Farage is a grifter like his hero Trump who seems to spends most of his time making a lot of money from various side hustles. But since becoming an MP in 2024, he has been facing scrutiny about some of those things, particularly a £5 million gift by a cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harbone that he claims was not a bribe but a gift freely given with no strings or quid pro quo attached. There was a parliamentary and even police inquiry into this and Farage may have thought that at least one of those might provide grounds for a Recall Petition. If it does, then if at least 10% of voters in the constituency sign the petition, the MP will lose their seat and it will trigger a by-election. Even though Farage’s constituency of Clacton is solidly right wing, he, like Trump, is very divisive and roundly detested by those who are not his fans and so there was a very good chance that the threshold of 10% would be met, forcing him out. Although he can run again, being ousted from office is never a good look.

So Farage did a very Trumpian thing. He said that the whole process was rigged against him by the political establishment and that by resigning (thus suspending the parliamentary inquiry that is currentlyunderway) and re-contesting, the voters would be the judge of whether he should be an MP. If he won, that would be claimed to be a vindication.

But several things happened that upset that plan that he could not have foreseen. One is that all the major parties declined to contest the by-election, calling it a farce, leaving him with no credible opposition. The second is that Count Binface found himself to be the main rival candidate. The other parties seem to be quite content to let Binface represent the anti-Farage voters with Conservative and Labour parties leaders signaling their support for Binface.

To add to Farage’s woes, there have emerged yet more allegations of suspicious donations.

Police are investigating donations worth £500,000 made to Reform UK by the mother of a convicted fraudster and ally of Nigel Farage.

The investigation concerns two donations of £250,000 made by Fiona Cottrell, whose son George has often accompanied Farage to Reform events and media appearances. The May 2024 donations are under investigation over whether they were intended to conceal a donation by an impermissible donor.
…

The donations appear to be separate to a deposit of about £1m that Fiona Cottrell made in June 2024 to a company run by Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader.
…

And it will add to questions facing Fiona Cottrell, who has not responded to detailed questions from the Guardian about her financial involvement with Reform. She refused to comment about the donation currently under police investigation, the Times reported. She is understood to be of relatively modest means, and yet has donated a total of £1.75m to Reform UK and its fundraising vehicle Britain Means Business.

All this means that these scandals will be playing out during an election in which Farage will find it hard to claim to be running against the establishment when his opponent is someone with a trash can on his head. While a two-person race would be bad enough, it appears that there will be two other candidates, both of whom are more likely to split the Reform vote. One is the actor Laurence Fox representing the extreme right wing Reclaim Party (people may remember him as the grumpy detective sergeant in the long-running Inspector Lewis police procedural TV series) and the other is the Monster Raving Loony Party. (There are three extreme right wing parties in the UK: Reform, Reclaim, and Restore. Reform currently has seven seats in parliament, Restore has one, and Reclaim none, when their sole MP quit the party. Why they would choose names that are so similar beats me.)

This has created an enormous amount of media coverage for Binface, the 5,900-year-old leader of the Recyclons from the planet Sigma IX, with calls for voters to unite behind him. So this has become essentially a two-person race and people are being urged to rally behind Binface who has been surprised at the outpouring of support.

[Binface] said that he had been inundated over the past 48 hours with emails and messages from Binface activists offering to knock on doors and deliver leaflets on his behalf in what could yet emerge as an electoral shock on a par with when Hartlepool United’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, was elected as mayor of the northern English town.
…

In the meantime, his candidacy has massively boosted interest in a live show Binface is due to perform on Thursday at London’s Museum of Comedy. The event is sold out and plans are being made for alternative dates amid a surge in interest in Harvey’s work.

Binface admitted to knowing little about Clacton but was pleased by what he had recently learned. “I have heard it’s on the sea and I have heard it has got a pier. In fact I was about to abolish it but then someone pointed out that it is a pier, not a peer. And I’ve also heard that the people are not necessarily all as Brexity … so there you go.” The area of Essex where Clacton is located recorded one of the highest votes to leave the EU in 2016.

Binface hopes to appeal to disillusioned Reform voters and others who would have voted for Labour, the Conservatives or other parties had they been given a chance. “When you think about it, you can see why I might court the immigrant vote in fact. I’m the ultimate alien, though I should stress, not an illegal one,” he added.

This has resulted in Farage being in a no-win situation. If he wins the by-election, it will be against a trash bin and thus meaningless. If he loses, it will be a loss for the ages and an ignominy he will find hard to live down and likely signal the end of his political career. It seems that Reform is sufficiently alarmed by this possibility that they have asked their party activists to go to Clacton to canvass for Farage.

Reform UK activists have been urged to divert from the Greater Manchester mayoral byelection to support Nigel Farage’s “fake” contest 250 miles away in Clacton.

A WhatsApp message shared with party members in north-west England said: “The message could not be more clear. We now need all of our fantastic activists, branch officers and councillors to come and help us in Clacton.”
…

A Reform UK councillor who received the WhatsApp message, sent on Wednesday, said the party was “desperate” to show support for its embattled leader, even at the expense of surrendering the chance to win the mayoralty.

What can work in Farage’s favor is that even voters who hate him might not relish their electorate becoming a laughing stock by electing Binface. So they might just sit this one out and not vote for him.

UK bookies have lowered the odds against Binface winning. Farage still remains the heavy favorite at ⅛ while Binface has a respectable 5/1. Both Fox at 66/1 and MRLP at 100/1 are rank outsiders. There is no tradition of debates among candidates so we will have to see what opinion polls say.

Although…I did have some free time, so I wandered around this old theater and found some potential spiders to track down. Next time I volunteer there I’m bringing my camera to find some spiders in the old dusty parts of the building.

I’ll be very brief today — I didn’t see a movie. I was volunteering at the theater last night, but we’re at the end of our run of Supergirl, and Minions&Monsters is still going strong, so I just did my job and didn’t pay any attention to the movie. Starting tonight, we’re playing Moana, the live action version of the animated Disney movie, which I have no interest in seeing. Disney’s live-action rehashes of their old movies are never very good and suffer in comparison with the originals, so why bother?

Minions&Monsters was a big win for the theater, even on a Thursday night it brought in lots of families and lots of money for the Morris Theater Co-op. Supergirl was kind of a dud. Family movies are pretty profitable for us, and Minions seems to draw in lots of kids and their parents. I’ll be interested to see if Moana has similar appeal.

Unfortunately for me, it was so busy that I had to serve on concessions, and discovered that I don’t really know how to us a cash register. For a while, I was the bottleneck and was slowing the flow until a more practiced person took over. In addition to being slow, I made mistakes.

At the end of the movie, one person came up to me and said she was pretty sure I undercharged her, and she had me add up a few of her purchases, and she was right — I came up $9 short. So she paid me on the spot! Minnesota nice sometimes actually means nice.

OK, that’s all. I do want to mention that we’re participating in the “Better Together Film Festival”, and on Wednesday, 22 July at 7pm, we’ll be showing a free movie, The [Conserv]atives, highlighting Republicans who are bucking against the general awfulness of the Republican party to support action on climate issues.

From their information…

From summer 2021 through Donald Trump’s re-election
campaign, four Republican insiders wage an uphill battle to transform their party’s stance on
climate change from within. A young grassroots organizer, a big-city mayor, an Iowa farmer, and
an evangelical pastor — each embedded in different corners of the conservative ecosystem —
risk alienation from their own communities as they attempt to reframe climate action as a
conservative value.
As extreme weather intensifies and the 2024 election approaches, they confront a political
machine built on denial, testing whether personal conviction can overcome tribal loyalty. This is
a deeply personal story about the cost of defying your own side and the haunting question that
drives them all: will their efforts be enough before time runs out?

I’ll probably attend that one.

Making Indie Games is Like Buying a Lottery Ticket | Jason Schreier (video, 20 min) – Jason Schreier educates people about basic facts of indie video game production.  Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in the indie game player space, as well as the game critic space.  I see Indie games routinely celebrated as the artistically superior form, unlike those ultra-high budget games that all kind of blend into each other and get monetized to hell.  Be that as it may, I’ve often wondered if indie games are actually worse for laborers, since they offer so little job stability, and it’s basically a bad financial decision.  Granted, these days all the big studios are laying people off–but still, it’s “only” 33% that experienced layoffs, whereas I’m pretty sure that fraction of indie games that fail is well over a third.

NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME | illomens (Click the play button, it’s an essay on a static page) – This manifesto argues that your video game is not a commercial project, and that frees you from a lot of irrelevant conversations that assume video games are commercial products (such as the paragraph above).  I have technically sold a game for money, so I have been excluded from the target audience of the manifesto, but I still basically agree with this.

It’s important to make a distinction between indie games and hobby games.  Indie games are framed as scrappy underdogs, but we’re still talking about big budget mass-marketed commercial products.  People talk a lot about the incredible number of games on Steam, like 21k last year, but this datum is somewhat problematic because it also mixes in projects that aren’t trying to be commercial.  For hobby devs, the fact that making a game is like buying a lottery ticket is mostly irrelevant, it’s just a perk.

Competing for a Minimum Wage Job at Sony | Game Arcadia (video, 25 min) – Jenna Stoeber discusses an old trash reality show where the prize is to work in QA at Sony.  It’s a metaphor for how working towards a dream job at all costs will open you up to a lot of abuse.

flying is getting worse, here’s why | Answer in Progress (video, 20 min) – Sabrina looks into airlines and learns that they operate on very thin profit margins.

I feel like leftist analysis of any industry often settles into some sort of “greedy corporation” narrative as the source of all problems.  Sabrina does explore the narrative, so I see lots of commenters attaching to that as the definitive explanation, despite that not actually being her conclusion.  Yes corporations are greedy, and legally required to be greedy, but a theory that can explain everything doesn’t actually explain anything.  Anyways, profit margins are like $8 dollars per ticket, so how much better do flights get in the hypothetical world where CEOs fart rainbows and airplane passengers seize the means of production?  What makes flying suck is that it’s very easy to do price comparison and hard to do quality comparison, so the airline market is in a race to the bottom for lower prices.  There are policies that could address the situation (e.g. penalties for delays, or better transparency about fees), but these come with tradeoffs, mainly higher prices.

The Probability Broach, chapter 20

We’re up to chapter 20 (of 24) in The Probability Broach. This chapter opens with another of L. Neil Smith’s fake quotes. This time, he puts words in the mouth of Lysander Spooner, an anarchist and abolitionist who served as president in Smith’s alternate history:

The entire concept of “law” is vain and fallacious, for what shall we have accomplished by enacting one? Those who agree with it will obey it, as they did before it existed. Those who disagree will break it, so it has no effect upon them. We have been occupied in an empty gesture of which but two consequences shall follow: those who take comfort in such things will be comforted, and those who derive perverted pleasure by enforcing their will upon others may now find positions among the police.

—Lysander Spooner
First Inaugural Address, 85 A.L.

Okay, look.

I’m not saying there’s no good argument for anarchism or its related philosophies. I believe individual freedom is generally a good thing, and we should seek to maximize it, consistent with respecting everyone else’s ability to enjoy the same right.

That being said, this is a fantastically stupid argument for anarchism. If Smith wanted to be taken seriously as a political philosopher, he fell flat on his face in the attempt.

This ignores the extremely obvious point of deterrence: the fear of being caught and punished will dissuade some people from breaking the law, even when they might otherwise be inclined to do so. There’s also the fact that people who commit serious crimes tend to be imprisoned, where their opportunities to commit further crimes are severely curtailed.

Of course, there are further replies to these points. You might argue that laws are badly designed and oppressive, punishing behavior that harms no one; that police have too much power to enforce them in excessively harsh or discriminatory ways; that most people who commit crimes don’t rationally weigh the costs and consequences; that prisons are cruel institutions that tend to make people worse rather than better. You could make all of these arguments.

What you can’t do is the thing Smith does here: just pretend that no one has ever offered any reason why laws and the justice system should exist, and then posture about how ridiculous it is that they exist anyway. It’s more than mere ignorance, it’s fundamentally dishonest.

You could construct a parallel argument for Smith’s position, like so: “L. Neil Smith says that everyone should carry firearms to protect themselves against violence, but what does that accomplish? Those who didn’t want to hurt you wouldn’t do so anyway, whether you have a gun or not. Those who wanted to hurt you will try to do so anyway, whether you have a gun or not. Therefore, guns are useless. They only give perverted pleasure to people who want to hurt others with them.”

Getting back to the main plot, Win Bear and his allies have just shown the Continental Congress the film of nuclear weapons from his world, which stuns and horrifies them:

Liberty Hall emptied in stunned silence, leaving Lucy and me behind. I’d lived all my life with a nuclear sword dangling over my head; it’s something else to be informed suddenly, to be shown, that your whole world’s slated for flaming destruction. That, or abject surrender, and Confederates didn’t strike me as the kind to lie down and spread their legs, even threatened with holocaust.

This is an incredibly gross and sexist analogy, equating willingness to have sex with passive acceptance of one’s own death. What does it say about the mindset of a person who’d write a sentence like that?

To be fair, this is Win’s internal narration, and an author doesn’t necessarily have to have the same opinions as his characters. A good writer can depict a character who’s a regressive misogynist without endorsing that view himself. But nothing in this book gives me the impression that L. Neil Smith was capable of that kind of subtlety.

My impression is that Smith held sexist views, but tried to tone them down so as not to alienate his readers (recall the earlier chapter that mentioned the availability of “hookers… organic or mechanical” but wisely said no more about it). However, there are places where it bleeds through in spite of him.

As we staggered out of the assembly hall through the portrait gallery, there were a dozen blinding flashes. I was suddenly showered with difficult questions: “Mr. Bear! Are you from another planet?” “Mr. Bear! Isn’t this whole thing an elaborate hoax?” “Mr. Bear! Is your planet radioactive?” “Mr. Bear! How do you like Confederate women?”

As Win squints and hunches against the glare, Lucy comes to his aid. She dismisses the journalists as “vermin” and says he could dismiss them by invoking his privacy rights. But she concedes it would help their cause if he answers a few questions, so he grudgingly agrees:

“Sam Hayakawa, Interplanet News. With me is ‘Win’ Bear, focus of the Seventh Continental Congress. Lieutenant Bear, may I call you Win? Would it be accurate to say you’re from another dimension?”

“I haven’t figured it out myself. I come from a place—a time, really—where history’s different, where—”

“I’m sure that’ll interest our technical-minded viewers, heh, heh. For us laymen, what’s it like to escape from a Federalist dictatorship, and win free to—”

“Now wait a minute! In the first place, I didn’t escape, I was pushed. In the second place the United States isn’t a dictatorship, it’s—”

“Win, since arriving here, you’ve left a wake of shootings behind you. We ordinarily expect perhaps a dozen murders per decade. You’ve killed that many in a month, and—”

No, just no.

As with the equally unbelievable claim that there are only a few hundred traffic deaths per year, Smith implausibly claims that violent crime is almost nonexistent in his anarcho-capitalist utopia. But the principles of this world make it impossible for anyone to know this.

How can a journalist—or anyone else—make any confident statement about how many murders there are in the North American Confederacy? There’s no agency that investigates suspicious deaths. There’s no bureau of vital statistics you can consult. There’s not even an authoritative list of the population. If a person just disappears, it’s very possible that no one would notice. The fact that murder is apparently rare might just mean that murderers are good at getting away with it—which is very likely when there are no police!

“Friend, I’m going to explain this once: I didn’t ask to be here; I didn’t ask your Hamiltonians to—”

“Well, how many people have you killed, then?”

“Nobody who didn’t have a weapon out and pointed. Until now. I’m thinking of making an exception in your—”

“Umnh, one more question, Win…”

“Call me Lieutenant Bear.”

“Erh… since your nation-state—is that correct?—has a long history of atomic warfare, do the ruins of your once-great cities really glow in the—”

“How’d your viewers like it if I took the mike and shoved it right up your—”

“This—this is S-sam Hayakawa, Inner-Interplanet News. G-goodnight!”

Tough guy Win Bear threatens to kill a journalist for asking him questions! How’s that going to play with the folks at home?

Lest we forget, the whole purpose of this is because Win and his friends want to win the Continental Congress over and persuade them of the threat they face. Logically, outbursts like this one—or last week’s scene where Win roughed up Madison and his henchmen in full view of the delegates—should turn everyone against him. They go against everything this world is supposed to stand for.

Shouldn’t the Hamiltonians be able to make an argument like: “Our views may be unpopular, but at least we’re peaceful. This man is a savage from another world who picks fights, disrespects our customs, and assaults people for saying things he doesn’t like. He’s not one of us. Don’t listen to his lies!”

When he wrote his main character, Smith was going for a classic template, depicting him as a rough-around-the-edges macho man who’s crude but honorable and eager to unleash violence in defense of what he cares about. It’s the right-wing worldview summarized in books like Jesus and John Wayne.

But that kind of character only works in the other kind of anarchy—the violent, chaotic Mad Max world where it’s every man for himself. That character shouldn’t find a welcome in the peaceful, civilized, twelve-murders-a-decade society he wants to depict.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach

I am pleased to read that Charlie Kirk’s reputation is rotting as fast as his corpse. While he shouldn’t have been murdered, of course, he was a terrible person whose influence was built entirely on right-wing idiocy and fomenting hatred and contempt of women, immigrants, and brown people, and supporting a political agenda built on the same. I’m only surprised that it has taken this long for his legacy to be properly recognized.

Ten months since his assassination, Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online. Just not the way the far-right activist would have wanted.

Audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, as have ironic reposts of the apparent AI-slop song We Are Charlie Kirk, which was originally created as a posthumous tribute. He was the butt of a crude joke during the Netflix roast of the Hollywood star Kevin Hart in May. The next month, a viral tweet encouraged people to take “a shot” in his honor on Juneteenth. And a trend known as “Kirkification” has emerged, in which internet pranksters superimpose his face on to unlikely images, such as the Mona Lisa, a woman in a bikini, or Jeffrey Epstein.

This contemptuous, at times nihilistic humor marks a dramatic shift from the period immediately following Kirk’s death in September, in which conservatives sought to suppress criticism of the late Maga luminary. Hundreds of people were fired or otherwise disciplined for denouncing him (which has since resulted in several settlements over alleged first amendment violations).

Yeah, there was a ridiculous (and fortunately brief) phase in which the right-wing advocates of free speech harassed anyone who expressed their dislike of Kirk. Like, for example, this woman:

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”

She was fired for her honest and accurate opinion.

But now that vengeful attitude towards Kirk-critics is waning. Part of it, I suspect, is that Kirk’s popularity was always artificial, propped up by the wealthy supporters who funded his organization, and those props are being kicked out from under it by the rich maggots who no longer see any profit in idolizing a dead man. I also think that making Erika Kirk his successor was a major misstep — she’s a graceless, over-reaching wanna-be who is easily mocked. Just ask Druski.

Likewise, Erika Kirk is in an awkward position. She and her husband promoted traditional gender roles centered on women’s subservience. Now, she is tasked with leading a multimillion-dollar organization. She has also been memed, at times misogynistically, for her quick return to public life after Charlie’s death – another demonstration of Turning Point’s struggle to control the digital narrative.

Without broad buy-in of Erika at the helm, Turning Point is a weakened enterprise. As Leidig observed, under Charlie Kirk’s leadership, the group pushed its messaging through a calculated “top-down approach” – with a cohesive strategy, funding from prominent Republican operatives, and support from the White House. This is a sharp contrast with amorphous grassroots entities such as Fuentes’s acolytes, the Groypers, who have ascended in the vacuum left by Kirk.

That’s the bad news: Fuentes is even worse than Kirk ever was, but he is such a hideously overblown bigot that the billionaires who favor his ideas are going to be reluctant to openly support him.

Trump declared that ceasefire is over and that he has ordered hte resumption of bombing on the ‘Islamic Republic of Japan’. Yes, that is what he said at the NATO summit. He also referred to Ukraine’s president as Putin.

And then as often is the case when Trump is faced with an embarrassing setback, he creates a diversion, this time that old standby, the annexation of Greenland.

After months of silence on the subject, Trump kicked off the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday by making yet another wild threat to acquire Greenland. Public opinion in Greenland and Denmark toward the U.S. has plummeted amid Trump’s desperate bids to take over the territory, including bribing its residents.

This has once again infuriated the prime minister of Denmark.

“We are ready to defend every inch of NATO, including our own territory,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters. “One of the reasons why we built NATO many, many years ago is if anything happens to one of us then everybody should stand up for each other.”

Even some Republicans are sick of Trump’s brinkmanship over Greenland, calling it ‘foolish’ and ‘stupid’.

The secretary general of NATO Mark Rutte keeps sucking up to Trump. I wonder if his nauseating obsequiousness is part of a plan, that he has been designated by the other NATO leaders to flatter Trump to keep him from withdrawing from NATO, or whether he is really such a toady. But I think Trump is bluffing and will never leave because NATO provides a useful cover for his illegal wars. Leaving NATO will be like the UK with Brexit, where the withdrawing nation will come to regret it.

The other NATO leaders treat him as if he were a child who will throw a temper tantrum if crossed.

Nato leaders have informally agreed not to mention the football World Cup to Donald Trump for fear of irritating the US president at a crucial time for the military alliance.

Officials said European leaders had discussed in the sidelines of the summit in Ankara how to keep Trump on side amid concerns he could further destabilise Nato with threats over defence spending.
…

In the first open acknowledgment of the strategy, the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, told reporters in Ankara he would not be discussing his country’s 4-1 win over the US earlier this week.

The summit follows a row caused by Trump asking the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to review the red card shown to the US striker Folarin Balogun, meaning he could then play in the match against Belgium.

Before meeting Trump at the summit, De Wever joked to reporters that the US president “has the reputation of sometimes reacting a bit irritably to things that he doesn’t like, and I think this defeat will hit hard”.

De Wever said Belgium’s footballing triumph against the US had dominated his early discussions in Ankara. “Everyone’s talking about one thing, and that is congratulations for the well deserved victory of the Red Devils,” he said, the nickname for the national side.

One can imagine the scene, with all the leaders talking excitedly about the World Cup and then Trump comes on the scene and they all go either silent or abruptly talk about something else. It is almost like high school with Trump in the role of the rich but unpopular student whom no one likes because, in addition to being ignorant, he thinks that his money entitles him to dominate everything.

Back to the war with Iran, Republicans are becoming increasingly uneasy that if the war continues into the period of the mid-term elections to be held in less than four months on November 3rd, that will harm their candidates. But they have hitched their wagon to the Trump circus caravan and they cannot let go.

You don’t say. This is a story about a professor who discovered his students will use AI to cheat.

Serrano decided that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students. El País has the story:

The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.

This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”

I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system. This professor decided to test his students.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

He should have known that the scores on the final were not going to come close to the scores on the midterm. I knew in my classes that grades were going to drop when I stopped offering online exams. I wouldn’t have offered a phony deal like that to my students.

My classes were a bit different, though. It sounds like Serrano’s econ exams consisted of a lot of essay questions which could be flooded with AI slop; my exams are much more quantitative, with questions that are answered by numbers, which you’d think would be even more susceptible to AI cheating, but where I catch students who fail to grasp the process to solve the problem. You gotta know how to ask the AI how to solve the problem to get a good answer!

But still, exam scores were notably elevated during the pandemic, so once I could rely on instruction to return to normal, I made all exams to be in-class. However, I still offer weekly online quizzes. Quiz scores are significantly elevated, but constitute less than 10% of the final grade, and I don’t have a problem with that — I tell the students to cheat freely, to collaborate with their fellow students and work through the quizzes together. That’s been a benefit, because it forces students to think through the problems in a kind of practice exercise, and if they are working together they are teaching each other.

I’ve got one more year of teaching ahead of me. I plan on sticking to this same procedure in the next two semesters.

Right away, I thought “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t sport a Nazi tattoo?”

Then there were the old internet posts, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t have a history of internet bigotry?”

Then we got the accounts of crude drunken behavior on dates, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t treat women with disrespect?”

Now the latest damning accusation has emerged, prompting Platner to finally drop out, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who haven’t raped someone?”

So I was useless on this issue, because I was too busy backing away from this growing clusterfuck. Rebecca Watson has a more forthright response.

Let’s learn to more quickly recognize disqualifying characteristics in our candidates, OK? How about if we don’t make excuses for them anymore?

CHUNK ONE__

_
Dan Kowal had once been a reasonable man – of this he was certain, though he could not remember that time and never noticed that he could not remember it.  The world was unreasonable, so fuck the world, he’d give it back what it had given him, every day in every way.  He emerged from sleep like a poison womb, immediately forgetting sleep, immediately remembering waking life, and howling obscenities at the air he was cursed to breathe.

Thrashing limbs burst from the pool of grey grease, gripped the frame of rotting cotton and wire, jerked him upright.  Slimy pale feet on the corroded hardwood, its texture nearly as weak and pliant as cork.  He knew that he had a bitch of a wife and snot-nosed kids, but they must have left him.  The bed could not hold two people.  Probably he was paying alimony, but he couldn’t remember the details, just that everything in his life was a complete fuckjob.  No sense of working toward a future when that would end – when his dues would be paid – he was only aware of the raw present.  Gotta fucking go.

The TV crackled and hummed and nattered with solicitous tones and hammering irregular beats.  Dan didn’t pay it any attention, didn’t regard it as part of his daily torment, although it was.

In the rusty bathroom mirror, time to shave.  He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a month, but he must have shaved yesterday.  Whatever.  A more pressing issue was the broken cheekbone, the unmoored segment twisted to create a flat stretch below his eye – a depression into which that eye sagged, leaving his vision blurry.  Fuck that shit!  He couldn’t afford to take time off for medical care.  Not now.  He felt for the outer edge of it and tried to get a grip, so he could shove it back into place.  Damn slippery skin.

Was there a little hole in that skin?  Yes, there was.  Like an entry wound from a bullet.  But that would mean a huge hole in the back of his skull, and that wasn’t possible.  He did dimly recall being shot by some asswipe.  See if that happens again, you rat fuck.

The muscles and tendons of his face had a preferred shape, and when he managed to wedge the bone fragment back into its original position, they finished the work, propping his eyeball – but goddamn it hurt.  He steadied himself with a palm splayed on the wall, clenching and unclenching the other hand in a fist.  When his focus returned, shaving.

He couldn’t remember shopping but he always had a little cream left.  Some kind of shitty gel type, probably his wife’s fault.  Blue slime joined the grey slime in his beard and frothed into something like the shit that comes out of slugs when you pick them up.  The razor was shitty but who has the time to replace them?  It ripped out hairs as much as it cut them.  The mess it left in the drain looked like somebody had punched a rodent to death and emptied a grease trap over the remains.  The heat in the shower could close the nicks, right?

The shower was just a standing stall hemmed in with soap-stained textured plexiglass.  It took all his self-control not to shatter the glass, just for the satisfaction of breaking something.  The water had to be hot as hell to cut the oil of his shitty life, doing more of the work than the thin suds from his bar of soap and threadbare rag.  He wanted to pull all of his skin off, but resisted.  Again, he had to get to work.  Self-destruction now would just mean having to talk to his boss about shit.

Back in the living room, just long enough to put on his clothes.  The TV was always on, day and night, and always alternating between advertisements and traffic reports.  Rush hour never really begins or ends, does it?  Because some fuck is always trying to be smart and skip the rush by going in early, or was working some other bizarre shift, so the report was always relevant.  He lucked out that the tube was between commercials so he could get the bad news.

“Highways 51 and 96, and Interstate 183 are all congested with multiple ongoing collisions.”  Xaviera Holland was the ethnically ambiguous peroxide blonde rattling off the details like a machine churning out ticker tape of meaningless codes.  “Tensions have erupted into gun violence by the Nelson Street Turnpike with four policemen and twenty commuters dead.  Most of the gas stations on the Third Avenue Corridor are in flames.  Authorities advise caution on all roads within city limits, and in the suburbs except for Diamond, Horace, Ballinger, and Cypress Row.  In those areas traffic is sluggish but there are presently no collisions.  Correction, a truck has spilled burning chemicals in the northeast corner of Horace, where they have broken through the retaining wall and are currently flooding the blocks between 144th and Flagston.”

Whenever she mentioned something that was inconvenient to Dan, he pictured her body being ripped apart.  Or was it his imagination?  Was she actually split open like a biology class frog, organs all spread out on t-pins, and then immediately not?  The screen was full of digital artifacts and blotches of LCD bleed.  Maybe he had no imagination left and the TV was just obliging his rage, like the way it was always so easy to find bullets in a pinch.

It meant little to him, just one more thing adding to the anger he felt every moment of his life.  As the TV cut to commercials, he headed to the kitchen for breakfast.  He’d skip it if he could, but the commute could take every last thing out of you, if you weren’t ready for it.  In the background, the voice-over was so meaningless, easy to ignore except as a mounting static inside his body.

Again, Dan didn’t remember getting groceries, but the usual shit was in the cupboards and the fridge.  Maybe his bitch wife had just left a few days ago.  Who cares?  Throw a bowl on the table.  Pour cereal out of a cardboard box.  It was all plastic, glass, and wire these days.  Probably meant to be toys for fucking kids, so much that it didn’t leave room for flakes and freeze-dried fruit and marshmallows.  He poured the milk into the bowl, and it was all sludgy motor oil.  Probably just a scheme to adulterate the milk with something cheaper that got out of hand, but hey, not like he had anything else.  Something wasn’t going down.  Steel wool?  He yarded it out of his throat with angry fingers, and got to work on the rest.

No garage.  Can’t afford it because of the alimony, maybe.  He slammed the door behind him and it sagged from the hinges.  No need to lock it.  He had nothing anyone wanted, and if he found someone in there, he’d probably just kill them.  The cops didn’t care.  Nobody cared.

Another day in paradise.  Smog kept the sky a permanent rust haze, a low ceiling for the world that helped keep the idea of heaven at bay.  There could be nothing above that bloody miasma.  Helicopters sluggishly cut wakes in the lower reaches of it, doing who knows what for hell knows why.  All grass was dead, all wood blistered, all concrete stained.  Cars, trucks, SUVs, hatchbacks, station wagons, minivans, and commercial vehicles rolled by in a stuttering parade, five to ten miles per hour – the best they could hope for, without shit getting violent.  Not that anyone had any hesitation about that, but they had to save it for later, if they were going to have any shot of getting to work.

All the cars on the curb were crammed together so tight their bumpers were flattened.  The first person to get their car out would loosen the squeeze for the others, but it was a lot of effort, and nobody wanted to be it.  Dan was mad enough to just plow ahead, kicking at his car until it bulged free enough to try the wheels.  The car in front of him lost a tail light in the commotion.

Dan Carson crossed his lawn with aggressive strides, stopping only to rip a fence picket out of the ground as an improvised weapon.  “The fuck did you just do to my car, neighbor?”

Dan Kowal wheeled around and walked straight up to him, chest puffed.  Carson reflexively lashed out with the picket, smashing it across Kowal’s shoulder.  Blood welled beneath his sleeve, but he didn’t flinch.

Kowal said, “Maybe you shouldna parked so fucking close, neighbor.  Didja think about that?”

“Fuck you, pal.  If my insurance goes up one solitary penny a month, I’ll wipe my ass with your face and use your fuckin’ skull for a mailbox.”

“And fuck you very much as well, Carson.  We’ll see whose fuckin’ mug ends up in the sewer when we get off work, right?  Or am I the only man in this motherfucking city with a goddamned job?”

“If I didn’t have to be at work in a half hour, we’d find out right now.”

“The feeling is mutual, friendo.  Have a nice fucking day.” He saluted him and stomped back to his olive green honda civic, almost ripping the door off the hinges.  It didn’t close all the way, already deformed by his efforts at dislodging the car, but that didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered except the commute.

Dan Carson watched him go, momentarily entranced by the cracks in the back of Kowal’s skull, who knows what kind of connective tissue the only thing holding his brain in place.  Biting back the desire to pull the cracks open, just to see what it looked like.

Kowal started his car, and was shortly ramming it back and forth between Carson’s datsun and Susan Washington’s chevy S-10, each impact getting him closer to the freedom to drive away – such as that freedom was.  Carson fumed and ripped open the door to his car, getting inside just to get to the glove box, and his big revolver.  The jolts from repeated impacts made it hard to get the weapon free, but he finally did, gripping the handle so tight, using the gun in lieu of a free hand to brace himself, to shove himself back out onto the sidewalk.

He walked out into traffic behind Kowal as he started to pull away, only to get jerked to the asphalt by a tire bearing down on his heel.  It was a low-speed vehicular manslaughter, dragging him slowly under an F-150, breaking one bone at a time until Carson stopped moving.  By the time that had happened, he’d emptied his revolver into anything and nothing, just more noise in a city of traffic, gunshots, and screams.
–

You could jockey for side roads, but it was always a crap shoot.  Most days you just joined the line.  People who had to be at work by nine left as early as two, three in the morning.  Timid types with darting movements and heads on swivels.  Cowards.  Most joined the river of metal around five.  Both sides of the highway had motherfuckers driving the same direction, whatever the laws.  Anybody unlucky enough to be coming home from a graveyard shift had to swim against that current.  The only real risk to driving on the wrong side of the road was a police riot, but Dan thought it was worthwhile.  Most days you didn’t get shot.

Highway 96, driving on the left side of the median, jockeying for position, bullying graveyard shift off the busiest lanes.  Powering through drifts of splintered steel, composite fiber, safety glass, bone, blood.  Near the Wasteyards a pileup had been driven over enough times to wear down to a crude metal ramp in the road, too easy to rip a tire on, but what could you do?  Somehow he got over the hump with all tires intact.

At the offramp downtown the cops didn’t even bother moving their vehicles from the traps.  Armored personnel carriers with roof-mounted machinegun turrets had been parked there so long the tires melted.  The armored men in those turrets were as withered as burnt turkey, where their flesh was still visible through the dust and kevlar.  Did arms and legs move the pedals and levers of the turrets, did fingers pull the triggers, or were the machines pushing the dead bones around?  They fired with perfect efficiency, keeping traffic moving by blasting obstructions to passable smithereens.

If moving is what you call that.  Every day every single commuter that passed that gauntlet had to imagine getting out and walking, just leaving the car and walking to work.  Just do it.  Just go.  By christ it would be faster.  So much faster.  But nobody ever caved to that temptation, because of the principle of the thing.  They made their goddamned car payments, they paid for gas, why should they have to walk?  Fuck that shit.  Better to sit there, blood boiling, grinding against each other, staring at the drivers around you in mutual hostility, frustrated bloodlust.  If you can just get there, just get past the turrets, just get around the corner, they’d know.

They would get around that corner.  The first block was demolition derby, with smashed cars and bodies everywhere, the first floor lobbies of every business blasted out and strewn with wreckage.  The sense of freedom from the watchful eye of the law was celebrated with violence.  Dan didn’t reach for his gun because he wanted maximum speed, instead using his honda as a weapon.  He was rewarded with punctuality.  Less than two hours late for work meant less grief from the boss, right?

Nobody was ever to work on time, except management, who seemed to grow out of the walls like mushrooms when no one was looking.  The only reason there was adequate parking was that a good chunk of the employees didn’t survive the commute, but that meant everyone who did show up was doing more than their fair share of work.  And yet it wasn’t really appreciated, was it?  Surviving, showing up, you were still griped at.  But most were over three hours late, barely getting any work in before having to punch out and hit the streets again.

Dan got into the elevator with Rebecca Tranh.  She was holding her side, blood soaking her blouse, but she straightened up when she saw him.  Don’t show weakness, understood.  They didn’t say anything as the elevator lurched through the building.  She was especially tight-lipped, nostril flaring with labored breathing.  He knew the feeling – forcibly holding the nostril open to make the rasp of your suffering quieter.

He didn’t slip in her blood stepping out on their floor.  The day was going exceptionally well.  Yellow mayonnaise light buzzed from the ceilings between drop tiles encrusted with reddish dust.  They punched their time cards at the thick dull metal clock and went straight to their cubicles.  Chipping beige shellacked metal wrapped with cracking beige polyurethane, spongy yellow innards visible through the wounds.  The desks were too covered with continuous feed paper to see the wood, the computers and office machines beige inside beige over beige.

Sticky notes along the top of the CRT should have said where he left off the day before, but looked like they’d bleached invisible in years of sunlight.  There was only enough of a ghost left to tempt one to read, to tease one into frustration.  He ripped one in half from surprise, when the Team Manager Ross Sparinger wrapped its talons around the edge of the cubicle and peered inside.

“Daniel, I see you’re late.”

“I’m earlier than everyone else.”  He tried not to look at the being, focused on the paper scraps in his hands.

“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.  That is obviously untrue, and you’re already escalating the temperature of this exchange.  It’s the kind of problem that gets people let go, mm?”  Sparinger was an exceptionally clean suit containing something dark red, with sharp black bits at the extremities.  To see its face was to look fully upon one’s self, which was the last thing anyone needed.

“OK, alright.  Please finish your piece so I can get to this work.  I need to…  I need to…”  Something complex enough to verge on meaningless.  Or meaningless in a way that made it look more complex than it was.

“This is for your own benefit.  As much as you need to do that work, you need to know these things as well.  It is really important for every single person in this office to be here when they are supposed to be here.  Staffing is a cost and the company can only remain profitable by reducing costs as much as possible.  We are already operating on a razor’s edge, Daniel.  A razor’s edge.”

Sweat dripped around Daniel’s head, coursed over pounding veins in his neck.  “What can I do to help you with that, Ross?”

A manila folder joined the stack of work covering his desk.  Sparinger said, “These are the reports Benjamin and Thomas were meant to input today.  Get it done by close of business, Daniel.  And your own work as well.  We can’t miss a dot this quarter.”

“I’ll try.”

“And best succeed.”  The thing slipped away, leaving Dan with his usual impossible amount of work.

If he could just remember how to do it.  The notes he’d made to himself were all so faded.  Nothing made sense.  He was going to be fired and end up a bum, like those rat pedestrians.  Until that happened, he had to keep trying.  Better dead than a bum.  A non-driver.

The new printed material helped.  He was able to decipher how it related to the programs on his computer, and start doing the inputs.  But what about his own work?  What had he even been doing?  As soon as he got into a data entry groove enough to free his mind to start wondering, the new work got to be more complicated.  There was no place to enter the data from some columns, and every sixth entry in the BIF column exceeded the character limit.  Rounding would be a problem.  Can’t miss a dot.

Dan tied himself in knots and broke down repeatedly, shuddering and fumbling at nothing, grinding his teeth.  But five o’clock was coming and he couldn’t be late out the door.  You did not want to be that guy, late off the jump, unable to get home before two AM.  His anger at being threatened, and at the possibility he’d get fired for only being the most productive worker in the building that day, finally broke through the stress and convinced him to half-ass the inputs.

At last, he was rushing to the elevator.  He punched the clock and stepped over Rebecca’s corpse, ignoring the way it seemed to be twitching and dissolving into the floor, and descended the shaft.  Work remained in his head and in his hands, just a poison to make him that much more insane on the way home.  He could sense his car, like a dreamer returning to their body.  He ignored the way Rebecca’s car was twitching and disintegrating into the concrete, pieces of frame moving like the legs of a dying spider.

There was no sense of relief in getting behind the wheel, just a sense that motion could resume after a seemingly endless red light.  It wasn’t happiness, and in fact, just set him on a path to a new release of anger.  His feet touched the pedals and he felt the argument with Dan Carson, heard his gunshots, anticipated what he’d do to that face when he saw it again.  He touched the gearshift and thought about everyone who had cut him off, had come too close, had clipped the paint, had dared to shoot at his car along the way in – how much he wanted to make them all pay.  He jammed his key in the ignition and turned, felt the impossible work task, the threat against his livelihood and by extension his life, the impossibility of facing the creatures that kept him in this state, and he wanted to destroy himself for his own cowardice.  He pulled out, knowing he didn’t care if he lived or died on the way home, as long as he could hurt people.
–

Pedestrians were rare on the street.  Something about them was just so killable, it was hard to resist the urge.  And what would it matter?  Taking the time to roll up on the sidewalk and do the deed, you might lose your place in line, might mess up your car, might be seen by a cop who would punish you…  Still, tempting enough to just do it, sometimes.  This was surely why they were so rare.

You could tell the difference between pedestrians and temporarily embarrassed drivers.  They were both full of fear, but the fear was visibly different.  Drivers were miserable, grey, yarded out things, ready to pivot to murderous rage at the drop of a pin.  Pedestrians were like rats and pigeons, just timid animals quivering and darting from shadow to shadow.  Maybe it was the spark of life in them, that you could see they had something left to lose, that fueled the murder impulse.  Dan didn’t care which because he so rarely saw them at a close enough range or opportune moment to act on it.

The cars were bumper to bumper on Ennis, which was the closest thing to a reasonable alternate route to the on-ramp for 96.  The sun was disappearing, though hard to tell through the smog and the buildings which direction.  It was just a gradual draining of natural light, before it would be replaced by equally yellow streetlamps.  The lamps didn’t turn on quite soon enough to make it work, making the dusk a great reminder of how much time you were losing to the jerks in front of you.  Deep charcoal grey shadows and muddier middle tones cut up the sidewalks and alleys.

For the first time in ages, Dan saw one.  Unbelievable!  Her skin was so dark she was nearly invisible in the shadows, and it was only chance that his eyes had fallen upon her.  She leaned against a wall, head darting back and forth, hoping for what?  Racist slurs came to his lips, though the only slur that held any meaning in his heart these days was “pedestrian.”  He’d lose his place in line, but it would be worth it.

He revved the engine for a burst of speed, drawing her attention, but he played it off like he wasn’t paying attention to her.  Important for her to not notice he was targeting her until it was too late to dodge.  Suddenly a car somewhere up the road distracted her, and he didn’t care why.  It was the opening he needed to gun it.

What was that movement out of the corner of his eye, as he jumped the curb, a hubcap rolling free?  Another pedestrian?  A two for one deal?  She was dead meat, at least.  Suddenly, he was robbed!  The woman flew out of the way, and a white man landed on his hood, bouncing around on Dan’s front end as it crunched and ground against the brick wall.  Motherfucker was like popcorn, bouncing away from serious injury at every moment, then falling out of sight.

Dan reversed, his car’s maneuverability as warped as its frame, but came free of the wall.  The man stood as he passed, and a moment later was in front of him again.  No way I can accelerate faster than he can dodge now.  He punched open the glovebox and reached inside for his gun.

Through the jagged frame of the blown out windshield, the young guy looked square at him with the most alien expression –  something he’d only ever seen in advertisements – a smile.  Then he shot Dan twice in the face.
–

Dreaming is the reliving of waking, of practicing the path you walk in the light of day.  Daniel Kowal’s brain began again, each reborn part adding substance to that dream, to the pain and rage that could never end.  His womb was steel springs and rotten tufts of cotton and hay, suspended in a vat of grease – an amniotic substance somewhere between the oil of engines and of human skin, continuous with the wombs of every soul that had not survived the previous day’s damnation.  His flesh was knit from horror and pain, from animal aggression that could never be allowed to stay dead.

He woke again, screaming obscenities, flailing free of the oily mattress.  Sun would not rise for hours but his alarm clock would go off in seconds.  Another day another motherfucking dollar, Danny Boy.

–

They also sometimes get interviewed by major media looking for a light-hearted take on the election. Here is Binface interviewed by Sky News during the recent by-election in Makerfield that Andy Burnham won on his way potentially to the prime ministership.

His platform addresses issues that annoy people, such as “The use of the speakerphone function on mobile phones to be banned in public. Any offenders caught will be forced to watch the film version of Cats every day for a year”.

These novelty candidates typically lose their deposits but now there has come along a confluence of factors that may give them their best chance. What happened is that Nigel Farage, the leader of UK’s Reform Party has resigned his Clacton seat in parliament, triggering a by-election in which he is going to stand again. This is a political stunt by him because he has been getting hammered on all sides because of a mysterious gift of £5 million by a cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harbone.

When asked about the gift, Farage has given a variety of explanations about what it was intended to be used for. Initially he said the money was given to pay for his security, then he described it as a reward for campaigning for Brexit. In sometimes tetchy exchanges with reporters, he has since said it was “nobody’s busines” what he did with the money, and that he could spend it on Ferrari sports cars if he wanted to.

Jonathan Pie explains Farage’s strategy in resigning.

Farage has disingenuously insisted that the money was not a bribe and that there was no quid pro quo to the money and that people have every right to give him money and that he has every right to spend it as he wishes. But that has not quelled the uproar and so he resigned his seat, thinking that it would defuse the controversy and that winning re-election would show that the people were on his side. But all the other major parties (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens, and even the more extreme Restore Britain) have said that they will not go along with this charade and give legitimacy to Farage and so will not field candidates.

This leaves a wide opening for Binface who has said that he will stand in the by-election and has urged people to vote for him for their protest vote, saying “I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house. Nigel Farage says he wants the people versus the establishment. So be it. Leave him to me.” Farage, like his idol Trump in the US, is a highly divisive figure in terms of his xenophobic and generally reactionary politics, and as arrogant and unlikable as a person. Thus in this election people can vote for Binface without fearing that they are harming the party that they would normally vote for. It is a no-lose proposition. So rather than the election providing Farage the legitimacy he seeks, he will now be forced to campaign against a candidate who wears a trash bin on his head. Binface is already drawing a lot of media attention as the main alternative to Farage. Here he is interviewed by the BBC.

And here he is interviewed by Andrew Marr on a popular news program.

I hope that they will have debates, though Farage will probably decline.

So people of Clacton, vote for Count Binface! You have nothing to lose but Farage.

And of course, Monty Python did a sketch on the way that the returning officers have to read the results with straight faces..