Panic city

I must be tired. I was sitting in my office reviewing my lecture notes, when I glanced at the clock. It’s 20 to! My class is at a quarter to! Panic followed, because I was still tinkering with a few slides, and I had yet to get to my classroom. Chaos! Rushing about! Slamming down the last few touches! Off to the room I go!

No one was there. What’s going on? My class starts at a quarter to noon — it was a quarter to 11. Sheesh.

At least I got to go back to my office and have a cup of tea. I’m getting too old for this stuff. It doesn’t help that I’m just generally losing my mind lately.

Summertime dreams

I like to haunt r/abandonedporn, where people post photos and videos of derelict buildings that they explore. I want to do that! It’s a bad time of year for it though, since it’s about -20°C out there, and if the spiders are all frozen, what’s the point? Once the world thaws again, I need to get out and do some exploring. These places are full of spiders, and I don’t have to interact with people to investigate them — spiders minus people? Perfection.

This summer you all have to help out by nagging me to get out and find abandoned houses, farms, and shacks, every weekend. I’ll reward you with pictures — lots of close-up pictures of creepy crawlies. It’ll be awesome.

For now, here’s an example: this guy explores an abandoned house and finds an abandoned 1973 Corvette in the garage. It’s February, though, so no spiders, which makes it a lot less interesting.

There’s got to be an interesting story behind it. This is an isolated, tiny house — am I the only one thinking it’s a drug house? — with an expensive car rotting and neglected. Where’s the owner? What happened that no one would claim that car? And most importantly, what kind of spiders will be flourishing there once the weather warms up?

Monitoring our grandchild’s media consumption

We had learned that our granddaughter Iliana is getting into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, so last night my wife and I watched a couple of episodes so that we could talk intelligently about it with her. I was shocked. The show is clearly socialist propaganda intended to promote communal solidarity and mutual aid. The whole story is antithetical to its capitalist origins as a marketing tool for a toy line.

We approve of this subversion.

The one question I have, though, is why haven’t the Republicans banned it yet? It’s a brilliant attempt to infiltrate the minds of our children.

P.S. I think Iliana is a real Pinkie Pie.

The problem is all the qualified people have Imposter Syndrome

I think Marcus Ranum just diagnosed my problem.

I am so full of anger and hatred that it’s 3:00am and I can’t sleep.

Hey, that’s my problem! I just checked my dipstick, and yep, I’m overflowing with bile. No wonder I’m waking up in the middle of the night.

What’s making the bitter gall flow? It’s similar to what annoys me: Joe Rogan and the whole elaborate pile of bullshit that is the current ladder to success. Rogan is just one symptom, but hoo boy, his recent not-pology pushed all my buttons, too.

Then, Rogan made his elaborate not-pology, basically saying that he’s just a dumb jock, and he’s a curious guy who likes to interview trolls. Basically, he’s pulling the Oprah excuse, “I didn’t create ‘Doctor’ Phil, I just uh… promoted him and handed him my microphone. He’s the grifter, not me!” Everyone is playing the same song, and it’s edging perilously close to the “free speech” defense. You know, that one? It’s usually followed around by its nasty little cousin “Both sides”. And that’s where I have to stop and call ‘bullshit’ on the whole thing.

It’s grifters all the way up.

We have to be a lot less forgiving of the bullshit, “I am just trying to learn…” dodge. Let me speak as someone who used to teach (fairly well-reviewed and popular!) classes around the world: I would not give a 1 hour lecture on any topic whatsoever without developing the expertise, first. It usually took me most of a day to write any given 1 hour presentation and I already knew my topic. If someone offered me $1 mil to do a talk on virology, sure, I would do it but it’d be basically a wad of “this paper says this and this professor says that and isn’t it all cool?” That’s being a cheerleader, not an expert, but I’d take the $1 mil. Anyone who is trying to have a public conversation about any given topic, whatever, owes their audience the simple attention to detail to absorb the supporting knowledge necessary to have the conversation. That’s why I have to hoist another great big “fuck Joe Rogan” flag – he had Jordan Peterson on his show and simply batted the bullshit-ball back and forth; that tells me that he (and his handlers) didn’t do the simplest, most basic research, to figure out that Jordan Peterson is a sociopathic compulsive liar who doesn’t even bother to get his facts straight in the field he professes; never mind the other fields: the guy is omni-wrong. Interviewing Jordan Peterson is not the time to play dumb jock, it’s the time to pull out the verbal knife. That is the only way to get these people off the mainstream media: make them walk off the stage with the rhetorical equivalent a fat lip and a bootprint on the seat of their pants. Any “interviewer” who can’t hold their own against a bullshit artist is, ipso facto, a bullshit artist themself. Or they’re not qualified to hold a mic.

Right. I’m giving a one-hour lecture today, on a subject I’m familiar with and have been teaching for a couple of decades, and I still have to sweat over it for a few hours, reviewing material, trying to figure out better ways to present the topic, thinking ahead to how it will fit in the rest of the curriculum, putting in late nights and early mornings on the class. I can’t get up to the lectern and bloviate with a fellow bullshitter for an hour. Where’s my million dollars?

And seriously, is Rogan even worth the hundred million dollars Spotify paid him? He doesn’t bring any expertise to the table. Just go down to the local bar and offer the motormouth (there’s always one) $50 and a case of beer to sit in front of a microphone. Oh, right: he’s paid to bring his custom-built audience of artisanal stupid people along. That’s his value-added.

Oops. Whoopi Goldberg just got suspended for two weeks over her Holocaust remarks. Black woman gets stronger corporate response than dumb jock, news at 11.

Welp, scratch that charity off my list

World Wildlife Fund UK just made the most bone-headed announcement. As a supposedly environment-friendly organization, you’d think they’d know that the most environmentally unsound investment you could make is in blockchain and NFTs, but that’s what they’re doing — selling NFTs.

I don’t believe that claim that “each transaction has the equivalent carbon emissions of a glass of tap water”. It’s built on a lie.

This was an enlightening response.

That’s the way of it. NFTs are hopelessly confusing and complicated, but there’s always some enthusiastic tech-bro who wants to see his personal investment validated, so he proselytizes fanatically and convinces a befuddled management that this really is the way to get more funding for their cash-strapped organization (and charities are always cash-strapped, and so are good marks for this kind of scheme).

Have you got a passionate NFT-proponent working for you? Fire ’em. You see someone on Facebook or Twitter with an NFT avatar? Block ’em.

I despised Bill Maher before it was cool to hate him

I guess the Left has moved towards me, then. Bill Maher is now claiming that, because right-wing Fox News has said the Democrats ought to make Maher a presidential candidate (I’m sure his bloated ego loved that), the Left has left him. So on a recent show he defended that endorsement from right-wing loonies by trying to argue that no, the Democrats are the loony ones. Yeah, right, our center-right political party is far crazier than the party that has embraced the anti-democracy racist misogynist position. He trots out a series of headlines from the Wall Street Journal and Forbes to prove that Democrats lack all common sense. It’s painful to listen to, especially since he has an audience that whoops and hollers to every stupid point he makes.

The solution: watch it with Dusty Smith who pauses it to take apart his every claim.

Man, Maher has always been every well-off white guy who thinks its funny when someone questions his sense of entitlement. I never cared much for him, and even disliked his atheist movie, Religulous.

Interesting. After posting this, I did my usual morning cleanup of the comments section, and what do I find? Our chronic homophobic/transphobic/misogynistic/antisemitic bigoted troll had erupted overnight, dumping 52 comments in various places, all totally uncreative, repetitive garbage accusing people of being gay. Everything from “seanbf” has been cleaned up now, but the curious thing is…he was inspired by Bill Maher. He kept citing that Maher segment above, declaring that Maher was correct, he loved Bill Maher. Good company.

There are so many symptoms of brain rot around us

I wonder how history will look back on the first decades of the 21st century. When I was growing up, this was supposed to be the century of miracles and wonders, of science and technology leading us to a golden age. It hasn’t panned out that way.

America throwing away its freedoms in a frightened response to terrorism. Spastically bombing and blowing up distant countries in a futile 20 year war that ended in defeat. Electing the dumbest bumbling president in our history, then doubling down by later electing a corrupt clown. QAnon. Billionaires getting richer, unchecked, while demonstrating their idiocy. Our public intellectuals are Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. The IDW. A congress that sits on its thumbs while trying to decide if an insurrection to take over the capitol should be punished or not. Previously mentioned corrupt clown planning another presidential run while announcing his intent to jail anyone who disagreed with him…and not being arrested. Black people being murdered at will by cops. Climate change, and its neglect. The MAGA movement. Brexit. Boris Johnson. A serious pandemic that is approaching a million deaths in the US alone (although, to be fair, the US has been the absolute worst at making a coherent response to the threat.) Anti-vaxxers. And, to put the slimy icing on the shit-flavored cake, blockchain and bitcoin madness.

Here’s another story about how cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. It was obvious from the beginning that it was a scam. It divided the population into three groups: the wealthy grifters who have been promoting it, the gullible marks who happily handed over their money to the lying con artists, and the rest of us, who were smart enough to see that it was another fraud by the rich to bleed the less well-off. Perhaps just as damning is the fact that our government closes its eyes to this massive Ponzi scheme running unchecked — perhaps because our government is run by and for the kind of people who benefit from it — when there are solutions.

Going after fly-by-night stablecoin issuers will devolve into a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. The only real solution is to ban the trade of private cryptocurrencies entirely. We cannot stop foreign actors from issuing unbacked stablecoins and manipulating crypto prices on unregulated exchanges. But we can make it illegal to sell cryptocurrencies on banked exchanges, such as Coinbase, operating entirely legally while they cash people out of the Ponzi scheme.

This would, of course, kill off cryptocurrency almost entirely, relegating it back to an oddity of the tech enthusiast. No one should shed a tear. Cryptocurrencies have virtually no legal use case. They’re great for facilitating ransomware, laundering money, distributing narcotics and child porn, running Ponzi schemes, and… not much else. They fail as currencies due to high transaction costs. They fail as “digital gold” or a “store of value” because they consume ludicrous amounts of energy to run what is essentially a glorified spreadsheet.

China already banned cryptocurrencies entirely, and India and Pakistan are poised to do the same. Other countries have also made moves to prohibit or constrain cryptocurrencies, but Western liberal democracies are notably permissive. This is in no small part due to aggressive industry lobbying, which includes hiring former financial regulators and compliance officers into the industry to influence policymakers.

We do nothing. Congress has been bought.

So yeah, I’m curious. How will the world summarize this moment we’re living in from the perspective of the 22nd century? So many problems, all with solutions that we talk about but never act upon, future citizens will wonder whether it was a consequence of contaminated tap water or some brain-eating fungus, because it’s otherwise inexplicable. Unfortunately, I’ll never know, because even if I had a time machine, the histories will probably be written in Mandarin, and all the ones in English will all be censored.