Uh-oh. Now I’m getting the really weeeeird spam

Yesterday, I started getting a small trickle of spam from someone asking desperately if I was the “PZ Leader of Project Zorgo”. They were quite insistent — they sent multiple links to a questionnaire I’m supposed to fill out (I didn’t).

They have a YouTube channel that looks like kids’ game channel — lots of short videos, stylized and phony, but the latest one has a million views, and they have 1.75 million subscribers. Here’s their “about” description.

We are the YouTube Hacker group Project Zorgo. We believe YouTube has become too powerful and is a threat to traditional media. Phase one of our plan is to hack the YouTube trending page and promote unpopular videos from television networks. Phase two is to hack popular YouTuber channels and prevent them gaining more subscribers.

I fear someone may have noticed my initials, and also that I seem to fit the description from phase one perfectly. I have noticed that whenever I post a video featuring spiders my YouTube analytics immediately turn red and the numbers rocket downward, as if I’m self-destructively and intentionally destroying my channel. It’s almost amusing.

Sorry, gang, I never even heard of Project Zorgo until yesterday.

But then, that’s exactly what the “PZ Leader of Project Zorgo” would say.

What is the government for?

I had a phone conversation with my son, who currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, about the current situation there. They’re having rolling blackouts to deal with the cold and power failures, and oh boy, did his wife give us an earful. She’s disgusted with Texas — she’s from South Korea, and they’d never allow this kind of collapse of services in Korea. They spent a few hours standing in line to get food and water, and today they’re going to the Army base to try and take showers, since they haven’t had any running water for several days.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz fled the state to vacation in Cancun, Mexico. I’m surprised that Mexico would allow such riff-raff to cross their border. I am not surprised that Chickenshit Cruz would run away.

And (ex)-Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, posted an amazing rant on Facebook that is so beautifully representative of how Republicans think.

The mayor of Colorado City, Texas has resigned after sparking outrage with a Facebook post where he told residents complaining of power outages during an unprecedented cold snap to “get off your ass and take care of your own family.” Tim Boyd, who announced his resignation Tuesday, also wrote that “if you don’t have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.” “No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice!” he wrote. The town, with a population of about 4,000, is located in Mitchell County, where many were left without power as record-setting cold weather batters much of the state. In a subsequent post, Boyd apologized, writing, “I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout.”

Uh, what, exactly, is local government for? When I elect a mayor, or a city council, or a state representative, what I want is a good steward of the resources of my region, who will take responsibility and use those resources to help every citizen. Did this mayor regard his position as a sinecure, or an opportunity to bleed off what he could into his pocket? Maintaining the services that all of those people paid taxes for is not a handout! Even if a citizen did not pay taxes for reasons of poverty or disability, that does not mean you get to deny a responsibility to them. Even Boyd’s “apology” is an insult and a failure to recognize his mayoral obligations.

My daughter-in-law is correct. We should try to be more like South Korea, where the civic infrastructure is taken seriously.

Texans are screaming in outrage, so ol’ Chickenshit Ted is cutting his inappropriate vacation short. But of course he’s got to squeeze out a little extra chickenshittery: he’s asking for the Houston police to protect him from his constituents!

If you’re mourning the death of Rush Limbaugh, you’ve revealed how rotten you are

Some people are mourning the death of Rush Limbaugh.

Media Matters, you say? Thanks for reminding me.

Jesus, but he was a horrible, repulsive, nasty little man, the primordial archetype of the modern Republican.

For more than 30 years, Limbaugh’s show helped to set the agenda for hosts across the country, and it’s not clear who is likely to succeed him as talk radio’s unifying voice.

One possible replacement may ironically be the only Fox News prime-time host without radio experience. Tucker Carlson’s monologues are already frequently cited by right-wing radio hosts, and his emphasis on culture war topics — particularly his xenophobic, anti-trans, and misogynistic content — aligns well with standard talk radio fare.

But even Carlson is unlikely to match the hold Limbaugh had on a now-declining industry. Today, conservative talk radio is just one facet of a much larger right-wing media ecosystem, where television hosts and conservative writers all sound somewhat like Limbaugh. This ecosystem controls a political party whose latest president regularly sought the counsel of Fox News hosts.

Even without one of its central architects, a right-wing media machine built on outrage and cruelty will continue to deceive its audience long into the future.

He’s dead, but what’s still horrifying is that there are still right-wingers who praise him and think he was “funny”. That says a lot about his sycophants.

YouTube, your ads suck

I checked in on my latest video, and the first thing I see is an ad stuck on the beginning, an ad for this nonsense:

It was cheaply made and cheesy, with bad audio and bad lighting and bad video, of a guy going on and on about how this beanie will block 3G, 4G, and 5G electromagnetic waves because it has silver threads woven into it, and how those waves will fry your brain and make you nauseous and sick and cause cancer and who knows what else. It’s pure quackery. Google must be desperate if they’ll sell ads to these kinds of cheap charlatans, and market snake oil to the kind of audience that would watch my cheap & cheesy videos.

Remember Milo Yiannopoulos?

Boy, that guy plummeted from far right wing darling to persona non grata fast. Now he has been banned from Parler, the “free speech” website, or more accurately, the “free speech for fascists and racists” site. You’d think he’d fit right in there.

He had taken to declaring that he was going to publicly post Ben Shapiro’s phone number, in the name of free speech, and then he started suggesting that he’d give a $500 bounty to people who murdered immigrants.

Fabulous. Soon I’ll never ever have to hear about Milo again.

You go to a panel discussion, and then discover the other panelists are promoting a eugenics article from Areo

I am done with this discussion at last. Now I have to get cracking on my genetics lecture for tomorrow. It never ends! (No, it does sort of end. I get a four day weekend, beginning at 12:50pm tomorrow, so I will catch up.)

Anyway, I include my part of the panel below. I kept it mostly cool, except at the end I blew up a little — the article we were given to prompt the discussion was crap from Areo, AKA Quillette Junior, and I was furious. Why? There were two philosophers on the panel. They could have suggested any of a number of serious philosophy articles by reputable bioethicists, and instead we got an article by a known eugenicist/HBD wackaloon/racist. So I called them out at the end. It’s that so many people were completely oblivious to the rancid eugenic thought permeating the whole article.

Not that it mattered. One of them continued to reference Jonathan Anomaly throughout. Ugh. We should have higher standards than that.

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