How to cure your manly depression

I’ve been depressed lately, and I turned to YouTube to find out why. Cody Johnston asks “Are Men OK?” and I thought maybe this would explain it all.

Unfortunately, the first half of the video is a lot of excerpts from the self-declared gurus of manliness, Jordan Peterson & Fresh&Fit & Bronze Age Pervert & Elon Musk & Andrew Tate & Sneako & William James & Charlie Kirk & Teddy Roosevelt & Patrick Bet-David & Josh Hawley & Ben Shapiro (I tried to take notes, but there were so many I probably missed a few) and they just made me more depressed. I don’t even listen to any of them — I think they’re all flaming morons — but the idea that people so stupid can be so wildly successful financially is discouraging. I don’t think my problems have anything to do with what those bozos claim, but is more about being reminded of my limitations as I grow older and seeing the possibility of retirement constantly receding away from me.

In the last half he talks about solutions, but mainly they’re about dismantling the patriarchy and shutting down the grifters, which doesn’t actually help me directly, but would probably have other benefits.

The formula for fame & fortune: Hate + Christianity

Say you’re a poorly educated little man with no redeeming qualities, but you want to be rich and famous. You aren’t very talented or skilled, but you are able to talk fast and with confidence about very little at all. So you open a church. That’s the limit of your abilities.

But most churches are local two-bit affairs, and church pastors who are nice and try to help their communities are going to go nowhere. Yeah, you might have the respect of your neighbors, and you might be able to have some self-respect, but kindness never pays, and if you want to skyrocket to national attention and get donations from really rich people (you know, the people who matter), you’ve got to have some pizzazz. So you add this to your statement of faith.

We believe that the human race was created as genetic male (man) and genetic female (woman) by a direct act of God; that marriage has been established by God; therefore, marriage is a sacred covenantal union between one man and one woman, for life. We also believe that legitimate Biblical sexual relations are exercised solely within marriage. Hence, sexual activities such as, but not limited to, adultery, fornication, incest, polygamy, homosexuality, transgender, bisexuality, cross-dressing, pedophilia and bestiality are inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible and the Church. Further, lascivious behavior, the creation, viewing and/or distribution of pornography and efforts to alter ones gender are incompatible with a true Biblical witness.

Now you’re talking. Now you’ve got a juicy topic for many sermons, and you’ve succeeded in drawing the most venomous, petty people to attend, and they’ll take action against all the people outside your church, getting you more and more attention. It’s such a simple formula, and it works. So many big-time preachers have launched careers that buy them private jets and mansions and yachts off this basic approach! You’d think people would catch on, but no, there are always more little angry people who want to get a trivial sense of power by tormenting The Other.

The latest parasite to leap unto this bandwagon is Pastor Tim Thompson. He’s going to go far, because he has hitched his star to the MAGA message, which is going to draw in the dumbest and most gullible people in America.

Earlier this year, a Southern California pastor named Tim Thompson welcomed former President Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba to a stage. “I gotta say this is really refreshing from New York City,” Habba chirped at the fancy wedding venue and equestrian center in Temecula. “I’m in God’s country now.”

“Knowing the president the way you do,” asked Thompson, who runs the nonprofit ministry Our Watch, “can you give us three things tonight that we as a group can be praying for him?”

Habba told Thompson’s flock they should pray for America, non-believers, and Trump’s family, adding that, “He’s gonna go down as the best president this country has ever had.”

I’ll save them some trouble and tell them they don’t need to pray for us non-believers.

His first target has been school boards, of course. Every promoter of a crank ideology knows that local school board elections are cheap, low-profile springboards to get influence and promote stupid beliefs — people just don’t pay much attention to them, but they do have an over-sized effect on the community. Thompson has already packed the local school board with right-wingers, and a common feature of his sermons and Twitter ranting is to name queer teachers and mobilize protests against their existence.

Indeed, Thompson speaks frequently about battling “evil” on Our Watch—usually in public schools, but he’s also sounded off about tarot cards at Coachella and videos of people “sticking laser beams into their anus.”

In late March, he created a video urging California viewers to run for their local school boards. “We’ve seen Satan creep in, strip away the rights of parents and try to indoctrinate children into filth,” he warned.

Thompson already tipped the scales of the Temecula Valley Unified School District in 2022, helping to give three new right-leaning board members a majority. That year, IE Family PAC raised more than $206,000, filings show. His candidates included Dr. Joseph Komrosky, who is facing a special recall election on June 4.

After the trio assumed office, they immediately banned critical race theory (CRT) and shelled out at least $15,000 in district funds for a consultant to teach staff why CRT is harmful. The panel also passed a policy that forces teachers to “out” transgender kids to their parents and rejected a social studies book because its accompanying teacher materials included gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

We don’t know much about Thompson’s background. There isn’t much information on his education (which makes sense — he hates education) or history, and he seems to have simply grown up in Temecula and never gone anywhere else. Temecula has a bit of a reputation.

The Temecula Valley of Thompson’s youth was awash with racism and neo-Nazi activity. In the 1980s, Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger founded a white supremacist group in nearby Fallbrook. In the ’90s, a pair of 14-year-olds tied to local white supremacists were charged in two drive-by shootings targeting Latinos, while members of Hammerskin Nation, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a neo-Nazi skinhead organization, were convicted of assault in the gang beating of a 21-year-old Black man as dozens of others watched. The district attorney called it “one of the most egregious incidents of racial violence that has occurred in Riverside County.”

There’s little public record of Thompson’s early years, other than he attended Temecula Valley High School at least in his freshman year and worked as a chaplain for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, a relationship that served him well. A campaign committee for Sheriff Chad Bianco later gave $5,000 to the pastor’s political action committee. Bianco was a member of the Oath Keepers during the time Thompson was a chaplain but said he left the extremist group because “it did not offer me anything.” Thompson, as well as his adult son, Timothy Jacob, have been photographed or filmed sporting patches affiliated with the Three Percenters, a far-right anti-government militia.

In 2012, Thompson began cultivating his church. At that time it was called Venia, and met in rented spaces across the Temecula Valley, for a while in a bar. The congregation eventually found a building in 2016, and changed its name to 412 Murrieta and later to 412 Temecula Valley.

Before long, Thompson became a fixture at far-right rallies across the state. He spoke at the state Capitol in 2019 to a group opposed to sex education in public schools and returned a few weeks later to speak at another protest over California’s Health Education Framework. Days later he attended another rally on the matter outside of the Riverside County office of the California Department of Education.

So he probably attended at least a year of high school, attached himself as a chaplain (do you need no qualifications whatsoever to be a police chaplain? I guess not) to the conservative sheriff’s department, and mastered everything he needed to know to found a church, make life hell for gay people, and steadily move into the orbit of the Trump crime family.

I told you it’s an easy formula that works.

If you want to find the most horrible, awful, evil people in your community, all you need to do is pop into the fundamentalist church in your town on a Sunday morning, and there they all are, growing fat as ticks on the blood of your fellow citizens.

It’s too bad we don’t have any laws prohibiting non-profit, tax-exempt entities from lobbying for political causes.

The orcas are at it again

The orcas are getting good at sinking ships. It’s gotten so bad that Spanish officials are recommending that small boats avoid the deep water off Gibraltar and hug the coast.

The Alboran Cognac’s crew said they felt sudden blows on the hull and that the boat began taking on water. They were rescued by a nearby oil tanker, but the sailboat, left to drift, later went down.

The sinking brings the number of vessels sunk – mostly sailing yachts – to at least five since 2020. Hundreds of less serious encounters resulting in broken rudders and other damage, Alfredo López Fernandez, a coauthor of a 2022 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science, told NPR late last year.

What I find interesting is that there is so much speculation about what causes the behavior. I’m observing the humans, and what I see is a lot of floundering about trying to blame the sinkings on simplistic single causes, rather than appreciating that these are large brained animals with complex social interactions, and maybe we need to avoid explanations that hinge on one aspect of animal behavior. People are moving in their world and dancing around explanations that respect the sophistication of the animals.

Researchers are unsure about the causes for the behaviour, with leading theories including it being a playful manifestation of the mammals’ curiosity, a social fad or the intentional targeting of what they perceive as competitors for their favourite prey, the local bluefin tuna.

Something else I’ve noticed is that all the explanations are centered on the whales, treating the fact that another large brained animal with complex social interactions is moving into their territory, and we apes are sitting around saying “It’s not our fault!” as if we are blameless victims of dumb animal reflexes.

So I have my own simplistic single cause that may explain what’s going on, and that places any blame appropriately.

Humans are assholes.

The actions of a New Zealand man filmed jumping off a boat in what appears to be an attempt to “body slam” an orca have been described as “shocking” and “idiotic” by the country’s Department of Conservation.

In a video shared to Instagram in February, a man can be seen jumping off the edge of a boat into the sea off the coast of Devonport in Auckland, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to touch or “body slam” the orca, the department said. He leaps into the water very close to a male orca, as a calf swims nearby, while someone on board the boat films it. Others can be heard laughing and swearing in the background.

As he swims back towards the boat he yells “I touched it” and asks “did you get that?” He then attempts to touch the orca again.

Hayden Loper, a principal investigator at the department, said the 50-year-old man showed reckless disregard for his own safety and that of the orca. “The video speaks for itself, it is shocking and absolutely idiotic behaviour,” he said.

I think my hypothesis is backed by an immense body of evidence. Humans are arrogant idiots, and the fact that the orca did not respond by simply eating the stupid individual suggests that the whale are capable of remarkable restraint and are far more civilized than the overgrown monkeys attacking them.

I rest my case.

Our vigorous young athletes will not be discouraged!

The 2024 Olympics are going to be held in Paris, and someone has decided that they must find a way to stop healthy young athletes from having sex while they are there. Why, I don’t know. Isn’t that what people do all the time? Of course, because only stupid people would think that would be a good idea, they’ve come up with stupid solutions: anti-sex beds.

They’re narrow and flimsy, so they’re cheap, at least. But you know, I’m not young or athletic, and I look at that and see a floor, and a wall, and they’ve probably got showers, and there’s grass outside, and as a muscular young person I could probably get to the roof. Do the prudes behind this idea have absolutely no imagination?

Picking rich people’s pockets is profitable

Massachusetts leads the way! They placed a wealth tax on rich people and gleaned over a billion dollars, which sounds like a good deal to me.

Massachusetts’ so-called “millionaires tax” appears primed to actually deliver billions.

State officials said Monday that the voter-approved surtax on high earners has generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue this fiscal year — with still three months left to go — meaning state officials could have hundreds of millions of surplus dollars to spend on transportation and education initiatives.

Education? That’s a great priority. Also transportation is a good idea, if it’s being invested in mass transit.

They had some reservations, though, that it might scare the rich people away.

The Department of Revenue won’t certify the official amount raised until later this year. But the estimates immediately buoyed supporters’ claims that the surtax would deliver much-needed revenue for the state despite fears it could drive out some of the state’s wealthiest residents.

I would like to help Massachusetts. If every state imposed a wealth tax, the looters would have nowhere to run to!

An entertaining debunking of evolutionary psychology

This video is definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed it (what I’ve seen of it — it’s 3½ hours long! I don’t have time for the whole thing). Part of it because I agree wholeheartedly with its conclusion that evolutionary psychologists are a mob of pretentious wankers, but also the reason for the length is that münecat actually reads and summarizes more evo psych papers than I’ve ever read myself. Also, she frequently breaks to sing and dance.

If that’s to your taste, or if you just enjoy seeing Geoffrey Miller, David Buss, Jordan Peterson, etc., getting skewered, I recommend this video. Or if you already know that evo psych proponents are nothing but bullshit artists, you can skip it.

What is the Vatican Method?

We’ve generally found that the scientific method is a useful tool for testing explanations, and apparently Catholics are envious, so they’ve evaluated their method for identifying supernatural phenomena and have come up with their own method, officially declaring changes in their protocols. Unfortunately, I struggled through a summary and haven’t been able to see exactly what’s new — the answer seems to be that they’re going to defer more to the authority of the Pope.

They are concerned that too many charlatans outside of the church are profiting from weird claims of supernatural manifestations of Catholic phantasms. That money should be going into Catholic coffers!

The Vatican’s doctrine office revised norms first issued in 1978, arguing that they were no longer useful or viable in the internet age. Nowadays, word about apparitions or weeping Madonnas travels quickly and can harm the faithful if hoaxers are trying to make money off people’s beliefs or manipulate them, the Vatican said.

The new norms make clear that such an abuse of people’s faith can be punishable canonically, saying, “The use of purported supernatural experiences or recognized mystical elements as a means of or a pretext for exerting control over people or carrying out abuses is to be considered of particular moral gravity.”

But there’s now denying that there are great sums of money to be made from wild-ass claims of apparitions appearing to the faithful. The Catholic church has profited from such claims for centuries.

When confirmed as authentic by church authorities, these otherwise inexplicable signs have led to a flourishing of the faith, with new religious vocations and conversions. That has been the case for the purported apparitions of Mary that turned Fatima, Portugal, and Lourdes, France, into enormously popular pilgrimage destinations.

Church figures who claimed to have experienced the stigmata wounds, including Padre Pio and Pope Francis’ namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, have inspired millions of Catholics even if decisions about their authenticity have been elusive.

Francis himself has weighed in on the phenomenon, making clear that he is devoted to the main church-approved Marian apparitions, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, who believers say appeared to an Indigenous man in Mexico in 1531.

So the answer to this conundrum is to change the rules. Claims of supernatural events cannot be granted official status by local bishops, but must instead be reviewed and evaluated by a Vatican committee, and if acceptable must be rubber-stamped by the Pope. I don’t think they will be assessed on the evidence, but rather, on compatibility with church doctrine and potential to generate revenue. Of course that’s not the excuse the defenders of the Catholic church use.

Robert Fastiggi, who teaches Marian theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan and is an expert on apparitions, said at first glance that requirement might seem to take authority away from the local bishop.

“But I think it’s intended to avoid cases in which the Holy See might feel prompted to overrule a decision of the local bishop,” he said.

“What is positive in the new document is the recognition that the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mother are present and active in human history,” he said. “We must appreciate these supernatural interventions but realize that they must be discerned properly.”

Right. Ghosts are real, if “discerned properly.” I guess I haven’t been discerning right.

Good morning from the big city!

I’m taking a break in Minneapolis, with just two missions: dropping off an old pocket watch for repair, and meeting some entomologists.

Caliber Works Watch Repair was an interesting outfit. They only have limited hours, and seem to be stacked up with lots of work. There was a line to get in yesterday morning! Most of them seemed to be there to get new watch batteries or a new band, but I dropped this bigger project on them: a badly abused Elgin pocket watch that I wanted completely patched up. Their prices were reasonable, but unfortunately they estimated that it was going to be 18 months before they could get it fixed. Fine, I’m in no hurry. They did open up my watch, making it look easy, and I could get a quick photo of the works and get the serial number for the mechanism.

Yeah, it’s.a poor photo. The serial number is 5770454, which meant I could look it up in a database. Made in 1895, I guess. Not particularly rare or valuable, but I didn’t expect much — it’s value is all sentimental to me. Anyway, I look forward to getting it back ’round about Christmas 2025, when it will be 130 years old and still ticking.

Later this afternoon I’ll pop by Bug Club, and then drive back home.

Have there been any good commencement speeches this year?

Or ever? You might bet tempted to cite Kurt Vonnegut’s “Wear sunscreen” speech, but he didn’t give it and it was written as an essay by Mary Schmich. I’ve never heard one that I would want to hear twice.

But this year has suffered through some truly bad commencement speeches. I’ve already mentioned Chris Pan’s Bitcoin spam at Ohio State. But did you know that speech went through multiple public revisions? Pan worked through it on social media, got all kinds of criticism, and he went ahead and delivered it anyway. Why did he bother asking for criticism if he was going to ignore it anyway? There’s a special kind obtuse confidence on display there.

Pan was topped, though! Harrison Butker, a place kicker in the NFL, was invited to speak at Benedictine College, a small Catholic liberal arts (but not liberal!) college in Kansas, and he delivered a remarkably regressive pronouncement about how men and women should live…like 12th century Catholics, apparently.

In front of the crowd of about 485 male and female graduates, Butker suggested that a woman’s accomplishments in the home are more valuable than any academic or professional goals.

“I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” he said.

“How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

Butker also praised his wife Isabelle, saying she “would be the first to say her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”

I don’t recommend it, but you can suffer through this speech, too. He isn’t shy about declaring his deeply conservative, crude opinions.

The smugness. The obliviousness. The absolute lack of empathy for half the human beings on the planet. He’s awful.

What worried me most, though, is that no one walked out on him. Jerry Seinfield did a commencement speech full of banalities, and people walked out. This crowd at Benedictine College applauded and cheered at the end of that paean to neo-Nazi values, which tells me…don’t trust Benedictine College graduates. What are they teaching there?