You know what?

It’s still snowing. It was snowing all day yesterday. It’s not going to stop until 7am tomorrow, presumably.

Fortunately, I have been immersed in preparing another lecture on endocrine disruptors all weekend long, and haven’t even looked outside. Just as well, I’d probably just see flakes of BPA falling out of the sky at this point.

Bad dads

I thought this was one of the worst fathers ever: remember the Canadian farmer who moved his whole family to Russia? Arend and Anneesa Feenstra, who dragged their ten kids to an uncertain future, are being told to leave because who knew, they were expected to learn the Russian language, and Arend didn’t have time. Why he didn’t have time is a mystery, since his wife, by his own admission, was doing all the childcare and housework and editing the YouTube videos that were their sole source of income.

That’s a deeply stupid dad who is letting his ideology destroy his whole family.

But then there’s a dad that’s even worse. Stewart Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers and is now serving an 18-year federal sentence for conspiring to overthrow the government. You might suspect he didn’t have the happiest home life. Now we know how bad it was: his son has come out and told all.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Adams revealed his abusive upbringing at the hands of Stewart Rhodes, and the new path that he seeks to chart.

He said living with Rhodes was a constant process of moving around and starting over, as the Yale-educated militant convinced his family the government was spying on them and the end of days was imminent.

“We lived in extreme isolation in one particular cultural bubble in increasingly paranoid and militant right-wing political spheres everywhere we moved in the country, until eventually we ended up in Montana,” Adams said.

When his mother divorced Rhodes in 2018, Adams was able to move out of the shadow he cast on their family. Rhodes severely undercut Adams’ and his seven siblings’ schooling and barred them from publicly talking about their home lives. Adams couldn’t complete a times table until he was 19 and has spent the last several years trying to catch up on his education—recently enrolling in several college courses.

Yikes. Dakota Adams has his revenge, though. He’s running for the Montana state house…as a Democrat!

“It served as a sobering wake-up call in terms of how much danger we are truly in and how the Republican Party enabled a president to become an active danger to this republic,” he said. “I was forced to reevaluate a lot of beliefs and face hard questions about what I really stood for.”

He has plans to sell the body armor and guns he once wore to protest the government alongside his father, and he had some strong thoughts on guns and gun culture.

“American gun culture needs to be rehabilitated from an egotistical and vanity-based, hyper-individualist ego trip culture to civil service and solemn responsibility to the community,” he said. He still opposes total bans on firearms—he believed they could be necessary for the self-defense of vulnerable groups.

Many of his direct policy concerns are about making Montana livable for middle- and lower-income people. Most of the voters in his area are strongly conservative, and Adams tries to avoid sweeping cultural and social issues. He would rather focus on the challenges directly facing Montana residents.

I’d vote for him.

It’s something I’ve always felt, so this is an interesting illustrative example. I’ve thought that the only way to cultivate empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded children is to give them an empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded upbringing. The authoritarian parents, like Rhodes and Feenstra not only make their kids’ lives a living hell, it drives them away from their ideology. I suspect some of the commenters here have similar stories, of being brought up in an oppressive environment and now rebounding towards a more progressive approach to life. That’s one of the strengths of the Left.

Winter is overcompensating

It’s been a dud of a winter, but now the weather service is predicting 25-35 cm (10-14 in) of heavy, wet snow tomorrow, turning to rain in the afternoon, and then freezing and turning back to snow on Monday. It’s maximal yuck.

I’ve already sent an announcement out to all my students that class will be held over Zoom on Monday. The weather forecasts are usually a bit overblown, but let’s play it safe.

Things that will kill your SF book for me

I am an addict, but a healthy one. One of my addictions is reading — every night when I go to bed, I have to spend an hour reading a book, just to settle my brain and redirect it away from constantly fussing over the work I’ll need to do. I try to vary the subjects: so one recent book was Silent Spring, which was a mistake, since it was way too close to my work, and another was The Demon of Unrest, but sometimes I just want some lazy trash, and Kindle Unlimited has been a great source of all kinds of interesting variety. Until lately.

When I look at the Kindle Unlimited offerings, this is what I see:

Do you detect a theme? I get screens full of boobs, crotch shots, and presumably seductive poses. It’s gotten ridiculous, and it’s gotten worse. The Amazon AI knows I enjoy a good SF novel, and to the Amazon AI, that means bosoms. Lots of big, pillowy bosoms everywhere…and most of this cover art is probably generated by an AI somewhere. There was nothing that interested me anywhere.

I had a wild thought that maybe the covers aren’t indicative of the content — maybe it’s the easy availability of cheap AI-generated art has led to writers throwing provocative covers on their work, but that there’s actually some good writing underneath. I made the mistake of downloading a random couple of these things.

No, there isn’t any good writing there. It’s all cheesy, formulaic, stupid shit. I skimmed one that was purportedly about a guy who found a gadget that allowed him to travel back in time to the early 19th century, which has potential for a good story and maybe some interesting stuff about history. Unfortunately, the extent of the history was the author (and his proxy, the protagonist) congratulating themselves on being smarter than those stuffy ivory-tower academics because he knew that the War of 1812 was fought in this period. Did he explore any details of that war? No. What got him enthused about time-traveling was the opportunity to get laid with a busty daughter of a minor politician. Thus, the cover.

What’s worse is that so many of these books are part of a series — sometimes 15,20 books long — that go on and on repetitively, never actually exploring the SF topic they nominally introduce. There are apparently people who consider themselves authors who churn out klunky dialog and interminable “stories” that are all wrapped around unimaginative sex acts, and seem to be written by and for genuinely stupid men. And they’ve driven out all the interesting stuff! (Be warned, though: download one of these trash books, and Amazon will try to feed you even more.) There are good books sprinkled in there, but they’re drowning in all the hackery.

You know we’ve got a guy on this network, William Brinkman, who is trying to make a living writing and marketing through Amazon, and I can’t imagine how tough it is to get noticed while swimming through that morass. He doesn’t succumb to the temptation of lurid cover art or an endless series of books chummed out with minimal effort. He’s also got a book on Kindle Unlimited, A Fire in the Shadows. I may have to stick to familiar authors, rather than exploring new authors, because the hacks have taken over, and that’s
a real shame.

The lesson: You can tell a book by the cover. Also, you get what you pay for.

Inevitability

Surprise. Candace Owens, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, has been fired by Ben Shapiro, the Jewish conservative weirdo. I suspect there were irreconcilable differences.

The feud began last November when Owens tweeted that “no government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide.” While she did not specifically mention the State of Israel, her remarks were widely condemned by her fellow conservative media figures. Soon after, Shapiro publicly called Owens’ behavior “disgraceful” and chided her “faux-sophistication” on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Days later, their feud became even more personal. Owens posted to X a series of Bible verses suggesting “you cannot serve both God and money.” That pointed remark was viewed by many as a not-so-subtle use of the antisemitic “dual loyalty” trope against Shapiro, who responded: “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit.” Owens hit back that her boss was “utterly out of line” and “acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now.”

That same week, Owens appeared for a friendly interview on Tucker Carlson’s web show, where she lamented Shapiro’s “ad hominem attacks” and said she would not respond to him on a “level of intellect” because “there’s nothing that he has expressed… that he fundamentally disagrees with in terms of what I said.” Carlson agreed, taking issue with how Shapiro had skipped past saying “‘I don’t think she’s correct’ or ‘Maybe she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,’” and went straight to labeling her “absolutely disgraceful.”

I don’t care for either one’s opinions, they’re both stupid and annoying. But at least there was some entertainment value in watching them shred each other.

Musk mocking, it’s always fun

I greatly enjoyed this skewering of his stupid cybertruck. Maybe you will too.

If you really want to annoy Musk, be a wealthy woman. Mackenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, has announced that she plans to donate $640 million to charity, which will lead to the downfall of Western Civilization, according to one really wealthy idiot.

‘Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should filed be listed among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died,’ Musk said in a now-deleted X post on March 6.

Musk didn’t elaborate on why he’d singled out Scott, but he’s been a harsh critic of efforts to promote corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it, Musk said in an X post in January.

Scott does not impress me — she has a net worth of $40 billion, so giving away a small percentage of that is not much of a sacrifice. But OK, it’s a token amount, wish it was a lot more. But what will kill American civilization, at least, is the existence of billionaires of either sex who wield undue influence on the culture. Scott, Bezos, and Musk are the problem.

I should write something about DEI, because I’m at a university that doesn’t blink twice at DEI initiatives, so I’ve got lots of experience with it. It wouldn’t be an exciting post, though, because DEI is just fine, we should do more of it.

None should be too big for justice

I’ve been a fanatical Apple fanboi for over 40 years. I bought my first Apple II in 1980, and I switched to the Mac in 1984, when they first came out. I was an official Apple developer in the 1990s — I persevered throughout that long period when everyone was predicting that the company would eventually fade away, eaten up by the evil Microsoft. I stuck it out through the 6502 era, the 68000 series era, the Intel era, and now the Apple Silicon era. My lab is full of Macs. I’ve got a Mac desktop and a Mac Powerbook and an iPhone. You may not question my devotion.

And then

The Justice Department sued tech giant Apple on Thursday, kicking off a potentially historic antitrust battle. The lawsuit alleges that Apple’s ecosystem of products are designed to limit competition and put consumers at a disadvantage. “Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,” the authors write. Later in the filing they add that “this case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future.”

Good! It’s about time! Apple is a big fat bloated tax-evading monster that needs to be smacked down and taught some humility. Every big company needs to be regulated, and I don’t exclude the ones that make great products that I love.