Optimism must be tempered with realism…and dread

Portrait of Victory!

Tragedy and waste, that’s all anyone will get out of the war in Ukraine. It seems to have entered a phase where exhausted, demoralized Russians get to run away.

In the end, the Russians fled any way they could on Friday, on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals. Hours after Ukrainian soldiers poured into the area, hundreds of Russian soldiers encamped in this village were gone, many after their units abandoned them, leaving behind stunned residents to face the ruins of 28 weeks of occupation.

“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.

Russia has announced that they are regrouping in the face of the Ukrainian surge.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the north-east of the country has inflicted an extraordinary defeat on Moscow, prompting the Russian army to pull back thousands of troops after suffering a series of battlefield defeats.
Ukraine appears to have regained control of the two key cities of Kupiansk and Izium after a major counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in recent days, after wrongfooting Russian forces with a much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region.
Photos published by the Ukrainian security forces showed troops raising the national flag in Kupiansk, an important logistical hub for Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, where rail lines linking Russia to eastern Ukraine converge and which, in the last months, has supplied Russian forces in north-eastern Ukraine.

Nobody has won. Russia is spasming and continues to rain missiles on civilian targets. Ukraine has retaken narrow strips of land that were theirs to begin with. Putin must react savagely to this embarrassment; there are whisperings of discontent among the militaristic factions in his country, and he will be deposed if he loses his strongman reputation. I want Ukraine to win, to be honest, but let’s be willing to face the facts and see every bloody step forward as an action that will demand more blood.

That other Pennsylvania candidate

No Dr Oz today. There’s an even worse guy running for office in Pennsylvania: Doug Mastriano wants to be governor, and he’s a certifiable nutcase.

The Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania has done any number of things that would doom to Hades the political prospects of any mortal politician: wearing a Confederate uniform, doing business with a white nationalist website, calling Roe v. Wade worse than the Holocaust, associating with militia figures from groups such as the Oath Keepers, appearing at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and sharing QAnon conspiracy ideas, anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Muslim hatred.

But though he walks through the shadow of the valley of defeat, he fears no evil — because he has his very own campaign prophet! Her name is Julie Green, and she personally receives messages directly from God, “sometimes … twice a day,” she says, when He instructs her to turn on certain recordings and then speaks to her through the music’s “frequencies.”

Yes. English grammar.

This is not that unusual in America since every conservative president seems to adopt a personal god-walloper. For many years — most of my life, it seems — it was Billy Graham. Julie Green, though, is particularly weird.

Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano has promoted and campaigned with Julie Green, a “prophet” who has claimed that God will execute political figures “for their planned pandemic, shortages, inflation, mandates and for stealing an election.” The Mastriano ally and fringe religious commentator has also alleged a variety of conspiracy theories, including that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood”; the government is conducting “human sacrifices” to stay in power; and President Joe Biden is secretly dead and an “actor” is playing him.

…

Green’s prophecies are badly performed pro-Trump fantasies in which God has “chosen” Trump to be his “Moses” to “deliver the people out of the hands of these nowaday pharaohs.” In this telling, the “majority” of states will decertify their 2020 election results, Trump will “take back his rightful place of power,” and God will send his “Angel of Death” to take the lives of people who stole the 2020 election, among other alleged misdeeds.

Green’s prophecies justify the coming deaths of elected officials by alleging vast conspiracy theories. For instance, she claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar is “a spy sent from your land to get everything you could to give it back to the nation that you serve”; she said that Sen. Mitt Romney’s “fingerprints will be found all over the fraud of the 2020 election”; and alleged that Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Brian Kemp were also involved in stealing the 2020 election.

Her prophecies have a special place for Mastriano and Pennsylvania. On February 28, she prophesied: “Doug Mastriano, I have you here for such a time as this, saith the Lord. I know it seemed like I had forsaken you, all your hard work, and all the time you put forth to get to the truth in election integrity. You know the truth, and you have seen so much evidence of what really happened. It is now time to move forward with the plans you have been given. Yes, Doug, I am here with you. I will not forsake you. The time has come for their great fall and for the great steal to be overturned.”

I had to look to see what this Julie Green is all about…and I’m sorry, she is the most uncharismatic evangelical preacher I’ve ever seen. She has this rather flat delivery of nonsense, and her videos…well, I include one here just so you can see what I’m talking about. It’s strange. It’s random animal videos with Green in a corner, talking, but her voice is completely out of sync with her mouth. Don’t watch the whole thing, it’s boring and poorly done, and if you watch a few minutes (or seconds) of it you’ll have captured the flavor of her entire video catalog.

What’s also strange is that while she has 10 times the number of channel subscribers that I do, hardly any of them watch her video — the number of views is typically in the hundreds. It’s like how an American majority may claim to be church members, only a small minority actually attend church on Sunday. I think there are a lot of fanatical far-right old people who see a sermon by her on Facebook, click on subscribe, and then don’t bother to look up her work at all regularly.

To put it in perspective, my maggot video has had more viewers than most of Julie Green’s boring prophecies. I don’t know why no governors have attached me to their election campaigns. Hey, Tim Walz, for a small fee, I could feed you a steady supply of cool spider videos! Call me.

Oh wait — an explanation. Julie Green Ministries has said they have no videos on YouTube (for good reason, they’re banned), and the videos I saw were all made by some rabid fan who steals the official videos on Rumble and Telegram and Truth Social and hacks them up and splices audio recordings of her sermons with what seems to be an arbitrary recording of her face. If you check out those sites, there are no cute animal videos, her voice is in sync, and the number of views is much more representative of her popularity among the Q wackos. The content is still flat and boring, though.

Let’s bash Oz some more

It’s fun! He is such a bad doctor and a dishonest candidate. He also tortures and kills puppies. That’s almost comically villainous.

In 2004, complaints about Dr. Mehmet Oz’s dog experiments were cited in a report from an internal investigation into allegations of poor animal care made by Dr. Catherine Dell’Orto, a post-doctoral veterinarian. See also individual reports of Dr. Oz’s dog experiments. According to the report, “highly invasive and stressful experiments” on dogs were performed without a “humane end point.” AWA violations included a litter of whelped puppies killed by painful cardiac injection:

“The screams of these puppies could be heard through closed doors. All of these puppies, lying in a plastic garbage bag, were killed in the presence of their litter mates.”

Subsequent applications for grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by Dr. Oz have been denied. In 2004, Columbia paid $2,000 in fines to the USDA.

I have to make a significant caveat to that accusation, though. Almost all the sources are from PETA, and PETA is not trustworthy. I haven’t been able to find a source outside PETA for the claims (there is an NYT article from that time, buried deep behind a paywall), but that NIH cut his support is a more significant fact…but on the other hand, a $2000 fine is kind of insignificant. I also have no idea what the purpose of the experiments was — why was a TV doctor doing that?

True confession: I’ve euthanized puppies in the past (not in over 40 years, though!), and why would you do it with cardiac injection, and why would you do it en masse? Something is wrong there. Ask a vet who has to put animals to sleep — you do it quietly, respectfully, and with a sedative injection that lets them die peacefully. Screaming animals means you’re doing it wrong.

But then, Oz has always been an ethical nightmare. He has been featured in the AMA Journal of Ethics, and not positively.

Columbia’s affiliation with Oz had been under fire long before he launched a surprise Senate run in late November. In 2015, when Oz testified before the Senate about his endorsement of shady “miracle” cures, a group of some of the country’s top medical professionals sent Columbia a blistering letter demanding the renowned medical school fire the Oprah-blessed daytime star.

“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” the physicians wrote. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

Columbia University has also severed all ties with him (rather murkily, unfortunately).

After years of criticism, Columbia University Medical Center has finally—quietly—cut public ties with celebrity doctor turned Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.

The acclaimed teaching hospital, where Oz held senior positions like vice chair of surgery and director of integrated medicine for years, stripped his personal pages from their website in mid-January.

I had no idea Columbia was in Pennsylvania, though.

Can we all forget Oz after the November elections? I look forward to that.

The daily Oz skewering

It’s not really going to be a daily event here.

But jeez, Oz provides a target-rich environment.

Can I just say that the claim that “life begins at conception” is sufficiently absurd in all of its particulars that anyone who says it needs to be laughed off the stage? Life doesn’t “begin” at conception, and the question is not whether the focus is on life (it’s not, or these same people would be against the death penalty and eating meat or any living thing at all), it’s about when human personhood begins, which is a much fuzzier and poorly delimited thing altogether. Except we know it doesn’t happen at conception.

Is demographics destiny?

This is fascinating, and I have no idea what the consequences will be. The populations of many countries are rapidly shrinking, and it defies simplistic explanations.

Is that good? Bad? I don’t know. Reducing the human population is good for the planet overall, but how these countries will respond is an open question. Also, modern capitalism seems to be a gigantic Ponzi scheme that relies on continuous growth — what happens when the base of the pyramid shrinks?

The decline in growth isn’t entirely universal. Some countries continue to expand that population base, largely through the mechanism of immigration. Look at the difference between China and the US!

My grandchildren are going to grow up in a different world than I did. We need to accept the fact of change and prepare to adapt with it.

Another demise!

Where’s his fedora?

I trust no one will be trying to defend this unfortunate victim: Kiwi Farms is dead. It would have been nice if it had been executed sooner.

If you never heard of Kiwi Farms, lucky you. RationalWiki explains:

Kiwi Farms is an immensely creepy stalking forum run by manchild Joshua Conner Moon out of his mom’s house. The people who are stalked are what are known as “lolcows” to the site’s userbase or “exceptional individuals”. Think some of the Internet’s worst assholes and coalition of criminals projecting their frustration onto minorities – and now that you’re picturing GamerGate, think creepier.

Due to difficulties enforcing harmful speech on the internet, there hasn’t been much legal action taken on Kiwi Farms, despite them being responsible for harming many people (directly and indirectly), costing them jobs and partners, exaggerating and spinning rumors, or even mentally abusing their victims to the point of suicide. In fact, the owners maintain that there is nothing illegal about the site, citing technicalities (we don’t harass people; our users do!) and phonebooks also distributing personal information (because sharing the address of this person we find weird is totally the same as a printed 411Wikipedia!); or just simply denying, downplaying, or justifying the activities being taken place. No services are buying their lies, however, as KiwiFarms is struggling to find any web service company willing to do business with them ranging from Paypal to CloudFlare to even Russia-based DDOS-Guard. Not even 8chan wants anything to do with the site owner.

Too loathsome for 8chan! That’s how bad it is…was. It was one of those sites one avoided tangling with because a) its users were violent and abusive, and b) there was no content there worth engagement, consisting entirely of angry losers vomiting up cliches. Even RationalWiki’s short confrontation got them mad.

Kiwi Farms has a thread “discussing” RationalWiki, which it describes as a “whiny hugbox for spergs and a clusterfuck of never ending drama on a rapidly declining website”. Cynical later helpfully labeled the statement as “sarcasm”, though it’s not clear what part of the statement is supposed to be “sarcastic”, especially since he continued to insult us.

“Sarcasm,” “jokes,” and mindless buzzwords are never adequate explanations for the kind of stupid behavior these kinds of people indulge in.

But you know what does?

Moon is a Florida man.

(Sorry, that was sarcasm and a joke.)

Not much to see in the news today

It’s all “the Queen is dead”, over and over again. I don’t care. Time to move on.

The news comes in two categories:

  1. Tradition is broken! One aspect of the world is changed. I will now wax sentimental over what the Queen represented (omitting the awkward bits, of course), and moan about how the world was better during her reign and we must return to the values of the 1940s and ’50s.
  2. A wealthy white woman represented the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and now she’s dead, can we return the loot her system stole back to their home countries? What? She’s going to be replaced by a wealthy white man? Oh nawww no. Look at all those wealthy conservatives crying.

#2 is not getting printed in the pages of the big name newspapers, but oh boy are the powers that be having a wonderful time with #1, mourning a tiny and inevitable change that doesn’t really affect their status. They’ve got an excuse to wallow in sanctimony! Go ahead, guys, take your moment, but can we get it over with soon? We’ve got things that matter to get done. Swapping figureheads for an immoral system isn’t one of them.

I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this morning, and a couple of appointments with students, and a lecture to give, and some lab prep to do, so I’m a bit relieved that there’s so little of interest to distract me today.

The Queen is dead. My regrets to those who cared about her. Call me when the monarchy is dead, OK?

All the essential stuff was already written long before her death. Take it away, Patrick Freyne in the Irish Times:

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

Beyond this, it’s the stuff of children’s stories. Having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok as head of state. What’s the logic? Bees have queens, but the queen bee lays all of the eggs in the hive. The queen of the Britons has laid just four British eggs, and one of those is the sweatless creep Prince Andrew, so it’s hardly deserving of applause.

That’s from March 2021. It’s all that needs to be said.

Have you considered forming a United Republic, maybe?

The Queen of England is not doing well right now. I don’t wish her ill, but I can’t get too worked up about her potential imminent demise. What does worry me is this:

Prince Charles, her heir, and his wife Camilla and Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge are traveling to Balmoral to be with the queen, according to their offices.

Hasn’t the United Kingdom suffered enough with boobs occupying high office? It seems so unfair.

The greatest thing Queen Elizabeth could do would be to disinherit all her heirs and dissolve the office, break up the kingdoms and let them all be independent. Or maybe do a Buffy and bestow her royal powers on every girl in the land.

The Queen is dead. May the monarchy follow suit.