Shall we get ahead of the cycle with the next JD Vance weirdness?

He’s full of them, and we’re just waiting for someone to open the basement door and shine a light on the scuttling, slimy critters chittering down there. Here’s one that I haven’t seen on CNN yet: he has a pet Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug in that dark cellar.

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé, Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Vance has several other “intellectual” peers, but Yarvin is one of the more damaging. He’s the source of this proposed plan to fire everyone in the civil service.

As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code.

Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

There’s a rich vein of disturbing sickness in the Vance basement — Yarvin, but also Rod Dreher, the Claremont Institute, and a whole host of bizarre conservative Catholic goons. Keep digging, everyone! It’s the creepy season!

Road trip!

I have learned that the most haunted road in Minnesota is located about an hour away from me, near Sibley State Park. It’s called Timber Lake Road.

The street is called Timber Lake Road, which is located in central Minnesota near New London. The area is far from any major cities – about an hour west of St. Cloud – so you’re in for a bit of a drive. In the daylight, that might not seem like such a big deal. It looks like any other country road in Minnesota.

But at night, things can get a little scary. The road is located near the thick forests and wetlands of Sibley State Park. The landscape certainly looks like it would set the scene for a horror movie. As the story goes, a woman who lived in a house near the road one day came home to find her children murdered. Devastated, she hung herself, and her ghost has wandered the road searching for the murderer ever since.

Locals have reported strange sightings on the road for years. Shadows in the woods along Timber Lake Road may point to a supernatural force at work. There have also been reports of red eyes blinking at travelers from the darkness.

A gated cemetery stands along Timber Lake Road. This is where the woman and her children are said to be buried. Here, visitors have sighted ghostly children wandering the graves. You may also hear strange sounds. Dogs howling, a woman wailing, and otherworldly screaming have all been reported.

Never mind the imaginary ghosts — I’m looking at the photos and thinking, “Spider country!” The wailing and screaming are just the sounds the locals make when they stumble into cobwebs. I should check it out. Maybe we could spend a night at the Palmer House Hotel while we were out there.

Man, the ghost-hunting business must be tremendously profitable — you can just milk the absence of the subject of inquiry for money.

Burnt monkey testicles?

I can’t keep up with the trail of poop-nuggets JD Vance leaves behind him. The latest is one that I don’t have to issue with a disclaimer — he really is this bad this time.

An article by Rolling Stone, dated October 25, 2022, has exposed allegations of animal cruelty linked to a company financed by JD Vance’s venture capital firm, Narya.

Wait — the reminder that Vance is a venture capitalist isn’t the horrifying revelation?

The report claims that AmplifyBio, which received funding from Vance’s firm, carried out severe experiments on live animals, including monkeys and dogs.
These revelations have ignited a firestorm of outrage and heightened scrutiny regarding JD Vance’s suitability for high office. Rolling Stone’s investigation uncovered troubling details about AmplifyBio’s testing practices, revealing that many animals suffered and died due to toxic testing exposures and harsh conditions. Particularly shocking were reports of “dreadful mistakes,” including a lab monkey that died after becoming trapped in faulty equipment and technician errors causing severe burns to other monkeys’ genitals, TOI reported.

We seem to have moved out of the comical phony exposé phase of the attack to dragging him for the things he actually does and says. He’s a Sideshow Bob surrounded by rakes.

I blame the childless cat ladies.

Frittering away the presidency in a lost cause

Since Biden no longer is campaigning for office, and has about 6 months left in his term, one might wonder what he will do in his remaining time. This actually ought to be normal — it’s weird that the leader of our country typically seems to spend about two years out of four focused on re-election, rather than doing their job. At least we can say that Biden is going out with an ambitious goal.

President Biden endorsed sweeping changes to the Supreme Court on Monday, calling for 18-year term limits for the justices and a binding, enforceable ethics code for the high court.

He is also pushing for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit blanket immunity for presidents, a rebuke of the Supreme Court after it ruled this month that former president Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts.

I approve, although I might favor even shorter term limits. These are essential changes, because the judiciary is totally broken right now (I’d argue that the electoral college is even more broken, and that the Senate is an archaic relic, but let’s fix one thing at a time.) However, let’s get real: Joe Biden is not going to achieve his goals.

The calls, however, are largely aspirational at this stage given the long odds they face in implementation. Term limits and an ethics code are subject to congressional approval, and the Republican-controlled House is unlikely to support either. Both proposals also require 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Democrats only hold 51 seats in the upper chamber. Passing a constitutional amendment requires clearing even more hurdles, including two-thirds support of both chambers, or via a convention of two-thirds of the states, and then approval by three-fourths of state legislatures.

But that’s OK. Maybe the old man will prepare the way, get everyone used to the idea that the Supreme Court is not inviolable, and maybe scare a few justices into cleaning up their act.

That’s a cunning way to defund education and kill a lot of children

Trump has a new campaign promise: he’s going to defund all schools that have a vaccine mandate.

You know, they all have vaccine requirements. Here in Minnesota, kids are required to be immunized against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTaP), polio, measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), hepatitis B (Hep B), and varicella (chickenpox) before kindergarten. I’m not enthused about the return of polio! Or all those other diseases! It’s a strange political ploy to promise to rewind that childhood mortality curve all the way back to 1800, but that’s what the Republican party wants.

The cat’s not dead yet

She just looks that way. It’s around 30°C here, and every morning the evil cat complains at me — she won’t shut up — until she collapses on an old carpet remnant near a fan I’ve set up in my office. Then she’s immobile most of the day. I’d feel sympathy, except I’m stuck in the same oven with her.

Could be worse. Look at these views of the Park Fire, currently raging in Northern California. The video is especially notable for showing all the different views technology gives us on the fire — satellite, radar, airplane flight maps, etc. — so you can get a multidimensional appreciation of the awfulness.

All I can do is show you a photo of a heat-stressed cat in western Minnesota.

Random godless thought

After seeing a few recent atheist videos and reading a few godless articles, I had a question: where are my natural-born, god-free from birth atheists at?

It’s just strange that all the popular atheists nowadays are people who deconverted — you know, like Matt Dillahunty and Paulogia — which is fine, they are good representatives, but I can’t relate. Other ex-Christians and ex-Muslims probably find them relevant and interesting, but they aren’t me. I never believed; I got shuffled through Sunday school more because it was free daycare for my parents, who had six kids wearing them out, and I would memorize Bible verses for the teachers, but that was just an exercise that would get me praise on Sunday. I never prayed, not even as a very young child, because it seemed stupid to me. Who’s listening? I didn’t expect a response from someone else inside my head.

My parents were not religious either, and neither did they ever pray or even go to church. My grandparents made me read from the Bible every Christmas, but do you think they ever went to church? Heck no. I didn’t know anyone, except the Sunday school teacher, who was particularly devout, and even the pastor, when I asked him about why I was going to church at all, just shrugged and said it was fine if I didn’t. (I wonder if he was deconverting himself — he later left that church).

This is not a complaint — atheists who deconverted are great, and an important part of the face of atheism. I am just feeling unrepresented. For instance, I don’t give a flying fuck about interpreting Bible verses or finding contradictions, but there’s a lot of atheist content on that sort of thing, which I find largely irrelevant. I enjoy stuff about humanism and science, which matters far more to me.

What about you? Are there more people here who never ever believed in Jesus or prophets or whatever, or more people who fought the good fight to escape from youthful misconceptions?

Don’t be that professor

This is Charles Conteh, a political scientist at Brock University in Canada.

He had a post-doc named Amy Lemay. They worked together on a paper; reading between the lines, it sounds like an awkward partnership. She provided lots of data, but suggested that it really needed to be split into a couple of papers. Conteh disagreed.

In emails seen by Retraction Watch, Conteh asked Lemay and another faculty member for feedback in March 2023, on a draft of the article they were writing. After reviewing their feedback, Conteh said he could no longer proceed with the project, citing “serious reservations” about Lemay’s suggestions to publish separate papers based on policy reports they had produced for Niagara’s Community Observatory platform.

“We can (and most likely will) cite them in future papers, but I object to the idea of us reproducing and republishing them in their current forms,” Conteh wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch. “I plan to revisit this project at a future date, but at this point, after some reflection, what I can candidly say is that I am not clear about a collaborative way forward.”

So far, so good. As the primary author, it was Conteh’s decision whether the work was ready to publish or not, and it’s actually commendable to not clutter the literature with a paper that was not up to standards. I’m on his side on that, so far.

Except…Conteh then went ahead and published the paper without attribution or acknowledgment anyway! He didn’t even inform his collaborators what he was doing, and they discovered accidentally that he’d dissolved their partnership and intentionally done the exact opposite of what he’d said he would do!

Months later, Lemay discovered the published paper online by accident. The article used text from the policy briefs she had worked on, without citing those sources.

Yikes. I wonder if maybe his relationship with his post-doc was rocky and contentious — I’ve known from first-hand experience a post-doc with an extraordinarily bad relationship with his PI — but that does not excuse improper attribution, and worst of all, plagiarism. Conteh is clearly in the wrong here.

But he then he slathered on a good-sized dollop of bullshit on his behavior, and any sympathy evaporated.

Lemay asked Conteh to add her as a co-author to the paper. In October, Conteh asked a journal editor if the authorship could be updated to include Lemay and another co-author’s name.

Conteh replied he was “glad that you’ve suddenly taken an interest in being a co-author in the manuscript now that it has been published. I am adding your name not because I think you deserve it or are entitled to it, but because it is the noble thing to do.”

You don’t get to magically turn plagiarism into nobility by slapping on an author’s name — that sounds more like you’re trying to buy her cooperation with an authorship, which is not noble at all. Also, if you think she does not deserve it, how is adding an unwarranted authorship “noble”? Get off that high horse, Dr Conteh. You’re just another opportunist.

I also see how Conteh could be a difficult person to work with.

The paper has been retracted, and a Brock University inquiry found Conteh in the wrong.

Another interesting point:

Though she recently finished a postdoc, Lemay worked in academia for 25 years before pursuing her PhD. At this point in her career, she said, she is not intimidated by the “power imbalance” in academia, as some younger students who are still forging a career path may be.

Yes, the hierarchical nature of academia is itself an obstacle to progress.

Someday, I’ll learn to ignore Marvel movies

I had hopes. Deadpool is notorious for breaking the fourth wall and making sarcastic asides about the whole premise of comic book superheroes, so I thought maybe it would be funny. Maybe it was, but it was buried in over-the-top, nonstop violence — limbs lopped off, decapitations, multiple stabbings, and that was just in first ten minutes. The whole premise of the entire movie is that Deadpool has the superpower of instant healing, Wolverine is also able to heal any damage, and they didn’t like each other…so there were multiple overlong scenes which consisted of nothing but the two of them stabbing and chopping at each other in gruesome ways. I was bored.

Also, it’s a multiverse movie. I hate the multiverse concept. It erases the possibility of tragic mistakes, because you can just hop to a different timeline, or go back in time and fix an error, and it lowers the stakes. It also opens up the possibility of all kinds of cameos from other Marvel movies — even dead characters can pop in for a visit — and this movie worked that angle thoroughly and repeatedly to the point that I just stopped caring that so-and-so from an old superhero movie showed up.

It was not amusing when the culminating battle (it’s always a battle nowadays) was bringing in hundreds of alternate universe superheroes in a climax of pointless hacking and slashing. I was ready to fall asleep. The plot was also a mess, with two villains, neither of whom cared about the knifings and choppings going on, they were operating on a different plane of existence, apparently.

Skip it, unless you’re really into fan service.