Ex-‘Smallville’ Actress Allison Mack Sentenced to 3 Years in NXIVM Sex Cult Case

TV actor Allison Mack, who played a key role in a scandal-ridden, cult-like upstate New York group, was sentenced to 3 years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges she manipulated women into becoming sex slaves for the group’s spiritual leader.

Mack — best known for her role as a young Superman’s close friend on the series “Smallville” — appeared Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court. She’s expected to seek credit for cooperating against NXIVM leader Keith Raniere and taking responsibility for helping him create a secret society of brainwashed women who were branded with his initials.

Devoting herself to the self-improvement guru “was the biggest mistake and greatest regret of my life,” she wrote in a letter filed with the court last week.

“I am sorry to those of you that I brought into NXIVM,” she wrote. “I am sorry I ever exposed you to the nefarious and emotionally abusive schemes of a twisted man.”

If the eventual TV movie is not titled The Secret World of Allison Mack and she’s not played by Larisa Oleynik, I’m going to burn shit down.

 

Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction overturned by Pennsylvania court

Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction was overturned by Pennsylvania’s highest court.

The court said Wednesday that it found an agreement with a previous prosecutor that prevented him from being charged in the case.

The disgraced actor has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a state prison near Philadelphia. He had vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge any remorse over the 2004 encounter with accuser Andrea Constand.

Cosby, 83, who was once beloved as “America’s Dad,” was convicted of drugging and molesting the Temple University employee at his suburban estate.

The former “Cosby Show” star was charged in late 2015, when a prosecutor armed with newly unsealed evidence — Cosby’s damaging deposition from her lawsuit — ordered his arrest just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired.

The trial judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby’s first trial, when the jury deadlocked. However, he then allowed five other accusers to testify at the retrial about their experiences with Cosby in the 1980s.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women.

One step closer to my dream of OJ, Bill Cosby and R. Kelly all living in a loft to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real…

 

The Revival of Stoicism

Over the last 10 years, Stoicism has gone from a topic confined to philosophy lectures to one consumed by the masses. Sometimes referred to as Modern Stoicism, Stoic ideas and texts are now found in dedicated podcasts, newsletters, Instagram accounts, self-help books, personal coaching, and in-person events, like the well-attended annual event Stoicon.

During the pandemic, Stoicism’s popularity has only grown. Print sales of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius went up 28% in the first part of 2020 compared to 2019, and print sales of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic increased 42%. E-book sales of Letters from a Stoic went up 356%. Penguin Random House told The Guardian that while 16,000 copies of Meditations were sold in 2012, more than 100,000 copies were sold in 2019. “We have noticed a natural (slightly mysterious) year-on-year increase in our sales of the Stoic philosophers,” the Penguin representative said.

As trends go, a philosophy that preaches emotional tranquility, reason, and virtue would seem to be on the beneficial end of the spectrum. But Jackson’s case is just one example of what can happen when an ancient philosophy becomes popular, widely adopted, and, at times, distorted.

tl;dr: Stocism is bad because people I define as bad like and it might keep people from being screeching harpies about thing I think they should be screeching harpies about.