You can see a bit of it in this photo.
Mainly, though, this is a picture of my wife’s swarm of bird feeders, which were also swarmed with birds this morning, which all fled the instant I stepped outside. There is a squirrel hiding in the photo, you might not be able to see it. They’re kind of sneaky.
You know what that means: I am welcoming all the spiders to come in from the cold and find a cozy place to stay in my house, like this Pholcus in my shower.
I was planning to go into phased retirement at the end of the next school year. I’d told the chair of my division, and had warned all my faculty colleagues, but now…I’m not so sure. This might be a bad time to suffer a reduction in income and to throw myself on the mercies of our health care system.
Trump’s picks to lead US health agencies:
HHS – Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
NIH – Jay Bhattacharya
CMS – Mehmet Oz
CDC – Joseph Ladapo (TBC)
FDA – Marty Makary (TBC)
Surgeon General – Casey Means/Vinay Prasad (TBC)
That is a stunning list of quacks and incompetents. Do I really want to give up my good university health insurance to rely on whatever these humbugs and charlatans cobble up? Fortunately, I have not yet made any legal commitments to retire, so I could rethink everything and continue to inflict myself on a few more cohorts of incoming students. I would rather they got a fresh new face, and that I got to relax for a few years — I know you might think I’ve got an easy job, but still I can feel my stress levels skyrocketing every semester.
So now I’m uncertain. I might have to linger on until the walls of the ivory tower crumble down around me. Which may not take long: Trump is also appointing the wife of a corrupt wrestling promoter, Linda McMahon, to be Secretary of Education. She has no qualifications, of course. This is a clear indication that the intent is to tear down the entire edifice of our school system, and I’m sure higher education is on the chopping block. Maybe I’ll just die with the American universities instead of getting a few years of rest.
Or less dramatically, I’ll be one of a multitude of casualties when the next epidemic sweeps across the nation.
Would you like some free biological illustrations that aren’t the products of an AI’s unrestrained imagination? NIH BioArt is such a source.
These are bold, simple illustrations with limitations. There is a section on arthropods, but it doesn’t contain any spiders, or much of anything outside ticks and mosquitos. If you want a graphic of a tick, it’s got you covered. Here’s a tick for you:
Today is International Men’s Day. Finally! I’m so tired of being ignored all the other days of the year.
I do wish to complain, though. Most of the logos I can find on Google are all about facial hair, ties, and sometimes bowler hats. Is that all we are? We can do better.
The theme this year is “Positive Male Role Models.” I don’t want to hear about your positive role models, though — tell me how you’re trying to be a good role model.
I greatly appreciate Dan McLellan’s work — he’s a serious scholar of the Bible and he often addresses the shallow assumptions some people make about their religion, and delves into the complicated history of Christianity. Sometimes, though, I think his focus on Biblical scholarship can lead him to miss the big, glaring horror behind belief.
This video begins with an arrogant Christian prick reading triumphantly from the Bible. It confirms his prejudice that women are less important, and that their purpose is to bear children.
I was surprised at McLellan’s criticism. The guy is quoting this verse of the Bible, 1 Timothy 2:11:
Women are to learn in silence with complete submission. I do not allow a woman to teach or to hold authority over a man. She should keep silent. For Adam was formed first, and Eve afterward. Furthermore, Adam was not deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and fell into sin. However, women will be saved through the bearing of children, provided that they continue to persevere in faith, love, and holiness, marked by modesty.
McLellan rightly points out that this book of the Bible is presented as the work of the apostle Paul, but it isn’t — it’s regarded by scholars as the work of someone else altogether. Fine. So? Those words and ideas are ugly and do harm, no matter which ancient evangelist wrote them, and those words are canonically in the Christian Bible. Are the words of Paul generally regarded as true and accurate representations of Christian belief? That’s one implication of McLellan’s criticism, that the only valid source of information is Paul’s writings.
My objection is to the blatant misogyny — the actual empirical evidence is that women are just as intelligent and just as worthy as men, and that there was no Adam & Eve & an apple, and therefore reality contradicts the literal stories told in the Bible. I don’t give a damn who wrote it. It’s just another example of how the wickedness in their holy book inspires the wickedness of smug young men, like the one in the video.
That’s the better argument, not quibbling over authorship, but simply talking to women and recognizing their personhood and autonomy and equal worth to men. It’s so weird to see a kid who doesn’t care about scholarship being rebuked for his lack of scholarship, when he’s treating the Bible in the same way he would an Andrew Tate podcast.
He’s leaking the idea that he might appoint Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, to be the Secretary of Education, a department that he has also threatened to eliminate. This is pure power-mad arbitrary trolling. It’s not as if she has any qualifications for the job.
Among the early arguments against Justice, the foremost is her lack of a college degree, which may be met with criticism from one or two moderate Republican Senators but is unlikely to push any into the “nay” camp.
That tracks. He’s got a pattern of promoting the most ignorant, hateful people to positions of power because he know it will get a reaction from his opponents and get him on the news. It’s a troll move.
You know who else is a petty hateful troll? Nancy Mace.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) set off a firestorm on Capitol Hill with a bill to keep Sarah McBride, soon to be the first transgender member of Congress, from accessing the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol.
Why it matters: The measure is not being immediately dismissed by Republican leadership, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) telling Axios, “We’re going to talk about that. We’re working on the issue.”
He lies, he’s not working on the issue. He’s going to let it ferment as a distraction, because hate is the center of the Republican way. This is how they’ll also get the most anti-woman legislation done, by making hateful women the face of their party on those issues.
I am so sorry for what misery trans men and women are going to go through in the coming years.
It sure must be handy to be able to lead a billionaire around by his dick. Elon Musk is using his wealth to stop a result Trump doesn’t like.
Last week, satirical news website The Onion announced acquiring InfoWars in a court-ordered sale.
Subsequently, Musk-owned social media platform X “entered an appearance” – a legal term expressing the intention to take part in proceedings – asking the federal court that it be included on any future communications about the case.
As a result, a federal bankruptcy judge temporarily halted the transfer of InfoWars to The Onion while ordering an “evidentiary hearing” to review the auction process aimed at ensuring the “process and transparency”.
Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas Southern District warned people against feeling “comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing takes place next week.
On the one hand, The Onion CEO Ben Collins is insisting that his company has won the bid fair and square and that the only thing pending was “standard processes”. Collins plans to relaunch InfoWars as a “satirised version of itself” in January.
On the other hand, Jones, who is a vocal Trump supporter, has hailed the court’s review order. “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed,” he said, implying that the president-elect is unhappy with the court-ordered sale of a news platform that has consistently supported the 45th US president.
So many questions. Why did a judge decide to include an unrelated third party in the proceedings? What gives Trump the right to interfere? Why is Musk doing the bidding of Trump? Why did they bother to have an auction if some random asshole can swoop in and invalidate the results?
For better or worse, Coca Cola has driven the iconography of Christmas — that jolly bearded fat man in a red suit is a corporate construct. Every year, Coca Cola proudly trots out some new heartwarming ad featuring Santa or a polar bear or whatever knocking back a frosty cold soft drink. Buy coke! They’ve been working hard for almost a century to make sure you associate this holiday with their beverage.
This year they blew it. They’ve aired an AI-generated ad that features trucks and an annoying jingle. Is this to be our new sentimental memory of Christmas?
One of the wealthiest companies in the world decided that they don’t need to pay artists to do their advertising artwork, and would instead have a computer churn over old imagery and cobble together an unappealing hash that won’t win over anyone. Take a look at the comments on that video — people hate it.
The National Institutes of Health is a hugely successful organization behind modern biomedical research in the USA — among their many goals was establishing policy for dealing with infectious disease, as well as funding research in vaccines.
You already know what the know-nothings and anti-intellectuals of the MAGA movement think of the NIH. They’ve been opposing rational responses to the pandemic for years now, and one of the big names in the anti-NIH, anti-Fauci, anti-masking, anti-vaccine mob was Jay Bhattacharya. So guess what’s going to happen?
Bhattacharya, who holds a medical degree and PhD from Stanford, has never held a senior government position, nor any role overseeing a large bureaucratic organization. While that might have stymied his candidacy in prior administrations, Kennedy and his allies view his inexperience as a positive, saying they are seeking reformers willing to battle the bureaucracy.
Inexperience is a positive with these people.
Let’s hope we don’t have another disease outbreak in the next few years. We already know that Kennedy wants to starve infectious disease research, and with a MAGA ideologue running the NIH…people are going to die that wouldn’t need to.
