“we live in a loving, compassionate, exceptional country.”

Except for the hateful, cruel, petty people who live in it.

I’d vote that we deport Bad Santa there to some shithole country elsewhere, but I’m afraid that no matter where he is, he’s already squatting in that hole.

I was so impressed when the young woman who was brought here when she was 2 says she didn’t have health insurance for 18 years, and the Republican in back triumphantly announces that she didn’t have health insurance either, and that’s how she lost her eye. Yeah, that’s a great argument for your political party, lady.

Charles Darwin and every scientist ever

I have a long day ahead of me and lots of annoying little responsibilities to take care of and am feeling a little overwhelmed — there’s even more to do next week — so this was a perfect start to my day. I am not alone!

I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders. I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am

Ever yours”

—Charles Darwin, 1861

You can pick up a copy of The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects right now. It’s a little book, only … 338 pages? Suddenly filled with a sense of failure and despair again.

Caucusing while brown

This is the time of year when states that use a caucus system, like Minnesota, will have caucus training. Flawed as it is, it’s part of the package, and if you want to be politically effective, it’s perfectly normal to learn how to do it. We’ve never had a complaint about training people, and it’s bizarre to think that someone would complain about learning basic civic duties.

But then, this is a rather white part of the state. Caucusing while brown would be a whole different story…at least as far as Republicans are concerned.

Warnings from GOP legislators that Muslim voters plan to “infiltrate” Republican caucuses appear to have galvanized Muslim efforts to get out and caucus. But Muslim leaders say the rhetoric has extended well beyond the content that the two Republican representatives have shared.

It started with a Facebook post that said a “Macalester professor from Bangladesh” led a recent caucus training at a mosque. Dave Sina, chairman of the 4th Congressional District GOP, wrote that the training “encourages them to infiltrate them all, Republican, Democratic as well as Green and independent.” The post went on to say that “the easiest is the Republican, because they don’t show up.”

As the article points out, this is training to participate in elections, which has rather different implications than infiltrate. They are proposing entirely legal activities which are in fact encouraged by society. I watched the introduction to this training video on facebook, and while I’m not at all a fan of ISAIAH, a group that tries to encourage non-partisan political partisan by faith groups, everything the speakers say is exactly correct, fair, and just. (I’m not a fan because of sour grapes — I’d like to see more secular training).

But read the comments. People are freaking out. She talks about how to “build political POWER”! The Muslims are going to take over! They’re TAKING OVER! We’re DOOOOOOOOOMED! You can almost hear the shrieks of horror at the idea that minority citizens of the state might actually get out and vote.

By the way, it’s true that Republican caucuses are small. At the last one, the Republicans just held it at someone’s house; the Democrats took over a big meeting room at the big bar in town, and had volunteers at stations to help guide the mobs of people who showed up to their positions and to explain the procedures. It was standing room only.

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere

This is where fighting gets you.

Amazing find!! This was shared today on one of the snake pages, nothing about the location but it would’ve been in south east Asia somewhere.
A King Cobra (the worlds longest venomous snake) has attempted to catch, kill and eat this Reticulated Python (grows to be the longest snake in the world) and has been coiled and strangled by the python and died in the process. Both were dead when found.
The King has met its match…

Eagles & Patriots fans: watch your behavior if you’re in Minneapolis this weekend

The Superbowl is in Minneapolis this weekend, and I’m happy to say I’m staying 150 miles away from that mess. Various outlets are busy trying to inform the influx of visitors about Minnesota culture, and this is one absolutely essential point.

Be ready to experience first-class passive aggression. If someone says your old school Ron Jaworski Eagles jersey is “interesting,” they are not a fan. If someone says, “I’m not mad,” they are, in fact, mad. If you get to a 4-way stop at roughly the same time as another driver(s), your best bet is to just abandon the car, get out, and walk to your destination, as who gets to go first will never be resolved by conventional means.

The 4-way stop thing? Totally true, unless one of the people was born out of state, like me, and exasperatedly cuts the friendly waving short and accelerates right on through. What they don’t say about the passive-aggressive stuff is that everyone is going to be very polite to all these East Coast people, but deep down…they hate them. Especially the Philadelphians. No, wait, especially the Pats fans. We hate them with a white hot passion. They will be boorish and crude and impolite, and all the natives will be seething inside, regretting that they left their Viking axes at home, or there would be some churls waking up in Hel with their brains draping their shoulders, I tell you what.

Interesting term

I wouldn’t have thought this possible, but it’s happening: the rise of the I-Love-Jesus atheist. I’d qualify it a bit, though, because this isn’t the generic benign Jesus, but the immigrant-hating white Jesus of American evangelical Christianity, and it’s also a Jesus divorced from any religious tradition. They’re accepting one religious figure to spite women and people of color. It’s revealing that many atheists weren’t in the movement for freethought or a rejection of dogma, but for the anti-feminism, anti-Muslim side of atheism, and they’re now enthusiastically joining forces with the regressive right, no matter their views on gods, to exercise that hatred further.

Not surprising. None of the chaos within atheism has been about our beliefs (or lack thereof) in gods, but about our beliefs about how other human beings should be treated.

Making an eye

How timely! We just started talking about evolution in my first year intro biology course, and next week we’re getting into eye evolution, and this video comes out.

I assigned it to my students, naturally. That and some reading.

What has Adam Corolla been up to lately?

No good and getting worse, I guess. He’s teamed up with right-wing fruitcake Dennis Prager to promote something called “No Safe Spaces” which is…I don’t know what it is. An opportunity for conservatives to whine about higher education, or something? Anyway, here’s a promo for it.

Warning: the first third of this video is set on “Utopia University”, of which Corolla says, That campus doesn’t really exist, does it? That doesn’t even look like parody to me. You could run that after Don Lemon’s show on CNN, and it would just play like a commercial. I think you’re going to see that Corolla has a bit of a credibility problem.

No university looks anything like that. I don’t understand the logic of proclaiming the importance of free speech while striving to silence all those liberal voices that make narrow-minded bigots uncomfortable.

Also, further statements that question Corolla’s credibility: in explaining their pairing, he says that Prager has more wisdom than anyone he knows (which might well be true), and that…he’s funny. I think we can safely say that statement is false.

Jon Del Arroz tries so hard to promote himself

Jon Del Arroz bubbled up in my news again — you may remember him as the self-aggrandizing fellow who bills himself as the “Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction” and who last rose to my attention as yet another rabid puppy whimpering about SJWs with made-up statistics and bad analyses. He’s making noise again, not for the excellence of his writing, but because he had his membership to WorldCon revoked.Oops. It’s hard to lead from the rubbish bin.

But his complaining provoked Jim Hines to catalog all the reasons he was banned. That’s going to leave a mark. I can’t say that I’m sorry to see an anti-feminist, anti-social justice friend of Vox Day get a public spanking, but it’s kind of sad to see someone who works so dang hard at self-promotion accomplish the reverse of what he intended.