Don’t island girls count?

I guess the cost of influence went up. It’s not enough anymore to just offer free candy from your beat-up van anymore, you need a private plane and to give away millions of dollars. At least, that’s the lesson I’m learning from the Jeffrey Epstein case, which has taken another lurch into the gutter despite the fact that he’s dead.

Jeffrey Epstein allegedly transported underage girls to his secluded homes in the US Virgin Islands and forced them into sex work from 2001 through 2018, according to a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands.

“Epstein created a network of companies and individuals who participated in and conspired with him in a pattern of criminal activity related to the sex trafficking, forced labor, sexual assault, child abuse, and sexual servitude of these young women and children,” according to the lawsuit filed by Attorney General Denise N. George.

The suit, filed Wednesday, alleges that Epstein used a system of private planes, helicopters, boats and vehicles to bring young women and girls to his island residence on Little St. James. There, the victims were “deceptively subjected to sexual servitude, forced to engage in sexual acts and coerced into commercial sexual activity and forced labor,” the lawsuit says.

The scheme led to the molestation and exploitation of “numerous” girls between 12 and 17 years old, the suit alleges.

The lawsuit says that flight logs and other sources established that the enterprise stretched from 2001 to 2019. As recently as 2018, the lawsuit says, air traffic controllers and other airport personnel reported seeing Epstein leave his plane with young girls who appeared to be between 11 and 18 years old.

Remember, he was convicted of doing similar things in Florida in 2008. Convicted. Yet there he was, trafficking in young girls with barely a hiccup from 2001 to 2018. In between raping children, he was visiting prestigious scientists and offering them big bucks to help polish his reputation, and they accepted. They knew! Lawrence Krauss and Seth Lloyd were all completely aware that the source of their money was filthy and tarnished, and they took it anyway, and tried to make excuses to others that Epstein was a good guy, a true patron of science, who was trying to help advance knowledge — Krauss tried that line on me at an atheist conference in 2010, and I didn’t fall for it.

That’s what pisses me off. These people all knew what was going on, even if now they’re trying desperately to pretend they were innocent and unaware. A guy who was convicted of pedophilia and sex trafficking shows up at your door, accompanied by a couple of “Victoria’s Secret models”, and offers you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in free money, but shhhh, don’t tell the university administration, and somehow you’re so fucking stupid you don’t suspect something shady?

Come on.

Am I that much smarter than some of the best-known names in science, at the most prestigious universities in the world?

Or maybe I’m just a little more sensitive to the idea of raping children than they are.

Those sure are funny-looking spiders, Mary

While she’s away, I’m expected to take care of my wife’s animals, but so far I’m finding them mystifying. I can’t identify any of them, and I have a large collection of books for classifying North American invertebrates. I think they might be new species, never before seen by humans.

This one I’m calling a grey-backed bark spider.

This one is a red-headed pig-eating spider. As you can see, she has captured a bit of pork belly in the curiously colored red silk of her nest.

She better come back soon before I get even more confoozled.

It’s a catch-up day

It’s not on my calendar, but I do have a set of priorities today:

  • Dirty work. I have to clean up the cell biology lab from last semester, because another class will be using it this semester. I have to store away microscopes and computers, and scrub benches.
  • Setting up fly stocks for my genetics lab.
  • Feeding spiders some of those same flies.
  • Shoveling sidewalks. We got more snow last night.
  • Picking up all the things on the floor that our cat spent the last week knocking over.

More will probably come up. It always does.

Look who else is leaving Facebook!

Mark Hamill is out.

Are you going to disagree with Luke Skywalker? (Don’t remind me that he’s also the Joker.)

Don’t go there, little blue dot!

Every morning, I get up, fix the coffee, and sit down to the computer, and the first thing I do is check my calendar. I identify with that blue dot; that’s me. I’m marching forward through time.

Look how clean and pure this week is. My time is my own. I have things to do, but it is my choice when to do them.

But the dot marches on, and I can see that next week it slams into a wall of duties and obligations. I want to tell it to stop. It’s like those horror movies where one of the protagonists announces, “Let’s split up. I’ll check out the basement of this creepy house.” And they do, and you’re watching and thinking they shouldn’t do that, and then the guy get his face ripped off because it was inevitable and there’s nothing you can do.

That’s my calendar. I should probably stop looking at it. Doom, doom, doom.

When librarians turn to the dark side…

I thought all librarians were perfect saints, champions of goodness and openness, and then I read that the New York Public Library had banned Goodnight Moon for decades, because of the fact that an influential librarian, Anne Carroll Moore, didn’t like it. She apparently thought children’s books ought to have a “once upon a time” feel to them, and she was the Authority in charge of deciding what children should like.

Anne Carroll Moore was not a fan of Margaret Wise Brown’s work. Brown, with her Bank Street training, was “looking at the mind of a child, operating at the level that a child understands,” says Bird. “She was trying to get down on their level, whereas Anne Carroll Moore placed herself above the children’s level, handing what she viewed as the best of the best down to them.”

Yet Goodnight Moon is a book I read repeatedly to my kids, to the point where we wore it out and had to buy multiple copies. Just this week, I saw my granddaughter carry a copy to my wife and demand that she read it. She’s 15 months old. I can’t even imagine why a librarian would block stocking such a sweet, innocent story. Moore was apparently progressive in other ways, but I just don’t get it.

Then I read this little aside about Margaret Wise Brown.

So no one was pressuring the NYPL to stock the book, least of all Brown, who died in 1952. (Recovering from surgery for an ovarian cyst in a hospital in France, she playfully kicked her leg up, cancan-style, to show a nurse how well she was feeling; the action dislodged an embolism from a vein in her leg, which traveled to her brain, killing her nearly instantly.)

Huh. Should I go out of my way to tell my granddaughter that story? Should I wait until she’s old enough to no longer be quite so attached to Goodnight Moon before she learns about reality? Am I now policing the content she is allowed to see? I could probably turn her into a little Goth girl if I made it a point to tell her how the authors of all her favorite children’s books died.

I am home again, unfortunately

I left my darling granddaughter this morning to come home. Why? Because someone has to take care of the cat.

I walked in the door to discover that, while I was away, she had puked in the entryway. She puked in the kitchen. She puked in the hallway. She puked all over the comfy chair in the living room. She puked in the bathroom. She puked in my office. She puked in my slippers. As soon as I opened the door, she was so grateful that she darted outside, into the snowy, -15°C weather, and didn’t want to come in.

So I left her there.

She was scratching at the door 5 minutes later, and I relented. But I considered letting her have a night out in nasty weather!

Here she is, not looking at all guilty.

It’s OK. I’m renaming her Princess Pukes-A-Lot.

Now I have to spend my evening scrubbing everything.

You know, spiders are much less disgusting than cats. If only I could convince my wife…

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.