The right wing authoritarians recently looked around and noticed that they have a girl gap. While the reality-based community has Greta Thunberg, they had nothing — so they cast about desperately, found Naomi Seibt, and the Heartland Institute elevated her to be their Anti-Greta spokesperson. Only they tried a little too hard, and got someone who is the antithesis of Greta in all things.

Where Greta’s consistent message is, “Listen to the scientists”, the Anti-Greta says the scientists are all wrong.

Where Greta is painfully, passionately honest, the Anti-Greta is a carefully groomed liar. Here’s a perfect example of an obvious lie.

The teenager, from Münster in western Germany, claims she is “without an agenda, without an ideology”. But she was pushed into the limelight by leading figures on the German far right and her mother, a lawyer, has represented politicians from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in court.

Seibt had her first essay published by the “anti-Islamisation” blog Philosophia Perennis and was championed by Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, who has been denied entry to the UK and US because of his political activism.

Anybody who claims to be without an agenda or an ideology is lying. That she also supports right-wing bigotry is more evidence that she lies.

Also, the Heartland Institute is paying her, and they are an evil and ethically bankrupt institution. Good grief, they lobby for the tobacco industry and fracking, as well as against climate change. The Anti-Greta is their puppet.

I think I’d rather be on the side of the genuinely good, like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. That’s my agenda, my ideology, and I’m proud to say it.

For years, we laughed at Kent Hovind for his Ph.D. from a degree mill, the absurd Patriot University, a cheap house in Colorado. This “university”:

It looks like they spent more money on landscaping than on their faculty.

But now, a new ridiculous “university” has emerged, and a new photo of a joke institution. Hello, Reagan National University!

Impressive. It is matched only by their elaborate web presence, which if you followed that link, is this:

It apparently has no faculty and no students, but it is accredited, for real. This story broke because pesky journalists started poking around revelations about dodgy accreditation practices.

Twice, on Jan. 29 and Feb. 12, a reporter visited the listed addresses for Reagan National University in Sioux Falls. In one location, the doors were locked, and the office suite was dark. Both had signs bearing the school’s name. At another location, the suite was mostly empty, save for some insulation scattered on the floor and a shop vacuum.

In case you didn’t know, you shouldn’t be able to put up a shingle and call yourself a university. There is a regular accreditation process in which teams of experts descend upon your university and check over the facts: how many students do you have, how many faculty, what are the available expertise and facilities, how is assessment done, how are students faring after their degree…it’s a massive amount of work. We just went through this here at UMM — I contributed tiny bits of information in my faculty role, but we also had a committee that had to put together a fat report, and the accreditors will tell us what needs to be improved, and we will take their recommendations very, very seriously and struggle to implement them before they fall upon us again. Accreditation is about standards and maintaining quality of education.

Except when it isn’t.

The accreditation agency is central to the process, and there are some of those around that aren’t quite as rigorous. Morris is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. Every good university will make it clear how they are accredited.

Patriot University is ‘accredited’ by Accrediting Commission International, a religious organization based in Florida that puts their seal of approval on Bible colleges. They do not have any affiliation with the US Department of Education or the government, and are proud of that fact. Patriot University is likewise proud of not accepting those secular standards of accreditation.

Reagan National University is accredited by ACICS, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools. They claim to have some rigor, with site visits and evaluations, but somehow they missed the fact that RNU doesn’t have any faculty or students. That’s not a good sign.

At first glance, the ACICS correspondence with Reagan appears to be a purposeful response to a struggling school, said Antoinette Flores, an accreditation expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

But the correspondence doesn’t address the apparent absence of faculty and students that USA TODAY uncovered this winter.

“You accredited this institution. How did you miss this?” Flores said.

That Reagan sought ACICS approval in 2017, when its future as an accreditor was unclear, should also raise questions, she said. The Department of Education recognizes many groups that can accredit colleges, and universities sometimes have multiple options to choose from. Some groups may have higher standards than others.

“I don’t think this bodes well for them,” she said of ACICS. “They had said that they’re turning themselves around.”

When the accrediting body faced closure in 2016, some of its colleges found new accreditors.

The ones that were left with ACICS, said Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow who studies higher education at Third Way, a left-leaning think tank, probably couldn’t find accreditation elsewhere.

“They’re the bottom of the barrel,” he said.

ACICS seems to be mainly in the business of collecting fees to rubber stamp college accreditation requests. They’ve been slapped down before, and have risen again thanks to…can you guess?

The agency in question, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools, has a history of approving questionable colleges, with devastating consequences. It accredited ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges and Brightwood College, massive for-profit universities whose sudden closures last decade left thousands of students without degrees and undermined the value of the education of those who did graduate. Those closures led President Barack Obama’s Education Department to strip ACICS’ powers in 2016.

After a federal court decision, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President Donald Trump’s administration reinstated the accrediting agency. By that point, it had lost dozens of colleges and their membership fees. It needed new members, and fast.

The decision in 2017 to approve Reagan National University as a viable college – one that today lacks the discernible hallmarks of higher learning – calls into question ACICS’ ability to hold colleges accountable for the education they’re supposed to provide.

So now in addition to diploma mills that gouge students for worthless degrees, we have accreditation mills that gouge diploma mills for fake seals of approval. Sitting atop the scammer’s food chain is Betsy DeVos’s department of education. It’s yet another thing Donald Trump has corrupted.

At least it’s fitting that the ‘university’ is named after Ronald Reagan.

I read the story a few times — it’s short — and I still don’t know what these “activists” were trying to accomplish. At the time of the Nevada Democratic debate, a group calling themselves P.U.T.I.N. (“Pigeons United To Interfere Now”) glued little red MAGA hats on the heads of pigeons and released them in Las Vegas. Why? I don’t know. Was it to protest Russian interference, to mock the Republicans, or to ridicule Democrats? I have no idea. It just seems to be a petty exercise in animal cruelty with no point.

It’s not even funny or clever, only ineffective and confusing. It’s a good demonstration that, while it’s good to be motivated to do something, some thought needs to be put into your plans and you must have specific goals that are served by your actions. Whoever pulled this stunt was heedless of the animals they were coercing.

I did! But then last night I didn’t watch the whole debate, just bits and pieces here and there, but I saw enough to feel a primal urge to bow down before the fierce goddess and worship her. Elizabeth Warren was on fire, and that’s what I need from my candidate. I’m not saying I’ll abandon an intellectual commitment to Bernie Sanders on election day, but Warren is what my heart wants.

It was very nice of Michael Bloomberg to volunteer to be the punching bag of the evening, and to spend what, $400 million dollars for the privilege, but man, did he get flensed alive. If Bloomberg was the proxy racist, sexist billionaire on the stage, Trump ought to be terrified at the thought of facing Warren after the primaries are over. I say “ought to be” because he’s probably too squidgy-brained to care. He also got torn up by Clinton in the debates, and it didn’t matter.

I was amused by the post-debate from the Bloomberg camp that he did very well in the debate — that was a definitive trouncing. He went so far as to claim that he delivered the most potent zinger against Bernie, accusing him of owning three houses. That’s right, a billionaire accusing a man of being a little bit rich was the strongest riposte he could think of.

Also notable: Klobuchar did a fine job of torpedoing Buttigieg.

The Minnesota presidential primary is less than two weeks away and I’m going to have to make up my mind: I’m torn between the savage warrior wonk and the dedicated sage. Of course, my wife is going to unlimber a couple of arms, wave a sword and trident and a severed head at me and tell me to vote for Bernie, and I have to respect that ferocity, too.

You really don’t want to find your name in it. It’s his aspirational list of who a creepy rich pedophile thinks are the important people in his world.

While we await subpoenas and depositions—if they ever come remains to be seen—there is a road map of sorts in the form of Epstein’s so-called “little black book,” 92 pages of names, emails, and phone numbers of people Epstein knew, or wanted to know, but in any event had detailed information about. Wall Street people comprise a significant amount of the entries. “He was a kind of wholesale collector of people, including people he didn’t know,” one of the Wall Street guys in the black book tells me. “I guarantee you that 90% of the people whose names are in his book, he’s not in their book. Many of these people don’t even know him.”

What the book tells us is that Epstein knew, or aspired to know, some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in Washington. Sure there are the Trumps—Donald, Ivana, and Ivanka—and Bill Clinton’s surrogate Doug Band in the book. But once you get past their names, there is the horde of Wall Street executives. The contact book is dated for sure, replete as it is with misspellings and incorrect or superseded phone numbers, emails, and addresses. It remains something of an enigma: What was the book’s purpose? “I don’t think it means anything,” the Wall Street executive continues. “…I didn’t really know Jeffrey. He was like Boo Radley in the corner of the room. After I met him, he became Jeffrey Epstein, he had no interest in me. He knew right out of the box who the players were, the people who would stay out all night, people who had interests in extracurricular objectives, and who the hitters were. That wasn’t me.”

That unnamed Wall Street executive has the words we’re going to hear a lot of in the future: I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. I don’t think it means anything. Right. Except that it does mean something. It means you were a wealthy plutocrat who came into the orbit of a man who was looking for an angle on rich people everywhere. You are a member of the looter class.

So, also on the list of greedy people we find David Koch, Mike Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, Conrad Black, etc., etc., etc. You don’t need to be a super-brilliant detective to see a pattern in the names.

I am confident that I am not in the book.