Ito knew, Ito lied

Joi Ito is toast. The latest revelations about Epstein’s association with MIT are damning.

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

All this was after Epstein was convicted of raping children. MIT had judged him “disqualified” from making donations on paper, but the MIT Media Lab had continued to clandestinely allow Epstein to slip them money under the table, and get influence in return. Further, billionaires like Bill Gates were still listening to Epstein’s advice and following his recommendations about where to make donations. Ito knew, and kept the pipeline open secretly.

Then there’s this little anecdote. His colleagues and coworkers are squeamish about being associated with a pedophile, so Ito makes arrangements for a visit that objectors won’t know about, and Epstein is so blatant that he won’t go anywhere without his retinue of young attractive women.

In the summer of 2015, as the Media Lab determined how to spend the funds it had received with Epstein’s help, Cohen informed lab staff that Epstein would be coming for a visit. The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to give input on projects and to entice him to contribute further. Swenson, the former development associate and alumni coördinator, recalled saying, referring to Epstein, “I don’t think he should be on campus.” She told me, “At that point it hit me: this pedophile is going to be in our office.” According to Swenson, Cohen agreed that Epstein was “unsavory” but said “we’re planning to do it anyway—this was Joi’s project.” Staffers entered the meeting into Ito’s calendar without including Epstein’s name. They also tried to keep his name out of e-mail communication. “There was definitely an explicit conversation about keeping it off the books, because Joi’s calendar is visible to everyone,” Swenson said. “It was just marked as a V.I.P. visit.”

By then, several faculty and staff members had objected to the university’s relationship with Epstein. Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor, had voiced concerns about the relationship with Epstein for years. In 2013, Zuckerman said, he pulled Ito aside after a faculty meeting to express concern about meetings on Ito’s calendar marked “J.E.” Zuckerman recalled saying, “I heard you’re meeting with Epstein. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Ito responding, “You know, he’s really fascinating. Would you like to meet him?” Zuckerman declined and said that he believed the relationship could have negative consequences for the lab.

In 2015, as Epstein’s visit drew near, Cohen instructed his staff to insure that Zuckerman, if he unexpectedly arrived while Epstein was present, be kept away from the glass-walled office in which Epstein would be conducting meetings. According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.

On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”

I guess the dollar signs in Ito’s eyes were obscuring his ability to see what he was enabling, but not enough that he was unaware of how ugly this would all look to outsiders.

He’s done. He should resign post-haste, before the university decides to throw him to the sharks in a forlorn attempt to save face.

A remarkably delicious exposé

I’ve probably seen the name “John Glynn” around — he was prolific, and was getting published all over the Rightosphere and elsewhere. He even got published in the Huffington Post, so some left-leaning pubs had stuff with his byline. But I would have sailed right over it, because his work was all bumblingly ideological and built on evolutionary psychology BS, which immediately flagged him as a charlatan, despite his claimed status as holder of a doctorate and professorships at several universities. Really, people, saying you’re a professor doesn’t make you infallible!

But some people, especially those gullible enough to favor EvoPsych and conservative positions, were taken in, including Michael Shermer.

To his slight credit, Shermer exposed the guy as a fraud. He became suspicious, not when Glynn submitted glib garbage to his magazine, but when Glynn asked for a loan. You can lie about science all you want, but when you start eyeballing a right-winger’s wallet, their ultra-sensitive sensors start pinging. Anyway, it turns out with a few questions it was determined that Glynn did not have an advanced degree, and did not work for any university. Everything was a lie. He’d persevered in publishing crap all over the place, successfully, and fooled Skeptic magazine for three years. The key was offering to write stuff that catered to the biases of publishers, leaping right past any critical evaluation.

Look where else Glynn published! Areo, where the “grievance study” nonsense was published, where Helen Pluckrose is an editor. Quillette. The American Thinker. The Federalist.

The credibility of Skeptic magazine and Shermer has been nonexistent for years, and they’re cruising along on the support of people who still buy into the garbage Glynn was peddling, so they’ll be fine — in fact, they’ll probably be praising Shermer as a true skeptic for identifying the fraud, ignoring the fact that he’d been publishing him for years. John Glynn will be fine, since he’s an insubstantial, lying wraith. He’ll just invent another pseudonym and another set of fake credentials, and continue making contributions to the trash heap of bad media. So I’m chagrined to say that, while this revelation is amusing, it’s not going to make a speck of difference.

So much wrong in one little story

Here’s some smug sanctimonious Christianity for you, all inflicted on a helpless baby.

On Wednesday, Martina Obi-Uzom was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm to an 11 month old baby boy. She was entrusted to look after the baby while his parents went away one weekend. During that weekend, she took the baby to London to be circumcised, in accordance with her own Nigerian Christian beliefs. She knew the baby’s mother did not want her baby circumcised. So she posed as the child’s mother, recruited a man to pose as his father, and convinced a Jewish circumciser to perform the procedure.

You are probably rightly horrified right now. Wait until you learn what happened to Ms Obi-Uzom.

She was given a suspended sentence of 14 months. She was also ordered to pay costs of £1,500 and a £140 victim surcharge, which seems paltry compensation for amputating part of a person’s genitals without consent or medical need.

…

Judge Freya Newbery said although the offence merited a prison sentence, “circumstances” meant she decided to suspend the sentence. The judge said she accepted that Obi-Uzom’s intention “wasn’t to harm the boy” and that she was of “impeccable character”. She also said she was a “professional person” and “highly qualified”.

I’m going to guess that the judge overlooked the mutilation of a baby because the perpetrator’s “impeccable character” consisted of being Christian. Anyone who took a knife to harm a baby for any other reason would be dealt with far more severely.

Friday Spider

I knew who I was cheering for — my spiders are combfoots, too, and the behavior I see in this video is exactly what I see in my colony. The careful guarding of egg sacs, the swift wrapping of prey, that disabling bite once the target was helpless is exactly what I was watching in the lab this morning. Very cool.

We also got several new egg sacs this morning. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, paternally. Anyone want pet spiders around here?

(The answer is no. Well, I’m just going to have to drop them off in their forever homes without the knowledge of their new parents.)

I’m working on this attitude

Yeah, I just got out of lecture and am a wobbling blob of nerves and sweat, as usual, and it’s good to see an inspiring message. I’m not a woman, I don’t have major mental health issues, so it’s helpful to see that I ought to be able to handle my petty concerns.

All I need to do is stop drinking coffee and take a shower, and I’ll be normal again.

The advantages of not being a NYT subscriber

It’s a matter of perspective. Nowadays, when the internet lights up with the latest idiocy from their opinion pages, such as the newest mad screed from David Brooks and I wonder what orifice he’s stuffed his foot in now, I can succumb to temptation and click on the link, and the New York Times immediately comes roaring back, “YOU MUST PAY ME MONEY TO SEE THAT!” and I think, “Hmm. How much money would I pay to read Brooks’ column?” and my answer is always “None. They should pay me to read it”, and I wisely just close the window and move on.

Ditto for anything by Bret Stephens or Thomas Friedman or any of the other sinecured bozos they’ve got over there. Sure, they reasonably want to recoup some of their investment in that freak show, and I can understand that, but still, it’s a freak show. Set them free, let them find some dignity in honest work and a decent way of living, instead of being propped up as a spectacle for the mob to jeer at.

Plant trees!

I think this article hits the nail on the head: Stop Building a Spaceship to Mars and Just Plant Some Damn Trees. Basically, if you want a machine that will suck carbon dioxide out of air and lock it up so it doesn’t contribute to climate change, we’ve already got one. It’s called a tree. They’re cheap and easy and they build themselves, and further, they look good. There’s no NIMBY phenomenon here!

All we have to do is plant a heck of a lot of trees, and they can sequester 200 gigatonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere. All this is from a paper in Science that calculated about how much land area is available for planting trees, and suggests that we should work fast to use that area.

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

There’s a catch, though. A lot of this land is owned and/or inefficiently used. The authors try to take that into account.

In total, 4.4 billion ha of canopy cover can be supported on land under existing climate conditions. This value is 1.6 billion ha more than the 2.8 billion ha existing on land today. Of course, much of the land that could potentially support trees across the globe is currently used for human development and agriculture, which are necessary for supporting an ever-growing human population. On the basis of both the European Space Agency’s global land cover model and on Fritz and colleagues cropland layer, we estimate that 0.9 billion hectares are found outside cropland and urban regions and may represent regions for potential restoration. More than 50% of the tree restoration potential can be found in only six countries (in million hectares: Russia, +151; United States, +103; Canada, +78.4; Australia, +58; Brazil, +49.7; and China, +40.2), stressing the important responsibility of some of the world’s leading economies.

Great! Let’s plant trees on the over 100 million hectares available in the US! Except…here’s land use in this country.

Wow. Look at all the land used for raising cows, and for feeding cows. Do you think the cattlemen’s association will let us shut down their wasteful use of the land? There’s profit in cows! Not so much in setting aside land for trees. There’s also the little problem of convincing consumers that going vegetarian would help cool down the planet. It’s unlikely that we can do what’s good for us; Brazil right now is making a dedicated effort to burn down their forests.

Don’t let the capitalists stop you, though. Do you have a space where you can plant a tree? Do it! Cut back on the meat-eating. When you eat fewer cows, it’s like kicking Ammon Bundy in the balls, dries up the profit motive for setting aside vast tracts of treeless land to feed herds of selfish cattle who are eating your salads. Maybe you can’t go full-on vegan yet, but that’s fine — cut back to eating meat once a week, you’re making a difference.

One other thing: I’ve already seen people complaining about the title of the Mother Jones article. Why can’t we do both? We can plant trees and explore Mars, but I think it’s a dig at the billionaires who are aspiring to escape Earth’s problems and build imaginary colonies on Mars. That’s not going to work, and it’s an excuse to shirk responsibilities to this planet.

Bastin JF, Finegold Y, Garcia C, Mollicone D, Rezende M, Routh D, Zohner CM, Crowther TW (2019) The global tree restoration potential. Science 365(6448):76-79.

There’s a Jeremy Renner app? Why?

I am mystified. There’s an app you can download that will keep you up to date on all your Jeremy Renner news, which is a thing, I guess. Not a very interesting thing, I’ll admit, but apparently there’s all this drama on it, with users getting upset at censorship, which is the only unsurprising detail about it.

It made me wonder, though: is there any celebrity in the world for whom I would find an app interesting and worth downloading? You know, something where I could check in on a whim and see what they had for lunch, what they were watching on TV, how work was going, that sort of thing? And I realized…no, no one. Not the Queen of the UK, not Donald Trump, not even (or especially) people I actually like and respect. I seem to lack the hero worship “gene”.

Apparently, though, this is the core of the Instagram “influencers” phenomena — people who become celebrities by carefully grooming their appearance in photographs and cultivating mobs of people who regularly check in to see what a Kardashian is doing. It’s fine if that’s your deal, but I just find it weird and unrelatable, and I suspect there are a lot of people out there who similarly find it bizarre. But the difference is that we therefore do not aggregate and push up the popularity of certain individuals beyond reason, so all you see when you get a peek at the media landscape is the few who have been elevated by a minority of follower-types.

So, who would you follow obsessively? Anyone? No one? I do follow my grandchildren on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, because their parents post lots of photos of growing babies, but I can’t imagine caring what party some superstar model went to last night, or what they wore. Am I really missing out?

And Jeremy Renner? How strange and trivial is that? This tendency of humans to develop cults of personality is worrying.

Breaking news! The Jeremy Renner app has been shut down! Follow every detail of the tragedy by googling “Jeremy Renner” at least once an hour.

Science, why you gotta do me like this?

“It would be cool to map the appearance of a pigment pattern,” I said. “Just photograph spider abdomens over development,” I said. “It’ll be easy,” I said. “Just do it!” I said.

So I took these Steatoda triangulosa embryos that emerged from their egg sac yesterday, and I sat down at my microscope and configured my camera to a useful and consistent setting (with a little tinkering, I found I could get decent photos at f/4, 1/80th of a second, ISO 3200 (!), at 64x on my Wild dissecting scope), lined up the containers with the spiderlings next to me, and thought I’d just march through and snap photos of the dorsal surface of the abdomen. Then I’d repeat this procedure every couple of days, and at the end of it all I’d have photographic series of pigmentation changes over time in a developing set of spiders. Simple! Except…reality intrudes.

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A meme is born

Karl Rove once said this.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

And now…Donald Trump is making that attitude manifest in so many ways.

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