I am relieved that our invasion plans are all going to fail

I think this clown’s head might roll pretty good

Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama are even more relieved that the American war machine is run by idiots and incompetents. When they make war plans, they invite random journalists to the meeting…which is also held over a commercial app rather than all those secret channels the government controls. The editor of the Atlantic got advance notice about a recent bombing run over Yemen.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

Is it? Is it, really?

It’s clear the military is being controlled by the gang who can’t shoot straight. My questions are: are they going to repeat this behavior next time they want to blow something up? Are they going to pay attention when the Pentagon tells them to not use that app? Will the Democrats be as persistent in hounding these baboons as the Republicans were about Hillary’s Emails?

And, was Pete Hegseth sober at this badly mismanaged meeting?

The fox is in charge of the henhouse

NASA’s budget is getting slashed.

NASA is terminating $420 million in contracts the agency says are redundant or “misaligned” with its core priorities, but has provided few details about what is being cut.

In a statement to SpaceNews late March 24, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens confirmed a post by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that NASA had terminated about $420 million in “unneeded” contracts.

The question I have is…how much of that $420 million in contracts was going to SpaceX, which is run by Elon Musk, who is also running DOGE?

Much corruption, so respect.

Feminine stereotypes

Male tarantulas, when they reach sexual maturity, are focused on wandering away to find sex, to the point where they may lose interest in eating.

Females, on the other hand, turn into voracious consumers of calories.

Blue wants her morning mealworm, and strikes like lightning.

The “Average Christian” is a believer in lies

Apparently I need to go back to bed and shut down all social media, because this is the dreck I’m getting now on Bluesky.

Created by @darwintojesus, posted by @markwillworship

I can’t resist, let’s look a little more closely at the supposed contrasts in this illustration.

The average atheist pretends to understand science, while the average Christian understands science. I’m an atheist who has an advanced degree in biology and teaches evolution, and I guarantee you that the average Christian apologist does not know the first thing about science — I’ve been debating them for a few decades. All I have to do is point out that this illustration was created by a fanatical Christian who thinks Darwin is to science as Jesus is to Christianity.

The atheist doesn’t believe in right and wrong while the Christian believes in right and wrong. Atheists do believe in right and wrong, they just reject the unthinking authoritarian right and wrong, the rule-following idea that Christians have that they already possess absolute inviolable Truth in their mish-mash of a Bible.

The atheist secretly hates god while the Christian loves god. Nope. God doesn’t exist. We don’t feel much of anything about the invisible man. Now Christians, on the other hand…

The atheist doesn’t care about evidence while the Christian cares about evidence. The one thing about most debates between Christians and atheists is that the atheist will spend most of his time asking for evidence to back up the Christian’s assertions, while the Christian will gish-gallop all over the place, making a whole series of baseless claims. These debates get boring and predictable.

See also the atheist refuses to defend his atheist worldview while the Christian defends his worldview. This is not true, the two approach this concern from two different angles. The Christian thinks a recitation of dogma is a defense, while the atheist expects to give and take evidence.

The atheist has no purpose while the Christian has a real purpose. All purposes are constructed frameworks we use to explain why we do what we do. Atheists have them, they just don’t accept that they are fixed and absolutely assigned by a deity who communicates them to us through an old book. Christians real purpose is an arbitrary bit of nonsense, to serve God, which is dangerous and destructive since that God is observed by following a lot of out-of-date rules that don’t apply to the society we live in.

Then the whole image collapses into scattershot nonsense because the artist couldn’t think of comparable contrasts.

I’m not particularly terrified of dying, I’m sort of resigned to the reality — but I will resist it even as I know it’s inevitable. I don’t believe that Christians are unafraid of death or ready to die and go home, they will fight it as hard as I will.

I don’t think I’m just an evolved fish. Fish are pretty amazing organisms. I respect my lineage, I don’t deny it like the average Christian does.

I do understand the moral argument. That’s just the idea that a moral norm is an objective truth that is only explainable as a command from a God, or a kind of created instinct. I understand it, I just reject it.

I don’t want to be god. Can Christians ever get it through their thick skulls that we don’t believe in gods?

I’ll add another label. The average Christian believes in pious bullshit and readily lies about others.

So bad

This is how I start my morning? Make sure you’ve got a clear path to the toilet before you click on play.

The good news: it’s not an earworm. As soon as it stopped, I figured out that there’s nothing memorable or interesting about the “song”.

JB Pritzker makes my day

We have two kinds of Democrats in the party, and I want to see more of the JB Pritzker kind.

He gave a great speech.

Donald Trump cannot take anything from us that we don’t choose to give him. He and his henchmen don’t want people to realize that. But now is the time for us to wake up. The good news is every day I’m seeing more and more people across this country realize that they don’t want to give him much at all.

The question I get asked most right now is, “So what can I do? What can I do?” And I’m going to be blunt about this. Never before in my life have I called for mass activism, but this is the moment. Take to the streets, protest, show up at town halls. Jam the phone lines in Congress, 202-224-3121, and afford not a moment of peace to any elected representatives who are aiding and abetting Musk and Trump’s illegal power grab. This is not a drill, folks. This is the real thing.

Seize every megaphone you have. Go online and make a donation to the legal funds fighting Trump, to HRC, and to the candidates for Congress that vow to take this country backward. And don’t limit your voice to the traditional political channels. Be like Lucy Welch. When JD Vance went to vacation at the Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont, Lucy, who writes the Sugarbush Daily Snow Report, used her report to defend her diverse and wonderful community, ending by saying, “I am using my relative platform as a snow reporter to be disruptive. What we do or don’t do matters.”

What we do and don’t do matters. It matters right now more than it ever has before. When my future grandkids look back on this moment, I want them to know that my voice was one of the loudest in the room, screaming for justice and fighting against tyranny.

And in the midst of this existential fight, this battle that seems to consume everything, well, let’s not take the soul-sucking path of sacrificing the most persecuted for that which we deem to be most popular. I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.

Yes! More Democrats like that!

The Eichorn saga is sinking into the abyssal depths

Remember Justin Eichorn? The Minnesota Republican who was caught in a sting trying pick up 16 year old girls? This is what he looked like before his arrest.

Update: here’s his latest available photo:

Yikes. That man is not coping well. He’s also in even more trouble: he tried to get an accomplice to go to his apartment before the police, in order to get a gun he lied about, and to get rid of a laptop. They failed. The police haven’t yet said what was on the laptop, but I think the fact that he would try to hide the evidence is incriminating in itself.

You know, I don’t feel any need to erase my browser history if I’m ever arrested — it might be weird, and it might trigger a few WTFs, but there’s nothing illegal on it.

Another twist of the knife: Eichorn’s wife has filed for divorce. This guy has ruined his life.

I think Blue is a she

Blue is the lab mascot, a Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens, and after their last molt, they’ve acquired the dark blue and blue-green colors of a mature greenbottle blue tarantula, and maybe reached sexual maturity. I’ve been checking out those palps, and they look very feminine to me.

Let me know what you think.

Fortunately, Blue is a perfectly good name for a female. Or male. Or immature juvenile.

Columbia University’s shame

They should be ashamed by their cowardice. Trump threatened and Columbia caved.

The US president has made no secret of his intent to control what is studied, thought, and debated. His administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding sweeping changes, including placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department under “academic receivership” for five years, abolishing the university judicial board, and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the office of the president. Such unprecedented intervention is blatantly illegal and a wholesale attack on academic freedom and free speech. On Friday, Columbia capitulated.

It is an embarrassment to Columbia, of course, but the embarrassment is not Columbia’s alone. The use of federal funding threats to control universities should be a five-alarm fire for the thousands of other universities, and yet the response from the majority of academic leadership has been silence.

It is, ultimately, about the money. Trump has destroyed the autonomy of federal research agencies, which is what allows him to hold research funds hostage and exercise that kind of leverage over the curriculum and control faculty and students. That’s why spineless Columbia surrendered.

The reasons are understandable. If any one university speaks out, they are scared Trump would pull funding. The president of that university will have to see the place they love and the people they are responsible for gutted by a $50 or $100 or $400 million cut, either to federal grants or scholarships. What if speaking out will change nothing? Why risk the all-critical research of their science faculty, important scholarships for their students, for a statement that might lead to naught?

It seems to me that one approach universities could take to this threat is to not stand alone. Shouldn’t we all be standing together to resist. After all, it is illegal, everyone says, why isn’t everyone responding with lawsuits and threats of legal action? Columbia’s actions are going to have repercussions for all of us, because it’s crippling research.

The reason this is different is because the government is attacking free speech and free inquiry itself. The current collective cowardice is self-defeating. Their refusal to stand together now only makes them more vulnerable in the future, and less credible when they say they are privately resisting. How can we trust they aren’t complying in advance, reshaping their curriculum and research dollars to avoid retribution? We can’t.

If university leaders, some of the most privileged people in our society, allow themselves to be bullied and blackmailed, and refuse to coordinate with each other on courage, how do we expect any other institutions – law firms, non-profits, businesses – to stand up?

Personally, I find the silence of the University of Minnesota worrying. Maybe they’re busy building a case to defend against Trumpian attacks? Or maybe there are a bunch of lawyers on the board of regents holding everyone back.

I should acknowledge that one provost of Columbia has spoken out strongly against the assault on academic freedom — in the pages of the New York Times, no less. Usually the NYT is doing their best to provide cover, in the form of ambiguity and weasel wording, for Republicans, so this was a surprise.

The Trump administration has sought to impose its will on higher education by withdrawing more than a billion dollars of funding from some universities and threatening others with similar punishment. It has sought to deport student protesters who are legal residents. All this represents a fundamental assault on the values and functioning of our university system. Columbia and Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 and America’s first true research university, may be only the first to feel the effects of this needless use of a sledgehammer.

Columbia’s capitulation last week to the Trump administration, in which it agreed to a number of demands in order to restore federal funding, obliterates its leadership in defending free inquiry. If Columbia allows authoritarian-minded leaders to dictate what we can teach, then the federal government will dictate what we can read, what books we may have in our libraries, what art we can display, what problems scientists can explore. Then, we are no longer a free university.

They don’t want a free university! Having a bunch of intelligent, articulate people who can criticize the dumbass-in-chief and his wicked, self-destructive policies is not desirable. He loves the uneducated, remember!

Today, the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means, and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.

Collective resistance sounds like a good plan. Who is organizing it? Not the Democratic party, that’s for sure.