Zero surprise

Elon Musk declared that Wikipedia was “woke,” and started his own online encyclopedia titled “Grokipedia”. He was probably tempted to call it Xipedia, but decided to use a different ‘cool’ word. You will not be surprised that he chose the easy routed of stealing all of Wikipedia’s entries and dewokify it by spicing it up with racism. I’ll let someone else suffer the task of doing the actual comparisons.

In his latest quest to fix something far from broken, racist billionaire lunatic Elon Musk decided to unleash his own optimized version of Wikipedia, predictably named Grokipedia, onto the world this week. Now if, like Musk’s own children, you’re not a member of the Elon fan club, you can probably imagine why Musk took on this project. Here’s a man who purchased Twitter a few years ago specifically to refashion it into a neo-Nazi disinformation machine (check), insinuated himself with the second Trump administration so that he could hollow out the federal government (check), and designed electric cars that spontaneously combust, burning their liberal owners to death (check). There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y.

Plagiarism is not a mark of genius, if not being racist is all it takes to be “woke,” shouldn’t everyone aspire to be woke?

Cleaning up spam

PragerU has been flooding my in-box with trash lately.

No, I don’t give a good fucking goddamn about Dennis Prager’s personal life, I’ve never wondered what makes Dennis who he is (he’s yet another god-soaked authoritarian with a mission to ruin America), and it’s arroggant to presume anyone wants to know what makes him tick. We don’t, and shouldn’t, care.

Time to update the filters.

Life sometimes gets in the way

I was sorta disconnected yesterday. My router was down for most of the morning, but mainly, my wife had one of her infrequent days off from work. She has an erratic schedule, and seems to work approximately 6 days out of 7, and her days off are unpredictable. Working in elder care is one of those difficult and under-appreciated jobs that should be paid better but never will be.

So we took advantage of the time to get a lot of mundane things done.

  • We reorganized my home office, clearing out a lot of the clutter, moving the futon I never used to a different room. Now I actually have room to move!
  • Our clothes dryer wasn’t working. It turns out the vent was clogged, and we pulled it out of its niche to clear it, which was a revelation. This appliance was here when we moved in almost 25 years ago, and we’d never looked under or behind it until now. We finally discovered what happened to Mary’s favorite gardening hat. To put it in perspective, we found old Howard Dean signs that had fallen behind it.

  • We went shopping for a new bed. Mary has some minor respiratory issues, which means she often has to sit up in bed, so we’re looking for one of those fancy adjustable beds that will let us both be comfortable. I think it might be a Christmas gift to each other. I think we’re also sinking into degenerate decadence here in the waning years of the American empire.

    • It’s not supposed to be bent like that

  • I’m also looking for a bookshelf with doors — the evil cat destroyed a camera lens (an inexpensive one, fortunately) by flicking it off a shelf, so I need a cat-proof way to store electronics and camera gear. I’ve ordered one that will arrive next week. Until then, I’m hovering over my lens collection like a dragon over its hoard, and snarling if the cat approaches.
  • Of course I went into the lab to tend the spiders.
  • Mary restocked her bird feeders. My job was to hold the ladder.

The long-term consequences of misogyny

It’s as if America wasn’t the paradise the Right tries to tell us. A Gallup poll shows that a lot of young people want to escape our dystopia.

For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women.

In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.

A lot of young women want out. It’s hard to blame them.

Young American men don’t feel the same degree of alienation. It also seems to be an American phenomenon — women in other countries aren’t as interested in fleeing their homeland for somewhere else.

The growing trend in younger women in the U.S. looking to leave their country is not evident in other advanced economies. Across 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the percentage of younger women who say they would like to migrate has held relatively steady for years, typically averaging between 20% and 30%.

For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, younger U.S. women were less likely than their peers abroad to want to move. That changed around 2016. Since then, they have been more likely than younger women in other wealthy countries to say they would leave their homeland for good. By contrast, U.S. men aged 15 to 44 continue to be less likely than average to want to migrate compared with their peers in the OECD.

It’s almost as if women have noticed that we’ve been denying them autonomy and rights.

Our continuing descent into corruption

I remember, over 20 years ago, there were furious online debates where some of the worst people in the world were making repulsive arguments about what children were old enough to fuck. They were claiming that you weren’t a pedophile if the children were adolescents — you were a “hebephile,” as if that made a difference. It doesn’t.

Now Megyn Kelly is echoing that same stupid claim. I thought we were done with that stupid nonsense.

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): As for Epstein, I’ve said this before, but just as a reminder, I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything. Not everything, but virtually everything. And this person has told me from the start years and years ago that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realized this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.

And that is what I believed, and that is what I reliably was told for many years. And it wasn’t until we heard from Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged — forgive me, they used to call it kiddie porn, now they call it child sexual abuse material — on his computer that for the first time, I thought, oh, no, he was an actual pedophile. I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. She’s never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON (GUEST): Or anything else.

KELLY: Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference. There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?

What is that difference, exactly? They’re both under the age of consent. They’re minors, you don’t suddenly become fair game for sexual abuse when your breasts begin to grow. For that matter, adults aren’t sexual objects either, but I don’t think the people who make these bad arguments really care about that, either. But then, Megyn Kelly has long been prone to making idiotic claims — remember when she was irate that Santa Claus could be anything but a white man?

It’s nice that she doesn’t trust Pam Bondi, but I don’t trust Megyn Kelly, either. She went on to say…

Kelly acknowledged Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, telling Ungar-Sargon, [Epstein] did like them young, and there were several young women who he did this to who were minors, who were underage. There’s just no question about that.

She then insisted that Trump was not involved, adding, That is a true fact about Jeffrey Epstein. But that is not a true fact about Donald Trump.

We’re learning all kinds of surprising things about Donald Trump lately.

That’s Epstein’s brother asking him about some compromising photos; there was a flurry of speculation that “Bubba” was Clinton, in a verified email, but the brother has come forward to say it wasn’t the former president. Interesting…a partial denial suggests that the rest might be true, that Putin has some blackmail material on Trump.

This whole affair has gotten unbelievably slimy. Now I’m worrying that we might be suffering under a President Vance in the near future.

Texas leads the way!

They have new policies for their university.

Courses at Texas A&M University System schools that “advocate race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” will only be allowed with pre-approval, following a policy change approved Thursday.

Editorial comment: they will never be pre-approved.

Speaking ahead of the committee vote Thursday, committee chair Sam Torn said a rigorous review of university courses will accompany the policy changes.

Editorial comment: they will enforce rigid ideological beliefs…but will deny that they are being ideological.

“The board agreed it was essential for the Texas A&M University System to refine existing policies and lead the way with an in-depth and repeatable review of our courses so that we can, simply put, make sure we are educating, not advocating, and that we are teaching what we say we are going to teach,” Torn said.

Editorial comment: see what I mean? They haven’t figured out yet that silencing a set of ideas is ideological, too.

The university system’s Civil Rights Protections and Compliance policy also has been revised to state that “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO or designee.”

Editorial comment: they will erase race, gender, and sexual orientation from the curriculum, denying that such phenomena even exist.

Many faculty and outsiders are speaking out against this policy.

The new race and gender policy has garnered condemnation from educational rights advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which sent a letter to the regents earlier this week arguing the policy amounted to censorship.

“We urge the board to reject these proposals, which invite — indeed, practically guarantee — unconstitutional political interference with faculty teaching and academic freedom,” the letter reads. “Academic freedom requires that faculty, not administrators, determine whether, when, and how to teach material germane to the topic of their courses.”

Before the final vote, FIRE special counsel Robert Shibley told Houston Public Media the policy change would affect a wide swath of curriculum, from civil rights to the Civil War or even classical Greek plays.

“That would subject dozens or potentially hundreds of courses to the veto of high-level administrators,” Shibley said. “So, even if a faculty member just wants to assign one chapter of a book, and it has something to do with race or gender, that means that the college president is going to have to pre-approve that.”

My god, FIRE opposes it? An organization funded by Charles Koch favoring libertarian/conservative causes thinks that maybe Texas has gone too far dislikes the policy? You know it’s bad.

In addition, Texas A&M is going to enable a network of student snitches. It’s going to be so much fun!

As part of the review process, Hallmark said there would be a “24-7 reporting mechanism” for students to report what they consider “inaccurate or misleading course content.”

Shibley, the FIRE special counsel, said the potential creation of such a reporting mechanism could have a “chilling” effect on faculty.

How will the students know if the course content is inaccurate? Because Fox News or TPUSA tells them so?

If you’re from Texas and attending college or planning to attend, get out now. The neighboring states aren’t particularly great, though, may I recommend applying to the University of Minnesota system?

I guess Chinese scientists have cooties

In the latest example of insanity, congress wants to penalize scientists who dare to work with Chinese scientists.

Scientists and research advocates in the United States are mobilizing to fight a bill that would essentially prohibit researchers with any ties to China and other countries deemed hostile from receiving federal funding. Nearly 800 academics signed a 29 October letter opposing the ban, part of a bill passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives that sets spending priorities for the Department of Defense (DOD). A coalition of higher education and research advocacy groups has also urged Congress to strike the language as members reconcile the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with what the Senate adopted last month. Final passage is expected by the end of the year.

The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act would deny federal funding to any U.S. scientist who collaborates with anyone “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity,” a category that includes four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.

You know, collaboration is an essential part of good science — both partners benefit from working together. There are many highly qualified, expert Chinese scientists we could profitably work with, and this kind of bill is only penalizing Americans, denying them research funding and restricting who they can partner with. The bill is sponsored by yet another short-sighted, ignorant MAGA Republican.

The act’s author, Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI), wants to “stop federal [science] funding from going to universities or researchers that collaborate with China’s military and intelligence services.” Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has produced a slew of reports in the past 2 years decrying what it sees as a rising tide of such harmful collaborations.

We have a whole committee on the Chinese Communist Party? Chaired by a jingoistic conservative fanatic? Do they also oppose the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace?

Well, at least it looks like constituents are getting disgusted with him.

More AI hype

You’ve probably already seen the video of the stupid Russian AIbot falling flat on its face in its debut, but here it is again.

This is all a waste of money, time, and effort. Before you reply with that “what use is a baby?” line, there’s no there there — these aren’t aware, thinking machines, they all need pre-programmed tasks to follow in their slow, clumsy way. You wouldn’t want one with full autonomy, anyway, given how erratically AI performs in simple text tasks.

Near the end of the above video, they talk briefly about industrial automation, which is good, I’m all for it. Those are repetitive tasks in which you do give the machine a set of programmed operations, and you gotta wonder…what is the “humanoid” part for, anyway? Wouldn’t it be smarter to have just an arm, with specialized grasping elements?

This is just another example of hyping up AI, because a bunch of billionaires make more money by selling server farms and stolen information, but they need flashy stuff to convince the rubes to buy into it.

Also, some of these robots aren’t even independently controlled by AI — they’ve got a guy behind a screen diddling switches and joysticks, in which case they should just cut out the middle android.

OH NO! Larry Summers and Bill Clinton might be hurt by the Epstein files? Threaten me with a good time already.

The Democrats have been releasing damning emails from the Epstein files, which is a good start. There’s nothing too surprising in them, though. We already knew Trump and Epstein were pals, we’ve always known that Trump was a nasty little sleazebag with a thing for underaged girls, and the right-wing side of the electorate has been able to ignore that all along, so I expect nothing to change. Also, the Republicans are playing the victim card and howling about it was all innocent banter and Trump didn’t do nothin’, anyhow.

Except that conservatives are hypocritically complaining about emails that expose the president for what he is, and simultaneously fishing through the emails that make Democrats look bad. I’m all for it! Expose all the dirtbags, no matter what side of the aisle they sit on.

For example, Larry Summers, good buddy to Bill Clinton and ex-president of Harvard, was quite chummy with Epstein.

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers maintained a close personal relationship with convicted sex criminal Jeffrey E. Epstein until just months before his death in August 2019, according to emails released by Congress on Wednesday.

The cache, released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, details how Summers and Epstein regularly corresponded about women, politics, and Harvard-linked projects. They appear to have maintained a close correspondence as late as March 2019 — just months before Epstein’s arrest and death.

Some of the emails are casually venal, as when Summers tried to cajole huge financial gifts to specific projects at Harvard.

The correspondence reveals that Epstein had planned to donate $500,000 to Poetry in America — a television show and digital initiative spearheaded by Harvard English professor emerita Elisa F. New, who is married to Summers. In 2016, Epstein donated $110,000 to Verse Video Education, the non-profit organization which funds the initiative.

Cool. It’s quite the inbred tangle of scholars they’ve got there at Harvard.

We also get the slimy side of Summers, as he asks Epstein for dating advice.

In dozens of emails, Summers — corresponding from his personal account — also appears to have written to Epstein with ease about his personal life. At times, he confided in Epstein about his relationship with an unnamed woman, referring to the topic and his requests for advice as the “dear Abby issue.”

He recounted a conversation between himself and the woman to Epstein, telling him that at one point it had turned tense.

At one point, he told Epstein, the woman brushed him off with the phrase “I’m busy.” Summers told Epstein that he responded to the woman by telling her “awfully coy u are.” Summers then asked her, “Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming,” he wrote to Epstein.

“I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Summers recounted to Epstein, adding that “she must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”

Epstein supported Summers’ response, saying that the woman was making Summers “pay for past errors” but “no whining showed strength.”

Oh, ick. He was trying to arrange a weekend together with this woman (remember, he’s married), and she clearly wanted nothing to do with it. Epstein praises him for his strength. Come on, this was a homely, middle-aged man hitting on a woman, not a profile in courage.

And then there is the sexism, a trait that we’ve known Summers to have for many years.

In an October 2017 email to Epstein, Summers appeared to joke to Epstein that women were less intelligent than men — and suggested that having “hit on” women should not damage one’s career prospects.

“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population….” he wrote to Epstein, without elaborating further.

The message invoked one of the most controversial episodes of Summers’ career — his 2005 remarks at an economics conference suggesting that innate differences between men and women might help explain the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering at elite universities.

Yeah, fine, throw Summers under the bus. If you can hurl Bill Clinton under there at the same time, I’m not going to complain…I’m probably going to cheer. But please understand you can’t condemn Summers for being a sexist asshole without also condemning Trump.