Oh no, another lawsuit?

I’m a bit fed up with people who turn immediately to lawsuits to get big money for slights, but this one is different.

  • I’m not the one being sued! Yay! That changes one’s whole perspective, I tell you what.

  • It’s Sargon of Akkad being sued. It’s hard to be sympathetic, sorry to say, but if it was another bullshit suit by people angry about being called mean names, I would be.

  • This is not a bullshit suit! He’s actually been caught dead to rights on copyright infringement.

Here’s the person doing the suing to explain it all. Sargon just simply uploaded her video to his monetized channel, no commentary, no satire, just lazily retitling a copy to get mo’ money.

Note too, that in that first link, there are a bunch of Sargon’s buddies and allies telling him that he screwed up and he better settle, so it’s not just my bias compelling me to pick sides here.

This is not news

It has been discovered that Louise Mensch made false allegations based on a hoaxer’s claims. Why is anyone surprised?

Louise Mensch is a hack, and always has been. This is not news at all.

The only reason that this is worth mentioning is that she was telling lies about the progress of investigations into Donald Trump, asserting that Trump was in even bigger trouble than he actually was, a story the left wants to hear.

The hoaxer, who fed the information to Taylor by email, said she acted out of frustration over the “dissemination of fake news” by Taylor and Mensch. Their false stories about Trump have included a claim that he was already being replaced as president by Senator Orrin Hatch in a process kept secret from the American public.

“Taylor asked no questions to verify my identity, did no vetting whatsoever, sought no confirmation from a second source – but instead asked leading questions to support his various theories, asking me to verify them,” the source said in an email.

Louise Mensch is a fake news source, and her work reinforces the false claims by Trump that his opponents are all liars, even as she disseminates anti-Trump stories. Seriously, people, she is a discredited source. What are you going to do next? Express shock that the Daily Mail and Weekly World News are garbage newspapers?

The price of ignorance

Houston is paying it today. Whose city will pay for it next?

The Republican administration is going to make everything worse for everybody. Trump rolled back regulations intended to support better standards for infrastructure projects — he apparently thinks the way to encourage investment in infrastructure is to allow it to be half-assed infrastructure.

An executive order issued by Trump earlier this month revoked an Obama-era directive that had established flood-risk standards for federally funded infrastructure projects built in areas prone to flooding or subject to the effects of sea-level rise – like many of those now sinking in Texas.

Houston already has some of the laxest building regulations for structures in potential flood zones and the president wants to spread that policy across the US.

“It makes no sense,” Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said. “Taxpayers deserve to have the assurance that if they provide assistance to a community to build or rebuild, it’s done in a way that isn’t going to cost taxpayers money in the future.”

Setting better flood-risk standards wouldn’t have helped Houston — Texas has been busy doing things half-assedly for generations, for short term gain — but they would help build for the future. If we have one.

State of the lawsuit hanging over our heads

As you may recall, Richard Carrier is suing Freethoughtblogs, the Orbit, Skepticon, and a woman who objected to his behavior. We got an update from our lawyer over the weekend.

First, we got the schedule of court deadlines, and my heart skipped a few beats. We’ve got stuff scheduled for December and May of next year, and resolution of one point may not happen until August. Of next year. Yeesh. This stuff takes forever. The good news is that most of that time is spent waiting for a judge to make decisions on various concerns we’ve raised, and we’re not going to be shoveling money non-stop into a lawyer’s maw. But there will be some continuing expenses.

Another bit of amusing news is that Carrier’s lawyer discussed settling the case (I will emphasize, this was his lawyer and not Carrier himself) and tentatively suggested some possible terms: that we cover Carrier’s legal expenses so far, estimated at about $50K (heh, no way, we’re not going to fund his future SLAPP suits) and — hang onto your hats, gang, this was unbelievable — that we hand over contact information and communications from all individuals who’d ever said a bad thing about Richard Carrier.

My takeaway from this is that he’s finding us a tougher nut to crack then expected, so he’d like to find some softer targets to pick off. So it’s going to drag on a long time, but I’m heartened by the news that his lawyer is concerned. Ours is pretty damned confident.

It goes without saying that we’re not going to concede any money to him without a hard fight, and there’s no way we’re going to expose anyone else to his predatory behavior. Rather, we’re going to fight harder, and the long drawn out process is an opportunity to bleed him more. His reputation is going to be in tatters if he continues his misguided SLAPP suit.

We will still have legal expenses coming up. Help us out by donating, if you can! You can also help out Skepticon with a tax-deductible donation, although that doesn’t benefit the rest of us.

Ed Brayton is a meanie

There he goes again, picking on the distinguished and august Thought Leaders of Atheism, in this case Sam Harris. It’s easy to do; there are a lot of buzzwords that trigger my rage, and Harris is fond of trotting out indicators of inanity like “identity politics” and “politically correct” and, of course, “divisive”.

…why is “divisive” a bad thing? Can you name a single example of progress in our society or any other that was not “divisive”? The push to end slavery was divisive, so much so that it sparked a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died; does that mean we should not have pushed to end slavery? The fight for women’s suffrage was divisive. The fight to end segregation was divisive. The fight for LGBT equality is divisive. Every single movement that resulted in a more fair, just and equal society was divisive. So why do people make such an accusation, as if it was somehow a strike against movements for social progress rather than a point in their favor? This is just lazy, sloppy thinking, and once again the use of buzzwords in place of serious argument.

That last sentence encapsulates Harris neatly.

You don’t expect vampires to be ethical, do you?

You knew this was coming, the perfect example of raging capitalism: old people buying young people’s blood.

In Monterey, California, a new startup has emerged, offering transfusions of human plasma: 1.5 litres a time, pumped in across two days, harvested uniquely from young adults.

Ambrosia, the vampiric startup concerned, is run by a 32-year-old doctor called Jesse Karmazin, who bills $8,000 (£6,200) a pop for participation in what he has dubbed a “study”. So far, he has 600 clients, with a median age of 60. The blood is collected from local blood banks, then separated and combined – it takes multiple donors to make one package.

Let’s consider all the ways this is sleazy.

  • Karmazin isn’t paying the donors in proportion to the value of their blood; a unit of blood is worth a few hundred dollars, and he’s just buying it up from blood banks and repackaging it with a significant markup.

  • If he were paying what it was worth to him to donors, he’d be enticing donors to contribute to him for a pointless exercise in imaginary rejuvenation, rather than to blood banks/hospitals for saving lives.

  • Right now he’s depleting the local blood supply by a small amount for his venality.

  • He’s lying and calling it a “study”. There are no control groups. Participants have to buy in with large sums of money, so he’s selecting for only the rich.

  • There is no good evidence that this is an effective and significant treatment for aging. There is some work in mice, but it’s so preliminary that there’s no way to justify leaping into human trials.

  • Imagine that there are solid, measurable improvements in the recipients’ health. I don’t believe in getting something for nothing; then I would have to ask what are the detriments to the donor’s health of giving blood. Are there long term losses? Short term effects? This ‘study’ is ignoring that side of the issue.

Bad science, weak justifications, and wealthy exploiters literally feeding on the blood of the young, like a swarm of geeky overpaid ticks. They are actual vampires. They should think about that, because there is a universally known literary precedent for how one deals with vampires.

I do think that research into, for instance, stem cell replenishment is a good idea — but let’s not pretend that what this guy is doing is serious research. And if these transfusions do have some beneficial effects, it’s time to have some serious consideration of the ethics of such treatments, and their wider effect on society — two things that venture capitalists and vampires don’t know much about, and don’t care about.