Minor Christian nightmare

I had to do some quick shopping to pick up a few winter essentials, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll give the local version of a big box store, one run by our terrible fundagelical brethren, another try. They can’t be that bad, can they?

Then I saw this wall of goods, and decided there was nothing I needed from them that badly.

Yeah, no, nope nope nopitty nope-nope.

Where conservatism leads

Scott Yenor is a professor who gave speech at a National Conservatism conference that said the quiet parts out loud. Women don’t belong in engineering or medical careers, we have to have strong manly leadership to convince them to stay home and have babies. Our independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be, don’t you know — the significant word in there might be our. Also, women are at their peak fertility in their late teens and early 20s, and to be a great nation, they must be quickly impregnated. And here I thought Dr Strangelove was satire!

…a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.

That’s this guy.

Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

Fortunately, Yenor is not a professor of engineering, medicine, or law. He’s a professor of political science, a field that seems to have much lower standards. Or at least, lower standards at schools in Idaho.

Totally unsurprising revelation of the day

One of the worst people on the right is Nick Fuentes, a bizarre 23 year old racist and misogynist who inexplicably has a large following. Here he is in a video with a Blaze TV talking head in which he makes an amazing admission.

…I think any man who is observant enough and honestly, we could go back to great geniuses, we could go back to people who have been in relationships, like a perfect example is the pick-up artists. Have you ever noticed that pick-up artists who have the most relationships with women and the most sex what they say is that with women it’s the same bag of tricks to seduce a woman or whatever. And I think that kind of tells you something about the nature of women, you go from woman to woman and it’s the same kind of like little tricks little things you can say, whatever, to kind of hack them, I think that kind of says it all about their nature. So, you know…

Interviewer: What does it say about our nature, Nick?

Well, it says that they are not fully rational. I don’t believe that, like men, they possess a certain full rationality…a male has a real impersonal sense of rationality and reason. I think that a female sense is far more personal, and that derives from the fact that women are made to bear children.

He’s a horrible little man, and that he thinks pick-up artists are examples of great geniuses who have been in “relationships” (I don’t he knows what the word means) tells me a lot about him. But that’s not the unsurprising admission. That would be this response:

Interviewer: have you ever been in a relationship with a woman?

No.

I guess he’s aspiring to be the king of the incels.

I see a horrifying future of … marketing

One of the advantages of small town living is that I won’t get this crap until at least 20 years after those of you in the big cities. It’s called anamorphic advertising.

No. Just no. I don’t want this anywhere. Fortunately, it’s somewhat limited in that it only works when viewed from a small range of angles, but still, as the article points out, this can get obnoxious and distracting fast.

The trend could make advertising more dynamic and fun, giving us giant digital playspaces anytime we step outside. “When you literally have things popping out of a billboard at you, it feels inviting in all kinds of new ways,” said Greg Coleman, Prime Video’s global head of marketing and franchise.

It could also turn our public commons into obtrusive brand exercises, making advertising literally something we can’t avoid. Anyone who has ever endured a too-popular meme knows it’s a short jump from virality to annoyance.

“This is exciting and it’s attention-getting,” said Arun Lakshmanan, an associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo School of Management and an expert in immersive advertising. “It also could really start getting intrusive.”

I don’t know about you, but I was already prepared to hang all the marketing professors. I’m imagining driving down I94 to the twin cities, and now in addition to all the Jesus billboards and baby heartbeat billboards, I get to see Kris Lindahl flapping his arms all over the place. Yuck.

It’s good to be the CIA, or rich

If you’re a sick, warped pedophile, that is.The news is not good this morning.

Did you know that if you work for the CIA, or are even a contractor doing work for the CIA, that “the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets”? So you can get away with all kinds of evil acts if you work there (which, I guess, shouldn’t be at all surprising, given that it is the CIA).

Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.

It’s all rather horrifying, especially given that these secret agencies have been blacklisting homosexuals for decades and acting aghast at the very idea of a gay person acquiring a sensitive position. They might be blackmailed, don’t you know. But pedophiles…just a slap on the wrist and a dismissal.

Speaking of pedophiles, there’s new news about dead child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. New records, flight logs, have been unearthed that reveal hundreds of additional flights we hadn’t known about. Epstein was just happily flitting about the globe for years, doing…what? I don’t know. Maybe the CIA does, but they’re not telling. This jumped out at me, though.

Epstein owned a Gulfstream II (sold in November 2013), a Gulfstream IV (sold before his arrest), a Gulfstream GV-SP, and a Boeing 727 (nicknamed the “Lolita Express”) that notoriously ferried notable passengers and girls around the globe. According to flight manifests unsealed in a defamation case against Maxwell, travelers on Epstein’s planes included public figures from Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to the supermodel Naomi Campbell and the astronaut John Glenn.

Why? How? How does a guy without any kind of college degree, who started out as a math teacher at a private school (he wasn’t even very good at that), and then drifted into banking and finance, get such ridiculous sums of money that they can afford their very own 727? What did he do to earn that kind of money?

Don’t ever try to tell me that the wealthy worked hard and deserve all that money.

I think we done killed another tree

Years ago, when we moved into our home, it was graced with magnificent trees. In the front yard, we had this huge weeping willow, one of the notable landmarks in our neighborhood, and a pair of tall pine trees; the centerpiece of the back yard was a grand old slippery elm. They’ve all succumbed to age, and we’ve had to pay experts to come in and chop them down as they became increasingly dangerous, losing limbs in storms and just generally falling into crepitude.

We have only one original tree left, right outside my office window. It’s a busy home to squirrels and birds. But it’s also doomed. Look at this hideous gnarled gap in the trunk.

It’s a deep wound, and that’s a horrible pale fungus eating away at the heartwood. We’re probably going to have to butcher this tree, too.

We’ve had a fair number of saplings planted around the yard, but it’s doubtful that I’ll live long enough to enjoy their shade someday.

It took journalists this long to figure that out?

Smug hacks on their way to destroy the country

Paul Waldman has suddenly figured out that the conservative justices lied in their confirmation hearings. And now, just now, it’s time to admit it.

They lied.

Yes, I’m talking about the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and the abortion rights those justices have now made clear they will eviscerate.

They weren’t just evasive, or vague, or deceptive. They lied. They lied to Congress and to the country, claiming they either had no opinions at all about abortion, or that their beliefs were simply irrelevant to how they would rule. They would be wise and pure, unsullied by crass policy preferences, offering impeccably objective readings of the Constitution.

It. Was. A. Lie.

We went through the same routine in the confirmation hearings of every one of those justices. When Democrats tried to get them to state plainly their views on Roe v. Wade, they took two approaches. Some tried to convince everyone that they would leave it untouched. Others, those already on record proclaiming opposition to abortion rights, suggested they had undergone a kind of intellectual factory reset enabling them to assess the question anew with an unspoiled mind, one concerned only with the law.

It is astonishing that the media took this long to realize what was obvious to everyone. The Trumpkins knew it, and were giggling behind their palms about getting away with it. Everyone else knew it, too, but felt trapped by an unwarranted respect for norms and knowing that the media was in the bag and would ridicule the simple words, “they’re lying”. It was a real emperor’s new clothes kind of situation and everyone went along with it.

What’s also appalling is that those fuckers knew that had to lie. That opposing the established law of Roe v. Wade would instantly scuttle their nomination, that the electorate would rise up and make it impossible for many politicians to support their nomination. So they lied. They misled everyone until they could hide behind their Supreme Court tenure. Now they get to wreck civil rights in this country, their aim all along.

They were ashamed of their position. They knew it could only be whispered in the darkness until they got power, and then once they’d brought down that veil of darkness on the land, then and only then could they shout it out loud.

You know what else burns?

But sometimes the right puts its purposes in the open. There was a particularly striking exchange between Laura Ingraham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Fox News, where Ingraham grew inexplicably enraged over the mere possibility that Roe might not be overturned.

“If we have six Republican appointees on this court,” she said, “after all the money that’s been raised, the Federalist Society, all these big fat-cat dinners — I’m sorry, I’m pissed about this — if this court with six justices cannot do the right thing here,” then Republicans should “blow it up” and pass some kind of law limiting the court’s authority.

“I would do that in a heartbeat,” Cruz responded.

In other words: We bought this court, and we’d better get what we paid for.

Yep, we’re a third-rate banana republic where the law is for sale to the highest bidder.

“Endorsed by the Federalist Society” ought to be a huge black mark against any judicial nominee. Will our representatives see it that way? Don’t count on it.

It was all a lie, a scam, a con: the assurances that they were blank slates committed to “originalism” and “textualism,” that they wouldn’t “legislate from the bench,” that they have no agenda but merely a “judicial philosophy.”

Somehow that philosophy nearly always produces results conservatives want: undermining voting rights, enhancing corporate power, constraining the rights of workers, enabling the proliferation of guns, and now most vividly, allowing state governments to force women to carry pregnancies to term against their will.

From this day forward, no one should be naive enough to believe a word any conservative says on this subject, except for those few who forthrightly proclaim that the Supreme Court must read right-wing policy preferences into the Constitution. There was never any mystery about who these justices are and what they would do. There were only liars saying otherwise, and fools who chose to believe them.

Fools run the media in America, then.

How stupid can a congressperson be?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is setting a new low. Here she is comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to cancer.

Did you know that cancer is not generally contagious? Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t.

So she proposes that we should target fat people and take more ivermectin.

It seems to me that the effective solutions that she avoids mentioning — vaccines and masks and lockdowns — would be more direct in addressing the problem than vilifying fat people, taking useless drugs, or using relatively expensive post-infection treatments. But then, the stupid people run the country.