Ian Murphy has died

I didn’t know him personally (which may have been for the best), but I followed his work. He did what a satirist is supposed to do, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and he was especially expert at the latter. Now Murphy has died.

Friends and colleagues of journalist and satirist Ian Murphy, former editor of the recently revived Buffalo Beast, an alternative online news site in Buffalo, NY, report that Murphy has died. Murphy passed away on July 17, 2019, Buffalo Beast staff said. He was 40 years old. The cause of death has not been confirmed.

In life, he was a professional weirdo.

Ian Murphy is the editor of The BEAST (buffalobeast.com), a half-satirical news and opinion website dedicated to militant rationalism and quasi-journalistic hijinks, which was founded in 2002 as a Buffalo, NY biweekly rag by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. Murphy is best known for prank calling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wherein he posed as arch-libertarian moneybags David Koch. He’s also infiltrated the grand opening of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” by posing as a Christian reporter afflicted with “Asperger’s Syndrome by proxy,” gone undercover in the Church of Scientology while on hallucinogens, canoed to Canada to expose ineffective and profit-driven post-9/11 border security, and proudly received hundreds of death threats. In the spring of 2011, Murphy ran as the Green Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to fill the seat vacated by disgraced “Craigslist Congressman” Chris Lee. While reaping a pathetic one percent of the vote, Murphy nonetheless scored a comedic victory, and national press, for creating a scathing parody of his Republican opponent’s website. Murphy has also been published by Alternet, Crooks & Liars, The Daily Beast, Free Inquiry, and The Progressive. And as of this writing, Murphy is standing trial for “disruption of a religious service” with a dildo. In reality, he was arrested for filming a police officer while covering a National Organization for Marriage anti-gay marriage rally. So if he doesn’t show up, he’s probably in jail.

He was the gonzo commentator for our era, and now he’s gone. He was a better reporter than the sad fumbledums working for the 24 hour news networks, that’s for sure — we’d be living in a better world if he’d been hired to replace Chris Cilliza. Actually, we’d be better off if the corpse of Ian Murphy replaced Cilliza — it’s not too late!

The conspiracy theories will bloom spectacularly

Uh-oh. How did this happen?

Jeffrey Epstein, the financier facing charges of sex trafficking involving dozens of underage girls, was found unconscious in a Manhattan jail cell with injuries to his neck, US media reported late on Wednesday, citing unidentified sources.

Epstein was found by guards sprawled on the floor of his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Wednesday, it was reported.

The billionaire financier was taken to hospital, according to the New York Post, but it was unclear where he was taken or what his condition was. It was not clear how he suffered his injuries.

That’s a lot of unclear stuff for a guy who has a lot of enemies, who is suspected of possibly blackmailing people, and has a lot of powerful people terrified about what he might say. At least one major bank, Deutsche Bank, is scrambling to cover up their connections to his money.

I want him to live because I want him to talk, some people might want him dead because they don’t want him to talk. Or maybe it’s sunk into Epstein’s mind that his lifestyle has met its end and he’ll never go back to raping schoolgirls.

Space spiders, prepare to land and conquer the planet

You know that batch of spiderlings I caught earlier? I had them in this container in my office, like so:

They’re all the little dots in there. Well, I decided I would set them free out in the garden, and I opened the container as you can see…while still in my office. They immediately became agitated and started scurrying about, and next thing I know, many of them have lifted off and started ballooning. I whipped out my camera and tried to get a photo, but tiny dots wafting through the air aren’t easy to photograph. Here’s a pair of them looking like spiders in space.

This is my favorite, though — it was drifting near the container, so it look like it’s about to land on Earth.

Most of them are outside now, but I’ve still got a few crawling on me, and every once in a while one floats across my field of vision. It’s magical!

Spiders done been fornicatin’ in my garage!

Look! I found their unholy spawn crawling out of their crude, barbaric nest!

These are probably all Larries (Larinioides), but they’re too young to tell for sure.

I know, you’re all getting tired of spiders, spiders, spiders on my web site, but you can look forward to a Minnesota winter when they’re all dead or hiding or hibernating, and I’ve got nothin’ but ice-rimed empty cobwebs to gaze upon, forlornly.

You cannot possibly take Quillette seriously

Oh. My. God. They published a piece praising Boris Johnson that, I swear, reads like something from The Onion or McSweeney’s.

With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

It goes on and on interminably, saying nothing. It even quotes some of his more infamous racist lines, like this one, about the Congo:

No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

That’s satire, don’t you know. They’re never clear about exactly what they’re satirizing, but like a troop of monkeys, they’ve learned that all they have to do is parrot the word “satire” to excuse their grossest impulses.

Which now makes me wonder…is this entire article by Toby Young, with all its hyperbole and bizarre imagery, also intended to be satire? Is it mocking Boris or praising him effusively? It’s impossible to tell. When two buffoons start mugging at each other, does it mean something, or is it meaningless?

What of Quillette itself? An ugly, tasteless joke, like Johnson’s disparagement of the people of the Congo, or an attempt to be serious by a gang of clowns?

I hope we can throw this tweet in his face in 2020

Trump thinks he’s going to win Minnesota.

It could happen — Republicans are good at cheating, and there is an undercurrent of bigotry thriving here. But I think he’s going to lose votes compared to 2016, because his record is terrible and he’s even more openly bigoted than he was then.

Also, he doesn’t get to take credit for the Minnesota economy. The Democrats are responsible for that, while the Republicans have been holding us back.