A new Minnesota state flag would be welcome

Minnesota has a state flag, and it is hideous. They stuck the state seal on a blue background and called it done, so it’s this horribly busy smear with a farmer and a fleeing Indian and flowery glop and a bunch of dates on it. It’s tasteless and ugly.

Ick. Not that the flag is particularly important, but could we at least have one that isn’t embarrassing?

A few people are lobbying for a new flag, an effort that doesn’t have a high priority right now, but they’ve definitely got some better designs. I like this one.

It’s simple and distinctive. I’d vote for it. Heck, I wouldn’t be ashamed to fly it in front of my house, if I bothered with flags at all.

The lyrics are supposed to go “Forward he cried from the rear And the front rank died”, don’t you know

I have no idea how the war is going in Ukraine — it seems to be turning into a hard slog of urban warfare, with Putin committed to saving face by throwing everything he’s got at a couple of cities. He has turned his vicious elite Chechen units on the country. I’m going to take solace in the little victories, at least.

That bearded guy to the right is Magomed Tushaev, a monster who committed atrocities against LGBT people. He’s dead now.

A despotic general who ruthlessly rounded up and killed LGBT+ people in an act that became known as the “gay purge” has been killed in the fighting in Ukraine.

Magomed Tushayev, who was a military boss under the command of hardman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was killed in fighting at the Hostomel Airport, a key Russian target not far northwest of Kyiv.

Tushayev previously led the 141 motorised regiment of the Checnyan National Guard and his death was confirmed by a spokesperson for Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky.

Anti-LGBT+ purges were first reported in the southern Russian republic back in 2017 and reportedly involved kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings.

Under the leadership of the infamous Kadyrov, who recently said Vlaidimir Putin needed harsher tactics in Ukraine, Tushayev was key in the persecution of LGBT+ people.

Am I a bad person if I say, “Good!”?

It’s a worrying sign for the Russians that generals are getting killed. Usually it’s just the grunts on the front.

Kent Hovind is a busy, busy man

Wow. Kent has a full schedule this month, with lots of debates to brag about. He’ll “win” them all, too!

I am a bit dismayed. I’ve never heard of any of his opponents, they’re all “debating” exactly the same topic — which tells me that Hovind set it — and also, they’re all hosted on the same “impartial” YouTube channel, Standing for Truth Ministries. You’ve been suckered, gang. You’re getting gamed. These are all a sham. Why do people keep falling for this nonsense?

I can guess why. Hovind is stupid, shallow, and repetitive; you listen to him talk and you think, “that’s all wrong, I know enough to counter that argument,” and you confidently challenge him to a debate. But then you let him set the agenda, since he’ll refuse to talk to you if he doesn’t, and he decides the venue, because, again, he’ll refuse if you don’t let him. Then when you do engage him, he just says the same dumbass crap every time. Evolution is the dumbest religion in the world. Do you believe you came from an amoeba? Cats have never given birth to dogs. Yadda yadda yadda.

You might precisely and eloquently deliver the facts that demonstrate he’s wrong on every point. You think you’ll get him this time, because you listen to a few of his “debates” and discover that they never change, he always says exactly the same stupid things, so you will be prepared. It doesn’t matter, because Hovind will consider it a victory if he obtusely refuses to accept anything you say. He’s got the mind of a two-year-old who has learned the word “NO”. He’ll sail through your debate, rejecting all evidence and reason, and emerge at the end not having learned anything, and then he’ll sign up another sucker who will let him execute the same performance.

Stop doing this. Show a little spine. If you really want to debate him (I can’t understand why, it’s not going to look good on your CV), then demand a debate on a much narrower topic, and get a moderator who is not a fawning lickspittle creationist like SFT, one who will actually shut you down if you veer off topic. This is the way. It is the only way.

You’ll at least get the satisfaction of seeing Kent Hovind yip-yip-yip as a runs away from your conditions.

In case you’d forgotten how bonkers the Christian Right is

Pat Robertson was compelled to rise from his crypt to remind us.

He is explaining to us that Putin is an agent of God who is making a righteous move to expand towards Israel to bring about the End Times. He’s going to take over Ukraine as part of a march towards the Dardenelles so that, when the Apocalypse arrives, he can kill all the Jews, except for the ones who convert to Christianity. A little geography reminder:

Taking Ukraine doesn’t get him that close to Robertson’s hallucinated destination. He’s also going to have to take Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. I wonder how much Robertson’s prayers for victory every step of the way will help?

Robertson is barely able to move anymore, so we shouldn’t worry about him. There are others like him in the halls of Congress, though, who believe in that bizarre Christian eschatology of the End Times and the Rapture and who babble about “Judeo-Christian morality” while dreaming of the day all the Jews are eradicated or converted in a world-wide spasm of destruction…and who believe that would be a good thing. When you’re fantasizing about Hell on Earth and mass slaughter, I guess someone like Putin begins to look like a divine hero.

We’ve willingly adopted a Cylon

It’s a beauty…look at thing. Ominous, brooding, ready to rise up and destroy us if we don’t do its bidding. We’re glad to have it, though!

Would you believe that’s what a modern microscope looks like? The biology discipline just bought a Keyence BZ-X810, which is a light sheet fluorescence microscope that is intimidatingly automated. You don’t touch any of the microscope components directly, you just load up a holder with multiple slides or petri dishes or 24 well plates, put it in the guts of the box, and close it up. Everything is controlled with a computer. Push a button to select your fluorescence wave length. Push another button to select your microscope objective. Click on the screen to move your specimen under the objective. Focus with your mouse wheel. When an administrator stomps in demanding to know why you spent $100,000 on a strange gray box, click another button and it turns its elongate blue eye to the offender and disintegrates them. It’s perfect.

I am the imperfect one, because I’ve got to get a genetics lecture and exam together tonight, so I can’t snuggle up with our new machine and play. Spring break is coming soon, though, and then…then we will take over the world.

(By the way, this is not mine, it’s shared equipment for the whole biology discipline. I just look forward to mastering it.)

I didn’t ask to live in interesting times

But here we are. It’s been a rough decade — we had a terrible one-term president who appalled most of us with his incompetence and corruption, and seemed to inspire the authoritarians and racists and wanna-be fascists. One of our political parties tumbled down into outright insanity, which isn’t a good thing for a country run by a two-party system. We’re repeating the Gilded Age crap, with billionaires getting richer and richer. The ongoing climate crisis continues to be ignored by our capitalist overlords. Then layer a pandemic on top of all that that has killed a million Americans and triggered another million or so it flamboyant science denial, rapidly spread by the greed of the social network poombahs.

We should cry out like Job, I should think. But now we get a major land war in Europe to add to the world’s tribulations.

I have no idea how that war is going. One thing that has repelled me lately on the media are all the pundits, whether they have a cushy sinecure at some major newspaper or they are Joe Nobody, sitting in his car opining at a camera (oh, how I loathe those videos of middle-class, middle-aged white guys sitting in their cars talking at their phones) telling me which side is going to win. Worse is when they declare why their side is going to when. Near as I can tell, the Right thinks the Russians will conquer because they despise pronouns, while the Left thinks Ukraine will win because Zelensky is sexy. They don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a cacophony of pure noise that isn’t helping.

So, what I do know…

Russia is making a massive effort, throwing all kinds of soldiers and artillery and tanks at Kharkiv. They could win the military battle, it wouldn’t surprise me. Ukrainians are brave, but bravery doesn’t stop a bullet. I have no idea what the outcome of the war will be, other than pain and death and misery, and we’ll have to helplessly wait and see what happens. Isn’t that annoying? Big dramatic bloody events occur, and we here on the other side of the world have to wait.

I do know that Russia is losing the diplomatic war rather brutally. Suddenly, coalitions and alignments and nations that have been around for practically a lifetime are shifting! I haven’t seen this kind of transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finland is discussing joining NATO? Sweden is increasingly antagonistic to Russia? Ukraine has requested to join the EU, and some countries want to fast-track that application? It’s all happening so scary-fast. We’re racing towards a polarization and alignment of forces that we haven’t seen since the Cold War, and let me tell you, that’s not a good thing.

What I do find encouraging, though, is that the world was quick to react with open condemnation of Russia for invading a sovereign state and killing citizens. I just wish that the world had been equally damning when the US invaded a sovereign state and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents — we can hope that what emerges out of this new world is an agreement that bullying smaller nations by powerful ones will no longer be tolerated.

Unless, of course, the bullying nation decides everyone needs a good scourging with nuclear fire.

And that’s all I know. Sit. Wait. Watch.

Hey, Job has sort of a happy ending, right? He loses his family, his health, and his security, but God gives him new kids at the end? It’s kind of warped that the Old Testament thinks families and kids are fungible, so I’m not going to take much consolation from that.

The UMM D&D Wilderness Adventure!

Here’s a short solo D&D adventure that I play every day.

Your destination is the university (and specifically, my lab) on the right side of the map. You will enter from the left, or west side, either from town or my house, the blue marker. There are three main entrances: 4th Avenue, on the top, which is a bit round about and only has a pedestrian walkway to the north, and also skirts the perilous cemetery; 2nd Avenue, south, which is really only for vehicular traffic and mainly gives you access to glamorous parking lots; and 3rd Avenue, the middle and most direct route. It’s difficult and dangerous to detour to 2nd or 4th from 3rd Avenue, since there are no sidewalks along College, and the roads are currently packed ice, inhabited by wandering bands of student cars.

Conveniently, there is a footpath from 3rd & College, my starting point, directly to the Science Building. Excellent! Unfortunately, it slopes gently downward, and when we get any snowmelt at all, followed by a freeze, it turns into the Slalom of Death. We’re going to get a brief thaw today, followed by a plummet once again into bitter cold. I may die tomorrow.

That same path becomes more navigable in the summer, but it is surrounded on both sides by leafy ground cover and lots of trees, and is inhabited by clouds of blood-sucking monsters in the summer, the Tunnel of Blood. The stirges hibernate in the winter, at least.

Roll for initiative. Choose your path. ‘Ware wandering monsters. I hear there are bugbears and slime beasts in the administration building off map, to the right, so don’t get clever and think you can just go around.

There is a dungeon in the science building. Also a book store where you can replenish your supplies of t-shirts, pens, and candy bars (not much in the way of books, though).