Can we cancel this weird creep now?

Dave Rubin is one of the dumbest online pundits on the planet, and he’s also one of those people caught with his hands in the Russian cookie jar. Rubin weighed in on Taylor Swift’s endorsement, and it’s one of the sleaziest, most repulsive takes you’ll see.

“Let’s talk a little bit about how this fits into the pop culture part of this, because the pop culture is a huge driver of the cultural narrative,” said Rubin. “Poor Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris on Instagram after the debate on ABC, proudly calls herself ‘a childless cat lady.’ Elon Musk, who they hate, saw that and he wrote this: ‘Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.’ So he’s mocking and exposing the ridiculousness, right?”

“It’s like Taylor Swift, you are a young, pretty girl,” said Rubin. “Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young, pretty girls? It ain’t pretty. So what do we have to do? We just have to keep finding each other to whatever extent we can, we have to keep waking people up, it is the only chance we have in these remaining 60 days.”

Seriously, dude? “Vote for Trump or you’ll be raped by a Venezualan gang”? Combining racism, classism, and threats of sexual assault is an ugly mix, you know. That’s just how desperate the Trumpers are getting.

Game over, man

Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris/Tim Walz.

Lest you think the Republicans will be steamrollered, have no fear: Donald Trump quickly countered.

When asked Wednesday morning about Swift endorsing the Democratic nominee, Trump tried to shake it off, telling Fox News he prefers Swift’s close friend Brittany Mahomes over the singer.
“I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan.”

Who?

I looked her up on Wikipedia.

Brittany Lynne Mahomes (née Matthews; born August 31, 1995) is an American sports team co-owner and former soccer player who played as a forward for Icelandic club UMF Afturelding. She is a founding co-owner of the Kansas City Current, a team in the American professional top-division National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

She is married to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

OK, I’m still saying, “Who?”

It’s a good thing that the election won’t be decided by celebrity endorsements, but I do think Harris might have an edge here.

This is rather horrible.

He’s just confirming that the Trump cult is weird and creepy.

I watched the debate

I did. I sat through the whole thing, and I did not enjoy it.

Harris said nothing radical. No surprising policy changes; she wants to stay the course with Israel, demanding a cease fire and release of the hostages, but what I wanted to hear was that she would leverage the sale of arms to pressure Israel into ending the genocide — nope, she couldn’t say that. She did promise other positive changes, though with a $6K tax credit for new families and $50K for new business startups. Otherwise, she hammered on Trump a bit, as expected. “In this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” she predicted. She was exactly right.

Trump glowered through the whole thing. He looked resentful at being there, and yeah, he kept returning to immigration. He really hates a lot of people, and wants to deport millions of people, all those dangerous criminals pouring over the border, released from prisons and insane asylums. He repeated that nonsense about immigrants hunting down your beloved pets and killing them and eating them.

Asked about abortion, he claimed that everyone, including women, Democrats, and professors, loved the fact that he killed Roe v. Wade. No, they do not. Asked if he would veto a bill that proposed a nationwide abortion ban, he dodged the question. Asked about January 6th, he said “I didn’t do it.” He’s a liar and a coward.

Here’s a 20 minute summary of the whole thing.

The highlight for me, though, was when he was asked about what he planned to replace Obamacare with, he admitted he didn’t have any specific plans, he had concepts of plans.

He’s a hate-filled sack of shit. He’s got nothing but jingo and contempt for anyone who doesn’t look like him.

Maybe that will be enough to get him elected, unfortunately.

Lies, lies, and more lies

It’s just that easy!

What to expect from the debate tonight: as we get closer and closer to the election, the lies get more and more extreme.

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgeries during their school day, exacerbating existing fears among conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house, and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state, on Saturday.

What the hell is wrong with Trump and his audience? And he repeats it again!

When asked by the group’s co-founder how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the United States nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere.

My transgender friends are constantly complaining about how many hoops they have to jump through, how many years it takes to get approval, and how many states won’t even allow you to buy the drugs for maintenance. I’ll have to inform them that all you had to do was say that you used a different pronoun in middle school, and zip, you’re sent to the school nurse, who has a fully equipped surgery, and the sex change is done in a day.

Yeah, right.

And the MAGA idiots will believe it, and are ready for the next lie.

Which happens to be that Haitian immigrants are flooding the country and stealing your pets to eat raw in their apartments in the slums. Sure, fully believable. Everyone knows that housecat is the national dish of Haiti.

Examples of life in my neighborhood

My front yard is a bit of a scary place — it’s been taken over by cranky stinging insects. Here’s a wasp that has a nest in my front door.

Scarier still, though, is this small cavern that has been excavated in my lawn, and is full of buzzing frantically busy creatures that I could not photograph well, because they were moving so fast to complain about my existence. It might be a swarm of Karens.

I’ve mentioned that I have an endoscopic camera. Anyone want to double-dog-dare me to probe deeply into that mysterious tunnel full of alien life-forms? I’ll do it. I’m not a-skeered.

If you’re in the neighborhood…

On Thursday, 12 September, at 2:30, I’m joining forces with another class to drag our freshman students outside, before the snow starts falling next month, to confront the reality of life on campus. I’m bringing some handlenses, my macro camera, and an endoscopic camera for poking into holes, and we’ll take a look at life in the desert of the campus lawns and shrubbery (there is some, but it’s mostly springtails, ants, and spiders). We’ll also talk about how “spider” is misleading, because there are at least 30 different species of spiders living here, alongside the human monoculture.

I’m encouraging the students to sign up for iNaturalist and to use Seek to begin their careers as natural historians. It’ll be fun! Especially since otherwise I’d be lecturing them on meiosis. You’re welcome to join in if you’re in the neighborhood of Morris, Minnesota — this is going to be casual and geared to the first year college student.

You can almost get away with anything in the name of Jesus

Almost. There’s a line you can cross that will finally get the FBI on your case, but you have to push it to an extreme. Pastor Apollo Carreon Quiboloy went a little too far.

The FBI’s Most Wanted poster for Pastor Apollo Quiboloy refers to his aliases — including “The Appointed Son of God” and “Sir” — and lists the U.S. charges against him, including conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, and sex trafficking of children; and bulk cash smuggling.

He had a familiar strategy. He followed the American/European model, dispatching missionaries to countries around the world, where they lived in desperate poverty, panhandling and thieving and conning people out of money that they then sent back to Quiboloy, who lived high off the hog and kept the pretty girls around himself.

From 2002 to at least 2018, the U.S. indictment states, leaders of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ selected girls and young women between the ages of 12 and 25 to be “pastorals” — personal assistants to Quiboloy who were also coerced into sex, U.S. prosecutors say.

The pastorals’ duties included preparing the pastor’s meals and cleaning his homes. According to a superseding indictment from a federal grand jury in California, the girls also “gave him massages using lotion, and traveled with him on trips throughout the world,” including the U.S.

“Pastorals engaged in sex with defendant Quiboloy on a schedule” that assigned them “night duty,” the indictment states.

Some pastorals were minors, the indictment states. It accuses Quiboloy and church administrators of telling the girls and young women that sex with the pastor was God’s will, threatening them with physical and verbal abuse “and eternal damnation” if they didn’t comply.

Note the dates: he was doing this crap starting in 2002, and the Philippines government just now arrested him. Mobs of followers are protesting his arrest. The FBI wants him extradited because his “church”, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ The Name Above Every Name, has been actively operating in the US as well.

The Kingdom of Jesus Christ sent workers to Los Angeles and other parts of the U.S. to solicit money on the streets for what U.S. prosecutors call a “bogus charity,” the Children’s Joy Foundation, based in Glendale, Calif. Officials at the foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

The workers told the public that donated money would go to help children in poverty, “when in fact the money directly financed KOJC operations and the lavish lifestyle of KOJC leaders, including defendants,” the federal indictment alleges. It adds that his church controls properties in Hawaii, Las Vegas and California, with Quiboloy also maintaining large residences in those areas.

Many of the workers arrived on student visas, with the church paying their tuitions, the indictment states. Some were allegedly placed in sham marriages with fellow church workers to help them stay in the U.S., according to the indictment. It accuses leaders of confiscating workers’ passports and immigration papers.

Every church is a scam, but most of them have learned to maintain certain standards of decorum in order to avoid the wrath of secular interests. Pastor Quiboloy shows us that those standards are terribly low…but then, we know that, because the Catholic Church and the various Protestant megachurches have been getting away with so much for so long.

This summary of Israel’s defenses holds up

Accurate.

A quick guide to Israel’s PR methods:
1. We haven’t heard reports of deaths, will check into it;
2. The people were killed, but by a faulty Palestinian rocket/bomb;
3. OK we killed them, but they were terrorists;
4. OK they were civilians, but they were being used as human shields;
5. OK there were no fighters in the area, so it was our mistake. But we kill civilians by accident, they do it on purpose;
6. OK we kill far more civilians than they do, but look at how terrible other countries are!
7. Why are you still talking about Israel? Are you some kind of anti-semite?
Test this against the next interview you hear or watch.
Adam Johannes, Secretary, Cardiff Stop the War Coalition

Debate schmebate

Great. We’re having a another presidential debate tomorrow. I predict it will be a debacle.

I won’t predict who will win, because that is going to be shaped by people’s subjective impressions and the way impressions will be shaped by the media. And one thing I can definitely predict is that the media will fuck it up.

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

This debate shouldn’t be happening, because in a functional democracy the senile narcissist running for the Republican party should have been repudiated long ago.