A prediction: the Republican party is about to divide itself

I’m not going to go so far as to predict that Hillary Clinton will win in this madhouse of an election, but the odds in her favor keep improving.

More icky revelations about Trump are trickling out.

The Republican party is cutting off support to the Trump campaign.

Many Republican leaders are publicly denouncing Trump, although many are not going so far as to decline to endorse him.

Trump donors are pissed off.

Trump refuses to resign. With an ego that size, can anyone imagine that he would?

Now picture this.

He loses big in the election in November. Even if it’s close, maybe especially if it’s close.

Now put yourself in his shoes, with his narcissism. He’s got to blame someone else, right? Who is he going to blame?

Not Clinton. Not some woman, especially not some woman he thinks is a crook. Maybe there will be some whining of voter fraud, but that’s not going to hold up for long.

He’s going to blame those Republican bigshots, Paul Ryan and John McCain and Reince Priebus and all those governors and senators and congresspeople who failed to support him in the face of these terribly unfair attacks. He has been betrayed. He has been stabbed in the back by his own party.

Trump still has fanatical supporters. Look at Breitbart. Look what’s happening: Trump fans are booing Paul Ryan.

This is what has the Republicans sweating bullets right now. You know they’re busy calculating: they have to repudiate what he said, but how far can they go before they alienate the Trumpian base and find themselves a target of their own fanatics in subsequent elections?

Even scarier — what if he wins? Do you think Trump is the kind of fellow who keeps enemy lists, bears a grudge, and is going to screw over anyone who tried to hurt him the campaign? These guys are trapped.

I do think Clinton will win, though, and then that 30-40% of the rabid electorate that was fueled by racial hatred will pin a Dolchstoßlegende on the Republican establishment and turn on them. They won’t go Democrat, though — they’ll sit there simmering in resentment waiting for a fresh demagogue. It’s just going to get uglier and uglier, but I don’t think the Republicans will benefit.

Republicans in disarray!

It’s good to see, finally. The rats are trying to desert the sinking ship, but don’t let them — and it’s not as if they can. It’s only about a month until the election. Deadlines to put names on the ballot have passed; no matter what the other Republicans do, come November, people will go into their voting booths and Trump’s name will be there, even if every other Republican in the country has repudiated him. He will get many votes from angry white people. All that has changed is that the size of his defeat will probably be larger (although we might also get surprised: this much controversy is probably going to increase the turnout, especially among the racist/sexist/white nationalist electorate).

But it’s also too late for the Republican leadership to untangle themselves from the hideous Trump. They endorsed him. They marched out and made their little speeches approving of the man — even Ted Cruz, who told everyone to vote their conscience at the Republican convention, swallowed his pride and got on board the Trump Train. None of these people should be allowed to escape public censure.

It’s particularly galling because we all knew all along that Trump was a racist, sexist, loud-mouthed hateful boor. He declared that Mexicans were racists and that a judge of Mexican descent couldn’t be trusted; they waffled. He announced that he had a plan to deport Muslims, and he took on a running mate who wanted to bar all Syrian refugees; well, that’s all right then. He proposes shutting down Planned Parenthood and bringing in judges who will overthrow Roe v. Wade, and Pence tried to pass a law requiring formal funerals for aborted fetuses; no problem. Trump wants to end marriage equality, and Pence claims tolerance for gay rights will lead to societal collapse; that’s fine, they agree. He calls women pigs, ugly, fat, and mocks them for blood coming out of their wherever; he’s just speaking his mind. He builds a following of openly racist white nationalists, he foments violence at his rallies; Dick Cheney approves this message.

Everyone knew this. These were not secretive attitudes. He was utterly brazen. We also knew that he was incompetent, had a feeble attention span, was anticipating -science, and was totally unqualified for the job, but those are basically the prerequisites for being a Republican nowadays, so we can’t fault them for overlooking that, but the naked hatred was inescapably obvious, and one thing I’ll say for the Republicans, they usually try to keep their hatred discreetly clothed.

So what suddenly turned everyone against Trump? He said lewd things about a white woman. That is unforgivable. Paul Ryan revealed the real problem. Trump was not chivalrous.

Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.

Fuck you, Paul Ryan. No. Women don’t need you to be their champion, and reverence is not what they are looking for: fairness and equality are. Especially when your version of “reverence” involves supporting a vulgar bigot who doesn’t trust women with their own bodies.

I’ll believe Republicans are sincere in the repudiation of Donald Trump when they also repudiate all the policies and ideas Trump represented. But until then, bury the lot of them in the dung heap of history.

New entertainment: look up all the people and groups who endorsed Trump before this, when he was a known racist and perpetrator of harassment and sexual assault and were undeterred by his history. For example, here’s a page of Scholars and Writers for America, a long list of very serious very intellectual wankers who think…

Given our choices in the presidential election, we believe that Donald J. Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America, and we urge you to support him as we do.

Where, apparently, the promise of America is to support slavery and not allow women to vote.

Theranos, soon to be a movie

If you’ve wondered about that spectacular flameout by Theranos, the blood testing company, but didn’t want to read all those articles all over the place, the story is now available in cartoon form.

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Next, it’s going to be made into a movie with Jennifer Lawrence starring as the grand fraud, Elizabeth Holmes? Say, if I lie and endanger sick people and suck in a few billions from gullible investors, I want George Clooney to play me in the movie of my life.

2 Corinthians 4: 17-18

You knew this day would come.

Your beautiful wife has been on a cleaning kick. She has been tidying the upstairs bedrooms, which used to be the boys’ rooms, which were an awful mess of teenage boys’ junk. You thought you could tuck your preciousses in there, where they would blend in and she would never notice. No one would notice. They were safe.

But then, one evening, she drops a great big box on the ottoman. She looks at you, accusingly.

“I thought you weren’t hoarding these things anymore,” she says.

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“You never know when you might need that special cable,” you say, “You might give me some big home improvement project some day, and that box will hold exactly what will do the job.”

She gives you that look. You know the one. The one where she’d really like to say something critical, but she’s holding it back, because she’s so darned nice all the time.

“Sort it out now,” she says. “I’m hauling everything away tomorrow.”

You go through it all. There was ribbon cable in there. A Centronics parallel interface. A 1200 baud modem. You never know when you might suddenly have a use for a 1200 baud modem, and they’re just about impossible to find nowadays! Oh my god, Firewire cable. You know how much that stuff cost? Appletalk to ethernet adapters. Phone wire. Ancient mice that only worked with the old school Apple mouse connectors. You untangle and sort, and she glares at you and you end up throwing all that history away. You finally cling to only a couple of nice ethernet switches, and you found your handy RS-232 patch adapter, which you slip into your pocket when she wasn’t looking. It’s all going to the dump now.

She doesn’t know about the much bigger stash you keep in the lab, though, so you’ll still be OK if the apocalypse comes and you absolutely must solder up a serial-to-parallel cable, or you’ll die.

Oh, no! She just came down the stairs with the big spool of Cat5! We can’t get rid of that!

Donate!

Everyone wants our money right now — presidential candidates are begging every day. But there are two other organizations that could use some help.

  • Skepticon! They have a contributor matching all donations until midnight tonight. You’ve got six hours!

  • RationalWiki! Help them out in their quarterly fundraiser — it’s all that’s keeping the doors open.

Oh, sure, give some money to Clinton, too.

Very presidential

Ladies and gentlemen, the pick of the evangelical Christian right.

Charles Blow is a bit upset.

Do you think this will change Trump’s supporters’ minds at all? Now you can find out! Breitbart has rather tersely reported the bare facts of this story. Just read the comments.

Lots of “Bill Clinton is worse!” comments.

TRUMP = boys talk. Clinton actually did attacked and raped woman against their will and used his position to do so.

If only it would sink in that Bill Clinton isn’t in the running.

Then there’s the “All men do it” excuse.

If You’re upset about this, you have never been in a mens locker room. Sorry, but men (if they’re straight) talk about women as women talk about men.

Sorry, nope, I don’t, nor do any of my friends.

There are people who are very happy about what Trump said. It makes him a manly man.

BFD! 2005 LMAO, Yawn! At least he’s not a fag!

TRUMP is a true red blooded American, he has AMERICAN CHILDREN not imports or one that is soley a CLINTON political set up

And then there’s simple denial.

Women love Trump and Trump loves women. Nobody cares.

Election fraud!

Oh, look here: the Christian Times has exposed a massive conspiracy, tens of thousands of pre-cast ballots for Hillary Clinton stored in an Ohio warehouse, ready to be released and cheat Trump out of his rightful victory.

According to sources, Randall Prince, a Columbus-area electrical worker, was doing a routine check of his companies wiring and electrical systems when he stumbled across approximately one dozen black, sealed ballot boxes filled with thousands of Franklin County votes for Hillary Clinton and other Democrat candidates.

“No one really goes in this building. It’s mainly used for short-term storage by a commercial plumber,” Prince said.

So when Prince, who is a Trump supporter, saw several black boxes in an otherwise empty room, he went to investigate. What he found could allegedly be evidence of a massive operation designed to deliver Clinton the crucial swing state.

Prince, shown here, poses with his find, as election officials investigate.

Prince, shown here, poses with his find, as election officials investigate.

The article then goes on to state that they don’t actually have any photos of the contents of those ballot boxes, but they have a picture of a sample ballot filled out for the Democrats.

You might be predisposed to be suspicious — wouldn’t this be big news? Why don’t they have any samples of the ballots? You might also look at that photo and be thinking…wait a minute, the words “BALLOT BOX” are just clumsily Photoshopped on, without even an attempt to tweak them into the appropriate perspective.

I bet you wouldn’t even be surprised if I told you that that isn’t Randall Prince. Or that the photo isn’t taken in Ohio. Or that while those actually are ballot boxes, they’re empty.

We know this because the origins of that photo have been tracked down. It’s a stock photo that has been poorly edited of empty ballot boxes being transported in Sheldon Heath, Birmingham, England.

Boy, the residents of Birmingham are sure going to be surprised to learn that they voted to elect Hillary Clinton to the US presidency.

If everyone from Yong to Zimmer says it’s true, it must be

You must have already read the tragic news: scientists have determined that I am doomed to die by 2072, when I turn 115, if not sooner. This was figured out by analyzing demographic data and seeing that people seem to hit a ceiling around age 115; the mean life expectancy keeps shifting upwards, but the maximum age seems to have reached a plateau. Carl Zimmer gives the clearest explanation of the methodology behind this conclusion, and Ed Yong gives a good description of the phenomenon of death in the very old.

The ceiling is probably hardwired into our biology. As we grow older, we slowly accumulate damage to our DNA and other molecules, which turns the intricate machinery of our cells into a creaky, dysfunctional mess. In most cases, that decline leads to diseases of old age, like cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s. But if people live past their 80s or 90s, their odds of getting such illnesses actually start to fall—perhaps because they have protective genes. Supercentenarians don’t tend to die of major diseases—Jeanne Calment died of natural causes—and many of them are physically independent even at the end of their lives. But they still die, “simply because too many of their bodily functions fail,” says Vijg. “They can no longer continue to live.”

I agree with all that. I think there is an upper bound to how long meat can keep plodding about on Earth before it reaches a point of critical failure. But I’m going to disagree with Yong on one thing: he goes on to explain it in evolutionary terms, with the standard story that there hasn’t been selection for longevity genes, because all the selection has been for genes for vigor in youth, which may actually have the side effect of accelerating mortality.

This is true, as far as it goes. But I think it’s a different phenomenon, that we’re seeing a physico-chemical limitation that isn’t going to be avoided, no matter how refined and potent ‘longevity genes’ become.

When organized pieces of matter are stressed or experience wear, their level of organization decreases. You simply can’t avoid that. Expose a piece of metal in a car to prolonged periods of vibration and it will eventually fail, not because it was badly designed, but because its nature and the nature of its activity dictates that it will eventually, inevitably break.

Likewise a soap bubble is ephemeral by its nature. The same fluid properties that enable it to be blown doom it — the film will flow over time, it will tend to thin at the top, and eventually it will pop. There’s no way to suspend the physics of a soap bubble to let it last significantly longer, shy of freezing it and defeating the whole point of a soap bubble.

In people, we have a name for this wear and tear and stress: it’s called “living”. All these different things we do that make it worth existing are also fundamentally damaging — there’s no escaping the emergence of an ultimate point of failure.

115 years sounds like a reasonable best estimate from the current evidence. I’d also point out that this does not imply that we won’t find a common critical failure point, and find a way for medical science to push it up a year or five…but every such patch adds another layer of complexity to the system, and represents another potential point of failure. We’re just going to asymptotically approach the upper bound, whatever it is.

That’s OK. I’ll take 115 years. It also helps that it’s going to really piss off Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil.

A sharp knife cuts both ways

This is funny. Trump supporters are illogical and full of contradictions.

But it’s also troubling. What would happen if you sent a similar crew of interviewers to a Clinton event? Are they also nonsensical in their reasoning?

I also wonder whether there were Trump supporters who were not amusingly stupid, who weren’t used in the video. How many of them were there? What’s the difference in frequency of idiots between Democratic and Republican voters?

Yeah, I’m looking at a comedy bit and wondering about control groups and sample size and data representation. I’m a science nerd. No apologies.

This stuff matters. We’re kind of lucky that all the witty, sharp, funny comics tend tend to be on the liberal side, while the conservatives have nothing but unfunny smirking dudebros who use racism and misogyny to get laughs, but imagine if a talented, insightful comedian arose among the far-right and turned this same strategy against us. Shall we get into an arms race in which we each raise the worst of the other side as their champions?