May righteous wrath consume all tainted by InfoWars

Alex Jones offered each of the families of the Sandy Hook children he defamed $120,000 to settle their lawsuits against him. They turned him down.

Each of the plaintiffs turned down the settlement offer in court documents, saying, “The so-called offer is a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

Jones treated those murdered children as things, things he could use to jack up right-wing hysteria and fuel profitable traffic to his site. They are not things. Jones was so unconscionably exploitive and abusive that I can entirely sympathize with those parents. They aren’t looking for money, something else Jones can’t understand. They are out to destroy a locus of hatred, one that grew on the bodies of dead children.

InfoWars has now declared bankruptcy, saying they only have assets of between $0-$50,000. That’s a lie. They have a heavily-trafficked website that brings in at least that much every week; they get ad revenue from Breitbart, so at least one other right-wing site is propping them up; they’ve got a quack store and must have a storage facility filled with crap like Ultra Brain Force (although, I’ll give them this: if their supply was valued for their effectiveness, it would be worth $0) and stupid hats; just the video gear that they use to record and edit all the lies they pump out has got to be worth more than that. Jones has a house and cars and a studio.

Take them all and put Jones in an institution for the criminally insane. Cut off all the “reporters” he supports — Ian Miles Cheong, Owen Shroyer, Millie Weaver, Margaret Howell, Savannah Hernandez, etc. — and let them get jobs serving fast food somewhere, if they’re qualified for that. Burn it all down. Scatter salt on the careers of all the people affiliated with it.

The line goes down

How much should owning the rights to a picture of tweet be worth? If you asked me, I might give you, as an act of charity, a dollar before throwing it away. Not Sina Estavi! He paid $2.9 million for this:

Oops. I think I just committed grand larceny. It’s the first time I ever stole millions of dollars, and it felt good. Maybe I should steal more…oh, wait. Uh-oh.

Crypto investor Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ever for $2.9 million in March of 2021. And after a year of constant hype for NFTs, most people would naturally assume Estavi might be able to turn a nice profit on his investment by now. But most people would be wrong.

Estavi put the NFT up for auction last week and bidding ended on Wednesday. The highest bid? Roughly $277 worth of ethereum, at current prices, according to crypto news outlet CoinDesk.

That’s a crushing disappointment. One moment I’m a glamorous international thief planning a weekend in Monte Carlo on my ill-gotten gains, and next I discover that my precious objet d’lucre is worth next to nothing, and if I could even find a fence for it at best I’d get a trip to the drive-through at my local McDonald’s.

I can laugh now, but I sure hope I don’t learn that my retirement funds are all invested in blockchain shit.

Tweaking the work week

Hey, this sounds strangely familiar.

According to a study conducted last year by the American Federation of Teachers with the Rand Corporation, one in four teachers were thinking about quitting their job by the end of the school year. Teachers were also more likely to report experiencing regular job-related stress and symptoms of depression than the general population, according to the study.

Texas has one solution.

A local school district in Texas has announced plans to reduce students’ school weeks from the traditional five days to four days for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year.

The Jasper Independent School District cited teacher shortage and retention when it announced the change in a Facebook post last month and said it had conducted surveys with parents, teachers and staffers before the change was voted on by its board of trustees.

Also, pay them a little more.

Teachers would get a $3,000 stipend while staff members, such as librarians, would receive $1,500 if they remain with Jasper ISD. The funds allocated would come from the public school district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) grants, a federal grant program under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act

They are having longer school days to compensate, so it’s not exactly free time. I’m also wondering what parents think: 4 day school weeks and 5 day work weeks don’t line up neatly, and there’s going to be an increased demand for day care.

Unless employers in the region go to 4 day work weeks, which wouldn’t be a bad idea…

I get email: Oh no! I have tugged on the lion’s tail!

I mocked Ben Shapiro. I shouldn’t have done that. You know he has legions of brilliant defenders who would leap to his defense, and now I am staggered by the sharp-witted repartee.

So that’s the kind of person who loves Ben Shapiro. I guess I better be careful or I might be fucked up by these dazzlingly sharp-witted fellows…

Oh, wait…hard to breathe…I’m choking on my own sarcasm! The poisonous toxins of my very own horrible, laughing bile are rising up to strangle me <choke> <cough, cough> Kharma Agent succeeds in their devious plan to make me die! Tell my…family…that…I love…theaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgghhhhhhh.

P.S. Sorry that I didn’t black out their email address. I forgot, and then I, you know, died.

Butt is comfy, eyes have gone blind

I’ve been having chronic back pain lately, so I indulged myself in a shiny new office chair with good lumbar support. It took me a while to assemble it, but hoo boy, it is comfy, exactly what I need.

The one catch: the instructions come in tiny red print on a black background, which is totally nuts. My eyes hurt now, although, admittedly, my backside is nice and cushy.

I am a man, and a teacher

Fuck David Mamet. What an ass.

You know, when a man announces that men are predatory and prone to pedophilia, he’s actually talking about his own attitudes. Please keep Mamet away from kids and from schools.

If you care about good comedy…

Don’t watch this video by Christian fanatic Matt Powell. He’s trying to be “funny”, so he made a “prank” video. The “prank” was walking into various fast food places wearing headphones and shouting his order loudly. Then taking the headphones off and speaking normally.

That’s it. That’s all it is.

And then the comments! People are praising him for his brilliant work. Reading those brought home the fact that I’ll never ever understand the fundagelical brain. They’re totally alien.

If it’s not one thing it’s another

Oy, I am currently 100% caught up in my grading, have my lecture for Monday all lined up, and was looking forward to a pleasant weekend with no obligations for a change.

Then I get an email reminding me that my yearly performance review is on Monday.

Can I just go in and say I’m very, very tired and am counting the seconds to the end of the semester? How about if I just walk into the chair’s office and curl up on the floor sobbing? I’m hoping that’s adequate preparation. Just once this term I’d like to have a quiet day off, and I worked hard to get everything cleared away. I even scrubbed and autoclaved all the fly bottles! And put them away! I ought to be given a pass on this review just for that.

Tigger-ized!

Back in the halcyon days of my youth, skateboarding was the radical, edgy sport that had the old men shaking their fists and talking about “kids these days”, and then also sired even edgier programming like Jackass. I never got into it. Even then I was too stodgy for such extreme sports.

Put your wheels away, the new up-and-coming street activity is extreme pogoing.

Awesome, dude. I think I’ll pass on the hobby, but more power to all the xpogoers out there. Except, well, I do have a few reservations…

But as rubbery as they may be, they aren’t immune to injury. To that end, when Smith was 13, he went to his first world championship in Salt Lake City. “I qualified for the finals, which I was shocked to make at such a young age,” he tells me. As a result of that shock and excitement, he decided to attempt a double backflip dismount at the end of his final run. “It all built up to that moment; the hype got me buzzed up, and I was ready to fly. I sent the double!” Smith recalls. But he opened up his body too early. “I basically belly-flopped, knees first, into the concrete,” he says.

He would spend the next four months in a wheelchair after shattering both of his kneecaps, all the toes on each of his feet and his nose. (He suffered a major concussion, too.) It hasn’t exactly paid either — at least in terms of dollars and cents. “Most jumpers have another job to supplement like Uber or Grubhub, odd jobs or other service industry stuff,” says Smith. “I make roughly 25-30k a year and live in a converted sprinter van.”

I’m not going to tell anyone not to do it, though — after all, I went into academia, which likewise isn’t going to get you rich, and while you’re probably not going to break bones at it, your mental health won’t be sheltered well. Boing boing away!

Why am I here?

How odd. This video of my lecture on extrachromosomal inheritance is blowing up on YouTube — I guess The Algorithm hiccupped and is serving it to random people. That in itself isn’t very interesting, but I am amused by all the comments. It’s very existential, with people wondering “why am I here?” and just generally baffled at how this particularly video ended up in their recommendations. I wonder at this question too.

Of course, the answer to the question is easy: because a program told you to be here.

This is a blip that will quickly fade, especially since today’s topic will be maternal inheritance.