Creepy bobblehead farms gullible flock

How can normal human beings fall for Kenneth Copeland’s schtick? But they do,and this ranting twit makes millions of dollars, and sheesh, watch his audience clutch their baldspots.

Somebody make a video of Copeland “curing” impotence, or hemorrhoids.

The new Minnesota rules

The crackdown has started at last — late, but better late than never. Just in time for Thanksgiving!

Most prominently, the state is telling Minnesotans not to gather with anyone outside of their immediate household, just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday.

In addition: Indoor and outdoor dining will be prohibited, limiting restaurants and bars to takeout service only. Public pools, rec centers, gyms, fitness and dance studios and indoor entertainment venues like theaters and bowling alleys will also be closed.

Wedding receptions, celebrations and private parties are also not allowed under the new orders, though wedding ceremonies, funerals and other religious events are allowed if they follow current capacity and social distancing rules.

This is good. Shut down this nonsense now.

Unfortunately, there is some bad news.

The order also puts organized sports — for youth and adults — on pause, but allows professional and college sports to continue, under certain restrictions.

Retail, salons, places of worship, other activities will operate under restrictions already in place.

You know what this means, sports fans and church-goers! The state is just fine with you getting sick and dying. That’s no skin off my nose, since I don’t belong to either group, but I think you ought to be protesting and demanding equal respect. Close the churches and the sports arenas too!

You know what else is over? The election.

This is getting ridiculous.

President Trump has abandoned his plan to win reelection by disqualifying enough ballots to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in key battleground states, pivoting instead to a goal that appears equally unattainable: delaying a final count long enough to cast doubt on Biden’s decisive victory.

On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign wired $3 million to election officials in Wisconsin to start a recount in the state’s two largest counties. His personal lawyer, ­Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has taken over the president’s legal team, asked a federal judge to consider ordering the Republican-controlled legislature to select the state’s electors. And Trump egged on a group of GOP lawmakers in Michigan who are pushing for an audit of the vote there before it is certified.

Giuliani has also told Trump and associates that his ambition is to pressure GOP lawmakers and officials across the political map to stall the vote certification in an effort to have Republican lawmakers pick electors and disrupt the electoral college when it convenes next month — and Trump is encouraging of that plan, according to two senior Republicans who have conferred with Giuliani and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.

But that outcome appears impossible. It is against the law in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin law gives no role to the legislature in choosing presidential electors, and there is little public will in other states to pursue such a path.

Behind the thin legal gambit is what several Trump advisers say is his real goal: sowing doubt in Biden’s victory with the president’s most ardent supporters and keeping alive his prospects for another presidential run in 2024.

Trump is openly trying to corrupt a democratic election in the United States, and he’s shameless about it, and his Republican cronies are turning a blind eye to the whole degrading process. Is there nothing that can be done? Do we just sit back and watch this boob commit fumbling, bumbling crimes that embarrass the country in the eyes of the world, and do nothing? It’s like standing outside the plate glass window of a bank, watching an idiot pound on the vault with a sledgehammer, while Rudy Giuliani stands at the door speed-talking nonsense at the crowd.

Oh, and almost half the crowd is cheering the crooks on.

Can we please put an end to our ongoing national humiliation and frog-march the whole mob of blithering grifters out of their positions of authority now? Can we at least strip Rudy of his license to practice law? It looks like we’re not even capable of that.

Huzzah! The last Thursday of the semester!

I have complained about my Thursday schedule before, which makes it the worst day of the week for me. Well, this is the last one! As an added bonus, I also have no committee meetings scheduled for today at all! I can’t get too excited, though, that just means I have a few free hours I can use to tame that savage stack of proliferating grading obligations. Oh, and I have to compose the lab exam that I’ll be flinging at cell bio students tomorrow. And it’s oral presentations day in my communication class. And I need more coffee. It’s not a perfect day, but it’s getting better.

That settles it — I’ll be cowering in my bunker

I do believe I’ll be staying home for Thanksgiving. I definitely wouldn’t be attending any 10-person get-togethers, but if I got together with my daughter, who lives in the center of the dark red infection zone in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I’d be facing a somewhat unacceptable risk. I’m not going anywhere near the death zones of Fargo or Sioux Falls. In fact, the whole Midwest looks like a disaster, but I’m trapped in the middle of it.

You know, if I huddle alone in Morris, Minnesota for the entire holiday season, looking like a dork, and do everything the epidemiologists tell me, I am going to be so pissed off if I get COVID-19 and die anyway. I’m going to haunt all those Republican motherfuckers for eternity if that happens.

I don’t care that there is no such thing as an afterlife. My rage will not be contained.

Bargain accepted, Brenden Dilley

All right, Brenden. I’ll wear the mask and accept that I look like a stupid dork, and you can point and laugh all you want.

You can die.

Could you please get it over with quickly, though, before you infect others? The whole point of the mask is to protect others from your pernicious vapors, so it really doesn’t help contain the pandemic for you to ramble about spewing in public.

One. More. Week.

The last day of the Fall semester is Wednesday, 25 November. I can tell I’m going to barely scrape over the finish line. Yesterday was exhausting, with my face locked into Zoom all day and early evening, and I ended up totally zombified by the time I’d suffered through my last online meeting. Today I have the morning sort of free (there’s always prep work & grading to fill in the gaps), and I’m going to use it to dart into the lab and feed the poor neglected spiders. That seems to be the only joy in my life right now, and even that has to take a backseat to wading through Zoom and clearing my backlog of grading.

Of course, this is the last week of instruction — the final surge of assignments and exams comes sailing over the transom to keep me occupied from Thanksgiving through the first week of December.

Oh, and the holidays…we’re supposed to be sensible and avoid large family gatherings, and I was thinking that maybe we could get away with a small family gathering for Thanksgiving, meeting with my daughter & her husband & the adorable granddaughter. With us, that would only be 5 people, and they all work from home and have been careful about minimizing exposure. But then I realized that I am the dirty, filthy plague rat of the family, since I have been compelled by my job to share a physical space with about 40 people per week. My presence alone would expand their bubbles to a much larger size.

It makes me very unhappy, and it isn’t fair — I’m also probably the most at-risk person for severe symptoms in the family — but it would be terrible if, in this case, it was Grandpa who was responsible for infecting the younger family members. I guess I’ll be staying home. Maybe if I quarantine myself for a month I’ll be able to meet in a tiny family gathering without worrying that I’m going to kill someone.

Actually, after this killer semester, I might be content to just lie down and take a nap for a month, anyway.