Texas, not satisfied with wanting to ban critical race theory, ending colleges diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and eliminating tenure, has set its sights on banning people from countries conservatives dont like with HB 4736.

PROHIBITED ADMISSIONS. Notwithstanding any other law, an institution of higher education, as defined by Section 61.003, may not admit an applicant for admission to the institution as a student if the applicant is:
(1) a citizen of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia;
or
(2) not authorized under federal statute to be present
in the United States.

Honestly, Ive never had a North Korean student the North Korean government isnt big on exposing their citizens to strange foreign ideas, much like the Texan government. Ive had lots of Chinese students, and a few Russian and Iranian students. Theyre fine. Theyre often more motivated than American students, and if they go back to their home country after a few years with a little sympathy for the US, thats a net gain for us. Or if they decide they want to stay in the US, thats also a net gain. We cant lose by freely sharing education with the world (its also a good idea for American students to study abroad). We all win.

Unless, of course, your goal is to make sure your citizenry doesnt understand and hates foreigners from certain countries that have been currently designated as an enemy.

Some people have been pushing the idea that COVID-19 was artificially created in a Chinese lab. Theres no real evidence for that the virus itself doesnt contain any labels of its origin, that a research lab in China was studying the virus isnt evidence of manipulation (a research lab researching is what research labs do), and the people promoting the lab leak theory all seem to have a political agenda to blame someone. I sure havent been convinced. Now theres a new revelation: theyve found genetic evidence from samples collected at the Huanan wet market that infected wild animals were there.

Way back in 2019, researchers were swabbing locations in the market and filing away samples for later analysis. Guess what? Its later. Swabs sampled from a stall that was selling raccoon dogs have been sequenced, and theyve found raccoon dog DNA, which is no surprise. But they also found lots of SARS-CoV-2 mingled with it, which tells us that these wild animals were already infected with COVID.

A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. Its some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.

This really strengthens the case for a natural origin, says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory who wasnt involved in the research. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the research, told me, This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. Theres really no other explanation that makes any sense.

Ive never been that interested in the question of its origin. I already know that we live on a planet of viruses, with an unimaginably huge population of diverse viruses squirting their DNA and RNA into every available creature, genetic material that is constantly mutating at a rapid rate, and what we ought to be amazed at is that we have molecular mechanisms of resistance, an immune system, that can cope with it at all. It was inevitable that something would evolve to get past our defenses, and that wed have to adapt or die. Thats what weve been doing for the entirety of the existence of life on Earth.

That life changes and that there are naturally inimical forces that exist...

In reading and listening to news items, I find many people using the phrase going forward. It has become so overused that I find it grating to hear. It is often redundant but seems to be a more a rhetorical device, a filler, to end a sentence. For example, an analyst discussing financial news might say It is not clear what the Fed will do going forward when It is not clear what the Fed will do conveys the same sentiment. After all, will do implies the future and besides, the Fed cannot go backwards anyway.

Other phrases that have become cliches are perfect storm and think outside the box. Mercifully the latter seems to seems to be going out of vogue, probably because everyone is sick of hearing it so much and it is the kind of corporate jargon that managers like to inflict on their employees.

These are my personal pet peeves. My dislike of them is largely because of their overuse, not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. This article lists other junk words and phrases that the author thinks people should try to avoid for various reasons.

How about some low-lying fruit for a light afternoon snack? Heres a cocky believer to nibble on.

Atheism is the greatest moral error because it breaks the greatest command demanded from humanity: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
Mark 12:30

Oh. OK. Atheism is bad because a god-priest says it is. This is not the gotcha he thinks it is.

These guys will never settle for nebulous, vague assertions about an invisible being. Theyve also got to go after science with a vicious punch of ignorance.

Natural selection is a euphemism for no real force. Environment, social pressure, survival, etc. These do not guide consciously the process of genetic traits or modifications. I mean, the environment is non-conscious, non-rational and Ignores what is happening.

Exceptby accident, hes sort of right. The environment is non-conscious, non-rational and ignores what is happening. I suspect he thinks that is an argument against evolution though, because he assumes evolution has to be conscious and rational.

Also, a lightning bolt is non-conscious, non-rational and ignores what is happening, but try to deny that its a force if it hits you.

Ive been hearing a lot about how the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a bank in the heart of tech bro country, where Peter Thiel kept his money, was due to it being too woke. Go woke, go broke, as they say. As it turns out, the claim is contrived nonsense.

According to stories bursting across the right-wing mediasphere today, a key reason for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was its focus on spreading woke culture rather than efficiently managing risk and profits. Ground zero for this is the allegation that SVB had donated over $73 million to the BLM Movement & Related Causes. That struck me as quite a lot of money for a single company, even a large and profitable one, to give to any cause or even all causes. So I tried to find out where this factoid came from and rapidly found my way to a Trumpist think tank. Perhaps not surprisingly, its a complete lie. I want to show you the receipts, but first some key details.

The story came from an analysis from the Center for the American Way of Life, a project of the Claremont Institute. You can tell from the name it was going to be a skeevy, dishonest organization, where they conflate American with Capitalist. What they did was compile all charitable donations to a huge range of organizations under one umbrella they called Black Lives Matternot that BLM isnt an unworthy recipient, but that they threw in so much money that any grass roots organization would have no way to spend it all.

Basically, if a donation benefitted a black person in any way, it was BLM. For instance:

Claremont lists 3M pledging a whopping $50 million to BLM. But the cited document, published in September 2020, appears to be mainly focused on supporting STEM learning in Black communities. Its a pledge of $50 million over 5 years and lists $6 million in initial investments. That $6 million consisted of $5 million to the United Negro College Fund for work in St. Paul, Minnesota; another $1 million is slated for annual investment to social justice partnerships, led by our employee resource network community champions and building on the initial investment from 3M Foundation in 2020.

For Claremont, these are all BLM.

Oh, look, Boeing supported BLM! Not really.

Then theres Boeings $15.6 million to BLM.

You can see the cited list of recipients here. The largest recipients include the Seattle Childrens...

Last week, two major banks collapsed: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature. These were the second and third largest bank collapses in US historythe largest being Washington Mutual in 2008. Since I seem to be writing about finance this month, I wanted to try my hand at explaining why, for the reader who doesnt know anything about finance.

Short answer: SVB placed a big bet long-term US treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. However, the prices of these assets went down. Companies with money in SVB were worried about it, so they started withdrawing a lot of money, requiring SVB to sell its assets at a loss until it was wiped out. Bank collapses tend to spread via a process called contagion, and Signature appears to be the first victim.

Really long answer: Okay, lets walk through these concepts one by one.

First of all, what even is a bank? A bank is an institution that accepts deposits of money, we know that. But how does a bank pay you interest, pay expenses, and make its own profit besides? A bank basically borrows money from depositors and uses it to give out loans or make other investments. The bank makes money because its own investments give it greater returns than the interest they pay you on on your bank deposit.

You might think, why allow the bank take a cut? Cut out the middleperson, invest your money directly instead of depositing it in a bank. However, the bank account offers two distinct advantages: you are guaranteed your money back, and you can easily withdraw it at any timewith important exceptions to be discussed further down.

The ability to produce money on demand is called liquidity. If an asset is illiquid (meaning not liquid), that means that it may be difficult to sell on short notice, and you may suffer a loss from having to put on a fire sale. While depositors want their bank accounts to be completely liquid, the bank itself doesnt need to be completely liquid. Thats because, generally speaking, depositors are not going to withdraw all their money at once. Banks need enough liquidity to cover the aggregate demand of depositors, but theres a lot of room left for illiquid investments, which tend to have higher returns.

The way banks guarantee all your money back is by taking on almost all the risk themselves. Banks make leveraged investments, which means borrowing money (e.g. from depositors) to invest money. For example, suppose a bank makes a $100 investment with 10x leverage. Theyre investing $10 of their own money, and $90 of your money. If their investment has a 10% payout, then they earn $10, doubling their money. If it had a 10% loss, they lose everything, and the bank becomes insolvent, which could lead to collapse.  But it doesnt really affect deposits unless the bank suffers more than 10% loss, in which case depositors might lose some money...

Friendships are important to ones well being, even for introverts like me, with quality being more important than quantity. It is easier to form friends when one is younger, during ones school and college days, when one is thrown together with peers for extended periods of time with few responsibilities and relationships can develop organically. But once one starts working and settles into a nuclear family, it becomes more difficult to form new friends, since work place friendships can be tricky to handle. Also, when one starts working, one tends to move to different locations and lose not only the physical proximity that is conducive to maintaining existing friendships but one has fewer opportunities to make new friends.

This article by Marisa Franco discusses how to make new friends.

Our adult lives can become a monsoon of obligations, from children, to partners, to ailing parents, to work hours that trespass on our free time. A study of young adults social networks by researchers at the University of Oxford found that those in a romantic relationship had, on average, two fewer close social ties, including friends. Those with kids had lost out even more. Friendships crumble, not because of any deliberate decision to let them go, but because we have other priorities, ones that arent quite as voluntary.

Such is the pace and busyness of many peoples adult lives that they can lose contact with their friends at a rapid rate. For instance, a study by the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst found that, over a period of seven years, people had lost touch with half of their closest friends, on average. Whats especially alarming is that many of us seem to be losing friends faster than we can replace them.

If were not careful, we risk living out our adulthoods friendless. This is a situation thats worth avoiding. Friends are not only a great source of fun and meaning in life, but studies suggest that, without them, were also at greater risk of feeling more depressed. Its telling that in their study Very Happy People (2002), the American psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman found that a key difference between the most unhappy and most happy people was how socially connected they were.

Social media can give the illusion that one is well connected because one may have lots of friends on the networks but those can be superficial, really more like acquaintances than friends.

The article suggests various strategies to overcome the hesitation that many people have to initiating contact with others. The fear of rejection is a big one, that people might not like you. But Franco says that people tend to underestimate how much others, even those they may have just seen, like them. She m...

Today I learned from webcomic that yesterday was the anniversary of the death of HP Lovecraft in 1937.

That all caps subhead, WROTE ABOUT ASTRONOMY, cracks me up, although apparently it was true, he wrote a regular column for a newspaper. I guess WROTE WEIRDLY RACIST AND NIHILISTIC COSMIC HORROR didnt fit the column width.

Today is our 43rd anniversary, and this morning I was thinking about our wedding.

It was a nice wedding, not too fancy, not too stressful, exactly as my wife-to-be planned it. There were many people there: family from both sides, and lots of familiar friends from the University of Washington, where both of us had attended (Id recently graduated and had moved to Eugene, Oregon, where Mary would shortly follow). Wed been living in the dorms on campus, and had a close-knit crew whod been applying to the same rooms year after year 5th Floor Lander Hall, represent! There was the gang I played D&D with. Of course my two best friends since Junior High, Steve Klopfstein and Steve Dixon, were in attendance. These were all people I liked very much, and was happy to have a little party with them.

As I was reminiscing, though, I realized that this was also the 43rd anniversary of leaving all those good friends behind. I was never very good at being sociable, and immediately after the wedding Mary and I were off on our peripatetic academy journey, and we lost contact. I didnt tell them how much our friendship mattered, and I drifted away, no forwarding address provided (not that it would have mattered, we moved so often over the years), and didnt even try to stay in touch. I was the flavorless marzipan groom, I could stand woodenly on the cake, and do nothing but fail to communicate, no matter that I wanted to.

I guess my shriveled little heart only had enough love for one person there. At least thats held up for a good long while.

I think Ive been fairly open about this, but for those who dont know, I have a bit of an anxiety problem. Its mostly because of climate change, but also most of the other stuff I write about here (especially ground-hunting bats. Those things are terrifying), and Im generally taking meds for it. I have also had a couple therapists, neither of whom helped a whole lot, but it was kind of nice to have someone to talk to I guess? I think its something that should be available to anyone who needs it, especially if theyre dealing with trauma of some sort. Family and friends can be very helpful, but they dont always know how to help, and that can put pressure on any relationship.

One service that a therapist provides, supposedly, is confidentiality. A therapy session is supposed to be a place where you can share anything thats troubling you, without worrying that it will affect your social interactions. If you have a crippling fear of small, furry creatures with wings that arent flying, you may not want to let other people know about that. You might worry that others will think less of you, or feel uncomfortable around you, knowing that youre constantly on the lookout for crawling bats.

In a therapy session, at least a good one, you can feel confident that the person youre talking to you will take you as you are, and try to help you on your terms. What I would not want, for example, is for a giant corporation to find out about my pekapekaphobia, and start giving me ads for, I dunno, t-shirts with crawling bats on them, or crawling bat phone holsters or something. Or, which is more likely, theyd sell that information to a company wanting to sell me bat-repelling boots, knowing that I would do anything to finally feel safe. It goes further than that, though, because Facebook has a record of massive data leaks, and so if, somehow, they got ahold of my information, anyone could find out!

Im mentioning all this to you, in confidence, because one of my therapists was through the online service BetterHelp. It was cheaper than conventional therapy, and much easier, as I didnt have to travel to the other side of town for a session I just had to have a laptop. Unfortunately, it turns out that my sessions may not have been as private as I wanted,  because as The Illuminaughti will explain, BetterHelp shares your data with Facebook:

...

My brother used Midjourney to make

Insane Clown Posse in Cats.  Enjoy.

Ive got a couple longer pieces in the works right now, including a followup on the Norfolk Southern disaster in East Palestine, OH. This is sort of peripheral to that. I think Ive mentioned in the past that railroads are natural monopolies, and monopolies are a serious problem for society, if theyre being operated for private gain. From that point of view, I suppose one could argue that a rail company merger is no big deal theyre already monopolies of a sort, so does it really matter if they become more monopolistic? Well, I think so. At the very least, its a matter of principle. As Ive already said in the past, Im in favor of the government having a monopoly on rail in the United States, but thats with the (optimistic) assumption that it would be run for the benefit of the general population.

Unfortunately, thats not what were talking about today. In the midst of national scrutiny on the industry, the Biden administration has apparently decided that theyre just fine with at least some corporate mergers:

U.S. federal regulators on Wednesday approved the first major railroad merger in more than two decades, a move that follows the East Palestine rail disaster and that critics warned would reduce competition, raise prices, cost jobs, and threaten safety.

The Surface Transportation Board (STB) approved Canadian Pacific Railway Limiteds proposed $31 billion acquisition of Kansas City Southern Railway Company, a merger that will create a single railroad linking Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The agency said the merger will take roughly 64,000 truckloads off the road and add more than 800 union jobs.

The decision includes an unprecedented seven-year oversight period and contains many conditions designed to mitigate environmental impacts, preserve competition, protect railroad workers, and promote efficient passenger rail, STB said, adding that it also anticipates the merger will result in improvements in safety and the reduction of carbon emissions.

However, opponents of the deal pointed to the East Palestine, Ohio disast...

The program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) provides states and territories with flexibility in operating programs designed to help low-income families with children achieve economic self-sufficiency.  States use TANF to fund monthly cash assistance payments to low-income families with children, as well as a wide range of services.

On the latest episode of his show, John Oliver describes how this program has been abused so that a lot of the money does not go to the people it was meant for.

Part of the problem is that although it is a federal program, rather than the federal government giving the money directly to needy people, conservatives lobbied to have the federal government give it in the form of block grants to states who were given guidelines on how the money could be spent. But the guidelines were loose enough to allow states to siphon money away to build things like a new college volleyball stadium. This is why proposals to convert federal programs into block grants to states should always be viewed with extreme caution.

I admit, I might have a small problem. I came in to work this morning and found another egg sac had spewed out a bunch of adorable baby spiderlings. (This is a very low resolution shot, I hope the arachnophobes here can bear it.)

This is nothing new or surprising. Ive had four egg sacs bear fruit since last week, so Im getting used to it. I sit down and sort out all the spiderlings into separate vials, and tuck them away near the incubators. Not in the incubators theyre all full of spiders already. They seem to do fine at room temperature.

Well, I think the future of the colony is more than assured at this point. If I raise 150 spiderlings to adulthood, Id have to take over the neighboring lab spaces and maybe occupy the science building atrium, and I have about 15 more egg sacs waiting in various containers already. Im going to have to draw a terrible, wicked line.

Future babies will not be coddled and given living quarters and free food. Instead, we have some experiments in microscopy and staining in mind, and they will be killed, quickly and humanely, thrown into fixative, and their bodies treated with various exotic chemical compounds before being mounted on a confocal microscope.

Oh jeez, I sound like a Republican.

Thanks to the internet and the rise of social media, we now live in a world where there are vast numbers of so-called influencers, people who try to tell others what to do in pretty much every area of their lives, even if they have no expertise or credentials in that field. What is surprising (to me at least) is that there are so many people willing to follow their advice.

Daniel Lemoi was one such influencer and he died on March 3, 2023 at the age of 50. He used his channel on the social media app Telegram to advocate for the use of the drug ivermectin, the deworming medicine that gained popularity as a prophylactic and treatment for developed to treat humans for certain specific ailments, he chose horses and cows, something that has been strongly discouraged by medical professionals. But its use took off after some people promoted it as an alternative to Covid vaccines and treatments.

For the last decade, Lemoi had taken a daily dose of veterinary ivermectin, a dewormer designed to be used on large animals like horses and cows. In 2021, as ivermectin became a popular alternative COVID-19 treatment among anti-vaxxers, he launched what became one of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to promoting the use of it, including instructions on how to administer ivermectin to children.

animals on a daily basis in 2012, after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease, according to a detailed account of his medical history he gave on a podcast last November. He said then that five months after first taking the drug, he quit all other treatments and believed ivermectin had regenerated his heart muscle.

And according to the Missouri Poison Center, ingesting large doses of ivermectin formulated for animals has a long list of side effects, including seizures, coma, lung issues, and heart problems. Veterinary ivermectin is not a cure or effective treatment for COVID, the FDA has repeatedly warned, and is highly concentrated because it is designed for large animals like horses and cows. Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans, the FDA cautions.

Many of the people who had been following Lemois advice have been reporting on his Telegram channel the numerous kinds of side effects that medical experts had warned might occur if people veterinarians.

Lemoi explained away the negative side effects of taking veterinary ivermectin by describing them as herxing, a real term to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibio...

The conservative vision of the future of America is quite clear. Lets hide the ugly parts of our history. An eighth grade history teacher was canceled.

Finally, on Feb. 8, 2022, at 4:05 p.m., Wickenkamp scored a Zoom meeting with Superintendent Laurie Noll. He asked the question he felt lay at the heart of critiques of his curriculum. Knowing that I should stick to the facts, and knowing that to say Slavery was wrong, thats not a fact, thats a stance, Wickenkamp said, is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?

Noll nodded her head, affirming that saying slavery was wrong counts as a stance.

We had people that were slaves within our state, Noll said, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Post. Were not supposed to say to [students], How does that make you feel? We cant or, Does that make you feel bad? Were not to do that part of it.

She continued: To say Is slavery wrong? I really need to delve into it to see is that part of what we can or cannot say. And I dont know that, Greg, because I just dont have that. So I need to know more on that side.

He left the teaching profession after that load of waffly rubbish.

They hate women. Conservatives have a radical perspective on abortion and contraception.

The House Judiciary Committee in Arkansas was scheduled to discuss a bill that would classify causing the death of an unborn child as a homicide. Im not using the word abortion here for a reasonbecause while the legislation would certainly make abortion prosecutable as a homicide, it goes far beyond that. HB 1174 says that its a crime to end a pregnancy by wrongful act, neglect or default, language so broad that women who have had miscarriages could be prosecuted for murder if the state decides that they somehow caused it. (The bill even specifies that accidental miscarriage is not prosecutable, which means that legislators believe there is such a thing as a miscarriage that is not accidental.)

So if a woman miscarries and the state decides that it happened because she lifted a heavy box, or didnt take her prenatal vitaminsthey could charge her with murder. I wrote about this bill back in January, but its worth repeating: There is no limit to what a zealous prosecutor could argue caused a miscarriage or stillbirth. In fact, cases like this have already been brought forward before...

Who the heck is Bethany Mandel? I had to look her up on Wikipedia to find out: shes a conservative pundit, one of those weird libertarian goons.

She transferred to Rutgers University in 2005 for its strong Jewish Studies department and Jewish student community, and worked full-time while a full-time student, graduating in 2008 with a degree in history and Jewish studies. During her college years, she adopted conservative views after finding that Medicaid and other government welfare programs she had expected to help her after her mothers death were inefficient and ineffective, objecting to the idea that as someone who had grown up in poverty, she had any white privilege, as well as due to the influence of college friends and the writings of Ayn Rand.

She has recently written a book titled Stolen Youth, about how the left is waging an all-out battle on the American family, particularly the youngest members. If they can make our children miserable, lead them to question every building block of society, and rebuild their entire concept of reality, then the left and their woke indoctrinators will consider that a victory. Right. That kind of popular right wing fanatic.

I dont have any sympathy for the kind of fame shes getting right now. She was being interviewed, and was asked to define woke. Watch her brain short circuit its quick.

She did manage to scrape up a very bad definition: woke is not about being aware of systemic bias, its about creating hierarchies of oppression, which is kind of the absolute opposite of the idea. No wonder she hates it!

Thats a good way to handle these clowns: just ask them to define what theyre railing against, and either theyre going to give an accurate definition (as Desantis did, the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them), which made him look like a hateful idiot for opposing it, or they have to invent a fake definition (like Mandel, the need to reimagine society in order to create hierarchies of oppression) and look like an ignorant idiot.

Good work, Briahna Joy Gray. You made that skewering look effortless.

Last month, I wrote about the likelihood that were under-estimating the amplifying feedbacks that can cause global warming to push itself along, even without further help from us. Todays bit of news adds to that worry, though its focused on the Arctic. If you saw the video I posted about diving in an Antarctic lake, youll have some notion of the conditions involved in polar expeditions. Antarctica may be a harsher place than the Arctic in some ways, but in both cases, the brutal conditions make research extremely difficult, and often dangerous. This means that were pretty much always short on data from those regions, despite their importance in understanding the single biggest threat facing humanity.

In case its not clear to anyone, I think that climate research in general is underfunded, and that includes polar research. Its so bad that at least one research team turned to crowdfunding (a campaign to which I contributed) to finance research in Greenland. This dearth of data seems to have lead to an unsurprising result the climate models that the IPCC has been relying on seem to be falling behind the actual rate of change:

Two recent scientific studies involving researchers from the University of Gothenburg compared the results of the climate models with actual observations. They concluded that the warming of the Arctic Ocean will proceed at a much faster rate than projected by the climate models.

Models underestimate the consequences

These climate models underestimate the consequences of climate change. In reality, the relatively warm waters in the Arctic regions are even warmer, and closer to the sea ice. Consequently, we believe that the Arctic sea ice will melt away faster than projected, explains Cline Heuz, climatologist at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of one of the studies.

Warm water flows into the Arctic Ocean via Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard. However, the volume of water in these ocean currents and its temperature in the climate models are too low, which is one of the reasons why the climate models projections will not be accurate. Even the stratification of the Arctic Ocean is incorrect. The researchers argue that since roughly half of the models project an increase and the other half a decrease in stratification, the consequences of global warming cannot be estimated accurately.

These days, I often feel a bit fatalistic about our ability to accurately estimate whats coming. Weve a solid understanding of whats coming for longer than IR...

Before the mid-term elections last November, Michael Moore went against the conventional wisdom that there would be a Red Wave and said that democrats would do very well and he was proven right. He produced a daily series of what he called Truth Tsunamis and this was one of them.

Anyone who wants this is welcome to it.

Get onto Amazon.com with an E-book titled Letters to Trump, 2

The book would contain nothing more than the text of various subpoenas, legal filings, letters from courts dismissing his lawsuits, letters from courts sanctioning his lawyers, etc. Thats all public record stuff and theres no copyright on it.

Maybe put a disclaimer on the cover (for entertainment purposes only, not intended to be factual) and then have ChatGPT write a few cease and desist letters from Oprah Winfrey, other famous peoples lawyers saying you are not authorized to use our clients letter to you and perhaps a letter from Kim Jong Un, or rather the North Korean Embassy. Or perhaps a letter from MBS mentioning sanctions and bone saws.

I asked ChatGPT for a RNK letter and got this:

Dear Mr. Trumps Lawyers,

We, the representatives of the North Korean Embassy, write to you to express our concern regarding the recent reports of the publication of correspondence between our esteemed leader, Kim Jong Un, and your client, former President Donald Trump.

As you are well aware, the relationship between our two nations has been complex and delicate, with a history of tensions and mistrust. The private correspondence between our leaders is a critical component of the diplomatic channels that we have established to foster a more constructive dialogue between our countries.

We understand that such correspondence may be of great interest to the public, particularly given the high-profile nature of the individuals involved. However, we respectfully demand that you do not publish any earlier correspondence between our leaders. Doing so would not only violate the confidentiality and trust that we have built, but it could also potentially undermine the progress that we have made in our diplomatic relations.

We also wish to remind you that the publication of such correspondence would be a violation of international law and could have severe consequences. We urge you to consider the gravity of this matter and act with the utmost responsibility and respect for our diplomatic relations.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

[Name] Representative of the North Korean Embassy

Well, I have to admit it. I dont like it, but facts are facts and I like to think that I am strong enough to admit that Im wrong when confronted with unwelcome information.

The Santa Rosa Drag Coalition, made up of dozens of performance spaces with hundreds of performers and raking in tens of millions of dollars per year, has had to declare bankruptcy because of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse, many of which (though not all) targeted children, over several decades. The Drag Coalitions deliberate concealment of risks and assistance to predators has made them liable for damages far exceeding their assets.

Its horrifying to me that this real risk had to come to light this way, and Im truly embarrassed at ever having portrayed drag as a harmless activity that does not groom children for sexual abuse and might even have some ancillary benefits to the society of Santa Rosa and the larger United States but

Im sorry? Whats that youre saying?

Its the Santa Rosa Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church and all the activities that exposed children to risk were religious activities and/or so-called enrichment activities hosted by the church and overseen by church employees?

It didnt have anything to do with drag at all, just Christians doing Christian sexual abuse to children and others?

Oh, very sorry then. Didnt mean to pass along bad information. Im sure that well be outlawing the exposure of children to Roman Catholicism before long as the US and its subsidiary governments are famously very evidence-based in their decision making.

Continue dragging it up as you were, kings, queens, and rogues. Im sure that now that this is cleared up no Republicans will be coming after you.