oh god it’s thursday

Shortly, I start talking and encouraging students to talk back and I don’t stop until, probably, around 3. This is unnatural and exhausting. I don’t even get a chance to spend some quiet time with some charming spiders. I’m gonna be done with this communicatin’ stuff at the end of the day.

The good news is that my course load is stacked up this way to leave me totally free on Fridays. I will recover overnight and withdraw into my laboratory lair and spend the whole day chittering with spiders.

It sure is good to be a white dude

This is David Surman. He’s the 32 year old owner of a chemical company who, with his girlfriend, drove around Bucks County in Pennsylvania throwing small bombs out of his car window, creating loud explosions and small craters. The two of them were finally caught, arrested, and convicted.

Surman pleaded guilty Monday to possession and manufacturing of a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to possessing and manufacturing a weapon of mass destruction. He also pleaded guilty to criminal use of a communication facility and unlawful use of a computer for a large cache of child pornography detectives found on an external hard drive while investigating the bombs.

Wow. Yikes. You might wonder what a fitting sentence for such a pair might be.

4½ years probation for the girlfriend, Surman got 1-2 years in county prison. He argued that he merely “acted with immaturity”.

Woohoo! White justice!

When did you first suspect you were being trolled by fake news?

The recent coronavirus outbreak is serious news and an important concern for world health. It seems there is no worry so great that someone won’t find a way to exploit it. Australians have been getting dire warnings to avoid certain places and certain foods because they have ‘positive readings’ for coronavirus; one clue is that they also try to paint Chinese immigrants as tainted, to get the clueless racists to bite. The Australian health service had to make a statement that these were bogus claims.

A spokeswoman for NSW Health said: “NSW Health has been made aware of a social media post that is being widely circulated warning people to not consume certain foods or visit certain locations in Sydney.
“This post has not originated from NSW Health or any entity relating to us. Further, there is no such entity as the ‘Department of Diseasology Parramatta’.
“NSW Health would like to assure the community that the locations mentioned in this post pose no risk to visitors, and there have been no ‘positive readings’ at train stations.”

Diseasology? Seriously? I get the impression that the trolls don’t respect their victims at all.


Oh, wait! This isn’t the dumbest troll yet. QAnon is telling everyone they can stave off the coronavirus threat by drinking bleach.

As the global death toll from an alarming new coronavirus surged this week, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were urging their fans to ward off the illness by purchasing and drinking dangerous bleach.

The substance—dubbed “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “MMS”—has long been promoted by fringe groups as a combination miracle cure and vaccine for everything from autism to cancer and HIV/AIDS.

It’s a wonder that conspiracy theorists and medical quacks haven’t already gone extinct. Maybe this will do it.

Now I know what spies for China can expect to be paid

Charles Lieber, a Harvard chemist, has been arrested for working with the Chinese. My first thought was that this is terrible, science is an international enterprise, we value cooperation and the sharing of information, and working with the Chinese people and other international students is exactly what a respected scientist at a university ought to be doing. I have students from China in my classes, I think it’s great that they are here and learning.

I think that’s going to be part of the defense strategy. It’s government paranoia, part of a campaign of hostility against China.

Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer who has represented Chinese Americans accused of espionage, said in an email that the Justice Department “has launched an all-out war on any U.S. scientist associated with the 1000 Talent or other Chinese Talent programs.”

He said that is a major shift in U.S. practice after years of lax scrutiny of the issue.

“The government is now expecting perfect compliance for scientists who received no training on how these forms needed to be filled out and no warnings about the dangers of submitting an inaccurate form,” Zeidenberg said. “Treating these mistakes as felonies is entirely inappropriate.”

Except, well, ‘not knowing how to fill out a form’ is a bad tactic when you’re defending one of the most successful scientists in the world, at one of the richest universities in the world. He can probably figure it out, and if not, there is certainly a team of well-paid administrators at Harvard who could figure it out for him.

Then I read the actual charges. He had a contract with the Wuhan University of Technology.

I about choked. He was personally paid $50K per month, handed $150K per year for personal expenses, and awarded a $1.5 million grant? All that was on top of his Harvard salary, which wasn’t stated, but is probably a healthy sum. Man, I’m wondering how I can get on the Chinese spy payroll all of a sudden, because those numbers are not what you get paid for academic work. Just the fact that he’s being given $750K per year as his own cash to swim around in in his vault is abnormal and suspicious, and then we learn that it was all under the table, and he didn’t tell anyone about his secret contract.

The Justice Department says Lieber, 60, lied about his contact with the Chinese program known as the Thousand Talents Plan, which the U.S. has previously flagged as a serious intelligence concern. He also is accused of lying about about a lucrative contract he signed with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.

In an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Plumb said Lieber, who led a Harvard research group focusing on nanoscience, had established a research lab at the Wuhan university — apparently unbeknownst to Harvard.

Universities care about this stuff. Every year I get a little form sent around that I have to fill out, which is basically asking if I’m moonlighting at anything, am I getting paid on the side. They are paying me a salary for full-time work 9 months out of the year; it’s OK if I’m bringing in summer salary, for instance, but they want to know about it, because they want to know that I regard them as my primary employer. If I were to mention that the Chinese government was paying me 10 times what the Minnesota state government was coughing up, they might suspect a conflict of interest.

Lieber lied about his affiliations. Further, and quite amusingly, when WUT started touting their connections to Harvard, Lieber was frantically contacting them to shush, that he was working with them, but Harvard was not, so ix-nay on the Arvard-hay talk, or they’ll catch on.

This ain’t about international cooperation and scientific values, it’s about a greedy American being bought by the Chinese government and lying about it. Throw the book at him.

Maybe the legal strategy of claiming that he was too stupid to fill out a form properly is his best bet after all.

It’s going to be a long semester

Tuesdays I have a morning class and an afternoon lab; sandwiched in between was a discipline meeting. I think I’m plum wore out today.

Just to make it more awful, the first genetics assignment is due tomorrow, and I made an awful hash of it, trying to juggle multiple textbook editions, so the students are all confused. So I made an announcement that the assignment is basically cancelled, ignore everything I said, and I’ll come in tomorrow with a whole new problem set that we’ll work on together. What a mess. I’m exhausted just thinking of sorting it all out.

Dishing out ALL the dirt

Oh, this is going to be fun. Mark your calendar and keep the evening of Sunday 23 February open, because we’re doing a grand celebratory hangout, since we’re finally out from under that ridiculous law suit by Richard Carrier.

By now, you may know that Richard Carrier dropped his remaining SLAPP suits in November. If you read the settlement agreement, you’ll see he even explicitly said we are free to talk about the allegations and the suit without incurring more legal hassle from him. So we’re going to do that.

Save the date for the evening of February 23. We’ve rested, we’ve let the news sink in, and we’re ready to talk. We’ll bring you more news soon as we work out technical details for live streaming and confirm special guests. In the meantime, however, just know that our lips are legally unsealed. We can talk. We will talk.

Yes, we will. We are angry at the unjust and self-servingly stupid behavior by Richard Carrier, and we plan to vent. We have unfair debts imposed on us, and oh boy, are we ready to flame that jerk.

Related: Rebecca Watson has a few words to say about these abusive defamation lawsuits…in this case, about Lawrence Lessig. Fuck ’em all.