Feeling: Disgusted

Emily had another ultrasound this morning. The girls are each over a foot tall and weigh about 1.5 pounds!

• Donald Trump threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea, including about 25,000,000 innocent civilians, and probably a good portion of the civilians in the surrounding nations, if North Korea don't stop threatening nuclear attacks. Of course, this is precisely just what North Korea wanted him to do, because now they can continue to convince their citizens to continue being in a state of war preparedness because the leader of the US is dead set on murdering them all.
• The Koch brothers and their ilk brazenly tell Republican politicians that, until they lower their taxes and eliminate health care for the needy, they won't get any more bribes.
• The US military budget is the largest in the world, by far. We waste an obscene amount of money on creating new war machines that even the military's own leaders say we don't need, but facts don't matter to the Republican Senate who just voted to increase our military budget another $80,000,000,000 a year. That money could be spent on infrastructure, on medical research, or, enough to pay for every single American to go to college for free!
• When Trump supporters donated money to the man who claimed he would personally fund his own campaign, they probably didn't realize they were going to be paying his attorney fees for his Russia collusion.
• A Swedish man went undercover in various white supremacists groups around the globe and found that they're well-funded and well-connected to Republican politicians.
• Trump posted on Twitter his desire to kill the Affordable Care Act. A woman with cancer reminded him that Trumpcare would eliminate health insurance for her and 32,000,000 other Americans. So Trump blocked her.

The Angry Video Game Nerd, season seven.

What happens to fire when it's in a free fall?

Illinois police arrested a man and threw him in jail, not for burning an American flag, which has been protected freedom of expression since 1986, but to protect him from people who might attack him for exercising his freedom. Well, the court saw through that lie and awarded the man $15,000 in restitution, and another $20,000 for the man's legal fees, all of which was paid for by taxpayers because of the incompetence of the police.

How fast do languages evolve, and how long does it take before a language is completely unrecognizable?

Atheists go to the Ark Encounter and much hilarity ensues.

Feeling: Happy

I've added a page for one of my favorite typefaces, Benguiat.

• Republicans are once again trying to pass Trumpcare, and, at the same time, eliminate Medicaid entirely.
• One of the biggest thorns in Hillary Clinton's side during the campaign was her private email server, and FBI Director Jame Comey's politically-inspired claim that they were re-opening the case shortly before the election was one of the major reasons she lost the presidency. Republicans, and especially Fox "News" made a huge deal about this, but nothing criminal was ever found, and a private email server was something that many other politicians did as well. How many others? Well, everyone of Trump's senior staff uses a private email server, his useless and very expensive voter fraud commission is using private email, and Trump himself, for a long time, refused to switch to a secure phone.
• The Trump administration is rejecting the findings of their own governmental study because it found that refugees increased the US economy by about $63,000,000,000.
• Why did Trump fire his original campaign manager? Probably not because he was incompetent at his job, most of people Trump hires are incompetent, no, it's probably because Paul Manafort was so deeply tied to Russian politics, that even Trump had to distance himself from him.
• Right after the terrorist attack in London, Trump bragged about his Muslim travel ban saying is should be even larger and tougher. The trouble was, nobody had released any information about the religion or home country of the terrorists. Trump, being a bigot, just assumed they were Muslims and from one of the countries he banned. British politicians pointed out the obvious, that his gloating wasn't helpful.
• Trump wants to have a military power parade just like the ones conducted by so many fascist dictators before him. Typical of a draft dodger.
• The self-proclaimed "Mother of All Trump Rallies" at D.C. had an estimated 500 attendees. No doubt there are plenty of Trump fans around the country, but this gives you an idea of just how poorly-organized this event was to be planned on a day Trump wasn't even in the White House. Of course, he vacations so often, when is he ever in the White House? To put things in perspective, three times as many Juggalos showed up to protest being called a "gang."
• How can we make American great? By eliminating the problems and keeping the good.
• If Trump doesn't want people to call him a white supremacist, maybe he should stop acting like a white supremacist?

The Canadian arm of the Jehovah's Witnesses church is being hit with a massive class action lawsuit for, like so many other churches before it, protecting child rapists. But that's not nearly as bad as the New Mexican Catholic Diocese which just released a list of 74 convicted child rapists.

A lecture on the question, does the universe have a cause.

Another category 5 hurricane is hitting the Caribbean. Also, we're not doing ourselves any favors by treating hurricanes like war zones.

Which is better, a modern digital camera, or the human eye?

A graphic designer changes the cover of Girl's Life to actually empower girls.

John Oliver gifts the people a Scranton a wonderful new model train.

Apparently, these are they types of students wanted at private Christian colleges.

Why did To Kill a Mockingbird become so famous?

Feeling: Happy

Nursery progress continues, two cribs have been assembled. Also, I finished reading the book Good Dog, Happy Baby and added a page for the writer Douglas Adams.

• Republicans claim they prefer small local government, but they're actions show that they're really authoritarians who want their form of government at all levels. Case in point, Trump is trying to refuse Federal funding to cities that don't adhere to his racist policy of arresting immigrants who report crimes. Unfortunately (for Trump, not for decent human beings), all Trump's past racist talk makes the judges less inclined to trust him in matters like this, and his attempt to block their funding has been refused.
• Trump's deal with Democrats over DACA is still really strange.
• While we've seen Trump repeatedly belittle the racist Jeff Sessions in public, it turns out he privately insulted him even worse after Sessions recused himself and demanded he quit. Sessions even offered his resignation, but Trump refused to accept it after more intelligent members of his administration rightly pointed out that, getting rid of Sessions would make things far worse.
• Obama didn't just talk about having the White House more transparent (and therefore less corrupt), he actually enacted policies like making the visitors a matter of public record. Trump not only eliminated that policy, but, because he so rarely goes to work, has his visitors on his vacation spots where ethics rules apply even less.
• Whenever I read headlines like, "Half of Americans Don't Trust Trump On North Korea," I always shudder that half of Americans do. Just think about it, we share a country with people who trust a bigoted racist ignorant hate-monger even to sit the correct way on a toilet, let alone deal with a nuclear nation!
• Trump continues to stand by his bigoted remark that there were many good people among the white supremacists, and that much of the riot's problem stemmed from those protesting the KKK and Nazis.
• We know that Fox "News" is mostly spin, and we know that they often get the story wrong, sometimes embarrassingly so, but why don't they correct themselves when it happens? Furthermore, why don't they even have an office for ethical journalism like every other new outlet?
• The more I listen to Steven Bannon, the more I fear his racism and bigotry.

The Angry Video Game Nerd, season six.

Schools still send girls home when they wear tight pants, but not boys.

Facts about Legos.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, over half of Americans who have abortions are Christian. Even though they claim abortion is evil, their lack of sexual education and vilification of birth control makes them much more likely to become pregnant, especially as teenagers, and knowing the stigma associated with unwed pregnancies in Christian communities often leads the teens to abortions. However, as the Muslims community grows in the US, so too will horror stories like these.

Teaching evolution using phylogenetics.

Why is it so hard to swat a fly? Because their perception speed is much faster that ours. Humans process visual information at about 60-frames-per-second, house flies at about 250-frames-per-second, although there is one species that tops out at 1,000!

Be careful when you call for the IT department.

Turns out Jerry Sandusky's son is also a child rapist, but I'm sure Penn State fans will continue to worship him.

Yes, even Buddhists can commit genocide.

Feeling: Happy

I added a page for the band I Wish I Were the Moon.

• Despite what they claim, the morality of religious people change their morality along with the changes in their culture. Slavery, abortion, homophobia, and so forth go back and forth between being below the radar to being the most important topic in history. A great current illustration is how American Christians have changed their mind on voting. In 2011, only 30% of white Evangelicals said they would consider voting for a president who had committed an immoral act in their private life. But after Trump won the Republican ticket, suddenly, that number skyrocketed to 72%! Which it would have to since the private life of Trump and his cronies contain a -lot- of immoral acts, and even Trump's personal lawyer isn't too sure he can save them.
• The racist rag Breitbart is furious that the latest issue of Superman has him saving Mexicans from being murdered by a white supremacist. When you can't tell the difference between headlines written by Breitbart and the KKK, something is wrong.
• I'm glad that Samantha Bee is back on the air exposing lies and hypocrisy, cutting down the Republican attacks on DACA, teaching us how to respond to white supremacists, and covering up racist tattoos.
• Why do Republican candidates have to be insipid clowns?
• In second grade, I tried to remain seated during my school's morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. My teacher called me to her desk and demanded that I recite the Pledge with the other students which I felt was unfair because there was another student in the class who never stood for it. In a stern voice she explained that the other student didn't stand because of his religion (I later learned he was a Jehovah's Witness), and she asked me if my religion prevented me from standing. I didn't know how to answer, so I gave her the response I knew she wanted and said, "no," so she told me to go back to my seat, and in the future, to stand for the Pledge, which I did. I was far too young to understand the purpose of the Pledge, which, by itself, should be a good enough reason not to force someone to perform it, but now that I'm older, I'm very much against the mandatory recitation of the Pledge. First and foremost, because it has been modified from the original author's intent into a prayer. Second, it was originally made popular as a advertising gimmick. Third, nobody should be expected to recite daily their allegiance to a country, let alone a flag. So, it makes me see red when a public school teacher lays his hands on a student for refusing to perform a ritual of religious nationalism.

The 13-year Cassini space probe mission ended in a blaze of glory as NASA plunged it into Saturn. It made several amazing discoveries in that time, and I can't wait to see pictures of its descent!

The nation of Tunisa has finally granted women the right to marry non-Muslims after 44 years of bigotry!

A SciShow compilation of water videos.

Facebook is quite embarrassed to be told that their ad service allows people to target users who use anti-Semitic language.

Feminism as a product.

Another prayer plaque in a public school has been rightfully taken down thanks to the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Feeling: Disgusted

I added a page for the band Eve 6.

• Trump is slammed by Miss America pageant contestants.
• Now that Hurricane Harvey and Irma have devastated the south-east coast of America, it's up to the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help them set things right. A refresh my memory, who is in charge of HUD? Oh right, Ben Carson. They're screwed.
• If a government employee is being sued or is charged with a crime, any political group that wants to help pay their legal fees must do so publicly. This ethics rule is in place because it doesn't help the American people to have anonymous donors trying to buy a political criminal's way out of jail. Well, that's how it used to be, under the Trump administration, the Office of Government "Ethics" has quietly eliminated this ethical practice.
• While it seemed that, after nearly a year in office, Trump had finally made a successful deal, since it was with Democrats, and his Republican buddies were mad, he has decided to lie about it.
• Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is turning out to be just as much of a bigot as her father, recent argued that Donald Trump can't be a white supremacist because, "no one has done more than President Trump to prove that white people are not superior." Well, when you put it that way...
• Porn stars probably don't want to be associated with disgusting immoral perverts like Ted Cruz.
• Sheriff's deputy Robert Belt, an officer who has a history of assaulting civilians, recently told a bus full of public school students, "No faggot activity will be permitted on this bus! In my bible it states that 'faggots will burn in hell,' and I will not condone it!" Officer Belt does not appear to have been disciplined.

There are many important avenues to be taken to fully utilize the might of modern technology for the betterment of humankind. Using it to determine if someone is gay based on the structure of their face is not one of them.

Some of the hot spots around the world that are the most affected by climate change.

Learning the difference between a white dwarf, neutron star, and black hole.

Josh Duggar, Republican activist and good Christian man, is hoping to cash in on his sister's lawsuit, but his sisters don't want him anywhere near them because of all the times he sexually assaulted them.

Angry Video Game Nerd, season five.

The number of Catholic hospitals in America is growing, and this is bad news for anyone who wants to control their reproductive system. Catholic hospitals refuse to let women abort their pregnancies, even if they'll likely die from complications. Catholic hospitals refuse to let women have tubal ligations, even if they might die if they become pregnant. Catholic hospitals even refuse to let women even have corrective surgery to repair fallopian tubes on the off-chance that they will have to be severed to prevent a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy! Of course, none of this is taken very seriously by American politicians who are almost entirely men, but they might have to start taking notice because Catholics also refuse to let men get vasectomies!

People who tend to believe in conspiracies aren't doing so because of logic, they're doing so because they want to be special.

One thing you'll notice when you watch a lot of debates between religious apologists and scientists is that the religious apologists often lie. I don't mean that they mistake the facts. Everyone occasionally states something as fact, only to be later to be shown that it isn't. I say they lie because, even after being shown their mistake, they continue to state it as fact. At first, this may seem confusing; why would a person who claims to honor truth and despise dishonesty frequently lie? It turns out, part of religious apologetics training is being taught to lie.

How to prove the Earth is round with nothing more than a ball and string.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for the author Neal Stephenson and the Eve 6 album, Eve 6.

• Another mass-resignation in the White House; this time a quarter of the members on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council quit. The group that handles cyber-security complained, not just because the Trump administration was ordering them to act immorally, but also because they were uninterested in the threats against our country!
• Steve Bannon really is a xenophobic bigot who thinks America is great, not because slaves helped build it, not because of a huge influx of immigrants, but because pf white nationalism and the exclusion of foreigners. But, of course, only three generations ago, when the borders were wide open, his family immigrated to America. It's almost as if immigrants get the job done.
• If your ideology is, "government is the problem," don't be surprised when, even if you control everything, you fail to govern.
• With two enormous devastating hurricanes smashing into the US coast back-to-back, it has become clear that human-made climate change is a serious threat. But for science deniers, like the current head of the EPA, they still don't want anyone to talk about it.
• Due to Russia's influence on the 2016 presidential election, the US version of the propaganda program "Russia Today" will now have to register with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent. Of course, the DOJ is currently run by racist Jeff Sessions, whose appointment by Trump was made possible in part because of Russians meddling in the US election, so don't expect anything anytime soon.
• When Hurricane Harvey hit the US, Mexico expressed its condolences and offered to help on the relief efforts. Trump refused to answer, but the Governor of Texas accepted the aid. Unfortunately, shortly after that, Mexico was hit by a terrible earthquake. As expected, Trump made no offer of aid to help Mexico, or even cheap words of sympathy. Mexico is no longer helping Texas, and is focusing on its own disaster.
• With two of the world's super powers--the USA and UK--being run by incompetent Conservatives too focused on crippling their own countries to bother with foreign issues, delicate political situations elsewhere in the world are beginning to fall apart. Case in point, Turkey is now buying surface-to-air missiles from Russia.
• Police in the UK are becoming just as evil as American cops.
• Yet another Fox News host, Eric Bolling, has been fired for sexually harassing his co-workers.

Season four of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Want to hold your newborn child after giving birth? In America, sorry, that's a $40 fee.

Polyamorous people answer your burning questions.

Paul Burress, the Christian preacher who turned his church into a fight club has been arrested for sexually assaulting two women.

Epsom salt baths may feel or smell nicer, but they don't actually have any therapeutic benefits.

The importance of pointers in computer programming.

Feeling: Frustrated

I added a page for the game Portal 2, and the Gravis GamePad controller.

• Trump's expensive, but entirely pointless, voter fraud panel is naturally declaring Democratic victories as evidence of voter fraud.
• Internet trolls are posting tons of fake videos and pictures of Hurricane Irma, but, embarrassingly, one of those trolls comes directly from the White House.
• The man Donald Trump pardoned, Joe Arpaio, is really an evil monster.
• Republican Ted Cruz has a history of discriminating against the LGBT and even trying to ban people from purchasing sex toys, so why did he click like on a Twitter porn channel?
• The current head of the CIA is Mike Pompeo, a Tea Party Republican. He was nominated by Donald Trump, and appointed by Republicans. So, it goes without saying that, under his "leadership," the demographics of the CIA shifting towards more white straight male Christians.
• Not only does white-collar crime often go unpunished, it pays extremely well!
• Trump is killing DACA, but he doesn't want the people who are going to be deported to worry about it because it's going to be awhile before they get deported.
• Just a reminder, Trump's pick for the head of NASA doesn't know the first thing about NASA.
• I understand the importance of requiring food vendors to be licensed for public safety, but the police officers in California are just common thieves.

Hurricane Irma was the most powerful hurricane in recorded history. Thankfully, most of its power was unleashed in relatively unpopulated areas so it wasn't the most deadly or damaging, but it's a stern reminder of what we face if we don't get the climate in check. Speaking of that, here is a wonderful XKCD comic about human history in relation to climate change, and a video about why people often get climate change wrong.

How having a support animal can make you mentally healthier even if you don't notice it.

Come on Hillary, Bernie didn't sabotage your campaign. You won the popular vote.

An interactive Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements which gives an example of how each element has a manufacturing purpose.

What the hell is a hemocytometer?

When video games get sad that they're not being played.

Feeling: Disgusted

I finished reading Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and added a page for the Harry Potter Candies.

• So, why did Trump change his mind after saying he would end DACA? It turns out, when he first said he would end it Trump didn't really know what DACA was.
• Since Trump couldn't convince a Republican-majority Congress to vote down the Affordable Care Act, even though these are the very same people who have been voting to eliminate it for the past 8 years, he's now trying to ruin it from the inside by refusing to renew the program's outreach funding. With no money to fund workers, all the poor and sick people who desperately need insurance will be left in limbo.
• The Hurricane Harvey relief and debt ceiling bill passed, but 17 Senators voted against it. They are: Bob Corker, Steve Daines, Mike Enzi, Joni Ernst, Deb Fischer, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Mike Lee, John McCain, Jerry Moran, Rand Paul, James Risch, Ben Sasse, Pat Toomey. Aside from not caring about hurricane victims, what do these Senators have in common? They're all Republicans.
• Just a reminder, in case you've forgotten, having the Conservative half constantly threatening to shut down the entire government if they don't get their way, is not normal.
• The Trump administration is -still- getting all buddy-buddy with Russia even as more information in their collusion comes to light.
• Days after suggesting that the US government might be purposely overstating the damage Hurricane Irma might cause, Rush Limbaugh went off the air and evacuated Florida.

Using candy to learn about quarks.

Last week, Equifax was the victim of a cyberattack which laid bare the private information of around 143,000,000 Americans. That in itself is horrible news, but what was even more horrible is the fact that, days before Equifax made the information public, three of its senior executives sold off their stock, cashing in for $1,800,000. Naturally, they're all claiming they sold before being informed of the security breach.

Important reasons why we don't dump trash into active volcanoes, but why we don't keep planting trees that smell like semen.

Christian movie maker Gabriel Joseph, III has been hit with a $32,400,000 fine after illegally robo-calling millions of people with a recording of Republican bigot Mike Huckabee advertising Joseph's film, "Last Ounce of Courage." Joseph's lawyers say he won't be able to pay the fine because his movie was so bad, his company is going bankrupt.

The chemistry demonstration I never received as a child, fireworks.

Some wonderful DOS screen savers.

Feeling: Happy

I added a page for the mobile game Hill Climb Racing.

• A brief explanation of what DACA is. A pretty cool program, but that doesn't stop Breitbart from using a picture of El Salvadorian gang members to depict people protected by DACA.
• Christian Republican leaders often blame the victims of sexual assault and rape, and Betsy DeVos is no exception. In a recent talk, she explained that her goal is to stop sexual assault, but just like how Trump blamed "many sides" when a white supremacist murdered a protester, DeVos kept claiming that men need to be protected because they are so often victims of false accusations of rape. The reality is, false accusations of rape are extremely rare, but rape is horribly common. DeVos went on to say that the current definition of "sexual assault and harassment," was too broad, implying that many inappropriate things that men do to women should just be accepted. What can you expect when her boss has a history of bragging about sexually assaulting women?
• After Hurricane Harvey had died down, Trump showed up in the Texas for a photo op. Though he refused to talk to a single victim or visit a destroyed city, he did promise federal aid to the traditionally Republican state. However, now that Oregon, a traditionally Democratic state, has uncontrolled wildfires in Oregon are out of control, federal aid is being flatly refused. Trump is now cheerfully bragging about Hurricane Irma.
• Trump tries to pitch his tax plan in, of all places, North Dakota, and is still somehow able to creepily hit on his daughter.
• Facebook is still having a problem with the same Russian propaganda that helped get Trump elected.

An -extremely- rare earth element: technetium.

Michigan's immigrant ethnicity is traditionally German, but in recent years it has become home to the largest Arab-American population in the USA. In 2007, it was estimated that there were 300,000 Arab-Americans in the state, and, in the city of Dearborn, the Arab-American population is almost 30% and growing. While this includes a lot of Arab Christians, it naturally includes a lot of Muslims as well. This leads to some rather unusual reactions in government leaders. If you notice that a competing religion might overtake yours in the near future, it's probably not a good idea to cement laws that give extra authority to whatever religion is the biggest, but that's precisely what Michigan authorities are doing. The Board of Commissioners in Jackson County start each meeting with a sectarian Christian prayer delivered by one of the Commissioners, all of whom are currently Christian. They don't allow non-Commissioners to pray, because they don't want non-Christian prayers to be heard, and are fighting a lengthy lawsuit using taxpayer money against people who are rightly claiming that they're violating the Constitution. While they had lost their initial case, they wasted more taxpayer money to appeal to a Federal Appeals Court and shockingly won, despite precedence against them! Though there was strong dissent, the majority of judges ruled that, even though they were refusing to let non-Christians pray, the city officials are not violating the Constitution, because, one day, a non-Christian may be elected who will pray differently. This will most likely be appealed to a higher court, but even if it loses, what does this mean for a state with a growing Muslim population? Will Jackson County continue to favor a majority-rule when Muslims get elected and openly pray to Allah?

No, those glasses you see on the Internet don't actually fix colorblindedness, but there is some pretty cool science behind them. And 3D glasses don't let you see in 3D, but there are still ways to do it.

Not all police officers will lie to you or bully you into giving up your civil rights, but since you can't tell a good one from a bod one by appearances alone, it is important to know their schemes.

Sometimes, video games contain hidden messages.

Feeling: Happy

I added a page for the children's book Up In Bubbles.

• Trump is still dead set on kicking law-abiding immigrants out of the country, but thankfully, several states are suing the Trump Administration for their racist killing of DACA.
• Trump is handling natural disasters exactly as you would expect, incompetently, and Rush Limbaugh has reached the level of crazy where he's suggesting that the government might be purposely overstating the damage hurricanes cause in order to continue lying about climate change.
• Jeff Sessions is very racist, and when you hear a very racist person claim that they've never done anything racist, it's expected that you would laugh derisively. That's a reflex, not a form of protest.
• Paul Ryan is a and a double-talking spineless coward.
• Republican Larry Bates told people the world economy was going to collapse according to Christian prophecy and they needed to convert their life savings into gold, and it just so happened he could sell them gold coins. Well, after making $21,000,000, and sending only a fraction of the gold coins he promised, Bates has been sentenced to give everyone refunds, and will spend the next 21 years in prison.
• North Korea is still testing nuclear bombs, and Trump doesn't have the slightest idea what to do.

The religious concept of hell doesn't make any sense.

The science of whiskey.

Scientists think they have finally solved the "Wierd!" signal from space and we have learned much from using CRISPR on embryos.

Feeling: Happy

I made this graphic because people often confuse software developers with people who fix computers--that's like calling an automotive engineer a mechanic. Also, I've added a page for the movie To the Bone.

• Racist Attorney General Jeff Sessions argued in favor of killing DACA, but his arguments, like the entire Trump administration, were highly dishonest. It will be up to Congress to actually have compassion and pass DACA properly, but since it's mostly Republican, don't hold your breath.
• Here is a list of all the previous directors of NASA. They include astronauts, physicists, aerospace engineers, and the like. This is a far cry from Trump's pick to head NASA, a Republican politician and climate change denier, Jim Bridenstine.
• Donald "I-forgot-which-foot-had-the-bone-spur" Trump continues to be corrupt and self-serving as he uses his position to tell the soldiers of the US military to lobby Congress on his behalf.
• Betsy DeVos has ruined Michigan schools. Don't let her ruin the Nation's schools as well!
• Trump loses a member of his National Diversity Coalition because of he keeps trying to eliminate diversity.
• Border security along Mexico is already costing us a fortune, despite being not very useful.
• The pros and cons of the disorganized Antifa movement.

How the media screws up by trying to give balance to every issue.

A PRRI poll shows what many previous polls have shown, religion is dying in the USA. White Christians are still the largest racial-religious group, but they now account for less than half of the US population, and there are more Hispanic Catholics than white Catholics!

The Angry Video Game Nerd, season three.

The science behind the brain freeze and the ethanol lamp.

Joel Osteen may be seen as a monster, but at least he's getting some great parody.

Feeling: Happy

I had a pretty fantastic weekend. Friday, I watched Miyazaki movies at Sarah's. Saturday, it was too cold for our planned tubing trip, but we ended up hanging out in Ann Arbor. Sunday was a grueling preparation of our nursery. Monday was a windy day at the beach. Over all, lots of sun, drinks, and good friends!

I've added a page for the arcade game Pac-Man.

• For Trump, even his hurricanes have to be the best, but, and I can't believe I have to say this, sorry Trump, in terms of damage or deaths, Hurricane Harvey is nowhere near the level of destruction of Hurricane Katrina. A major reason Hurricane Harvey did so much damage is because Texas Republicans keep refusing to build science-based infrastructure. But Trump isn't out of the runnings yet. If he keeps up his current level of ignorance and apathy, he might still be able to bungle relief efforts worse than George W. Bush did with the approaching category 5 Hurricane Irene? After all, he sure isn't donating any money to disaster relief. While we're talking hurricanes, as you know, the same Republican congressmen who voted against helping the victims of Hurricane Sandy are now begging Congress for federal aid, but they don't think they're being hypocrites because they claim 66% of the money in the Sandy relief bill didn't go to hurricane relief. Well, the Congressional Research Service examined the bill and showed how nearly every cent went to hurricane relief. The Texas Republicans are either lying or too stupid to understand the bill (probably both).
• President Obama instituted the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program which made it easier for immigrant children who were raised in America to become citizens. The idea was, if a child grows up in American schools they will develop strong ties to American friends, businesses, and civic institutions, and will therefore be much more likely to be a beneficial addition to our country. Republicans fought Obama on this through the program's entire existence because, let's not beat around the bush, many Republicans are flat-out white supremacists, and now, the most powerful Republican white supremacist of them all, Trump, is ending the program.
• Even while under the control of Trump and his lackeys the DoJ, NSA, and FBI, have still all publicly stated that they never tapped his phones under the Obama administration. Place your bets to what Trump believes.
• Another one of Trump's unqualified friends is set to take charge of a major branch of the US government.
• Donald Trump is just fine with bribery and government corruption.
• Erik Prince, former head of Mercenary company Blackwater, and now also trying to profit off of mercenaries in Afghanistan, not only has ties to Russia and Donald Trump, but he's also the brother of Betsy DeVos.
• Lest we forget, it's important to remind everyone just how corrupt, ignorant, and destructive President Reagan was.
• Jeff Payne, the Utah bully with a badge who arrested a nurse for preventing him from violating a patient's civil rights, has forced the hand of the hospital to no longer allow police free entrance into any patient care areas. The officer's bosses have apologized, but still haven't actually done anything to Payne who is currently enjoying a taxpayer paid vacation.

Why you shouldn't, and can't, low-level format disks anymore.

The European Court of Human Rights has made a very important ruling. Companies are no longer allowed to spy on their employee's emails unless they first inform them.

The FDA is extremely important. It's the reason scam artists have to go to another country to purposely inject humans with herpes and why we no longer purposely poison people just to see what happens.

Christian pastor Mitch Olson of Grace Ministry Center in Kimball, Michigan wanted to put anointing oil on one of his 19-year-old female followers, but, aw shucks, he didn't have any at his church, but thankfully, he found some and was able to take it to the woman's apartment where she was alone. During the "anointing" process, the much older Pastor Olson anointed the young woman's breasts, buttocks, and even her genitals. During the groping, the young woman agreed to being touched like this, but when she later came to her senses and realized that Pastor Olson was fondling her for his own repressed perversions, she went to the authorities. Well, during the legal process it came out that this wasn't the first time Pastor Olson had molested a young woman, and his church has been trying to keep it all under wraps, telling his victims to just forgive him and get over it. In the end though, Pastor Olson will not be charged with a crime. Since the young woman was of age of consent, and technically said "yes" to him putting hands on her private parts, he can't be charged with a crime.

The strangeness of color and why mixing pigments and light don't give the same results.

After finally reopening his church, not for hurricane victims, but for regular services, Joel Osteen asked for donations. Again, not for hurricane relief, but just for his own church.

All of season two of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Over half of the population of Great Britain is non-religious.

Feeling: Happy

Now that my favorite YouTube download browser plug-in has been removed, I've created a page with instructions for several ways to download streaming video from various sites. I also added a page for the Game Boy Color.

• Authorities from Quebec, Canada offered to send aide to Texas, but the Republican Secretary of State Rolando Pablos declined their offers of beds, blankets, and workers and instead asked for thoughts and prayers.
• Despite his presidential pardon, Trump's racist criminal friend Joe Arpaio isn't out of the woods yet.
• Why did the New York Times publish an article that argues in favor of sending mercenaries to Afghanistan to do the same thing they did in Iraq (which turned out to be murdering unarmed civilians)?
• Three cops gone wild! Colbert, Oklahoma just found out that their police chief, Bart Alsbrook, is a white supremacist with ties to a Nazi organization. That, by itself, indicates a serious failing of who ever was supposed to do his background check, but maybe they just didn't care, because a city spokesperson stated, "They don't want him to leave because he hasn't done anything they warrant would be grounds for his dismissal." They gave a Nazi authority over authority over black people and Jews and a legal right to carry a loaded gun wherever he goes. Also, taking a blood sample from an unconscious person who isn't a criminal suspect is a federal crime, and something you would think a police officer trained in blood collection should know, but officer Jeff Payne was so adamant about violating a person's Constitutional rights that he violently attacked a nurse to do it! Naturally, officer Payne is still on active duty and will not be punished. And the last horrible cop, Georgia police Lieutenant Greg Abbott, who tried to calm down a nervous civilian by saying, don't worry, we "only kill black people." I'm sure he thought he was telling a hilarious joke, but now Officer Abbott plans to retire before he can be fired.
• Fact-checking a day after someone lies isn't helpful in today's media. News outlets need to stop repeating someone lies altogether, fact-check first, then report on their lies.
• Pointing out that Trump is a liar won't make the problem go away, news outlets need to stop repeating his talking points. Only after they fact-check his remarks, should they then report what he says.
• Maybe if we all pretend real hard, racism will go away!

Now if only we could get cable news to do the honorable thing and correct their errors!

Comcast is suing the state of Vermont because they don't want to have to run new cables.

Any time a business pays a lab to conduct a study for them, you should be weary of the results, especially if they come to the conclusion that women can have better orgasms with their products.

America still hasn't converted to the metric system. This is why we can't have nice things.

Feeling: Frustrated

I added a page for the Youth Group album, Casino Twilight Dogs.

• Mexico has offered to help out the victims of Hurricane Harvey, but Trump has a better idea, he's considering cutting $1,000,000,000 from the disaster relief budget in order to pay for his wall that he said Mexico would pay for. That's as stupid as not believing in climate change, even though we know it's happening, and responsible for making tropical storms more violent.
• A poll by Fox "News" shows that 69% of Republicans believe that American Journalists are a bigger threat to the United States than white supremacists, and they believe Trump personally hates journalists more than white supremacists, and that they approved of him blaming KKK protesters for the violence of Charlottesville. Meanwhile, Nobel winners believe the biggest threat facing humankind right now is Donald Trump.
• The Trump administration keeps implicating themselves in more and more Russian collusion.
• The good people of Nashville do not appreciate when a Christian hate group uses the name of their city for a manifesto of hatred.
• If you saw a shady-looking person approach a man from behind, pull out a gun and point it at them, then snatch their wallet, what would you think? Well, if you're an American, you'd naturally assume the gunman is a cop.
• What has Besty DeVos's dismantling of the Michigan public education system done for the state? Well, what did you expect?
• The Late Show's fantastic names.

In case you missed some of the back-episodes of the Angry Video Game Nerd, here's the entire first season.

Some of the more interesting arguments by PZ Myers.

Turns out, monkeys can most likely see optical illusions too!

Laboratory outfits for the working scientist.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for the Queen album, A Kind of Magic, and the Flash game, Dice Wars.

• When Trump went to Corpus Christi, Texas, he said, "what a crowd, what a turnout!" No, you egomaniac, the people weren't showing up to see you! Their homes are flooded! They're seeking help, and you couldn't even be bothered to speak to a single hurricane victim! And great work Republicans on making it harder for citizens to hold insurance companies responsible. And while we're on this topic, remember when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and dozens of Christian pastors said it was their god punishing Louisiana for having Mardi Gras and gay people? Now that the state of football and Jesus has been flooded, they're awfully silent.
• When you look at just how awful Joe Arpaio is, you can understand why only someone as equally as awful would pardon him.
• The man who pulled out his gun and fired it at the Charlottesville protest was none other than Richard Preston, a KKK imperial wizard, and one of Trump's "fine people."
• Kudos to General Mattis who is refusing to enforce Trump's transgender ban until the ban's affect on military readiness has been studied.
• "Someone" using the account of William C. Bradford (Trump's appointee for the Department of Energy) posted, "Well, it is a fact: Obama is the son of a fourth-rate porn actress and whore," but it couldn't have been Bradford, because he assures us that his account was hacked!
• Marco Proano, Officer a Chicago police, who shot 16 rounds into a stolen car full of teenagers, has been found guilty of using excessive force. Though cops often unload a hail of bullets at unarmed civilians, they almost never get convicted, so maybe we're seeing some progress here? Proano can get a maximum of 10 years in prison, but it's far more likely he'll see little time in prison since he's an officer.
• Even Rolling Stone magazine is sick of Republican bullshit.

Putting out a candle... with science!

Intel designs their CPUs with a built-in system to allow administrators remote access to every computer on their network, which is fine, but they made it impossible to turn off! So, any computer with an Intel CPU has a built-in backdoor that can't be sealed! Users who actually care about their security have tried for years to find a way to shore up the security flaw, but Intel designed their chips to crash the computer if you ever tried to make it more secure! However, someone just found a way to disable it, and, wouldn't you know it, it's because of the NSA.

Daniel Cook explains how to design original games.

Oh good, the church that protects child rapists from the police has figured out how atheists are made.

Some Mormon teens, while trying to explain how the church's racist past should be forgotten, accidentally discredit their doctrine.

Okay, maybe Magneto is a bit overpowered.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for the Eve6 album Horrorscope. I also added a list of the games I've beaten grouped by franchise and a King's Quest series page.

• Donald Trump is the kind of person who, during hurricane season, and even as a hurricane was predicted to make landfall, eliminates a lot of flood protection standards. And won't try to fix the problem, but just prevent people from being able to talk about it. And while we're talking about Republican responses to hurricanes, many of the Texas politicians begging for federal aide are the same ones who denied aide to other states during Hurricane Sandy.
• Criminal sheriff Joe Arpaio is a man who arrested countless innocent people based solely on their race and locked them up in conditions so bad the country doesn't even allow them for dogs, let alone humans. So, when asked why he pardoned such a monster, we shouldn't expect a cheeky joke from Trump, but that's what we got. And remember, the people who support Trump, don't support him in spite of his horrible behavior, the support him because of his horrible behavior.
• The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has a long history of abusing the people it takes into custody, and with Trump at the reigns, things are only getting worse. Sadly, ICE has been approved for more immediate destruction of their records for things like the torture of those in custody, those who have been killed, or even sexually assaulted. With their records shredded, internal investigations and Freedom of Information Requests will now turn up nothing.
• While Trump was on his 17-day vacation at his own golf course, he spent $13,500 on golf cart rentals, and $7,100 on portable toilets.
• What I find most scary is that a large portion of Trump supporters are the people who lived through, or were kids during World War II.
• The questions people ask tour guides at historic plantations demonstrates just how bad American schools are at teaching slavery.

How Venezuela has been brought to its knees by a dictator.

Rebecca Watson explains why believing in past-life regression doesn't make you a very good skeptic.

Sam Harris is wrong about Black Lives Matter, and Ed Brayton's critique explains why. And Steve Shives explains how it's not people pointing out racism in the atheist movement that is hurting it, but rather people defending racists.

Sonic wasn't the star of his first game.

Some amazing pictures and information about the sun.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added an essay titles Jewish Physics. I added pages for the record Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol and the short story, The Fir-Tree. I also finished cataloging my vinyl collection.

• After his propaganda rally, Trump pardoned a disgusting criminal whose racism landed him a conviction of ruining the lives of people who weren't white. And while Trump was asking around if he could pardon his own family for criminal collusion with Russia, it doesn't look like that's possible.
• Sebastian Gorka, a man who has connections to the Nazi party, and who wanted everyone to refer to him as "Doctor," even though he is woefully under-qualified, is another casualty of the Trump Administration.
• Trump still thinks the presidency is a bad reality TV show.
• Late in the election, when Trump was saying he didn't have any business dealings with Putin, he was trying to build a building in Moscow and get Putin to endorse it.
• Hurricane Harvey has caused massive flooding in Texas, but it mercifully it hasn't been as devastating as Katrina. But, without anyone in charge of FEMA, and a President who "handled" the problem by telling people stuck in the storm, "good luck," this is a clear sign to everyone that Trump just isn't even remotely prepared for, or even concerned about, about natural disasters. Speaking of government disasters, just before the hurricane, ICE dropped off 50 Central American asylum seekers (women and their children) at a Greyhound bus depot, but before they could travel, the depot was closed due to the hurricane and everyone was left stranded. ICE cannot even confirm that the depot was open when they dropped them off.
• One of the many reasons police offer constant abuse to civilians is because they are being treated like soldiers rather than police officers. During the Bush administration police departments were given huge guns and ammo, armored vehicles, and dangerous anti-personnel grenades. Since they had them, police used them, and turned otherwise peaceful cities into battlegrounds, often killing or wounding bystanders. Obama put a halt to the practice of giving police military surplus, but guess who has bring it back? I know being a police officer is difficult and dangerous work, and I don't they officers get the respect or payment they deserve, but part of the distrust comes from the fact that police officers are sometimes literally Nazis.

Non-stop chemistry experiments from a non-stop talker. Featuring explosions!

Arkansas has mandated an "In God We Trust" sign to be placed in every classroom of every public school, because, patriotism.

Church is the cool place to be.

Discussing the problems with the fine tuning argument.

Feeling: Happy

I added a page for The Sounds album, Crossing the Rubicon and the Queen album, Queen II.

• When Trump says, "the media didn't report..." that's a good sign that he did something awful and won't own up to it. I think this German magazine pretty much sums it up.
• During the Trump Administration, there is an ethics violation pretty much every day, like when Trump turned the murder of a woman at the hands of the KKK into an advertisement for his winery.
• Further information about Confederate monuments being built to celebrate white supremacy. And while Trump may be very concerned about keeping Confederate monuments around, he isn't very interested in preserving natural monuments.
• After referring to the White House as "a real dump," Trump has wasted $3,400,000 of taxpayers money to make everything gold plated.
• A new string of uncovered emails shows that during the election, Trump's aides were trying awfully hard to setup meetings with Russian officials, including Putin.
• How can you trust our nation's intelligence agencies when they can't even trust each other?
• Trump continues to belittle journalism.

Understanding the metal nickel.

Men in STEM fields were asked to review studies about sex bias in the workplace, and they tended to favor the studies which showed that there isn't any. The truth is, most studies show that there is sexual bias in STEM fields, and the studies the men gravitated toward were fakes! The actual test was to see if men prefer data which says there isn't sex bias in the workplace, and they certainly took the bait.

The entire 7th season of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

What this black man learned after pretending to be an online white supremacist.

Rebecca Watson answers some of her viewer's questions.

Feeling: Okay

I added a page for the Rilo Kiley album, The Execution of All Things and the Metroidvania genre of video games.

• A woman was murdered in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a white supremacist, but Trump believes he's the real victim. It's like when oil companies poison an entire city and say the protesters are the real terrorists. And speaking of protesters, Trump's propaganda rally didn't end well for the civil rights of the protesters. And how about a fact check for the Arizona rally?
• Trying to make sense of Trump's Afghanistan "strategy." Turn's out, it's the same as Obama's, only without equal rights for women.
• All through the election campaign, Trump assured his voters that he would build a wall along the border of Mexico and force Mexico to pay for it. Every expert told him that, not only would the wall be useless, but there was no way he would get Mexico to pay for it. Turns out, the experts were correct. So, Trump switched to saying that the US taxpayer would pay for the wall, but Mexico would reimburse them at some nonspecific point in the future. Congress kept balking at the price tag, so the wall went from being a 30-foot-tall concrete behemoth to a small chain link fence, but still no dice. Now, Trump is saying that if Congress doesn't surrender our tax dollars to build his wall, he'll do what Republicans have been doing for the past 8 years, shut down the entire US government. Honestly, I'd prefer no government to Trump's government.
• Joe Arpaio is the former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He's also criminally racist, and I don't mean that as a clever way of saying he's extremely racist, his racism is so bad, he's actually broken the law several times due to his racism, to the point where he was convicted of a crime. However, Trump has a particular love for Republican racists who are convicted of crimes, and is working to give him a Presidential Pardon.
• After the military explained that Trump had lied about consulting with them on banning transgender people, Trump actually got around to doing talking to them about it, and they're currently hammering out exactly how they will be banned.

How much of the Earth can you see at once?

Assistant coach Joe Kennedy, who used his public school position to force his religion on students and lost his job, now lost his court appeal. Next on the chopping block, Sylacauga High School whose administrators canceled class for the whole school and made them witness a church ceremony.

Some tips about game design from someone who has failed more times than you've tried.

Just because I'm an atheist doesn't mean I'm a serial killer.

Feeling: Proud

Meh babbies are looking great. Almost 10 inches long!

I made a page for the DOS game, The Savage Empire and the short story, The Little Match Girl.

• During the Obama administration, Trump frequently criticized him for remaining involved in foreign war for years, but now that Trump has surrounded himself with military officials, he's increasing US military foreign occupations. A draft-dodging hypocrite is not the kind of person you want in charge of the military!
• Trump's nominee for the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist is Sam Clovis. Clovis is not a scientist, but he is a Republican talk show host who denies the scientific consensus of climate change, doesn't believe Obama was born in America, thinks that people can simply choose who they're sexually attracted to, and believes that same-sex marriage leads to raping children.
• One of the good things about Trump burning through an entire year's Secret Service budget is that they'll probably have less time to violate the Constitutional rights of non-violent legal protesters.
• Trump doesn't understand basic macroeconomic issues, but he does understand how to give himself a massive tax break.
• It's not just Americans who have condemned Trump for defending the KKK and Nazis, now the rest of the world is calling him out!

The awesomeness of the 2017 total solar eclipse, and how you can apply it to politics.

A man was using his cellphone to take pictures of women changing in the dressing room of Target, so naturally, the Christian hate group, American Family Association, blames transgender bathrooms.

While I don't wish it on anyone, it's nice to commiserate with other countries whose leaders think it's a good thing to compartmentalize children based on their religion.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, except when it does.

Feeling: Happy

I created a page for the TV show DuckTales.

• How good of a job did General John Kelly do in bringing discipline to the White House?
• So far, Trump has spent $60,000 of tax payer money just in golf cart rentals. Most of which were at properties he owns, so he's literally taking US tax dollars, and giving it to himself, so he can play golf instead of working.
• The Federal Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, a group of scientists studying the effects of climate change, has just been fired by the Trump Administration. And, just a reminder about what happens when the Earth's average temperature changes by just two degrees Celsius. But then, Trump wasn't elected to work with scientists, he was elected to make great deals with businessmen. How well is that working out?
• Louise Linton, second wife of Trump appointee Republican Steven Mnuchin, just bragged about her extremely expensive vacation and shopping spree paid for, apparently, by the US taxpayer. When one of her social media followers called her out on it, Linton mocked them for not being as rich as she is.
• Trump is sending more troops to Afghanistan, because he's an America-first President.

Building an intercontinental ballistic missile is harder than you'd expect.

The New Zealand government rightfully removed a Christian-led hate group from their list of approved charities because the group wasn't about education or truth, but rather about bullying the LGBT and lying.

A Christian preacher gives a list of 10 women you shouldn't marry.

It's rare these days to say something nice about Richard Dawkins, so here you go.

In the UK, a 21-year-old man gave a 12-year-old girl alcohol, then took her alone into the woods and sexually assaulted her. However, she won't be given any compensation for her abuse. Why? Because the government organization that decides who gets compensation is, in part, run by the Catholic Church, who says they the 12-year-old girl, and many other children, consented to the abuse.

Remember in the 80s when we solved our nuclear waste problem? No? That's because we didn't, and we still haven't.

The largest NFL player National Anthem protest was just held. Good work boys, refuse to stay quiet!

Feeling: Nerdy

I created a counter to Trump's infamous "we condemn violence on many sides" line. I also finished reading What to Expect When Your Wife's Expanding.

• Trump continues to receive fallout after defending the KKK and Nazis. In addition to the CEOs in the Strategic and Policy Forum quitting, his entire Arts Council resigned. But, to show their loyalty to racists, Trump's Christian Evangelical Advisory Board is still intact. However, Jerry Falwell, Jr.'s complacency with bigotry has caused graduates from Liberty University to return their diplomas. And now, Trump is skipping the Kennedy Center Honors altogether since most of the artists being honored said they might protest. His bad polling is coming especially from women where 71% disapprove of him. Why didn't they vote this way in the first place? I'm kind of glad that Trump never apologizes for his mistakes, and instead doubles-down, which means his racism is going to bury him.
• The USA is progressing as more Confederate statues come down.
• Trump continues with his plan to prevent the elderly living in nursing homes from being allowed to sue the home when they're abused by the workers.
• Betsy DeVos, the nation's Secretary of Education, has just now realized the importance of students being taught history in schools (seriously!) and didn't even know about the American Civil War until last week when she Googled it !
• Trump was unable to make up his mind, first calling Boston protesters "anti-police agitators" and later praising them for speaking out against bigotry. I'm presuming the first one was his actual post, while the subsequent post was done by his staff. They probably also corrected his misuse of the word "heel" when he meant "heal." A simple mistake, for a seven-year-old.
• It's only August, but Trump and his shitty family have used up the entire budget allocated to the Secret Service with their countless vacations.

The strange all-encompassing trend toward popularity as identified by Zipf.

Daniel Dennett gives a wonderful lecture on information, evolution, and (not religious) intelligent design.

An interesting talk with a believer and why they should believe in something if there is no evidence.

The importance of stupid-proofing an experiment.

The garbage reasons for why people believe in fake medicine.

Feeling: Disgusted

I created a page for the SNES port of SimCity, and made a graphic called Goth Eyeshadow Palette.

• One of the primary arguments against the removal of Southern Civil War military statues is that it is trying to eliminate history, and Trump is sad to see them go. This argument fails because most of the statues were not built during or shortly after the US Civil War (circa 1965), but erected decades later to solidify white pride in response to black people beginning to fight for their rights (circa 1895). Thankfully, cities like Baltimore have come to understand this, and have removed their Confederate statues.
• Donald Trump has defended white supremacists and blamed the people protesting the Nazis and KKK for starting the fight, which doesn't match the account of people who were actually there, many of whom deserve a medal for their restraint. Good Christian white man Mike Pence says he support Trump defending the Klan, and while most Republican's have the good sense enough to denounce Nazis, none of them are denouncing Trump. At this point, Trump is so hated that the Mayor of Phoenix has even asked Trump to delay his visit and let things calm down, especially if he planned on coming to pardon Phoenix's most famous racist, Joe Arpaio. Thankfully, not everyone in the government defends Nazis, the highest levels of each branch of the US military issued statements against racism and hatred using language much stronger than Trump's pretend denouncement.
• Now that a white woman has been killed by it, Fox News has taken down their video telling people to take notes on how to purposely drive their car into protesters.
• One person who claimed he was only pretending to be a white supremacist ran away from the mob and took off his shirt which identified him as a racist. Doesn't he realize that people of color can't just change their skin when they're being confronted? However, another Nazi has probably ended the business he co-owns by outing himself on social media.
• Trying to understand the people who vote for Trump.

Muslim terrorists drove a van through a walkway in Barcelona, Spain murdering at least 12 people and injuring dozens of others.

The scientific reason why you shouldn't feed your pets chocolate.

In Texas, you should expect an 11-minute-long unwarranted violent vaginal cavity search alongside a public road. And no, the police involved will probably not be punished.

Understanding motion sickness.

Some interesting throwbacks in the 2016 remake of Doom.

A strange scientific paradox known as the faint young sun.

Feeling: Disgusted

I've added a page for the Nintendo Cereal System, a list of audio books I own and my opinion on the Cowper painting, Vanity.

• In Trump's pseudo-press conference about the Charlottesville protest and murder, he blamed the people protesting the KKK and Nazis for inciting the violence. He also denied that it took him a long time to denounce American terrorists (he still hasn't, really) and refused to acknowledge that the actions of the KKK and Nazis are terrorist actions. Trump also received praise from his buddy, Klansman David Duke, who thanked Trump for blaming the KKK and Nazi protesters. Meanwhile, the Holocaust Memorial in Boston has been vandalized. At least some good is coming out of this tragedy, people all over the country are actively denouncing the KKK and Nazis, cities are expediting the rate at which they're removing Confederate memorials, and Web host providers are ditching their Nazi customers.
• Since people keep quitting Trump's two pet projects because he refuses to denounce the KKK, both the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and the Strategy Policy Forum have been disbanded.
• As the Trump Administration continues to believe coal is the future, Scotland is building an 80,000 panel solar farm.

How to see the smallest things in the universe.

I think it explains a lot that the third highest authority in the Catholic Church, and Archbishop named Denis Hart, says he would rather go to prison than report to the police a child rapist's confession. I wonder how he would respond to Pastor Mitch Olson from Grace Ministry Center in Kimball, Michigan, who has been accused of groping a 19-year-old girl's breasts, buttocks, and pubic region so he could "anoint her with oil."

Don't be like a sphex wasp.

Feeling: Angry

I've added short pages for two Browser games: Today I Die and Totem Destroyer.

• Former KKK leader David Duke explained how Trump's speech was very good to the Klan. Trump didn't blame them, or even condemn white supremacy, but placed the blame equally on the KKK and people protesting the KKK. After Duke said they were doing exactly what Trump wanted, journalists asked Trump to comment on Duke's message. Trump once again refused to say anything bad about the KKK, white supremacists, or Nazis. When the White House was asked why Trump won't condemn American terrorists, they explained that he didn't want to upset his voters dignify them. But Trump's silence has caused many white politicians to speak out against him, and several big names resigned from his "American Manufacturing Council," which caused Trump to -finally- say that the KKK and Nazis are bad, but he then immediately invalidated the condemnation by sharing a post from another white nationalist and a train running over a CNN reporter.
• Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered by white supremacist James Alex Fields, Jr., won't even get a nice memorial due to continued threats of the KKK, Nazis, and other white supremacists who are very pleased she was murdered. One of the angry racists who attended the protest, Peter Cvjetanovic, a 20-year-old from Nevada who has become an overnight Internet celebrity, doesn't want people to view him as an angry racist. And Nigel E. Krofta, who stood next to the murderer was fired from his job, but still thinks of himself as a great person with a clear conscience.
• Jeff Sessions won't be pursuing charges of terrorism against murderer James Alex Fields, Jr., or any other domestic terrorist for that matter, because we don't have laws against it. However, he is demanding identifying information including names, addresses, telephone numbers, IP addresses, and even photos for everyone who has visited a website to organize protests against Donald Trump. DreamHost has been working the Justice Department for several months now, but says they refuse to comply with their most recent demand since it is a violation of Constitutional rights.
• Trump and his staff are far too incompetent to deal with North Korea.
• While all this shit is going down, Republicans are still trying to dismantle the government. Scott Pruitt is trying to remain in secret as he takes apart the EPA.
• When Trump was running for president, his aides kept trying to get in touch with Russia and setup meetings.
• In many countries, people have the right to say ignorant racist things, but that doesn't mean private companies have to give them a megaphone with which to spread their hate. Twitter, however, continues to be the mouthpiece for vile and often violent hate speech refusing to ban those who use Twitter to make rape threats, murder threats, and even genocide threats. One man decided to force Twitter to have to own the evil they promote.

Why humans have earwax, and why you shouldn't use a Q-tip to clean it out.

Metal batteries won't solve everything.

Finding the world's oldest fossils.

The interesting nature of 3D printers.

Feeling: Happy

I married another couple yesterday. Help me, before I become addicted!

I've added a page for the game Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle.

• One person has been murdered and 15 others were injured when a white supremacist James Alex Fields, Jr. purposely drove into a crowd of people counter-protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia where the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists were protesting the removal of Confederate monuments with tiki torches. Thankfully, many of the white supremacists are being identified. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi web site hosted by GoDaddy, is having their contract canceled for violating their terms of service after posting how thrilled they were that one of the protesters was murdered. I find it a bit scary that it took this long for GoDaddy to cancel a racist Nazi web site. By the way, which presidential candidate do you think all these bigots voted for? And while only one group decided to show up with guns and torches and ram a car into the other group of protesters, Trump put the blame equally on everyone involved!
• All around the country Federal plans are helping decrease the rate of unplanned teen pregnancy. Well, at least they used to, because Trump has cut them all to give a tax break to billionaires, and its his tax breaks that the Trump Administration is hoping will be something that the Republican controlled government can finally call a success.
• Being on the brink or war, or in a war, is great for presidential ratings, but I'd just prefer the earth wasn't blown up to satisfy Trump's ego.
• Ivanka Trump is not a feminist. Not even a little.

Our flat universe.

You can get arrested in Iran for teaching people how to dance. And in Russia, don't expect to get a promotion if you look like you might be gay.

How to fake trick shots.

Common questions for biology grad students.

Feeling: Happy

I've added a page for the game Little Nemo: The Dream Master.

• More sabre-rattling between Trump and Kim Jong-un; both trash humans. The White House staff continues to fight about who's in charge. And, Trump is taking credit for revamping the US nuclear arsenal, even though nothing substantial has been changed.
• Because Putin is Trump's best buddy, he doesn't critique him, but praises him for kicking people out of the US embassies in Russia.
• After receiving backlash from not doing anything, Trump is now finally ready to declare the USA's massive opioid addiction a national problem.
• When the political leaders of the country are either too stupid to know about climate change or too corrupt to stop the companies that bribe them, you have to go to the courts.
• Thanks to Republicans obstructing Obama for 8 years, Trump is going to appoint 120 judges (15% of the Judicial Branch) during his tenure, and if they're anything like the monster Neil Gorsuch, we're in for several decades of hurt.

Meet the women who fight ISIS. And we need to plan for what's going to happen when they win.

After learning that one of their 12-year-old buys had been raped by several other students, the administrators at Brentwood Academy, a private Christian school, not only refused to inform the police or even the boy's parents, but told him to turn the other cheek!

Explaining post-modernism to someone who fancies themself a skeptic.

Why dropping stacked balls makes them bounce so high.

"Reverend" Elvis Taveras, a Catholic Priest, has been arrested as a suspect in the killing of a 16-year-old altar boy!

Nothing's free, not even free parking.

Feeling: Happy

I've added a page for the game Magic Carpet.

• The FBI have raided Paul Manafort's home. If he had any brains, he would have stashed anything incriminating months ago, but it's still worth checking.
• Pretty much everyone Trump appointed is directly related to the agency they now run, not through competence, but from profiting from the agency or actively trying to destroy the agency.
• Remember when Trump said Hillary Clinton would be embroiled in countless lawsuits if she were elected as president? Well, the lawsuit against Trump's attempt to ban people from serving in the US military is proceeding.
• Under Trump's guidance, the USA has American-born citizens seeking asylum in Canada as refugees.
• Being an impersonator for the White House goon Stephen Miller is hard work.
• Pray for peace, prepare for global thermo-nuclear war.

If plants absorb light for energy, and black absorbs the most light, why aren't plants black?

Who do you think hates gay people more? American Muslims or Evangelical Christians?

A 50% chance of rain doesn't mean what you think it means, or even what it sounds like it means.

Officer Wayne Welsh, assistant police chief of Estherwood, Louisiana, has resigned after it became public that he posted to his Facebook a "joke" suggesting that, if your daughter wants to date a black boy, you should drown her in the bath tub.

There is an unwritten rule which states every religious apologist who denies evolution must not know anything about evolution.

Why are red blood cells shaped like donuts?

Feeling: Rebellious

I've added a page about my opinion on having "In God We Trust" as our national motto.

• Trump refuses to declare the mass opioid addiction in the USA an epidemic, despite the findings of his panel, and instead tells drug addicts to just say no! Remember how well that worked during the Reagan administration?
• As things become more tense, Trump is reassured by Christian charlatan Robert Jeffress that God wants Trump to start a nuclear war with North Korea. And nothing improves Presidential ratings like a war!
• The US dollar has been on a steady decline ever since Trump was elected, meanwhile, Trump will continue to be on vacation for the next two weeks.
• If you publicly mock a politician for sending dick pics, and then get caught sending dick pics, you're probably a host on Fox.
• Once again, Betsy DeVos sides with the bigots and refuses to try and stop discrimination.
• Republicans defunded Planned Parenthood in Texas and then saw a major rise in unwanted teen pregnancies. Shocking!
• What has Mike Pence been up to? Nothing big, just shutting down abortion providers, converting public schools to churches, ending health care for the poor, making it harder for minorities to vote, and trying to criminalize the LGBT. You know, typical Republican stuff.
• Republicans don't much care for immigrants or the Statue of Liberty.
• One good thing to say about Trump screwing up so badly, is that people no longer will claim that America is the leader of the free world.

Is the 2017 eclipse a sign from god? Probably.

Child has a bike accident and a cut on his forehead. Doctors suggest a tetanus vaccine. Ignorant parents refuse. Child develops the first case of tetanus Italy has seen in 30 years!

Police continue to plant drugs on black people even when they're wearing body cameras.

Christians have successfully outlawed homosexuality in Nigeria to the point where people are being arrested for having sex with the people they love.

The Wall Street Journal has finally figured out how to market to Millennials.

In Malaysia, it is a crime to stop being Muslim, and a recent picture of an atheist meeting is leading to a government crackdown!

Yung Mazi, a rapper who claimed that his god had made him bulletproof, has been shot to death.

Feeling: Proud

I cross off the word "GOD" from the back of my paper money to protest the 1957 unconstitutional addition of the phrase to US money. Several years ago, I bought a black Sharpie marker to keep in my car specifically for this purpose, and every time I got new bills from an ATM or change from a drive-through, I would redact the bill. Well, a couple days ago, my Sharpie finally ran dry. I used an entire Sharpie marker on nothing but centimeter long marks! I wonder how many thousands of bills I must have struck? And, yes, I have a new Sharpie and will continue with the civil disobedience.

I've added a page for King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne.

• There are some serious problems with the US Border Patrol, and Trump is only making things worse.
• There is a new Republican bill which will allow immigrants into the country based on merit rather than need. You're asked questions about your education, job offers, English speaking ability, etc. Since I speak fluent English, have graduated high school, already have a decent job, and invest money in the American stock market, you'd think I'd be the perfect candidate for immigration, but I only scored 19 out of a necessary 30 points needed to be accepted! If only I'd have won that Nobel Prize!
• For someone who adores attention, Trump avoids press conferences like the plague, probably because he's incompetent at public speaking. Also, after someone through a bomb through a Mosque window, Trump has been quite silent. According to the highly-racist and entirely-unqualified national security advisor Sebastian Gorka, they think the terrorist attack might have been faked by Liberals.
• The Trump administration is trying to censor government-employeed scientists from saying the words "climate change".
• Trump has a weirdly symbiotic relationship with the goons from Fox and Friends.
• Twice a day, every day, White House workers compile a folder full of praise for Donald Trump and give it to him so he'll feel like people like him.

The inconsistent arguments women give for why they cover up their faces. Is it for modesty? For culture? For religion? For all? For neither?

Google rightly fired their asshole employee who wrote a memo saying that women can't be good at technical skills.

How country are you? I'm so friggin' country!

Some interesting Virtual Boy Easter eggs.

Describing some of the myths surrounding Jesus.

Shigeru Miyamoto's keynote speech from 1999.

What manner of sorcery is this? Transparent solar panels?

Feeling: Frustrated

Over the weekend, I got to play my friend's HTC Vive (a VR headset) which was a pretty awesome. I finished reading The Mote In God's Eye. Also, some friends and I beat an escape room with only a few minutes left, but we weren't able to figure out who the murderer was.

• Trump is estimated to take more vacations in his first year than Obama took in his entire eight years as president making him the laziest president in history!
• When Trump begged the President of Mexico to lie for him, he wasn't expecting his phone call to be leaked, and make him look like a pansy.
• Trump isn't able to get anything of his own done, so he's relying on just eliminating everything Obama did in his has few months as president, regardless of how helpful they are. For example, before Obama, nursing homes often required people to waive all their rights to sue the home, even if their workers sexually assaulted their residents. Obama made a law preventing that from being allowed, but now Trump is going to do away with it.
• Jeff Sessions finally cracks down on racism, but only when it's against white people.
• Fossil fuel companies are thrilled that Trump's Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, is re-opening a tax loophole that allows them to avoid paying $75,000,000 in taxes.
• Trump's ban of transgender people in the military is going from Twitter to national policy.
• Yet another Fox "News" employee, this time host Eric Bolling, has been suspended pending an investigation that he has sexually harassed many of his co-workers and guests including sending unsolicited nude pictures of himself. Naturally, the women who have brought up these accusations are now the target of death and rape threats.
• Robert Mueller's grand jury for the Trump administration's Russian collusion has been put together.
• The NRA made an advertisement with several thinly-veiled violent threats toward the New York Times and the way they conduct journalism with evidence and facts.

The importance of knowing what you believe and what you don't, and why, regarding atheism.

Calvary Chapel Christian School shows that it's not so much about being Christian as it is about winning basketball games.

Using chemistry to create a detonation that can blow a coin into a metal sheet so hard it leaves an indentation.

Catholics often argue that all those rapists priests are a thing of the past, and that the current Catholic Church is back to helping the poor and praising Jesus. Tell that to Father Lagarejos who was caught trying to have sex with a 13-year-old girl in the Philippines. And you can tell him that because he's not even in jail after paying the equivalent of $2,400 in bail.

Orchids are lying cheating bastards!

Why are for-profit prisons a bad idea? Because they demand courts give them criminals to incarcerate, even when crime is at an all time low.

The NFL continues to try to hide the evidence which shows just how dangerous football is to player's brains.

The majority of American Christians believe that poor people aren't poor due to a bad economy or having jobs replaced by automation, or having expensive accidents, no, Christians today believe poor people are just plain lazy.

Feeling: Frustrated

I beat the game Operation C. I also added a Personal Video Game Post and a template for making your own.

• A transcript of Trump's first call to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, has been leaked. It has plenty of mild racism and a whole lotta lies which the Washington Post has fact-checked, but the most interesting thing is how Trump begs President Neito to stop publicly contradicting him about not paying for the border wall.
• Samantha Bee puts together a wonderful musical about racist lawyer Kris Kobach and his many failed lawsuits which have left small towns in ruins.
• Three major people in the White House are out, General John Kelly is in, and Trumps says they're gonna have a good time!
• It may not make it through the Republican Congress, but at least one Republican is growing a spine and trying to pass a bill that won't let Trump fire the man investigating his Russian involvement unless Trump can actually give a good reason.
• After almost a decade of failing Republicans still can't repeal Obamacare, despite unending attempts to sabotage it, and, while they haven't admitted defeat on Trumpcare, maybe they can save face by crippling the US economy by giving the 1% massive tax cuts.
• Cable news is normalizing the bat-shit craziness of the Trump administration.
• It must have pained him greatly, but Trump finally increased sanctions on Russia.
• Why do Kurdish people like Trump?

Looking at perpetual motion machines.

Justin Georges Stephen Coulombe wants to be a priest so badly that he dresses like one, talks like one, and even sexually assaults children like one.

Can humans be modified to derive energy from photosynthesis?

Michael Shkreli has been found guilty of defrauding his investors! I guess he won't be getting an apology from the judge after all!

Fun in games is not nearly as simple as you'd think.

Kim Davis, the Kentucky woman who refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, which was part of her job, cost the state $225,000 in legal fees after she and her bigoted Christian attorneys lost their case. But they refuse to accept that they were at fault, and say the reason the state is out a quarter of a million dollars is because of Liberals!

Being an atheist ex-Christian is difficult, but being an atheist ex-Muslim is a Herculean Labor.

Slime molds are amazing.

Feeling: Annoyed

I beat the game Ninja Gaiden Shadow.

• Remember when Trump said he loved the poorly-educated? He wasn't wrong, in fact, uneducated people, especially uneducated white men, were his largest voter base. I say "was" because even ignorant white men are finally starting to become disenfranchised with Trump. But Evangelical hypocrites... that's another story, and it doesn't matter that Trump is the opposite of a traditional Christian.
• Even the White House has finally admitted, the calls where Trump claimed he was congratulated by the head of the Boy Scouts and the President of Mexico were lies, or, should I say, "not inaccurate." In fact, the White House is creating its own State-run outlet for informing the public with what it calls "Real News," which, of course, will be anything but since it will be hosted by another one of Trump's family members.
• This is what happens when you choose people who aren't qualified to be your head of cyber-security.
• Republicans continue to try and eliminate Medicaid, but here's why it is so important to our country.
• As Trump continues to champion for the right of businesses to pollute without any pause for the environment, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has grown to the largest it has ever been.

Millionaire coal tycoon, Robert Murray is suing John Oliver for saying mean things about him. The legal defense obviously had a lot of fun showing Murray's long history of being a whiny lawsuit happy little bitch, because one of the major sections in the brief is titled, "Anyone can legally say, 'Eat shit, bob!'"

Rather than trying to create machines that act as pollution filters and carbon sinks, we could just plant more trees.

No, you can't prove the existence of a god by rolling dice.

Knoxville, Tennessee police finally acknowledge and take down their unconstitutional Christian plaque rather than waste taxpayer money on a definite legal loss. And this brings up an important question, should atheists fight for simple things like this? Well, history has shown what happens when we don't.

The best ways to criticize someone without them getting mad at you.

Sure, nothing ultimately matters, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic about it!

Feeling: Aggravated

I added a review for Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Bridge to Terabithia.

I have made a revelation of literature over 30-years in the making.

• Jeff Sessions, Trump's racist Attorney General, keeps claiming that he's never done anything even remotely racist, but he does want to divert resources away from civil rights to try and stop Affirmative Action.
• The bible study that goes on in the White House is taught by Ralph Drollinger, a man who believes Catholics are false Christians, homosexuality is an abomination, and that it's sinful for mothers to become Congresswomen.
• Trump claims the head of the Boy Scouts of America called him to tell him that his Jamboree speech was the best speech the Scouts had ever heard. The Scouts respond saying they never made such a call. In fact, the Scouts officially apologized because they felt Trump's speech was inappropriate.
• Scaramucci, we hardly knew ye. And take Priebus with you!
• Under the guidance of plutocrat Rex Tillerson, the State Department seems to be eliminating "the promotion of democracy" as one of its missions.
• A 30-year veteran of the EPA just resigned because the Trump administration favors lying to help billionaires.

Davino Watson is a naturalized American citizen, but ICE still held him in jail for over 3 years and almost deported him before finally realizing their mistake and releasing him. Once out, Watson sued and the court awarded him $82,000 in compensation, but a higher court refused him the money because the statute of limitations, which is only 2 year, had expired... while he was still in jail.

The USA still doesn't take rape seriously, many ERs across the country don't even stock rape kits and lack staff trained in their use. Thankfully, Democratic Senator Patty Murray is fighting to change that! And disgusting Christians continue to force children who have been raped to give birth.

Can a bad font choice make people less religious?

For years, the Methodists who own the Bay View Association, a group of cottages outside of Petoskey, Michigan, refused to let non-white people live in their cottages. By 1959, fearing a lawsuit, they removed the "whites-only" requirement from their official literature (but probably kept it in practice for years to come). To this day, they refused to let any non-Christians live in their cottages and require a letter from a pastor for any potential clients, but this bigotry may also be on its way out now because of a discrimination lawsuit.

We've all seen optical illusions, but here's an auditory illusion.

Why labeling yourself can often cause people to treat you with less skepticism, and why that's a bad thing.

Amber Rudd, a British politician claimed that "real people" don't care about encryption, and tech companies should do more to help governments spy on people rather than protect possible terrorists. Okay, Mrs. Rudd, please give me your personal email address and password. What's that? You don't want a stranger reading your personal correspondence? Well, neither does anyone else! Maybe you should remember that before implying that the rest of us aren't real people!

How non-magnetic metal can stick together with the Van der Waals force.

Feeling: Accomplished

I finally found and beat the very first computer game I ever saw in real life: Lurkley Manor. I also created a page for the TRS-80 Color Computer which the game ran on.

Also, if you believe that transsexualism is a mental illness, and you mock transsexual people, then you're no different from someone who mocks people for having autism.

• In addition to winning the race for the fastest drop in approval ratings for an American president in history, Trump has also broken all records for how quickly he fires his staff! Scaramucci, after throwing the majority of the White House staff under the bus, has himself been fired after only ten days on the job, that's not even long enough to commit fraud.
• Things aren't looking so good for Jeff Sessions either, as Trump continues to hate on him, but the rest of the Republicans seem like him.
• Even when they control all branches of government, Republicans still can't repeal Obamacare, and that's certainly for the best as it will severely injure the country. Thankfully, there are two Republican women who don't want the nation to implode, but their fellow Republican men are out for their blood.
• Remember when Don, Jr. lied saying the meeting he had with former spies from Russian was about adoption and not altering the outcome of an American election? Turns out that lie was concocted by none other than Trump himself!
• Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to Secretary of Education and she openly advocates for replacing public schools with for-profit charter schools like the Ohio Distance & Electronic Learning Academy which teaches their students that the earth is only 6,000 years old because that's when Jesus made it.
• Trump's meeting with Pat Robertson is an American horror story.

Alex Jones may be so insane he lost his children, but insane pays awfully well.

Pharma-Bro Martin Shkreli, the asshole who bought a drug company that makes an HIV treatment and raised the price by 5,000%. He faces up to 20 years in prison because of fraud, not from pricing the drug so high that many people died because they couldn't afford it anymore, but because he lied to investors by purposely mishandling their money. He doesn't seem to care saying, "Trial's over tomorrow, bitches. Then if I'm acquitted, I get to fuck Lauren Duca." Duca responded saying she would chop off any organs that he used to try an touch her.

The Physics Girl explains why mirrors flip images horizontally, but not vertically.

Lucian Wintrich is pissed off that immigrants would break into his country and take a picture of themselves flipping off Mount Rushmore. He doesn't realize that Mount Rushmore is in the Black Hills, an area of land sacred to the Lakota tribe which was seized by white men who them carved giant faces of the very same people who helped slaughter the Natives... and the people in the picture are Native Americans.

If you were dying, and there was nothing that could be done to save you, would you want to know?

Hobby Lobby is so Christian they refuse to allow their employees have birth control, even if they don't have to pay for it. They're so Christian they close all their stores on Sunday (even though the Sabbath is Saturday). They're so Christian, they help smuggle out of the Middle East, $20,000,000 worth of antiquities.

Aron Ra goes over the falsehoods of Answers In Genesis.

Alabama Republicans tried to force a 12-year-old girl who had become pregnant after being raped by one of her own family members to give birth, but thankfully a State Judge struck down the law the Republicans passed that could force her.

Feeling: Proud

Wedding went well! Check "officiating a wedding for two wonderful people" off my bucket list!

I finished reading Dude, You're Gonna Be a Dad! and added a page for the NES Advantage.

• Trump's new Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci, isn't acclimating to his new job very well. In addition to blabbing secret information about the White House, getting Reince Priebus fired, insulting the senior staff, and threatening to fire everyone, now his wife is leaving him.
• The US military has no plans of enforcing Trump's ban on transgender people in the military, and it's not just because his stated reason is a lie, but also because, Twitter posts aren't policy. And despite the influence Evangelical Christians are having convincing Africans to criminalize the LGBT community, if Trump wants to halt his plummeting approval ratings, he would do well to rethink the ban. Even among Republicans, support for same-sex marriage has reached an all time high, and support for transgender rights will follow.
• Even as accounts of police brutality dominate the news, Trump gives a blanket statement that police stop being so nice to suspects.
• Trump is squandering taxpayer dollars with constant vacations that require an obscene amount of protection.
• Trump won the state of Wisconsin's popular vote by a very narrow margin, only 22,748 votes. However, a study of how the 2016 Republican voter suppression has affected Wisconsin estimates that the newly enforced voter ID laws discouraged around 200,000 people from voting who usually vote Democrat.
• Predatory for-profit schools like Trump University often go bust leaving their students with a massive amount of debt and a worthless education. And Betsy DeVos is there to protect, not the students, but the people who prey on them.

Thanks to a man who doesn't know the difference between a scientific theory and religious indoctrination, Florida now has a law where citizens who can't even spell the name of a subject are now allowed to challenge what is written in public school textbooks.

Air lines claimed they charged for checked luggage because fuel prices were so high, but now that fuel prices have dropped, why haven't they stopped charging for bags?

According to the bible, God had the Canaanites wiped out for being naughty. According to genetic research, the Canaanites thrived and are still alive today.

How to increase your critical thinking skills by identifying your brain's own problems.

City officials in Pensacola, Florida have already wasted $131,000 of their tax payer's money trying to keep a cross on public land, and now they're repealing again! Imagine how quickly they would have folder if it was their own money at stake?

Samantha Bee visits Stephen Colbert.

Alex Dainis talks about DNA and RNA and bio-mimicry.

Feeling: Proud

Heading to Kalamazoo for a wedding rehearsal this afternoon, and tomorrow, I officiate the wedding of two of my friends!

I added a page for Excitebike.

• I over-estimated the fractured Republican party. They were just barely able to pass a bill that would allow them vote on Trumpcare, but after that, they dropped the ball trying to repeal Obamacare, and now they've fallen back onto their "skinny" repeal which would only eliminate the parts of Obamacare they didn't like, but still failed! For the past seven years, Republicans did a show-vote to repeal Obamacare, but they knew they could never actually do it. Now, when they have full control of the government, they can't even get a simple majority vote! And even though people are fawning over McCain, the real heroes here are Murkowski and Collins.
• Trump's new communication director thinks he can get a journalist to reveal their sources by threatening to fire the entire White House staff (because firing disgruntled employees won't increase leaks!) and also by appealing to patriotic nature. Bitch, anyone who is a patriot wants the leaks to keep coming to prevent Trump from burning the country to the ground. Scaramucci's iron fist attitude has only caused several more leaks to occur including when he claimed that he had been cock-blocked by Reince Priebus, that Steven Bannon tries to suck his own cock, and that he wants to kill every leaker in the White House!
• Both the House and Senate voted (419 to 3 and 98 to 2, respectively) to not only increase sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but also prevent anyone from re-opening them without Congressional approval. This is quite a blow to Trump who has been wanting to lift sanctions on Russia to prove his love for dictator Vladamir Putin. Even if Trump vetoes the bill, Congress can override his veto because of their majority vote, but it just another bit of evidence towards Trump's obsession with Russia. Russia responded by seizing two American properties in Russia and demanding that American embassies in Russia reduce the size of their staff!
• Draft-dodging Trump called for a ban on transgender people in the military, wrongly stating that their health care is preventing the US military from stopping terrorism, but US generals, you know, the ones he claimed to have talked to about the problem, don't know anything about the ban, and aren't going to take a Twitter post as law.
• Trump continues to throw Jeff Sessions under the bus for doing the right thing, and ruins the life of pretty much everyone he comes in contact with.
• Sam Brownback just finished bankrupting the State of Kansas by following the tax-cutting play book of Arthur Laffer. Even Republicans had to re-institute taxes to keep the state solvent. So, what possible political future can Brownback expect after ruining an entire state? Why, being appointed by Trump to the White House, of course! Brownback, an ultra-conservative Christian who wants to ban abortion, fire all LGBT workers, and force Creationism into public schools is now the head of International Religious Freedom at the State Department!
• Kelly Anne Conway explains that part of the reason the White House still hasn't been able to fill all their vacant positions is because of those pesky ethics rules which are scaring off their potential employees, which gives you an idea of what kind of people they are trying to hire.
• Trump claimed his rally in an auditorium that can only hold 6,000 people broke every attendance records ever.

Paul Joseph Watson, a racist at Infowars (I think that's redundant), got his knickers in a twist when he saw a BBC educational cartoon that suggested that Roman-occupied Britain was ethnically diverse. So, a historian went on a rant explaining to him that the vast majority of the Roman empire actually was very diverse and included Moors, North Africans, Middle Easterners, and more.

Interesting information about the Game Boy Advance.

The Boy Scouts of America finally apologized for Trump's political rant, but it's too little too late.

If atheists talked like Christians.

What would happen if you let an ex-Christian teach a Sunday School class?

The fascinating crystals known as perovskites.

They the 2% failure rate of condoms doesn't mean what you think it means.

Feeling: Annoyed

Our babies are both 7 inches long, both 5 ounces, and both female!

I added a page for the NES port of Gauntlet and reworked my page for Queen's Sheer Heart Attack album.

• Republicans voted in favor of a Trumpcare bill that they've never even seen, but now they voted not to repeal Obamacare, in large part because they keep ignoring Republican women and creating rules that hurt them. And how do Republican men respond to their female colleagues who feel disenfranchised? The same way they respond to all women, with threats of violence.
• For decades, the Boy Scouts have discriminated against everyone who isn't a religious straight male. So, I'm not too shocked when they invited Trump to lie about his presidency and tell dirty jokes to children.
• Newt Gingrich, another party-over-country Republican, has come to rescue his damsel Donald Trump with a slew of lies and misrepresentation.
• Trump's argument for why he's banning transgender people from the military is so the military won't be burdened with the cost of their gender reassignment therapy. The reality is, the military has an obscene amount of money, almost as much as every other country in the world combined. Also, there are very few transgender people in the military anyway (they only account for 0.14% of their medical budget), Trump spends almost as much as their entire yearly budget every time he goes to his resort to play golf. In fact, shockingly, each year the US military spends over ten times more than their former transgender soldiers as they do on $84,000,000 worth of Viagra. So, no, banning transgender soldiers was not done to save money, but it wasn't just done because Trump is a lying bigot either. It may have been done to force Democrats to make transgender issues part of their platform in an attempt to injure them because they believe even Democrat voters are still afraid of transgender people. To some extent, they're right, but considering Republicans still think they can win the fight against same-sex marriage, I'm not so sure they understand their opponents very well, especially when there are people like this.
• Trump claims the US has the highest taxes in the world. Trump is a liar.
• Trump doesn't understand the first amendment to the US Constitution.
• Though it's only a drop in the bucket, Twitter has started to lose users, many who explain the reason they left as Twitter's lack of desire to stop revenge porn and cyber-bullying (often from Trump).
• Trump appointed someone with strong ties to the drug industry to lead the FDA and put his son-in-law in charge of solving the opioid epidemic. Needless to say, neither of these moves have decreased the number of people getting addicted to pain pills, and have probably made it worse.
• Republicans elected a clown, and now they don't know what to do because the lown has taken over.

Since torture victims can't sue the US Government, they're instead trying to sue the company that was paid $81,000,000 of taxpayer's money to create and oversee the CIA's torture program. The company is defending themselves by saying they shouldn't be held accountable for making a torture program because they didn't force anyone to use their torture tactics, just like how the people who created the chemical weapons for the Nazis weren't guilty of killing the Jews. First of all, if you want to claim innocence, it's best not to compare yourself people who created poison gas for the Nazis. Second, the people who supplied the Nazis with poison were found guilty.

The three biggest claims of Dr. Oz, and why each one is a lie.

Malaysa is a mostly Islamic country where a politician can get away with saying that women who withhold sex from their husbands are causing extreme emotional abuse.

The shape of the universe and why it's no fun to be a male hyena.

Ken Ham finally lost his battle with the State of Kentucky, he tried all the underhanded tactics in the Christian play book, but eventually he agreed to give $0.50 of each ticket sale to his giant wooden box amusement park to the state to pay for police and fire protection.

Simone Giertz opens her packages after being gone for 2.5 months and electrocutes her face for fun and profit.

Another victory against using the state police department for religious indoctrination in Knoxville, Kentucky.

Feeling: Angry

Had a bit of a scare with the twins, but things are looking pretty good so far. Emily had another ultrasound and our fears have been assuaged. We're also waiting on the results of a blood test to confirm happy results.

I added a page for the Howl's Moving Castle movie.

• If even a bunch of racist rednecks like the KKK can organize, we knew Republicans would eventually stop tripping over themselves and pass something. Yesterday, the Senate voted on a new Trumpcare bill that nobody was even allowed to see, and enough Republicans voted in favor to get a tie vote, which allowed Mike Pence to cast the deciding vote in favor allowing Trumpcare to continue. Republicans Rand Paul and John McCain have said on numerous accounts that Trumpcare would hurt the country, but they still voted in favor of it, because they would rather hurt the country than go against their party. So, we're back on the path of killing millions of Americans by taking away their health insurance and making it impossible for them to ever get it back so we can give a tax break to the 1%. The only two Republicans who voted against Trumpcare were Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and it's telling that they would be women, as Trumpcare, much like Trump himself, is particularly cruel to women.
• Bigotry is usually pretty easy to spot. It usually takes the form of, we don't want "you people" to be around us. Trump, a classic bigot, gives a great example by banning transgender people from serving in the US military.
• Trump's new communication director meets all the qualifications for the job. He's a rich white man who helped cause the 2008 depression, and is bad at communication.
• Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, the three members of Trump's team who worked with Russians in an attempt to smear Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, will be questioned by the Senate, but we shouldn't expect much since the Senate is majority Republican, and the questioning will occur behind closed doors.
• Trump accidentally confirmed the existence of a secret CIA operation on Twitter.
• Once again, Republicans demonstrate that they favor bigger and more bureaucratic government by creating new restrictions for women seeking abortions.
• While the Trump administration continues to pretend that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese, the UK is planning to ban the sale of fossil fuel burning cars by 2040.

Officer Mohamed Noor shot Justine Ruszczyk to death after she slapped his police car. But the police report doesn't explain why Ruszczyk was shot to death, or even that she was shot to death. Instead, it reads that, "the female became deceased in the alley."

This summer, the US Supreme Court will hear two cases about gerrymandering.

Stefan Stewart was caught sexually assaulting his relative, a 4-year-old boy. He claimed that he was possessed by the devil, but didn't need prayer from the boy's mother because the devil had left him after she walked in on them.

Chris Bishop talks about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence.

If your great-grandfather is a famous televangelist, you won't have to see the inside of a Oklahoma courtroom, even if you take part in a drive-by shooting, like Blake Kenneth Hagin.

Is America a Christian nation? Here are the arguments.

A detailed history of the civil war going on in Middle East.

Feeling: Frustrated

I added a page for The Goonies video game.

• After lying about it for almost a year, new information keeps surfacing about Don Jr. when thought he was meeting with people he thought were with the Russian government to change the outcome of the US election. In addition to a former spy, Don Jr. also invited into his office someone who has been accused of laundering $1,400,000,000.
• Parents eventually learn to tune out the tantrums of their children, and the American public appears to be doing the same with Donald Trump's tantrums. In some ways, this is terrible because it means Americans won't bat an eye the next time he tries to violate the US Constitution, but in other ways, it hurts him as well, like when he calls for the investigation of Hillary Clinton and nobody cares.
• Trump got up in front of 40,000 Boy Scouts at their Jamboree to complain about fake news and his failed health care bill, and patted himself on the back for how well he did in the election. He also talked about the importance of hard work and American values, even though he possesses neither.
• Trump has a cheerleader in Michelle Bachmann who claims that Trump has been working non-stop and definitely hasn't taken a whole bunch of time off to play golf, and he's definitely a great Christian who understands the god of the bible. Now, the "hard working" argument is easily shot down, but how do you deal with the "Trump is a good Christian" argument? I don't remember where I heard it, but someone presented a simple question that will kill the argument. If you have a decent understanding of the bible, simply ask, "what is it about Trump's behavior that reminds you of Jesus?" and point to a story of Jesus that proves them wrong.
• It wasn't being forced to lie for his boss on a daily basis that bothered him, but having to compete with another speaker that ultimately caused Sean Spicer to quit.
• Republicans are impotent when it comes to health care.

Earth worms are not native to upper North America, and they're changing the ecosystem in big ways.

The giant wooden crate that was built in Kentucky was sold to a church for $10, to avoid having to pay taxes, but after hearing that the state was going to eliminate their tourism-related tax rebate, they're selling it back, for another $10.

An interesting lecture about how movement is one of the primary things that drives of evolution.

Making a baryon with different types of quarks!

Kevin Koers is the Principal of Franklin Central High School in Indiana. He reprimanded a teacher for telling his students the truth, that the state is not allowed to force them to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and, I would add, since it is now a prayer, they shouldn't say it.

2017 has some interesting game innovation.

Piracy on the Amiga using X-Copy.

Feeling: Frustrated

I added a page for Kiki's Delivery Service.

• When Donald Trump failed to win the popular vote, but still won the presidency, he wanted to assure someone very important to him that he would do a good by them. That person is the certifiably insane Alex Jones. Jones, who believes every terrorist attack in recent years was a false flag operation created by the Democrats, lost custody of his children because he's crazy, and has a fear of gay frogs (seriously), is calling for a civil war against Democrats, and some of his listeners have taken up arms because of him.
• Trump put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of a few minor things like reforming the American justice system, restructuring the entire US government, solving the problems with veteran's care, diplomatic relations with China and Mexico, eliminating the opioid addiction, and ending the thousands of years of conflict in the Middle East. However, before Jared Kushner can single-handedly tackle those basic issues, he has to convince the government that he wasn't involved with Trump, Jr. and Paul Manafort's Russian collusion. And since Jeff Sessions can't help him because he was forced to recuse himself, Trump now hates Jeff Sessions.
• Everything that comes out of Tucker Carlson's mouth over at Fox "News" sounds the exact same as what is said by white supremacists.
• Republicans are still trying to get Trumpcare passed, now, by holding sick Americans hostage. They're going to have a hard time, not just because they can't even get their own party on board, but because the bill violate the Senate budget rules, you will need a 60% majority vote.
• Trump has spent one quarter of his presidency at his own properties, mostly golfing and watching TV.
• Donald Trump is human garbage who just can't keep his mouth shut.
• Trump is a compulsive liar, but Mitch McConnoll is a strategic liar.
• A bit dated now, but here is a recap of Trump's first 100 days in office.
• Trump's plan to pardon himself and his family from any crimes they may commit (or may have already committed) might actually be legal according to the US Constitution, but it wouldn't be the wisest move.

Remember Kim Davis? The Christian woman who refused to follow her Kentucky law and issue same-sex marriage licenses because Jesus didn't want her to (but he's fine with her multiple marriages)? Well, now that the smoke has cleared, Kentucky tax payers are left with her lawsuit bill totaling $225,000.

Dan Dennett answers the question, is there any good reason to believe in a god?

It would be nice if more cities would force the Christian anti-abortion clinics where they lie to pregnant women to post a visible disclaimer that the place is not a health care facility.

Julia Galef explains the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for Sopwith.

• Trump has asked his legal team if it's possible for the President to pardon himself, his family, and his appointees of legal crimes.
• The Affordable Care Act could have been a lot better, but Republicans voted against all the bells and whistles, so now we're stuck with a crappy half-version. Of course, for the people who actually use it, even the ones who were vehemently against it, they can no longer picture life without it.
• Our tax dollars continued to be wasted and our private information continues to be leaked as Republicans search for non-existent voter fraud in order to satiate Trump's fractured ego.
• Trump, just like Nixon, doesn't want people around making official records of what he says while talking to foreign rulers, like Putin.
• Ordinarily, a new president has the majority of his important cabinet leaders already picked out and ready to be approved when they take office. This has not been the case for Trump. Trump is both woefully under-prepared and so buy golfing, he's made it over half a year into his presidency before finally getting around to appointing a new head of the US Department of Agriculture. Naturally, is someone is going to be in charge of the country's farming policy, you would expect them to be an agricultural scientist, but come on, this is Trump we're talking about, so we're getting a conspiracy theorist radio host: Sam Clovis.
• Things got a bit too spicy in the White House for Sean Spicer, so he resigned. Interestingly, it wasn't having to constantly lie for the president that made him quit, it was because they hired someone else to work with him who is just as evil and incompetent: Anthony Scaramucci.
• This Republican rant against transgender people includes babbling, stuttering, incorrect history, and a complete lack of audience.
• Trump demands unflinching loyalty, just like a Mafia don.
• Trump continues to collude with Russia, a country so paranoid, they're banning fidget spinners.

The parents who willingly gave their their two underage daughters to a man who claimed to be a god and had sex with them will thankfully be going to prison.

Kaydin Alabbas was abandoned at a national park by his family after telling them he didn't want to become a Mormon missionary. He had to stay the night with strangers and get picked up by his grandparents the next day who convinced him to give Mormonism another shot, and he did go on the mission trip after all (I wonder if disownment played a role in that?). Since the story had a happy ending (as far as the parents are concerned), they used his abandonment as a wonderful teaching lesson for other Mormons doubting their faith!

When one quack accuses another quack of stealing their bullshit, everyone wins!

Landing on Mars isn't not as easy as it sounds!

That's some salty water!

Even mythology disproves Noah's Ark.

Feeling: Frustrated

I added a page for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.

• For the past eight years, Republicans have been saying no to every idea in existence, refusing to even take a vote on them. Just look at how they reacted to Obama's Supreme Court picks. Well, eight years of saying no to everything must be a hard habit to break, because now that they run the entire US government, they're still saying no to everything, even Trumpcare! Trump is still trying to sell the repeal, in a largely incoherent, largely dishonest, talk. He even tried throwing dissenting Republicans under the bus, but they're not even remotely afraid of him and his record-breaking disapproval rating. It's hard to expect much more from someone who believes that health insurance costs $12 a year.
• Betsy DeVos is trying to eliminate public schools, but thankfully she's having a hard time even giving a speech without drawing a crowd of protesters.
• Trump might not be able to get anything done, but that doesn't mean the people he appointed aren't ruining the country. With the EPA now being run by climate change denier Scott Pruitt, the agency has been successfully hobbled. In fact, even talking about climate change is a good way to lose your job. But simply getting rid of scientists and halting their research won't fix our problems, like the massive damage we're causing to the largest ecosystem on earth.

The Giant Wooden Crate amusement park which was sold to a church for $10 to avoid paying taxes might be faced with an upcoming lawsuit.

Police officers have a habit of turning off their body cameras before committing crimes. Thankfully, when officer Richard Pinheiro planted drugs at the scene of a crime, he accidentally filmed himself.

When scam artists like those working for Gweneth Paltrow attack doctors.

For the record, trying to force people to be non-religious and love the government is just replacing one type of dogma with another.

According to Gallup, fewer American Protestant Christians adhere to a particular denomination than ever before. Down from 50% in 2000 to only 30% in 2016.

Kelvin Helmholtz instability is pretty amazing looking.

Alex Dainis talks about making animals depressed, and extracting your own DNA.

Feeling: Rebellious

I added a page for Uninvited.

• Donald Trump, Jr.'s lie keeps growing taller. It went from claiming he only met with a random Russian to talk about orphans to colluding with a roomful of Russians, one a former Russian spy, to bring down an American politician. Oh look, here's a fun song about it. Want to know what's really terrifying? Even after Trump Junior admitted to meeting with Russians, and even released his emails about the meeting, 45% of Trump voters still don't believe the meeting ever took place! In addition, when Trump voters what should happen to Donald Trump if he were found to be guilty of personally working with Russians to sway the American democratic process, a whopping 77% of Trump voters don't believe he should remain in office.
• And it doesn't help that the Trump himself held an undisclosed meeting with suspected murderer Vladamir Putin after the planned meeting that lasted four times longer than it was supposed to.
• Republicans couldn't even get Republicans to accept the Republican health care bill, and Trump's idea of just killing the current health care plan without a replacement is a terrible idea, but one that Mitch McConnell is keen to vote on!
• With Trump favoring companies over citizens, he's encouraging the FCC to eliminate Net Neutrality, and people want to know just how angry the public are about this, so they made a Freedom of Information Request to see they 40,000 complaints made to the FCC website. Naturally, the FCC has refused to serve the people.
• The Trumps don't even live in Trump Tower anymore, but the US military is still spending $130,000 a month to rent it out.
• Typical Republican, one rule for the ruled and another one for the ruler.

When the NRA issues a dangerous statement, LA natives respond perfectly.

Not only do phone and Internet companies have to surrender your private information to the FBI whenever they ask, but Federal courts have ruled that they aren't even allowed to tell you when the FBI demands it.

Mega Man probably wouldn't last very long if Dr. Wily had a competent assistant.

A personal journey of a mother who raised a highly autistic son.

Seth Andrews has a message for religious spouses that are married to an atheist.

Part of why religion is so effective is because it convinces you you're sick, and only it has the cure.

Simone Giertz doesn't speak Spanish all that well, but she does speak English, Swedish, and a bit of French and Chinese.

Feeling: Rebellious

• For the past seven years, Republicans have been obstructing every attempt to repair the USA's failing health care system. Now, finally, their loyal voters give them control of the entire government only to discover they never bothered to actually come up with their own plan. So, rather than work as a group to come up with a comprehensive replacement, a few high-ranking Republicans went into a closed room, refused to take questions or give input even to their own party, and created a last-minute hack that would be about 100 times worse than the current flawed system. As expected, nobody liked it. Now, they're giving up entirely on getting their garbage plan through. Trump's position on this whole mess is to simply repeal the Affordable Care Act entirely without any replacement, and just let over 25,000,000 people lose their health care.
• Fox "News" continues to downplay the Trump administration's Russian collusion.
• Journalists asked about the hypocrisy of Trump celebrating "Made In America Week," when most of his crappy products are made with foreign labor, and the White House decided to stop answering any of those types of question.
• Remember John Oliver's report on how police can legally steal money from civilians as long as they call it civil forfeiture? Well, Trump's racist Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, wants them to do it even more! He also loves to give closed-door lectures to bigots.
• Helping translators accurately translate Trump's incoherent racist babbling.
• Trump likes to claim that he's signed more legislation than any president in history. He hasn't.
• Effectiv immideatly, peeple wil hav 2 stort spelin' lyke Trump!
• A recap of last week.

Shooting a shotgun into a car full of teenagers is a crime, unless you're a cop, and you claim they were trying to run you over. But just hope nobody ever asks to look at the footage which shows that you were in no danger of being run over when you killed a teenager because then you might get indicted on murder charges.

The Ark Encounter was able to be built because it got a massive tax break from the State of Kentucky under the claim that it would be a theme park. Well, now that the state is asking for them to pay taxes typical to what is expected from a theme park, the owners are avoiding all taxes by selling the park to a church for $10. The local government is disappointed that they're going to lose all this tax revenue, but they probably should have thought of that before trusting a Christians like Ken Ham.

Sami Karra has been charged with murdering his 17-year-old daughter by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck because she was dating a Muslim.

The Boy Scouts of America now allows gay scouts and leaders, transgender scouts, and it's even thinking about letting girls join, but they'll be damned if they allow kids who don't believe in a god!

Windows 10 is trash, and it doesn't show any signs of getting better.

Armin Navabi talks about what it's like to leave Islam.

Feeling: Exhausted

I had a fantastic time at the CFI Secular Summer Retreat! It still amazes me that something as simple as having secular Humanist beliefs can bring a large group of people together to have a wonderful time with their families and friends.

I added a page for Left 4 Dead 2.

• Don Jr.'s lawyer tried to offer a valid reason for why it was okay for Jr. to meet with, what he believed to be, Russian agents, but the Secret Service called bullshit on the lie. The FOI request that Jeff Sessions refused to file on time has been entirely redacted except for the check box indicating that he had no contact with foreign governments in the past seven years, which we have since learned is a lie, because he met with Russians multiple times. And remember, the White House's collusion with Russia is such a big deal, not just because Russia is a hostile foreign power, but because it's pretty damn evil. When asked about the systematic torture of gay people in Russia's Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov ignored the question and claimed that they didn't have a single gay person living there, and, "Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them."
• The White House continues to lie about how bad Trumpcare will be, and one of the few Republicans who is expected to vote against the destructive bill just had his offices broken into!
• Just as predicted, Trump's massive spending and tax breaks are going to cause a huge government deficit. The current number is, by the next 2 years, the USA will have lost $248,000,000,000.
• Trump just can't help himself from making unwanted personal observations of women, even when they're the wife of a world leader.
• Trump takes another step toward allowing churches to become not being religious institutions and become political institutions.
• Trump unveils "Made In America Week," which is a bit odd considering that most products which bear his name are made in China.
• There are many reasons why States have been refusing to give the personal information of voters to the White House, but probably one of the best reasons is that the White House it entirely incompetent in handling sensitive data. They just released 112 pages of comments from private citizens about the request. One comment simply reads, "Do not release any of my voter data period!" and then the White House released not only that person's name and personal email address, but everyone else's as well!

Justine Damond called 911 due to a possible assault in an alley near her Minneapolis home. Police arrived and Damond went out to talk to them, and the police shot her to death. Although all Minneapolis cops wear mandatory body cameras, there is no video evidence of the killing. So, yet another unarmed person gunned down by police, but maybe something will come of this because Damond was white.

A passenger on an American Airlines flight started masturbating next to a sleeping woman, and even though another person complained about the masturbating man, the flight attendants never bothered to wake the woman and instead allowed the man to continue masturbating next to her. When she finally woke up and realized what was happening, American Airlines required her to continue to sit, trapped between the man who was masturbating next to her and the window.

Law enforcement are trying to make it illegal for companies to tell their customers when they're demanding private information about their customers!

Iranian women are badass. Not only are they driving cars (Allah forbid!), but they're doing so while not wearing a hijab!

Julia Galef explains how you too can have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics... just hang out with Sean Carroll.

The mathematical genius, Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, has sadly died at age 40 from breast cancer.

The headline read, "Local Pastor opens church inside Mumford High School," which sounds awfully shocking, and it's exactly what happened.

Anthony Erb likes to help the homeless, but that didn't stop someone from throwing a rock through his car window with the words, "GOD IS GOOD" written on it.

Feeling: Angry

I added a page for Sonic the Hedgehog.

• The White House is still doing damage control ever since Donald Trump, Jr. proved that they have been lying for the past 9 months, and now we've learned that Don Junior conveniently forgot to mention Rinat Akhmetshin, ex-Russian counter-intelligence, was also in the meeting! Fox "News" is trying their damnedest to blame everything on Obama and Clinton, seriously. Not that it's necessary, as John Oliver explains, truth doesn't matter to the Republican voter. Don Jr. will be questioned on Capitol Hill, but since Republicans are in charge of punishment, it's doubtful that his unethical behavior will be treated seriously.
• Trump's Muslim ban is now in effect, but some judges are at least working to make it less of a Constitutional violation. And, no doubt needing to be reminded that banning an all-girls robotics team was a PR nightmare, Trump finally allowed them entry into the country to compete. I'm hoping we finally get to the stage where people don't have to surrender their personal life as well, but I understand how that's asking too much.
• You know Trumpcare is bad because Congress refuses to use it.
• ISPs like Comcast, who expect to make billions gouging online companies for decent download speeds, have already spent $572,000,000 trying to buy the FCC's decision to eliminate Net Neutrality. And since the FCC is now led by a friend of Trump and Mitch McConnell, that might very well happen.
• Republicans want to take money away from poor women and children to fund Trump's useless border wall. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, they just want to murder everyone who is different.
• When Trump's family travels, they purposely stay in their own hotels so they can charge everything to the US tax payer.
• Remember the woman who was arrested because she let out a laugh of disbelief when racist Jeff Sessions claimed he treated all people equally? She is -finally- being cleared of charges.

Texas cut funding to Planned Parenthood, and, as expected, teen abortions began to rise. This is the same thing that has happened in th past; every time access to birth control is made more difficult to obtain and sexual education is eliminated, more teenagers get pregnant and seek abortions.

An interesting postmortem on Darkest Dungeon.

Baby formula isn't the poison ignorant naturopaths think it is.

Who knew it would be so difficult to define a kilogram?

Simon Giertz talks about the worst day of her life being on a Chinese sitcom, a slightly better time on a Spanish talk show, and and much better time on a Swedish science show.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for God of Thunder.

• Trump is pretending the reason his son released incriminating evidence about his collusion with Russia is to be "transparent," but if Don Jr. is so interested in transparency, why did he wait close to a year to finally admit it? No, the real reason he released his emails about trying to meet with the Russian government to get dirt on Hillary Clinton is because he was told by journalist they were going to break his story wide open, and this was a last ditch effort to make his history of lies look good.
• Our racist Attorney General, Jeff Sessions is refusing to a fill a Freedom of Information Act request, despite a court order demanding he do so, because it would show the details of which Russians he met with, and later lied about meeting. You know you're living in 1984 when the head of the Justice Department is obstructing justice. There will most likely be another lawsuit against the Trump administration because of this.

Tatyana Hargrove was shocked when a Bakersfield, CA police officer drew his gun on her for no reason. She became belligerent from being treated like a sub-human, and the officer punched her in the face, wrestled her to the ground, and allowed his dog to bite her, before finally arresting her for aggravated assault on an officer. After the abuse, the police realized they had apprehended the wrong person. They confused a 115-pound 5'2" 19-year-old girl with braids, with a machete-wielding 180-pound 5'10" 30-year-old bald man with a beard. The Bakersfield police say it's a simple case of mistaken identity.

A wonderful lecture about the history of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Sonic wouldn't last so long if Dr. Robotnik had an assistant.

Why do people think they see ghosts?

Archeology also disproves the global flood myth.

Alex Dainis is awesome.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for Below the Root.

• Donald Trump's eldest son admitted that he, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner all met with some Russians who claimed the Russian government could provide them with secret information to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. This is precisely the type of Russian collusion that the Trump administration has been denying for nearly a year now. Faced with his lies, Trump is now trying to assure the American people that his son is not only innocent, but the victim of the vile scourge of America: transparent journalism. Despite Donald Trump, Jr. personally admitting that he and two other top Trump administration officials colluded with the Russians, many Republicans still think the story is made up by the media. Actually, if you watched this report on Fox "News," you would be left with the impression that the Trump's merely talked to a random Russian citizen, because Fox purposely left out the line about the information coming from the Russian government!
• Trump was widely ignored by world leaders at the G20 Summit, not just because he was so unprepared he didn't have a speech and couldn't even get a hotel room, but also because he's a colossal embarrassment of a human.
• Jesus' miracles don't go as far as they used to under Trumpcare.
• Seattle politicians unanimously agreed to institute an additional tax on the wealthy to try and shore up their huge tax losses. While it is most likely to be shot down by a higher court, it's nice to see some cities push back against Trump's incompetent destruction of American social programs.

Police Officer Shannon Kepler punished his teenage daughter by stranding her at a homeless shelter because she kept trying to have a boyfriend. At the shelter she met a new boyfriend, nineteen-year-old Jeremey Lake. While the two were distributing food and water for the homeless shelter, Officer Shannon Kepler showed up, saw that his white daughter had a black boyfriend, and shot Jeremey Lake to death. Lake's aunt said that the boy was extending his hand to greet Officer Kepler with a handshake, but Kepler claimed Lake was armed with a semi-automatic pistol and shot the boy in self defense. No gun was found on Lake's corpse or anywhere around the scene, and no witnesses saw one either. This all happened in 2014, but Officer Kepler is still a free man because his third hearing has resulted in a mistrial.

Christian youth pastor Samuel Patrick Dockary is facing charges of raping two girls, both under the age of 16. And speaking of Christians raping children, why does TLC keep making shows about them?

While the LeMay family was away camping, they had someone look after their two Staffordshire Terriers. The house-sitter accidentally tripped their home security alarm, but called the company and gave their correct information to cancel the alarm. The Minneapolis police showed up at the house anyway and one officer hopped the family's backyard fence where he encountered the two dogs and shot them both. The officer says he had to shoot the dogs because they were charging at him, but security footage released by the family shows that the officer lied. The dogs were wagging their tails and not even paying that much attention to the cop when he shot the first one in the head. Despite falsifying his police report, the officer will receive no punishment, but the police chief claims he will have better training in the future.

Good thing we didn't waste time trying to be part of the Paris Climate Agreement, because an iceberg the size of the entire state of Delaware just broke off of the Antarctic ice shelf.

Bowser wouldn't probably do better if he had an assistant.

If you're going to forge documents, make sure you use a font that existed at the time the document was supposed to have been created!

We could help struggling cities in the Mid West by moving some government headquarters into them.

Roy Zimmerman's new song, Summer of Loving.

Feeling: Annoyed

I added a page for Martian Dreams.

• For every major organization of government, Trump appointed someone who either hated the organization (like Scott Pruitt who kept suing the EPA and now runs it) or someone who knew absolutely nothing about it (like Rick Perry who probably still doesn't know what the Department of Energy does). And now that each organization is led by a either an adversary or an incompetent, that is, the person who can do the most damage, he's asking each leader to put together a plan to eliminate their own organization's authority.
• You know your country is on the fast track to the bottom when the party in charge thinks more highly of churches and banks than universities and journalism.
• Republicans also want to put the wealthiest corporations (like Comcast) in charge of the Internet so that they can blackmail the sites you love the most by slowing them down until they pay extra rates, which will be passed on to you.

A nice lecture by Lawrence Krauss followed up by a Q&A session with Matt Dillahunty.

An in-depth review of the Mega Man II soundtrack.

Street Epistemology and why bible class won't prepare you for basic questions about faith.

Did You Know Gaming, Castlevania and Metroid Lore.

An interesting workshop about the failures of game making.

Alex Dainis is awesome.

Feeling: Happy

After almost 30 years since I first played it, I finally beat Ultima: Exodus for the NES. I also finished reading The Way of the Heathen.

• It's a bit shocking just how brazenly the Trump and his cronies fawn over Russia, spending hours making nice with the country that sabotaged our democratic process, and is now even hacking into our nuclear energy networks. Trump even discussed how much he hates journalists with Vladimir Putin, a man linked to the murder of multiple reporters in his own country. Trump's White House is even threatening to block a CNN merger if they don't stop pointing out all his lies.
• Trump's son, Donald, Jr. hopped on a plane to Russia for a chance at getting his mitts on compromising information about Hillary Clinton, but it turned out he was duped. While the Trump's continue to waste tax dollars trying to find something to pin on Clinton, their own toadies continue to be the target of Federal investigation.
• Paul Ryan appears to becoming a Muslim. He's requiring all women who want to enter the House of Representative to be dressed according to his personal modestly rules.
• This reporter says it plain and simple, Donald Trump has neither the desire nor capacity to lead the world, and is the biggest threat to Western values.
• Trump isn't just the most protested man in the USA, he also appears to be the most protested man in the world! It might be because he's scientifically illiterate, or it might be because he let his daughter represent the USA at the G20 Summit.
• I'm not even shocked to hear that, shortly after a lunatic riddles Republicans with bullets at a baseball game, they want to make it even easier for people to get guns.

Cardinal George Pell, a major player in the Vatican, is finally returning to Australia to face multiple charges of sexually assaulting children.

God lost his UFC title.

Peter Boghossian digs his grave deeper suggesting that "nearly every male who's a 3rd wave intersectional feminist is physically feeble," (they're not), and then justifying his bigotry by claiming it's based on evolutionary theory (it's not).

God can turn a cracker into his own flesh before you eat it, but not if it's gluten free.

William Rian Adams, an Episcopal Priest, was out driving his tax-free Corvette when he got mad because he felt the driver behind him was tailing too closely. When the driver tried to pass the priest, Adams pulled out a Glock 22 and pointed it at the driver. Adams is now in custody with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. When will this war on Christianity end?

The Angry Video Game Nerd plays Planet of the Apes.

Imam Mohammed Haji Sadiq was sentenced to 13 years in jail for sexually assaulting four little girls, all under the age of 12.

Creepy animal teeth.

Feeling: Happy

I played my first real-life Escape Room last night with some friends. It was a bit pricey, but a lot of fun. Even though it was the hardest room they run, and we were down two players, we almost beat it; if we had another 10 minutes we would have solved it. I was helpful in solving an interesting wheel-spoke puzzle and a devious coded-tantagram, but I unfortunately held up my team trying to solve a strange handcuff puzzle involving an encoded journal. I'm looking forward to trying a different one in the future.

I added a review of The Simpsons.

• Trump is universally hated world wide with some of the worst approval ratings in history, but there is one country who still likes him. Can you guess? It's the same country that helped him get elected! In fact, very soon Trump is going to have a meeting with his boss.
• Will you receive a tax break from Trumpcare? That depends. Are you extremely wealthy? No? Then you probably won't get a tax break. Thankfully, the Republican Party is so fractured with Tea Party lunatics, there is still hope that Trumpcare will fail.
• The whole point of having an ethics department in the White House is to challenge the President when they do something unethical. The office is entirely pointless if Trump gets to hand pick someone who won't challenge his unethical behavior. I guess, you can't expect much from someone who exempts his staff from ethics oversight.
• Mike Pence touches the NASA equipment labeled "DO NOT TOUCH," and the memes commence.
• Rick Perry doesn't understand one of the most basic aspects of economics.
• Neil Young has a new patriotic anthem.

Former Muslim Yasmine Mohammed has a talk about being the wife of a man involved with the 9/11 terrorist attack.

City officials in Pensacola, Florida have been wasting tax payer money trying to defend a Christian cross on public land. The mayor shot himself in the foot by saying he hoped that the cross could stay up so that religion would always have a place in the public square, and the judge sided with many preceding cases which have ruled that such monuments are a government endorsement of religion. But, since it's not their money on the line, the city has chosen to repeal their case, which will only result in an even bigger settlement for the Freedom From Religion Foundation when they lose.

The evolution of apple flies and various types of mutations.

More information about actinium.

Feeling: Happy

I added a review of Loom and a list of bands I've seen in concert, although I know I'm forgetting several.

• Trump is finally admitting what every government intelligence agency already knew before he was elected, that Russia hacked the USA. But he won't admit any of the important points, like Russian hackers are one of the main reasons he's president.
• Trumpcare will be used by everyone in America, including men and women, the LGBT, the young and old, rich and the poor, and every race, religion, and creed, but it was created in a closed room by 13 straight rich old white men.
• Trump is hurting America, not just in global competition where China is making deals with the European Union because everyone there hates Trump, but here in the US as well because, by pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, state and city officials are now forced to continue making the nation greener while also fighting the federal government's incompetence.

• Coal has been dying since the 1920s, and solar keeps growing. America has backed the wrong horse.
• It shouldn't surprise anyone, but Trump has increased the White House women's pay gap by 300%.
• Thankfully, most of the states in the Union are refusing to hand over voter records to satisfy Trump's fractured ego.
• The director of the Office of Government Ethics has resigned out of disgust for Trump's disregard for ethical practices.

It's a shame they have to do this, but their populace is almost as stupid as Americans, so France is making mandatory 11 childhood vaccinations.

Trying to answer the top 100 most Googled questions.

Hobby Lobby, the holier-than-thou craft store who refuses to respect their female workers, has to pay a $3,000,000 fine after they were caught trying to smuggle ancient Iraqi artifacts through the Middle Eastern black market.

Answers In Genesis is chocked full of dishonest goons, and PZ Meyers doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Christians continue to mock the US Constitution by turning taxpayer-funded events into church services.

Why our brain often has a hard time distinguishing a hill from a valley.

Feeling: Happy

I've been married for three years today, and I have to admit, it's been pretty great!

I added a review of Lemmings.

• During the Obama Administration, it was discovered that the state courts in Memphis, Tennessee were stripping teenagers of their civil rights and racist workers were particularly hard on black teens. Just like in decades past, the Federal Government had to step in to make sure that the Southern courts would treat black people fairly. However, the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is a fellow racist Southerner and he's itching to eliminate oversight, not just in Memphis, but in many other states as well.
• But if you think that's just Republicans trying to eliminat "big government" remember, when it comes to women's reproductive rights, they can't be involved enough.
• Has your local news channel become a Conservative shill because of the Sinclair Broadcast Group?
• Trump fans left a lot of insulting comments on NPR's Twitter feed on posts they felt were attacking Trump. What was the source of the posts? The Declaration of Independence.
• Trump is trying to eliminate aid for low-income families to heat their homes in the winter, and the Republicans in Congress are with him.

A very accurate historical documentary about Warren Harding.

Iraqi actor, Karar Noshi, was tortured to death by Muslims for being too attractive for a man.

Two more victories for atheists. A public bench which featured a quote that insulted all non-Christians was finally removed and a public school had to pay over $150,000 in fines because they took their students to a Christian Ministry building to be preached at. Also, Seth Andrews talks to attorney Monica Miller who led the case to take down a giant cross on public land and received the typical "Christian Love" you'd expect.

Alex Dainis is awesome.

Feeling: Happy

I added a review of River Raid.

• As you celebrate your freedom, please remember, your freedom of the press, of speech, and expression only exist because you continue to demand them and fight for them. As Donald Trump continues to try and take these freedoms away from you, stay angry, and continue to fight for what's right, or it will be taken away from you. Because, it's nice when Republicans say Trump is wrong, but when it comes time to vote, they still support all his insane anti-Constitutional legislation.
• Trump doesn't know anything about the Republican health care bill that he has both loved and hated at the same time, and his most recent rant calls for the removal of health insurance regardless of whether a replacement has been made, an act that would remove health insurance for 32,000,000 Americans.
• Island Beach State Park in New Jersey has been closed to the public due to the state's government shutdown, but that didn't stop Republican Chris Christie from enjoying the day at the beach with his family. When later asked if he had gotten some sun that day, Christie brazenly lied and said no. But when, aerial photos of him at the beach surfaced, his spokesman explained that the Governor didn't get any sun because he had been wearing a baseball cap.
• Strangely, Republican's don't care when the Federal Government targets Christians if they're not white.
• The White House no longer has a department of science. The last few members have left, and Trump is too incompetent to restaff it.
• We're spending a lot of money paying for Trump's all-white staff.
• If your inexperienced 18-year-old son draws a million dollar salary from your own Christian charity, you're probably Trump's lawyer. And, it's highly unlikely either will face any punishment, because it's perfectly legal for a Christian charity to take all the money donated to them and, instead of helping the needy, paying their own salaries.
• Ever since Trump became president, the country has a less-civil political tone. Big shock, right?
• The girl's robotics team from Afghanistan is being denied visas into America because of Trump's bigotry.

Kentucky is making the a Christian bible the official textbook of some of their classes, and Florida is making it easier for religious people to question whether scientific fact should be taught in public schools. If Trump keeps getting to appoint more judges to the US Supreme Court, this may become the law of the land.

Over half of Scots are not religious, and that number is on the rise!

Just a reminder, there are Muslims who still extol the virtues of cutting off the genitals of women.

You've probably heard Christians warning against Harry Potter because they're afraid of make-believe, but did you know that Harry Potter could also teach your children something terrible like respect for other human beings?!

Many of the same phony products sold by brainless Gwenneth Paltrow are sold by brainless -and- heartless Alex Jones. They're different as night and day, but their audiences do have one thing in common, the inability to know fact from fiction.

Alex Dainis is awesome.