Alex Jones’ media empire has been sold at auction, and the winner is The Onion. No Joke.
The satirical news outlet bought Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, backed by a group of Connecticut families. Jones said on today’s show that security has notified him he needs to vacate the premises this morning.
Proceeds of the sale will go to paying down Jones’ nearly $1.5 billion debt to families of Sandy Hook victims who won two defamation suits against him for spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which Jones said never happened. He accused the families of being actors, faking the killing of 20 children and 6 educators, in an effort to drum up support for gun control, and Jones supporters who believed the lies threatened and harassed the families for years.
It is no secret that Alex Jones was hoping for some of this allies to buy Infowars and let him keep the brand. Alas, for him, this was not to be. And he is not taking it well:
“We’re going out like vikings with swords in our arms,” he said. He’s accusing the auction house of rigging rules against him to benefit the families.
“At the last minute, the rules of the auction changed,” he alleged yesterday. “What was going to be an open auction where you […] could offer more money and top [previous] bids, but now they’ve decided that it’ll just be sealed and there’s one bid and whoever’s the highest gets it.”
For a tough guy, he whines a lot, doesn’t he?
As to why the Onion, or rather its parent company, bought Infowars, I think I will let the explain themselves
Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.
All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.
Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.
What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.
As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.
Infinite Growth Forever,
Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO
Sweet justice with a twist of satire. What more could we want?
“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.
He’s also white.
With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.
Unsurprising he has defrauded people and owes millions in back taxes.
A bunch of archaeologist and other online creators have come together to do an online event where they teach real archaeology – they call this initiative real archaeology:
Real Archaeology was started by a collective of online creators who produce fact-based content about the past. Our goal is to collaborate in creating, promoting, and sharing entertaining and educational media with the wider public on the wonders of our shared history.
We use peer-reviewed sources and our experience as researchers, teachers, archaeologists, historians, and more to bring history to life and make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible. As a part of our efforts to spread our message, we have created the Real Archaeology online event that spans three days in October.
During this time, our speakers will be releasing a myriad of archaeology-related content across multiple platforms including YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Follow our creators (list below) or search #realarchaeology to find and engage with our material.
The event started yesterday, but there is still time to catch the schedule today and tomorrow
Kris Kristofferson died a couple of days ago, and the world is somewhat poorer for it. He was a talented songwriter and actor, and by all records a decent human being, fighting for a better world.
Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and an A-list Hollywood actor, has died.
Kristofferson died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.
McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given.
Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such country and rock ‘n’ roll standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”
The problem of identifying the influential spreaders – the important nodes – in a real world network is of high importance due to its theoretical interest as well as its practical applications, such as the acceleration of information diffusion, the control of the spread of a disease and the improvement of the resilience of networks to external attacks. In this paper, we propose a graph exploration sampling method that accurately identifies the influential spreaders in a complex network, without any prior knowledge of the original graph, apart from the collected samples/subgraphs. The method explores the graph, following a deterministic selection rule and outputs a graph sample – the set of edges that have been crossed. The proposed method is based on a version of Rank Degree graph sampling algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments in eight real world networks by simulating the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) and susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic models which serve as ground truth identifiers of nodes spreading efficiency. Experimentally, we show that by exploring only the 20% of the network and using the degree centrality as well as the k-core measure, we are able to identify the influential spreaders with at least the same accuracy as in the full information case, namely, the case where we have access to the original graph and in that graph, we compute the centrality measures. Finally and more importantly, we present strong evidence that the degree centrality – the degree of nodes in the collected samples – is almost as accurate as the k-core values obtained from the original graph.
Defendants Are Alleged to Have Committed Cyber Attacks in Advance of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine; Also Targeted 26 North Atlantic Treaty Organization Countries
It is the official release of the charge against Tenet and the Russian paymasters that was release a couple of weeks ago. For a good overview of the case, I recommend this article from the Columbia Journalism Review: The Tenet Media Incident
Denne rapport udgør den hidtil mest omfattende undersøgelse af racisme i Danmark
med udgangspunkt i oplevet diskrimination og fordomme. Mens enkeltpersoners egne
oplevelser ikke kan give et præcist billede af det faktiske omfang af diskrimination
og fordomme, så kan oplevelser i kombination med den omfangsrige forskning, der
henvises til i rapporten, tydeliggøre, at der er problemer, der skal løses.
Undersøgelsen tager udgangspunkt i voksne minoritetsetniske personer med
opvækst i Danmark – dvs. personer der enten er født i Danmark eller kommet hertil
som børn (herefter betegnet som minoritetsetniske personer). Overordnet viser
besvarelserne i undersøgelsen, at over 8 ud af 10 minoritetsetniske personer angiver,
at de har oplevet diskrimination eller fordomme inden for det seneste år. Over 6 ud af
10 minoritetsetniske personer angiver, at de har oplevelser, man som udgangspunkt
kan karakterisere som ulovlig diskrimination. For mange er der ikke tale om en enkelt
hændelse, men gentagne negative oplevelser på tværs af bl.a. arbejdsmarkedet, i det
offentlige rum og i kontakten med myndigheder.
This is a report about experienced/perceived ethnic discrimination in Denmark, made by the Danish Institute for Human Rights in 2023
Adolescent girls who lived through Covid lockdowns experienced more rapid brain ageing than boys, according to data that suggests the social restrictions had a disproportionate impact on them.
MRI scans found evidence of premature brain ageing in both boys and girls, but girls’ brains appeared on average 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years older for boys.
This certainly sounds like something we should be worried about, even if it is not clear what the effect of these differences are.
The widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the study of child- and adult-onset developmental psychopathologies has generated many investigations that have measured brain structure and function in vivo throughout development, often generating great excitement over our ability to visualize the living, developing brain using the attractive, even seductive images that these studies produce. Often lost in this excitement is the recognition that brain imaging generally, and MRI in particular, is simply a technology, one that does not fundamentally differ from any other technology, be it a blood test, a genotyping assay, a biochemical assay, or behavioral test. No technology alone can generate valid scientific findings. Rather, it is only technology coupled with a strong experimental design that can generate valid and reproducible findings that lead to new insights into the mechanisms of disease and therapeutic response
The subject the review focus on is not the one that the prematurely aged brains study fall under, but the same general problem exist.
And then there is the fact that the study is linked to COVID political measures. Any time this is the case, we have to stop up and be extra careful. There are a lot of biases related to this subject, both from the scientists and by the people reporting on the study.
Unsurprisingly this is also the case here. As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, the Health Nerd, explains:
The study in question is a neurological examination of teen brains. The researchers put a bunch of adolescents aged 9-17 into MRIs before the pandemic, and then looked at their brains again a few years later. They used this data to look at what had happened to the brains in the interim using a variety of statistical techniques.
The Health Nerd goes through the study, explaining the setup and limits of the study. Unsurprisingly, it is a small study, and it is hard to make broad conclusions based on it. And when it comes to the effect of lockdowns?
Which brings us to an interesting point – what does any of this have to do with lockdowns?
Simple answer, really: nothing. The study does not, in any way, examine the effects of lockdown on teen brains.
Rather, the study shows that teen girls’ brains after the pandemic were different to the expected trends from brains before the pandemic. This could be caused by many things. Maybe the virus itself, which can cause some changes to brain chemistry, is to blame. Perhaps it was the global disruption brought about by a novel pandemic. Maybe the girls were more vulnerable than boys to things like relatives dying of COVID-19. We have no idea, because the authors didn’t do anything to investigate these myriad explanations. They don’t even report that the children in the study were present in Washington State for the lockdowns, nor whether they experienced similar lockdown impacts (i.e. school closures).
To make any inferences about lockdowns, the authors would’ve had to find some control group who’d had a different exposure to their intervention. Perhaps MRIs from kids in Florida, which had different COVID-19 restrictions, or a longitudinal sample from before the pandemic. These would all be inadequate samples for one reason or another, but they would’ve at least given some insight into whether lockdowns were associated with the cortical thinning seen in the research. As it stands, the study tells us nothing at all.
So, this is a somewhat doubtful study, which doesn’t tell us what is claimed about the study. The claims however are not sensational reporting by the press, but directly made by the scientists:
You can’t just blame the media here – the authors put the word “lockdown” into their study. It’s the second word of the title of their paper. Despite the paper having nothing to do with lockdowns.
This is, in a word, bad. Bad science. Poorly thought-through. Inadequate in a very serious way.
The Health Nerd explains how such a paper could be published in PNAS.
As some of you might know, I have a double citizenship. I am Danish/Australian. I have lived my whole life in Denmark, but have close ties to Australia, where I have a lot of family that I try to visit regularly. As a matter of fact, I am going to visit them in a few months.
My parents met each other while my father was living in Australia, mostly traveling from place to place, doing odd jobs. They met in Alice Springs, where my mother had arrived at, after leaving her parent’s home, and traveling around. My father’s travels where much more extensively and over a much longer time than my mother’s travels.
For some reason, I today thought about the fact that when my father first arrived, he had gone by ship. This lead me to wonder if I could find any record of what ship he had traveled to Australia on.
Searching my father name, turns up two records, both from 18 Mar 1965.
The first record shows that my father arrived on the ship GUGLIELMO, which upon closer inspection turns out to be Guglielmo Marconi of Lloyd Triestino. The record from the NAA contains the passenger manifest, which should my father is getting of at Melbourne.
The NAA also contains the disembarking papers of my father (the incoming passenger card)
Both the NAA record and the disembarking papers for my father, shows that he was going to stay at “ICEM, Bonegilla Camp VIC.”. This is the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, which mainly handled non-English immigrants. Since my father was from Denmark, he fell into this category.
Each person or family group at Bonegilla was registered with an identity card which recorded dates of arrival and departure, the ship or flight they came on, the block they lived in and more.
Using the lookup tool, I found the ID card for my father
It shows that he arrived on March 23rd 1965 and left just over two weeks later on April 7th 1965, where he was going to take up residence at the Maribyrnong Hostel in Melbourne. The Maribyrnong Hostel was a migrant hostel, originally named Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Center, and later renamed to Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel, and finally Maribyrnong Hostel. The buildings of the hostel seems to still exist, even though it seems that there has been a proposal to demolish them in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, there are no further clues about my father’s travels from there.- At least not for now.
Most focus on the 2024 US election is rightfully on the Presidential election, where the is a stalk choice between Harris and Trump. A lot of focus is also given to races at the secondary – for the US congress and the US senate. But it also important to focus on the state level, where there are both elections to political positions, that are incredible important, as well as propositions on a number of issues. One of these issues in many states is abortion.
Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, voters in 6 states have weighed in on constitutional amendments regarding abortion, and the side favoring access to abortion prevailed in every state. In 4 of these states – California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont – measures amending the state constitution to protect the right to abortion were approved by voters and in the other 2 states – Kentucky and Kansas – measures seeking to curtail the right to abortion failed. In 2024, up to 10 states may have abortion measures on their ballot seeking to either affirm that the state constitution protects the right to abortion or that nothing in the constitution confers such a right.
There is a map showing the states, but here is the list as well:
Arizona (for abortion)
Colorado (for abortion)
Florida (for abortion)
Maryland (for abortion)
Missouri (for abortion)
Montana (for abortion)
Nebraska (one measure for and one against abortion)
Nevada (for abortion, first of two needed elections)
New York (for abortion)
South Dakota (for abortion)
If you are in one of these states, make sure to vote to help protect abortion
This sounds like it started out with normal stuff happening when a company split, but clearly Lin Wood have learned from Trump and started defaming his former partners
Science fiction has always been a way to envision the future. Sometimes for the optimal; sometimes as the future might be if humans do not zig toward the good and just. As the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote, “the saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
Black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writers of these genres. The field has long been run by mostly white men: the J.R.R. Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks and George R. R. Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of Black female writers proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today.
What I especially love about this article is that I became aware of it because John Scalzi shared it on Threads. He is always trying to promote diversity and promote other people.
Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.
They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.
They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.
It is a long read, but well worth reading. It is a important view into people who are actively trying to destroy democracy by violent means.
Writers love to cite Ernest Hemingway’s famous advice, “write drunk, edit sober.” But not only did he not actually say that—he practically said the opposite.
It is one of those annoying quotes that goes around, and it is nice to get it debunked
