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. 

Are Most People Seriously Just Not in Pain?

Maybe it's because I'm on both Reddit and Tumblr, but I've seen a lot of discourse about migraines and headaches and chronic pain lately. 

I used to have killer migraines that put me in bed for up to four days, and only improved when I started vomiting. (Why is vomiting a cure for migraines? I have no idea.) Those mostly stopped when I went through menopause, but I still get them a couple times a year. Medication does nothing.

I have had a constant low-grade headache -- like, my head always hurts -- since I was a child. From reading social media posts, I have learned that not everyone has a constant headache. Is this true? Medication does nothing, although once when I was in high school I took ten aspirin, which cut the pain a little.

Also, my joints and my bones have ached pretty much non-stop since I was about fifty. I remember telling my primary care physician about it when I was fifty-two and saying, "I guess it's because I'm old?"

"Fifty-two isn't old," she said, but she didn't suggest any sort of solution.

Then a couple months ago, as you know, my knee went out. My current PCP did an X-ray and determined nothing was wrong. He gave me some NSAIDs to take, and they did the trick. It's been fine since.

ANYWAY. I'm just curious. Is this typical, or am I weirdly filled with pain?

My reviews are up at Asimov's!

 You can read them here.

Here's who I review:

Alexis Hall, Hell’s Heart

Theodora Goss, Letters from an

Imaginary Country

Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

Justin Key, The Hospital at the End

of the World

Neon Yang, Brighter than Scale,

Swifter than Flame

A.D. Sui, The Iron Garden Sutra

Freedom of as well as From Religion

This clip from a townhall meeting shows a GOP operative attempting to create a viral clip which would make Democratic senate candidate Abdul El Sayed seem evil.

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

[image or embed]

— Abdul El-Sayed (@abdulelsayed.bsky.social) 8:17 PM · Oct 17, 2026

The take-away from this is that Christian Nationalists do not, in fact, support the Constitution above their own religious beliefs. Having lived among Evangelicals for decades, I could have told you that to begin with. It's part of their faith -- (their) God above all. 

The Constitution says that this country does not have a religion; it allows us all to decide that for ourselves. Their churches say their singular way of believing in their God must be the God of everyone. That's a dangerous thing to believe in a country filled with people who do not believe in their one specific sort of Jesus -- or in God at all, like me.

Their religion cannot and should not be allowed to decide how all the rest of us live. That is the straight road to terrorism. 

Fall in Arkansas

 Yesterday was a beautiful fall day, sunny and chill. 

The kid, Dr Skull and I drove up to the fancy outdoor shopping center in Rogers, Arkansas, known as the Pinnacle Hills Promenade, and had brunch at Sweet Paris, which is a little bistro that sells crepes and coffee and various breakfast items. Dr Skull had an omelet, I had a croissant, and the kid had something spicy with eggs, as well as a Crepe Maman (a crepe with cheese and jam).

The place was crowded with people walking their babies and toddlers through the mall streets (they are actual streets, with wide sidewalks): there's a Lego shop up there, among other things. I saw an actual Lululemon shop. I thought those were only in memes.

The kids seemed to like the fountains better than anything else, even though for some reason the water had been dyed this hideous shade of pink.

We went to the William Sonoma, and after that to the Fresh Market, which had all sorts of fancy foods. The bright cold weather was lovely to walk around in, but Dr Skull's mobility is limited, so we didn't explore further.

A very good day!

Bizarre Claims from the Death Cult

Over at Camestros Felapton's site, he writes about a claim being made by the death cult which American Christianity has developed into -- that there is more evidence for the resurrection of Christ than there is for the assassination of Julius Caesar. 

It's obviously not true, and CF explains why, so I'm not going to spend words on that.

Instead, I want to talk about two things. First, Christians are supposed to be taking the existence and the resurrection of Christ on faith. The faith in the impossible thing -- the definition of a miracle -- is the entire point. They believe this story not because they have evidence, but because they don't. You don't need faith to believe in the existence of hats, for example, or that the cat is on the mat. If I point at the cat on the mat and say to you, That cat is there, and you believe the cat is there, that's not religion. That's just living in an evidence-based world.

So why are they are so desperate to find evidence that their religion is factual? It's like that part in the John where Thomas needs to stick his fingers into Christ's wounds before he'll believe Christ is real. The text is pretty clear that we're not supposed to respect Thomas because of that.

The second thing relates to their attitude toward trans people. I've seen more than one soi-disant Christian claim trans people are evil for trying make them "believe" in trans people, or in pronouns. In fact, no one care what any specific person believes. We care about everyone being equal under the law, and we care about our country not making certain groups into second-class citizens. Hate the 'woke' all you want, but stopping trying to pass laws that make it illegal for people to exist in public, or get medical care, or live their lives. 

Who is it that is trying to force all of us to believe something which is not, in fact, supported by evidence? 

I am fine with Christians holding to their frankly unsupportable belief system -- that the world is 6000 years old, that it's possible to rise from the dead, that after death we can go to an eternal paradise, but only if we believe in this one specific sort of Christianity. That God cares what pronouns people use, or whether we perform our gender the way Karen in Indiana thinks we should. That God wants us to beat our children. That God says women have to submit to men. That Jesus loves America more than any other country. That America is the best country in the world.

I am not fine with those Christians trying to force everyone else to act as if those beliefs are fact. They're not facts. They're a story certain people believe because it makes them feel better. That's fine. I'm all for people doing what makes them happy. I'm not fine with (Christian) people trying to force everyone else to do what makes Karen in Indiana happy.

Why do they need to try to force us to admit that their religion is the truth? I asked a Christian that once, and he admitted that if his kids saw people who weren't Christians living their lives and being happy, it might make his kids wonder whether their religion was, in fact, the truth.

That's what it is. They don't have faith. They have a story they desperately want to believe, and they need all of us to believe it too, or else maybe they might start to wonder if their weird death-cult religion is  true. 

In their desperate quest to make the world around them believe what they (pretend to) believe, they are destroying democracy, our public schools, our universities, and the planet. 

(Not all Christians, in case I need to say that. I have known six or seven people who actually do the things Christ said in his sermon on the mount. But mostly our American Christians today live more like Romans: pretend to believe what we believe, lick our boots and say we're right, or we'll happily nail your ass to a cross, destroy your country, and steal everything you care about, including your children, your rights, and your liberty.)