There’s nothing like a divorce to spill the tea

Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing, news that does not interest me at all. A pair of meddling incompetent billionaires are splitting their fortune? Whoop-te-doo, as we say down here in the holler, does that mean they’ll stop trying to interfere in healthcare and education? Probably not.

But what does make me sit up and listen is that Melinda is letting all her resentments hang out. Oh boy! I am not at all surprised that Bill was suckered by Jeffrey Epstein.

Melinda Gates met with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside her husband Bill in New York City and soon after said she was furious at the relationship between the two men, according to people familiar with the situation.

The previously unreported meeting occurred at Epstein’s Upper East Side Mansion in September 2013, on the same day the couple accepted the Lasker Bloomberg Public Service Award at the Pierre Hotel and were photographed alongside then-mayor Mike Bloomberg.

The meeting would prove a turning point for Gates’ relationship with Epstein, the people familiar with the matter say, as Melinda told friends after the encounter how uncomfortable she was in the company of the wealthy sex offender and how she wanted nothing to do with him.

This is what I don’t get about these people who willingly associated with Epstein. As the article says, Epstein was rude and arrogant and was constantly name-dropping, so why would anyone with billions of dollars want to hang out with him?

The ties between Gates and Epstein ran much deeper than the tech mogul first admitted. As The New York Times reported, starting in 2011, Gates met with Epstein on numerous occasions. This was three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida; by then, accusations that Epstein exploited girls and young women were widely reported in the press.

Oh, and this is fun: catch Gates lying about his relationship.

Indeed, the Times reported Gates visited Epstein multiple times from 2011 to 2013, and that Epstein had tried pitching a new charitable fund to JPMorgan honchos and to the Gates foundation. In 2013, Gates also took a ride on Epstein’s private jet (christened by tabloids as the Lolita Express), from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight records reviewed by the Times. CNBC also reported that Gates rendezvoused with Epstein in New York in 2013.

When Gates first met Epstein, he was still Microsoft’s chairman and the second richest person in the world with a net worth of $56 billion.

“I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him,” Gates said in September 2019, as media coverage into his connections with Epstein were heating up. “I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that. There were people around him who were saying, ‘Hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.’

Oh, yeah? What were you doing in Palm Beach, Florida in 2013 that you now want to hide, Bill?

No one, other than trolls and corporate lawyers, likes DMCA takedowns

Rebecca Watson has been getting lots of them, and threats of lawsuits, in a tangled web of complaints from a couple of parties fighting over porn addiction vs. no porn addiction. I don’t want to even try to untangle it, but it sounds like Rebecca is just a civilian casualty taking friendly fire, or not-so-friendly lashing out by one side of the argument. I’ll let her try to explain it.

I’ve been there. It always seems like those most religious about free speech who fling around SLAPP suits and try their hardest to silence everyone else. I’m with Team Rebecca on this one: I’m not going to sue anyone no matter what they say about me, and it’s just abuse of the legal system to play these games. Did Richard Carrier or Ben Radford improve their reputations with their shenanigans? No.

A few other comments:

You too can support Rebecca Watson on Patreon!

I’ve noticed that she generally seems much happier and more relaxed since she kicked the atheist/skeptic movements out of her life and replaced them with surfing and a dog. There’s a lesson there. I’m replacing them with photography and an army of spiders.

Everyone congratulate her on her recent elopement! That seems to be a wise decision, too: my parents eloped, my niece is eloping at the end of the month. Getting out from traditional demands is another recipe for happiness.

Long-legged beasties

On my daily spider meditation in the lab, today I found that they’d molted again. They’re bigger, and they have this rangy long-legged look to them.

Very handsome, one and all, but something is troubling me: they’re 8 months old. Keep in mind that I suspect there are baby Parasteatoda emerging right now, and by June/July they’ll be big strapping behemoths raising families of their own, so it’s clear my lab colony isn’t growing as fast as it should have — I may have been starving them for much of their childhood. I’m shoveling flies at them every day now, but for most of their life I had them on a weekly feeding schedule. Now I want to get some fresh egg sacs and do some comparative feeding protocols and see if that can determine an optimal schedule.

In other promising news, on my walk home from the lab I checked out a few familiar haunts. There’s a place where last year and the year before I’d found many shy Theridion lurking, and while I didn’t see any yet, I did find some fairly dense new cobwebs there. I also checked under the eaves of my house where, last year, Mary found a huge cat-faced spider that we observed all summer long, and where we found its body after the weather turned cold. No spider there yet, either, but some egg sacs tucked into dark corners, so maybe later. I’ll have to look in on that spot regularly.

Science words!

You don’t need to understand the meaning, as long as you string together a few science terms you learned in grade school, it must be true.

Do I really need to say it? Being injected with an RNA vaccine does not replace your entire nuclear genome with RNA.

Although…it does make me wonder what would happen if a magic enzyme added a hydroxyl group to all your ribose sugars to convert DNA to RNA. Yeah, changing the chemical properties of all of your chromosomes to make them more labile and prone to rapid breakdown and unrecognizable to most of the key proteins for transcription, among other things, would be kind of catastrophic and thermodynamically costly.

There’s probably some vicious Hebrew abuse going on there, too, but I wouldn’t know.

Wait, does this mean that when you die, your soul retains some kind of DNA-based organic structure?

No, stop, don’t over-think this. Trying to puzzle out serious meaning from that text leads to madness.

Would you get into a van with this man?

What if he offered you candy, or had a puppy you could play with?

That’s Josh Duggar, the man who became famous for being on a reality TV show about a religious family popping out a train of babies. Then he became more famous for the fact that he had been molesting his little sisters. And now he’s hooked on the prestige and has been caught in another glamorous crime.

Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Gerald Faulkner, testifying for the prosecution, alleged Duggar downloaded computer files depicting child sex abuse on May 14, 15 and 16 of 2019.

The files were initially flagged by a police detective in Little Rock, Ark., and then allegedly traced to Duggar’s IP address on a computer at his workplace at the time, the Wholesale Motorcars dealership.

One file, according to Faulkner, depicted child sex abuse involving children ranging from 18 months to 12 years of age. Faulkner described the images as “in the top five of the worst of the worst that I’ve ever had to examine.”

According to Faulkner, when homeland security officials raided Duggar’s car dealership and asked to speak with him, without informing him they were investigating child pornography, Duggar “spontaneously” responded, “What is this about? Has someone been downloading child pornography?”

So that’s what used car salesmen do in their free time.

Anyway, now he’s begging to be released on bail with a novel excuse.

The motion further argued that because Duggar is a public figure, it is unreasonable to view him as a flight risk: “Duggar has a widely-recognizable face and has spent the majority of his life in the public spotlight—making any concern that he is a risk of flight all the more unwarranted.”

Widely recognizable? Gosh, if he’s released am I going to have to call the police on every pudgy, balding white guy I see on the street? Never underestimate the ego of a white man.

Donald Trump, reduced to the lowest of the low

The poor man. He was banned from Twitter and Facebook (he tried to appeal to Facebook, but they’ve recently denied him). Then he announced that he was going to create his very own social media platform, to make an end run around Big Tech. Now he claims to have done it. You can go to his grand social media platform right now, and I did.

I looked at it.

I puzzled over it.

It’s a web page where Donald J. Trump can type things, creating “posts”, which are displayed in chronological order, and you can go to his site and read them.

Oh my god.

Trump has created a blog, and is a blogger. That’s all it is! It’s not a very good blog, and it’s missing some important things, like allowing people to comment, or like having titles (every post is titled “Donald J. Trump”), or being able to link to individual posts, but by golly, it’s a blog! A half-assed blog, but a blog nonetheless.

Welcome, Donald! You and I…we’re peers now.

It’s adorable, dude.

Embrace it. Don’t be one of those wankers who insists their blog isn’t a blog. Also don’t try to claim you’ve built a novel social media platform — it’s just an ordinary ol’ blog, just like mine!

The evil cat’s new torment

She has decided to pursue a new career as a mouser. That wouldn’t be so bad — every time the weather fluctuates and cools, the local mouse population decides to move indoors until it warms up again — except for a few small problems.

  • The mouse hunting hour begins at 3am. It can then go on for a few hours.
  • She is not a stealthy feline making swift, silent pounces. No, she’s a klutz. Hunting involves much bouncing off of furniture and knocking things off tables or just generally over.
  • She’s a sadist. One mouse is good for hours of bumbling, brutal torture.
  • She is finally succeeding at her profession. She used to just bat her prey around like a toy, but now she eventually actually kills. This is not for me, at all — she doesn’t proudly present me with a trophy. Nope, she leaves the sad little corpse where ever it eventually succumbs, and then it is my job to find it before it rots and stinks up the house.

It’s not just the classwork that is turning me into the shambling undead. It’s also my roommate.

Last…day…of cla…AAAaaaaaaughhhhh

I might make it. I may be crawling over the finish line, but the end is in sight. One more class today, in which I give them a deadline for turning in the final lab report (Saturday), give them their take-home final exam (due on Tuesday), and go over the answer key for the previous exam, and then I … do some more grading today, wrapping up a backlog of other assignments.

Obviously, then, I’m not done done, but at least there’s the firm definition of a final boundary and I’m not stuffing any more information in their heads. I might survive this hell year after all (he says, as the flaming meteor enters the atmosphere, on target for his head).