Pounding plagiarism into a thin vile slime

Last night, I saw that hbomberguy had put out a new video, and I started to watch it. Couldn’t finish it. So I resumed this morning. Still haven’t finished it. It’s almost 4 hours long! This is like some epic fantasy movie!

But it’s really good, so I’ll link to it here, in case anyone has more stamina than I do. It’s all about plagiarism on the internet.

It’s incredibly thorough, giving multiple examples, going through the details, and explaining why they are plagiarized. I teach some writing classes here at UMM — one of them in the coming spring semester — and I hammer on plagiarism as one week’s topic. This video is so comprehensive that I wish I could assign it to the class, but I can hear the groans if I tried to do that (although I’m sure they’d find it entertaining). Maybe I should rip out 20 minutes of the video and present the words in my class as my own? Wait, no, that would be bad.

I’ll probably tell them that it’s an optional video they could watch if really interested, and use hbomberguy as a boogey man and let the students know that if they plagiarize, a guy with 1.3 million subscribers might feature them in a massive youtube video that gets over a million views and comprehensively drag them over the coals.

iNaturalist has been observing me

iNaturalist does this thing where they’ll give you a graphical summary of your contributions in the past year. Here’s mine.

See all the orange? That’s what they use to color-code arachnid observations. I might have a little bit of a bias there, and I have no idea how any birds and mammals crept in there, and I’m afraid plants don’t exist in my universe. Still, despite my narrow focus, I spotted 68 species this year. That’s not at all impressive. Can you name 68 species? Apparently, I can, and I’ve even photographed them.

I’ve been terrible at contributing identifications, that is, helping others by identifying what’s in their photos. I should aspire to do better at that next year.

Maybe I can strive to look at something other than spiders in the coming year, too, although that might be difficult, since they’re not as interesting.

Incredible! A Republican held accountable?

I know it’s hard to believe, but George Santos has been expelled from congress.

By a vote of 311-114, the House voted to expel Santos, with 206 Democrats and 105 Republicans voting for expulsion, and two Democrats and 112 Republicans voting against it. This was just the sixth time in U.S. history that the House has expelled one of its own and the first time the House has done so without a criminal conviction, though Santos doesn’t dispute that he lied about most of his resume. (He does, however, dispute that he broke the law, despite the 23 criminal counts against him and substantial evidence in his indictment—as well as an Ethics report released two weeks ago—that detailed a number of alleged legal violations.)

As members voted on Santos’ removal, the serial fabulist was in and out of the chamber, at one point leaving, and then reappearing with his coat draped over his shoulders to watch the finally tally and shake hands with certain members.

It is revealing, though, that lying on your CV and misappropriating campaign funds can get you expelled, but enabling pedophiles and committing statutory rape, as people like Jordan and Gaetz have done, doesn’t even get you a slap on the wrist, and the ethical standards of the Supreme Court are a joke. It’s the money that matters.

Space Scam

There is a company claiming to be opening a hotel in space — a great big spinning wheel like the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are a few clues that it’s actually a great big fake.

The first is that they claim that they’ll be opening the first hotel in 2025. You know, sometime within the next two years? Only they don’t have a lick of work done on the project yet.

Then they claim they’ll be opening a second, even larger space hotel in 2027. The first will accommodate 28 guests (or is it 280? The number varies with the source) and the second will house 400.

The rooms will be luxurious. This is far bigger than any cabin on an earthbound cruise ship.

So much room! Such big windows! Such thin walls separating you from the cold vacuum and hard radiation of space!

The founder of the company, John Blincow, is a former airline pilot, lacking any training in the sciences or engineering. He seems to have spent the last 20 years founding companies with big dreams that don’t do anything.

The company seems to have scaled down their promises. Their old ad copy says the goal is to build a space station-shaped hotel near a Disney theme park. That was in 2021. They don’t seem to have done it.

The original company seems to make money, not from engineering, but from computer dating.

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The new company, Orbital Assembly, seems to change their name fairly regularly. There’s nothing on their web page about a space hotel, but they did get a $1.7 million contract from the Space Force to build something. Communications gear? It’s kind of fuzzy.

Somehow, this “space hotel” gets promoted in newspaper articles/ads (hard to tell them apart) every year for the last few years. The latest was just a month ago, still making the same incredible claims every time, and always with the same opening year.

Scammers gotta scam, but it’s still appalling how news media, from CNN to Business Insider to MSN, are falling for it. Maybe they’ll get competent editors someday.

P.S. They’re also suggesting that a weekend stay in a space hotel would cost about $5 million. No mention of funeral costs, cancer treatments after the visit, etc. That’s all extra.

The day is ruined

I got up at 4:30am, went straight to work and hammered out the exam & exam key for my students, and prepped my lecture for today. I was on fire, gettin’ stuff done, and then I made coffee and decided to whip up a breakfast burrito, as one does.

I am out of hot sauce.

What is the point of our existence anyway? Nothing matters. We come from the void, we go into the void. Why did I get out of bed? Why am I here? There is nothingness all around me.

It could have been worse

News from the Florida GOP:

Christian Ziegler, Florida’s GOP chairman and husband of Sarasota County School Board member and Moms of Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, is under criminal investigation after a woman filed a complaint with the Sarasota Police Department alleging the longtime Republican official had raped her, according to a heavily redacted police report obtained by the Florida Trident.

The complaint was filed on October 4 and the alleged sexual battery occurred inside the woman’s home in Sarasota on October 2, according to the report. Among the few words that went unredacted in the report are “rape” and “sexual assault complaint.”

The woman, according to sources close to the investigation, alleged that she and both Zieglers had been involved in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident. The incident under investigation by Sarasota police occurred when Christian Ziegler and the woman were alone at the woman’s house, without Bridget Ziegler present, the sources conveyed.

At least this time, everyone involved was a full-grown adult.

Elon Musk is such a tough guy

Xitter is currently facing an advertiser boycott, all because Musk has been promoting, and contributing to, a culture of racism, misogyny, and hate. It was his anti-Semitic remarks that finally kicked me in the pants and convinced me I had to leave the platform. He’s mad about it now. He’s blaming the advertisers.

This is what happens when the richest person on Earth overdoses on redpills. A clammy, twitchy, agitated Elon Musk took the stage at The New York Times’ DealBook summit today and told former Twitter advertisers to “Go f*ck yourself.”

“Don’t advertise,” Musk told the brands who left because of Musk’s bizarre and offensive tweets. He jutted his chin and spoke in a clipped, more prominent-than-usual Afrikaans accent. His eyes glinted and snapped with aggression.

“You don’t want them to advertise?” asked the host, incredulously.

“No,” said Musk, turning his head and jutting his chin again.

“What do you mean?” asked the host.

Musk stuttered, then blurted, “If somebody tries to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f*ck yourself.”

The nonplussed host stammered, “But–”

Musk interrupted and said in a tight, robotic voice accompanied by stiff gesticulations, “GO. F*CK. YOURSELF. Is that clear?” he said, whipping his head back toward the host.

“I hope it is,” he added. He waved to the audience and said, “Hi, Bob,” referring to Disney CEO Bob Iger. “I’m sure you’re in the audience.”

This is madness. The man runs a social media company that makes money by selling advertising — it would be wonderful if someone came up with an alternative scheme, but Musk isn’t doing that. Instead, he’s telling all the people who would buy his product to go fuck themselves, all while acting like an angry five-year-old bully. Look for yourselves: does this seem to be a stable, mature, responsible grown-up?

He’s even saying that if his company goes belly-up and fails, then “Earth” will blame the advertisers and not the incompetent CEO/owner.

Yeah, you go on telling yourself that. I’m saying that it’s all the fault of the guy who decided single-handedly to shape the culture to be tolerant of racists.