You will be mocked if you fail to conform

Abcde Redford should not be ashamed of her name, but Southwest Airlines should be ashamed of their employee’s behavior. Every child should have a name that is unique, or has a strong history, or reflects something about their family. Unfortunately, there is an annoying strain of conformity that says everyone should have a name that is familiar and belongs to a limited repertoire of common names, just because.

I was interested to learn, though, that Abcde is not totally unique.

Although Abcde is an unusual name, it’s not unheard of. In 2014, Vocativ reported that over the past three decades, 328 baby girls have been given that name, 32 of whom were born in 2009. But when the name is entered into the Social Security Administration’s database of popular baby names, it states that “Abcde is not in the top 1000 names for any year of birth beginning with 2000.”

I think it’s a very nice name. It’ll also be incredibly popular when Abcde grows up and is so pissed off at the mockery that she shatters the status quo.

The one thing you need to know to succeed in life

I loathe going to the gym. I especially loathe it when I forget my earbuds at home, and am forced to consume generic mass media while I’m stretching and sweating and pumping up those feeble strands I call muscles — modern pop music seems to be striving for all the passion of muzak, and broadcast TV…forget it.

So I’m rage-peddling on the exercise bicycle when some insipid collection of TV celebrities are delivering their favorite lines of life-advice to the loved ones in their family, and I’m hating it, and I come up with a line of my own.

If all you needed was the right aphorism, it wouldn’t take a score of years to raise a child.

See? This is why I’m not invited to those kinds of shows. Well, one reason.

Grandbabies

Iliana is working hard at being adorable. So adorable that we just booked our tickets to fly down to Boulder in early December to spend a week in her precious presence.

Meanwhile, Knut is hulking out. They’re moving to San Antonio next month. Are there skyscrapers there? He needs things to climb on and smash.

A position I can agree with: debate is stupid

Yep, we don’t need to argue, it’s patently true.

After all, these days we are constantly being told that one of the top threats to society is not climate change or fascism but people stifling debate. Some claim that by “no-platforming” controversial speakers, or calling pundits mean names on Twitter after they say something racist on Bill Maher’s show, we are facilitating a dangerous slide into illiberalism. If those pearl-clutchers are to be believed, the key to becoming a society of informed and sophisticated intellectuals is to hook ourselves up to an IV of pure debate, and let the heated repartee course through our veins until it leads us to fact-based solutions.

The article also has some positive suggestions.

Do not be tempted by the promise of easy satisfaction. Watching a debate can make you actively worse at understanding the nuances of a topic. If you want to really know about a subject, here’s my advice: read widely and extensively (and not just the books your favorite YouTuber recommends). Talk to people, patiently and fairly, rejecting your instinctual desire to win. And perhaps most importantly — take this from a veteran — do not reward former debate team kids with your attention. They are the worst type of nerds and they never share their snacks.

I’ve been trying to get people to do this for years. I get a call requesting a debate, and I say, I’d be happy to host a discussion with an audience, why are you making everyone waste half the time allotted with that other blithering fool? And then they hang up, because usually the people asking for a debate aren’t looking for an informed discussion, they’re looking for a foil to make the other guy look magnanimous and open-minded, and they’re bringing in an audience with a bias, anyway.

It never gets less creepy

I never met Jeffrey Epstein, fortunately. My sole link was through Lawrence Krauss, who memorably took me aside way back in 2010 to urge me to ignore the “rumors” going around about Epstein, who was a donor to his Origins program at ASU. He particularly warned me against that scurrilous gossiper, Rebecca Watson, who has since been revealed as a wise prophetess. I just figured this was what high-level people with the job of getting donations do to curry favor with donors, I didn’t actually know much about what Epstein had done. Of course, now I know (and I quickly learned then) that Epstein had pled guilty to soliciting sex from minors back in 2008, and it wasn’t so much “rumor” as “incontestable fact”, and that Watson wasn’t so much a prophetess as she was someone who had her eyes open. As she wrote in 2011:

Jeffrey Epstein is the infamous media mogul who was jailed in 2008 for paying underage prostitutes who said they were recruited by his aides. Some girls were allegedly flown in from Eastern Europe, their visas arranged by his bookkeeper. Epstein only served 13 months in prison thanks to a sweetheart plea agreement which is now being contested by attorneys representing two of the girls, who were 13 and 14 when they were allegedly paid for sex. Both girls are part of a larger group of victims who have won monetary settlements from Epstein in civil cases.

Krauss responded to that with several comments, still ardently defending Epstein, and this quote is particularly damning.

“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

“Unfortunate period.” Jesus. Epstein was paying local schoolgirls to give him naked massages and jerk him off, and who knows what was going on at his orgies. What an uplifting fellow. It was not an “unfortunate period”, as Krauss had to know — the police had a line of children who wanted to testify, had been raking through his garbage for evidence, and had him dead to rights, and then, as Rebecca mentioned, got a slap on the wrist (an 18 month jail sentence, which compared to what he should have gotten, counts as a relatively trivial penalty) in an exceedingly generous plea deal, which is still being contested.

The Miami Herald has published a multi-part investigation into that deal. The corruption just reeks on the page.

Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.

But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.

The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.

This is a huge story, and Epstein was monstrous in his crimes — he was a voracious sexual predator, and his favored prey were girls in their early teens. This was all known when Krauss was asking me to avoid discussing his patron.

“This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who supervised the police probe.

More than a decade later, at a time when Olympic gymnasts and Hollywood actresses have become a catalyst for a cultural reckoning about sexual abuse, Epstein’s victims have all but been forgotten.
The women — now in their late 20s and early 30s — are still fighting for an elusive justice that even the passage of time has not made right.

Like other victims of sexual abuse, they believe they’ve been silenced by a criminal justice system that stubbornly fails to hold Epstein and other wealthy and powerful men accountable.

“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein.

Justice dropped the ball on this one. The evidence is so damning that you have to wonder what the hell was wrong with people like Krauss, or his inner circle of enablers, or the rich and famous people like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton who called Epstein a friend. A lot of money was buying a lot of favors and silence.

And, you know, it’s not clear to me what he did to earn so much money that he had a private plane and his very own private island in the Caribbean. He’s a hedge fund manager. He manages other people’s money, and apparently it’s perfectly legal to skim off so much profit that you can basically get paid for diddling little girls, and you can escape prosecution by ratting out other overpaid financial company executives.

It just makes me sick. I don’t even want a second-hand connection to that world.

This “gender reveal” nonsense is getting out of hand

I’ve been in this rodeo a few times: 3 children, 2 grandchildren. We’ve been through that period of anxiety where you want to know the status of the pregnancy, and somewhere early in the second trimester you find out the sex of the fetus…and it’s no big deal, except that it’s a landmark in development, so it’s always good to know that all is progressing smoothly. That’s it. We were not hung up on getting a boy or a girl, because you know they’re all good kids.

Some people, though, stage these elaborate events where they tell everyone it’s a boy or a girl. Really elaborate. Like this act of stupidity:

That was the start of the Sawmill Fire in Arizona — some dumbass had to set off an exploding target with colored smoke to show off whether a fetus had a penis or a vagina. And he just had to set it off in a dry, grassy, arid place. Look at that sere landscape, full of dry brush — you’d think anyone would be smart enough to know that this is not the place for a fiery explosion.

You’ll be pleased to know they’re having a boy, and they’ve also been slapped with a $220,000 fine. He got off really easy.

Before the fire was over, it had burned 47,000 acres and cost $8.2 million to extinguish, with nearly 800 firefighters battling the blaze.

His name is Dennis Dickey, and he’s a border patrol agent. I hope this idiotic act haunts him for the rest of his life. Maybe he can explain it to his son.

Facebook sucks, and it’s too big to die easily

If you’re a Facebook user, think about what you signed up for. I suspect that most of you are like me, you thought the idea of a hub for keeping in touch with family and friends was a good one, and that’s what you wanted — something like that old newsletter your Aunt Matilda used to send out every Christmas, only shorter and more casual and spread out over the year. Or like a bar where you’d stroll in and see friends from the community, and a few strangers, and you could strike up a little conversation. That sounds wonderful! Only it hasn’t turned out that way, because the barkeep has decided to be intrusive and obnoxious. He wants to introduce you to new friends, all the time, and it doesn’t matter if they’re a bit skeevy. He’s trying to sell you stuff on the side. He keeps asking you questions about your personal life, all with the helpful intent of trying to match you with more compatible friends (only he doesn’t seem to actually understand human interactions, and he’s more than willing to connect you to any guy who’ll tip him a dollar), or to better understand what he might be able to sell to you. And then he turns up the television news real loud because it’ll give all of his patrons something to talk about.

The problem with Facebook isn’t the idea, it’s the Facebook executives, like Zuckerberg, who want to control and profit from the conversation. It’s gotten so bad that even avaricious robots like Zuckerberg have noticed, but they haven’t realized that what the users want is for Zuckerberg to shut the fuck up and quit intruding.

In his February letter, Zuckerberg essentially acknowledged what was obvious to anyone who had a Facebook account during the 2016 election: the social network has not exactly enhanced our democracy. The News Feed, the main scroll of posts that you see when you open Facebook, fueled hoaxes (which were overwhelmingly “tilted in favor” of Donald Trump, according to an analysis by Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow at Stanford), and it overfed people stories and memes that fit preconceived notions. On social media, “resonant messages get amplified many times,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes.”

He talks as if he understands, but the wheels in his head are spinning, and he’s trying to figure out how to keep his hooks in his userbase while acknowledging that maybe sometimes he’s an obnoxious ass, a little bit, occasionally (really, it’s always, a lot). This is not an indication that Facebook is a good place to find genuine communication:

For example, by cross-referencing your behavior on Facebook with files maintained by third-party data brokers, the company gathers data on your income, your net worth, your home’s value, your lines of credit, whether you have donated to charity, whether you listen to the radio, and whether you buy over-the-counter allergy medicine. It does this so that it can give companies an unprecedented ability to post ads that are presumably likelier to appeal to you. (I asked Facebook whether anything has changed to make the Post’s report no longer accurate; the company had no comment.)

They have “algorithms” to figure out what ads you’d like to see. But their algorithms suck, and are easily gamed, and even more easily bought. Every time they glean some scrap of information, like that recently I’ve been looking up camera gear, they use a sledgehammer and start throwing buckets of ads in my face for inappropriate stuff grossly out of my price range or not at all related to my specific interests, but it has the words “photography” or “camera” somewhere in it. The bartender here has a motor-mouth and low intelligence and is prone to manic obsessions. How about if you back off and just let me chat with friends?

So I’m backing off from Facebook instead. I’m going to stop interacting with Facebook at all for a while; I’m still going to do blogpost links there, but even that will go away eventually. And after a while, no hurry, I’ll just close my account altogether. I might skim through it once a day to see what everyone is up to — in particular, I get grandbaby updates for Knut there, although my other grandbaby has a mother who is very tech savvy and has mostly abandoned Facebook already. If you want to have a conversation with me, though, Facebook ain’t the medium for that.

I’ve been looking for alternatives, and Diaspora looks promising. I signed up for Pluspora this morning, and it’s already better. Not perfect, though. I said on signup I’d like to see various #science-related hashtags, and first thing in my face is a bunch of anti-vaxx bullshit…so my first experience with it involved learning how to filter out the garbage. I guess even if you’ve got a nice bar with an unobtrusive barkeep who isn’t poking his nose into your business all the time, you still have to deal with other customers.

Here’s an enthusiastic summary of the advantages of Diaspora.