The communists couldn’t take me out and i’ll be damned if I let a brown recluse take me out

So now his paranoia is imagining invisible communists and spiders under his bed. He’s a weird sad sick individual.

Keep crying, killer.

Derek R. Peterson, a professor of East African history at the University of Michigan, delivered a speech to the graduating class. It was a nice speech. He praised the activists on campus, and the students cheered.

Sing for the students of the Black Action Movement, whose members demanded a curriculum that would reflect the experience and identity of black people in this country.

Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activities who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The greatness of this institution does not only rest on the shoulders and on the accomplishments of our student athletes who deserve all the congratulations we can offer them.

It was honest, accurate, acknowledged student activists, and didn’t demean any of the people in the crowd. Except…hoo boy, it enraged Zionists and Republicans and Israeli donors to the university. The response was ridiculously over the top.

The same day, the university’s president, Domenico Grasso, issued a public apology, saying the comments were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.

We regret the pain this has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment, Grasso said, adding that Peterson’s speech deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony.

The swift apology did not stop some Republican officials, including Florida Sen. Rick Scott, from calling for the school to be stripped of federal funding. A Republican member of the Board of Regents, which governs the public university, also hinted at possible discipline for the professor. The prominent Israeli-American investor Adam Milstein urged Jewish people to halt any donations to the school.

This is madness. Are they claiming that there is no unjust and inhumane war in Gaza? It’s ongoing. People are starving, they’re being shot by the IDF, their homes are being bombed and bulldozed. Professor Peterson said no lie. Is the institutional position pro genocide? Peterson has made an excellent reply to the hysterical nonsense.

I have respect for Regent Hubbard and her colleagues: theirs is not an easy job, and we here at Michigan benefit from their leadership.

I would however urge Regent Hubbard to review the comments I actually made at yesterday’s commencement. It should not be controversial to have one’s “heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza”, which is what I credited activists with doing. Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue. It is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.

So I am mystified about what I have done to earn Regent Hubbard’s ire. I have – like many of us here in Michigan – been convicted by the evidence of human suffering in Gaza; and I credit my awareness of that to pro-Palestinian activists. That is why I gave the speech that I did. On a day meant to honor students for their accomplishments, I thought it important that we would honor the student activists who have, over the course of time, pushed the institution toward justice.

The University has taken down the commencement video. But here is my talk, if you’d like to hear the whole of it. As you will see, it is a talk about the salience of student activism in this institution’s long history.

Allow me to add, if I may:

The idea that graduations should be apolitical is ridiculous. Michigan is not a finishing school for polite young men and women. Our students are not wilting flowers. They have just finished their degrees at the foremost public university in the country. They can handle controversy.

They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we’ve given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed.

That is why I spoke as I did. If parents want sentimental graduation ceremonies, perhaps they should send their kids to a different institution. Here at UM we teach our students to face controversies, not run away from them. That’s what being the leaders and the best is about.”

There are a lot of people pushing the idea that a university should be apolitical; they are typically the kind of craven cowards who want to maintain the status quo, no matter how intolerable it might be. Alternatively, they have a political agenda which they want to promote by silencing critics, and they are backed by wealthy and influential supporters who do not question the vicious militants who want to carry out an ethnic cleansing in Israel.

I am shocked by the authoritarian, anti-free-speech actions taken by the University of Michigan and others (what the hell does Rick Scott have to do with Michigan?) who are loudly screeching about their intent to persecute Derek Peterson and the faculty and students of the University of Michigan.

We really need to kick these weird Zionist fanatics out of power.

A handful of students at U.S. universities also faced discipline in 2025 for seeking to highlight pro-Palestinian issues at graduation ceremonies, including a graduate of New York University whose diploma was withheld for criticizing Israel in a speech.

Expressing criticism in a speech is pretty much the definition of free speech, and those creepy zealots are the real opponents of freedom.

Then there are his abruptly shifting tactical moves. It is clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a big problem, not just for him, but for the global economy and that Iran is calling the shots on it. So what does he do? He first declares that the Strait is in fact open, then he orders Iran to open it, then he declares that the US is blockading it, as if that makes things any better. Then just on Sunday, he grandly declared Project Freedom in which US warships would provide safe passage to ships to pass through the Strait and on Monday, he claimed success in that US warships had escorted two ships out. But according to the International Maritime Organization there are roughly 2,000 ships with about 20,000 crew that are stranded in the Persian Gulf as of April 21, and it was obvious to knowledgeable observers that there was no way that US warships could provide escorts for that many. So on Tuesday, Project Freedom was summarily ditched, with Trump going back to that old standby that has not worked before, of threatening indiscriminate bombing of Iran (obvious war crimes) unless they allow free passage.

Julian Borger sums up Trump’s wildly careening behavior.

Another day, another hairpin turn in the world of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The weekend was all about war, and Trump insisting Iran had not yet “paid a big enough price”. Tuesday was Project Freedom, styled as a grand “humanitarian gesture” to allow trapped ships and their crews to escape the Gulf, but also aimed at weakening Iran’s chokehold on the strait of Hormuz.

By the early hours of Wednesday we were back to peace. The president announced: “Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement” so Project Freedom would be paused to give negotiations a chance.

The three approaches on three consecutive days do have something in common. They are all attempts to wrestle with the same set of hard facts: the regime in Iran is unlikely to collapse or surrender the right to enrich uranium no matter how many bombs are dropped on it, Tehran has shown its capacity to close the strait of Hormuz, and a total blockade of the Gulf hurts the US economy as well as Iran.

Together these hard facts make up the sides of a steel box in which the Trump administration, largely through its own actions, finds itself trapped. The repeated policy changes in recent days show him flailing around inside this trap, pinging off the walls and looking for an exit other than humiliation or a forever war.

It remains too early to say whether Trump has now found a way out. His accompanying threat of bombardment “at a much higher level and intensity” if Iran does not accept the initial terms betrays his nervousness it will not work.

During the later stages of the Vietnam war, when it had become apparent that the US was stuck in an unwinnable war with no way of getting out that did not look like a defeat, the blame game for the fiasco began and popular targets were those critics at home in the media, political world, and the general public who were demanding an end to the conflict. They were accused of lowering US morale and thus ‘aiding the enemy’.

We seem to have reached that stage with the current war with Iran. The bellicose secretary of defense Pete Hegseth articulated this line during questioning in senate hearings

“The negative nature in which you characterized the incredible and historic effort in Iran is part of the reason, senator, why the American people view it the way they do. It’s why I looked at the press corps at the Pentagon and called them pharisees in the press. It’s because they look for every problem that exists,” Hegseth said, adding: “Its defeatist Democrats like you that cloud the minds of the American people and would otherwise fully support preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon,” Hegseth said.

He then repeated his complaints.

Hegseth reprised criticisms he had made of Democrats and “some” Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing, when he had called critics of the war effort “reckless, feckless and defeatist”.

“As I said yesterday, and I’ll say it again today, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless naysayers and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” he said.

He dismissed critics as “defeatists from the cheap seats who two months in, seek to undermine the incredible efforts that have been undertaken and the historic nature of taking on a 47-year threat with the courage no other President has had, to great success and great opportunity for preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon”.

So we seem to be approaching the final stage whenever the US launches a war of choice in a distant land, and that is laying the groundwork for the debate to come on “Who lost Iran?”

Spiders don’t do that. Spiders like me. Birds…bleh.

What I’m wondering about now is…who is Dawkins getting advice from nowadays? Years ago, when I was briefly in favor, there was an active assortment of people on a group list maintained by Brockman. There was all kinds of private discussion about the things that were going on among all the high-powered writers and scientists in his stable — if someone was going on TV, for instance, they’d chat among themselves about topics and strategy. Ideas for articles would get floated among the group, often specifically by John Brockman, who would publish a book every year about the answers his people would give (I’m published in a couple of them, for instance).

I imagine there would be a great deal of discussion going on in that group, if it still exists. Epstein was part of it, and Brockman is all tangled up in the Epstein files, so it may not — everyone could be scrambling for cover right now. I was quietly purged long ago, when I exposed myself as a critic of Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and everyone who was happy to join the “Intellectual Dark Web”, so what do I know.

Anyway, if he were still talking with that group, you’d think they would have told him that blathering about “Claudia” was a tremendously poor idea politically. Is he isolated and alone now, except for the usual mob of sycophants? That bodes ill for him if so, and means we might be getting even more garbage from him in the near future.

Ken Ham is trying to game a tourism poll in Kentucky — he wants his followers to vote for his crappy “museum” as the best museum and as the best kid-friendly attraction in Kentucky. I think we should vote for Big Bone Lick State Park as the best museum, but that poll asks you to enter a zip code — I don’t know if they’re only going to accept Kentucky resident’s vote. I went ahead and voted anyway, since I have visited both the AiG frauds and the state park, and even if I hadn’t, I’d know that the Creation “Museum” and Ark Park are pretty much bottom of the barrel roadside attractions.

In the kid-friendly attraction category, the Ark Encounter is up against the Louisville Zoo, which is an insane match-up. Really, does Ham seriously think his pathetic fake boat is of a caliber that can stand up against an accredited, science-based zoological garden? I cast my vote for the real thing. I will be very disappointed if Kentucky blesses the stupid lie and con game of Answers in Genesis.

Go ahead, make Ken Ham disappointed instead.

Both of these polls allow you to vote every day this month, which makes them bogus from the outset, so neither are going to be very meaningful.

This was the wrong day to discover this study.

A major 10-year clinical trial is turning one of the world’s most common knee surgeries on its head. Researchers found that trimming a damaged meniscus—a procedure long believed to relieve pain—offers no real benefit over placebo surgery. Even more surprising, patients who had the operation actually fared worse over time, with more symptoms, poorer function, faster progression of osteoarthritis, and a greater likelihood of needing additional surgery.

Shortly, I’m going in to the local hospital to get an MRI to update the status of my knees before I get that same surgery in less than two weeks.

Fuck. I have been eager to get an operation that promised to ease pain and improve mobility just in time for the summer field season, and now there’s evidence that is also going to diminish the placebo effect.

Never heard of the goomba fallacy? That’s because it’s new. It was coined in 2024. It’s widely circulated in certain parts of the internet, and if you’re not in those parts of the internet then good for you, you’re not missing much.

The goomba fallacy doesn’t have anything to do with goombas. It’s just that the meme image that popularized the fallacy contains goombas. Source

My instinct when learning about a fallacy has always been to pick it apart. What exactly makes the fallacy wrong? Are there contexts where the fallacy isn’t wrong? What is the goal when people commit the fallacy, or point out the fallacy? So here is my overanalysis of the goomba fallacy.

Surface analysis

The goomba fallacy is a special case of the composition fallacy. The composition fallacy is when you assume that what is true for individual parts is also true of the whole. If you look at individual people, you may find people who believe A, and who believe B. But these are properties of individuals and not properties of the crowd as a whole. Therefore you cannot assume that everyone in the crowd believes A and B simultaneously.

Under this analysis, the goomba fallacy is always straightforwardly wrong.

Next step back a little, and consider why people commit the goomba fallacy. The purpose of the fallacy is to accuse people of hypocrisy. It’s to show that people have beliefs that conflict with one another.

And when people point out the goomba fallacy, the purpose is to defend against the accusation of hypocrisy. There isn’t necessarily any hypocrisy occurring. Yes, there may be different beliefs that conflict with one another, but those beliefs are not necessarily held by the same individuals. So rather than talking about hypocrisy, what we’re seeing instead looks like ordinary disagreement between different people.

In defense of hypocrisy

Let me ask the question: Why is hypocrisy bad? Why is ordinary disagreement less bad?

Both hypocrisy and disagreement imply the existence of conflicting beliefs. If two beliefs conflict, at least one of them must be false. So if all we care about is the presence of false beliefs, then both hypocrisy and disagreement are equally problematic.

Think about it from this angle. “Individual people” are not in fact indivisible units. Individual people change over time, may be thought of as many distinct people from one moment to the next. Brains are material objects with spatially separated components. We think of individuals as cohesive wholes as a matter of practical reality, but we understand that not all parts of the individual are necessarily aligned, thus the sin of misalignment, i.e. hypocrisy.

But couldn’t we also apply the same reasoning to communities? We understand that communities are made of many component parts, yet we may conceive of them as cohesive wholes. Just as we speak of the sin of misalignment within the individual, we can reasonably speak about the sin of misalignment within a community. Why can’t people within the community talk to each other and get their story straight? Why is the community presenting a unified front while ignoring substantial disagreements within their own ranks?

Disanalogies

I drew an analogy between hypocrisy and disagreement, but the reader should remain unconvinced. There are some major disanalogies.

In particular, it is relatively easy to resolve a conflict between one’s own beliefs. It is much harder to resolve disagreements between distinct people.

Hypocrisy is the greater sin, because it suggests you’re not even trying! You could just stop believing one of the things, but for some reason you chose not to. Is this epistemological neglect? Or worse, you may be deliberately advancing contradictions with malicious intent.

On the other hand, if people disagree, that doesn’t reflect neglect, it reflects the fact that people do not have infinite resources to argue until they come to a consensus. It’s widely understood that communities, even communities with a shared political goal, are essentially alliances. Disagreements, even on important matters, must be accepted if you want to get things done.

Blurring the line

We’ve shown that disagreements within a community are often accepted as a matter of practicality. Are there any analogous situations for individuals?

One example comes from lawyers. Lawyers have a practice of “arguing in the alternative”–making multiple parallel arguments on behalf of their client, ignoring that some of those arguments conflict with one another. I think this contributes to the image of lawyers as dishonest, but it serves a practical purpose. The lawyer is professionally obligated to pursue all arguments that may help their client, and they only need the judge/jury to accept one of their arguments. It does not matter which argument gets accepted, and the lawyer’s own belief on the matter is irrelevant.

And then there’s the classic example of hypocrisy: Rules for thee, not for me. Technically this is logically consistent, but violates a common ethical principle: rules should apply fairly or not at all. This form of hypocrisy is clearly self-serving, and should be rejected.

Is there an analogous situation in the community context? Suppose some people in a community believe “rules for thee”, and other people in the community believe “not for me”. When it comes to enforcing the rules on other people, the community is insistent. But when it comes to applying rules on themselves, the community remains silent. Is this not a form of community hypocrisy? The community is being epistemologically negligent for a self-serving purpose.

Generally speaking, it’s worse for a single person to hold conflicting beliefs than it is for the conflicting beliefs to be spread across multiple people. People commit the goomba fallacy because it gives them the upper hand in an argument if they can show that their opponents are being hypocritical.  But my intention has been the blur the line just a bit. Sometimes, hypocrisy does not require that contradictory beliefs are held within a single individual; hypocrisy may occur on a community level too.

Instead of waisting my time replying to all their emails, I’ve decided to consolidate my responses into this one post.

• Yes, your book club  may feature any of my books. No, I will not pay you to feature my book in your book club.
• Yes, you may write a review of any of my books, assuming you’ve read them. No, I will not pay you to review any of my books.
• Thank you for your email, famous author. Let me reply using your official email, instead of your Gmail account.
• You want to interview me for your video series? I won’t pay you. Especially if my videos have more views than your videos.
• If I ever want to hire a publicist, I know who I would reach out to. This person didn’t send me a blind solicitation. If I was able to find them, that tells me they something about publicity/marketing.
• You want to make one of my books into a movie, but I have to pay you first? Sorry, I know an Academy Award winning producer who would look at my books for free, if I asked.
• No, I will not pay an influencer to pretend to like my books on YouTube/TikTok/Instagram, etc.
• I’m not William Brinkley and I think the Brinkley estate doesn’t need your help to publicize The Last Ship. (Real eMail I received.)
• I’m glad one of my books changed your life. No, I will not buy a service from you. Please leave a Goodreads review instead.
• I don’t recall ever sending you or anyone else a query letter.

I do feel sorry for the legitimate book club organizers trying to reach authors for legitimate bookings. We’re just buried in spam emails right now. If it’s bad for me, I can’t imagine what it must be like for more established authors.

The IHME – in their annual Global Burden of Disease study – estimates that 8.7 million people die prematurely from tobacco use every year. As of November 2023, these are the latest estimates and refer to deaths in the year 2019. The references can be found in the footnote.

7.7 million of those deaths result from smoking, while 1.3 million are non-smokers who are dying because they are exposed to second-hand smoke. (An additional 56,000 people die annually from chewing tobacco.)

The unpleasant smell of smoke also penetrates into clothes and any permeable material so that as soon as one enters a room, one can tell if a smoker has been there.

However, thanks to massive marketing and the hiding of its negative effects, the tobacco industry has managed to create a large number of addicts. The industry has a massive army of lobbyists who work diligently to make sure that governments do not do more to curtail or ban their death-dealing industry. Banning smoking outright will not be easy because of the power of the lobby and those who will argue that it infringes on their personal freedom.

The tobacco industry targets young people because they know that if you get them hooked when young, then you will likely have them as customers forever. What the UK has done is to set in motion a process to try and prevent young people from ever taking up the habit, by moving to a steadily rising age to be able to purchase cigarettes, rather than a fixed age like 18 or 21.

A bill banning anyone born after 2008 from buying tobacco in the UK has completed its progress through parliament in a move that ministers hope will create a “smoke-free generation”.

Under the tobacco and vapes bill anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never be able to be legally sold tobacco across the UK, in an effort to save lives and reduce the burden on the NHS.

The bill will become legislation when it receives royal assent next week. Its long journey through both houses of parliament began when it was introduced on 5 November 2024 and ended on Tuesday, when the House of Lords approved amendments made by MPs in House of Commons.

Ministers hope it will end the sale of tobacco products altogether over time and break the cycle of addiction and the disadvantages associated with tobacco.

Here’s how the law will work.

From 2027, the minimum legal age for the sale of tobacco will increase by one year (from the current age of 18) every year. There will be a permanent generational line: everyone above it will still be allowed to buy cigarettes; everyone below it won’t. But over time the proportion of people allowed to smoke will become smaller and smaller as older citizens die – until one day no one in the UK will be able to legally buy cigarettes.

It’s quite a clever piece of legislation: rather than an outright ban that will result in conflict over rights with smokers now, it gradually reduces the number of those able to purchase tobacco products legally year by year, hopefully leading to further declines in smoking that happens invisibly. Public health researchers will be studying the impact of this legislation (a policy experiment and one of the first of its kind), and whether it could be a model to introduce in other countries and areas.

The law also extends the regulation of vapes – including their advertising and marketing to youth, and banning their use in playgrounds, public and commercial buildings and cars carrying children, and outside hospitals and schools. Despite an increasingly politically polarised climate, this law enjoys remarkable cross-party consensus, with strong support from Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. Some of the strongest support for the legislation has come from smokers. Research carried out by YouGov in 2024 found that 52% of smokers supported raising the age of sale by one year every year and 78% of the public supported the idea of a smoke-free generation.
…

Why would smokers support this policy? Perhaps it’s because they wish this legislation had been in place when they were younger: most people who smoke became addicted at a young age, with 90% of people who smoke starting before the age of 21. Many became addicted before they fully understood the health risks or how it would affect the quality of their daily lives. Understandably, polls tend to show that the vast majority of smokers regret starting. But quitting is notoriously difficult: it’s estimated that 80% of people who smoke have tried to quit, and struggled. Many of these smokers now know it’s killing them: two-thirds of deaths of female smokers in their 50s, 60s and 70s are linked to smoking, and smokers are estimated to die 10 years earlier than non-smokers.

The legislation will not criminalize smokers. Rather, it imposes penalties on those who sell the product to those under the age. So young people can still smoke but the hope is that the process to get cigarettes becomes so difficult that most will find it tedious and give up the effort.

The UK is not the first country to try this approach. New Zealand introduced such a law in 2022 but repealed it after less than a year, thanks to a new right-wing government and lobbying by the tobacco industry.

It won widespread public support, international praise from health advocates and inspired similar plans in the UK. But before the changes came into force, New Zealand’s new rightwing government unexpectedly scrapped it.
…

The most vocal public protest came from convenience store owners – known as dairies in New Zealand – who were concerned the ban would gut their earnings and expose them to crime.

The tobacco industry also protested. An investigation by the broadcaster RNZ into one of the most visible anti-smokefree groups, Save Our Stores, found the campaign, which is designed to look like a grassroots movement, was being quietly backed by the tobacco companies British American Tobacco New Zealand and Imperial Brands.

The Maldives also introduced a version of this law a year ago and it is still in place.

You can be sure that the unscrupulous, morally bankrupt, and ethically challenged tobacco industry will fight this all the way, especially in the developing world that it sees as the place to increase their revenues as smoking rates in developed countries go down.

I hope this marks the beginning of a global trend that will eventually result in a smoking-free world.