Now, live from Wisconsin!
It’s amazing how sharp the boundary is between Minnesota and Wisconsin: you cross the border and suddenly it’s adult novelty stores, billboards for cheese, and roadkill as far as the eye can see.
I’m in Madison, Wisconsin for a quick visit with the granddaughter. Talk among yourselves, I’m going to be chatting with a 6 year old.
Why try to foretell the future by pawing through entrails when the gods send such a clear sign?
This is not an omen. This is just the brain of a 53 year old man-child raised on 4chan, who has somehow acquired more money and power than he knows what to do with.
Elon Musk has changed his X profile.
His avatar is now Pepe the Frog, a mascot adopted by white supremacists.
His name is a Latinisation of “Kek”, a phrase used by neo-Nazis.
Musk has also backed AfD in Germany, the political home for racists.
The man is telling us explicitly what he’s about.
Could someone please let him know his immaturity is exposed?
Also, haven’t all the cool kids moved on well past the “kekistan” nonsense? This is so 2015.
The Aztecs would rip out still-beating human hearts to honor the sun god Huitzilopochtli, so that the sun would continue to rise. I too have performed a ritual every year, in a tradition taught me by my father. On New Year’s Eve, we consume a root beer float to honor the passing year and propitiate the new one. Every year since I was a wee little tyke I have performed the sacrifice.
Until last night. I no longer have children at home, and my wife was at work. I was alone with the cat when I suddenly realized at 11pm that I had none of the sacred ingredients, neither root beer nor ice cream, it was -10°C outside, and even if I felt like taking a walk, no store would be open at this hour. I must confess I also didn’t feel much like saving the world this year.
I apologize if 2025 turns out to be a disastrously bad year — it will all be my fault.
The omens have already begun. The US Capitol building was struck by lightning last night, something that I’m sure almost never happens.
The sale of my mother’s house is imminent — closing is on 3 January. I have spent my afternoons since last week trying to cancel utilities and various services to the house, and it hasn’t been easy. I’ve sat on hold on the phone for an awful lot of time, because, as it turns out, most of these services are reluctant to lose a paying customer, even if she is dead. Much of what I’ve had to do is call, wait for an answer, get told an email address to send a death certificate and letters testamentary, and then wait for a verification phone call. And then discover that the electric company had misspelled her name, which was not an obstacle when billing her, but becomes a problem when telling them to stop billing her.
But finally, it’s all done! The house goes dead on Friday, only to come back to life with new owners.
Next step is to go through a long list of annuities and get them cashed out. Also, a minor thing, I have 21 silver dollars that were in her bank deposit box, I’ll have to get those appraised. I checked out a few of them on the web, and they were selling for somewhere between $10 and $50 each, but I have to wring every penny I can out of everything before I’m done.
It’s hard to believe they can actually do this, but Meta plans to make the Internet objectively worse.
Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta’s AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website.
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT.
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.
Meta has already started dumping this crap online, allowing their bots to spawn on Facebook and Instagram. Isn’t Facebook already bad enough? Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been good enough yet to explain why we need to give every yahoo who uses their services the ability to create more fake personas.
The AI characters aren’t a new feature. Meta has long invested in AI and has spent the past year stuffing all kinds of generative AI tech into its existing products. That included the release of its AI Studio in the summer, which quickly became a hotbed of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.
Oh. You need a fake boyfriend or girlfriend? Zuckerberg prefers mindless bots to real human beings, I guess.
I was running some simple errands this morning — I need a short bit of ethernet cat8 cable, something I figured I could pick up locally for $5-$10. I went downtown to what used to be the Radio Shack, that was my usual convenient place to get necessary bits of cheap tech. It was gone! The store had been cleared out and all the merchandise replaced with…Jesus crap. Well, I sure wasn’t going to get my printer connected with a prayer and some slogan praising Jesus silkscreened on it.
This is getting worrisome. A lot of the businesses around town have been gradually replaced with pious garbage that I will not shop at. This one, no, they’ll never get my business. Especially since the hours are 4-8pm on weekdays, longer on Saturdays, and of course never on Sundays. That doesn’t sound like a particularly good business plan to me, but what would I know? I’m not their market.
Anyway, if you’re in need some non-essential fluff and want to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up, the place is called Kings Media & Merch. They sell nothing at all useful, and only at inconvenient hours.
Lots of biology teachers show their students this map in their classes. I’m one of them. The US has an ugly history of involuntary sterilization, using the excuse of eugenics. Personally, I like to point out that our progressive state of Minnesota sterilized over a thousand unwilling people, all in the name of helping society.
But that’s from 1935! We don’t do that anymore, right?
The state of California had to pass a law to compensate all the women they have sterilized in the last decade. Now they’re squirming to avoid paying out.
Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody.
But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.
How do you sterilize 800 people against their will by accident? This would be grounds for massive malpractice suits, except that it happened in prisons.
In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.” They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.
The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.
So a woman gives birth, and the prison doctor goes back in and scrapes out her endometrium? That’s unjustified and should be treated as criminal behavior.
Don’t worry. Some of the doctors have a perfectly good excuse — they were doing these women a favor.
The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,” he said in 2013.
“Heinrich”? Really? Did he have to have such a German name? Regardless of nationality, doctors should never carry out a medical procedure without informed consent, that the patient does not want, because they think they know what’s best.
It is so delicious that even before Trump is signed into office, MAGA is ripped with an internal war.
Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.
On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.
The battle is over immigration, between those who want perfect purity and every non-white expelled from the country, and those who want to allow a few brown people to stay to work in their factories and tech industries. It’s really that simple — are you so racist you don’t want to even see a brown person, or are you so racist you want to exploit their labor? Unfortunately they’re still in total agreement on the racism part.
One of the problems is that the leaders of these two factions, Trump and Musk, are ignorant buffoons with fallacious ideas about genetics.
Among the many charming aspects of their partnership is a fondness for some highly unsavoury views on genetics. Trump is an enthusiastic advocate of “racehorse theory”, which he shares with white supremacists; the belief that he is personally superior and that this is rooted in his “good genes”. It’s a vapid idea, but it directly informs his toxic views on immigration, where he argues the country needs to be shielded from the “bad genes” of outsiders.
Meanwhile, Musk has his own equally baffling take on genetics, infused with a characteristic messiah complex. Like some of his fellow tech moguls, he is determined to “save humanity” by producing as many offspring as possible, convinced that our future depends on it. This might all be laughable were it not for the fact that Trump and Musk now wield more power than they ever have before. The shared thread running through their rhetoric is genetic determinism: the idea that who you are, and what you can achieve, is all down to your DNA. Nothing else matters.
Do I need to explain why these ideas are bogus? I’m tired. I’ll let Jonathan Roberts do it for me.
In debates surrounding genetics and social policy, it is easy for the language of genetic determinism to lure you into an ill-advised “nature v nurture” debate. You know this debate: maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s the pervasive conditions of social inequality? But this debate misses the bigger picture entirely: it should not be seen as a binary choice. The truth is, humans are born with genes that require a good environment to thrive. It’s not either/or, but a complex interaction between the two that determines who someone becomes. We have a nature that requires nurture. Good science accounts for this complexity, rather than reducing it to a simplistic binary.
No matter how the “civil war” is resolved, we’re still screwed because all of these people are stupid assholes.
