What are we going to do about Missouri?

For one thing, we have to deal with the rise of Missouri Man, rival to the ubiquitous Florida Man.

On April 18, Republic Police Department officers were called to a Price Cutter to respond to a call about a robbery in which a man held an employee at gunpoint so that he would be served meat.

Larry Gene Gay, 70, of Springfield, is charged with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon and a felony count of armed criminal action.

Court documents show that officers responded to the scene and ordered Gay to get out of his truck so they could arrest him. After he was taken into custody, an officer removed a loaded semi-automatic pistol with a bullet in the chamber from Gay’s hip holster.

In an interview, Gay said he went to Price Cutter to buy steaks. He told the “good man” who was helping him that they needed to weigh the steaks. However, the meat department was closed. Gay said at that point, he showed his gun “Just to say I’m not stealing. I need you here to help me to get a couple of these steaks. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The officer asked Gay why he thought the people in the store called police and told them he was threatening them with his gun.

“I don’t know,” Gay said in the interview. “I have no idea.”

Hand stupid people a gun, and at some point they’re going to use it to deal with some minor inconvenience. Missouri has a lot of guns, and a lot of stupid people, it’s an inevitable problem. But we could wave that away, it’s a problem with a few individuals, I’ve met a lot of good people in Missouri, and we can’t blame the whole state.

Here’s wider problem, though. Missouri is run by a gang of regressive Republicans who have been passing all kinds of ugly laws. They hate transgender kids, you know, and want to deny them good healthcare. The state Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, set up a ‘snitch line’ where random concerned citizens could submit their complaints about those danged transes and their wicked doctors who poison them all with estrogen and testosterone. It’s not clear what Bailey was going to do with those complaints…arrest everyone who was androgynous? Send out genital inspectors to check the accused? It was the usual preliminaries, I suspect, where the fascist builds a list in anticipation of the day he can send out the brownshirts.

It didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.

Bailey said his office set up the tip line for parents to submit concerns about the gender-affirming care their children received from transgender youth centers. He also issued an emergency rule severely restricting access to gender-affirming care.

PROMO, a Missouri LGBTQ advocacy organization, said Bailey “fanned the flames of hate” in issuing the emergency rule.

“The Attorney General’s claims are maliciously cherry-picked and come from unverified sources that allow him to promulgate disgusting, obstructive, and misleading information into an emergency rule,” PROMO said in a statement. “It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the real threat to Missourians is the attorney general himself.”

Social media users on TikTok, Twitter and Tumblr ensured that Bailey’s office would have plenty of evidence to sift through for the investigation, flooding the site with fake complaints and other ephemera.

When the online form first launched, it lacked a CAPTCHA, which savvy Twitter users quickly used to their advantage by using bots to spam the site. Users also employed a generator to churn out fake names and fake Missouri addresses. Others just dumped text into the complaint form, ranging from the entire script of the “Bee Movie,” to Billy May’s OxiClean sales pitch, to Walter White’s introductory monologue in “Breaking Bad.” TikTok users said they submitted the “most raunchiest fanfic from AO3” and “a saucy love story of Mario and Luigi.”

Love wins in the end, right?

But here’s my dilemma. I’m a regular tourist visiting Missouri — I go for Skepticon every summer. The question I wrestle with is…should I refuse to go again, and not contribute my travel dollars to a fascist, theocratic state? Or should I go, and contribute my travel dollars to the good kinds of Missourians who support a liberal skeptical conference? I’ve got time to resolve this internal debate since the organizers haven’t even announced a date for the event.

They could fix my problem for me by moving the whole Skepticon show north, to a progressive state (not Iowa), but that leaves the good Missourians in the lurch. I dislike these kinds of decisions. My problem would go away if Missouri would just throw the rascals out, but that isn’t going to happen this year, or maybe even in years to come.

Since when is America fair?

It’s heart-wrenching what various states are doing to trans people, especially young trans people. Missouri, you suck.

Also, Texas, you suck. Florida, you suck. Tennessee, you suck. I could go on with this list, but basically, if any state has a Republican legislature or governor, it is a cesspool of cruelty. Stop electing those people, OK?

Can we debate about how remote the desert island debate bros should be abandoned on should be?

“Great!” I thought, a new ContraPoints video. “Oh no,” I thought, it’s almost two hours long. I put off listening to it until last night (you don’t have to actually watch it, it’s a good audio stream, too), and now I can say: it’s excellent. Partly I’m saying that because I 100% agree with her on everything in the video.

It’s all good, but my favorite part was in the middle, at about the 58 minute mark, where she rips into the debate bros.

…valuing dispassionate intellectualism above all else can cause problems, especially where topics of social justice are concerned. Because it can lead you to this kind of toxic centrism that asks, why are marginalized people so unwilling to have calm, philosophical debates about whether they should have rights? Are they afraid of dangerous ideas?

As examples, she then talks about Sam Harris (he’s on the wrong side, again) and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. It’s a calm, philosophical discussion that exposes those wankers as absolute dickheads.

It’s a good listen, take some time to tune in.

The only reason to pay attention to the haters is to shame them

A borough in the UK posted an innocuous tweet, suggesting that people should go in for cervical screening. They had to take it down because a small minority of haters complained that the words “anyone with a cervix” was offensive to women.

The wording was just fine! It was inclusive and was a message to an appropriate audience. In fact, if you look at the thread, there’s a deluge of support for it, with swarms of people, cis and trans, chiming in to see that the message was good and they appreciated it. There were also, of course, a few indignant assholes whining that only women have cervices, and they were the ones they had to listen to, because Calderdale deleted the tweet.

Those few vicious, mocking tweets are the modern equivalent of this, an ugliness that will stain us all for years to come:

Meanwhile, in the science world, the journal Nature is updating their policies. Language matters.

It is regrettable but true that researchers have used and abused science to justify racist beliefs and practices. As previous editorials have acknowledged, Nature has played its part in perpetuating racism — and has now pledged to play its part in tackling it, together with colleagues in the research community.

As part of this pledge, Nature and the Nature Portfolio journals are updating our advice to authors on reporting research that involves race, ethnicity and other socially constructed characteristics. Specifically, we’re asking that authors exercise care and consideration so that the highest standards of rigour are applied where these attributes are found to be an explanation for an outcome or conclusion. This is part of our ongoing updates to guidance asking authors to describe how demographic characteristics, including sex and gender, are considered in the design of studies — and, more broadly, to consider the research’s potential to cause harm.

They aren’t asking a lot. This is what Nature expects now, and I was a little surprised…shouldn’t this have been standing, routine policy all along?

So, what are we asking authors to do, if their research describes people according to race, ethnicity or other socially constructed categories? Essentially, three things. First, specify the categories used and explain why such classification is needed. Second, explain the methods used to describe people in this way — for example, did study participants self-report, or did the information come from a census, social media or administrative data? Third, we would like authors to describe how they controlled for confounding variables, such as socio-economic status. These requests will be added to a paper’s reporting checklist so it is a part of the usual editorial and publishing workflow.

I’m not going to publish in Nature, and the kind of work I do isn’t going to touch on issues of race and sex (although some will try to force it!), but I would have thought that if you were doing work in those areas of sufficient prestige that it would be published in top-tier journals, those rules would have been already incorporated. You can never underestimate the devious efforts of bigots, though!

Time is fleeting…madness takes its toll

The Red Scare was mostly over before I was born — Joseph Welch squelched McCarthy with his question, “Have you no decency?” in 1954 — but we still see echoes of that paranoia today. I did survive the great Dungeons & Dragons panic of the 1980s, and I followed the insane McMartin preschool case which destroyed lives over hysterical claims of child sacrifice in tunnels that didn’t exist under a preschool. Then we got the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory in 2016, and all the QAnon craziness. It’s total madness.

Now — right now, today, all around us — Republicans are leading the charge under the banner of homophobia and transphobia. They’re freaking out over drag shows.

Florida Republicans are pushing forward a bill that seeks to ban drag shows from allowing someone under the age of 18 to be in attendance.

But the bill is so vaguely worded, using the term “adult live performance,” that even Republican lawmakers have admitted it would prevent a high school kid from watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show or even the musical Hair.

The puckered sphincters who get elected as Republicans also want to shut down all Pride celebrations.

The bill also explicitly targets Pride parades and celebrations, by preventing a government entity from issuing permits to an organization that may put on such a performance. If a violation occurs, say in a city like St. Petersburg, which hosts the largest Pride celebration in the state, the person who issued the permit could be charged with a misdemeanor.

In addition, any establishment that violates the law would be subject to license suspension or revocation and liable to large fines and a misdemeanor charge. One violation would spur a $5,000 fine; subsequent incidents would spur $10,000 fines.

Remember when these assholes assured everyone that they were only concerned about trans people, they were just dropping the “T” in LGBT, they were still supportive of everyone’s sexual orientation? And everyone else knew what was coming and predicted that they’d be expanding those restrictions until it was criminal to be anything but a straight white man? Those days are here already, and they aren’t shy about saying it.

It’s not just Florida and Texas that are a nexus of Puritanical oppression, Tennessee is definitely joining the crowd. Watch this woman testify against allowing a Pride parade by making up lies.


It started out as Pride coming in and I thought everything would be ok…it ended with a rainbow room where 8-12 y/o kids were given butt plugs and dildos.

You know what else is curious about this phenomenon? In every case, without exception, the justification is rooted in conservative Christianity, America’s curse.

Democratic states are so much nicer than Republican ones

Hey, how about some good news, about people who are making other people’s lives better? All you have to do is go to a Democratically controlled state, you know, like Minnesota. High school kids have been lobbying for free menstrual products, and the state legislature is going to approve it!

Students and their allies have pressed lawmakers for years to address the problem they describe as “period poverty.” They detailed the indignities of struggling with periods at school without the products they need or the means to buy them. They framed it as a public health issue for those who viewed it as just a hassle.

The payoff for that hard work may come soon. Minnesota lawmakers appear poised to pass a bill requiring Minnesota public schools serving students in grades four through 12 to provide free pads, tampons or other menstrual products to students in all restrooms.

Advocates credit students for speaking out publicly and refusing to let the issue be ignored at the Capitol. Elif and other teens say in the fight they’ve learned some real-world lessons on power, persistence and making change.

It makes sense, it gives people dignity, it improves education. It looks like it also teaches students that they have the power to make a difference.

Travis Tritt, so brave

I think he’s one of those country-western singers I turn off the instant I hear them on the radio, but I had no idea he was so courageous. Travis Tritt has taken the bold step of dictating that concert venues must provide him with an alternative brand of free beer, because Budweiser has a trans spokesperson.

The courage! He knows that other artists might be afraid of stating their principles in public for fear of being ridiculed and canceled! But not Travis Tritt! He will boldly be ridiculous without worrying about ridiculed! In that, he shares an attribute with professional clowns. He might not be afraid of being laughed at, but he is terrified of trans women. Oh no! Dylan Mulvaney is laughing at him!

Oh no! They’re going to have to get sober!

Maybe certain Kansans are going to oppose the “woke” by drinking Coors, but I have news for them.

Coors Light has been a sponsor of the Center on Colfax and the Pride Parade and Denver PrideFest for nearly two decades,” said Molson Coors spokesperson Michael Nordman. “Our Pride runs mile high so we are excited to support the Center’s vital programs and services that positively impact the LGBTQ community.”

Thanks to support from companies such as Molson Coors, Denver PrideFest has become the largest celebration of LGBTQ pride in the Rocky Mountain region.

I’m still not going to drink it.

Kansas is for perverts

Kansas has passed a law to ban transgender athletes which has a few incidental consequences.

The legislation, which takes effect July 1, requires children to participate in school activities based on the gender assigned to them at birth. The Kansas Reflector reports that challenges could require a student athlete to undergo genital inspections or require a birth certificate for proof of the child’s gender.

Following the vote, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach applauded the legislature’s override of the governor’s veto.

“As the father of five daughters who are involved in sports, I care deeply about the fairness in girls’ sports,” Kobach said. “If any group challenges this law in court, I will defend it vigorously. And I am confident that the law will survive any challenge.”

Caring deeply about your daughters means insisting that they be available for genital inspections. I’m not going to look, but this sounds like a scenario you’d find on PornHub.

Now here’s a weird flex.

I believe there might be a small locus of science-belief centered around Lawrence, but the rest of the state is a benighted nest of bible-thumpers, so I disagree with his bigoted claims about “biological women.” Also, I told you conservatives have recently lost what little sanity they had over “woke beer,” that is, Budweiser.

I drink neither Coors nor Bud, and I’m not going to make a choice because of an imagined “woke” connection.