His bedside manner left much to be desired

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, and the cannibal castrators lop off testicles in their backwoods chop shops…would you believe this cute couple belong in a horror movie?

Two men were accused Wednesday in a criminal charge of performing an illegal gender reassignment surgery on a volunteer at their cabin in the woods and then keeping the body parts in a freezer, possibly to eat later.

Bob Lee Allen, 53, and Thomas Evans Gates, 42, were arrested Oct. 15 after going to the hospital in McAlester to try to visit the victim, Le Flore County Sheriff Rodney Derryberry said Tuesday.

That’s not “gender reassignment surgery”: it’s crudely chopping off body parts while lying about what they’re doing. It’s just castration, carried out by a couple of yokels. They’ve been getting away with it for years!

The victim reported Allen claimed to have 15 years of experience and that he “videos the procedures for personal use,” according to the affidavit. The victim also reported “Allen told him that the surgery wouldn’t cost him anything.”

The victim told investigators that Allen performed the removal Oct. 12 on a covered makeshift table at the residence and that Gates helped by handing over the surgical equipment, according to the affidavit. The victim said he was awake for the two-hour surgery after being injected “in the needed areas.”

The victim “stated that after the surgery was over that Allen said that he was going to consume the parts and laughed and said that he was a cannibal,” according to the affidavit. The victim also said that Allen then talked about “the time he worked on someone that he described to be crazy and that he left the male opened up to die overnight.”

I wonder how many people they actually maimed in their 15 years of butchery?

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It was a tuck

We watched the notorious movie last night, including the infamous closing scene with Rudy Giuliani.

Sorry to disappoint you, but yeah, he was just tucking in his shirt.

It was still stupid and inappropriate, just not as scandalous as everyone was imagining. Giuliani was smarming it up with a pretty reporter, smirking and flattering her. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, except for the condescension and DEAR GOD GIULIANI SHOULD NEVER SMILE. He looks like a creepy skull.

He is then invited into her bedroom for a drink. And he took her up on it! Extremely unprofessional and sleazy! I’ve done many interviews in hotel rooms, and if at the end I was invited to go into the bedroom for a drink (never happened, my interviewers were professional too), I would have said, “No thank you, I’ve got to go” or, if we wanted to continue the conversation, I’d have suggested that we meet in the bar in a few minutes.

Then there was a scene where the two of them were fumbling around removing each other’s microphones. Unprofessional again; yes, you thread the wire from the lavalier mic under your shirt to the transmitter, but it’s not a big production. A reporter would find this part of her daily routine, while a guy like Giuliani has done this a thousand times. He wouldn’t need assistance, and neither would she. I’ve done it a hundred times, usually standing up on a stage, sometimes right in front of everyone. It doesn’t involve taking off my pants.

It does, however, sometimes involve unbuttoning a shirt, and then tucking it back in. That’s what I saw Giuliani doing. It wasn’t a big deal at all.

Also, remember, there was a cameraperson recording it all. What Sacha Baron Cohen caught on film was a creepy politician being condescending and unprofessional, nothing more. It was disappointing, actually, and was simply some unflattering editing of an already unpleasant character who thinks he’s attractive and endearing, when he just gets more repulsive the harder he tries.

The attention that bit is given also detracts from the rest of the movie. The truly horrifying parts where when he got his audience of good ol’ salt-of-the-earth Americans to go along with his prompts: an audience of rednecks grinning like feral hyenas as he gets them to sing along to a bad tune he was making about gassing their political opponents to death; the casual and easily elicited antisemitism; the QAnon fans babbling their conspiracy theories; the weird debutante ball where the Southern gentlemen were locked in rigid politeness as Borat’s daughter does a fertility dance celebrating her menses, and the most they do is hiss, “call her an Uber”.

As is usual in a Sacha Baron Cohen movie, the real freaks we should pay attention to are ourselves, not the clown with a funny accent capering on the stage. Borat couldn’t make Giuliani more of a spectacle than he routinely does to himself on Fox News every day, so I thought that bit fell rather flat.

Also, it was an out-loud, unapologetic feminist movie. Let’s not forget that in all the noise about the final setup.

Jordan Peterson is back?

I’d noticed something peculiar in the last week — a surge of traffic and comments to some old videos I made criticizing Jordan Peterson, and they tended to be the usual smug BS from fanatics who are appalled that anyone (that is, lib cucks) would dare to reject the wisdom of Daddy.

Just today I found out that Peterson is back at work making his videos, dang it. He’s threatening to finish a book about the Old Testament, so get ready for more religious dogma and revitalized fans. The sanctimonious stupidity is back!

Online drama can really be entertaining!

Remember that weird, convoluted Omegaverse fanfic lawsuit, where a romance fiction writer, Addison Cain, went into a berserk frenzy of DMCA takedowns and lawsuits and histrionic online accusations? It’s back. She’s accusing Lindsay Ellis of being part of a Fan Fiction Deep State Conspiracy trying to bring Addison Cain down.

Or maybe it’s just me, overly sensitized to stories of bullying twits playing games with the legal system to lash out at people they don’t like. Hey! donate to our legal fund!

Thor may have heard my grumblings

Because he just smote my day a little harder. We had a power outage in the middle of lab today, and all the water baths stopped, and surprisingly, our sinks stopped working. Then I had to go to the refrigerator in our prep room, which is maybe 20′ x 10′ and cluttered with various gadgets, to fetch a reagent, and…I got lost. There were no lights at all in there, and I got turned around trying to maneuver around a ladder and a cart, and completely lost track of which way was what. I thought I might die in there and my body found rotting in the darkness weeks later.

I survived. The lab kind of worked on the residual heat in the water baths. No students were lost, the professor was only almost lost.

I guess the power just came back on after the lab was over. Wheee.

I snubbed Mike S. Adams again

Way, way back in 2006, I heard that Mike S. Adams was coming to UMM. I was surprised. He was one of those far-right loons who ranted on various conservative websites, and I’d commented on some of his poisonous crap, but why would he come all the way out here? And why would any of our students bother with such a goofball?

I attended his talk. I arrived late, had to listen from the hallway, and didn’t think much of it…but apparently, Adams was looking for me, and noticed that I didn’t ask any questions, and wrote a whole column calling me a coward and misspelling my name. I had to write an article explaining why I was unimpressed and repelled by him, but I was touched: he actually cared about me, and expected that I’d want to talk to him, and seemed disappointed that I found him so repugnant that I had no interest in engaging with a right-wing troll.

It was surprising then, to discover that Mike S. Adams is dead, as I learned in this video (it’s mentioned somewhere around the 15 minute mark, before dissecting Adams’ odious beliefs). He had been battling his university, demanding a promotion to full professor that it had denied him, and went through a long painful series of court engagements which he eventually won, I guess: he was promoted to full professor and given 7 years of back pay, about $500,000, but also agreed to retire. I imagine that cost him, maybe more than he was awarded, and the week before he was due to finally retire, he killed himself.

That was back in July. In a final snub, I didn’t even notice at the time. I ignored him when he gave a talk here, and I ignored him when he blew his brains out.

I wonder how all those people who sent me hate mail, prompted by his column, feel about this unforgivable injustice? They’re welcome to write to me some more, vent their rage and all that, since I don’t mind, and have enough self-confidence that I won’t be affected by their impotent fury.

Poor man.

A loss at the University of Oregon

I did not know him at all — he was at the University of Oregon after my time there — but I was sad to learn of the death of Jeff McKnight from cancer. He sounds like he was a passionate, enthusiastic scientist, and we always need more of those.

This bit jumped out at me, though.

“Jeff was definitely someone special who saw his students as equals and not as anything lesser,” said Bryson Tyler Ricamona, a UO biology alum. “It was really enlightening and very motivating to know that somebody really believed in us, not only in the work that we’re doing now but the potential work that we could do in the future.”

McKnight supported students inside and outside of his lab. When someone tore down posters encouraging LGBTQ+ students to take part in STEM, McKnight printed and hung 50 new posters and talked to the UO science community about the incident. The posters disappeared the next day, so McKnight printed and hung 100 more.

“He cared very much about our community,” Orlandi said.

That sounds familiar — that was my experience at the UO, that the faculty were all committed activists and concerned about improving the world, so it sounds like he fit right in.

It’s too bad about the individuals tearing down posters, but I’ll trust that they were an obnoxious minority and not at all representative of the student body. I’ve noticed that every university has a few terrible people who have terrible ways of getting attention, and they’ve gotten worse in recent years.