Where should Paloma go to college?

This is the notorious professionalized liberal making machine

The Secretary of the US Department of Transportation is an airhead lawyer and former reality-TV “star” with no qualifications in transportation, Sean Duffy, but hey, you knew because he has a high appointment in the Trump administration that he was unqualified and incompetent. At least it’s better than his previous sinecure as the acting administrator of NASA! The last I heard about Duffy he was advising us to take advantage of the long delays at airports by doing calisthenics in the terminals. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

What I didn’t know is that he roped in a bunch of corporate sponsors who wanted to curry favor with the Trump administration, like Boeing, Toyota, Shell, United Airlines, Comcast, Royal Caribbean, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Lyft to fund his summer vacation. He, his wife, and his 9 kids got into a gigantic RV with a following camera crew to drive all around the US for 6 weeks or so. Boeing and Toyota each coughed up a million dollars to pay for the extended joy ride.

I haven’t had a vacation in years. Maybe I’d be able to if just one of those corporations gave me a million dollars. Unfortunately, I’m not a corrupt opportunist like Duffy, and don’t have any influence on our government.

So anyway, one of the purported justifications for this trip was to visit colleges, for his kids who were of age to enter college. They visited Harvard. His daughter Paloma wants to go to school there. Duffy has opinions.

After declaring that they were a highly conservative family and that they had raised their kids in a strictly Catholic environment, he announces that she cannot go to Harvard because he didn’t believe that Harvard offers a well-rounded education.

His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, declares We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they are steeped in faith and values, so the idea of dropping her off at a place where they would undermine that or undo all those things makes me worried.

Because he is a profoundly stupid man, Sean chimes in And again I don’t want them to get one viewpoint, I want them to get a lot of different viewpoints, but I don’t want them fed only one viewpoint that is contrary to the way my kids were raised, completely oblivious to the fact that he has just contradicted his wife and himself in one sentence. Because he is truly, deeply, stupid and unthinking. He then claims that Harvard has professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls and corrupt their minds.

Uh, I’m not the greatest fan of Harvard (I think they are over-rated and too rich for their own good, and that we have numerous great institutions of higher education all over the country), but Harvard is not particularly liberal, and they are not a machine with the goal of churning out liberal students. The liberalism is a side-effect of getting a lot of different viewpoints. Harvard has a lot of prestige, a lot of money, and has a privileged status in the world; if any of my kids had had the opportunity to go there, I would have encouraged them, although it probably would have bankrupted us. Duffy wouldn’t have that problem. He’s just an ignorant goober attached to an administration that hates education.

I am wondering about poor Paloma. What shithole school would Sean and Rachel like to ship their daughter off to? I hope it’s not Liberty University, but that’s probably not Catholic enough for them. Sean is a graduate of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, a private Catholic college which I wouldn’t describe as a shithole, but it probably doesn’t have the status the Duffys would want. Notre Dame? Bad news there, they expose their students to a healthy diverse student body, and she’d probably end up learning about feminism and equality and reason, all those things the Duffy family opposes.

I’d recommend that she attend the University of Minnesota Morris, if Harvard is off the table. We don’t have a professionalized liberalizing process here, we just let students be who they want to be, and help them get the education they need. Paloma might just fit in perfectly here.

Lock him up!

I told you about how James O’Keefe had tried to prank Minnesota elections. This state had a major fraud scandal where a few people had scammed childcare funds for millions of dollars, and the government has been hammering through those cases and slamming the con-artists into prison, while MAGA has been shrieking for justice because some of the perpetrators were Somali (never mind that the organizer was a white American-born woman). We are going to have to be strict in the prosecution of these white-collar criminals.

I guess we’re just going to have to drop the hammer on James O’Keefe.

The man in the video who falsely identified himself as William Pomeranz, whose real name is James O’Keefe, may have put himself in legal jeopardy.

“It’s illegal in the state of Minnesota to impersonate another voter, and this is apparently what O’Keefe did,” David Schultz, a constitutional law professor at Hamline University, said.

Schultz, Pomeranz and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon say the video shows the system worked.

“As I read the law, you can’t impersonate another registered voter, and that’s exactly what they appear to have filmed themselves doing,” Simon said.

Impersonating a Minnesota voter at a polling place is a felony punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.

I wouldn’t object to seeing O’Keefe locked away for 7 years. We have to do it to avoid being seen as soft on crime.

James O’Keefe still likes to play dress-up

If you thought James O’Keefe was washed up and would vanish in the sewage outlet of history after his exposure and disgrace, guess again. He attempted to meddle in the Minnesota primary by dressing up as a “muslim”, putting on a poor “muslim” accent, and attempting to vote illegally, to show that Minnesota election laws were leaky and would allow for significant election fraud.

Veritas founder James O’Keefe, along with reporter Cam Higby, impersonated Muslims and went to multiple Twin Cities polling places during the Aug. 11 primary.

“During Minnesota’s Primary on August 11, 2026, members of a widely discredited Florida-based political group visited several polling places in Minneapolis impersonating Minnesota voters,” Simon said in a news release.

“Dressed in what they called ‘Muslim’ costumes, and imitating foreign accents, they falsely claimed to be registered Minnesota voters. The group used concealed cameras to record their interactions with poll workers, releasing a heavily edited video of their encounters. Their apparent goal was to cast doubt on one or more Minnesota election laws that have been in force for over fifty years. Instead, they revealed their ignorance of how those laws actually work – while putting themselves in legal jeopardy.”

According to Higby, their goal was to see if they’d be allowed to vote without showing identification, and whether they’d be allowed to vouch for people who aren’t registered to vote.

He failed, but he still went ahead and spliced together a very bad video that purported to show Muslim election fraud. O’Keefe has a kink for putting on cheap costumes and posing in racist one-act plays. Isn’t it past time to throw out this piece of trash?

We’ve got epic losers in this state

I told you who won the Minnesota primaries, but I should probably mention the wacky and unloveable losers of that race.

First and foremost is Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy. Despite the fact that Donald Trump endorsed him, he lost by 11 points to Lisa Demuth. Before the election night, he was saying that win or lose, he’d back the Republican nominee. During election night, he was getting visibly flustered as he tried to suggest that the election returns were flawed, and he’d need to examine the data closely, and he refused to concede. Now he’s singing a familiar song.

Mike Lindell, well-versed in denying election results, has cast doubt on his distant second-place primary finish Tuesday night in his effort to secure the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota.
The MyPillow founder, speaking to reporters at his watch party in a downtown Minneapolis hotel after The Associated Press called the race for Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, raised the specter of fraud in the vote count and was not ready to concede the race.
Lindell said there were “deviations (that) came right at the end,” when the final unofficial results came in showing him losing by more than 45,000 votes, or 11%, to Demuth.

You know this is going to be the game plan for every Republican loser come November. How do we know there’s election fraud? Because I lost!

I’m just surprised he got as many votes as he did. He’s a crackpot.

We had another big loser that night: Royce White, a former basketball player (and by all accounts, not a very good one) was running for the Senate. He lost bigly, coming in third place. His dalliance in crazyville was distinguished by his announcement that he was also declaring his eligibility for the WNBA, because he was a transgender woman. He proved it by putting on a wig.

Yeah, I’m convinced.

He also made an insincere public announcement.

He’s not getting drafted into the WNBA, and he lost the senate primary, so what’s a certifiable kook to do? Announce that he’s running for the presidency.

Now the real fun begins —I will be starting my campaign for President next week. I don’t care how much money they say I need or how much ass I’m supposed to kiss. It ain’t going to happen! We win MVP of the WNBA and then head to the oval office. What I witnessed today in Minnesota is disgusting. We have not had enough yet. Minnesota nice has killed our state. We still believe in moderates, it’s embarrassing.

Now that’s a delusional lunatic!

Do I blame our incompetent state department, or do I blame AI?

How about both?

At an AIDS conference in Rio, the representatives of the United States put up this map:

That’s a slap in the face of every attendee at that meeting. It’s a declaration that the USA does not care enough to get basic geography right. I apologize. Our only excuse is that we have elected idiots and assholes to run our country, which is, of course, no excuse at all.

In case you are wondering, here’s a rather more accurate map of the continent.

Africa Political Map

You realize how trivially easy it is to get a map of Africa off the internet, right? They couldn’t even do that.

Kangaroo court is in session

“COVID “”Cures”””

Anthony Fauci was hauled up in a senate hearing where ignorant, ideologically-poisoned buffoons like Rand Paul harangued him with absurd accusations. He rightly responded by taking the fifth — there is no point in arguing with delusional idiots. At one point, Paul had Fauci’s lawyer thrown out of the hearing.

Dr Anthony Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, has refused to answer questions at a high-profile congressional hearing, accusing a Republican senator of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.

Fauci, the veteran former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination when appearing before a Senate committee on Wednesday.

Fauci said Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul had, who called the hearing, led a years-long investigation into himself and the origins of the pandemic aimed at “embarrassing and intimidating me”, and ultimately landing him “behind bars”.

This is the way. Paul’s harassment was ultimately fruitless, except that the current political regime gave him the opportunity to try and browbeat an 85 year old scientist who had espoused a rational, evidence-based approach to the COVID pandemic. Fauci’s approach reflected the scientific consensus.

A 2024 survey of virologists from the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute found that most believed the pandemic began as a so-called spillover event, or a virus jumping from an infected animal to a human. Similarly, a group of virologists argued in the Journal of Virology that the “preponderance” of evidence points to a natural origin, even as the “lab leak” theory received outsized attention. Gain-0f-function research, meanwhile, has split the scientific community for years.

There is no good evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. It’s just a xenophobic contrivance made up to place the blame on China. It’s a political distortion of the evidence.

What was most bizarre is that Rand Paul exposed Fauci’s diary, in which he stated his opinions about certain political figures (and some journalists) without any diplomatic hesitations.

The scheduled hearing comes just days after Paul released what he described as Fauci’s “diary”, a more than 1,100-page document characterized as revealing Fauci’s inner conflicts about the lab leak theory. Scientists have said this is a normal part of scientific debate.

The diary also contained entries about Trump, who he advised closely during the early days of the pandemic. He described the president as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.

Hey, that was also just an echo of the scientific consensus! Trump is a bumbling incompetent. Some of us have been unabashedly saying that in public for many years. I would just rebuke Fauci for hiding his feelings away in his private notes. Let it all hang out, Anthony! It’s not as if being reserved about your true feelings has spared you any suffering at the hands of morons like Paul.

The true purpose of the hearing was obvious — the goal was to intimidate scientists from speaking out about biomedical approaches to disease, and to pander to all the frauds and influencers who profit off medical misinformation.

Gary Peters, a Democratic senator of Michigan, described the hearing as damaging to science and ignoring ongoing public health threats, such as the outbreak of the food-borne parasite cyclospora and measles, both at record highs.

“It’s attempting to turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations’ were responsible for handling,” said Peters, who did not ask Fauci any questions. “This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service.”

While the politicians are scapegoating Fauci, they’re giving a free pass to the MAHA goons who have enabled a cyclospora outbreak, watered down food safety regulations, and fueled criminal anti-vax mythologies that are allowing a measles comeback. The USA is at risk of losing our measles elimination status, thanks to people like RFK jr.

These people ought to be more self-aware. If they can drag the guy who successfully led the fight against the pandemic, I’m hoping we have the opportunity someday to turn the tables and confront the disease enablers with the butcher’s bill. There’s a better case to be made that they caused millions of deaths.

I can be even more delusional!

Jake Paul has inspired me. He’s this terrible YouTuber who made a lot of money with stupid prank videos aimed at kids who then bought his way into a boxing “career”, where he paid washed-up boxers to fight him, but not too hard. His last big match, he had his jaw shattered by his opponent. So now he’s talking about going to Stanford to get some football experience (hint: that’s not why you go to Stanford) or going straight to the pros, the Cleveland Browns or the Dallas Cowboys. He’s out of his mind. He dropped out of high school, so forget Stanford. Football is a tough sport, especially pro football, and he hasn’t trained for the skills you need to play the game. He is so incredibly delusional.

But then…he gets specific and says he wants to play “slot receiver”, whatever that is. And Rick Strom lets us know that the expected weight range for that position is 190-205 pounds.

Wait a minute. I’m in that weight range. I’m going to be looking for something to do in the Spring, maybe that’s a retirement option for me. It’s no more insane that a 70 year old man (with 80 year old knees) might try to turn pro football slot receiver than that Jake Paul might go for it.

One difference: my top choice would be the Seattle Seahawks, with the Minnesota Vikings as backup possibility. Call me, team.

All of Elon Musk’s heroes are frauds

I’ve always thought of Nick Bostrom as a font of bad ideas, but that’s not his self-estimation. He considers himself a genius!

Bostrom considers himself to be a towering intellect of cosmic-historical importance. He is not shy when boasting about his supposed accomplishments, even quoting on his website an article that describes him as the “Swedish superbrain.” For many years, he bragged that — to quote his profile on Edge.org — “his performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden,” though he backed away from this after Simon Knutsson pointed out that there is no evidence to support such a claim. (See the “Potentially Dishonest Self-Promotion” section of this article.)

The kinds of ideas he claims to have come up with are, for instance, the belief that AI represents an existential risk comparable to a nuclear holocaust which must nevertheless be pursued zealously, making him a hero to the capitalists building massive data centers right now. He also promotes the belief that potential people could be so numerous that it’s more valuable to create conditions that enable space flight and virtual people in computers than to actually help the poor and develop an egalitarian politics, again endearing him to the hyper-rich.

In brief, the paper argues that if we colonize space — especially as digital posthumans — the future population could be enormous. Bostrom estimates some 10^38 digital people within the Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of galaxy clusters that includes our own Milky Way. (That’s a 10 followed by 38 zeros, by the way.)

If one accepts a utilitarian perspective, this means the expected value of ensuring the realization of all those future people (assuming they have net-positive lives) far exceeds the value of, e.g., helping poor people today. If you’re a truly altruistic person who aims to maximize your philanthropic impact, then you should focus not on present-day people but those living perhaps millions or billions of years from now. It’s not that future digital people are inherently more valuable. It’s just a numbers-game: there are so many more of them (potentially) than present-day people, they overwhelm the simplistic equations of utilitarianism’s moral mathematics.

Bostrom’s conclusion is that we should colonize the universe as soon as possible, because every single century, decade, and even second of delaying this results in an “astronomical” loss of potential value — i.e., the non-existence of people who could have otherwise been created in some distant galaxy if only we had started colonizing just a bit sooner. However, Bostrom also concludes that “priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Space colonization should therefore be priority number five once we secure our survival. Perhaps you can see why Musk loves this paper.

It’s an incredibly stupid idea — it also has ties to eugenics and natalism and other flawed beliefs — and I have weird feelings about this article. It’s mainly functioning to excuse Bostrom from fault. Bostrom didn’t come up with all these bad ideas! No, he just stole all of them. He doesn’t have original ideas!

Yet, because I’m so conversant with the foundational literature of the TESCREAL movement, I’ve noticed that a large number of the “original,” “novel,” even (supposedly) “groundbreaking” ideas attributed to Bostrom actually originated with other thinkers. As early as 2018, I was posting about this on social media and privately sharing examples with colleagues — some of whom were rather shocked to see Bostrom’s work juxtaposed with that of others (from whom he borrowed without sufficient attribution). I wrote to one colleague that Bostrom’s “genius” seems to be taking ideas from other theorists and repackaging them in his own language such that they’re just different enough for him to avoid being accused of intellectual plagiarism. His oeuvre reminds me of the line, often misattributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

It’s a long and thorough article, and traces Bostrom’s soft plagiarism back to multiple sources, but one of them is notorious crackpot and self-promoter Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying?

What? The all-meat diet isn’t a panacea?

I don’t follow the day-to-day activities of the Peterson family, Jordan and Mikhaila, so I had just assumed that they were still pushing that cure-all diet of eating nothing but beef and salt. They aren’t! They’ve given up and shifted to a series of new diets. Mikhaila in particular is a real flibbertigibbet on her claims. The all-beef diet is so 2018.

In 2018, the all-beef diet had cured Jordan’s depression, tens of millions of people learned. But in 2026, Mikhaila admitted that her dad’s mental woes had not vanished: “it’s not the kind of depression you can normally diet and exercise away.” The carnivore diet had helped, she now claimed, but the much-vaunted magic bullet had been an exaggeration. It hadn’t even worked for her: in 2020, she thought beef was making her sick, so she stopped eating beef and switched to lamb and bison. Why? She hypothesized—and so much of what she does is hypothesizing and marketing her unproven conjectures—that North American beef was aged more and the ageing of the beef somehow made her sick. Croatian beef, eaten while on a trip, apparently wasn’t aged and she could digest it fine, but since she didn’t live in Croatia, she had to make changes. So, her exceptional diet was in like a lion, out like a lamb.

But now the all-lamb diet is also obsolete. She flipped through a whole series of hypothetical causes for illnesses, and hypothetical treatments.

The answer, at first, was her breast implants, which she had removed. Then, it was the “terrible tree allergies”she experienced while living in Tennessee, giving her brain fog. Subsequently, she moved to Miami in 2022, but the ill health did not abate. It turns out there was mould in her Florida house, which forced her to completely renovate it, sell it, and move to Arizona to undergo “mould treatment.” (I will be using the Canadian/British spelling; it is written “mold” in the United States.)

And so she took to her microphone to denounce mould as an invisible cause of illness. She created the website biotoxin.com to share papers linking mould to every conceivable disease and condition—autism, migraine, pain, even Parkinson’s disease. Sure, you can find individual studies showing preliminary evidence that there might possibly be some kind of link between mould exposure and, let’s say, dementia; but this should not be understood as “mould causes dementia.”

It’s not mold (mould) anymore, though. Her latest fad is…mitochondria. Maybe health problems are caused by bad mitochondria?

Mitochondria are real: they are the little factories inside of our cells charged with turning our food into energy. Some people have actual mitochondrial diseases because a key component inside their mitochondria is mutated. A much vaguer phenomenon known as mitochondrial dysfunction is also real, but it has been grossly exaggerated and serves as one of many boogeymen du jour for the Make America Healthy Again movement. Mikhaila Peterson had to jump on the bandwagon, and her first mention of it on her podcast appears to be from early 2023. So, now, this is her main culprit.

It’s all garbage noise, lacking in empirical evidence or supporting clinical studies, but that’s what enables her incessant flitting from cause to cause to cause, endlessly using her speculations to promote products that she can sell on her website. She’s a classic snake oil peddler. You don’t need to invest in a wagon and a fancy painted sign, and go to all the trouble of traveling from town to town anymore — just put up a website and take credit card orders, and when the grift dries up, switch in a new website.

The author of this article points out how transparent and simple Mikhaila’s game is by playing it himself. For instance…

I want to show how easy it is to construct these stories. I opened my old molecular biology textbook (Molecular Cell Biology, 4th edition, by Lodish and others) at a random page (769, if you’re playing at home) and imagined a theory I could promote on Mikhaila’s podcast based on the information that was on that page. My textbook reminded me that myosin is a molecular motor inside our cells and that it moves, like a train, on actin filaments. And funnily enough, you can break myosin down using an enzyme called papain. In what is papain found? The papaya fruit.

I could now use this knowledge to go on her podcast and, with adequate confidence and calm in my voice, promote my papain-free diet, sure to cure brain fog and chronic fatigue and likely to help you build muscles. Myosin, after all, is crucial to cell function. You don’t want it to break down, now do you? I might also be able to find a molecule that blocks the action of papain and sell it as a supplement so that people could continue enjoying papaya without feeling sluggish. And if the papaya-eating masses are not a big enough consumer base, I could add that other fruits contain similar enzymes that break down—read “damage!”—the essential proteins we need: pineapples, figs, kiwis, mangoes. All the more reason to platform me and my theory.

This is how you take molecular research, grossly misinterpret it, and turn it into a profitable health crusade.

Oh my god. I have concerns about my loss of income with retirement, and I glanced to the left of my computer, and I have shelves full of books on genetics, the biology of cancer, cell biology, and evolution. I’m sitting on a gold mine! I have a lot of basic knowledge about cellular processes, and about the developmental and evolutionary history of those processes, and with a trivial amount of effort I could turn all that into a wonderful grift.

If only I could come down with Alzheimer’s in the next year, a specific form of neuronal deterioration that selectively takes out any sense of integrity, self-respect, and restraint. Or maybe a serious blow to the head that scrambles my frontal cortex? It’s going to take a serious bit of brain damage to allow me to compete with Mikhaila.

The fate he deserves

I am pleased to read that Charlie Kirk’s reputation is rotting as fast as his corpse. While he shouldn’t have been murdered, of course, he was a terrible person whose influence was built entirely on right-wing idiocy and fomenting hatred and contempt of women, immigrants, and brown people, and supporting a political agenda built on the same. I’m only surprised that it has taken this long for his legacy to be properly recognized.

Ten months since his assassination, Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online. Just not the way the far-right activist would have wanted.

Audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, as have ironic reposts of the apparent AI-slop song We Are Charlie Kirk, which was originally created as a posthumous tribute. He was the butt of a crude joke during the Netflix roast of the Hollywood star Kevin Hart in May. The next month, a viral tweet encouraged people to take “a shot” in his honor on Juneteenth. And a trend known as “Kirkification” has emerged, in which internet pranksters superimpose his face on to unlikely images, such as the Mona Lisa, a woman in a bikini, or Jeffrey Epstein.

This contemptuous, at times nihilistic humor marks a dramatic shift from the period immediately following Kirk’s death in September, in which conservatives sought to suppress criticism of the late Maga luminary. Hundreds of people were fired or otherwise disciplined for denouncing him (which has since resulted in several settlements over alleged first amendment violations).

Yeah, there was a ridiculous (and fortunately brief) phase in which the right-wing advocates of free speech harassed anyone who expressed their dislike of Kirk. Like, for example, this woman:

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”

She was fired for her honest and accurate opinion.

But now that vengeful attitude towards Kirk-critics is waning. Part of it, I suspect, is that Kirk’s popularity was always artificial, propped up by the wealthy supporters who funded his organization, and those props are being kicked out from under it by the rich maggots who no longer see any profit in idolizing a dead man. I also think that making Erika Kirk his successor was a major misstep — she’s a graceless, over-reaching wanna-be who is easily mocked. Just ask Druski.

Likewise, Erika Kirk is in an awkward position. She and her husband promoted traditional gender roles centered on women’s subservience. Now, she is tasked with leading a multimillion-dollar organization. She has also been memed, at times misogynistically, for her quick return to public life after Charlie’s death – another demonstration of Turning Point’s struggle to control the digital narrative.

Without broad buy-in of Erika at the helm, Turning Point is a weakened enterprise. As Leidig observed, under Charlie Kirk’s leadership, the group pushed its messaging through a calculated “top-down approach” – with a cohesive strategy, funding from prominent Republican operatives, and support from the White House. This is a sharp contrast with amorphous grassroots entities such as Fuentes’s acolytes, the Groypers, who have ascended in the vacuum left by Kirk.

That’s the bad news: Fuentes is even worse than Kirk ever was, but he is such a hideously overblown bigot that the billionaires who favor his ideas are going to be reluctant to openly support him.