Don’t take it too seriously.

Clarence Thomas apparently said that white liberals were just as racist to him, they just did it in a more sly way. So he joined the side that made him the most money.

I can’t totally say he’s wrong.

Iran might be a fucked up theocracy, but they can generally be counted on to behave like a rational actor. More so than Trump can.

Well, then keep shooting, homophobes.

Probably cheats with duplicate cards in Commander. On the upside, she keeps duplicating One With Nothing, so nobody calls her out.

A scripture so inconvenient that they had to spend a good chunk of the last 2,000 years contorting an explanation for why the obvious reading must be wrong.

Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.

Project 2025’s playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.

Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren’t going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren’t necessarily going to be qualified in any way.

What may be surprising here is that they’re scraping the bottom so quickly. You’d think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.

This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it’s one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can’t work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.

The claim that the Psalms are just poetry is going to be heartbreaking to anyone that cites them as prophecies about Jesus

That’s completely fine. The early Christians went to great lengths to try to say “this bit here was prophecy, and here’s how our guy fulfilled it”. But nobody was viewing those passages as prophecies before then. It was all marketing for a weird little offshoot of Judaism on the fringes of the Roman empire which happened to take off centuries later.

Historically, this is what the NRA was for. They had basic designs setup that were very safe, and they’d offer grants to build them. There’s a local range by me (a private club, not state owned) that was developed that way. It’d be hard to shoot a bullet and have it get out of the range area.

They still kinda do it, but it looks like the industry is sending the funds on their own rather than funneling it through the NRA. Makes sense given the current state of the NRA.

Besides all the points everyone else has mentioned:

“Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”

Always be skeptical anytime anyone uses an argument of this form. There are tradeoffs for everything, but this phrasing only serves to stop people from weighing them fairly.

Oh, and the above quote comes from the co-sponser of the bill, who is a Democrat. Just in case you thought this was a Republican problem.

Along those same lines, they didn’t put parking lots in Sim City. They tried, but it completely fucked everything.

A good reminder that the system was already broken before Trump got here.

So they aren’t weeks away from a functioning weapon, and we can recall all the military buildup, right?

Right?

Well, a plucked bird does look pretty different. Then again, fossilized feathers for dinosaurs have been found, so it’s not like we’re completely blind to that, either.

Even that being true, it’s readily apparent that Christians always choose which scriptures to highlight. The fundamentalist ones will say you must take the whole bible or nothing, but that’s not how they behave. Not at all.

Let’s assume the homophobic translation of Romans 1 is the correct one. Is any given Christian talking about that, or are they talking about being kind to the poor, pointing out the hypocrisy of religious leaders, or that the literal, obvious interpretation of “rich men can’t get through the eye of a needle” is the correct one? There’s so many scriptures they could be highlighting, and it’s conspicuous that they choose to make a homophobic one really, really important to them.

MAGA Christians tend to get very angry if you point this out. The usual responses are along the lines of “you only know a few cherry picked scriptures as talking points” or “you atheists would burn alive if you actually read the bible”.

There’s a defensible argument that Paul invented Christianity. Jesus (whoever he was historically) does not appear to have intended to produce a separate religion from Judaism. Paul did that.

It’s not a complete slam dunk, but even if you don’t buy it, it’s still very apparent that Paul was the central figure in shaping what Christianity would become.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think there’s a single scripture that specifically calls out sexual abuse of children. There’s general prohibitions against sex outside of marriage and such, but nothing that applies directly to pedophilia.

You get there by not being a monster. Literal, direct interpretations of the Bible won’t do it.

Like Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum?

The more conservative American Catholics have a theology that’s close to the right-wing, protestant-derived groups around them. Ask Paul or Rick about how their views on evolution jive with the Vatican’s official position, and they’ll start to squirm.

Yeah, this stuff takes time to work out. As long as the side effects aren’t a big deal, they might err on the side of too much.

Covid vaccines were something of an exception because they were motivated and infections were widespread. Lots of chances to get good data. Treatments for other diseases don’t have those advantages.

The HPV vax, for example, was released in 2016 on a three dose schedule. There’s some studies out there that argue two doses would be plenty, but it’s not a consensus, either. That’s after almost a decade.

PrEP is already keeping HIV infection rates pretty low, at least in rich countries where there’s money to do these studies. Not going to be good data on dose schedules for many, many years. Maybe even decades.

They may have been a foundation to build on, but they largely failed in their goals. There was a sudden surge in cities proposing budgets that defunded the police. Once the sausage making process was done, those budgets largely reflected the status quo.

The best you can say about its direct practical effect is that Chauvin was convicted. I do think we’re seeing more cases of abusive cops actually being prosecuted for misconduct, or at a minimum, losing their job.

It’s still taking some effort to even get that, though. I just ran across a case in my YouTube feed, where a civil rights lawyer with a channel brought attention to a case. This had happened months ago, but all the sudden, the prosecutor dropped the charges and the cop was fired. If it weren’t for it blowing up on YouTube, that probably wouldn’t have happened. There’s almost certainly thousands of stories like it in process right now that aren’t getting that attention.

Oh, and we got Juneteenth added as a day off. I guess that’s nice. Except some companies have already dropped it from their holiday list (mine did).