Republican madness reigns

Republicans in Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District have a new party chair. It’s Bret Bussman! Here’s the part of his CV that he shares with the citizens.

Terri and I live in Browerville and have since 2016. We have 3 grown sons.

I am a 20-year Active Army retiree & a life member of the VFW and DAV.

I am a Christian and attend St. John’s Lutheran Church in Motley. Terri attends Catholic Church. Yes, Catholics & Lutherans can coexist.

I have a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Northwestern University in St. Paul and an MBA from Globe University/MN School of Business.

That’s all fine. But there’s more!

He has posted about “satanic chemtrails” in the skies above Minnesota.

He has argued that the collapse of a World Trade Center building during the 9/11 terror attacks was the result of a “controlled demolition,” and that a “cruise missile,” rather than American Airlines Flight 77, struck the Pentagon that day.

He has shared multiple videos arguing that the moon landings were faked, and that more recent footage of astronauts aboard the International Space Station was faked as well.

He has shared with followers a video entitled “5 Reasons Why I BELIEVE in the Flat Earth (And You Should Too!),” as well as numerous other videos claiming that the earth is flat.

Bussman’s Facebook posts demonstrate a longstanding interest in multiple extreme fringe theories. On May 8, 2023, he posted a video purporting to show “leaked footage of our flat earth from 1977,” showing an obviously computer-generated animation of a dim sun traversing flat icy terrain.

A year later he shared a video stating that a pilot “proved” the earth is flat because the sun and the moon were visible in the sky at the same time, a phenomenon which occurs on most days.

And on August 14, 2024, he posted the “5 Reasons Why” video about flat earth, which asks, among other things, that if the Earth is actually spinning, “why aren’t we all being flung out into space?”

Bussman has similarly posted multiple videos purporting to prove that the moon landings and other parts of the U.S. space program have been “faked.” He has shared video of an actor pretending to be film director Stanley Kubrick admitting that “he was responsible for faking the US Moon Program,” as well as a lengthy video claiming the landings were a “hoax” based on various false and spurious claims about film footage of them.

He has repeatedly suggested that a celestial structure called “the firmament” prevents space travel, which is a common trope among many flat-earthers.

Bussman’s conspiracy theorizing extends to world events like the 9/11 attacks as well. On March 22, 2024, he posted a conspiracy video and asked a skeptical follower “Have you seen the video of building 7 collapsing and the cruise missle [sic] hit the pentagon? I had a friend invomved [sic] in the clean up of the towers- no plane wreckage.” He has posted several other videos containing similar sentiments.

Some have noticed that there might be some damage to the reputation of the party in future elections.

Bussman’s elevation to a leadership position is part of a statewide pattern that alarms longtime Republican activists: The party is allowing itself to be taken over by the fringe, lowering the odds of victory in future statewide elections.

“It’s bad for Republicans who want to win,” said Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP who has vehemently opposed the party’s embrace of Donald Trump and figures like him, going so far as to publicly endorse Kamala Harris last year. “This is what happens when party leadership opens the gates of the insane asylum, and people come in off the streets and the inmates run it.”

Republicans: You elected Donald Trump and every demented loon who conspired with him. Own it. The damage is done, you’re already run by the asylum inmates.

So, you’re telling me I shouldn’t expect my tax refund check any time soon?

The IRS does not cope well with chaos.

At the Internal Revenue Service, the internet has become so patchy since President Donald Trump ordered remote workers back to overcrowded offices that staff are resorting to personal hotspots, crashing their computers at the height of tax processing season, two IRS officials told Reuters. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.

No wonder we have to fill out all those forms to file our taxes. The IRS lacks the computing capacity to calculate the amount I have to pay…except, wait a minute, then how do they know what I owe? The Social Security administration is also struggling.

At the Social Security Administration, lawyers, statisticians and other high-ranking agency officials are being sent from the Baltimore headquarters to regional offices to replace veteran claims processors who have been fired or taken buyouts from the Trump administration.
But most of the new arrivals don’t know how to do the job, leading to longer wait times for disabled and elderly Americans who depend on these benefits, according to two people familiar with the situation. Asked about the changes, an SSA official said in an email that reassigned employees “have vast knowledge about our programs and services.”

I’m trying to imagine what that is like — the few times I’ve had to work with the university’s bureaucracy, I’ve been completely lost. I have vast knowledge about biology and our curriculum, but please don’t ask me to process tuition payments. Those are highly skilled jobs! OSHA is also feeling the pain.

In its drive to cut costs, DOGE says it has canceled almost 500,000 government credit cards. It has placed a $1 limit on many others, and centralized decision making within some agency headquarters. That means managers in some regional offices can’t buy basic supplies.
At one center at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, it took a scientist a month to get authorization to buy $200 of dry ice to preserve urine samples, a purchase usually made at a local supermarket. Because the administration has barred many employees from making purchases, a colleague in another regional office who still has a government credit card paid for the dry ice, but it had to be shipped to the lab – at an additional cost of $100, according to a source familiar with the matter.

What can you buy on a credit card with a $1 limit?

They keep saying they’re saving us billions with increased efficiency, but all I see is greater inefficiency. I don’t see how that can save us any money at all. They’re just lying to us.

I’ll be curious to see if, at the end of this fiscal year, we’re deeper in the hole than last year. I predict that we will be.

Science is being murdered in the USA, and we know who is doing it

You should know that the National Institutes of Health was the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world. It was huge. It wasn’t just a gigantic research complex located in Bethesda, it administered the funding for most of the biological research in the country.

The NIH is headquartered on this sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s home to the largest clinical research hospital in the world, and 27 research institutes and centers.

The “leaked” budget draft includes a plan to consolidate those 27 institutes and centers into eight and eliminate four, including the Institutes on Nursing Research and Minority Health.
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But Collins says the bulk of that budget, more than 80%, goes to researchers off campus.

Dr. Francis Collins: Most of that goes out to the universities and institutes all over the country. They’re the ones that do the work, but they get the funds from NIH by writing very compelling grant applications that go through the most rigorous peer review system in the world.

Some of those researchers’ work lines America’s medicine cabinets, such as statins, antidepressants, and new forms of insulin.

A Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.

Dr. Francis Collins: Every dollar that NIH gave out in 2024 to a grant is estimated to have returned $2.46 just in a year. That’s a pretty darn good return on investment.

I was careful to use the past tense up there, because right now it’s being rapidly dismembered, dismantled, and disemboweled, in a savage act of intentional vandalism. This is like Egypt blowing up the pyramids, or Italy bulldozing the Vatican, or France deciding the Louvre would be a great storage facility for outflow from a sewage treatment plant. If America were to be remembered by history for one great accomplishment, it would be the scientific productivity established here, and an institution modeled by other countries around the world. And it’s being willfully destroyed by a gang of incompetent know-nothings.

NIH insider: I’ve never seen the morale of an institution or any place change so abruptly to where we feel fear.

It began, he says, in February, when more than a thousand probationary employees were placed on leave.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When that happened, that first hit, what was the reaction, like immediately and in the office the next Monday?

NIH insider: Tears. Everybody trying to assess damage, who’s been fired, who hasn’t been fired, what do we do? And then an immediate sort of assessment– in the clinical center: “Okay, can we still take care of patients and our research participants? Is it still safe?”

Sharyn Alfonsi: No one thought before they fired the people that dealt with the patients that maybe they shouldn’t be fired?

NIH insider: This didn’t come from within NIH, it came from outside, they don’t know what these people do.

As DOGE dismantled parts of the agency, employees told us work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.

Imagine the burning of the library of Alexandria — we will look back on this moment as something entirely equivalent. This is not something you can rebuild in a few years with a supportive congress and a bunch of money. Those people are leaving. They’re emigrating or looking for career alternatives. They’re knee-capping universities.

NIH insider: This doesn’t feel like a strategic plan to reorganize and make the NIH better and more efficient. It feels like a wrecking ball.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Typically, when a company has layoffs they talk about restructuring. There’ll be a new structure and this is how it’s gonna work. Is there a structure in place right now for the NIH?

NIH insider: Not that anybody’s shared. We have no idea. You know making the organization better, everybody is for that . There is no question. But again– this is not more efficient. It is infinitely less efficient right now because you can’t get anything done.

The confusion in Bethesda has also paralyzed many of the 2,500 universities and institutes that rely on the NIH to help fund their research.

So far, nearly 800 grants have been terminated- some on HIV and AIDS, trans health and COVID-19 after researchers were told their work was no longer an agency priority.

And last week, the NIH signaled that more cuts could be coming. It announced that any university with a DEI program or that boycotts an Israeli company might not be awarded new NIH grants for medical research and that existing grants could be terminated.

It’s catastrophic. And what’s amazing is that we can pin it directly on one man, Donald Trump, who has put vandals and morons in charge of what should be America’s pride. In particular, he’s put Rat FucKer jr in charge of HHS, which oversees the NIH. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and what he thinks he knows is all wrong.

If you need a little humor (I don’t, I think it’s time to seriously charge forward and battle these assholes) to stomach the bad news, here’s John Oliver. The best bit in this segment where RatFucker jr just confidently and stupidly makes up figures, claiming, for instance, that 50% of the people in China are diabetic. Nothing the RatFucker says can be trusted — he’s a liar, a con man, and a snake oil salesman.

The conclusion is also good.

Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public’s health and should resign or be fired.
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RFK needs to go and by impeachment if necessary.
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This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t know who he’s fired, he doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research all while bringing in a basement quack.

Yeah. But by impeachment? Congress approved RFK jr’s appointment, despite knowing everything that Oliver pointed out, so who believes we can trust them to act responsibly now?

America!!!

This house a few blocks away from my home is so perfectly emblematic of what MAGA has done to the United States of America: the flagpole with a Betsy Ross flag, faded and tattered and disintegrating, flying in front of a house with “JESUS” crudely painted on the roof, with the walls decorated with garish Trump signs.

Not shown is the giant gas-guzzling RV parked in their driveway.

I do despise these shabby, tacky MAGA idiots, but that’s what this country has become.

I went for a walk in Minneapolis, near the atheist con

I spotted different breed of street preacher. He was ranting at the top of his lungs about “the Tao” and something about kundalini.

How refreshing, I thought.

Then he started raving about the Jews are an abomination and predicting the Pope will die in 48 hours.

I decided not to bother debating him.

It was right near the Mary Tyler Moore statue, if someone else has more fortitude than I do.

The premise is false

Marc Andreessen, a world class boob whose existence demonstrates that intelligence is not a prerequisite to great wealth, wants to destroy universities. Why? Because they do a bad job.

no way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? 1t fails and another company takes its place. That’s how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.
These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out. We have built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system.

That’s baffling. I know I’m in the middle of a university, but judging by the quality of the students in my classes, their success on graduation (even without the social advantage of hanging out with spoiled scions of the rich at an ivy), and the reputation of American universities abroad, it is bizarre to say that our universities fail at their job. Given how starved they are by conservative legislatures, we’re doing a great job!

Andreessen himself has only an undergraduate degree in computer science from UIUC…he spent hardly any time in the university system before toddling off to get rich off the world-wide web. He’s not qualified to opine on the quality of our universities, especially since he turned a bachelors degree into a billion dollars. I think he was taught quite well, although having the ego of a conservative billionaire he probably imagines that his fortune and skills sprang fully-formed from his pointy, egg-shaped cranium.

He is not allowed to make an argument by analogy with evolution. He’s a techbro who probably never took a single class in biology.

He’s going to have to spell out what abuse of the tenure system he’s talking about. Tenure is not a problem. Most of us professors don’t make a billion dollars from our careers, and giving us a tiny bit of job security as a sop to excuse a middle class salary after a demanding and disruptive decade or more of post-grad training doesn’t “ossify” universities. It definitely isn’t corrupt, except in the sense that some administrators, coaches, and regents get paid excessive sums.

What can I say? Andreessen is a very stupid man who might have benefited from more exposure to learning.

Why do their arguments suck so bad?

Total buffoon

OK, Christians, have a go at me. Tell me your very best argument for the existence of a god. I just got an email that, instead of giving me an argument, listed the Top 20 Christian Apologists, as if I’m supposed to be impressed and cowed into silence.

Only problem is that I already know of most of these people, and most of their arguments, and they’re all terrible. Am I supposed to believe god exist because William Lane Craig, a confident debater with a brain the size of a pea, says, Everything that begins to exist has a cause; The universe began to exist; Therefore, the universe has a cause? That doesn’t even mention god, so who cares? I’m going to declare that the cause was hydrogen, because I’m not a physicist, and all I need to start nucleosynthesis and eventually chemistry is hydrogen. Is hydrogen god?

Anyway, here’s the list I was sent. It’s as fine a list of fools, grifters, and incompetents as you will find anywhere outside the Trump administration.

  1. Norm Geisler: normangeisler.com
  2. William Lane Craig: Reasonable Faith.org
  3. J. Warner Wallace: ColdCaseChristianity.com
  4. John Lennox: John Lennox.org
  5. Greg Koukl: STR.org
  6. Paul Copan: PaulCopan.com
  7. Ed Feser: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
  8. Lee Strobel: Lee Strobel.com
  9. Josh McDowell: Josh.org
  10. Discovery Institute (Dembski, Meyer, Richards, Luskin, Wells): www.Discovery.org
  11. C.S. Lewis: CSLewis.org
  12. Gary Habermas: GaryHabermas.com
  13. Timothy McGrew: http://historicalapologetics.org/
  14. Dr. Michael Brown: AskDrBRown.org
  15. Richard Howe: Richardghowe.com
  16. Tim Keller: TimothyKeller.com
  17. J. Budziszewski: Undergroundthomist.org
  18. Hank Hanegraaff: Equip.org
  19. Hugh Ross: Reasons.org
  20. R. C. Sproul: Ligonier

I actually find myself quite angry that Christians think these are their best. Give up your religion if the very best argument you can find for it is a bunch of word salad and lies from a Lee Strobel or Norm Geisler or <ick> the Discovery Institute. Try and do better.

Sissy hypno?

I have stumbled into a strange YouTube niche: feminization hypnosis. It’s a category of delusional videos in which voices whisper at you, telling you to put on make-up or become trans or encouraging your butt and boobs to grow larger. I listened to a few of them — they’re rather boring and ridiculous. If you want to see them for yourself, go to YouTube and search for “sissy hypno”. Be prepared for a deluge of results, none of them particularly pornographic or persuasive or even interesting. I don’t see how anyone could fall for this nonsense, unless you’re a real idiot.

Like Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire, who thinks it explains the existence of transgender people.

MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): And Genevieve can shed some light on this phenomenon that — frankly, as I’ve said on the show, I don’t even want to look into because I have been told and then I’ve read on different fora that talk about this phenomenon that there is a kind of pornography that is, apparently, a driver of the transgender identity that is so perverse that it constitutes a kind of hypnosis where men will say, I was a normal guy, I lived to be 41, 42, and I was basically normal. But then I fell into this kind of pornography and it essentially melted my brain. I had a nervous breakdown. Now I think that I’m a woman. So, rather than have to expose myself to that and then, you know, I have to go to confession, potentially my brain gets melted, I can just talk to Genevieve about it. Genevieve, thank you for coming on the show.

GENEVIEVE GLUCK (GUEST): Thank you so much for having me on the show.

KNOWLES: So, there’s a lot I want to talk about with you. We don’t have nearly enough time, so maybe we’ll just have to have you back and talk about it at greater length. But can you just give, not only the audience, but me a rundown — what is, among all of the types of pornography that lead to transgenderism, what is this hypnosis pornography?

GLUCK: Well, you touched on a good point there. There are many types of pornography that are, sort of, involved with the transgender movement. But hypnosis pornography is a little bit different in that it incorporates your lifestyle. So, typically when we think of pornography, we think of it as something that is passive that you’re, sort of, watching. But this type, it asks you to, sort of, change your behavior, change the way you dress, even to start taking hormones. And it’s sometimes called sissy hypno. So, that’s short for sissification hypnosis pornography. And, you know, I myself, I have personally been somewhat mocked for the suggestion that this is having a powerful impact on men. However, trans activists themselves will say things like it influenced them.

Oh, gosh, unlike Knowles I listened to some, and my brain didn’t melt — I just thought it was rather silly and harmless. Do I have to go to confession now? That would be even sillier than a sissy hypno video.

Although maybe he has a point. Going to church every Sunday and listening to a repetitive drone does work at turning people into Catholics.

These people are certifiable

Once you get sucked down into the gender critical maelstrom, you are doomed. You start off whining about men cheating in women’s sports competitions, and next thing you know, your brain is as rotten as Chris Rufo’s.

There is a battalion of male-to-female transgenders within the American intelligence apparatus. They hate Italians and LibsofTikTok. They fantasize about pseudo-vaginas and butthole lazers. They are in charge of the most sophisticated spying machine in human history.

Battalions of spies hating Italians with their butthole lazers? What? The only sane thing he wrote was about hating LibsofTikTok.

The entire right-wing is infected with some kind of dementia.

Discovery Institute ♥ Joe Rogan & Bret Weinstein

The Discovery Institute is thrilled by Rogan and Weinstein, entirely because these conspiracy theorists criticize “Darwinism”. It’s laughable. Rogan is an ignorant meathead, and Weinstein is a weird outsider who profits from babbling nonsense about science. It’s no surprise that the garbage out crowd is in alignment with religious propagandists.

Here’s the bit the DI adores:

Weinstein says he is “sympathetic” to ID but rejects it, which we knew. He says the current version of Darwinism, however, is “broken” and the evolutionary mainstream “lies” to itself, and to us. He alludes to another Darwinian mechanism operating on top of the standard one of random mutation and natural selection:

I believe there’s a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer. [I believe] that what we did was, we took the random mutation model and we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is, and we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces, on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between, in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet-codon in nature. [Emphasis added.]

In another words, I think he’s saying, the other information is in a “meta” relationship to the familiar material genome, the genetic information instantiated in DNA and other known physical epigenetic features in the cell.

Dr. Weinstein is a deep thinker, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. But this other information, in his view, is also material in nature, not spiritual — which might be the difference between Weinstein’s thinking and, say, that of Platonist ID scientists like Richard Sternberg and Günter Bechly who posit an “immaterial genome,” occupying that meta role.

Weinstein is not a deep thinker. He’s a disgraced ex-biologist and intellectual charlatan who now pals around with Douglas Murray and Andy Ngo and various other far right wing creeps, promoting ridiculous ideas about vaccines, race, and is an AIDS denialist, while promoting ivermectin during the COVID epidemic. He’s a fringe kook, but the DI is so stupid they can’t tell.

I have no idea what this “kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form” that he is referring to is, and I don’t think he knows either. He’s making up strings of words. The DI is right about one thing: it is on a par with “immaterial genome”. It’s all nonspecific nonsense that dumb ol’ Joe Rogan will nod along to.

Weinstein has another tell that exposes his irrelevance.

[In my opinion,] the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood. So by reporting that yes, Darwinism is true, and we know how it works, and people who aren’t compelled by the story are illiterate or ignorant or whatever, they are pretending to know more than they do. So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it.
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There are several different things that are wrong with [Darwinism]. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell, about how it is that mutation results in morphological change, is incorrect.
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I am sympathetic to the intelligent design folks, though I do not believe they’re on the right track. I’m open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I’ve seen no evidence of that universe myself. I’m open to it. If it happens, I will look at it.

Darwinism. Darwinism, Darwinism, Darwinism. Yes, there are things wrong with Darwinism: it’s a 19th century hypothesis composed by a guy who knew nothing about DNA, genes, molecules, or mutation. Show me anyone who proudly announces that he has discovered problems with Darwinism, and I’ll show you a popinjay whose understanding of science ended in 1900.

What is the story we tell about how mutation results in morphological change? I would love to hear it.

And then…

You’ve had Stephen Meyer on. He’s a scientist who’s quite good, and he’s spotted that the mechanism in question [the standard Darwinian one] isn’t powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains. And so he’s catching up, but that’s really on the Darwinists for not admitting what they can’t yet explain and pursuing it, which is what they should be doing.

Holy crap. Stephen Meyer is not a scientist. He got an undergrad degree in physics and earth science, decided he knew everything there is to know about biology, and went on to get a master’s and Ph.D. in philosophy. He held jobs in a couple of private Christian colleges before becoming a professional propagandist at the Discovery Institute. And now Weinstein thinks he’s a “quite good” scientist? That tells you all you need to know about Weinstein.

Well, that and vague, handwavey glop about mysterious sources of genetic information, vaccine quackery, racist apologetics, and ill-informed complaints about “Darwinism”. This is a guy whose whole career now is bent on getting on the Joe Rogan show to foment non-controversies.