UMIAEAC!

I stumbled across this article from Ben Rehder on Facebook. It sounded familiar.

I received an emailed pitch this morning from “an established, full service book publishing and book marketing publisher with global distribution and rights to help support book sales.” I googled the address they provided in the email and found their office:

Anyone remember Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics of Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.?

Just a reminder that you can call your house anything you want. Why settle for “Bide-A-Wee”, or nothing at all, when you can christen your home “The Upper Midwestern Institute for the Accelerated Evolutionary Advancement of Cephalopods”? Well, you can’t use that name. It’s taken already.

Bawbags?

I missed two concerts recently. The first was Roger Waters, who I did see last year, but he was in Scotland and so he had to modify his stage sets a little.

Heh. It’s not an slander, it’s true!

I regret not being able to see that show. I’m not regretting missing the one in St Paul last week, but we did get a glorious review of the Jimmy Buffett and Eagles concert. Read it. It’s one good thing to come out of the event.

The most appalling extension of Lewis’ Law yet

Eurydice Dixon was an Australian comedian who was raped and murdered as she walked home one night. The site where her body was found was spontaneously turned into a memorial, with people leaving flowers. She was only 22.

And then someone scrawled giant penises all over the football field where she was found.

The vandal was caught — he claims he wanted to be caught — and he was just making a statement. He was sending a message to feminists…and about vaccinations?

I was upset, and I want to make this clear, this was not a personal attack at all…this was purely an attack on feminism, on mainstream media for hijacking a vaccine-causing issue and turning it into a men are bad, women’s rights issue.

Y’all remember Lewis’ Law: Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism. Apparently a woman can be raped and murdered and some toxic asshole will find a way to comment on it, and thereby justify feminism.

The logic behind the vandal’s action was remarkably twisted: the lawyer for the accused murderer says his client was autistic; the vandal interprets that to mean autism caused the killing; the killer was therefore not to blame; but we should blame vaccines for it instead. And somehow, feminists.

I don’t think any individuals on the autistic spectrum actually want this guy’s support. I’m kinda feeling, as a man, I’d rather not have this scumbag sharing a sex with me, either. He’s all alone on this one.

Ded now

Can’t go on. I’ve been laid low by an irony cannonball in the Second American Civil War. Tell my family I was thinking of them as I bled out in the hedgerow.

(The Keen Report, as is obvious from the context, is a Trumpian Maga-lovin’ Twitter account. Tony Schwartz is…the ghost-writer who actually wrote The Art of the Deal.)

Projection isn’t a modern fallacy

Note to all: remember, this paragraph exists in the Declaration of Independence.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

And the Boston Tea Party began our great American tradition of committing crimes and blaming them on minorities.

Don’t forget the gigantic omission, either. In a grand document declaring Liberty and Freedom and Independence, slavery was ignored. Swept under the rug. “all men are created equal” except the ones we don’t mention, and oh, yeah, women aren’t.

Hope I haven’t put a damper on your cookouts and picnics.

Narcissistic, oblivious arrogance: that’s the New York Times

The New York Times wastes some more space on that whiny turd, Alan Dershowitz.

But this summer, Mr. Dershowitz says that because he has expressed views that back President Trump, he no longer feels so welcome on the Vineyard, a summertime epicenter of progressive values, money and sheer Democratic power in the United States.

He’s being “shunned”, he says, and for his plight, he gets a write-up in the New York Times. I don’t give a rat’s ass for Alan Dershowitz, but this is so symptomatic of how bad the NYT has become. It’s not just that a cranky old man (hey, where’s MY feature?) gets a sympathetic article, but that phrase: Martha’s Vineyard is the “epicenter of progressive values”? Martha’s Vineyard, vacation spot of the rich? If there’s any clearer picture of the delusions of the NYT and the Democratic party, this idea that Martha’s Vineyard matters, I’d like to see it.

But then, the NYT and the Democratic party have been ongoing oblivious catastrophes for years. Now a former executive editor has a few words to say about that.

I’m feeling about the NYT now like I did when my son cheated on a test in 10th grade. I loved him to death, believed he was a thoroughly wonderful young man, but he needed a course correction. So I left my desk at The NYT, where I was DC [Bureau] Chief, met his school bus and read him the riot act. He needed a course correction.

So does the NYT… it’s making horrible mistakes left and right.

This sums up her litany of complaints:

More narcissism: It’s always about us. Yikes. Distance is part of journalism’s discipline.

It’s that narcissism that allows them to think they are doing good by including a line-up of deplorables on their opinion pages, and printing complete garbage with a straight face. Like this piece by Matt Schmitz, an editor at First Things, a website that claims to present a “theological perspective on life in America today”. It got past an editor because the editors at the NYT all have their heads up their asses.

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children* as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska. Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order.

Mr. Trump’s purple family values may even explain some of his populist appeal. Global leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker appear to have stable and loving marriages. But their childlessness makes them worse exemplars of family values in the eyes of some non-elites than divorcees who have multiple children — a category that includes Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League party, and Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally party, as well as Donald Trump. Contempt for elite respectability is reflected not only in the respective party platforms, but in the personal lives of these populist leaders.

First hint to any NYT editor with the flexibility to swivel their heads in their colon and peep out with one eye through their anus: reject any submission that uses “elites” in that way. They’re talking about a grifter billionaire, but to them, the “elites” are working class Democrats.

Do not accept the normalizing of misery and the pathologizing of women. It is not normal to find alienation from your children’s mother as admirable. It happens, it happens all the time, but it’s a consequence of poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. Jesus, guy…listen to some country western songs. Alienated families are not a happy outcome. Single mothers are in for a world of struggle. He portrays these “red” families as moral monsters, who are just fine if their daughters experience marital difficulties and grief and alienation, and consider Trump to be an exemplar of an admirable lifestyle. These are lies. These are the excuses Trumpist bigots tell themselves to pretend they have good intentions.

And then…oh my god, look how he twists the perspective to make fascists look like the true models of familial unity. They have children! That’s enough to make them good people. But then he makes it seem that a few more liberal world leaders have been rejected by the American “non-elites” (Jesus fuck, how does this usage persist? Thanks, NYT) because they don’t have kids…as if those red-staters are so familiar with the family lives of European politicians. One thing we do know is that they were familiar with the fact that Hillary Clinton has a daughter, and that there seems to much love and respect between them, because Rush Limbaugh called her a “dog” and because they hated her. They knew that the Obamas had two daughters and a strong family, because those “non-elites” loved to fling racist vitriol at them.

If there was even a hint of truth in Schmitz’s bullshit, wouldn’t those wingnuts in Nebraska that he cites have been admiring Clinton and Obama, and cheering on the family values that they claim to love so much? But no, that would undermine his argument that good Americans love Nazis for their kinder.

But the New York Fucking Times published it. Because the NYT is a garbage rag that is completely out of touch with reason and reality that blithely publishes right-wing propaganda.

*One word comes to mind: Tiffany.

Now I understand.

Has anyone else lost all interest in celebrating the 4th of July?

I know I have. There is a lot of high sentiment in that ol’ declaration of independence, but 240+ years of this country failing to live up to them, and now deciding to just give up and abandon every noble principle expressed in it, doesn’t leave me feeling like commemorating much of anything.

This will be a good day for fasting, working, and watching the rain come down (it’s a thunderstorm day here in Morris, good for Nature for putting a wet blanket on the annoying fireworks.)

Please, stop with the goofy fads

OK, this is a weird one: getting a “pedicure” by putting your feet in a tub with Garra rufa, a small fish that then industriously nibbles dead skin away. That’s not a pedicure, for one, and two, it probably doesn’t do anything for you, although it does feed the fish, and three…your toenails might fall off, probably due to secondary infections.

The CDC has a few things to say about the practice.

  • The fish pedicure tubs cannot be sufficiently cleaned between customers when the fish are present.
  • The fish themselves cannot be disinfected or sanitized between customers. Due to the cost of the fish, salon owners are likely to use the same fish multiple times with different customers, which increases the risk of spreading infection.
  • Chinese Chinchin, another species of fish that is often mislabeled as Garra rufa and used in fish pedicures, grows teeth and can draw blood, increasing the risk of infection.
  • According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Garra rufa could pose a threat to native plant and animal life if released into the wild because the fish is not native to the United States.
  • Fish pedicures do not meet the legal definition of a pedicure.
  • Regulations specifying that fish at a salon must be contained in an aquarium.
  • The fish must be starved to eat skin, which might be considered animal cruelty.

Next step up: dunk your toes in a tank full of piranha.