Although…I did have some free time, so I wandered around this old theater and found some potential spiders to track down. Next time I volunteer there I’m bringing my camera to find some spiders in the old dusty parts of the building.

I’ll be very brief today — I didn’t see a movie. I was volunteering at the theater last night, but we’re at the end of our run of Supergirl, and Minions&Monsters is still going strong, so I just did my job and didn’t pay any attention to the movie. Starting tonight, we’re playing Moana, the live action version of the animated Disney movie, which I have no interest in seeing. Disney’s live-action rehashes of their old movies are never very good and suffer in comparison with the originals, so why bother?

Minions&Monsters was a big win for the theater, even on a Thursday night it brought in lots of families and lots of money for the Morris Theater Co-op. Supergirl was kind of a dud. Family movies are pretty profitable for us, and Minions seems to draw in lots of kids and their parents. I’ll be interested to see if Moana has similar appeal.

Unfortunately for me, it was so busy that I had to serve on concessions, and discovered that I don’t really know how to us a cash register. For a while, I was the bottleneck and was slowing the flow until a more practiced person took over. In addition to being slow, I made mistakes.

At the end of the movie, one person came up to me and said she was pretty sure I undercharged her, and she had me add up a few of her purchases, and she was right — I came up $9 short. So she paid me on the spot! Minnesota nice sometimes actually means nice.

OK, that’s all. I do want to mention that we’re participating in the “Better Together Film Festival”, and on Wednesday, 22 July at 7pm, we’ll be showing a free movie, The [Conserv]atives, highlighting Republicans who are bucking against the general awfulness of the Republican party to support action on climate issues.

From their information…

From summer 2021 through Donald Trump’s re-election
campaign, four Republican insiders wage an uphill battle to transform their party’s stance on
climate change from within. A young grassroots organizer, a big-city mayor, an Iowa farmer, and
an evangelical pastor — each embedded in different corners of the conservative ecosystem —
risk alienation from their own communities as they attempt to reframe climate action as a
conservative value.
As extreme weather intensifies and the 2024 election approaches, they confront a political
machine built on denial, testing whether personal conviction can overcome tribal loyalty. This is
a deeply personal story about the cost of defying your own side and the haunting question that
drives them all: will their efforts be enough before time runs out?

I’ll probably attend that one.

I am pleased to read that Charlie Kirk’s reputation is rotting as fast as his corpse. While he shouldn’t have been murdered, of course, he was a terrible person whose influence was built entirely on right-wing idiocy and fomenting hatred and contempt of women, immigrants, and brown people, and supporting a political agenda built on the same. I’m only surprised that it has taken this long for his legacy to be properly recognized.

Ten months since his assassination, Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online. Just not the way the far-right activist would have wanted.

Audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, as have ironic reposts of the apparent AI-slop song We Are Charlie Kirk, which was originally created as a posthumous tribute. He was the butt of a crude joke during the Netflix roast of the Hollywood star Kevin Hart in May. The next month, a viral tweet encouraged people to take “a shot” in his honor on Juneteenth. And a trend known as “Kirkification” has emerged, in which internet pranksters superimpose his face on to unlikely images, such as the Mona Lisa, a woman in a bikini, or Jeffrey Epstein.

This contemptuous, at times nihilistic humor marks a dramatic shift from the period immediately following Kirk’s death in September, in which conservatives sought to suppress criticism of the late Maga luminary. Hundreds of people were fired or otherwise disciplined for denouncing him (which has since resulted in several settlements over alleged first amendment violations).

Yeah, there was a ridiculous (and fortunately brief) phase in which the right-wing advocates of free speech harassed anyone who expressed their dislike of Kirk. Like, for example, this woman:

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”

She was fired for her honest and accurate opinion.

But now that vengeful attitude towards Kirk-critics is waning. Part of it, I suspect, is that Kirk’s popularity was always artificial, propped up by the wealthy supporters who funded his organization, and those props are being kicked out from under it by the rich maggots who no longer see any profit in idolizing a dead man. I also think that making Erika Kirk his successor was a major misstep — she’s a graceless, over-reaching wanna-be who is easily mocked. Just ask Druski.

Likewise, Erika Kirk is in an awkward position. She and her husband promoted traditional gender roles centered on women’s subservience. Now, she is tasked with leading a multimillion-dollar organization. She has also been memed, at times misogynistically, for her quick return to public life after Charlie’s death – another demonstration of Turning Point’s struggle to control the digital narrative.

Without broad buy-in of Erika at the helm, Turning Point is a weakened enterprise. As Leidig observed, under Charlie Kirk’s leadership, the group pushed its messaging through a calculated “top-down approach” – with a cohesive strategy, funding from prominent Republican operatives, and support from the White House. This is a sharp contrast with amorphous grassroots entities such as Fuentes’s acolytes, the Groypers, who have ascended in the vacuum left by Kirk.

That’s the bad news: Fuentes is even worse than Kirk ever was, but he is such a hideously overblown bigot that the billionaires who favor his ideas are going to be reluctant to openly support him.

You don’t say. This is a story about a professor who discovered his students will use AI to cheat.

Serrano decided that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students. El País has the story:

The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.

This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”

I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system. This professor decided to test his students.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

He should have known that the scores on the final were not going to come close to the scores on the midterm. I knew in my classes that grades were going to drop when I stopped offering online exams. I wouldn’t have offered a phony deal like that to my students.

My classes were a bit different, though. It sounds like Serrano’s econ exams consisted of a lot of essay questions which could be flooded with AI slop; my exams are much more quantitative, with questions that are answered by numbers, which you’d think would be even more susceptible to AI cheating, but where I catch students who fail to grasp the process to solve the problem. You gotta know how to ask the AI how to solve the problem to get a good answer!

But still, exam scores were notably elevated during the pandemic, so once I could rely on instruction to return to normal, I made all exams to be in-class. However, I still offer weekly online quizzes. Quiz scores are significantly elevated, but constitute less than 10% of the final grade, and I don’t have a problem with that — I tell the students to cheat freely, to collaborate with their fellow students and work through the quizzes together. That’s been a benefit, because it forces students to think through the problems in a kind of practice exercise, and if they are working together they are teaching each other.

I’ve got one more year of teaching ahead of me. I plan on sticking to this same procedure in the next two semesters.

Right away, I thought “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t sport a Nazi tattoo?”

Then there were the old internet posts, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t have a history of internet bigotry?”

Then we got the accounts of crude drunken behavior on dates, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t treat women with disrespect?”

Now the latest damning accusation has emerged, prompting Platner to finally drop out, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who haven’t raped someone?”

So I was useless on this issue, because I was too busy backing away from this growing clusterfuck. Rebecca Watson has a more forthright response.

Let’s learn to more quickly recognize disqualifying characteristics in our candidates, OK? How about if we don’t make excuses for them anymore?

@Toytime-TV
I Got you PZ…It goes like Yah, Darwin noticed adaptation and developed an expansive theory to encompass his study of that progress in an attempt to understand the nature and origin of creation because the vastness of his theory held millennia of time spans causing him see patterns and repetition throughout the ages, which caused him to then develop the theory of memetics, which sir truly is the language of the divine as it can only be understood over long periods of study, causing one to MUST believe in an Originator of the system of sequences he had uncovered. Most of your smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, even if they loosened the ideology and imagery. You can believe too PZ, being a smart man like you denotes, you must. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgYIzpSGgk

Don’t bother with the included link: it’s just an old one-eyed man dancing. No real content.

This is somehow a reply to my video in which I said that evolution wasn’t simply made up by some guy, Darwin. The comment starts out OK, saying that Darwin developed a theory to explain what he observed in nature…but then they go on to say that Darwin invented memetics (not true, you can blame Dawkins for that one), and that it is a divine language and that you MUST believe it originated in a creator. I think we’ve all heard that before. Then they tell us that the smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, and concludes with a little flattery that being a smart man I must also believe.

I guess I’m not as smart as @Toytime believes, because that is a load of horseshit.

Just ask Doug Wilson.

“If Kamala [Harris] had won the presidency, there would have been basically zero evangelicals in the White House administration,” Wilson said. “And although Donald Trump is not an evangelical by any stretch … his administration is full of them.”

Doug has something in common with Richard Dawkins.

“So probably the best illustration of this would be church bells? Yes. Minarets? No,” he said.

Why?

“Because, the public space would belong to Christ,” he added.

He also doesn’t want women to vote, let alone run for high office.

Wilson also wants to repeal women’s right to vote. When asked why, he was quick to respond.

“Because it’s a good idea,” he said, adding that he wants it replaced with household voting, with women only voting if they are the head of their household.

I voted for Kamala Harris. It’s nice that a pig like Doug Wilson is reassuring me that my vote was righteous.

Portrait of a pseudoscientist

Nathaniel Jeanson, that incompetent “geneticist” who was employed by Answers in Genesis, has a new gig: he has been hired by Columbia International University as a visiting research professor. This is not a step up in prominence. It’s actually kind of a step backwards, but the creationists will crow about the words without recognizing the meaning.

A “visiting research professor” is often a prestigious appointment, but it’s not an effective research position — it’s more of an attempt to bring a big name into connection with a university, and possibly forge new partnerships (Note: Jeanson is not a big name, except to the intellectually impoverished creationist community.) I’d be interested to know what the quid pro quo here might be, because he’s not going to improve the reputation of CIU.

Curiously, if you read that announcement from CIU, there’s no reference to Answers in Genesis anywhere in it. They name-drop Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, but the noisy loud creationist/Christian organization that has been associated with him for years? Not a whisper.

It’s unclear what they are going to accomplish with this appointment. He is still employed at AiG, they don’t discuss what his teaching duties will be, other than just talking to students. This is purely an attempt to swap titles and connections, but CIU is going to do this without openly acknowledging AiG.

This is also not going to help Jeanson’s career. CIU is a private Christian college that used to be called Columbia Bible College. It requires a whole lot of fundamentalist bullshit to graduate from there.

There are seven doctrinal points which students must consent to as a part of their admission to and candidacy for a degree from CIU. These are biblical inspiration, natural separation of humanity from God, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, the historical doctrine of the Trinity, the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer, and the evangelical mandate to witness to the gospel of Christ. The doctrine of Premillennialism is officially held by the school, but students are not required to adhere to this doctrine. CIU requires all teaching faculty to affirm Premillennialism.

That’s a fake school. It’s a Sunday School with delusions of grandeur.

I found the recipe here. If you try it, caution: the proportions there are sufficient for a whole family of 6 or more. We’re going to have chlodnik oozing out of our pores for a few days. Next time I’ll cut everything in half.

The flavor is interesting. Imagine digging up everything in a Slavic peasant’s garden, chopping it up fine, and drowning it in yoghurt, kefir, and sour cream.

It’s cold, though, which was the important criterion.

How is your desk spider doing?

Not shown: last night, we had a summer thunderstorm blow through. It was a light show with constant flashing lights that made me wonder why we bother with fireworks in July.

Remember Bryan Johnson? Here’s a reminder of his silly obsession.

Johnson famously claims to spend millions on his health each year, which goes towards keeping a personal army of doctors on hand who constantly monitor his biomarkers, and help carry out more unorthodox health interventions like swapping his blood out with his younger son’s and monitoring his nighttime boners (though he’s seemed to pare things back as of late).

Unfortunately, poor little Bryan is sick.

Bryan Johnson, in his quest for eternal youth, has been dealt a mortal blow.

Last week, the longevity-obsessed tech investor revealed that he had been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease in which his “stomach is eating itself.”

He’s got autoimmune gastritis. It’s not a mortal illness, but it is a serious and uncomfortable chronic disease, nothing to be made light of. Pity him, but don’t plan the funeral just yet.

Besides, he’s going to turn this into a profit-making drama.

But, true to his mission, Johnson believes he can biohack his way out of this gut-punch, too.

“I’m going to try and solve it,” he wrote on X. “Will share all.”

The man is rich, he already spends millions of dollars on his health every year, and gastritis is a manageable illness. I’m pretty sure he’s going to live through this, it’s just become a significantly more uncomfortable process.

But someday, he will die.

Mitch McConnell has been MIA for a few weeks. Credible sources say he’s been in the hospital since 14 June, “recovering”.

Laura Loomer says he is “brain dead” and never coming back.

Who are you going to believe? I think we’ve caught Loomer in a lie. McConnell is a Republican, if you’re going to say he’s brain dead, I’m going to ask, “how can you tell?”

Since December, CNN has featured Kalshi in a segment called “The Odds” at least 115 times. In these segments, Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, frequently suggests that Kalshi predictions are more accurate than other sources. While polling relies on volunteers, Enten repeatedly reminds CNN viewers that prediction markets are driven by people who “put their money where their mouth is.”

On January 7, Enten highlighted that, in six days, the odds on Kalshi that the United States would buy part of Greenland by the end of Trump’s first term increased from 12% to 36%. Enten said this was proof that “the people putting their money where their mouth is” are “absolutely taking this seriously.”

“Whoa… way up there now to 36%,” Enten exclaimed. “A tripling in less than a week. My goodness gracious.”

Wishful thinking by gullible people is not evidence.

The good news is that some people are trying to take down these corrupt companies.

On Monday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a total ban on futures trading platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. The Trump administration filed a lawsuit Tuesday to prevent the ban from going into place on Aug. 1, with the CFTC arguing its authority supersedes the state’s ability to regulate futures trading. Notably, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor for Kalshi and has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm.

You can tell that Kalshi and Polymarket are not to be trusted just by looking at the scumbags who are investing in it. They’re parasites all the way through. It makes me suspicious of the Young Turks that they are also taking Polymarket money.

These are just barely legal gambling sites. Let’s make them illegal.

P.S. There is no evidence that we are imminently going to get evidence that aliens exist.

I guess I’ve made it now. I got a partnership offer.

Dropping you a line because we’ve been looking closely at a select group of creators to bring into the fold for the rest of 2026. Your page jumped out at us – especially how you capture the culture around pushing boundaries and living boldly.
Nothing about it feels corporate or safe – and that’s what we need when we’re considering brand fit.
We’re not interested in a quick send-and-forget partnership – we’re aiming for something that gives you wings to do what you do best.
Want to learn more? Reply and I’ll walk you through the details. This time of year tends to move fast, so didn’t want to wait too long to connect.
Appreciate you reading this, pzmyers.

It was from Red Bull. I’m flattered by the “pushing boundaries and living boldly” comment, but no, just no. Part of my “living boldly” ethos involves rejecting corporate influence.

Also, I’ve never had so much as a sip of Red Bull, so it would be dishonest of me to promote it.

The problem isn’t conservatism, it’s authoritarianism. We are living in a country with a rising authoritarian minority that wants to shut everyone else down, and that is a problem. And that’s why Ohio is a problem — authoritarians want to dictate the content of a college education.

Ohio universities’ new centers to combat “liberal bias” aren’t popular with students, so a Republican leader wants to require attendance.

Bringing in America’s 250th anniversary, the Republican supermajority in Ohio’s legislature wants to expand civics education at colleges and universities. That hasn’t been getting the warmest of welcomes on campuses.

This puckered prune of a beancounter doesn’t like free speech

So this Republican, Jerry Cirino, has passed a new law.

S.B. 1 focuses on what Cirino calls “free speech,” banning public universities in Ohio from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, having “bias” in the classroom and limiting how “controversial topics” can and can’t be taught. “Controversial” under Ohio law includes “belief policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”

I appreciate how the report mentions that Cirino is a “free speech” advocate, and the next word is “banning”. It goes on to say that he opposes “controversial” ideas, in which he gets to categorize what ideas are to be policed. “Climate policies”? Climate change is real and has serious consequences (witness the heat wave we’re experiencing now), but Cirino wants to control discussion of what to do about it.

“electoral politics, foreign policy”…do Ohio universities lack political science and history departments?

I know Republicans hate DEI, but Ohio is a diverse state, and universities tend to hire from an international pool of academic candidates.

Ohioans can’t even discuss immigration policy? Are we just supposed to accept a conservative white man’s opinions without recourse to evidence, or the consequences, or the literature?

The primary consumers of college education are 18-22 year olds. Lord forbid that marriage and abortion be a topic of interest and concern among that group.

Jerry Cirino is a retired medical device company executive. Don’t assume that he therefore has experience in medicine or engineering, though — he has a BS in business and an MBA, and has completely foregone the kind of breadth of knowledge a typical liberal arts graduate gets, and instead has been narrowly focused on making money.

Yet he thinks he has the qualifications to overhaul higher education in Ohio? Jesus. This really is the age when incompetence rules.

I also made an Instagram reel as I strolled through the building.

Transcript below the fold.

Let me take a moment to talk about my local movie theater and my role in it, and why I’m making videos about the movies I see.

The Morris movie theater is an old institution in my town. It was built in the 1930s, and I know some of you are laughing at the idea of calling a 90 year old theater old theater “OLD”, but keep in mind that this town has only existed for about 150 years, and was incorporated in 1902. It was little more than a whistle-stop to serve a few grain elevators and a community of farmers for a long time. It’s mark of distinction was a Catholic Indian school built in the 1880s, which fortunately later evolved into a liberal arts college that employs me. This theater was an important center for entertainment in the area, and flourished during the early days of Hollywood and the development of the movie entertainment culture in America.

It had fallen on hard times, though. The entertainment industry was reliant on these small town movie houses, but the revenue has been shrinking, in part because of contract clauses that required showings, no matter whether the movie stank or not. This is why multiplexes are all over the place — because they spread the gamble out, one stinker doesn’t dominate your revenue for weeks. So one of the big steps the Morris theater had to take was to remodel and add a second theater. The main theater holds over 250 people, and the additional micro theater holds only 18, but it’s a way to dump a contractual obligation. Although…the micro theater is nice and cozy, and I actually prefer to watch movies there.

Keep in mind, though, that that was a major expense for a business with only a small revenue stream. We have a theater board that makes decisions about investments to improve the theater, and putting in a second theater was a costly one. We’re also looking at essential maintenance, like repairing the roof, and quality of life improvements, like completely remodeling the two bathrooms. We also have to be prepared for emergencies, like what if a projector dies on us? We’re also dealing with a lot of obsolete equipment. Like, would you believe the computer that controls the projector is running Windows 7? I’m always surprised by how slow that thing is.

Running a small town theater is a marginal enterprise. The only thing keeping us viable is a clever little trick: we don’t pay the staff. We’re all of us, every one, volunteers. Every one working there is invested in keeping the theater running.

So we’ve got volunteers to staff the concessions, making popcorn and running the cash register. We’ve got a volunteer accountant keeping the books for us. We have a couple of incredibly dedicated people who handle programming the scheduler and fixing things when they break down. A couple of volunteers recently came in and completely repainted the lobby, and it looks stunning now. I’m one of several projectionists: I come in once or twice a week for a three hour shift, turning everything on and counting the money in the cash box, helping out with concessions, and at the end sweeping up spilled popcorn and shutting everything down. Many hands make light work, and I’m willing to put in a few hours to help keep everything running.

All of the profits from this theater are poured back into maintenance and capital improvements. It’s a wonderful example of mutual aid and community cooperation.

Clearly, people value having a movie theater in town, even in this age of streaming services and home theaters. I assure you, if you want to focus on the movie, the theater is not the best way to optimize your finely tuned cinematic experience. The theater is a community event: we get families coming in, when we show those horrible PureFlix movies church congregations will show up, certain movies will draw in special interest groups who will bond over a shared experience. Me, I personally like the familiar surroundings and memories of past theater gatherings, the smell of popcorn, the people settling in around me. It’s worth it to me and a lot of other people.

I guess the question is…why? Why are so many people willing to sacrifice time and effort for an old theater? I don’t have a good answer, other than that we’ve adopted movies as a significant element of our secular culture, which shouldn’t be surprising, since plays predate movie technology, and story-telling with dance and masks and music and drama and comedy are human universals. I think Morris would be a poorer place without a theater.

And, after saying all that stuff about human universals and communal effort, I have to tell you that the movie this week is Minions & Monsters, the 7th in a series of animated movies featuring these strange little yellow guys who speak in incomprehensible lingo. I’ve found them kind of annoying, one of those weird cultural memes that sort of sail past my understanding, but I must confess…this movie clicked with me. There are a couple of reasons for that.

One, I just told you a bit of the history of the theater in Morris, and the plot of this movie (it actually has a plot, and a good one) revolves around film making in the 1920s … and also splices in references to movies from the 1950s and elsewhere.

Two, it included a mini-Cthulhu. The minions are trying to make a monster movie, so they use an old book to summon a monster to star, and they got this cute adorable little green tentacled thing. But they still remain true to the mythos: while he might be cute, he’s still planning to destroy the world.

Third, it is a kids movie, but it still includes enough references to classic adult movies from this era and beyond to amuse me.

And fourth, it’s a good moneymaker. Our theater relies on blockbusters to bring in the crowds to buy our popcorn (concessions are the real money-maker for the theater), and this movie sold tickets. We had lots of families come in for the show, and families buy treats to keep the kids in line.

The bad news, though, is that we were making bank at the concessions, and I had to help because we had a long line in the lobby, so I missed the first 45 minutes of the movie. It’s OK, though, because I recognized all the tropes and could fill in the blanks.

I come from a big extended family, so I had lots of brothers and sisters and swarms of cousins, and in my childhood we’d take turns staying with my grandmother and my Uncle Ed, who probably shaped my tastes in entertainment more than I am aware of. We’d go to the corner drug store and buy a bunch of comic books — which was far more feasible in an era when they cost 15 cents each — and we’d soak in the superhero milieu for a while. Then we’d go to a matinee, which would consist of Japanese kaiju or old horror movies starring Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi, and sometimes slapstick like the Three Stooges. We’d go home and watch Soupy Sales on the TV (if you don’t remember him, it would be an hour of pies thrown in faces), and later we’d watch Batman — the one with Adam West — or The Avengers — the one with Diana Rigg, rawr — and stay up late for the creature features, when Uncle Ed would usually fall asleep.

It was paradise. It also rotted our brains, so you can blame the content of current popular cinema on what Boomers grew up on. Sorry.

Anyway, the Minions & Monsters movie was all of that mixed up in a lumpy smoothie of slapstick and cheesy old horror movies, so it resonated. The audience also made me feel good about what I was doing.

There was a little girl who came up with a ten dollar bill clutched in her hand to order popcorn and candy. She was all alone and shy and very, very serious about her mission. I was impressed — she was taking her first steps towards independence and learning how to deal with the world. I hope I wasn’t too scary.

There was a little boy who was maybe getting a bit overstimulated by the movie, so he’d discharge a little energy by running up the aisle to the lobby, where we had this big poster on the wall. He’d stand in front of the poster, flex his arms, and babble at it in incomprehensible toddler-speak, which is about as comprehensible as minionese, before scampering back down the aisle to his family.

Obviously, the audience was having a good time. That’s why I’m in show business, after all!

I can’t say much about the details of the movie, because I was swamped with scooping up popcorn and filling pop orders, but I am volunteering at another showing tonight. I’m torn between hoping we get another big crowd that’ll bring in good money, and having light attendance that let’s me sneak away to actually see more of the movie.

If you want to learn more, a webcomic I’ve been subscribed to for a great many years is the Unspeakable Vault (Of Doom), at goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/, and the creator is employed by Illumination, the animation company behind all the minions movies, and he gives some of the inside story on how it was made. It’s how the uncanny valley between cosmic horror and children’s movies was populated and pacified and made safe for mass market audiences.

I recommend this movie if you have a childish heart or if you have children.

These gomers make it so hard to celebrate Independence Day

It’s Independence Day, which means most Americans are thinking about hot dogs and fireworks, neither of which interest me, and the Christian Nationalists are all reading that one line in the Declaration of Independence that represents the totality of their perspective: “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Forget the Constitution and forget that the bulk of the Declaration was an enumeration of the offenses of the British king, which the current American president is trying to repeat. The Discovery Institute is going all out on that line, with John West writing a whole book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul on their obsession. Wait…the Bible? I thought the Discovery Institute was scientific and secular!

Anyway Charles Thaxton and Stephen Meyer have written an op-ed plugging that theme. It’s terrible, muddled and sloppy, exactly what I expect for the DI.

It’s trying to argue that there are two perspectives, one God-centered that enables human dignity, and the other is scientific, which…they avoid specifying. It’s just not giving God credit, and therefore it’s implied that respect for human dignity will be somehow diminished. It’s an argument based on potential consequences which they don’t support with evidence.

Yet we in the U.S. and other Western countries, with our own familiar materialist scientific view of man, have created a curious situation. The orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity contend that man has dignity because he has been created in the image and glory of God. If the orthodox view is false, as is widely assumed in the academic and legal professions, then one must wonder how long it will be until we in the West reason correctly from a strictly scientific perception of human nature.

The religious perspective has done a poor job of supporting the value of human lives — Christian orthodoxies are all about an afterlife, and has been used to justify slavery. That half of their argument is unsupported, and they don’t bother to support it — just assume that religious beliefs are good. The other half, that science is going to diminish us, is even weaker: they don’t have evidence, we are expected to wonder how long it will be until a strictly scientific perception of human nature leads to some inevitable outcome, which we should assume will be dire.

I’m amazed at how frothy and vague their argument is. It’s the Discovery Institute, though, so they think handwaving at Darwin and Marx is sufficient to prove their thesis.

We might well remember that neither the edifice of Western technical sophistication nor the “science” of Marx, or of Darwin, can provide any firm ground for asserting these rights. Instead, productive proclamations of human rights depend upon a shared conviction that man’s dignity is inherent — safe from any political expedient — as our Western religious heritage once asserted, and as the Declaration of Independence still does

The Declaration of Independence is a 250 year old document that tried, successfully, to justify a separation from a colonial power. I don’t care if it “asserts” an 18th century view on the relationship between humanity and an imaginary god. I have a belief in man’s dignity based on an evolving humanism, not the words of a slave-holder.

Public, and especially political, references to this heritage doubtless offend the sensibilities of a secular age. Nevertheless, if the traditional understanding of man is correct, if it is not only doctrinal but factual, then governments can derive human rights from a dignity that actually exists. But if the traditional view is false and the modern scientific view prevails, then there is no dignity and human rights are a delusion, around the world and in the West as well.

Weird. So if you derive human rights from your fantasies about an invisible superman, then that actually exists. But if don’t believe in this god (and don’t forget, it has to be their specific Christian god), then human rights are a delusion. You know, humanists aren’t the ones arguing for the violation of human rights, that seems to be the domain of sectarian and racist ideologies. Thaxton and Meyer can try to wrap themselves in the thin thread of a single line in an old document, but it still leaves them naked.

I made a safe and conventional pick.

Parasteatoda tepidariorum

This is not the most glamorous spider — it’s extremely common, found in pretty much every home (although you may not know about them!), and represents a diverse group of invertebrate predators. In the last few decades it has become a useful standard model system in developmental biology. This spider is a workhorse for science!

They’re also pretty. I’ve got one on my computer desk, in a vial, and I occasionally give her a mealworm. She’s a quiet and pleasant pet.

Imagine that Donald Trump offered me a prestigious and profitable position in his administration (that’s not going to happen). I’m on the edge of retirement, and would love to have a nice comfortable position for my twilight years, so maybe you think I’d be tempted. I would not. I am not going to trash my own integrity to get some advantage. That would be the last thing I’d ever consider, and would feel a deep shame if I were to accept it, because everything Trump touches turns to crap.

In other words, I’m not Avi Loeb.

A polarizing Harvard astronomer known for splashy theories about alien visits has been tapped by the Trump administration to lead a team of outside scientists to study the national security risks posed by UFOs.

Avi Loeb, a cosmologist who studied black holes and served as head of Harvard’s astronomy department until 2020, was recently appointed to helm a new scientific advisory council tasked with investigating the origins of mysterious orbs and other objects reported by military personnel in recent years.

Loeb has made a career of pushing patently nonsensical bullshit. That’s not just my opinion, the scientific community in general thinks he’s a con artist.

His theories have won praise in UFO circles but often put him in conflict with academic peers. Other astronomers accuse him of making exotic claims with little evidence. Some chafe at his habit of skipping the peer review process and bringing claims directly to the public.

Steve Desch, an Arizona State University astrophysicist who has challenged some of Loeb’s theories, said Loeb uses flawed methods to reach wild conclusions about alien life — all while shunning a more established branch of science searching for life beyond Earth.

Loeb’s role on the administration’s new panel casts doubt on the entire endeavor, Desch said.

“I don’t know what’s going to come of this, but we’re not going to get any closer to answering these questions with him in charge,” Desch said.

Loeb has been artificially propped up by the grifter administration. Let’s hope he comes crashing down hard in a few years, and learns regret.

Confirming the terrible quality of this panel, Michael Shermer has also been appointed to it.

Why is it that all questions about atheism and evolution by the True Believers rest on false premises? Answer that one for me, ma’am.

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

I remember the 200th anniversary celebration. You may recall that Gerald Ford was the president then, but he didn’t issue bicentennial coins with his face on them, or hire a religious organization to lead the event, or appear prominently in any of the celebrations that were going on — it was generally non-partisan. It was also a weird political era, since we’d just chased Nixon out of office in 1974 for his criminal chicanery. May I suggest that we do something similar to celebrate the semiquincentennial? That would be a lovely tradition to continue.

As we’ve come to expect from the Trump crime family, it was all about the money, funneling it into their personal pockets. This is an outrageous level of corruption.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There is one phrase you hear repeated over and over again, from TPUSA and PragerU and the White House: our rights are not given to us by the government, but by God. I always thought those rights were derived from the people, but that slogan is being pushed everywhere in the Freedom250 propaganda train.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the Revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

For a thorough breakdown of all the ways Freedom250 is lying to us, and in particular an analysis of the “Freedom Trucks” that PragerU was paid $14 million to deliver, I recommend the following video. That $14 million was stolen from public libraries and museums. It’s 45 minutes long, well worth it for the righteous anger and disgust it will generate.

It ends with a call to action: visit the American Library Association for things you can do to save our libraries and the propagation of a truer history.

Also, fuck Dennis Prager, Erica Kirk, and every member of the Trump family.

Your date has bright green teeth, and there’s a bug caught in them. What do you do?

Well, sort of. Researchers in the College of Biological Sciences on the Twin Cities campus have created a synthetic cell from scratch that has many of the properties of evolved cells, but they also have significant limitations. Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart have combined 7 plasmids in a lipid bubble, that they’ve called a spudcell, that can do many of the cool things that natural cells can do.

This is likely the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” said Adamala. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.

You can almost hear the mad cackle. So what can it do?

Among the characteristics of SpudCell:

• Replicates a biological cell’s life cycle: SpudCell is capable of selection, genome replication, growth, resource acquisition via feeding, and genetically encoded division.
• Cell division without a cytoskeleton: Natural cells divide using internal scaffolding called a cytoskeleton, which has been a bottleneck in synthetic cell research. SpudCell sidesteps the need for a cytoskeleton with proteins that crowd together on the membrane surface until the mechanical stress makes the membrane split.
• Selection and competition: Researchers introduced a genetic change that increased production of the fusion protein, resulting in cells that grew faster and produced more offspring. After five generations, the faster-growing variant had outcompeted the original. Under nutrient scarcity, the advantage increased, demonstrating selection and competition operating in a fully synthetic chemical system.

It’s basically a minimal, defined biochemical system in a liposome, with a tiny genome. It doesn’t have any organelles (other than ribosomes), and is a uniform soup of enzymes, which is why I think they called it a SpudCell, because it’s got all the character of a potato. You can read a preprint which gives all the details.

The system contains 36 purified enzymes, a 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine separate DNA molecules, and a lipid membrane. SpudCell is able to grow, replicate its genome, divide, and undergo selection and competition across multiple generations.

The preprint also discusses some of the major limitations of this system. It’s not going to compete with natural cells, and it will die out within a few generations if released. It needs to be fed specially prepared liposomes filled with nutrients that can spontaneously fuse with the cells, which is kind of cheating. But also…

• Building ribosomes from genetic instructions. SpudCell currently uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria. Without the capability to remake ribosomes, SpudCell runs for 5-10 generations before the machinery degrades. Building ribosomes from scratch means synthesising dozens of proteins and RNA molecules, then getting them to assemble in the right order.
• Improving genome distribution. After five generations, about 30% of daughter cells have the complete set of seven DNA plasmids. Natural cells solve this with cytoskeletal machinery that pulls chromosomes apart during division. SpudCell does not have that yet, and better genome inheritance will need more sophisticated division mechanisms.
• Reducing dependence on external feeding. Nutrient-carrying liposomes have to be added regularly, and division requires streptavidin and molecular linker proteins from outside. Making the system more autonomous will require building metabolic pathways that can synthesize components from simpler starting materials.

It’s not sophisticated enough to assemble its own ribosomes, which is a major limitation. It’s going to need at least an order of magnitude more complexity to do that.

I’m more interested in the lack of a cytoskeleton. You’ve got 23 pairs of chromosomes in your cells, and the cytoskeletal machinery in mitosis works to guarantee that each daughter cell inherits the same 23 pairs; there are cells that don’t have that cytoskeleton, and they can do just fine with a single strand of circular DNA, but these SpudCells have at least 7 separate plasmids that have to be sorted. They rely on chance distribution of the plasmids to daughter cells, so they have to point out that after 5 generations 70% are nonviable.

What it’s good for is that it’s greatly reduced, bare-bones cell where every component is precisely known so you can track every molecule for at least a few generations. There are toy cells, but good educational toys.

Of course, you have to remember that it’s probably got the texture of a spongecake, and those long arms are there to collect marine snow, so don’t invite her on a dinner date and don’t expect intimacy, unless you like limp noodles. She’s all show.