I haven’t had the slightest interest in the games, and haven’t watched a single minute of them. But now I learn the Russian artistic swimming team had a spider theme, so now I’m regretting missing it.
Has the Olympic committee considered requiring all of the events to have a spider motif? How much would I have to bribe them to get them to consider it?
Governor Andrew Cuomo might not be governor for long. The New York state attorney general has determined that he was guilty of sexual harassment and creating a hostile workplace for women. Biden has called on him to resign.
Investigators laid out a devastating portrait of Cuomo’s behavior and extensive examples of unwanted touching, including an incident last November in which Cuomo allegedly embraced an executive assistant and reached under her blouse to grab her breast. Witnesses also described an environment in the governor’s office that was abusive and vindictive, with one of the women who came forward targeted for retaliation through the release of her personnel file, investigators said.
In all, the independent probe found that Cuomo harassed 11 women, including a state trooper whom the governor arranged to be put on his detail.
Cuomo has made an absolutely mad rebuttal. He posted a document that includes 8 pages of photographs of Cuomo kissing and hugging various people, including his mother, and 15 pages of photos of other politicians kissing and hugging people (see, they do it too!). It’s embarrassingly irrelevant, and shows that he doesn’t understand the problem at all.
No one thinks it is wrong to hug your mother, as long as she consents. No one thinks public displays of affection are a crime. Were you abusive and vindictive to your mom? Did you create a hostile work environment for your mom growing up? There are specific, verified accusations of vindictive behavior in the New York governor’s office, and that is the problem.
The moment we dreaded has arrived. The believers have suddenly realized that they have a fully operational super-being at their beck and call, and all they have to do is ask their Supreme Creator of the Universe to eradicate us. All they needed to do is take advantage of the organizational efficiency of Facebook to gather their hordes and tell God what to do with a global prayer to end atheism. They finally figured it out. Next Thursday, 12 August 2021, this will be us.
Yeah, every atheist has been quaking in terror, dreading that moment when Christians finally realized the unstoppable power of prayer.
What are you all planning for next Friday? I guess I don’t have to worry about what to wear, since we’re all scheduled to have a grand naked orgy in Hell.
The president of Columbia University made it crystal clear. The administration is wrestling with the idea of in-person classes, which is telling in itself — the administration doesn’t give a good damn about the health and safety of faculty, staff, and students or they wouldn’t be debating how to shove their employees into milling crowds of unvaccinated students. But President Bollinger admitted something heinous in a memo to other administrators. First, though, he said this in public.
Faculty response to new models of teaching necessitated by the pandemic has been tremendous. We want to support faculty in every way we can…the University will not prescribe an approach for individual faculty members. Faculty will have leeway to teach in person, online, or some combination of the two, in consultation with their schools.
Great! That’s what I want to hear! Except…
…the instructional faculty for the Core is largely composed of non-tenure-track individuals, which means we should have greater leeway to expect in-person instruction, if that’s what we deem best.
Hey, you know that huge swarm of underpaid, untenured adjuncts we have teaching the core courses of the university? They’re expendable, they have to do what we say, we’ll just make them take all the risks! After all, we know what’s best for them.
I call on my fellow tenured faculty to show solidarity with the scholars and scientists who work side-by-side with us, with far more job insecurity and with the contempt of the administration. They are not serfs. They deserve equal respect…which, given that university administrators don’t have all that much respect for their tenured faculty, isn’t asking a lot.
This is a sweet story. Fiona Grayson saw a big funnel web spider taking up residence on her porch, and decided to make the spider welcome by decorating her place. So she made a tiny welcome mat, and put out little vases of flowers, and talked to the spider, who she named Cordelia.
“It was simply fun and wholesome, and in the process, I became very fond of her and excited to see her when she’d reveal herself at night,” Grayson said. “I tell her she’s beautiful and loved and thank her for her diligent pest control work. Any less would be just kinda rude and unneighborly.”
For the record, I like spiders, but I don’t quite go this far in appreciating them — I suspect the spider just sees the clutter as convenient anchor points for silk.
It’s still a nice idea.
There is no denying that there are bad apples in the bunch, and that police culture favors bad actors, but we also have to acknowledge that there are many police officers who actually are there to “protect and serve”. It’s those officers who are made to suffer.
The District of Columbia’s police department on Monday said two more police officers who responded to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol have died by suicide, bringing to four the number of known suicides by officers who guarded the building that day.
Add to the tally the Capitol Police officer who was killed in the line of duty, and the 100 who were injured, and it’s clear that the 6 January Insurrection was more than a few tourists getting rowdy. This was a terrorist action. Those rioters were not good people.
During emotional testimony last week, four police officers told a House of Representatives special committee that they were beaten, threatened, taunted with racial insults, and thought they might die as they struggled to defend the Capitol against the mob.
Meanwhile, Republicans are squirming and lying and trying to pin the blame on anyone other than Trump supporters.
[Wisconsin Senator Ron] Johnson, one of Trump’s most fervent congressional supporters, has for months raised numerous questions about the circumstances surrounding the attack, including the security failures and the nature of the events. He has taken exception, for instance, with describing the attack as an “armed insurrection.”
In the recording captured Saturday, Johnson explained his view that “by and large those folks were peaceful protesters” and that the news media and Democrats are “painting 75 million Americans who voted for Trump as attached with domestic terrorists.”
It’s amazing. A nest of traitors is probably going to walk away scot-free from their actions.
It’s incremental progress, I guess. The University of Minnesota will require masking in the Fall — actually, as of now.
The Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus appears to be much more easily transmitted, resulting in new CDC guidance on masking announced this week. This guidance recommends that in any county where the COVID transmission rate is shown to be substantial or high, individuals wear facial coverings while indoors, whether vaccinated or not.
Relying on this guidance and with the advice of our University public health experts, effective tomorrow, August 3, we are reinstituting the requirement that all students, staff, faculty, contractors, and visitors to our campuses, offices, and facilities, statewide, wear facial coverings while indoors, regardless of your vaccination status. Voluntary mask wearing today, August 2, is encouraged. Masks or facial coverings are not required outdoors.
Wearing a mask or facial covering indoors has been shown to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and, as we saw as a nation, virtually eliminate other airborne illnesses like the flu. This requirement applies to all of our campuses and offices statewide, whether a given location is in a substantial or high transmission county or not.
I hope they don’t expect me to be grateful. Dragging their feet about doing the basic, obvious things and then finally taking a small step in the right direction does not earn my praise. Now do a vaccine requirement next.
According to Lifesite News (as we all know, a highly reliable site), Outer space to be solely the dominion of gays and trans
. Now it sounds spectacularly fun, but I guess I’m excluded, not being either. They really are discriminating against us cis-het folk! I’m also curious about the sexual orientation of Branson and Bezos.
The story goes on:
According to a growing number of astronomers, physicists, and major scientific journals, anyone who is not sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ should be denied a presence in the cosmos.
There is a movement afoot within NASA to rename the much anticipated, $8.8 billion yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Why? As a State Department official in the 1950s, James Webb opposed employing gays and lesbians, viewing them as security risks susceptible to blackmail.
Webb went on to become in 1961 the head of NASA, where he oversaw the Apollo program.
Because the race to beat the USSR to the moon was viewed as integral to winning the Cold War, the Apollo program had to be protected against vulnerabilities to Soviet interference. Webb was responsible for implementing federal policy that included purging gays and lesbians from the NASA workforce.
That’s rather thin gruel of evidence for the extraordinary claim that all the straight people will be denied a presence in the cosmos
. It’s a bit of a grand leap from suggesting that large space projects shouldn’t be named after bigots to whining that the straights have been banned from outer space.
You do know that the reason gay people were considered vulnerable to Soviet interference is because good ol’ American bigots would use information about people’s sexuality to find common cause with the nefarious Russkies and wreck our own programs, right? All they had to do was recognize that gay people could also be patriotic Americans to negate the threat, but Webb willingly went along with a plan to discriminate against gay folk, which suggests he shared that bigotry. It’s the presence of homophobes, like everyone at Lifesite news, that is the problem.
They also make the claim that LGBT corruption: Making the hard sciences soft, squishy
, citing the fact (which is a fact) that statements about, for instance, the biology of men and women are more complicated to interpret than a simplistic, dishonest TERF can comprehend.
Scientific American regularly publishes articles that are political, not scientific, where LGBT ideology trumps intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research. Recent editorial headlines include Why Anti-Trans Laws Are Anti-Science, A Nationwide Ban Is Needed for “Anti-Gay Therapy,” and Gender-Affirming Health Care Should Be a Right, Not a Crime — all of which belong in the opinion sections of The Advocate or LGBTQ Nation, not a science journal.
Nature has appended notices to articles and social media postings, declaring, “Nature recognizes that sex and gender are neither binary nor fixed,” or some variation on that theme.
Science and policy are intertwined, so of course a science journal is going to take a stand on the intersection of science with politics. It is true that “intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research” support the idea that anti-trans laws are anti-science, because they are, and that “anti-gay therapy” doesn’t work and does more harm than good, and fucking of course gender-affirming health care should be provided to everyone who needs it. What is wrong with these people that think respecting the diversity of human identities should be a crime? It is anti-science to think it’s bad that scientific evidence repudiates their narrow-minded views.
As for Nature…it is entirely reasonable that they would qualify statements about the nature of men’s and women’s sexual and gender nature with a reminder that those properties are more fluid and complex. They are rightly concerned that, for instance, actuarial statistics that classify people into male and female categories will be misinterpreted as evidence that sex is rigidly binary by, for instance, bigoted readers like Lifesite News.
Case in point: they try to discredit the petition to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope by implying that the people behind it are a bunch of weirdos.
The name-change petition was launched by the four astronomers, including one who identifies as ‘non-binary,’ an astrophysicist who uses the pronouns ‘she/they,’ and a professor of physics and astronomy who is also a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies who identifies as “queer and agender.” The petition now has amassed 1,250 signatories, according to Nature.
But that makes the point for those scientists! These non-binary astronomers exist, and are speaking out and demanding respect as human beings; they are saying that you don’t get to pretend they can only be pure, ideologically conservative men and pure, ideologically conservative women. They are different, and don’t fit into the traditional pair of bins, and they are protesting the fact that people like them were discriminated against! Meanwhile, Lifesite News is not contesting the fact of discrimination, implicitly acknowledging that Webb was biased against them, instead just trying to justify it because we were in a space race against the Soviet Union.
It was a stupid race, anyway. Think what we could have accomplished with less competition and more cooperation, and with the assistance of more brilliant minds that just happened to have sexual preferences James Webb, and other hidebound administrators, didn’t like.
And we’re going to celebrate next week!
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