I got the question

You know, the inevitable dumb one.

If there are more than two sexes, name a third one.

The correct answer is, obviously, “Your mom.”

But seriously, if I tell you something is a range or continuum, you don’t refute me by telling me I have to name every shade. When I was a child, I learned that there are 7 colors, precisely 7, in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Then when I got older I learned that there are hundreds of wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. And then when I got older still I learned that color is the product of combinations of wavelengths, like chords, and the numbers got larger still. And then I learned about photoreception and color vision, and discovered that colors were a property of visual processing derived from context and relative distinctions in illumination and intensity, and there’s nothing fixed about them. I read David Marr in the 1980s, you know.

Then someone comes along and insists that the stuff they learned in kindergarten is the absolute rock solid truth.

Hey, I bet you this person is also one of those who mocks the abbreviation LGBTQIA+ because there are too many letters in it and we keep adding more.

Who will replace Ken Ham?

Calm down, he’s not dead yet. At his age, though, he’s probably contemplating his future successor. Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, is a blithering goober, and the other people at the top of his organization are women, so naturally they’re out of the running. Andrew Snelling, Terry Mortenson, Danny Faulkner? Negative charisma. Tim Chaffey? He’s tall, that’s about it. Nathaniel Jeanson? An insufferable twit.

Apparently, Ken has been recruiting back in the homeland of Australia, and he has landed a real winner: Martyne Iles. He’s perfect. He’s young. He’s loud. He’s a confirmed hater: he doesn’t want anything to do with the gays or the transes, he despises the idea of climate change, he hates commies. He’s a cerfiable culture warror, and his ideology lines up nicely with Ken Ham’s.

And now he’s been hired as Chief Ministry Officer for Answers in Genesis.

Also interesting: he was formerly the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, but he was kicked out. The apparent cause was that the ACL, under his leadership, was flopping badly. Australians kept passing those danged liberal laws anyway. He was ineffective and obnoxious.

The ACL grew rapidly under Iles – its membership tripled, Iles said – but its size wasn’t the board’s problem. It was struggling for political impact. In a few short years, it recorded losses on virtually every single key issue: same-sex marriage was legalised in 2017, just months before Iles took the post; almost every state in the country has loosened laws on abortion and voluntary assisted dying; and major steps against gay conversion therapy have been made in Victoria, WA and NSW. And faced with the potential for a multi-term Labor government that saw the group as – at best – irrelevant, the Australian Christian Lobby needed a major strategic reset.

So now he has left Australia to a country that if more favorable ideologically. He’s just like Ken Ham!

They have one other thing in common: they’re both abominably stupid. Here’s Iles’ “evidence for god”.

No one ever thought that intricacy could come out of simplicity or that order could come out of chaos in anything except creation.

Also, beautiful sunsets. Fanaticism and banality, such a great combination.

It’s a match made in heaven.

New boss, same as the old boss

Elon Musk has announced that he has found a replacement CEO for Twitter, currently rumored to be an ad executive name Linda Yaccarino. That could change. Musk is a dorky flibbertigibbet who might change his mind depending on how the rumor is received.

It doesn’t matter, though. Nothing will improve.

  • He’s personally selecting a CEO, which means it will be someone who aligns with his views.
  • Whoever he hires will be under his control, and he’s a micromanaging tyrant.
  • Whoever he hires will be subject dismissal if she crosses him.
  • He has driven the company so far into the ground, both in income and reputation, that there’s no hope.
  • It’s a Musk decision. Every decision he makes is terrible.

I feel pity for anyone who gets lured into this position, although, given the kind of person who’d willingly associate with Elon Musk, I suspect any sympathy would evaporate after their first day on the job.

Oh, actually, this announcement is a distraction. Quick, focus on the Twitter noise, not the costly recall of Tesla cars in China!

Tesla will recall more than 1.1 million cars in China due to potential safety risks, the country’s top market regulator said on Friday.

Starting May 29, the US company will take back 1,104,622 vehicles that were produced between January 12, 2019, and April 24, 2023, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said in a statement, citing a plan filed by Tesla (TXLZF) with the regulator.

That’s nearly equivalent to Tesla’s total sales in mainland China during the four-year period. From 2019 to March 2023, Tesla sold about 1.09 million vehicles in the country, according to CNN calculations based on figures from China’s state-backed industry associations.

Today is the day

It’s the last day of finals week. I have two final exams and a term paper due — and I foolishly made everything due at 6pm this evening. Everything. All at once. I am smart, S-M-R-T.

A few students have submitted their work early so I can try to get a leg up on all the grading. Grades are due on Monday, so there’s an absolute deadline to finishing up this semester.

CNN’s hour of lies

Last night, CNN hosted a town hall for Trump. I didn’t watch it. My trust in the that news outlet was already low, but after they announced they were going to host this debacle, I’m writing the network off. The town hall was a catastrophe for the truth.

Donald Trump’s long-awaited return to CNN went off the rails almost immediately on Wednesday night, with the former president using the exclusive town hall event to repeatedly lie, mislead viewers, and steamroll CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins—all to the delight of a Trump-adoring crowd.

From the very first seconds of the town hall, Trump was lying. When Collins opened the event with a softball—“Why should Americans put you back in the White House?”—Trump immediately leaned into his normal election lies. He repeated debunked theories and passionately argued the election was stolen.

When he got his first question from the crowd—Will you suspend the “polarizing” talk about election fraud?—a question that had already been answered in the first minute of the town hall, Trump just pushed forward with more disproven election falsehoods.

Collins, by the way, was recruited from Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. The CNN executives had to know she was a poor choice, on top of knowing that Trump was going to lie non-stop, and that his audience was going to love it. They figured it out partway through (I knew what was going to happen last week when I heard about this nonsense — put me in charge of CNN, already, I’m smarter than anyone there.)

Halfway through the town hall, CNN staffers were acknowledging the event was a disaster for the truth.

“This is so bad,” one of CNN’s on-air personalities told The Daily Beast before the first commercial break. “I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism… it is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.”

“One of the worst hours I’ve ever seen on our air,” another CNN staffer told The Daily Beast.

And yet another on-air commentator for CNN was clear this wasn’t a good night for the cable news channel. “I’m floored by this whole evening,” this person said.

Right now, analysts at the network are reading over the viewership stats, and if this hour of non-news and MAGA propaganda was popular, you can expect to see lots more of it for the next year and a half.

Wait, I just realized the presidential race has already begun, and is going to go on interminably. Another reason to turn CNN off.

Fuck all of these guys.

Run/fly away, little fellas, I have cruel plans in mind

Started a big project today — we have a fate in mind for all these spiders my lab is churning out. It will be an interesting fate for me, but alas, not at all healthy for the spiders. I’ll be keeping my Patreon followers informed, the rest of you will have to wait until the Fall.

I’m going to be redoubling my spider farming efforts for a while. I literally had baby spiders nesting in my beard this morning, and I just now had one crawl out of my shirt cuff. It’s a good thing I like the little fellas. Which makes it sad that this kind of a meatgrinder project. I’m going to be the Cruella DeVille of spiders.

I don’t want to be at the mercy of people like Harlan Crow

One of the excuses I’m seeing from defenders of Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow is the claim that Crow was being generous and kind and you don’t want to discourage people from being kind, do you? Dahlia Lithwick is having nothing to do with that.

There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is, this is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours. The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits—and guess what? Unless and until you are related to a sitting Supreme Court justice: It will be not you.

The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem, and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips.” (You may still know them as “journalists.”)

Right, let’s replace the social safety net with crony capitalism. That’s not generosity, that’s selfishness.