They want me to take down a post they call “Page One”, which I called How not to build a coalition, in which I reported that the Secular Policy Institute tried to recruit the Feminist Freethinkers to align with them by saying I’m starting to believe that the reason the secular movement doesn’t have more women is the women. Prove me wrong, which is something of an own goal. That post from 12 years ago they have now decided was defamatory.

They also want me to delete “Page Two”, a post that is only ten years old, titled Which do I dislike more, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Johnny Monsarrat? That one is both defamatory and copyright-infringing, because it links to a post about the unsavory and unethical behavior of one Jonathan Monsarrat, who is somehow involved with the Secular Policy Institute. I also include a formal, professionally photographed image taken directly from the publicly available, at that time, Secular Policy Institute, which showed Edwina Rogers in a group shot including Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and a few other people. They want that taken down. She may not like being seen together with Richard Dawkins, since a few years earlier Rogers had been suing Dawkins and the Secular Coalition of America.

I know. Ten years ago, there was a Secular Policy Institute and a Secular Coalition of America, along with many other godless organizations that have faded into the dim shadows of history, and they were suing each other. But of course, I was the problem that was splintering the whole movement.

Anyway, this new demand has added a “Page Three” that must be deleted — it’s the post from last month in which I mentioned “Page One” and “Page Two”! I think that means that next month they’ll have to send me revised demands that will include a “Page Four”, which will be this post you are reading right now. I think we’re trapped in a time loop.

They have an additional complaint about “Page Three”.

By demanding that “Someone needs to mention Barbra Streisand to these people,” your newest article could be interpreted as a call to encourage additional defamation against Ms. Rogers, her organization and her colleagues.

Wheee! I guess mentioning Barbra Streisand is now stochastic terrorism, and I am an agent of chaos.

They conclude by demanding the takedown of “Page One,” “Page Two,” and “Page Three” by August 12 2026, and have also added a confidentiality clause.

3. Confidentiality: Agree that the contents and existence of the parties’ settlement are confidential, including the settlement communications culminating in the settlement. Neither the contents nor existence of the settlement, nor communications leading to the settlement, may form the basis of future articles, blogs, or posts on Freethoughtblogs.com or anywhere else.

That’s the “Shut up and don’t expose our idiocy anymore” clause. Sorry, I don’t play that game.

At an AIDS conference in Rio, the representatives of the United States put up this map:

That’s a slap in the face of every attendee at that meeting. It’s a declaration that the USA does not care enough to get basic geography right. I apologize. Our only excuse is that we have elected idiots and assholes to run our country, which is, of course, no excuse at all.

In case you are wondering, here’s a rather more accurate map of the continent.

Africa Political Map

You realize how trivially easy it is to get a map of Africa off the internet, right? They couldn’t even do that.

I agree with Jamelle Bouie that we need to push harder.

As he points out at the end, all of Musk’s enterprises seem to be papier mache facades. OK, SpaceX has a good technological core because he bought good engineers, but everything else is falling apart (and even SpaceX is floundering lately). He’s not worth a trillion dollars…and that already fell apart fast. Now is the time to make him squirm more over Tesla and Hyperloop and Neuralink and his fake androids and the hash he’s made of Twitter. He’s so mentally unstable it’ll prompt an unseemly collapse.

Then we have to work on Bezos…

I’ve never been much of an alcohol drinker — the example of my alcoholic grandfather kept me wary of the stuff — but I’ve gotten even more extreme over the course of the last few years and am a teetotaler now. I just figure I don’t need to add to the problems of aging with something that’s stacking on other difficulties.

But there is one event that might make me temporarily end my abstinence. When Donald Trump dies, I’m going to have a margarita. Just one. I might even be moved to dance.

If the conservative powers-that-be have their way, such behavior would be illegal.

A popular brewery that promised free beer to its patrons upon the death of President Donald Trump is having its alcohol permit revoked.

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue is planning to shut down the Minocqua Brewing Company by August 4, according to a newsletter published Sunday by brewery owner Kirk Bangstad, who described the business as “the state’s most progressive brewery.”

Please let it be known to MAGA that conservatives want to prohibit the sale of beer.

“COVID “”Cures”””

Anthony Fauci was hauled up in a senate hearing where ignorant, ideologically-poisoned buffoons like Rand Paul harangued him with absurd accusations. He rightly responded by taking the fifth — there is no point in arguing with delusional idiots. At one point, Paul had Fauci’s lawyer thrown out of the hearing.

Dr Anthony Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, has refused to answer questions at a high-profile congressional hearing, accusing a Republican senator of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.

Fauci, the veteran former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination when appearing before a Senate committee on Wednesday.

Fauci said Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul had, who called the hearing, led a years-long investigation into himself and the origins of the pandemic aimed at “embarrassing and intimidating me”, and ultimately landing him “behind bars”.

This is the way. Paul’s harassment was ultimately fruitless, except that the current political regime gave him the opportunity to try and browbeat an 85 year old scientist who had espoused a rational, evidence-based approach to the COVID pandemic. Fauci’s approach reflected the scientific consensus.

A 2024 survey of virologists from the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute found that most believed the pandemic began as a so-called spillover event, or a virus jumping from an infected animal to a human. Similarly, a group of virologists argued in the Journal of Virology that the “preponderance” of evidence points to a natural origin, even as the “lab leak” theory received outsized attention. Gain-0f-function research, meanwhile, has split the scientific community for years.

There is no good evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. It’s just a xenophobic contrivance made up to place the blame on China. It’s a political distortion of the evidence.

What was most bizarre is that Rand Paul exposed Fauci’s diary, in which he stated his opinions about certain political figures (and some journalists) without any diplomatic hesitations.

The scheduled hearing comes just days after Paul released what he described as Fauci’s “diary”, a more than 1,100-page document characterized as revealing Fauci’s inner conflicts about the lab leak theory. Scientists have said this is a normal part of scientific debate.

The diary also contained entries about Trump, who he advised closely during the early days of the pandemic. He described the president as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.

Hey, that was also just an echo of the scientific consensus! Trump is a bumbling incompetent. Some of us have been unabashedly saying that in public for many years. I would just rebuke Fauci for hiding his feelings away in his private notes. Let it all hang out, Anthony! It’s not as if being reserved about your true feelings has spared you any suffering at the hands of morons like Paul.

The true purpose of the hearing was obvious — the goal was to intimidate scientists from speaking out about biomedical approaches to disease, and to pander to all the frauds and influencers who profit off medical misinformation.

Gary Peters, a Democratic senator of Michigan, described the hearing as damaging to science and ignoring ongoing public health threats, such as the outbreak of the food-borne parasite cyclospora and measles, both at record highs.

“It’s attempting to turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations’ were responsible for handling,” said Peters, who did not ask Fauci any questions. “This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service.”

While the politicians are scapegoating Fauci, they’re giving a free pass to the MAHA goons who have enabled a cyclospora outbreak, watered down food safety regulations, and fueled criminal anti-vax mythologies that are allowing a measles comeback. The USA is at risk of losing our measles elimination status, thanks to people like RFK jr.

These people ought to be more self-aware. If they can drag the guy who successfully led the fight against the pandemic, I’m hoping we have the opportunity someday to turn the tables and confront the disease enablers with the butcher’s bill. There’s a better case to be made that they caused millions of deaths.

My Wednesdays all this month have been consumed with running errands to Alexandria, which have been worsened by the fact that the AC in our car is dead. I’ve just spent a couple of hours in a car with windows rolled down and a roaring hot wind blowing past me. I’m slumped in a puddle of sweat right now.

OK, a distraction: anyone else remember the Hot Stuff comics? How about Wendy, the good little witch, and Casper, the friendly ghost? That’s the trinity that provided me with all of my theological training. It wasn’t any less contradictory and silly than the nonsense the Lutheran church tried to stuff me with, and it was more amusing and more ethical than anything in the Bible.

Jake Paul has inspired me. He’s this terrible YouTuber who made a lot of money with stupid prank videos aimed at kids who then bought his way into a boxing “career”, where he paid washed-up boxers to fight him, but not too hard. His last big match, he had his jaw shattered by his opponent. So now he’s talking about going to Stanford to get some football experience (hint: that’s not why you go to Stanford) or going straight to the pros, the Cleveland Browns or the Dallas Cowboys. He’s out of his mind. He dropped out of high school, so forget Stanford. Football is a tough sport, especially pro football, and he hasn’t trained for the skills you need to play the game. He is so incredibly delusional.

But then…he gets specific and says he wants to play “slot receiver”, whatever that is. And Rick Strom lets us know that the expected weight range for that position is 190-205 pounds.

Wait a minute. I’m in that weight range. I’m going to be looking for something to do in the Spring, maybe that’s a retirement option for me. It’s no more insane that a 70 year old man (with 80 year old knees) might try to turn pro football slot receiver than that Jake Paul might go for it.

One difference: my top choice would be the Seattle Seahawks, with the Minnesota Vikings as backup possibility. Call me, team.

Her web is in a great location, because she had a second dragonfly trussed up and awaiting consumption.

These are top predators in their community, except for the birds. But the birds don’t want to stick their beaks in a sticky web.

I used to do a little Forth programming…in the 1980s. Sing out if you’re a wizened ancient nerd who gets the joke.

Emily Wilson has written a review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey! She’s the author of an excellent translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, one that Nolan himself mentioned as an inspiration, so she is one of the best qualified people to judge the movie.

She starts off diplomatically.

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

Uh-oh. I think she had mixed feelings about the movie.

As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention.

It’s been playing at the Morris Theater for going on two weeks, and one thing I’ve noticed while working concessions is how loud this movie is. Thumping, shrieking, clanging at high volume while I’m trying to take a popcorn order — it’s been an epic struggle. But yes, I agree about the flatness of the characters. One of the most notable moments of acting in the film is when Ann Hathaway’s Penelope cuts loose and expresses the complexity of her feelings — anger, resentment, confusion — to Tom Holland’s Telemachus, but mostly she’s seen as a quiet, reserved figure behind a screen.

I also expected more from Argos. In the movie, the suitors toss the old dog onto a dung pile, and when Odysseus returns, the dog notices…and simply dies. Blink and you’ll miss it. It was an opportunity to humanize Matt Damon’s Odysseus, and it was allowed to pass.

Another complaint: the Americanization of the violence.

But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

I just finished reading a translation of The Odyssey last night — Emily Wilson’s, in fact — and that jumped out at me. In the bloody massacre of the suitors, as Odysseus goes on his killing spree, Homer doesn’t dwell on the gore, but instead names each man as they are murdered, and sometimes goes on to talk about their fathers, and maybe some notable feature of their character. Many of them are terrified and beg for mercy. It’s a much more impactful way of dramatizing the slaughter, rather than showing a knife going into Antinous’s throat.

The book also details many events that the movie omitted. I’d forgotten what a compulsive liar Odysseus was. Multiple times he lies to people he encounters, giving his cover story about being from Crete, with elaborate details about his background. When he finally meets Penelope again, the first thing he does is spin a long story about his alias, all of it entirely unnecessary, but “liar” is one of his epithets, so I guess he has to do it.

Also omitted from the movie is his treatment of the female slaves who slept with the suitors. He gets his head household slave to rat them out, puts them to work cleaning out all the dead bodies and gore in his palace, and then pitilessly hangs them so they die kicking and struggling. It’s not a pretty story, but fortunately, Matt Damon did not have to deal with such complications.

Wilson has her gripes, especially with the screenplay, but still ends on an upbeat note.

Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

The movie got me to re-read The Odyssey, so I’m an example of that. I’ve always championed the importance of the humanities in education, so nothing new there, and sorry, no, I’m not going to study ancient Greek, but maybe more people will.

It’s a great essay from an expert. If it’s too long for you, Wilson has also posted an abbreviated bullet-point version of her main points on BlueSky. Also do see the movie — your local theaters appreciate it — but I think it would be a good idea to bring earplugs.

Of course an old teratologist is going to immediately check the number of digits and conformation of the palate. Looking good so far!

(also it wouldn’t matter if he has six toes and a facial abnormality — still my grandson.)

There are ~7500 languages signed and spoken in the world today, and they have a wide range of grammatical structures, vocabularies, speech sounds, signs, and usage rules. The study of language diversity has brought distinctive insights into how human behavior and cognition are shaped by ecological, social, and communicative pressures. The observable limits of linguistic diversity—features that are either universally present or absent in the world’s languages—have been at the core of what makes humans a distinctive species. Insights into language have also been used to understand other dimensions of human variation and homogeneity, including cultural and psychological traits. Over the past 500 years, all evidence points to a large systematic decrease in linguistic diversity, in parallel with the spread of a handful of behemoth languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi. Nearly 5 billion people use at least 1 of the 10 most common languages, whereas half of the world’s languages are now endangered, and about four become dormant every year. This results in the loss of cultural and scientific knowledge embedded in minority languages and contributes to the unequal development in science, technology, medicine, and education that predominantly benefits speakers of the world’s largest languages.

I’m sure speakers of Anishinaabe recognize the definite advantages of speaking English, or maybe Mandarin in a few years, but they still want to retain a connection with their ancestors. Something similar happened to my immigrant great-great-grandparents — they spoke Norwegian, lived in communities of fellow Norwegian immigrants, and right up to my great-grandparents generation, were learning Norwegian and speaking it in church and family gatherings, but my generation has completely adopted the dominant English language of my region. We might still occasionally say “uff-da” or have lutefisk and lefse on holidays, but otherwise, we’re totally assimilated.

So about 4 languages a year are disappearing. The authors of that paper have attempted to quantitatively estimate the number of languages spoken over our history, and it’s surprising how much we’ve lost.

Fig. 4. Marginal results of our model aggregated across all conditions.
(A) The number of languages through the Holocene. Lighter shades of the curve correspond to progressively wider intervals comprising 10 to 90% of the predictions. Black lines indicate the interval containing 70% of the predictions.

Whoa. That’s a pretty sharp peak and a rather precipitous decline. The authors propose an explanation of what was going on.

Typically, the total number of languages has been increasing for most of the Holocene, mimicking the global expansion of human populations. This suggests that the rise of large-scale regional powers 4000 years ago did not generally and immediately deter the growth of linguistic diversity. Instead, most trajectories reached a maximum of 1000 to 3000 yr B.P. Although there is wide uncertainty in our estimates, most trajectories display an approximately 10-fold increase in the number of languages between the early Holocene and this point. This period, harboring tens of thousands of languages, has escaped previous theorizing.
In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia. The process unfolded so quickly that the rate of language loss must have been even faster than the current pessimistic forecasts for the year 2100.

As populations grew, the number of languages also grew…until the rise of large empires and increased trade and communication, when a few successful dominant groups swallowed up the smaller populations. This model also makes the evolution of various languages non-adaptationist — some languages thrive, not because they are superior to other languages, but because they are piggy-backing on other properties of their population. Don’t bother trying to argue that English is better than Spanish, because what really matters is the strength and success of the population speaking the language. Languages don’t die because they’re inferior, but because they’re taken over by an expanding population.

It follows that this massive and biased reduction in linguistic diversity has shaped the relative abundance of different language traits. However, functional factors (such as learnability, efficient communication, or computational costs) are typically invoked instead to explain why some language traits are more common than others. But the intensity and recency of the linguistic diversity bottleneck make it a clear nonfunctional null hypothesis for understanding any skewed linguistic distribution.

Cool. I do have to envy linguists because at least they don’t get stupid demands like “Show me an Italian giving birth to a baby speaking Thai.” A lot of the elements of language evolution are similar to the properties of biological evolution, and seem to be equally incomprehensible to the ignorant.

I’ve always thought of Nick Bostrom as a font of bad ideas, but that’s not his self-estimation. He considers himself a genius!

Bostrom considers himself to be a towering intellect of cosmic-historical importance. He is not shy when boasting about his supposed accomplishments, even quoting on his website an article that describes him as the “Swedish superbrain.” For many years, he bragged that — to quote his profile on Edge.org — “his performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden,” though he backed away from this after Simon Knutsson pointed out that there is no evidence to support such a claim. (See the “Potentially Dishonest Self-Promotion” section of this article.)

The kinds of ideas he claims to have come up with are, for instance, the belief that AI represents an existential risk comparable to a nuclear holocaust which must nevertheless be pursued zealously, making him a hero to the capitalists building massive data centers right now. He also promotes the belief that potential people could be so numerous that it’s more valuable to create conditions that enable space flight and virtual people in computers than to actually help the poor and develop an egalitarian politics, again endearing him to the hyper-rich.

In brief, the paper argues that if we colonize space — especially as digital posthumans — the future population could be enormous. Bostrom estimates some 10^38 digital people within the Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of galaxy clusters that includes our own Milky Way. (That’s a 10 followed by 38 zeros, by the way.)

If one accepts a utilitarian perspective, this means the expected value of ensuring the realization of all those future people (assuming they have net-positive lives) far exceeds the value of, e.g., helping poor people today. If you’re a truly altruistic person who aims to maximize your philanthropic impact, then you should focus not on present-day people but those living perhaps millions or billions of years from now. It’s not that future digital people are inherently more valuable. It’s just a numbers-game: there are so many more of them (potentially) than present-day people, they overwhelm the simplistic equations of utilitarianism’s moral mathematics.

Bostrom’s conclusion is that we should colonize the universe as soon as possible, because every single century, decade, and even second of delaying this results in an “astronomical” loss of potential value — i.e., the non-existence of people who could have otherwise been created in some distant galaxy if only we had started colonizing just a bit sooner. However, Bostrom also concludes that “priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Space colonization should therefore be priority number five once we secure our survival. Perhaps you can see why Musk loves this paper.

It’s an incredibly stupid idea — it also has ties to eugenics and natalism and other flawed beliefs — and I have weird feelings about this article. It’s mainly functioning to excuse Bostrom from fault. Bostrom didn’t come up with all these bad ideas! No, he just stole all of them. He doesn’t have original ideas!

Yet, because I’m so conversant with the foundational literature of the TESCREAL movement, I’ve noticed that a large number of the “original,” “novel,” even (supposedly) “groundbreaking” ideas attributed to Bostrom actually originated with other thinkers. As early as 2018, I was posting about this on social media and privately sharing examples with colleagues — some of whom were rather shocked to see Bostrom’s work juxtaposed with that of others (from whom he borrowed without sufficient attribution). I wrote to one colleague that Bostrom’s “genius” seems to be taking ideas from other theorists and repackaging them in his own language such that they’re just different enough for him to avoid being accused of intellectual plagiarism. His oeuvre reminds me of the line, often misattributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

It’s a long and thorough article, and traces Bostrom’s soft plagiarism back to multiple sources, but one of them is notorious crackpot and self-promoter Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying?

On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it’s unlikely to have anything like the impact of “Science, the Endless Frontier.”

“Gold standard”? So he wants to buy some cheap crap from Home Depot, spray paint it gold, and call it science?

Jesus, but he made the oval office kitschy and cheap, and now he’s going to give science the same treatment.

Wyoming students aren’t allowed to get a degree in philosophy.

Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy.

It is unclear what the justification for this decision is.

It’s not unclear at all. Wyoming is a very Republican state, and the people who run the government there are doofuses who’ve never taken a philosophy course or even thought about philosophy. Ignorance breeds ignorance.

Tom the Dancing Bug

I think the threat that a whole civilization will die is kind of like the prophecy that Delphi gave to Croesus. Another phrase associated with Croesus is “Count no man happy until the end is known”, and I’m waiting for the ending.

I’m hoping the end will be something like that of another fabulously wealthy man of the ancient world, Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Oh no. I’m getting so old. Now my oldest son, Alaric, and his partner, Katarina, have announced that they are expecting, and that we can expect our third grandchild in November. We’ve been sent a gift registry and have been invited to a baby shower next week. I guess this is real. This will also mean that each of our 3 children have produced one grandchild each.

The baby is a boy, and they’re planning to name him Vittorio, after his mather’s grandfather.

It’s weird how we suddenly start thinking we need more grandkids, because they’re so fun and we don’t have to do any of the work. Three’s enough, and it’s actually four, since this event brings along an additional boy from a previous relationship. I guess I should be calling myself Grandpa⁴, but I don’t want to encourage an increasing series of exponents.

Also, the baby shower is going to have a Lilo&Stitch theme to explain the illustration above. That’s not a picture of the baby, but I won’t complain if he’s big-eared, furry blue, with big teeth. He’ll fit in perfectly with the rest of us weirdos.

I’m not showing you the video, because next…he takes a big swig of the rotten, curdled milk, and I nearly lost it. Would you drink any milk, let alone raw milk, that had been left to fester in the sun for a few days? I wouldn’t make you watch that.

But if you insist, here’s a link to instagram. Mmmm. Warm lumps of slimy coagulated milk.

Then he insists that it was probably better for him than when it was fresh, because the bacteria have had time to culture and develop more complexity. He reassures us that it is totally safe.

The raw milk fanatics are totally insane.

What if a documentary was made to bridge the divide between conservatives and liberals, and it only showed the conservative perspective, while liberals are asked to just listen? And what if the only people to show up to watch the documentary were liberals? That was my experience at the movies last night.

Last night, the Morris Theater was a host for the 3rd annual Better Together film festival. This is an event in which theaters all around the country are encouraged to show documentaries that encourage communication between conflicting groups — it’s supposed to heal the polarization that is so strong right now.

The Better Together Film Festival is an initiative designed to bring communities together through powerful storytelling. Launched in 2024, the festival aims to provide a platform for films that highlight efforts to bridge divides and promote unity in an increasingly polarized world. Each screening is followed by an opportunity for meaningful discussion, helping audiences reflect on key themes and build connections within their communities. By showcasing diverse perspectives and real-life stories, the festival encourages people to listen first and engage in productive conversations that foster understanding and empathy.

That’s a high-minded goal, and I agree that communication is absolutely important. I was a little concerned about that “listen first” idea, though. If everyone listens first, won’t we all just be sitting silently, looking at each other? Or is the unstated intent really for one side to shut up and listen to the other? Maybe this could be done in some way, I don’t know how, to get both sides to respect the other’s perspective, but there’s an awful lot of ill will in the country that isn’t going to be reconciled with a movie.

Also, The Minnesota Council of Churches is one sponsor of this event, which puts me on high alert already.

Churches have been builders of peace in the midst of conflict for millennia. There are many different ways to practice peace and build it – Respectful Conversations being only one. Practice another way to manage conflict, boost empathy, strengthen relationships, promote social cohesion, support democracy, and build bridges by attending a Better Together Film Festival screening.
Through the Better Together Film Festival Minnesota congregations and other communities partner with national and international peacebuilding and entertainment professionals. Watching a values-based movie or documentary about people bridging their divides actually makes us more ready to be peacemakers ourselves.

Churches have only rarely been builders of peace — just look at the Middle East right now, where religions are excuses for violent bloody rebellion and genocide. Is this film festival propaganda for lies?

But let’s give them a choice. The Morris Theater was showing a documentary called The [Conserv]atives, for free, and invited everyone in town to come, and promised a post-movie discussion between community members. I didn’t like the gimmicky title — how do you pronounce that, open-square-bracket conserv close-square-bracket atives? And if you don’t include the brackets, it’s just pronounced “Conservatives”, as if it’s just about one side. I guess my worry that the theme here was for one side to shut up and listen was valid.

So I showed up for this movie, to give it a chance. Here’s how the theater advertised it:

As extreme weather intensifies and the 2024 election looms, four Republicans embedded in different corners of the conservative ecosystem wage an uphill battle to transform their party from within—testing whether personal conviction can survive tribal loyalty.

It’s a documentary about conservation, the environment, and climate change, told entirely from the perspective of four Republicans. Fortunately for my sanity, these are four Republicans who take the rational position that climate change is real, caused by humans, and is a serious threat that must be addressed.

One is an activist who is trying to build a climate coalition within the Republican party. We see tiny little meetings, poorly attended, surrounded by protesters who accuse him of being a Republican in name only and claim that climate change is a hoax.

Another is the mayor of Miami, who recognizes that the changing climate is a threat to his city. He doesn’t seem to be doing much, other than posturing for candidacy to president of the US.

The third is a preacher AND climatologist, although suspiciously, they don’t present her credentials for calling herself a climatologist. I’ll accept it as given, just like I accept her qualifications to speak for god. She mainly is shown promoting a religious perspective.

The final conservative is an Iowa farmer, who actually seems to be doing something, teaching people about soil conservation and cover crops. He’s the only one of the four I could actually respect, because he was taking a pragmatic approach to a real problem.

The documentary bounces about between those four, showing that they are sincerely concerned about climate change and are talking to their Republican colleagues about environmental issues. Good for them. But the problem is that this is an unrepresentative sliver of the conservative movement — the documentarians had to stretch to find a small minority who are sensible on climate change, and we just pretend the majority, who are batshit delusional, don’t exist.

Further, they had to be very specific on their topic. They only talk about the environment, and studiously avoid any other Republican issue. I guess that’s fine, to tune the movie to their chosen topic, but all the other issues are also relevant.

The question I had in my mind, that was never asked, was, “OK, you’re genuinely concerned about the environment. So why are you a Republican, a party that has openly declared war on the environment and denies the existence of climate change? What makes you identify with a party hostile to your goals?”

Because that’s the missing piece of the puzzle. What is there in the Republican party that warrants rescuing them from their folly about the environment? There’s got to be a hidden motivation. Maybe they hate immigrants, or the gays, or want to wage war on foreign countries, or are fans of the bogus great replacement theory. Or maybe they have a misplaced dedication to tradition, and are Republicans because their grandparents were. Or they believe all Democrats are godless commies (they aren’t, you know — Democrats love money as much as Republicans do.) We aren’t told. We’re supposed to sympathize with these four on one single issue, and pretend all the baggage they carry doesn’t exist.

As you might guess, I despised this feeble attempt at namby-pamby, middle-of-the-road appeasement of wretched conservative Republicans. I have my own idea of how we should respond to these parasites.

This film festival wasn’t even effective in its conciliatory goals. About a dozen people turned out for the showing last night. Every single one of them was a liberal. Not one single Republican showed up to “listen,” even for a documentary that was entirely sympathetic to the Republicans.

You want more evidence of stupidity? Here’s another example. There’s so much more on her YouTube channel.

She also rejects evolution for the dumbest reasons.

We evolutionists say we all evolved from one-celled organisms, but we don’t have any 2-cell or 3-cell organisms. Checkmate, atheists!

She’s all over social media. She doesn’t just pester atheists with her nonsense, but there are also lots of videos that start Hey Christians, Hey Hindus, Hey Buddhists, Hey feminists, Hey vegetarians, etc., etc., etc. all with the same sort of stupid gotcha claims. She is incredibly obnoxious. I’ve long been in the habit of instantly scrolling away when that face and the word Hey… appears.

She not only has a huge personal following, but she claims to have built a charitable organization, the Lily Jay Foundation, which has been opening up orphanages and mosques all over Africa. Or has it?

The foundation she recently established, the Lily Jay Foundation, also has a massive following.

Its logo often adorns banners that appear in her videos, usually fixed behind her.

In one of those videos, posted in February, viewers are introduced to “our newest children in Africa”.

They wear white T-shirts, adorned with the same Lily Jay Foundation logo and the Ugandan flag.

“We washed them, gave them new clothes, everything a child needs to grow up in a positive environment,” the voiceover says, over images of happy children.

Except…these propaganda videos all seem to be made with AI.

The woman who appears at the start of the video, enthusiastically announcing the establishment of the orphanage, is not the real Lily Jay.

This blonde woman is a fabrication, made with artificial intelligence. So too are the children with lollipops, and the foundation’s banner behind her.

Further, no one seems to be able to find these charitable constructs via independent sources.

The Ugandan Registration Services Bureau initially confirmed to ABC NEWS Verify that there was no orphanage registered under the Lily Jay Foundation name, or “Ada Nur”, the name Lily Jay has given to the orphanage on her website.

It turns out the foundation isn’t even registered as a charity — it’s a logistics firm.

The Lily Jay Foundation registered its first ABN in 2025, but at the bottom of the foundation’s website is the admission that it is not an actual charity.

“Lily Jay Foundation is a next-generation social enterprise and high-speed humanitarian logistics firm executing rapid aid deployment in global crisis zones,” it read.

“To maintain absolute speed and independence, we operate as a private commercial structure funded by voluntary project sponsorships, which fuel our high-speed supply chain and are currently not tax-deductible.”

If you’re curious about what anyone would have to gain by setting up a fake charity, or why they would do it, the answer is simple.

Lily Jay — real name Lily Jay Hinson — does not appear to currently reside in Australia and details about the 31-year-old’s life are difficult to pinpoint.

Her social media account shows a life of jet-setting luxury, business class travel and expensive-looking jewellery.

Clues online indicate she is originally from the Sunshine Coast and had attempted a career in music and dance before pivoting to become an Islam influencer.

I will be curious to see if her popularity starts to drop, or if YouTube or Instagram kill her lying, phony channels. But I’m not holding my breath — she says what believers want to hear, so it’ll probably continue.

Oops. Her instagram account has already been deleted.

A military police officer turned researcher got a job as a corrections. No one will be surprised that she discovers that prisons are a hotbed of ugly attitudes and hateful beliefs.

In my observation, the sex offenders seemed to express the most frequent adoration and fealty for Trump.

They had violated the most fundamental boundaries of human empathy, and they appeared to find something familiar in a politician who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who had been found liable for sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case, who treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered. They would gather closest to the TV when he spoke, nodding along when he denied accusations, claimed victimhood, attacked his accusers. The people convicted of predatory crimes identified with rhetoric that mirrored their own rationalizations.

Not surprised by that at all. What is more troubling is that his fellow corrections officers were almost as bad. The rot was a product of the environment, that even the people with more tolerant and thoughtful beliefs would intentionally suppress themselves while the wicked would rage. The description made me think of another place.

The break room had its own speech rules. Conservative officers announced their politics daily and loudly, with no apparent thought that anyone might disagree. The rest of us kept our mouths shut until we sussed out who was in our lane. I privately thought of that second group as the “low-key lefties.” There were not many of us, and some had come to the job from social work. For months I believed my coworkers were almost universally conservative. I was wrong, in an instructive way: the visible politics of the facility was universally conservative, because only one kind of politics could be said out loud there. The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.

Sound familiar? Flip the script and that sounds a bit like more progressive environments where conservatives are squelched and liberals express themselves freely. It sounds a bit like here.

And that’s good. The alternative is a den of lies and hatred, like the discussions going on among corrections officers.

The daily subjects rarely varied: their love of Donald Trump, the evils of socialism, the evil ex-wives, the adult children who no longer called. They lamented, often, that the days were gone when an officer could settle things with an inmate with his fists and face no consequences. And trans people. Not a day passed without a long transphobic rant, though trans people were maybe one percent of the incarcerated population, and the officers doing the ranting could go weeks without interacting with one. The centerpiece was a claim repeated as established fact and never once sourced: that the state was spending millions of dollars per trans inmate on gender reassignment healthcare. Years later, records requests filed by hostile conservative media put a real number on it: through mid-2024, Washington’s prison system had spent $592,577.67 total on gender-affirming healthcare, across 44 incarcerated people. That works out to roughly $13,000 per person, around one percent of the break room’s per-person claim, and the sourcing matters: even the outlets working hardest to inflame the issue could not document anything close to the figure repeated daily in that room. I later recognized the same ratio on cable news: a group that is roughly one percent of the country, discussed nightly at a frequency that suggested it was half.

Yuck. I would like to hang out in a place that is the opposite of that.

For the rest of the world, the author makes a suggestion.

None of this is fate, and the fixes are not mysterious. Stop using prisons as the country’s largest mental health facilities, so the people warehoused for illness get a hospital instead of a tier. Change what the correctional officer’s job selects for, through staffing levels, training, and real mental health support, so the rational adaptation stops being callousness. Treat empathy as what the research shows it to be, a teachable skill: a meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled trials found that empathy training works, with a medium effect size, across ages and settings. And hold the algorithms accountable for what they amplify. Each of those deserves its own article and its own model legislation, and that is work this publication exists to do.

Donald Trump is imposing 50% tariffs on most Canadian goods in response to the country retaliating against previous US tariffs, the White House announced Monday, declaring Canada has unfairly discriminated against American cars, alcohol and dairy products.

Sorry.

Sometimes senile old people get institutionalized, and they are cranky and resentful, and they kick and pinch and slap at the people who are hired to help them, and the relatives (unless they are terribly entitled) feel horrible about it. At least, though, their deranged elder loved one is being confined for their own safety, and is typically too old and feeble to do serious harm. Unfortunately, our foul-tempered nasty old geezer is running free, and has the vast power of the USA at his fingertips, and all the hired help seem to be more interested in enabling him than in being responsible guardians.

Jamelle Bouie knows what he’s talking about.

The responsible thing to do here would be to take all his dangerous toys away from him and put him in a luxurious retirement home with lots of gold geegaws glued to the walls and let him rot away. Unfortunately, too many other people are profiting off their proximity to the demented old fart.