Update about "OK Doomer," aka "Jessica Wildfire""

I've written before about the "OK Doomer" nutter and my guess on her background, here in Part 1 and a follow-up here in Part 2.

Curiosity led me to teh Google, about what she might be up to recently. 

She's off Medium and now at a new place called "The Sentinel Intelligence." Her "about" pretty much confirmed old sleuthing. PhD college English prof. To update my pieces above, she got the tenure she was chasing. (She still has her Substack, where I'm blocked, after an interaction that came after I wrote the two pieces above.)

She's also still grifting, getting some non-profit fund founded in 2021 on her side.

The details of the financial relationship aren't mentioned at either site but there you are. She has a 2.0 version of her survivor prepping guide as part of that:

Her current project, Project C, is an illustrated survival manual — a practical guide to homesteading, preparedness, and self-sufficiency for a world where the systems we take for granted may not hold. AKET provides sustained support for Jessica's work because a voice this clear, this honest, and this useful should not have to fight for survival in the economics of independent writing.

OK now.

That confirms my part 2 above, that she's grifting off the prepper world, offering a more librul version of that than you usually find. One of the five coauthors at her Substack explicitly identifies as a prepper.

As for the couple behind that Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimble Fund? His father started a shoe store in Ohio that he eventually sold to Payless, per his obit. (There's NO "about" on the fund's website.)

She also occasionally admits she's wrong, or more likely, doesn't like getting called out; she deleted the "we're running out of food" piece that I linked to in both part 1 and part 2.

She doesn't care a lot about one big geopolitical event. She wrote in early November 2023 to claim that the start of Israel's genocide in Gaza was about oil and gas. Wrong. And, she also apparently is, or was, sympathetic to Zionism:

Let's start with a couple of chilling facts. The war in Gaza has nothing to do with democracy or human rights. It also has nothing to do with Israel's right to defend itself. Until yesterday, that's what I thought.

Ouch. Yet more reason not to like her. (A search finds "Zionism" nowhere on her site, and this is the last piece she wrote about Gaza.)  Two of the other five "contributors" there wrote before that, in more detail, but not that much more.

She did get tenure, per this piece, but says "she gave it up." Contra several items? You got paid in summer; it's part of your contract. You just don't get paid EXTRA in summer. And colleges, unlike high schools, have LONG had summer sessions.

The pay? It's about what I would have guessed for someone at either assistant professor or associate professor rank at a second-tier state university in a Southern state. As for the drop in enrollment? Happening at K-12 everywhere, including first-ring suburbs of the Metromess here in Tex-ass. It's a second "baby bust," following with about expected timing after a dropoff from the original Baby Boom hit colleges in the middle 1980s.

That said, this doesn't tell the full story.

She doesn't work the entire summer. She may work parts of it, but not the entire summer. And, "writing books and articles"? After you have tenure and don't have to worry about publish or perish, that's not part of your job anyway. It's something chosen.

Then, she actually BITCHES about students taking independent studies. I guess you long ago stopped being very idealistic as a prof.

She also, at a state university, was in the state employees' pension system. Not a lot of people have on-the-job pensions any more, and of those that do, a lot of them aren't a defined-benefit pension, which I am guessing hers is. She also probably has better health insurance than the typical private-sector employee. 

She's right that universities generally aren't librul. They're certainly not leftist.

Oh, as of a year ago, she was still being a Doomer on COVID. And, she claims to be a quasi-clairvoyant "disaster whisperer"; that's where the phrase "sentinel intelligence" for her website comes from.

OK, the other co-contributors at her Substack? One thinks the Democratic Party invented the "Green New Deal." Green Party nowhere mentioned. 

Where IS Farris Wilks?

The Monthly wonders what happened to Farris Wilks.  Reportedly, there's been some sort of break with fellow bazillionaire nutbar Tim Dunn, but it doesn't say what that might be about?

Maybe a gay relationship on the down low imploded? "Just asking questions," wingnuts. Deal with it.

Semi-seriously, or more than that, the piece says that the two started shorting out over the Nick Fuentes' brouhaha in late 2023, a meeting with Wilks and Dunn operatives that also included Matt Rinaldi and Former Fetus Forever Fuckwad Jonathan Stickland. (Ahh, who can forget him? The Texas GOP pretty much has.)

Apparently this got deeper in June 2024 when Wilks may have been the unnamed Daddy Warbucks to cut funding to the True Texas Project. Amarillo's not-totally-wingnut bazillionaire Alex Fairly notes that it was about this time that Tim Dunn first recruited him. Surely no coincidence. 

Maybe, per the end of the story, there was a gay threesome involving the Forever Fuckwad? Did I just make you throw up in your mouth with that scenario? Per Stickland's own language, and my sense of alliteration, that would then make him Former Fetus Future Faggot Forever Fuckwad. If only this could be true. (I can throw Fuentes in for a foursome if you want.)

Texas Progressives talk polls and nukes

Off the Kuff brings you two more polls showing James Taalrico leading the race for US Senate in Texas. 

SocraticGadfly loves him some James Hansen, agrees that we're in a climate crisis, not just climate change, that will lead to 5°C of temperature increase in a century without strong action soon, knows that WAY too many people still don't get this, and hates that the likes of Michael Mann have attacked him as alarmist, BUT explains in great detail why he is far more skeptical than Hansen about nuclear energy being a major part of the solution.

Inside Climate News notes the great number of commercial lithium mining claims that are on American Indian tribal land. 

The Observer warns even wingnut landowners on the border to read the fine print on Team Trump's requests to survey their land. 

Too bad, in its runoff overview, the Observer won't tell you to vote for neither Colin Allred nor Julie Johnson and to undervote this in the general. 

Camp Mystic will not reopen this summer. Next question: Will it next summer? 

Is Havana / Cancun Ted Cruz running for president again in 2028? He's clearly working on the Trump Toady angle.

Contra Kalshi's claims, and riffing off the Trib, wondering why both Dannie Goeb and Kenny Boy have been slow to act or react, I think predictions markets are gaming, not a commodities-like futures market. Pro sports sub-reddits very much agree. 

ICE may have deported a US citizen. 

UNT has a massive budget shortfall, mainly cuz Trumpism has led to a big drop in international students. Faculty buyouts are a partial solution; per the Trib, a number of humanities profs are gladly accepting, saying UNT has gone well beyond the state-mandated minimum in anti-diversity. 

More Pete Hegseth brilliance — wanting to build a data center in the aridity of Fort Bliss. 

Chris Hooks extends his John Cornyn bromance to Shrub Bush and isn't worth further effort on addressing. 

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project spoke about empowering ourselves at a May Day event at a Unitarian Church in The Woodlands. As always-The next action is when you organize it.

Steve Vladeck and Law Dork critique the SCOTUS "ruling" in the lawsuit over Texas' Congressional re-redistricting.

Space City Weather answers your questions about El Nino, why it always rains on weekends, and more.

The Texas Signal talks to some drag performers about what they feel they can legally do now.

Texas Rural Reporter uses the example of a kid from Spearman being drafted by the NFL to show how important public schools are in rural communities and why the voucher program is a threat to them.

City of Yes talks about making space for the things we don't like but still need.

Contra Barbed Wire on Whataburger

Contra Barbed Wire, Whataburger, or as I call it, What? A Burger? has never been all that, other than being one of Tex-ass' three retail cults along with HEB and Fuck You the Beaver.

THAT said, re my own comparison of it with In and Out, yeah, we don't go there any more for exactly the reason BW says it should be beloved by Texans. I don't need a fucking burgers version of Chick fil A. That said, What? A Burger? likes to push the bible hard itself, or a least it does on the walls of the location nearest me.

Beyond all that, What? A Burger? is overpriced. I definitely will take Jack in the Crack over it. 

Really on Alexander Cockburn? And really, St. Clair?

According to Jeff St. Clair in a recent Roaming Charges there, Cockburn thought that Jerry Ford was the best president since FDR. It appears to be serious. That said, Jerry was less a warmonger than the others, overall. Of course, he had shorter service.

As for Jeff's claim of Secret Service incompetence and its being traceable to Trump? Doesn't this ignore the "whores" under Obama? Between the JFK assassination and that incident, it had plenty of other scandals and screwups. It also ignores that Congress has repeatedly refused to ease the Secret Service burden. A good idea would be splitting the Protective Division from the rest of the Secret Service as well as providing more funding. 

As for the USA USA USA after assassinations? St. Clair misses on the angle that gunz are one of the few things made in America, and also the claim that all gunz are made in America is not true. Many Glocks come from Austria. Ditto, many Heckler and Koch come from Germany. 

On both of these two points, St. Clair is drifting toward becoming a Blue Anon type of Never Trumper. 

Finally, re Friday's date (I originally had "yesterday's" as I was going to post it on Saturday), and nothing about May Day in the piece? Like mine?

Is it budgetarily necessary for Texas cities to cave to Strangeabbott over ICE?

First, the Fifth Circuit screwed illegal immigrants by saying their advocates lacked standing to fight Texas law allowing state and local cops to make arrests. 

ICE has, in turn, just arrested an interpreter of Indo-Pakistani languages. 

Speaking of, how big a portion of a city's budget are these public safety grants that Abbott has threatened to cut unless cities kowtow to him on having police cooperate with ICE? In Austin's case, $2.5 million is 0.04 percent of $6.5 billion. For Dallas and Houston, it may be bigger, but still. Since part of Dallas' money is World Cup security related, why not just call Strangeabbott's bluff?