Hell, definitely

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate should have been inscribed on the exit doors of the Phoenix airport. Tremble and weep in horror at this thorough description of the Turning Point USA conference.

‘Twas the weekend before Christmas when Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA hosted a massive, sold-out 4-day conservative youth conference featuring 10,000 teens and young adults screaming for Dennis Prager, the Fox News lineup, January 6-plotting politicians, a dancing James O’Keefe, and former active shooter Kyle Rittenhouse in Phoenix, AZ. AmericaFest was located in the same building where Arizona holds it’s yearly ComicCon and the layout was eerily similar. It featured an exhibitor hall filled with merch booths and meet-n-greets, except instead of getting a picture with Spider-Man one could get a picture with Jack “Pizzagate” Posobiec or accused child trafficker Rep. Matt Gaetz. Instead of buying an overpriced Street Fighter figurine, you could buy an $500 bedazzled gun purse or “invest” in Let’s Go Brandon cryptocurrency. Tickets for this mega conference reached up to $750, with people flying in from all over the country to see their favorite TPUSA-sponsored influencer preaching the benefits of white Christian American hypercapitalism. Hotels in the nearby area offered package deals so the entire downtown area was overrun with 20-somethings in blue and hot pink tailored suits and Trump hats for the entire long weekend.

Hate is as popular as comic books, I guess. You couldn’t pay me to set foot in that hall.

Religion, and more specifically Christian supremacy, was present throughout the weekend. Lining the street leading up to the conference, men with graphic anti-choice signs handed out pamphlets for AbortionNO. Turning Point Faith was a co-sponsor of the conference and had a large booth with free merch advocating for the merging of politics and religion, speeches throughout the weekend often spread a similar message. Creepy fetus dolls were on display and fetal development commercials played in between speakers, followed by “BUY GOLD! BUY SILVER!” Anti-choice activist Abby Johnson was a speaker, hosted panels on “how to fight abortion,” and also had a massive merch booth for her “Pro-Love Ministries.” Johnson has previously advocated for “household voting” where only the husband can vote and said that it would be “smart” for the police to racially profile her biracial son. Give Send Go, the Christian supremacist crowdfunding site that platforms white nationalists and other extremist groups also had a merch and prayer booth while the co-founder Jacob Wells joined a reception across the street with an organization with ties to neo-Nazis (more on that later).

Has white nationalism infected religion, or is religion tainting white nationalism? I can’t tell anymore. They’ve long been entangled, and this is just the emergence of a particularly virulent mutant strain of both.

Similar brochures were given out on “gender identity” but explicit transphobia was an ongoing theme from many of the speakers as well. Charlie Kirk took the stage multiple times during his event and demonizing trans people was one of his most repeated points. Dennis Prager lead the crowd in booing trans athletes and he rejected the term “transphobic” entirely, claiming it’s a “meaningless phrase,” implying that trans men, women, and nonbinary people do not exist at all. The one transgender joke conservatives have was repeated countless times this weekend. Nothing can truly describe the pure hate in the crowd any time trans people were mentioned. There were 10,000 young adults frothing at the mouth and scapegoating a tiny and extremely marginalized community for all of their perceived problems.

How transphobic is Charlie Kirk? This transphobic.

Horrible as that was, I’m going to have to nominate the Rittenhouse moment as the low point of the event.

Day three of the convention was noticeably the busiest despite being on a Monday. Charlie Kirk endlessly bragged about how the arena, capable of seating up to 10,000 was filled to capacity. Kyle Rittenhouse was going to take the stage and his appearance was the already the topic of conversation all weekend. The day before, in the snack line, I listened to two teenagers who were giddy in excitement over seeing Rittenhouse, talking about his recent appearance on Louder With Crowder. Rep. Lauren Boebert swooned over Rittenhouse during her speech and later appeared in a photo with him backstage. He was billed as “a VERY special guest” alongside Jack Posobiec, Drew Hernandez, and Elijah Schaffer. Before walking out, the three large screens played scenes from Tucker Carlson’s special on Rittenhouse. The crowd stood to attention and cheered as Kyle appeared on screen then booed and laughed when his victims, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz came on, including the graphic images of their death and injuries. The clip of Rittenhouse crying on the stand was met with shouts of “we love you Kyle!” He took the stage to flashes of red, white, and blue filling the room as a Kyle Rittenhouse-themed rap song blasted. The screaming was deafening as they chanted his name. A young teenager behind me couldn’t stop repeating “based, based, based.”

They showed gory images of the dead and wounded…and the audience laughed about it? Jesus. There’s a crop of young men and women I don’t want to ever meet.

Is this America? Or is this Hell?

What would we do if we discovered the world was going to end?

I think we already know, but now Netflix has turned it into a metaphor in this new movie, Don’t Look Up.

(I think the gag about the government putting a bag over your head is part of the metaphor.)

I watched it last night, and I liked it in a grim, cynical, we-are-so-fucked sort of way. The story in the movie is about our response to learning that a planet-killing comet is going to smash into the Earth in six months, which is a nice, sharp, discretely bounded example of a catastrophe, so it does differ from our current situation where the oncoming catastrophe is messy and slow. It makes no difference, though, since we’d probably react to either kind of disaster with ineffectual denial. (Probably? In the case of our current situation, definitely.)

Michael Mann appreciated the message of the movie.

McKay’s film succeeds not because it’s funny and entertaining; it’s serious sociopolitical commentary posing as comedy. It’s a cautionary tale about the climate crisis stitched together by McKay’s signature biting humor. That’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

As we look toward the next decade — a critical decade from the standpoint of averting truly catastrophic climate change — we need more unconventional endeavors like “Don’t Look Up” to communicate the perils of climate inaction. Scientific research, on its own, will travel only so far (until scientists distill a 900-page report into a 90-second TikTok). Science isn’t finished until it’s successfully communicated.

As Beth Osnes, associate professor of theater and environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said, “Climate change isn’t a laughing matter, but sometimes you have to laugh at your pain to get to a solution.” So let’s stop to have a laugh or two. And then get on with the work at hand.

I think he’s right, but we also have to appreciate how hard it’s going to be. The movie made that obvious: even when our doom was obvious, when there was a comet hanging in the sky, there were still people scheming to use it for political gain or corporate greed. The signs and portents of our troubles are all around us, yet we still have conservative think-tanks denying the need to take action because it might interfere with corporate profits, and we have a political party that’s raison d’etre seems to be about disenfranchising the citizenry because they might vote against greed and exploitation. What is the work at hand? It’s not just doing good science, it also seems to require crushing a corrupt political party, replacing a negligent one, and dismantling all of capitalism. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

The most important civics lesson they never taught us

I was this many years old before I learned this extremely important civics rule (forgive me, I’m a little slow):

The laws don’t apply to the people on top.

Or, rather, the laws were written by the people on top to provide them with loopholes, but also the minions who enforce the law do so at the bidding of the people on top.

I know, it’s obvious, and has been obvious all of my life, but as a white man I have been given enough benefits that I could overlook that aspect of reality. Events of recent years have made it so conspicuously overt that it is an unavoidable conclusion. Why do you think so many white men are rushing to join white supremacy movements, or voting Republican, or writing desperate op-eds defending the latest horrific act? It’s because they’re panicking about losing their privileged status in the inevitable upheaval. They’re shoring up the dikes, but the waters are rising fast, and they’re afraid they’ll drown in the flood.

There are only two possible outcomes here: either we get a total fascist crackdown to armor up the inequities of the ex-Republic, or we are going to see the Ancien Régime demolished for its excesses. I’d rather be on the side of the latter process.

What finally hammered the lesson home to me? There have been so many things. The Supreme Court has become transparently political, and I can no longer regarded it as an impartial arbiter of the law. It’s stacked. It’s rigged. It’s laws can no longer be regarded as fair and just.

The police…I remember when they were portrayed as Officer Friendly in PR campaigns. Nope. They are militarized enforcers for the status quo, committing murder at will. Have you noticed that the blue of the boys in blue has become progressively darker over the decades, until now it’s just black? If this were a fantasy novel, we’d call it blatant, over-the-top foreshadowing. Any day now they’re going to redesign the badges to be just silver skulls. Oh, too late — the police themselves think that would be awesomely cool.

We’re only just now becoming widely aware that the US Senate is an undemocratic institution that privileges wealthy landowners. I know, that’s what it was explicitly set up to be, but all we were taught is that the power was distributed among three branches so no one could dominate. Well, the judicial branch is dead, and the Senate is a place where minority views by octogenerians get total power to block legislation.

We still have the house, right? Nice populist institution? Forget it. The House Speaker thinks it is a branch of the “free market economy”. The real reason Jimmy Stewart as Mr Smith goes to Washington is to sell out and get rich. He’s going to filibuster to make sure coal and oil companies can continue to destroy the environment.

We can still respect the distinguished office of the presidency, though. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Presidents make clowns look dignified.

Now we know that…

The Trump administration engaged in “deliberate efforts” to undermine the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes, a congressional report released Friday concludes.

The report, prepared by the House select subcommittee investigating the nation’s Covid response, says the White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote then-President Donald Trump’s political agenda.

He is responsible for the deaths of thousands, and further, he helped sow the seeds of conspiracy theories and bogus quack medicine that will kill thousands more. He pressured the head of the NIH to endorse hydroxychloroquine and other quackery — fortunately, Collins refused (shockingly, there are some tiny specks of integrity in the political landscape, although Trump followers will probably be chanting about killing him now).

Trump still walks free, and is planning his next run for office. The media is eagerly awaiting the exciting, spectacular news and the frenzied PR circus that will follow along in the trail of wreckage it leaves behind. Everyone is dithering, because…because…because, well gosh, he’s the ex-president! We can’t arrest him for conspiring to overthrow the government and being so incompetent that he let citizens die for political gain! Why, if he fell, then congress would have to after their colleagues, like the rapist-enabler and the coke-snorting party boy and the incompetent conservative loony (I know, that one describes a lot of Republicans), and they won’t do that. That could disrupt the party money machine. And then, who knows, the UK might wake up to how wretchedly stupid Boris Johnson is, and the whole edifice that props up idiot privileged assholes all around the world might crumble.

That could lead to principled politicians taking office, and next thing you know, reform. The well-established money making game might get shaken up, the tables flipped, and suddenly everyone in office would have to work for a living.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that isn’t going to happen.

Hey, remember the good old days of George W. Bush, when idealists would fantasize about how his crimes and corruption and wholesale murders would culminate in him being put in handcuffs and perp-walked out of the White House? It never happened. The war criminal is in a prosperous retirement in which the media occasionally publishes a puff piece about his cheesy amateur paintings. Henry Kissinger is still alive, has a net worth of tens of millions of dollars, and still has journalists begging for interviews. Donald Trump might just be the next president of the United States.

Burn it all down. The American republic is a failed experiment.

The world will sigh with relief when we’re simultaneously hollowed out by the pandemic (facilitated by our own idiot policies) and torched by climate change, which we will do nothing about.

Mark Meadows is an oozing pus-bag of poison

Jesus wept.

Mark Meadows may go down in history as the corrupt political sleazemaster who assisted Trump in his coup attempt (which is still ongoing, unbelievably!), but I remember him as that loon who bought a dinosaur dig site, facilitated the transfer of a valuable Allosaurus skeleton (naming it Ebenezer) to Ken Ham and the Creation “Museum”, and put together a “documentary” about the discovery of the fossil in which he had his own daughter lie on camera and pretend to be the discoverer. It’s pretty damned vile, and just highlights how dishonest and creepy creationists are.

But here’s the icing on the cake: Ken Ham appropriated that fossil and mounted it in his carnival show “museum”, where it’s not even used for scientific research. It’s a prop.

But for all of this, the weirdest part of the story may be that – for all the desperate efforts on the part of creationists to secure this dinosaur skeleton, for all the brouhaha and AiG-hype surrounding “Ebenezer the Allosaurus” – the Creation Museum makes absolutely no use of the skeleton itself to advance the case for a young Earth and a global Flood. Referring to arguably the most relevant placard that accompanies the dinosaur fossil, we note in Righting America that

Given that this placard appears in the room wherein a truly impressive skeleton of a real dinosaur is on display, and given that this placard tells a story that seeks to link that skeleton to the Flood, it is surprising that the placard makes no mention of the skeleton itself. Not one piece of physical evidence from the skeleton is mobilized in any way by this placard. No inferences whatsoever are drawn from the skeleton about Ebenezer on this placard . . . In the end, Ebenezer-the-skeleton appears to make no contribution to an understanding either of his demise or any other creature’s (Righting America 93).

The only evidence provided by the Creation Museum in behalf of the claim that Ebenezer died in a global Flood is the story recounted in Genesis 7:21-23. That’s it.

When it comes to creation science, there is no there, there.

Now Meadows has something else to be infamous for.

The House voted Tuesday night to hold former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack to appear for a deposition.

The vote was 222-208, with GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming voting with all Democrats.

Meadows is now the first former lawmaker ever held in criminal contempt by Congress — and the first held in contempt since 1832 — when former Rep. Sam Houston was held in contempt for beating a colleague with a cane.

What a legacy. These are the charlatans the American people elect to high office.

At least they made him cry

Look at that smiling white man and his bag of killing tools!

That’s Cleveland Meredith, a right-wing asshole who drove to Washington DC in January to participate in treason and maybe, if he was lucky, get to murder a few Democratic politicians.

In other messages sent the following day – while Pelosi and Bowser were making public remarks about the riot – Meredith texted, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG c***.” Meredith then sent a similar text about Pelosi, saying he was, “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi C****’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”

His defense was to claim he didn’t really mean it.

Meredith addressed the judge near the end of the hearing, saying he’d had “no intention” to act on his messages. He described them as “political hyperbole that was too hyper.” He apologized to Pelosi and to his family and was audibly tearful as he asked to be able to go home.

Right. He just packed up a pistol, a rifle and 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his truck, and drove more than halfway across the country, from Colorado to Washington DC, to commit an act of hyperbole. The judge sentence him to 28 months in prison. I don’t know if that was sufficient, but at least it may have slapped him into a brief awareness of his own madness. Brief. Because then he made the usual excuse:

That’s not who I am, boo hoo. It was exactly who you are. He’s a grown man, 53 years old, and he was blustering misogynistic bullying abuse about murdering people, and he drove off giggling about the prospect.

More signs we live in a dystopia

Last week, I ordered some extra warm fleece-lined slippers to wear around the house. It gets cold around here! I did not consider the torments workers have to go through to keep my toes warm and comfy. They got to suffer through arbitrary, ridiculous rules that benefit the billionaires at the top, but mean they get to work in conditions that Dickens or Kafka might have imagined.

So this rule is incredibly petty, and it kills.

In Indiana:

Last week, a man shot and killed eight people at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Those people and others working on site couldn’t call or text their families to tell them what was happening because some FedEx employees aren’t allowed to bring their cellphones into work.

In Illinois:

An Amazon.com Inc. warehouse collapse on Friday night that killed at least six people has amplified concerns among its blue collar workforce about the return of the internet retailer’s mobile phone ban in work areas.

But why does such a ban even exist? These are workers who are constantly evaluated on their performance already, and that should be all their employer cares about: how many boxes do they move from Shelf A to Truck B during their shift. That’s demanding enough, especially when they also have these rules about how often you can use the bathroom, so why these additional rules that say you can’t even have a cell phone in your pocket? Isn’t it cracking the whip hard enough to say you can’t make personal calls during your shift?

I can’t imagine answering a personal phone call while I’m teaching, but I’ve got one in my pocket (in fact, my university requires me to use my smartphone to enable computers and projectors in my lecture rooms). I turn off the ringer, and if it starts vibrating during class I ignore it — I just know that someone is trying to reach me, and I’ll check the calls when I get a break. That seems sensible and humane, not just for college professors, but for anyone who has a job to do.

So why should Amazon and FedEx have the right to control every second of a worker’s life? Probably because people are desperate enough for work that they’ll take these lousy repressive jobs for $15 an hour, so the company knows they have the power to squeeze.

How much money is Jeff Bezos making again?

You’ve got a smoking gun, now do something about it

So we now have this PowerPoint document that the former White House chief of staff was sharing with select members of congress. It’s blatant, advocating overthrowing the government.

Rejecting the electors from “states where fraud occurred” — I think that’s Trump-speak for Democratic votes.

“Declare electronic voting in all states invalid”, so they were going to discard legal, recorded votes.

This was a threat to commit a coup. We have it in writing. We know who the principle players were. Trump is still holding rallies and planning to run for the presidency in 2024, and there are criminal conspirators in congress still serving on committees and passing laws.

This is absurd. These were the same kooks who were changing “lock her up” about a politician who had not committed a crime. Why aren’t these traitors being arrested, stripped of their positions of authority, and held for trial? Why are the Democrats just sitting there, doing nothing but having Nancy Pelosi spam me with email begging for money? I might make a donation when Trump is in jail and everyone who received that PowerPoint is fired.

I will never understand what’s going on in the UK

I will also never understand what’s going on in the US. So, after years of incompetence and corruption, the one thing that might crash the insane conservative party in the UK is…a Christmas party?

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing calls to resign over reports that members of his staff attended a Christmas party last year while the country was in lockdown.

The Daily Mirror newspaper reported that the party took place on Dec. 18, 2020, which would have been illegal under the coronavirus restrictions in place at the time. Johnson has denied the allegation.

The aftermath has already brought down one party official.

In the video, the prime minister’s press secretary and other staff members can be seen holding a mock press conference, discussing how they would respond to allegations that Downing Street had held a Christmas party.

“It wasn’t a party, it was cheese and wine,” one person can be heard saying, prompting laughs across the room. The leaked video prompted fury from opposition lawmakers and residents alike.

Allegra Stratton, the staff member seen in the video, resigned from her post on Wednesday.

The party of Brexit might be brought down (I expect them to weasel away, though) for their hypocrisy in flouting their own rules? OK, I guess we should be grateful for that.

I can’t single out the UK for this bizarre conservative madness, given the fact that the conservative party over here sponsored an insurrection and none of the instigators are being brought to justice…and in fact, still serve in our legislative bodies. Can we organize a Christmas party for them?

Related: my university division was scheduled to have our annual Christmas party next week. We were recently informed that it has been postponed to January because “COVID cases are on the rise in the area and we want to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think it helps that we have a biologist chairing the division.

Minor Christian nightmare

I had to do some quick shopping to pick up a few winter essentials, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll give the local version of a big box store, one run by our terrible fundagelical brethren, another try. They can’t be that bad, can they?

Then I saw this wall of goods, and decided there was nothing I needed from them that badly.

Yeah, no, nope nope nopitty nope-nope.

It’s good to be the CIA, or rich

If you’re a sick, warped pedophile, that is.The news is not good this morning.

Did you know that if you work for the CIA, or are even a contractor doing work for the CIA, that “the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets”? So you can get away with all kinds of evil acts if you work there (which, I guess, shouldn’t be at all surprising, given that it is the CIA).

Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.

It’s all rather horrifying, especially given that these secret agencies have been blacklisting homosexuals for decades and acting aghast at the very idea of a gay person acquiring a sensitive position. They might be blackmailed, don’t you know. But pedophiles…just a slap on the wrist and a dismissal.

Speaking of pedophiles, there’s new news about dead child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. New records, flight logs, have been unearthed that reveal hundreds of additional flights we hadn’t known about. Epstein was just happily flitting about the globe for years, doing…what? I don’t know. Maybe the CIA does, but they’re not telling. This jumped out at me, though.

Epstein owned a Gulfstream II (sold in November 2013), a Gulfstream IV (sold before his arrest), a Gulfstream GV-SP, and a Boeing 727 (nicknamed the “Lolita Express”) that notoriously ferried notable passengers and girls around the globe. According to flight manifests unsealed in a defamation case against Maxwell, travelers on Epstein’s planes included public figures from Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to the supermodel Naomi Campbell and the astronaut John Glenn.

Why? How? How does a guy without any kind of college degree, who started out as a math teacher at a private school (he wasn’t even very good at that), and then drifted into banking and finance, get such ridiculous sums of money that they can afford their very own 727? What did he do to earn that kind of money?

Don’t ever try to tell me that the wealthy worked hard and deserve all that money.