If I don’t like your name, do I get to rechristen you?

This is a wonderful 19th century photo of a famous person from the Pacific Northwest — the daughter of Chief Seattle, dubbed Princess Angeline. I knew about her when I was growing up, and Chief Seattle, too, since they’re such key figures in the history of the area, and I’ve seen this photo many times. That is a strong and dignified face.

But I’d never known how she came by such a European name, until now. It’s a genuinely cringeworthy story.

Born in 1820 in Lushootseed, near modern day Seattle, Kikisoblu (Kick-is-om-lo) was the first daughter of Chief Seattle, the leader of a Suquamish Tribe (Suquamish) and Dkhw’Duw’Absh (Duwamish). When American settlers arrived in Seattle, Chief Seattle befriended one of them, David Swinson “Doc” Maynard.

When the second wife of “Doc” Maynard, Catherine Maynard, saw the beautiful Kiksoblu, she said, “You are too good looking for a woman to carry around such a name as that, and I now christen you Angeline.”

Kikisoblu is a lovely name! In fact, all the Coast Salish place names that dot Western Washington are pretty and resonant — so it’s odd to see that kind of dismissal. And the Maynards have a reputation as being the early settlers who were most sympathetic to the natives. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but the pioneers that named a city after an Indian chief were mostly brutal, violent, and aggressive towards the people who lived there first — Seattle itself was a permanent collection of Coast Salish villages that had existed for about 4,000 years before the Europeans showed up. Surprising, I know.)

Intolerable cruelty

A child is brought to the US by their illegal immigrant parents; they grow up knowing nothing but America, go to American schools, have American friends, are fundamentally American. And then Donald Trump decides that, because of their parentage, they are going to be thrown out of the country and sent to a different country that they might not know anything about. He wants to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which doesn’t go far enough in accommodating these kids. I think the DREAM Act, which would have allowed undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship with college attendance or military service, would be an excellent idea — we ought to recognize that there are people living here, who want to live here, who want to be part of this country, and that we ought to be welcoming them.

It is intolerably cruel to deny these young people anything short of full acceptance. They have committed no crime, yet Trump wants to make them suffer.

It is un-American to base people’s role in life on their ancestry — or at least, it is an overt rejection of the myth of American equality and opportunity. At least, the ideal that this was a place where you could advance yourself by studying and working hard, even if imaginary, was part of what we told ourselves made America great. The Republicans would rather your position in society was determined by inheritance, I guess.

There are a few moderate Republicans who see this, but far too many are as heartless as Trump. This anti-immigrant attitude that is sweeping through voters is chilling and horrible, too: our country is supporting an idea that the Nazis would have promoted as a matter of course.

These monsters must go. It’s not just an arbitrary political decision, it’s becoming a matter of defining the basic humanity of the American people…and the current regime is making all the wrong decisions.

WRAPTOR!

Our house is around 70 years old, and it has desperately needed a major makeover. It was covered with these natural wood shakes that were inexplicably painted over white, long before we moved in, and that paint was cracked and peeling. In addition, the windows were clunky and old fashioned and less well insulated than they ought to be.

So right now, our house is naked — all the old siding has been ripped off, and the windows are in the process of being replaced with modern, well-insulated glass. Now that the old hideous slabs of wood have been removed, we’re going to get new siding shortly…but before you put on the siding, you have to cover it with house wrap to add a little more insulation and provide a moisture seal. I have discovered that our contractor isn’t just using familiar Tyvek. This is what part of our house is covered with now: WRAPTOR!

It’s silly, but I kind of like the idea that our house will be shielded by an invisible layer of dinosaurs.

How to model a universal butt

Fascinating — models in software games have some subtle but intentional design features. There is a game character in Overwatch (which looks like a fun game, but since it’s PC only, I’ve never tried it) named Tracer who was the focus of some controversy a while back because some of the promotional materials emphasized her lovely, shapely butt maybe a bit overmuch. Now there has been a detailed analysis of the design of her character to identify what makes her butt so nice in every view.

Wu discovered that the primary cause of Tracer’s plump backside is an inhumanly deep buttcrack. In fact Tracer has a butt crack so deep that regular humans could not possess similar physiology and survive. Such a crack would inevitably interfere with organs and the body’s structural integrity.

As a result of this bizarrely deep posterior, Tracer can be put in literally any pose, under any lighting, and her butt will still cast a shadow implying depth, plumpness and tautness. The way Tracer’s bottom is emphasised in any situation is a genuine feat of engineering.

On top of that, there’s more. Another aspect of Tracer’s butt that plays a big part in its eternal visibility is the fact that her outfit is either impossibly tight or glued to her ass cheeks.

Take a look at the image on the far right. Natural fabric would find a resting point between the peaks of the two cheeks, naturally bridging the gap. If the material pulls in to show cheek definition, this would be the result of both cheeks physically trapping the fabric. This is different, in that the fabric follows the contours of the cheeks and buttcrack without the two cheeks making contact. For the titillation of boys and girls worldwide, Tracer suffers a permanent wedgie that is literally designed to make her individual butt cheeks shine.

Wait, but what about realism? What about ethics in gaming?

We’ll get to that once I’m done marveling that there is such a thing as virtual butt analysis, and that there are game designers and artists working hard to maximize butt exposure.

Nature is also working on it. Check out Jon Snow’s butt.

It really is all about race hatred

I’m sure you’ve all noticed this: white nationalism is commonly characterized by the media as a primarily economic issue. This is the party line from the New York Times; they’re constantly banging on about how Trump voters are just desperately poor (not true), and reporting on interviews and focus groups with disaffected moderates where they hear them complaining about employment and regulations and immigrants competing for their jobs (because, apparently, young Republicans dream of someday working in a poultry slaughterhouse).

Another victim of this desperate aversion to actually pointing out endemic racism is the New Statesman. Writing about some new right wing scheme called The Anglosphere Project in 2000, you might get the impression that this movement is defined by its stance on free trade, entrepreneuralism, and market policy — it’s all very wonky.

For the moment, it remains semi-subterranean, new, a little shocking – like the ideas of rolling back the power of trade unions which the Tories were rehearsing in the mid-1970s; or the attack on comprehensive welfare systems which the US policy-thinker Charles Murray was testing out around the same time; or the foretelling of the collapse of the Soviet Union which analysts such as Zbigniew Brzezinski were putting into public debate, to general disbelief, a little later.

This idea, or rather cluster of ideas, has similar origins – in the Anglo-American intellectual right, a milieu at once self- confident, vengeful, well funded and very sharp. It is based on the belief that the transatlantic right needs some kind of coherent internationalist vision to set against the corporatist European Union. The answer is what the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has called the Anglosphere. The US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and much of the West Indies, it is pointed out, enjoy a common language, a common culture, common legal traditions and, above all, common entrepreneurial instincts. Can these countries create a loose association of some kind? Mexico, though it does not meet all the criteria, would have to fit in, since it is already part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) – which is central to the Anglosphere project, both economically and politically. Norway might fit in, given that it is negotiating with Nafta. Japan, backward-looking and over-regulated, would not.

You should be suspicious, though. The Anglosphere Project was founded by John O’Sullivan, a Thatcherite, Conrad Black, the Canadian version of Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Conquest, a right-wing historian, now deceased.

I don’t know whether it has evolved in the last 17 years, or whether the real motivation was lurking beneath the capitalist veneer all along, but if you check out Project Anglosphere right now, it’s a hotbed of seething racist buzzwords. They are all about our “heritage”. We must defeat “diversity” and “multiethnicity”. Repeal “multiculturalism” now.

In this turbulent era an amoral, ruthless Globalism and it’s resulting pathologies threaten the very existence of the Anglosphere. In response nationalists are on the march. Our principles guarantee social stability, cultural coherence and genuine unity – unlike globalist ideologies such as Multiculturalism which guarantee intractable social conflict. It is becoming increasingly apparent that ethnic, religious, political and sexual violence are the toxic fruits of ‘Diversity’ extremism. Only Nationalism has the necessary antidotes and political will to heal the deliberately induced polarisation and fragmentation of the Western world.

It’s an anti-immigrant white nationalist organization. I suspect that that’s what it was all along. But gosh, whining about the North American Free Trade Agreement is a nice distraction from the underlying motivation of the group.

It also has something in common with other far right groups: it’s primary business seems to be churning out propaganda, especially internet-digestible memes. Oh, look, they have black friends!

It’s even more blatant on the @ProjectAnglo twitter feed. Nothing but memes. They follow Ann Coulter, VDARE, Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, James Delingpole, and a few cartoon frogs. You want to see the ugly underbelly of the internet, though, all you have to do is look at who is following them. Here’s a sampling of the profiles of typical pro Anglo Project supporters.

ᚹᚺᛁᛏᛖ᛫ᛈᚱᛁᛞᛖ, Nationalist,ProLife,Protector of Western Civilization’s EuroCentric Heritage, Identity & Traditions, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ,ᛟPutinᛟLePenᛟCharles Martel

Right Wing Meme Squad. Supporter of ethnic cleansing- pls no bully meh.

🐸 Alt-Right. American Nationalist. Pro-White. Reactionary. #HailVictory

Rising sea levels can be attributed to Libtard tears, not global warming! I follow back to any Trump supporting patriots. I fully support Obama for prison!

Trigger the tards!! Wish my dad’s were Joe Rogan, Lawrence Krauss, and uncle Jordan b Peterson, aunt Camille Paglia, Princess Kenny. Kekistani Sith Lord

I really hope Krauss is embarrassed by the company he’s keeping there.

But the main point is that the economic jibber-jabber is just a mask over the real reason these people are pro-Trump and pro-America and pro-Britain — the truth is that they’re really just xenophobic, hate-mongering bigots who’ve found that complaining about free trade (not that there aren’t good arguments on that matter) is a sneaky way to virtue-signal to their fellow jingoists and start a racist asshat club. That’s what they are.

Wrong question

A study basically asked people ““Can you be good without god?”. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that a heck of a lot of people think you can’t.

A recent study (of more than 3,000 people in 13 countries) published in the journal Nature Human Behavior echoes Voltaire’s maxim. Looking at intuitive thinking—presumptions drawn by individuals through unconscious biases—researchers led by Will M. Gervais, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, discovered that most individuals intuitively conclude that a serial killer is more likely to be an atheist (approximately 60 percent) than religious (approximately 30 percent).

The article has a lot of good rebuttals from atheists like James Croft, Monette Richards, and Maggie Ardiente, but let’s cut the crap. This survey isn’t actually going to answer that question. Of course there are good atheists and good Christians, and also bad atheists and bad Christians. All that survey can do is determine that the subjects have been methodically lied to by their religion.

The question should be, “Can you be good with god?”, and the results determine that religion is great fertilizer for bigotry. I’d also argue that the example of the most notoriously godly people in America further demonstrates that with great faith comes great greed and exploitation.

Here’s Joel Osteen’s house.

Never mind his behavior towards his fellow human beings in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. I ask you, what kind of corrupt, selfish person needs the kind of conspicuous consumption being shown off here?

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer

Tezcatlipoca, god of hurricanes

It happens every time a natural disaster occurs: the ghouls creep out of their crypts and get national press coverage for their rationalizations. One example: Rick Stedman, generic Christian pastor and apologist, has emerged to ask a stupid question.

When hurricanes like Harvey devastate so many lives, where is God?

That’s a really good question—one which I’ve heard whenever a hurricane, tornado, or tsunami wreaks havoc—and it deserves an honest, though maybe surprising answer.

No, it’s not a good question. Where is Harry Potter? Where is Dread Dormammu? Where is Aquaman? These would also be stupid questions, because they are fictional characters, and we know exactly where they are: in the pages of books and comic books. They’re not going to emerge when a catastrophe strikes.

The only people who ask that question are religious apologists. It never occurred to me, for instance. This is the kind of question people ask when reality comes up and smacks their mythologies in the face, and they have to figure out an excuse for why their all-powerful superhero didn’t show up to help out. The rest of us…nope, we have known all along that nature isn’t necessarily our friend, that good and evil don’t apply in the cosmic scheme of things, and we have no expectations of beneficent super-beings feeling obligated to ride to our rescue.

As you might expect, though, Stedman is going to give us his stupid answer to his stupid question, and — big surprise — it’s not going to be surprising at all. His excuse is that his God was there, expressing himself in the charity and kindness of human beings in the face of adversity, because, apparently, people are incapable of recognizing the importance of their friends and neighbors and family, or even strangers, unless they are possessed by a supernatural entity. Whenever you see someone doing something nice, that’s God, not actually that person acting ethically. I think it might be part of that odious Christian doctrine that says we’re all evil sinners who deserve Hell, except Jesus somehow ‘saved’ us. How the idea that goodness is a manifestation of God could be compatible with Christian versions of Free Will that say our actions are our choice, so evil is our problem, not God’s, I don’t know.

It seems simpler to me to cut out the imaginary phantasmal middle man and credit human beings themselves with the good and evil they do, but then, I’m not soaking in Christian dogma.

Then there’s also a purpose to God unleashing hurricanes on us:

In a world that assumes there are no objective rights and wrongs, tragedies recalibrate our moral compasses and remind us that some things are always right.

See, God killed those people and destroyed their homes and livelihood sorta like how he tortured Job: it’s a test to help them see what is right and what is wrong. It really makes it crystal clear that when someone kills your dog and your aunt, turns your home into a mudhole, blows up your workplace, and spews chemical poisons all over your neighborhood, it reminds us that there is an objective good and evil, and if your moral compass is properly calibrated, you ought to realize that the omnipotent agent (if there is one) who spawned that death and destruction to wake us up to the nature of what is good and evil is Himself an evil mofo, and we ought to stop making excuses for him. Right? If your moral compass is still so fucked up that you scribble out apologias the deity you love, then presumably you are now in need of a colossal natural death strike on your home to straighten you out.

I don’t think even that would help Stedman, though. He’s drunk so much Kool-Aid he’s oozing Purplesaurus Rex and Incrediberry out of his pores. Look at this bullshit:

Families wept over the death of loved ones, just as Jesus wept near the tomb of his friend Lazarus. Could our tears and sorrows be reminders that death was not part of our original design, that we were created to be like God—immortal?

I have never in my life grieved over the death of a loved one because it reminds me that, oh yeah, I’m supposed to be God-like and Immortal, and gosh, the loss of this loved one sure is a painful prod to make me think of how I got stiffed out of my Cosmic Destiny by that Eve chick. I’m not crying for them, it’s for getting cheated out of my supernatural inheritance.

Jebus, but I despise Christianity.

And then he has to top it off by sniping at evolution.

(Think about it: if atheistic materialism is true, don’t you think we would have become used to death in 3+ billion years of life on planet Earth? Wouldn’t we have settled the case that human deaths are par for the course and shouldn’t trouble us more than the death of a plant or pet?)

Any time a Christian says something along the lines of If evolution is true, then…, you can predict that they’re going to say something that reveals the depth of their ignorance.

It seems to me that if evolution would predict anything along those lines, it would be that successful lineages would evolve mechanisms to promote survival and to resist death, even inevitable, ubiquitous death. Getting “used to death” is such a weirdly narrow anthropomorphism, since most organisms are going to lack the awareness that is behind the concept of “getting used to”, and because we would expect that successful organisms would resist death.

But then, maybe this is part of the Christian experience. They get used to the unutterable boredom of having to sit through miserable church services every week, so they imagine that is what life is all about — getting accustomed to the intolerable. That’s what they think their imaginary afterlife is all about, too…an eternity of repetitive, predictable slavery. They expect they’ll get used to it. Rick Stedman will help them!