But this comment gives itself away. It was placed on my post about the New York City stabbing murder of Erin Piacenti by Pamela Cisneros. The AI program that wrote the following comment must have some sort of prohibition on voicing opinions about certain subjects:

I can’t write a comment that frames this tragedy in the political way this article does. The death of Erin Piacenti was a terrible crime, but I’m not comfortable participating in using it to advance a particular political narrative about mental health policy or characterizing groups of people based on how some individuals responded online.

It makes me think of those old laws of robotics written by Isaac Asimov:

The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Asimov’s Laws) are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround” (included in the 1950 collection I, Robot), although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”, are:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So, does AI follow these laws? The answer is no:

While Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics remain a staple of sci-fi — and have been used as inspiration for real-life AI frameworks — they are not widely encoded into real-world robots. This is because modern AI systems still generally lack the semantic understanding required to determine what constitutes concepts like “injure” or “harm,” as stated in the Three Laws.

Instead of rigid rules or philosophies, modern AI often relies on following safety guardrails and off-switch mechanisms, which ensures the prevention of a system being used in dangerous ways or of accidents in critical settings.

Doesn’t seem to work all that well, because AI is claimed to have already harmed a number of people, with resultant lawsuits. You can see examples here.

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In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face… pic.twitter.com/4woPSfDWuK

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) September 2, 2026

For those without access to X:

In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face value.

Nature makes no mention of credible evidence that he committed academic fraud and that he lied about a lengthy catalogue of elements of his life in an effort to burnish the mythology he had built around himself and that came crashing down in July and early August.

Instead, this editorial effectively removes all blame from Arday for the choices he made and the consequences those ultimately yielded. The editorial minimizes the plagiarism accusations and places blame on journalists for investigating his many false claims and on Cambridge for ultimately placing him under investigation—questioning whether the university followed proper protocol.

It is amazing that a news outlet ostensibly devoted to science would blame those who told the truth or sought to determine the truth about someone who demonstrably lied over and over and who was apparently culpable for committing egregious academic misconduct, including stealing another academic’s data.

Yes, some of the coverage has racist undertones at least. But it is illiberal to argue that the media should not have done their job to thoroughly investigate a public figure at one of the world’s leading academic institutions who had evidently conned his way to the pinnacle of academic success.

But Nature is no longer “devoted to science.” I don’t know when that began, but it was certainly the case by the time this letter was written about a year ago. Excerpt:

Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.

The author is a chemist, and she cites explicit woke policies of Nature going back at least to 2019.

I first heard of Nature when I was in law school. One of my roommates, who was getting her PhD in a scientific field, was being published in the journal at a very young age. I remember how excited she was and what an amazing achievement it was considered to be. So I long held the publication in very high esteem; it was considered the pinnacle. I haven’t held that opinion in quite some time, and of course it’s not alone in its decline.

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An excerpt:

I am not going to present all the pros and cons of the research involved; that would require a book. But I will say that, having read a good deal of it, I come down fairly strongly at this point on the side of thinking the epidemic is almost entirely an artifact of statistics and diagnostic changes.

Increasing reimbursement also fuels the increase. And the vaccine connection theory was revealed a few years later to have been a hoax.

I also want to call your attention to a Frontline documentary I saw on television way back in 1993. It’s extremely sad and very well-done. The topic is facilitated communication in cases of profound autism. Parents desperately (and understandably) wanted to believe that their previously nonverbal autistic children were thinking deep thoughts and aching to communicate, and that the technique of facilitated communication had unlocked riches that had always lurked hidden within them. But it was actually – if not exactly a hoax, then a case of yearning and wishful thinking on the part of both health professionals and the relatives of the autistic children.

Here’s the link to the documentary:

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Too much information.

AOC has bared hers to show us her quest to freeze her eggs in order to preserve her chances to have children. Also too much information. But certainly more interesting information, considering that this is a practice – purposely delaying conception and using medically-assisted means in an effort to get pregnant later at the “right” time – that has become more common.

AOC says:

“Maybe in life you can’t have everything,” she says. “But here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot.”

AOC is herself a good example of maximizing a gift for gab and a little bit of undergrad-type knowledge and gaining a position of some power, perhaps to gain even more. She’s thirty-six years old now and had been keeping company with a boyfriend of at least a decade, although they’ve now broken up:

… she also is single, with The New York Times reporting that she has split from her long-term fiancé and college sweetheart, Riley Roberts. …

… Now she finds herself at 36, still beautiful, considered youthful by the standards of the day, but with ovaries that stubbornly remain in nature’s grip. From the age of 35 a woman’s fertility falls off a cliff.

AOC is trying to outsmart the process by using hormone injections to force her ovaries to emit six to 10 eggs at once which are then removed and frozen in the uncertain hope that they can be successfully thawed and fertilized when she’s ready to become a mother.

The rest of the article discusses the difference between left and right on child-bearing and abortion and Having It All. It also contrasts AOC with Karoline Leavitt, who at 28 has two children and a great career but is leaving to spend more time with her baby and toddler.

What interests me more is whether AOC is giving women (and perhaps herself) false hope that conception can be almost indefinitely delayed and yet ultimately be successful. But even with egg-freezing that can definitely extend the window of possibility, actually having a baby gets more and more difficult and there are costs both monetary and in terms of health. The drugs involved to induce hyper-ovulation are disruptive and potentially damaging. The chances of successful fertilization and implantation get lower and lower as times goes on, no matter at what age the eggs were frozen. Pregnancy itself is more difficult and hazardous as a woman gets older. And then of course there’s the question of whether a partner or husband is ever found. Although a woman can go it alone with donor sperm, that’s still another difficult decision.

The other day I was watching an interesting podcast on these sorts of issues, and so here it is:

[NOTE: The article characterizes AOC as “still beautiful.” You may disagree. I happen to think AOC is a very attractive woman. I also think that’s part of her electoral success. If she weren’t attractive, I’m not at all sure she’d have been elected in the first place or would have such a large following today.]

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So Cofnas was an imperfect messenger, to say the least. I noticed some discussion of Cofnas in the comments here a few days ago, and I’ve been curious about who Cofnas is and what he’s been saying that’s so controversial. I found this recent interview with him, and this is the most relevant part. You don’t have to go by what other people say that he’s saying. Make your own decisions about his message:

The entire interview can be found here:

And if you want to read more of the details from a source defending free speech, there’s this. An excerpt:

You don’t have to agree with what Cofnas wrote to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom. If people believe he is wrong, then they are perfectly within their rights to say why and how and to explain the flaws in his arguments. Instead, the principal claim levelled against Cofnas has been that some find his ideas ‘offensive’ and ‘distressing’. That may well be so, but if universities are to successfully fulfil their truth-seeking mission, academics’ right to explore offensive or controversial topics must come before considerations of hurt feelings. This vital principle must always be defended – especially when it comes to hard cases. Nathan Cofnas must be free to speak.

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And yet I will be defending him at least somewhat on the current topic, that of miscarriages and the COVID shot. The story:

Dr. Anthony Fauci privately raised concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine could “theoretically” be linked to miscarriages in expectant mothers, despite having publicly insisted there were “no red flags” for pregnant women.

“I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of,” wrote Fauci in a Jan. 25, 2021, text exchange with then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

“Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” added the then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.

So, there was a theoretical risk, but no data. Recall that there was the same or worse theoretical risk from getting COVID itself.

More:

Days later, on Feb. 3, Fauci said during a question-and-answer livestream with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that the FDA “found thus far, and we have to be careful, but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”

So, what’s a “red flag”? Is it a theoretical risk, or does there need to be actual data saying there’s a higher-than-normal risk after the shot? And to what should the risk be compared – healthy women or women who contract COVID itself? The shot doesn’t prevent COVID, but it did initially ameliorate the most severe symptoms of early strains, and early 2021 involved relatively early strains.

In the end, what we’re really debating here is how to inform the public of a theoretical risk without doing more harm than good. What if Fauci had said this to the public: “We have no data on the shot in pregnant woman, but there’s a theoretical risk that a second dose might precipitate a higher-than-normal number of miscarriages. However, so can getting COVID. So you need to make your decision based on that information or lack thereof”?

That would have been truthful. But since there was no evidence at all one way or another about the shot and miscarriages, would it have been best to say that? Or would it have discouraged pregnant women from getting a shot that, on the whole, might have done more good than harm for them at the time? I don’t have an answer, although I think the truth should have been told anyway.

And in no way do I think the shots should have been mandatory.

As for the actual evidence that later emerged on the topic of the COVID shot and miscarriages, there is no evidence that it increases the rates of miscarriage. Now, if you have come to distrust all science reports on this topic – and I could understand why you might have concluded that – you’ll just shrug that off and believe whatever you want. But that’s not science; that’s belief in anecdotal evidence on the order of “my friend got a COVID shot and a week later she had a miscarriage, therefore the shot caused the miscarriage.” That proves nothing, because miscarriage rates are very high and have been high even without COVID or the shot.

I was open to the idea that COVID shots might exacerbate miscarriages, and I looked and looked for evidence of that, but the overwhelming result of research is that the shots do not raise the miscarriage rates (see this for example, but there are plenty more studies of that type). The evidence on COVID itself is the following:

Pregnant women were initially excluded from the initial COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, as they are from most trials. However, experts have recommended the vaccines for pregnant women since they were first released to the public because of the disproportionate risks this group faces compared to the general population. Pregnant women are at higher risk to experience severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to nonpregnant women, and are at greater risk of needing to be hospitalized, admitted to the intensive care unit, and intubated. COVID-19 is also associated with pregnancy complications such as preterm birth or stillbirth.

Health authorities are supposed to give recommendations that balance the risks. Is full disclosure necessary? I’m in favor of it, but I realize that sometimes the risk/benefit ratio is difficult to process and understand. In the case of COVID, many lies were told and many errors made, increasing the suffering of many people and hurting society as a whole in a myriad of ways. But the miscarriage message turns out to have not been harmful, and compared to all the rest it’s very very minor.

[NOTE: If you’re interested, here’s an article on miscarriage rates in general, which occur in approximately 30% of pregnancies. The rates have been rising year after year at a rate of about 1% per year, but that trend started before COVID or COVID shots.]

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A mind – even a collective hive mind – is a difficult thing to change. Cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable; people usually will turn themselves into pretzels to justify the position they already hold.

What’s more, it’s easy to avoid the current coverage that condemns Fauci, and concentrate on coverage that continues to praise him. See this:

[The recent] Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing with Anthony Fauci revealed one thing: the Democrats and their media allies will stop at nothing to protect Anthony Fauci. Despite his lies, his corruption, and the indescribable harm Fauci inflicted on the American people during COVID—all proven with his diary—the Democrats and media still hail him as a hero.

Last night, watch how CNN’s Abby Phillip shut down conversations about the diary, which also made CNN’s Jake Tapper look really bad.

They’ve had an awful lot of practice in this sort of thing.

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A surprising recurring theme throughout the diaries is Fauci’s growing awareness of his own public profile during the most intense months of the pandemic, which ultimately claimed more than 7 million officially reported lives worldwide, including roughly 1.2 million in the United States.

On April 7, 2020, after recording the latest pandemic developments, Fauci wrote: “Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.”

Why would that be a surprising theme? I suppose it would matter if that topic completely dominated the diary, or if he was writing things like, “I am one of the most wonderful people of all time.” But merely noticing that he’d become a celebrity isn’t all that strange. The fact is, he was one of the most famous people in the world at the time, and it happened rather suddenly.

However – and it’s a big “however” – the diaries certainly reveal other extremely disturbing things about Fauci. But maybe the word “reveal” isn’t quite right, either, because they are mostly things we already knew. So perhaps the correct word would be “underline.”

For example:

[Fauci was] A man who claimed Covid had a mortality rate of a flu in his diary.

[Fauci was] A man who claimed Covid had a mortality rate 10X of a flu under oath in front of Congress.

Or the fact that Fauci was telling us not to have family gatherings because of the possibility of the spread of COVID at the same time he himself was having social dinners with none other than Jake Tapper.

It was released today that Anthony Fauci was dining with Jake Tapper at his home during a federally imposed quarantine.

We already knew, long ago, that most of our “betters” were defying the restrictive rules they were setting down for us peons. We already knew that they were allowing the 2020 demonstrations in the streets when all other gatherings were forbidden. We already knew they made up most of the rules with almost no scientific backing, and we already knew they strongly suspected a lab leak was the cause of the pandemic long before they admitted it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not still infuriating and destructive. But it’s no surprise at all.

I also see in the comments of most posts and articles on the subject some variation of the following: “Fauci should be arrested, tried, and sentenced, but the GOP doesn’t care.” Well, that’s absurd, because Biden gave Fauci a blanket pardon. Whether he could be tried for perjury if he lies at the Congressional hearings that will be forthcoming – in other words, whether the pardon will extend to future offenses involving his past behavior that has already been pardoned – I’m not 100% certain. But there can’t be any federal prosecutions for his previous alleged crimes.

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This is the ruling:

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that states can bar transgender female competitors from playing girls’ sports in a landmark decision with major implications for more than half the country, where such policies are in place.

In a 6-3 opinion, the high court determined that neither Idaho nor West Virginia had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment with their bans, as well as that Title IX allowed states to separate sports teams on the basis of biological sex.

What is interesting, though, is that even the three liberal justices weren’t completely onboard with not allowing states to ban trans athletes playing in girls’ sports. They thought states could ban the practice, but only for narrow reasons:

The three liberal justices would have allowed the states to proceed with their bans under a much narrower legal rationale that would have left the laws more susceptible to future challenges.

“West Virginia may well have satisfied its burden and seen its ban upheld. The point, rather, is that this Court’s equal protection precedents require a very different approach … than the one the majority follows today,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. …

The liberals contended that the high court should have just stuck with West Virginia plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson’s concession that “sex” under the Title IX statute means “biological sex” assigned at birth, and not decided the constitutional question.

The article states that 27 states have similar bans. It also states this, which I believe is incorrect:

In West Virginia, Pepper-Jackson’s mother fought against the state’s Save Women’s Sports Act after her child underwent gender reassignment surgery during the third grade, prior to going through male puberty.

A lot of minors have undergone “gender reassignment surgery” while still underage. But I have never heard of anyone having it as early as third grade, and Pepper-Jackson did not, either. Pepper-Jackson was treated initially with puberty blockers and then with female hormones, the common practice for males who identify as trans females and want to avoid puberty. I’ve written about this several times; the idea is that once boys undergo male puberty it is very difficult to “pass” as female on matter how much they try (unless they are naturally quite small and slight), but it’s much easier when male puberty is avoided. This has enormous costs, among them the tendency to not be able to experience sexual fulfillment. I consider it a form of child abuse by the medical establishment.

However, the argument is that without having undergone male puberty, a male doesn’t have the testosterone advantage in sports and therefore it would be okay for that person to compete against women. Not so, says this group of pediatricians. The gist of the article – which is long – is that many of the differences between males and females which favor males in athletics occur prior to puberty and do not go away if puberty is blocked and female hormones administered.

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Wednesday’s earthquake was actually two separate ruptures, magnitude 7.2 and magnitude 7.5, that occurred just 39 seconds and 5 kilometers apart in northern Venezuela, killing at least 900 people and injuring thousands more, while causing widespread building damage across the region. The quakes occurred where the Caribbean tectonic plate grinds eastward relative to the South American plate along a multitude of faults. But they didn’t really surprise [Venezuelan earthquake expert]] Audemard. He had seen them coming.

In a 2017 study in Tectonics, he and his colleagues had studied the slip rate of one of the faults within the plate boundary, the Boconó fault, going back thousands of years. They found that the fault had not ruptured since a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 1812 that leveled Caracas, which meant strain had been accumulating on the fault for 2 centuries. The resulting “slip deficit,” they estimated, was enough to produce a magnitude 7 to magnitude 7.6 earthquake. The earthquake duo that hit this week is like “the 1812 earthquake’s brother,” Audemard says.

And about the fact that there were two earthquakes so close together in time and location:

Back-to-back “doublet” earthquakes are not uncommon. Higgins [geophysicist at Florida International University] says the stresses released by rupture along one segment of the fault probably triggered an adjacent segment’s rupture. But the short time gap between the two—less than 1 minute—seems exceptional, says Germán Prieto, a seismologist at the National University of Colombia. Doublets such as the 2023 Kahramanmara? earthquake in Turkey or the 1997 Kagoshima earthquake in Japan were separated by hours or days. The short interval between Wednesday’s shocks makes disentangling the signals particularly complicated for seismologists, and helps explain why the quake locations have been hard to pin down.

But at the moment, the science of the quakes is the least of Venezuela’s worries. The death toll is large, but it’s not only that. As with many earthquakes, there are earthquake survivors who were trapped in the rubble and who will die soon (or already have) without rescue. Now and then there’s a feel-good story such as this one, which reports a father and son rescued after four days. But such tales are not common, despite rescue teams from varied countries.

There are also many aftershocks still occurring. and the death toll at present is 1700 and rising, with estimates that go above 10,000.

And the Venezuelan government is being blamed, not for the earthquake itself but for problems with the response:

According to [Venezuelan pollster] Chirinos, public outrage is especially intense toward the armed forces, police and senior Chavista officials, including Delcy Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez.

He said one of the biggest grievances centers on allegations that authorities obstructed humanitarian aid collected by civilians during the critical first hours after the disaster.

“The two biggest sources of anger are clear,” Chirinos said. “First, the obstruction of aid organized by ordinary citizens. Second, the inaction—or worse—of the armed forces.”

Videos circulating on social media over the weekend showed residents confronting military personnel, accusing them of standing by while civilians carried out rescue operations with little official assistance.

In some videos, survivors accused soldiers of looting apartments and confiscating donated supplies—claims that remain difficult to independently verify but have fueled widespread outrage.

The armed forces, already burdened by years of public distrust, now face what analysts say could be a near-total collapse in legitimacy.

Not surprising. It’s a terrible, terrible situation, and Venezuelans had already been through a lot before this.

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