One more Wohlism

Do you know why Minnesota is overrun with jihadists? Do you? DO YOU?

Chevys with bumper stickers, that’s why. How dare individuals “value all families”, support girls sports, point out that “The media are only as liberal as the conservative businesses that own them”, and wish for peace on Earth. Radicals! Freaking extremists! We’re one small step away from sharia law, socialism, and guillotining small business owners at this rate.

Ali: Bat Ang

I have to admit, I walked out of Alita: Battle Angel half-liking it. It’s set in a somewhat creative world where the oppressed citizens are dominated by a floating city overhead, and the only way out is to win a championship game of some kind of ultra-violent murderball. Dystopian society: check.

For some reason, an awful lot of the citizens of this city are missing limbs or other body parts, but they’ve been replaced by advanced cybernetic prosthetics. Some people have had their bodies entirely replaced, and are just human faces on bizarrely complex robots. Ubiquitous futuristic technology: check.

Christof Walz is a guy (all body parts human) who has the job of repairing all those prosthetics, making him indispensible. He’s also moonlights as a hunter-warrior, going about collecting bounties on bad guys. He finds a head in a junkyard — the brain is still alive, somehow — and installs it in a new robot body. That’s Alita. She’s got giant eyes, but is otherwise a pretty, teenaged gamin. Main character camping happily in the uncanny valley: check.

She’s super good at fighting, beating up all the bad cyborgs, ripping their arms off, crushing their human heads, etc. Much fight choreography. Much balletic violence. Super zippy CGI. Action movie tropes: check with a sword slash and an explosion.

Another bonus: Jennifer Connelly. She’s still beautiful, but she’s matured into an icy, stern, scary kind of older beauty. That time with the goblin king has turned her fey. I love her work.

So I’m enjoying it for what it is, as long as it’s swooping along kinetically with CGI fights and weirdly fascinating anime robot girl doing her thing. But it had 3 big problems.

They killed the dog. I’m not happy with that.

The love interest just came out of nowhere, and the boy did not have the charisma to warrant the girl abruptly (and literally) offering him her heart. It was stupid and superfluous and compromised Alita’s character. I wish a giant cyborg had murdered him on first sight, rather than the dog.

Worst of all, the ending. There wasn’t one. It just stops cold on the brink of the big battle in the murderball arena. I practically got whiplash, slamming on the brakes that hard. This was clearly a two-parter, at least, and there’s no warning of that anywhere, and it was a risky enough venture that it’s not at all certain the sequel will be made.

It’s half a movie, more like a mega-elaborate over-long trailer for a story in development. If you’ve ever wanted to watch a Margaret Keane waif slice a cyborg juggernaut in half, lengthwise, but aren’t worried about seeing a plot resolution, this is the movie for you.

One more example of the sterling inanity of Wohl and Loomer

The Chucklefuck Twins are on a legal mission here in Minnesota. Jacob Wohl explains:

Let’s just try to parse that, OK?

Laura Loomer and I just tried to serve Ilhan Omar

So they’re acting as process servers? Is there a lawsuit in the works?

with a sworn affidavit

I don’t get it. They’re serving her with a piece of paper that someone else signed? An affidavit? You don’t need to serve that. You could just mail it, it’s just providing information.

that says she never married her brother

Now we’re deeply in right-wing lunacy land. That makes no sense. They’re giving her a sworn affidavit that she never married her brother? I think most of us could recieve a piece of paper with someone’s signature on the bottom that says we hadn’t married a sibling, and without batting an eye, would calmly close the door and call local mental health services. Yeah? It’s true. I didn’t marry a relative. I don’t need you to inform me of that fact.

Apparently, though, this is part of a scurrilous rumor (spread by Minnesota’s own crank right wing conspiracy mill, the PowerlineBlog) that she married her brother in a cunning scheme to get him a green card. There is no evidence for any of it.

It’s also bizarre because a) any brother would have been naturalized by the same process that naturalized the Omar family, b) US citizenship laws make siblings as eligible as spouses, so there’d be no need for a marriage, and c) the “brother” she’s accused of marrying isn’t her brother.

I think this is more of a case of the Chucklefuck Twins showing up with an accusation and a demand that she deny it, and then hoping to use the fact that she wouldn’t dignify such an absurd claim with an answer and threw them out as evidence that she was guilty. Just like how the Immigration Law Center of Minnesota wouldn’t respect a pair of chucklefuck pseudojournalists in an armored car, therefore the ILCM hates Jews.

And then Omar isn’t dignifying them with her attention. How sad for them.

Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer are in Minneapolis. Be still my heart.

The pinnacle of Jacob Wohl’s career was his attempt to shut down the Mueller investigation by cobbling up a fake company, Surefire, and spreading the rumor that they had info on a sex scandal involving Robert Mueller. He’s a far-right, fanatical conspiracy theorist who is paranoid about Muslims. He’s also not very bright.

Laura Loomer’s career reached it’s peak when she handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s New York office door to protest the fact that her account had been banned for racist remarks. She gave up when she got cold. She is obsessed with Muslims. She is also not very bright.

It was kismet. These two shallow, untalented, lazy people who run after any media attention have joined forces to…chase after more media attention. They have failed to name their partnership in media whoredom, though, so I’ve decided to give this whiny duo one.

Let’s call them the Chucklefuck Twins.

Anyway, they have paired up to engage in another media blitz that will be just as successful as their previous efforts, I’m sure. They have picked a target, hired a security and film crew, and have dived on their chosen Gotham City to right wrongs, reveal the villainous underbelly of the scabrous slums, and document the evil that lurks there.

They’re in Minneapolis.

They chose to descend on the city in February, which tells you how clever they are. Loomer got cold in NY in November. We’re at -5°C here on the prairies, and we’re supposed to be hit by a major blizzard tonight. I live here in outstate Minnesota, and I wouldn’t travel to Minneapolis today — we know that this time of year the roads are hazardous and the weather can turn on you.

I guess we’re an irresistable target to racist xenophobes, though. Minnesota has the most refugees per capita of any state. We’re honestly open and friendly, we encourage people to move here, we think it’s great that they form distinctive communities. We’ve got a large Hmong population, for instance — they and other groups have been an asset to our universities and make our cities diverse and interesting. It turns out that an atmosphere of tolerance improves the quality of life for everyone.

But the Chucklefuck Twins aren’t here for the Hmong. Oh, no.

Wait. The total population of Somalis and people of Somali descent in Minnesota is between 40 and 50 thousand, and many of them were born here. We get a few thousand refugees from all sorts of places, not just Somalia, every year. His math is nonsense.

I’ll return to that “third world ghettos” comment in a moment.

That first bit is correct. Minnesota now is populated mainly by descendants of immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia who displaced the native Ojibwe and Dakota nations. Speaking for my own family of Swedes and Norwegians, one thing that may help make for a more tolerant community is that we remember and take pride in our ancestry — people still celebrate Swedish and Norwegian holidays here, and make traditional foods — so we’re sympathetic when other people arrive here and try to preserve their own culture. We’re not being taken advantage of here, we have our own family stories of moving to a harsh environment and both trying to adapt and retain our identities. Somalis, welcome! What do you like to eat? Shall we share?

The Chucklefuck Twins are not making friends here. At the start of this video, they pan across our snow-covered streets and declare Minnesota not a very pleasant place, it’s a wonder why anyone wants to come here (you showed up in February, Chucklefucks!) before making a big complaint about the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

They showed up at the Center and quickly determined that Jews are banned, and they only help Muslim Somalis and claim that they were kicked out and the door locked behind them, when they disingenuously say they were only there to see if they could help their oppressed Jewish relatives in Europe.

I will just point out the official position and role of the ILCM.

Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) is a nonprofit agency that provides immigration legal assistance to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota. ILCM also works to educate Minnesota communities and professionals about immigration matters, and advocates for state and federal policies which respect the universal human rights of immigrants.

They help “low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota“. They are not a travel agency. They are there for people in Minnesota who need legal and educational assistance.

The Chucklefuck Twins showed up at their door with a film crew and bodyguards. They were obviously not in need of their kind of help.

The Chucklefuck Twins are lying assholes, trying to gin up controversy.

And that’s right…they have hired a top-notch security team and are driving around Minneapolis in armored cars because they are so terrified.

This is ridiculous. No one cares about two paranoid, xenophobic chucklefucks wandering about the city. No one is conspiring to go after them. They’re here for two reasons: because Ilhan Omar (“The Jihadi” as they call her) was elected to congress from here, and because we have a neighborhood nicknamed “Little Mogadishu” in Minneapolis (we also have a place called “Little Canada” — I don’t know if it’s on the Chucklefuck Twins’ itinerary).

Wohl mentions that he thought he was in the movie Black Hawk Down when he drove into the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Right. This place.

That, by the way, is the “third world ghetto” he’s complaining about. It’s located right around the West Bank of the University of Minnesota campus. I’ve been there many times — without an armored car. If you want to try some African food of all varieties, not just Ethiopian, it’s the place to be. (I wonder where the Chucklefuck Twins are dining tonight? I doubt that they’ll be taking advantage of their opportunities here.)

It’s also the nicest “ghetto” I’ve ever seen. I’ve been to neighborhoods in North Philadelphia that look bombed out and crumbling, but this is a pleasant part of Minneapolis. If you’re ever in the Twin Cities, you should explore it, because we’re not all Swedes with funny accents dining on potatoes and salt herring.

Good god but the Chucklefuck Twins are appallingly stupid bigots.

Nice example of burying the lede

The headline: BILLIONAIRE HORNDOG BOB KRAFT CHARGED WITH SOLICITING PROSTITUTION IN LEAD-UP TO SUPER BOWL.

Don’t care. Prostitution shouldn’t be a crime anyway. But this one hides the real story:

In a press conference Friday morning, Jupiter Police Chief Daniel Kerr announced that Kraft was just one of the 25 people being charged with solicitation as part of a human-trafficking investigation.
…
According to Florida police, Kraft was caught in a months-long investigation into a human-trafficking ring in the area, involving at least 10 spas.

There’s an important word being downplayed there. Sex between consenting adults, not an issue, even if there is an exchange of money. When it’s human-trafficking, though, that means consent has been lost, and this Kraft bozo is exploiting women.

They did at least include one criminal charge in the headline, “Billionaire”. Lock him up for that, I’m fine with it.

I’d try it

My wife just interrupted me and told me I had to go to the store for various items. Very well then; I also have to throw dinner together, so maybe I’ll get a special treat or two.

The recipe looks fairly straightforward, although they don’t list the ingredients. It looks like green onion, garlic, peppers, cooking oil — I’ve got all that already — oh, is that Haplopelma? I’m fresh out. I wonder if they have any in stock in a small rural midwestern grocery store, or if I’m going to have to go to Cambodia to pick up some?

I’ll probably have to fix something else for Mary’s dinner, since I don’t think I can zip to Phnom Penh and back in time for my other evening plans (gonna check out Alita: Battle Angel at the Morris Theater). It’s too bad, I’d really like to try that sometime.

How to annoy Ken Ham

Someone brought him a Gideon’s Bible from a Kentucky hotel that had been horrifically defaced.

Someone came prepared. I usually just scribble something caustic on the first page.

But Ken is irritated, and he has a rebuttal to the argument that something might be older than the Bible: IS NOT!!!.

Whoever left this trilobite image is scientifically wrong. Terry the trilobite died, was buried and fossilized just 4,350 years ago during the global flood of Noah’s day. These creatures—with their incredibly complex eyes—aren’t evidence of millions of years of evolution, but rather of God’s creative power and the destructive nature of the flood.

scientifically wrong…jeezus. So he simply asserts that the fossil is a hundred thousand times younger than the scientific evidence says it is, and claims that is still a scientific position.

You know, there are a lot of Christians that have no intellectual difficulty with the idea that the universe is far older than Ken’s goofy, anti-scientific interpretation says it is. Answers in Genesis is the muck at the bottom of a rotten barrel of bad ideas.

Here are some awful Red Pill stories, but hey, did you know feminists are just as bad?

Here’s an interesting article about the Red Pill cult, focusing mostly on people who have left it. There’s a common thread: lonely young men who are socially awkward and find themselves in a group that tells them all their problems are caused by an evil, alien force, that is, women.

Jack became involved with the Red Pill when he was 23, and had been single for a “long” time. “I was numb, lonely and desperate,” he says. “It was a terrible time in my life.”

Though Jack only spent two months on the subreddit, he quickly fell in with anti-feminist and libertarian rhetoric. “An uncomfortable misogynistic streak grew within me,” he says. “At one point [I] thought that Donald Trump was a good candidate for President.”

But then, unfortunately, the article falls into bothsiderism.

Like many of the places we frequent online, the Red Pill has become an echo chamber. The psychologist I spoke to, Mike Wood, told me this can lead to people adopting more and more extreme views. “If you’re in some sort of a group that defines itself by its opinions, then people will get more and more polarised over time,” he says. “Individuals will try to conform to what the group mandates.” This is true of not just the Red Pill, but its opponents. While radical feminists on Tumblr, for example, become more extreme in their views, so too does the subreddit. In many ways, the extremes of each group justify one another’s existence in their minds.

OK, I’ll bite. You’ve just written an article that describes men who characterize half of humanity as evil parasites, who find unity in demonizing women in absurd ways, who get brainwashed into voting for Donald Trump, who advocate for murdering women and in far too many cases actually do so. They’re members of a Reddit subgroup with 200,000 members. It’s a fucking horror show.

Where’s the equivalency? The lazy shorthand of generically referring to “radical feminists on Tumblr” is not evidence and is not convincing. You’ve got incels going on murder sprees, you’ve got the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989 — misogyny has a body count. Who have the Tumblr lesbians slaughtered lately?

I agree that online tribalism can polarize and lead to in-group conformity. Those are common psychological phenomena. But the red pill cult has crystallized around ideas that dehumanize women and justify lies and hatred, and it does us no favor to synonymize that with every social group ever. Especially when Tumblr feminists seem to have a far better sense of humor than the redpillers.

Alexander Acosta broke the law

There’s yet another crook in Trump’s orbit. His labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, has been found to have broken the law when he gave convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal.

A judge ruled Thursday that federal prosecutors — among them, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta — broke federal law when they signed a plea agreement with a wealthy, politically connected sex trafficker and concealed it from more than 30 of his underage victims.

It was quite a serious crime. Years of procuring and sexual molestation of kids. More than 30 victims.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said that the evidence he reviewed showed that Jeffrey Epstein had been operating an international sex operation in which he and others recruited underage girls — not only in Florida — but from overseas, in violation of federal law.

“Epstein used paid employees to find and bring minor girls to him.,’’ wrote Marra, who is based in Palm Beach County. “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.’’

But man, what a slap on the wrist Epstein got.

Instead of prosecuting Epstein under federal sex trafficking laws, Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution. Epstein, who lived in a Palm Beach mansion, was allowed to quietly plead guilty in state court to two prostitution charges and served just 13 months in the county jail. His accomplices, some of whom have never been identified, were never charged.

Left unsaid…that jail sentence was a joke. He got to go home during the day, and just had to check in for confinement at night.

I remember when Lawrence Krauss and Robert Trivers flailed about trying to defend Epstein…and Krauss earnestly telling me at a conference that I should stop criticizing him, he’s a good guy and a friend to science.

I sometimes wonder if, since his own fall from grace, Krauss has ever admitted that he was wrong, and that his arguments were bad and foolish. I haven’t heard. I certainly haven’t had a conversation with him in years.

He probably hasn’t. Last year, this was Krauss’s wife defending him…and Epstein.

You know, Dr Dahl, one other problem with that comment, besides the fact that having sex with a minor is not a “lifestyle”, is that the courts have just determined that he was not punished for his crimes. He is a bad man who got away with it. I wonder if any of the recipients of his largesse are willing to recognize that yet?

By the way, Krauss is still getting gigs, but he’s not quite in demand as he used to be. I see he’s appearing on this YouTube channel next Tuesday…maybe someone should ask him about it.

Money can be mesmerizing

Watch those billions of dollars stack up behind corporate brands.

There have been so many times when I’ve seen Apple tumble in value, and I’ve thought, “I should buy stock”, and then it surges upward and I think “Now I can’t buy stock”, and then I think “I’m not the kind of guy who plays the stock market anyway”, making it weird to watch Apple’s brand value soar. Why? I don’t know? The iPhone?

Not going to invest in it now, anyway. I’m just waiting for capitalism to burn to the ground making all this meaningless.