I am an AI training module

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?

Another racist outed, time to follow the threads to his promoters

I hadn’t heard of this guy, Richard Hanania, until recently — but I sure was familiar with his old pseudonym, Richard Hoste. He was one of the more hateful, obnoxious, stupid racists who was busy stuffing the internet with lies a decade ago. Now I learn, in one of the most thorough, devastating journalistic takedowns I’ve ever read that Hoste and Hanania were one and the same, and that he’s broken into the mainstream with the complicity of conservative billionaires.

A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

I remember Hoste, because I’ve long kept half an eye on nasty little websites like Taki’s Magazine, The Unz Review, VDARE, the Occidental Observer, and anything linked to the Pioneer Fund. These are the places some of the most openly racist people, like Richard Spencer or Steve Sailer, let it all hang out nakedly. I’ve always marveled at how they can write such vile, repugnant articles in their safe little hugboxes full of racists, and then walk out in public without shame, even to friendly appreciation from notable academics. It’s one of the tells I recognize for closet racists — people who praise Sailer, for instance, are the kind of slimeballs who read VDARE approvingly, even if they’d never dare to write such things themselves.

Now I’m going to have to add “following Richard Hanania” as another marker for the shy racists.

You’re on notice, guys. Scuttle for the kitchen cabinets as fast as you can, the light has been turned on.

Anyway, a major data leak from Disqus has exposed Hanania’s history, and it’s interesting to see how a low-life troll mainstreamed himself and started grabbing attention and money from more respectable venues. First, he dropped the pseudonym and was writing under his real name, Hanania. Then he started writing somewhat less inflammatory, but still crackling with racism, op-eds and articles that he’d submit to big-name sites, where he’d get picked up by sympathetic editors (they’re everywhere). It also helps to cozy up to rich white people, many of whom already share his views.

The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.

Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.

Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.

Yes, he has a “think tank,” a term that is long past its past-due date. Hanania’s is called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. It’s run out of his house, and mainly seems to be a drop-box for donations that pay his substantial salary. The function of CSPI is…

In addition to being a laundering service for handing out money to reactionary academics, it is a paper mill for “studies” that back up reactionary talking points, to be spun into articles and opinion pieces with headlines such as “Social trends causing rapid growth in people identifying as LGBT, report says” (from the ideological astroturfing Sinclair Broadcast Group), “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” (WSJ) and “The new class war is over identity” (Washington Examiner) — the latter being an anti-LGBTQ screed that ended, “My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.”

It’s a profitable gig, collecting donations from insufferable rich Republicans and shuffling it into bad publications that pollute the body politic, but there’s no “thinking” involved in a think-tank. But it paid off for Hanania! He could use that illusion of serious scholarship to work his way up the grifter’s ladder.

Hanania was making a name for himself. By 2022, he was selected as a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center — funded through right-wing donors including billionaire Harlan Crow — is led by executive director Carlos Carvalho. “I have no comment,” Carvalho told HuffPost when asked about Hanania.

Hanania was also tapped to be a lecturer for the “Forbidden Courses” program at the University of Austin, the unaccredited school funded by venture capitalists and founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, now a prominent right-wing influencer herself. The university did not respond to a request for comment about Hanania.

Earlier this year, Hanania spoke to the Yale Federalist Society, the school’s chapter of the conservative legal organization, about what the government has done to “discriminate against whites and men.” The chapter did not respond when asked for comment.

And this October, Hanania is scheduled to teach a seminar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The school did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

He may be dropping a few rungs off that ladder, though. Bari Weiss has said she didn’t know him and wouldn’t have hired him if she had. Oops.

The University of Austin, founded by a group including Bari Weiss in reaction to progressive campus culture and promising freer speech, has drawn a line at the right-wing writer Richard Hanania, after HuffPost revealed that he’d written in favor of eugenics and racism under a pseudonym.

“Richard Hanania has no affiliation with UATX. He was invited once as a speaker. Like many other institutions, we were completely unaware of his pseudonymous, racist writings. Had we known, we would not have invited him,” a spokesman, Hillel Ofek, told Semafor in an email.

His invitations to speak at the Federalist Society probably still stand — they eat up the racist white nationalist stuff there. He’s probably going to face some opposition at Stanford, I hope, but you never know. Apologists for hate seem to have infiltrated many higher levels of society. You don’t have to worry about Hanania’s prospects, he was already gearing up to jump to a new grift.

Hanania mentioned all of these men [Andreesen, Sacks, Ramaswamy, Thiel] in a June Substack post while describing what he celebrated as the “Tech Right,” a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”

The cult of “longtermism” has swept through Silicon Valley in recent years, with Musk and Thiel among its most well-known acolytes. It’s a worldview that often prioritizes the health of future generations of humans — even ones millions of years hence — over people currently living in the here and now, suffering and getting by on planet Earth. (Musk’s goal to colonize Mars, for example, is a longtermist project.)

Its adherents are often obsessed with IQ scores and scientific racism, and the famous computer scientist Timnit Gebru has criticized longtermism as “eugenics under a different name.”

The scholar Émile Torres has also noted that longtermism’s “transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of ‘posthumans’ is eugenics on steroids,” a recapitulation of 20th-century beliefs that ushered in “a wide range of illiberal policies, including restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations.”

It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that Hanania has emerged as a scribe for this new “Tech Right.” After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.

“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.

“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”

New grift, same as the old grift.

The rational reason to reject eugenics is, of course, that we know where it led when it captured “the hearts and minds of policy makers” over a century ago: to suffering and death and a world where an asshole like Hanania can thrive.

P.S. I neglected to mention that another important rung on the racist grift ladder is publishing in Quillette. You will not be surprised to learn that Claire Lehman, the creepy mastermind behind Quillette, still supports Hanania.

Did you think my personal medical saga was on the mend?

Ha ha, fooled you. I’ve been getting steadily worse. My ankle is totally fucked up, my whole foot is swelling like a balloon, and to top it all off, the problems are spreading to my knee. I’ve been reduced to lying immobile hoping some random twitch doesn’t trigger spasms of pain.

Last night was the worst. I’m trying to find a position I can sleep in, rearranging limbs and whimpering pathetically at every twinge, when Mary suggests we go to the ER. “No,” I whined. “I have to man up and deal with this in my manly masculine stupid way. I can’t admit that I can’t deal with this!”

Around 2am I turned to her and said “I can’t deal with this. Take me to the ER, please,” and she did.

So I was shortly stretched out on a table and a nurse was sticking an IV in, and then the Dilaudid flowed. O Sweet Relief! Then another liter or three of blood was extracted to pay for it, and I got lots of blood tests (which came back mostly normal). We’ve got to figure out what was going on, so there were a great many needle sticks as the doctor tried to draw fluids out of my joints, both the ankle and the knee. He succeeded, and slurped about 75mL of Mtn Dew out of me.

If I installed a tap in my knee, I could apparently get free Mtn Dew* at will.

The fluids have all been sent up to a lab in Alexandria. They’re to see if I’ve got an infection, or weird sharp crystals in solution damaging the tissues. He didn’t think it was an infection, and my uric acid results were normal, so he’s just being thorough. It’s time for some thoroughness here.

It’s also time for some pain management. I’m now on NORCON every four hours, for the next 5 days, and prednisone once a day for the same days. I’ve been on this before, and know what to expect: insomnia, diffuse anger at everything, and a wobbly, semi-drunken perspective on the world. So I’ll be ready to blog, in other words.

I’m also aware that I’m getting a few opioid doses here. There have been limits set on their use, and I’ll respect them. These things are scary. I’m just hoping I get an effective treatment before I have to stop taking the potent drugs.

I’m meeting a podiatrist tomorrow, and what will then follow is a solid plan of treatment. For now, it looks mainly like wearing the horrible boot and confinement to my house, where Mary will wait on me hand and foot. Maybe I should order a little silver bell from Amazon? Yeah, no, I don’t want to take her for granted.

*Warm, flat Mtn Dew that mainly tastes of salt. Maybe PepsiCo should think of a new flavor, Mtn Dew Synovial Goo.

That’s Texas logic

A new announcement from the Holy Republic of Texas:

The largest school district in Texas announced its libraries will be eliminated and replaced with discipline centers in the new school year.

Yep. They’re shutting down the school libraries. And what, you may wonder, is a “discipline center”? It’s where you send the troublemaking students to get them out of your hair.

Teachers at these schools will soon have the option to send misbehaving students to these discipline centers, or “team centers’” – designated areas where they will continue to learn remotely.

This is getting worse and worse. Now you might be curious about what has prompted this sudden decision to eliminate libraries and turn them into detention camps? It’s Texas, so it could just be cussedness and a love of ignorance. But no, they have a specific excuse.

News of the library removals comes after the state announced it would be taking over the district, effective in the 2023-24 school year, due to poor academic performance. Miles was appointed by the the Texas Education Agency in June.

That’s Texas logic. You’ve got a school system with poor academic performance, so you step in to improve it by preventing the kids from reading books.

Think it will work?

Jeffrey Epstein’s legacy

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.

The bad news from the past week

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.

Resigned to a new normal

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.

Chronic pain sucks

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.

“severe ensethopathy”

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?