FIFTY BILLION ($50,000,000,000) DOLLARS!!!

Regular readers of this blog don’t need to be told who Rhawn Joseph is, but for the rest of you, he’s the panspermist who gazes at photos from NASA and ESA of the surface of Mars and Venus, and then claims to have identified mushrooms. And spiders. And human skulls. He’s just a barrel of laughs.

He’s also been dabbling in the law. He tried to sue NASA, and more recently, he sued Springer Nature for refusing to publish one of his pareidolia papers, and for daring to retract another when people alerted the publisher about what a flaming ball of garbage it was. He’s litigious, but either too cheap or too weird to get a legitimate lawyer to help him out, so he’s filing these things pro se, which makes them particularly amusing. Here’s a succinct summary from a judge:

Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D., proceeding pro se, is a scientist who claims he found evidence of possible extraterrestrial life on Venus and Mars. To expound his ideas here on Earth, Dr. Joseph wrote two articles—one about life on Venus, the other about life on Mars—and submitted them for publication in an academic journal called Astrophysics and Space Science (“ApSS”). ApSS published the article about Venus, and the piece received some traction in the scientific community. But before publishing the article on Martian life, ApSS told Dr. Joseph that it needed to vet his findings a bit more. Dr. Joseph did not like the sound of that. So he withdrew his submission of the Mars article and demanded that ApSS remove the Venus article from its website. Rather than remove the Venus article, and after conducting additional peer review, ApSS told Dr. Joseph that it would retract the article.

The judge also made a few other comments.

The Complaint is at times difficult to follow. It is littered with speculation, confusing ramblings, conclusory legal assertions, and personal attacks against Defendants. See, e.g., Compl. ¶ 12 (“The Defendants are lying, confabulating, engaging in fraud and falsifying their references[.]”), ¶ 20 (claiming that “major scientific discoveries must pass through three stages: 1) Ridicule, 2) Violent opposition, 3) Acceptance as obvious and self-evident” and that Dr. Joseph’s work regarding life on Venus and Marks “is now at stage 2 (violent opposition)”); ¶ 23 (calling the two individual Defendants “mediocrities”); ¶ 30 (“Defendants libeled and slandered Plaintiff in April of 2020.”). Because Dr. Joseph is proceeding pro se, the Court endeavored to distill the facts from the Complaint as best it could and construe them in the light most favorable to him.

Yeah, that’s the shouty deranged Rhawn Joseph I know all right.

The best part: Rhawn Joseph was suing Springer Nature for…

FIFTY BILLION ($50,000,000,000) DOLLARS!!!

His case was dismissed.

Shut up, Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman is one of the many reasons I do not and will not subscribe to the NY Times — they have way too many assholes granted a sinecure to babble their stupid opinions on one of the more prestigious newspapers in the world, and I guess all we can do is make a little effort to reduce their reputation, one reader at a time. So you’ll have to read his latest stupid column via a link to a site that skims off articles from the NYT.

Anyway, he starts off with classic centrist garbage — you know, both sides are wrong and extremist, therefore we ought to pick something in the middle.

On the one hand, liberal greens will tell you that the world is ending — but that we must not use nuclear power, an abundant source of clean energy, to stave it off. On the other hand, conservative greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that we can’t burden people with a carbon tax or a gasoline tax to slow global warming.

On a third hand, suburban greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that they don’t want any windmills, solar farms or high-speed rail lines in their backyards.

On a fourth hand, most of today’s leaders will tell you that the world is ending, so at Glasgow they’ve all decided to go out on a limb and commit their successors’ successor to deliver emissions-free electricity by 2030, 2040 or 2050 — any date that doesn’t require them to ask their citizens to do anything painful today.

He’s right that the Glasgow meetings were relatively ineffective because they were all about compromise, but isn’t that what Friedman wants? Split the difference, find a middle ground, characterize all environmentalists as wackos? He got what he wanted, so he can’t complain that his very own brand is a failure. His own solution is to further empower technocrats and corporations to engineer us out of the hole the technocrats and corporations have dug us into.

His answer is this turd to make it all worse.

In short: we need a few more Greta Thunbergs and a lot more Elon Musks. That is, more risk-taking innovators converting basic science into tools yet to be imagined to protect the planet for a generation yet to be born.

The only reason we need more Greta Thunbergs is because the Elon Musks have been running amuck. He’s not a “risk-taking innovator” — he’s a billionaire who is busy looting the planet and our economy to fuel his ego. He doesn’t do science! He spends money on whatever gives him a good return on his investment; his fantasy of launching people (not himself, obviously, other people) to Mars is flaming anti-environmentalism.

I am not surprised, though, that Thomas Fucking Friedman worships Musk as his Space Jesus.

Minnesota Man truly believes in FREEEEEEEDOM!

It’s not just for Floridians anymore. We have a Minnesota man going buck wild at the airport.

Telling agents he “did not have to stop” because “it’s a free country,” a 44-year-old Minneapolis man is charged with threatening TSA workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The charges state that he also swung a stanchion line post before throwing it at agents, taking his clothes off and masturbating.

<sniff, sniff> It warms the heart to see a True Patriot exercising his rights. Like any other True Patriot, he also has a domestic assault charge hanging over his head.

If only all those Enlightenment philosophers who made all the noise about liberty could see the end result of their work.

It looks like PragerU will have some competition

And Lo, it shall be named the University of Austin. The usual disgruntled suspects are marching off to set up an unaccredited university that offers no degrees to Austin, Texas, as announced by a right-wing ex-college president, Panos Kanelos, on Bari Weiss’s substack. After deploring the censorious nature of the liberal university, he declares that he has moved to an office in Austin and is going to create a new university, fiat ex nihilo, from the dregs of the canceled.

But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

I mean that quite literally.

As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.

I am not alone.

Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.

We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.

We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

What a rogues gallery. It’s going to differ from PragerU, though, in being more than a YouTube channel — Kanelos is committed to creating a physical campus, with buildings and all that stuff, somewhere near Austin. Why Austin, you might ask? His answer:

If it’s good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it’s good enough for us.

He forgot to mention that other equally esteemed scholar and fellow Austinite, Alex Jones.

He has appointed faculty! They include Ayaan Hirsi Ali (how far she has fallen), Kathleen Stock, the transphobic philosopher, and Peter Boghossian, the asshole philosopher. That’s it, so far. The curriculum isn’t going to have much breadth, I guess. Although, to be fair, they don’t even have a curriculum, yet, except perhaps to be the rubbish bin that attracts incompetent ideologues. They also have an ambitious goal of having a fully functional four-year undergraduate program in place by 2024. Ha ha.

Don’t you worry about the University of Austin, though! What they lack in academic rigor and actual scholarly talent, they make up for with the usual far-right super-grifting abilities. They say they are in the process of securing $250 million, which means some asshole billionaires somewhere are lined up to throw money at this poisonous shitpile.

Oh. We do know who is funding this grift: Joe Lonsdale, tech bro venture capitalist and pal to Peter Thiel.

Yay.

The water-logged corpse of JFK jr did not appear in Dealey Plaza

I am so disappointed. I just got home from the lab and the first thing I had to check was whether John F. Kennedy Jr had shown up in Texas.

He did not.

It turns out his father was also supposed to appear. He did not.

You know who else was a no-show?

The Dallas QAnon believers had become convinced the Kennedys would unveil themselves on Nov. 2 around 12:30 PM Central time, right around the timing of Kennedy’s assassination. But they then began to add on other dead celebrities, convinced that they, too, would appear, having faked their deaths to avoid the deep state.

They began to pick out random people they encountered in the Dallas area as celebrities in disguise, claiming one man was comedian Robin Williams and another comedian Richard Pryor.

Also…

“I just can’t wait to see Kobe Bryant!” the new woman said.

The list of returning celebrities grew long, coming to include not just the Kennedys, Bryant, and Williams, but also actress Debbie Reynolds and racecar driver Dale Earnhardt.

“Yes, there’s been a rapper here, we’re not sure of his name,” said one man livestreaming from Dallas.

“Tupac, maybe?” asked one helpful listener.

None of them showed up, which may have been a good thing given one concern.

One Dallas resident pointed out that no parade permits had been obtained for the parade of dead celebrities that was supposed to follow on Tuesday afternoon.

Yes, I’m sure that would have been embarrassing if the cops turned up to hand out tickets to John F. Kennedy, his son Jr, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Kobe Bryant, Debbie Reynolds, Dale Earnhardt, and Tupac.

What? No love for Biggie Smalls?

Bargain basement second coming

Anyone in Dallas today? There is a small crowd of wackaloons gathering at AT&T Discovery Plaza to await the resurrection, the second coming, the beginning of a new era. It’s not Jesus Christ they eagerly await, though — it’s John F. Kennedy Jr..

JFK Jr died in a plane crash at sea in 1999. His decomposing body and that of his two passengers were recovered after 5 days of decay and marine scavengers had been at him. I don’t think he survived.

QAnon followers have gathered in Dallas, Texas, where they believe John F. Kennedy Jr. will reappear and announce Donald Trump is president.

A large crowd of QAnon believers descended on the AT&T Discovery Plaza on Monday, ahead of the supposed return of the deceased JFK Jr. before midnight today.

The Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli shared several photos that showed a dozens-strong crowd, with some wearing t-shirts that said “Trump: JFK Jr. 2024.”

Right, “dozens”. I think we’re seeing the fringe of the fringe.

You might be wondering what else they believe.

Conspiracy followers also believe the clocks will go back an hour, that people will adopt the Julian calendar and that the date will go back to October 20.

The QAnon conspiracy, which originated on online message boards, holds that an elite global cabal of Satanic pedophiles is engaged in mass child sex trafficking and that, somehow, former President Donald Trump will expose this group and order its members arrested and sentenced to death.

They are sort of right about one thing: the clocks will be set back an hour next Sunday. The rest? I don’t think so.

But wait! There’s more!

But there is a section of the QAnon conspiracy movement that has also latched onto the belief that John F. Kennedy Jr. will reveal he did not die in a plane crash in 1999 and will help usher in a new period of American prosperity.

The outlandish theory posits that JFK Jr. has been in hiding for more than two decades and would return as Trump’s vice president.

A popular QAnon Telegram account with more than 100,000 subscribers echoed the conspiracy in a Monday post and said Trump would be reinstated as president and JFK Jr. would be named his vice president.

The post continued to claim Trump would then step down, meaning JFK Jr. would become president and name Michael Flynn as his vice president.

It continued to push a messianic narrative, with the post adding Trump would “most likely” become king of kings, failing to elaborate on what that would entail.

Their iconography is amazing.

By the way, I found that image, and many more, in a “Donald Trump is Jesus” group on Facebook, which is still a major vector for spreading bullshit, like anti-vaccination memes.

Kent Hovind’s unsavory career

There’s nothing here I didn’t already know, but if you want an up-to-date summary of Hovind’s criminality, here’s a video. In addition to committing spousal abuse, he’s been hanging out with and making excuses for convicted pedophiles. Would you believe that he thinks one of his associates being found guilty of the crime is that, sure, he was playing strip poker with an 11 year old, but they only got down to his underwear before he stopped.

Only watch on an empty stomach.

I could have predicted he’d be taking this route 30 years ago. He’s a skeevy, creepy liar who found a profitable grift in religion.

Sorry, Australia

The first thing I learned this morning is that Candace Owens wants us to invade Australia. You might be curious about what prompted this bellicose idea: it’s because they are managing the pandemic better than we are.

“When do we deploy troops to Australia?” she said before the Victoria lockdown was eased. “When do we invade Australia and free an oppressed people who are suffering under a totalitarian regime?

“When do we spend trillions of dollars to spread democracy in Australia?” she added. “Australia currently, make no mistake, is a tyrannical police state. Its citizens are quite literally being imprisoned against their will. So when do we deploy?”

It seems she’s just following the lead of Ted Cruz.

Owens’ comments follow a similar swipe against Australian authorities made last week by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) who tweeted: “The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful and sad,” before adding: “Individual liberty matters.”

It’s embarrassing. Don’t worry, Australia, these are just the stupid Republicans that are currently afflicting our country, they don’t speak for us. With any luck, they’ll be dying off thanks to their own mismanagement of our health policy.

If you felt like turning around and invading us to liberate our country from a totalitarian, insane political party, I wouldn’t object. I’d be grateful.