I get email

I get the impression that Phillip Jones is not a fan.

Pz Myers how dare you trivialize the inhuman and insidious horrors of Nazi concentration camps by comparing them to ICE facilities! Yes the conditions in those places are unsanitary and unacceptable, but they are nothing like concentration camps which were specifically intended for genocide. Stop pretending you oppose concentration camps PZ! Communists and Socialists like you always lock people who don’t agree with collectivist ideology up when you get into power! You always torture and murder them too, because you know that people won’t abandon their individual rights, freedoms, concerns, sovereignty, and independence for your pipe-dream, hammer-and sickle utopia! The discovery Institute has written about you too, asshat! They remarked, completely and accurately, that you are a crusader/bully determined to silence and Malign anyone who disputes your talking points, even if they agree with you on most everything else. Even if the person is a leftist and evolutionist like you, if they don’t agree with you in every minute point, you attack them like a rabid dog!! Dawkins and Harris aren’t perfect, but they are better men than you!! And they continually publish scientific research; you haven’t published research in more than four years! You’ve spent nearly all your time trolling and trash talking on twitter!!! You should have been disowned by Atheist Ireland and it’s allies a long time ago!! If Dawkins, Harris, or any other new Atheist dies as a result of your defamation, like Pim Fortuyn was, I will make sure you and all the other hate-mongering, Islamic appeasing, Ameriphobic , uber-left wing pricks who’ve been lying about and bashing them are held accountable. Dawkins is in danger of being killed like Taslima Nasrin. Because of bin ladenist, brown-shirt lefties like you!! By the way, the Federal Government, while refusing to charge you with treason and sedition like they should, informed me that they have you under surveillance, and are waiting to catch you committing some act of insurrection or violence against the government so they can arrest and charge you. And don’t tell me you’d never do that, you said you hoped for a revolution to erase the stain of America. And you support Antifa violence against right-wingers like Andy Ngo. I wouldn’t be suprised if you’re plotting to bomb a bridge, like those Occupy Cleveland nuts!! If this country is so terrible get out!! I’m going to boycott any appearance or association with you asshole!!

Twenty three exclamation points. Not a high score, but respectable. I appreciate how it gradually escalates from “how dare you trivialize…” to “new Atheists will die as a result of your words” to “you’re plotting to bomb a bridge”.

Extra points for going to the Federal Government, and gloating that they said I was under surveillance and are awaiting any excuse to arrest me, while at the same time claiming that I’m the one who wants to take away individual rights, freedoms, concerns, sovereignty, and independence. Always nice to be reported to a police state for daring to suggest that they’re a police state!

That is the most on-brand thing I’ve ever seen

It’s a masterwork. Some advertising genius was asked to encapsulate Joe Biden in a single phrase, and they thought hard about it, and distilled him down to two words.

It’s perfect! You see “malarkey”, and you think “antiquated, old-fogeyish” and it’s a natural to associate that with Biden. It’s going to go over well with timid old boomers.

In a particularly nice touch, in smaller print on the back of the bus, it includes a dictionary definition of “malarkey”. I guess that’s their idea of outreach to the young folks.

Where is Patrick Kessler, and how much was he paid?

Didn’t the NY Times find it suspicious that this is the only photo of Kessler they’ve got?

This guy calling himself Patrick Kessler sure had a brilliant scam. He talked to rich people and institutions and told them that he used to work for Jeffrey Epstein, and had been hired to set up encrypted servers that stored the thousands of hours of secret video recordings Epstein had made of rich, famous people raping young girls at his house, and that he now had the keys to the server and was willing to make them available to lawyers and the media. As proof, he’d show them grainy, porny still photos on his phone and say, “That’s Prince Andrew” or “That’s Alan Dershowitz”, and the gullible lawyers would fall for it. He kept the scam going for months, constantly evading any attempt to get any concrete evidence out of him.

He played off multiple marks. First he’s negotiating with David Boies and John Pottinger, two lawyers who were supposedly representing Epstein’s victims, and then he’d sneak off to the NY Times and tell them he didn’t trust the lawyers and wanted to deal with them. He invented convoluted schemes for transferring files, and would then at the last minute announce, “Oh no, the servers are on fire!” Everyone was dancing to his tune.

Then, the best part is unstated. The NY Times finally reports on this story, and I notice something is missing. Read it yourself, you’ll notice that the con artist, Patrick Kessler, just quietly drops out of the picture as his marks start turning on each other and pointing fingers. Has he been arrested? Has he fled the country? We don’t know. Apparently the reporters don’t care, either, since they just stop mentioning him. I might also ask if Kessler had been paid anything — he strung them along for months, are you saying he kept the con going just to sponge off the lawyer’s expense accounts for dinners and alcohol?

I’m actually impressed. He scammed a couple of high-priced New York lawyers, and he scammed the NY Times, and now he has disappeared and none of his targets will admit that they were stupid and got taken. If this were a crime novel, it would be a page turner. I want Carl Hiaasen to write it, because I think only he could adequately skewer Boies, Pottinger, and the NY Times while laying out the story.

And this is just legal corruption.

Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger discussed a plan. They could use the supposed footage in litigation or to try to reach deals with men who appeared in it, with money flowing into a charitable foundation. In encrypted chats with Kessler, Mr. Pottinger referred to a roster of potential targets as the “hot list.” He described hypothetical plans in which the lawyers would pocket up to 40 percent of the settlements and could extract money from wealthy men by flipping from representing victims to representing their alleged abusers.

The possibilities were tantalizing — and extended beyond vindicating victims. Mr. Pottinger saw a chance to supercharge his law practice. For Mr. Boies, there was a shot at redemption, after years of criticism for his work on behalf of Theranos and Harvey Weinstein.

Who is the real con artist here, Kessler or Boies/Pottinger? It seems to me that the lawyers were drooling at the prospect of getting blackmail material they could use as leverage to get rich people to cough up large sums of cash in return for suppressing the evidence, and they got to skim 40% off the top, while the rest would go to the clients they represented, or to charities, to make it look “ethical”. Further, they could get paid by billionaires who aren’t even in the recordings, like the contemptible Sheldon Adelson (at least, I don’t think Epstein would have had an Adelson sex tape, but who knows…). Adelson wanted to influence elections in Israel by buying incriminating videos of politicians he didn’t like.

Mr. Adelson, a billionaire casino magnate in Las Vegas, had founded one of Israel’s largest newspapers, and it was an enthusiastic booster of Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Pottinger wrote that he and Mr. Boies hoped to fly to Nevada to meet with Mr. Adelson to discuss the images.

“Do you believe that adelson has the pull to insure this will hurt his bid for election?” Kessler asked the next morning.

I guess this isn’t illegal? Or it is, but we’re going to quietly sweep it under a filthy rug somewhere?

It’s also weird how, throughout this story, they get all sensational about what men were possibly engaging in sex with underage girls in these photos. “Could that bearded man be…?” or “Is that actually Famous Man having sex…?” and the women are all invisible. No one seems to stop to consider that juicy compromising photo of some guy is also a photo of a victim — a victim who ought to have some rights, rather than being nothing but a pawn in photographic evidence of a crime.

But mainly, I read the entire NY Times story and wondered how bad journalism can get, when they don’t even ask, let alone try to answer, the major questions.

Where is Patrick Kessler, and how much was he paid?

Regressive taxes are good!

That’s what Bloomberg says, anyway. We should tax poor people more, so they can’t afford to buy things like sugary soft drinks, which would shorten their lifespan. Apparently, if you’re rich, you never indulge in stuff that might harm you.

Some people say, well, taxes are regressive. But in this case, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money. And so, higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves. So, I listen to people saying ‘oh we don’t want to tax the poor.’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life. And that’s why you do want to do exactly what a lot of people say you don’t want to do.

The question is do you want to pander to those people? Or do you want to get them to live longer? There’s just no question. If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks, for example, they will drink less and there’s just no question that full sugar drinks are one of the major contributors to obesity and obesity is one of the major contributors to heart disease and cancer and a variety of other things.

So…who in New York has a guillotine? I think it’s time to wheel it out and take care of some patronizing jerks.

Spiders: The Next Generation

This is how I spent my morning:

I was cleaning up cages to set up more space for the next generation of spiders. The previous generation were all wild-caught; these are all lab-born, raised in isolation, so they’ve never seen another spider, which is why they are all flagged with a big “V” for virgin. The plan is to let them get cozy in their roomy new boxes, put up some cobwebs to decorate the place, and then next week I’ll introduce males to them, one by one. I’m going to watch them and then, as soon as the male has accomplished his duty, I’ll scoop him right up and put him in a vial, nice and safe.

I’ve got more juvenile females to set up with cages, but the remaining spiders are still on the small side. These spiders are small, too, especially compared to the behemoths I caught at the end of the summer, but they’ve got to start sexing it up sometime.

I guess I have to take “Eat the Rich” literally

Look who WholeFoods magazine selected as their “Man of the Year”. It’s not very delectable, but OK. Can I get it delivered? Do I have to clean and dress it myself? Can I order just a few select cuts?

WholeFoods magazine is a trade magazine that bills itself as “informing and educating the natural foods industry”, peddling supplements to retailers. They seem to be very gung ho about CBD and hemp farming, and like McConnell because he’s sponsored legislation to encourage more hemp. OK.

Still, that’s a distasteful and unappetizing slab of meat they’re selling.

What is 2 + 2?

Here’s an amusing video about what happens when we stop caring about giving a fact-based education to kids.

Laugh away. The schools aren’t teaching that “22” is an acceptable answer to the problem of “2+2”, yet. We’ve still got people insisting that evolution is false, though, and trying to expunge it from the curriculum…as they’re succeeding in doing in Turkey.

When children in Turkey head back to school this fall, something will be missing from their textbooks: any mention of evolution.

The Turkish government is phasing in what it calls a values-based curriculum. Critics accuse Turkey’s president of pushing a more conservative, religious ideology — at the expense of young people’s education.

It’s just the start.

“Among scientists, of course, we feel very sorry and very, very worried for the country,” says Ali Alpar, an astrophysicist and president of Turkey’s Science Academy, an independent group that opposes the new curriculum. A Turkish association of biologists and teachers’ unions have also expressed concern about the new textbooks.

“It is not only evolution. Evolution is a test case. It is about rationality — about whether the curriculum should be built on whatever the government chooses to be the proper values,” Alpar says. He also objects to how the government has converted many secular public schools into religious ones — Turkey’s publicly funded Imam Hatip schools — in recent years.

Ha ha. It’s just Turkey, going backwards, right? The levels of creationist ignorance in the US are competitive with those of Turkey, you know, and we have government officials supporting this one ignorant person, Ken Ham, and his flock.

He goes on to say…

The fake news is this article stating, “Babylonian tablet that describes the story of Noah and the Ark, widely believed to be the inspiration for the Biblical story.” The real event of the actual global Flood that did occur about 4300 years…ago as totally accurately recorded in the infallible Word of God in Genesis was the inspiration for the perverted (fake news) version now found in Babylonian (and other) records from cultures around the world.

That’s just as bad as trying to tell kids that “2+2=22”.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who wrote abortion laws had to know some biology?

Here we go again. In Ohio, Republicans are trying to pass a law requiring that ectopic pregnancies be surgically reimplanted into the uterus. This is not medically possible. An ectopic pregnancy is a crisis that requires surgical intervention, and this law would require that a doctor who tried to save a woman’s life would be charged with murder.

In Pennsylvania, they want to require a birth certificate be issued and a formal burial be carried out for any fertilized egg that fails to implant. Most failures to implant are not even noted by women or doctors — it’s just another menstrual period. This is another law that cannot practically be implemented, and is just another hurdle added to the trauma of spontaneous abortions, or additional expense for planned abortions.

I am getting the impression that regressive conservatives are desperately trying to exploit this moment of ascendance before a progressive rebound slaps them back into the teeming, hellish pit of hatred they come from.