Most Minnesotans would like better gun control laws. Most.

A Minnesota Democrat, Linda Slocum, has proposed some sensible gun control regulations for the state.

Slocum’s bill would expand the definition of assault weapons and ban those weapons, prohibit many private gun sales, outline felony charges for possession of bump stocks, silencers and high-capacity magazines, restrict ammunition sales to licensed dealers, and outlaw gun ownership for individuals who fail to pay court-ordered child support.

Those restrictions sound reasonable. Heck, they sound excellent, and I’d vote for Slocum if she were my representative. However, you can guess what happened next.

Thousands of angry emails have poured into the office of state Rep. Linda Slocum (D-Richfield) since she introduced the proposed restrictions, but one of those stood out, reported KMSP-TV.

“He threatened to kill me,” Slocum told the TV station. “(He said,) I have my gun, and I’m ready to come and get you — and it was very threatening.”

Other messages compared her to Hitler, called her a whale or included lewd comments and profanity, but Slocum said she would seek charges if that man called again.

One of Slocum’s aides received what he described as a threatening call while working late on Feb. 26, but state police investigated and decided not to press charges, reported the Pioneer Press.

“He said, ‘You better hide because I have my gun and I know where you are,’” said legislative assistant Adrian Benjamin, who reported the threat to capitol police — which then passed on the report to the Minnesota State Patrol.

And there you have it. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to get rational gun laws in this country — because so many of the gun-fondlers are irrational, violent lunatics, and they are armed.

How quickly a reputation can unravel

Lawrence Krauss has been cut off from the Richard Dawkins Foundation and Center for Inquiry, after years of being one of their most prominent featured speakers. Now he has also resigned from the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and has been put on paid leave from Arizona State University.

The university, in a statement issued late Tuesday, said it began a review of the professor’s conduct after it was contacted for the article.

“In an effort to avoid further disruption … as the university continues to gather facts about the allegations, Krauss has been placed on paid leave and is prohibited from being on campus for the duration of the review,” ASU said in a written statement.

Krauss is busy denying everything. It’s kind of shocking how rapidly his academic empire is crumbling around him, but then I have to think of the women who never had a chance to build a little academic province of their own, and I guess I can’t feel too bad about it.

He does still have one bulwark desperately making a last stand for him: Wikipedia.

…as of today, March 5, Krauss’ Wikipedia page has no mention of any recent developments – not the allegations themselves, not Krauss being barred from multiple college campuses, not several of his upcoming talks being canceled. If you look at the talk page, you can see several contributors deleting edits by other users that mention these things, and insisting that the Buzzfeed article is just “gossip” and that “Buzzfeed isn’t usually considered a reliable source”, and that this merits totally excluding any mention of it.

Note: as of today, the 7th, the Wikipedia article does now include a paragraph on the allegations — I guess since the article was touting his ASU position and his leadership of the Bulletin, and those are now no longer operational statements, that had to be amended.

That dismissal of Buzzfeed has become the routine defense of Krauss — and these clever, serious, objective skeptics don’t even seem to notice that they’re committing the genetic fallacy (also, skimming through the wiki talk page, they commit another fallacy: that because these accusations are serious, if they were true, he would have been arrested, therefore they don’t need to be reported. Who needs philosophy and logic when you’ve got the police to do your thinking for you?)

But Adam Lee has an excellent defense of Buzzfeed, so I’ll just let him continue.

While Buzzfeed does publish its share of silly clickbait, their investigative unit employs 20 journalists and engages in serious, important reporting. One of their reporters was a Pulitzer finalist in 2017; another won a Pulitzer prior to being hired there. Ironically, BuzzFeed’s own Wikipedia page has categories for “Notable stories” (significantly, including the sexual-misconduct accusations against Kevin Spacey) and “Awards and recognition”.

As for the journalists who wrote the Krauss story, one of them, Peter Aldhous, has reported for the journals Nature and Science and teaches investigative and policy reporting at UC Santa Cruz. The other reporter, Azeen Gorayshi, has written for the Guardian, New Scientist, Newsweek, and Wired, among others. The editor, Virginia Hughes, has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, National Geographic, and Slate.

If this doesn’t meet the definition of serious, noteworthy journalism, then no such thing exists. Clearly, the Guerrilla Skepticism group is employing their own biased and highly selective definition of “reliable source” in order to avoid mentioning stories that would cast their hero in an unfavorable light, even in a supposedly neutral and comprehensive encyclopedia article. (The State Press, a student-run newspaper at Arizona State University, has since published their own article about Krauss.)

Yeah, you actually have to read the news articles to assess them. I was also surprised, once upon a time — I thought Buzzfeed was synonymous with superficial clickbait. But then I discovered that they had really built up a substantial news group,
with people I knew who had excellent journalistic reputations, and they were really digging deep.

One of the things about Buzzfeed that may rub some people the wrong way is that they’ve run quite a few stories about the culture of sexual privilege and harassment in academia. It’s not so much that they’re a bad news organization as that they’re a very good news organization that isn’t afraid to challenge powerful, influential people.

You know, like we used to imagine journalists were supposed to do.

I should mention that Krauss does still have some other defenders. His scheduled speaking tour with Richard Dawkins in Australia and New Zealand is still on.

Oops. Spoke too soon.

Who for Minnesota Governor?

The frontrunner is Democrat Tim Walz. I scratched him off my dance card long, long ago: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. That ought to be the kiss of death for any politician any more.

On the other hand, Rebecca Otto has the recommendation of environmentalists and climate scientists like Michael Mann, along with an excellent record as the state auditor. She’s pro-democracy and pro-environment.

An A+ from climate scientists vs. an A+ from the freakin’ NRA. This one’s an easy choice. I want Rebecca Otto for governor of Minnesota.

Rod Dreher gets email

Just like I do! But instead of mocking the wacky beliefs of his correspondents, Dreher likes to praise them and agree with them. I guess he gets better letter-writers than I do.

But no! This guy is nuts. He senses omens of cultural armageddon in the Academy Awards. He is apparently very concerned that the Best Picture award went to a movie that was all about…bestiality. It’s not just cats and dogs living together, it’s human women copulating with fish! That’s all that movie was about!

Full confession: I very much liked The Shape of Water, although I would actually have favored Get Out winning the big award. It’s a nice, gentle story of love triumphing against adversity in a fantastic context. I guess that makes me a sexual prevert and degenerate now.

They haven’t seen the movie, but these two are aghast at what they think is the plot.

He’s talking about The Shape Of Water, a movie in which the female protagonist falls in love with a humanoid amphibian, and has sex with it (“cod coitus,” according to Sonny Bunch). The reader continues:

Even more astounding is that no one seemed to care: the critics, the media and now the Academy all applauded at director Guillermo Del Toro’s “boldness”. The Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film winners — respectively about a pederastic love story and a trans woman fighting prejudice — look almost tame in comparison, though they’re symptomatic too.

But the movie is so much more! The villain, the excellent Michael Shannon, is a deeply conservative, materialist man who is also a kneejerk Christian — see? Dreher’s ilk have a prominent role in the movie. One of the protagonists is a gay man. The heroine is a disabled poor woman with a mysterious past, who also seems to have gills. The “humanoid amphibian” has supernatural powers, and is actually a kind of god, worshipped in his native land.

There’s so much they could have hated if only they’d seen the movie.

But gosh, they must suffer greatly at the movies if the idea of a trans woman fighting prejudice repulses them. They see everything as an attack.

I agree with the things you say most of the time, but something I think you miss is how the turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.

This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.

The Shape of Water is not a revenge story. It’s a love story about people finding happiness outside of conventionality. If you want to see a movie about rancor and revenge and people who attack those who are different, the remake of Death Wish is playing right now. I’m sure torture-porn is more in keeping with Christian values.

Dreher ends with an apocalyptic warning:

Listen to me, conservative Christian readers:

  • there are no politicians on earth capable of turning this tide of decadence; the power of culture is far too strong;
  • you cannot expect your children to be salt and light to a culture that gives its highest honor to a movie celebrating bestiality as an act of liberation, and a “love letter to love”;
  • soon, people who believe the things you do will be regarded as perverted and dangerous to the common good; are you ready for that?

You had better be ready for that. The handwriting is on the wall, and the cracks are widening in the foundations.

Again, if we’re going to prognosticate on the future of our nation based on movies, The Shape of Water gives me far more hope than Death Wish. I’d rather see a love letter to love than a celebration of bloody violent murder.

How decadent is your aristocracy?

Ours is getting pretty creepy. They’re buying blood from healthy young people to inject into sickly old fucks, and they’re gathering at ritzy gala events to learn how they too can become techno-vampires.

It’s called The Young Blood Project — that’s a nice ghoulish name, at least. A Florida doctor is carrying out a “clinical trial” which you can pay to be part of (a warning flag is already being thrown), in which you, if you’re old enough (hey, I qualify!) will be transfused with plasma obtained from young men and women. While I’m the right age, though, it’s apparently going to cost $285,000 to sign up. I dunno, man, get a bunch of blood or a Porsche 911 R? Decisions, decisions.

This “study” also has some serious design flaws.

Mixed but intriguing evidence in mice doesn’t yet justify testing this idea in humans, much less charging them a huge sum to sign up. And the study uses neither blinding nor a placebo group, design elements considered essential for rigorous medical research.

“There is no way under heaven that they will be able to convincingly show whether this works or this doesn’t work. It’s a trial that is designed and destined to provide no valuable information,” said Dr. Steven Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who performs bone marrow transplants. He called the scientific hypothesis “incredibly far-fetched.”

Really, it probably isn’t going to work.

Maharaj has not published any animal studies testing the procedure he’s proposing to try in humans. He did, however, publish a paper last year documenting a study in which he infused three cancer patients with white blood cells from young donors who had been injected with G-CSF. The trial was originally intended to enroll 29 patients, but Maharaj did not answer questions about why the paper featured results from only three of them.

Asked by STAT for citations in the published literature that provide the scientific basis for his new trial, Maharaj pointed to six studies. One was conducted on human cells in lab dishes. The other five were conducted in mice; they found that, after being exposed to the blood of young mice, old mice had less abnormal thickening of their heart, grew more nervous tissue, and saw improved cognitive function, among other changes.

Man, in the old days all you needed to become a vampire was to get bitten by a creepy old fuck in a cape. Now you gotta be rich, you’ve got to shuttle to Florida once a month, you have to get all these needles, and then at the end you get to hope that maybe you’ll be able to name the camel on a cognitive assessment test.

That settles it, I’m going for the Porsche. Can one of you break the news to my wife that I’m planning to spend 10 years salary on a penismobile?

I get email

It used to be that I’d only get ranty, incoherent, ill-informed email from devout Christians. I guess we’ve won and converted them all to ranty, incoherent, ill-informed atheists now. Victory!

You are a stalker

Why do u continue to stalk Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and shermer and other NA.[Define “stalk”. You seem to think it synonymous with “criticize”. Does that mean you’re stalking me?] You vermin. You are obsessed. Just leave these people alone. [meme?] You have target. You really think you are smarter then a PhD in neuroscience.[All bow down before the Ph.D. in Neuroscience] Sam Harris is like really really smart [who else is like really, really smart?], you couldn’t get a PhD in that field.[I don’t know why I find that amusing]

You side with irrational blue hair women [More accurately, I don’t use hair color as a criterion for deciding who I side with]. Hysterically pathetic “girls” not women [I knew there’d be misogyny in here — there always is]. Sam is more of a man than you’ll ever be. [Oh. Degrees of manhood — so he’s agreeing that gender is not binary?] That’s logic [I missed the logic bit there]. Where suppose to trust a buzzfeed journalist. A retart could get a degree in journalism.[A journalist would know to spell and use proper grammar] Only the top 1 percent get into neuroscience. [Source? Top 1% of what?] You wonder why majority of people choose Harris over your inquisition [Source?]. A Harvard graduate vs were did you get your degree from a community college. [University of Oregon, Institute of Neuroscience, 1985] Hahahah. Lawrence a mit grad. You really think an mit grad is a rapist? [Impossible. No rapes ever occur at MIT. Also, I don’t think anyone has accused Krauss of rape. Why do you bring it up?] We will win this war.[With your logic?] Notice how na movement is a hundred times bigger than your movement.[What is “my” movement? I wish I knew. Also…Source?] I wonder why?[Because you just made up a number?] Hmmmmmm. #loser [I am crushed. You are #winning!]