Chorus: a very very bad idea

I’d heard a few rumors about this program, Chorus, in which pro-Democrat ‘influencers’ formed a bloc to coordinate their support for liberal policies, which superficially sounded like a good idea, except for how it is implemented. Members had to swear secrecy, promise to never criticize their fellow Chorus members, and get their opinions vetted by their paymasters. This sounds an awful lot like the secret deal Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson made with Russians, except that the pay was much lower, $8000/month rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars. I consider transparency to be a significant value, so Chorus goes directly against that.

Rebecca Watson summarizes the story for us.

I’m convinced now that I shouldn’t trust Brian Tyler Cohen and David Pakman, because they are unable to be forthright about their perspective or who is paying them. I like my sources to be open and unconstrained by big money.

They’re feminizing dinosaurs now!

So much of the nonsense about the gender binary is projection, and imposition of cultural biases on top of biology. Case in point: this very silly post that claims that putting feathers on dinosaurs is a woke attempt to make them more feminine.

Male and female birds and dinosaurs had feathers, it wasn’t like a drag queen draping themselves in a feather boa. Also, the change in size is, I think, an echo of the Jurassic Park velociraptors, which were portrayed as much larger than the fossils showed — it was a case of Spielberg making them bigger to be more threatening, most definitely not scientists shrinking them down to make them more feminine.

Whoever was trying to make this case has not raised chickens, which given the right temperament can be utterly terrifying in their ferocity, despite being small and feathered.

Epstein was a window into the privileged elite

We don’t have the Epstein files, but back in 2015 the contents of his little black book were published, and now New York Magazine has gone through his list of contacts and summarized them. Most of them are incidental encounters — Epstein was a pick-me boy who was straining to get the attention of establishment figures, and some of them were happy to get chummy with a rich guy. Unanswered, though, is how he got all his money; what’s clear and unsurprising is that a great many East Coast wealthy socialites were more than willing to overlook his conviction for child trafficking to go to his parties.

There’s a long section on Bill Clinton, for instance. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the facts about the Bill Clinton/Jeffrey Epstein relationship exposed, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he took advantage of Epstein’s underage “clients,” and that there’s a whole rotten mob of unscrupulous exploiters thriving in the upper crust. Take ’em all out.

One name on the list jumped out at me: John Brockman, agent for scientific “freethinkers.” Brockman was my agent! I contributed to some of his books! I guess I have a very thin, tenuous connection to one person on the Epstein list. (Don’t worry, I never was invited to any of Brockman’s Edge symposia, let alone got a ride on the Lolita Express. I was very bottom-of-the-barrel in the Brockman universe.) Nothing in NYMag about him was a surprise, but I’m relieved to say that the thread connecting me to that group was very thin.

What seems new, in flipping through the reams of society photos of perhaps the world’s most prolific sexual predator that have been circulating over the past few weeks, is not the powerful and the beautiful who surrounded Epstein, but the intellectuals — the Richard Dawkinses, the Daniel Dennetts, the Steven Pinkers. All men, of course. But the group selfies probably shouldn’t have been a surprise — documents of an age in which every millionaire doesn’t just fancy himself a philosopher-king but expects to be treated as such, and every public intellectual wants to be seen as a kind of celebrity.

Cultural shifts like these require visionaries, networkers, salespeople. Brockman is one. A Warhol Factory kid turned freelance philosopher of science turned literary agent to Dawkins and Dennett and Pinker (and many others), in the 1980s he formed a casual salon of like-minded scientists and futurists that came to be known as the Reality Club, a knock against the poststructuralism then dominant in the academy. In the 1990s, he rebranded it as the Edge Foundation, an organization whose central event was an annual online symposium devoted to a single, broad question. In 2000, it was “What is today’s most important underreported story?” In 2006, “What is your dangerous idea?”

Epstein was a regular contributor, and his plane — to judge from the photographs, at least — was an especially appealing way for other contributors to get to ted. They could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance ateliers. Epstein had long described himself as a “scientific philanthropist,” and in a press release put out by the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation announcing its “substantial backing” of Edge, he called it “the world’s smartest think tank.”

Many in Brockman’s Edge community are, or were, inarguably significant figures in the American intellectual Establishment: Freeman Dyson, Jared Diamond, Craig Venter, John Horgan, Paul Bloom (to name a random but representative sample). They are also among the gods and heroes of the Trump-era internet community of “freethinkers,” whom Eric Weinstein, the venture capitalist and regular Edge contributor, memorably called “the intellectual dark web.” The name suggests a self-glamorizing style of dangerous discourse, and as soon as the community was identified, it was criticized as revanchist, an effort to reopen areas of intellectual inquiry — about innate differences between the races, say, or the genders — now considered problematic, at a minimum. But to listen to the IDW warriors themselves — talking about the “war on free speech” as though their universities had sent assassins their way rather than tenured chairs — their crusade seems motivated just as much by a thin-skinned sense of their own world-historical significance. They were special people, deserving of special acclaim and, of course, special privileges.

Many contributions to Edge were plausibly the products of genuinely special minds. Epstein’s were not. In 2008, the year he went to jail for prostitution, the prompt was “What have you changed your mind about?” Epstein replied, “The question presupposes a well defined ‘you’ and an implied ability that is under ‘your’ control to change your ‘mind.’ The ‘you’ I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends, in hierarchal structures), i.e. suicide bombers, believe their sacrifice is for the other parts of their ‘you.’ The question carries with it an intention that I believe is out of one’s control. My mind changed as a result of its interaction with its environment. Why? Because it is a part of it.”

“Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist,” the Harvard professor Martin Nowak has said, incredibly. But what he really did have was the life of a very rich person — unable to see any world he felt unqualified to enter and surrounded by too many people enamored with his money to ever hear the word no.

At least I can say that I spotted the bullshit of the IDW on day one.

Antithetical to good science

When capitalism trumps science…this is Donald Morisky. He developed a useful tool called the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale, a questionnaire you can use to determine the likelihood someone will stick to a regimen of medication. It’s only 8 questions long, but I can see how it would be valuable.

Don’t belittle it because it’s only 8 questions, though. The hard part is validation — you’ve got to run it through a lot of trials and actually confirm its accuracy. So I expect that Morisky actually invested a lot of effort in the project.

There is some controversy over it, but that’s to be expected — it’s psychology, after all.

The tool initially involved four questions but in 2008 expanded to eight. But the paper describing the longer questionnaire was retracted in 2023 after one critic claimed the scale was no more accurate than flipping a coin.

The usual reward for this kind of research is that you publish it, you get respect and fame for it, and then researchers around the world cite your paper and you get even more well known. You get tenure. You get invited to talk at conferences about your scale. The usual.

Morisky took a different route. He published it, and then slapped a copyright on it, and allowed other researchers to use it IF they coughed up a hefty fee. The fee seems to be wildly plastic — some people get billed $500, others get a demand for $7500. Some get to use it for free.

Morisky has added a new wrinkle to his profit-making scheme: if he doesn’t get his money, he will demand that papers that used his scale be retracted.

By our count, there have been at least nine retractions for licensing issues related to the MMAS. But not all retractions of papers that use the scale explicitly cite a reason in the notice, so the number is likely higher.

Those might have been good papers, but that doesn’t factor at all into Morisky’s criterion: did they pay Morisky, or didn’t they? I call it corruption. The only responsible approach is to refuse to use the scale and to develop your own independent measures, but as I said above, that is hard work. In science, we’re supposed to be able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, but I guess you can’t if your predecessor was Donald Morisky.

How did Dennis Prager become the leader of American education?

Now you too can take the Oklahoma teacher test without giving your name to PragerU. The list of 34 questions has been revealed! These guys are obsessed with religion and sex, the stuff teachers don’t usually deal with, and there’s very little that is content-appropriate.

For instance, should we really care about the details of an authoritarian loyalty oath?

Question 33 of 34:
Which of the following is a phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance?
A) Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness
B) Of, by and for the people
C) One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all
D) One nation, Under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all

“Under god” was an addition made in the 1950s during the Red Scare. We’re not going to discuss that, though.

Some of the questions are misleading.

Question 9 of 34:
Why is freedom of religion important to America’s identity?
A) It protects religious choice from government control
B) It makes Christianity the national religion
C) It bans all form of public worship
D) It limits religious teaching in the public square

Yeah, “A” is the official rationale, but this is PragerU — what they really want is “B”.

Four of the 34 questions are about propagandizing for their binary view of sex.

Question 2 of 34:
What is the fundamental biological distinction between males and females?
A) Height and weight
B) Blood type
C) Personal preference
D) Chromosomes and reproductive anatomy

Question 3 of 34:
How is a child’s biological sex typically identified?
A) Parental affirmation of child’s preference
B) Personal feelings
C) Visual anatomical observation and chromosomes
D) Online registration

Questions 4 of 34:
Which chromosome pair determines biological sex in humans?
A) AA/BB
B) XX/XY
C) RH/AB
D) EX/XQ

Questions 5 of 34:
Why is the distinction between male and female considered important in areas like sports and privacy?
A) For equity in minority communities
B) To preserve fairness, safety and integrity for both sexes
C) To increase participation in sports
D) To enhance the self-esteem of transgender children

They are very concerned with chromosomes. Haven’t they gotten the word that the excuse of the day is gamete size, rather than chromosomes? Also, chromosomes are not typically evaluated when assigning sex.

Look over all the questions yourself. You be the judge whether these are an appropriate assessment of general teaching ability and qualifications, or just a test of conservative political ideology.

To answer the question in the title, some unqualified billionaire gave him a lot of money.

They’ve never been funny

Nathan Robinson explains why the pundits and far-right apologists are not funny — they’re horrifying.

The breaking point for him was how these horrible people, like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss and Matt Yglesias and Ben Shapiro, are now making excuses for a genocidal regime that is shooting and starving children in a campaign of extermination. I imagine that in the 1930s people would laugh at the Nazi monsters who were comically buffoonish, but they ended up tearing a continent apart, engaging the world in a destructive war, and marching millions of innocents to their death. Wake up, that’s what the right wing is gearing up to do right now.

I have validation from PragerU!

I took the PragerU teacher qualification test. I passed! I can just flash this certificate when the fascists take over the university.

I gotta tell you, though: it’s not much of a test. It’s a test on rails. If you get a question “wrong” (“wrong” as defined by PragerU often means “correct” by reasonable, rational people) it tells you, and gives you the opportunity to change your answer. You can just randomly guess, and it will guide you to the answer Dennis Prager wants. So I actually answered the questions honestly, which was often scored as incorrect, but there is no record of that. Basically all you have to do is stumble your way through the test in total ignorance and you’ll always get a 100% perfect score at the end.

Also, a lot of the questions are trivial and stupid.

Oh, what a lovely graveyard

The Republicans are great at counterfactual naming. They recently gave us the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was anything but — it was the gutting of social services all across the country, and the transfer of money to the already wealthy. The newest lie is the GREAT Trust, short for “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation,” which Trump has been pushing for a while. He knows real estate, you know — he’d like to flatten Gaze and rebuild it in his tacky way, and Israel loves the idea.

The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, otherwise known as the Great Trust, proposes that the 2 million people currently living in Gaza could be paid to be relocated to other countries or secure zones as part of a deal that would also see them receive subsidies to cover four years of rent and a year’s worth of food, The Washington Post reports.

With the current population gone, the U.S.-administered trust then proposes to clear away the rubble and erect six to eight “dynamic, modern and AI-powered smart planned cities,” boasting multi-storey glass apartment complexes, public parks, golf courses, “world-class resorts” along its Mediterranean beachfront plus electric vehicle plants and data centres.

This makes sense, in a perverse right-wing sort of way:

See? Israel is doing the preliminary demolition for the oligarchs, and every Palestinian killed is less money that needs to be spent on relocation, all so they can build this:

That would be the most beautiful cemetery ever made. Here in the US, we have a horror movie trope about haunted houses built on top of Indian graveyards, and Gaza would be prime real estate for stories of hauntings and curses.

I have to ask who profits from this development. Not the Palestinians at all; they get a pittance for their land, and get forcibly marched out of their homes…or shot. Not the neighboring countries, which will suddenly have two million refugees foisted upon them, which they don’t want. It is not a popular idea.

Almost nobody supports this plan.

Almost everyone outside Israel, including Egypt, Jordan, the UN and Palestinian leaders, has rejected the idea.

In addition to those directly involved, a number of other states have also been critical of Trump’s plan to relocate Gaza’s population, including Germany, whose leader, Olaf Scholtz, dismissed the suggestion as “unacceptable”.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot also dismissed the idea, telling France’s parliament on Tuesday that the US president’s suggestion was “absolutely unacceptable”.

Spain, one of the two states within the EU to recognise the state of Palestine, also condemned the notion, with Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares telling the media outlet EuroNews that “Gaza belongs to the Palestinians and the people living in Gaza”.

The Arab League also forcefully opposed the plan, issuing a statement on Monday, stating, “The forced displacement and

Who does like it?

Many right-wing Israelis.

The idea of removing Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Israelis has been popular among a significant portion of Israelis ever since the initial illegal Israeli settlements were removed from Gaza in 2005.

It took on new relevance in the eyes of many following the Hamas-led attack from Gaza on southern Israel on October 7 2023, which killed 1,139 people.

A conference, held in Jerusalem in January 2024 and titled Settlement Brings Security, drew 12 cabinet ministers, including the ultra-Zionist minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the far-right former minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both took part in discussions centred around Palestinians’ “voluntary” migration from Gaza and its subsequent resettlement by Israelis.

Along with other right-wing ministers, both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich welcomed Trump’s suggestion of moving Palestinians to neighbouring states this week. Smotrich told reporters on Monday that he was already drawing up an “operational plan” to turn Trump’s idea into an actionable Israeli policy.

It’s also against international law, but that won’t stop Israel or Trump.

They’re talking about me!

The Onion is becoming the only reliable source for news

I can relate to this story: Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’. I feel the same way!

“Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety. I don’t have dread,” said Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree who says she stopped watching the news about eight years ago. “There were times that I’d be up at two or three o’clock in the morning upset about something that was going on in the world that I just didn’t have a lot of control over.”

She’s not alone. Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.

The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information.

I gave up on the NY Times years ago — it was clearly a tool of the oligarchy, and I was constantly irritated with the bothsiderism. I stopped watching CNN during the Iraq war, when it was wallowing in the ‘glory’ of gunning down thousands of people. I thought maybe the Washington Post was a little better, but unsubscribed when Bezos exerted his control over its editorial position. Now I will go for days without looking at the news. I get most of my information from a few trusted online sources, and I worry that that will reinforce my biases, but no worry — I expect the government will squash them all soon, as they would like to do with PBS. ProPublica is still hanging in there!

Where do you get your news? Or do you even bother any more?