I didn’t want to know more about Caroline Ellison after all

We’re learning more about Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried’s partner in crime. Some of it is kind of cute. She was a math nerd!

The daughter of esteemed economists — her father, Glenn Ellison, is currently the head of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her mother, Sara Fischer Ellison, is an economics department lecturer at the university — she grew up outside of Boston, in a household filled with numbers. While other kids were playing with Lego, Ellison was learning about Bayesian statistics before middle school; one year, rather than write her father a birthday card, she presented him with an economic study of stuffed animal prices at Toys ‘R’ Us. “We definitely got exposed to a lot of economics,” Ellison previously told Forbes in an interview.

A natural mathematician, high school was a laboratory for Ellison’s love of numbers and she competed multiple times in the Math Prize for Girls, the national contest that draws the country’s brightest young minds. But her interests went far beyond math, and as a senior, she received an honorable mention in a linguistics olympiad. She also loved books—her parents read her the first Harry Potter book when she was 3, she said, then she read the second one on her own at age 5. (She has apparently described herself as a Ravenclaw.)

So far, that’s cool — I can’t hold the Harry Potter fandom against her, since lots of people got into that in her youth. But then her biography takes a darker turn.

By the time Ellison arrived at Stanford as a math major in 2012, her professional ambitions were taking shape, and while adjusting to college life, she took to Tumblr to publish her daily musings. The now-deleted blog, called WorldOptimization, is unsigned but a close associate confirmed that it was hers. In it, she wrote that “the sexual revolution was a mistake” and that she believed “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers.” She also mused about race science, in one post saying the “genetic differences there are massive” when it comes to Indian people from different provinces and castes — which has become a source of discrimination in Silicon Valley. And at the top of her list of “~cute boy things~” was “controlling most major world governments.”

Oh god. So she wasn’t so bright after all. Just another privileged white person with a battery of misconceptions and a poor understanding of the sciences.

Quaintly evil

If you ever had any doubts that Shi Huang was a freakin’ racist, behold his latest Twitter admissions.

Whether there is a superior race is a scientific question and can only be answered by highly qualified geneticists after a thorough scientific investigation. For lay people to have a no answer to such a question prior to investigation is bizarre, non-scientific, and pure politics

People have been pushing this racist notion of a “superior race” for centuries, and it’s clearly been an example of motivated reasoning — people trying to justify colonialism and slavery. There is no point to investigating “scientifically” when it’s patently counterfactual. I question whether Shi Huang is a highly qualified geneticist, since he then goes on to justify his claim with a childish caricature of evolutionary theory.

Evolution has a progressive direction from simple to complex or from more random noise within the system to less noise, which is what science has found out, at least my science. This would put human at the top. The same logic would equally apply to different people.

Humans at the top, huh, because they have less random noise. You know, the human genome is full of random noise and garbage and selfish DNA, but bacteria, like E. coli, don’t have introns or massive chunks of repetitive DNA and all the functional genes are packed efficiently and tightly. By the criterion of “noise,” bacteria would be at the top and humans at the bottom. Even by his own fallacious reasoning he’s wrong!

This ‘great chain of being’ model of evolution is so totally 19th century (or older) stuff. No one believes it anymore, except for a lot of ignorant racists.

He’s going to have a tough time getting published in Nature again. Oh well, there’s always Quillette!

Boo hoo, PragerU

Dennis Prager is unhappy that some of his fans don’t get to see their grown children on Christmas. Tragic.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of men and women who, because of political differences, maintain minimal or no contact with their parents and, even more cruelly, do not allow their parents to have any contact with their children—their parents’ grandchildren.
…
I know of this firsthand. Parent after parent calls my radio show, often close to tears, sometimes actually sobbing, pouring their heart out to me about being alone on holidays despite having children and grandchildren.

In virtually every case, the parent is conservative, and the child is on the Left. I assume there are cases of grown conservative children who won’t allow a liberal/Left parent to see his or her grandchildren—but I have never heard of a single such case. It is almost impossible to imagine a conservative adult depriving his or her parents of access to their grandchildren because the parent(s) voted for Joe Biden. Moreover, if there were such a person, every conservative I know would vociferously condemn this individual.

Awww. Don’t you realize that it is a religious imperative — it’s right there in the Ten Commandments — that you are required to honor your parents, without regard for whether they honor you or not? It’s an absolute rule. Your parents can be hateful bigots, they can have neglected or abused you, they can be preaching prejudiced ideas that do great harm to others, but you must place your children in their claws for Christmas. You have no choice in the matter, nor do your kids, because choice and consent are dirty words to the Pragers of the world. Shall we consider that maybe those sobbing grandparents are deprived of contact with their grandchildren because they are poisonous vipers who want to indoctrinate the kiddies with evil ideas? No, we shall not. The problem lies entirely with those damned liberal parents.

Prager gives three reasons why evil leftists are entirely at fault for making their parents cry.

Reason #1 is basically authoritarian absolutism. Thou shalt not question the orders of the preacher Lord!

The further left you go, the less likely you are to believe that you are accountable to an absolute moral code, let alone to a Giver of an absolute moral code. On the other hand, conservatives, certainly religious conservatives—people who believe in a God-given Ten Commandments—believe that they are obligated to honor their parents regardless of their political differences.

No, we Leftists do have moral values — we just don’t accept the unquestioned authority of a holy book, especially not when it’s a self-serving commandment that panders to the authority of old people, and especially not old people who have made questionable moral decisions. Shouldn’t a universal moral code be one that even people who do not follow a narrow religious sect can accept? “Honor your parents” doesn’t work as a blind precept, because some parents don’t deserve honor.

A parent who endorses the politics of hatred, as Republicans do, should legitimately be disowned. You want to say that gays should be killed, brown people deported, atheists (and anyone who follows a different sect than yours) is evil? Then no, you don’t get to play with my kids. Perfectly fair.

Reason #2 is a strange one, and a good reason to avoid people like Prager: it’s because atheists do not have a conscience and are evil, and that’s why they make Grandma cry.

The Left proves the utter inadequacy of the conscience. To cite the present example, the adult children who deprive their conservative parents of contact with the parents’ grandchildren have a perfectly clear conscience. All those secular people—including secular conservatives—who argue that God is unnecessary because it is enough for people to answer to their conscience are spectacularly naïve. The consciences of most people who do evil are blissfully untroubled.

They don’t even care that they are making their parents unhappy! To the contrary, if I’d had to cut off my parents’ access to my kids, I’d have felt terrible about it, and would have suffered pangs of guilt (fortunately, that was never a problem in my family, and I wish my kids could have spent more time with their grandparents). The reason someone may sever communication with a parent is precisely because they have a conscience and a set of moral values that find the ideas of an older generation repugnant.

Reason #3 is even stranger and more absurd. It’s college. Conservatives really have a hate-on for education.

You almost have to be a college graduate to shun your parents and deprive them of their grandchildren because of political differences. If you had asked most of these college graduates before they enrolled in college who, because of political differences, won’t see their parents for Christmas if they could imagine never talking to their parents because of political differences, most of them would probably have deemed the question absurd. After four years of college indoctrination—essentially consisting of hatred of nonleftists—the question is no longer absurd.

No, what happens is that kids escape their parents’ control, and learn that Mommy & Daddy’s moral and religious code isn’t the only one out there — they learn to think for themselves and discover that there is a world of ideas that aren’t as blinkered and narrow and oppressive. They might just wake up to the fact that the gay-bashing and transphobia and racism and greed they were brought up with are bad ideas. They may even still love their parents, but just regret how they treat others, and not want their own children to have that kind of bias instilled in them.

It’s not that the more liberal offspring are the problem. It’s the nasty opinionated hidebound kinds of people who would call in to cry on the shoulders of a conservative wretch like Dennis Prager who are terrible role models for anyone’s kids.

I already got the best present

I got my present the other day, shipped to me by my niece, Rachael.

Are you dazzled? I know, let’s get real: if I tried to sell that at a garage sale, I might get $5 for it, and that would be entirely for the frame (it is a nice frame). It’s worth a lot more to me, though, and it’s entirely because of its history. It was passed on to me after my brother’s death, and he had in turn inherited it after my father’s death, and he had rescued it from my grandmother’s house after her death. Grandma had several paintings by this artist hanging in her home, proudly displayed in good frames, and I remember them from my childhood. They were the most prominent pieces of art in her home.

The artist was my father.

He had painted these watercolors when he was a teenager, which would date them to the mid-1950s, when he was pretty much a stereotype of the classic 50s teenage troublemaker — hair slicked back with Brylcreem, on the football team, letterman’s jacket, tinkering with cars or playing hooky to go fishing, all of that. But also…he wanted to be an artist. That was the dream. He painted, he sketched, he had standards. Unfortunately, his family was dirt poor — his father had died when he was very young, and he and his 5 siblings were raised by their widowed mother, who worked picking fruit in season, and at a cannery in town out of season. They lived in a shambles of a house (but I loved that house!) right next to the railroad tracks, and apparently on the wrong side of those tracks.

I don’t think he ever even considered the possibility of art training. Once he graduated from high school, he went straight into the work force. He worked on the railroad, as a logger, as a mechanic and gas station attendant, as a water meter reader, as a custodian, as anything he could do between stints at Boeing — Boeing was, of course, the big kahuna in Seattle, with the best pay and benefits, but they were also a fickle lord, with regular waves of layoffs. It was a tough struggle to raise a family as a blue collar worker in an unpredictable economy, and he was sometimes reduced to working two jobs to make ends meet. Art? It doesn’t pay the bills. There was little free time, either. He’d get home at some odd hour and flop his aching back down in bed, to try and get a little rest before going off for another shift of hard labor.

Sometimes he’d ask me to read the comics to him while he rested, but he was picky. Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant or Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, that was the good stuff, although he also liked Turok, Son of Stone. It had to have good art, none of that talking animal stuff. Some evenings the whole family would just sit at the table and draw, while he showed us how to sketch people and do perspective. My brother continued that practice for years after he moved out and started his own family.

He never did get any professional training in art, and had little opportunity to practice it, but I think it made a difference to his family. We grew up with a working class appreciation of the arts and an aspiration to do more than just work for a living, since we could see how the demands of labor had deprived our father of his dream. We never fell into the trap of anti-intellectualism or turned into Fox News zombies — I’ve got a remarkably progressive and open-minded family, and never had those uncomfortable holiday get-togethers I’ve read about. I credit that to a father and mother who were reasonable people who never fell victim to the irrational fears and paranoia that has poisoned so many American minds. We could just look at the walls in Grandma’s house and see that there were greater depths, depths that they were deprived of exploring, in our family of poors and manual laborers and struggling lower class workers.

That’s what the painting means to me. Don’t saddle people with your biases about what their class should be like, because they’re human beings who might surprise you with their hopes and ambitions. Also, damn, but the demands we impose on working people and our own biases have deprived the world of great potential.

Have a good Christmas this weekend, and remember that the best gifts you can give are mostly intangible.

Brings back childhood memories of going to church at Christmas

It was exactly like this.

I never go to church anymore, not even at Xmas. Instead, this year I’ve replaced it with the roars of a murderous freight train circling around and around my house all through the night, letting me know it would kill me if I stepped out into the blizzard. It’s still out there. There’s a weird haze outside my window caused by all the shards of ice whipping through the air.

It’s all preferable to church, though.

Rats, sinking ship, yadda yadda yadda

Some bad guys are getting betrayal for Christmas. There are hints that Mark Meadows may have been turned. Meadows was Trump’s chief of staff, and there are already piles of incriminating memos and text messages during the insurrection that have turned up, so maybe he’s seeing some advantages of turning into a witness for the prosecution.

“There is a very tantalizing comment in the executive summary,” said Weissmann, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on Mueller’s team. “It’s hard to call it that because it’s 160 pages, but in that executive summary there’s a reference to why the Department of Justice may not have sought to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino with contempt.”

“If you recall, they were both referred by the committee to the Department of Justice for contempt failing to comply with a subpoena, and one of the things the report says, is it sort of speculates, but odd that it says it may be that they’re already cooperating,” Weissmann added, “and with Mark Meadows, that would be huge. I mean, he is in the place to know everything so, obviously, if not cooperating already, there is a ton of pressure that is going to be put on him.”

Meadows is a real sleaze, but I’d be happy to trade him for a more robust criminal prosecution against the big orange guy.

Also in the news — Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested, but the question has been…where is his partner-in-crime, Caroline Ellison? While SBF has been babbling to everyone, including minor league youtubers as well as the big money press, Ellison has been lying low, silent. The answer has been revealed: she’s been singing like a canary to the feds.

Two former colleagues of disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that they helped him orchestrate a years-long scheme to defraud investors in FTX, the crypto trading platform that collapsed last month, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York said Wednesday.

The executives — Caroline Ellison, who served as chief executive of Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried, and Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer — are cooperating with prosecutors, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.

You dirty, yellow-bellied rat!

I’m not complaining. None of the rats will ever be trusted again.

A manly soup

My wife says, “Manly, aye, but I like it too.” (you have to be a certain age to get that reference.)

It started out as a bland bean soup, but after I added carrots and potatoes and sausage (Impossible Sausage, so still vegan) and onions and garlic and a lot of mysterious spices, it became hearty enough to keep a man (and a woman) warm and strong through even the most savage blizzard Minnesota might throw at us.

Awaiting a blizzard

Doesn’t it give you a little thrill when the National Weather Service informs you of “life-threatening conditions” about to descend upon your home?

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON CST THURSDAY… …WIND CHILL WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM THURSDAY TO NOON CST SATURDAY… …BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON THURSDAY TO 6 AM CST SATURDAY…

WHAT…For the Wind Chill Warning, dangerously cold wind chills expected. Wind chills as low as 40 below zero. For the Winter Storm Warning, heavy snow expected. Total snow accumulations of 5 to 8 inches. For the Blizzard Warning, blizzard conditions expected. Winds gusting as high as 50 mph. For the Wind Chill Advisory, very cold wind chills. Wind chills as low as 30 below zero.

WHERE…Stevens, Pope and Swift Counties.

WHEN…For the Wind Chill Warning, from 6 AM Thursday to noon CST Saturday. For the Winter Storm Warning, from 6 AM Wednesday to noon CST Thursday. For the Blizzard Warning, from noon Thursday to 6 AM CST Saturday. For the Wind Chill Advisory, until midnight CST tonight.

IMPACTS…Travel could be very difficult or impossible. Widespread blowing snow could significantly reduce visibility. Gusty winds could bring down tree branches. The dangerously cold wind chills could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS…This could be a life-threatening situation if you get stranded traveling late this week. Consider adjusting any travel plans now.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…

Travel should be restricted to emergencies only. If you must travel, have a winter survival kit with you. If you get stranded, stay with your vehicle.

The latest road conditions for the state you are calling from can be obtained by calling 5 1 1. Road conditions can also be found at 511mn.org for Minnesota or 511wi.gov for Wisconsin.
More Information
…ACCUMULATING SNOW WEDNESDAY FOLLOWED BY GROUND BLIZZARD AND DANGEROUSLY COLD CONDITIONS THURSDAY AND FRIDAY… …TRAVEL THURSDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH FRIDAY NIGHT COULD BE IMPOSSIBLE AND LIFE-THREATENING…

.Snow will overspread the region Wednesday and bring 5 to 9 inches of fluffy accumulation through Wednesday night north of a line from Madison to Mankato To Eau Claire, with 3 to 5 inches to the south. Winds will be relatively light Wednesday and Wednesday evening. There should be a break in severe winter conditions late Wednesday night and early Thursday. Then, strong northwest winds gusting as high as 50 mph and dangerously cold air will surge in Thursday afternoon through Friday night. Whiteout conditions are expected during that time with travel becoming very difficult or impossible. This event could be life- threatening if you are stranded with wind chills in the 30 below to 45 below zero range. Travel plans for late this week should be adjusted now. In addition, heavy snow remaining on trees from the last storm and strong winds arriving could result in tree damage and power outages as temperatures drop below zero.

A Winter Storm Warning is in effect Wednesday and Wednesday evening. Then, a Blizzard Warning goes into effect Thursday across southern and western Minnesota, with the Winter Storm Watch continuing north and east where wind and blowing snow will begin a bit later.

So, today — lots of snow. Tomorrow and the next day — 50mph winds pick up all the light fluffy stuff and blow it around and around, reducing visibility, making it painfully dangerous to be outside, and drifting all over the roads and highways. I just looked out my window and the snow is already here.

I’m taking this seriously, of course. Shortly, before the snow gets too high, I’m going across the street to the lab to feed all the spiders and set up the fly stocks for genetics that arrived yesterday, and then I’ll dart home and hunker down. I’m planning a big pot of soup — maybe more of a stew, I’m planning to throw in lots of chunky vegetables — that’ll tide us over for a few days. And then tonight, I’ll huddle around the warm glow of the computer monitor and have a conversation with anyone who wants to join in. Unless the power goes out.

Stay safe, everyone!

The Menu is a different kind of horror movie

The Menu is getting a very short run at the Morris Theater, only a couple of days and then it’s out tonight. It’s not exactly holiday fare, I guess. I got in to see it last night, in a nearly empty theater (the competition running on the second screen is Avatar, which doesn’t interest me in the slightest).

It’s worth seeing! I didn’t know what to expect, and was continually surprised. I could summarize it as your standard horror/slasher movie: obsessed chef with a cult following invites obnoxious upper-class snobs to a private dinner in order to kill them all, the sort of thing you might expect a Vincent Price to headline. But that’s not it at all. Ralph Fiennes is marvelously intense as a chef who has lost all joy in his craft, and plays it with a sorrowful despair. His guests might be frightened at first, but mostly they sink into resignation. “We’re all going to die tonight,” one says, while passively remaining seated at the table. They all stay and eat — no, taste and savor — the weirdly finicky plates of little tidbits artfully tweezered into miniature tableaus in front of them.

Instead of the traditional grisly-murder-one-after-the-other, most of the diners survive to the very end. They instead face psychological torture, becoming increasingly aware of their doom. Even the one set-piece event, in which the men are released onto the island with a 45 second head start before the waitstaff will hunt them down, doesn’t end with any killing — they’re caught and brought back and sit down for the next course. It was more horrifying than culminating the hunt in gore and splatter.

Even the staff are caught up in a cult of depression and despair. No one will get out alive, and all seem to welcome the release of death. There’s no point in living, you know. You’ll never be great enough, other people will suck all the life out of you eventually. Serve the chef, that is all.

The exception to all the doom-and-gloom is Anya Taylor-Joy (is she going to be in every movie from now on?) who plays a prostitute hired by one of the pretentious twits to be his plus one. She is mainly pissed off when she learns her client knew ahead of time that this dinner was going to end in death, and he hired her because he know he couldn’t attend without a partner. She fights back by reminding the chef of a time when he wasn’t jaded and cynical, and even gets an honest smile out of him.

The real monster in the movie turns out to be wealth and capitalism and greed, and how it consumes people with ennui. But it is at heart a true horror movie, it’s just lacking an Abominable Dr Phibes and replaces him with a sense of sorrowful futility.

A perfect Christmas movie!