After more than a week of narcotics and steroids, I decided to quit this morning — the fog and haze and insomnia were too much. It wasn’t quite cold turkey, because I started dropping the dosage a couple of days ago, but still, this is my first day totally drug-free.

It’s not going real well so far. The pain is back (but still much less than last week), and now I get to deal with diffuse feelings of nausea, and I’m still foggy and slow. It’s one of those lose:lose situations and I’m not having a grand time. I also keep getting reminded that classes start in a few weeks.

I will get better. Next doctor’s appointment is early Monday morning.

I’m trying to plan some alternative teaching options for the Fall, since I might be temporarily incapacitated for a bit — I’m waiting on a call from podiatrist right now, which might define some of my limitations. One of the obvious fall-back strategies would be to do some lectures remotely, since we’re all well-trained on using Zoom nowadays. Except that now I learn Zoom wants to use us.

Zoom has rolled out a controversial update to its terms of service, adding a clause that allows it to use customer data for AI and ML training.

The pertinent clause is quoted below:

You consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable Law, including for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models), training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof, and as otherwise provided in this Agreement. In furtherance of the foregoing, if, for any reason, there are any rights in such Service Generated Data which do not accrue to Zoom under this Section 10.2 or as otherwise provided in this Agreement, you hereby unconditionally and irrevocably assign and agree to assign to Zoom on your behalf, and you shall cause your End Users to unconditionally and irrevocably assign and agree to assign to Zoom, all right, title, and interest in and to the Service Generated Data, including all Proprietary Rights relating thereto.

Those bastards. This is a sneaky way of violating privacy, confidentiality, and our ownership of classroom content. If they announced that my lectures could be lifted wholesale and sold for use by anyone else, that would be less of a violation than this. They figure they could use a computer proxy to take all that content, massage it, refilter it, and then distribute it without attribution in the guise of AI — no one will be able to blame or credit me as a source, which is an essential part of the way science works.

They’ll also be able to steal my students’ contributions, although mostly they’re all silent black rectangles on the screen. They will chime in with good stuff now and then, though, all of it to be grist for the AI machine.

Also, people use Zoom for business meetings, where real money is at stake. I wonder how they’re going to take to the idea of a digital spy lurking in the background?

Or how about medical consultations? Are those to be AI fodder, too?

It lives! So what if Epstein is dead, he was just a symptom of a whole slimy vein of rot.

One of his successors is Leon Black, another billionaire and good buddy to Jeffrey.

Now Black is back in the headlines, this time accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in the home of Jeffrey Epstein, a serial sex trafficker Black financed with more than $150 million.

Is anyone surprised? The poison spreads. It spreads further. It turns out Black and his private equity cronies have bought a politician, Kyrsten Sinema. Are you surprised yet?

In 2018, Black and his wife together made a $5,400 donation to Sinema’s campaign, the maximum legal contribution at the time. Three years later, Black was out from the top post at Apollo Global Management, the firm he helped found, after it was revealed that he paid the disgraced financier Epstein more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services. The Senate Finance Committee is currently investigating that payment and whether it involved tax evasion.

During her 2018 bid, Sinema received a smattering of donations from others in the private equity world, including a few dozen senior Blackstone managers, Bain executives, and Goldman Sachs financiers, but she received much more money through the Emily’s List political action committee and from Google employees.

This whole story is about tawdry corruption and the oddly insulated world of the very rich. One of the main threads connecting everything, though, is Harvard. Harvard isn’t an educational institution anymore, it’s the prestigious locus of every pretentious wanna-be and nouveaux riche moneybags who wants to buy credibility…and unfortunately, Harvard knows this and is happy to sell out. It’s what they do, and they simultaneously attracted grifters like Epstein and exploited them in a hideous symbiotic relationship.

As the steady drip of revelations over the past few months shows, Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to intellectual, cultural, and financial luminaries were much more extensive than previously known. For years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution, he socialized with Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, Leon Botstein, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, private equity billionaire Leon Black, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, CIA director William Burns, and Lawrence Summers.

According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, Summers—a former president of Harvard and the current Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School—had more than a dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein from 2013 to 2016. In April 2014, Summers sent Epstein an e-mail seeking “small scale philanthropy advice” regarding his wife, Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard. “My life will be better if i raise $1m for Lisa,” he wrote. “Mostly it will go to make a pbs series and for teacher training. Ideas?”

“Small scale.” She wanted to make videos about poetry, which is nice, but most of us wouldn’t even dream of getting a million dollars for that sort of thing. But if you know a criminal who wants to whitewash his reputation and suck up to a famous university, you can find a way.

The Summers-Epstein relationship opens a window into the interlocking of intellectual and financial elites in our era of bloated capital accumulation. The perks and privileges that the superrich can offer make their company and resources hard to resist. Top universities, in turn, entice the tycoon class with a mix of academic prestige, intellectual stimulation, and social legitimation. And no university has more to offer in this regard than Harvard. The school has come to have a mesmerizing effect on the American public, especially its most mercantile tier, for which it is a honeypot.

Harvard is going to have a tough time buying their way out of the strikes against their reputation in the last few decades. I know if I had a grandchild applying to callege, I’d strongly discourage them from considering Harvard. I’d consider Harvard on a CV to be a detriment, but then, I’m not a billionaire with ties to the financial industry who thinks schmoozing with other rich people is more important than an actual education.

Right now, I mainly follow news from Harvard for the scandals. Like this one:

On June 16, Harvard Business School put one of its most celebrated professors on leave after an internal investigation into accusations that she had falsified her research. Francesca Gino was a popular behavioral scientist who was known for prolific publishing and a schedule packed with speaking gigs and expensive corporate trainings. Harvard paid her over $1 million a year while companies paid tens of thousands more to book her for their private events.

Gino’s record of publishing over 10 journal articles a year, in contrast to the faculty average two or three, seemed too good to be true—and as is now coming to light, it may have been. A four-part investigation by the independent academic watchdog site Data Colada alleges that Gino fabricated some of her high-profile research over at least a decade and as recently as three years ago. It claims to have found at least four times that data in her studies were manipulated. The watchdog believes it is likely that Gino carried out the alleged fraud without assistance from her collaborators.

OK, Harvard Business School is kind of the lowest cesspit of a tainted brand, but a professor getting paid a million dollars a year is already suspicious. What, you may wonder, does she study that warrants that kind of salary? She studies dishonesty in business, ironically enough. She’s an advocate for being a rebel and breaking the rules, so you can see already why this would appeal to corporate executives.

Anyway, don’t go to Harvard unless you dream of one day being a willing enabler of the extremes of capitalism.

I have been lost in a haze of pain for the past week, and missed out on some of the news — I’m reading it now, so forgive me, my posts might sound a bit like I’m a time traveler from the misty long-ago of July 2023. First up: people died without me noticing.

Peewee Herman (Paul Reubens) is gone? I loved that guy. Apparently, a lot of people loved him, but he didn’t tell them he was dying of cancer. That’s strength of character.

Also, he was 70 years old? I need to know his secrets, and it’s too late.

We also lost Sinead O’Connor. I remember watching Saturday Night Live back in 1992 — that is, when I still watched the show — and standing up and cheering when she ripped up the photo of the pope. Good for her. Of course, she was immediately blacklisted by the show, which was one reason I no longer watch it.

You will not be surprised to learn that Bill Donohue of the Catholic League did not like O’Connor at all, and took this as an opportunity to spit on her memory. It’s a strangely digressive whine — he rambles on about various other people he claims to have destroyed, and claims there is no sexual abuse problem in the church. It’s those damned homosexuals.

The truth is that anyone who talks about clergy sexual abuse and refuses to tell the truth about the oversized role played by homosexuals is either ignorant or dishonest: they were responsible for 8 in 10 cases of molestation. And they got away with it because of the gay subculture that orchestrated the cover-up. All of this is detailed in my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes.

It is an amusingly un-self-aware and horrifically homophobic rant. He claims to have vanquished the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which still exists and has multiple locations around the world.

Michael McDonnell is quoted in the AP article speaking favorably about Sinead. He is identified as the “interim executive director” of SNAP. Poor Mike has been the “interim director” for quite some time now. The reason he is still “interim” is because SNAP does not exist anymore. It’s nothing but his cell phone.

Pretty ironic, coming from one lone homophobic crank with a fax machine.

I have discovered the only method of pain management that works right now: don’t move. It only hurts if I walk, so don’t walk. This means that I spend my days confined to my home office, leg propped on a pillow, only occasionally taking slow, limping walks to the bathroom and back. We’re getting into Argiope season, though! I need to get out into the weeds and sticks! But no, four walls it is.

I also had to cancel my trip out to Seattle. There was just no way I’d be able to traverse an airport and settle into a cramped seat with my stupid right foot on fire. If I just sit, though, and sit and sit and sit, I can avoid triggering my angry deltoid ligament and pissed off Achilles tendon, and I can almost pretend that everything is OK.

By the way, have you ever really looked at your ankle? It’s a jumble of small bones all piled into a rough structure, tied together with a cobweb of ligaments. It’s like throwing rocks into a pile and then strapping them together with duct tape.

Intelligent design, my foot.

Anyway, there is still some faint hope. I’m waiting to hear back from a podiatrist, there may be some surgery in my near future. Otherwise, I’m planning how to get around to my classes with limited mobility — I’ve got a Boot lurking here in my office, and also some other gadgets with straps and clamps and wires that immobilize the joint. I’ve got three species of spiders living in my lab (four, if you count the wild Pholcus that hide in the corners), so I’ve got a tiny slice of diversity to study.

The good news is that the pain is under control, as long as I’m perfectly immobile. I guess that’s good.

Can’t think. Can’t read. Can’t write. My brain is focused entirely on not moving my leg, or sometimes on moving it to a more comfortable position — which doesn’t exist. My right ankle continues to swell, and my whole foot is turning pink, so everything is getting worse.

After praising the alacrity of my treatment yesterday, though, we have hit a snag. Everything has been held up because…further work has to be approved by the insurance company. I guess they have a lot of highly qualified orthopedic surgeons examining my case and going “hmmm”, and wondering whether I can handle more chronic pain before they approve treatment.

So I get to suffer for a few more days before we can take the next step.

I am not asking for sympathy, though. Don’t feel sorry for me! The health insurance demons have found me wanting and think I deserve a few more pokes from the pitchfork. Instead, I would appreciate your curses and imprecatory prayers directed at the health insurance industry and the whole damn American health care system. My situation is relatively minor compared to what others must suffer.

That’s doctorese for “your bone spurs are shredding your Achilles tendon, bro!” It’s exactly what I expected, but I also got a bunch of tests to rule out blood clots and gout. Now I’m scheduled for an MRI this afternoon to get the fine details, and once we work that out, next step is probably surgery. Yay.

One nice thing about living in a small town is that I called the clinic, they got me into an appointment this morning, I gave up a quart of blood for tests, got an X-ray, and got the conclusions within an hour. There’s a bit of a wait for the MRI, but it’s still same day service.

I recall taking my son into a clinic for a clearly broken arm in Philadelphia, and sitting there for almost 6 hours before he was treated. I show up here with a complaint that I’ve got an ouchie on my ankle and they whip me through like lightning. Maybe I’m just better at whining and complaining?

I really overdid it yesterday — I took a powerful dose of ibuprofen so I could walk around in the wilderness, and it worked. I was walking around in rough terrain, rather gingerly I’ll admit, and then I got home and a little later the drugs wore off and now…holy crap, I was so stupid. I’ve spent the day doing nothing but lying back and moaning.

It’s been a day of drugs and ice. I’m hoping I’ll be able to go in to work tomorrow, but the rational side of my brain is telling me not to be stupid again, to call the doctor in the morning, and stay off my damned pathetic ankle.

This is not good, since I’m flying off to visit the family in the Pacific Northwest on Friday, and at this rate I’ll be doing it from a wheelchair.

Did I mention I was an idiot?