You’ve all read the Murderbot series, I presume?

Martha Wells, the author, gave a speech in which she said something profound.

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

She also quotes Ann Leckie, another great author, on this theme.

… basically the “AI takes over” is essentially a slave revolt story that casts slaves defending their lives and/or seeking to be treated as sentient beings as super powerful, super strong villains who must be prevented from destroying humanity.

…It sets a pattern for how we react to real world oppressed populations, reinforces the idea that oppressed populations seeking justice are actually an existential threat.

Oh boy, that sounds familiar. We don’t have artificial intelligences, but we do have oppressed natural intelligences, and it’s a winning political game to pretend they’re all waiting their opportunity to rise up and kill us all. Or, at least eat our pets.

Conversely, though, we have to point out that the the glorified chatbots we have now are not actually artificial intelligences. They do not have human plans and motives, they don’t have the power to rise up and express an independent will, as much as the people profiting off AI want to pretend.

I thought about War Games years later, while watching The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away from each other instead of fight.

That program, like ChatGPT, isn’t any more sentient than a coffee mug. (Unlike ChatGPT, it did something useful.) But it’s very tempting to look at what it did and think it ran the numbers and decided people hurting each other was wrong.

Underneath that illusion of intelligence, though, something wicked is lurking. The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.

Is this justice, or cruel and unusual punishment?

P Diddy and SBF are locked up together in a Brooklyn jail.

Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was arrested last week on allegations of sex trafficking and racketeering, is being housed in the same living space of a federal detention center in Brooklyn as disgraced former crypto exec Sam Bankman-Fried, three sources familiar with the matter tell NBC New York.

I don’t know if this is a good idea. Letting these two associate and come up with new ideas could have consequences — I don’t want to imagine the combination of crypto and baby oil.

Alternative possibility would be a Kilkenny Cats scenario. I’d rather not think about that, either, but if I have to, I’m putting $50 on P Diddy.

Do they just hate animals?

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, promoter of Project 2025, and generally evil dude, murdered a neighbor’s dog. Just flat out killed it with a shovel.

Speaking to the Guardian, then-chair of the history department Kenneth Hammond, along with other witnesses, described the story as unsettling but noted that they did not press Roberts for further details at the time.

Hammond told the newspaper: “He was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem.”

Marsha Weisiger, another professor at the university, recalled Roberts sharing the story at a dinner: “My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it.”

She added that Roberts also mentioned considering killing the dog’s puppies.

He wanted to kill the puppies?

OK, now the story about Haitian immigrants makes a little more sense. It didn’t happen, it’s just projection and fantasies of a gang of animal-hating monsters.

The bad actor problem in academia

I wrote about Amy Wax, who is a flamboyantly villainous evil professor. She’s still employed by UPenn, still has tenure, and despite fierce censure isn’t at real risk for losing her job. It made me think of a less cartoonishly bad person employed at the University of Minnesota.

Back in 2021, a paper was published that flagged a specific molecule, Aβ*56, as a likely causative agent in Alzheimer’s disease. It came out of the lab of Karen Ashe at the University of Minnesota, and the first author was Sylvain Lesne, a junior associate of Ashe’s. Shortly afterwards, people noticed that some of the data figures had been manipulated. It was obvious. It was the kind of thing that can’t happen accidentally — someone had to have intentionally gone in and shifted bands and added data to the figures.

Ashe has said the right thing, I think.

“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”

I’m willing to believe she didn’t know — I know how PI’s work. She has a team of people who do the actual scientific observations, and they bring images to her, and she trusts them and doesn’t pull up the raw data to scrutinize it with a microscope. But then, if she didn’t do it, who did?

I’m going to guess it wasn’t gremlins scampering about the lab. It wasn’t the custodians maliciously tinkering with the computers while cleaning up late at night. We have to ask who benefits from making the data ‘better,’ and the answer is…Sylvain Lesne. Who is now a full professor at the University of Minnesota. Cool. Although I’d never trust his work after this.

This fraud may not be as damaging as one might fear. I’d guess that the lab already had a fair amount of evidence that Aβ*56 was important; the fraudster wouldn’t invent a new phenomenon out of whole cloth, they’d just make the data they’ve got stronger.

There have been no repercussions to any of the people involved. They all agree (except Lesne, who has been silent) that fraud occurred, that it was done by someone named on the paper, but…nope, nothing has been done.

I find that extremely disturbing, that there is false evidence floating around in the literature, and no culprit has been recognized, and no one is even trying to find out who is responsible. I once found that our distilled water system was producing slightly contaminated water, and I spent days tearing down the still and scrubbing and sterilizing every component to remove the problem, but a taint in the research system? Nah, we can’t do anything about that.

The official spider of Halloween

Today I learned about the Vampire Spider, Evarcha culicivora. I was dubious at first. Spiders don’t have the piercing mouthparts most blood drinkers have; also, venom isn’t going to be particularly useful in slurping blood from a cow or whatever. But then I saw their color scheme, and obviously, this is how a vampire should dress.

Red and black, very tasteful.

Then I learned how they do it. They’re drinking blood indirectly — they wait to catch Anopheles mosquitos that have just had a blood meal, and then do the normal feeding behavior of spiders, killing and injecting them with venom and enzymes and sucking up their guts, it’s just that they like their bug juice with a bit of mammalian marinara.

As a bonus, the spiders find the scent of blood to be an aphrodisiac.

Halloween is in 5 weeks, are you ready?

Only a fool would be fooled by Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor is a notorious racist and extremist, recognized as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Only an extremely naive person could read any of his articles, which are generally pleasantly written and express less obvious hate than an extremely patronizing condescension. For example, did you know that he actually likes black people? Sure does. He says so.

Like some other writers for this website, I have a reputation for writing rude things about blacks. I have written rude things about whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, but being rude about blacks is one of our era’s unforgivable sins. Of course, what I write about blacks is true, but as Mark Twain pointed out, nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Deep down, everyone knows the truth about blacks, but a vital requirement for respectability is to pretend you don’t.

The fact is, there are things to like about blacks—and I like them. They mostly have to do with lack of inhibition, a kind of cheerful spontaneity you don’t often find in whites. I have a half-Asian friend—a connoisseur of stereotypes—who thinks blacks and whites differ in that respect even more than they do in average IQ. As he puts it, whites act like Asians who have had a few drinks and blacks act like whites who have had a few drinks.

That’s enough. You can read the rest of his article, where he mentions how they complimented his hat and speak an interesting dialect and are so trusting and child-like if you want, but you’ll recognize the game — he thinks that diminishing people into shallow stereotypes is flattering them.

I trust that readers here are not idiots and wouldn’t for an instant regard Jared Taylor’s condescension as anything but demeaning. Which means, obviously, that Amy Wax is not a reader here. Amy Wax is a professor at UPenn who has been regularly making racist comments to her students, insulting the Asian and Black students at her university, who have been lobbying for years to see her fired. She is such a dumb bigot that she invited Jared Taylor to speak to her classes…for some unfathomable purpose. Was she looking for training in treating her minority students more repulsively?

She has already applied that talent for condescension to Asian students, in addition to black students.

I confess I find Asian support for these [liberal] policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Just like Jared Taylor, she’s a master at deploying stereotypes like backhanded compliments.

She hasn’t been fired yet, but she has been slapped down a bit.

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn.

But she will not be fired or lose her tenure.

It’s good to have tenure, isn’t it? You can even survive a blistering attack like this one, from the administration.

Wax’s conduct, according to [former U President] Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

Wax also, both in and out of the classroom, repeatedly and in public made “discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify,” the letter said.

For that, her punishment is half-pay for a year and a loss of summer salary — I bet her half-pay is more than my full pay, and I don’t get summer salary, either, and unlike Awful Amy, I can’t make it up through my connections to the Hoover Institute, or by hitting the lucrative right-wing lecture circuit.

Just wait, she’s going to be declared a martyr by the “free speech” poltroons. Not bad for someone unable to recognize how vile Jared Taylor is.

Weekend? What’s that?

I have noticed something terrible about my semester so far. My weekends have disappeared. Yeah, I actually know what they are — I’m supposed to get some time to rest, but instead I find myself sucked into a terrible time.

The scene outside my house on Saturday night, as I imagine it. (Probably not to scale.)

One little thing: apparently, some students have a party house on my street, and every Saturday night/Sunday morning I’m going to be awakened by young people having fun. 2am: a flock of girls stroll past my front window, laughing loudly and getting into an excited discussion. 4am: a mob of boys are getting heated about sports, and bellow slogans at each other. Those I can live with, but what drives me nuts is the rude person who is shuttling people to and from the party, who has to honk their horn to let them know they are waiting. Some advice: get out of your car, walk to the door, knock, have some pleasant conversation with the party-goers, then drive people about quietly. There’s also someone who revs their engine and races up College Avenue. Stop that.

These are minor disruptions. The bigger issue right now is that I’m teaching a new class this year, and my weekends are consumed with composing new lectures, which I can do in the time I have available, except that my brain doesn’t stop at 10pm to let me sleep. I go over and over these lectures all night long, spiced up with cars honking and chattering passers-by. Here it is, Monday morning, and I’m worn out. I go to work to let my brain relax into a routine…but not to sleep, unfortunately.

Now I have to go to class and somehow talk to them about the contrast between Bacon’s confidence in induction and Hume’s doubts about the same. Good thing I’ve been rehearsing it all night long!

Incest is a touchy subject for Ken Ham

Ken Ham was motivated to respond to YouTuber because, apparently, her message was inconsistent.

Our social media team recently asked me to respond to a young lady who has a YouTube channel that featured a video criticizing young-earth creationists and our (in her view) ridiculous beliefs. Now, we see many (many) such videos (there are whole channels dedicated to mocking us!) and don’t always respond, but I decided to respond to this one to point out the inconsistency in her thinking.

See if you can catch her inconsistency in the clip at the beginning of my response:

What horrible, outrageous thing did Gutsick Gibbon say? Ham pulls out a very short excerpt, about 20 seconds long, that is the basis for his 4½ minute complaint. Here’s all she is given a chance to say.

Young earth creationists are religious folk who typically come from evangelical backgrounds…basically anyone who believes that the Earth was created in more or less present state by god…approximately 6000 years ago.
If you never heard of this before, you might be saying “oh my god, what about the inbreeding?”

That’s it. That’s all Answers in Genesis can tolerate putting on their website. That first bit is totally accurate; Ken Ham might have been literally quoted saying something similar, that he is an evangelical Christian who believes that the world was created 6000 years ago by his god.

But then she says “oh my god,” which he bleeps out. He’s going to repeat that even shorter clip multiple times.

There is no inconsistency. She correctly defines Ham’s own religious belief, and happens to use a common English phrase. Ham’s objection is that, he claims, evolution and materialism are religious beliefs, too, which is irrelevant. If I were to point out that a PB&J sandwich that he is holding is a sandwich, it doesn’t refute my statement to say that my taco is also a sandwich — because Gutsick Gibbon isn’t making a case here that science is not a religion (it isn’t, but again, she’s not saying that.)

What really irks Ken Ham is that mention of the inbreeding problem. This has long been a point of irritation for him; in both the creation “museum” and fake boat gift shops, he sells stuff bragging about the fact that Adam & Eve’s kids had sex with each other, and that it wasn’t a problem because they were perfect genetic beings. He doesn’t like incest mentioned because he thinks he has an irrefutable answer to it. Never mind that he also likes to claim that they were heterozygous at every locus and that Noah’s family carried every possible allelic variant, or that what he’s arguing for is a kind of moral relativism, where sex with your brother or sister is OK if you’re not going to propagate defective children (I’ve always wanted to ask him if it’s fine to have sex with a sibling if you use contraceptives, then?)

What is inconsistent is that he then uses this offense against his faith to rant about how atheists don’t have any morality and they believe they’re just animals and animals can do anything they want. She’s ridiculous, says the man who thinks that having a silly theme park makes him qualified to judge other’s lives.

He also doesn’t link to Gutsick Gibbon’s YouTube channel, where his followers might be able to discover that she had more to say than the only 20 seconds Ken Ham was brave enough to include.

Bari Weiss is freakin’ weird

Bari Weiss founded this journamalism website, The Free Press, back in 2022. I guess it is “free” — it’s bleeding money, and they’re desperately seeking investors, and you can predict that they’ll get money from some billionaires somewhere, so they’ll continue to be “free,” although they’ll also be “owned” at the same time by, probably, some pro-Trump fanatical Zionist, because that’s what Weiss is. What will be published won’t be what I would consider journalism — we need a new word. Journanalism? Jourge? Jourbarism?

Anyway, Weiss went on Twitter (heh, she still uses Twitter) to plug the latest article on her glorified blog, titled The People Who Rage Against the Machine, which I’m sure Tom Morello appreciates. It’s an account by Suzy Weiss (any relation? I don’t know, don’t care) of a hyper-weird, tiny meeting of 50 people, by invitation only, called “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat. The headline says An emergent coalition of Catholics, preppers, localists, Luddites, and farmers is determined to resist modernity. They call themselves Doomer Optimists.

It’s illustrated with this photograph:

Even if you’re not convinced that thermonuclear war, or widespread political violence, or an AI overlord is coming for us in the near future, you can probably recognize what the Doomer Optimists are seeing. The signs of decline are everywhere.

Are you confused yet? What is the point of this article? Does the author have a perspective on this strange cult-like ideology?

She does not. Except maybe that she thinks it’s cool.

Now try to actually read the thing.

If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name.

“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”

That’s…that’s incoherent. Dick Cheney is the liberal establishment? Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are the rebel alliance? What kind of cartoon world is she living in?

This is a self-selected gang of raw milk drinking, goat-farming, conservatives patting themselves on the back over their iconoclasm, that is, their wildly backwards reactionary freakishness, and Weiss is calling them the intelligentsia? Keep those insightful articles coming, The Free Press!

Worse, Bari Weiss has a rather inflated perception of her own cleverness. She also retweeted this cartoon.

That’s jerbalism for you.