Wealthy math teacher faces justice

Jeffrey Epstein with some random people

Can it be? Will Jeffery Epstein get his comeuppance?

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. Saturday’s arrest by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.

The article also points out that it’s a mystery where he got his millions of dollars. He was a math teacher who broke bad into the lucrative world of hedge funds, but no one seems to know what he was doing, his employees were invisible, and he seems to have just one client. Something shady was going on, which makes me wonder if the reason he got such a sweetheart deal before is that he’s a key to unraveling a tangled web of nefarious activity by the rich and powerful.

Speaking of the rich and powerful, Alan Dershowitz sure seems to be sweating copiously suddenly.

How I’m spending my day at #cvg2019

Well, how I plan to spend my day. I might get carried away on a whim or stumble across something unexpected.

11:00am-12:00pm @ Hyatt 2 Greenway HI Weird Biology
12:30pm-1:30pm @ Hyatt 4 Great Lakes A2 N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy
3:30pm-4:30pm @ Hyatt 2 Greenway HI Books to Read Right Now
5:00pm-6:00pm Magic Schoolbus Party Room (5123) spider salon
7:00pm-8:00pm @ Hyatt 4 Great Lakes A3 AMC’s The Terror
8:30pm-9:30pm @ Hyatt 2 Greenway CDE Paranormal Minnesota
9:00pm-9:45pm @ Hyatt 1 Nicollet Ballroom Pounded in the Tingle
11:30pm-12:30am @ Hyatt 2 Greenway B ASMR

I’m presenting at the ones in bold. I’m bringing Common House Spiders to the Salon, I plan on that being more of an interactive demo.

I have the least confidence about making it to the ASMR panel. I’m curious, but it’s late and I might fall asleep. Actually, if I popped in I wonder if I’d find the entire audience asleep.

Well, this sucks

I’m at Convergence, which definitely does not suck and has been enjoyable so far, but I’m also becoming untethered from the Internet, which sucks horrendously. There are two problems so far.

One: I can’t connect to the hotel internet. Have you ever noticed how even the cheapest little hole in the wall motel will just give you free wireless that works, while every upscale hotel insists that you enroll in their special program to get the slowest possible internet connection, and then offers you faster connections at a price? All the extra layers and attempts to squeeze more money from you reduces reliability. I’m at a Hilton. Hate it.

Two: Fucking Apple. Speaking of high priced screwups, I HATE APPLE’S WEIRD CABLES. The charging cable for my iPhone/iPad, which is an official Apple cable, is disintegrating and has stopped working. Their computing devices will keep going for decades — my laptop is getting up there, and is fine and functional — but you’re going to have to get a new power brick every year, because the thin cable immovably attached to it will crack and fray. The charging cable for my iWidgets is even worse, and woe unto you if you buy a third party cable, because they have to be Apple-certified, and half the time they don’t work.

Their machines have code in them to sense some secret handshake from the cable, because I get messages when I plug them in to the effect that this is not an Apple approved “device”. This one nuisance is about to drive me out of Apple’s ecosystem, after 35 years of loyalty.

Anyway, it all means I have a laptop that won’t connect to the Internet, and a phone and tablet with batteries slowly dying because I can’t recharge them.

My god, I might have to interact with a purely physical world at the biggest SF conference in the upper Midwest. Will there be things to do? How will I survive?

Shameful Fourth of July to you all

I’m certainly not celebrating today. We’ve got more to regret than to praise.

We’re running concentration camps on our southern border. It’s not a recent aberration, either: we were enslaving people before we became a nation, we built this country on the labor of the barracoon. We slaughtered the native population and herded the survivors into reservations. My university was founded on the site of an Indian school, where children were ripped from their families and imprisoned to be taught White Man’s Ways; there’s a big sign outside the building where I work to remind me of that every day.

We’ve been at war since our founding. It’s easy to forget, since we civilians are kept fairly well insulated from the consequences, but if you’re one of the working poor drafted to fight, or worse, one of the targets of our wrath, you know it. Nowadays we do most of our killing remotely, with drones or bombers, so even the military suffers little pain.

We’ve elected a crude, ignorant boor to the presidency who is disgracing our nation before the eyes of the world. We have a state propaganda channel that funnels lies to the populace. The “newspaper of record” provides a mouthpiece to apologists for the status quo. We’re having a goddamn military parade in the capitol today. I’m torn between thinking that at least it honestly represents the spirit of the country and thinking it is deplorable and vile.

I’m expected to treat this as a holiday celebration?

I’m not going to. I’m waiting to celebrate the revolution that erases this stain.

Maybe humanity deserves extinction

I guess there’s a market for this:

One of the biggest pornography companies in the world has launched a webseries called Border Patrol Sex that features American border patrol agents catching undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrant women attempting to cross the border, arresting them, handcuffing them, raping them, and then sending them back to Mexico.

The reality of the series is too close for comfort. A recent Fusion investigation revealed that 80 percent of women and girls crossing into the U.S. from Mexico are raped during their journey.

I don’t have a problem with porn — watch it if you’re into it. I do have a problem with exploitation, misogyny, and rape, though, and this webseries is promoting all three.

Also I had no idea there was a capitalist near-monopoly on porn, but here’s who is making this poison.

Border Patrol Sex isn’t the diseased brainchild of random misogynistic nativists with video cameras. The site is operated and owned by MindGeek, a European company that owns most of the biggest porn sites on the Web, including YouPorn, Pornhub, Xtube, RedTube, SpankWire, and dozens of major porn sites.

How frustrating. I already have nothing to do with any of those sites, so I can’t boycott them.

Where to start learning about antifa

Mark Bray explains the history, goals, and philosophy of antifa in Teen Vogue. Every paragraph is a jewel, you should go read it. Just a taste:

Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing; doing that can take many forms, and so the tactical repertoire of anti-fascists is broad.

The vast majority of what they do does not entail any physical confrontation. They focus on researching white supremacists and neo-Nazis across different social media platforms, figuring out who their leaders are, what other groups they are networking with, [and] where they are trying to hold events, so they can contact hotels or local venues to get the owners to cancel the events and, if they refuse to cancel, organize a boycott or campaigns of public pressure against them. They also organize public education campaigns and form alliances with unions and social movements to organize large demonstrations. Part of it, however, and this is what gets the most attention, entails self-defense and, at times, confronting these groups before they can gain enough momentum to promote their politics.

Shermer’s disgrace continues apace

Not that it will cost his reputation in the skeptic community anything — he is the master of falling upwards. But recently he has been saying really stupid things on Twitter to defend the alt-right, including this bizarre declaration:

Yeah, right. As we’re seeing in the American concentration camps today, German Nazis didn’t have a monopoly on evil. Ordinary, not-very-bright American Trumpkins are doing a phenomenal job of imitating them right now. Shermer had even more to say, though, including this astonishing canard: Good to remember that Nazi=National Socialism. Not far right but far left. Do we really need to debunk this exercise in naive etymology anymore?

Also, in case you didn’t get the memo, Nazis were not atheists, but were generally Lutherans and Catholics. They also weren’t demonic satanists incarnate.

Anyway, just enjoy Rebecca Watson’s thorough takedown of this skeptic fraud.

At the Close the Camps protest in Morris, Minnesota

We had a good turnout, about 75 people.

We signed stuff. We’re sending a message to our Blue Dog Democratic representative, not that I expect he’ll give a damn.

We also read testimonials from kids in the camps, and also a list of the names of children who died in custody was read out. This was grim.

I learned something new, too: ICE is planning to open up “detention centers” all over the country, including nearby in Appleton, MN. You might want to find out if they’ll be creating concentration camps in your backyard, so you can start getting ready to protest.

Who are antifa?

A sociologist who studied antifa activists reports on their motivations:

For most people, fascist activism and organizing are abstractions removed from their daily lives; images on television and news reports, cartoonish villains. For the antifa activists whom I researched, fascists represented an intense and immediate threat.

Many militant anti-fascists become involved in this form of activism because aspects of their identity are directly targeted by fascist violence; they are queer, transgender, gender non-conforming, people of color, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and certainly identified in ways that intersected across these categories.

For them, anti-fascism was a means of ensuring their safety from a movement that threatens their very existence and venerates violence as the highest form of action. Even the antifa activists who identify as cis heterosexual white males are the targets of fascist violence as “race” and “gender” traitors.

Antifa activists routinely describe both verbal threats and physical assaults made against them by fascists. Those who suffered from physical assaults often struggled from PTSD as a result of fascist violence.

What about the police? Aren’t they there to protect the peace?

From a militant anti-fascist perspective, the role of the police has been either ineffectual or outright complicit in fascist violence. It is a criminological truism that police rarely arrive to an incident in progress. A great deal of anti-fascism is informal and spontaneous response to fascist presence in a subcultural or public space. Such “everyday anti-fascism” intervenes against an immediate threat long before any law enforcement could arrive on the scene.

In the case of protest scenarios, especially in Portland, there is evidence of collaboration and collusion between far-right protesters and police with officers engaging in friendly banter with far-right leaders via text message and police logs indicating the targeting of anti-fascists while ignoring armed alt-right activists.

In this context, antifa activists view their actions as the only means of defense against a demonstrable threat from fascist activists. Militancy becomes a move designed to match the violence of far-right activists with a counter-veiling force. I noted after Charlottesville the danger of drawing an equivalency between the violence of the far-right and militancy of antifa activists, and it rings true today.

In response to fascist organizing and even threats of violence, antifa activists mobilize public shaming and confrontational protest. They do so as part of a countermovement strategy designed to demobilize the fascist movement, and in doing so secure the safety of themselves, vulnerable populations, and their communities.

Stanislav Vysotsky doesn’t make excuses for the fascists, unlike far too many people who are promoting the “never punch fascists under any circumstances” approach.