The rich are not like us

Another story about Jacob Wohl — I’m still waiting for his 15 minutes to end. But he’s such an egregious liar and grifter that he’s a magnet for attention.

The son of lawyer and Fox News contributor David Wohl, Jacob showed an early eye for manipulation — though not for execution. As a teenager, he founded a series of hedge funds, claiming to manage 178 clients and $10 million in assets. But after an investor reported that he hadn’t been paid out in full by Wohl (who called himself the “Wohl of Wall Street”), the National Futures Association (NFA), the derivatives industry’s self-regulatory organization, quickly realized Wohl had been lying to investors about his experience and prowess as a means of securing their funds. In reality, he had 13 clients and $500,000 in assets. He also appeared to be funneling some profits into his mother’s account. Wohl was banned for life by the NFA, ending his nascent career as a hedgie.

Barred from the investment world, Wohl turned his sights on following in the footsteps of his father, a vocal Trump supporter. In 2017, Jacob began tweeting earnestly about the president, praising his stream-of-consciousness tweet storms as “the modern day version of FDR’s Fireside Chats.” It wasn’t long before Wohl built a sizable following, eventually amassing 185,000 followers. Around the same time, he also set up Surefire Intelligence, an unlicensed private investigation firm. He created a personal alias for that company: “Matthew Cohen.”

This story, however, is not primarily about Wohl. It’s about a woman named Carolyn Cass, who was willingly set up by Wohl to claim she’d been raped by Robert Mueller. She had apparently been assaulted by another man, but Mueller had an airtight alibi — he’d been in a different city at the time — and like all of Wohl’s schemes, it rapidly disintegrated into a shambles that would have humiliated a man with any shame. He does not have any.

The horrible part of the story is the oblivious Cass, a trust-fund baby who later receives a large inheritance and seems to fritter it away on a life of careless privilege. Whenever the money starts to run out, she decides to charge off to another “career” in pop music or art, seemingly unaware that those professions do require talent, skill, and discipline, all of which she lacks. It’s just a horror story of incompetence all around.

Then she wakes up and realizes that Wohl is a bad actor, and engages legal assistance. Smart, right? Except the lawyer she hires is…Michael Avenatti.

So in March, she called Michael Avenatti — yes, that Michael Avenatti. The onetime lawyer for Stormy Daniels was publicly on the hunt for Wohl. Less than two hours after they spoke, Avenatti claimed in a tweet that Wohl was under investigation for possessing illegal firearms, information Cass says he only could have gleaned from their call. (These assertions haven’t been confirmed; the LAPD doesn’t comment on information that could jeopardize a potential active investigation.) Five days later, Avenatti was arrested for embezzling from clients and attempting to extort Nike for more than $20 million, and is now under investigation for embezzling $300,000 from Daniels, too.

It’s one disaster after another, and all of it of her own doing. Yet she’s a pretty white woman from a wealthy Texas oil family, so you know she’ll just bounce back from it all and move on to another stupid pratfall.

I don’t think I like any of the people in this story.

Victory over bunnykind

I’m getting ready to leave for the airport, and Mary sends me a photo from home. She’s been working hard at a garden in the backyard, and I helped put up a crude fence around it. We did a good enough job. Look at that frustrated bunny, excluded from the carrots and squash and who-knows-what-else Mary planted.

It’s probably scheming to tunnel under the flagstones, though.

Minnesota is slipping up

It’s the time of year when everyone is gearing up for the Minnesota State Fair, and one of the highlights has always been when the local newspapers write up the latest grisly, greasy, deep-fat-fried abominations that vendors will be selling there. I’d never eat the stuff, but the descriptions are always gruesomely entertaining.

But not this year.

The City Pages preview is out, and it is disappointing. These things look tasty and tasteful!

Snow Cap Mini Waffle Sundae: Mini waffle topped with a scoop of Izzy’s cream cheese ice cream, warm real maple syrup and a maraschino cherry.

At Hamline Church Dining Hall, located on the north side of Dan Patch Avenue between Underwood & Cooper streets

Stuffed Cabbage Roll: Cabbage leaves wrapped around seasoned ground pork and rice, prepared with tomato sauce and served with a dinner roll.

At iPierogi, located in the Food Building, south wall

Tipsy Pecan Tart: Pecan pie infused with Dubliner Irish Whiskey and baked in a buttery shortbread shell. Gluten-free.

At Sara’s Tipsy Pies, located in the Food Building, south wall

Turkish Pizza: A Turkish-style cracker-thin flatbread, authentically named Lahmacun, topped with spicy minced beef, onion, tomato, lettuce, cucumber salad, parsley, fresh herbs, a squeeze of lemon and garlic sauce, then rolled or folded.

At Blue Moon Dine-In Theater, located on the northeast corner of Carnes Avenue & Chambers Street

This has got to be some kind of satire, right?

Spider meeting is done

Waaah. I just have the closing banquet tonight, and then tomorrow is a long travel day home. So what did I learn?

  • Spiders are cool, but I guess I already knew that.
  • Spiders are a jillion times more complicated than I thought, and I’ve got a lot to learn.
  • Spider meetings are small and cozy and nice.
  • I’ve made a list of a dozen experiments that I think are doable by undergrads, and will provide interesting information.
  • I need to get home to start putting these ideas to work.

I guess that’s a pretty good outcome for a meeting, to end it inspired and better informed than I was at the beginning.

Next year AAS2020 will be held in Davis, California. I’m hoping I can fit it into my budget.

That makes it official

I was at dinner with a group of arachnologists last night, and I was surprised when I mentioned that I was from Minnesota and was then told that I was one of the only two arachnologists in the state. I was firstly startled at actually being told I was an arachnologist since I’m still trying to get a good grasp of the field, and secondly surprised that they’re so rare (would you believe there are only 500 people in the International Society of Arachnology?). He qualified it by saying that I was one of two people who had officially registered with the American Arachnology Society, from which I learned a few things.

If you want to be an arachnologist on paper, it’s easy — just send in your membership dues.

If you are a real arachnologist in Minnesota, with skills and expertise and deep knowledge, rather than a wanna-be like me, you’re behind. Send in your membership dues. Otherwise, people will keep mistaking me for you.

Otherwise, if you want to become a real arachnologist, here’s an article on the subject. It recommends starting in childhood and your teenage years, which is a little worrisome, since I waited until I was 61 to start. But you can do it! Unfortunately, unlike being an arachnologist on paper, it’s going to take a lot of hard work.

Doctors advising doctors

Hey, I guess people have known about that cutting entry in the index to an obstetrics text for a good long while. Here’s an article on the book and general ob-gyn attitudes, in which we learn that the indexer was … the author’s wife! I guess she’d know. But doctors know better now, right?

Recall that preeclampsia was once called toxemia because it was thought to be a build-up of toxins in the maternal blood that had not been secreted through the normal monthly purification of the menstrual cycle. Miscarriages must be caused by the woman doing something she shouldn’t have done, like picking up a bag of groceries. Bottle feeding was superior to breast feeding because men had used science to outsmart the female breast. In fact, for about half of the twentieth century, obstetrics consisted of rendering pregnant women unconscious, cutting a procto-episiotomy, and ripping the child out with forceps. Sounds very efficient and modern. [Yikes. That’s how I was born.]

But surely we don’t think this way today. Have you ever recommended that a woman be on bed rest for any condition in pregnancy? Have you ever mocked a woman with a birth plan? Have you ever told a woman to “take it easy”? Do you believe that a Cesarean delivery is an improvement over vaginal delivery? Do you believe that when women suffer from depression or anxiety it is related to abnormal hormone levels? Much of the worldview of modern obstetric practiced was formed with the belief that women were inept and incapable and that science needed to fix them. Think about that next time you integrate old myths into your practice.

Another day, another overwhelming mess of spiders

This meeting is really an exercise in attitude readjustment. I’ve been steeped in the zebrafish world for so long that I’ve unconsciously held the model organism perspective — here’s my animal, all I have to do is query it deeply with increasingly thorough techniques, and I shall understand biology. Now I’m in a world where every observation is tested against a dozen closely related species, and a dozen distantly related species, and a dozen outgroups that aren’t even in the same order, and everyone is sprawling out horizontally to get a feel for the dimension of a problem rather than digging down vertically into one convenient animal bred specifically to thrive in the artificial environment of the lab. It feels strange and sometimes uncomfortable.

I’m also sometimes totally lost. I was at a session yesterday where arachnologists were just projecting photos from their personal collections, and where I was content to just think “OK, I guess that’s a spider”, other people were shouting out latin names and recognizing old friends. Or worse, “here’s a spider I haven’t been able to identify, and I consulted the world’s foremost expert, and they had never seen it before either”, and it begins to sink in that we’re surrounded by an immensely diverse population that is so wild and weird that we have no idea who they all are, and that I’m going to have to do a lot of work to catch up. It is intellectually terrifying and bizarrely stimulating.

Every once in a while, fortunately, I find something to anchor myself. Yesterday was all about spider silk, which, on the one hand, is molecular biology and can be reduced to genes and physical interactions with the environment (adhesive droplets on webs are a product of self-assembly, contingent on things like humidity and temperature), but on the other hand, of course spiders produce an incredible diversity of different kinds of silk. Sometimes, it all gets to be a bit much.

Looking at the program, this morning is all about biogeography, diversity, evolution, ecology, and life history, while this afternoon is all about behavior. I’m pretty sure my brain will explode at some point today, because I can assure you that there won’t be any single principle that I’ll be able to condense everything down to.

A concentration camp by any other name is still a concentration camp

I find it hard to believe that conservatives are currently trying to argue that the USA does not have concentration camps by redefining the term to mean only camps for Jews. No, just stop it and face up to reality. The US has concentration camps. This country has always had concentration camps. We are the world’s greatest master of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing. I wrote about this in 2015.

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

A concentration camp is “a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.” It’s a general term. Liz Cheney is the one trying to redefine it by claiming a concentration camp doesn’t count as one unless it’s being used to persecute Jewish people.

“Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history,” Cheney wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

Hitler used concentration camps in the Holocaust, no one is claiming he didn’t. But America used them to round up and imprison people of Japanese descent in WWII, and we’re also using them now to isolate people of Latin American descent. We are throwing people who have committed no crime into crowded, inadequate facilities on the basis of their ethnicity, and people are dying.

Learn some history, and remember: Hitler’s concentration camps were inspired by an American model.