Or is it? This is a midwest horror film.
22 years ago, I moved here from Philadelphia — which is kind of the antithesis of Minnesota. It was scary how nice everyone was when we moved in.
There are regional differences, though. That video is clearly from a Wisconsinite perspective. Minnesotans don’t talk about brats and the Packers, it’s all hot dish and the Vikings, and more purples than greens. We’re also a little less nasal and a bit more sing-songy.
The pandemic has been a good thing for the rich. They’ve consolidated their power.
The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19. Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities—as well as the inequality that exists between countries—are tearing our world apart. This is not by chance, but choice: “economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most. Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality. We can claw back extreme wealth through progressive taxation; invest in powerful, proven inequality-busting public measures; and boldly shift power in the economy and society. If we are courageous, and listen to the movements demanding change, we can create an economy in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which inequality no longer kills.
It’s only a small ‘elite’.
The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during COVID-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years—fourteen years that themselves were a bonanza for billionaire wealth.
This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages—all aided by the weaponization of racism.
These trends are alarming. By not vaccinating the world, governments have allowed the conditions for the COVID-19 virus to dangerously mutate. At the same time, they have also created the conditions for an entirely new variant of billionaire wealth. This variant, the billionaire variant, is profoundly dangerous for our world.
New figures and analysis released in December 2021 by the World Inequality Lab reveal that since 1995, the top 1% have captured 19 times more of global wealth growth than the whole of the bottom 50% of humanity. Inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century has been surpassed.
The good news: we’ll only need a small number of guillotines to take care of that group.
The bad news: they control the media, and have succeeded in brainwashing hundreds of millions to act against their own interests and prop up the oligarchs. It’s shocking how thoroughly they’ve convinced the mob to spurn vaccination, the most effective tool to control the pandemic. It’s as if the media moguls and politicians are finding it advantageous to promote death and disease.
Soon, the meetings will resume (I hear that phrase as “soon, the beatings will resume”). I do believe meetings at the university level have been infiltrated by CIA moles, because these instructions sure look familiar.
I think every leftist should pass this around once or twice a year just so we're all on the same page: from recently WW-II era CIA "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", guidelines for how to disrupt organizations. pic.twitter.com/xflDagwpIr
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@OlufemiOTaiwo) January 20, 2022
Our biology discipline meetings aren’t bad — we’re a small department, I don’t think we’ve been given our CIA plant yet, so they usually get down to business reasonably efficiently. As soon as we get into larger groupings, though, all of the above kicks into action, especially #2 and #5. Meanwhile, I tend to just sit quietly, thinking more productively about the work I need to get done.
I do wonder what the CIA’s intent with poisoning academia with these tedious bores might be, though.
The next election is going to be a doozy. The Republicans have been pulling out all the stops to claim that the last one was fraudulent, and you just know that the only time a Republican will accept an election result is if a Democrat loses. Every election is going to be surrounded with a cloud of lawsuits, and further, they imagine that victory means they get to trample over the law even more. Steve Bannon is already planning to lock Joe Biden up.
Fringe conservative Steve Bannon announced that the 2023 Republican agenda, should they win the House and Senate back in 2022, will be to impeach and arrest President Joe Biden.
Newt Gingrich went even further. He’s going to lock up every congressperson who had the temerity to investigate the 6 January insurrection.
Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.
Do they even realize these are extraordinarily anti-democratic proposals? You can dislike Biden and the Democrats, but doing their job is not criminal activity — unlike, say, using a political office to enrich themselves or conspiring to revolt if an election doesn’t go their way. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, we see the end product of this kind of thinking. Tucker Carlson Wonders Why the U.S. Would Side With Ukraine’s Fledgling Democracy Against Putin’s Russia. Charming.
“Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?” Carlson asked. “They’re both foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States. Kind of strange.”
Carlson’s comments came as Russia has steadily massed troops on Ukraine’s border over the last few months. The latest assessment by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry estimates that there are 127,000 Russian troops in the region. In response, up to 8,500 U.S. troops have been put on heightened alert for a possible deployment, the Pentagon confirmed Monday, with most of them intended to aid NATO forces.
Such countermeasures are pointless, Carlson argued, because Ukraine, a fledgling democracy, is “strategically irrelevant” to the U.S.
I remember when Republicans were fanatically anti-Russia, and they defended their position by advocating for Democracy and the American Way of Life; we were the forces of Good, that shining light on a hill, and they were the evil empire. Now Tucker Carlson declares No rational person could defend a war with Russia over Ukraine. Nobody thinks a war like that would make America safer or stronger or more prosperous.
I wouldn’t suggest we should go to war, again — we’ve been rather quick on the trigger to plunge into wars — but there’s a difference between that and thinking we should side with an openly tyrannical dictator like Putin. It’s nice that they aren’t even pretending these wars aren’t about profit and gain, but that they’re even baffled by someone who’d take the side of a democratic underdog against an oppressive authoritarian invasion is revealing.
But then it’s become obvious that Republicans don’t like democracy and are eager to set up their own authoritarian dictatorship.
Even if they like that idea, though, they should look at their prospective emperors. There isn’t an Augustus among them, just a lot of bumbling poseurs and deeply stupid demagogues.
I can see my future now, for at least the next four months. I have committed myself to record all of my lectures so the students have asynchronous access to the course content to maximize flexibility in case pandemic catastrophe strikes, so what I’ve got to do is:
There are always glitches. Last week, the audio recording of the lecture was unlistenable, so I had to re-record the whole thing. That was better (but far from perfect) today. Today, though, the in-class technology threw up a whole bunch of problems — nothing worked until I called in IT to fix it, so I lost over 10 minutes to annoying problems. I intensely dislike the way the university has configured the AV in our classrooms.
So anyway, here’s today’s lecture. It’s about chromosomes.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation wants your input.
I voted for a few. My criterion was that they at least have some connection to Minnesota.
You had to know this was coming. Republicans in Tennessee were outraged that federal law prohibited discrimination.
In December, the Greenville-based Holston sued the Biden administration for regulations that prohibit discrimination in programs funded by U.S. Health and Human Services grants “on the basis of religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and same-sex marriage status,” saying it violates its First Amendment rights.
So they did something. They passed a law to give religious adoption agencies a loophole, a law specifically designed to allow them to discriminate against same-sex couples. It was easy. Enabling bigotry against the people straight people dislike seems to be popular.
The lawsuit comes nearly two years to the date that Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a measure that allows religious adoption agencies to deny service to same-sex couples. The law allows adoption agencies to refuse to participate in a child placement if doing so would “violate the agency’s written religious or moral convictions or policies.”
But here it comes: that law is a blunt instrument that can be used against anyone. So a taxpayer-funded religious adoption agency used the new law as an excuse to deny a heterosexual couple the opportunity to adopt because…they were Jewish.
“The Tennessee Constitution, like the U.S. Constitution, promises religious freedom and equality for everyone. Tennessee is reneging on that promise by allowing a taxpayer-funded agency to discriminate against Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram because they are Jews,” Alex J. Luchenitser, associate vice president and associate legal director at Americans United, said in a news release.
“Public funds should never be used for religious discrimination,” Luchenitser told Knox News. “The law should never create obstacles that keep loving parents from taking care of children who need a home. That should certainly never occur because of religious discrimination.”
End all religious exemptions in the law, please. They are going to be abused by the biggest dumb-asses in the country.
I read that Elon Musk is currently the richest man in the world, which is as complete an indictment of capitalism as could imagine. Whenever he opens his mouth he exposes his ignorance, yet people still think he’s saying something worthwhile. He’s just a guy with an undeserved mountain of money that he uses to buy stuff, nothing more, and it’s a shame that his follies haven’t caught up with him yet, if ever — money seems to be a pretty effective cushion against the consequences of your actions.
A few years ago, he bought a company called Neuralink, which was supposedly working on brain-machine interfaces, but is actually 99% hype, and put an unqualified tech bro in charge. The real neuroscientists could tell the whole idea was a load of overstuffed bullshit, but the media stumbled all over itself in a rush to give him more press.
You would think that someone — the investors, the journalists, the people hoping for medical breakthroughs — would notice the similarities between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes, especially since the Holmes trial just wrapped up with a conviction, but noooo.
Now Neuralink is looking to find human guinea pigs for his overhyped technology.
The Silicon Valley company, which has already successfully implanted artificial intelligence microchips in the brains of a macaque monkey named Pager and a pig named Gertrude, is now recruiting for a “clinical trial director” to run tests of the technology in humans.
“As the clinical trial director, you’ll work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink’s first clinical trial participants,” the advert for the role in Fremont, California, says. “You will lead and help build the team responsible for enabling Neuralink’s clinical research activities and developing the regulatory interactions that come with a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment.”
Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated $256bn fortune, said last month he was cautiously optimistic that the implants could allow tetraplegic people to walk.
“We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year, pending FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval,” he told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit.
“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury. Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.”
He is nowhere near that capability. He is lying. I know that here in America no one is going to care about the victims of irresponsible experimentation, but I would hope that someone would give a loving, concerned thought to the investors who are being taken to the cleaners by this fraud. Hope is not data. Appealing to the suffering victims of tragedy is one of the oldest tricks in the con artist’s toolbox.
That’s not all. Someone has confused science-fiction novels with reality.
Musk said that he thinks in the future we will be able to save and replay memories. “I mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode but yeah essentially if you have a whole brain interface everything that’s encoded in memory you could you could upload you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be weird one!” said Musk.
A “whole brain interface” — what’s that? How are you going to do that? You think you can skim off the totality of a person’s experience with a little chip you can pop on and off? Where are memories encoded so you can extract them? How are you planning to overwrite a brain’s structure and chemistry and connectivity so you can replace one brain’s identity with another?
I don’t think he’s going to have much luck hiring someone to oversee human experimentation in these areas, since Josef Mengele is dead. He’ll probably just hire some tech-dude with no qualifications and no sense of ethics — I hear those guys are sprouting up all over Silicon Valley.
It’s -25°C and snowing, but no worries, it’s going to stop snowing. Of course, once it stops, it’s going to get cold…-30°C by Tuesday. This cartoon is kind of wrong, though.
Silly Lio. You won’t be so thoroughly skeletonized until you thaw out in the spring, although your corpse can get severely dessicated.
Another genetics class video — our first fly lab is this week, so they’re going to set up the parental stocks for a complementation assay.
