I read the news today, oh boy, and there’s nothing reassuring.

• This big name hacker, Jake Appelbaum, has been using his reputation to harass, stalk, and abuse women. I’ll spare you the details, but jeez does this ever sound familiar.

  This didn’t happen because we’re broken as a hacker culture, or because we’re hackers and thus too undeveloped to comprehend empathy. People like Jake can be found in other places; priests and churches, Hollywood, the porn industry, and more. Wherever power imbalances, hero worship, and secret-keepers intersect. People like Jake are found in hacker culture, too, and it’s past time for hacker culture to deal with it.

  Know any other organizations with “power imbalances, hero worship, and secret-keepers”?

• A boy writes a graphic letter describing how he’d rape and murder girls at his school, and hands it to a girl with a smirk. Again, I’ll spare you the ugly details. What’s shocking is that despite a clear school policy, administrators did nothing to punish him or assure the girls that they were safe, only requiring that the boy take his exams in isolation.

  “The principal and school staff didn’t do a thorough investigation and were negligent in ensuring protection of students, and school staff against a potentially violent person,” said a parent of one of the girls. The Sentinel is not naming the parent because it would identify the minor girl.

  Another parent of one of the girls said, “I am in complete shock and disbelief at the principal’s response to this dangerous situation. I felt like the school was protecting the perpetrator and ignoring the possible threat to the victims. I am at a loss of words that a person who would write such a descriptive rape and kill list would be allowed to stay on campus at all.”

  No one thinks there might be something deeply wrong with a student who writes explicit, violent pornography about fellow students and hands it to the subject of his fantasies?

• Don’t worry, though. Someday, Earl Erhart will be there to defend men like him accused of rape.

  Earl Ehrhart is worried about his sons. Both boys attend Georgia public universities, and Ehrhart, a state representative from the Atlanta suburbs, has heard all about the college sexual-misconduct hearings in which young men are presumed guilty until proven innocent. The proceedings are flawed, he says, they’re like “kangaroo courts.” And their rulings are so biased against the accused, Ehrhart fears that his boys—as with male students across the state—could end up expelled based on a false accusation of rape.

  Somehow, these guys are always far more worried about men being accused of rape, then of women being raped.

  I went through fraternity rush once, way back in 1976. I attended one frat party — it was all about alcohol and getting women drunk enough to go to bed with you, and was an evening of crass jokes and boorish behavior. I never went to another frat party, but when people say some aspects of a university encourage rape culture, I can say yes, they do.

  But Earl Erhart will be there to protect it.

• I wonder how some jobs get to be so male-centric. Masonry, for instance. That’s highly skilled labor, and in a competition, Shania Clifford excelled at it.

  Judges in the masonry program, a field usually dominated by men, originally awarded Clifford first place by a whopping 72 points.

  Larry Moore, her instructor, said the scores of the top performers usually vary by only a couple of points, but Clifford’s column for the state competition was exceptional.

  “She had the best plumb there,” Moore said. “Two or three corners were perfect.” Plumb refers to how straight a vertical edge is.

  And then later the competition officials retracted the win and gave it to the guy who finished third, instead.

  I wonder how some jobs get to be so male-centric?

• Laila Alawa wrote “9/11 changed the world for good“, where “for good” is a common English idiom meaning “permanently”. Unfortunately, the usual gang of professional illiterates and idiots, like Pam Geller and Milo Yiannopoulous, seem to have had to run it through Google Translate to get it from English to their native tongue of Hate, and it garbled it to “for the good”, and they then announced to the world that Alawa is a Muslim who thinks 9/11 was wonderful.

  On Tuesday, June 14, 2016, I woke up to a hell that even I could not have predicted,” Alawa wrote yesterday in a post on The Tempest, an online publication she founded and runs. “Hundreds of people were tweeting at me, the vitriol, hatred and fury in their messages each worse than the last one.

  It’s remarkable how often stupidity and hatred go hand in hand.

• The latest scandal out of Australia is that a wealthy radio presenter and football team president joked on air about paying $50,000 to drown a woman football reporter. He apparently doesn’t like her, comparing her to a spider, which makes it OK. I really don’t understand where he gets his casual sexism.

  This is a promotional ad for his radio station.

  

  Nope. Nothing unusual about that picture. Nothing at all.

I really should stop reading all this stuff people send me every day. It’s not good for my mood.

Oh, heck. One more.

• Another college football player flushes his career and life away.

  An ex-Vanderbilt University football player will serve at least 15 years in prison after he was convicted by a jury Saturday of encouraging three teammates to rape an unconscious woman he was dating, and filming it in his dorm room.

  It’s not just the rape that was awful. On what planet is it considered fun to invite your friends to join in a rape, and to record it? Planet Privilege, I guess.