That’s no Franken-sheep

What do you think happened in a story with this headline, “Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts”? Oooh, Franken-Sheep and animal parts…were they importing chopped up bits of animal corpses and stitching them together to make monster sheep? The story continues:

An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.

The “animal parts” are whole, intact embryos of Marco Polo sheep, a very large species, and then raising them to adulthood. He was basically smuggling in embryonic sheep, nothing particularly radical scientifically.

Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the U.S., he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.

“Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named ‘Montana Mountain King’ or MMK,” federal authorities wrote in a press release.

Then they collected semen from the adult sheep, and crossed them to domestic sheep, again, not at all radical scientifically. Somebody tried to jazz up the story with talk of animal parts and Franken-sheep, when it’s really a story about illegally importing an endangered species from its native range, and hybridizing them to produce a stock for profit. The story is bad enough without stuffing it full of misleading pseudoscience.

At least the guy behind the scheme got his comeuppance.

Schubart pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, and conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to acquire, transport or sell wildlife in contravention of federal law.

“This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” assistant Attorney General Todd Kim from the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a press release.

“In pursuit of this scheme, Schubarth violated international law and the Lacey Act, both of which protect the viability and health of native populations of animals,” Kim continued.

Yeah, and that’s the extra ugly twist here. They weren’t doing this to help the species — they were raising great big sheep on ranches so big game hunters could pay big money to shoot a large animal. On a farm. You know, real sportsman-like.

People are good at producing vomit all on their own

The last couple of posts were all about blaming AI for the decay of the internet. I must be fair and impartial, though: humans are also to blame.

For instance, Andrew Tate is in and out of jail and facing extradition from Romania. The only reason we know of that scumbag’s existence is thanks to the internet.

Tate and his brother are dual US-British nationals. Tate is a former kickboxer who has built up a massive social media following — 8.9 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter — by sharing misogynistic views about the role of women and masculinity.

He was previously banned from various prominent social media platforms for those views, but has been reinstated on X.

As far as I know, he had no assistance from AI — he built that empire with his own personal human hate-mongering.

It goes without saying that he “has been reinstated on X,” because Elon Musk is another human who is enabling more poisonous speech.

Another conservative grifter gets a legal slapping

It’s beginning to look like just being a Republican is an admission of guilty participation in a scam that netted millions of dollars. Justice has taken a small step in giving Wayne LaPierre of the NRA what he deserves.

After a bitterly fought six-week civil trial, a New York jury on Friday found ex-National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre liable for improperly spending millions of dollars of the pro-gun group’s money on luxuries such as private jet flights, extravagant vacations, and sun-soaked stays on private yachts.

LaPierre’s profligate ways violated his fiduciary duties and cost the NRA some $5.4 million, the jury determined. He has reimbursed the organization $1.5 million, thus far.

Jurors deliberated for five days before returning their verdict on the state’s allegations of brazen corruption by the 74-year-old LaPierre. In court, prosecutors from the New York State Attorney General’s Office laid out a broad array of evidence to demonstrate what they described as a high-living chief executive using the NRA as his own personal slush fund.

LaPierre delivered the most unlikely justification for his years of theft.

When questioned on the stand about receiving luxurious gifts including Italian suits worth nearly $300,000, LaPierre insisted he considered the clothes to have been “work items.”

“I did all the television for the NRA,” he testified, explaining that his publicist wanted him to look good onscreen.

Seriously, dude? You’re the most Lon Chaney looking motherfucker on the planet. You always looked like a raging lunatic, and you thought you were looking good?

For comparison purposes:

But seriously, he shouldn’t be penalized for being a funny-looking guy (neither should I!), and being convicted of embezzling is the least of his crimes. He should be imprisoned for his long career of promoting mass murder and irresponsible gun ownership.

Let’s all get disappointed in humanity

I thought everyone knew by now that the whole “bumfight” concept was repugnant and deplorable, but it seems to have gotten some new life from technology. A few sick people are harassing unhoused people with drones. See, bullying in total safety! There’s an amazing amount of cowardice behind this behavior.

The TikTok account was called “BumsnDrones,” and its previous name was “Bad2TheDrone.” Similar accounts are active on YouTube and Instagram under the same name, and a new account with the “BumsnDrones” name was active on TikTok as of Friday evening.

…

In two separate videos, the drone hovers above individuals for an unspecified period of time and distance and appears to provoke them by flying up and down. Other videos show individuals throwing projectiles at the unmanned aircraft system, such as rocks, water bottles and sticks.

“It’s really disappointing to see the way this individual is harassing and bullying people experiencing homelessness,” said Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “It was difficult to watch people put in humiliating and exposed positions.”

In nearly all of the videos posted on each channel, music plays in the background, seemingly for comedic effect. Many of the individuals filmed in the videos attempt to flee the vicinity of the drone or seem agitated by its presence.

Multiple videos appear to show the operator of the drone mocking or taunting the individuals by flying close to them before bolting in another direction either vertically or horizontally when the individuals reach for it.

The drone bullies are calling these “pranks”. I’m getting tired of that word — “prank” seems to be a synonym for cruelty.

Some of these accounts have been taken down, but as the quote above mentions, they just pop up again with a new synonym. It was easy to find lots that are still active — here’s one called “abnormal humans”. I don’t think the creators realize how self-referential that name is.

One such video had 59,000 views and 226 comments, and the comments were as vile as the video. No, I’m not linking to it. Go google your own bullies!

Sam Bankman-Fried…guilty!

Of course he was guilty. Billions of dollars vanished under his watch, while he somehow lived an extravagant life of luxury in the Bahamas, while piously preaching the gospel of “effective altruism” as a cover. The jury deliberated for only five hours, but now we have to wait until March until we learn how many decades he gets to spend in prison.

Now…when do his partners-in-crime, his girlfriend, his parents, face justice? They’re all awful people.

Russell Brand finds a way to endear himself to his audience

Russell Brand’s frantic fast-talking comedy never really appealed to me, but he seems to have found a new audience in the past several years as a fast-talking conspiracy theorist on a podcast I’ve never listened to. Braying out loud weird claims just doesn’t appeal, but OK, he’s successfully tapping into a revenue stream that exists.

Except now he’s got criminal charges hanging over his head, being accused of rape and sexual assault. It’s all so predictable: volatile personality gets rich, acquires lots of privilege, uses it to treat other people like things. How will he get out of it? By talking fast, of course.

Brand had already moved to deny what he called “very serious criminal allegations” on Friday night. In a video posted online, he said he had received correspondence from a media company and a newspaper detailing the claims; this is standard practice for journalists preparing to report serious allegations about a named entity.

He issued his denial in a video posted across his accounts on several media platforms, insisting his relationships had always been consensual.

He portrayed the reports as a “litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks” and said they pertained to a period of his career when he was working “in the mainstream … As I have written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous [at that time].”

Brand continued: “Now, during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I am being transparent about it now as well.

“To see that transparency metastasised into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question: is there another agenda at play?”

Somebody explain to him that promiscuity is one thing, but rape is a completely different other thing. You do not get criminally charged for consensual promiscuity.

At least he knows that “consent” is a useful word to deploy when your behavior is brought to light, but I don’t think he grasps what that is, either.

According to the paper’s report, one of the women said Brand entered into a relationship with her while he was 31 and she was still a 16-year-old schoolgirl. She reportedly said he referred to her as “the child” during an alleged emotionally abusive and controlling three-month relationship.

She told Dispatches the presenter once “forced his penis down her throat”, making her choke, which led her to punch him in the stomach to make him stop.

I think we can reject his version of consent when the words “16-year-old schoolgirl” enter the picture.

He has at least dug up the formula that will keep his gullible audience in thrall: it’s a paranoid conspiracy, they’re all out to get me. It’s true, a lot of people will be out to get you if you commit reprehensible crimes.

Science relies on honest observation

Elisabeth Bik is getting mad. She has spent the better part of a decade finding examples of scientific fraud, and it seems to be easy pickings.

Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results…..

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals…. By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I’ve reported 2,500 of these to their journals’ editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public….

Unfortunately, many scientific journals and academic institutions are slow to respond to evidence of image manipulation — if they take action at all. So far, my work has resulted in 956 corrections and 923 retractions, but a majority of the papers I have reported to the journals remain unaddressed.

I’ve seen some of the fraud reports, and it amazes me how stupid the scientists committing these fakes must be. It’s as if they think jpeg artifacts don’t exist, and can be an obvious fingerprint when chunks of an image are duplicated; they don’t realize that you can reveal cheating by just tweaking a LUT and seeing all the duplicated edges light up. The only reason it’s done is to adjust your data to make it look like you expected it to look, which is an obvious act against the most basic scientific principles: you’re supposed to use science to avoid fooling yourself, not to make it easy to fool others.

This behavior ought to be harshly punished. If image fakery became in issue when one of my peers came up for tenure or promotion, I’d reject them without hesitation. It’s not even a question: this behavior is a deep violation of scientific and ethical principles, and would make all of their work untrustworthy.

Also, this is a problem with the for-profit journal publication system. Those scientists paid money for those pages, how can we possibly enforce honesty? The bad actors wouldn’t pay us for journal articles anymore!

But guess what happens when Elisabeth Bik takes a principled stand?

Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists’ work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats….

Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud.

How about instantly firing people who do this? Our tenure contracts generally have a moral turpitude clause, you know. This counts.

My nightmare

This is a story that worries me.

Jinming Li, an arts and business student in the class, was an eyewitness to the event. According to Li, a man of about 20-30 years of age entered the class and asked the professor what the class was about. The man closed the door, pulled two knives out of his backpack and proceeded to attack the professor. Students ran to the back of the class to exit out of the one class entrance.

It was a gender studies class at the University of Waterloo. You know what triggered it — it was an act of stochastic terrorism driven by the right wing’s current moral panic.

The good news is that while a professor and two students were slashed, they’re alive and recovering. The attack occurred in Canada, with knives. Here in the USA, it would have been guns, probably an assault rifle, and the only question would be how high the body count would go.

We do have one thing in common with Canada: an ineffectual response to such events. Waterloo has an app they provide to students, faculty, and staff that’s supposed to send out an alert when active threats are on campus. It took 90 minutes to send out warnings, well after the danger was over.

Another judge caught with his snout in the trough

Here we go again. Justice John Roberts has been profiting from his position via his wife’s lucrative headhunting.

Jane Roberts was paid more than $10 million by a host of elite law firms, a whistleblower alleges.
At least one of those firms argued a case before Chief Justice Roberts after paying his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Details of Jane Roberts’ work come as Congress struggles to reform the Court’s self-policed ethics.

Here, let’s slather a little more juicy slop into the trough. He refuses to testify about Supreme Court ethics because it might compromise “separation of powers concerns” and “judicial independence.”

Chief Justice John Roberts has notified Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin that he won’t testify at an upcoming hearing on Supreme Court ethics, instead releasing a new statement signed by all nine justices that is meant to provide “clarity” to the public about the high court’s ethics practices.

When will congress learn that you don’t ask the crooks to dictate what the law should be? You tell them.

The rapist who would be president

I guess this must not be an important story, because both the NY Times and the Washington Post have buried it in small articles far down on their pages…but it seems like it ought to be a big deal. Donald Trump is being tried for the rape of E. Jean Carroll. The leading Republican candidate for the presidency has been credibly accused of rape. Maybe we ought to care a lot more about that? Everything in the account is consistent, and fits with what we know about the man. Carroll has testified:

In a heart-wrenching testimony, Carroll told her story once again: She hung out with Trump on a whim. They bantered. Then he raped her. She was so scarred by the experience, she said, that she was “unable to ever have a romantic life again.” This, too, is consistent with her first public recounting of this story, published in her book and in New York magazine in 2019: “I have never had sex with anybody ever again.”

Donald Trump is the cure for desire. I believe it.

While Carroll has been present and bravely telling a story that clearly hurts her deeply, Trump is not present in the courtroom. His lawyers (who are scum-sucking creeps, whose only defense is to slander the victim) have wisely chosen to keep him away.

Of course, there’s a pragmatic reason to keep Trump away, which is that he’s too undisciplined. He can’t keep his story straight regarding sexual abuse, and whether he’s for it or against it. During the deposition, for instance, Trump tried to stick to his story that no encounter happened. But, being the sexist pig he is, he kept veering very close to contradicting himself in order to invoke another sexist myth about rape, which is that victims are asking for it.

“She actually indicated that she loved it,” he grumbled during the October 19, 2022 testimony, referring to a CNN interview he watched with Carroll. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped.”

Carroll’s attorney almost caught him, by replying, “So, sir, I just want to confirm:· It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?” Seemingly realizing his screw-up, Trump back-tracked and started dithering about how he was merely speculating about her mental acuity based on a cable news program. But one can see from this, and from Trump’s social media posts, why his lawyers are so worried he will let some damning detail slip if he’s under the pressure of cross-examination.

He’s a corrupt fool and a rapist, but he’s still running for the highest office in the land. The Supreme Court has been packed with corrupt and untrustworthy lickspittles to the rich. There is no justice in America.