I guess these are the kinds of people who run the country now

American Idiot

You may have heard that the state of Florida banned a poem by Amanda Gorman from grade school libraries. What’s chilling is that this was triggered by one person complaining, a woman named Daily Salinas. She is a real piece of work.

In a series of screenshots tweeted by the group Miami Against Fascism, Salinas appears to be photographed in several Proud Boys events. In one photo, Salinas appears to be standing next to Enrique Tarrio, the far-right group’s neo-fascist leader who was found guilty of seditious conspiracy last month. “Freedom to choose,” said Salinas’s T-shirt.

In another post that featured a picture of Tarrio, Salinas appeared to hail the Proud Boys, writing, “Los mejores,” or “The best” in Spanish, adding, “My Proud boys,” alongside emojis of the American flag, a heart, a flexed arm and prayer hands.

Miami Against Fascism also posted pictures of Salinas’s apparent involvement with CCDF, also known as County Citizens Defending Freedom USA, a controversial Christian nationalist organization.

The outlet Jewish Telegraphic Agency also reviewed a Facebook account that appeared to be Salinas’s. The account featured a series of rightwing and antisemitic posts, including one about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated Russian antisemitic text originally published in 1903 about a purported Jewish plan to dominate the world.

According to JTA, the post about the Protocols showed a list of steps on how “Jewish Zionists” would dominate the world.

Not only is she a bigot, she is a nearly illiterate dumbass.

“I see the word ‘communism’, and I think it’s something about communism,” she told JTA, adding, “I didn’t read the words.”

Salinas added that she is Christian, has Jewish friends and enjoys watching the Israeli Netflix series Fauda.

She also revealed that she only read snippets of the books that she sought to ban at the education center. The books include The ABCs of Black History, poetry by Langston Hughes and books on Cuba, all of which she has criticized for “indirect hate messages”, references to critical race theory and gender indoctrination.

“They have to read for me because I’m not an expert,” Salinas told JTA. “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education.”

The state of Florida allows an idiot who doesn’t read to dictate the contents of school libraries.

Maybe they should only accept criticisms of books from people who pass a test of basic literacy and who can actually demonstrate that they read and understood the whole book in question. But that would be un-American!

High octane crazy blood!

Blood is life, you know. That’s been the lesson from science documentaries like Dracula and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Remember creepy weird Bryan Johnson, the middle-aged Silicon Valley techbro who want to live forever by gobbling down lots of supplements, slathering on the skin creams, and eating a strangely specific diet? Now he has decided that vampirism is the answer.

An anti-aging zealot who spends $2 million a year in a quest to turn back time has dragged his teenage son into being his personal “blood boy.”

Bryan Johnson, the 45-year-old tech tycoon who wants to keep his internal organs, including his penis and rectum, functioning youthfully — enlisted 17-year-old Talmage to provide blood transfusions, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

At a clinic near Dallas last month, Johnson, his 70-year-old dad, Richard, and Talmage showed up for an hours-long, tri-generational blood-swapping treatment, the outlet reported.

Johnson usually receives plasma from an anonymous donor, but this time Talmage provided a liter of his blood, which was converted into batches of piece parts — a batch of liquid plasma and another of red and white blood cells and platelets.

Ugh. This is creepy child abuse — although they did it in Texas, where they hate children, so he’ll probably get away with it. Even if this worked, I wouldn’t ask my children to ever do this for me.

I also notice the icky Elizabeth Holmes-style pose. It’s all quackery.

A few more raptors would reduce the noise

My wife was working in the garden this morning, while I was vegetating in front of the computer. One of the things Mary does is listen and fire up Merlin Bird ID as she works — paying attention to bird song is supposed to be good for you, you know. This is what she identified in our back yard this morning: Chipping Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, House Finch, Black-capped Chickadee, Common Grackle, Rock Pigeon, Grey Catbird, American Crow, American Robin, Northern Cardinal, White-breasted Nuthatch, Red-eyed Vireo, Willow Flycatcher, Alder Flycatcher, Blue Jay, Common Raven, Eastern Towhee, Black-and-White Warbler, Philadelphia Vireo, House Sparrow, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Great Crested Flycatcher, Great Horned Owl, European Starling, Eastern Phoebe, House Wren, American Goldfinch, Downy Woodpecker, Chimney Swift, Dickcissel, American Redstart, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Mourning Dove, Yellow-rumped warbler, Cedar Waxwing, and Yellow-bellied Flycatcher.

I thought she made up “Dickcissel,” but apparently it’s a real bird living in the Midwest. I know we’ve got owls in the neighborhood, and also hawks, since this is clearly a great feeding ground.

This does explain why I’m getting up early every morning — the cacophony is tremendous around here.

Another reason I won’t get Neuralink

I was wondering what Neuralink is good for — it must be for treating some serious medical condition, since it involves serious surgery. But no! It’s just techdude fantasies.

Neuralink’s BCI will require patients to undergo invasive brain surgery. Its system centers around the Link, a small circular implant that processes and translates neural signals. The Link is connected to a series of thin, flexible threads inserted directly into the brain tissue where they detect neural signals.

Patients with Neuralink devices will learn to control it using the Neuralink app. Patients will then be able to control external mice and keyboards through a Bluetooth connection, according to the company’s website.

An app. Bluetooth. Controlling computer mice.

It absolutely did not help that I am currently using a computer mouse, a cheap wired optical mouse, that has an intermittent fault. Every once in a while, but not often enough to motivate me to get a replacement, the LED cuts out and the buttons stop responding. The fix is to shake the cable or unplug and re-insert the USB cable. It’s a bit annoying, I really should just get a new mouse, they’re only about $7.

But now imagine that your Neuralink device has a less than perfect connection: scar tissue builds up, an electrode gets jostled out of position. Every once in a while, the app drops the Bluetooth connection. The artificial limb you’re controlling becomes unresponsive, or even worse, you miss a kill shot in Call of Duty (worse, because I’ve seen how gamers can explode in fury at the most trivial stuff). There’s no easy cable-jiggling you can do, you’re going in for major brain surgery.

Or more likely, you’ll make do as I am with my mouse…you let it slide, 99% function is good enough. The only thing is, your brain doesn’t like wires stuck in it — there will be a gradual accumulation of scar tissue and localized damage, the performance of the device will inevitably incrementally deteriorate, and Neuralink doesn’t have a good replacement strategy.

“Right to repair” acquires a new urgency when it’s a gadget imbedded in your brain. Musk doesn’t seem the type to allow outsourcing of his profitable toy, and is probably anticipating making lots of money from obsolescence.

There’d have to be something wrong with your brain to sign up for a Neuralink trial

Has anybody read The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton? It’s about a man who gets a brain implant to correct his epilepsy, but then it starts triggering increasingly violent crimes. I strongly dislike everything Crichton ever wrote — he was a Luddite who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, while the press and the public fawn over his bad science — but for the first time, I feel like he might have been onto something.

Reportedly, Elon Musk has gotten FDA approval to stick chronic electrodes into people’s brains. Why you’d want anything associated with that incompetent boob permanently wired into your brain is a mystery.

The FDA acknowledged in a statement that the agency cleared Neuralink to use its brain implant and surgical robot for trials on patients but declined to provide more details.

Neuralink and Musk did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The story has triggered my internal Michael Crichton and now I’m wondering what horror will result from this decision.

  • Patients will start murdering people ala The Terminal Man (or Musk’s self-driving software) as Neuralink misfires.
  • Neuralink will catch fire and burn down to the patient’s basicranium.
  • Neuralink will explode when it’s switched on, cratering the patient’s head.
  • Neuralink will attract Nazis who will fill the patient’s brain with bad ideas.
  • Neuralink will do nothing at all, but it will distract the patient from investing in better treatments.

My imagination fails. You’ll have to think of all the likely horrible consequences of getting a Neuralink implant.

I hope you choke on your birthday cake, Henry

Today is an evil birthday, a reminder that the universe is not fair and just.

Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century. The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.

The news, as usual, was sickening. Kissinger is generally treated as distinguished, honorable statesman, and his crimes are glossed over because, obviously, he’s a very old man and he’s celebrating a birthday. You don’t want to ruin his birthday, do you? (Yes, I do.) So the Washington Post runs a piece written by Kissinger’s son, David, that


tells us all about his secret for living so long — a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, a career of relentlessly stressful decision-making, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never a participant. He forgets never having a speck of empathy for others, and never ever facing the consequences of his decisions. He has seen some of those consequences, but they do not deter him.

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he had lost 13 family members and countless friends to the Holocaust. He returned to his native Germany as an American soldier, participating in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp near Hannover. There, he witnessed the depths to which mankind can sink unconstrained by international structures of peace and justice. Next month, we will return to Fürth, where he will lay a wreath at the grave of his grandfather, who did not escape.

That’s so sad. If only the lesson he’d learned from his personal experience that murdering civilians is an evil act. At least the Intercept has a lengthy article on the civilian experience in Cambodia and Kissinger’s war crimes.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

Kissinger doesn’t understand the meaning of “honor.” He’s a butcher who promoted the impersonal use of technology to lay waste to villages — he established an American tradition continued to this day, using drone strikes to wage bloody war with no clear idea how flattening farms and blowing up children will end a war.

Mother Jones summarizes Kissinger’s place in history.

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands are drenched in blood.

Yet he will be feted today, and every simpering politician who praises this man is an accomplice.

I wish there were a grave that they could lay a wreath on, and that the rest of us could piss on.

Another example of why I despise Christianity

It leads stupid people like Ray Comfort to say things like this:

The Queen of rock ‘n’ roll passed into eternity today. All the money that Tina Turner possessed, all her fame, all her awards, and accolades now mean nothing. The only thing that matters, is “Were her sins forgiven?”

OK, I forgive her sins. Done.

Maybe better questions to ask when someone dies are: “Did they make the world a better place? Did they create beauty? Did they inspire? Did they speak truth to the world?”

Tina Turner gets a yes to each question. Ray Comfort gets a slow, sad shake of the head.

Texas rides again!

After their attempt to stuff the ten commandments into classrooms failed, the Texas legislature rebounds and succeeds in stuffing chaplains into the schools.

Senate Bill 763 was approved in an 84-60 vote in the Texas House, one day after it passed the Texas Senate. It allows Texas schools to use safety funds to pay for unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles. Volunteer chaplains will also be allowed in schools.

Note: they want to use safety fund for this futile effort, in a misguided belief that this will keep kids safe. But then the bill specifically allows unlicensed chaplains, that is, the local Baptist minister with no training in education or safety is going to get paid to come in and pester the kids. And they’re expected to provide mental health assistance! Like mental health care is just something anyone can do adequately.

Wow, but that one sentence — “It allows Texas schools to use safety funds to pay for unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles” — is doing a lot of work.

The Democrats made an effort to reduce the harm this bill is going to do to no avail.

Earlier this month, House Democrats also offered amendments to bar proselytizing or attempts to convert students from one religion to another; to require chaplains to receive consent from the parents of school children; and to make schools provide chaplains from any faith or denomination requested by students. All of those amendments failed.

Those are reasonable requirements, but they don’t go far enough. In particular, you need training to do counseling. Republicans think it’s going to help, for their usual ignorant reasons.

As with other faith-driven legislation this session — including a bill to require the Ten Commandments in classrooms that failed to reach a crucial vote on Tuesday — conservative Christians argued that religious chaplains could help prevent school shootings, drug use, suicide and other societal ills by returning God to classrooms.

My experience with most religious nutcases is that they’re only going to increase the sense of futility and despair. Not to mention the increase in sexual abuse by priests, which always seems to follow.

How’s that war in Ukraine going, anyway?

It seems to have settled into a long deadly grind, with Russia committed to capturing the city of Bakhmut and Ukraine committed to defending it, with both sides pouring troops into the months-long battle, and what they’re getting out of it is a lot of dead people and a bombed out city. Russia says they’ve finally succeeded, while Ukraine says they’ve still got a toe-hold and are busy encircling the city. It sounds to me like they both lost.

Even if I grant the Russians their “triumph,” it doesn’t seem to have been worth it.

In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, also asserted that the war has backfired spectacularly by failing to “demilitarize” Ukraine, one of President Vladimir Putin’s stated aims of the invasion. He also called for totalitarian policies.

“We are in a situation where we can simply lose Russia,” Prigozhin said, using an expletive to hammer his point. “We must introduce martial law. We unfortunately … must announce new waves of mobilization; we must put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition,” he said. “Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders … and work hard.”

Yikes. Russia started a war of aggression, and that’s what victory means — they have to become like North Korea? That’s a complete failure. Sure, close your borders, enslave your own population, alienate the rest of the world, and claim you won.

Of course, the people in charge will still get to live luxurious lives.

Citing public anger at the lavish lifestyles of Russia’s rich and powerful, Prigozhin warned that their homes could be stormed by people with “pitchforks.” He singled out Ksenia Shoigu, the daughter of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was spotted vacationing in Dubai with her fiancé, Alexei Stolyarov, a fitness blogger.

“The children of the elite shut their traps at best, and some allow themselves a public, fat, carefree life,” Prigozhin said in the interview, which was released Wednesday on video. “This division might end as in 1917, with a revolution — when first the soldiers rise up, and then their loved ones follow.”

I guess a Russian would know. Of course, Putin would know this too, and would know that he’s got to keep the pressure on, and that losing the war in Ukraine would possibly be the real trigger for revolution, more so than spoiled rich kids flaunting their wealth.