Nice example of burying the lede

The headline: BILLIONAIRE HORNDOG BOB KRAFT CHARGED WITH SOLICITING PROSTITUTION IN LEAD-UP TO SUPER BOWL.

Don’t care. Prostitution shouldn’t be a crime anyway. But this one hides the real story:

In a press conference Friday morning, Jupiter Police Chief Daniel Kerr announced that Kraft was just one of the 25 people being charged with solicitation as part of a human-trafficking investigation.
…
According to Florida police, Kraft was caught in a months-long investigation into a human-trafficking ring in the area, involving at least 10 spas.

There’s an important word being downplayed there. Sex between consenting adults, not an issue, even if there is an exchange of money. When it’s human-trafficking, though, that means consent has been lost, and this Kraft bozo is exploiting women.

They did at least include one criminal charge in the headline, “Billionaire”. Lock him up for that, I’m fine with it.

I’d try it

My wife just interrupted me and told me I had to go to the store for various items. Very well then; I also have to throw dinner together, so maybe I’ll get a special treat or two.

The recipe looks fairly straightforward, although they don’t list the ingredients. It looks like green onion, garlic, peppers, cooking oil — I’ve got all that already — oh, is that Haplopelma? I’m fresh out. I wonder if they have any in stock in a small rural midwestern grocery store, or if I’m going to have to go to Cambodia to pick up some?

I’ll probably have to fix something else for Mary’s dinner, since I don’t think I can zip to Phnom Penh and back in time for my other evening plans (gonna check out Alita: Battle Angel at the Morris Theater). It’s too bad, I’d really like to try that sometime.

How to annoy Ken Ham

Someone brought him a Gideon’s Bible from a Kentucky hotel that had been horrifically defaced.

Someone came prepared. I usually just scribble something caustic on the first page.

But Ken is irritated, and he has a rebuttal to the argument that something might be older than the Bible: IS NOT!!!.

Whoever left this trilobite image is scientifically wrong. Terry the trilobite died, was buried and fossilized just 4,350 years ago during the global flood of Noah’s day. These creatures—with their incredibly complex eyes—aren’t evidence of millions of years of evolution, but rather of God’s creative power and the destructive nature of the flood.

scientifically wrong…jeezus. So he simply asserts that the fossil is a hundred thousand times younger than the scientific evidence says it is, and claims that is still a scientific position.

You know, there are a lot of Christians that have no intellectual difficulty with the idea that the universe is far older than Ken’s goofy, anti-scientific interpretation says it is. Answers in Genesis is the muck at the bottom of a rotten barrel of bad ideas.

Here are some awful Red Pill stories, but hey, did you know feminists are just as bad?

Here’s an interesting article about the Red Pill cult, focusing mostly on people who have left it. There’s a common thread: lonely young men who are socially awkward and find themselves in a group that tells them all their problems are caused by an evil, alien force, that is, women.

Jack became involved with the Red Pill when he was 23, and had been single for a “long” time. “I was numb, lonely and desperate,” he says. “It was a terrible time in my life.”

Though Jack only spent two months on the subreddit, he quickly fell in with anti-feminist and libertarian rhetoric. “An uncomfortable misogynistic streak grew within me,” he says. “At one point [I] thought that Donald Trump was a good candidate for President.”

But then, unfortunately, the article falls into bothsiderism.

Like many of the places we frequent online, the Red Pill has become an echo chamber. The psychologist I spoke to, Mike Wood, told me this can lead to people adopting more and more extreme views. “If you’re in some sort of a group that defines itself by its opinions, then people will get more and more polarised over time,” he says. “Individuals will try to conform to what the group mandates.” This is true of not just the Red Pill, but its opponents. While radical feminists on Tumblr, for example, become more extreme in their views, so too does the subreddit. In many ways, the extremes of each group justify one another’s existence in their minds.

OK, I’ll bite. You’ve just written an article that describes men who characterize half of humanity as evil parasites, who find unity in demonizing women in absurd ways, who get brainwashed into voting for Donald Trump, who advocate for murdering women and in far too many cases actually do so. They’re members of a Reddit subgroup with 200,000 members. It’s a fucking horror show.

Where’s the equivalency? The lazy shorthand of generically referring to “radical feminists on Tumblr” is not evidence and is not convincing. You’ve got incels going on murder sprees, you’ve got the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989 — misogyny has a body count. Who have the Tumblr lesbians slaughtered lately?

I agree that online tribalism can polarize and lead to in-group conformity. Those are common psychological phenomena. But the red pill cult has crystallized around ideas that dehumanize women and justify lies and hatred, and it does us no favor to synonymize that with every social group ever. Especially when Tumblr feminists seem to have a far better sense of humor than the redpillers.

Alexander Acosta broke the law

There’s yet another crook in Trump’s orbit. His labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, has been found to have broken the law when he gave convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal.

A judge ruled Thursday that federal prosecutors — among them, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta — broke federal law when they signed a plea agreement with a wealthy, politically connected sex trafficker and concealed it from more than 30 of his underage victims.

It was quite a serious crime. Years of procuring and sexual molestation of kids. More than 30 victims.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said that the evidence he reviewed showed that Jeffrey Epstein had been operating an international sex operation in which he and others recruited underage girls — not only in Florida — but from overseas, in violation of federal law.

“Epstein used paid employees to find and bring minor girls to him.,’’ wrote Marra, who is based in Palm Beach County. “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.’’

But man, what a slap on the wrist Epstein got.

Instead of prosecuting Epstein under federal sex trafficking laws, Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution. Epstein, who lived in a Palm Beach mansion, was allowed to quietly plead guilty in state court to two prostitution charges and served just 13 months in the county jail. His accomplices, some of whom have never been identified, were never charged.

Left unsaid…that jail sentence was a joke. He got to go home during the day, and just had to check in for confinement at night.

I remember when Lawrence Krauss and Robert Trivers flailed about trying to defend Epstein…and Krauss earnestly telling me at a conference that I should stop criticizing him, he’s a good guy and a friend to science.

I sometimes wonder if, since his own fall from grace, Krauss has ever admitted that he was wrong, and that his arguments were bad and foolish. I haven’t heard. I certainly haven’t had a conversation with him in years.

He probably hasn’t. Last year, this was Krauss’s wife defending him…and Epstein.

You know, Dr Dahl, one other problem with that comment, besides the fact that having sex with a minor is not a “lifestyle”, is that the courts have just determined that he was not punished for his crimes. He is a bad man who got away with it. I wonder if any of the recipients of his largesse are willing to recognize that yet?

By the way, Krauss is still getting gigs, but he’s not quite in demand as he used to be. I see he’s appearing on this YouTube channel next Tuesday…maybe someone should ask him about it.

Money can be mesmerizing

Watch those billions of dollars stack up behind corporate brands.

There have been so many times when I’ve seen Apple tumble in value, and I’ve thought, “I should buy stock”, and then it surges upward and I think “Now I can’t buy stock”, and then I think “I’m not the kind of guy who plays the stock market anyway”, making it weird to watch Apple’s brand value soar. Why? I don’t know? The iPhone?

Not going to invest in it now, anyway. I’m just waiting for capitalism to burn to the ground making all this meaningless.

Good atheists of the world, unite and speak out

Adam Lee says a lot of things about the atheist movement I’ve said before — the deplorable leaders, the avid adoption of alt-right ideology, the islamophobia and misogyny, the dominance of awful people over YouTube atheism. He ticks off all the same check boxes I do.

But one thing different is that he ends on a note of optimism. I think he makes an important point here that I’m typically too exhausted to care about anymore — it’s not all bad and hopeless.

It can’t be denied that many prominent atheists, as well as some of the louder and most vehement voices in the community, have supported Alt Right ideology and White male supremacy. However, many of the larger atheist and secular groups have gone in the opposite direction and are quietly engaged in serious work on social-justice and intersectional issues. Organizations like the American Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the atheist charity Foundation Beyond Belief have a solid record of supporting women’s equality and reproductive justice, promoting the voices of people of color, and supporting non-church-based charitable programs in underserved communities worldwide.

These groups and others like them have recognized that society is diversifying, and so must the atheist movement. To remain narrowly focused on the issues of greatest concern to White men, and no others, would lead the secular community into an ideological dead end. To actively scorn the concerns of women and people of color isn’t just morally abhorrent, but self-eradicating. As for atheists, there are strong currents pulling the movement in both directions. Which one will win out, and how that victory will reshape the movement’s priorities, are very much open questions.

It’s true — some of the best, most inspiring people I’ve met have been atheists, and they do sometimes end up in leadership positions in good organizations, too often with little fanfare. Part of the problem here is that it’s easy to be loudly aghast at the scattered assholes with loud voices, and overlook the majority who share decent progressive values. While religious people are also mostly good, there’s always this one commonality they hold: an intellectual and emotional commitment to raving lunacy, proudly held. When I would attend atheist conferences, one of the biggest reliefs was finding oneself in a community where the superstitious foolishness of religious gatherings was gone, and it was a welcome absence.

We just went looking for other bad ideas in our groups, and we let them taint that joy, rather than simply casting them into the void, where they belong.

One other factor I have to mention is that the villains of atheism were passionately dedicated to making sure their views, and only their views, were allowed to be expressed. I had a conversation with a conference organizer who was feeling me out to see if I’d be willing to speak at their event, and I was…but they then explained that it was a tentative invite, because while the majority of the committee were eager to get me, there was this one guy (there’s always one guy) who hated me and was going to raise a big stink. I never heard from them again. Which was fine…I don’t feel a right to a platform.

But that’s what’s been happening: a few loud voices can dominate the discourse, and the tolerant Left tends to avoid the whole idea of “domination”, while the intolerant Right embraces it. It leads to an asymmetry that influences our perception.

In addition, the bad voices are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to secure that dominance. Just look at our Republican party. Or look at YouTube, where the name of the game is fooling the Algorithm, and using endless sock puppet accounts to generate an illusion of overwhelming numbers. Those assholes have built an amazing Potemkin village to subvert any principle of democracy or merit.

It’s hard because I’m so goddamn tired of the game any more, but I have to try and remember there is a virtue to godlessness, and a majority of good people in atheism. It’s just been subverted by an unscrupulous minority.

I had no idea how sleazy Manafort was

All I can say is, “Holy shit.” I’ve always known that the Republicans were publicly depraved, but that’s nothing compared to how they carry on in private. The Rude Pundit puts it plainly and rudely.

A pretty goddamn extraordinary article by Maya Gurantz in the Los Angeles Review of Books delves into the hacked and leaked texts of Paul Manafort’s daughter, Andrea, many to her sister, Jessica. This happened in 2017. Gurantz looked through the 285,000 texts, many of which deal with wedding plans and pregnancies, and she finds one giant thing that most every article or report you’ve read or seen about Manafort has left out.

That would be “a decade of coercive and manipulative sexual behavior, in which Manafort allegedly forced his wife, vulnerable from having sustained brain damage after a near-death horseback riding accident years before, to engage in ‘gang bangs’ with black men while he watched.”

Usually, I expect the Rude Pundit to state the story in the bluntest, crudest way…but this time, after reading the Gurantz article, I have to say he may have failed to fully communicate the horrifying nature of Paul Manafort. It isn’t quite litotes, but it comes perilously close in comparison.

Manafort was a sick, racist, misogynist who abused his own helpless wife, and his wife revealed these facts to her daughters, who then disgustedly talked with each other about how much they hated their father.

I tried to help my mom and she just put her head back in the sand and is currently happy.
Either in ignorance or acceptance. Either way not my choice to judge. It’s her life.
And as long as that shit doesn’t affect my life, whatever.
I know my dad is a horrible and moral-less human. Total selfish sociopath. I don’t ever fool myself or forget. He is a master manipulator

The daughters also inherited that trait — they talk about milking their dad for a lavish dream wedding, guilting him into coughing up big bucks, and then never speaking to him again. They’re also pro-Trump.

Remember: this is the party of evangelical Christians.

Rutger Bregman is a hero

After the historian made a big splash by calling out all the billionaires at Davos who flew in on private jets to explain how committed they were to addressing global climate change, Tucker Carlson was eager to have him on his show…until the actual interview happened, Bregman called out Fox News and Carlson for their hypocrisy, and then poor little Tucker melted down in fury and announced that he wouldn’t air the the interview, said Bregman should go fuck himself, and declared him a tiny-brained moron. Sweet.

Fortunately, Bregman was clever enough to record the interview for himself.

He did ask another perceptive question, though. Why is it that all these TV pitchmen at Fox (and, to be fair, elsewhere) millionaires? Sure, they should get a fair wage for putting the work in, but face it — they’re not particularly bright or talented.

You ought to get paid more than that for speaking truth to power. Bregman is totally transparent about who is paying him.

I should have cited Ed Yong

I just submitted a proposal on Monday for in-house funding for student research this summer and next year, specifically to assemble a Spider Squad to do a local survey of spider taxa and numbers. I cited the Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys article as evidence that there are grounds for concern about declines in arthropod numbers, and argued that spiders are a good proxy for insect populations, because they’d also give us a perspective on those non-charismatic insects, not just butterflies and bumblebees, that form their food supply.

I just this morning got around to reading Ed Yong’s summary of the Insect Apocalypse, and I agree completely. The review suggests that it’s all bad news, that we should be concerned, and that we should be studying this more thoroughly, but that the panic over insect armageddon is grossly over-inflated. Nothing is going to make insects go extinct, short of a planet-sterilizing impact with a world-killing asteroid.

The Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys review is fine, it’s real data, but it’s not necessarily representative. So what do we need to do? Fund more science!

She and others hope that this newfound attention will finally persuade funding agencies to support the kind of research that has been sorely lacking—systematic, long-term, widespread censuses of all the major insect groups. “Now more than ever, we should be trying to collect baseline data,” Ware says. “That would allow us to see patterns if there really are any, and make better predictions.” Zaspel would also love to see more support for natural-history museums: The specimens pinned within their drawers can provide irreplaceable information about historical populations, but digitizing that information is expensive and laborious.

“We should get serious about figuring out how bad the situation really is,” Trautwein says. “This should be a huge wake-up call, and we should get on the ball instead of quibbling.”

What a coincidence — that’s what I said in my proposal. We need to collect baseline data, which is what I aim to do in this first year. And then, of course (hint, hint) I should get funding to keep collecting data for years. We’ll be covered with spiders!