Once again, I was going to do a science post today. I was going to review a recent paper purporting to show that athiests and liberals are smarter than conservative religious types, and (bet you won’t see this coming) I was going to savage it as junk science. And once again, the world has thrown a monkey wrench into my plans.<\/p>\n
Apparently I am now a fugitive.<\/p>\n
I didn’t show up at court this morning, you see. Neither did my lawyer. I did not show up because nobody told me that there was a hearing scheduled; my lawyer is on vacation all week, so it’s pretty safe to assume that nobody told him either. No matter. Bail has been revoked. A bench warrant has been issued for my arrest. And if I try to cross the border before this bullshit is sorted out, I automatically disappear back into an orange jumpsuit.<\/p>\n
I’m not going to do that, of course. I don’t know whether this latest screw-up results from malice or incompetence, but it’s obviously bogus and will in all likelihood get sorted out before too long.\u00a0 I wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except that\u00a0\u2014 just a couple of hours after the event\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 the facts have already been twisted 180\u00b0, and deformed little buds of disinformation have appeared in the blogosphere.\u00a0 Peter Watts Failed To Appear.\u00a0 What Is Peter Watts Trying To Prove?\u00a0 Oh, and Peter Watts Was Cruel To His Mother.<\/p>\n
Just buds so far, as I say.\u00a0 The raw data’s online on the St Clair County Court Docket, and as of 1422 EST I’m aware of only one blog that’s picked up the story and run with it.\u00a0 But Jesus, that blog ran fast; I’d<\/em> barely heard what had happened before the post was up.\u00a0 So to be on the safe side I’m going to get out in front of it here,\u00a0 try and squash it before it metastasises further:<\/p>\n Nobody told me, people.\u00a0 Nobody told my lawyer. I did not boycott the court to make any kind of point or take any kind of stand.<\/p>\n This is just another fuck-up.\u00a0 And I am not guilty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once again, I was going to do a science post today. I was going to review a recent paper purporting to show that athiests and liberals are smarter than conservative religious types, and (bet you won’t see this coming) I was going to savage it as junk science. And once again, the world has thrown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-squidgate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1132"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1139,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions\/1139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}