New Mastodon server!

For those who care, I’ve switched my Mastodon server. I’m now @pzmyers@freethought.online.

HJ Hornbeck set this up for us a few years ago, but I didn’t bother to move at the time, but now I’ve made the shift. This server has been open for business for a while now, and is currently kind of empty (it’s me and HJ), but if anyone else is looking for a Mastodon instance to try out, come on over.

Don’t visit America

Warning: cancel your travel plans. The US is not a viable destination anymore.

Read this account by a Canadian professor who was trying to give a lecture in this country.

So much bureaucracy. So much confusion. So many intrusions into privacy. He didn’t make it to his talk, and had to struggle to get out of the us.

Stay home. Don’t come here. Maybe if we overcome these horrible people and make some steps to recover, then we’ll deserve your company.

They hate libraries, too

If this weren’t so horrifying, it would be ridiculous. Trump & Co. want to eliminate federal support for libraries.

When President Trump recently proposed eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), librarians and educators voiced outrage, confusion and fear. Soon afterward, the appointment of Keith E Sonderling as acting director of IMLS highlighted the administration’s intention to reshape the agency’s priorities toward “promoting American exceptionalism” and cultivating “patriotism”.

This is where Moms for Liberty and all those reactionary assholes who get worked up about drag queen story hour have gotten us. They’ve long wanted to police the content of libraries, so why not go all the way and get rid of them altogether? Especially since librarians tend to be sticklers for the free dissemination of knowledge.

They’re trying to close the Department of Education, too. So their vision of the future is no schools, no libraries, and every woman staying home and homeschooling their swarm of kids using conservatively approved materials. I guess they’ll plan on recruiting the scientists and engineers and medical professionals society needs from abroad…except that they hate immigrants, too.

What libraries we have left will be propaganda outlets. This whole insane notion of “American exceptionalism” has poisoned our country and wrecked our ability to cooperate and collaborate with everyone else in the world, and now it’s official American policy.

I’m not at all happy to be finding myself living in one of those dystopian YA novels.

That problem is too easy

I’ve seen this game of Telephone played out in my cell biology class, but to a greater degree.

Square units? Far too easy. Our first lab in cell biology is about observing cells and then doing a bunch of unit conversions — but we’re working with volumes and cubic units. For instance, we look at a sample of microorganisms taken from a local lake, and they calculate the density and size of cells, and have to estimate how many cells are in the lake and the volume they take up. I hate to tell you this, but our lake either contains one gigantic cell that fills the entire thing, or is a thick soup containing 10googolplex cells…mmmm, sounds tasty and nutritious.

Fascists erasing history for racist reasons

The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.

It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.

We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.

The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.

After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.

I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.

Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.

That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.

That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.

They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Native American Code Talkers.

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”

The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.

Egregiously predictable

The fellow to the right is Damion Surles, a little-known troll whose previous claim to fame was distributing a doctored, fake photo of Kamala Harris standing next to notorious pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

You all know exactly where this story is going, right?

Damion Surles, 40, was identified as the suspect who allegedly interacted inappropriately with a minor.

Surles was arrested on Aug. 15 and charged with first-degree rape and child sexual abuse.

He was booked into the Jackson County Jail.

Man, there’s such a strong correlation between MAGA Republicans and child rape. It’s almost as if you’d expect their president to also be guilty of sexual assault…oh, wait.


Another one! Ricci Wynne.

A MAGA influencer known for posting sensationalized videos of homeless people in San Francisco was indicted Tuesday on federal charges of producing child sex abuse material.

Ricci Wynne, 39, known as Raw Ricci to his more than 100,000 Instagram followers, was first arrested in November and charged with pimping and pandering by procuring, HuffPost previously reported. He was taken into custody alongside a woman shortly after arriving at San Francisco International Airport.

Vivian Wilson, cover girl

Vivian Wilson is interviewed in Teen Vogue. She is not a nepo baby — she’s been cut off from the sperm donor, Elon Musk, who contributed in a minimal way to her birth.

Wilson entered the public consciousness because of her father, but not for typical nepo baby reasons. (Before you ask, Wilson says she’s been financially independent from her father since she came out as trans in 2020, so you can stop sending her Venmo requests for thousands of dollars, something she says has happened before.) At the time, she was trying to disconnect herself from Musk, eventually writing in a 2022 petition to legally change her name that she doesn’t “wish to be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form.” Though she’d never publicly spoken about Musk before then, her attempt to distance herself from him is what ultimately drew her into the public eye.

“I have a sharp tongue,” Wilson tells Teen Vogue in her second-ever published interview. “When you spend all of COVID [lockdown] in online communities of queer people who are constantly getting into drama and trying to read each other, [you] learn how to make a response very quickly, and you learn how to be funny and snap at someone else in a comedic way…. Getting into fights with other queer teenagers — that’s how you learn how to be quick and witty.” Much like her father, Wilson is extremely online; unlike her father, she’s really good at it.

In my personal experience, this holds up: the gay and trans people I’ve known are all great conversationalists with a wicked sense of humor. She definitely did not inherit that from her terrible father.

I’m sympatico with her politics, and not Musk’s.

TV: Isaacson described your politics as “radical Marxism” in the book. Do you consider yourself a Marxist?
VW: I’m a leftist, not a Marxist. I describe myself by the things that I personally believe in and the things that I feel are pretty common sense, if you think about it for more than two seconds. I believe in [universal basic income]. I believe in free health care. I believe food, shelter, and water are human rights. I believe that wealth inequality is one of the biggest problems of the United States right now, especially of our generation. I feel like workers should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, and I don’t feel like wealth should be hoarded by these mega-billionaires who are the top 1%, who only have their own interests at heart. I’ve met some of these billionaires — they’re not very good people. I don’t think any of them are.

I don’t think that’s an unusual perspective, and I think most Americans would agree with that, if they weren’t poisoned by the lie that those goals are being stolen from them by immigrants and gay/trans people. It’s the position that all Democrats should take, except for the unfortunate fact that that party is led by people seduced by money and power.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy

Would you buy a cancer cure from this man?

It’s been a while since I mentioned Joseph Mercola, the alternative medicine cancer quack with a vast empire of snake oil supplements.

If anti-vaccine influencers had a king, it would be Dr. Joseph Mercola, the osteopathic physician whose supplement empire has netted him a tidy fortune of $100 million. Mercola has been a power broker in alternative medicine circles for years—as my colleague David Corn has reported, he received a publicity boost more than a decade ago from celebrity doctor and erstwhile US Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who called him a “pioneer in holistic treatments.”

You’d think he’d be riding high right now, given that the quacks have been been put in charge health, science, and medicine in this country. But it seems his fake drug companies are getting a bit of a shakeup.

This week, the supplement industry trade publication Natural Products Insider reported that last week, Mercola suddenly fired four members of his executive team. He also announced that his company would be going in a new direction, reportedly informing his staff in a video that “my new goal is to reach billions, literally billions, around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.”

He doesn’t have a grand plan. What he’s got are delusions of grandeur, fueled by a psychic. The con man has been thoroughly conned!

The details of Mercola’s “new goal” and “new paradigm” are scant, but according to the article, he made the changes in management after extensive consultations with a psychic named Kai Clay, who sometimes goes by the name of Bahlon.

Janet Selvig, Mercola’s sister, was one of the executives who was fired. In an interview with Natural Products Insider, she expressed concern about Bahlon’s influence on her brother:

Selvig said she confronted her brother about the odd behavior on Jan. 31 after seeing hours of videos of his trance channeling sessions with Bahlon. “I just felt immediately that he was being taken advantage of,” Selvig said.

The confrontation did not go well. Selvig said her brother was very dismissive of her concerns and defended his work with Clay. “He thinks the book is going to save the world,” Selvig said. “He believes that he’s [Mercola] a god and he’s been reincarnated. And he even referred to himself as the new Jesus.”

On Feb. 2, Selvig was shown an email sent to a coworker from Mercola’s address announcing the doctor’s intention to fire Selvig, Rye, Boland and a fourth executive. The email offered the CEO spot to a different Mercola team member who later turned down the position. The email went on to explain “reasons for the mutiny,” describing the Catholic church as a “global cabal” that controls “50% of the world’s worth” and “created all the pain that most people experience.”

Who is Kai Clay? Who is Bahlon? Just ask him.

Ever hear of channeling? Or Light Language?

Meet BAHLON an ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane channeled by Master Trance Channel Kai Clay.

The messages and healing energy shared during their packed group events are always uplifting, are often staggeringly predictive—filled with the Divine healing energy of Universal love, hope and healing.

And now sometimes when available, his 10 year-old daughter Sera joins with Bahlon to share full conversations in Light Language (and interpret these in English for all) followed by Light Language meditations so powerful many say they can “feel it in the bones of every past life, present and future life.”

It’s nice that Mercola has been taken in by a New Age crackpot, but…Bahlon has also roped in his 10 year old daughter Sera. A ten year old! That is child abuse. I found a video of Bahlon and his daughter babbling (and that’s all it is, babble) at each other, if you’re curious about what “light language” is. It’s horrible and gross, and I only listened to a few minutes of it before I had to close it. Maybe you’re made of sterner stuff? I hope not, because no one should want to listen to this creep lying to a child.