Does anyone on FtB think Rowling has a point? No.

The Geeky Humanist has weighed in on l’affaire Rowling, and comes to the same conclusion most people have: Rowling is wrong about everything. I warned Sarah that posts about Rowling are a magnet for obnoxious trolls, but you know how it goes: Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, it must be addressed.

You know, HJ and Brinkman and GAS have also been punching up at a certain rich TERF, and then I noticed that Rhiannon was on the case before the Screed was published, and Caine had Rowling pegged 3 years ago.

Kent Hovind thinks he’s going to win a half billion dollars in a lawsuit

As you know, I’m not impressed with the American legal system — it has built-in deep injustices and biases, and also, while I benefit from many of them as a white man, it also has loopholes that allow every crank and bad actor to manipulate the system, shaking it as if it’s a piggy-bank to harass people and dream of getting rich. Wouldn’t you know it, Kent Hovind is one of those delusional manipulators who wants his money. He was in jail for 9 years for his money schemes — Dinosaur Adventure Land wasn’t just a tool to evangelize, but an illegal money-making operation for the Hovinds to get rich off of — and was legally convicted of his crimes, and also lost an appeal. Now he and his crackpot lawyers have convinced themselves that there was an error, a technicality, that will allow them to invalidate his conviction and sue the federal government for $500 million. It’s a fantasy. He was caught playing games with his money to avoid taxation, and he can’t deny that. What he is now claiming is that the federal government needed a “verified complaint” to even begin action against him, and therefore the entire trial should be thrown out.

As Peter Reilly explains, it’s a nonsensical complaint. What triggered his arrest, trial, and conviction was a grand jury indictment that evaluated the evidence at the time, and concluded that there was cause to pursue the matter further. Hovind is making yet another Sovereign Citizen style argument based on Imaginary Law. He’s not going to clean up and get rich with this lawsuit, but is only going to pour more money down a legal rabbit hole. I guess I can’t complain about that.

I am a little concerned about Reilly’s analysis, though.

Robert Baty alerted me to the filing. I think there are others involved but he seems to be the prime mover behind Nightmare. Kent has a tendency to refer to his critics, other than those who have deserted him, as atheists. Baty is not an atheist, but rather a Christian who has a problem with Young Earth Creationism.

Baty is a retired IRS agent and Kent maintains that Baty has been called out of retirement to “get Hovind”. I find that accusation highly implausible. My evaluation of Robert Baty is that you should never underestimate a cranky old man with a couple of obsessions, an internet connection and time on his hands when he is not watching the grandchildren.

<gasp> I feel seen!

By the way, Kent Hovind posted another comment in my latest video.

How can you BELIEVE the amazingly complex genetic code in ANY form of life happened by random chance over billions of years? How can you teach the silly evolution religion to students and still sleep at night? Call 855-big dino ext 3 to schedule a debate on the very best three evidences you have for evolution. I’ll post the debate unedited (unless profanity needs bleeped) on my kenthovindofficial YouTube channel where my rebuttal of your position was posted a few weeks ago. Come visit our Dinosaur Adventure Land REAL Science Center in Lenox, Alabama and I’ll give you a tour. :) Kent Hovind

I don’t believe organisms evolved entirely by random chance, so as usual, his criticisms are not based on reality. I’ve informed him, though, that my fee for wasting my time in debate with idiots has risen to $7000/day, a special rate just for him. Maybe when he wins his absurd lawsuit, he’ll be able to afford my rates. Unlike him, though, I’m not counting on the windfall, ever.

Snide and funny!

This guy makes a series of smart points about fascists. I found it amusing.

I am fine with statues being torn down and military bases being renamed. This is not the destruction of history, it is the correction of distortions of history, a process that historians do all the time. Some people seem to think history is fixed and absolute, but then it would be done — and historians are well aware that our understanding of the past requires constant sifting of new evidence and reassessment of past interpretations in the light of new knowledge. US history, in particular, has been the victim of political attacks to change people’s perception of the Civil War, and to erase the struggles of black communities. It’s about time we rose up and rejected these weird ideas that Robert E. Lee was heroic, that the Civil War was about state’s rights, that the American Revolution was led by noble idealists who cared about liberty most of all, that colonialism brought enlightenment to barbarous parts of the world. Every generation lies about its virtues, and it’s the role of subsequent generations to correct the record.

If you need further dissection of JK Rowling…

Portrait of JK Rowling

I was only able to handle a single sentence of Rowling’s screed — it was too stupid to bear — but if you’re unclear on why the rest of it was so awful, Ashley Miller slogged through the whole thing, and if you’d rather see it analyzed from a trans perspective, Dawn Ennis looks at it and the context of the response to it. As far as I’m concerned, JK Rowling is dead to me and I won’t be reading anything by her ever again.

I don’t find that a particular loss. When the Harry Potter books came out, I was happy to get them for my kids — they were enthusiastic, there was some peer pressure from their friends, it got them reading, although that generally wasn’t a problem with my nerdish offspring. I read the first couple. I didn’t care for them personally. They were just too formulaic — does every book have to revolve around Quidditch, a game which makes no sense — and Hogwarts as an institution was far too offputting, seeming to fit better with the kind of British culture that thinks sending kids off to be tortured for a few years in a boarding school builds character. The movies bored me, and if you asked me now what happened in any of them, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Uh, um, there was a Quidditch match. There were monsters? Harry Potter is tormented, but never seems to do much of anything? I dunno.

She seems to be trying to churn out spinoffs from the Harry Potter universe now. I didn’t care before, I am actively repulsed now. JK can just toddle off to her mansion and her well-earned irrelevance, and the Harry Potter phenomenon can be recognized as the peculiar phenomenon it was.

They’re afraid!

The thin blue line is cracking. A few members of the Minneapolis Police Department are realizing that their jobs are in peril, and are ready to throw Derek Chauvin to the media wolves and an angry citizenry, and wrote an open letter disavowing any association with the ‘bad guys’ of the police force.

Members of the Minneapolis Police Department spoke out on Friday out against former police officer Derek Chauvin in an open letter addressed to “everyone — but especially Minneapolis citizens.”

“Derek Chauvin failed as a human and stripped George Floyd of his dignity and life. This is not who we are,” said the letter, signed by fourteen MPD officers. “We’re not the union or the administration,” the letter says.

“We stand ready to listen and embrace the calls for change, reform and rebuilding,” says the letter, which comes as powerful police unions across the country are digging in, preparing for a once-in-a-generation showdown over policing and new polls that indicate that most Americans now acknowledge that African Americans are more likely to be mistreated or even killed by police.

“There were many more willing to sign, but the group opted to showcase people from across the PD as well as male/female, black/white, straight/gay, leader/frontline, etc. Internally, this is sending a message” said Paul Omodt, a spokesperson for the officers who penned the open letter.

Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t believe you, and fuck you. The MPD has had a reputation for brutality for decades, and the minority population of Minneapolis has a rich collection of stories. Where were these police in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980? Prioritizing loyalty to a corrupt union and fellow gang members, that’s where. Standing in unity with bad cops. Probably getting in a few licks of their own. This is like those cops who now take a knee for a photo op before heading out to bust heads with a baton or shoot bystanders with rubber bullets or hose down crowds with pepper spray. I’m not impressed.

That is who they are.

Don’t be swayed when the bully starts sniveling and begging for mercy. They all do that.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about the unintended consequences of technology — I hadn’t thought about it before, had simply taken it for granted, but the ability of popular cell phones to record video is only about 12 years old, and has progressed rapidly to the point where the majority of consumers won’t accept a phone that lacks video recording technology. Better and fancier phone cameras are a major selling point! They are now used all the time to record the viciousness of the police, and are much more reliable than the body cams that somehow magically get turned off just before a cop kills someone.

I might have been much more sympathetic to a subset of cops making a plea for “change, reform and rebuilding” in 2005, before it became apparent that they were going to have problems getting away with brutality, and before all those videos emerged revealing how horrifically cruel and callous the police were. It’s too late for them now.

Lazy day on the Pomme de Terre

After making a bunch of spider cages, I spent the rest of the day slackin’. The sun was shining! There was a nice breeze! We looked for spiders! Also, I dusted off the ol’ drone and tried to remember how to fly the stupid thing, so I threw together a few clips of Pomme de Terre park. Yes, it’s a real river. Yes, it’s French for “potato”. It’s pretty!

It’s centered on the Gazebo, and I buzzed a few pelicans. Mainly, you can see what my part of the country looks like.

Work!!?!

We’re in the midst of spider season, and Mary has been finding every Parasteatoda that pokes its adorable little fangs out in the garage, so I’m running out of spider cages. I’m going to have to spend a few hours this morning with a glue gun building more, so I guess I’m going to have to go into work for a while this morning executing my weirdly specific and not at all marketable skills building happy wooden climbing structures for spiders. I’ll be back later this morning!