They really hate Ilhan Omar

I’m not in her district, so I can’t vote for her, but if I were I would. James O’Keefe, professional slimeball, is targeting her yet again with pseudo-exposes of what he claims is illegal behavior.

Project Veritas has claimed Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar is engaging in illegal ballot harvesting and a cash-for-ballots scheme in her district in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The group, which has targeted mainly liberal groups with “sting” operations, posted a video late on Sunday showing what it claims is evidence of an illegal effort to harvest absentee ballots.

The group’s founder, James O’Keefe, alleged on Twitter that Omar’s team may have bribed voters in Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, which she has represented since 2019.

A few problems here: he has no evidence of voters being bribed (which would be peculiar, since the population of her district are eager to support her, and you’re not going to bribe local bigots to vote for her anyway), so that accusation is basically libelous. A second problem is that assisting others in delivering ballots (“harvesting” ballots) isn’t illegal in Minnesota. The practice has even stood up in the state Supreme Court. The Republicans hate it, because how dare you help the elderly and shut-ins and the overworked practice their rights?

Also, this smear campaign has nothing to do with Omar. The ballots they’re complaining about were collected by campaigners for Jamal Osman, for a city council seat. But hey, he’s Muslim, they’re all the same, right?

None of that matters. Project Veritas is a sleazy operation that’s desperate to distract voters from the spectacle of Republican corruption, so they ginned up some weak sauce to splatter Democrats with. Mediocre.

This election should be the clearest, easiest decision you ever make

Charles Pierce summarizes the the man exposed by his tax returns.

But he stands also exposed as a failure who was allowed to thrive because he failed at a time in which politics and government were rearranged to keep his particular genre of failure ever from being fatal. In fact, if he hadn’t run for president*—and, especially, had he not been elected president*—he likely would have floated gracefully into eternity, leaving a complex disaster for his heirs to straighten out, and remembered in history as a crude, wealthy wastrel with some interesting eccentricities. And measured only against his fellow plutocrats, posterity might have gotten away with remembering him that way. But measured against the presidency, he was what Wayne Barrett said he was in 1979: small and venal, with no ideas big enough to transcend profit, a fitting epitaph for the republic in the age of the money power.

Good stuff, but let’s never forget that he successfully tapped into a vein of national venality and rose to extraordinary power, which could happen again in November. He’s going into a national presidential debate tonight, which I’m not going to watch, because I know what he’s going to do: he’s going to mug and preen for his base, which will happily glug down the lies he vomits up, and at the end of the evening, he will have solidified his support among the American troglodentia. It’s what he does. It’s how he won (well, that and the Republican cheating and vote suppression).

Tonight, Biden has to show up strong and clear-eyed and confident, which I’m giving 50-50 odds he can do, and he’ll probably “win” the debate, in the sense that polling will show a slight increase in his support. But remember the debates with Hillary Clinton! I watched those, unfortunately, and Trump came off as a creepy bully and Clinton was definitely far more competent, and the polls all showed Clinton as the “victor”, but we all know how that turned out.

To be uncharacteristically optimistic, though, an incremental gain might be enough and is all we ought to expect. Debates aren’t a football game, although way too many people see them that way: there will not be a battle in which one side is definitively declared the winner. We’re in the final grind of the election, and shaving off a few fence-sitters here and there is the best we can do. Biden just has to come off as slightly better than Trump to a few people who are swayed to vote for him in November, and mission accomplished for the night. Don’t expect to wake up tomorrow morning to learn that Trump was like a punctured bladder flopping to the floor and immediately fading away — won’t happen. You still have to show up and vote. You still have to fight the anti-democratic strategems of the Republican party.

So get to work, throw the pig out.

Cool story, bro

Every few years, stories of Organism 46-B rise up again, and of course, I’m starting to see it again in 2020. Organism 46-B is a mythical creature of extreme inaccessibility — it lives in Lake Vostok, the freshwater lake buried 2 miles beneath Antarctic ice. You’d think that would hamper the spreading of the tall tale, since you’re not going to have drunk tourists stumbling around the edge of the lake snapping blurry photos of phenomena they call the Lake Vostok Monster, but it also prevents skeptics from dissecting the claims. They think. Except this story has Russian scientists building an elevator and sending scuba divers down to visit. Not true and not possible! A couple of holes have been bored down to the surface, but no one is going for a swim.

The scary story claims that the Russians found a giant monster down there.

Organism 46b is a species of giant octopus, but with 14 arms rather than eight.

It also spits poison and can mimic human form. I think I see a bad B movie developing here.

I’m disappointed. It’s so implausible on every level, yet I think 2020 really needs a tentacled man-eating sea monster.

By the way, one truly cool story: the existence of deep Antarctic lakes was predicted by the great Peter Kropotkin.

The late, great Catface

I am sorry to report that, on my latest scan of my house, I have discovered that our beloved feral friend, the Cat-Faced Spider That Lives Under the Eaves of our Garage, has died. She seems to have passed quietly in her web, probably due to the dropping temperatures in the area. She simply curled up quietly and died, possibly just overnight.

Internment will be tomorrow. I’m warming the body in my house in case she revivifies.

We are having a viewing on Patreon and Instagram.

The Crying Nazi is guilty

I haven’t been paying attention to the case at all, but Chris Cantwell has been found guilty of his crimes (whatever they are) and faces a possible sentence of 22 years. What I find most disturbing is the peek into the life of a neo-Nazi.

Authorities say Cantwell used the Telegram messaging app to convey a threat last year to a Missouri man, saying that he would rape the man’s wife if he didn’t give up information about the leader of a white supremacist group of which the man was a member, authorities said.

Cantwell is also accused of threatening to expose the man’s identity if he didn’t provide the personal details about the leader of the Bowl Patrol. The group’s name was inspired by the haircut of Dylann Roof, who was sentenced to death for fatally shooting nine Black church members during a Bible study session in Charleston, South Carolina.

There are multiple levels of “nope, nope, nope” in there. I’m not going to even try to tease them apart to figure out precisely which of those things got him convicted. It’s enough for me to see all the nastiness between neo-Nazis, and that at least one of them is going to be out of circulation for a while.

Don’t read this essay

Indi Samarajiva lived through the collapse of Sri Lankan society, and wants to tell us what it was like and compare it to our American experience. Don’t fall for it! You’ll just find out how screwed you are!

I lived through the end of a civil war. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.

If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

Then after relating the chaos in Sri Lanka, he has to tell us how much better the country was at dealing with the pandemic.

Don’t read it unless you want to be driven to do better.

Ignore the liars and WEAR YOUR MASK

The pandemic numbers are rising again, and this is the kind of phenomenon responsible leadership could have checked. We lack responsible leadership, though.

Dr. Robert Redfield, who leads the CDC, suggested in a conversation with a colleague Friday that Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data about a range of issues, including questioning the efficacy of masks, whether young people are susceptible to the virus and the potential benefits of herd immunity.

“Everything he says is false,” Redfield said during a phone call made in public on a commercial airline and overheard by NBC News.

Atlas is a Trump appointee in charge of the federal coronavirus task force. It’s an ongoing failure, obviously.

What could we do, though? Redfield has an optimistic prescription.

Redfield testified before Congress this month that he suspects that a face covering could protect him from Covid-19 better than any future vaccine. Most public health officials share the view that masks are essential to stop the spread of the virus. Still, Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on how useful wearing them may be.

“If every one of us did it, this pandemic would be over in eight to 12 weeks,” Redfield said before offering a stark warning that contradicted the president’s assertion that the country is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic.

I don’t know about the specific timeline, but facemasks do reduce the rate of infection, and would definitely help. What do we have going on now, though? Paranoia and misinformation, emanating from the very top, that lead to people encouraging people to oppose simple, basic mask use fanatically. One parallel: the way propaganda was used to encourage people to smoke cigarettes, generating all kinds of opposition to regulation and control. Now we’ve got mobs of people opposing basic hygiene and health information.

Is it too much to hope this is Trump’s Doom?

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the New York Times managed to get their hands on Trump’s tax returns, and we finally learn why, unsurprisingly, he refused to release them willingly. He’s a tax cheat, a fraud, and a loser.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

I pay more in taxes than this “billionaire” — and you probably do, too — which I’m sure his supporters will claim is an example of his canny business acumen. Harder to rationalize with that excuse, though, is that his way out of paying taxes is to lose so much money in the businesses he runs that he is sitting in his office with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, much of which will come due in the next few years. Poor man. I thought I was struggling with a mortgage and legal debts. His daughter is also implicated in the shenanigans, in which he paid her tens of millions of dollars (and paid himself!) that he then declared as losses he could deduct from his taxes.

I’d like to know who he is beholden to, which would have been information we should have had prior to the last election.

And right now, he’s desperate to hold onto the presidency, not for the good of the country, but to escape the financial obligations that are going to splat his griftin’ ass into putrid slimy gibs in the near future. Unless, that is, a lot of bankers see him as representing their just fate and try to shelter him.

As the Wormhat turns, so goes the nation

That was a busy weekend, but I still disciplined myself to crank out a Sunday video, even if it didn’t appear until the 11:00 hour. What I talk about here is the sad case of Hans Wormhat, a YouTuber with a very strange channel.

What’s interesting about him, though, is that he is neither stupid nor crazy — he’s a person with an absurdly strong ideological and religious commitment that he is furiously rationalizing. The world is coming at him with both barrels, but he carries all the baggage of fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity, and his way of reconciling reality and his faith is to deny everything that causes a conflict. Noah’s Ark was real, but couldn’t possibly have held millions of species…therefore, there are Illuminati high schools with sports teams and mascots used to train up puppeteers, fursuit wearers, and animatronics experts who populate the world with fake animals, with the intent of undermining your faith in the simple truth of God, who created a flat plate world with a firmament above and just a few useful, normal animals for people. There are no sharks or penguins, they are demonic creations built by Satan to deceive you into denying Jesus.

He has crazy ideas, but take him and his kind seriously: he’s not crazy or dumb, he’s just way way out there on the spectrum of ideological zealotry. He’s not all that unusual, though. He’s like a QAnon or Trump supporter with the dial turned up to 11. Ignore his kind and next thing you know, you’ll be living in a country that has come totally unmoored from reality.

On a lighter note, if you watch to the end, you’ll see my lovely list of Patreon supporters in the scrolling credits, and I also put in some drone footage shot from 60m above my front yard. It’s fall! The trees are turning all orange and yellow! I think. Unless the local Illuminati high school students have been out pranking us again with paint.