Major space news!!!!

Jeff Bezos launched Katy Perry into space for 11 minutes.

That’s it. That’s our big news today. Woo hoo.

You can find a most excellent summary of the whole thing in the Guardian.

Given the mixture of freebie rides and seats sold to the super-rich, the thing people always say about Blue Origin tickets is that prices range from zero to $28m dollars. A bit like a seat on a RyanAir flight to Tallinn. But these spots were all personally gifted by Bezos and Sánchez because this was an Important Mission. Which also meant the whole thing was exclusively documented by Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel. Here, the anchors and reporters kept explaining that – unlike when men went to space in the past – this mission was all about emotions. But look, it’s great that we’re valorising emotions above all things, because it gives me permission to say how very much I hated this entire, hilariously vacuous spectacle.

Is blood the only alternative to comedians?

Jon Stewart exposes the over-the-top stupidity and arrogance of the president, and also the embarrassing sycophancy of the Republicans who fawn over him, but is it enough?

I think I’ve had enough of comedians covering this crisis with funny voices and schtick. When will people get serious about this horrible man? It’s clear that the rot has consumed the senate, the house (with exceptions: Sanders and AOC are not treating this as a joke), and the supreme court, but all we have left are the court jesters? I appreciate that they’re speaking up, but we desperately need someone, many someones, serious to deal with this ludicrous lump with way too much power. Laugh at him, please, but at some point we need to kick him off his throne and embarrass all the suck-ups he is surrounded by.

In the next step, this absolute clown is going to follow the lead of the Chinese president, who is even more of an authoritarian than our president. Chinese billionaires don’t get to rest easy.

The Alibaba founder [Jack Ma] had accused Chinese banks of operating with a “pawn-shop mentality”. He had also claimed that the authorities were trying to “use the way to manage a railway station to manage an airport” when it came to regulating the new world of digital finance.

These statements angered the banking establishment and reportedly reached the attention of President Xi Jinping.

Soon Ma and his close colleagues were summoned for a meeting with the regulators, and Ant Group’s flotation was halted in its tracks.

Shares in Ma’s companies fell, wiping nearly $76bn (£54bn) off its value.

After that meeting, Jack Ma was nowhere to be seen.

I don’t like billionaires, I want them taxed until they squeal, but disappearing anyone, whether they are a student protester or a bloated billionaire, is not acceptable…but that’s the direction we’re going in. It’s making me think back to my old history classes, learning about Roman emperors who would tell rich and powerful people to fall on their swords so their estates could be confiscated, and they would do it. Probably while satirists wrote comical poems and plays and scribbled graffiti on the walls, but they were still dead.

It really is time to stop laughing and stop trying to appease the tyrant. Tyrants are never appeased.

If you thought they could lie fast before, now AI has been harnessed to spew them harder & faster

A new paper is out: A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO₂-Global Warming Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence Contradicts IPCC Models and Solar Forcing Assumptions.

A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO₂-Global Warming Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence Contradicts IPCC Models and Solar Forcing Assumptions
• Grok 3 beta
, • Jonathan Cohler
, • David Legates
, • Franklin Soon
, • Willie Soon

Let us examine the authors.

• Grok 3 beta: the first author is AI software, Elon Musk’s pet AI, to be specific. It is competent at stringing words together, but can you trust it?

• Jonathan Cohler: He’s a professional clarinetist with no scientific training (he has written software), but he’s also a vocal climate change denialist. Ironically, he’s also the author of The Puppeteers of Perception: How AI systems are designed to mislead. I guess now he has changed his mind and decided that AI is a path to the truth.

• David Legates: He actually has climatology credentials! But he’s been using them to deny climate change. He’s a creature of the Heartland Institute, and was recently appointed by Trump to a position at NOAA.

• Franklin Soon: He’s a high school kid. He’ll have to grow up a bit before we can kick him around.

• Willie Soon: A notorious climate crank. He’s an aerospace engineer affiliated with the Heartland Institute and a whole slew of far right think tanks. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly many millions, from the fossil fuel industry, but he works damn hard to lie about his ties. He’s generally an awful person, worst of the bunch on that paper. He’s apparently also corrupted a teenaged boy to follow his path in lunacy.

I am unperturbed by the human authors on this atrocity, who have been babbling like this for decades, but am very concerned about the use of AI to churn out garbage. The paper is dense and technical, and mostly impenetrable by me (dammit, Jim, I’m a biologist!), but clearly goes against the climate consensus, denying any role of carbon in global climate change. I’m going to reject its conclusions out of hand because a) it flouts all the information delivered by real, human, scientists who are experts in the field, b) it’s a machine-generated Frankensteinian mishmash cobbled together from cherry-picked sources; c) it was fed by a team of kook climate deniers who fed it garbage in, and got garbage out, designed to mislead. But you know all the climate change deniers are going to be citing this thing without question.

What I dread, though, is when even more denialists pick up on this. You want to argue against vaccines, or a spherical earth, or evolution, or racial equality, it’s easy: crank up Elon’s Lie-Making Machine, feed it trash from any of a number of delusional web sites, and it’ll spit up a technically dense, grammatically competent, flaming heap of bullshit that you can cite in your debates. I imagine the Discovery Institute and AiG and Jay Bhattacharya’s corrupted NIH already have some dumbass intern gearing up to crank out more papers with a shiny pseudoscientific gloss. The Gish Gallop will be mechanized.

My alma mater isn’t feeling so good

I graduated from the University of Washington, which is a major research institution, with lots of NIH money usually flowing through it. Usually. Everything changed this year.

Universities are reeling. The Trump administration has executed a flurry of research grant terminations at large, private institutions like Johns Hopkins and Princeton University. In a recent court case against NIH, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the administration targeted cuts to grants about topics it disfavors like diversity, LGBTQ issues and gender identity.

Among public universities, the University of Washington is one of the hardest hit, and researchers and students have said the fallout from the cuts has upended their careers and forced some to consider leaving the U.S.

“We’re going to have a big brain drain in the U.S. of these really talented folks,” said Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, the vice dean of research and graduate education at UW Medicine. “It’s not just a switch that you flip, right? If people move out into another direction with their careers, they often don’t come back.”

In a statement to NBC News, NIH said it was dedicated to restoring “gold-standard, evidence-based science.”

That last bit sounds like something Jay Bhattacharya would say, and it’s a lie. We had “gold-standard, evidence-based science” before the fringe pseudoscience kooks took over, and whatever it is they’re restoring, it isn’t evidence-based science.

Several institutions out there around Puget Sound are important centers of Alzheimer’s research — I guess that disease doesn’t fall under MAHA’s list of good research, which mainly seems to center on denying vaccines and peddling pointless supplements and killing the scientific establishment.

“Many of us are in the same boat” as the University of Washington, said Dr. Helena Chui, the principal investigator at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Southern California. “It’s a very strong network, and it would be easy to wreck, but it took years to build.”

All this destruction in the name of making the government more “efficient” and reducing deficits, all while the Trump administration is burning money at a furious rate.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of daily financial statements issued by the Treasury Department found that government spending since the inauguration in January is $154 billion more than in the same period in 2024 during the Biden administration.

I have to ask where that $154 billion went…

Blue has outgrown her home!

She’s been living in a plexiglas cube that used to be quite comfortable for her, but that pile of molts I keep on top is testimony that she just keeps on growing.

So crowded. So shabby. So this morning I relocated her to a huge, roomy 29 gallon fish tank, about 75cm x 25cm, with high class furnishings.

If you want to see it, you can get the full story on Patreon.

OK, if you don’t want to subscribe, I’ve also posted a photo on Instagram.

Civil war in the Minnesota Republicans!

That’s some headline I saw on the front page of the Star Tribune this morning.

Fed up with attacks, Minnesota Republicans wage war against far-right group
Republicans push to “cut out the cancer” of Action 4 Liberty, a group that has repeatedly attacked elected officials and tried to replace them with hardliners.

Say what? Republicans opposing the extremists in their ranks? This is good to see…except the mainstream Republicans are only opposing this one radical group because it’s fighting against the extremism of the mainstream Republicans.

Top officials in the Minnesota Republican Party recently gathered to take an unprecedented vote: formally condemning a right-wing group that has antagonized GOP elected officials for years.

Action 4 Liberty was repeatedly attacking Republicans in the divided Minnesota House for compromising with Democrats, while also encouraging “grassroots Patriots” to oust party officers at local conventions and replace them with hardline activists.

The state GOP’s executive committee declared that leaders of Action 4 Liberty are more focused on “tearing down Republicans” than helping the party win elections: “The leadership of the organization instead works only to enrich themselves, attack those actually making a difference, and claim victories they had nothing to do with,” read the declaration brought forward by committee member Bobby Benson, who’s the state chief of staff for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer.

This is a counter-move led by Tom Emmer’s wing of the party, and Emmer is an unpleasant conservative hardliner and big fan of Donald Trump. Action 4 Liberty is just an even more extreme subset of the Minnesota Republicans — they call Tom Emmer a Globilist[sic] RINO which tells you how far out these guys are. This isn’t an effort to make the Republicans a little more sane, it’s just a civil war within the party that’s going to bring more chaos to the far right, and leave them unchanged.

Action 4 Liberty has had some recent successes, which leave me unimpressed.

Action 4 Liberty has enlisted grassroots activists across the state in its effort to push the GOP further to the right, telling them to seek party positions and primary incumbent lawmakers. Its success has varied over the years, with many of its candidates losing primary battles to more moderate Republicans. But last year, the group rallied activists who ousted state GOP Chair David Hann, endorsed far-right Republican Royce White for U.S. Senate and blocked GOP U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach from winning the party’s endorsement.

Michelle Fischbach is my representative, and she’s a horrid conservative. I am pleased to see her blocked from accomplishing anything. It is amusing that it’s her fellow Republicans who are busy standing in her way.

The DFL doesn’t care which crazy faction controls the MNGOP, since they’re going to suck no matter what.

Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin released the following statement after MNGOP Chair David Hann was deposed on Saturday with the help of far-right activists, including the group Action 4 Liberty.

“The Minnesota GOP has been completely captured by the most extreme, fringe activists in Minnesota politics,” said Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin. “Control of Minnesota’s entire state government is on the ballot in 2026. Today’s chaos shows that if Minnesota Republicans regain power, they will be beholden to the same far-right fringe that now dominates the national Republican Party.”

The Minnesota GOP has not won a statewide election in Minnesota in almost two decades.

That’s what they are: enemies of democracy

Remember Garbage Pail Kids, those collectable cards that illustrated horrible, disgusting cartoon characters? They were pretty tame in comparison to this version: an illustrator drew up some “Enemies of Democracy” cards (perfect name, by the way) and has posted them on Instagram. There are lots, and all of them gruesomely accurate.

Now I’ve gotta collect them all.