These are scientists?

Tell me if this sounds familiar. MIT students confronted Seth Lloyd about his affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein, and he made this gobsmackingly stupid remark: I never saw him with underage women. He traveled around with two assistants, who were women in their 20s, who were typically very beautiful, and they were presumably previous Victoria’s Secret models.

Did he card them? Check their CVs for their employment history? Does he think that association with women above the age of consent means you could never have ever associated with underage women? Remember, this was after Epstein had been convicted.

It reminds me of something else: Lawrence Krauss’s feeble rationalizations.

“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

I’m embarrassed for them. Scientists should have a better appreciation of how evidence works, and that personal eyewitness evidence isn’t the only kind there is…that’s more of a Ken Ham attitude than I’d expect from these two.

Holy crap, MIT!

The Epstein fallout continues. MIT is thoroughly scolded by the Boston Globe editorial staff.

Heads have rolled; new rules have been promised. But what led MIT to accept the donations of sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein is about much more than bad apples or bad fundraising criteria: It’s a reflection of a culture that has strayed from basic values and that’s long overdue for a reckoning.

The report that MIT released Friday showed the Institute took $750,000 in donations from Epstein after he was convicted as a sex offender in Florida in 2008 (and $100,000 before that) as well as hosted the late financier on campus nine times between 2013 and 2017. The investigation of the donations, led by the law firm Goodwin Proctor at the behest of the MIT corporation, showed that in addition to two faculty members who solicited the post-conviction gifts — former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd — three university vice-presidents, R. Gregory Morgan, Jeffrey Newton, and Israel Ruiz, were aware of Epstein’s donations, his reputation, and his 2008 conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution, and yet approved taking his money and keeping it a secret anyway.

We’ve already seen Joi Ito go down in flames — he knew exactly what he was doing, and he lied to cover up the money coming into his lab. I’d heard of Seth Lloyd, but had no idea until know what a corrupt SOB he was. Lloyd was an associate of Brockman’s Edge group, which is beginning to look like a red flag.

Mano has covered the Lloyd story well, and it’s written up in Nature.

It’s hard to comprehend how consciously devious he was.

He received $225,000 in research grants, and shockingly, a $60,000 personal gift from Epstein. This is unheard of, as far as I know. Grant awards do not come with big ol’ piles of money to the awardee; not once in my career have I profited from a grant in any way. That money is supposed to go through the institution, and be managed and regulated by that institution.

Then he kept the money secret.

“Professor Lloyd knew that donations from Epstein would be controversial and that MIT might reject them,” the report concluded. “We conclude that, in concert with Epstein, he purposefully decided not to alert the Institute to Epstein’s criminal record, choosing instead to allow mid-level administrators to process the donations without any formal discussion or diligence concerning Epstein.”

Wow. Unimaginable. The last big grant I received was administered by our grants office, I didn’t see a penny of it, and every purchase request was overseen by an administrator who would double-check whether it was allowed under the terms of the grant. Heck, even the little in-house grants I’ve received are policed strictly by administrators, which is right and proper. It is not the PI’s money!

Lloyd even tried to justify his actions to his classes!

In her op-ed, Graham said that Lloyd opened his initial class, by asking, “How many of you have heard of Jeffrey Epstein?” and then diving into an explanation of why he decided to visit Epstein in prison and accept funds from him after he had been convicted of having sex with minors. He told students he had consulted important women in his life, his mother and wife, before taking the funds. “There was no information that couldn’t have been sent in an optional email to the class. This was a power play, pure and simple,” Graham wrote of Lloyd’s lecture.

In other words, Lloyd knew that accepting the money was wrong, that the association with Epstein was unconscionable, so he had to make a guilty rationalization to his students. This is another alien experience to me — I’ve never felt the need to explain to a class that “I did X, and I know it looks really, really bad, and it got me entangled with criminals, but…”.

That Boston Globe editorial may not have gone far enough. It’s true that MIT has “a culture that has strayed from basic values”, but let’s not let the faculty off the hook. They hired a bunch of cowboys, turned ’em loose with little oversight, and are now shocked to learn that they were a bunch of sleazy rustlers.

I wonder if MIT will now start enforcing the rules, and how many of their big names with big egos will complain?

The least the president of MIT can do right now is resign. Lloyd should be fired.

Democracy dies in a pile of money

In a Washington Post op-ed, John Ellis opines on who he thinks ought to be the Democratic presidential nominee. This is John Ellis.

Worked at Fox Business Network and Fox News on business and financial news “content,” programming and strategy. Worked at Dow Jones on WSJ CEO Council News Items, a newsletter that went out to the WSJ’s CEO Council and to a wide network of “influencers” in government, media, finance, entertainment, etc. Worked on business projects for Rupert Murdoch from 2016 through 2018.

Do you think he might be giving good advice? Perhaps he might have the best interests of Democrats at heart?

A short summary of his opinion piece: Bernie Sanders is a “nightmare”, and he’s going to lose to Trump, as is everyone except for one shining knight: Michael Bloomberg. And why is Bloomberg so good?

He’s rich.

If Democrats nominate anyone besides Bloomberg, they will be outspent in the general election by 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1. If they nominate Bloomberg, he will outspend Trump at least 5 to 1 and dramatically improve the party’s chances of winning seats at every level of governance.

Holy hell. The presidency is for sale, and rather than electing a candidate who might fight for campaign finance reform, we’re supposed to bow to the wind and find the richest man we can to run the country, because he is so wealthy.

Fuck off, John Ellis. You’re going on my list of smug lackeys to oligarchs who need to be lined up against a wall.

Something’s rotten in North Carolina

Recently, the University of North Carolina paid a Confederate group to take possession of a Confederate monument, a deal that stank like a garbage dump. They paid $2.6 million to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a shady low-rent outfit of good ol’ boys who existed only to promote racism, which made it even stankier. Now the SCV has been further exposed — they’re a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization which is prohibited from meddling in politics, and guess what they’ve been doing? Meddling in politics, of course.

For years, the pro-Confederate group that the UNC System dealt $2.6 million has been violating federal tax laws, operating a political action committee in violation of its tax-exempt status and facilitating political donations through illegal means, according to numerous individual first-hand accounts, a slew of internal communications provided to The Daily Tar Heel and multiple expert legal opinions.

The North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans Inc. struck a pair of backdoor deals last November with UNC System Board of Governors members. A predetermined lawsuit and settlement gave the group Silent Sam and $2.5 million in UNC System money for the Confederate monument’s “preservation and benefit.” A week previous, the system paid $74,999 to the SCV for an agreement to limit its display of Confederate symbolism on UNC System property.

When I say low-rent, I mean it. SCV has $100 membership dues, and their process is rather irregular. The dues are paid to an individual who cashes the checks and doles out payments with little in the way of documentation.

“We tend to have the cigar box in the gun safe approach,” Starnes wrote. “So the checks are made out to the Captain, ie, Bill Starnes, so they can be cashed.”

They’ve got enough members that the organization’s income gets up into the range of tens of thousands of dollars, and UNC just plopped a couple of million dollars into Bill Starnes’ lap. This is nuts. It represents considerable fiduciary irresponsibility on the part of UNC — why are they paying all this money out to a fringe group with little financial oversight? — and suggests that there’s an even deeper layer of corruption in the UNC system that hasn’t been fully exposed yet.

I can’t even imagine my university dropping a few mil on some radical group to perform a dubious “service” for us. Heads would roll. Our students would rage at the wasteful use of their tuition dollars.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s lap odor has sold out

Gwyneth Paltrow would have you believe that her vagina smells like this:

With a funny, gorgeous, sexy, and beautifully unexpected scent, this candle is made with geranium, citrusy bergamot, and cedar absolutes juxtaposed with Damask rose and ambrette seed to put us in mind of fantasy, seduction, and a sophisticated warmth.

I’m not going to test her claim that her crotch smells like a geranium soaked in Earl Grey, but somehow I doubt that it does, and also it’s rather egotistical that she thinks it does. People aren’t flowers.

It’s probably the least harmful lie on her site, at least.

Tactical gender

Isabel Fell has taken that feeble joke about identifying as an attack helicopter and weaponized it as a short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”. It’s good and slightly terrifying.

I sexually identify as an attack helicopter.

I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not a biological sex. My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope somatic female.

But, really, I didn’t lie. My body is a component in my mission, subordinate to what I truly am. If I say I am an attack helicopter, then my body, my sex, is too. I’ll prove it to you.

When I joined the Army I consented to tactical-role gender reassignment. It was mandatory for the MOS I’d tested into. I was nervous. I’d never been anything but a woman before.

But I decided that I was done with womanhood, over what womanhood could do for me; I wanted to be something furiously new.

To the people who say a woman would’ve refused to do what I do, I say—

Isn’t that the point?

If transhumanism leads to increasing integration with machines, sure, why not have identity at all levels associated with the whole?