My purpose in life

I have been enlightened. I know exactly what my role on this Earth is.

Yesterday, my wife found a dead rabbit in the shrubbery in our yard. You couldn’t miss it — the odor was horrific. So of course she sent me out to dispose of it.

It had been disemboweled and left to rot for several days. I found spoor nearby, and I suspect the killer was a dog, since cats tend to be more fastidious and don’t leave large lumps of poop nearby. I scraped it into a garbage bag, and noticed that the entire body cavity was a writhing mass of maggots.

I did not take pictures of that, even if I was impressed. You can thank me for that.

I put the body in our garbage can. Fortunately, garbage pick up was the next day, that is, this morning. I figured I was done.

My wife interrupted me again this morning. She’d gone to bring the trash can into the garage this morning, only it wasn’t empty. She told me it was “insect related,” so it was my job.

The trash can was covered in maggots. They were in masses on the bottom, had crawled up the sides, were covering the lid, and were dripping off the container into the grass.

I will share a photo of the lid.

The rabbit was gone, and we’re talking tens of thousands of homeless maggots crawling everywhere. Everything was covered with maggots, which I guess explains why Mary hadn’t brought the garbage can in.

I used a garden hose to clean it up. There is now a patch of our yard that has been enriched with a wiggly mass of protein, I hope the birds appreciate it.

Jurassic spider tracks!

You need to include a scale with these images, Riley Black!

Finding fossils depends as much on light and time of day as search image. I’ve walked over this Jurassic sandstone sidewalk slab multiple times over 14 years but only today saw the spider tracks, those clusters of three dots. 🧪

I need to know how many tons a Jurassic spider weighed.

The army is fast-tracking corruption right into the officer corps

I have a son who is a major in the army — he worked his way up in the ranks, and he’s hoping to earn a promotion to lieutenant colonel sometime before he retires, but it gets harder and harder the farther up the ladder you climb. Next time I talk to him, I’ll have to tell him he’s been doing it all wrong. He’s about to be outranked.

The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

It’s not just that they’re being jumped up to high rank without earning it, but they also get a few special perks.

The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.

They’re also only going to have to work for about 3 weeks a year, and they’re probably going to be doing everything remotely, so no real soldiers will have to salute them.

The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.

If they’re really patriotic, I say send them to bases in Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iran. Tip of the spear, baby.

I can’t believe I’m suddenly pro-Iran

I don’t like theocracies, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re the Islamic Iranian kind or the Christian American kind, but Iran has a right to exist, and they are the victims of a surprise attack by Israel (aided by an American distraction). Unfortunately, America is led by an idiot who is demanding unconditional surrender and is itching to get involved on the wrong side — we might find ourselves involved in another pointless war for regime change in the Middle East.

I think we need a debate, and I found one: one side takes the position that “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism,” while the other side says “No It Won’t.”

A little problem, though, is that it’s the Onion. No one takes them seriously.

Another small problem is that debate is from 2003, and they’re arguing about the Iraq War.

You’d think we’d have learned our lesson…but deja vu, man, deja vu.

Minnesota has lost a thriving business

Are you in the market for a pillow? You could go to MyPillow.com and order one, along with lots of cheap Chinese-made products.

Not for much longer, though. He has been tried for defamation for the last few weeks, because he made false claims against a person at Dominion Voting Systems. He was put on the stand to defend himself, and he used the time to repeat his false claims with more vehemence. His performance has had consequences.

Coomer said during the two-week Lindell trial that his career and life were destroyed by the statements. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.

Lindell’s lawyers denied the claims and said Frankspeech was not liable for statements made by others. The jury found that eight other statements made by Lindell and others appearing on Frankspeech were not.

Lindell said he went to trial to draw attention to the need to get rid of electronic voting machines that have been targeted in a web of conspiracy theories. He said he used to be worth about $60 million before he started speaking out about the 2020 election and is now $10 million in debt.

He lost the trial and has been fined $2.3 million dollars, a drop in the bucket compared to the $80 million he has thrown away. This is a man who is digging a hole and doesn’t know when to stop.

Run, if you see this in a car

Vance Boelter is cooked. You can see a detailed list of all the evidence he left in his wake, as he fled, and it’s overwhelming. This is going to be a short trial.

I was horrified at the glimpse of the contents of his car.

Who lives like this? If your car contains four (at least) rifles on your seats and stuffed loosely into plastic buckets, your life has taken a sad and desperate turn. When he set off on his shameful tour of legislators’ homes, he could have just looked to his right and seen that he was a wrong, fucked-up person.

Women’s bodies must be hidden!

The transphobes are experiencing the contradictions inherent in their ideas. In England, which has become Transphobe Central, they set up some rules that competitors in swimming competitions must compete according to their birth sex. A transwoman showed up for the women’s races, and the organizers turned her away…so she showed up for the men’s competition, in men’s swimgear. She swam topless, like a man.

Anne Isabella Coombes protested a policy banning her from female competitions by competing in an ‘open’ category race wearing men’s sports trunks and no bra.

The 67-year-old swimmer said Swim England, the UK’s competitive swimming regulator, told her she wasn’t eligible to compete in female category races, despite having done so in the past.

Good for her, breaking gender norms with the assistance of transphobic rules-givers.

The media have also chosen to blur out her chest. They’re going to have to make up their mind about these rules someday.

I recognize that specific racist Uncle Sam!

Back in the 1980s, we made frequent family trips from Eugene to Seattle and back again, and one of the major landmarks was this huge billboard just off I-5 that always featured these demented, racist, far-right slogans. It was a significant feature — I always checked to see what vileness the old farmer had posted this time. Before Twitter, you had to make a large capital outlay to promote your bigotry.

That’s about to change. The Chehalis tribe has bought the billboard, and I trust that the content of the messages will soon change significantly.