An accurate summary of the space-billionaire pathology

I agree with this summary.

What’s more, the global economic system is rigged so that a guy like Bezos can become a hundred-billionaire while profiting off the labor of over a million employees, some working for poverty wages, who piss in bottles to meet quotas and sometimes die at work. Meanwhile, the activities of the corporations that create these billionaires are ravaging the only habitable planet we’ve got. But because our neo-feudal lords have sold us on a science-fiction fantasy, many look up to them as heroes rather than decrying their obscene and ill-gotten wealth.

Also, this:

Assholes…in spaaaaace.

David Brooks knows nothing

Brooks was invited to opine on the American Indian boarding schools horror, and of course he fucked it up. Because he is David Brooks.

I think what strikes me, looking back, one, it’s there are so many levels to what happened. One is just the raw racism. I mean, they weren’t taking Ukrainian kids and ripping them from their parents. They were just taking Native American kids.

The second was the ideology. There was — after Darwinism, there were all these pseudoscientific crappy beliefs in races and in some civilizations were better than other civilizations. And, therefore, the idea that you’re doing somebody a favor by taking them away from their heritage is — that was a pseudointellectual belief system that was pervasive, not only in the fringes, but pervasive in Western society, this crazy, really garbage science Darwinism.

And then the final thing which is to be appreciated, which they did not have then, but hopefully we’re getting now, the idea that cultural diversity is a plus, and not a minus. And this is a — it’s not a recent phenomenon in world history. The Book of Jeremiah embraces cultural diversity.

For a group of people dedicated to preserving a certain vision of the past, conservatives have no sense of history. While I agree that evolution was readily seized upon, and is still happily used by racists, as a rationalization for racism, racism seems to have thrived throughout history before Darwin. Recall that Darwin went public with his theory in 1859. But Gobineau published his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in 1853…how did he do that? Did he have precognition? Thomas Jefferson, a slaver, was convinced that black people were “dull, tasteless, and anomalous”, and called for scientific research to establish the inferiority of the black race. Arthur Schopenhauer had a whole theory of racial virtues; but he died in 1860 (maybe The Origin killed him?). Hey! 1859! That was when the American Civil War, a war fought over slavery, was started. Darwin must have triggered it with this sudden revelation that racism was scientifically valid.

Indian boarding schools in America started with the Indian Civilization Act Fund, established by the US government in 1819, when Charles Darwin was ten years old. He was an ambitious and busy little boy, I guess. And then he turns around when he’s 15 and creates the Bureau of Indian Affairs! He wasn’t even American! I am so impressed.

I’m sorry, David Brooks, you don’t get to pretend that “raw racism” and racist ideology was spawned by “Darwinism”. Colonialism and the Enlightenment appeared side by side long before Darwin was born. You can be appalled at the crappy beliefs in races and in some civilizations were better than other civilizations, but Darwin didn’t invent it — he was living in the middle of it, soaking in the smug attitudes of Victorian England that were there long before he came on the scene.

As for Jeremiah, I’m not going to believe you, and I’m not going to waste my time reading through an old prophet’s screed looking for hints of multiculturalism. Besides, by the iron law of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which seems to be the guiding principle of conservative understanding of history (although they don’t seem to believe in any chronology besides “when I learned about it”), I’m going to have to blame every intolerant act since the 7th century BCE on Jeremiahism.

It’s a time warp! The Infinite Thread is back!

I’m consolidating things. I’m fusing the Open Thread (which died in 2020) and the Political Madness thread, which has been going strong all this time, thanks to the stewardship of Lynna, into one unholy amalgam of anything goes. Almost anything goes, that is. I’m hoping Lynna will continue to inject regular antidotes to the political madness, but also it’ll be a place where all the random odd thoughts and question and socializing can go on.

This would be the 20th iteration of the political madness thread, I think, so fill this up and we’ll go on to Infinite Thread XXI.

Oh, also: The Endless Thread has been maintained on Affinity. This is not a replacement for that lovely thread!

Cassandra here; we’re all buggered

I could have told you months ago that this was going to happen. Thanks to the right-wing propaganda networks and the gullibility of the American citizen, the pandemic is coming back.

Federal health officials sounded an alarm Friday about a surge in U.S. coronavirus infections fueled by the twin threats posed by the highly transmissible delta variant and a stagnation in efforts to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.

During a White House briefing, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the seven-day average of coronavirus infections soared nearly 70 percent in just one week, to about 26,300 cases a day. The seven-day average for hospitalizations has increased, too, climbing about 36 percent from the previous seven-day period, she said.

“There is a clear message that is coming through: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Walensky said. “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk, and communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.”

Imagine your community is threatened by a brush fire. Everyone rushes to put it out; they spend a whole bunch of money on fire-fighting equipment. They get it mostly extinguished, there are just some smoldering coals left on the ground, and at that point we all say, “That’s taken care of, everyone go home, take it easy.” The next day, the neighborhood is burning again. Carl’s house burns down. We’re all sorry about Carl, but the fire is out, mostly, a few embers still smoking over by the gas station, but hey, this new fire extinguisher we bought is too heavy to haul over there to put it out completely, let’s just give up.

Maybe it’ll go out on its own. There couldn’t possibly be an explosion of flames that destroys the whole town. We’ll deal with it then, if we absolutely must.

When will we realize that it’s going to take a consistent, sustained effort to tamp this problem down? Nah, it’s too hard, probably never.

Oh,look. Florida leads the way.

About two weeks after Florida health officials discontinued publicly reporting some data and stopped issuing their daily COVID-19 summaries detailing cases, test positivity and vaccinations, some researchers remain concerned that the moves were made too early.

Even as the pandemic wanes, scientists such as Jennifer Nuzzo, a leading epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, say that state health departments should be presenting more data, not less, while the medical and science communities continue to gauge the effectiveness of a still-fresh vaccination campaign.

“It feels like we’re running a marathon and we’re almost giving up a couple miles from the finish line,” Nuzzo said in an interview with the Miami Herald.

Did you know 20% of the new cases in the US are in Florida?

Insurrectionist cosplay

There are a thousand stories in that mob of insufferable insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on 6 January. This is one of them.

The picture ought to be enough, but I’ll fill in a few details. That’s a guy dressed up as Captain Moroni, a figure from the Book of Mormon. His flag reads, IN MEMORY OF OUR GOD, OUR RELIGION, AND FREEDOM, AND OUR PEACE, OUR WIVES, AND OUR CHILDREN. ALMA 46:12. The FBI had absolutely no problem tracking this absurd wanker down, and he has been arrested. His real name is Nathan Wayne Entrekin. He bragged about showing up in costume, and despite the flag blustering about his wives, he also recorded video on his phone addressing his mother.

I made it Mom. I made it to the top. Mom, look, I made it to the top, to the top here. Look at all the patriots here. Haha, if I can make it up that, anybody can. [laughs] Oh man. Look at all the patriots here. Patriots, patriots, patriots. Look at all the people, Mom. Look at all that down there. And the monuments over there, way over there. I gotta catch my breath here. Sorry. Haha.

[yelling to an unseen protester] Captain Moroni! Same fight, same place, different time. 76 B.C.!

I’m here for Trump. Four more years, Donald Trump! Our rightful president! I made it to the relative top, anyway. Oh my gosh, how many of us are here? Must be like, millions. Couple million, maybe. I keep running into trees, though. I gotta get this first, though, before my costume falls off me. Check this out, Mom. All those people.

Being raised in religion doesn’t help one distinguish fact from fiction, does it? The Book of Mormon was a fantasy story scribbled up by a 19th century con artist, and Captain Moroni has about as much basis in reality as Captain America or Captain Marvel or Captain Planet or Captain Caveman or Captain Underpants.

Of course, he also parrots the racist bullshit the Mormons have always believed.

I am Captain Moroni. I am the William Wallace of the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Alma of the Book of Mormon, a freedom fighter named Captain Moroni fought for his freedom against the King-Men. He was a Freeman, part of the Freemen movement. And around, I like to say 76 B.C. because 1776 sounds so—is so popular—but before Christ came to Jerusalem, in this land, the Book of Mormon is about this land, right? The same fight for freedom, this land, the same land, right here, upon which we stand, the native American Indians they have Jewish DNA, descent. I can tell you about, you can Google that, the Algonquin Indians have Native American, have, uh, Jewish descent in their DNA, there’s evidence of the Book of Mormon. I don’t want to get too much into that. I’m here for freedom. You’re here for freedom. Captain Moroni ripped his coat and he wrote this message right here. And if I can get it open, it says …

The rioters weren’t sending their best. But then, we knew that all along.

Find the bodies

The Circle of Nations Indigenous Association put out a call to search our campus for graves a month ago.

June 14. 2021

CW: Indian Boarding Schools, Historical Trauma, Cultural Genocide.

Circle of Nations Indigenous Association calls upon UMN Morris to make immediate plans to search for unmarked gravesites of children buried on/near our present-day campus.

How many colleges in America have 2-7 murdered children buried underneath their campuses? How many colleges have gone decades without intending to search for these remains and return them to their families? These circumstances are unacceptable.

Since 2019, UMN Morris has committed to a policy of truth telling, understanding, and healing in regards to our campus’s history. We believe honoring this commitment is impossible without searching for these children and returning them to their homes, so that their spirits and their kinships may heal as well.

We are thankful for the University’s decision to cooperate with the Department of Interior’s review of federal Indian boarding schools. However, it would be more appropriate if the university led the search itself, with constant, close collaboration from tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community, rather than the United States federal government.

Search the School.
Circle of Nations Indigenous Association

Our student leaders seconded that suggestion.

There is a petition.

The University of Minnesota-Morris has a moral obligation to make immediate plans to search the school for the unmarked burial sites of the 2-7 Indian boarding school victims. These children must then be returned to their home communities so their spirits and families can heal.

This is an essential action step towards fulfilling UMN Morris’s policy of truth telling, understanding, and healing in regards to our institution’s history as a former Indian boarding school.

In June 2021, outgoing Chancellor Michelle Behr announced the University’s willingness to cooperate with the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

However, we prefer that the search be conducted by an Indigenous ground-penetrating radar specialist, in constant collaboration with tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community, rather than the federal government – an institution responsible for destructive policies towards Native American people, including Indian boarding schools.

I assume that number of 2-7 comes from some historical evidence. I hope it isn’t more. If there are unmarked graves on or near campus, I agree that we have an obligation to find them.

Now that’s stolen valor

Another election fraud case by Sydney Powell and Lin Wood is going down in flames as a Michigan judge finds their affidavits of voting shenanigans in Detroit were not responsibly vetted. “There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement … that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said. They had not.

Going through the list of rejected claims, one jumped out at me.

One declaration came from a witness referred to by the lawyers in court documents only as “Spider.” In his sworn declaration, he claimed to be a former military intelligence expert who had discovered server traffic revealing that Iran and China had tampered with the election. But The Washington Post revealed in December that “Spider” was actually a 43-year-old Texas-based information technology consultant named Joshua Merritt who never worked in military intelligence.

Records show he enrolled in a training program with a military intelligence battalion but never completed the entry-level course, an Army spokeswoman told The Post. Records show that Merritt spent most of his decade in the U.S. Army as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic.

How dare he steal the honorable name of “Spider”! Can he be arrested for that?

I suspect that the more serious accusation is that he lied about his credentials and expertise. Being a “wheeled-vehicle mechanic” is an honorable job that does require considerable skill and knowledge — my father was a mechanic, too — but it probably doesn’t prepare you in military intelligence or cybersecurity, and doesn’t involve any training in cracking the information communications going on in Iran and China.

This kind of thing is all Powell and Wood have — people swearing that they saw a mysterious bag that could have held ballots, that sort of thing, and the lawyers didn’t carry out even a superficial scrutiny of the claims.

If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.

Yes, please.

By the way, you may have heard that one of the lawyers was weeping, and later resigned from the Wood/Powell team. This wasn’t because she was humiliated in court. She later said she wasn’t crying, she was just furious because no one was defending her hero Donald Trump as he deserved.

“Google, show me the naturalistic fallacy”

Here we go, Rob Schmitt, an announcer on Newsmax illustrating not just the naturalistic fallacy, but also diving deep to show us how conservative news networks are in a competition to represent the dumbest possible take on everything:

Obviously, I’m not a doctor. But I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. I mean, if there is some disease out there…maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.

Then he brings on Dr. Peter McCullogh, the latest “expert” who has been making the rounds of the conservative talking heads talk on TV about how we don’t know about the side-effects of vaccines and you don’t really need to be vaccinated and COVID-19 isn’t that dangerous, and he doesn’t push back at all on that garbage — instead he tells us that “natural immunity” is superior.

I can’t watch Fox News, so I’m sure not going to be able to avoid death by apoplexy if I started watching Newsmax or OAN. Fortunately, other people do. Here’s Sam Seder and his crew dismantling this nonsense — really, you don’t need a Ph.D. in Science to see what’s wrong with that argument, or to list a whole lot of “unnatural” things that people naturally do.

Unfortunately, pointing out the bad science doesn’t address the real problem in that “news” cast, which I think is embodied in the statement that he thinks about the way everything works. He’s got a larger model in his head of what Nature is that incorporates all these assumptions about teleology and purpose and the proper functioning of the world, and the reason he’s embracing this absurd notion of vaccines being an intrusion on nature is that that clicks with all of his priors. It’s not that he’s actually thought about vaccines in any coherent way, it’s that he’s cobbled up a way of thinking about the world from non-rigorous, ideologically anti-science institutions and authorities, that make him more comfortable with adopting a lie than with accepting an idea that would shake up his notions of how the world properly works.

He’s also driven by tribalism and fear. Schmitt also complained that it is despicable that the high and mighty Left and the media [are] ridiculing so many people for questioning vaccines, and look, he’s getting ridiculed, confirming the truth of his beliefs!

He’s also indulging in an amazing amount of projection.

It’s become so politicized, and many liberals will pump these vaccines into themselves and to their children simply to prove their loyalty to ‘science,’ ’cause that’s the in-thing to do right now.

Uh, I don’t want my children vaccinated because I’m virtue-signaling at science, or because it’s fashionable. It’s because I do have an ideological commitment to accepting the facts, and right now 99.5% of the COVID-19 related deaths are hitting the unvaccinated. That’s the brute reality that’s pounding on Rob Schmitt’s head, trying to tell him his mental model is invalid.

Well, also, there’s an emotional revulsion against the idea that a certain amount of people need to be “wiped out”, which is a sociopath’s creed.

They’ve always known

Ignorance is such a common excuse.

We didn’t know carbon dioxide could affect our climate. We didn’t know pipelines would leak. We didn’t know slaves were people. We didn’t know women could have the same aspirations as men. We didn’t know colonialism was exploitive. We didn’t know those people would be unhappy if we stole their children.

We knew all along. We just didn’t want to do anything about it.

Don’t believe those “if we had only known” people. There were other people who were telling them the truth, and they just chose to ignore them, usually because the lies were more profitable.