Yesterday, Iliana took Grandma and Grandpa to the zoo in Chippewa Falls.
We did see some animals, but she was mostly excited about the green fire hydrants.
She insisted that I get a photo of her with a fire hydrant.
My family is so weird. I have no idea where they get it from.
Finally, the touch of Bill Gates is being recognized as the taint that it is. The New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Guardian are all writing about his terrible ideas, I talked about it yesterday, and Rebecca Watson has a video on it.
I’ve despised him since the late 1970s, when he wrote his paean to capitalism, a letter berating the Homebrew Computer Club for pirating his version of BASIC. Don’t you know that because he wrote a BASIC interpreter, he now owned BASIC and you all had to pay him for his two months of work…forever? That’s been his philosophy ever since.
Now he has written a book (I think; did he have a ghostwriter?): How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. The hubris is impressive. Does he have any expertise at all in climate science (or epidemiology, or education, all topics he has pretended to have mastered)? No. He’s a college dropout who spent most of his life marketing a monopoly. Now he’s so obscenely rich he can throw all kinds of money around to get reviewers to publicize his stupid book.
Why would anyone buy a book by an unqualified rich person on a complex topic? Go read Michael Mann’s book instead. He knows what he’s talking about.
I expect Jeff Bezos to come out with a bestseller on labor management now.
I got some correspondence from a person at Portland State University, who tells me a bit about Peter Boghossian’s teaching. He teaches an introductory philosophy course on ethics, a subject with a deep history. Guess what his textbook is?
The one and only textbook?
The one that’s supposed to introduce students to philosophy and ethics?
It’s…
All the philanthropy in the world won’t erase his character — especially when all that money is coming from the accumulation of excess wealth. Bill Gates is getting scrutinized rather intensely, and it turns out he was the subject of internal investigation at Microsoft over his philandering. And there’s more! A while history of coming on to women in his employ!
And while it’s unclear whether the revelation about or investigation of the affair in question was a contributing factor to Gates’ recently-announced divorce from his wife of 27 years, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, it is an example of a longstanding pattern of questionable behavior by Gates. According to the New York Times report published on Sunday, Gates pursued multiple women who worked for him at Microsoft and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. As soon as she wrapped, he reportedly emailed her and asked her to dinner. “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” Gates wrote in the email, which was shared with the Times. The employee said she did feel uncomfortable and ignored the request.
What could make this worse? Let’s throw in his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein!
Her concerns over Gates’ priorities were only compounded when the New York Times published the 2019 article “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” which detailed the men’s meetings together. While Epstein was connected with many wealthy and powerful people, “unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes,” the Times said. At the time, Bill told the publication, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” But The Daily Beast reported on Sunday that “the billionaire met Epstein dozens of times starting in 2011 and continuing through to 2014 mostly at the financier’s Manhattan home” to discuss Gates’ “toxic” marriage.
A Gates representative denied the allegation: “Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein— on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein.”
His only salvation: give away all of his money and retreat into obscurity, where he’ll never again be able to meddle in affairs beyond his competence.
I guess there has been a wave of panic-buying of gasoline after a major pipeline was shut down; I haven’t noticed because I’ve been walking everywhere. People were concerned that they wouldn’t have fuel for their daily commute, so they were stockpiling gas in anything that would hold gas, including plastic bags. There are supposed to be safety laws that limit what you can use to store a flammable liquid, but apparently gas station owners were looking the other way. Sometimes, that led to disaster.
A Hummer in Florida burst into flames right after a driver filled four containers with gas.
Citrus County Fire Rescue said they responded to a call at a Texaco Food Mart in Homosassa, Fla. for a vehicle on fire on Wednesday.
Four 5-gallon containers filled with gasoline were in the back of the vehicle when it caught fire, officials said.
Hummers are practically a symbol of self-indulgent excess, so I would have applauded the sight. But what’s really ironic here is that a guy who was concerned about running out of gas is driving around in a Hummer, a vehicle that optimistically gets 10-14mpg. If we really want to save fuel, one way would be to torch every Hummer on the road. Go buy an electric or hybrid or at least a small economy car that gets 30-40 mpg.
We had a great fundraiser this week, and we’re going to talk about it and thank you all on Sunday.
I shackled myself to the computer today, and I can now report that every assignment, lab report, exam, and term paper for all three of my courses have been read and evaluated and scores entered into my Canvas class page.
I have a few more trivial things to do: I have to download everything into my laptop spreadsheet, because Canvas is too stupid to do normalization and important things like dropping the lowest exam score, as I told my genetics students I would do. I am, however, too brain-dead to do that right now, especially since the Evil Cat decided to deny me many hours of sleep last night. So I’ll do the finicky grade massaging tomorrow morning, and then submit all the grades to the registrar, and be done with this hellish academic year.
OK, so tonight I plan to veg out to something stupid on Netflix or whatever. I’ll have to see what’s available, and it better be really stupid, because I may pass out in the middle of it.
Of all the panspermists in the world, Rhawn Joseph is most deserving of rock that he fantasizes is a Nobel.
The goddamn cat decided to go on a goddamn mousehunt at 1am last night. She is no good at it. A mousehunt to her is an opportunity to torture a small helpless creature for a few hours. She finds a mouse, pounces on it, and then lets the terrified beast free to pounce on it again, and again, and again. Last night she played this game going around in circles about my bed, pouncing and jumping and thumping and growling and squeaking until I leapt up screaming, chasing the cat with a broom, trying to break this goddamn cycle and get her out of the room.
There were echoes of similarities with the movie, Mousehunt. I was the Nathan Lane character. If you’ve seen the movie, you know you never want to see yourself in any of the humans.
I could also see hints of myself in the Christopher Walken character, except last night I was doing a lot of futile yelling. Yeah, Nathan Lane.
