Dr Pangloss lives, and she is a creationist

I am speechless.

…we can look at the nasal bones right here. God designed humans very specifically with this nasal bone, because he knew because of sin we’d be wearing glasses and contacts, right, so this helps hold our glasses. Primates have no need to wear glasses, so they were not created with that bone there. Right? Distinct difference. And that’s how easy it is to look at a fossil and know right away whether it is a primate or whether it is a human.

That’s from Answers in Genesis, just today.

The Minnesota Nice version of collegiality

Or, in other words, ratfuckers gonna fuck rats.

A day after it was revealed that GOP state Sen. Dave Senjem tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a Nov. 5 party caucus, news broke that Republican senators and staffers were informed in a Tuesday memo that “a number of [GOP Senate] members and staff have been diagnosed with COVID-19.”

DFLers were not informed of the rash of cases on the other side of the aisle.

I wonder how many of the Republicans saw this as an opportunity to mingle with their Democratic colleagues and spread the virus before the fact that they were plague ratfuckers got out?

Resentment in the monkey brain

This monkey monkey got his banana, why should he share it with anyone else? It’s that selfish libertarian impulse, I’ve got mine, bugger the rest of you.

Damon Linker has a monkey brain.

We’ve seen the same phenomenon in our elections for a few hundred years. They’re all about keeping the privileged in their state of privilege. The chief isn’t going to share his banana with us peons, so all we can do is make sure those other monkeys over there are even less likely to get a scrap of banana than we are.

We’ve got to get out of that mindset. I worked off my college debt (which was tiny compared to what students face now), but I consider the deprivation of so many people to be a crime that needs correcting, and I want my students to succeed — I am overjoyed if the next generation surpasses mine. Please do grant them debt relief.

(Mr Linker has been featured on this blog a few times. I’ve never been impressed.)

Then there’s this guy:

Yes, please. Make college free. Why should you be unhappy if your fellow monkeys improve themselves and are able to make greater contributions to your society? Why should you be unhappy at seeing other people allowed to improve their situation?

“Ancient Aliens” can go eat a bag of dicks

I did not enjoy making this video at all, not because of the content, because of all the copyright bullshit YouTube put me through. I use a few very short clips from the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens, specifically to criticize the stupidity therein, and I guess the History Channel is very protective of their idiocy, and the thing kept getting flagged. I finally said screw it, demonetize it, I’m not going to let that channel of lies and foolishness push me around.

So here it is, for what it’s worth. I hate the History Channel, alien pseudoscience, and Giorgio Tsoukalos even more now.

Do I include a sorta partial script of what I said, below the fold? Yes, I do.

[Read more…]

Living next door to the worst

I live just a few miles from the North and South Dakota borders. This situation makes me a bit uncomfortable, since if the entire country has been slack about dealing with the pandemic, the Dakotas have been the slackest.

The current rates of infection and deaths per capita in South Dakota and previously restriction-free North Dakota are what Dr. Ali Mokdad would expect to see in a war-torn nation — not here.

“How could we allow this in the United States to happen?” asked Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This is unacceptable by any standards.”

North Dakota’s COVID-19 death rates per capita in the past week are similar to the hardest hit countries in the world right now — Belgium, Czech Republic and Slovenia — according to Saturday New York Times data. That data also places South Dakota’s recent per capita deaths among the world’s highest rates.

And there’s currently nowhere in the U.S. where COVID-19 deaths are more common than in the Dakotas, according to data published by The COVID Tracking Project.

It’s a situation “as bad as it gets anywhere in the world,” Dr. William Haseltine told USA TODAY.

It’s taken getting death rates to the highest in the world for those states to even begin to implement basic procedures to limit the spread. Not to excuse Minnesota, we’ve just been dragging behind on good policy, but not quite as badly as either Dakota. It helps that we’ve got a Democratic governor, unlike Noem (fanatical mad woman) and Burgum (coward).

Haseltine, president of ACCESS Health International and author of My Lifelong Fight Against Disease, blamed politicians — especially South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem — for ignoring public health measures that have been successfully used to curb the spread of the virus elsewhere in the world.

Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying that she’ll leave it up to the people to decide. She has said the virus can’t be stopped.

Burgum, also a Republican, had pleaded with people to wear masks and praised local towns and cities that have mandated masks. He had avoided requiring masks and refused to enforce limits on social gatherings and business occupancies until late Friday.

The disgraceful thing is that this isn’t even a question of following the will of the electorate — a majority of citizens favor a stronger state response.

A survey in late September and early October by the state health department found that 55% of respondents supported a mask mandate and 68% said they wore masks. Surveys of mask usage show North Dakota lags behind most of the nation — but now has reached about 80%, according to Facebook surveys mapped by Carnegie Mellon University.

We’ve let a fanatical minority of incompetents take the wheel and drive the country into a ditch.

The wrong way to relax

I’m so buried in grading that I shouldn’t take a break, and in particular, I shouldn’t take a break to look at the news…

AAARGH. FUCK! SHIT NO! Do not trust this man ever. I’m seeing all this nonsense about how we ought to be conciliatory now that we won one election, and my rage knows no bounds. I’m just someone who is seeing those MAGA chuds trying to destroy and criminalize mere science, I can’t even imagine how people whose very existence has been targeted for annihilation would feel. No. Just no. No apologies to Republican scum. Their poisonous ideas need to be hounded out of the body politic — they can go join the Nazis in the hall of infamy.

This is how I feel about these people now saying it’s time to make nice.

Give up nothing. Fuck Charles Koch.

I guess I’m going to go play a game of Among Us with people who aren’t toxic assholes, before I get back to grading.