Awful person…and he was a scientist, too

This story is unbelievably horrible. Adam Britton, a fairly well-known Australian expert on crocodiles, has been arrested for unspeakable acts.

A prominent crocodile specialist from Darwin has pleaded guilty to dozens of charges of bestiality involving the torture, rape and killing of pet dogs.

A suppression order had hidden the identity of Adam Robert Corden Britton, a zoologist who has built an international reputation for his work on crocodiles over decades, since his arrest last year. However, that has now been lifted.

Britton is facing 60 charges relating to bestiality and possessing, accessing, and transmitting child abuse material.

A number of videos depicting animal cruelty were found during a joint NT Police and Australian Federal Police raid which resulted in his arrest on a rural Darwin property last year.

You’d think a professional zoologist would have a deep respect for animals. If he offered to adopt a pet dog you could no longer care for, you’d think that for sure you were sending the animal off to an excellent home. You’d think wrong.

Britton had a “sadistic sexual interest” in animals since at least 2014, prosecutors told the court, and along with exploiting his own pets, he had manipulated other dog owners into giving him theirs.

He would use the online marketplace platform Gumtree Australia to find people who were often reluctantly giving their pets away due to travel or work commitments, building a “rapport” with them to negotiate taking custody of the animals. If they reached out to Britton for updates on their old pets, he would tell them “false narratives” and send them old photos.

In reality, he was abusing the animals in a shipping container on his property that had been fitted out with recording equipment – which the court heard he called a “torture room” – before sharing footage of his crimes online under pseudonyms.

A truly sick man.

Prosecutors told the court Britton owned a shipping container on his property equipped with filming equipment and used the space “to torture, sexually exploit and kill dogs”.

Last year, police seized 44 items including computers, mobile telephones, cameras, external hard drives, tools, weapons, dog paraphernalia and sex toys.

Mr Aust told the court that Britton operated a Telegram account which was used for the sole purpose of engaging in conversations with “like-minded people”, and that he used another account to upload and disseminate images and recordings of his crimes.

“Using these applications, the offender discussed his ‘kill count’ … and described the shipping container on his property as his ‘torture room’,” Mr Aust said.

The only reasonable penalty for this monster was suggested at the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I’m sorry to say.

Sometimes it’s hard to be against the death penalty.

Another bad memory

Oh, no. You must understand, in the late 80s and 90s, growth cone navigation was my jam. It’s what I was doing research on, and my head was full of papers from that era. Netrin, robo, slit, various molecules that attracted or repelled growing axons to establish the pattern of connections in the early developing brain…that was what I did. Now I learn that some of those papers, those written by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, were a lie.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned following scrutiny of his published papers and an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a third paper, this one from Cell.

Last week, Tessier-Lavigne retracted two articles from Science that had been published in 2001.

The Cell paper, A Ligand-Gated Association between Cytoplasmic Domains of UNC5 and DCC Family Receptors Converts Netrin-Induced Growth Cone Attraction to Repulsion, was published in 1999. It has been cited 577 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In my circles, Tessier-Lavigne had a colossal reputation — he was turning out all this work from a prestigious, well-funded lab with an army of students and post-docs. I was teaching developmental biology, talking about netrins, with a textbook that already cited the Tessier-Lavigne work. Such cool stuff, and it can’t be trusted anymore.

Worse, can we trust Cell magazine? They’ve posted the retraction, and it admits that the editors didn’t care about faked data.

In 2015, we, the authors, consulted with Cell editors about issues that had been brought to our attention about this paper, specifically image splicing in Figures 3C, 5A, 5B, and 7B–7D and duplication of blank blots in Figure 7C. Cell declined to publish a Correction at that time because in 1999, when the paper was published, the journal did not have policies prohibiting unmarked image splicing and because, for the duplication, there was insufficient information to determine intent, and the impact of the duplication on the paper’s conclusions was limited. In 2022, when new concerns were raised, Cell posted an Editorial Expression of Concern (Cell 186, 230 [2023], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.019) while an institutional investigation was conducted. The investigation is complete and has revealed further issues including manipulation of data-containing portions of Western blot images in Figures 3A–3C, 7A, 7B, and 7D, undermining confidence in the paper’s conclusions (https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2023/07/Scientific-Panel-Final-Report.pdf). As a result, we are retracting the paper. We regret the impact of these issues on the scientific community.

Yikes. All it should take is one fudged image to cast doubt on the entire paper. If you’re faking data, we have sufficient information to determine intent — I was brought up with strict instruction that you never never never never ever do that.

What a disgrace. Shame on Tessier-Lavigne, and shame on Cell.

A genuinely evil guy

Sorry to ruin your day…don’t watch this if you’d rather not. This is the horrible Jared Taylor, professional bigot, jumping on the anti-trans bandwagon. He hates black people and gays, so adding another category to his long list is not a stretch for him.

A few quotes:

“When someone’s sexual energy — and we have a lot of it — is wasted on a reproductive dead end, that’s a defect,” Taylor said. “Biologically it’s no different from wanting to copulate with lawn mowers, or animals, or dead people. Just because same-sex attraction is more common, doesn’t mean it’s not a defect.”

“Homosexuals are different,” he continued. “They don’t want to be treated just like everyone else. They want us to think they’re special. And better. They want to be noticed and celebrated. Adored, even. It’s like being Black: We must never forget that people used to give them a hard time.”

“It comes as a shock to a lot of Americans, but whom you copulate with, when, and why are not your business alone,” he asserted. “Every society sets rules, because without rules society collapses. Healthy societies have rules that are meant to build families and promote child-rearing. They grow out of an ancient sense of duty to family, nation, and race.”

Taylor claimed that the “homo-tranny-drag queen stuff is the very opposite” and that the “strongest opposition to it comes from religious groups and racially conscious people.” And he said that “every gain in white racial consciousness is a victory for families and sound sexual behavior.”

He went on to say that, “You cannot have white awareness without understanding that healthy families are the key to our survival. And anyone willing to fight the madness and stand up for healthy families is half-way to an understanding of race.”

Don’t be like Jared Taylor.

I hope you choke on your birthday cake, Henry

Today is an evil birthday, a reminder that the universe is not fair and just.

Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century. The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.

The news, as usual, was sickening. Kissinger is generally treated as distinguished, honorable statesman, and his crimes are glossed over because, obviously, he’s a very old man and he’s celebrating a birthday. You don’t want to ruin his birthday, do you? (Yes, I do.) So the Washington Post runs a piece written by Kissinger’s son, David, that


tells us all about his secret for living so long — a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, a career of relentlessly stressful decision-making, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never a participant. He forgets never having a speck of empathy for others, and never ever facing the consequences of his decisions. He has seen some of those consequences, but they do not deter him.

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he had lost 13 family members and countless friends to the Holocaust. He returned to his native Germany as an American soldier, participating in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp near Hannover. There, he witnessed the depths to which mankind can sink unconstrained by international structures of peace and justice. Next month, we will return to Fürth, where he will lay a wreath at the grave of his grandfather, who did not escape.

That’s so sad. If only the lesson he’d learned from his personal experience that murdering civilians is an evil act. At least the Intercept has a lengthy article on the civilian experience in Cambodia and Kissinger’s war crimes.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

Kissinger doesn’t understand the meaning of “honor.” He’s a butcher who promoted the impersonal use of technology to lay waste to villages — he established an American tradition continued to this day, using drone strikes to wage bloody war with no clear idea how flattening farms and blowing up children will end a war.

Mother Jones summarizes Kissinger’s place in history.

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands are drenched in blood.

Yet he will be feted today, and every simpering politician who praises this man is an accomplice.

I wish there were a grave that they could lay a wreath on, and that the rest of us could piss on.

Dallas Humber, American terrorist

Another vile human being has been dragged into the light. This woman has been promoting terrorism and encouraging mass murderers for decades, while hiding behind online anonymity. Left Coast Right Watch has done an amazingly thorough job of tracking her down — online anonymity isn’t as safe as she thought.

Over the past few years, she was simply known as “the narrator”—the disembodied voice that reads mass murderer manifestos, how-to guides on attacking critical infrastructure and collections of short essays written by an anonymous collective of white supremacists and accelerationists—the people hell-bent on causing the collapse of society.

Her name is Dallas Erin Humber, and she’s deeply involved with the online network of violent, militant bigots known as Terrorgram.

Here she is with her Nazi pedophile (why do those two words go together so often?) boyfriend, Jason Gant.

This is a doxxing I fully support. She’s the voice behind this thing called the Terrorgram Collective, an online group for the cheering fans of terrorism, murder, and mass destruction which has inspired at least one mass killing. Humber is a cheerleader for the worst, most contemptible people on the planet. I won’t quote her screeds — they make me sick, and probably would nauseate you, too — but if you must, the link above includes many excerpts from her sordid history, and there’s more here.

It’s not clear what more can be done about her, though. She’s a 33 year old woman living a normal public life in Sacramento, California, while inciting international violence under a cowardly pseudonym. Will exposing her have any discouraging effect at all? It’s not at all clear what it will do, other than give CPAC an opportunity to invite her to next year’s conference, and it looks like the law isn’t rushing forward to shut her down.

It’s also unclear whether Humber — now that her role in Terrorgram has been exposed — could or would be prosecuted. In the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brandenberg vs. Ohio, the court ruled that advocacy of violence could be punished only “where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Arusha Gordon — associate director of the James Byrd Jr. Center to Stop Hate at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — told HuffPost that it can be a high hurdle for prosecutors to jump to prove that certain incitements are “likely” to produce “imminent” violence.

It might be tough, for example, to demonstrate that Humber encouraging her followers to commit acts of terror amounts to an “imminent” threat in court. The Terrorgram Collective’s propaganda doesn’t always declare a specific, upcoming date for its followers to do terror.

So far, we’ll just have to settle for the fact that the world knows her name, where she lives, and what she looks like, and that her hatred will be scrutinized.

The Genocide Party had their yearly get-together

One pleasant bit of non-news is that CPAC is dying. For a couple of decades now, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a yearly spectacle of far right conservative speechifying, when the radical Republicans could let their hair down and let their freak flag fly, and the media would dutifully report on their gibbering mania, and we’d point and laugh, and then some of the kooks would get elected to high office. Remember when David Silverman tried to get American Atheists represented at CPAC? That was an omen.

This year, I hadn’t even realized it was going on until several days into the conference, it was that much of a yawner. Attendance is way down, and the ratfuckers are giving speeches to nearly empty seats. Prospective presidential candidates are skipping the whole show. It’s a “who cares?” event now.

However, as it’s relevance declines, the participants are reaching for the big bottle of crazy evil to spark excitement, and as we all know, the Republican party has become unhealthily obsessed with what’s in other people’s pants. They’re trying to pass laws to restrict people’s civil rights, they’ve developed a weird hatred of Mrs Doubtfire, they want to burn books that even mention the existence of non-traditional non-heterosexuals. What’s next? How can they top the insanity they’re perpetrating right now?

How about genocide?

The Right’s war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles openly called for the public eradication of transgender individuals. During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, For the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.
…
In his speech, Knowles used a convoluted line of thinking and false logic while trying to prove his horrifying point that trans people should not exist. There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It can be all or nothing, he said. If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false — as it is — if men really can’t become women — as they cannot — then it’s false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it, especially when that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of many people. It if is false, then for the good of society — and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion — then transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.

We’ve seen where this line of thinking goes, we don’t need a roadmap to recall our history. First we have to silence the Badthought with bookburnings and firelit marches and shrieking news articles. Then we pass laws criminalizing drag shows (Tennessee just made appearing in drag a felony with a 6 year prison sentence). Next we have to isolate the bad people in concentration camps, and then we have to move on to a Final Solution.

You would think that Ben Shapiro, Knowles’ big boss at the Daily Wire, would be aware of the comparison. Knowles himself is being made aware that he said the evil parts out loud, and is lashing out at the media that is reporting on his words and demanding retractions.

You said it, big boy. Be thankful that the only pain you might suffer is a little public humiliation, rather than a prison sentence or a beating or a gas chamber, like your victims have to deal with all the time.

ALL the trigger warnings

Well, this is one horrific story of child abuse.

The Adams family lived on a lonely dirt road about 8 miles from the center of Bisbee, an old copper-mining town in southeastern Arizona known today for its antique shops and laid-back attitude. Far from prying eyes, the Adams home — a three-bedroom, open concept affair surrounded by desert — was often littered with piles of clothing and containers of lubricant Adams used to sexually abuse his children, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP.

Paul’s wife, Leizza, assumed most of the child-rearing responsibilities, including getting their six children off to school and chauffeuring them to church and religious instruction on Sundays. Paul, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, spent much of his time online looking at porn, often with his children watching, or wandering the house naked or in nothing but his underwear.

He had a short fuse and would frequently throw things, yell at his wife and beat his kids. “He just had this explosive personality,” said Shaunice Warr, a Border Patrol agent and a Mormon who worked with Paul and described herself as Leizza’s best friend. “He had a horrible temper.”

Paul was more relaxed while coaxing his older daughter to hold a smartphone camera and record him while he sexually abused her. He also seemed to revel in the abuse in online chat rooms, where he once bragged that he had “the perfect lifestyle” because he could have sex with his daughters whenever he pleased, while his wife knew and “doesn’t care.”

How can someone get away with that? The one cunning trick: he’s a Mormon. He confessed all to a Mormon bishop, who tossed the information into a confidential Mormon network, where everyone was more concerned with protecting the ‘good name’ of the Church of Latter Day Saints (and their own asses) and let it go on and on for seven years. The little girl is finally out of that house, and three of the kids are suing their father and the Mormon church. The church lawyers are something else.

MJ and her adoptive mother asked the AP to use only her initials in part because videos of her abuse posted by her father are still circulating on the internet. The AP does not publish the names of sexual abuse survivors without their consent.

William Maledon, an Arizona attorney representing the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams’ six children, told the AP last month that the bishops were not required to report the abuse.

“These bishops did nothing wrong. They didn’t violate the law, and therefore they can’t be held liable,” he said. Maledon referred to the suit as “a money grab.”

They did nothing wrong? Sheltering a pedophile and rapist isn’t wrong? Allowing children to suffer for years isn’t wrong? I guess the Mormon church doesn’t care much for that morality stuff.

At least MJ has emerged from his horrible experience with the right attitude.

“‘I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks,” said MJ, who is now 16, during an interview with the AP. “They are just the worst type of people, from what I’ve experienced and what other people have also experienced.”

Yeah. Give ’em hell, young lady.

A dirt road leads to what was once the home of Paul Adams and his family on the outskirts of Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. Adams, a Mormon and U.S. Border Patrol agent living with his wife and six children, admitted he had posted videos on the dark web of him molesting two of his children, a 9-year-old girl and a younger daughter he began raping when she was only 6 months old. Adams killed himself after his arrest. The revelation that Mormon officials directed an effort to conceal years of abuse in the Adams household sparked a criminal investigation of the church by Cochise County attorney and a civil lawsuit by three of the Adams’ children. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

It really isn’t funny

Ha ha. He made a slip while speaking and admitted that his invasion of Iraq was just as much a criminal act as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Ha ha.

Ha ha. It’s funny because he’s old. Ha.

You know what? That George W. Bush can still laugh over his murderous, pointless, unjustifiable killing of hundreds of thousands of people is just another reason that man, and his cronies, ought to be in prison. Maybe he and Putin could share a cell.

I hope his dreams are populated by the ghosts of all those dead Iraqi children, and that he dies quietly in his bed knowing that his life was a net loss to humanity.