GOATS ON FIRE!

Kooks are like stray cats: give them a little bit of attention, and they end up following you everywhere, making annoying squalling noises and clawing at your door. A perfect example is David Mabus aka Dennis Markuze aka That Insane Prat, who, now that registration is a barrier to posting his little kook-droppings here, has taken to trying to flood my mailbox. Ha ha, the laugh is on him, my mailbox is already flooded! Also, I’ve got filters up the wazoo there, anyway.

There a whole lot of skeptics (and the entire faculty of the University of Minnesota Morris, too, who have marveled and laughed at is output) who have been getting these lunatic emails, but I just filter them and delete them. However, Rebecca Watson has pointed out one felicitous random phrase from his recent eruption: GOATS ON FIRE! It’s just sitting there. I have no idea what he’s talking about. But it does seem to me to be a useful term for flagging weird stuff, so I’ve added it to my email filters to highlight any comments that use the phrase. It’ll be handy for bringing the crazy to my attention…as long as you don’t abuse it.

And again, the stray cat effect: crazy David Cumming, author of the God Equation, really wants my attention, and sent me a four page summary of his reasoning. It was too long and too stupid, so I only skimmed it, but in case anyone else wants to add it to their cracked pot collection, I’ve scanned it in. No, don’t thank me. I’m just hoping one of you will shred it apart so that Cumming will follow you home.

It’s very GOATS ON FIRE! There is a section that asks, “Where is the science?”, but when I looked, there isn’t any there.

Time to activate Team Canada!

Uh, there is a Team Canada, isn’t there? Many of you may have noticed that Dennis Markuze has been going on a commenting spree lately. He’s leaving a few hundred threatening messages a day, which I clean up as I find them, and has also said he is emailing these threats to every individual member of my university (I haven’t verified that he has yet, but he has done so in the past). I’d say he is just another deranged spammer, except that he’s been escalating lately — the messages have become more personal and much more violent. Here’s a small sample of the terroristic threats he’s sending out:

i will execute you. the police wont save you

God told me to MURDER you…

pz and his entire family will burn in HELL…
police won’t save that fucker from me…

you will be executed without mercy…

you have forfeit your lives…
and the police wont save you…

see, the entire university is going to be destroyed because of
blaspheming PZ…
this will be sent to every member of the University…

police won’t save that fucker from me…

did you know that blasphemy is punishable by DEATH and I am here
to execute all of you?

He is quite simply insane, and unfortunately, he’s got violent delusions and is becoming increasingly frenetic in his outbursts. It’s time to call in the police. Unfortunately, he’s Canadian, so I need to contact them…and the Mounties don’t have a station down here in Minnesota. Here are some of his recent IP addresses.

whois 72.12.103.179
B2B2C Inc B2B2C-CABLE (NET-72-12-96-0-1)
72.12.96.0 – 72.12.111.255
CIDC Internal use B2B2C-CABLE1 (NET-72-12-96-0-2)
72.12.96.0 – 72.12.111.255

whois 69.70.187.234
Le Groupe Videotron Ltee VL-13BL (NET-69-70-0-0-1)
69.70.0.0 – 69.70.255.255
Videotron Ltee VL-D-QN-4546BB00 (NET-69-70-187-0-1)
69.70.187.0 – 69.70.187.255

whois 69.28.232.153
Peer 1 Network Inc. PEER1-BLK-07 (NET-69-28-192-0-1)
69.28.192.0 – 69.28.255.255
3482286 Canada Inc PEER1-3482286CANADA-02 (NET-69-28-232-0-1)
69.28.232.0 – 69.28.233.255

I suspect that he spends his insomniac nights wandering from internet cafe to internet cafe, sitting down for a while in each to tap in his rants and screeds and post them repeatedly to various blogs and forums. It makes it difficult to get his ISP to put a block on him, because he doesn’t seem to have one and is probably using public terminals. He also varies his login name and fake email address, which makes it difficult to block him on my end.

Markuze has been doing this for years and years…I remember him popping up on usenet with this nonsense. We’ve all become somewhat inured to the crazy ranting Canadian with the Nostradamus obsession, and it’s not good — at some point he’s going to snap and cause harm to himself or others, and investigators will look with considerable alarm at the rising tide of hysterical threats he has been posting and wonder why no one did anything.

So let’s do something now. I just need somebody with some knowledge of Canadian legalities to explain how. Suggestions about how to get the RCMP to take this nut seriously would be appreciated.

If nothing else, when my body is found beaten to death with a hockey stick, surrounded by scrawled quatrains from Nostradamus, you’ll all know who was responsible and will be able to point a finger. Seriously. I don’t think I’m his only declared target, and I think he’s too scrambled up in the head to make the concerted effort necessary to get all the way to Morris, Minnesota (and I have mentioned him to the local police), so I’m not barricading my doors — but he has loudly announced his desire to commit mass murder. I think the innocent residents of Ottawa or Montreal (it’s not clear where he lives) are in some danger.

I give up

I have just spent over an hour of my day cleaning up the spam from the insane asshole, David Markuze/Mabus. I’m still not done; I’ve got various tools cranking away in the background purging his recent eruption of hate-filled, lunatic rants. 160 comments, all saying the same thing.

It’s too much, and it’s eating up way too much of my time. Starting Monday, I’m turning user registration back on. I know, a lot of you find it a real pain, and it will inhibit some people from commenting…I’d rather not do it. But I’m serious: David Markuze is costing me too much time and effort, and I have to take some fairly extreme efforts to cut him off. Blame him, not me.

If any of you know a way to get to his ISP (he’s Canadian, lives in Quebec, and currently uses the IP address 70.48.98.204) and convince them that he is committing egregious abuse of his privileges on the internet, that would be a useful alternative. I doubt that we can shut him down at the source, though, so my only choice is to throttle everyone here.

P.S. All of you who responded to Mabus are not helping. The next time this happens I’m also purging all of your comments, so don’t bother making them.

P.P.S. Fair warning: this kind of thing also frays my tolerance to a frazzle. There are a few other morons who have been commenting here regularly, and it’s not going to take much to make me snap and finally get around to banning your useless, parasitic asses. Silver Fox, Pete Rook, and Facilis…I’m looking at you. You might want to lie low until the “Hulk Smash” mood fades a little bit.

Kooks amuck

What happened last night? Did someone spike the entire North American water supply with hallucinogens? Because for some reason all the kooks went nuts in a short span of time. Many of you probably noticed that David Mabus/Markuze, the Canadian lunatic with the obsession with Nostradamus and James Randi and seeing atheists burn in hell, went on a spamming spree all over here (a spree which seems to have been mostly cleaned up now). He was also emailing me his angry rants, so that was another mess to clean up.

There was other silly email, but I’ve thrown most of it out, too. You might be amused at the Return of the Kwok, though. He’s been mailing me regularly, and also cc’ing his cockeyed screeds to random other people, like senior faculty in my discipline. This one also went out to Abbie, for no rational reason that I can determine.

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The recent Mabus incursion…

I see you’ve all met our little troll, David Mabus. “Mabus” (his real name is Dennis Markuze, and he used to sell used computers in Montreal, Canada) has been flooding my mailbox for about the last month — he has a list of about 70 skeptics and atheists, and just about every day he fires off his little angry rant about how James Randi owes him a million dollars right now, based on prophecies from Nostradamus or some such nonsense. You can get a feel for his insanity from this series of posts he made to the Center for Inquiry forum. It’s hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that he really is mentally ill; if any of you know this fellow personally, you might want to get him some help, fast.

I do have his phone number and address. He has been escalating his attacks lately, and if they get any worse, I’ll be contacting the authorities myself. This is one of those cases where I’ve been targeted by someone with a severe mental disorder, and I think he can be a real risk — but of course I’m only one among many targets, and I think the person who ought to be most concerned is James Randi.


Mabus is still dumping lots of spam in my mailbox—and one claims, ” I will send the CFI link with this video to every faculty member at your university….”.

Great. My colleagues, I hope, are getting used to all the kooks who think they can get at me by proxy by sending crap to them.