May righteous wrath consume all tainted by InfoWars

Alex Jones offered each of the families of the Sandy Hook children he defamed $120,000 to settle their lawsuits against him. They turned him down.

Each of the plaintiffs turned down the settlement offer in court documents, saying, “The so-called offer is a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

Jones treated those murdered children as things, things he could use to jack up right-wing hysteria and fuel profitable traffic to his site. They are not things. Jones was so unconscionably exploitive and abusive that I can entirely sympathize with those parents. They aren’t looking for money, something else Jones can’t understand. They are out to destroy a locus of hatred, one that grew on the bodies of dead children.

InfoWars has now declared bankruptcy, saying they only have assets of between $0-$50,000. That’s a lie. They have a heavily-trafficked website that brings in at least that much every week; they get ad revenue from Breitbart, so at least one other right-wing site is propping them up; they’ve got a quack store and must have a storage facility filled with crap like Ultra Brain Force (although, I’ll give them this: if their supply was valued for their effectiveness, it would be worth $0) and stupid hats; just the video gear that they use to record and edit all the lies they pump out has got to be worth more than that. Jones has a house and cars and a studio.

Take them all and put Jones in an institution for the criminally insane. Cut off all the “reporters” he supports — Ian Miles Cheong, Owen Shroyer, Millie Weaver, Margaret Howell, Savannah Hernandez, etc. — and let them get jobs serving fast food somewhere, if they’re qualified for that. Burn it all down. Scatter salt on the careers of all the people affiliated with it.

Wait, when did Casey Luskin get a Ph.D.?

I met Luskin 8 years ago. How time flies when the idiot stops yapping.

I just learned that the Attack Mouse of the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin, got a Ph.D. I’d known that he sort of vanished in 2016, leaving the Discovery Institute, but had no idea why…I missed it entirely, but Klinghoffer mentioned it last year, in 2021, that he’d been in South Africa, getting a degree in geology. It was a secret!

Dr. Luskin’s PhD in geology, from the University of Johannesburg, is something to celebrate. It was five years in the making, during which his location and activities were a closely guarded secret. In truth, while he was far away geographically, we thought of Casey often and missed him. The reality of the Darwinist cancel culture meant that if word got out, some malignant ID critic — more than one, in all likelihood — would try to hurt him and ruin his doctoral work, get him kicked out of his university, whatever they could do. There were a couple of times when we were anxious that something just like that might happen.

Wow, your persecution complex is showing. If they’d been open about it, I would have figured it was a good thing that he was finally off learning something. Truth be told, I didn’t care and failed to notice that he’d stopped lying for 5 years, and barely noticed his return. That’s saying something, because when I took a look at my blog archives, I’ve been ripping on Luskin’s stupidity and mendacity for over a decade and a half, at least.

September 2006: Luskin claims that the fusion of chromosome 2 in the human lineage is not evidence for evolution, and poses a huge problem for neo-Darwinism, because a Robertsonian fusion would be non-viable, and even if it were, you’d have to have two individuals of different sexes to acquire the same mutation in order to reproduce. He knows nothing of genetics, but he likes to pretend otherwise.

March 2007: Luskin reviews Carroll’s book, The Making of the Fittest, and to show how wrong the book is, inadvertently reveals that he doesn’t understand junk DNA or pseudogenes. This is a habit with him: anytime he is expected to discuss a subject, he quickly reveals that his understanding is a millimeter deep.

October 2007: Luskin declares that gene duplication is simultaneously trivial and incapable of generating new information. To make his point, he quote-mines a Nature article to misrepresent its conclusions.

May 2009: Luskin is invited on to Fox News (a match made in hell) to claim that all the biology textbooks are wrong, repeating the Haeckel nonsense, and further claiming that horizontal gene transfer invalidates all evolutionary trees.

January 2010: Luskin thinks that finding fossil trackways older than Tiktaalik invalidates transitional forms. Everything is supposed to be linear and sequential, don’t you know.

July 2011: Luskin claims that I conceded that embryology does not support evolution. I, of course, said no such thing. This is how he operates, though.

July 2014: Luskin quote-mined me to claim I agreed with Behe that chloroquine resistance in malaria couldn’t possibly be a result of evolution, when I said the opposite. This is something of a theme in Luskin’s ‘work’, that he can’t read for comprehension and replaces understanding with lies.

September 2015: Luskin gets cranky about the discovery of Homo naledi. Once again, because the fossil demonstrates a mosaic set of features, rather than recognizing that biology predicts a complex branching pattern in the human lineage, he thinks it disproves evolution. Really, the guy has the most child-like understanding of basic concepts.

Possibly most revealing, way way back in 2006 he also criticized the journalist Chris Mooney for not having a degree in biology, claiming that he has no formal credentials in neither science nor law, back at a time when he only had an undergraduate degree in geology. I guess being blind to hypocrisy is an important skill for a creationist, and I’m going to guess that he went back to school to get an advanced degree in something just so he could claim to have credentials of some sort. Joke’s on him, though: we don’t care.

Trust me, I have a long history of dealing with Luskin’s lies. Now that he’s back at the Discovery Institute — I guess he didn’t actually get a doctorate so he could do advanced study in geology — one might wonder what idiocies he’s promoting more recently? Professor Dave has got you covered.

Oh man, he was terrible in the past, he’s just as terrible as ever now. I guess the only thing his new degree did was promote him from Attack Mouse to Attack Rat.

Hell has many chambers

It isn’t just the one in the previous post. It also includes this nightmare hellscape:

It’s next week, the damned will need to get their tickets soon. Of course it’s in Texas.

It’s a one-day event, noon until 10pm, and look at all those people! Everyone is crammed into panels so they can shout over each other, a crucial part of being in Hell. They seem to have simply drafted a bunch of otherwise unknown nobodies from social media; I especially like the ones who don’t even go by an identifiable name, like Nuance Bro and Andrew, just Andrew, and oooh, Spectre. Spooky. They seem to have no qualifications other than a follower count and reliably regressive opinions.

You know, once upon a time I was one of those guys in great demand to appear at conferences, but then I became Mr Unpopular practically overnight because I spoke out against a rapist. I suppose I could have been there if only I’d abandoned human decency and all of my principles to be part of that mess, like a Peter Coffin (who is also going to be there.)

At least I can attend Skepticon without any regrets…and yes, it’s happening this year, July 29-31, in person in St Louis. Look for a real announcement from the organizers sometime soon, but keep that weekend open.

An outbreak of vampires in Kentucky this weekend?

It’s the only way to interpret this rather ominous newspaper ad.

Except, right, it’s Easter, that weekend when the death-cult celebrates involuntary sacrifice and grisly torture methods.

It’s all OK, because maybe their victims of slow murder will pop back up and be alive again, despite the fact that in two thousand years of repeated trials with billions of participants, it’s never happened, not once, other than the occasional apocryphal hallucination.

Spontaneous combustion for the win!

You know that Russian flagship that mysteriously caught fire yesterday? Well, it sank.

The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sank after an attack from Ukrainian forces triggered a “significant explosion” as the vessel floated off the coast of Ukraine, U.S. officials said Thursday, with Moscow offering a competing claim about the cause of the destruction.

The alternative explanation from Moscow (which has acknowledged that it sank) is that…it caught fire.

Personally, I think the Ukrainian military has been drafting gremlins.

HaloDays

My grandnephew Alex (my brother’s daughter’s son — it can be hard to keep track!) is growing into a young man, which brings with it challenges most of us didn’t have to worry about. He was born with cleft lip and palate, which was surgically corrected…many times. It turns out that this is not a one-and-done kind of surgery, as he grows, his skull has to be continuously adjusted with more surgery and more gadgets. Right now he’s about to go in and get a device called a halo attached to his head for 3 months. It’s like braces for your whole face.

He has decided to document the procedure and his travails afterwards with a video series called HaloDays.

Follow and subscribe!

The line goes down

How much should owning the rights to a picture of tweet be worth? If you asked me, I might give you, as an act of charity, a dollar before throwing it away. Not Sina Estavi! He paid $2.9 million for this:

Oops. I think I just committed grand larceny. It’s the first time I ever stole millions of dollars, and it felt good. Maybe I should steal more…oh, wait. Uh-oh.

Crypto investor Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ever for $2.9 million in March of 2021. And after a year of constant hype for NFTs, most people would naturally assume Estavi might be able to turn a nice profit on his investment by now. But most people would be wrong.

Estavi put the NFT up for auction last week and bidding ended on Wednesday. The highest bid? Roughly $277 worth of ethereum, at current prices, according to crypto news outlet CoinDesk.

That’s a crushing disappointment. One moment I’m a glamorous international thief planning a weekend in Monte Carlo on my ill-gotten gains, and next I discover that my precious objet d’lucre is worth next to nothing, and if I could even find a fence for it at best I’d get a trip to the drive-through at my local McDonald’s.

I can laugh now, but I sure hope I don’t learn that my retirement funds are all invested in blockchain shit.