Category: Controversy

Baphomet Isn’t Real Until You Make Him Real

Ugh. I live in Iowa, Des Moines, mere miles from the incident which I am about to recount. The incident being the holiday destruction of one Baphomet statue at the Iowa state capitol building. This drew national attention, and here I’m obligated to speak up. This is because I am the only person you will ever get the sane version of this story from.

Everybody else in this story is a goober.

Baphomet-Des-Moines-statue

Spoilers: They Caught the Guy

The man who busted up the statue has, as of the very week of this writing, been identified, apprehended, and charged with a hate crime. The fellow happens to be 35-year-old Michael Cassidy of Lauderdale, Mississippi, this goober.

Who just so happens to have run for office in Mississippi, and possibly might yet still. No really, we live in a country where a guy charged with masterminding insurrection against the nation while in office as president is running for president again, the rulebook is all torn up and fit for fireplace kindling now.

I would be tempted to pour more derision upon his head were not everyone else in this story a goober too. Certainly goober Governor Kim Reynolds shares some blame; she spit out the following statement after the goobers at the Satanic Temple, tongues firmly in cheek, managed to file the right forms to get the statue erected, as they have on other occasions and capitols.

Reynolds-Baphomet

While she didn’t explicitly say “somebody come out here and maul this scary goat-man with a baseball bat,” she didn’t make it sound like removing the statue would ruin her day either. That could be taken as invitation, verily incitement. Indeed, it turns out Iowa’s code on hate crimes

729A.2 Violation of individual rights — hate crime. “Hate crime” means one of the following public offenses when committed against a person or a person’s property because of the person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability, or the person’s association with a person of a certain race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability: 1. Assault in violation of individual rights under section 708.2C. 2. Violations of individual rights under section 712.9. 3. Criminal mischief in violation of individual rights under section 716.6A. 4. Trespass in violation of individual rights under section 716.8, subsections 3 and 4.

is almost specifically aimed at punishing this kind of thing. I’m pretty sure goober Kim hadn’t read this code at the time of her statement.

Anyway, despite the possibility of pardon from one hard-orange-R to another, readers may rest assured that justice of some degree is, if not served, at least warming up in the microwave.

Yes, I said the Satanic Temple are goobers too. Don’t cry tears for me that they’re trying to push back against theocracy blah blah, they do a shit job of it. Pulling clown stunts like this does no favors for Civil Rights. I wouldn’t want the Satanic Temple to be a theocracy either; they get everything as wrong as the Christians do. Before you take these modern-day Yippies too seriously, remember they sell branded hot sauce. How pious.

BUT we have to back up here first…

I’ve had a dozen conversations by now with my fellow Iowans that boil down to:

  • ME: (spots religious pamphlets at cash register) Can I bring in some Baphomet pamphlets too?
  • Cashier: NO! Baphomet is in league with Satan!
  • ME: Um. He is? Where does it say that?
  • Cashier: (throwing me out of store)

Well I’m right, dammit, and when it comes to religion, when I say there’s no such thing as an American Christian, it’s because I’m sick of arguing with goobers who think Jesus was white, blonde, American, owned a gun, and hated everybody but rich white male Republicans. These same goobers insist that Satan has red skin and pointy horns and a trident.

This is bad:

Jesus-vs-Jeezus

But the answer is not this:

After the jump: Your complete schooling on Baphomet:

Continue reading “Baphomet Isn’t Real Until You Make Him Real”

Education Should Be A God-Given Right

Take a look at the map at the top of this post and tell me what’s wrong with this picture. That map shows all the countries in the world with FREE university tuition. The United States, the richest nation on Earth, is not one of them. The nations which provide free college extend beyond the usual northern European utopias which typically best the United States on every aspect. Even nations like India, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, those all have free tuition.

In the news this week, US president Biden has agreed to pass a new measure which not only overhauls the Student Loan system, but *forgives* up to $10K in federal debt for students making less than $125K/year. The problem of spiraling Student Loan debt has long been a story of major concern to young adult citizens.

As predictably as the dawn, US Republicans are tied in knots having conniptions about Biden’s Student Loan debt forgiveness efforts. As you rattle around in the social media echo chamber, pay attention to the White House Twitter feed, which has been fast to call out hypocritical Republicans who protest Student Loan relief while also having pocketed PPP loans during the pandemic.

Somehow, all these Republicans come out of the closet, soapbox underfoot, to talk about how bad Student Loan forgiveness is for the economy, while also having had their own PPP (the Paycheck Protection Program, circa COVID-19) debt erased. Naturally, we’re all having a social media fight about it.

For example, in that thread, Representative Vern Buchanan brags that he was “a blue-collar kid who worked his way through college,” while neglecting to mention the boon that most blue-collar kids don’t get, $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven. This hypocrisy goes on and on, Republican after Republican…

Republican_PPP_loan_record

The American public is finally waking up to this inherently stupid state of affairs, where 3 generations of American professionals have been railed by the education financing system. And yet, as mad as you all are (good for you, my cosmic blueberries) you have no idea how much madder you should be!

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From the Trenches of #2022 : Your War Blogger

Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.

Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.

I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.

I Predicted Everything!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?

Trump-fires-Yates

Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?

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Dear Service Industry : Have You Tried Just Not Being Such Huge Assholes?

Is there a new wind blowing through Capitalism? One can only hope so!

There’s this great big Bolshevik revolution going on, if you hear pop media tell it, where all the low-paid service workers are scurrying away from their greasy deep-fried enslavement to give the McFinger to McJobs. Ostensibly it’s merely about the low pay, but I’m writing this to point out that other factors don’t help the situation.

Leftycartoons

But yes, the media hype has it that “We All Quit!” It’s just “take this job and shove it,” all day every day. In the background, there’s a political war going on (when isn’t there?) to raise the minimum wage. Of course, the true story here is not that there is a “labor shortage” like these retail slave pits claim, but rather a wage shortage.

Trotsky_worker_shortage

OK, employers, the ball is in your court. You’ll have to do better than $7.25 an hour, a figure set nearly a generation ago. But in the meantime, while you fondle your change purse and wonder how you’re going to pay for all this, may I suggest an appeasement measure to your disgruntled workforce, which is also a cost-practical solution?

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I For One Welcome Our Visigoth Overlords

You can’t deny that 2021 is shaping up to be a different year from 2020. We have the same ol’ virus, but we threw out everything else we can get our hands on. The smell of revolution is in the air, and it smells like a new generation wrestling the wealth away from the old, and new culture bumping off the old guard. Finally.

At request of my handlers at 123ish.com, I plunged again into the Gamestop stock short raid and modern Bitcoin millionaires, and pointed out that this, at last, is the proverbial sacking of Rome writ in modern times and the movement of wealth from dusty old guys in suits to bright young kids who approach investing the way they do a World of Warcraft raid.

WallStreetWoW

Speaking of Bitcoin, JWZ, one of my old-skool-hacker idols, has lately become the Al Gore of cryptocurrency mining, yelling that we’re heating the Earth with our greed and we’re all doomed, doomed, DOOMED! He has headlines like “Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet,” and more on his dunning-krugerrands tag.

Meanwhile I follow Satan on Twitter (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and come to find out Hell has its own cryptocurrency now. Because of course it does.

I think Satan and JWZ should meet, and possibly have a no-holds-barred brawl in the DNA Lounge for the destiny of this planet. Wouldn’t that be exciting, boys and girls?

Want to see what other cultural rat-traps I have been poking my battered nose into lately? Right this way…

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Penguin Pete’s Patented Environmentalism Rant

Straight to the point: I care about the environment. I care about climate change. I believe in science.

Do you people also care about the environment? Good, then we are on the same page. We should be friends. But we are not. You are all going to hate me because I’m about to tell you something you don’t like to hear, but you need to hear.

wrong-way-environmentalism

You’ve been going about environmentalism the wrong way!

This makes me angry, nay, fist-clenching furious. Can everybody understand this concept, or have I lost you naive little blueberries already? You can have good intentions, and still do bad things because your method is wrong. Try to sit down and allow that thought to penetrate for a minute before you go on.

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Now My Other Gigs Are Infected With Occult Influence

You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.

Ignite_Cannabis_Co-1021x574

Is Ignite Cannabis Co. trying to tell us something?

At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!

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Might as Well Start October With a Zombie President

In H.P. Lovecraft’s America, Halloween seems almost redundant, but we can all try our best to get in the festive spirit anyway. Between the cults and the plague, any horror movie you watch this time of year seems downright sunny by comparison. And now most of our leadership exists in a Red-Wedding-cliffhanger twilight of infection. I told you guys, zombie apocalypse.

occult_Cultist_Simulator

I’ve been sucked into the cult of Cultist Simulator!

I got the game off Steam for an early birthday present for myself, in keeping with the spirit of an Autumn person. I haven’t been able to put it down since! This led to my writing up a review / guide / journey through Cultist Simulator at my GeekyDomain gig – not once, not twice, but in three parts.

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I See Nobody Calling Me Elitist For Advocating Science Now

UPDATE 3/7/21: The proverbial picture worth a thousand words:

UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”

Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.

Now on with the original post…

None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.

Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.

Yes, all of that happened in the 2000s!

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I Am Now A Documented Nunsploitation Watcher

Cthulhu give me strength, my review of Satanico Pandemonium : La Sexorcista (1975) is now live over at my 366WeirdMovies gig. There’s no taking it back now. What’s worse, I actually half-liked it. It’s got great locations and cinematography, and moves at a brisk enough clip that the batty plot will fly right by you without too much grief.

Oh, and here’s a film still that didn’t make the review’s cut:

Satanico_Pandemonium slasher nun

My clients get a little squeamish about posting borderline images, but here in the gutter on my own site I put on no airs of propriety. You’re already reading a post with “Nunsploitation” in the title; it’s a little late to pretend you have standards now.

Of course, I’ve been up to a lot more film-related devilment lately…

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