Minnesota has lost a thriving business

Are you in the market for a pillow? You could go to MyPillow.com and order one, along with lots of cheap Chinese-made products.

Not for much longer, though. He has been tried for defamation for the last few weeks, because he made false claims against a person at Dominion Voting Systems. He was put on the stand to defend himself, and he used the time to repeat his false claims with more vehemence. His performance has had consequences.

Coomer said during the two-week Lindell trial that his career and life were destroyed by the statements. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.

Lindell’s lawyers denied the claims and said Frankspeech was not liable for statements made by others. The jury found that eight other statements made by Lindell and others appearing on Frankspeech were not.

Lindell said he went to trial to draw attention to the need to get rid of electronic voting machines that have been targeted in a web of conspiracy theories. He said he used to be worth about $60 million before he started speaking out about the 2020 election and is now $10 million in debt.

He lost the trial and has been fined $2.3 million dollars, a drop in the bucket compared to the $80 million he has thrown away. This is a man who is digging a hole and doesn’t know when to stop.

Run, if you see this in a car

Vance Boelter is cooked. You can see a detailed list of all the evidence he left in his wake, as he fled, and it’s overwhelming. This is going to be a short trial.

I was horrified at the glimpse of the contents of his car.

Who lives like this? If your car contains four (at least) rifles on your seats and stuffed loosely into plastic buckets, your life has taken a sad and desperate turn. When he set off on his shameful tour of legislators’ homes, he could have just looked to his right and seen that he was a wrong, fucked-up person.

Women’s bodies must be hidden!

The transphobes are experiencing the contradictions inherent in their ideas. In England, which has become Transphobe Central, they set up some rules that competitors in swimming competitions must compete according to their birth sex. A transwoman showed up for the women’s races, and the organizers turned her away…so she showed up for the men’s competition, in men’s swimgear. She swam topless, like a man.

Anne Isabella Coombes protested a policy banning her from female competitions by competing in an ‘open’ category race wearing men’s sports trunks and no bra.

The 67-year-old swimmer said Swim England, the UK’s competitive swimming regulator, told her she wasn’t eligible to compete in female category races, despite having done so in the past.

Good for her, breaking gender norms with the assistance of transphobic rules-givers.

The media have also chosen to blur out her chest. They’re going to have to make up their mind about these rules someday.

I recognize that specific racist Uncle Sam!

Back in the 1980s, we made frequent family trips from Eugene to Seattle and back again, and one of the major landmarks was this huge billboard just off I-5 that always featured these demented, racist, far-right slogans. It was a significant feature — I always checked to see what vileness the old farmer had posted this time. Before Twitter, you had to make a large capital outlay to promote your bigotry.

That’s about to change. The Chehalis tribe has bought the billboard, and I trust that the content of the messages will soon change significantly.

You may want to avoid produce from Texas

I wonder what RFK Jr and the MAHA gang think of this:

This topic is all coming to a head right now because the great state of Texas has just passed legislation that allows recycled fracking wastewater to be used to irrigate crops in the Lone Star state. According to WFAA News in Texas, proponents argue the recycled water could supplement the state’s supply of fresh water and incentify the oil and gas industries to clean up their messes. Critics say it could contaminate the very land Texans depend on for food and survival.

Yum. Mystery chemicals, greasy surfactants, petrochemical contaminants, all the stuff we love to find in our salads. And that’s not all!

Farmers in Johnson County, Texas, are already fighting toxic sewage-based fertilizer biosolids. They are outraged by the new legislation that approves using wastewater from fracking to irrigate crops despite the fact that it contains many of the same carcinogenic chemicals found in those fertilizers,

“There was another bill that was put forth that would allow fracking water to be land applied. They’re going to… treat it and then it’s gonna be safe for land application,” Dana Ames, who lives in Johnson County, told WFAA News. “Contaminated with all kinds of chemicals from oil and gas fracking. We don’t even know all the chemicals because they’re proprietary.”

Mystery chemicals and sewage based fertilizer biosolids? Squeeee! Fortunately, they’re deporting all of their immigrant farm workers, so I think a lot of them will be rotting on the ground. Or not rotting, if this cocktail of toxic slime has miraculous preservative powers.

But don’t worry, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner is quick to reassure us that it’s been purified.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller believes the concept has potential if done right. “Well, we need water. We don’t really care what the source is as long as it’s good, clean water that we can grow crops with. Fracking water would be fine,” he said. He added that first all harmful substances like heavy metals would need to be removed. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would be responsible for regulating the process. “As long as this water meets those strict guidelines, I don’t have a problem with it,” Miller added.

Miller said technological advancements are bringing the state closer to being able to fully clean and reuse produced water. “I don’t know that we’re all the way there yet, but with the technology and AI and everything that we’ve got available to us now, we’re in the technology age, so it’s certainly doable and it’s, you know, probably doable pretty quick, I would think.”

I note that he’s not saying that heavy metals are removed — they would need to be removed. And some other Texas commissioner, of environmental quality (I bet that commission is well funded and active!) would be responsible. But he doesn’t know that “we’re all the there yet,” but sure what with AI and all that, he thinks it is doable. He’s a moron.

You might be entertained by his campaign ad for Agriculture Commissioner, in which he brags about being a Christian, a cattleman (he runs a nursery business that grows decorative shrubs), and he supports the second amendment, all irrelevant to the job. At the end he mentions that Ted Nugent is his campaign treasurer. Yeah, that Ted Nugent. He’s also notorious for his embrace of every right-wing conspiracy theory (except those involving Big Oil) and corruption.

But he does own a big cowboy hat.

Texans will, apparently, elect anyone with a big enough hat, even if they’re planning to poison everyone.

A famous hoax

Hey! I vividly remember this cover, the May 1969 issue of Argosy magazine!

My father’s family was fond of some of these weird men’s magazines of that time, which often featured macho masculine heroic men battling ferocious creatures in the wilderness, or going fishing. I walked off with a copy, and kept it in the attic of my grandmother’s house, which I’d adopted as my workshop for building model airplanes. I spent many afternoons up there and browsed this, and a few copies of National Lampoon, while I was waiting for the glue or dope to dry. This was a particularly memorable issue, since it featured a cryptid with photos and reconstructions. I can still picture it lying on the desk in that room, where it rested for several years.

It was a hoax, a spectacularly graphic bloody hoax. Here’s a recent video series that traced the history of the Minnesota Iceman, summarizing the controversy. The story changed so many times that it is definitely unbelievable.

It’s still around. It was sold to a place called The Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas. I’d love to see it someday.

It’s often called the Minnesota Iceman, but some people resent that and say it was a Wisconsin Iceman: How a Wisconsin Bigfoot Became the Minnesota Iceman. Wisconsin can have it, I don’t mind.

I’m sorry, we’re going to have to ban tea now

People use tea for tasseography, or tea leaf reading, which is silly, stupid, and wrong, so we have to stomp this vile practice down hard. Big Tea has had its claws in us for too long, and now they’re claiming they can tell the future, when clearly they can’t.

Once that peril is defeated, we can move on to crush ChatGPT.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

I recognize those tactics! The coders have programmed these LLMs to use the same tricks psychics use: flattery, love bombing, telling the person what they want to hear, and they have no limits to the grandiosity of their pronouncements. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since the LLMs are just stealing the effective tactics they steal off the internet. Unfortunately, they’re amplifying it and backing it up with the false authority of pseudoscience and the hype about these things being futuristic artificial intelligence, which they are not. We already know that AIs are prone to “hallucinations” (a nicer term than saying that they lie), and if you’ve ever seen ChatGPT used to edit text, you know that it will frequently tell the human how wonderful and excellent their writing is.

I propose a radical alternative to banning ChatGPT and other LLMs, though. Maybe we should enforce consumer protection laws against the promoters of LLMs — it ought to be illegal to make false claims about their product, like that they’re “intelligent”. I wouldn’t mind seeing Sam Altman in jail, right alongside SBF. They’re all hurting people and getting rich in the process.

Once we’ve annihilated a few techbros, then we can move on to Big Tea. How dare they claim that Brownian motion and random sorting of leaves in a cup is a tool to read the mind of God and give insight into the unpredictable vagaries of fate? Lock ’em all up! All the ones that claim that, that is.

Are you unmarried? Are you a Democrat?

You could be in trouble. Those rules that target trans people could be used against you.

VA officials cite the president’s 30 January executive order titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.

Maybe you thought that executive order was a fine thing. It was hurting trans people, but you aren’t trans, so no worries!

Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that removing civil rights protections from one group opens the door to removing rights from other groups. If you didn’t complain when trans people were criminalized, you don’t get to complain when the fascists pound on your door.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show. The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.

Are you single? Are you a Democrat? Have you joined a union? Have you been the vicim of a crime?

They “seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected”, said Dr Kenneth Kizer, the VA’s top healthcare official during the Clinton administration. He said the changes open up the possibility that doctors could refuse to treat veterans based on their “reason for seeking care – including allegations of rape and sexual assault – current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and personal behavior such as alcohol or marijuana use”./p>

Have you forgotten that civil rights are supposed to protect everyone?

So far, this is only a hypothetical danger. But talk to your gay and trans friends — they’ll tell you how rapidly a hypothetical risk can become an immediate threat to your health and well-being.

Creep

RJ May, a state representative in South Carolina, voted for anti-trans legislation, and then piously declared that

We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done to them.

He was declared Legislator of the Year in 2023 by Moms for Liberty, and was vice chair of the Freedom Caucus. He was a true conservative hero.

Unknown to everyone, though, he had set up an account on KiK, an instant messaging app popular because you don’t have to provide email addresses or phone numbers to sign up, which gives a nice illusion of anonymity. However, if someone uses the service for criminal activity, the police can get the IP addresses used by posters and trace them back to the person.

Guess who was swapping hundreds of images and videos of child pornography under the username joebidennnn69? You guessed it, I’m sure.

RJ May was arrested at his Lexington County home after a lengthy investigation and was ordered Thursday by a federal judge to remain jailed until his trial.

The three-term Republican is accused of using “joebidennnn69” to exchange 220 different files of toddlers and young children involved in sex acts on the Kik social media network for about five days in spring 2024, according to court documents that graphically detailed the videos.

Each charge carries a five-to-20 year prison sentence upon conviction and prosecutors suggested May could spend over a decade in prison if found guilty.

The files were uploaded and downloaded using May’s home Wi-Fi network and his cellphone, prosecutors said. Some were hidden by the use of a private network but others were directly linked to his internet addresses.

He is claiming that he didn’t do it, that someone stole his wifi password. Except…

Prosecutors said they also investigated whether May used a fake name to travel to Colombia three times after finding videos on his laptop of him allegedly having sex with three women. An agent from the Department of Homeland Security testified the women appeared to be underage and were paid. U.S. agents have not been able to locate the women.

Prosecutors said May created a Facebook account with his fake name and his internet history showed him switching between his real account and the fake one and even searching his primary opponent from the fake login.

He is currently being held without bail.

Prosecutors asked that May, 38, not be given bail because he lives at home with his wife and young children, and some of the files he is accused of sharing feature children of about the same age as his.

Every accusation is a confession.

They caught him!

The police caught Vance Boelter. Good. Now we can all forget him forever.

Except for the people whose lives he harmed. Two of them are dead, two were incredibly lucky.

On Sunday evening, US Senator Amy Klobuchar shared a statement from Yvette Hoffman expressing appreciation for the outpouring of public support.

“John is enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods,” Yvette Hoffman said in a text that Klobuchar posted on social media. “He took 9 bullet hits. I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive. We are gutted and devastated by the loss of Melissa and Mark.”