You knew this combo was coming

Scott Adams makes a blatantly racist rant and his comic strip is dropped from a large number of newspapers; guess who rushes to defend him? That privileged child of apartheid, Elon Musk.

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

That is the least surprising alliance since the Rome-Berlin Axis.

Well, I guess we all have to start reading Dilbert, since Elon says so.

Florida, again

Now they’re planning to destroy higher ed in the state by putting everything in the hands of the governor and his appointed cronies.

A bill filed this week in the Florida House would turn many of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law by limiting diversity efforts, vastly expanding the powers of university boards and altering course offerings.

House Bill 999, filed by Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, proposes leaving all faculty hiring to boards of trustees, allowing a faculty member’s tenure to be reviewed “at any time,” and removing majors or minors in subjects like critical race theory and gender studies. It would also prohibit spending on activities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and create new general education requirements.

You want to read the whole bill? Here it is.

My sympathies to my colleagues in Florida. This is a terrible time to be looking for a new job — colleges everywhere are struggling — but do you really want Chris Rufo deciding whether to fire you or not?

Wow, Florida…

I’m sorry, Florida is a joke.

If the Lee County Republican Party has their way, the state of Florida will be banning the use of Covid-19 vaccines. Yes, you heard that correctly. Based on a majority vote, the Party has passed a so-called “Ban the jab” resolution that will now go to the desk of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) for his consideration. And why does the Party want such a ban? Well, an article for WINK News by Michael Hudak and Taylor Wirtz quoted Joe Sansone, the guy who drafted the resolution, as saying, “The Lee County Republican Party is going to be on the vanguard of this campaign to stop the genocide because we have foreign non-governmental entities that are unleashing biological weapons on the American people.”

This Sansone clown is a “psychotherapist” who clearly knows nothing about biology. He claims the vaccine is a “bioweapon”, and he has the ear of the governor. Do you think DeSantis will refuse to sign his insane declaration?

Sansone is pretty far out there.

The WINK article also included another quote from Sansone that really seemed to embrace some conspiracy theory claims: “If you got this shot, you go home and hug your pregnant wife—she can have a miscarriage through skin contact.” Wait, so now, you’ve got to start worrying about hugging people who have gotten Covid-19 vaccines? How exactly is that supposed to work scientifically? Did Sansone provide any peer-reviewed scientific studies to support his assertion? Most likely not, because good luck trying to find any peer-reviewed scientific studies to support such an assertion.

Don’t worry, though, he has been verified by Psychology Today, so you can trust him. PT would never publish a wackaloon, right? (Actually, I feel like Psychology Today is the Florida of pop-sci magazines.)

Joseph Sansone, M.S., PhD, LMHC, CCMHC, is the author of Bioplasticity: Hypnosis Mind Body Healing. A psychotherapist specializing in clinical hypnosis, Joseph was trained in advanced clinical hypnosis at the Academy of Professional Hypnosis in 1997. Dr. Sansone has a B.A. in psychology, a M.S. in clinical mental health counseling, and a PhD in psychology. Joseph has spent much of his life as an entrepreneur and enjoys facilitating self-actualization. Joseph Sansone is a licensed mental health counselor as well as a board certified clinical mental health counselor. Dr. Sansone is also a member of the National Guild of Hypnotists.

Hmmm, I was right?

I said we should cancel Scott Adams, and gosh, look what happened: people spoke up all across the country, and Scott Adams was canceled.

Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them.

I guess it’s easy to be a prophet when you predict the obvious stuff.

One could argue that this means Adams will be whining indignantly about injustice and those damned libs some more, but that’s fine, he has free speech, he can complain all he wants, I simply won’t be hearing about it and can take some satisfaction in the fact that he won’t be making as much money off his bigotry anymore.

Probably touched by an angel

Asbury University is a small Christian college in Kentucky with a reputation for promoting these weird cultish revival meetings.

What started as a standard chapel service on Feb. 8 quickly ballooned into something much larger than anyone could have anticipated. “The first day we had a very ordinary service, I would call it unremarkable,” university President Dr. Kevin Brown told NBC News. But by nightfall, students began returning to the auditorium, joining the group of those that stuck around after the initial mass. More followed, and more, and more, until the chapel was overflowing with students eager to join their peers in prayer. For the next 12 days, the ever-growing congregation worshipped around the clock, as word of the movement meanwhile spread like wildfire on social media, encouraging thousands of pious hopefuls to trek to Asbury and join what many participants had dubbed a “revival.”

It did go in a direction nobody anticipated. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus!

Someone who attended the “large spiritual revival” at Asbury University on Feb. 18 has measles, the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services announced Friday night.

“Anyone who attended the revival on Feb. 18 may have been exposed to measles,” Dr. Steven Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health, said in a statement. “Attendees who are unvaccinated are encouraged to quarantine for 21 days and to seek immunization with the measles vaccine, which is safe and effective.”

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

A peek into the fantasies of a creationist

In case you ever wondered what kind of schlock a creationist would churn out if they decided to write fiction, I give you…Mythic Evolution, a collection of short stories written by Miguel Atkinson.

Finally the mysteries of evolution may be revealed! Short stories on evolution collected to enjoy! From the World’s Greatest Evolutionist appearing to solve every mystery of evolution to the raw power of the Lightning Evolutionist, the world of evolution may never be the same!

I know, you’re curious, but like me, you don’t want to pay $3.99 to read any of these glorious works of creative writing. Fortunately, he provides a free sample, which I include below the fold, which simultaneously will satisfy your curiosity about the content and will cure you of any desire to read further. But first, I’ll tell you what I found interesting about it.

Here is the cover to the book.

Even conservative Christians know that sex sells! The orientation of the image is a bit odd, and I found myself wondering why this woman is wearing her lab safety goggles around her thigh.

Then the sample story is about…a debate at a science conference. Creationists certainly have a skewed perspective on what science involves, don’t they? In this story, his mystery man scientist — who is wearing a lab coat and safety goggles, of course — presents his dazzling theory. Or rather, what a creationist thinks would be a typical scientific explanation.

…humans like bananas even though they are not native to their locality. Here we see humans remember their ape-like diet. Humans love bananas and apes love bananas. I call it, theory of evolutionary flavor!!! Haha! Why? Therefore evolution.

Then the creationist, Dr. Roman Sigfried, who is going to end the lies of evolution with a presentation of his evidence, reveals his rebuttal: photos of human footprints and human bones on top of dinosaur tracks. Atkinson has all the power of his imagination to conjure up a persuasive example, and he falls back on a debate that rehashes the Paluxy River footprints. It’s been done. It didn’t work.

The excerpt ends shortly after the evolutionist threatens to kill his opponent, so I guess we’ll never know how the big debate is resolved. I promise you won’t enjoy the full force of his muddled writing and twisted logic and limited imagination, but here’s the unadorned writing sample if you wish to torture yourself.

[Read more…]

Tomorrow is a “Day of Hate”

There’s nothing anyone can do about it, I guess, but anti-semitic, that is, NAZI organizers are telling their followers to carry out acts of harassment against Jewish people on Saturday. The police are just warning you all — you’re on your own, nothing they can do.

Chicago police are urging Jewish and other religious communities to be extra vigilant this weekend when a neo-Nazi group has declared a “day of hate.”

“At this time, there is no actionable intelligence,” the Chicago Police Department said in a statement. “We continue to actively monitor the situation.”

In New York, the police will have “elevated situational awareness”, but otherwise, it’s on you to be careful.

In the warning, the NYPD advised officers to maintain “elevated situational awareness” on Saturday, particularly at locations that “might garner higher interest from these types of actors.”

What good are the police, then? Once the bodies have bled out, then they can step in? I have noticed that the police are pretty darned good at making life miserable for black people, harassing them with frequent traffic stops, hassling them on street corners, threatening them with arrest for trivial actions, even too often outright killing them — I don’t want cops murdering skinheads either, but it seems to be easier to stroll around with a swastika tattoo than the unadorned skin a black person is born with. The police have the tools, they use them when they wish, but apparently, they don’t wish to crack down on white people threatening violence to other citizens.

In addition to the uselessness of cops, do these Nazis have even an ounce of introspection? Declaring a “Day of Hate” really ought to be enough for any normal person to realize that they are the baddies. The very baddest baddies. I guess the fact that they’re wearing swastika arm bands should have been the first clue, but they ignored that and are just going to run all the way to beating up little old Jewish ladies in the street, because they generically hate them.

There be spiders under there!

Beneath that huge pile of drifted and shoveled snow beside my garage lies buried my compost bin, legendary home to many generations of spiders (especially Steatoda borealis) and maggots. I couldn’t seen any spiders before the last big storm, but now I can’t even get to it. It’s completely covered in an avalanche of snow.

This is probably just fine for the occupants. Lots of spiders overwinter by snuggling down under the layers of snow, and others just tuck away an egg sac and let the embryos rest quietly until the spring. I’ll be checking in as soon as it melts and it warms up a bit more.

We came this close to electing a bozo governor

OK, it wasn’t really that close: Scott Jensen was defeated 52% to 44% by Tim Walz in the recent Minnesota gubernatorial race. It looks worse in the maps, but that’s because rural Minnesota is relatively thinly populated, with most people living in the dark blue lake of Democrats on the eastern side of the state. You mean to tell me that real estate doesn’t vote?

Scott Jensen would not be making the news now except that he’s under investigation by the state medical licensing board.

Dr. Scott Jensen, the family medicine doctor who lost his run at Minnesota governor in the midterm elections last year, announced on social media that he was under investigation by his state’s medical board, adding “If it can happen to me, it can happen to you!”.

It can only happen to me if I were a medical doctor, and if I spent an election campaign making grossly dishonest claims about the pandemic.

This “humble midwestern family doctor” has some pretty serious ties to international Bannon politics which would explain his shocking brashness. Jensen’s attempts to convey his overdue accountability as an attack not just on him but on anyone who speaks out as he so “courageously” does (in line with his political affiliations) is Trumpian. It’s also how fascists gaslight for undeserved support. He is the problem. His actions have had consequences on others and it is high time they have consequences for him. Thanks to his November loss, he’s just a regular citizen without the power to carry out his revenge fantasies on the medical board.

Fortunately, he got beat, badly. The news isn’t so great for Wisconsin.

In any case, accountability has come far too late for these politically-aligned disinformation doctors thanks in large part to politically-aligned lobbying efforts. One state over in Wisconsin, Senator Ron Johnson – who had hosted Jensen’s Pandata colleague McCullough on his conspiracy panels – won his re-election. He has joined the fight against medical license accountability for his allies, despite that falling completely outside his jurisdiction as a senator.

Doctors like Jensen and politicians like Johnson claim to want to take politics out of healthcare while politicizing medicine during a global crisis. There is no sympathy to be felt for power-hungry men like these who lie so brazenly and so destructively. Covid was not a political game; it has cost real people their real lives. Disinformation has been central to the global failure that has been the Covid response.

I hope disinformation will have a political cost. It’s a thin hope, though.

Cancel Scott Adams

Fuck both those guys

That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? We have the power to somehow, in some way cancel people for being, for instance, racist as hell. So get to work! Chant the magic words, wave your fairy wands, summon the spirits of expulsion, whatever, and banish Scott Adams to some pit on the fringes of Sheol. He’s the face of bland, casual, rich white person racism.

I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, the 65-year-old author exclaimed. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.

Reiterating that whites need to escape, Adams said that he had already done so by moving to an area with a very low Black population. He then cited Black CNN anchor Don Lemon to justify his assertion that there’s a correlation between a mostly Black neighborhood and a bunch of problems he didn’t see in majority-white areas.

So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore, Adams huffed. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.

He continued: The only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying.

This rant was prompted, he claims, by a survey that showed that the phrase “It’s OK to be white” was considered racist by almost half of black people. How considerate of Adams to immediately confirm that opinion.

If we can’t “cancel” Scott Adams, then “canceling” is a toothless, imaginary threat. The difficulty lies in the fact that Adams is rich, his comic makes lots of money for a tangle of distributors (Andrews McMeel Syndication, Universal Uclick, GoComics, etc.), and all you have to do is look at the comics page of any newspaper to see that this is an industry locked in to nearly permanent frozen rigidity. Adams knows this. He can afford to be smug and safe and bigoted.

He can be pulled by individual newspaper chains, though.

Amid the incorporation of the anti-”woke” plot lines, Dilbert was dropped last September from 77 newspapers by publisher Lee Enterprises. Adams, for his part, claimed the move “was part of a larger overhaul” of comic syndication. At the same time, however, he also said it’s “possible” the strip was pulled for other reasons.

I suspect that all we can do is recognize that Adams is a front for racism, and while we can’t do anything about him, we certainly can judge our friends and family who post Dilbert comics on their office door and send them around via Facebook. That’s all “canceling” is, anyway.