Tech companies are not altruistic

If Steve Jobs was an awful person, why should we expect that the Apple corporation is altruistic and good? The news is full of this shocking announcement that Apple has removed all of Alex Jones’ podcasts from the iTunes library.

In a statement Sunday evening to BuzzFeed News, Apple confirmed that it notified Jones of the decision to remove the five shows under its hate speech guidelines earlier this weekend. “Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users,” a company spokesperson said. “Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

The cynic in me is wondering why. It’s a no-brainer to me that people shouldn’t promote hateful lunacy like Jones’ ranting, but Apple was just fine with it for years when Jones and his crew were spouting deranged shit non-stop. I don’t believe that a corporation has suddenly grown a conscience, so there must be something more to it.

Again, cynical me speaks up and suggests that the haters, while a profitable market to cater to, have gotten out of hand and are alienating the non-haters, another profitable market. Apple is cracking down on the most prominent crackpot on their network to put on a show of “Hey, we’re good guys at heart”, while allowing the numerous littler Nazis to thrive.

…unless you think those vague guidelines are going to be enforced all across the board. I think not. Making an example of one particularly loud asshole will send a useful message to the less successful assholes that they’d better be careful not to disrupt the business, which is Apple’s only goal.

Rich people aren’t like the rest of us

They’re worse. I don’t know whether the process of getting rich warps them, or only damaged people commit to getting rich.

Take Steve Jobs. We peons knew him as the intense guy in a turtleneck who’d come on stage twice a year to announce the latest cool expensive gadget from his company, but he also had a daughter, sort of. He was a reluctant father who seemed to accept his responsibilities grudgingly, and appeared to actively resent her. And now she has written a revealing book about what it was like to grow up with a cold, aloof father.

Preceding this excerpt, she’d heard that he was so rich that he’d trade in his shiny black Porsche if it got so much as a scratch.

For a long time I hoped that if I played one role, my father would take the corresponding role. I would be the beloved daughter; he would be the indulgent father. I decided that if I acted like other daughters did, he would join in the lark. We’d pretend together, and in pretending we’d make it real. If I had observed him as he was, or admitted to myself what I saw, I would have known that he would not do this, and that a game of pretend would disgust him.

Later that year, I would stay overnight at my father’s house on several Wednesdays while my mother took college classes in San Francisco. On those nights, we ate dinner, took a hot tub outside, and watched old movies. During the car rides to his house, he didn’t talk.

“Can I have it when you’re done?”I asked him one night, as we took a left at the leaning, crumbling white pillars that flanked the thin, bumpy road ending at his gate. I’d been thinking about it for a while but had only just built up the courage to ask.

“Can you have what?” he said.

“This car. Your Porsche.” I wondered where he put the extras. I pictured them in a shiny black line at the back of his land.

“Absolutely not,” he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake. I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth of the scratch: maybe he didn’t buy new ones. By that time I knew he was not generous with money, or food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception.

I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me.

“You’re not getting anything,” he said. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.” Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.

If any of my children had asked anything like that (they’d have to ask for a beat-up old Honda instead of a Porsche), that is not the answer I would have given.

“Yes. You can have it. You can have everything. You’re getting it all — I’d give you the world if I could.”

That’s how human beings answer that kind of question.

It’s sad that Lisa Brennan-Jobs did not experience that, growing up.

Nice headline

From Forbes, no less: Ticket Sales Dry Up for Noah’s Ark Tourist Attraction.

It gets even better in the body text.

The Ark Encounter has sold just over 860,000 tickets in the past year, according to the (Louisville, KY) Courier Journal, which obtained the numbers via a Freedom of Information request. That’s just one third of the high-end estimates park officials made when the attraction opened in 2016.

Don’t worry for Answers in Genesis, though. Lying and spinning the facts are domains of creationist expertise.

Competence porn

After that blustering buffoon badgering bison, it would be nice to see a thoughtful man behaving competently. How about this? Mark Levy was one of 21 pilots flying WWII aircraft in a British airshow, when the engine on his P-51 conked out, and he had to sputter to a landing in a cornfield. And best of all, there’s full cockpit video of the whole thing! You get to watch these magnificent old planes flying in formation, and then crisis as the engine begins to fail (and you know the pilot is going to be fine).

It’s less than two minutes between engine failure and grinding to a stop in a cornfield, but the video goes on for over a half hour as the pilot discusses what he was thinking and what he did and what his concerns and priorities were. I don’t know about you, but I love this stuff: glamorous machines and thoughtful people behind them.

I’m also even more impressed with the WWII pilots. Imagine managing this beast while other airplanes are shooting at you, over ground with big anti-aircraft guns intentionally trying to knock you out of the sky.

Prediction: Lawrence Krauss will be resigning

Everyone knew that Krauss had been ill-behaved towards women, and there’d even been that story of him groping a fan at a conference. We all believed it, but it sure took a long time for the powers-that-be to get around to confirming it. Now they have: ASU has released their findings, and confirmed that Lawrence Krauss grabbed a woman’s breast in public.

Arizona State University has concluded that physics professor Lawrence Krauss breached the school’s sexual harassment policy by groping a woman at a conference in Australia.

The incident, which happened at a dinner in November 2016 in Melbourne as part of the Australian skeptics national convention, was revealed in February in a BuzzFeed News investigation that described allegations of unwanted sexual advances, groping, and inappropriate comments by Krauss over more than a decade.

The incident in Melbourne happened when one of Krauss’s fans took a selfie photograph with him. A witness, microbiologist Melanie Thomson, filed a formal complaint with Arizona State in July of 2017, stating that the professor had grabbed the woman’s breast. (The woman in the selfie did not complain to the university.)

Krauss made excuses that were not believed, and also tried to place the blame on his accuser.

Thomson told BuzzFeed News that she felt vindicated. “The original investigation was basically a ‘he said, she said’ scenario, where they believed him over me,” Thomson said. “And that’s the way these things often go.”

She still wants Krauss to apologize, she said, and to withdraw his claim, made to BuzzFeed News and in a nine-page response to the article, that her complaint was “fabricated with malicious intent.”

“I call for him to retract his retaliatory, inflammatory, libelous remarks,” Thomson said.

I find the whole affair disappointing. I’ve had people ask to take a photo with me, I’ve never felt any urge to fondle them in response. It’s just sad when a smart guy is stuck with an adolescent emotional brain that leads him to misuse people that way.

I’ve known of college professors in the past who’ve screwed up this way, and have had to accept restrictions, like denial of promotions and strictly enforced policies with students, but they’ve managed to keep their jobs. I don’t see them getting away with slaps on the wrist anymore — ASU is a respectable university, which isn’t going to want confirmed harassers on their staff. I’m going to guess he won’t be associated with them much longer.

Although I could be wrong — some people seem to lead a charmed life, or maybe Chapman University and Scientific American and the ACSH don’t seem to care what kind of scum work for them. Maybe Krauss can find a position in one of those institutions if his situation at Arizona falls completely apart?

Poor impulse control

Perhaps you were wondering what happened to this guy who was seen taunting a bison in Yellowstone park.

His name is Raymond Reinke. He has a peculiar notion about how to enjoy a vacation in a national park. He’d been making a grand tour of some of the more spectacular sites in the Rockies, making a public nuisance of himself.

Reinke had been traveling to multiple national parks over the last week. On July 28, he was first arrested by law enforcement rangers at Grand Teton National Park for a drunk and disorderly conduct incident. He spent the night in the Teton County Jail, and was then released on bond.

Following his release, he traveled to Yellowstone National Park. Rangers at Yellowstone stopped his vehicle for a traffic violation on July 31. Reinke appeared to be intoxicated and argumentative. He was cited as a passenger for failure to wear a seat belt. It is believed that after that traffic stop, Reinke encountered the bison.

Yellowstone rangers received several wildlife harassment reports from concerned visitors and found Reinke later that evening, issuing a citation requiring a court appearance. The video of the event surfaced after that citation had been issued.

On Thursday, August 2, Yellowstone rangers connected Reinke’s extensive history, and seeing the egregious nature of the wildlife violation, the Assistant U.S. Attorney requested his bond be revoked. The request was granted and on the night of August 2, a warrant was issued for Reinke’s arrest.

Reinke had told rangers that his plans were to travel to Glacier National Park. Last night, August 2, Glacier National Park rangers began looking for his vehicle. Simultaneous with that search, rangers responded to the Many Glacier Hotel because two guests were arguing and creating a disturbance in the hotel dining room. Rangers identified one of the individuals involved as Reinke.

He’s in jail now. Maybe next year he can just stay at home and get drunk.

Fire all the writers

Here’s what passes for creativity in the new Mission Impossible: Fallout movie: you know how it’s a standard cliche in this kind of movie to have the ticking time bomb with the red LED display counting down to the explosion and you know the hero is going to disarm it in the last second or two? That wasn’t good enough for this movie. No, they had to increase the threat by having two bombs that are synchronized, and if you don’t cut the green wire in both of them simultaneously, they’ll explode, because they’re in radio communication with each other.

But wait! Even that won’t work. The countdown timer is locked in to inevitable detonation, and if you tinker with either of them, they’ll go off. It’s impossible to stop the bomb once triggered.

Except! There is a remote detonator that triggered the countdown, and there is a bug in the software so that if you yank the key out of the detonator AND cut the green wires in both bombs at the same time, then the bombs will fizzle. Of course, the remote detonator has a red LED countdown on it, too.

No spoilers here, so I won’t tell you if the Mission Impossible team manages to coordinate this triple shutdown, and I especially won’t tell you if they do it in the last second. If you can’t figure it out, you deserve to watch this movie.

One other detail I have to share. The terrorist leader who was responsible for this intricate, complex bomb mechanism that would have Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames racing to do precisely choreographed things to the ridiculous circuitry was such a fanatic that he had suicidally decided to stay with his bombs to watch them go off and see his enemies vanquished. And I’m thinking that all he needed was one simple button that he could push that would instantly trigger the nuclear explosion. No timers needed. No fancy schmancy radio links. Just “Ah, Ethan Hunt, my hated enemy. You have landed in my base…”<click>BOOOOM!. The whole elaborate setup was irrelevant.

There were other lapses in reason. Ethan Hunt kills a pilot flying his helicopter, leaps into the seat, taps quizzically on a dial in the complex array of instruments in front of him, and says “I guess that’s my altitude” — this is apparently the first time he’s flown a helicopter — and then proceeds to go on a dizzying high speed, ground- and cliff-hugging helicopter chase through rugged mountain valleys. No problem. He finally catches up with the bad guy’s helicopter, and his solution is a kamikaze collision that has both of them smoking and on fire in shattered machines crashing onto a mountaintop. They both survive. Then the choppers roll down the mountainside and over a cliff. They both survive. Then they fall through a cliffside chimney, all herkey-jerkey like, and during the descent Ethan Hunt jumps into the bad guy’s chopper and they punch each other. The helicopters crash to the ground. They both survive. They punch and kick some more. One helicopter rolls over yet another cliff, and is hanging by a long cable. But of course they end up clinging to that cable at a terrifying height, punching and kicking each other. Then the cable snaps. Helicopter falls, finally explodes.

Only one survives. If you can’t figure out who, then this is the movie for you.

Also, Alec Baldwin gets murdered a couple of times, I lost track. He keeps coming back anyway. I could tell you that the entire cast gets vaporized in a nuclear explosion or flaming helicopter crash, and it wouldn’t matter. The key grip or the caterer would just rip off a rubber mask, revealing Tom Cruise was in disguise the whole time, and the movie could proceed.

It was predictable and trite throughout. There was only one mystery: Henry Cavill’s mustache. Cavill had appeared as Superman in that bomb, Justice League, and was shooting Mission Impossible: Fallout when he was called back for some reshoots. As Superman, he was cleanshaven; as Walker, CIA agent, he’s got an ugly stubbly beard and mustache. They decided that rather than delaying the reshoots and simply shaving, they would spend $3 million to erase his mustache with some bad, obvious CGI.

Clearly, his mustache was very important to this movie. I kept watching and waiting for the moment when it crawls off his face to do some derring-do, like a gunfight or a motorcycle chase, since it’s got a $3 million value (hey, I’ll shave my mustache off for $3 million!). Spoiler alert: it never does. It just sits there on his lip, the entire movie, daydreaming about its bank account.

There is one remaining mystery. Cavill was in one ghastly stinker of a movie, Justice League, and now he’s come back with yet another stinker, Mission Impossible: Fallout. Is his career like those falling helicopters? Boom, crash, it doesn’t matter. Crash again. Stagger out, waving his fists. Tumble off a cliff, kick, punch. But at some point, the writers will insist on a giant flaming explosion and a death he can’t survive. Probably.

(Suddenly, PZ Myers claws at a wad of latex over his face, peeling it back to reveal…the craggy, strong-jawed good looks of Henry Cavill! Cue Mission Impossible theme. Cue ka-ching, ka-ching as cash pours into his bank account. Cue next crappy movie.)

Anyone got any ghost repellent?

I’m worried, if this is true: Fed Up With Mortal Men, Women Are Having Sex with Ghosts. I’m concerned because I live only a short distance from a cemetery, and even if I didn’t, it might give my wife reason to think she could improve her sex life by translating me to a different realm.

It’s got multiple testimonials from real women! Also, Elayne Riggs told me about it, so it must be true.

…a woman named Amethyst Realm appeared on the British daytime television show This Morning, claiming that she began having sex with ghosts in her home and has not had since with a human being since. Her first erotic encounter with a ghost occurred 10 years ago, while she was still in a relationship with her mortal fiancé. As can occur with affairs, Realm was caught mid-coitus when her husband-to-be returned early one day from a trip away. “He saw the shape of a man through the spare room window,” she explained.

Betrayed, Realm’s fiancé broke up with her, and she and the ghost then decided to fuck everywhere in the house: “Once my fiancé had left, [we had sex] everywhere, [but] always within the building,” she said. That particular ghost romance lasted for a time, until the entity “started to appear less,” and Realm ended the inter-dimensional affair.

After that, Realm began to have regular sex with a variety of ghosts, each as distinct in style and feel than any human mate might be. “I’ve got no interest in men now,” she proclaimed.

Now I’m reassured, though. She’s lying. There’s now way sex with ghosts could be better than sex with real men. After all, ghosts would be kind of gauzy and nebulous, weak and barely perceptible. The strongest kind of interaction they’d be able to have is delicate little butterfly kisses, soft ephemeral strokes along the skin like hummingbird down, quiet, barely audible whispers in her ears, and a bit of moaning — I’ll admit, they’re probably really good at moaning — and no one would enjoy any of that.

Just in case, though, I might want to stock up on bottles of Ghost-Be-Gone.