Maybe we need to exploit Republican stupidity more

This is true.

A new Minnesota law lets people 21 and over buy and consume food and beverages with a small amount of hemp-derived THC, but some legislators might not have fully understood the bill before passing it.

The new law says food and beverages cannot contain more than 5 milligrams of hemp-derived THC per serving and no more than 50 milligrams per package.

Although marijuana-derived THC is still illegal in Minnesota, THC derived from hemp is chemically the same. Marijuana and hemp come from the same cannabis plant, though the plants are bred differently, with marijuana plants high in THC and hemp plants very low in THC.

THC, or delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical that causes the high of marijuana.

They didn’t mean to. They didn’t understand the law they were voting on.

Minnesota state Sen. Jim Abeler, a Republican from Anoka, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune he did not realize this law would allow THC-infused edibles of any kind and thought it would only apply to delta-8 THC products.

No takesie-backsies!

Get outta here, Nancy

What bumbling, incompetent corporate lackey is in charge of Democratic fundraising? Fire them. Really, they annoy me so much. I get a flood of email from the Democrats, and it’s instantly recognizable, and it grates. They always put my formal first name in the subject line, like so: I don’t know what to say, Paul. Sorry. You’re not my friend, my friends call me PZ, and it’s not a human writing me anyway, it’s a bulk emailer. Call me “Mr Myers”. If you really want to suck up, “Dr Myers” is OK, but I’m not at all fooled that this is in any way a personal contact.

Then, goddamnit, SAY SOMETHING. This is the latest text.

I asked you Monday.
I asked you Tuesday.
I asked you Wednesday.
I asked you Thursday.
I’m truly sorry to ask you again today, Paul.

But my team just informed me we failed to meet yesterday’s FIRST End of Quarter Deadline since the Supreme Court’s ruling. I won’t sugarcoat this, Paul. If I don’t reach 1,387 more gifts before midnight to close the budget gap, it will be the single most devastating setback for Democrats’ chances of winning this election and protecting women’s reproductive freedoms nationwide. If you’ve been waiting for a moment to step up with $15, this is it, Paul. Can I count on you? >>

Paul, I just received an emergency phone call that made my heart drop.

My team just informed me that I did not receive enough support from Democrats to reach last night’s critical End of Quarter goal.

I don’t know how else to put this, Paul:

If Republicans discover we failed to meet our FIRST fundraising goal since the Supreme Court’s ruling…

They will take it as a sign that the Majority is theirs for the taking — and unleash every last cent at their disposal to seize power in this election.

I know I ask a lot of you, but this is quite possibly my most urgent ask:

Will you step up with $15 in this dire moment?

I need 1,387 patriots to help before midnight to hit our End of Quarter goal of this pivotal election year and avoid a humiliating defeat.

Are you self-aware enough to realize that your opening is a confession that you’ve been dunning me for money? This is SPAM. It is a gross turn-off. All you’re peddling is fear.

Allow me to make a suggestion, knowing full well that you won’t read it, because while you call me “Paul” all you really care about is my credit card number: a fundraising letter telling me what you’ve done and what you hope to do in the near future would be far more inspiring to get me to crack my checkbook open. “In June, we proposed bills X, Y, and Z, and we got Y passed. In July, we’re going to push hard for Z, and we’re revising X.” You know, that sort of thing would impress me. Can it with the fear-mongering to try and get confused old senior citizens to part with cash. Also, stop over-using my first name. You’re wearing it out.

I’m afraid, though, if the Democrats got honest about their accomplishments, they’d be talking about their vacations and cocktail parties and schmoozing with lobbyists.

Anyway, mail from Nancy Pelosi is now blocked.

Next, rage

Next week, our monthly Podish Sortacast will tackle a hot-button issue: abortion. We’ve got a doctor, a biologist, and a whole swarm of people here who will happily defend the medical procedure and castigate the people who oppose it. Should be fun. I’ll be sure to take my blood pressure medicine beforehand.

Democrats can’t even compromise competently

He’s laughing at you, Joe.

This is the deal.

President Joe Biden struck a deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to nominate Chad Meredith, a Republican anti-abortion advocate, to a federal judgeship on the Eastern District of Kentucky, Slate has confirmed. Under the arrangement, Meredith would take the seat currently occupied by Judge Karen Kaye Caldwell, a George W. Bush nominee. Caldwell submitted her move to senior status on June 22, which, once complete, will allow Meredith to take the seat. A lawyer with connections to the Kentucky governor’s office who is familiar with the agreement told Slate that Caldwell conditioned her move upon the confirmation a successor—specifically, the conservative Meredith. In exchange, McConnell will allow Biden to nominate and confirm two U.S. Attorneys to Kentucky.

In return for appointing two term-limited attorneys to the state of Kentucky, Joe Biden will allow one fanatical wingnut anti-choice lifetime appointment of a federal judge. I’ve seen this move before. Two tens for a five, Joe?

The pandemic is/is not over

I know everyone is acting as if it’s won and done, but it isn’t.

The number of new coronavirus cases rose by 18% in the last week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally, according to the World Health Organization.

The U.N. health agency said in its latest weekly report on the pandemic that the worldwide number of deaths remained relatively similar to the week before, at about 8,500. COVID-related deaths increased in three regions: the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

It’s annoying how the people who actually know the science are saying one thing, while politics is pretending the opposite.

“This pandemic is changing, but it’s not over,” Tedros said this week during a press briefing. He said the ability to track COVID-19’s genetic evolution was “under threat” as countries relaxed surveillance and genetic sequencing efforts, warning that would make it more difficult to catch emerging and potentially dangerous new variants.

Here’s a fun one. I want to know what reasonable precautions I can take in my classes, but here’s how my university dodges the issue:

So sure, you can ask your students and colleagues to take reasonable action to protect you and each other, but they are allowed to ignore you, and you will respect their decision to endanger everyone’s health.

Great. This is going to be the year I get COVID. Hope I don’t die!

I waded through the filth so you don’t have to

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Kent Hovind, creationist, is bad enough, but Kent Hovind, groomer, is enough to disgust anyone. There have been some developments in the revelations about what goes on at Dinosaur Adventure Land. Unfortunately, no one involved in discussing the story can write, so you have to sit through long rambling videos to extract the facts.

I’ll spare you that. If you must drill down through the slime, there’s a video on YouTube by Cindi Lincoln (Hovind’s ex-wife) and another on UGetTube, a right-wing conspiracist site, by a YEC who doesn’t like Hovind. I had to sit through a commercial for MyPillow to see that one.

OK, here’s the short summary. Kent Hovind has a good buddy named Chris Jones — they’ve been friends for 30 years, Hovind says — who showed up at DAL with a young boy in tow. The problem: Chris Jones has been “convicted on multiple charges of lewd acts against minors” and is on a sex offender registry. The kid is not related to Jones.

Normal people in that situation would ask many pointed questions of their pedophile friend and would call the police. No, not Kent Hovind! He says the charges against Jones were trumped up, just like the charges against him that put him in jail for ten years. Most of us would be extremely suspicious of a convicted pedophile showing up with an 11 year old boy, but what Kent did instead was put the man and his mysterious child in an empty house, with nothing but a mattress on the floor, for 5 days.

And then the kid disappears. People are looking for him, but Kent says it’s fine, his pedophile friend had the permission of the child’s mother to take charge of him. Now he’s been found, and his mother is grateful for the return of her boy, and has reported Chris Jones to the police.

Hovind still defends Jones. He went on the awful Brett Keane YouTube show to protest his innocence, and in the process, admit that he put a convicted child molester and a child in a house, unsupervised.

Does evangelical Christianity have the molestation of children as one of its precepts? Get out while you can!

Another development: the boy is pressing charges against Chris Jones, so Kent Hovind calls him a “moron”. Not Jones, his victim.

His heart’s desire!

Jordan Peterson announced a while back that he was leaving Twitter for good. Strangely, he was back to posting frantically only a few hours after that.

You’d think a psychologist would be able to recognize an addiction when he sees one.

Anyway, now Twitter has suspended his account. Over this:

I’ve had people try to tell me that Peterson is not transphobic –he’s just highly principled and dedicated to the ideals of free speech. That tweet was just hate and disgust and contempt for others. So much for admirable principles.

He’s been off Twitter for a couple of days. His daughter is begging Elon Musk to help him. He might be able to console himself with his new ticket to the right-wing gravy train.

Peterson, who joined the staff of conservative podcast outlet Daily Wire on Thursday, is infamous for his anti-trans stance. He once claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that being transgender is a result of a “contagion” and similar to “satanic ritual abuse.”

I’m starting to pity Texans

It’s easy to hate the demented fucks they keep electing, but then the citizens of the state have to live under the inanity they produce. Maybe some day they’ll figure it out, but until then, they get to suffer the consequences of their actions.

So now they’ve got conservative ‘educators’ who specialize in double-think.

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction.

The group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum change requests. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms.

Uh-oh. If the goal is to not “feel discomfort”, there goes math. You know, one of the things we need to do in education is stretch brains a little bit, which does cause some stress. Hiding the reality of slavery behind euphemisms is not education.

The TERFs have science on their side!

A remarkable letter sent to Julie Bindel congratulating her on her ‘service’.

The remarkable bit is this paragraph:

The usual number scientists talk about is 200,000 years for modern humans, give or take. She’s only off by about 2500 times.

She beat the creationists, who claim humans have only been around for 6000 years, so they go the other way, but are only off by about 33 times. Yeah, they also claim that the whole dang planet has only been around for 6000 years, rather than 4.5 billion, so they do get somethings even more wrong.

What’s cute about her 500 million year guess is that puts us back in the Cambrian, and the basal state for chordates (actually, for all animals) was almost certainly hermaphroditic, back then.

Wanna see a bag of spiders?

I’m afraid no one will, and that makes me sad. They’re so cute! They’re like a bunch of puppies, all awkward and bumbling, stumbling out of the egg sac to try and figure out this messy ol’ world. So I made a video of Steatoda triangulosa spiderlings that, like my usual spider videos, will flop. I don’t quite know what to do about that — I’ve got to carry out a world-wide campaign to readjust everyone’s attitude towards spiders.

So I made my video into a YouTube premiere. You won’t be able to watch it until 7pm Central tonight, and I think the idea is to build a little anticipation and promote it before it’s available, as if maybe people will tune in expecting something more than 20 minutes of baby spiders.

Surprise. It’s 20 minutes of baby spiders. I simply can’t hide the truth.

Check it out in about 12 hours. They’re lovely and will melt your heart, if you give them a chance.