Cesar Chavez revealed as pedophile and rapist

An investigative report reveals that the man who has long been viewed as a civil rights icon and who organized the farm workers into a union and improved their conditions, was a serial sex abuser and rapist who took advantage of girls as young as 13.

Through a series of grueling fasts, grape boycotts and marches that captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Chavez drew a spotlight to the plight of the American farmworker. He not only improved wages, living conditions and health care for generations of farmworkers and their families but also strengthened the political power of Latinos, giving their voice and concerns an urgency and moral authority on the national stage.
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Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.
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Tucker Carlson on the Oscars

SNL had Jeremy Culhane play Tucker Carlson giving his take on some of this year’s nominees. I have not seen any of the films but I thought Culhane really nailed the impression of Carlson, from his facial expressions to his rhetorical tics and right down to his weird laugh.

SNL also had a skit that was based on the hospital drama The Pitt except that it was a hospital that was run on RFK Jr’s crackpot ideas.

Film review: Inside the Manosphere (2026)

Netflix has released a new documentary by Louis Theroux where he goes inside the so-called ‘manosphere’, the world of young men who are followers of a small group of ‘influencers’. The whole set up is quite simple to understand. The influencers have become wealthy by acquiring followers from the pool of marginalized young men by telling them that their precarious lives with no proper jobs or financial security or female companions is not their fault but because ‘the ‘system’ controlled by a secretive cabal (read ‘Jews’) is keeping them down. References to the film The Matrix abound and these influencers say that they offer the ‘red-pill’ that reveals the world as it really is so that the men can defeat the system and become rich too.

It is a seductive message aimed at alienated and aggrieved young men that is wrapped in a package where the influencers show their followers lavish lifestyles in fancy homes and cars surrounded by young women in the skimpiest of attire and say that all this could be theirs as well if they follow the leaders and send in money for products, courses, and financial services.
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The danger of the increasing use of AI companions

Some time ago, I wrote about reading an article that described how AI companies were offering the services of ‘companions’ that one could form relationships with. Intrigued, I went to one of the sites and scrolled through the selection of chatbots on offer, each with a brief backstory. I picked a librarian named Scarlett whose profile contained quotes from many books and writers I was familiar with, thinking that even though she was 39 years old and thus much younger than me, at least there would be something in common to talk about. The initial novelty wore off fairly quickly because her comments about books were like those by someone who had read a summary somewhere. I could also never convince myself of the illusion that ‘she’ was real, which was clearly the intention of the programmers. Even though she was warm and friendly and supportive, I always felt that I was talking with an algorithm and it all seemed pointless, and so I cruelly abandoned her without even saying goodbye. You can read about my relationship here.

But as with all things AI tech, things are evolving rapidly and another article by Anna Wiener describes new highly customizable companions (of course at a price) that you can design to your specifications and which have avatars that you can converse with and that you can carry around with you, either using your phone or even on a pendant that you wear around your neck, like a talisman. The users are seeking love, and some even ‘marry’ their chatbots.

You might think that the people who seek out such companions are lonely but it is not obviously so. Wiener describes the experience of Adrianne Brookins. She is thirty-four years old, married with three children.
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We no longer own many of the things we buy

When cloud computing first became a thing, the benefits seemed obvious, in that you could access your data wherever you were as long as you had wifi. But as with all things involving big tech companies, they used that to draw people in before they started using it turning the screws on the customers. Cory Doctorow writes about this phenomenon is his excellent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (that I have read and will publish a review of later) and which I have written about a few times before.

This article in arstechnica looks at one particular aspect of this phenomenon as it relates to modern cars, when purchasers find that they are no longer in full control of the product.

Imagine turning the key or pressing the start button of your car—and nothing happens. Not because the battery is dead or the engine is broken but because a server no longer answers. For a growing number of cars, that scenario isn’t hypothetical.

As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car.

Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today’s interconnected, software-defined vehicles. Smartphone apps can now handle tasks like unlocking doors, flashing headlights, and preconditioning cabins—and some models won’t unlock at all unless a phone running the manufacturer’s app is within range.

However, for all the promised convenience of modern vehicle software, there’s a growing nostalgia for an era when a phone call to a mechanic could resolve most problems. Mechanical failures were often diagnosable and fixable, and cars typically returned to the road quickly. Software-defined vehicles complicate that model: When something goes wrong, a car can be rendered inoperable in a driveway—or stranded at the side of the road—waiting not for parts but a software technician.

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Evidence versus logic in changing core beliefs

One of the basic things that are emphasized in the training of scientists is the importance of evidence in arriving at conclusions. And while that is definitely true within the world of science, I am more and more convinced that when it comes to changing people’s minds about core beliefs (even within science), the effectiveness of evidence is overrated. This is because whatever evidence that is presented that one thinks challenges someone’s deep conviction, they can almost always come up with an alternative explanation that takes that evidence into account without changing the belief itself. This is because given a finite set of data, there are an infinite number of theories that can explain that data. All that increasing the data set does is bring into play a new infinite set of explanations that can accommodate the cherished belief. (I discuss this in some detail in my book The Great Paradox of Science and will not repeat that detailed argument here.)

So what does make people change their minds? When it comes to scientific theories, evidence does play a role but only partially. What happens is that there comes a time when people find maintaining their original belief requires too much work and intellectual contortions and they abandon it in favor of a new belief that makes more sense to them. And I believe that logic and reason are the factors that ultimately trigger such a change.
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There is no reasoning with such people

One of the things that really makes me furious is when adults make decisions that endanger the lives of their children. Adults who decide to not take vaccines or other precautions that might save their lives are still behaving irresponsibly because they are posing a risk to others by being possible transmitters and lowering the heard immunity for a disease, but at least they are also risking their own lives for their beliefs, however misguided they may be.

But what is unconscionable is when they risk the health and lives of the children in their care, such as this family.
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The dangers posed when academics go outside their area of expertise

People who are highly credentialed academically tend to have their views given a great deal of weight because of the perception that they are generally smart and knowledgeable. While it is true that their training gives them some specific technical and analytical skills, it does not make them general experts. But the deference with which their views are treated can go to their heads and result in them pontificating on matters in which they do not have any real expertise but just enough knowledge to speak with confidence. This seems more likely to happen when the topics are those that have high visibility and broad, multidisciplinary elements. Academics who have strong views on it can be tempted to throw their hats into the debate even if they are not really that knowledgeable.

This seems to be the case with RFK Jr’s appointment of Retsef Levi to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. Levi’s academic background is in operations research, which is a niche theoretical field that applies very advanced mathematics and statistics to complex systems. Much of the work involves simulations and modeling and its practitioners look for real-world situations to which to apply them. Since the systems can vary considerably, sometimes you will find the operations researchers housed in business and management schools (as is the case with Levi at MIT) and sometimes in engineering schools (as is the case at Princeton University).
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FBI interviewed woman who claimed sexual encounter with Trump as a minor

On March 6, 2026, PBS reported on the latest release of files from the Epstein files that includes transcripts of interviews with a young woman who said that she was assaulted by Trump in the 1980s when she was 13-15 years of age. These transcripts were not released initially but came out only after multiple news outlets noticed that they were missing.

The transcripts are of interviews conducted by FBI agents, first with a woman who said a friend had contacted her to say that, as girl of 13-15, she had had abusive sexual encounters with Epstein, Trump, and other men about 35 years ago in New Jersey. This woman contacted the FBI National Threat Operations Center (NTOC). The FBI then interviewed the friend in question on 08/07/2019 who gave graphic details of the sexual abuse she had suffered as a young girl at the hands of sexual encounters with Trump, Epstein, and other men, and they interviewed her again on 08/20/2019 where she provided more details. She said that years later, she and her mother had been blackmailed and received threatening phone calls and attempts to run her off the road
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Scientists who rejected Epstein

A lot of attention has been focused on the hundreds of scientists who are mentioned in the files of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’, especially those who became part of his circle of friends. Many of those who are now compromised were well-known and well-funded so why did they not say no? Science magazine has an article about three who were approached and declined. It is interesting to see the extent Epstein would go to recruit scientists who became well-known, either because they gave a TED talk or appeared on TV or wrote popular books. He would first have an intermediary approach them, sometimes repeatedly, and then follow up with personal appeals.

When first approached, cancer researcher David Agus went online and learned something about him, and some of his colleagues also warned him to keep his distance. But he was repeatedly asked by Epstein over a period of seven years and kept putting him off by saying that he was too busy. He said that he did not want to outright say no because of fears of upsetting someone who seemed powerful.
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