Time to institutionalize Dennis Markuze

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages.

You know what? This is wrong. I shouldn’t have to do this. Over the years — I’ve been getting these threats from Markuze since 1993 — it’s gradually grown from an occasional deranged message on usenet to part of my daily routine, where I’m dealing with hundreds of ranty messages every day from one disturbed individual in Montreal, Canada. And I’m not even his sole target: he has a hate-on for Shermer, Randi, and Dawkins, and this is all he does with his life: he sits in his bedroom in his parent’s house and sends out shrill, incoherent messages to the world, all day long.

I have reported him to the police. I have seen these complaints climb the ladder from the local department, to the FBI, to the RCMP, to the Montreal City Police, where they promptly fizzle out. The police don’t care. The word I’ve gotten back is that they aren’t going to do a thing until he snaps and starts killing people. A little late, don’t you think?

As a target for over almost twenty years, I’ve been watching this guy escalate — his hate messages have gotten crazier, more vicious, and more frequent. He’s a psychological cripple who wastes his life in this “project” to howl stupidly at the world; he’s on a clear trajectory of more and more demands for people to recognize him, and he’s not going to ever get any respect from anyone.

I am not a psychologist, but anyone who writes those disconnected rambling death threats, and does nothing else all day long, is mentally disturbed. Something is wrong in his head. I’m not the only one to notice.

The only people who don’t seem to notice are the Montreal city police.

If you’re on Twitter, one thing you can do is, when you receive one of his spam messages, retweet it, but delete all the names on it (because I don’t need more!) and add one: @SPVM. Give the Montreal police a sample of the noise coming out of their city that we’re drowning in.

There is now a petition demanding that the Montreal city police take his threats seriously. Sign it, please. I want at least ten thousand names from around the world on it.

I don’t have any confidence at all in them: they’ve had this deranged man making death threats on their watch for over a decade, and have done nothing. I don’t think the petition will do a thing.

What I want is a public record of the criminal neglect of that police department, so that when Markuze does have his little psychotic break and harms someone, probably some innocent, they won’t be able to deny that they were warned, that there was a world-wide outcry, that hordes of people thousands of miles away could see all this coming, and the incompetents in Montreal sat on their hands and did nothing.

(Also on FtB)

Time to institutionalize Dennis Markuze

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages.

You know what? This is wrong. I shouldn’t have to do this. Over the years — I’ve been getting these threats from Markuze since 1993 — it’s gradually grown from an occasional deranged message on usenet to part of my daily routine, where I’m dealing with hundreds of ranty messages every day from one disturbed individual in Montreal, Canada. And I’m not even his sole target: he has a hate-on for Shermer, Randi, and Dawkins, and this is all he does with his life: he sits in his bedroom in his parent’s house and sends out shrill, incoherent messages to the world, all day long.

I have reported him to the police. I have seen these complaints climb the ladder from the local department, to the FBI, to the RCMP, to the Montreal City Police, where they promptly fizzle out. The police don’t care. The word I’ve gotten back is that they aren’t going to do a thing until he snaps and starts killing people. A little late, don’t you think?

As a target for over almost twenty years, I’ve been watching this guy escalate — his hate messages have gotten crazier, more vicious, and more frequent. He’s a psychological cripple who wastes his life in this “project” to howl stupidly at the world; he’s on a clear trajectory of more and more demands for people to recognize him, and he’s not going to ever get any respect from anyone.

I am not a psychologist, but anyone who writes those disconnected rambling death threats, and does nothing else all day long, is mentally disturbed. Something is wrong in his head. I’m not the only one to notice.

The only people who don’t seem to notice are the Montreal city police.

If you’re on Twitter, one thing you can do is, when you receive one of his spam messages, retweet it, but delete all the names on it (because I don’t need more!) and add one: @SPVM. Give the Montreal police a sample of the noise coming out of their city that we’re drowning in.

There is now a petition demanding that the Montreal city police take his threats seriously. Sign it, please. I want at least ten thousand names from around the world on it.

I don’t have any confidence at all in them: they’ve had this deranged man making death threats on their watch for over a decade, and have done nothing. I don’t think the petition will do a thing.

What I want is a public record of the criminal neglect of that police department, so that when Markuze does have his little psychotic break and harms someone, probably some innocent, they won’t be able to deny that they were warned, that there was a world-wide outcry, that hordes of people thousands of miles away could see all this coming, and the incompetents in Montreal sat on their hands and did nothing.

(Also on Sb)

There are actually atheist movies?

Enough for a film festival? I guess so: San Francisco will be having the Atheist Film Festival next week. They’ve got four movies lined up, which isn’t bad; I can think of a few others, but not many.

I can’t make it to San Francisco, so tell me what some other good godless movies might be — movies with no gods, no miracles, no afterlife, no ghosts, no kindly priests being beneficent rather than rapey.

This photography stuff is amazing

i-c3c037517c16cbce10120441cf2d620f-crowd.jpeg

This is a small piece of a larger — much larger — photo of a Vancouver street crowd. Go to the original image, though, which allows you zoom in and in and in — you’ll be able to see the faces in surprising detail of each of the little dots.

The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was captured at 5:46 pm on June 15, 2011. It is made up of 216 photos (12 across by 18 down) stitched together, taken over a 15-minute span, and is not supposed to represent a single moment in time. The final hi-res file is 69,394 X 30,420 pixels or 2,110 megapixels.

I’ve stared at it for hours, though, and still haven’t managed to find Waldo.

(Also on FtB)

This photography stuff is amazing

This is a small piece of a larger — much larger — photo of a Vancouver street crowd. Go to the original image, though, which allows you zoom in and in and in — you’ll be able to see the faces in surprising detail of each of the little dots.

The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was captured at 5:46 pm on June 15, 2011. It is made up of 216 photos (12 across by 18 down) stitched together, taken over a 15-minute span, and is not supposed to represent a single moment in time. The final hi-res file is 69,394 X 30,420 pixels or 2,110 megapixels.

I’ve stared at it for hours, though, and still haven’t managed to find Waldo.

(Also on Sb)

Exercises in obfuscation

As a follow-up to his video of 100 atheists, Jonathan Pararajasingham has collected 20 believing academics explaining their position. Your brain will hurt.

Jerry Coyne has posted brief summaries of all 20, but you’ve got to listen to it all. The point isn’t their answers, which are all non-answers and babbling, but the stark raving incoherence and inconsistency of their attempts to explain themselves.

Glenn Beck has a very silly poll

His site, The Blaze, has an article about these crazy conservative Christians who disagree with the mainstream view that there were precisely two people, Adam and Eve, who founded the whole human race. And it has a poll which is going in a predictable direction for wacky Beck.

How did mankind come about?

God created man in present form, as per the Genesis story 75.16%

God created man and the universe, but scientific evolution occurred 17.52%

Man evolved without God’s creation or intervention 4.88%

I’m unsure 2.44%

Maybe we can change some of those numbers around.

But why do you believe in Gawd?

This word “god” needs some serious redefining. I keep running into these intentionally obscurantist blitherings about “god” when the definition is clearly bouncing back and forth between multiple meanings. There are at least two categories of gods. Let’s give them different names so we stop confusing them.

  1. Gods as working deities or GAWD. GAWD is an interventionist; it may have created the universe, it has power in the real world, it has a personal interest in human beings and planet Earth. GAWD can answer personal requests, GAWD can carry out miracles, GAWD must be propitiated by thoughts and rituals lest GAWD become wrathful…which is a bad thing that can have dire results in the real world. GAWD is what most religions are about, it’s what most people worship. GAWD is usually portrayed as an omnipotent, omniscient being who is greater than and beyond the universe, but he keeps a hand in and dabbles with virgins and foreskins and sends the occasional tornado and earthquake.

  2. Gods who avoid reality, or GWAR. GWAR is an abstraction, an impersonal and remote being who exists completely outside space and time, who doesn’t actually interact with our world; alternatively, GWAR is simply the state of existence that permeates the entire universe. GWAR does not tinker; it does not modify the rules of existence to satisfy personal requests; it does nothing but be and watch and sometimes, love. GWAR is invisible and indetectable because GWAR does nothing. At best, one can aspire to die and become invisible and indetectable oneself, and then you’ll get to meet GWAR. No religion actually exists to support GWAR. GWAR doesn’t need them, and they don’t believe that GWAR will actually do anything for them anyway.

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