Another fun computer game you can play!

If you don’t care about birds flitting about, here’s another tool, TimeTree. It’ll let you look up the divergence time between any two species, in this case I just chose to compare myself with my house spiders.

700 million years sounds about right, but that’s just the general time since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates. Our shared ancestor would have been some nondescript little worm.

If you’re arguing with Kent Hovind, it might be useful to know that the last common ancestor of humans and bananas lived about 1.5 billion years ago; same time since we diverged from the amoeba. The paleo-proterozoic was a busy time! Or, at least the seas were full of eukaryotes then.

I have a computer, I don’t need to look up

In the olden times, before technology, at this time of year I’d normally be hearing the geese honking and I’d have to look up to see the birds flying overhead. No more! I can just check Birdcast and see how the annual migration is going. Much more data than I can gather with just my eyes.

Check out your county! It’s the only way to know what the birds are up to!

What do you think this is, Spring?

I came home this afternoon to find swarms of dispersing spiderlings — the trees and shrubs were dotted with these tiny little guys on skeins of silk trying to spread out and find new homes.


It’s October, you dopes. It’s getting cold (although this week we’re having a surge of warmer weather), it’ll snow sometime in the near future, unless you’re looking for a safe place to hunker down and overwinter, this doesn’t seem like a smart strategy to me.

Straight up Nazi shit

Trump is letting it all hang out. His recent comments are all about eugenics and race and heritable criminality.

When you look at the things that she proposes, Trump, speaking of Vice President Harris, told far-right pundit Hugh Hewitt Monday morning, they’re so far off she has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border? 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them, murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States you know now, a murderer.

I believe this. It’s in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now, Trump alleged.

None of that is true. The 13,000 convicted criminals are the sum total of all immigrants over the last 40 years; immigrants convicted of a serious crime aren’t happily living in the US, they are in jail or living as felons; immigrants have a lower rate of criminality than life-long US residents; and it has absolutely nothing to do with “genes.” Trump has no idea what genes are, he just wants to blame the ancestry or race of all immigrants somehow, as if they’re carrying some heritable taint.

Don’t berate me with technical details about what constitutes a literal Nazi, he’s a fucking Nazi in spirit and deed.

Find your own damn cause, Republican swine

My grandson is autistic. I really resent it when some Republican jerk who will do nothing for autistic people jumps on the bandwagon and lies. So this guy, Dave McCormick, booked some space in North Philly for an autism awareness event…and then instead just does a campaign event for his US Senate run. There was nothing about autism at the campaign stop, just a sleazy Republican handing out cheesesteaks and grubbing for votes.

Max’s Steaks, the cheesesteak place the event was held at, kicked him out. Good.

It was organized by a Republican operative, Sheila Armstrong, who is a member of Moms for Liberty. It’s lies all the way down.

After getting kicked out of the cheesesteak place, the sleazebags went looking for another opportunity to leech off an activist group. They saw that East Bethel Baptist Church was holding a fundraiser across the street for a food ministry…so they blithely went over there to suck off that teat. They got kicked out again.

The Rev. Thomas Edwards Jr., who leads the church, told his campaign to leave because he didn’t want the GOP candidate to use photos of his congregation for campaigning purposes.

“You can Photoshop,” he told the Inquirer. “You can make things seem like they aren’t. Maybe they’re going to post we’re eating dogs or eating cats, like in Ohio. Forgive me if I’m wrong. I don’t trust these people.”

That’s the right attitude. They’re parasites.

Racists think they’re being sneaky

Offhand, I know about a dozen interracial couples — some of them are in my family. Republican Senator Mike Braun thinks it would be fine to dissolve their marriages.

In a media call on Tuesday, U.S Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind) said that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage in a ruling that stretches back to Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

According to Braun, the decision should not have been made by the country’s highest court and instead been left to individual states. Even though some states had made interracial marriage illegal prior to the Supreme Court ruling.

They’ve discovered this handy circumlocution. They aren’t going to come right out and say that interracial marriage is wrong…oh no, they’re just going to say that we ought to permit states (that is, Republican lawmakers in some states) the right to destroy marriages, if they want. They’re playing the same game with abortion.

Come on, no one is fooled. Braun is a closet racist who has found a not-so-cunning way to signal to other racists that he’s on their side.

When you’ve lost the New York Times…

The New York Times has always been a weaselly accommodationist to Trump’s nonsense, putting a positive spin on his words and downplaying his general incoherence. That pattern might be ending — they just ran an article titled Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age. It’s scathing.

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s, there are moments when he pines for the 1890s, holding out that decade as the halcyon period of American history and William McKinley as his model president because of his support for tariffs.

It’s brutal. I’m not used to seeing this kind of analysis of Trump’s speeches from the NY Times.

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.

It’s interesting, because the NY Times is not written for us — it’s the paper of record for lawyers, stock brokers, wealthy Long Island nepo babies, the aspiring upper class, etc. Maybe the Times has detected a shift in the biases of their readership, which they are quick to pander to.

It could be a good sign of troubles for the lyin’ grifter ahead…

Posole morning

On Saturday mornings, I try to make a big pot of something that will last a few days, because Mary works such wacky hours and we usually don’t have dinner together. Today I made posole.


(Note: we’re vegetarians, so I didn’t make it with pork, just Impossible Burger. I didn’t add jalapenos, since my wife has a more delicate palate.)

This got me to wondering, though: why do we USAians associate hominy with the South, and why don’t we eat more of it, since we’re swimming in corn in this part of the world? Hominy is just nixtamalized corn, very healthful, since it enables better digestion of tryptophan and assists in the production of niacin, but it’s an Aztec/Mayan food. Are Southerners more obliged to contributions from our Mexican neighbors than is commonly acknowledged?

Also, Minnesotans should be pre-adapted to like hominy — lutefisk is just nixtamalized cod, after all.