This is what happens when you abandon a consensus

Suddenly, we have “universities” claiming to be the only ones in pursuit of the truth.

Then…THE DEEP RIFTS. Oh, this is delicious. The phrenologists and the anti-vaxxers are battling it out on Twitter.

There’s more.

Screw all those guys, every one of them.

I’m too old for this stuff

All right, I’ve kicked prednisone to the curb, since it was magically making me wake up at 2am every morning. Now that I’ve been off it for a few days, though…I wake up at 1 am every morning, and can’t get back to sleep. Never again will I touch this poison!

To be fair, though, I think part of the problem is that the stupid ankle has slowed me down so much I’m not maintaining my usual level of physical activity, trapping me in my office most of the day. I’ve got this boat anchor strapped to my left ankle which simultaneously means I can’t get out much, but at the same time, I’m worn out from hauling it around.

On happier news, I seem to have successfully blocked our little troll. He’s now battering himself senseless posting one word abusive comments that get immediately whisked off into the spam trap. Seeing his frustrated futility cheers me right up. Also, my lectures are all prepared and ready to go for the next few days — I might be presenting them in an exhausted fog, but at least I won’t need to think too hard for a while.

The real cancel culture

It’s moms.

Monday evening’s discussion was spurred by parents of a Riverbend student, who brought their concerns to the meeting.

The mother said during public comments that she was initially alarmed by “LGBTQIA” fiction that she said was immediately made available upon accessing the library app. After doing more research, she discovered a book in the collection that she found more upsetting.

The book, “33 Snowfish” by Adam Rapp, concerns three homeless teenagers attempting to escape from pasts that include sexual abuse, prostitution and drug addiction.

Oh no! The LGBTQIA stuff was just the tip of the iceberg! Down below we find stories of homeless kids who are sexually abused, which never ever happens in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

Don’t you worry, though. The school board has a cure.

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

There’s a solution that has never ever gone wrong in the entire history of humanity.

Another example of our neutered “justice” system

Jennifer Gosar, sister to the demented fascist Paul Gosar, condemns his behavior and asks how we can sit back and watch him promote racism and genocide.

Good questions. And yet he was elected. The rot goes deep.

Cops are useless

Dynamic shot of police leaping into action to defend the citizenry from terrorists!

Have you ever read the news and wondered how the loons and right-wing terrorists can get away with it all? We had an insurrection on 6 January, 10 months ago, and the wheels of justice, we are told, grind exceedingly slow, so all we see is slaps on the wrists delivered to the low-level dupes. The ring-leaders are sheltered by doubt and fear, the propaganda sources continue to spew poison in the name of “free speech”, and Donald Trump gets to run free and plan his 2024 campaign for president. It’s doubly unjust, because while the so-called “patriots” get all the benefit of the doubt, their victims get swift and decisive condemnation from the opinion pages of the New York Times, the offices of Fox News, and too often get executed by the police. IOKYAR — It’s OK If You Are Republican — has somehow become the unwritten law of the land.

Reuters has published an article on the ongoing campaign of fear.

In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

You can shout all the terroristic threats you want because FREEEEZEPEEEECH, you can try to intimidate others at will because FREEEEEEEEEEDOMMMMM. The intimidator/terrorist gets the freedom, though, at the cost of the terrorized. And part of it is that the cops and justice system are useless at best, enablers most often, fellow terrorists at worst.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

I’ve had a small taste of that. Remember Dennis Markuze, the nutjob who sent death threats to me practically every single day for years? He wasn’t alone, either; I still get email, at a lower frequency, fortunately, from people who make explicit threats. I’ve had people announce that they were going to show up at my university office and shoot me in the head. I’ve gotten detailed descriptions from Catholics and atheists (it turns out, atheists were the worst) telling me how they were going to cut me up at public events, and horrific threats against my family. There was a time when I would document them all, gather IP addresses and even names and home addresses of these lunatics and take them to my local police department and ask them to forward them to the parties that could take action. I’d get dumb cow-like looks, nothing more, and the information would get filed away and ignored.

I eventually just learned to accept the fact that someone could promise to murder me, and all I could do was note it down so that maybe the investigation into why I was turned into a bloody corpse would have a lead. I don’t even have that confidence anymore. What I see in the justice system is that justice doesn’t matter anymore. I could be murdered in public in broad daylight and I think the cops would spend their time trying to rationalize why the culprit did it, and the media would be speculating about what I did to deserve it.

And I’m a privileged white guy! I can’t even imagine the despair and futility minorities must feel in this country. I’m a member of the older white demographic that is trampling all over decency in America, and that won’t protect me at all.

Most galling is that the 9 people who made these over-the-top threats in the story are not ashamed at all and aren’t even shy about confessing their identities and admitting that yes, they did tell an election official that they were going to “pop” them and talk about firing squads and torturous deaths; they leave abusive phone messages with horrific promises of murder with clear intent to threaten them, they get passed on to the bumbling, incompetent cops, and what do they do? They hide behind excuses to do nothing.

The officials referred the voicemail to state police, who again declined to investigate. Agency spokesperson Adam Silverman said in a statement that the message didn’t constitute an “unambiguous reference to gun violence,” adding that the word “popped” – common American slang for “shot” – “is unclear and nonspecific, and could be a reference to someone being arrested.”

Legal experts didn’t see it that way. Fred Schauer, a University of Virginia law professor, said the message likely constituted a criminal threat under federal law by threatening gun violence at specific individuals. “There’s certainly an intent to put people in fear,” Schauer said.

The article includes the recorded audio from a number of these messages. You can’t possibly listen to them and think that golly, the wording is ambiguous…they are crystal clear and no doubt is left in the listener’s mind that this person wants to do them serious harm to prevent them from doing their job. The journalists consulted multiple legal scholars about whether these were actionable threats, and got responses that were rather different from what the cops would say.

Three legal experts said the message met the threshold of a threat that could be prosecuted under federal law. “The whole purpose of the threats doctrine is to protect people from not only a prospect of physical violence, but the damage of living with a threat hanging over you,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary Law School professor.

Yeah, that’s the whole story, over and over again, at length. Angry crank screams death threats at an official. Cops shrug and do nothing. And then we all wonder why the madness is escalating.

Those uppity women…no longer controlled by fear of dinosaurs

What a charmer. This guy, Sean Parnell, is running for the Pennsylvania senate with Donald Trump’s blessing, and is facing charges of spousal abuse. His ex-wife has had two protections from abuse orders on him. He’s a thoroughly unpleasant person, as you can tell from this outburst.

The idea that a woman doesn’t need a man to be successful… the idea that a woman can live a happy and fulfilling life without a man, I think it’s all nonsense.

I am gonna say something very un-pc, I reject this study wholesale. I feel like the whole happy wife, happy life nonsense has done nothing but raise one generation of women tyrants after the next.

Maybe it is just now there is an entire generation of men that don’t want to put up with the bs of a high-maintenance, narcissistic woman.

It used to be, you know, women were attracted to your strength because you could defend them from dinosaurs.

The whole rant is just hateful and nuts, but I do confess I laughed out loud at the stupidity of that last comment.

Noooooo! Curse you, algorithm!

I made the mistake of reading this article about some minor celebrity, Demi Lovato, endorsing some weird video channel, Gaia. Look at this: it’s perfect skeptic bait.

On a Lovato-themed Gaia page for their fans, the singer’s supporters can view a free episode of a Gaia show about an “ancient space program” before signing up for a $11.99 monthly Gaia membership.

Lovato’s “handpicked favorite” shows, according to the website, include a series positing that Atlantis was real and that humanity is living in the aftermath of a battle between giants and lizard-like “reptilians.”

A representative for Lovato declined to comment on the record. Gaia didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While the claims made in the videos produced by Gaia can seem laughable, the site, which claims to have more than 750,000 members, has become a clearinghouse pushing conspiracy theories into the New Age movement. Gaia’s videos are slickly produced to look like genuine documentaries, with some featuring prominent figures in the anti-vaccine movement. The site has also been called a “hub for QAnon,” with QAnon promoters flocking to the platform after facing crackdowns from other websites.

Then I doubled my mistake. I had to look up this Gaia thing (warning: you might not want click on the link yourself, it’s cursed). It’s an overpriced subscription service for really bad fake “documentaries”. It left me wondering how these incompetent clowns get so much attention for such wacky beliefs?

I know of some of them. They’re total idiots.

But now the curse of the internet algorithm — Gaia must be pumping lots of money into their ad promotion, because now I get tons of pseudoscience ads. I can’t watch YouTube without getting wall-to-wall ads about Atlantis and the Annanuki and Bigfoot and Q. It’s annoying. In for a penny, in for a pound, so I watched a bit of this one. Don’t do it unless you’re a committed masochist!

This young man calmly asserts that he was born in Atlantis to the descendants of the Annanuki.

Now I am doomed. It’s going to be even more continuous foolishness than usual for me on the interwebs. Heed my warning!

For once, I’m siding with the engineers

I do trust the conservation of energy, and I do think evolved responses are often useful (but not always!), but most of all, I know that incompetent people can screw up badly. Recent example: leaving a loaded gun on a movie set. I’m not going to comfortably expect that somebody hung a massive object that could break my nose or worse did so correctly.

(Actually, I probably usually side with the engineers.)

I think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar might feel personally offended

Dangerous Liar

I haven’t been following this Aaron Rodgers story much at all — he’s one among so many idiots who don’t know a thing about biology or medicine, but are so arrogant that they’ll pontificate foolishly about it and end up killing people. In this case, he’s a rich, overpaid, poorly educated professional athlete, and I confess, I find it easy to dismiss him as just a big dumb jock.

And then Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rises up and demonstrates that my stereotypes are false, delivering a well-informed smackdown to the stupid football player.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has revealed several athletes who abuse their position and responsibility, not just to the public, but to other professional athletes’ livelihood.

That latest egregious abuser is Green Bay quarterback and three-time MVP Aaron Rodgers who directly and deliberately lied to fans and the public when he assured everyone he was “immunized,” knowing that word would be interpreted as his being vaccinated. He wasn’t vaccinated. And he got COVID-19. And he went maskless during in-person press conferences, which not only violated NFL rules, but put everyone else’s health at risk.

Instead of consulting immunologists, he consulted anti-vaxxer and podcast host Joe Rogan, who also contracted the virus. If he ever requires open-heart surgery will he hand the scalpel to romance writers because they know about matters of the heart? While many who came into contact with him thought he was vaccinated, Rodgers had embarked on his own regimen to boost his “natural immunity.” He failed, as any scientist could have told him—and as they have been publicly telling us for over a year. University of Michigan microbiologist Ariangela Kozik explained that achieving “natural immunity” through these homeopathic methods is a non-starter because vaccines inform our immune system what the virus looks like so the body can build its own protection.

Joe Rogan…now there’s the type specimen of the big dumb jock. Abdul-Jabbar references that to point out that, obviously, some big jocks aren’t that dumb.

Rodgers’ ignorance regarding the science of immunology brings back to life the old stereotype of the big dumb jock. His utter lack of even the most basic knowledge and logic is shocking. In an effort to defend his lying, he stated, “This idea that it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated, it’s just a total lie … If the vaccine is so great, then how come people are still getting covid and spreading covid and, unfortunately dying of covid?” Those two statements don’t even belong together. Statistics from many sources conclude that around 97 percent of those being hospitalized or who have died in the past several months are unvaccinated. The CDC found that the unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die than those vaccinated. If he thinks that’s a lie, what credible evidence does he have? None.

And then — I did not know that Rodgers had been whining about “cancel culture” and the “woke mob”, but I am unsurprised. As always, though, the ones who whimper the most about being “canceled” never seem to face any real material consequences, they’re just bawling over their inanity being exposed.

Rodgers complained that the “cancel culture” was coming for him, but his own words cancel him as a liar and a bad thinker. If he had a principled objection to the vaccine, he could have chosen not to play, like Kyrie Irving, who at least is honest. What really sacked his whining stance was his refusal to wear a mask during interviews to protect others from sickness and death. That was merely his hubris and arrogance against what he called the “woke mob.” In this case, woke means compassion and responsibility toward others. He might also remember that the only reason he is able to play in front of crowds again is because all those suckers got vaccinated.

What will happen to Aaron Rodgers? Other than the brief suspension probably very little. He’s a valuable asset to a multi-billion dollar industry. The deal he signed with the Packers in 2018 is worth $134 million, plus the $9 million for commercial endorsements such as the one he has with Adidas, State Farm Insurance, and others. He has lost one endorsement: Prevea Health, a health care provider, cancelled their contract because his actions were contrary to their commitment to encourage vaccines to end the pandemic. When Rodgers signed with the company in 2019, Dr. Ashok Rai, president and CEO of Prevea, remarked at the time, “As one of the most respected athletes in the country, Aaron is truly passionate about improving the health and wellness of our communities.” That, too, turned out not to be true.

I can’t help but think of Colin Kaepernick, who was blacklisted by the NFL for passively expressing his frustration with systemic racism—a brave act meant to help his community and save lives—while multi-millionaire Rodgers will continue to play, despite lying to the fans and his teammates and putting innocent lives in danger. Time will tell whether Rodgers will be judged by the content of his character or the strength of his throwing arm.

I’m going to guess that the content of his character has just become a more valuable asset to the regressives.

Circadian rhythms are amazing

My streak continues: 5 consecutive nights in which I go to bed, fall asleep, and then at between 2:00 and 2:05 am, my eyes snap open and I’m wide awake the rest of the night, although too tired to get anything done. I’m still kind of impressed at the consistency of this effect of the drug on my system. There’s also a bout of late afternoon/early evening shakes, but that hasn’t been as precisely predictable.

So now I’m being a bad patient and stopping the medication prematurely. I’m kind of curious to see what happens tonight. Does my internal alarm stop going off altogether? Does the clock start to vary? It’s not a great experiment, because the fact that I’m currently so dang tired is a confounding variable, but I do want to see the outcome. Unfortunately, I’d rather not do further experimentation along these lines on myself, so I’m not going to play with the variables any more. Student volunteers? The cat? Nah, that would probably be fatal to me.