Burn them to the ground

The whistleblower’s letter is now available to be read online. I’m hoping this becomes a historic document and isn’t just swept under the rug, as the Republicans and president would like.

The president is corruption personified. Trump must be destroyed, utterly and without pity. He’s a tumor who must be cut out and action taken so another such malignancy cannot arise.

Trump needs to be destroyed, and the way to do that is to attack him relentlessly, and in particular to mock him, since mockery — especially in regard to his most evident failings and vulnerabilities — is the thing a malignant narcissist can least stand. (The Republican party must also be destroyed, but one thing at a time).

We can do two things at a time. The way to destroy the Republican party is to end gerrymandering and voter suppression and all the anti-democratic chicanery they do, and to root out and shame the racism that fuels the “Grand Old Party”.

How do you feed a baby without rubber nipples?

These odd little pots tell a story about a revolution in human biology that occurred over 5000 years ago.

They turn out to have been milk bottles for feeding infants. That’s a reasonable inference about function from shape, but now also it’s been determined by isolating lipids still adhering to the inner surface, showing that they contained goat or cow milk. These came from cultures that had domesticated milk-giving animals, and they were using them to supplement feeding their children. Probably the adults as well, since this would have been a time when lactose tolerance was evolving.

Another effect of this change in diet: the pots were extracted from children’s graves. With new nutritional sources came exposure to new pathogens. There is evidence that these pots were heated, cooking some of the lipids into the ceramic, which makes me wonder if there wasn’t also some accidental pasteurization going on…although it’s also likely they would have just squirted fresh warm milk straight from the teat into these pots.


Counterpoint.

(No, she isn’t living on a diet of Dr Pepper, she’s just playing with an empty can under parental supervision.)

Children are to be sold quietly to billionaires, not heard

In case you were wondering what the worst reaction to Greta Thunberg might be, let’s look in on a Libertarian Communist Catholic’s (what?) opinion:

He’s not even being provocative! He just thinks girls can’t have credible opinions if raping them makes you a pedophile.

That’s probably the Catholic side of his bio speaking. Well, maybe the Libertarian side, too.

By the way, he’s quite proud of his tweet, and is bragging that Twitter didn’t see any problems with it, either.

She’s mad, really mad

Why aren’t you?

She seems to be the only one making an honest response to our situation.

Real Seattle pride

He would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those pesky kids.

Today, Seattle Proud Boy Zac Staggs attempted to infiltrate the #ClimateStrike march in black bloc gear, but was reportedly identified immediately under his mask and got beat up… at an event organized by high schoolers.

Good on the Seattle antifa for catching out this clown…and the high school kids who exposed him.

Note also what the “Proud Boy’s” right foot is stepping in. So appropriate!

The Pragerization of YouTube

I’ve been naughty and haven’t made any YouTube videos in a while (I have to change that, if only I had time), but would you believe I still get comments on stuff I made months ago? Here’s a recent comment made on my video about Jordan Peterson’s PragerU video on those darned liberal arts universities. It’s all racist talking points while accusing Democrats of being racist, but of course they wander all over the place with all kinds of random boogity-boos.

Why does school cost so much? Gov offers more loan money to students who have no business being in school. Then what does the wonderful university do? Yep you guessed it raise tuition. The whole alt right dog whistle thing is a low blow, so far from the truth. Why do some left Leaning universities like Berkeley try and ban Ben Shapiro? Does he have alt right dog whistles lol 😂. Mr. left professor how many genders are there? Another question do support or oppose the death penalty? Are you pro choice or pro life? Those two questions can tell a lot about someone. The left has done more harm to this country then good. Democrats and slavery, kkk, Jim Crow. Once the blacks switched parties in the thirties it’s been all down hill. The more black government officials at the county, city levels the more corruption. Teachers unions have ensured the black inner kids a horrendous education. That fucking pisses me off that unions and make no mistake they give more campaign money to democrats and it has caused inner city schools to be horrible. I’m sorry I don’t care as much about men and women transitioning into whatever they want to be called as much as Obama did. When Obama and his education secretary saw how bad things were they said they needed to act. Well still waiting President Obama! Let’s be perfectly honestly the Left doesn’t care about black kids if they did there would be vouchers and choice. The thing is everybody knows what needs to happen but it would cost the Democrats dearly at election time. I say once and for all stop oppressing black people.

So much incoherence and contradictions! I should whip up a video about how there are far more than two genders, to pick just one example of its nonsense.

My little video focused on just one collection of bogus claims by one cranky Canadian fart, but PragerU is a far more poisonous set of lies than that…and yet somehow they’ve avoided the mass demonetizations that afflict my liberal friends, or even the raving right wing nutcases. Money greases a lot of wheels at Google, I guess. Rather than wasting a lot of time on this one fool’s comment, I’ll just point you at this recent analysis of PragerU.

It’s not enough to just say that PragerU isn’t an actual university. It’s outright propaganda, and those appearing on the channel are propagandists.

As an institution, PragerU has proved to be toxic, and it should be best understood as — as its “About Us” page notes — a “digital marketing campaign.” If one of Prager University’s goals really is to “[make] the world a better place, five minutes at a time,” it deserves a failing grade for its current output.

Neither Jewish, nor Christian, nor Western. Ben Shapiro is just full of…

I hate reading essays that I mostly agree with, but are poorly written and completely miss the most important point. I opened up this one because of the title: Ben Shapiro Is On The Wrong Side Of History. Then I find nothing but shallow nitpicking and a tendency to overlook the big flaw.

Here’s his summary of Shapiro’s recent book, which he promises to examine from a philosophical standpoint.

Ben’s proclamation at the start of the book is essentially this: reason alone, absent of God’s moral law — and more precisely — the absence of Judeo-Chrisitan [sic] moral law dooms our world to live in a meaningless abyss. Ultimately, he thinks without this it means the doom of society.
He also wants to argue our toxic political climate and divide can be boiled down to our societal rejection of these Judeo-Christian values.

Nowhere in this essay does he evaluate those critical words, “Judeo-Christian values”. What are they? Why is Islam excluded from the Abrahamic tradition? How do we decide whether a society is actually following these ill-defined moral laws? Shapiro just thoughtlessly assumes that his definition of what is moral is universal and historical and right and proper, and this essayist just goes along with him and assumes “Judeo-Christian” is a real thing. It’s infuriating.

He quotes from Shapiro something he says “essentially sums up his reasoning”.

“The USSR rejected Judeo-Chrisitan[sic] values and Greek natural law…and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings. The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek Natural law, and they shoved children into gas chambers.”

But he doesn’t follow through! Is not killing millions actually part of this fiction called “Judeo-Christian values”? The holy book they share praises war and slaughter, and has many examples of the same. The people who are historically Christian, and that belong to that similarly vaguely defined concept of “the West”, also murdered millions. Was King Leopold of Belgium “Judeo-Christian”? How about the British in the Opium Wars, or during the conquest of India? How do you then justify excluding Nazi Germany from the ranks of “Western Judeo-Christian” nations?

I wouldn’t argue that the Nazis were moral in the slightest, but they were definitely part of Western Civilization (is Shapiro going to argue otherwise?), they were definitely Christian, and the Germans are definitely rooted in Western/Christian philosophy — in fact, contributing largely to it — so how does that ignorant twerp get off claiming that Nazi philosophy was a rejection of the social values of a culture they were strongly part of?

Maybe a better approach would be to note that being Christian, Jewish, or Western does not make one good, by any means. That is the deep hole in the middle of Shapiro’s assumptions.

I am disappointed in Marv

Marv hadn’t heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire until now.

There is something deeply wrong with American education when one of the most important labor tragedies in our history isn’t taught any more. Should we also let him know about the Haymarket riot, the Colorado labor wars, the Imperial Valley lettuce strike? That it was routine to call out the national guard to beat workers into submission? I suppose we’re going to have to roll back the tape to Peterloo, or earlier.

Do listen to the video, though. Elizabeth Warren does explain it all…and also explains how corporate interests have spent a lot of money to bury their shameful history. That’s one thing the bad guys have always had, more money than the people they’re exploiting.

But that’s all in the past, right? It’s not as if millionaires and billionaires are buying our government today, right?

To influence the court’s composition, Whitehouse said, a combined $34 million in “dark money” went toward both blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and confirming President Donald Trump’s two Supreme Court picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

In a follow-up to the legal brief, Whitehouse in a Sept. 6 Washington Post op-ed described the money as follows:

“One unnamed donor gave $17 million to the (Leonard) Leo-affiliated Judicial Crisis Network to block the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and to support Gorsuch; then a donor — perhaps the same one — gave another $17 million to prop up Kavanaugh.”

It sure would be nice to elect a president and congress who opposed corruption, rather than welcoming it, as Moscow Mitch and Trump have done.

How’s MIT doing lately?

MIT seems to be having a bad day week month year, and new horrors keep tumbling out all the time. Thanks, Jeffrey Epstein, the one good you did in your life was to make corruption visible!

  • You know, Richard Stallman has always been an egotistical jerk, so he had to poke his head up and demonstrate it once again. His latest is to claim that Epstein’s “harem” — I guess that’s his word for “victims” — were “mostly willing”. Ugh. You aren’t helping, rms. Crawl back into your hole.
  • Joi Ito pressured other faculty, like Naomi Oxman, to participate in rewarding Epstein for his “anonymous” gifts, and they in turn pressured their students to create and send gifts to him. What’s interesting is that the students were the ones to immediately question the whole process, and to feel guilty about succumbing to pressure afterwards. I guess MIT hadn’t had enough time to pound the ethics out of them yet.

I’ve noted elsewhere that the rich get richer, and colleges with already massive endowments tend to be the recipients of more corrupt gift giving…so they inherit all the filth that comes with the filthy lucre. I suspect our small liberal arts colleges would be just as guilty if billionaires were trying to impress their peers by giving us money.