This is a mildly amusing xkcd:
What makes it great, though, is the alt text.
“Although I hear they were caught cheating off of Rosalind, who sat at a desk in front of them.”
Sviggum rhymes with Wiggum, you know.
Our bigoted regent, Steve Sviggum, has resigned from his position as vice-chair of the board. He’s remaining on the board for the remaining year of his term, so we still have some ‘canceling’ left to do.
Get a cup of tea, pull up a chair, and talk to me this Thursday afternoon. Everyone’s welcome!
Except Otangelo. Get bent, Otangelo.
This chart is very pretty and colorful, but all it’s really doing is plotting a single variable, population size, against the arbitrary names of political subunits. It’s hard to read and difficult to extract any information about relationships from it. I think the creators need to go back and re-read (or read for the first time?) Edward Tufte.
This is what you get when someone is told to make some visual candy that really pops, rather than to transform information into a visual medium. My eyes are simultaneously stimulated and offended.
If you’re wondering where I was this weekend, I was husbanding my strength by taking some time off. This is the time in the semester when everything comes pouring in — we’re past the halfway point, students have enough information to know where their grade stands, and some are panicking. The first midterms are well over, but another exam is looming on the horizon. We’re soon going to be handling spring term registration, and students have already been coming by my office for academic advising. The administrative duties are gathering — I’ve got two major evening committee meetings coming up this week, our review of our colleagues for tenure and promotion, which is no fun at all. Yay, meetings all day long followed by meetings in the evening!
Only about 6 weeks of the accelerating chaos to go. I can make it.
I’m also committing myself to getting some daily exercise, because I can tell my decrepitude is also increasing, and I have to start getting ready now for next summer’s spider season. Waiting until the last minute to try and get back in shape is always disastrous and leads to something breaking.
Theodore Beale AKA Vox Day is in the news again. A few years ago, sick of all those comic book movies full of good guys and liberal ideals (I’ve got news for him: most of them are violent libertarian fantasies), he decided to promote and raise money for his idea of a good comic book story: Rebel’s Run, a Confederacy-themed anti-woke superhero pissed off at a world that has made hate crimes a, well, crime. How dare they?
Then, of course, it was an idea from rabid Vox Day and his legion of frothing mad, walking talking hate crimes. There was a chance he could pull it off.
There was reason to think Beale and his fans could realize their dream of going from comic books to cinema, if only through sheer fanaticism. His devoted followers call him the “Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil,” and describe themselves as his “minions.” Beale’s supporters, who frequently complain about supposed progressive “social justice warrior” influence creeping into fields like video games and science fiction, had already funded a handful of comic book issues and stirred up a controversy at science fiction’s premiere awards.
Beale’s history of racism could have made it difficult for Rebel’s Run, which stars a character sometimes depicted in a Confederate flag bustier, to find traditional financing. He has claimed that certain races are more likely to commit violence and called one of his foes in the science-fiction dispute, a Black author, a “half-savage.” Beale has affiliated himself with the Gamergate movement, opposes women’s suffrage, and once described homosexuality as a “birth defect.”
He even made a teaser trailer. They didn’t actually have any movie footage — it hadn’t been made or cast or anything — so basically it’s a clip of a woman in a convertible firing a pistol at some stock footage of cops. It’s not at all impressive but it got the conservative donors fired up.
Rebel's Run Teaser Trailer from Galatia Films on Vimeo.
He raised a million dollars from his minions, which is small potatoes in the big screen superhero world, but hey, it was seed money. He just needed to invest it somewhere safe, build on his now-demonstrated ability to raise funding, persuade some investors to grow it, and…uh, ooops.
Given that track record, he instead turned to Utah-based Ohana Capital Financial, a business aimed at customers that would struggle to get money elsewhere.
As Ohana’s promotional materials put it, according to prosecutors, the firm offered “banking [to] the unbankable.” On Nov. 5, 2020, Beale transferred the $1 million to Ohana to be held in escrow in advance of future film funding.
Ohana was the creation of James Wolfgramm, a self-described cryptocurrency billionaire who posted pictures of sports cars that supposedly belonged to him on social media. But in fact, according to a federal indictment filed last month, Wolfgramm’s wealth was a sham. The sports car pictures, for example, were pulled from other websites. Wolfgramm’s business also sold what were billed as high-tech cryptocurrency mining rigs — but those too were a hoax, according to prosecutors, with their screens just running on a loop to create the illusion of mine.
Unbeknownst to Beale and his supporters, the indictment alleges, Wolfgramm was deeply in debt to one of his business’s other clients. That client had paid Ohana more than $4 million in September 2020, several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of what was meant to be a payment to a Chinese manufacturer of personal protective equipment. Instead of carrying out the transaction, prosecutors allege, Wolfgramm spent the millions on his own unrelated business issues.
Oh. He trusted a cryptocurrency grifter with his seed money. It’s gone. All of it, vanished into the pockets of con artists and conservatives…but I repeat myself. The movie is not going to be made.
But don’t you worry about Vox Day. He’s already blaming the libs. It was a conspiracy, don’t you know, to destroy his dreams.
Beale claims, without evidence, that the alleged con was carried out to disrupt his right-wing fanbase.
I strongly suspect that this whole thing was a targeted operation intended to break our community,Beale said in the video he published last week.
And he’s bouncing back with another fantastic anti-woke plan.
Beale isn’t done with movies yet, though. In a video to his fans, he told them he’s working on a script starring his friend, antisemitic former comedian Owen Benjamin. In this new movie, Beale plans to cast Benjamin—who believes the moon landing was faked—as the head of NASA.
Somewhere out there, another cryptobro is rubbing his hands in glee, anticipating another windfall of a million or more from the gullible minions of the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil.
My brother Jim’s ancient dog Nestlé made it through his remembrance event on Saturday, blind and stumbling as he is, only to expire on Monday. Poor old dog.
You may recall that I suggested that Yvon Chouinard, founder of the Patagonia retail store, might be that mythical beast, a good billionaire. Do me a favor, will you? Forget I ever mentioned it. As it turns out, his donation of his entire company to a charitable trust dedicated to protecting the environment was a sham — it was a maneuver to get some massive profit from tax breaks, and the trust was actually a way to put his money in a 501c4 that would be controlled by his heirs and himself, and would allow him to meddle in politics freely. He was simply abusing the system and undermining democracy in that special way that capitalism grants the filthy rich.
I should have known. You don’t get to be a billionaire by being a good person, you have to have a thick, deep core of corruption running through your heart in order to cheat the system and gather that much money. At least Chouinard knows that the reality of his existence is so thoroughly shot through with evil that he has to work so hard to put up the illusion that he’s a good man.
I won’t be fooled again. You’re a billionaire? You’re by definition bad.
It was a long weekend in Hoquiam, Washington, where I attended my brother Jim’s remembrance. It was a quiet event, no ceremony, just friends and family gathered and talking and looking over old photos, feeling sad.
Here’s a young Jim.
He always was better looking than me, although I never admitted that to him. He told me often enough.
For comparison, here’s a photo of the Myers kids sometime around 1970. Nobody call attention to my ugly teeth, please.
All that’s left of that handsome boy now are ashes, nicely stowed away in his old work thermos.
Now I’m getting sad again. Must stop.
I just got confirmation of my textbook selection for my spring term course.
CONCEPTS OF GENETICS
9780134604718
BY KLUG, WILLIAM S., CUMMINGS,
MICHAEL R., SPENCER, CHARLOTTE
A., PALLADINO, MICHAEL A.,
KILLIAN, DARRELL, KLUG, WILLIAM,
CUMMINGS, MICHAEL, SPENCER,
CHARLOTTE, AND PALLADINO,
MICHAEL
PUBLISHED BY PEARSON ED
(PRENTICE)
12
PUBLICATION DATE: MAY. 9, 2019
LIST PRICE: $246.65 😱 🤯
!!!!!
Registration is coming up soon. I’ll be sure to inform the students that old editions, used books, any alternative is fine. I’ve hung on to a few copies of past editions I’ll loan to students who are desperate.
