The Legend of PZ terrifies the populace, once again

Oh, no — I have been not-invited to not-appear on a radio show about me.

Dear PZ,
I host a US radio show from here in the UK, with ArtistFirst Radio Network, which predominantly focuses on bullying and abuse.
A few years ago, you had an infatuation with attacking me. To this day, I have no idea what this was about, or even what provoked you.

Wait, what? This person is named Debra Rufini, and I had to look her up — she was gesturing maniacally on the interwebs at me back in 2008. I can tell you what “provoked” me: she was sending me dozens of emails, sometimes daily, in which she complained in the same way she is here. I responded to her first email, which was a list of 50 “proofs” for the existence of a god. It was very silly.

I replied to her frequent and obsessive emails precisely four times — while she was pestering me for over 5 years. To claim I had an infatuation with attacking her is contrary nonsense.

When I politely asked you, you cowardly ran away from facing up to me, hiding behind your website, insisting that I had an ‘obsession’ with you – one of the major traits of NPD; provoking, followed by victim blaming.
The subject of my last show was the serial killer, Rosemary West. After all my broadcasts covering abuse of all forms; from spiritual abuse carried out in the church, to Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it’s only right, and about time that I host a show exploring and examining my own bully – you!

Asked me what?

To claim I’m hiding behind my website is absurd. I’m right here, easily accessible, with my email right there (she’s had no problem finding it), and I’m not clear on what she expects as an alternative. I’m not going to show up in person at her front door — that would be stalkerish, and would suggest a degree of interest in her that simply isn’t there.

But sure, go on some tiny (or even popular) radio show and talk about me. Don’t care.

I would invite you to be my guest on next month’s show … but you will only run off into your mouse hole, gathering your flying monkeys along the way, enhancing the degree of bullying and abuse.
You targeted a weak and vulnerable person in me all those years ago. Justice will be served on behalf of myself and all the others you have targeted. You have other victims too, don’t you?!

Yes. I have other victims, just like Debra Rufini. People who regard me as evil personified, who I mostly have never heard of. Don’t care.

In preparation for this broadcast, I Googled; ‘PZ Myers- bullying.’ I was shocked, but not surprised at the amount of people you have attacked. What a vile individual. You have attacked Professor Dawkins, Atheistrev.com mentions how you mock and attack anyone who doesn’t agree with you, where you have been referred to as a bully. On another site, you have been referred to as a ‘bigot.’ You’re like an atheist Shirley Phelps-Roper. How easy it is for you to select online strangers from behind your keyboard.

Shocking! I must have mocked and attacked this atheistrev person, although I don’t recall and don’t know who they are. My victims are so numerous I can’t keep track of them!

I have made contact with all the websites which have exposed you for the despicable person you are, sending them this very message, and inviting them for comment, which of course you are free to immaturely post on your website in your usual pathetic manner. However, if you tweak it, as you’ve done so before, you will only be exposing yourself for the dishonest person you are.

All the websites? I don’t believe you. They are like the gnats flitting above the dungpiles on the prairie, too numerous to be counted. Do not underestimate my perfidy, I’ve been cultivating it for years.

I would never “tweak” one of her emails. Every detail is just too amusing. The last time I responded, I included her precise words as a screen capture to make sure no nuance was lost.

This email to you will be aired on the show. And, this is what happens when a bully’s weak victim grows wings of steel, and gets her own radio show. Bullies never win, even if it takes years later for justice to be served. For every anti bullying campaign, media event, or organisation, someone like you is responsible.

Soar high on those wings of steel, Ms Rufini! Don’t care.

Now I have to go add another email filter.

How to recognize a fool

Well there’s our problem. When wingnuts see a man with swastikas tattooed on his body, they think that’s antifa. Sorry, guy, that’s just the fa.

Although it should be said that the guy with the tats has seen the error of his ways, and has repudiated Naziism. You can’t judge a man by the mistakes of his past, I guess.

This, by the way, is Chris Loesch. Scraggly bearded, skimpy mustached Chris Loesch, who is so vain that he thinks curling a sparse few hairs with wax makes him look good.

That’s just an ongoing mistake. I’ll forgive him after he apologizes for his deeper crimes against humanity.

Jacob Wohl rides again!

Lung & oral cancers are nature’s way of cleaning out the barn.

Tell me if this strategy sounds familiar.

  1. Pick a target, any target, as long as the Trumpkins hate ’em.
  2. Pay a non-credible source to make up an unlikely story of sexual malfeasance.
  3. Hold a press conference in which the story palpably unravels.
  4. Profit!

That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and Warren, and their balloons collapsed so fast they sounded like a fast wet fart. Would you believe Wohl and Burkman have done it again? Only you may not have heard about it because the press doesn’t believe them anymore.

  1. They tried to discredit Anthony Fauci.
  2. They found a woman, Diana Andrade AKA Diana Rodriguez, willing to make up a story about Fauci.

    “He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair. He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs,” Rodriguez wrote of her fictional meeting with Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. After detailing some ineffective hotel bed wrestling and managing to flee with her honor intact, Rodriguez closed with the statement, “Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story.”

  3. They tried to recruit the media to report on the story. They mostly failed. Andrade later wrote to journalists confessing that she’d been paid.

    And that would have been that—until Saturday’s email, which included Andrade telling me, “The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” taken when they were romantically involved. Also, that Wohl and Burkman “had me do something like this…back in January.”

  4. I fail to see what they gain from this nonsense. Does anyone believe anything they have to say any more?

To put the frosting on the cake, though, Andrade called Wohl and Burkman to express her unhappiness with her role, and most wonderfully, recorded the entire call, so we get to see the two con artists rationalizing their lies. It’s something.

“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”

Andrade counters that he and Wohl are not taking COVID-19 seriously. “It’s not just any virus. I mean, it’s a huge deal….I think you guys think it’s something made up, and it’s not.”

“Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often,” Burkman counters. “How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it’s real, it’s a positive thing, for God’s sake.”

“So, what? Survival of the fittest?” Andrade asks, a bit more pique in her voice. (The sense you are dealing with people who have an enthusiasm for eugenics can do that.) But Wohl’s not having it.

“Diana, look, can you just do this for me?” he says. “Can you just keep your mouth shut and just…just do it for me.”

Uh-oh. They said the quiet part of the Republican strategy out loud. It’s OK if the virus kills 400,000 people, because half of them are old and the other half are “the bottom of society”.

They don’t seem to have noticed that they themselves are the dregs.

Another professor embarrasses the professoriate

A university professor filed suit against his institution because it chastised him for inappropriate sexual behavior. He wasn’t fired, they just tut-tutted, put a black mark on his record, and told him not to do that anymore. He sued anyway, for his ego.

During a class in 2013, a psychology professor at George Mason University named Todd Kashdan told students he had once performed oral sex at a party, an anecdote he later said was meant to make a point about exhibitionism, according to findings from an internal school investigation and a federal lawsuit the professor filed against the university.

In 2016, Kashdan told graduate students gathered in his hot tub about a sexual experience he had in Europe, and in 2018, he went with graduate students to a strip club where he received a lap dance, the internal investigation found. The professor’s lawsuit said these incidents were misconstrued.

How is bragging about performing oral sex, his sexual experiences, and getting a lap dance in front of his students “misconstrued”? I’m mystified. Just going with students to a strip club seems like it’s crossing a line, and with all the rest, it’s hard to imagine how it could be “misconstrued”.

On top of all that, two former students also filed complaints about him with the university. He is baffled.

The professor, according to the suit, “was surprised to learn that the same women who had given him unsolicited praise for his teaching and research, and sought him out for assistance with academics and their careers, now alleged that he had created a ‘hostile environment.’ ”

Wow. He doesn’t understand that he’s a gatekeeper, that he holds the keys to future advancement in his students’ careers, and is so oblivious to the social workings of human minds that he can’t comprehend that people whose future he controls might flatter him to his face while resenting him?

Psychopaths. Psychopaths everywhere.

IMPORTANT: do not learn anatomy from reddit or twitter

Or from men, apparently.

Men can’t possibly commit sexual assault, because there’s no way they’d be able to find their way about in a woman’s nethers. They’ll just fumble about and end up poking her in a dimple in her knee, or something.

Or they’re just grossed out by the arrangement of parts.

I think we all want that guy to continue to be repulsed by all women. It’s best for everyone.

Even wealthy people can be crackpots

I saw Cody at Some More News talking about the rich people who are dealing with the pandemic in rich people ways. So Gwyneth Paltrow is buying an expensive custom face mask and jetting off to some exotic place to avoid the problems (she thinks). Grifters are setting up luxurious get-aways for the wealthy to get away…in groups. It’s all very Masque of the Red Death, and one can only hope it ends in the same way for them.

And then there’s Eric Weinstein. Sheesh. He’s supposed to be a smart guy? He does this rambling monolog about “Covid, new physics, and our need to get off the planet” and you just have to laugh. What a buffoon…except of course that he has a lot of money and is beloved by the Intellectual Dork Web.

To paraphrase his message, in case you don’t want to sit through that mess: humanity has been very lucky so far, but the lucky streak has ended and COVID-19 has put the world’s economic systems at risk. We should be asking why we’re so ill-prepared, why we have so few ventilators and hospital beds.

This is an insane risk to be taking with the world’s economy. People are accused of being racist if they call it the Wuhan virus and talk about travel bans.

“What should we do if the economy collapses?” he asks. He’s very concerned about The Economy.

This is where it all goes off the rails. To continue to paraphrase: He insists that we’ve got to get off of this planet. He admits that people called him crazy on the Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro shows when he said that. This virus should have been grown in a lab and escaped. We’re not going to be wise enough to rethink. Are we going to have to reboot from tardigrades?

No, really, he said that. I guess he thinks “we”, whatever he means by that, might die off, and “we” will have to restart as tardigrades. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Then he dismisses Elon’s idea of going to Mars, because it’s too marginal. The moon is too bleak for a colony. The only place with abundant opportunity is the far cosmos.

Wait, what? He doesn’t think there’s any place in the solar system to go (I agree), but he thinks we’ve desperately got to get off the planet (I disagree. He’s nuts). So we’re going to have to take off and travel to other star systems. Again, he uses “we” a lot. Who is “we”? Is he going to bring 8 billion people along with him in his space ship?

So, he points out, we’re trapped by Einsteinian physics, so he casually suggests we just have to invent a new physics. Just like that. Oh, Elon Musk going to Mars is crazy, but coming up with a new physics that lets Eric Weinstein do what he wants, that’s sensible.

That gets us about 8 minutes into him talking at his phone, less than halfway through, and you might expect that the rest would be talking about his New Physics, but no. He asks if he has enough of an audience to talk about his new ideas, and the rest of it is him mumbling at people in the chat and rambling on about how scientists and academia are close-minded and wrong, and how he wasn’t even allowed to attend his own thesis defense. Well, if this is how he defends his ideas, I sympathize with his committee.

It’s both infuriating and entertaining — this bozo is one of the leading lights of the IDW? Wikipedia puts his claims of a “new physics” in an enlightening context.

In May 2013, Weinstein gave a colloquium, Geometric Unity, promoted by Marcus du Sautoy as a potential unified theory of physics. His equation-less unpublished theory includes an “observerse,” a 14-dimensional space, and predictions for undiscovered particles which he stated could account for dark matter. Joseph Conlon of the University of Oxford stated that some of these particles, if they existed, would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Few physicists attended and no preprint, paper, or equations were published. Weinstein’s ideas were not widely debated. The few that did engage expressed skepticism. They were unable to debate more intensely due to the fact that there was no published paper.

Yep, total crackpot.

We are now in a race for the dumbest pandemic advice

Florida takes an early lead, with a Republican lawmaker suggesting we aim a hair dryer up our nose to treat COVID-10.

Florida Okeechobee County Commissioner Bryant Culpepper (R) referenced a program he said he saw on One American News Network on how to combat the coronavirus, the Lake Okeechobee News reports.

Said Culpepper: “One of the things that was pointed out in this interview with one of the foremost doctors who has studied the coronavirus said that the nasal passages and the nasal membranes are the coolest part of the body. That’s why the virus tends to go there until it then becomes healthy enough to go into the lungs.”

He added: “This sound really goofy, and it did to me too, but it works. Once the temperature reaches 136 degrees Fahrenheit, the virus falls apart, it disintegrates. I said how would you get the temperature up to 136 degrees? The answer was you use a blow dryer. You hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose.”

Do I need to explain that that wouldn’t work at all, and would probably be deleterious to your sinuses?

By the way, One America News Network is a conspiracy-peddling, far right paranoid network that promotes nothing but pro-Trump bullshit. Don’t trust it.

Seriously, America? Laura Loomer in congress?

She’s running, and fundraising successfully. But this is Laura Loomer.

First, she’s not the least bit bashful about her efforts to stoke hate against Muslims.

In 2017, she bragged on Twitter about being a “#ProudIslamophobe,” as she called Muslims “savages,” calling for a ban on allowing Muslims into America “EVER AGAIN.” She has called Islam a “cancer,” and worse, she wrote that there’s “no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same.” Loomer dangerously wants you to believe that a Muslim American like myself is no different than a person in ISIS.

Loomer, who once worked for the right-wing group Project Veritas, seems to especially despise immigrant Muslims, tweeting in 2017, “Someone needs to create a non-Islamic version of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” That resulted in her being banned from Uber and Lyft for violating its community standards, which prompted Loomer to tweet, “Uber will literally hire an Islamic terrorist, but they will ban a conservative journalist for addressing legitimate safety concerns.”

In 2019, Loomer took to Instagram, where she made a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in vile terms, blaming all Muslims including Omar for 9/11, and adding, “Muslims should not even be allowed to seek positions of political office in this country.”

Beyond social media, in October 2018 Loomer praised and appeared with self-professed Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, who has claimed in the past that homosexuality facilitated the Holocaust and openly recited and defended the “14 word” mantra used by white supremacists. Loomer also trespassed on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s property in January 2019 along with her colleague, Charlottesville Unite the Right marcher Antonio Foreman, to denounce her refusal to support Trump’s wall. While on Pelosi’s property, Loomer reportedly made racist comments about Latinos.

The article doesn’t even mention the time she handcuffed herself to a door at Twitter headquarters and peed herself. Or the time she crashed a Shakespeare play to yell about ISIS controlling CNN. She wants to declare Keith Ellison’s election invalid, because he got 50,000 votes from Muslims and another 50,000 by voter fraud.

The Florida GOP loves Loomer, which is just another sign that the entire goddamned party has been infected with a brain-eating virus, and that we’ve got to do more than topple Trump.

For those who think Trumpism ends with Trump, think again. Loomer, who is 26, and the others we saw march in Charlottesville in defense of white supremacy are part of a younger generation that will be with us long after Trump. The best and only antidote to driving Trumpism to the fringes of society where it belongs is winning big in November. Barring that, Trumpism will spread and infect our nation like a deadly cancer.

How did @Glinner become such an ass?

I tend to have a very hostile reaction to people flinging around lawsuits over the internet. It’s gotten worse lately, I can’t imagine why.

So Graham Linehan (TERF, Gender-Critical Feminist, flaming twit, whatever) saw a video over the weekend and immediately contacted his lawyer. I think he’s a bit touchy about his ugly history.

And here’s the video. Maybe Linehan was just feeding the controversy to help popularize it?

The title is accurate. Linehan does want to eradicate trans children; among the points the video makes, backed with citations from the scientific literature, is that conversion therapy is torture that does harm, increases unhappiness, and makes the victims more likely to commit suicide. Does he plan to go to court to defend his coterie of transphobic fanatics and their distortion of reality?