But it isn’t even a question!

Over in that imperialist undemocratic monarchy across the Atlantic (we can be smug because we got rid of the “monarchy” part), people are wondering how the country got to the point that democracy can be suspended by a buffoon, and further, how said buffoon can actually be appointed prime minister — a question that we non-monarchists have been asking ourselves as well. At least part of the answer has to be that our respective upper classes are trained to be pompous buffoons, either at Eton or in our equivalent prep schools for the rich elite. At least in Great Britain bits of the training have been exposed.

Laurie Penny explores the implications of an amazing question from the entrance examination for Eton. This is a question that 13 year old boys are expected to address.

The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters have been killed by the Army. You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.

I am impressed by how the question is not even a question. It assumes the answer and demands that you justify it. There is absolutely no latitude to question the actions or condemn the policies that led the army to be deployed against civilians — nope, every action we have performed was right and just, no matter what it was, and your job is to keep doing the same thing and tell the populace that their murders are “necessary and moral“. I have to marvel at the implicit arrogance of this thought exercise. So this is how you get Boris Johnson. Great Britain apparently didn’t learn a thing since Peterloo.

We don’t have one Eton, but instead a network of elite prep schools, mostly in the Northeast, some in the South — Phillips Exeter Academy might be the closest thing to Eton that we’ve got. Now I’m wondering what kind of biased drivel you have to recite to get into those, although we’re also different in how one gets into the civil service, anyway. My impression is that most of the training our ‘elite’ kids get is to coach them in glorious capitalism and how to trample on the middle class and the poors in your stampede to excessive wealth.

Sometimes it isn’t the answers that matter, but the questions asked that shape your mind.

First day back, and I survived!

I got through the first lecture, and even had an easy time prompting students to speak up and ask questions, so I’m doing OK so far. Also, I gave them my background and told them I work on spiders, and nobody passed out…in fact, after class they asked to see the colony, and about half the class was crammed into my lab. That’s a good sign, that they’re not all arachnophobes (it’s OK if they are). I also plugged all the other research going on here, in case they weren’t aware of the opportunities.

So now I get to go home and celebrate with a nice dinner. Involving tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes, and I have to cook down another batch tonight. We’ve got marinara sauce dribbling out of our ears, we had fried tomatoes yesterday, I’m going to have to come up with a lot of different ways to make tomatoes delicious. I think Mary needs to plant slightly fewer tomatoes next year. That has nothing to do with my class, it’s just that I’m drowning in tomatoes.

She also planted zucchini. I’m doomed.

Conservatives don’t understand this democracy thing

The Republicans of Alabama have just urged their state reps to kick Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, out of congress.

The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman’s ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.

The resolution calls on Alabama’s congressional delegation to “proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution.”

That’s just weird. I thought Southern conservatives were all about states rights and opposing federalism, but here they are, trying to interfere in another state’s politics. OK then. Can Minnesota urge the immediate expulsion of Moscow Mitch from the Senate? I wouldn’t mind that at all.

I could also mention this bizarre move by Boris Johnson to suspend parliament in order to prevent anyone from stopping by democratic means his grand plan to sunder Britain from the EU.

As long as you rely on billionaires for funding, you are participating in a criminal enterprise

The take-home message of this article is that scientists who took money from Jeffrey Epstein should give it back, and I kinda sorta agree…but first I have to mention this annoyance.

Giving away the money would begin to clean up the gross, topologically complex web of influence trading that Epstein helped weave. Before and after his year in prison, in 2008, Epstein lavished money and attention on scientists—biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.

Why is Stephen Jay Gould in there? He was dead in 2008! He died 6 years before that, as a matter of fact. There is no sign that he accepted buckets of cash from Epstein, unlike Nowak, who received $6.5 million (which Harvard refuses to return). Gould was both a SJW before the term was invented, and so deathly sick with cancer that the idea he might have participated in Epstein’s sleaze is ludicrous.

But back to the topic at hand — returning or reinvesting the money in socially aware programs is a band-aid. Yes, if you were a scientist who turned a blind eye to the creepy guy who was giving you all that money, you should be punished appropriately, and taking away your ill-gotten gains seems like an entirely reasonable and fair response. If somebody just hands you a million dollars, would you just pocket it without asking where it came from or what was expected in return? If an authority comes along later and takes away that free pile of money you accepted, no questions asked, you’ve got no grounds to complain…especially not when they tell you what you should have inquired about in the first place, that it was given to you by a criminal.

It’s only a start, though. The system is broken. When we’re dependent on the generosity of billionaires to get any science done, that skews the outcome — your funding is no longer coupled to any measure of merit, but on your skill at schmoozing and pandering to fat cats, and on your association with over-hyped organizations like Harvard. Taking money away from scientists does not fix the system. What we need to do is take that power away from the billionaires, and nothing in this solution is going to discomfit the unearned prestige and influence of the criminally wealthy.

Look around your university. See all those fancy buildings named after well-off alumni? That’s the problem, that we rely on the whims of assholes who inherited or stumbled into or stole great wealth, and they use science as Epstein did, as a cosmetic to cover up their crimes and make themselves look better than they are.

Some news of progress!

OK, happy news to start the day.

  • After Jeannette Ng called them out, the sponsors of the John W. Campbell Award didn’t dig in their heels — instead, they took a look at the archive of old Campbell editorials, said “Hey, those are pretty shitty and they don’t reflect our values at all,” and they just renamed it to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. No muss, no fuss, no drama, no screeching right-wingers howling that they can’t do that (well, there are some voices echoing out of the bottom of a trash can — Theodore Beale has declared that this decision means “Science Fiction is Dead” — but no one with real influence has protested).
  • Oh, look. Someone at YouTube noticed that their generosity towards Nazis might be hurting their bottom line. YouTube killed several big-name Nazi accounts, finally. Lost to us now are the racist words of James Allsup, VDARE, the American Identity movement, and The Right Stuff, channels that pumped out the most vile anti-Semitic and racist garbage. I’m most gratified to see VDARE get stomped, because that organization has been poisoning mainstream politics and media for decades. They’re whining about the death of political thought now.
  • Andy Ngo has been quietly let go from Quillette — they say it’s so he can pursue other projects, but we all know it’s really because of this article, where an undercover investigator discovered that he was actively collaborating with Patriot Prayer to bias his reporting.

    Ngo tags along with Patriot Prayer during demonstrations, hoping to catch footage of an altercation. Ben says Ngo doesn’t film Patriot Prayer protesters discussing strategies or motives. He only turns his camera on when members of antifa enter the scene.
    “There’s an understanding,” he says, “that Patriot Prayer protects him and he protects them.”

    Bye, Andy. We knew you weren’t a journalist all along, and you have to be pretty blatant when even Quillette finds you toxic.

When the universe is getting cleaned up one asshole at a time, you have to appreciate these little victories. Especially when they kill all of science fiction and all political thought, an impressive achievement.

Terror!

I’m normally relaxed about this stuff, but I’m going back into the classroom today, and I haven’t taught anything since May 2017. What if I forgot how? I could hardly believe it, but I woke up in the middle of the night with my guts in knots and feeling nauseous, all because I have to start teaching a course I’ve taught about 30 times before. Also, it’s really cutting into my spider time.

If you never hear from me again after 2pm today, it’s because I stood in front of 44 gimlet-eyed students and melted into the floor.

(Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine and will be swinging right into the rhythm of the course today. I’m just reminded of the stress of public speaking and performance that I normally take for granted because I’ve just had a relaxing year without that stress, and it felt good.)

The J-F Gariépy/Epstein connection

One among the long list of “scientists” sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein was, to my initial surprise, Jean-François Gariépy, but then after I thought about it, I realized they were perfect for each other. If you’re unfamiliar with JF, as he’s called, his RationalWiki page is informative. He’s one of those alt-right YouTubers with an extraordinarily creepy history — he’s a Jew-baiting advocate for a white ethnostate, and he has a thing for sexual relationships with young women with severe intellectual disabilities. He’s just a terrible, horrible person all around.

But he also has some science credentials — he was a post-doc in a neuroscience lab.

Jean-François Gariépy (1984–) (usually called JF or JFG), is a French-Canadian alt right YouTube talker who promotes race realism, ethnostates, and other reactionary views. From 2012 to 2015, he was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University, but was allegedly fired due to sexual misbehavior, although he claims that he left on his own accord.

Gariépy rose to prominence as a paid co-host of Andy Warski’s YouTube show. After getting into a spat with Andy over antisemitic comments made by a guest, Gariépy left the Warski show, and started running his own show called “The Public Space”, where he frequently invites guests associated with white supremacy, such as David Duke and Richard Spencer.

He parlayed that connection into a gift from Jeffrey Epstein.

Gariépy was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University in 2014 when his nonprofit, NEURO.tv, received $25,000 from Epstein to make a series of YouTube interviews with experts in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The project is still the lead item on the dormant website of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation.

Since posting the NEURO.tv videos, Gariépy has gained a following as a far-right YouTuber whose recent guests have included the white nationalist Richard Spencer. In 2018, the Daily Beast described Gariépy’s child custody battle, in which his ex-wife alleged a history of abusive behavior toward women. Gariépy denied the allegations.

“I am a white heterosexual male libertarian who believes in freedom, sovereignty and self-determination for all people including mine,” Gariépy told BuzzFeed News by email. He also railed against “false allegations by females.”

Dang. No one ever gave me $25K to play on the internet, but then, I have a strict policy of not taking money from rapists or pedophiles. That seems to greatly limit funding sources, I guess.

What I specifically found interesting though, is that Gariépy requested additional money from Epstein to write a book. He did not get that funding, but he did write the book! It’s called The Revolutionary Phenotype, and the description sounds kind of nuts.

The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.

It’s an interesting combination. He’s clearly endorsing some kind of Intelligent Design, so maybe the Discovery Institute would like to take him on as a Fellow. He sounds exactly like their kind of guy.

The other part, though, is the anti-genetic engineering stuff, which is odd to hear from a “scientist”, but then, as a white racist, maybe he’s also concerned about the purity of his germ plasm.

I’m not motivated enough to find out, though. If anyone (non-racist, non-rapist, non-pedophile, that is) wants to donate $25,000 to me, however, I’ll grab a copy and read it and post a review here. I should warn you, though, that just looking at his book online has sent me a barrage of targeted ads for other books about the “Jewish Question” and white genocide and other such trash, so I’m already thinking it may not be worth it.

Growing up is tough for a spider

I mentioned a while back that we had this surplus of spiderlings and that we were going to do some measurements of survival under different population densities. Well, we’ve got two weeks of data now, so we can think a bit.

It was a simple experiment: we put different numbers of recently emerged spiderlings in two different sized containers. We had 5, 10, 15, or 20 spiders in containers that were either about 100ml in volume, or 5.7 liters, so spider density ranged from 0.0009 spiders/ml for the big, nearly empty containers to 0.17 spiders/ml in the small overcrowded ones. We’re basically asking how crowded to they need to be to start affecting each other’s survival, and what’s the greatest density we can get away with, anticipating that no matter what, some will die. And the answer is…

Density doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter how many spiders we started with, or whether it was a small or large container, we ended up with 1-3 spiders in a container at the end of two weeks. You start with 10 in a giant container, you end up with about 3; you start with 20 in a tiny box, you end up with about 3. They’re all spaced out, too; we found that individuals tended to occupy different corners, no matter how much room they had. There were no containers which had 100% mortality.

What does that look like? They seem to be murdering their siblings to set up exclusive territories. Ah, the life of an adolescent spider. What it means is that only about 20% of the spiderlings have survived this battle royale so far. Maybe eventually they’ll be reduced to one spider per container.

Dang. Next experiment is to set up containers for individual spiderlings to see if that increases the overall survival rate. If it does, then I’ve got to do some more thinking. I can’t possibly accommodate every spiderling produced by a parent, since that would mean I’d have 150n spiders in n generations, with a generation time of about a month, so in a year I’d have 1026 spiders, which would mean I’d have to pack about 1012 spiders per square meter of Earth’s surface area, and I’d have to take over the earth to provide housing for my brood. Oh, man, and all the flies I’d have to raise! Sorry, everyone, I’m going to have to draft everyone on the planet to help maintain my spider colony.

Alternatively, I have two more modest strategies. A) I handpick the small number of spider babies I need to repopulate my colony and maintain the population size, which would require raising their offspring in individual containers. Or B) I put a small number, say 10, spiderlings in small containers, expecting that most will die in a vicious battle royale, and only one can survive in each container. There can be only one! But that one will be the most savage, ruthless spider of the group. It’s mollycoddling vs. natural selection.

Maybe I can do both for a while and see which strategy leads to the healthiest next generation.

One worry is that (B) might lead to the total extinction of all males, since the females are bigger. In nature they can disperse far apart, so we don’t have as much fratricide/sororocide, other factors will cull them. Get males from population A, and females from B? This sounds like another experiment.

Rich people using charities as a way to whitewash their crimes

The effort to salvage David Koch’s reputation is underway — usually by praising him for his donations to charity. Jeet Heer is having none of that.

Such encomiums are premised on the idea that Koch’s charitable giving was so commendable that questions about where his money came from or the general impact of the super-rich on society would be impertinent. This willful lack of curiosity was sharply critiqued as long ago as 1909 by then-President Theodore Roosevelt, who wasn’t impressed by John D. Rockefeller’s setting up a foundation to help disperse his mountain of money. “No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,” Roosevelt curtly but accurately noted. In the case of the Koch family, there’s plenty of misconduct to investigate.

Then he explains how the Koch money was earned by their father, a fanatical John Bircher, who built oil refineries for Nazi Germany, and how they were despicable in their treatment of their employees. How much would they have to give away in order to compensate for the evil they’ve done? More than they have.

Must we celebrate David Koch’s bountiful donations to public institutions, even if we dislike how the duo have pushed the Republican Party (and America as a whole) to the right? Not at all. The Koch brothers’ bad deeds outweigh their public service. Besides, plutocratic philanthropy is a wretched social model.

I would also add that even their good donations were tainted by an agenda. They funded a major exhibit on human evolution at the Smithsonian, but one of their goals was to play up how climate change affected human evolution. Why, we wouldn’t be here if not for climate change! Therefore, it’s all good for you.

At least that was one step beyond outright denial.

Charles Pierce is also piling on.

Fair warning. I am about to speak very ill of the dead. David Koch went to his eternal barbecue spit on Friday. Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that’s not even to mention the lasting damage they’ve done to the planet as a whole. Sorry, Morning Joe gang, I wouldn’t care if they opened branches of the National Museum of Puppies and Rainbows in every congressional district in the United States. The Koch brothers financed the wrecking ball that is still doing damage, and now one of them is dead, and, if I am not rejoicing, I am breathing deep sighs of relief and praying deep prayers of thanksgiving.

Well, I’m rejoicing, at least. Let the whole family rot.