Michelle Malkin still has a fanbase? And it’s enhanced by including Milo?

Milo Yawannapissoff and Michelle Malkin have been collaborating, and the results are even more awful than you can probably imagine. They decided to work together to create an “America First” reading list for their followers. Just from their choice of subject you can tell it’s going to be a collection of racists’ greatest hits.

So what’s on it? Lots of Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza, obscure racist tracts and not so obscure racist fiction, like The Turner Diaries, Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Vox Day, and categorized as “U.S. politics, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The cherry on top? They include The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They also toss in a scattering of genuine Western classics like The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy, but really, they’re only there to put a shiny sugary glaze on the pile of shit they think are valuable contributions to the canon. It’s also rather demeaning to lump A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome.

They provide summary blurbs to go with the books. The Iliad is “What it’s like to be around an unstoppable killing machine.” Mein Kampf is “History’s most demented autodidact sets out his political vision.” Kevin MacDonald’s deeply racist and anti-semitic book, The Culture of Critique, is a “Highly controversial historical survey of the roots of anti-semitism”.

Say what you will about the classic Western canon of literature — it is full of Old Dead White Men — but I don’t think that a compilation of recent racist propaganda and fleeting pop culture nonsense is an improvement, especially when it’s driven by a blatant far-right conservative agenda, and written by a pair of not-very-bright boobs.

Need to visit my doctor more often

I’m back from my doctor’s visit! It was nothing but good news. The outside walls of the clinic are covered with swarms of chironomid midges!

Everywhere I looked, there they were, clinging to the brickwork. This is one big buffet for spiders that I’ll have to check again later, but I didn’t see many today — just one lone jumping spider hanging about. There has to be more.

Oh, yeah, I’m also fine.

I have a doctor’s appointment today?

I was scheduled to get a routine physical a while back, cancelled for obvious reasons, and last week Stevens County Medical Center called me to come in for it today, which feels odd. I guess our local clinic has not been overwhelmed — there have been zero reported cases of COVID-19 in Stevens County, perhaps because the closure of the university meant we had a net outflow of residents as the pandemic hit — but I’m a little nervous about visiting a place that could be a disease vector.

Also, I was called in on this specific day because it is “reserved for senior citizens”. What? But I’m a young buckaroo! Oh, well. I guess they’re just doing what they must to separate susceptible populations, so I’m not going to complain. I’m also thrilled at the possibility I might actually talk to a human being face-to-face, something I haven’t done in a month and a half.

Behold! The Face of God!

I’ve always wondered what he looked like.

You may be somewhat disappointed. You haven’t yet seen the mind behind that rather ordinary face, though, which will leave you a lot disappointed.

A Republican Ohio state representative cited his religious beliefs to explain why he would not wear a mask as recommended by Gov. Mike DeWine (R) to help limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“This is not the entire world,” state Rep. Nino Vitale wrote in a lengthy Facebook post on Monday morning. “This is the greatest nation on earth founded on Judeo-Christian Principles.”

“One of those principles is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. That image is seen the most by our face. I will not wear a mask,” he continued.

  • This is not the greatest nation on earth — we are one among many, and we need to throw out these politicians who preach American exceptionalism. This unfounded arrogance hinders any effort to make the country better.

  • We were not founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which is not even a thing. We are a secular nation. Or should be. Kick out these religious fanatics.

  • It’s a rather limiting conception of the nature of the hypothetical supreme being of the universe to imagine he is an anthropoid ape with a human face, or even a gaseous vertebrate of some kind, as Haeckel put it. Nino Vitale is some kind of shallow Biblical literalist, I guess. We should also evict those. They aren’t smart enough to govern.

  • I hope he is consistent in his beliefs to the point where if he comes down with COVID-19 or any other respiratory disease that he refuses to be intubated or to wear a mask; if he needs surgery he should do it without any anesthetic gas or oxygen. I want him to go to his maker with his bare face shining splendidly.

Vitale also doesn’t understand the data.

“This is not based on logic, this is based on fear and propaganda and every statistical, data driven study done in the last 2 weeks says death counts are low, the models were wrong, and this is more like the flu,” he continued.

Wrong on all counts. The data says we’ve been underestimating the effects, due to the lack of available testing, and that it isn’t anything like the flu.

It does not fill me with confidence that our government is packed with ignorant religious zealots who want to make policy counter to the evidence. It’s no wonder this country is screwed.

Amazon employees with courage

You have to give a lot of credit to Tim Bray, an Amazon vice-president who quit over the company’s treatment of workers. He was making a big sacrifice to expose Amazon’s corruption.

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

He makes a point of mentioning the names of the fired activists:

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Even if it wasn’t intentional bigotry, it’s still no coincidence that Amazon is hiring the underprivileged and desperate to do tedious labor in their warehouses.

He even provides a solution…a solution that has to be enforced outside of the Amazon executive boardroom.

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

As long as Republicans and conservative Democrats hold power, though, no one is going to have the political will to make Jeff Bezos do the right thing.

Another professor embarrasses the professoriate

A university professor filed suit against his institution because it chastised him for inappropriate sexual behavior. He wasn’t fired, they just tut-tutted, put a black mark on his record, and told him not to do that anymore. He sued anyway, for his ego.

During a class in 2013, a psychology professor at George Mason University named Todd Kashdan told students he had once performed oral sex at a party, an anecdote he later said was meant to make a point about exhibitionism, according to findings from an internal school investigation and a federal lawsuit the professor filed against the university.

In 2016, Kashdan told graduate students gathered in his hot tub about a sexual experience he had in Europe, and in 2018, he went with graduate students to a strip club where he received a lap dance, the internal investigation found. The professor’s lawsuit said these incidents were misconstrued.

How is bragging about performing oral sex, his sexual experiences, and getting a lap dance in front of his students “misconstrued”? I’m mystified. Just going with students to a strip club seems like it’s crossing a line, and with all the rest, it’s hard to imagine how it could be “misconstrued”.

On top of all that, two former students also filed complaints about him with the university. He is baffled.

The professor, according to the suit, “was surprised to learn that the same women who had given him unsolicited praise for his teaching and research, and sought him out for assistance with academics and their careers, now alleged that he had created a ‘hostile environment.’ ”

Wow. He doesn’t understand that he’s a gatekeeper, that he holds the keys to future advancement in his students’ careers, and is so oblivious to the social workings of human minds that he can’t comprehend that people whose future he controls might flatter him to his face while resenting him?

Psychopaths. Psychopaths everywhere.

A good start

New York has given Franklin Graham the boot.

After weeks of scrutiny, it was announced over the weekend that the Central Park tent facility run by Graham’s charity Samaritan’s Purse will be wound up, closing to new patients from May 4, before the site is disinfected and dismantled. The eight patients currently being treated at the site will be moved elsewhere.

Notorious anti-LGBT+ evangelist Franklin Graham was granted permission to set up the site back in March, with NYC mayor Bill de Blaiso saying that he had received assurances the group – often criticised for exploiting disasters to evangelise – would not discriminate.

Graham went back against his word almost immediately – forcing all medical volunteers to sign a belief statement that disavows homosexual relationships, publicly comparing homosexuals to drug addicts, and bringing in a film crew to record sermons and evangelist videos.

As usual, Graham’s purpose wasn’t charity, it wasn’t a sincere effort to help people in need, it was a missionary crusade. I like that state senator Brad Hoylman told him to “pack up his tents and leave New York City for good” — can we do that with all the religious grifters? And do it everywhere? It would be a great idea to turn Franklin Graham into a homeless pariah who’d have to roam the world with a tin cup, begging for charity himself.

It’s just too bad that New York did not fully follow tradition and resurrect the old tar and feathers custom.

Corruptin’ the Youth

Fortunately, I haven’t been made to drink hemlock yet, but I did get this nice message.

Over a decade ago, I found your blog. I was an English major at the time, but I found the debate over science more intriguing and changed my major to biology. The course work was so fun, I sailed through to an MS in ecology still in love with the field and unable to shake the feeling I never “earned” my degree. Now I work in epidemiology and just got half-pulled from a cohort study to help on COVID research (actually, I still have to do all the cohort stuff, so…).

I’m happy that I can now use the job you helped inspire me to to offer you this small return, and I hope you continue to inspire.

In addition to the science, you made me rethink, and improve, I hope, my ideas on sex, gender, race, and human rights in general. So now I get to work in a very prestigious lab while very vocally supporting diversity and equality.

There’s nothing wrong with being an English major, I may have just tweaked him in the direction of his true calling. I’m not in the right discipline to do anything about the pandemic, but it’s good to know that maybe some of my students and readers are going to be better able to contribute.