You didn’t know you’d wake up this morning to hear an old man raving about teenaged boys’ sperm counts

RFK jr went on a rant about sperm. It’s a national security threat, you know!

Today, the average teenager in this country has 50 percent of the sperm count, 50 percent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man. Our girls are hitting puberty six years early, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children.

Parents who want to have children do not have access. I have seven children. I feel that God has blessed me with that and I can’t imagine how different my life would be if I did not have that blessing.

Sperm counts are known to decline with age, meaning a teenage boy is likely to have a much higher count than a man in his late sixties, according to experts.

our parents aren’t having children… think about that one for a moment.

Then consider Parents who want to have children do not have access. Access to what, you may ask, and also what makes them parents if they don’t have children? My head hurts reading whatever that ratfucker has to say about health.

It’s true that sperm counts have been reported to be declining, although very poor sampling of a variable parameter adds some doubt to the conclusion. We tend not to get sperm counts from teenagers! But I’d agree with him that environmental hazards, especially the ones that big capitalist corporations tend to spew everywhere, are almost certainly damaging the quantity and quality of gametes humans are producing. We should probably do something about that, but Republicans aren’t going to change anything that might affect the bottom line of Dow or Monsanto, so seeing a lackey of corporate interests piously expressing concern about forever chemicals contaminating the environment leaves me unmoved.

Also, making babies is a more complex process than just having a man making sperm (that’s probably the smallest part of the problem). Conception requires a consenting woman, and also requires that the parents have the time and money and interest to invest in raising a child. If you want more healthy babies in America, provide better medical care with low cost first — pumping up male sperm counts accomplishes nothing if no one wants or can afford children.

As for RFK jr himself — he has six children by two mothers (I think he’s counting his current girlfriend’s child as his own, which is fair). All of his marriages ended in divorce, and one was exceptionally acrimonious, and one of his former wives died of suicide. I don’t think he should be talking about “blessings”. He’s an old rich fuck and is not a role model for successful parenting. One of the causes of his divorce was the discovery of a book where he listed all of his extramarital affairs!

Wait…I thought conservatives blamed feminism for declining birth rates, but now it’s all due to those tainted, poisoned men shooting blanks? Cool.

English, do you speak it, Kelbie Murphy?

Dumbass

I don’t think she should graduate from college until she passes a basic English literacy test. She read a simple sentence in her “expensive” textbook and misinterpreted it.

Kelbie Murphy, a senior at the university, paid roughly $100 for an assigned textbook in her International Public Relations course. In Chapter 8, the opening passage reads: “An internet search produces the following modifier for identity: corporate, sexual, digital, public, racial, national, brand, and even Christian (a U.S.-based white supremacist group).”

“The way it was worded, it listed several marginalized groups, but then only called Christians to be White supremacists,” Murphy told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. “But the scariest thing is that the book was written in 2007.”

That’s not a particularly expensive textbook.

The fact that “identity” when modified by “Christian” refers to a racist, white supremacist organization outraged her because she couldn’t comprehend that “Christian identity” is a narrow subset of Christian thought, and thought it was maligning all of the Christian faith (although maybe it was an accurate misreading, that wasn’t what the textbook was saying). She got lots of views on TikTok, and even got highlighted on Fox News, two places where ignorance prospers.

Dan McClellan dismantles Murphy’s whole argument.

The University of North Georgia should be ashamed if they cave in to her lies.

All for moi?

Yesterday, I started moving the larger juvenile Latrodectus to their very own special homes, and I give them a day to build a cobweb before giving them a homecoming meal. This young lady got handed a whole mealworm — imagine giving a teenager a whole cow and permission to kill and eat it. That’s what this was like.

She kept tapping it like she could hardly believe it was all hers. She’s been living on fruit flies for the past month or so, so this was like a miracle meal plopped into her lap. If spiders had laps.

Notice how she has the white juvenile markings on her dorsal abdomen. Those will fade. She also has a red hourglass on her ventral abdomen, which will not.

He is embarrassingly tacky

We’re in the middle of a Republican shut down of the government, and Donald Trump is making ridiculous redecorating plans.

His other second-term developments include a gilded makeover for the White House, paving over the Rose Garden and constructing a $250m ballroom, as well as the clearing of homeless encampments throughout the capital.

Gilding the White House? Jesus fuck.

You could build a lot of low-income housing for $250 million. Just saying.

This is what he does in his free time?

He also wants to build a monument, the Arc de Trump.

US President Donald Trump wants to build a triumphal arch across from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, the latest in his efforts to make over the capital city in his style.

The so-called Arc de Trump would commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary next year and is reportedly being privately funded by Trump’s supporters.

He wants to build a pointless monument in just a year? You know it’s going to be cheaply and sloppily built, and will fall apart shortly afterwards. Plaster and lath, with gilding. Yuck. And who cares about laws and regulations? Not the Republicans.

Plans for Trump’s proposed arch are still taking shape but it is expected to be located across the Potomac River on federal land inside the district’s boundaries.

Developing a memorial in the District of Columbia is complex given its unique status as the capital city, according to Dr Christine Henry, director of the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

New commemorations typically need congressional approval as part of a 24-step plan developed by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which approves designs along with the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA).

Even the craven New York Times is calling this for what it is.

Critics, including a guest essayist for the New York Times, have called his Oval Office remodel a “Gilded Rococo Nightmare”.

I hope the next Democratic administration, if there is one, is prepared to budget for demolition and cleanup.

Needs more spiders

A reader sent me a comment about how Catholics tell stories that they claim are in the Bible that aren’t, and that specifically they don’t include spiders. I had to double check. Here are all the Bible verses that mention spiders.

Pathetic. For one, they’re about spider webs, not spiders, and the second one is about lizards. Do they think lizards and spiders are the same thing? They’re so desperate to pad their list of spider facts from the Bible that they include reptiles.

Speaking of padding, here’s my correspondent’s tale of Catholic fable-making.

I made a comment on Bluesky that it wasn’t until I was studying the Bible in Religion class at a Catholic High School that I realized how many of the stories I was told by nuns in grade school weren’t actually in the Bible. I gave, as an example, the story of how Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in their flight to Egypt to escape Herod Antipas’ attempt to kill all potential Kings of the Jews, they hid in a cave from pursuing soldiers. After they entered the cave, spiders spun webs across the entrance to the cave causing the soldiers to believe that the Holy Family couldn’t have possibly entered the cave.

A commenter wondered if the story I related was inspired by a similar one about David fleeing from King Saul for the exact same reason. Unlike the story about the Holy Family, the tale of David hiding in a cave, minus the spiders, is actually in the Bible.

I interpret this to mean Christians realize that there is a serious lack of spider relevance in their holy book, and they are crying out for more.

The problem with trying to make sense of a bad sci-fi movie

Have you ever sat down to watch a movie and realized, within 5 minutes, that it was going to suck, but you’d walked to the theater and your knees were aching and you just need to sit and rest for a while before beginning the clumsy trek home again, so you decide that letting your brain suffer for two hours is better than wrecking your legs some more? No? Maybe I was too specific.

Anyway, I tortured my self with Tron: Ares last night. I’d seen the original Tron when it first came out in 1982, it sucked then, and I should have known better, but over 40 years have passed and the memory had faded. Now I remember. Remind me when the sequel comes out (yes, it sets up a sequel) that I shouldn’t waste my time.

The summary: it’s a movie about unexplainable magical phenomena gussied up with a lot of bad technobabble. I can enjoy a movie that has magic as a key premise, but the technobabble kept bringing me up short, with a jolt: whoever wrote this thing doesn’t understand physics or biology, and for a movie that is ostensibly built around programming computers, they don’t have the vaguest notion of how those machines and skills work. It’s simultaneously magic + coding. Hated it.

What the heck is a “particle laser”? It’s central to the story, but it makes no sense.

Also, Jared Leto.

I shoulda stayed home.

Encouraging news for Oklahoma

Ryan Walters, the superintendent of education who was trying to force Christianity on students — introducing PragerU trash into the curriculum, requiring Bibles (the Trump Bible, actually), etc. — resigned a short while ago. I assumed it was because he had been made a more lucrative offer by a conservative Christian organization, but it may have been a deeper problem than I thought.

Walters is being investigated by the state ethics commission! He had been abusing teacher licenses and firing people he didn’t like, among other fiscal irregularities. He had given high-paying positions to his friends, instead. Some of his actions are already being revoked.

Starting with the cases regarding teacher licenses. The board voted to dismiss several cases for revocations of teachers like Regan Killackey, the Edmond teacher who went somewhat viral last year after an Instagram post from five years prior came to light that showed his kid in a Trump mask and Killackey with a pirate sword, they were at a Halloween store around the holiday time.

The board also voted to dismiss the case of the teacher license revocation for Alison Scot, who also became a target under Walters when she commented on someone’s social media post regarding the assassination attempt of President Trump.

Also cool: the Oklahoma education website, which once promised all this crap about Bibles and PragerU, is already being revised, and his weird religious programming is already beginning to disappear.

As Sam Seder mentions above, this suggests that the Oklahoma citizenry aren’t as far gone as we feared — they’ve been quietly fighting back all along, and we’re starting to see the bad policies of the Walters era being rolled back. Maybe they’re getting tired of being the 50th worst education state in the country.

Evil isn’t just banal, it’s also petty and childish

Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli captivity, and she talks about her capture. What’s surprising is just how childishly stupid and misogynistic the Israeli soldiers were.

Her red suitcase lies in the hall. “Whore Greta” someone has written in large black letters. Around the text: an Israeli flag and an erect penis.
The bag was confiscated by the Israeli military from the boat – and returned to her like this. She laughs.
– They’re like five-year-olds!

She was not allowed to wear her T-shirt with “Free Palestine” on it and was ordered to change, she explains. She put on an orange one with the text “Decolonize” instead.

– And then I put on my frog hat. When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.

Here, everything goes “from zero to a hundred,” several witnesses describe – the violence escalates.

Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.

– It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground.

Greta gets up from the sofa and lies down, showing the position on the striped living room rug.

– They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.

Greta laughs.

– Then they ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it, and kind of threw a tantrum.

– They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.

Every time someone looked up from the ground, they were knocked back down to the ground, Greta and the other Swedes recount. In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag.

– The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.

They’re like spoiled children. Unprofessional and eminently mockable. You might think it’s because these are young soldiers, with the mentality of a college freshman at best, but even the older, unwiser senior politicians are like that.

This smug asshole

Suddenly, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the area and stood in front of everyone, Greta recounts.

– He shouted, ’You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies.’ Those who shouted back were taken aside and beaten. They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.

They were humanitarians, who wanted to deliver aid to Palestinian children.

The US has given over $20 billion in aid to Israel in the last two years. It’s past time to turn off the faucet — no more aid to these immature thugs, ever. Force them to learn how to live with their neighbors in a civilized manner.

Teaching with AI

When I get back into the classroom in January, one thing I’m looking forward to is the ability to generate lessons with sophisticated computer graphics by simply clicking a button. So fancy! So informative!

The irony of teaching about water conservation with AI does not escape me.