Find your own damn cause, Republican swine

My grandson is autistic. I really resent it when some Republican jerk who will do nothing for autistic people jumps on the bandwagon and lies. So this guy, Dave McCormick, booked some space in North Philly for an autism awareness event…and then instead just does a campaign event for his US Senate run. There was nothing about autism at the campaign stop, just a sleazy Republican handing out cheesesteaks and grubbing for votes.

Max’s Steaks, the cheesesteak place the event was held at, kicked him out. Good.

It was organized by a Republican operative, Sheila Armstrong, who is a member of Moms for Liberty. It’s lies all the way down.

After getting kicked out of the cheesesteak place, the sleazebags went looking for another opportunity to leech off an activist group. They saw that East Bethel Baptist Church was holding a fundraiser across the street for a food ministry…so they blithely went over there to suck off that teat. They got kicked out again.

The Rev. Thomas Edwards Jr., who leads the church, told his campaign to leave because he didn’t want the GOP candidate to use photos of his congregation for campaigning purposes.

“You can Photoshop,” he told the Inquirer. “You can make things seem like they aren’t. Maybe they’re going to post we’re eating dogs or eating cats, like in Ohio. Forgive me if I’m wrong. I don’t trust these people.”

That’s the right attitude. They’re parasites.

Racists think they’re being sneaky

Offhand, I know about a dozen interracial couples — some of them are in my family. Republican Senator Mike Braun thinks it would be fine to dissolve their marriages.

In a media call on Tuesday, U.S Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind) said that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage in a ruling that stretches back to Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

According to Braun, the decision should not have been made by the country’s highest court and instead been left to individual states. Even though some states had made interracial marriage illegal prior to the Supreme Court ruling.

They’ve discovered this handy circumlocution. They aren’t going to come right out and say that interracial marriage is wrong…oh no, they’re just going to say that we ought to permit states (that is, Republican lawmakers in some states) the right to destroy marriages, if they want. They’re playing the same game with abortion.

Come on, no one is fooled. Braun is a closet racist who has found a not-so-cunning way to signal to other racists that he’s on their side.

When you’ve lost the New York Times…

The New York Times has always been a weaselly accommodationist to Trump’s nonsense, putting a positive spin on his words and downplaying his general incoherence. That pattern might be ending — they just ran an article titled Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age. It’s scathing.

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s, there are moments when he pines for the 1890s, holding out that decade as the halcyon period of American history and William McKinley as his model president because of his support for tariffs.

It’s brutal. I’m not used to seeing this kind of analysis of Trump’s speeches from the NY Times.

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.

It’s interesting, because the NY Times is not written for us — it’s the paper of record for lawyers, stock brokers, wealthy Long Island nepo babies, the aspiring upper class, etc. Maybe the Times has detected a shift in the biases of their readership, which they are quick to pander to.

It could be a good sign of troubles for the lyin’ grifter ahead…

Posole morning

On Saturday mornings, I try to make a big pot of something that will last a few days, because Mary works such wacky hours and we usually don’t have dinner together. Today I made posole.


(Note: we’re vegetarians, so I didn’t make it with pork, just Impossible Burger. I didn’t add jalapenos, since my wife has a more delicate palate.)

This got me to wondering, though: why do we USAians associate hominy with the South, and why don’t we eat more of it, since we’re swimming in corn in this part of the world? Hominy is just nixtamalized corn, very healthful, since it enables better digestion of tryptophan and assists in the production of niacin, but it’s an Aztec/Mayan food. Are Southerners more obliged to contributions from our Mexican neighbors than is commonly acknowledged?

Also, Minnesotans should be pre-adapted to like hominy — lutefisk is just nixtamalized cod, after all.

The things we get away with at a liberal arts university…poetry in a science class? Tsk.

I am struggling with student engagement in all of my classes: poor attendance, poor participation, all those horribly negligent bugaboos that make it hard to teach. So here we are, halfway through the term almost, and I’m trying to shake things up.

I’m teaching a course titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought,” which is also a writing-enriched course — I’m expected to spend half the class time, approximately, teaching writing skills. I consider that permission to get experimental at times. This past week I lectured on the history of geology, Hutton through Lyell, so today I made them sit down and do a writing exercise.

We read poetry.

Can I do that in a science building, in a science course? You betcha. I did. I made them think about a poem about James Hutton. I gave them these instructions:

The idea of Deep Time inspired many writers, and some of them are poets. Today, I want you to write a paragraph on this poem. You can
• interpret some aspect of the poem
• write about the virtue of poetry to science
• explain how it makes you feel
• express your own ideas about Deep Time
• write your own poem!

And here’s the poem!

JAMES HUTTON LEARNS TO READ THE
HIEROGLYPHICS OF THE EARTH
by Ron Butlin
 
Woken once too often by the rattle-clatter
of tumbril wheels on cobbles, the click . . . click . . .
click of distant knitting needles,
James Hutton decided never to go
to sleep again.
 
Then, by the light of several Edinburgh Council moons
(spares, in case the heavens were taken over
by the church), he tip-toed past storm-wrecked
Holyrood Abbey, went striding down
unimagined corridors,
through undreamt-of walls and doors where
Scottish Hope would one day
be cemented into place
(the bars across its parliament windows
wooden, just in case).

The Park . . . Salisbury Crags . . .
 
where several hundred million years ago,
the Earth had cracked itself wide open –
*
Detailed as a map of Man’s undiscovered self,
zigzag Time lies flat-packed,
for everyone to see . . .
 
Stacked magma, olivine, dolerite chilled to glass,
eternity crushed to lines of slowly
spelled-out hieroglyphics, and cut
in blood-red haematite.
 
. . . and Hutton sees it. He’s the first!

First to know he walks upon an ancient ocean floor
(God’s Flood, the merest puddle in all that vastness).
First to hear the stone-hard heartbeat pound-pound-
pounding out Existence.
 
Elsewhere, Revolution has taken to the streets
with an accusation and a scream,
a guillotine-swish . . .
French clocks run backwards to Year One.
 
Sunday 23rd October 4,004 BC?
All in the blink of a biblical eye! says Hutton.
*
Meanwhile, you and I continue turning
on our axis to the tick . . .
tick . . . tick of Time that never
started Once upon a . . .
And will surely never, ever –
 
Ah, these strata, these infinities glimpsed between!

I made them ponder and write for 25 minutes, and then we had a discussion. I think it went well. They were wide awake, at least!

Next week, I’m talking about pre-Darwinian ideas about biological change. Maybe I should read them one of Erasmus Darwin’s poems? Or maybe not — they’re awfully suggestive, and I don’t want to end up like Joe Gow.

Please, tell me more

I can sometimes see the appeal of conspiracy theories.

SMBC

Think about it. He’s called Captain Hook, but there’s no way he was born with the name Hook. He was born with hands. And what character 21 years earlier and was about 21 years younger? Long John Silver’s coxswain: Mr Israel Hands.

There’s something compelling about connecting the dots and seeing the pattern, even if it is deeply stupid.

Oh, Trump is going to hate the Washington Post even more now

There they go!

We all know that the one thing that Donald Trump is most sensitive about is the size of the crowds at his rallies — don’t you dare impugn his popularity! Kamala Harris derailed him at their debate by mentioning that lots of people leave his rallies early, and he had to deny that. Well, the Washington Post had reporters investigate, going to his rallies and asking the people trickling out early why they were leaving.

The Republican presidential nominee consistently draws large, enthusiastic and rowdy crowds to his rallies and other campaign events, and at nearly all of them, another trend is clear: Scores of people leave early.

Most stay. But Trump often runs late and goes long, prompting many to bow out because of other responsibilities, priorities or, sometimes, waning patience and interest, according to Washington Post interviews and observations across dozens of events. Some said they wanted to beat traffic or had work the next day. Others complained about sound quality. One man wanted to go home to his French bulldog. Another needed to get home to his daughter. A third had a Yorkie with him that started acting out. A fourth man said his phone died.

Trump is in denial.

“Honestly nobody” leaves the rallies, Trump said at a recent town hall in Flint, Mich. At an event in Walker, Mich., Trump insisted “nobody ever leaves,” before adding, “and when they do, I finish up quick, believe me.” Trump then suggested that it looks like people are leaving their seats because they want to come up and take photos with him.

He thinks the people just love to hear him ramble on for hours.

Trump repeatedly has resisted entreaties from advisers and allies to cut down on his speeches. “They want a show. They want two hours,” Trump said this year to an ally who suggested shorter speeches. Like others, the ally spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

The former president has told advisers that after people stand for so long and wait for so long, he needs to give them something more than a “boring policy speech,” one person who has spoken to him said. The speechwriters craft remarks that are usually designed to go for 60 to 90 minutes, a campaign adviser said, but they know Trump will veer repeatedly off the script.

I’ve only heard short excerpts from Trump speeches — I think two hours of an old man babbling off topic would drive me insane, and I’m never attending one of these rallies. However, I encourage him to continue them, because the repetitive nonsense about sharks and batteries and windmills and eating cats and dogs are the only soundbites that are going to make the news, and they do make him look demented.