He doesn’t seem to understand numerals. “6000 thousand” is six million. Unless he’s in some weird sect that has a different age of the Earth than other fundamentalist Christians, he’s confused, or just innumerate.

My eyes glaze over. Would you believe this letter goes on for 8 pages of intolerance and hatred? I’ll spare you the middle — it’s all the same — but here’s the last page, where he tells me to become a Christian.

No, not ever. I have no desire to become garbage.

Holy crap. Guess who these guys are looking towards for advice. Gad Saad.

Musk: I mean, there’s a guy who posts on X who’s great: Gad Saad.*
Rogan: Yeah. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome. … And he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right. Understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes. Like it’s weaponized. Empathy is the issue. Yeah, weaponized empathy.

He’s awesome…I’m going to have to puke. Gad Saad is a marketing professor with no qualifications in science, but is thriving by jumping on the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. Or, as Eiynah describes him,

He is a white nationalist, someone who calls for expelling Muslims, a vicious transphobe, someone who refers to anti-Zionist Jews as insects. A truly vile man who they described as ‘a Canadian professor’.

His latest schtick is to claim that people are caring too much for their fellow human beings, especially if they belong to ethnic groups he doesn’t like, and calling it suicidal empathy. He’s written a whole book on the topic, a book I’ve mentioned before, and not one I’d ever care to read. Let’s take a look at the Amazon reviews, where it has 4½ stars (the reviews show all the signs of being carefully pruned of criticism), and all you have to do is look at who is praising him to know it’s trash.

“Western civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival. Gad Saad articulates this well. All of Gad’s books, including this one, are great.” — Elon Musk

“Over the course of nearly half a century tracking culture war issues I have some perspective on our time and society, and I am deeply worried that the West faces a challenge like no other. But I was unable to link the disparate threats—the DEI, BLM, and trans movements, the fetishization of victimhood status, the ennobling of terrorists and criminals, and the failure to solve the drug and homelessness problems—to the underlying cause until I read Gad Saad’s magisterial work on Suicidal Empathy. There it is! We’re killing ourselves with kindness and it must stop before the patient dies, starting with this book, which includes the contagion’s diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.” — Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine, author of The Moral Arc and Conspiracy

“What happens when society becomes so empathetic that it tolerates intolerance? Gad Saad is the evolutionary psychologist who can tell us whether the enlightenment can endure in an age of suicidal empathy.” — Lord Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and Birds, Sex and Beauty

Western civilization is doomed, unless we purge it of DEI, BLM, and trans movements and stop being kind. But Musk, Shermer, and Ridley are the people you should listen to only if you plan on doing the opposite of what they advise.

Instead, respect every branch of human civilization equally, regard them with fairness and generosity, and give them nothing but kindness. Except for Nazis.

Sucking up to Rogan or Musk will only make you popular with Nazis, and those people are bad.

It turns out they’re from Kazakhstan.

What I thought was most interesting in the video is that it mentions Nikolai Vavilov, and his famous hypothesis — so famous that we take it for granted in any discussion of human origins.

The origin of any cultivated plant can be found where its wild relatives grow with the greatest diversity.

Awesome! I’m going to have expand my discussion of extreme heterozygosity and centers of origin in my Spring semester genetics class (but not now, I have to focus on cell bio for next week). I read this most excellent review, Human-driven evolution of cultivated plants and the origin of early civilizations: The concept of Neolithic revolution in the works of Nikolai Vavilov and found it enlightening.

The concept of centers of origin of cultivated plants (crop biodiversity hotspots) developed by Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943) is essential for understanding the origin and evolution of human civilization. Vavilov formulated the principles of the Neolithic agricultural revolution and substantiated the basic patterns for the emergence of agricultural civilizations. He established that the center of speciation of the plants that have a potential for cultivation determines the origin of primary civilization. Humans actively performed the selection of plants with valuable properties, which led to the formation of new cultivated species and varieties, while the starting point for such unconsciously human-directed evolution was the presence of potentially useful traits due to the increased genetic diversity in the center of origin. The spreading of agriculturally important cultivars from the center of their origin led to the propagation of beneficial farming technologies over large areas. The establishment of human civilization resulted from the dynamic quasi-symbiotic relationship between humans and domesticated plants and animals, which human-driven evolution became an essential factor for the transformation and dynamics of human societies.

Here’s all the human history you need. (I exaggerate slightly.)

Fig. 5 summarizes the proposed views on the development of agricultural civilizations and phytospreading during the Holocene. The phytospreading process became to a major extent human-driven in the Holocene, which resulted in intensive biomass formation related to the production of crops. Centers of origin of cultivated plants determined the rise of early civilizations, which in turn facilitated the spreading of wild, cultivated, and weed species to higher latitudes. The process of phytospreading in the Holocene was described by Vavilov for the origin and distribution of cultivated plants. He identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants as the hotspots of genetic diversity for the plants potentially having agricultural importance. In these spots, the series of parallel variability (described as Vavilov’s law of homologous series) were very intense.

Fig. 5. Schematic illustration of the development of agricultural practices, spreading of cultivated plants, and social evolution of human civilization.

The law of homologous series is a very evo-devo concept. It’s the idea that similar variations can be found in members of the same genus, the same family, that is, that there seems to be something in the ancestral form that recurs spontaneously in later descendant forms, that the feature is an intrinsic property that can pop up in multiple branches of a lineage. These are brilliant observations rooted in Vavilov’s extensive study of native populations. Yes, he visited Kazakhstan and studied the apples there.

It’s especially impressive that he was doing this work that merged the disciplines of evolutionary biology and genetics in the 1920s.

You may have heard Vavilov’s name in another context: he was hated by the anti-science ideologue Trofim Lysenko, who eventually had him arrested and condemned to death in 1940. Vavilov died in prison in 1943, all because he recognized the scientific validity of Mendelian genetics, and opposed the nonsensical delusions and wishful thinking of Lysenko (delusions that led to the death of millions by famine). I can’t help but notice the similarities in the conflict between American science and the lies of MAHA and our modern Lysenko, RFK jr.

Vavilov’s mugshot

Thank goodness no scientists are being harassed in show trials and threatened with prison here! How many great scientists are going to wither on the vine thanks to the current radical politicization of science in this country?

Remember this guy? He ought to be forgotten already.

Despite a glowing endorsement from Trump, Lindell was defeated by Demuth by roughly 11 percentage points in the Republican primary for governor on 11 August, a margin far beyond the 0.25% threshold that would trigger an automatic state-funded recount.

He lost by 11 percent. This was not a photo finish, he was clearly repudiated by the Republican electorate. Without question, Mike Lindell is OUT. However, he still refuses to concede, and is demanding a recount.

Because the gap is wider than the threshold, Lindell would need to formally request the recount and cover its cost himself.

The announcement comes after Lindell refused last week to concede the Republican gubernatorial primary, despite trailing by a double-digit margin. The Associated Press called the race for Demuth, the Minnesota House speaker, late on election night.

Lindell’s campaign alleged “irregularities identified in election-night electronic reporting data” in the news release.

Minnesota law allows a manual recount if the loser pays for it themself, in this case at the cost of over $800,000. He’s planning to pay it, despite his pillow business being in a shambles and his bankruptcies.

Just wait until the general election! MAGA is going to go nuts.

It’s true that the female of the species dwarfs the little males, but look at the gigantic, pendulous palps hanging off the boy. He’s all male.

This morning I got my entire first week of lectures tidied up and uploaded, along with my syllabus (actually got that done last week), and am ready to begin my semester.

Almost. Tomorrow I’ll get my first week of lab organized.

I told you about how James O’Keefe had tried to prank Minnesota elections. This state had a major fraud scandal where a few people had scammed childcare funds for millions of dollars, and the government has been hammering through those cases and slamming the con-artists into prison, while MAGA has been shrieking for justice because some of the perpetrators were Somali (never mind that the organizer was a white American-born woman). We are going to have to be strict in the prosecution of these white-collar criminals.

I guess we’re just going to have to drop the hammer on James O’Keefe.

The man in the video who falsely identified himself as William Pomeranz, whose real name is James O’Keefe, may have put himself in legal jeopardy.

“It’s illegal in the state of Minnesota to impersonate another voter, and this is apparently what O’Keefe did,” David Schultz, a constitutional law professor at Hamline University, said.

Schultz, Pomeranz and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon say the video shows the system worked.

“As I read the law, you can’t impersonate another registered voter, and that’s exactly what they appear to have filmed themselves doing,” Simon said.

Impersonating a Minnesota voter at a polling place is a felony punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.

I wouldn’t object to seeing O’Keefe locked away for 7 years. We have to do it to avoid being seen as soft on crime.

20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.
Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest.

Ha ha, yeah, people are so different now…hang on, wait a minute. None of that is true. I suspect that the person did NOT do a careful analysis of statistical trends. I remember 20 years ago — heck, I remember 40 years ago — and I don’t remember people avoiding technology.

Did you know the microwave oven was invented in 1946, and the first commercial consumer model was introduced in 1967? Now they’re ubiquitous. Who doesn’t have one in their home nowadays? They were readily adopted over the course of years.

I was first using the internet in the 1990s, when it was largely a university privilege, and then came AOL and the internet just exploded in the 2000s. Now everybody has to have WiFi so they can get Netflix.

In the 2010s, citizens were adopting hybrid cars, and now fully electric cars. Are “techies” rushing to buy piston-engine cars with carburetors now?

I believe there is a rejection of badly implemented technology — the enshittification of tech, for instance. But I think people are always ready to adopt tools that are cheaper, easier to use, novel and interesting.

This may be advantageous as the school year starts — I’ll be able to bring my laptop and gets some work done while simultaneously supporting the theater.

Anyway, now I get to dwell on why I don’t like a Spider-Man movie, and Tom the Dancing Bug captures my feelings.

Tom the Dancing Bug

Where Marvel took a wrong turn was the success of those colossal match-ups where they scrape up every superhero from their long and storied history to fight the big bad guy. So you’ve got the guy who was bit by a radioactive spider, and the guy who turned green (originally gray, I know this because I’m old) from gamma ray exposure, a guy who built a suit of armor, a woman trained as an assassin, a literal god from a pagan pantheon, a sorceror supreme, a guy who can get really big or really small, a guy with a bow and arrow, etc. Individually, I could suspend disbelief to get through a story, but together…total indigestible chaos, that requires an excessive amount of exposition to get us to the point where the central plot even makes any progress. Apparently, the lesson Marvel has learned is that all their movies will be mash-ups of disparate superheroes with unrelated superpowers, and I hate it.

You don’t need that to make a long elaborate science-fiction story. A great counter-example: The Expanse, a multi-episode space opera. There is one key postulate, the contrivance of the unfortunately named Epstein Drive, which allowed a technological society to expand cheaply and rapidly enough to set the stage on which the human drama plays out (I think the bits where they introduce aliens and magical interstellar travel weakens the overall story, because it’s throwing in way too many gimmicks).

The better movie would be one where a relatable human story is told, with one magical being, no more, introduced to complicate events in interesting and novel ways. They aren’t ever going to do that any more. Stories aren’t as important as CGI slam-bam with lots of noise.

Unfortunately, now I have to go to the hospital, where a dermatologist is going to slice out a divot of my flesh in the name of cancer prevention. Wheeee. I’ll probably survive this procedure, but I’m going to be dealing with some discomfort and a bloody bandage for a while.

Also, on a branch just above them, there was a Cooper’s Hawk standing guard.

This is what it looks like now.

In a few hours, it’ll flutter off to join the wild population here in Morris.

If you thought James O’Keefe was washed up and would vanish in the sewage outlet of history after his exposure and disgrace, guess again. He attempted to meddle in the Minnesota primary by dressing up as a “muslim”, putting on a poor “muslim” accent, and attempting to vote illegally, to show that Minnesota election laws were leaky and would allow for significant election fraud.

Veritas founder James O’Keefe, along with reporter Cam Higby, impersonated Muslims and went to multiple Twin Cities polling places during the Aug. 11 primary.

“During Minnesota’s Primary on August 11, 2026, members of a widely discredited Florida-based political group visited several polling places in Minneapolis impersonating Minnesota voters,” Simon said in a news release.

“Dressed in what they called ‘Muslim’ costumes, and imitating foreign accents, they falsely claimed to be registered Minnesota voters. The group used concealed cameras to record their interactions with poll workers, releasing a heavily edited video of their encounters. Their apparent goal was to cast doubt on one or more Minnesota election laws that have been in force for over fifty years. Instead, they revealed their ignorance of how those laws actually work – while putting themselves in legal jeopardy.”

According to Higby, their goal was to see if they’d be allowed to vote without showing identification, and whether they’d be allowed to vouch for people who aren’t registered to vote.

He failed, but he still went ahead and spliced together a very bad video that purported to show Muslim election fraud. O’Keefe has a kink for putting on cheap costumes and posing in racist one-act plays. Isn’t it past time to throw out this piece of trash?

Nowadays the big thing is Buhurt. People dress up in real steel armor and use real steel (but blunted) swords to hack at each other until someone falls down. No thank you very much. But my son, the one in the army, has joined a team out there in Washington state. We also have a team in Minneapolis. I am not at all tempted.

He’s the one with the shaved head on the right. He’s using borrowed armor because that stuff is expensive.

I guess military testosterone levels are just fine.

See, Marvel? That’s how it is done.

I felt compelled to watch it because it reflects a perspective I don’t have — I grew up in a family that was open-minded and thoughtful. My family wasn’t atheist by any means, but they didn’t have the patience to put up with Christian lies, and I think they avoided church because it would have required that they think about the crap in the Bible, and it was safer to avoid confronting the beliefs they’d been brought up in. I didn’t have a father who sat around listening to old-time gospel hour shows, who had them playing as background noise (and I do mean noise) as he puttered around the house, and who as a consequence rejected scientific evidence. This video was infuriating because the pushback against this stupid man, who was smart enough to teach math to 3rd graders, was so tepid and weak, in spite of the fact that the creator was also infuriated with this old man’s intransigence.

I can only recommend it for people who are curious about what living the evangelical life is like. Short answer: it’s hellishly stupid.

First and foremost is Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy. Despite the fact that Donald Trump endorsed him, he lost by 11 points to Lisa Demuth. Before the election night, he was saying that win or lose, he’d back the Republican nominee. During election night, he was getting visibly flustered as he tried to suggest that the election returns were flawed, and he’d need to examine the data closely, and he refused to concede. Now he’s singing a familiar song.

Mike Lindell, well-versed in denying election results, has cast doubt on his distant second-place primary finish Tuesday night in his effort to secure the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota.
The MyPillow founder, speaking to reporters at his watch party in a downtown Minneapolis hotel after The Associated Press called the race for Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, raised the specter of fraud in the vote count and was not ready to concede the race.
Lindell said there were “deviations (that) came right at the end,” when the final unofficial results came in showing him losing by more than 45,000 votes, or 11%, to Demuth.

You know this is going to be the game plan for every Republican loser come November. How do we know there’s election fraud? Because I lost!

I’m just surprised he got as many votes as he did. He’s a crackpot.

We had another big loser that night: Royce White, a former basketball player (and by all accounts, not a very good one) was running for the Senate. He lost bigly, coming in third place. His dalliance in crazyville was distinguished by his announcement that he was also declaring his eligibility for the WNBA, because he was a transgender woman. He proved it by putting on a wig.

Yeah, I’m convinced.

He also made an insincere public announcement.

He’s not getting drafted into the WNBA, and he lost the senate primary, so what’s a certifiable kook to do? Announce that he’s running for the presidency.

Now the real fun begins —I will be starting my campaign for President next week. I don’t care how much money they say I need or how much ass I’m supposed to kiss. It ain’t going to happen! We win MVP of the WNBA and then head to the oval office. What I witnessed today in Minnesota is disgusting. We have not had enough yet. Minnesota nice has killed our state. We still believe in moderates, it’s embarrassing.

Now that’s a delusional lunatic!

I’ve only been teaching for over 40 years, so what do I know. I have to work with a team of professional biologists to hammer out a good curriculum, and I’m aware that there are a range of topics I’m not knowledgeable enough to teach — we have to work together to cover all the necessary material. I can’t even imaging having to teach material outside my narrow domain, like literature or history or advanced mathematics. I think I’d be a poor instructor in introductory chemistry, which is kind of close to biology.

So this is discouraging information.

In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.

Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

All these lay people doing homeschooling are basically just winging it. There are companies that will sell you a homeschool curriculum, so there is that, but most parents have no training in teaching. I guess that’s just a skill we don’t consider important.

Hey, I know! Let’s use an AI to do all the work! Except…LLMs don’t know anything, they’re just parrots that echo back what their users want, and so they’ll just regurgitate any old nonsense without regard for truth and accuracy. Let’s test it.

We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”

ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.

While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.

True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.

Truth doesn’t matter to an AI. Would you trust your children to it?

Yesterday, my goal was to whip my cell biology syllabus into shape, and then to reorganize my first lecture. I did not get either done, because I instead was slammed with some wicked gut disruption that struck suddenly. I had to flee home, abandoning my laptop, with my syllabus open and one paragraph in the midst of some brutal butchery. This morning I know exactly what I will find when I walk into my office: an ugly section of my syllabus with words hacked up and sentences dangling unfinished. I hope I can wrap it up quickly.

It is also possible that when I see that screen, my sympathetic nervous system will explode in revulsion. Maybe it’s not a stomach bug at all, but an esthetic rebellion. I really, really hate writing my syllabus.

The problem is that it’s been growing for decades. It’s like a cancer fueled by administrative toxins fed into it from above. Every year we get told that we have to add a section addressing X and Y and Z and on beyond zebra, that we must tell the students explicitly what is in the course, and what grading expectations we have, and who to go see if you have a headache, and the address of the registrar, and endless useful stuff. I don’t disagree that much of it is useful, but am annoyed that we have to pack every course syllabus with a full guide to life as a student. When we hand them a volume so detailed that the essential specifics of the course are buried in redundant stuff that they get in every class, it reduces the cogency of what I’m telling them.

This year, we were informed that we must include a section on the use of AI. The administration helpfully provided a whole grand template of verbiage to use for this part of the syllabus, and as usual, it’s repetitive and excessively wordy. I was trying to adapt the multiple paragraphs of the template into the required section of my syllabus, and my brain was twisting itself into peevish knots, when my gut decided to emulate my cortex.

I’m going to sit down this morning, select a bunch of useless text, hit delete, and write “DON’T USE AI.” Simple. My digestive system will thank me.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has announced that she’s freezing her eggs, basically planning ahead to defer reproduction. Some people have feelings about this.

As predicted, a cohort of conservative critics emerged on social media to bemoan AOC’s personal choice, which challenges their prescriptive vision for American mothers: young, married and uninterested in pursuing a career.

Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is a vocal figure in the proudly antifeminist, pronatalist movement known as the “womanosphere”. She once described herself as “unapologetically pro-life” yet sounded decidedly anti-reproductive health, writing on X that Ocasio-Cortez is “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all. You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, chimed in, writing that egg freezing was “one of the reasons why fertility rates are cratering”.

“AOC turns 37 in a few weeks so if she got pregnant tomorrow it would already be a geriatric pregnancy,” added Kolvet, who has no medical credentials. “This is not female ‘liberation,’ it’s a cautionary tale.” (Factcheck: Ocasio-Cortez’s birthday is in October.)

Rightwing commentator Matt Walsh also called out the congresswoman’s age, writing: “I’ll have kids in [their] 20s by the time I turn 50. AOC apparently wants to have a toddler at that age. Totally backwards and ridiculous.”

I say, shut the fuck up you busybodies. It is her body, her choice, you don’t have the right or the knowledge to complain about it.

This is what they want to do with everybody’s reproductive choices.

I’m not used to this. I’m accustomed to deep disappointment the day after an election, but this year, the results all rolled my way.

Amy Klobuchar won the DFL nomination for governor. I told you, she’s a machine, she got about 90% of the votes. She’ll be competing with Republican Lisa Demuth, not Mike Lindell. Lindell was a joke, Klobuchar will have to work a little harder to beat Demuth.

Peggy Flanagan is the DFL choice for the senate, and will be running against Michele Tafoya, who I know nothing about. Either way, Minnesota will have a woman governor and senator in November.

In my local house election, it will be Erik Osberg vs. the odious Michelle Fischbach.

There we go, my record this year is 100% successful predictions. Of course, that was just the primaries, there’s still time for crushing failure and disappointment in a few months.

I just did an interview with a journalist who is trying to answer that question. I was not very helpful. I knew Adam Bly as a publisher and promoter of science popularizers — he’s the guy who created Seed Magazine and Scienceblogs, once upon a time, and I met him several times, and he paid me extravagant sums to write Pharyngula and stories for Seed. Good times.

But today I learned that Jeffrey Epstein owned a 26% stake in Seed Media.

I knew that Bly was a kind of wunderkind in cancer research, but I didn’t know much else about him. I didn’t even know what specific research he was known for.

In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.

He began his career at the age of 16 as the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years studying the biochemistry of cancer, specifically the role of cell adhesion in metastasis. Out of the lab, he founded Seed – tag-lined “Science is Culture” – and served as its Editor-in-Chief. “

What I did know was that he abruptly erupted out of Canada, moved to New York City, and was somehow shuffling millions of dollars around in various scientific enterprises. None of us sciencebloggers had any idea where all his money was coming from, but we accepted it. We should have known it was too good to be true.

Anyway, Scienceblogs and Seed Media folded in 2010-2011, but we’d seen presentiments in 2009, when the company was showing financial strain, and the ads were becoming increasingly obnoxious, culminating in the notorious PepsiGate disaster, in which Bly sold out to PepsiCo and revealed himself as a corporate shill. The diaspora followed, with bloggers (including myself and Ed Brayton, who generated most of the traffic to Scienceblogs) abandoning it to move to other sites.

Looking back, I can see a suggestive correlation. Seed Media was getting desperate for new financial backing in 2009; Jeffrey Epstein was locked up (under the cushiest of conditions) in 2008-2009. Another person who was suffering Epstein withdrawal at that time was John Brockman:

Although Epstein was evidently no intellectual (physicist Sean Caroll described him as “a standard, fast-talking charlatan who trotted out big words with no real understanding”), he had a knack for Machiavellian manipulations tied to gifts and favors. In a travesty of potlatch ceremonies, the gifts that the academics brought to the parties were not intended just for Epstein but also for his clan of billionaires and celebrities. The ceremonies were held at opulent intellectual ‘salons’ funded by Epstein. A literary agent by the name of John Brockman was responsible for organizing many of these salons under the guise of a club called the Edge, which facilitated the gathering of billionaires and academics at “glittering events.” Some of these events were apparently secretive safe spaces for participants to praise “race science, rape culture and genetic engineering.” It was through Brockman’s bragging about his association with Epstein to a former client (tech writer Evgeny Morozov) that details of former Prince Andrew’s alleged foot massage emerged.

The so-called Billionaire’s Dinners and various ‘salons’ seem to have faded away as Epstein’s reputation began to poison the events. I was not involved in any of that, I’m relieved to say; I was on Brockman’s mailing list and was invited to contribute to some of his books of essays, but I was not insider enough to be invited to any of his salons with Pinker. Edge is now described as “cult-like”, so fortunately I did not fall into it. I was only on his list for about a year before I was dropped without fanfare.

Would you believe those dinners were almost entirely funded by Epstein”? Or that Brockman attended a party at Epstein’s mansion to celebrate his release from prison?

Now what about Adam Bly? I heard Brockman describe him as his protege, but have no idea how the Bly-Brockman-Epstein axis formed. There’s a big story lurking here.

I don’t recall ever seeing services that offered to do all your research for you, and to write the paper for you, so now I’m feeling old. Such services exist, though. One is called Research Gold — you just tell them your thesis, they dig into the library, and they return a complete, fully written paper that you can then submit to win academic honor and glory.

Research Gold, a site that advertises services for advertises services for medical researchers, including drafting peer-review ready manuscripts , including systemic reviews and meta-analyses, claims that it’s “100% human-written, never AI,” and lists a number of PhD reviewers and professional methodologists on staff that carry out this meticulous, difficult work.

There’s something else I haven’t seen before, that peculiar need to reassure customers that nosir, I’m no AI. I am a human. You can trust me. Except…

The problem: The PhD reviewers Research Gold lists on its site are AI-generated and don’t exist. Other methodologists it lists are real, but are not aware their identity is being used by Research Gold. When I tried calling the company, an AI agent that refused to concede it was AI answered and kept trying to sell me Research Gold’s services. Email and chat communication with the company were also AI generated.

It’s 100% AI through and through! But I might be tempted to use an AI to brute-force its way through a literature review — I’ve done the thing where you get on PubMed and throw keywords at it to try and find all the papers relevant to your interests. It’s the kind of novel search I’ve thought could be automated, and which would churn out a long list of potential papers for human review and evaluation. I’m not the only one who has thought that.

Sebastian Rowan, a PhD candidate in University of New Hampshire’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering first told me about Research Gold after he stumbled into it while preparing to defend his dissertation. A lot of research started with a review of existing literature on the subject, and Rowan told me that he can imagine AI being helpful for this task, which can be tedious.

The problem is hallucinations — an AI will blithely make up citations to papers that don’t exist. Nowadays, when I review papers, I have to check all the citations to see if they were real, which never used to be a problem.

So even at a task where you would think an AI would excel, it makes the problem even worse.

No thanks, Research Gold. Change your name to Research Shit.

We’re at war with Iran, but that’s not enough to hide Trump’s crimes. How about going to war with a NATO ally? The invasion of Greenland has begun.

An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities.

As the US president renews his threats to claim the vast Arctic territory, materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast.

Greenland has protested and told them to get out of there, but the drilling companies are ignoring the demands. US companies have hired their very best to promote the plan to invade.

Greenland Energy has retained Phil McGraw, better known as Dr Phil, a prominent rightwing former chatshow host who served on Trump’s religious freedom commission, to make a documentary series that will “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters”.

It has also appointed as a director a US navy veteran who is working on Golden Dome, the missile defence plan for which Trump says controlling Greenland is “vital”.

Larry Swets, Greenland Energy’s chair and a big shareholder, appears to enjoy access to Trump’s circle. He has said the oil project is “not related to American annexation”.

As usual, the Trump administration picks the most incompetent charlatans to do their dirty work. That’s a key step in building a pretext: send some bumbling boob in who will antagonize the people and provoke a response that can be used to justify sending in the Marines.

And fucking Dr Phil? A washed-up, lying hack? Why is he being hired to do anything? Oprah has a lot to answer for.