Now I’ll never sign up for Disney+

You know those interminable, petty, long-winded End-User License Agreement that you’re expected to sign when you get some new tech thingie? I’m afraid I’ll never bother to read all that lawyerese, even though apparently it can affect your life in surprising ways.

Disney is trying to get a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a New York University doctor’s grieving husband tossed — because he signed up for the Disney+ streaming service years earlier, court papers said.

Kanokporn Tangsuan’s bereaved husband Jeffrey Piccolo is currently suing the theme park juggernaut claiming that she suffered a fatal allergic reaction shortly after eating at a Disney Springs restaurant in Florida last October.

But Disney is now claiming the $50,000 suit should be moved out of the courts because Piccolo agreed to arbitrate all disputes with the company when he first signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service back in 2019, court documents charge.

Wanting to see Star Wars or Marvel movies should now be considered a deleterious disease, like gambling or alcoholism. Who knows what else is buried in that EULA? Disney will own your first-born, has droit du seigneur, can garnish your wages, owns all the minerals stored in your corpse. You won’t find out until a lawyer knocks at your door.

It begins again

I want you to know that I always give my spiders fresh, live flies.

I’m going to be handing out flies like candy today, because I have to have something pleasant to do when I go to work, and I’ll start with a meeting of the Latrodectus horde. This is it, the semester is starting now, and as usual, we start it with…committee meetings. We start today with a meeting of my biology colleagues, so at least we’ll be discussing stuff that matters. On Thursday we all meet with administrators, which won’t matter at all and just sucks more time away.

Maybe I should bring a couple of bottles of flies to share?

I don’t meet with any students until Monday. That’s so backwards — we should start the semester by engaging with students, and then later, in our spare time, the administrators can yammer at us.

The end is imminenter, maybe

Nature reviews Ray Kurzweil’s latest tome of foolishness, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. They came up with the perfect illustration for the review.

Ray Kurzweil’s future is bad haircuts and silly gadgets stuck to your head.

The text is no less scathing. If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you know I despise everything Kurzweil publishes. I appreciate this pithy summary of Kurzweil’s bullshit.

Kurzweil repeatedly muddles computation with intelligence and consciousness. He flirts with materialism, dualism and panpsychism, contending that consciousness is “much like a fundamental force of the Universe”. Kurzweil then states that “it is the kind of information-processing complexity found in the brain that ‘awakens’ that force into the kind of subjective experience we recognize”. The words ‘complexity’ and ‘emergence’ are too often used in contexts in which ‘abracadabra’ might do as well.

That’s all muddled up with quasi-religious eschatological crap about the end of the world as we know it in the very near future. The singularity is imminent!

Kurzweil’s hyperbolic technological fetishism does not stop in ‘the cloud’. Apparently, the soul is digital and the body is mechanical. And so, the litany of fiction science, as I call it, goes on: the hype is squared as AI meets nanoengineering, in a revolution that “will enable us to redesign and rebuild — molecule by molecule — our bodies and brains and the worlds with which we interact”. He also argues that diligent people will achieve “longevity escape velocity”, living for much longer than we do now, by 2030. I can only hope that we would have reached bullshit escape velocity by then, too.

OK, you heard him. 2030. The eschaton will be here in 6 years. Maybe we’ll all live to see the prophecy go kablooiee, so we can all laugh at goofy ol’ Ray.

It’s just Texas, they won’t mind

SpaceX has been poisoning the environment for years, and have shown a reckless disregard for the effects their launches have on local residents and wildlife, and have been guilty of dumping toxic materials in waters nearby.

SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been polluting the local environment for years, possibly in violation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act. for years. The news arrives in an exclusive CNBC report on August 12, which cites internal documents and communications between local Texas regulators and the EPA

SpaceX’s fourth Starship test launch in June was its most successful so far—but the world’s largest and most powerful rocket ever built continues to wreak havoc on nearby Texas communities, wildlife, and ecosystems. And after repeated admonishments, reviews, and ignored requests, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have had enough.

Don’t worry, though, Elon Musk is on the case. Here he is responding to a news report on his awful company.

CNBC sucks, Elon Musk tweeted in a reply to his company’s statement.

What this reminds me of is the bro who buys a bunch of illegal fireworks, heads down to the lake and blows stuff up and makes an obnoxious racket, and then leaves a mess of cardboard and paper and scorched debris to go back home and be an asshole to his neighbors.

It’s fine. I suggest that every state dump its garbage on Texas, they don’t care.

I did not watch the Musk/Trump interview. Did you?

I’ve read a few reports about it. It started 40 minutes late; Musk blamed the technical problems on a denial-of-service attack, a peculiar one that only affected the interview and not any other service on Twitter. Can we just admit that Musk is an incompetent manager? Trump got lobbed nothing but softball questions, and delivered the same old lies. Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s email account was hacked, giving bad guys access to lots of campaign information.

All the dim duo accomplished was more mockery.

he failure to launch of Elon Musk’s planned audio live stream on X with former President Donald Trump quickly became the subject of online mockery on the very same social platform, including by the official campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

“BREAKING: Twitter,” the pro-Harris account @harris_wins posted about 20 minutes after the stream was supposed to start.

While Musk claimed the malfunction was due to a massive denial-of-service attack, other prominent X users weren’t so sure.

“so the guy who makes cars that randomly crash and burst into flames is interviewing Donald Trump, and the interview crashed and burst into flames?” wrote self-described “internet loudmouth” Jeff Tiedrich. “holy s—, how did we Nazi this coming.”

“LOL the Elon-Trump space is broken no one can get in apparently,” wrote professor and attorney Seth Abramson. “This app is a flaming poop salad.”

“I’m in the historic Musk Trump twitter space and all you can hear is heavy breathing and the occasional fart,” quipped Cyanide and Happiness co-creator Rob DenBleyker.

Novelist Paul Rudnick pondered if the interview crashed because “Trump kept talking into the remote,” or “Elon got distracted by a squirrel.”

I feel no desire to watch the recording.

Doom doom dooooom

Classes start next week. This week it’s various organizational meetings. Summer is over.

I have to get my syllabi together right away. I’m also the chair of a university committee, so I had to be the bad guy writing to everyone and summoning them to our first administrative meeting of the semester. I apologized. It was not enough.

Now we just wait for the first blizzard.

Creepy weird apocalyptic conspiracy theories about sex

Project 2025 is pure electoral poison, as everyone except the goons at the Heritage Foundation are becoming aware. Kevin Roberts, the guy behind it all, has authored a book to promote it titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, but its release has been delayed to 12 November 2024 — gosh, that’s after the election! I wonder why. I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that Kevin Roberts is fucking weird, would it?

Media Matters got their grubby progressive hands on a copy.

A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks.

Dog parks? What’s wrong with dog parks?

On page 69, Roberts targets the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.

Roberts is a Catholic who is obsessed with reproduction. Ultimately, his opinions seem to be driven by a pathological need to compel everyone else to get pregnant.

He says that having children should not be considered an optional individual choice but a social expectation or a transcendent gift, and describes contraceptive technologies as revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family. He labels reproductive choice methods as a snake strangling the American family.

You’d think that with that insistence on baby-making he’d approve of IVF, but no. You see, IVF gives women the option to not be pregnant at inconvenient times — they’ll waste their god-given fertility by going to college or working outside the home, instead.

Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.

So it’s really about controlling women. Abortion and birth control are bad because once upon a time not being able to end an unwanted pregnancy or avoiding pregnancy in the first place protected women, and also kept the men in line.

As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

I think you can see why the Republicans want to keep their nefarious agenda in the dark while they’re trying to get elected to office. After they have convinced the citizenry to give them power, then they can reveal the iron boot.

The New Republic has also lucked into getting a copy. They find some nuance in what they’ll do after they’ve got everyone pumping out babies: prayer.

This repopulation will take time, of course. In the meantime, what weapons do we have at our disposal to fight China? I don’t think we will succeed without the return of a practice absolutely antithetical to everything CCP and its Uniparty sympathizers stand for: widespread prominent public prayer.

Yes, that’s right: Prayer is going to be an essential factor in fighting globalization. For Roberts, the path back to economic independence involves putting public prayer

in a place of prominence—to take a moment for prayer before football games, to have prominent leaders including our president not just issuing the occasional prayer proclamation but actually publicly taking a knee before almighty God (as Washington did), to begin school days again with prayer (enabled by school choice legislation)—would be to once again properly acknowledge our gratitude to God and humbly seek His assistance in our struggle to restore vitality to our nation.

This appears to be the best strategic policy advice Roberts has to offer, a literal Hail Mary against China.

Again, it’s all about sex, procreation, babies. Everything boils down to banning birth control and abortion, and making everyone get pregnant if they want to have sex. It’s an attitude I associate with a certain kind of creepy, regressive Catholic, the kind of weirdo that Kevin Roberts, and JD Vance (who wrote the foreword to the book) are. They think the only reason someone might oppose their primitive beliefs is if there is some conspiracy theory driving misinformation about their plans. If that’s the case, why hide the book away? Please do announce it everywhere.

Childless societies, Roberts claims, are decadent and nostalgic, but of course it is Roberts who is decadent, with his $675,000 D.C. think-tank salary, and nostalgic, with his beliefs that globalization can be undone if enough people read Xenophon and take Sunday off. He seems to be arguing that it’s possible to undo the twentieth century and recapture the time of Benjamin Franklin and the Boston Tea Party (without all that violence against Catholics, presumably)—a time when the U.S. had a frontier and it was violent and lawless, a time when having many children was a necessity because several would likely die young from poverty or inadequate health care.

But Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claims our current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones. Surprising literally no one, George Soros is repeatedly invoked, usually as the puppet master behind soft on crime California district attorneys like George Gascón and Chesa Boudin.

I think the Democrats are on the right track. These people are out of touch, bizarrely ideological, and just plain weird. Not amusingly idiosyncratically weird, but nasty creepy weird.

Sighted in Morris

Assholes like to advertise.

You’re missing out on the ambience, though. This gomer had left his truck running in the parking lot, and he had done something to his muffler so the engine was roaring and grumbling while idling.

In case you can’t read his window sticker:

Oh, simple farmers. The people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know…

The first crack in Tim Walz’s perfection appears

Uh-oh. You knew that somewhere in the next few months the frantic digging for dirt on Harris/Walz would strike gold, and boy, have they discovered some horrific facts about Walz.

First of all, he’s a Christian. Crap. When will we get an atheist/satanist vice president?*

Secondly, he’s a Minnesota Lutheran. I know that sect well, it’s the one I was brought up in, although fortunately, it didn’t take. It probably won’t hurt his campaign with the general public, though.

And then, the real horror show: Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy and Blasphemy. The news article exposes an unbelievably foul doctrine in which Walz has been soaking for his entire lifetime. This website has been documenting the appalling beliefs of his church.

Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St Paul, MN, is a trainwreck of a congregation. Led by impastor Jen Rome, they are an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregation that exemplifies all the most heretical parts of the denomination. Notably, a recent article by RNS identified this as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s (who is Kamala Harris’ radical Vice President pick) denomination and parish.

Some of the ELCA’s greatest hits include:
ELCA Praises and Platforms Lutheran Pastrix Who Attended Pride Parade in the Nude
ELCA Publishes Book For Teens Saying Porn Can Be ‘silly fun’ and ‘safe way to explore your sexuality’
ELCA Releases Hilariously Woke DEI Recommendations For their Denomination
ELCA Publishes Book Encouraging ‘Queer Children’ to Ignore and ‘Limit Contact’ with Non-Affirming Parents
ELCA Church Hosts ‘Queer Nativity Play’, Featuring Mary and Joseph As Two Catfighting Lesbians
ELCA Considers Expelling all Conservative, Anti-LGBTQ Pastors from their Midst
Leader of ELCA Goes Off On Jesus in Sermon, Calling Him ‘Mean’, Troubling, and Even a Little Racist
ELCA Church Recites Blasphemous ‘Sparkle Creed’ + ‘I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural’

OMG. A liberal church. When was the last time you heard of one of those?

They then list the priorities of this church, each one like a brutal slap to the face of ‘normal’ Americans everywhere.

The church, which checks off all the usual pro-choice/ pro-LGBTQ boxes, uses the “Inclusive Bible” for all scripture readings and say they are committed to:

  • Antiracism work, de-centering whiteness, and making reparations for race violence
  • LGBTQIA+ affirmation and making a safe space for people of all genders and orientations
  • Gender equity and ensuring that the voices of women and nonbinary/gender non-conforming individuals are amplified
  • Accessible spaces that all bodies can navigate with ease
  • A planet we can thrive in for many generations to come, including supporting efforts to uplift and protect indigenous care of the land

Stop it, stop it, stop it. We staunch atheists can’t stand the thought of a Christian congregation supporting the same stuff we atheists and humanists do. What will we complain about if churches are all like that?

Well, I guess we’ll still have the hatemongers at that Protestia website to oppose.

*I am aware that we had an atheist/satanist president already, in 2016.