is retaliating. We’re going to feel it in the form of toilet paper shortages soon. If he doesn’t get his way, he’s threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center — and he’ll do it, just like he tore down the East Wing. Most petty of all, he threatens to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Since when does the US president have authority over geography? He doesn’t.

These events are just the latest in his history of idiotic, self-defeating policy decisions by an incompetent bully. When will it become obvious to the other branches of the so-called distributed balance of federal power? Oh, wait, they know. The Senate and Supreme Court are enabling it.

But we really have to blame the American voter. Latest example: they’ve made Darline Graham* the Republican nominee to replace her dead brother. She’s not qualified. Her only ‘virtue’ is blood, and she got elected solely because she’s a member of the tribe. That tribal thinking is what’s going to get more Republicans elected in November.

We are so screwed.

*My mother’s name was Darlene, with an “e”. I’m not happy to see it dragged through the news attached to that smooth-brained Southern dingleberry.

Grisly & horrible

Sometimes my spiders make me queasy. This is the reality of nature, though.

I fed my Parasteatoda a mealworm this morning, and sadly, the spider was not particularly effective in killing its prey. It’s been gnawing on the worm for over 4 hours, while it writhes and twitches. It was frantically writhing away most of the day as the spider clung to it, nibbling.

Spiders are predators, you know.

The image quality is bad because I recorded it through the plexiglas of its container. At least it blunts the horror.

Definitely not for kids.

Another sleepless night

I was up at 2am again last night, and now I’m really tired. The reason is right here:

That’s my mailbox. It’s located under the eaves of my garage roof, and you might have to look closely to see it, but it’s covered with bat poop. I’ve gone out with a garden hose a few times and cleaned it off, but every night, without fail, a swarm of bats emerges from the voluminous (and unused) storage space above my garage, lightens their load with a quick evacuation, and then flits off to diminish the local mosquito population. From the amount of bat crap we see, I think we’ve got an impressively large colony of bats inhabiting our garage.

That’s fine. I like bats. I’m happy to provide a shelter for the local population, and while I’m not thrilled that they’re voiding their bowels over my mailbox, it’s always over the back half, so it doesn’t interfere with human uses of the mailbox.

But then, every once in a while, a bat somehow finds its way into my house, and they don’t like it. Late last night I heard a scratching and scuffling at the blinds in my bedroom, and then…flutter flutter flutter. I turned on the lights, waking up my wife, who looked up and saw this brown beast running laps around the room, going around and around in circles, with me putting on a robe and running to my office to get my butterfly net.

It was very exciting and a bit chaotic for a while. I was sweeping that net around, mostly missing (bats are agile critters), and banging into ceiling light fixture, which eventually broke and fell to the floor with a crash of breaking glass. Eventually I swished the net just right and captured the bat, which I took out the back door and released.

All that disruption meant we were now fully awake and it took a while to get back to sleep, briefly, because the alarm goes off at 5am so Mary can get to work on time.

I raise spiders and house a swarm of bats. Is my dream of becoming the Addams Family coming true?

An interesting, but arbitrary, engineering exercise

The World Humanoid Robot Games took place in Beijing a few days ago. They’re fascinating and baffling to watch.

That “Humanoid” in the title is clearly a significant constraint that artificially forces the human creators into making some very bad design choices. But why? No practical devices will be built with that limitation: in the races, for instance, if you’re going to mimic biology, you ought to go for four or six legs, and why bother to imitate an animal, just put wheels on the goddamn thing. What are the advantages of requiring your running robot to clumsily use a bipedal form? I suppose it’s an exercise in building limbs to a difficult and ultimately stupid specification, but why?

It is kind of menacing and intimidating to see a field of soldier-like robots, but only because we carry along associations with human armies. When I’m someday hiding in the post-apocalyptic rubble waiting for the Chinese Robot Army to kill me, I’m not going to worry about the bipedal ersatz human tripping awkwardly through broken terrain, I’m going to be scared of the flying drone with lasers, or the rat robot scuttling through wreckage to drop a grenade at my feet. The robots at the games are just comical.

In more benign situations, I’m not bothered by a machine being able to run faster than I can — I’m used to that. An autonomous e-bike could beat those robots easily.

The video focuses on the failures, which is a little unfair. I was actually impressed most with how some of them compensated for failure. They fell down, and then smoothly pivoted and twisted and stood right back up, unless they caught on fire, of course. There’s some really good and clever design work going on there. There needs to be, because people are bad models for high-performance physical activity.

I do have questions. Are these robots required to operate autonomously? If there is some Chinese nerd hunkered down behind walls of monitors with a joystick and keyboard, triggering series of pre-programmed routines, I’m much less impressed. If they’re run by AIs with massive datacenters trying to model human behavior, I’m also unimpressed, other than by the raw wastefulness of the exercise. I’m also curious about maintenance. Sure, you can fire off actuators to move a limb at a high rate of speed, but for how long before one burns out? And if losing one little electronic piston sends your whole elaborate robot with its sensors and cameras and expensive circuitry crumpling against a wall, what’s the cost-effectiveness or reliability of the robot?

I suppose there will be some long-term return on investment trying to solve those little problems, but I think the first solution is to ditch the stupid “humanoid” restriction and design machines that do specific tasks well.