Cheese it, they’re on to us!

Uh-oh. Kerry Roberts has noticed.

A Republican Tennessee lawmaker says he supports getting rid of higher education because he argues it would cut off the “liberal breeding ground.”

Sen. Kerry Roberts of Springfield called for eliminating higher education while speaking about attending a recent abortion legislative hearing on his conservative radio talk show on Sept. 2.

Roberts specifically called out one activist who testified in favor of protecting abortion rights. He asserted without evidence that the woman’s beliefs were a “product of higher education” and claimed that getting rid of higher education would “save America.”

Yep, he’s right. The kind of conservativism he thinks would “save America” can only thrive in ignorance, so getting rid of education would lead to fewer liberals and progressives, fewer ideas, less progress, more stupidity. If that’s what you want, his formula would actually work!

Concentrated comeuppance!

A lot of bad guys have been getting exposed lately. It won’t make a bit of difference, but it’s as if a few journalists are waking up to their job and deciding to do it, so I’ll take it.

  • Alex Pareene shreds Mitch McConnell. Sure, it’s an easy target to reveal that the manifestation of evil in Republican politics is pure evil. If you want to understand why Moscow Mitch is a special evil, though, this is a good and through place to start.

    McConnell has built a GOP machine that is as immune as it can be to the ballot box, because he is smart enough to know that Republicans cannot, as currently constituted, win fair elections often enough to retain power.
    But by choosing incredibly canny battles—his relentless attempts to first upend even the possibility of campaign finance regulation and enforcement, and then to pack the judiciary with right-wing ideologues—McConnell has enabled the conservative movement to dominate American politics long after its tenets are fully rejected by the majority of the electorate.

  • Maybe he is not as powerful, but Scott Adams is the worst blogger (I like that title because it means I don’t hold the record.) The article makes plain his weird contradictions: the popularity of Dilbert rests on the fact that both office drones and bosses like it — it simultaneously tells workers that their lives are miserable, but that you have to suck it up and obey anyway. His blog is a bizarre exercise in phrasing all of his predictions so that either way they turn out, he can claim he was right all along. And how can you be a champion of the working class while defending Trump? Answer: he doesn’t actually support the working class.

    It seems counterintuitive that Scott Adams, defender of the common office drone, would ally himself with a billionaire whose catchphrase is “you’re fired,” but there are strong parallels between the two. For one, they both make you dread reading the newspaper. Neither is willing to acknowledge the real causes of the American worker’s declining fortunes, choosing to pin it all on the idiosyncrasies of office culture or the existence of immigrants. Most importantly, Adams and Trump both offer the working class cheap, stupid, and forgettable entertainment that placates dissatisfaction for a moment before a swift return to late-capitalist dread. We deserve better.

  • Politico is an annoying online magazine, because while they’re generally on the side of the villains of the Right, every once in a while they publish a long piece tearing into the excesses of the far right. Like incredibly blatant evangelical charlatan Jerry Falwell Jr. Do you really want to know how corrupt, decadent, and greedy Falwell is? Then buckle up, because this is a long, jaw-dropping ride through all the perfidy. Tea is served.

    In interviews over the past eight months, they depicted how Falwell and his wife, Becki, consolidated power at Liberty University and how Falwell presides over a culture of self-dealing, directing university resources into projects and real estate deals in which his friends and family have stood to make personal financial gains. Among the previously unreported revelations are Falwell’s decision to hire his son Trey’s company to manage a shopping center owned by the university, Falwell’s advocacy for loans given by the university to his friends, and Falwell’s awarding university contracts to businesses owned by his friends.
    “We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”

I know. McConnell, Adams, and Falwell will still have all their money and influence, but it’s nice to see someone spell out how wretched they all are now and again.

Bonus! Jacob Wohl has been charged with a felony. Maybe he’ll go to jail! Nah, rich white Republican fraudsters only get a little pat on the wrist.

Welp, looks like capitalism broke another scholar

It’s a tragedy, but increasingly common. Evgeny Morozov rages against the culture that fostered Epstein, Ito, and the association of science and money.

Is it so surprising, then, that when a colleague cautioned Ito against meeting Epstein – who used to list his interests as “science and pussy” – Ito described him as “really fascinating”? Brockman, for all his realism about low intellectual standards of the tech community, also couldn’t resist Epstein’s charms, describing him, in an email to me, as “extremely bright and interesting”.

If the “third culture” is so much more sophisticated than its predecessors, how come most of its card-carrying members – famed scientists-cum-brands, courtesy of the Brockman empire – got caught up in the Epstein mess? It’s not uncommon for intellectuals to serve as useful idiots to the rich and the powerful, but, under the “third culture”, this reads like a job requirement.

Are the costs of living with this culture – eg the prostitution of intellectual activity at “billionaire dinners”– worth it? And can we still trust what the leading intellectuals of the “third culture” actually have to say, given, also, what they have to sell?

The answers to these questions are self-evident. And yet, while it’s easy to attack the rotten apples such as Ito or Negroponte, a more radical transformative agenda should ask for more: close the Media Lab, disband the Ted Talks, refuse the money of tech billionaires, boycott agents like Brockman. Without such drastic changes, the powerful bullshit-industrial complex that is the “third culture” will continue unharmed, giving cover to the next Epstein.

It’s time to get radical, I agree. But shutting down the old avenues of support is pointless without alternatives. Science ought to be maintained by government support, and you ought to mistrust the bilge that relies on a billionaire’s largesse…especially when that billionaire doesn’t read about or care about science, except for the prestige it grants them. Of course, how do I explain to my university administration that I’m rejecting a million dollar grant because I think the donor is a parasite? (Note: Purely hypothetical. No million dollar offers are knocking at my door.) The people who benefit most from these cash prizes are the donors, who get to pretend to be contributors to science when all they’ve done is successfully undermined egalitarian mechanisms for promoting good science. Like these people:

One of Brockman’s persistent laments was that all the billionaire techies in his circle barely read any of the books published by his clients. Not surprisingly, his famed literary dinners – held during the Ted Conference, they allowed Epstein (who kept Brockman’s Edge Foundation on a retainer) to mingle with scientists and fellow billionaires – were mostly empty of serious content.

As Brockman himself put it after one such dinner in 2004, “last year we tried ‘The Science Dinner’. Everyone yawned. So this year, it’s back to the money-sex-power thing with ‘The Billionaires’ Dinner’.” Was “the money-sex-power thing” that very potent “new mode of intellectual discourse” promised by the “third culture”? If so, we’d rather pass.

Also…TED talks are terrible. One in a few hundred might be informative, but most are exercises in formulaic hype.

I sure am triggered and owned!

This is Laura Ingraham sucking on a plastic straw stuck in a piece of red meat imbedded with incandescent light bulbs. In order to own the libs.

I am rather surprised at the astounding success of our plan to get conservatives to do incredibly stupid, pointless things in public. Be sure to let them all know how much your feelings have been hurt by these performances! Maybe they’ll escalate. I sure am glad that no one told Laura that there are regulations about contamination of meat that we’d hate to see violated, and that libs think it’s a bad idea to smash those light bulbs and put broken glass in your cheerios.

Ito out!

As expected:

Forward email sent to provost, cc-ing President:
“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as Director of the Media Lab and as a Professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.”

I bet he gave it much thought. He knew all along; he’d worked hard to keep Epstein’s involvement secret. And then, boom, the day a major article reveals how snout deep in the trough he’d been, he decides now would be a good time to resign.

I don’t think he’d planned this until he was caught blinking in the floodlights.

Ito knew, Ito lied

Joi Ito is toast. The latest revelations about Epstein’s association with MIT are damning.

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

All this was after Epstein was convicted of raping children. MIT had judged him “disqualified” from making donations on paper, but the MIT Media Lab had continued to clandestinely allow Epstein to slip them money under the table, and get influence in return. Further, billionaires like Bill Gates were still listening to Epstein’s advice and following his recommendations about where to make donations. Ito knew, and kept the pipeline open secretly.

Then there’s this little anecdote. His colleagues and coworkers are squeamish about being associated with a pedophile, so Ito makes arrangements for a visit that objectors won’t know about, and Epstein is so blatant that he won’t go anywhere without his retinue of young attractive women.

In the summer of 2015, as the Media Lab determined how to spend the funds it had received with Epstein’s help, Cohen informed lab staff that Epstein would be coming for a visit. The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to give input on projects and to entice him to contribute further. Swenson, the former development associate and alumni coördinator, recalled saying, referring to Epstein, “I don’t think he should be on campus.” She told me, “At that point it hit me: this pedophile is going to be in our office.” According to Swenson, Cohen agreed that Epstein was “unsavory” but said “we’re planning to do it anyway—this was Joi’s project.” Staffers entered the meeting into Ito’s calendar without including Epstein’s name. They also tried to keep his name out of e-mail communication. “There was definitely an explicit conversation about keeping it off the books, because Joi’s calendar is visible to everyone,” Swenson said. “It was just marked as a V.I.P. visit.”

By then, several faculty and staff members had objected to the university’s relationship with Epstein. Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor, had voiced concerns about the relationship with Epstein for years. In 2013, Zuckerman said, he pulled Ito aside after a faculty meeting to express concern about meetings on Ito’s calendar marked “J.E.” Zuckerman recalled saying, “I heard you’re meeting with Epstein. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Ito responding, “You know, he’s really fascinating. Would you like to meet him?” Zuckerman declined and said that he believed the relationship could have negative consequences for the lab.

In 2015, as Epstein’s visit drew near, Cohen instructed his staff to insure that Zuckerman, if he unexpectedly arrived while Epstein was present, be kept away from the glass-walled office in which Epstein would be conducting meetings. According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.

On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”

I guess the dollar signs in Ito’s eyes were obscuring his ability to see what he was enabling, but not enough that he was unaware of how ugly this would all look to outsiders.

He’s done. He should resign post-haste, before the university decides to throw him to the sharks in a forlorn attempt to save face.

The advantages of not being a NYT subscriber

It’s a matter of perspective. Nowadays, when the internet lights up with the latest idiocy from their opinion pages, such as the newest mad screed from David Brooks and I wonder what orifice he’s stuffed his foot in now, I can succumb to temptation and click on the link, and the New York Times immediately comes roaring back, “YOU MUST PAY ME MONEY TO SEE THAT!” and I think, “Hmm. How much money would I pay to read Brooks’ column?” and my answer is always “None. They should pay me to read it”, and I wisely just close the window and move on.

Ditto for anything by Bret Stephens or Thomas Friedman or any of the other sinecured bozos they’ve got over there. Sure, they reasonably want to recoup some of their investment in that freak show, and I can understand that, but still, it’s a freak show. Set them free, let them find some dignity in honest work and a decent way of living, instead of being propped up as a spectacle for the mob to jeer at.

A meme is born

Karl Rove once said this.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

And now…Donald Trump is making that attitude manifest in so many ways.

[Read more…]

But…but…that’s the whole goddamn problem!

MIT is struggling with the disclosure that one of their star professors, Joi Ito, accepted a heck of a lot of money from the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So, at one of their meetings, Nicholasa Negroponte decided to “help”.

Throughout, the meeting had proceeded calmly. But as one of the organizers began to wrap things up, Negroponte stood up, unprompted, and began to speak. He discussed his privilege as a “rich white man” and how he had used that privilege to break into the social circles of billionaires. It was these connections, he said, that had allowed the Media Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay people full salaries, and allow researchers to keep their intellectual property.

Negroponte said that he prided himself on knowing over 80% of the billionaires in the US on a first-name basis, and that through these circles he had come to spend time with Epstein. Over the years, he had two dinners and one ride in Epstein’s private jet alone, where they spoke passionately about science. (He didn’t say whether these occurred before or after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.) It was these interactions, he said, that warmed him to Epstein and made him confidently and enthusiastically recommend that Ito take the money.

It was at this point that Negroponte said he would still have given Ito the same advice today. Different people in attendance had conflicting interpretations of his statement. Some understood him to mean he would act the same way even knowing what he knows now about Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking. But Negroponte told the Boston Globe that in retrospect, “Yes, we are embarrassed and regret taking his money.”

Oh my god. Stop shooting yourself in the foot.

Negroponte has all these privileges. MIT is a good university with an excess of wealth and privilege. Isn’t it nice that he hangs out with capitalist looters? Shouldn’t all our science and education be funded by making friends with rich criminals? Yeah, let’s all cozy up to perverts and bankers and stock market speculators and hope they shower us with gold. Money is magic! It doesn’t matter where it comes from!

Some in the audience were shocked and horrified, the ones with some awareness and social consciousness. Negroponte just got up and admitted that all the great things that benefited all the lucky people at MIT were the product of unclean hands, and that he’d happily take any money from anyone, no matter how they acquired it.

I guess ethics isn’t one of the scholarly disciplines MIT is known for.

Three words: “I was mistaken”

Donald Trump said that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian. It wasn’t. The weather service had never said it was. He was told that was incorrect.

So he or his staff whipped out a sharpie to add a line to a weather map, and the White House put out a video of Trump pointing to a fake map to “prove” he wasn’t wrong. That is so pathetic.

He can’t even say, “I was mistaken”.

Should I feel sorry for the grim flunky in the background who had the job of handing him the edited map?