Worth reiterating

Ted Cruz, sauntering in Athens

Ted Cruz had killed weather forecasting funds in the Big Beautiful Bill, and then zoomed off to vacation in Greece while his constituents died.

The Texas senator was spotted visiting the Parthenon in the Greek capital, Athens, with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday evening. That was a day after Camp Mystic announced that more than 20 girls had gone missing in the floodwaters.

On Saturday, July 5, at about 6 p.m. local time (11 a.m. ET)—more than 24 hours after the Guadalupe River burst its banks—Cruz and his wife were spotted by a Swamp spy lining up outside the iconic tourist site.

“He was with his family and a lone security guard,” said an eyewitness at the Parthenon. “As he walked past us, I simply said, ‘20 kids dead in Texas and you take a vacation?’

“He sort of grunted and walked on. His wife shot me a dirty look. Then they continued on with their tour guide.”

He’s a perfect example of Republican governance.

Sure, it’s just chance that weather disasters struck (or is it? Should Texas put up danger signs when Ted goes on vacation?), but when children are dying, you could at least set aside your Greek dinner and get on a plane home.

Bigotry and ignorance kill

Over 100 dead, and the toll is still climbing. The deadly floods in Texas swept through an area full of camping sites and Christian youth camps, and people died because they didn’t get any warnings.

The thing is, the counties involved had been discussing buying flood warning systems for years — a network of sensors that would set off sirens if the river waters were rising at a dangerous rate. That sound sensible to me. We’ve got tornado warning sirens all over where I live, and I’d be glad to get a noisy alert to wake me up if dangerous weather was bearing down on me. The Texas county commissioners were discussing this threat back in 2016.

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we’re not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it’s still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.

Except it didn’t work. They didn’t install any sirens. What saved some people was that an old couple saw the rising waters and drove around honking their car horn.

But they debated this same thing in 2017, and again decided they didn’t want any “damn sirens.”

COMMISSIONER MOSER: So we’ve talked about, you know one of the things we said sirens and we said we don’t want sirens, too many many people said they did not want sirens when they had these — when we had these gatherings. Code Red, and I don’t know if Dub wants to chime in on this, but Code Red is the same that’s going to get information to a lot of people; not to everybody, okay. One of the things that we’ll do is identify a point of contact in all of the camps, we won’t communicate with everybody in the camp, but we have a point of contact at the camp so that they can disseminate people within — to people within the camp, like during the summer when kids are there, or to RV parks. Now, if the RV parks want to have a siren themself when something goes up that’s up to them. That’s not part of our thing. So getting the information to the public is the end item of this whole thing. The first thing is sense a flood, then communicate that information to the local authorities, to the right authorities, and then for them to have a system by with which to disseminate the information to the public.

In 2021, they argued some more. They had over $5 million in federal relief funds, but they didn’t want to spend Biden’s money. So they did nothing.

Resident: Are you accountable to anyone for how you spend it? Or is it a, kind of, a reward and shows your support for this particular program? It’s not free money. Being present as we talk. How do we know this? Immediately. Unless you want it on the COVID lies and vaccination pressure, you have to send it back. Those are heavy strings. And those are strings. The deep state harangue and vilified President Trump for calling COVID for what it was and then suggest responses that were non-draconian, and then when Biden took office, the leftist government took its gloves off. It has lied and lied more about this COVID — about COVID.

The temptation is great, you’re accountable, and we would like to know where your allegiance is.

Resident 2: And I’m here to ask this Court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House. And Kerr County should not be accepting anything from these people. They’re currently facilitating an invasion of our border, and we’re going to support these people? So that’s what I have to say. Thank you.

Resident: I happen to know that there is no such thing as free money. It’s never government-funded; it’s tax-payer funded. So they’re taking our money and they’re putting strings attached to it and then they’re giving it back to us. And they’re going to get their foot in the door in this county. We don’t want their money. I feel like the people have spoken and I stand with the people. Thank you for your time.

I think we can all see how the right wing has poisoned the minds of the people. The Biden administration was the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House? These people are demented and delusional.

So the county decided to hang on to the money (sending it back might mean New York or California would use it!) and dawdled and refused to do the simplest, most sensible thing.

JUDGE KELLY: And GrantWorks has been very helpful in — in getting us focused on what colors between the lines and what doesn’t. As of last Thursday, when I got a call from Bonnie White telling me about this — the problem that y’all were going to present at the meeting, I went and got on the telephone to their Senior Vice President from GrantWorks. And there — there are discussions that they want to have with us and so we want to sit down and listen to them. And we want — we want you to hear them, too. Because you’re the public. But we — we need to know and get very comfortable with where we are with this grant before we start taking that money. And the claw back was the first thing. As far as where that money sits for the next year or two, my old law partner John Cornyn tells me that if we send it back it’s going to New Jersey or it’s going to New York or it’s going to —

MRS. LAVENDER: Or California.

JUDGE KELLY: — or California. And so I don’t know if I’d rather be the custodian of the money until we decide what we have to do with it rather than giving it back to the government to spend it on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with. So —

COMMISSIONER BELEW: And any spending of it would have to be done in Commissioners’ Court so you’ll be able to see it and know it.

You might be wondering what Texas senator Ted Cruz was doing. You can guess. He was doing what he always does in the face of disaster.

Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting.

Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp.

This would be an appropriate place to cite a face-eating leopard meme, but I just can’t do it. At least 28 children, innocently enjoying a weekend with other kids, many in Christian-run church camps, drowned in these floods, all because their guardians didn’t want sirens disturbing their sleep, didn’t want to spend money from a criminal treasonous communist government, and they just wanted to hoard money to prevent it from going to California or New York (which they probably also believe are communist states).

Many of those kids were attending Camp Mystic, a Christian all-girls’ summer camp. That one camp lost 27 campers and counsellors. I can’t imagine sending a child to a fun-filled summer camp only to get word later that their body had been fished up out of roiling flood waters, that they’d died in fear and pain, all because some Texas assholes (pardon the redundancy) had refused to make camps on a river with a reputation for flash floods safe.

Parents, you can come pick up your kids’ camping gear. They won’t need it anymore.

They don’t make ’em like this anymore

A sudden, vivid flash of memory:

A Martian princess and a doctor replace the women on Mars, destroyed by atomic war, by raiding Puerto Rico while a shot down android terrorizes all.

It’s summertime. I’m 9 years old, I’m clutching a couple of quarters in my hand, every day I’m checking the posters outside the Vale Theater in Kent, and I’m eagerly going to the Saturday afternoon matinee, to see this movie. It was awesome. This was high cinema in the 1960s — it had two rubber monsters, Martian invaders, and a bikini beach party.

Watch the trailer here, or you can watch the whole thing for free on Tubi. There’s also going to be a watch party on Mastodon this evening. It sounds like a great way to spend an evening.

I’m arachnophobic?

If you’re like me, that picture will make you start identifying all the anatomical errors.

This was fun. I found a paper about developing an arachnophobia scale, a questionnaire that someone could use to evaluate a person for arachnophobic tendencies, title Questionnaire Dimensions of Spider Phobia, by Watts and Sharrock. I figured I’d breeze through it, see that I’m clearly an arachnophile, and get a good laugh. Except…I think I would personally mess up their metrics. I’m apparently some weird outlier.

But I’m not. You know who is weird? These people.

In the cognitive domain a distinction emerged between those who were very vigilant for spiders, constantly scanning for them. Generally visual scanning was predominant. but one pilot S claimed also to use her senses of smell and hearing to detect spiders. She frequently lay awake listening for them. For others, cognitions about spiders took the form of distressing internal preoccupations. They felt haunted by spiders, imagined them vividly and often dreamed about them. They tried to think about spiders as little as possible.

Anyway, so I pulled up their questionnaire and quickly realized it’s not appropriate for typical people — you know, the kind who love spiders.

Their questions are organized into a couple of reasonable categories: vigilance, preoccupation, and avoidance/coping. So first, let’s see if you’re vigilant about spotting spiders.

Do you check the lounge for spiders before sitting down?

Yes. You wouldn’t want to sit on one and crush it.

Do you ever make plans in case you come across a spider?

Yes. I’m often intentionally planning to find spiders.

Do you sometimes look at the corners of the room for spiders?

Yes. Also the walls, ceiling, and floor.

When watching television, would you notice a spider crawling across the floor elsewhere in the room?

Yes.

Do you check the bedroom for spiders before going to sleep?

No, not really. I’m usually looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

Would your mind be a lot easier if spiders didn’t exist?

Sick! No! Spiders are an important part of the ecosystem!

Are you always on the lookout for spiders?

Yes.

Have you a “plan for action” in case you find a spider in the kitchen?

Of course. I have capture vials stored in the kitchen.

Do you make very certain there are no spiders around before taking a bath?

Why? Am I shy?

Do you sometimes sense the presence of a spider without actually seeing it?

Yes. The most tell-tale signature is seeing silk threads.

If there’s a spider in the house. are you the most likely person to find it?

No. Mary has a very good eye.

Can you spot a spider out of the corner of your eye?

Yes, if one is there.

The next category is preoccupation, like whether you are obsessed with spiders. I’m not going to do well here.

Do you sometimes dream about spiders?

Yes.

Do you think a lot about spiders?

Yes. And what’s wrong with that?

Do you worry more about spiders than most people?

Definitely. I worry about the health of the spider population all the time — for instance, the grass spiders appear to be late in their annual appearance. I hope they’re OK.

When you imagine a spider, can you see parts of it in great detail?

I am very familiar with spider anatomy, so yes.

Do you ever find yourself thinking about spiders for no reason?

Not for no reason.

Do you sometimes find it an effort to keep thoughts of spiders out of your mind?

Why would I make that effort?

Do you often think about particular parts of spiders for example the fangs?

I’m more of a palps man, myself.

Are you sometimes distracted by thoughts of spiders?

Never distracted.

Are you sometimes haunted by thoughts of spiders?

Weird choice of words…no, not haunted.

When watching television do you think more about the danger of there being a spider in the room than about the programme?

It is not dangerous to have a spider in the room.

Have you had nightmares about spiders?

No. Do you have nightmares about beautiful women (or men) jumping into bed with you?

The next block of questions are about how you cope when you see spiders.

Can you deal effectively with spiders yourself when you find them?

Yes.

Do you get other people to get rid of spiders when you find them?

“Get rid of”? Why?

Would you know how to cope with spiders in the bath?

Put your hand down, lift them out, set them free.

Do you sometimes use a book or a newspaper to deal with a spider?

Spiders can’t read and are uninterested in human news.

Do you feel a lot more secure if someone else is in the house in case you come across a spider?

The someone else is probably more dangerous than the spider.

When you find a spider in a room, would you avoid going in that room until someone else had removed it?

There are spiders in every room. Avoiding them would require going outside, and there are even more spiders there.

Would you get help if you came across a spider?

Help to do what?

If you find a spider in the bath, would you, say, use a shower to wash the spider down the plughole?

Sadist. Hell, no.

If you discover a spider in the room, do you leave the room straight away?

Why?

Would you think about using a broom to deal with a spider in the kitchen?

That’s useless. Small paintbrush, and a cup.

Cognitive/behavioral items!

When imagining a spider, is it always the same one or kind?

I know an awful lot of kinds of spiders.

Do you ever lie in bed at night and listen out for spiders?

No. They are very, very quiet.

If you thought you saw a spider would you go for a close look?

I usually do.

When you see a spider. does it take a long time to get it out of your mind?

No, because it is then a permanent resident of my memory palace.

Are you slightly scared to enter a room, say a bathroom, where spiders have been in the past?

Ridiculous. Spiders have been and will be in every room.

Another category is factual knowledge. These are stupid. Of course I know the answers to these questions.

Are spiders insects?
Do spiders have SIX legs?
Are spiders solely meat eaters?
Have you a good idea whereabouts spiders are likely to appear?
Do you know when (what time of year) you are likely to come across a spider?

They don’t provide a scoring sheet or answer key, you’ll just have to decide for yourself if you feel arachnophobic.

May all these anti-woke crusaders sink without a trace

Did you know that Dr Phil, that old fraud, had put together a media company called Merit Street Media to combat the “Woke Mind Virus”? And that he partnered with Trinity Broadcasting Network (there’s a combo formed in Hell) to set it up? And that they sunk somewhere between $100 and $500 million into the assets for this company?

No? I didn’t either. Completely missed it. The first I heard of it was this bit of news:

This week, Merit Street also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Variety reports. At the same time, the company has sued TBN, and accused it of sabotaging the business, the outlet notes. Merit Street claims that TBN has “abused its position as the controlling shareholder” and that, as a result, Merit Street was forced to “pay or incur obligations to third parties in excess of $100 million.”

Not only a failure, but an ugly lawsuit between some awful conservatives, it’s like Christmas in July. The company also says of TBN:

The company further states that TBN provided production services that were “comically dysfunctional. Although it promised the equivalent of the professional facilities and services that Dr. Phil had long relied on when producing his show in Los Angeles for CBS, the supposed ‘first class’ services TBN promised under the Joint Venture Agreement were nothing of the sort. TBN provided screens and teleprompters that blacked out during live shows, an incomplete control room operating out of a truck, an unusable cell phone app for viewers, and amateur video editing software.”

Go Christian, go broke.

Birds are OK, I guess

After all, one of the virtues of bird is that they can be used to motivate research into insects. That’s nice. We couldn’t possibly get the general public interested in arthropods when there are charismatic warm-blooded flying things to save.

Juncos are known as seed-eating birds. They spend their days rummaging through the undergrowth searching for fallen seeds. At feeders, they prefer smaller grains, like millet. But seeds don’t provide the protein juncos, or any songbirds, need to grow a new set of feathers while they molt. And the protein this baby junco needs to molt its blotchy juvenile feathers and to grow sleek stone-gray feathers on top and white ones below would come only from bugs. In fact, 90 percent of the more than 10,700 known bird species rely on insects for food during at least part of their life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed-eating songbirds must eat insects and other arthropods, that many-legged group of creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to grow new feathers and to feed their young. Without insects, in other words, they wouldn’t survive.

So, yes, we should care about the health of insects because they are bird food, and birds are dependent on insects for protein. That’s why we should care about this next terrifying statistic.

Unfortunately, insects are disappearing at a rate of about 1 to 2 percent a year. And the decline is not limited to just one species nor just one group of insects. The data suggests that the decline is widespread, even global. These findings have been confirmed in hundreds of rigorous, peer-reviewed studies, says David L. Wagner, a University of Connecticut entomologist and the lead scientist of a program known as the Status of Insects, which coordinates pertinent research on insect populations from around the world. “The weight of the evidence is clear,” Wagner says. “I feel like it would stand up in a court of law.”

That 1 to 2 percent is a mean. I think from what I’ve seen here, in this rural agricultural region, is that it is much higher — the population of visible, obvious insects is less than half of what it was when I moved here 25 years ago. Less dense clouds of insects clustered around street lights. Car grills that are no longer choked with splattered bugs. Fewer reports of clouds of mayflies rising off lakes.

I think it’s scary without even considering bird populations. We’re wiping out a key component of the food web here. Do we have to wait for birds to drop out of the sky or bird song to fade from the dawn symphony before we will care?

Besides, as we all know, insects are spider food. Getting the public to care about spiders is probably an even harder sell.

Dreading 2026

I’m starting to hear all about a major celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary next year, and it’s clear that the Trump administration is planning to use it for more propaganda. One ominous sign is that the White House is working with…<hack, spit> PragerU, which is not a university, to provide “educational” material for a major exhibit. PragerU is also not the Smithsonian Institution. But they’re the ones in charge of telling the nation’s history.

The Department of Education has tapped conservative media platform PragerU to tell the nation’s origin story in an “America 250” exhibit that opened in the White House complex this month.

The PragerU Founders Museum on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building features 82 historical paintings of people and events from the American Revolution to inspire patriotic fervor for the yearlong celebration of the July 4, 1776, signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Each painting includes a QR code linking to a short PragerU video or essay on the White House website. Online content includes artificial intelligence-generated talking figures coming to life from the paintings, such as the 56 men who signed the Declaration on July 4, 1776, and a written recap of the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781.

“President Trump is championing the spirit of patriotism in our country,” said Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman. “The Founders Museum is an innovative way for schools and community centers to encourage Americans to reflect on the pivotal moments and people that shaped our nation into one that values courage, hard work, and freedom.”

For a different perspective…

Social justice advocates, however, said the inclusion of PragerU reflects a Trump administration agenda to whitewash history. They say the exhibit fails to acknowledge the experiences of marginalized racial minorities, women and gay people during the revolution.

“This [exhibit] promotes a limited view of all that America is, was, and will be,” said Robert Kesten, executive director of Stonewall National Museum, Archives, & Library, an LGBTQ historical preservation group. “It shortchanges us and ignores all the progress we have made historically and academically.”

Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, said PragerU videos aim to make White people “not feel guilty about history.”

“PragerU’s videos are ignorant and disrespectful,” Mr. Dibinga said. “The goal of this partnership is to accelerate the erasure of non-White male history and use PragerU’s 3.37 million followers to spread their propaganda.”

And also to promote a Christian Nationalist view. Here’s a video that discusses Trump’s, and PragerU’s, atrocious slopaganda.

I’m cancelling the Fourth of July at my house

Hey, y’all remember when Game of Thrones was a hot show? It had dragons, and zombies, and bloody destructive wars, and gratuitous nudity, and engaging characters, and multiple plot lines that were plummeting forward. Must-see TV, with gigantic budgets!

And then the last season comes along, it’s hot garbage, it betrays all the premises of the previous seasons, closes plot lines with idiot finality and illogical resolutions, and everyone realizes…maybe it was all shallow pretense all along, a series of excuses to justify the next slam-bang event in a long chain of them, and all interest in repeat viewing dissipates, and the show is only remembered as an embarrassment, because of that horrible conclusion.

I am reminded today of another long-running serial that started with grand ideals (FREEDOM!), had heroic battles, vivid, memorable characters, a vast landscape of spectacular scenery, beautiful dreams of a progressive society, and then it ends with a squalid little fart. We discover it was all a lie. We should have known. We started with a fantasy of equality and freedom composed by a team of rich landowners who made sure that the little people would never break their grip on power. We announced that the central theme of this great endeavor was liberty, while postponing emancipation of the horde of slaves we held, and taking over all that beautiful land by genocide of the people already living there.

And now, on the verge of our 250th anniversary, we have put the reins of power in the hands of a babbling loon who wants to deport anyone with a skin color less pasty than his own, who has just passed a bill that slashes the social safety net and enriches millionaires even more, all while his allies shred education and science in this country.

The “one big, beautiful bill”, as Trump calls it, won final approval by the House of Representatives on Thursday, in time for his signature on 4 July, the US Independence Day holiday. In addition to the tax cuts, it will also channel tens of billions in dollars towards immigration enforcement and building a wall along the Mexican border.

To cut costs, Republicans included provisions to end green energy incentives created under Joe Biden, but the bulk of the savings will come from changes to two programs: Medicaid, which provides healthcare to low-income and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps low-income Americans afford food.

Both programs will face new and stricter work requirements, and states will be forced to share part of the cost of Snap for the first time ever. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill’s Medicaid changes could cost as many as 11.8 million people their healthcare, and the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities forecasts about 8 million people, or one in five recipients, may lose their Snap benefits.

Look at those chucklefucks cackling over their evil laws

And of course Trump capped it all off with an anti-semitic slur in his victory speech.

I’m sorry, but the finale of this series really sucks. Can I cancel my subscription? Get my money back? I would never have started watching if I’d known how badly the writers and show-runners were going to botch it in the conclusion.