Child murderer was a white nationalist

Who is surprised? The recent shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival was perpetrated by an angry young man with racist views.

Legan also shared his views that include fringe white supremacist book written in 1890. Called “…one of the most incendiary works ever to be published anywhere,” by a noted anarchist, Legan quoted from the book in a post accompanied by a Smokey the Bear sign about fire danger. He wrote: “Read Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”

According to the book Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Subculture, Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard was authored under a pseudonym. It is purported to expand on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “theories of master–slave morality and herd mentality …”

The book is described as being akin to Social Darwinism and includes misogynistic and racist principles “claiming that the woman and the family as a whole is the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.”

Please do go on about how antifa is a dangerous organized gang. So far, they’ve killed no one, while these right wing thugs are running up the score. This guy murdered a 6 year old child and seriously wounded his mother and grandmother!

East Side Park is infested with wild gangs of juvenile mammals

The cartoon is a lie. We’ve been to many playgrounds looking for spiders, and there is a consistent pattern. If you visit a neglected park, like Dogpoop Park that we visited yesterday, you’ll find lots of webs dangling everywhere under the equipment (whether the owner is at home at the time is a different question). Go to a park heavily trafficked in children, and the place is bare of spiders and their webs. I’m pretty sure children eat spiders and pretend cobwebs are cotton candy.

So this morning Mary and I visited Eastside Park, which is probably the most popular park in town. There are picnic tables everywhere, a large shelter, a band shell, and two playground areas with slides and swings and all that good stuff. One thing it doesn’t have is a lot of spiders.

I mean, seriously, what is the point?

We did have some success prowling about the band shell, which has complex siding with many crevices to hide in, and we found a few spiders cowering there. I think they’re terrified of carnivorous children. There were mainly Theridiidae lurking about, and curiously, they were uniformly Steatoda borealis, the Boreal Combfoot. They are pretty false widows. I like the mottled pattern on my friends, Parasteatoda, but the boreals are also nice, with solid dark black to reddish purple body and an elegant white band on the front of their abdomen.

So not a total waste of time. It would be a much more interesting hunting ground if we could get rid of the roving bands of kids. That park is full of pernicious children every time I pass by on a sunny day.

Jared Kushner, slumlord

Last week, our fool president went on another Twitter rant, in this case blaming Representative Elijah Cummings, who has been a thorn in his side by simply being an upright, moral human being, of being responsible for the “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” that is Baltimore. This is ironic coming from a New Yorker, home of Pizza Rat, but whole new levels of amusement are added when you learn that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, is a major Baltimore area slumlord.

In 2017, Baltimore County officials revealed that apartments owned by the Kushner firm were responsible for more than 200 code violations, all accrued in the span of the calendar year. Repairs were made only after the county threatened fines, local officials said, and even after warnings, violations on nine properties were not addressed, resulting in monetary sanctions.

In an investigation by the New York Times and Pro Publica published earlier that year, tenants of Kushner properties reported mouse infestations, mold problems and maggots. A private investigator who looked into Kushner’s property management company, Westminster Management, described the managers as “slumlords.”

“Basically, [Kushner] has been creating a race to the bottom in terms of poorly maintained properties,” she said. “He’s been very, very deeply implicated.”

In the past two years, the Kushner firm and its affiliated entities have been sued multiple times by Baltimore-area residents who allege that the company has charged them excessive fees and used the threat of eviction to pressure them into paying.

I’ve been to Baltimore several times. It’s a fine city, with character and a beautiful downtown (I also like visiting New York), and it’s amazing how petty that demagogue Trump can get when he’s lashing out. He fully deserved what the editor of the Baltimore Sun wrote about him.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

Impeach that monster. I can’t believe the Democrats have been dragging their heels about confronting a man so manifestly unfit for office.

AXP has been axed

I closed comments and new posting, but The Atheist Experience was still left up here at FtB. Despite requesting some recommendations from the Atheist Community of Austin, what’s left of it, for what to do with the blog, I’ve heard nothing from them. So this evening a removed it from FtB’s roster for good.

What a freakin’ mess. Matt and his transphobic crew really did a great job of flushing a fine organization down the tubes.

Optical illusion, or weird injury?

I was walking home from the lab, when I saw this utterly motionless dragonfly perched on a signpost. I looked at it closely, and there seemed to be something unusual about it –the back of its head was gone, with a sharp boundary at the eyes. It looked like it had been surgically snipped out, but that seemed so improbably, I thought it had to be some kind of illusion.

Then I touched it and it flew away.

I keep telling everyone, in case of a zombie insect invasion, they have a ventral nerve cord, so aim for the throat, not the top of the head.

What should atheists support?

I received a long email complaining about the priorities of American Atheists. To distill it down a lot…

To use American Atheist (AA) resources to continue
pressing issues that are predominantly
LGTB is, in my opinion, a dereliction of duty, unwise
and possibly actionable.
…
Please remember that AA members are,
primarily and traditionally, interested in
separation of church and state issues.

Why?

I agree completely on the importance of church/state separation, and I think it’s important to get religion out of our schools, for instance. But why? Think about the deeper motivations behind atheism.

There are many reasons why people should oppose religion. I oppose it because it’s antithetical to good science, and that religion is used by people to endorse ideas that are contrary to the evidence. I consider that a very good reason.

Another very good reason, though, is that religion is behind many of the most repressive policies in this country. It fosters misogyny, child rape, the oppression of LGBTQ people, and a whole raft of vicious discriminatory ideas that harm those who don’t conform. It’s antithetical to healthy social practices, and that is a perfectly valid reason for atheists to fight back. It’s not just for science, or for anti-clericalism, or for legal agendas…many oppose religion because it is a social ill, and they may legitimately find common cause with other atheists for that reason. LGBTQ people need atheism, too, and they may care about other aspects of our culture than that “In God We Trust” is on our money.

It’s funny how Big Tent Atheism only wants to share the tent with cis het privileged white people who only want to talk about the Constitution as holy writ.

Also, it’s really weird to send me a letter like that when I’ve been ostracized from the formal atheist community for arguing that social issues ought to be as important to us as the scientific and legal ones. They don’t know me very well, I guess.

Thundering spiders!

I slept in this morning until 6:30, which felt nice, but when I woke up, there was Mary — she’d been up for a few hours. She drank all the coffee. She was eager as a puppy to go on a spider walk. It was raining hard, with thunder, but that did not dissuade her. So I drank the cold dregs off the bottom of the coffee pot, and we went off to explore.

First stop was Kjenstad Park, over by Lake Crystal, where I hoped that the proximity to insects hatching out of the lake would fuel a massive spider population. No such luck. There were a few little guys like this one lurking in the playground equipment, but not much otherwise.

Most horribly, though, we discovered some of the neighbors are using the park to walk their dog(s), and it was a filthy, dirty, disgusting place, with the ground covered with dog poop. We are now privately calling the place Dogpoop Park, and would be willing to lobby the city council for an official name change, or for city officials to teach residents how to clean up after your goddamn dog.

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Death to mosquitos!

Today, we got smart. We decided to do a spiderwalk in the cool of the morning, before the day turned into an oven for both humans and spiders, and we tried some new turf, the Stevens County Fairgrounds. The fair starts next week, and the fairgrounds sit empty all year long except for, I presume, regular maintenance, making the place an interesting combination of well-kept buildings that have been sitting abandoned and mostly neglected for almost a year, and it was a utopia for spiders. There were orb webs and cobwebs everywhere, and in case you’re wondering why, it’s because the air was practically a soup of mosquitos. The metal siding of every building, in this case the Dairy Barn, was swathed in webbing, and the webs were thickly clotted with mosquito corpses. I applaud their industry.

(By the way, hot tip for photographing spider webs: carry an atomizer of water with you, and spritz them so they pop out a bit more.)

Of course there were spiders there.

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Whoa — those goons buy their popularity?

I’m gobsmacked. Ben Shapiro is spending $20K per week advertising on Facebook? PragerU, $80K? That’s a big chunk of change.

Two things come to mind. These right-wing figures are “fake news”. They’ve bought a claque, and their popularity is partly a sham.

But also…if you’re wondering why social media sites keep avoiding social responsibility, are being so cagey about not antagonizing fascists, all you have to do is ask who is paying them.