FDA approves CRISPR cows for beef. Yikes! And CRISPR doesn’t mean crispy beef, it means “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats“, which is science-speak for genetic editing. Somehow I think this will end very badly, somewhere down the line. Genetic editing of our food sources, plant or animal, has so many potential unintended consequences…

***

Dave Winer has the correct take on the real damage Republicans are doing to us these days:

So here we are.#

Can you imagine how the rest of the world sees the January 6 attack on the US Capitol?#

Spoiler: It scares the shit out of them. Because the main product the US sells is safety. Our financial system is where the world stores their money for safe keeping.#

What scares them even more? We haven’t done anything about it. Trump and all the people who organized the coup are free. No prospect of any punishment. The can do it again and again.#

If you’re smart you’re looking for the next safe place to put your savings.#

I want to know this — why isn’t journalism running constant articles, reports and panels on this topic:#

When will Trump be charged?#

We failed to learn the lesson from Nixon it seems. #

The damage is that the world realizes that America isn’t stable, and isn’t the place they can count on when things go to shit. So who might they turn to?

***

St. Peters (there, I said their name) is thankfully no one-hit wonder. This makes our loss to them a tiny bit more bearable. Now they need to beat North Carolina and then Duke. At that point we’ll know that we were rolled over by manifest destiny, not just a bad night on the court.

***

Yesterday, religion once again disappointed me. I was driving east on I-64 when I felt The Call. I resisted, but The Call was insistent, subtle but strong. I had not been to church in a while, so I gave in and made my way to that holiest of holys (holies?), St. Spauldings of Lexington. There I stood in line, mumbled the words that would allow the acolytes to serve me, then gave my cash-only offering in return for a bag of Most Perfect Fried Perfection. I returned to my car, carefully opened the bag and extracted one of the sacred treats. I closed my eyes, took a bite, and…something was wrong. The bite wasn’t a warm, sweet, chewy transcendental experience. It was ordinary. This wasn’t a holy Spaulding’s doughnut, it was just like any other cakey bland fat pill.

Thinking I had just gotten a mutant or an outlier, I frantically sampled a couple of others, and they were the same. Ordinary. Not worth the calories or the effort of leaving the highway. I tossed the bag into the back seat, fought back the tears and made my sad way back to the interstate.

Needless to say, the entire experience has left me shaken, my faith challenged as never before. St. Spauldings has never before disappointed me. Perhaps this was a test. If so, it just proves that the universe is cruel and capricious, when even innocent doughnuts can be corrupted. It may be a while before I can try again.