North Idaho. Enough said.

This woman does not believe you should define people by their race, but she carries a sign that says “proud white supremacist”, because white supremacist is synonymous with “patriot”.

No, it’s not.

She’s from Hayden Lake, by the way.

Ireland isn’t going to take it

This is what journalists were supposed to do, I thought. At least this one time, one confronts a liar for Putin with the evidence.

You know, this is exactly what I wanted journalists to do to American politicians when we invaded Iraq. We didn’t get much of it. Instead, we got polarization driving people to Fox News, that nest of lies. And now Fox News is demonstrating that they always were a propaganda mill for conservative authoritarians — could you imagine Tucker Carlson doing anything but fawning over a Russian ambassador making excuses for atrocities?

The Irish people are also protesting outside the Russian embassy, while Irish political parties are calling for the expulsion of the Russian ambassador (although the EU is asking to keep embassies in place, which makes sense if there is to be any hope of a diplomatic solution –– a forlorn hope, but I guess it’s there.)

If you’re “woke”, you oppose Putin

Yesterday was my day for despair. Now that’s over with, and it’s time for rage.

I can’t do anything about Russia or Ukraine, but jesus, do we ever have a bunch of walloping idiot apologists here at home. The curious thing is that they’re neatly lining up across the chasm that has formed in our political divide. If you’re a Trumper, now you’re in Putin’s pocket — and that’s an about-face from Republicans I would never have expected. If you’re into crypto, of course you’re going to take the Russian side, since crypto is little more than a money laundering scheme for oligarchs. And now the IDW is rationalizing for Russia.

It’s like everyone is projecting their pet obsessions onto Ukraine. No, we don’t spend more time talking about pronouns that it does about things that matter. First of all, pronouns do matter, obviously, since they send the Heyings of the world into a frothing fury. And they seem to matter most to the people who hate the idea. If you tell me that you prefer to be addressed as “he,” “she,” or “they,” I’ll accept it as a matter of course and as a matter of courtesy. The anti-woke brigade will react as if you’ve just launched missiles into their Donbass. We aren’t fighting over pronouns, that war was won by the people who recognize that humans live cooperatively in a society.

The people who don’t recognize that side with Putin.

Here’s another thing that pisses me off: when they decide that they must be über-rational because they accept evolution, and therefore evolution must side with the Russians.

The evolutionary lens is logic and first-principles driven, rather than conclusion or ideology driven. Jesus fucking christ. Evolutionary biology is not a formula that you can plug your variables into, and out pops a fixed, flawless solution. Evolution is a diversity machine. It makes peacocks and parasitic worms. It produces humans with a battery of emotional and social needs, and the more complex the organism, the more unpredictable the outcome. Heying is the classic reductionist dudebro who thinks it is reasonable to strip away the complexity of reality to claim that Science with a capital S has decided that their narrow world view is the correct one.

And then they pretentiously announce the superiority of their perspective. I am one of the initiated, and I can tell you that Heather Heying is full of shit. She’s just a dogmatic reactionary who has found a rationale that feeds her ego and allows her to dismiss everyone else as wrong.

Also, Jesse Singal and Heather Heying joining hands to agree that the Woke are bad makes me want to puke.

Anyone else feeling overwhelmed?

It’s all too much.

  • War in Ukraine is the latest horror story. All we can do is stand back and watch as the Russian army tyrannizes a civilian population.
  • The pandemic is not over, although there is a lot of noise from dangerously ignorant people that it is.

  • Climate change is still creeping inevitably over the world, and no one is doing anything significant about it.

  • You know what else no one is doing anything about? Economic inequity. Billionaires got even richer during the pandemic.

  • Our country is torn apart by racism, and it’s getting worse. It’s flaring up at all levels of society.

  • Somehow, the Right has decided that sexual differences are the biggest issue now. They’re passing laws that will kill transgender people.

  • We’re racing towards a 2024 election that will be more divisive than ever, and that will probably conclude with conservatives trying to dismantle democracy.

  • Personally, my mother is going in for heart surgery next week, & I’m facing the prospect of retirement in a few years.

  • You can probably think of many more.

I’m a science nerd and teacher. I’m completely helpless in the face of circumstance, and I feel that.

How are you all coping?

A tiny glimmering of good news

The police officers who assisted in the murder of George Floyd have been found guilty.

A jury has found three former Minneapolis police officers guilty of violating the civil rights of George Floyd Thursday afternoon. All three officers were found guilty on all counts.

Tou Thao, the officer who held back bystanders when George Floyd was killed, was convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care and willfully failing to intervene. J. Alexander Kueng, who helped restrain Floyd by kneeling on his back, was convicted of the same charges.

Thomas Lane, who held the 46-year-old Black man’s feet, was found guilty of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as well.

It’s a good start. Now let’s see changes in the culture of the police in Minneapolis.

Too cold for a centipede

Mary caught a centipede in the house, and I was going to take a quick picture of it…but it was way too active. So I had the bright idea of bringing it to the lab, and just carry it outside as I walked in. I had it in a large plastic container that I figured would provide some thermal insulation.

It was not enough.

Before I reached the end of the driveway, it was immobile — that was less than a minute. It took another 3 or 4 minutes to get to work, and it looked dead and frozen. I took a picture anyway. This is a sad, corpselike centipede. Whoops. I was pretty sure I’d killed it with surprising speed. I guess -20°C isn’t healthy for small invertebrates.

[Read more…]

It’s WAR in Europe

I’ve been reading various articles on events in Ukraine, and I thought, wrongly, that it was going to be one of those prolonged smoldering affair, with Russia taking bites out of a country with regions that leaned towards Russian unity, but oh no, it’s just flat out total war, with the Russian army moving to take over the whole country of Ukraine.

Russia launched a broad attack on Ukraine from multiple directions early Thursday, bombarding cities, towns and villages and advancing toward the capital, Kyiv, as Ukrainian forces tried to stem the onslaught of Russian ground forces and air power.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said Russian troops were fighting to break into the wider Kyiv region and crossed the regional border, where Ukrainian forces were battling to repel them.

Putin’s excuse is that they’re carrying out a program of “demilitarization and denazification”. Riiight. This is nothing but imperial conquest. People are dying. Cities are being bombed.

Meanwhile, here in the US, fifth-columnists are buckling down to the dirty work of painting Putin’s gangsters as the ‘good guys’. Why? Because the Russians are “anti-woke” and label their bathrooms the way god intended them to.

It’s insanity everywhere. Don’t listen to Erik Prince & Steve Bannon — they’re just evil.

Minnesota-flavored racism

What a way to spread the reputation of your town. New Prague High School, a little place southwest of Minneapolis, hosted a girl’s basketball game, and the spectators started taunting the players from the Robbinsdale team.

Some people in a high school basketball crowd are being accused of taunting visiting players, many of whom are students of color, with monkey noises during a close game.

The racist chants happened at the girl’s basketball game between Robbinsdale Cooper and New Prague in New Prague Tuesday night, according to accounts.

One public Facebook post, shared more than 450 times, says some adults and students supporting the home New Prague team “started to make loud MONKEY NOISES,” directed at the Robbinsdale Cooper players, as the tightly contested game neared its end.

This seems to be a habit at New Prague.

Damian Johnson, head boy’s basketball coach at Benilde St.-Margaret’s and former Gopher, said on Twitter he “wasn’t surprised at all” to hear Williamson’s claims. He told Bring Me The News that during a Jan. 31 game between the Benilde and New Prague 9B teams, two girls in the stands referred to a Benilde player as a “monkey” while he shot free throws.

A player on the St. Louis Park boy’s hockey team said similar comments were made during the school’s game against New Prague this Tuesday. At least two New Prague players, he told Bring Me The News, called a student on the St. Louis Park team a “monkey” and told him to “go back to the 1860s” as that player was leaving the ice.

Other schools are responding strongly.

In a response to alleged racist taunts during a Feb. 15 high school boys hockey game, St. Louis Park will not compete in any contests against New Prague for at least until the end of the school year.

In an email to New Prague athletics director Brad Skogerboe sent on Monday, St. Louis Park AD Andrew Ewald said the ban “will continue until the harm that was caused is repaired and we are assured that any of our stakeholders, most importantly our students, will not be victimized by racism by any New Prague stakeholder in the future.”

But wait — that seems backward. The schools with black students are canceling their competitions with New Prague? Does that mean the racist high school wins in a forfeit? The penalty ought to be that New Prague is not allowed to compete. Further, apparently New Prague only recently applied to, and was accepted into, the West Metro conference. Kick them out. There’s no excuse for tolerating that kind of behavior.