Anyone remember Ed Conrad? I had a few encounters with him years and years ago. Now I found someone worse, a guy named Roger Spurr who runs a YouTube channel called “Mudfossil University”. It’s about as much a university as PragerU; it’s a dorkwad with stupid ideas promoting them without any critical evaluation, and what he believes is that natural rock formations and caves are actually the fossilized remains of giants. So I had to make a video about him.
Scriptish sort of thing below the fold.
I was in the boy scouts, briefly, long long ago, but that’s such a reactionary organization.
Yesterday, I got a letter from a charity in the mail — it was from Autism Speaks. It had me mystified me — why are they asking me for money, and most of all how did they think I’d be interested in their organization? I didn’t bother to open up, but just threw it in the trash.
So today I ran across this useful guide to autism organizations, and thought I’d share it, just in case they’re doing a large scale fundraising drive.
I had no idea that there was any relevance in ancient and medieval history to current events, but the history of the antipopes is shockingly on point and surprisingly much more complicated than I imagined. I’ll cut to the chase here, but the whole post is fascinating.
So what can we learn from this? History is full of venal, self-interested rich guys who do not take no for an answer, and the thing is a lot of the time they actually get their way. People with weaker claims to the papal throne have in fact won when they managed to get other powerful people on their side. Moreover, “official” titles and lineages are not necessarily proof of moral worth. We should approach pontiffs on a case by case basis when we start making generalisations about Antipopes. The more you know about Urban VI and his election the more you can sympathise with trying for a do-over and fucking back off to Avignon.
In the grand scheme of things, however, whether or not we think of any particular Antipope as, well, an Antipope doesn’t really matter to them. What care do they have for us hundreds of years later and how we feel, when they were able to live out their days in luxury, writing screeds about how they were wronged.
There is a lesson here, as well as a warning. Rich dudes are not good at being told no. That can mean a number of things. It can been an amusing story in a blog six hundred years later, or it can mean a destabalisation process which feeds into military conflict. The difference is largely based on clout, but one should never assume that the powerful and rich who bestow such things do so because of procedure or some sort of nebulous concept of morality. They do so based on what it gives them. It is our job to make our feelings about that clear so that poor decisions are not made and retroactively forgiven. (*cough* Bush v. Gore)
I think I already knew that answer.
Boy, do I have a page for you. Return to the late 20th century when the cutting edge of human interface design was buttons, lots of buttons, more buttons on everything, and modernity was all about slapping buttons on something.
I’m sorry, but I’m not into buttons at all. I once possessed a still — not that kind, the ones you used to make pure distilled water — and it may have been a thing of archaic beauty, with a gorgeous glass coil and a reservoir tank and multiple outlet valves, but it was entirely controlled by a bank of buttons. You had to initiate the process by firing up a boiler, and then you had to open up a set of valves in a specific order by pressing buttons in the correct sequence. In particular, there was a glowing red button that had to be pushed at the right time to start the process with a lot of hissing and bubbling, and you had to check regularly because if the boiler ran dry, it was bad. And if you pressed the buttons in the wrong order, you could, for instance, let the tubes get red hot before you flushed them with cooling water, and that would be very bad, because things could shatter and then you were out a few thousand dollars and your bench was going to get flooded with broken glass and boiling hot water and steam was going to spray out everywhere.
It looked very high tech, though, with a big gray sheet metal control panel studded with buttons and indicator lights. I kind of ruined it by taping sheets of paper with handwritten arrows and warnings in different sharpie colors all over it.
Buttons are kind of stupid, I decided. Give me smart control circuitry any day, especially with something as mechanically trivial as a still.
Anyway, the worst example of button porn at that link, I think, is this one.
Even in 1981, Byte was a dinosaur of a magazine, catering to that weird world of computer hobbyists who thought a good soldering iron was a practical tool for optimizing your gear (I know, I was one of them…but I got better). Did anyone stop to wonder where our future computer watch user was going to stow the microscope and tiny needle-like stylus they’d need to use that toy? Did they still think we’d do everything from the command line with little tiny spinning magnetized disks for storage?
I greatly appreciate that my phone has one button and gigabytes of solid state storage, and that I have access to more via a little USB port and wifi. I guess, though, that a thin black slab wouldn’t have been considered very magazine-cover sexy 40 years ago.
How can normal human beings fall for Kenneth Copeland’s schtick? But they do,and this ranting twit makes millions of dollars, and sheesh, watch his audience clutch their baldspots.
Kenneth Copeland and followers put their hands on their heads, pray to God, "Bald spots I call you gone! Hair grow!" pic.twitter.com/EmDcda1rsH
— Christian Nightmares (@ChristnNitemare) November 19, 2020
Somebody make a video of Copeland “curing” impotence, or hemorrhoids.
He loves that movie, don’t you know, but I don’t think it counts as legitimate legal precedent.
rudy giuliani, citing that key election law case, "my cousin vinny" pic.twitter.com/OVhxnUIvAB
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 19, 2020
Where’s the hook to drag this clown offstage?
The crackdown has started at last — late, but better late than never. Just in time for Thanksgiving!
Most prominently, the state is telling Minnesotans not to gather with anyone outside of their immediate household, just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday.
In addition: Indoor and outdoor dining will be prohibited, limiting restaurants and bars to takeout service only. Public pools, rec centers, gyms, fitness and dance studios and indoor entertainment venues like theaters and bowling alleys will also be closed.
Wedding receptions, celebrations and private parties are also not allowed under the new orders, though wedding ceremonies, funerals and other religious events are allowed if they follow current capacity and social distancing rules.
This is good. Shut down this nonsense now.
Unfortunately, there is some bad news.
The order also puts organized sports — for youth and adults — on pause, but allows professional and college sports to continue, under certain restrictions.
Retail, salons, places of worship, other activities will operate under restrictions already in place.
You know what this means, sports fans and church-goers! The state is just fine with you getting sick and dying. That’s no skin off my nose, since I don’t belong to either group, but I think you ought to be protesting and demanding equal respect. Close the churches and the sports arenas too!
This is getting ridiculous.
President Trump has abandoned his plan to win reelection by disqualifying enough ballots to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in key battleground states, pivoting instead to a goal that appears equally unattainable: delaying a final count long enough to cast doubt on Biden’s decisive victory.
On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign wired $3 million to election officials in Wisconsin to start a recount in the state’s two largest counties. His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has taken over the president’s legal team, asked a federal judge to consider ordering the Republican-controlled legislature to select the state’s electors. And Trump egged on a group of GOP lawmakers in Michigan who are pushing for an audit of the vote there before it is certified.
Giuliani has also told Trump and associates that his ambition is to pressure GOP lawmakers and officials across the political map to stall the vote certification in an effort to have Republican lawmakers pick electors and disrupt the electoral college when it convenes next month — and Trump is encouraging of that plan, according to two senior Republicans who have conferred with Giuliani and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.
But that outcome appears impossible. It is against the law in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin law gives no role to the legislature in choosing presidential electors, and there is little public will in other states to pursue such a path.
Behind the thin legal gambit is what several Trump advisers say is his real goal: sowing doubt in Biden’s victory with the president’s most ardent supporters and keeping alive his prospects for another presidential run in 2024.
Trump is openly trying to corrupt a democratic election in the United States, and he’s shameless about it, and his Republican cronies are turning a blind eye to the whole degrading process. Is there nothing that can be done? Do we just sit back and watch this boob commit fumbling, bumbling crimes that embarrass the country in the eyes of the world, and do nothing? It’s like standing outside the plate glass window of a bank, watching an idiot pound on the vault with a sledgehammer, while Rudy Giuliani stands at the door speed-talking nonsense at the crowd.
Oh, and almost half the crowd is cheering the crooks on.
Can we please put an end to our ongoing national humiliation and frog-march the whole mob of blithering grifters out of their positions of authority now? Can we at least strip Rudy of his license to practice law? It looks like we’re not even capable of that.
I have complained about my Thursday schedule before, which makes it the worst day of the week for me. Well, this is the last one! As an added bonus, I also have no committee meetings scheduled for today at all! I can’t get too excited, though, that just means I have a few free hours I can use to tame that savage stack of proliferating grading obligations. Oh, and I have to compose the lab exam that I’ll be flinging at cell bio students tomorrow. And it’s oral presentations day in my communication class. And I need more coffee. It’s not a perfect day, but it’s getting better.
