James Watson is dead at 97

That’s a good long life, so there’s that at least. But otherwise, let this be an object lesson to everyone: you can make marvelous discoveries and launch science in bold new directions, but if you treat people badly, that’s what you’re going to be remembered for. The Washington Post even brought it up.

Dr. Watson also was known for his unsparing, even mean-spirited candor when commenting on the personalities and rivalries at the cutting edge of science. A longtime colleague at Harvard, eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson, called him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met” and compared him to Roman emperor Caligula, the mad degenerate who fancied himself a god.

I have to paraphrase an old and familiar joke:

So a man walks into a bar, and sits down. He starts a conversation with an old guy next to him. The old guy has obviously had a few. He says to the man:

“You see that lab out there? Built it myself, recruited the staff, and it’s the best lab in town! But do they call me “Watson, the lab builder”? No!”
“And you see that book over there, I wrote that, number one bestseller in the country! But do they call me “Watson the author”? No!”
“And you see that double helix over there? I figured that out, took me years, against the resistance of the establishment, but do they call me “Watson the co-discoverer of DNA? No!”

The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says:

“but you peddle a lot of racist and sexist ideas…”

I do have to say, though, that I met his wife, Elizabeth, who seemed very nice and struggled to get Jim to shut up, and I feel sorry for her. She seemed to care very much for him, and I hope she’s coping well.

Inspector Clouseau is still employed, I see

Computer security is not an issue Clouseau has thought about much, I guess.

At the time of the brazen heist of $102 million in jewels from the Louvre last month, the password to the world-famous museum’s video surveillance system was simply “Louvre,” according to a museum employee with knowledge of the system.

Awesome. I wonder if the password to the vault at Fort Knox is “FORTKNOX”. Someone should try it.

They are trying so hard to come up with excuses for how this could have happened.

The Louvre director told French lawmakers, “The security system, as installed in the Apollo Gallery, worked perfectly. The question that arises is how to adapt this system to a new type of attack and modus operandi that we could not have foreseen.”

They could not have foreseen that a taxi driver, a delivery man, and garbage collector could have been so sophisticated to back a cherry picker up to an upstairs window and hack through with some power tools. It’s so crude and simple that no one could have imagined pulling it off!

A neglected (or hidden) history

Juan Cole makes an interesting point in light of Mamdani campaigning partly in Arabic.

Because so many Arabic speakers have immigrated to the United States since the end of the old Nazi-like immigration quotas in 1965, many Americans may think of Arabic as recent language in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Because he thought he was going to land in Muslim-ruled Asia, Columbus brought along interpreters on his voyage, including Luis de Torres, who knew some Arabic. De Torres was of Jewish heritage, but by then all Jews and Muslims in Spain during the reconquista had been forced to at least pretend to convert to Catholicism. It is likely that the first words a European said to a Native American chieftain in Cuba were “as-Salamu `alaykum,” Arabic for “peace be upon you.”

Wait a moment…but farther north, the first Old World greeting a Native American would have heard might have been in Old Norse. But they were white, so American audiences would be unsurprised.

Alternatively, the first greeting might have been an axe to the face, because Vikings might have exercised raiding extincts, rather than trying to be neighborly. (Columbus turned out to be rather nasty himself — first contact, no matter who it was, could be ugly.)

Of course, those Norwegian settlements proved to be temporary, and Scandinavians did a poor job of colonization until the 19th century, when my great-great-grandparents finally made it over the Atlantic. Muslim settlers had a better record.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims fled Spain rather than convert. While most went to North Africa, it is clear from the genetic record that many covertly went to the New World:

“Oteo-Garcia and his colleagues conclude . . . that the Arab and Berber heritage is much higher in Latin American than in contemporary Valencia, which shows that a lot of Moriscos must have exited to the New World (even though that was supposedly against the law at the time). They write, “One final point, highlighted by the survival of North African-related ancestry in substantial proportions until the seventeenth century, is the widespread presence of such ancestry in present-day South Americans ”
Karoline Cook points to the way Moriscos were perceived by Spaniards in the New World as having useful artisanal skills, such that they sought to bring them over. Some were brought as slaves and never sent back.”

The territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California thus had Arabic-speakers, many of them crypto-Muslims, for generations — throughout the 1500s and 1600s. One Arab woman from a crypto-Muslim community in Spain who married a Spanish gentleman and was taken to Mexico City, Maria Ruiz, ended up being tried by the Inquisition in the late 1500s for having retained her Muslim beliefs.

Isn’t it curious how Americans avidly gobbled up the idea that Leif Erickson and his merry band were early European visitors to the Americas, but this is the first I’ve heard of Arabic-speaking brown people adapting and thriving in these continents in the sixteenth century?

I got my sticker!

Yesterday, I took advantage of the university health clinic to get both my flu shot and my COVID shot. The important part is that I got my sticker.

Today, my right arm (flu shot) is fine, but my left (COVID) hurts like heck, and I’m feeling a general malaise…but it’s not as bad as previous COVID vaccinations. Maybe my body is getting accustomed to them. It’s still going to be a good day to take it easy.

Support a scientist!

I’m surprised that Siouxsie Wiles has had to fight with her own university — after she’d been fighting the good fight for science for so many years and striving against the ignorance of anti-vaxxer. The University of Auckland failed in it’s obligation to protect and support its employees, and that’s not just my opinion, since the courts definitively agreed with her.

Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles‘ employer breached its contractual obligations to protect her health and safety in the wake of harassment she experienced as a result of her work, an Employment Court judgment today has found.
The long-awaited judgment comes around two-and-a-half years after she and then University of Auckland employee Professor Shaun Hendy initially filed their claim with the Employment Relations Authority in January 2022.

Dr Wiles alleged the university failed to protect her from a “tsunami of threats” she received for her public commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic. She said she had raised concerns to the university about her safety since April 2020, shortly after the pandemic began.

The university has denied unjustifiably disadvantaging Wiles, breaching their agreement or its statutory obligations. It said it had also acted in good faith towards her. However, the Employment Court’s judgment does not agree.

She won! Unfortunately, as I know from ugly past experience, trials are absurdly costly. She won…but what she won, in addition to a moral victory, was $400,000 in court costs. Rebecca Watson is rallying her followers to help her out.

I’ll join in that call! Go to this site to donate to Siouxsie’s court costs!

Kim Kardashian news

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting to hear what Kim Kardashian has been up to. Apparently, she has landed a leading role on a new television series (honestly, I didn’t need to read the review to know I have no interest in watching it), but I did learn something new. Kardashian is a moon landing denier! I shouldn’t be surprised, since she was married to Kanye West, but I’m supposed to keep track of looney conspiracy theories and missed that one.

Fortunately, NASA shut her down this time.

But it’s one thing to purchase a billionaire’s (breathable and stylish, hand to God!) product and another to buy into the skewed version of reality they’re promoting. We can laugh at the conspiracy-minded lunacy Kardashian touted on a recent episode of “The Kardashians,” but the fact that NASA had to publicly and officially refute what she said tells us plenty about the times in which we’re living. NASA does a lot more than plant flags on lunar surfaces. It undertakes vital scientific research that is at risk of being defunded under an administration more devoted to bathroom renovations than functional progress.

But I have something to add to the legend of Kim Kardashian. NASA may have rebuffed her, but guess who wants her to join his “research team”?

Kim Kardashian is welcome to join my research team on 3I/ATLAS
— Avi Loeb

Is anyone surprised? She has negative research qualifications, but she is loaded with empty PR potential, which is all dear Avi wants. Sign her up!

I get email…from the Daily Wire

Usually, I just ignore anything from Ben Shapiro and Co., but this time I was tempted by the headline, Mamdani’s Party: NYC’s New Mayor Celebrates Win By Channeling America’s Marxist Icon. Who would that be, I wondered. I had to read the rest.

Moments after being declared the winner of the New York City mayoral race, Democrat socialist Zohran Mamdani opened his victory speech with a nod to one of the most infamous radicals in American history.

Oooh. He was quoting infamous radicals? Tell me more.

Mamdani, 34, quoted Eugene Debs, a far-Left activist from the early 20th century who was stripped of his American citizenship after being convicted of sedition in 1918. Like Debs, Mamdani has embraced radical policies, including broad promises to provide a range of free services to New Yorkers.

“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” Mamdani quoted Debs as saying.

The Daily Wire is afraid of Eugene Debs, well known Midwestern trade unionist and pacifist, and inspiration to Bernie Sanders? But of course they are. They don’t want a better day for humanity, they want a better day for billionaires.

Debs, who supported the violent communist revolution in Russia in 1917 and was deeply influenced by Karl Marx, had his citizenship restored by a joint resolution of Congress in the 1970s. From 1900 to 1920, Debs ran for president five times. He described capitalism as a “monstrous system” and said that his Socialist Party was defined by a “militant” spirit and “revolutionary” goals.

Debs was right. Not that Ben Shapiro cares about truth.

Debs campaigned for equality and against violence and war. He did run for president 5 times, because he believed in the electoral process. He was a pacifist in the run-up to WWI, which earned him the enmity of Woodrow Wilson — who was a terrible person and president, and pissing off Wilson was a mark of honor. Wilson had him charged with sedition. and he was sentenced to ten years in prison for it. Those years ruined his health and he died during the Depression, when everyone could see the failure of capitalism.

Debs made a passionate speech at his sentencing.

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions…

Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means…

Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison…

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.

In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…

I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all…

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth.

There are today upwards of sixty millions of Socialists, loyal, devoted adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color, or sex. They are all making common cause. They are spreading with tireless energy the propaganda of the new social order. They are waiting, watching, and working hopefully through all the hours of the day and the night. They are still in a minority. But they have learned how to be patient and to bide their time. The feel—they know, indeed—that the time is coming, in spite of all opposition, all persecution, when this emancipating gospel will spread among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greates social and economic change in history.

In that day we shall have the universal commonwealth—the harmonious cooperation of every nation with every other nation on earth…

Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.

I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

That man could speechify. I’d vote for him in a minute.

If only there were a faction within the Democratic party that actually represented Eugene Debs’ values…but of course they’d be vilified as godless commies by the Right.