Courage is what we need

We’re not going to see any bravery from the Republican lickspittles. In private, they’re even admitting that they’re trembling in fear.

Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him. But this is not the whole story of Republican subservience to the president. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)

Wow. Keep in mind that these are the boomer children of what they called “the greatest generation,” the sons and daughters of people who marched off to risk their lives fighting the Nazis, and now they’re hiding in terror from the Nazis running the country. What are they, the “weakest generation”? Their fathers were shot at and shelled and living under desperate conditions to fight off the fascist threat, and these people are whining that they might have to run against a well-funded opposition candidate. Oooh. Scary.

You want to see courage? Here’s Chris Kluwe standing up in court to protest the Trump regime by stating the truth.


MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and, most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.

Watch how brave the cops are to attack and tackle a man who threatened peaceful civic disobedience, scrambling madly to get at him. I’m not clear on what he was arrested for, but they sure were quick to take him away.

It’s also ridiculous that the city was discussing putting up a truly absurd plaque in the city library that said, “Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, Adventurous,” four words that I would never associate with “MAGA”.

If you watch the video above to the end, you’ll also learn that the public is getting fed up with Democratic cowardice, too. Primary them all.

Bernie Sanders has a plan

Spoiler: it’s not much of a plan.

He points out the magnitude of the problem: Trump has the backing of billionaires, who are rushing to fund his every desire; he has the media under his control; he’s a master of the “big lie”; he does not believe in democracy, at all. That’s what we have to overcome.

What do we have? We have high aspirations and grand values.

Healthcare is a human right and must be available to all regardless of income.

Every worker in America is entitled to earn a decent income. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage and make it easier for workers to join unions.

We must have the best public educational system in the world, from childcare to vocational training, to graduate school – available to all.

We must address the housing crisis and build the millions of units of low-income and affordable housing that we desperately need.

We must create millions of good paying jobs as we lead the world in combating the existential threat of climate change.

We must abolish all forms of bigotry.

Great! But I’m 3/4 of the way through his essay, and he hasn’t said how we will accomplish that. In the final few paragraphs, he gives us one goal: we have to defeat one particular and particularly significant bill.

In the coming weeks the Republicans in Congress will be bringing forward a major piece of legislation, a “reconciliation” bill, that encapsulates the value system of greed and their obedience to oligarchy. It is the economic essence of Trumpism.

At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, this legislation will provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the richest people in our country. It will make the rich even richer. At a time when the working class of this country is struggling to put food on the table and pay for housing, this legislation will make savage cuts to Medicaid, housing, nutrition, education and other basic needs. It will make the poor even poorer.

That’s it? Defeat this one bill? You know, I don’t get to vote on it, this legislation is entirely in the hands of the current crop of elected congresspeople, and we already know that a lot of them are spineless simps who will bow down before authority. I am confident my senators will oppose it, and that my representative is a terrible Republican MAGA-head who will support it. This is a plan that leaves me helpless, only pawn in game of life.

It also reflects a naive confidence in the rule of law. Trump is busy trampling over the Constitution, issuing executive orders that are both illegal and in defiance of all political norms, and we’re supposed to think that one political setback in congress will stop him? He doesn’t respect congress or democracy. The only thing that will stop him would be for the police/FBI/whatever to intervene, arrest him and his cronies, and lock them all up. We know that no one in government will have the spine to do what needs to be done.

But sure. I’ll tell my representatives to vote against the reconciliation bill. I hope it fails.

Now what do we do about the gutting of NSF and NIH, the dismantling of the parks service, the dissolution of the board of education, the selling out of Ukraine to Putin, the alienation of all of our allies in the world, and on and on and on?

I get email — flu brain edition

I got email from someone calling himself “devoted natural science diletant”, criticizing me for paying attention to Intelligent Design creationism, a fair cop. I think he’s expressing a secular, scientific perspective, but I can’t read it, my brain starts sputtering and sparking as I try to plow through the all-caps stuff.

WHY HAVE YOU SO MUCH OF THIS “INTELLIGENT DESIGNER – STUFF” ? IT HAS THE SAME TREND, THAN “INFORMATION FIRST” SCENARIOS. I THINK AS MANY OTHER, THAT AT THE BEGINNING WAS SOME WIDE-SPREAD METABOLIC AND CATALYTIC ELEMENTS, LAYERED ON GROUND LIKE SILICON AND CLAY-ASHES AND PORES – ON CRATON ISLANDS – HAVING WETTED – DRIED, COOLED – WARMED – ENERGY-GRADIENTS + ELECTROMAGNETIC-NANO-SCALE-FORCES BRINGING PEPTIDE BONDS BETWEEN PRIMARY AMINO-ACID CHAINS . THIS COULD HAVE BEEN THE STUFF, what came first – before there was any INFORMATION ELEMENTS like RNA or DNA . I MEAN that the primary substance of LIFE and its primary catabolics and collective autocatalytics with interactions, must have PRECEDED this INFORMATIVE ORGANIZATION – there must be SOMETHING from where the information can CONDUCT ITS “ALPHABETS” ! SO THIS “DESIGNER” – was the beginning of CELL-like differentiation of OUTER and INNER environments. SO first AGENTIAL LIFE began maybe after many TRIALS in different places and times in EARTH HISTORY – and they were COLLECTIVE POPULATIONS at first without INFORMATIVE structures. When these PROTO-CELLS came bigger – they begin SPONTANEOUSLY divide smaller – (maybe) – the difficult part are from where came those ion-conducting MEMBRANE CHANNELS – which at first had HYDROGEN-or SODIUM -gradients and outer/inner DYNAMIC HOMEOSTASIS.

He sent me a follow-up to make sure I’d read it.

I SEND THIS COMMENT TO YOU. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF “INTELLIGENT DESIGNER” NOWADAYS.

OK. Does he think I favor intelligent design? Do I need to use more random capitalization to get my message through?

Flu brain

I’m feeling better today. At least my gut has stopped spasming, and I don’t feel like I have curl into a fetal ball and dream about dying. I haven’t had the flu in about 5 years, I realized, thanks to all the sensible masking we’ve been doing, but when it finally sneaks past your defenses, it’s going to get it’s revenge.

I went back to work today, but it was a terrible mistake. I have a bad case of flu brain — I was stuttering through my lectures, making stupid mistakes in calculations, at one point I just froze and couldn’t think of a word. I was embarrassingly bad. A substantial part of the problem, I think, was that I haven’t eaten in two days, on top of a terrible sleep schedule. But I have no appetite at all! I’m going to have to force myself to eat something, and go to be early, and hope I’m at at least 90% functioning tomorrow.

More fossilized soft tissue

Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.

In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?

The popular science article explains:

Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.

Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.

The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.

They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.

Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.

We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.

This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.

The only thing you need to know about Paddington in Peru

My wife and I went on a date to this movie last night. It was OK, not as amusing as the previous one, but you knew from the beginning that everything would be fine.

I had one moment of concern, and I wanted to warn you in case you also wanted to watch it, especially if you take any children with you. There is a scene with a spider, which they said was a purple tarantula, Avicularia purpurea, in which it was resting on an important crank that needed to be turned by a character who had admitted to disliking spiders, and there was a minute of tension. I feared the spider would be harmed, and there was a flurry of slapstick in which the spider ended up on the character’s face, no doubt an unpleasant and terrifying scene for the spider, but it ended with the crank being turned and then the tarantula being returned to its home with a kind word.

It was briefly stressful for me, but I’m happy to report that I was able to uncover my eyes and that the movie is safe for everyone to watch. Eight tarsal claws up.

Maybe I’ll stay home for a few years

Fortunately, salvage crews work for free.

My wife & I have discussed flying out to Washington state, maybe with a side trip down the Oregon coast, but I may have to rethink that.

The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Probationary workers were targeted in late night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.

The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

ATC was already understaffed. In what muddled, evil mind does firing more improve air travel safety? Unless…maybe it’s not about safety.

One FAA employee who was fired over the weekend suggested he was targeted for his views on Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, not as part of a general probationary-level sweep. Both are owned by Elon Musk, who is leading Trump’s effort to cut the federal government.

Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander posted on LinkedIn that he was fired just after midnight Saturday, days after he started getting harassing messages on Facebook.

“The official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter,” Spitzer-Stadtlander wrote. “Less than a week later, I was fired, despite my position allegedly being exempted due to national security.”

He added: “When DOGE fired me, they turned off my computer and wiped all of my files without warning.”

I’ve criticized DOGE and Tesla and everything connected to Elon Musk. Will they try to revoke my tenure next?

At least innocent people wouldn’t die if I lose my job, unlike those air traffic controllers.

Back to the Miocene

It’s getting harder and harder to find something optimistic about. Seeing science knee-capped and obnoxious snots under Musk’s employ rifling through the IRS files and plotting to destroy Social Security (Hey! That’s my money! It’s not for billionaires to steal) is incredibly discouraging. I found something that looks on the bright side of climate change, though. The Miocene might be a good model for our future.

The Miocene, roughly 5-20 million years ago, had CO2 levels similar to where we’re going as we blast past recommended limit. It was generally warmer and wetter! That has some appeal as I sit here in a region at -30°C. It wasn’t a terrible world at all — primates were diverse and thriving, we had all these interesting mammals, “From Dryopithecus, a lineage of extinct primates that included forerunners of humans, to the toxodonts, large-hoofed mammals with long, curved incisors, to mammals similar to sloths, armadillos and anteaters, to marsupial carnivores”…it was great!

Significantly, the Miocene was a nearly 18 million year epoch full of change, albeit far slower change than ours. It started with a period of glaciation that must have been a chilly change from the greenhouse-like Oligocene, and ended with a prolonged period of glaciation, too. But through much of the Miocene, it was a warm world compared to today’s, a high CO2 planet that gradually cooled over millions of years until ice sheets developed in the Northern Hemisphere and Antarctica.

Around the middle of the epoch, we reached what is called the Miocene Climate Optimum (MCO), a roughly two million year-long greenhouse period when the world experienced its last period of sustained warmth, and the CO2 level was at least 500 ppm. This is the period we’re talking about, most specifically, when we talk about the Miocene as a proxy for our future, although changes throughout the Miocene are relevant: basically, from the middle Miocene Earth went through a process roughly opposite the one we are experiencing (and causing) today.

See? How can you dislike something called a “Climate Optimum”? It looks like paradise! Sign me up — these Minnesota prairies would be so exciting with little horses and hippos and Thylacosmilusand chalicotheres gamboling about in the lush vegetation.

The plants are going to love it.

Carbon dioxide levels affect plants by allowing for greater photosynthesis rates, and by increasing water use efficiency, in that plants can achieve the same amount of photosynthesis with less loss of water through the pores in their leaves, because higher availability of CO2 absorbed through open pores means they can keep them closed more of the time. Thanks to all this, it was also “a globally greener Miocene world,” as Reichgelt and West write in the 2025 paper. Various forms of evidence suggest that the biosphere was more productive during the Miocene compared to now, and that at higher latitudes, this effect was more pronounced.

Except for one major problem: evolution does not run backwards. No chalicotheres await us, especially since we’d be entering a neo-Miocene with a depauperate fauna.

Sadly, the taxodonts will not grace our future world. The long-armed, horsey Chalicotheriidae, reminiscent of Bojack Horseman, won’t be joining us at the bar. Smilodon, the catty predator whose ancestors emerged in the early Miocene, will not smile on us again. Nor the “bizarrely specialized” family of carnivorous marsupials, Malleodectidae, which used their massive ball peen-like third premolars to crush snails. Not the dog bears, Hemicyoninae, who emerged before and lived through the Miocene, nor the bear dogs, Amphicyonidae, which died out by the late Miocene. Evolution doesn’t work like that. Barring the odd de-extinction attempt, what’s lost is gone forever (that includes, thank goodness, the terror birds.)

Expect wild pigs and deer, already doing well, and novel species exploring new environments: I expect the descendants of raccoons and rats to thrive. Humans, not so much. We don’t do so well in the face of widespread environmental disruption, we like nice stable tame-able places where we can rely on crops to come in dependably. We’ll be starting with ecological wreckage and then amplifying the swings of climate and weather, which is a recipe for radical destabilization.

It’s also possible that we’re being seduced by the idea that the Miocene might represent a “happy medium.” As Steinthorsdottir and colleagues write, “More pessimistic scenarios of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions quickly move us beyond the Pliocene state, pushing Earth’s systems into a potentially vulnerable position where many of its ‘tippable’ subsystems such as glaciers, sea ice, forest biomes, deserts and coral reefs will be permanently destabilized […] an ‘intermediate’ deep-time climate analog, where boundary conditions are close to modern but extreme climate changes occurred, is therefore of great interest.”

As humans we have a notorious tendency to believe that whatever’s in the middle of two given extremes is moderate, cozy, all around OK. (In politics, this results in the Overton Window.) But Miocene-style hydrological or water cycles favor high altitude wind events, like cyclones and hurricanes, that transport heat and moisture evaporating from the tropics to higher latitudes, or California’s intense seasonal rainstorms. The future may be lush, sure, but it’ll also be erratic and dangerous for us. And the “tippable” subsystems Steinthorsdottir mentions may have tipping points that occur well within a Miocene-like context, as scientists have warned.

Whenever a paleoclimatologist tells you a scenario is “of great interest”, it’s time to run.

Sorry. I told you it’s hard to find anything to be optimistic about.