Scroogey. Very scroogey.

Well, the Republicans did it again.

Three buses dropped off dozens of migrants near Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington D.C. as the area experienced record low temperatures on Saturday night, per NBC News.

About 140 migrants from countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean arrived in D.C. from Texas, Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network organizer Madhvi Bahl told NBC News, calling the incident “awful.”

Some of the migrants that arrived had to battle the 18-degree weather wearing only t-shirts, according to CNN, and they were eventually given blankets and taken to local shelters in the area.

I’m not sure what game they’re playing. Is it “Be cartoonishly villainous”? Is it “Let Democrats be humane and kind”? Whatever game it is, could they please stop using innocent human beings as their pawns?

It seems the most likely asshole behind this cruel stunt is, of course, the governor of Texas. He isn’t issuing any denials, which is a little bit damning, and he isn’t claiming credit, because he knows it’s wicked. He probably spent his childhood pulling the wings off flies and hiding the evidence from his mom.

The White House placed the blame on Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has sent busses of migrants to northern cities in the past, though it has not been confirmed that Abbott send the buses that wound up at Harris’ residence. In a statement, the White House called the deployment of the buses a “cruel, dangerous and shameful stunt.”

Somebody needs to explain to the Republicans that the callous factory owners and poor house managers in Dickens novels were the bad guys.

Elon Musk has ascended to avatar status

We watched Glass Onion this weekend. It’s good, entertaining, a little bit off-kilter compared to most whodunnits, and expresses a contemporary point of view that’s clearly becoming more common. Most of the cast are playing the true detritus of society — influencers, fashion models, vapid sportsball types, etc. — and most of them aren’t very likeable. They’re spending a weekend at an extravagantly appointed Greek island that a ridiculously rich posturing fool, Miles Bron, had purchased, when, of course, murder occurs, and the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc has to figure out who the killer is. The key to the case is when he realized that he had assumed, like everyone else, that Miles Bron was a complicated genius. After all, he’s very very very rich. But the break in the case comes when he realizes that…Miles Bron is an idiot.

As were most of the people at this party. That’s not really a spoiler, because early on you should realize yourself that most of the likely killers are stupid and superficial.

You’ll probably also instantly recognize Miles Bron as a proxy for Elon Musk. Tech billionaire who clearly doesn’t understand anything? Elon Musk. Elon has become an archetype! Lots of people have noted that resemblance, but it’s not quite true (warning: there are actual spoilers at that link).

It all makes Miles Bron the perfect villain for 2022: a tycoon far dumber than he realizes.

Thanks to recent headlines, for many viewers, Bron’s mixture of bluster, hubris and half-baked ideas will likely bring to mind Twitter owner and part-time car enthusiast Elon Musk. But, as Norton has noted, he and writer-director Rian Johnson based Bron on multiple (unnamed) real-life billionaires and tech figures, not one specific person. The movie’s root conflict — Bron’s ouster of Helen’s sister Cassandra (Monáe) from the company they co-founded based on Cassandra’s idea — evokes Mark Zuckerberg’s battles in building Facebook. His proselytizing for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology — in this case, an unstable hydrogen fuel — recalls Elizabeth Holmes. His wardrobe of T-shirts and necklaces suggests Sam Bankman-Fried and other casually attired entrepreneurs.

Like all these figures, Bron is utterly convinced of his own genius. He speaks passionately of being a “disrupter.” He portrays himself as an innovator, even though he stole his co-founder’s ideas. His island is only accessible via a glass dock that looks impressive, but is only accessible at low tide, with the local police referring to it as a “piece of s—.” He brushes aside warnings that his hydrogen fuel is too unstable — heedlessness that literally blows up in his face.

This is a promising cultural shift, that many people are coming around to the realization, like Benoit Blanc, that billionaires are just greedy, wicked, dumbasses. It’s the one good thing Musk has accomplished.

Scanning…

For Christmas, my wife and I got a new dishwasher, and I also scanned in a lot of old photos for her. Here’s my mother- and father-in-law in the 1940s.

He was a Marine. Fought in the Pacific. Won a few medals for it, too.

For meritorious service in connection with operations against the enemy while serving with a marine infantry battalion on Iwo Jima, Volcano islands Feb.27, 1945. The light machinegun section of which Cpl. Gjerness was section leader was attached to a rifle platoon assaulting a vital ridge commanding the approaches to Hill 362. The platoon was repulsed by a superior enemy fire. The platoon again assault the ridge, this time suffering heavy casualties, among them the platoon leader. The platoon became disorganized. Cpl. Gjerness, realizing the severity of the situation, and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, took charge of the platoon and through his courageous leadership the platoon was orderly withdrawn and the wounded were evacuated with the highest traditions of the U.S. naval service.

Whoa, I don’t care for that “disregard for his own personal safety” bit. He had an obligation to get home and father my wife 12 years later.

Merry humbug

I don’t have much Christmas spirit left. There hardly seems much point when you’ve got no religion and your kids have grown up and moved away, and so many of the aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters you used to share a groaning table with have gone and died. It’s mainly a wistful echo of a holiday to me anymore.

There’s still one thing to bring me a little Christmas joy, though. No matter how depressed I might get, I’ll never get as bitter and spiteful and nasty over the holidays as a conservative Christian. Behold, I bring to you the gift of Kevin Sorbo and some well-fleshed grinning skulls at Newsmax sharing their gift of ludicrous resentment.

President Joe Biden talks about the Christmas myth of following a star to a child, the Son of God, bringing hope, joy, and peace. At his speech at the lighting of the national Christmas tree, he says the banned (according to Trump, anyway) word “Christmas” a half dozen times, and says “God bless you all, and may God protect our troops.” Yet smug announcer claims he was dancing around to avoid the religious sentiment, and the other one claims it was empty of the meaning of Christmas, and Kevin Sorbo responds by claiming the Democrats are hypocrites for not mentioning Jesus and leaving Christ out…and then plugs his new movie a couple of times.

Don’t worry, they move on to the true meaning of the holiday, which is about buying toys for the kids and complaining about teenagers and their cell phones.

That made me feel better about this cold dismal holiday. We’ve won the War on Christmas, and our opposition is reduced to joyless, bitter anger over their own holiday.

All right! I’ll now leave with the gift of advice: the most important thing for weathering the current icy cold is…warm dry socks. Keep your feet warm and you’ll feel so much better. I speak from experience — I went for a walk yesterday in the -25°C air with 30mph winds, a bad idea, I tell you, and a chill settled into the bones of my feet that made me miserable all day long. Be smarter than me!

I didn’t want to know more about Caroline Ellison after all

We’re learning more about Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried’s partner in crime. Some of it is kind of cute. She was a math nerd!

The daughter of esteemed economists — her father, Glenn Ellison, is currently the head of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her mother, Sara Fischer Ellison, is an economics department lecturer at the university — she grew up outside of Boston, in a household filled with numbers. While other kids were playing with Lego, Ellison was learning about Bayesian statistics before middle school; one year, rather than write her father a birthday card, she presented him with an economic study of stuffed animal prices at Toys ‘R’ Us. “We definitely got exposed to a lot of economics,” Ellison previously told Forbes in an interview.

A natural mathematician, high school was a laboratory for Ellison’s love of numbers and she competed multiple times in the Math Prize for Girls, the national contest that draws the country’s brightest young minds. But her interests went far beyond math, and as a senior, she received an honorable mention in a linguistics olympiad. She also loved books—her parents read her the first Harry Potter book when she was 3, she said, then she read the second one on her own at age 5. (She has apparently described herself as a Ravenclaw.)

So far, that’s cool — I can’t hold the Harry Potter fandom against her, since lots of people got into that in her youth. But then her biography takes a darker turn.

By the time Ellison arrived at Stanford as a math major in 2012, her professional ambitions were taking shape, and while adjusting to college life, she took to Tumblr to publish her daily musings. The now-deleted blog, called WorldOptimization, is unsigned but a close associate confirmed that it was hers. In it, she wrote that “the sexual revolution was a mistake” and that she believed “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers.” She also mused about race science, in one post saying the “genetic differences there are massive” when it comes to Indian people from different provinces and castes — which has become a source of discrimination in Silicon Valley. And at the top of her list of “~cute boy things~” was “controlling most major world governments.”

Oh god. So she wasn’t so bright after all. Just another privileged white person with a battery of misconceptions and a poor understanding of the sciences.

Quaintly evil

If you ever had any doubts that Shi Huang was a freakin’ racist, behold his latest Twitter admissions.

Whether there is a superior race is a scientific question and can only be answered by highly qualified geneticists after a thorough scientific investigation. For lay people to have a no answer to such a question prior to investigation is bizarre, non-scientific, and pure politics

People have been pushing this racist notion of a “superior race” for centuries, and it’s clearly been an example of motivated reasoning — people trying to justify colonialism and slavery. There is no point to investigating “scientifically” when it’s patently counterfactual. I question whether Shi Huang is a highly qualified geneticist, since he then goes on to justify his claim with a childish caricature of evolutionary theory.

Evolution has a progressive direction from simple to complex or from more random noise within the system to less noise, which is what science has found out, at least my science. This would put human at the top. The same logic would equally apply to different people.

Humans at the top, huh, because they have less random noise. You know, the human genome is full of random noise and garbage and selfish DNA, but bacteria, like E. coli, don’t have introns or massive chunks of repetitive DNA and all the functional genes are packed efficiently and tightly. By the criterion of “noise,” bacteria would be at the top and humans at the bottom. Even by his own fallacious reasoning he’s wrong!

This ‘great chain of being’ model of evolution is so totally 19th century (or older) stuff. No one believes it anymore, except for a lot of ignorant racists.

He’s going to have a tough time getting published in Nature again. Oh well, there’s always Quillette!

Boo hoo, PragerU

Dennis Prager is unhappy that some of his fans don’t get to see their grown children on Christmas. Tragic.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of men and women who, because of political differences, maintain minimal or no contact with their parents and, even more cruelly, do not allow their parents to have any contact with their children—their parents’ grandchildren.
…
I know of this firsthand. Parent after parent calls my radio show, often close to tears, sometimes actually sobbing, pouring their heart out to me about being alone on holidays despite having children and grandchildren.

In virtually every case, the parent is conservative, and the child is on the Left. I assume there are cases of grown conservative children who won’t allow a liberal/Left parent to see his or her grandchildren—but I have never heard of a single such case. It is almost impossible to imagine a conservative adult depriving his or her parents of access to their grandchildren because the parent(s) voted for Joe Biden. Moreover, if there were such a person, every conservative I know would vociferously condemn this individual.

Awww. Don’t you realize that it is a religious imperative — it’s right there in the Ten Commandments — that you are required to honor your parents, without regard for whether they honor you or not? It’s an absolute rule. Your parents can be hateful bigots, they can have neglected or abused you, they can be preaching prejudiced ideas that do great harm to others, but you must place your children in their claws for Christmas. You have no choice in the matter, nor do your kids, because choice and consent are dirty words to the Pragers of the world. Shall we consider that maybe those sobbing grandparents are deprived of contact with their grandchildren because they are poisonous vipers who want to indoctrinate the kiddies with evil ideas? No, we shall not. The problem lies entirely with those damned liberal parents.

Prager gives three reasons why evil leftists are entirely at fault for making their parents cry.

Reason #1 is basically authoritarian absolutism. Thou shalt not question the orders of the preacher Lord!

The further left you go, the less likely you are to believe that you are accountable to an absolute moral code, let alone to a Giver of an absolute moral code. On the other hand, conservatives, certainly religious conservatives—people who believe in a God-given Ten Commandments—believe that they are obligated to honor their parents regardless of their political differences.

No, we Leftists do have moral values — we just don’t accept the unquestioned authority of a holy book, especially not when it’s a self-serving commandment that panders to the authority of old people, and especially not old people who have made questionable moral decisions. Shouldn’t a universal moral code be one that even people who do not follow a narrow religious sect can accept? “Honor your parents” doesn’t work as a blind precept, because some parents don’t deserve honor.

A parent who endorses the politics of hatred, as Republicans do, should legitimately be disowned. You want to say that gays should be killed, brown people deported, atheists (and anyone who follows a different sect than yours) is evil? Then no, you don’t get to play with my kids. Perfectly fair.

Reason #2 is a strange one, and a good reason to avoid people like Prager: it’s because atheists do not have a conscience and are evil, and that’s why they make Grandma cry.

The Left proves the utter inadequacy of the conscience. To cite the present example, the adult children who deprive their conservative parents of contact with the parents’ grandchildren have a perfectly clear conscience. All those secular people—including secular conservatives—who argue that God is unnecessary because it is enough for people to answer to their conscience are spectacularly naïve. The consciences of most people who do evil are blissfully untroubled.

They don’t even care that they are making their parents unhappy! To the contrary, if I’d had to cut off my parents’ access to my kids, I’d have felt terrible about it, and would have suffered pangs of guilt (fortunately, that was never a problem in my family, and I wish my kids could have spent more time with their grandparents). The reason someone may sever communication with a parent is precisely because they have a conscience and a set of moral values that find the ideas of an older generation repugnant.

Reason #3 is even stranger and more absurd. It’s college. Conservatives really have a hate-on for education.

You almost have to be a college graduate to shun your parents and deprive them of their grandchildren because of political differences. If you had asked most of these college graduates before they enrolled in college who, because of political differences, won’t see their parents for Christmas if they could imagine never talking to their parents because of political differences, most of them would probably have deemed the question absurd. After four years of college indoctrination—essentially consisting of hatred of nonleftists—the question is no longer absurd.

No, what happens is that kids escape their parents’ control, and learn that Mommy & Daddy’s moral and religious code isn’t the only one out there — they learn to think for themselves and discover that there is a world of ideas that aren’t as blinkered and narrow and oppressive. They might just wake up to the fact that the gay-bashing and transphobia and racism and greed they were brought up with are bad ideas. They may even still love their parents, but just regret how they treat others, and not want their own children to have that kind of bias instilled in them.

It’s not that the more liberal offspring are the problem. It’s the nasty opinionated hidebound kinds of people who would call in to cry on the shoulders of a conservative wretch like Dennis Prager who are terrible role models for anyone’s kids.