A dismal way to start the march

We were just beginning to gather the group for our protest march, when we listened to Governor Walz’s announcement about the murders last night.

Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said the Hoffmans were shot around 2 a.m.

The second shooting, at the Hortman home, happened around 3:35 a.m., with police at the scene exchanging gunfire with the suspect before the suspect fled the scene.

Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said officers did their “due diligence” to check on Hortman’s home after learning that a lawmaker had earlier been attacked.

“When they arrived at Melissa’s house, they noticed that there was a police vehicle in the driveway with the emergency lights on and what appeared to be a police officer at the door coming out o the house. When our officers confronted him, the individual immediately fired upon officers, which exchanged gunfire and the suspect retreated back into the home.”

The manhunt for the suspect, who was impersonating a police officer, is ongoing and involved “hundreds and hundreds” of officers. The suspect fled through the back door of the home and he is on foot and at large.

The suspect was driving a vehicle that looked “exactly like a police vehicle” and they were wearing a vest with a Taser and police badge. Inside the suspect’s vehicle was a manifesto that identified “many lawmakers and other officials,” including Hortman and Hoffman.

“No question that if they were in this room you would assume that they were a police officer,” Bruley said, acknowledging that investigators have “people of interest that they are looking for.”

“This is a dark day today for Minnesota and for democracy,” Minnesota Department of Public Safety Superintendent Bob Jacobson said.

The two homes were 8 miles apart. There is no doubt that this was an intentional, targeted, political assassination of Democratic lawmakers. They’ve at least seized the cowardly criminal’s car, so we’ll probably learn his identity soon enough.

The protest march went ahead as planned. About a hundred people, a remarkably large event for our little town, marched peacefully and legally through the town. This isn’t notable except that the goddamned chickenshit state police were using the violence as an excuse to shut down rallies all across the state.

State officials are urging Minnesotans to refrain from attending political rallies Saturday amid the backdrop of shocking political violence in the state.

“Given the targeted shootings of state lawmakers overnight, we are asking the public to not attend today’s planned demonstrations across Minnesota out of an abundance of caution,” the Minnesota State Patrol wrote on X.

Walz echoed the message in his own post, writing:

“Out of an abundance of caution my Department of Public Safety is recommending that people do not attend any political rallies today in Minnesota until the suspect is apprehended.”

No. Ten thousand times no. This is precisely the time when we have to stand up against political violence.

And we did.

Time to protest

I’m getting ready to leave the house and join the No Kings protest here in Morris, Minnesota. I read up on recommendations made for other protests — stuff like leave your phone at home, mask up, what to do if there is tear gas, etc. — but it all seems like overkill here. I’ll be about 5 or 6 blocks away from my home, in a small quiet rural town, and I anticipate a well-behaved calm protest, so I hope you’re not expecting dramatic news when I get back. It’s just going to be a small group of citizens expressing their civic responsibility, unlike the Republicans in government.

I still think it’s important for everyone to stand up in resistance, even in situations lacking in drama.

Unfortunately, then I learn this morning that two Democratic state legislators, John Hoffman and Melissa Hortman, were shot overnight by a man dressed as a law enforcement officer. Their spouses were also shot. The shootings were in two different locations, so it seems to be a targeted terrorism attack, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the goal was to intimidate protesters on this day.

It’s all the more reason to get out there and peacefully protest. Don’t let the thugs win.

Gray days

It’s been raining non-stop for the last few days, just an ongoing drizzle, cool and wet.

No spiders. Spiders are not fans of the excessive water falling out of the sky. I’m missing my little friends.

The good news is that the vegetation is going mad, and I expect once it all dries out a bit and the sun warms up the place, we’re going to be swarming with insects, and the spiders will be joyous again.

They’re not geniuses — they’re pretentious twits

I rather strongly dislike Chris Hedges, but I have to admit that sometimes he makes a good point.

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. There’s a great comic-horror movie that made this same point: The Death of Stalin. In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, the people who profited from the tyrant’s death bumble about, scrambling to take over his role, and it’s simultaneously horrifying and hilarious, because you know that every childlike tantrum and backstabbing pratfall is concealing death and famine and riots and futility. It portrays the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union as a mob of idiots.

There’s a new movie out that has the same vibe, Mountainhead. It’s not as good as The Death of Stalin, but it’s only fair that it turns the stiletto against American idiots, the privileged CEOs and VCs of Silicon Valley. The premise is that a group of 4 fictional billionaires are getting together for a poker game (which they never get around to) at an isolated mansion in the mountains. One of them, who is kind of a blend of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, has just unleashed an AI on his social media company that makes it easy to create deepfakes and spoof other users — it turns out to be very popular and is also creating total chaos around the world, with assassinations, wars, and riots breaking out everywhere. He is publicly unconcerned, and actually suggests it’s a good thing, and suggests that we all need to push through and do more, promoting accelerationism. He’s actually experiencing visible anxiety as everyone at the meeting has their eyes locked to their phones.

What he wants to do is buy some AI-filtering technology from another of the attendees, Jeff, who doesn’t want to give it up. He just surpassed the others in net worth, and doesn’t want to surrender his baby. So they all decide that the solution is to murder Jeff so they can steal his tech. They aren’t at all competent at doing real world action, trying to shove him over a railing, clubbing him to death, etc., and their efforts all fail as Jeff flees into a sauna. They lock him in and pour gasoline on the floor, using their hands to try and push it under the door so they can set him on fire.

One of the amusing sides of the conflict is that all of them are using techbro buzzwords. The pompous elder “statesman” of the group is frequently invoking Kant and Hegel and Nietzche and Marcus Aurelius to defend his decisions, while clearly not comprehending what they actually wrote. They shout slogans like “Transhuman world harmony!” and declare themselves the smartest men in America, while struggling to figure out how to boil an egg. They have such an inflated sense of their own importance that they plan to “coup out” America and rule the world from their cell phones.

They’re idiots.

One flaw to the movie is that the jargon and references are flying so thickly that it might be a bit obscure to the general public. Fortunately, I had just read More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, so I was au courant on the lingo. It made the movie doubly depressing because it was so accurate. That’s actually how these assholes think: they value the hypothetical lives of future trillions over the existence of peons here and now. It’s easier to digest the stupidity when it’s coming from fictional characters, rather than real people like Yudkowsky and MacAskill and Andreesen and Gates and Ray Kurzweil (unfortunately, Becker twice says that Kurzweil is neither stupid nor crazy — sorry, he’s one or both of those). Fiction might make the infamous go down a little more smoothly, but non-fiction makes it all jagged and sharp and horrible.

Tech is the new religion. Écrasez l’infâme.

Don’t use these posters

Are you ready for the big No Kings protest on Saturday? Are you making signs? I have to tell you that you shouldn’t use these as ideas for posters.

Those are sarcasm. Sarcasm doesn’t work in a protest sign. Short, simple, clear messages are much more effective.

Keep in mind that conservatives do not understand sarcasm or irony or even humor. This, for example, is a real poster put out by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.

“Foreign invaders”…is that what we’re calling the people who are working so hard in our farm fields right now? Are the children of immigrants also called “foreign invaders”?

You know, that looks nothing like Steven Miller — he can’t grow that kind of hair on his ratty little face.

It’s not just me

Mano Singham is on the anti-Pinker train.

But if you claim to be of the left and yet find yourself frequently being criticized by others on the left but not by those on the right, and if you find yourself being repeatedly invited by those whose views you strongly disagree with and being quoted approvingly by them, it may be good for you to pause and reflect on why that might be so, and not simply dismiss your critics as being dogmatic and irrational.

The trigger here is Pinker’s flirting with the racist scum on Aporia, but it’s been a frequent issue in his career. He’s a faux leftist, and it shows.

I guess I’m supposed to be relieved

I got a note from our university advocate at the capitol, announcing the completion of the Minnesota state budget. Is it good news? I don’t know. It’s not great news, that’s for sure.

The higher education bill maintains current funding for the University of Minnesota’s core operations in the next biennium. The capital investment (also called bonding) bill provides $60 million in bonding to repair and renew existing University of Minnesota buildings across the state. The transportation bill provides $8 million from the general fund for safety improvement to Washington Avenue Bridge. These bills have been sent to the governor, who is expected to sign them as part of the special session agreement.

Although the funding for core operations amounts to a 3.5% reduction when adjusted for inflation, we recognize it was a tough budget year at the State Capitol. UMN Advocates minimized cuts and secured a bonding bill despite narrow partisan divides by helping legislators understand the statewide value of the University.

The legislature held the line. The budget was already skin-tight and our bones were showing, so we’re going to have to cinch it up a little tighter, but it could have been so much worse. But have you ever heard of the Minnesota starvation experiment?

During World War Two, conscientious objectors in the US and the UK were asked to volunteer for medical research. In one project in the US, young men were starved for six months to help experts decide how to treat victims of mass starvation in Europe.

Do we need to repeat it? Really?

Sad news for fans of the Newsboys and the God’s Not Dead movies

onstage during the 6th Annual KLOVE Fan Awards at The Grand Ole Opry on May 27, 2018 in Nashville, Tennessee.

I’m sure there are many of you here, who listen to Christian Rock and watch cheesy apologetics movies, but you could have predicted this. Michael Tait, lead singer of the Newsboys, has…

No, he hasn’t died. It’s the other thing you could have predicted.

…has confessed to cocaine use, drinking, sexual abuse, and grooming.

After meeting Tait at a concert in 2004, a then-22-year-old worship musician said he was invited twice to visit Tait’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, despite living eight hours away, according to the report. During the second visit, the musician said, Tait exposed his genitals and touched the musician’s anal area without consent. The musician told The Roys Report he initially thought Tait’s actions were an “anomaly.”

An “anomaly”. I think maybe this unnamed worship musician was remarkably naive.

Years later, a 22-year-old touring musician with the Chris Sligh band, which opened for the Newsboys in 2010, was befriended by Tait, despite Tait being 21 years older. The Chris Sligh bandmate alleged that in January 2011, Tait assaulted him after inviting him to his home and providing him with alcohol. The musician said he woke in the early morning to Tait kissing him and touching his genitals. He told The Roys Report he saw Tait as “basically the top of the food chain” in the Christian music industry.

The pattern reportedly repeated in 2014. A 22-year-old crew member said that after a night of drinking, Tait offered him cocaine. He later woke up to Tait touching his genitals over his clothes, he said according to The Roys Report.

You know, there were five God’s Not Dead movies released between 2014 and 2024. Tait has been the lead singer since 2009. But he was so sincere in those movies.

I saved the worst revelation for last.

Tait is also known for his conservative politics. In 2016, he endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for president before supporting Donald Trump. Tait signed a letter opposing Trump’s 2019 impeachment and was a performer at a January 2020 Evangelicals for Trump concert.

Unbelievable. Such a good Christian.

Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be a redemption tour.