It’s simple, we kill the Batman

killthebatman

Why did no one think of it before? You’ve got a problem, a big meanie who enforces the law and holds the crooks up to scrutiny, so the first step before you begin your crime spree should be to exterminate the people who might catch you at it.

This is exactly what the Republicans have done: before they start (OK, accelerate) looting the country, they’ve killed the Office of Congressional Ethics. Never mind that it was an independent office that policed both Democrats and Republicans — when you’re poised for a historic treasure grab, you can’t have an ethics office notifying everyone of what you’re doing.

It still exists, but instead of acting as an independent entity, it is now subservient to the house ethics committee, which is stocked with partisan lawmakers who get to strangle any nosy investigations, and further, get to silence any mention of any probes. This action was also approved by a secret vote of the congressional Republican caucus — there was no discussion with those pesky Democrats, they didn’t even announce that they were considering it, they just did it and presented it as a fait accompli.

I’m impressed. A comic book villain couldn’t have done it better.

Josh Marshall recommends that you contact your representative to find out how they voted, if you live in a Republican district (I’m not; my rep is a blue dog Democrat, who I’ve never voted before until this last election when I simply voted straight DFL on every office). I don’t know what you can do about it, although I suppose it would be nice to know.

I get email…again

It’s been a remarkable day for email from idiots.

Prof. Myers, I have 3 questions about the evolution of humans that I have not been able to find the answers to. Could you offer your opinions?

1. If men prefer women who are less intelligent than they are does this mean there could have selection for lower intelligence in women?

2. Why haven’t women evolved to spontaneously shit themselves to deter rapists?

3. Why are women so annoying? Could they have actually evolved to provoke men into giving them a slapping?

Thanks,
Gary.

Happy to help, Gary!

  1. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

    In case you hadn’t noticed, women are members of the same species as men. You had a mother (she’s probably embarrased by you), and you inherited rougly half your chromosomes from her. It would require a remarkable degree of dimorphism to configure genes responsible for intelligence to be differentially expressed.

    Also, speak for yourself. Men don’t necessarily prefer less intelligent women. I happen to prefer a partner who is my equal. I don’t think it would have been advantageous in our evolutionary history to have half the population deficient in a trait that is responsible for our evolutionary success.

  2. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

    Why haven’t men evolved to find violent abuse of their partners repugnant? I suspect it’s more of a matter of random variation within the population producing some proportion of individuals who are more stupid and more violent than the mean. That’s you, Gary. You are noise. You are the unpleasant nasty detritus of chance variation.

  3. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

    As you so well demonstrate, some men are even more annoying.

Sadly, I cannot continue this enlightening conversation with Gary — I’ve blocked his email. If any of you would like to explain things more gently to Gary, you can write him at gary99@rocketship.com. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

How not to get famous

Spokane’s most single man is getting a heck of a lot of press. Inquisitr covers him, he made it to Seattle television news…I almost feel sorry for him.

But then I discovered his Tumblr page.

cuties

creep

Sympathy…evaporated. Although with this kind of heavy criticism, it might be a good idea for law enforcement to be aware of him in order to protect him. Another side of this kind of toxic masculinity is that some people will feel justified in doing violence to him. Nothing he has done warrants violent action or even legal sanctions — his creepiness is self-defeating.

I do appreciate the fact, though, that he has taken a fairly common ugly sort of behavior and taken it to such an extreme that the media finally noticed.

Nixon lied. Nixon killed Americans and Vietnamese needlessly.

The Republican party has evolved into the party of disenfranchisement, dishonesty, and outright treachery. One place you might point to as the beginning of this sordid history is the presidency of the primeval ratfucker-in-chief, Richard Nixon. Newly discovered documents show that he intentionally scuttled negotiations to end the Vietnam War for political gain.

Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery. To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.

Now we know Nixon lied. A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.

John Kerry once said, How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?. He should have said, “How do you ask a man to die in order to elect Richard Nixon?” Then later we get Reagan and Iran-Contra, and George W. Bush and the mega-cluster-fuck in Iraq.

Of course, the problem goes even deeper than that, to a winner-takes-all two party system that fosters insane levels of partisanship. I think we need to burn it all down and start over.

Oh, and there’s even more.

Time has yielded Nixon’s secrets. Haldeman’s notes were opened quietly at the presidential library in 2007, where I came upon them in my research for a biography of the former president. They contain other gems, like Haldeman’s notations of a promise, made by Nixon to Southern Republicans, that he would retreat on civil rights and “lay off pro-Negro crap” if elected president. There are notes from Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, in which he and his aides discuss the need to wiretap political foes.

Also the party of racism.

I get email

This is from א ב.

i have 2 interesting thoughts about evolution

according to evolution- a feces (a group of bacteria) can evolve into a supermodel (human)

according to evolution if we will find a watch with a dna and a self replicating system- we will need to think that this watch just evolved. because its have a living traits

have a nice day

I’m sorry, you’re entirely wrong. You do not have any interesting thoughts about evolution.

“Feces” is plural (singular is Latin “faex”, but English did not adopt the singular form). It is not a group of bacteria; it is waste material from digested food with additional bacteria. Evolution does not predict that it will evolve into a human. Quite the contrary: the bacteria in our guts are already specialized far beyond the state of the ancestral microorganisms that evolved into eukaryotes, they are quite unlikely to evolve multicellularity (which is another derived condition), and they’ve got better things to do.

Essentially all the organisms you can find in the natural world contain DNA, reproductive processes, and clock-like mechanisms — circadian rhythms are ubiquitous. Think about circadian rhythms, monthly and yearly cycles, and internal regulatory mechanisms, like the cell division cycle. Creationists are people who, if they found a squirrel in the woods, are more likely to strap it to their wrists and call it a Rolex.

Another reason 2016 sucks

Because we’re victims of a lawsuit intended to harass us. As you’ve probably heard earlier this year, Skepticon, Amy Frank-Skiba, Stephanie Zvan, The Orbit, Freethought Blogs, and I are the target of a ridiculous $2 million lawsuit by Richard Carrier, and the legal bills are coming due (actually, I’ve already coughed up a good chunk of change). I don’t believe there’s any way we can lose, short of doing something stupid like not hiring competent legal representation, which costs money.

Skepticon is already asking for donations to help cover the legal costs, the rest of us will be tagging along shortly with a separate fundraiser. We’re all in this together, and the only reason Skepticon is doing their bit separately is because they’re a 501(c)(3) organization, so donations there are tax deductible, while the rest of us are just lowly ordinary citizens. Please do help us out by donating to Skepticon, but you might also save a few pennies to throw at the rest of us.

Oy, I can’t believe we have to do this.