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.

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.

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.

I’m in Washington state today, and in a few hours will be heading down to the Pacific Ocean with family to say goodbye to one of the people in this photo.

The weather is looking a bit grey. I call upon Odin to bring down an appropriately dismal drizzly rain today.

Did you know that you can actually get formal training in how to stage an effective peaceful protest? I got some non-violent activism training years ago. There really are experts in this subject who are steeped in the history and statistics and strategies.

I guess these two bozos skipped the class.

I am so entirely supportive of the cause of reducing oil production and consumption, I would be cheering on the cause except…

Their chosen form of protest was to throw tomato soup (what symbolic message is that sending?) on a famous Van Gogh oil painting (is that supposed to be a connection to the oil industry?) and super-glue themselves to the wall. This action sends only one message: the members of the “Just Stop Oil” protest are fucking irrelevant idiots.

Here’s their weak justification:

What is worth more: art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? one of the activists yells, adding, are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?

She continued, The cost-of-living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup.

The problem with that logic is that putting art in a museum does not at all conflict with the goal of reducing oil consumption. Are they suggesting that sacrificing art is necessary to protect the planet and to feed the hungry? They’ve also “called for roads across London to be blocked every day in October to protest fossil fuels” which sounds like a stronger protest than defacing paintings. There’s at least a strong connection between the action and the goal.

Also, the painting was protected behind a sheet of glass. They couldn’t even get the defacement right.