Found! Treasured knife, a bit of history

When I was a young boy, my grandfather had a special knife hung above the fireplace, one that he said he inherited from his father, and that he would pass down to me when I was grown-up. Things happened. My great-grandfather died, my grandfather died, I moved around chasing an education, my grandparents’ house was sold, the contents scattered, and heck, I was more concerned about my family and family values and all that then in some lump of metal.

The knife, as it turned out, had gone to my mother, and my sister found it, and she says I can have it now. I guess this is my inheritance, a simple, practical knife that brings back happy memories. Here it is:

I think those are silver fittings. The handle has my great-grandfather’s initials (PV, for Peter Westad) picked out with small nails, and an engraving “WESTAD 1908” on the sheath.

Here’s the blade.

It’s still sharp, but I think you can see the edge is a bit rough — it’s going to need some tender loving care. My grandfather always told me that it was good Norwegian steel and would last a lifetime. He was wrong. It’s lasted a couple of lifetimes.

The photo is my great-grandfather and his brothers, taken in Fertile, Minnesota.

My sister is going to ship it to me later (I don’t think it would be wise to bring it on a plane), so it’ll be returning to Minnesota at long last. I’m going to have to consult some experts about maintaining it — it’s in pretty good shape after a century of neglect, so it doesn’t need a lot of work, but I would like to buff it up a bit. After all, I’m going to have to leave it to my descendants now!

True, the charlatans have not gone away

William Brinkman received a fund-raising letter from an unusual source: some people have access to the James Randi Educational Foundation mailing list, and they’re using it to beg for money. This is already a dodgy thing to do — the people who willingly joined that list weren’t signing up for spam from anyone who found the mailing list, they were supporting the JREF. The list should have been erased when the JREF dissolved, but mailing lists are valuable things, so someone is taking advantage of it.

The fundraising pitch aims at an appropriate target for James Randi supporters, but it’s pretty damned ironic. We’re supposed to oppose charlatans, you know.

Meanwhile, the charlatans of the world have not gone away. Indeed, we see more pseudo-psychic nonsense than ever, with alleged psychics being only a phone call away, ready and eager to take money from grieving or worried people.

Unfortunately, the fund-raising is to benefit a convicted charlatan, Brian Dunning. Dunning ran a cookie stuffing scheme that pocketed millions of dollars from users of eBay, and was sentenced to 15 months in prison, back in 2014. Dunning is a smart guy who saw the money-making potential of the internet in the early 2000s, and jumped into the ‘scientific skepticism’ niche despite having no credentials in science or philosophy or anything at all relevant–he’s a salesman. I guess he’s continuing in that vein now that he’s out.

I would trust him to pick my pocket, but not anything else.

Isn’t it odd how the people who should have imposter syndrome don’t?

America’s Mayor fall down, go boom

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Best pratfall ever.

Rudy Giuliani, who has spent the last several years hitting rock bottom and somehow keeps hitting rock bottom again and again and again, has been ordered to pay an astonishing $148 million in damages to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, the election workers he defamed in an effort to keep Donald Trump in power. The figure is more than three times the high-end amount that the women had been seeking, which the former mayor’s lawyer had warned earlier in the week would constitute a civil “death penalty” and “be the end of Mr. Giuliani.”

The jury came to the $148 million by awarding Freeman $16,171,000 for the damage Giuliani had caused to her reputation, awarding Moss $16,998,000 for the damage to her reputation, giving each woman $20 million for emotional distress, and adding $75 million in punitive damages.

He’s been disintegrating for years. Freeman & Moss shouldn’t count on getting the money they’re owed, because I bet Giuliani crumbles into dust and slime before he pays up.

Crow city!

At my mother’s house — there are American Crows everywhere. Big black birds that complain if humans step outside. Odin watches.

Unfortunately, I left the good camera at home and am reduced to iPhone photography.

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine

A man has torn down the Satanic Temple’s display in the Iowa state capitol.

A former congressional candidate from Mississippi has been charged with allegedly vandalizing the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s statue depicting the pagan idol Baphomet at the Iowa State Capitol.

Michael Cassidy, 35, of Lauderdale, Mississippi, was charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief on Thursday, according to the Iowa Department of Public Safety. The charge could carry one year in prison and a $2,560 fine.

Good.

The whole point of the display in the first place was to highlight the intolerance and hypocrisy of conservative Christianity, and it served that purpose well. It got national attention. It was great PR. When the Baptists put up a manger in a public place, no one cares. A Satanist display provokes outrage, and everyone who is not a conservative Christian is made aware that there are haters out there who want to demand that you follow their religion.

Then some sanctimonious wackaloon tears it down, and there’s a second surge of PR that paints certain Christians as assholes and non-Christians as victims. Ha. Keep making our point for us, arrogant xian thugs, especially when it’s as ineffectual as knocking down cheap statues.

Nobody worshipped that display, and it doesn’t even need to come back as a Force Ghost. The bully has been exposed, that’s all anyone wanted.

In case you were concerned

My mother is home, she’s getting visits from nurses and therapists almost every day, and while she’s looking pretty frail and is dependent on supplemental oxygen, she has her good days when she gets lively and actually manages to stand up and walk on her own. Fortunately, my sister is retired and lives with her full time so Mom has a lot of local support.

I’m confident enough that I’m taking off today to visit my grandson in Tacoma for a bit, and also, ugh, attend a faculty meeting over zoom this morning. I can’t escape.

Here we go again with the War on Xmas

Every year around this time conservatives twist themselves in knots trying to argue against freedom of religion. One flashpoint this time around is the erection of a monument to satanism in the Iowa state capitol. It’s shiny and pretty.

I have noticed that every news story about it drags in this same weird religious wackaloon, Shellie Flockheart, who organized a prayer meeting to protest the display (about 4 people showed up), so in a sense it’s actually been effective in getting the conservative Christian perspective on air. In any other circumstance Flockheart would be getting no attention at all.

If you must witness true conservative hypocrisy, though, Michael Knowles has a ten minute rant about how religious freedom does not include those other religions. His argument is that a religion worthy of display must be leavened with “tradition”, and that the founding fathers weren’t thinking of Satanism when they wrote up the Constitution. That’s curious: so 17th century colonists did not actually believe in the evil being that they burned people to death over? I think it’s easy to argue that Americans have a long tradition of believing in Satan that’s still thriving today — just ask Shellie Flockheart. On the other hand, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, and Scientology didn’t exist when the Constitution was written, can we deny them their right to worship?

Heck, Christian Fundamentalism in the US is a post-civil war invention. Many of the founding fathers would have been appalled by biblical literalism, for instance, and they never heard of the Niagara Bible Conference, and they hadn’t read the twelve volumes of The Fundamentals. Religion evolves. The form it has taken in the 21st century, including the radical conservative Catholicism of Knowles, would have disgusted educated 18th century leaders.

But, you know, despite the contemporary existence of religions they did not care for (including Catholicism, by the Protestants, or atheism, which is a very old idea and also has a long tradition), those 18th century politicians declared freedom of religion with no qualifiers. They could have said that American was a Christian nation, or at least a nation that opposed Satan, but they didn’t, despite having full knowledge of the diversity of religious thought. They said:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Period. They qualified the second amendment by prefacing it with the words “a well-regulated militia,” a phrase the conservatives have pretended doesn’t exist ever since, but on the matter of religion they didn’t even insist on a formal priesthood. You can believe what you want. That’s our tradition that demented Christian traditionalist Knowles wants to abandon.

Some good news from Washington state

I didn’t even know about this court case in Minnesota, but it leads in the news here in the Seattle area. The Supreme Court made a good play.

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a Washington state law prohibiting licensed health care professionals from practicing “conversion therapy” – a scientifically discredited practice intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – as it applies to minors.

Critics say the practice – which attempts to convert people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning – into straight or cisgender people, causes serious emotional harm and can have deadly results.

Of course, it’s more of a “I’m not touching that with a 10 foot pole” decision than something that actively slaps down conversion therapy, but it’s a good start. At least until the court decides to revisit it again.

The usual suspects wanted to hear this case in court.

The vote was 6-3, with Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly saying they would have taken up the case.
Thomas wrote in a five-page dissent that he would have taken up the case to consider a First Amendment challenge to the law.

I know it’s not fair legal practice, but I personally consider any law favored by those three corrupt thugs to be a bad law.