Almost there!

Today is the day, the last day of finals week. My students will soon be finishing up their final exam, as of precisely 12:00 noon today, and then I spring into action and grade everything, and then plug the last numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate the final letter grade, and then I submit them to the registrar. Done! All done! No more teaching obligations until January!

To cap it all off, tomorrow is commencement. I’ll be putting on the silly cap and gown and saying goodbye to the students (and immediately after rushing home for a podcast).

But today…one last push.

Vandals get punished

That is a lovely tree. It’s been posing in a scenic location near Hadrian’s Wall for 150 years.

Then a pair of idiots came along with a chainsaw and did this to it:

The two vandals have been found guilty. They did it for a “laugh” and to fetch a souvenir for one of the men’s newborn daughter — I don’t think she’ll be taking pride in that as she grows up fatherless.

In a bit of good news, saplings have sprung up from the stump and a new tree may arise.

We have a new Pope, same as all the old Popes

It’s some American guy named Robert Prevost who has now accepted the purported mantle of infallibility and divine favor from an imaginary god. Just once I’d like to see one of these clerical nobodies admit that they don’t have any special powers and therefore need to turn down the unjustified honor. But no, this one is calling himself Pope Leo XIV and is already spewing pious declarations.

He does meet one of the necessary prerequisites to be a Catholic authority figure: he does have a distinguished history of concealing child-rape accusations against the priesthood.

OK, everyone, we can go back to ignoring and occasionally sneering at the ridiculous man at the top of the hierarchy.

I gotta get a better hobby

Huh. I woke up this morning to do as I usually do, browsing the news and commenting on it, and I just can’t. Nope. Nothing inspires me today.

My mistake might have been first reading about RFK jr’s policies.

Death is the policy

I can’t expand on that. The man is a walking catastrophe, an incompetent buffoon who has been shielded from the consequences of his actions by wealth and privilege, and now he’s inflicting his uninformed, insane opinions on everyone else. He’s a madman, given control of HHS and NIH and dictating policy on everything from autism to infectious disease, while we sit around gawping at the spectacle. Our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop the disaster, and in fact rubber-stamped his appointment. What am I supposed to do?

I have to wonder how such a pathetic creature could acquire so much power. Naomi Klein explains that we must blame the rich.

What they want is absolutely everything

Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men — who are guiding Donald Trump’s presidency — as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. “The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters,” she writes, “has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”

So the guys with billions of dollars are telling people like me, who is facing existential uncertainty about personal issues like retirement and health with virtually no financial backup, that we don’t matter, that there is nothing we can do, that we might as well die and get it over with. I’d be happy to do so if I weren’t so full of rage and frustration. Unfortunately, writing on the internet does not relieve my anger. We need to literally destroy these monsters of greed.

None of us are going anywhere anyway

Today is the day everyone is required to have that RealID/enhanced ID if you want to fly anywhere. It’s an incompetently managed sham.

I applied for mine two months ago, when I went to the DMV to renew my driver’s licence. I’m still waiting. Today I received email from the DMV saying they were rejecting my application, because I hadn’t included enough bank account information. Apparently you now need a verified bank account to drive or travel anywhere, so I’m going to have to resubmit the entire application all over again, and wait a few more months. This is particularly galling because I did go in person to the local license bureau (not any problem at all, this is a small town, no waiting) and had everything verified right there. I have a valid passport, so I could fly if I wanted to, but the airports are so chaotic that I don’t want to.

My wife has been struggling to get her realID for a while now, but she keeps getting rejected. She showed up at the license bureau with her birth certificate, social security card, etc., but she made the terrible mistake of changing her name when she got married, so they won’t accept it. We ordered a certified marriage license from King County, but they just sent us a photocopy, which doesn’t count.

On the bright side, ladies, I guess I’m now single and available. Except you can’t travel anymore.

This nation with the impressive interstate freeway system and huge airports in every major city is now effectively killing travel within our borders. We’re also not going to be getting much traffic from international travel, either. Tourism, who needs it? Next stop will be armed guards at the boundaries for each state, and you’ll have to show your papers if you visit any city…except that you can’t, because the bureaucracy is too incompetent to issue them.

Stay home, everyone.

I may be in Fargo for Flag Day

Mark your calendars. Donald Trump is planning a gigantic military parade — $90 million dollars sunk into rolling tanks and missiles down Pasadena Avenue — but the rest of us should be planning to rise up in protest on Saturday, 14 June, instead. There will be No Kings rallies all across the country on that day. Right now, the nearest event near me is in Fargo, so I’m planning on trooping north on that day to wave a sign and chant angry slogans. Look up the rally nearest you and try to hit the streets on that day!

The fundamental fork in the road to destiny!

The DOGE scam is fading, at least in the sense of helping Musk skim off money from the government, so now he’s pivoting to maximizing fear in the uninformed. Forgive me for including this clip from Fox News of that walking smarmy smirk, Jesse Watters, encouraging Musk to expound on his nonsensical imaginary apocalyptic claims of the coming doom of Earth.

He can’t even get the numbers right. He says that the sun is going to expand and swallow up the Earth in a few hundred million years — the end is imminent! It’s more like 5 billion years, but even a hundred million years is an immensity of time for a species that has only existed for maybe 300,000 years, and it’s ridiculous to be trying to terrify stupid people, like Jesse Watters, with the news of an apocalypse sometime. It’s a good way to shake down the rubes, though, just like the opening claim that the Biden administration stole billions of dollars from the gullible geezers watching Fox News.

I’m not being pessimistic to say that Musk will never build a colony on Mars; I doubt he’ll even get a single mission to land there and return. He is not saving humanity. He’s the biggest grifter to ever exist, and Fox News has cultivated an army of goobers who will direct the federal government to shovel their tax money into the gaping maw of this horrible person.

Tammy Faye is calling you home, Jim

Jim Bakker is 85 years old, and he’s still running his scam.

Televangelist Jim Bakker needs 1,000 people to donate $1,000 each to save his ministry: If they foreclose on this ministry, they will take my house too, so I’ll be on the street.

Yes, please. Shut down this scoundrel’s ministry and toss him out on the street.

I notice that he relies heavily on the old “seed money” con. If you give him money, he claims, Jesus will reward you with even more money, even if the truth is that handing your seed corn over to the old fraud really means he’ll be snacking on popcorn watching you fail and die.

People still fall for it.

Just in time for summer

It is now legal to go topless in public in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion last week that holds that women can go topfree without violating the Minnesota indecent exposure statute as long as they don’t engage in sexual conduct.

In short, the Court unanimously held that a woman who is topfree is not acting lewdly merely by appearing in public with her torso unclothed. Since the indecent exposure statute only criminalizes lewd behavior, a woman with an unclothed torso is not commiting a criminal act unless she is also engaging in sexual behavior. In other words, a woman merely going topless is neither lewd nor sexual and it’s perfectly legal.

It’s only useful about 3 months out of the year, and in those 3 months you’ve got to worry about mosquitos.

The best thing about this decision is that it removes a pretext cops used to search and arrest people.

The facts in this case are short and undisputed: On July 28, 2021, the Rochester
Police Department received a report that a woman was walking around a gas station
parking lot with her breasts exposed. An officer responded to the call and saw Plancarte
in the parking lot with her breasts exposed. The officer recognized Plancarte from two
encounters earlier that week. During those encounters, the officer saw Plancarte exposing
her underwear on one occasion, and her breasts and her underwear on another occasion.
The officer stopped Plancarte and asked her why she kept exposing herself.
Plancarte replied, “I think Catholic girls do it all the time.” Plancarte then worried about
how she would get home and stated, “I dance at the biker club. I’m a stripper.” The officer
said, “Well, you can’t strip in the middle of public.” Plancarte responded, “Yeah, but they
should account for me at the club, shouldn’t they?” The officer arrested Plancarte and later
searched her purse, where the officer found a vial containing cocaine.

Yeah, this is an anti-cop decision. I approve.