Evil isn’t just banal, it’s also petty and childish

Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli captivity, and she talks about her capture. What’s surprising is just how childishly stupid and misogynistic the Israeli soldiers were.

Her red suitcase lies in the hall. “Whore Greta” someone has written in large black letters. Around the text: an Israeli flag and an erect penis.
The bag was confiscated by the Israeli military from the boat – and returned to her like this. She laughs.
– They’re like five-year-olds!

She was not allowed to wear her T-shirt with “Free Palestine” on it and was ordered to change, she explains. She put on an orange one with the text “Decolonize” instead.

– And then I put on my frog hat. When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.

Here, everything goes “from zero to a hundred,” several witnesses describe – the violence escalates.

Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.

– It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground.

Greta gets up from the sofa and lies down, showing the position on the striped living room rug.

– They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.

Greta laughs.

– Then they ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it, and kind of threw a tantrum.

– They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.

Every time someone looked up from the ground, they were knocked back down to the ground, Greta and the other Swedes recount. In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag.

– The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.

They’re like spoiled children. Unprofessional and eminently mockable. You might think it’s because these are young soldiers, with the mentality of a college freshman at best, but even the older, unwiser senior politicians are like that.

This smug asshole

Suddenly, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the area and stood in front of everyone, Greta recounts.

– He shouted, ’You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies.’ Those who shouted back were taken aside and beaten. They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.

They were humanitarians, who wanted to deliver aid to Palestinian children.

The US has given over $20 billion in aid to Israel in the last two years. It’s past time to turn off the faucet — no more aid to these immature thugs, ever. Force them to learn how to live with their neighbors in a civilized manner.

Young Republicans, same as the Old Republicans

You’d think they’d learn. The Young Republicans had a signal chat where they thought everything was confidential among themselves, so they indulged themselves in profanity, misogyny, and racism while they were discussing their strategy for taking over the YR organization. Ha ha, it was leaked, and these unpleasant young men have been exposed. They were revealed to be repulsive people who hoped to be the future of the Republican party.

The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

Read the linked article if you really want to know what they had to say. I can say that at least the organizer has “apologized” for the disgusting conversation.

“I am so sorry to those offended by the insensitive and inexcusable language found within the more than 28,000 messages of a private group chat that I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans,” he said. “While I take complete responsibility, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and am deeply concerned that the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored.”

Classic. He’s apologizing that people were offended, and further is suggesting that the logs were faked. He was just ridiculously bigoted, he’s been caught, and now he wants to conjure up some plausible denial.

Giunta was the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages — often encouraged or “liked” by other members.

When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”

Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”

Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f–s.”

They’ve all got the same old tired racist “jokes”. Cancel ’em all. Hendrix has already lost his position in Missouri, despite, hypothetically, Missourians not liking homosexuals.

Flush all their careers away for being racist, and the one thing that might condemn them in the eyes of their fellow Republicans, being tech-stupid. Future Republicans are expected to be racist and savvy about communications — fortunately, they all seem to be ignorant idiots.

The latest medical nonsense

Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!

There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol, Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.

That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.

One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.

The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.

Another expert brings up a rather salient point.

“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.

Fire that guy.

By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.

Not the prettiest jumping spider I’ve seen

I’m used to seeing spectacularly pretty Australasian jumping spiders, and this one, the genus Simaetha, isn’t exactly dazzling.

Australian representatives of the two extant Simaethina genera: A, C, E, Simaetha sp. (female); B, D, F, Simaethula sp. (female). Specimens are shown in dorsal view (A, B), lateral view (C, D) and frontal view (E, F). Scale bars: 0.5 mm (B, D, F), 1 mm (A, C, E).

This one, though, has the excuse that it’s between 11 and 16 million years old. It isn’t that old — I’d expect that the planet had lot of jumping spiders during the miocene — but it’s nice to seen an example from that period.

Simaetha sp. indet. (AM F.161027). Only known specimen: A, light microphotograph. B, scanning electron micrograph. C, morphological interpretation of light and electron micrographs. Abbreviations: LL, left leg; RR, right leg; AME, anterior median eye; PME, posterior median eye. Scale bars: 0.5 mm.

It’s also impressive that they could sort out what was what in the squashed bits of that fossil.

The things we do for our kids

I’m back! We went to Madison, Wisconsin for our granddaughter’s 7th birthday, and also for brats (vegetarian style) and cheese curds and the fall colors and Kwik-Trip and all that Wisconsin stuff, but also, unfortunately, for a 7 hour drive each way, which was not fun. It was worth it, though, we wish we could see our kids more often, but most likely we won’t be seeing any of our children for another year, since winter is about to clamp down and trap us at home for a while.

Next weekend, we have closer plans. The No Kings rally is taking place right here in Morris on Saturday. You know, that communist antifa plot? The administration has it’s own characterization of the event.

n criticizing the rallies, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, No Kings means no paychecks. No paychecks and no government.

I guess we’ll be poor if we don’t have any kings.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated separately that the expected millions of attendees will be part of antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question (of) who’s funding it.

Except that we’ll be paid for protesting! Or will we? I didn’t get a check for the last one.

I don’t think it’s at all a question who’s funding it. Even far-right wackos have noticed some data.

The name, on its face, is unobjectionable, even vaguely noble: “No Kings.” Americans, after all, did declare independence from one. But the historical overtones here mask something more recent and considerably less authentic. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the ‘No Kings’ protest movement is not a spontaneous uprising of civic-minded dissidents. It is a coordinated, well-funded, tightly stage-managed campaign, backed by nearly 200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks, many of which are directly tied to the Democratic Party’s power infrastructure. It operates not from the street, but from the spreadsheet.

200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks? Why, that sounds like a distributed grass roots network with many donors. The organization actually lists all their donors, and doesn’t pay protesters.

I didn’t use a spreadsheet to figure out that I have to oppose this president and his incompetent cronies. I’m doing it for my kids.

He wants us all to die

It’s my granddaughter’s birthday this weekend, so yesterday we spent 7 hours traveling all across Minnesota and Wisconsin, and boy are my knees sore. We’ve got a party to go to tomorrow.

He looks like death already

In more interesting news, David Gorski tears into RFK jr with his teeth — it’s transparently clear that RFK jr is rabidly anti-vax and the he’s definitely coming for all of your vaccines, since he’s now denying that they have any efficacy at all.

Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.

Yes, things are grim out there.

Fortunately, my granddaughter has responsible parents who have kept her vaccination status up to date, which is why I get to go hang out with her and watch her open presents and celebrate her 7th birthday. It’s absolutely insane that we have a director of health and human services who is committed to killing young children with disease, while our Secretary of War favors more direct execution of children. This really is the death cult coming into fruition in our federal government.

Reminder: we have a podcast this afternoon!

Looks like we won’t have ol’ Jordan to kick around anymore

Jordan Peterson has been hospitalized with pneumonia and sepsis, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The psychologist, author, and bottomless fountain of tears is currently hospitalized and suffering from pneumonia and sepsis, as well as a spate of neurological issues that have apparently left him unable to regulate his emotions.

His daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, took to X to give the world an update on her father’s health, describing his recovery as “slow and scary”, and admitting “we’re not entirely sure what’s going on”.

The stated cause of Peterson’s ongoing neurological and physical deterioration is SIRS (systemic inflammatory response syndrome) caused by mold exposure. This is apparently the result of decades of living with mold, though it was recently exacerbated by exposure to an especially moldy environment.

Mold can be sneaky and dangerous, but he’s been a godawful mess for years — when he sprang on the scene, he was already deranged, and he’s only gotten worse. The stint in Russia in an induced coma probably didn’t help either.

Here’s hoping he recovers, but that someone realizes he is mentally unhealthy and should be spending the rest of his life quietly resting at home slurping his soup and shaking his fist at the TV.

His daughter thinks demons are involved, but this is a case where an undigested bit of beef might play a bigger role.