MAGA means imperialism

Watch out, Greenland (and Denmark!)

| am pleased to announce Ken Howery as my choice for United States Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark. Ken is a World renowned entrepreneur, investor, and public servant, who served our Nation brilliantly during my First Term as U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, where he led efforts to increase Defense, Security, and Economic Cooperation between our Countries. As a Co-Founder of PayPal and venture capital fund, Founders Fund, Ken turned American Innovation and Tech leadership into Global success stories, and that experiencegy will be invaluable in representing us abroac#or purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity. Ken will do a wonderful job in representing the interests of the United States. Thank you Ken, and congratulations!

Watch out, Panama!

Donald Trump suggested Sunday that his new administration could try to regain control of the Panama Canal that the United States “foolishly” ceded to its Central American ally, contending that shippers are charged “ridiculous” fees to pass through the vital transportation channel linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Panama’s conservative president José Raúl Mulino, who was elected in May on a pro-business platform, roundly rejected that notion as an affront to his country’s sovereignty.

He is inspired by Putin, and wants to launch a few militaristic adventures. To start with, he’s selecting easy targets — it won’t take many troops to overwhelm Greenland, but Panama might be a little harder, given that we have plenty of bombs, but bombs disrupt traffic. The aftermath, when the entire world mistrusts us, might be much tougher. Let’s hope that congress and the courts (yeah, right) can check his bloody ambitions.

You know, the UK has managed to isolate itself from the rest of Europe, making itself vulnerable…

A common thread among billionaires

Angela Collier points out a bizarre thing these billionaires do: these people — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk — are all college dropouts who couldn’t even finish an undergraduate degree, but now they all claim that they could have been physicists. Apparently anyone can be a physicist. No, wait, that’s not it, physicists have a reputation for being supersmart so these intellectual losers are all pretending to have an interest in physics for the reputation theft — these guys are going to grift everything.

I guess I’m not very bright because I never even wanted to be a physicist and was much more impressed with biologists like François Jacob or Lewis Wolpert or Rachel Carson or Rita Levi-Montalcini. Also, I not only completed my undergraduate degree, I finished a Ph.D. Dumb! Dumb dumb dumb.

If you can make it through the first half hour, you might also be amused at her take on Ayn Rand. She read Atlas Shrugged and enjoyed it because it was so ridiculous that she thought it was a satire. I can see that, but I’m still not going to slog through anything written by Rand.

The imagery that should scare the wealthy

I’m noticing a troubling but interesting phenomenon: the sanctification of Saint Luigi.

I don’t care for this at all — it’s more than just my anti-religious attitude, but that given Luigi Mangione’s privileged background I doubt that he’s the class hero anyone expects. The over-reaction by the establishment is what’s driving this, though. I don’t think they’re going to calm their freakout, this trial is going to be a media spectacle and it’s going to get worse. You would think villains would realize that creating a public martyr and exhibiting fear is the last thing you want to do. I do wonder if Mangione is going to get an opportunity to orate on the stand, and if he’s going to be any good at it.

On the other hand, I can understand the response. Assassination is a common thing in America. Think about it: my earliest memory of a news event is the JFK assassination. Then there was the RFK assassination. Martin Luther King jr, Malcolm X. Harvey Milk. Everything the CIA did — they tried hard to assassinate Fidel Castro, and failed…but succeeded all over the place in Latin America. It’s hypocritical for Americans to be outraged at any one particular assassination, but maybe this time it’s because the target lacked any taint of leftiness, since those are the only acceptable political murder victims. Uh-oh. What do you mean, rich conservatives might get killed? That’s not the game.

And maybe it’s starting to sink in that also, in America, we have handed everyone a gun. Maybe a few dim capitalists are waking up to the danger they have created for themselves.

I don’t want anyone to get murdered, but…if someone Luigi’d Elon Musk I’d run out and buy cake and ice cream and have a party at home. There’s a whole class of overpaid morons that could be gunned down in a mass uprising that wouldn’t trigger a single tear drop from me, and I might even think we’d improve society by removing them.

They’re quite right to charge Luigi Mangione with terrorism. He’s one little molecule getting heated up in a pot that’s close to boiling, and he could inspire a lot of other people to undergo a phase shift. The powers that be should be terrified.

Halfway across the state and back again

Cars are an expensive pain in the butt. It was time to do some maintenance on the Honda, but the nearest Honda dealer is in St Cloud, so I had to get up early and drive across the state on icy snowy roads to get it serviced. They were quick and bounced me right back on the road to head home again.

I don’t do much driving any more, so this was an opportunity to while away the miles playing old tunes. For some reason, I fired up my old collection of 60s and 70s music. Joan Baez! Laura Nyro!


I got fury in my soul, fury’s gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can’t study war no more
Save the people, save the children
Save the country, save the country, save the country

I think we need to bring back the 60s — the hippies had the right idea. Sure, they were a little vague on how to save the country, but we’ve had over 50 years to think on it. I’m sure we’ve got a plan by now, right?

There is no carol that won’t wear out its welcome

I’ve been avoiding stores for a while now, because they’re all playing the same tired, horrible Christmas carols all the time — I was trying to buy almond milk and eggs the other day and had to flee because Mariah Carey started singing. I’m wishing I could turn that about and carry around a boombox playing this mash up of the carol of the bells and the imperial march when I enter a business.

It goes on for an hour! The one drawback to my plan for revenge is that I’d get sick of this carol 5 minutes after I started.

Insufferably credulous “journalists”

Ainsley Earhardt, one of the “Fox and Friends” airheads, is very excited about the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

We’re all excited about him. How wonderful is it that we don’t — might, we might not have to worry about our children with autism or our kids with, you know, developing cancer or, you know, just — it’s wonderful that he wants to clean up our foods. Our foods, in Europe, when we go to Europe, we can eat pasta, we can eat pizza, we don’t gain any weight. I know you walk a lot, but you don’t gain weight. You feel fresh, you feel clean. You come back here, you start eating pasta and you gain weight immediately.

Again, so there’s something wrong with our foods. It’s the pesticides, the chemicals. We want all of that out. We’re excited that he’s a leader. He’s very knowledgeable. He has said he’s going to give you choice. He’s not going to take away vaccines. Everyone’s not going to get polio. He said if you want a vaccine, you can vaccinate your kids, but I’m giving you choice. And he says he’s going to be transparent.

Yay! RFK will end autism and cure cancer by “cleaning up” our food. He’ll remove “chemicals” from our food!

Let’s not equate autism with cancer, but no, RFK is not going to prevent either of those. He’s not going to eliminate pesticide use. What’s driving our agricultural system is money: pressure to increase yields and lower costs, and corporate consolidation to make farms bigger and service Big Ag. These are Republicans. They aren’t going to change the system, but are more likely to amplify it.

You know, I’m pretty sure that Europe doesn’t have magical pasta and pizza with no calories (Europeans in the comments, tell me if I’m wrong.) What they do have is smaller portions, which, as a resident of the American midwest, I can tell you would elicit howls of protest here if we suggested that maybe you don’t need 3 pounds of carbohydrates with every meal. That’s not going to change, either. Also, another reason you might not get as fat in Europe is that European cities are much more walkable — you don’t drive to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Ranch. So sure, RFK is going to persuade Americans to drive less, walk more, eat less, and pay more for food from small family farms, and Fox News will call it “wonderful”.

Oh god. The future looks bleak.

You think spider sex is crazy?

I beg to differ about spider sex — it’s perfectly normally weird, but then I have been spending a fair amount of time trying to encourage spiders to have sex. Mainly what I’m concerned about is that it’s too infrequent, and they seem to have seasonal depression. But OK, it is interesting, as this video demonstrates.

You know what’s kinky, though? The video mentions that “some flies have a female who penetrates the male to collect sperm”. Not spiders, but barklice (Neotrogla), which aren’t flies and aren’t lice, but a kind of true bug, have completely reversed sex roles.

The female has a penis-like protrusion called a gynosome, which is erectile and curved. The male has no such organ; he has an internal chamber instead. When she penetrates him during sex, he delivers sperm into a duct in her gynosome, which leads to a storage organ. He still ejaculates, but he does so inside his own body, not hers.

Neotrogla sex can last for days, so it’s important for the duo to stabilise themselves. The female does it by inflating the base of her gynosome inside the male. It’s covered in patches of tiny spines, which help to anchor her in place for her sexual marathon. You can find similar spines on the penises of many male animals where they provide extra stimulation during sex (as in cats, mice and chimps) or inflict horrendous wounds on the females (as in the seed beetle).

In Neotrogla, the spines are such good anchors that it’s impossible to separate a mating pair without killing the male. As Yoshizawa writes, “Pulling apart coupled specimens (N. curvata; n = 1) led to separation of the male abdomen from the thorax without breaking the genital coupling.” In other words: We tried yanking one pair apart; it didn’t work and the male kinda broke.

See? Spiders are perfectly ordinary, mundane, familiar little creatures. No pegging involved.

The Democratic Party will never change

After the humiliating and ridiculous loss in November, you’d think the Democrats would decide to shake things up and change a few of the top brass. You’d think wrong.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) lost the bid to be the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, following reports that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was actively plotting behind the scenes on behalf of her challenger, Rep. Gerry Connolly.

The 74-year-old Virginia Democrat ended up winning by a margin of 131 to 84 in a secret ballot vote taken by the entirety of the Democratic caucus.

In a report published by Punchbowl News last week, the outlet wrote that Pelosi was “actively working to tank” AOC’s bid and was “making calls” on behalf of Connolly.

Not only is Connolly old, but he was recently diagnosed with cancer. Pelosi just had hip replacement surgery.

Fresh off hip replacement surgery, Nancy Pelosi, 84, secured another victory. House Democrats on Tuesday afternoon decided that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly—who announced his throat cancer diagnosis in November—will serve as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, besting 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a closed-door caucus vote. “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” said Virginia Democrat Don Beyer, a Connolly ally. Pelosi had opposed the 35-year-old’s run for the role, “approaching colleagues urging them to back Connolly over Ocasio-Cortez,” Axios reported last week.

Connolly will join fellow septuagenarians in top committee spots next year. Richard Neal, 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means while Frank Pallone, 73, will be the party’s top representative on Energy and Commerce. Eighty-six-year-old Maxine Waters will be the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and Rose DeLauro, 81, will helm the Democrats’ presence in Appropriations.

Jesus christ, this is insane. I can say that, because at 67 years old, I can recognize that my age is a limitation, and that I should be stepping back to let younger colleagues place their stamp on my institution. When I’m in my 70s and 80s, I should definitely not be the one shaping policy in my department — I’m already too remote from modern science in my field.

But the Democrats are wed to money and power, and they’re not going to shake it off.

In other democracies, the leadership of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward.

That’s part of what’s so depressing about the Oversight Committee ordeal for the couple dozen journalists and political junkies who pay attention to that sort of thing. Pelosi and the old guard’s continued opposition to younger talent seems breathtakingly counterproductive in the face of the Democratic Party’s numerous challenges right now. Simultaneously, the House’s “resistance” to Trump and the GOP in the House will be led by people of all ages who don’t seem particularly interested in that project, despite having spent the entire election cycle warning that Trump’s Republican Party represents a second coming of fascism. If incoming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries really believes that, then why is he advertising his willingness to work with the GOP? Why are so many other Democrats, for that matter, trying to make nice with Trump acolyte Elon Musk?

Capitalism and a gerontocracy — we are cursed. They’re going to lose the next election, and the next after that, aren’t they?

A novel Xian argument

It’s only 4 minutes long, but it’s just packed with ‘clever’ arguments for god.

If you don’t feel like wasting 4 minutes on this guy — and I don’t blame you — here is his logical argument: if, in the future, people can invent an app that lets you instantly teleport a package to Nebraska, therefore God. If, in the future, we could 3-D print human tissue, therefore God. If, in the future, we decide not to color our tech in sleek black boxes, but use earth tones instead, therefore God. If you can imagine miraculous future technologies, then why can’t you imagine God?

OK, his first example has physical limits that make it extremely unlikely, his second is one researchers are already working on, and his third is trivial. Fundamentally, though, I don’t think you get to analogize human technological progress to a god poofing things into existence by miracles.

Man, that guy is thick.

I think I just sold a house

This house.

A notary just drove out to my house with a stack of documents from the lending company, and I signed them all, and now those documents get shipped back to Seattle for the buyers to sign, and if that all goes smoothly a bunch of money gets wired into the estate account, which I then have to divvy up to ten heirs. Wheee!

Unfortunately, mainly what I feel right now is memories of all the Christmases we had with Mom & Dad in that house. Never more.

May the new owners have many happy Christmases there in the future.