Also!

I think there's a lot of truth to this. 

Watching ICE shoot those people, and kidnap people off the streets, including that little boy in his blue hat -- and then watching MN resist and resist and resist -- I think that gave us all hope that MAGA could be defeated.

The resistance of Minnesotans this winter changed the trajectory of our country and that cannot be overstated.

— Liam Davis Temple (@liam2manynames.bsky.social) 12:10 AM · Nov 4, 2026

A Gift Links from the Atlantic Monthly

About how good it feels to rebuke MAGA.

I mean honestly, fuck them guys.

From the article:

Honestly, voters are so ungrateful. You break your promises, make stuff more expensive, and champion a slate of gargoyles distinguished only by their slavish loyalty to you, and suddenly everyone is all “Do we really need a ballroom, sir?” and “Could you talk less about glutes and more about grocery prices, Mr. President?”

And here's another. 

If this is America’s response to what has been almost two years of a president flouting norms, driving up prices, breaking promises, raking in billions of dollars, and running roughshod over ethical guardrails, it is an unmistakably emphatic one. Democrats, independents, and Republicans turned out in massive numbers to showcase their displeasure with Trump and his party, flipping the Senate and making the GOP sweat even in contests that were not previously considered competitive.

And here's Scalzi: 

Do you understand how much you have to have fucked up that Kansas elected a Democratic senator? 

 

Good News at Last

We took the Senate. We took the House. Texas is blue, as is Georgia and Illinois and Ohio.

The GOP lost seven senate seats and 25 House seats.

Now if only the Democrats grow a spine.

Arkansas, of course, stayed Red. But Hallie came closer to unseating Tom Cotton than anyone has done in awhile; and overall we shifted more than seven points toward Blue, as compared to the Trumpian election.

 

Election Day

If you haven't yet voted, get out there and vote.

I concur with Scalzi on this one.

On his watch and with his approval we’ve gotten into a war we had no plan for, the cost of gas and groceries have spiked, measles and other easily curable diseases have come roaring back, a masked, internal secret police is snatching people from the streets without due process, white supremacy has shoved its way back into official policy, and he’s turned his back on long-standing allies to gleefully lick the boots of the worst authoritarians in the world.

Tom Cotton

One More Day

I'm trying not to be tense about the midterms. 

It would help if every single MAGA, GOP member, and conservative in this country wasn't such an asshole. Too much to ask for, I guess.

I remember like ten years ago? Or maybe it was 20? There were relatively decent conservatives in this country. Now, everyone who is voting red is either dumb as a rock or filled with hate. That's their whole base. It's disgusting.

 

Fall Back

I forgot we put the clocks back today.

Luckily my phone remembered.

Sunset is at 5:12 this evening. We're heading for winter now.

Reddit LOL

I saw Trump called "Temu Hitler" on Reddit today, and it's cracking me up.

Apparently it's not original with Reddit, but it's still funny.

Hallowe'en Rained out

We barely got any trick-r-treaters here last year, and last night there was a steady cold rain, and we got none.

Now I have three pounds of candy I have to find a home for. Previously, I would take it to school with me and distribute it among my students. Maybe I can get the kid to give it to his students.

LOL

This cracked me up:

(Alt text: Your password must contain two characters who talk to each other about something other than a man)

Project Dumb-Ass

So James O'Keefe, famous for creating (heavily edited) videos which purport to show terrible behavior on the part of progressives, tried again.

Moriarty said that O’Keefe used the names of deceased Minnesotans and a Minnesotan who was alive and had voted in the primary. She said she was unaware how they received those names. The men allegedly tried to vote at four different polling places, asking questions of various election judges about the process while falsely identifying who they were. Moriarty said neither man received an actual ballot or cast a vote and that they left one polling place after being asked for identification.

He went to Minnesota, dressed up in faux Middle-Eastern garb, and tried to obtain a ballot using false names -- one of someone who was dead, one of someone who had already voted. He and his friend did this four times, and in none of these cases did they actually obtain a ballot.

In other words, the system in Minnesota worked.

Yet all over conservative FB and conservative blogs, I'm seeing the claim that actually O'Keefe exposed the ease with which people could commit voter fraud in Minnesota, and that this made 'the libs' mad and that's why they arrested him. He's a political prisoner!

O'Keefe has apparently posted yet another heavily edited video, and this is probably where conservatives are getting their mistaken conviction that O'Keefe managed to actually commit voter fraud, or that this was an exposure of the ease with which people can commit voter fraud in MN, instead of an exposure of how they can't.

Or they may be getting it from conservative news sources, which are pushing the same lie.

Also from the article:

Minnesota’s unlawful voting act states that “no individual shall intentionally misrepresent the individuals’ identity in applying for a ballot.” The charges allege that O’Keefe and Higby committed identity theft because O’Keefe “used multiple identities that are not his own with the intent to commit and aid in the commission of an unlawful activity” that included aiding Higby’s attempts to vote in several precincts.

And:

“It is not against the law to be performative, it is not against the law to be offensive, it is not against the law to say the things they said standing outside the polling place,” Moriarty said. “The fundamental issue here is you cannot go into a polling place and misidentify yourself and use other people’s identity and say that to our election judges when you apply for a ballot, whether or not you intend to vote.”

I'm with PZ Myers.  Lock this weasel up.

Voting Accomplished

 We have early voting here in Arkansas, so Dr Skull and I and the kids went to vote at the library today, and then went to eat Italian food after.

They gave me a sticker. 

The line was very short, and the whole process took like ten minutes. 

Vote, y'all!

When You Have Too Much Money

Look at this article.

In case you don't want to click through, or hit a paywall, it's a story about billionaires in Boston who built a $45 million dollar house, furnished it, and then decided, nah, we won't move in after all, we're good.

As the story goes on to relate, this is happening all over America. Apparently buying or building, furnishing, and decorating appallingly expensive homes, penthouses, and estates which you then never live in is a kind of expensive hobby for American billionaires.  (As one comment notes, "But we don't need a tax on them?") Nothing else to do with your weekend? Hell, let's buy/build another house. Maybe that will make us happy.

The linked houses and penthouses in the article as all astoundingly ugly (though I realize tastes differ). I wouldn't want to live in them either. But holy hell, what a waste of resources.

And yes, let's tax billionaires now, please.

The house in question:

In contrast, have a look at this house, which is also too expensive for me, but absolutely beautiful. (Skip the first two minutes or so, which is just the guy boosting himself.)

Things Ex-Anthropology Majors Find Cool

Or one thing, anyway. I used to be an anthropology major, until I realized I would have to do research outside, without air conditioning. But I still like to keep up with it.

This is Everything We Know About Denisovans. Denisovans are a hominid species we relatively recently discovered, which interbred with H. sapiens. (Lots of species of hominids interbred with H. sapiens, from what we're finding out.) Anyway, the video is 20 minutes long but very cool.

Rage-Baiting Reddit

Let me just mention that I did not mean to upset Reddit.

But someone sagely posted one of those posts that noted you could cook at home for far less than you would spend getting takeout or eating in a restaurant. I said I didn't disagree, but cooking at home had a hidden cost -- the labor of planning, shopping for the ingredients, doing the cooking, and cleaning up afterwards. 

It's the most hits I've ever gotten on a comment. Everyone is eager to tell me that the value of the labor spent on those things is zero, because "no one is going to pay you to do that." Also, I'm stupid.

In case you were wondering whether the labor of the homemaker has any value. Nope.

Mind you, I cook at home a lot. I'm not saying we shouldn't cook at home. But the hours I spent planning for and making a meal is labor, and my labor has value.

The real question is why this post made everyone so angry. It seems like a simple truism to me.

I suspect it is because many of them are young and they're thinking about their mothers cooking all those meals to "save money" and realizing maybe it was only saving money because Mom donated her labor.  Mom's labor has no value! She's doing it out of love, so it can't have value.

I might be reading too much into it, though.

My actual comment:

I mostly agree with you that it is almost always cheaper to cook at home than get takeout. But you're not factoring in the cost of labor. Someone is cooking that meal, cleaning up after that meal, shopping for the ingredients, and so on. Maybe you can say, well, I'm doing that work, and I'm fine with it; but even your labor counts as labor.

Little Free Libraries O No

I think I saw this first on Tumblr, though it might have been Reddit: a woman complaining about a Little Free Library near her house, because it gave people a reason to stop there and "do reconnaissance." At the end of the clip, she demands, "Are we even zoned for spontaneous public literacy?"

Another person objected to the Little Free Libraries because "anything" could be put in them. They didn't seem to mean drugs. I think it was porn they were worried about, though who knows, conservatives call everything porn these days. For examples, the very existence of a trans person or a gay person in a book makes that book pornography. (Hence the outrage because a public library had a copy of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.)

Honestly, about nine-tenths of being conservative is being afraid of things which are harmless. Do they fear an armed man in a grocery store? Heavens, no, that is simply a fella practicing the Second Amendment. 

Do they fear a woman in a hijab? Why, of course! A woman with purple hair? Even scarier! A trans woman in public. OH MY GOD.

Vaccines scare them so much they prefer to risk their lives and their children's lives rather than get a few shots. This also risks the herd immunity that protects the immunocompromised and infants too young for vaccines, but that is fine, their irrational fears trump everything. (Pun intended.) 

You might remember the whole mask uproar -- conservatives accused the rest of us of being "afraid" of COVID, unlike them. They didn't fear a little virus! And when Arkansas was passing a law that made concealed carry on university campuses legal, conservatives sneered. What were liberals afraid of, that they didn't want armed people wandering around on campus?

That's projection for you. They're so afraid of, well, everyone that carrying weapons everywhere seems, to them, sensible. But if we object to trying to teach sonnets while several people in the classroom are packing heat, we're the ones who are afraid.

So, obviously, books are too scary for conservatives. Anyone can read them; any idea at all might be in there; and even little children might learn to think for themselves.