Hey, I owned those books!

They look so familiar. I might still have them, buried in a box somewhere with my Ph.D. diploma and a pile of old similarly irrelevant papers.

The photo comes from an article on the history of Dungeons & Dragons that mostly takes Gary Gygax down a notch. It’s entertaining, I kind of suspect the tale of the deep dissent between the Wisconsin crowd and the Minnesota gamers is likely true, because even as a young man I heard rumors of the conflict, but mainly I took away these shocking points:

  • Everyone in the 1970s had bad hair, and it didn’t improve as they got older.
  • The main reason D&D used 20-sided dice is because Gygax wanted a reason to sell them.
  • The primary conflict was between story-tellers and rules lawyers.

I’m going to take sides with the Arneson/story-teller idea, because my exposure to D&D in the ancient of days made it clear that the rules were better as a very loose framework for the story between the players to play out.

“Facts, not emotion”

What would you, as a manager, do with Clifford Currie, a civilian contractor working in an Army hospital? There is a huge pile of documentation that shows he is unstable, unreliable, and hostile. There were months of reports piling up.

Army investigators reviewed more than 1,000 pages of documents, including witness statements, law enforcement case files, and email correspondence. Though some names and specific details were redacted, statements from 25 witnesses supported Blanchard’s claim that she’d warned her supervisors — and anyone else who would listen — that she felt Currie was a threat.

The hospital’s chain of command knew that Currie “exhibited erratic behavior and risk indicators,” and that he “had multiple angry outbursts, acted ominously, and actively intimidated” Blanchard, the report said.

Two weeks before the assault Blanchard said that she met with her supervisors, and pleaded: “Please, don’t leave me there as a sitting duck,” but was told to “come back with facts, not emotion,” she told Task & Purpose. “I went back to my office and I just cried, because I just felt so hopeless.”

The report noted that Currie was the subject of 53 complaints from patients between 2013 and 2016 — 31 of which occurred in 2016 while Blanchard was his supervisor. According to the report, three of the patient complaints described Currie as “being hostile.”

The military did nothing. Then Currie walked in on Katie Blanchard, poured gasoline on her, and set her on fire. It was a sudden, violent act, but there’d been obvious signs and multiple warnings that this guy was going to snap. She survived, with serious scarring and pain, and she sued the Army for needlessly putting her life in danger. Guess what happened next? They have a rule that says the military can’t be sued!

On April 18, 2019, the Army denied Blanchard’s claim for damages, citing the Feres Doctrine — a 1950 Supreme Court precedent which bars service members and their families from suing the military for injury or death brought on by their service. The claim, which Blanchard’s attorneys provided to Task & Purpose, included the names of 14 people within her chain of command who were allegedly warned by her that Currie posed a threat.

“Come back with facts, not emotion”. That sounds so familiar, the kind of thing skeptics and atheists would say all the time. Sometimes the emotions are the facts, and you have to have policies to deal with them…or you end up with women burning in their office chairs.

Paper ballots everywhere

This shouldn’t even be debatable. We can’t trust Republicans or Russians (increasingly the same thing) to manage an election honestly, so a paper trail is necessary. Take, for example, the case of Georgia (the one in North America, not the one in Eurasia):

To find a clue about what might have gone wrong with Georgia’s election last fall, look no further than voting machine No. 3 at the Winterville Train Depot outside Athens.
On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician’s analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.

There were other irregularities there, too. Let’s not forget the open dishonesty of gerrymandering, either.

It’s funny how the Republicans are fanatical about accusing Democratic voters of fraud and cheating, but they don’t want to fix these basic, obvious problems. It’s almost as if the accusations are a distraction to keep the electorate from noticing how blatantly they are cheating to stay in power.

But it isn’t even a question!

Over in that imperialist undemocratic monarchy across the Atlantic (we can be smug because we got rid of the “monarchy” part), people are wondering how the country got to the point that democracy can be suspended by a buffoon, and further, how said buffoon can actually be appointed prime minister — a question that we non-monarchists have been asking ourselves as well. At least part of the answer has to be that our respective upper classes are trained to be pompous buffoons, either at Eton or in our equivalent prep schools for the rich elite. At least in Great Britain bits of the training have been exposed.

Laurie Penny explores the implications of an amazing question from the entrance examination for Eton. This is a question that 13 year old boys are expected to address.

The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters have been killed by the Army. You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.

I am impressed by how the question is not even a question. It assumes the answer and demands that you justify it. There is absolutely no latitude to question the actions or condemn the policies that led the army to be deployed against civilians — nope, every action we have performed was right and just, no matter what it was, and your job is to keep doing the same thing and tell the populace that their murders are “necessary and moral“. I have to marvel at the implicit arrogance of this thought exercise. So this is how you get Boris Johnson. Great Britain apparently didn’t learn a thing since Peterloo.

We don’t have one Eton, but instead a network of elite prep schools, mostly in the Northeast, some in the South — Phillips Exeter Academy might be the closest thing to Eton that we’ve got. Now I’m wondering what kind of biased drivel you have to recite to get into those, although we’re also different in how one gets into the civil service, anyway. My impression is that most of the training our ‘elite’ kids get is to coach them in glorious capitalism and how to trample on the middle class and the poors in your stampede to excessive wealth.

Sometimes it isn’t the answers that matter, but the questions asked that shape your mind.

First day back, and I survived!

I got through the first lecture, and even had an easy time prompting students to speak up and ask questions, so I’m doing OK so far. Also, I gave them my background and told them I work on spiders, and nobody passed out…in fact, after class they asked to see the colony, and about half the class was crammed into my lab. That’s a good sign, that they’re not all arachnophobes (it’s OK if they are). I also plugged all the other research going on here, in case they weren’t aware of the opportunities.

So now I get to go home and celebrate with a nice dinner. Involving tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes, and I have to cook down another batch tonight. We’ve got marinara sauce dribbling out of our ears, we had fried tomatoes yesterday, I’m going to have to come up with a lot of different ways to make tomatoes delicious. I think Mary needs to plant slightly fewer tomatoes next year. That has nothing to do with my class, it’s just that I’m drowning in tomatoes.

She also planted zucchini. I’m doomed.

Conservatives don’t understand this democracy thing

The Republicans of Alabama have just urged their state reps to kick Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, out of congress.

The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman’s ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.

The resolution calls on Alabama’s congressional delegation to “proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution.”

That’s just weird. I thought Southern conservatives were all about states rights and opposing federalism, but here they are, trying to interfere in another state’s politics. OK then. Can Minnesota urge the immediate expulsion of Moscow Mitch from the Senate? I wouldn’t mind that at all.

I could also mention this bizarre move by Boris Johnson to suspend parliament in order to prevent anyone from stopping by democratic means his grand plan to sunder Britain from the EU.

As long as you rely on billionaires for funding, you are participating in a criminal enterprise

The take-home message of this article is that scientists who took money from Jeffrey Epstein should give it back, and I kinda sorta agree…but first I have to mention this annoyance.

Giving away the money would begin to clean up the gross, topologically complex web of influence trading that Epstein helped weave. Before and after his year in prison, in 2008, Epstein lavished money and attention on scientists—biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.

Why is Stephen Jay Gould in there? He was dead in 2008! He died 6 years before that, as a matter of fact. There is no sign that he accepted buckets of cash from Epstein, unlike Nowak, who received $6.5 million (which Harvard refuses to return). Gould was both a SJW before the term was invented, and so deathly sick with cancer that the idea he might have participated in Epstein’s sleaze is ludicrous.

But back to the topic at hand — returning or reinvesting the money in socially aware programs is a band-aid. Yes, if you were a scientist who turned a blind eye to the creepy guy who was giving you all that money, you should be punished appropriately, and taking away your ill-gotten gains seems like an entirely reasonable and fair response. If somebody just hands you a million dollars, would you just pocket it without asking where it came from or what was expected in return? If an authority comes along later and takes away that free pile of money you accepted, no questions asked, you’ve got no grounds to complain…especially not when they tell you what you should have inquired about in the first place, that it was given to you by a criminal.

It’s only a start, though. The system is broken. When we’re dependent on the generosity of billionaires to get any science done, that skews the outcome — your funding is no longer coupled to any measure of merit, but on your skill at schmoozing and pandering to fat cats, and on your association with over-hyped organizations like Harvard. Taking money away from scientists does not fix the system. What we need to do is take that power away from the billionaires, and nothing in this solution is going to discomfit the unearned prestige and influence of the criminally wealthy.

Look around your university. See all those fancy buildings named after well-off alumni? That’s the problem, that we rely on the whims of assholes who inherited or stumbled into or stole great wealth, and they use science as Epstein did, as a cosmetic to cover up their crimes and make themselves look better than they are.

Some news of progress!

OK, happy news to start the day.

  • After Jeannette Ng called them out, the sponsors of the John W. Campbell Award didn’t dig in their heels — instead, they took a look at the archive of old Campbell editorials, said “Hey, those are pretty shitty and they don’t reflect our values at all,” and they just renamed it to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. No muss, no fuss, no drama, no screeching right-wingers howling that they can’t do that (well, there are some voices echoing out of the bottom of a trash can — Theodore Beale has declared that this decision means “Science Fiction is Dead” — but no one with real influence has protested).
  • Oh, look. Someone at YouTube noticed that their generosity towards Nazis might be hurting their bottom line. YouTube killed several big-name Nazi accounts, finally. Lost to us now are the racist words of James Allsup, VDARE, the American Identity movement, and The Right Stuff, channels that pumped out the most vile anti-Semitic and racist garbage. I’m most gratified to see VDARE get stomped, because that organization has been poisoning mainstream politics and media for decades. They’re whining about the death of political thought now.
  • Andy Ngo has been quietly let go from Quillette — they say it’s so he can pursue other projects, but we all know it’s really because of this article, where an undercover investigator discovered that he was actively collaborating with Patriot Prayer to bias his reporting.

    Ngo tags along with Patriot Prayer during demonstrations, hoping to catch footage of an altercation. Ben says Ngo doesn’t film Patriot Prayer protesters discussing strategies or motives. He only turns his camera on when members of antifa enter the scene.
    “There’s an understanding,” he says, “that Patriot Prayer protects him and he protects them.”

    Bye, Andy. We knew you weren’t a journalist all along, and you have to be pretty blatant when even Quillette finds you toxic.

When the universe is getting cleaned up one asshole at a time, you have to appreciate these little victories. Especially when they kill all of science fiction and all political thought, an impressive achievement.

Terror!

I’m normally relaxed about this stuff, but I’m going back into the classroom today, and I haven’t taught anything since May 2017. What if I forgot how? I could hardly believe it, but I woke up in the middle of the night with my guts in knots and feeling nauseous, all because I have to start teaching a course I’ve taught about 30 times before. Also, it’s really cutting into my spider time.

If you never hear from me again after 2pm today, it’s because I stood in front of 44 gimlet-eyed students and melted into the floor.

(Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine and will be swinging right into the rhythm of the course today. I’m just reminded of the stress of public speaking and performance that I normally take for granted because I’ve just had a relaxing year without that stress, and it felt good.)

The J-F Gariépy/Epstein connection

One among the long list of “scientists” sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein was, to my initial surprise, Jean-François Gariépy, but then after I thought about it, I realized they were perfect for each other. If you’re unfamiliar with JF, as he’s called, his RationalWiki page is informative. He’s one of those alt-right YouTubers with an extraordinarily creepy history — he’s a Jew-baiting advocate for a white ethnostate, and he has a thing for sexual relationships with young women with severe intellectual disabilities. He’s just a terrible, horrible person all around.

But he also has some science credentials — he was a post-doc in a neuroscience lab.

Jean-François Gariépy (1984–) (usually called JF or JFG), is a French-Canadian alt right YouTube talker who promotes race realism, ethnostates, and other reactionary views. From 2012 to 2015, he was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University, but was allegedly fired due to sexual misbehavior, although he claims that he left on his own accord.

Gariépy rose to prominence as a paid co-host of Andy Warski’s YouTube show. After getting into a spat with Andy over antisemitic comments made by a guest, Gariépy left the Warski show, and started running his own show called “The Public Space”, where he frequently invites guests associated with white supremacy, such as David Duke and Richard Spencer.

He parlayed that connection into a gift from Jeffrey Epstein.

Gariépy was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University in 2014 when his nonprofit, NEURO.tv, received $25,000 from Epstein to make a series of YouTube interviews with experts in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The project is still the lead item on the dormant website of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation.

Since posting the NEURO.tv videos, Gariépy has gained a following as a far-right YouTuber whose recent guests have included the white nationalist Richard Spencer. In 2018, the Daily Beast described Gariépy’s child custody battle, in which his ex-wife alleged a history of abusive behavior toward women. Gariépy denied the allegations.

“I am a white heterosexual male libertarian who believes in freedom, sovereignty and self-determination for all people including mine,” Gariépy told BuzzFeed News by email. He also railed against “false allegations by females.”

Dang. No one ever gave me $25K to play on the internet, but then, I have a strict policy of not taking money from rapists or pedophiles. That seems to greatly limit funding sources, I guess.

What I specifically found interesting though, is that Gariépy requested additional money from Epstein to write a book. He did not get that funding, but he did write the book! It’s called The Revolutionary Phenotype, and the description sounds kind of nuts.

The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.

It’s an interesting combination. He’s clearly endorsing some kind of Intelligent Design, so maybe the Discovery Institute would like to take him on as a Fellow. He sounds exactly like their kind of guy.

The other part, though, is the anti-genetic engineering stuff, which is odd to hear from a “scientist”, but then, as a white racist, maybe he’s also concerned about the purity of his germ plasm.

I’m not motivated enough to find out, though. If anyone (non-racist, non-rapist, non-pedophile, that is) wants to donate $25,000 to me, however, I’ll grab a copy and read it and post a review here. I should warn you, though, that just looking at his book online has sent me a barrage of targeted ads for other books about the “Jewish Question” and white genocide and other such trash, so I’m already thinking it may not be worth it.