When I picture Hell, it looks like Dubai

I have a long list of places I’d like to visit, but am aware I’ll probably never get the opportunity: Florence, Italy; Lagos, Nigeria; both Antarctica and the far North; Istanbul (but that one scares me, I’d probably get arrested); and many others. I’m fortunate that I have been able to visit the Galapagos Islands, Beijing, China, and a scattering of places in Europe. If I had infinite money, I’d probably be flying off to a new place every week.

But one place I never, ever want to see is Dubai. My infinite money has a limit, and that limit stops cold at hellholes of vast wealth (I know, that’s a contradiction, but I will never have infinite, or even large amounts, of money, but Dubai actually does exist.) One journalist visited the place and now regrets it.

I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.

I am ashamed to have visited. There are some experiences that journalism cannot excuse. I add nothing to the record by having gone. I thought the trip would present a grotesque tapestry that might disclose some new truth about the reordering of the world. It got the better of me. I imagined a gonzo-style reveal about ordering a mojito in Russian from an Indian barman while gazing towards Iran. All of this is possible, but none of it makes my visit worthwhile.

That’s about how I feel about the place. It’s an abomination, the end result of shameful wealth inequity, and I have no empathy to share with the rich tourists who fly there to do…what? I don’t know.

Guess who else is in the Epstein files?

Rebecca Watson.

The context: it’s because Lawrence Krauss was getting clobbered by Watson over his abuses, and he wrote to Epstein asking for advice, because who better to ask for assistance than a convicted pedophile?

The Epstein files also include lots of examples of Krauss sucking up to Epstein, begging for money, and minimizing the reports of sexual abuse that were separately affecting both of them. Watson isn’t going to be hurt by this, but jesus, Krauss’s reputation is going to take an even bigger hit than it already had.

Bonus: Epstein is revealed as a scientific ignoramus.

Visit beautiful Utqiaġvik!

Seriously, I’d love to visit the high Arctic. Utqiaġvik (formerly called Barrow) is the northernmost point of the United States, dangling on a small peninsula on the northern edge of Alaska. The sunset the other day was the last they’ll see for a few months, so it’s cold, remote, and dark, the kind of place I wouldn’t mind living in. The population size is about the same as the place I live in now.

I’m never going to get to visit it, though, so I’ll have to settle for the Utqiaġvik Sea Ice Webcam. You too can visit that website and observe the slow progression of darkness and ice in the Arctic. Well, maybe — right now it’s continuously dark.

You can also check out the sea ice radar and see what the ice is doing. It’s a little more lively than the town.

Ken Ham makes an admission

Daniel Phelps has been tracking attendance at Ken Ham’s roadside attraction for many years, and as you might expect, it’s a highly variable number, but in general it’s had a slight downward trend. This is unsurprising, because it’s not a particularly interesting place, since it’s promoting a tired old set of myths and there are no dramatic changes to get the people’s attention. There can’t be — the whole point of Answers in Genesis is that the facts have all been laid out in a centuries-old Bible, and anything mere men might propose as novel is wrong. They have to keep churning out pointless new attractions to keep their audience satisfied.

The decline has become so noticeable that even Ken Ham is compelled to acknowledge it.

As you have likely seen, travel and tourism have been down across the nation this year due to previous years’ economic impact. And as the Bible reminds us, “It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and for the unclean; for the man who offers a sacrifice and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good man is, so is the sinner; as the swearer is, so is the one who is afraid to swear. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:2–3 LSB)

And so yes, the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum have been affected too. Because summer is our peak season, we use that time to put away funds to enable us to get through the slower times of winter (January–April). But this year, we weren’t able to do that to the degree we have in the past. Now, the good news is many experts are predicting things will get back closer to “normal” next year, and we are seeing improvements as we approach the end of the year.

Oh, gosh, the downturn in attendance is Biden’s fault, which is pure nonsense. The tourism industry will tell you that the election of Trump was a real shock to their business. I wouldn’t expect it to bounce back next year — I think we’re sliding into a pit of failure that can’t improve as long as the demented idiot at the top is batting the economy back and forth.

AiG is making changes in response. They’re selling off a quarter share in their company jet. We’re all tightening our belts! They’re also begging even harder for donations, with a $20 million fundraising goal. There are still plenty of gullible people in the country, and maybe his hope is that when Trump demolishes the educational system our population of morons, his people, will rise.

They will always have an excuse.

The most suspicious creeps among us

They even dress the part of criminal thugs

The police just busted a sex trafficking ring in Bloomington, Minnesota — a dozen men were caught in the act of trying to coerce sex out of a minor. Among the arrested was a revelation: who would be the person most aware of vulnerable individuals? Who is normally protected by the police and is able to freely extort and threaten people? Who would really be a great benefit to a criminal organization, who was used to trampling on the rights of people? You guessed it.

One of the men, he said, is an employee for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who could face federal charges. Hodges said the ICE employee works as an auditor.

“When he was arrested, he said, ‘I’m ICE, boys,'” Hodges said during a press conference Tuesday. “Well, unfortunately for him, we locked him up.”

It is amusing that he thought announcing that he was ICE was a get-out-of-jail-free card. If I had my way we’d just automatically arrest every ICE officer and strip them of their position.

We shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a glimmering of justice

Twenty years ago, Larry Summers gave his infamous speech in which he declared that the shortage of women in science was due to their intellectual deficiencies — women just weren’t smart enough to succeed in science. It was all part of a disturbing favor for genetic determinism that still afflicts science.

Just days before the 17 January national holiday, an African-American professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) charged that racism was a factor in his tenure denial. And on 14 January the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, triggered a national uproar when he said at an academic conference that genes and personal choices may help explain why so few women are leaders in science and engineering fields. Summers later apologized, but his contrite words aren’t expected to end the controversy.

No one denies that science and engineering faculty members at major research universities remain overwhelmingly white and male, despite large numbers of women and minorities at the undergraduate and graduate levels. But why this is the case is an explosive subject. Summers lit the fuse last week at a meeting on women and minorities in science and engineering, put on by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he cited data showing that more boys than girls score at the high and low ends on standardized math and science tests. Nearly simultaneously, MIT biologist James Sherley charged publicly that colleagues undervalue his research because he is black.

According to participants at the off-the-record NBER meeting, Summers argued that women typically do not work the 80-hour weeks common to professions like law, business, or science. And while noting that socialization and bias may slow the progress of women, he cited the gender variation in test scores as a possible explanation for the larger number of men at the top of the professional ladder.

It’s true that that stupid speech had consequences. A year later, that (and some financial conflicts of interest, but don’t we all expect that of economics/business guys? They’re an unethical bunch) led to him stepping down from his position as president of Harvard. But don’t worry for him, he then bounced right back, serving as Director of the White House United States National Economic Council under Obama, and more recently, he’s on the board of directors for OpenAI (another collection of lying opportunists who don’t even know what ethics is.) He’s still a tenured professor at Harvard.

Ironically, a writer for the Harvard Salient, a conservative student paper at that university is now defending Summers, claiming that his lecture on women’s inadequacy was the start of “cancel culture.”

Twenty years ago, Harvard President Lawrence Summers delivered a speech at an economics conference which, as a later Crimson article asserts, “started the war.” As a student in 2005, I viewed the event as a simple battle between open inquiry and political correctness. As an alum looking back, I see it as the debut of what we know today as cancel culture.

That’s sort of true, in that “cancel culture” has been mysteriously ineffective at delivering real consequences to its targets. Please, please, please…you can get me fired for being politically incorrect if afterwards I’m brought in to advise the president and to take a seat on a very wealthy board.

Well, Larry Summers might be paying the price soon, as the heat from his association with Jeffrey Epstein rises. He has made a shame-faced admission. He wants out of the limelight!

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” he told Politico in a statement.

“I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein. While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”

The left-leaning thinktank Center for American Progress told the Guardian that Summers is ending his position as “distinguished senior fellow”.

His comments come after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle urged companies and institutions to cut ties with Summers. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN that Summers should be held accountable for his years-long relationship with Epstein.

This should have happened twenty years ago. For some reason, a lot of people have maintained and sought out relationships with this old arrogant asshole, why, I don’t know. He was poison in 2005, people should have run away from any association with him at all. It took a few words from Epstein to finally kill his career. Also, why did the Center for American Progress affiliate with him at all?

It’s Republicans who demonstrate the greatest hypocrisy, though.

A senior Trump administration official told Politico that institutions should end their association with Summers, given the relationship he had with Epstein, who referred to himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man”.

“It’s shocking that Larry Summers remains a paid contributor to Bloomberg News, on the board of OpenAI and tenured at Harvard,” the anonymous source told Politico. “What more revelations about him and his “wing man” will it take for institutions to cut him loose? The British government immediately sacked their ambassador to the US over much less.”

Oh, really? He should have been denied various professional associations thanks to his friendly relationship with a known pedophile? Fine, I agree. Now apply the same reasoning to Epstein’s bestest buddy and fellow party animal, Donald Trump. What will it take for senior Trump administration officials to wake up and realize their boss is even more entangled in Epstein’s slimy web?

Zero surprise

Elon Musk declared that Wikipedia was “woke,” and started his own online encyclopedia titled “Grokipedia”. He was probably tempted to call it Xipedia, but decided to use a different ‘cool’ word. You will not be surprised that he chose the easy routed of stealing all of Wikipedia’s entries and dewokify it by spicing it up with racism. I’ll let someone else suffer the task of doing the actual comparisons.

In his latest quest to fix something far from broken, racist billionaire lunatic Elon Musk decided to unleash his own optimized version of Wikipedia, predictably named Grokipedia, onto the world this week. Now if, like Musk’s own children, you’re not a member of the Elon fan club, you can probably imagine why Musk took on this project. Here’s a man who purchased Twitter a few years ago specifically to refashion it into a neo-Nazi disinformation machine (check), insinuated himself with the second Trump administration so that he could hollow out the federal government (check), and designed electric cars that spontaneously combust, burning their liberal owners to death (check). There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y.

Plagiarism is not a mark of genius, if not being racist is all it takes to be “woke,” shouldn’t everyone aspire to be woke?

Cleaning up spam

PragerU has been flooding my in-box with trash lately.

No, I don’t give a good fucking goddamn about Dennis Prager’s personal life, I’ve never wondered what makes Dennis who he is (he’s yet another god-soaked authoritarian with a mission to ruin America), and it’s arroggant to presume anyone wants to know what makes him tick. We don’t, and shouldn’t, care.

Time to update the filters.

Life sometimes gets in the way

I was sorta disconnected yesterday. My router was down for most of the morning, but mainly, my wife had one of her infrequent days off from work. She has an erratic schedule, and seems to work approximately 6 days out of 7, and her days off are unpredictable. Working in elder care is one of those difficult and under-appreciated jobs that should be paid better but never will be.

So we took advantage of the time to get a lot of mundane things done.

  • We reorganized my home office, clearing out a lot of the clutter, moving the futon I never used to a different room. Now I actually have room to move!
  • Our clothes dryer wasn’t working. It turns out the vent was clogged, and we pulled it out of its niche to clear it, which was a revelation. This appliance was here when we moved in almost 25 years ago, and we’d never looked under or behind it until now. We finally discovered what happened to Mary’s favorite gardening hat. To put it in perspective, we found old Howard Dean signs that had fallen behind it.

  • We went shopping for a new bed. Mary has some minor respiratory issues, which means she often has to sit up in bed, so we’re looking for one of those fancy adjustable beds that will let us both be comfortable. I think it might be a Christmas gift to each other. I think we’re also sinking into degenerate decadence here in the waning years of the American empire.

    • It’s not supposed to be bent like that

  • I’m also looking for a bookshelf with doors — the evil cat destroyed a camera lens (an inexpensive one, fortunately) by flicking it off a shelf, so I need a cat-proof way to store electronics and camera gear. I’ve ordered one that will arrive next week. Until then, I’m hovering over my lens collection like a dragon over its hoard, and snarling if the cat approaches.
  • Of course I went into the lab to tend the spiders.
  • Mary restocked her bird feeders. My job was to hold the ladder.