The Attack Dog Barks, but Isn't the Lady You Thought

Chaos Agents, Part 9

My Chaos Agents articles have apparently raised the hackles of journalist Derrick Blanton, a.k.a. Sage Hana.

I know. I know. You thought "Sage Hana" was a woman. Maybe that's half the fun Derrick has with the pseudonym. There is a particular sort of man who goes online and plays role playing games as women. This is the age of the extreme Pareto distribution fallout, and I do sympathize. I don't get the blurred boundary with respect to the cross-gender role playing, myself, but to each his own. Until it gets weaponized.

If you thought one of these images was Sage Hana, you were wrong. They all are.

In this case, the use of "Sage Hana" seems more specifically misleading given the numerous plausibly-connected online brands surrounding versions of the name, including an actress who might not appreciate the associated branding. But apparently after trying on a bunch of fake names, Sage Hana stuck because people like Jay Bhattacharya seemed to prefer sending insider information to some random woman on Twitter than to some out of work journalist dude.

I get it. At this time, splattering COVID chatter frenetically into a substack stream is better than working as a Lyft driver. Why am I talking about this? Because Sage Hana now seems to be the attack dog coming after me. Yawn.

Holiday Spirit! Attorney Tom Renz will apparently not be receiving a Christmas Card from Mathew Crawford

Note that Derrick does not seem to care about the fidelity of the military health data, or who might be selling deceptions, or whether there are people pointedly ignoring the potential root of fraud. He admitted to me that he didn't even watch Died Suddenly before launching attacks against the people critiquing it. He's just hunting down what he can to share a single frame of my view of one of the self-anointed Medical Freedom Movement (MFM) heroes.

Sage neither shows the next tweet in the chain, where I specify my worries about distractions shifting attention, nor draws the readers to my several hundred pages of writing laying out my several hundred hours of related work in hopefully assiduous detail.

I politely lodged a simple complaint. What I got was asked a flurry of questions, smeared, cursed at, then banned (after just this one paragraph) so that I can't respond.

Understand that I've "known" Derrick for just over three months now. After a first meeting over zoom, I immediately felt great pity for Derrick. I could try to voice why, except that it's a confluence of reasons. Maybe this video captures some of that.

Edit: On Derrick’s Sage Hana substack, he claims that this video is not him. And that may be true. Understand that having had one zoom meeting with Derrick, I could probably pick him out of a lineup of people who don’t share similar characteristics, but that’s it. But when I searched for Derrick Blanton on the internet and saw this video, it rang out in my mind with little doubt that this was him. If it isn’t, it’s an interesting coincidence that this looks and sounds enough like him that it fooled me. But I’m still uncertain whether to simply trust Derrick about this claim. After all, in his last article, nearly everything he says about me is either misleading or outright false. And this whole conflict began over his declaration that he doesn’t care about getting facts correct.

But I had no interest in stepping into the "Virtual Pandemic Reality" gamer world to sort this out until the star character decided to use their popularity to swing audience anger toward me. So, I'm just going to do this once. That should be enough. After all, Derrick is busy writing about me as quickly as possible, and with little respect for getting the details correct.

Chaos Agents! Mathew Crawford, the Former Wall Street Math Guy Who Warns About Threats to the Not a Movement

Of course, I'm banned from commenting, and the probably-also-a-video-game-character-delusion anons are running up comment threads while beating down anyone who speaks up for an ordinary give-and-take exchange.

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Welcome to the "Mathew Crawford Invitational Fishing Expedition"

So, because I dare to document information about Stew Peters, Thomas Renz, and other MFM Hero-frens, and have opinions about their behavior (and I do), I'm the subject of a fishing expedition and rhetorical insult campaign.

Sage…I mean Derrick…repeatedly (really, he dropped a ton of frothing-at-the-mouth comments) tries to group me with Robert Malone, presumably to create what video gamers describe as "area of effect" damage.

At any and all times, I will repeat: I'm not on Team Anybody, and I believe that trust in any leaders (not Malone, not McCullough, not RFK Jr., not Kirsch) is antithetical to the best ways to jujitsu around the global domination network of the military-banking complex. Do you think that maybe Sage…I mean Derrick…knows this about me, but ignores it in order to purposefully paint a straw man target for his audience to hate on?

It's interesting that Sage…I mean Derrick…doesn't ask any of the people on whose behalf he attacks me why they wouldn't want their lawyers to file FOIAs for information about the military health database. He doesn't seem to be interested in whether their info is right or wrong, or in testing their character. He doesn't question a "Project Veritas"-like drop from somebody who vocally supported the quick start of the experimental mass transfection campaign. He just cares about…something…like a wrestling script?

Hmmm…

He never has done much more than write COVID FanFic, and very possibly at the behest of whoever best petted his gamer icon last. Again from his more recent attack piece,

Just ask me? Because I'd like to answer! This gets to one of my favorite topics: education. My primary work since Wall Street has been to try to create environments in which the majority of students perform as what we think of as geniuses. That is to say that I don't think genius is particularly special to the human experience, whether or not I fit some static definition of one. Please, Derrick, write about this. Just be sure not to withhold the links because this is the kind of work that objectively helps people. 

But the Wall Street part is interesting. The primary reasons I bring up my experience in finance is for the purpose of leveling the credentialist mindset. A lot of BS gets printed using credentials to feed images. This isn't to knock Ed Dowd, but he was introduced as a "hedge fund guru" for running a $12B stock fund, though nobody introduces me as a "hedge fund guru" for running a $12B bond fund (not that I ask them to). The point of my article on Dowd's introduction was not that he was a Chaos Agent, but that his image seems to have been used to fleece people (though, as I made clear after speaking to him, he seemed genuinely unaware). And though I explained this to Sage…I mean Derrick…he chose to actively ignore me and weave together some garbage paragraphs to pit me against Ed Dowd [perhaps in the minds of some wrestling fans?].

Ed is welcome on the RTE podcast to chat, FWIW.

Each of our experiences is relevant to our knowledge sets and domain experience, simply put.

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My Salacious History in the Biosciences

Is this even interesting?

What Derrick found on his fishing expedition was my wiki page from an education technology company that I helped build, and that still publishes some of my textbooks. On that wiki page, which I wrote most or all of very quickly perhaps seventeen years ago, it mentions my work on the Human Genome Project (HGP) at the Institute for Biomedical Computing at Washington University in St. Louis.

This implication is that I might be some sort of insider who helped along the Great Biogenetical Death that descends upon the world and perhaps that must be my motivation for critiquing the behavior of people in the Medical Freedom Movement (MFM).

I've never made a secret of any of my history—even the parts that are weird enough that I've suffered misdirected grief over them.

At the age of 17, wondering what I'd do during the summer between high school and college, I applied to something called the Howard Hughes Summer Scholars Program in the Biological Sciences (or something like that) at Washington University in St. Louis where I headed to attend on a fellowship to study math and physics (but mostly math). I was selected as the oddball out of a dozen students. I'd taken one biology class in high school (not even an advanced course), so I was oppositely credentialed from the other 11 rising freshmen in the program. Math-heavy as I was, I was invited to work at the Institute for Biomedical Computing (IBC) which was the statistical hub of the HGP, the totality of which I knew very little about aside from one or two snippets of news hype.

At the IBC (under David States, PhD and Pankaj Agarwal, PhD), I was given the task of deriving the run time algorithm for the Basic Local Alignment Search Toolkit (BLAST). In 1995, knowing when the next researcher could get work done on the computing cluster was a serious economic impediment to basic research such as telling how far apart human and chimp genomes were given parameters such as Point Accepted Mutation (PAM), which describes the drifting rate of genetic mutation. The problem was right up my alley insofar as I didn't need to know much of anything about biology, and only the basics of genetics.. I modeled the discrete problem as a continuous one (chopping units up into fractions of billionths means the estimate is tight), and handed Pankaj a solution an hour later. He looked over it, then sort of freaked out that I was right. Then, weirdly, nobody in the lab spoke to me for several days because they weren't sure what to do with me.

It was clear that the lab thought they had a problem that would make for a good Summer project, but it happened to be right up my alley. I'm more of a modeler than a research mathematician. As a result, I got pimped out to various biology labs once a week to help biologists get a grip on the newfangled world of genetics, doing things like reading papers and then explaining the distribution of nucleotide lengths of DNA fragments after restriction enzymes were centrifuged to dice up longer strands.

Otherwise, I spent my time reading at the Olin Library, or chasing girls. And winning.

Isn't that a deeply suspicious career in science?

But here is Sage's entirely blind continuation of this "story" about my work on the HGP:

I'll give points for creativity. I wouldn't have imagined this particular article could be used as a weapon against me.

I mentioned the HGP in an article! As a reference to economic returns from research not being enough for a self-funding business model. So…something something something blah.

Better to go on a fishing expedition for a fantasy interpretation than to answer those critiques, eh?

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The End of My Science Career

There was never really any beginning.

I never took a biology class during college. I did however enter my freshman year with something like a reputation as the "freaky math all-star" and was asked by professors several times to help with modeling problems (if the math professors did all that during the era in which biologists suddenly had to learn math, they'd have been irritated with requests all day) during my first semester.

But I found college to be largely dull (outside of chasing girls), and started getting into trouble. While dating a Psychology major, I would veer into the (brand new in 1995) Psychology building and make corrections to papers on the wall. I wouldn't write directly on the papers, of course, but my pinned/taped comments ruffled some feathers, and after a few weeks of that, I was literally physically chased out of the building by a woman who had clearly missed her calling as a rock on some NFL team's offensive line. A few days later, I was approached at the campus bar (which still catered to freshmen until some time in 1996) by somebody (not a professor, but not sure what he was) asking me to fake science papers for $35/hour.

Though not acknowledged much until very recently, the problem of scientific paper mills has been around for decades, and for various reasons. There are wealthy people from around the world—and China in particular—who send their kids to get PhDs at American universities, but can't do the work. There is also the weirdness in Germany that requires physicians to spend time doing research. This has resulted in a lot of major plagiarism and research fabrication scandals going up even to some of the nation's top politicians.

Though telling my peers about the offer resulted in a sort of dismissive shock as if I'd told them I spotted Big Foot on campus. My conversations about it with several professors drew mostly scorn, though a Mathematician-Philosopher named Joseph Ullian was willing to hear me out about it. That saved my sense of depression over Academia for another year.

Obviously, I declined the offer to fake science papers, but was pursued for several weeks until I took a job at a niche auto insurance company called National Alliance Insurance Company that advertised an opening for an actuarial assistant on the wall of the math department. The position eventually became full time at least partially because I stopped caring much about school (and was repulsed by Academia). In 1998, I dropped out of college during my junior year when offered a quant-trading job at one of the large hedge funds in Manhattan. Oddly, at that hedge fund, I worked on a project involving DNA computing that I cannot explain due to a confidentiality agreement. Much as with my summer internship a few years earlier, it was pure statistical modeling only. I spent no more than around 40 hours of time ever on that project, but my name may be associated with some internal corporate papers somewhere.

Since then, I've "consulted" with a few bioscientists at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) while running a school there (many of the parents of my students were scientists and professors at UAB) on math or modeling problems. In practice, this means that I could either help them with the math in an hour, or I'd recognize that the problem was a 10-50 hour problem that they needed to consult with one of the university biostatisticians about.

Over the years, I've written many blog posts and articles about faked science (including at RTE), and often participated in investigations of suspected fake science under various pseudonyms ("infopractical" is the only one I've made public) as I did during the Surgisphere debacle. Some of that writing I won't point to given the nature of those battles, but I've sometimes noticed what appear to be rewrites of my anonymous work appearing in journals and articles later as the Overton Window on the topic opened wider.

I have a dozen more of these, and that doesn't include my longer articles on now-deleted blogs.

Even these friends-only Facebook posts were largely meant to encourage my now several-thousand former students to understand the world they were up against. Otherwise, I'd have continued participating in the conversation using one of my dozen-ish pseudonyms only because I never intended to invite that larger discussion into my private life.

There, that's my entire science background in a nutshell. I've written about it a few times, and never hid any of it. If I'm embarrassed about any one thing, it's whether or not it's reasonable for me to claim work on the HGP. It's a weird question as to whether to put an internship in a lab on a resume/cv. But I have been paid as a modeling consultant a few times by corporate executives, professors, or engineers, and that entry explains simply that I have experience applying math to hard problems.

My wife did work as a bioterrorism defense expert for the world's largest defense contractor between her masters degree and PhD work. She helped build the prototype for a hospital decon device.

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My Real Crimes

If anybody wants them, just ask. I was a punk kid and have no need of lying about it (though I certainly lied far more often as a youngster).

Twice when I was a kid I was baited into shoplifting. The first time I did it for about six weeks, then quit. The second time was a one-off in high school, then wised up. I probably owe some people around $200. Maybe giving out a few thousand dollars in cryptocurrency in various educational exercises makes up for it, but I still feel guilty about it.

In middle school, I helped vandalize the car of the father of a classmate named Monica (if you're reading this, I'm sorry, Monica). We didn't dislike her at all. In fact, I later dated her older sister for a little while. They all seemed like good people. The vandalism started small. About eight of us were out at 2 AM egging houses, but this pristine new sports car (their dad did well financially) was in a driveway, unlocked. We opened it up and jammed an egg into the stereo. After that, one of the other kids went nuts and tore out the phone (that's a $3000 bill circa 1990). I felt bad, and though I participated in a lot of pranks for years afterward (like taking the Vacation Bible School banner from a large church and posting it at the liquor store), I steered away from most property damage [that didn't involve trash cans]. Being creative was always more fun than being destructive. Hearing the artwork of a good prank discussed by others at school who weren't sure who did it was honestly the highest prize.

I am one of a dozen or so people responsible for damaging several dozen trash cans in Central Alabama. We would find the trash cans with wheels, pull them up to the back of a hatchback, hold on, then drive wildly around neighbors in the middle of the night and just let them go, spilling trash into the streets or yard. And while I'm mostly regretful about my crimes and mistakes, I still giggle at the mental images of some of it. Maybe I'm still pissed off about having spent 7-8 almost entirely useless hours at school every weekday for nearly thirteen years. I hated it enough that I kept zero pictures from my entire childhood when I left home. All you can find of me are a couple of yearbook photos posted by classmates.

8th grade. I still wore a calculator watch and rode a skateboard.

Back when saltpeter was still OTC at pharmacies, I built a few pipe bombs with a friend. We just wanted to know how to do it. And make booms. BOOM. I'm sure somebody will come along and suggest that this shows some sort of violent tendency, or unbalanced state, but I'm pretty sure this went on among the pre-engineering minds of 2-10% of boys for several generations. Ask the question in a room of NASA engineers and they'll nod. But I'll pass the critique to, "What other violence can you point to?" and the question will end in silence. Well, I did once pull a friend out of a piled up fight who didn't intend to be there, and had to step on some coked up jerk's face to accomplish the task.

My friends and I mostly built bottle rocket guns and potato cannons out of PVC pipe. It's likely that potatoes we launched off a nearby mountain damaged a roof or two. If we broke a window or any patio furniture, I do feel bad about it. But we did [usually] aim at the parking garage we could see down below. One of the cannons we used was around five feet in length. We filled up the chamber with hair spray that we would ignite through a small hole and send those suckers serious distances. And we did completely blow up a mailbox one time (and scorched six to a dozen others?).

I cheated on a handful of largely busy-work school assignments. Actually, I don't regret that. I'd do it again. I even wrote an essay defending the practice that freaked out some of the teachers, but the fact was that 98% of the students very obviously all did the same thing, so all the pearl clutching was the farce I intended to poke at. But I was far more likely to find it entertaining to train myself to draw maps of each region of the world, and then understand the economic relationships between neighboring countries, than to skip out on actual learning. Though I'd often do that on my own time and in my own way—I usually just accepted lower grades for turning in some assignments late.

There is probably some other stuff that I don't remember anymore. I was a little naughty. Growing up took some time.

I've been a far more boring adult, for some definition of boring. I made a lot of what might be described as morally boring choices in my character development. Judge that as you may.

Taking notes, Sage? I mean Derrick.

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The Other Stuff

I better say it now before Derrick finds out and concludes that I'm in cahoots with the Great Satan: I worked for the FBI, and I don't put it on my resume. I taught a week-long class on statistical forensics for a combination of FBI and SEC officials. It was between two hedge fund jobs, and while Wall Street sounds impressive, I had pocket change when I got my first paycheck in New York, and rent in Hell's Kitchen ain't cheap. Changing jobs after less than a year (LTCM collapse forced it), I didn't really have much savings built up yet, so I took the offer. It wasn't that interesting.

But I did have security clearance, which was entirely unrelated to that job, and is a far weirder story to tell. Oddly, it appears to have been something like a clerical error that I was given security clearance due to being an experimental subject in a DoD paranormal testing program when I was in elementary school. The story is weirder than that, but essentially meaningless since I never made use of that access, which was apparently recognized as a mistake and revoked during a review when my wife was given security clearance to work at a military contractor between her Masters and PhD programs.

I worked for four hedge funds (two biggies and two tiny ones) over four years, but otherwise quit and traded successfully with my own capital. With the exception of a small trading firm called Cavalier in Chicago, I mostly detested the environment, but loved the game. I've been offered the helm of hedge fund management seven times, and turned it down seven times.

I did some financial consulting work for a member of the Hirohito family of Japan who appreciated that I spoke honestly about the American banking sector. I might write about that one day, but cannot name him. I was also recruited by the former Education Minister in China (Guiren Yuan) for an education project in China (due to two personal connections, and my work in educational technology). This brought the brief attention of federal agents who encouraged me to move to China. I turned down the invitation to everyone's chagrin. Sage…I mean Derrick…might now write up a story in which this reveals my deep CCP ties or intelligence connections, except that those don't exist. It just means that governments recognize the strategic value of education.

For a little less than a year in my early 20s, I smoked marijuana socially. Two years later, I bought some again and smoked a puff before bedtime to help with migraines I suffered during long work weeks. That lasted three or four months. I legally bought one joint during a hiking trip to Colorado about a decade ago. I inhaled.

Smear me. I'm sure you can come up with some way to implicate me as a bad, nefarious man. But it's going to be entirely innuendo because there's not much to work with. I spent fourteen years writing perhaps 20,000 pages of LaTeX'ed math curriculum, and perfecting educational processes that gets largely ignored (though my textbooks sell well). Once or twice I've given talks about my education work that were only successful insofar as they helped me understand what is hard for most people to understand about it.

Prior to moving to Texas, I turned down a 7-digit offer for all of my curriculum. Some of my friends think I'm a crazy man who tries his hardest not to be stinking rich. And honestly, that stings a bit. Somewhere along the way I became a millionaire, anyhow. It was almost by accident. It's also mostly illiquid, so I don't own my own house yet, and I drive a Honda CRV. I'm sure there is some secret villain story that has the same result, but I've largely shifted between 70-80 hour work weeks and taking time off to go hiking with my wife. That's the part of life that appeals to me.

I gained 24 friggin pounds doing research and keeping stats during the pandemic, hoping to educate people about early treatment medicine in 2020, then vaccines since, and I really don't like this lifestyle at all. But something nags at me every minute of every day about the way the financial world has been weaponized for an attempt at global financial domination and serfdom, so here I am, trying to be an investigator and educator. And while I love some of the people I've worked with, I'd rather go back to finishing that Game Theory course I've always wanted to teach. I have ideas about structuring Axelrod tournaments that I think could blow the field back wide open.

And I want to buy a farm where I can experiment to create bricks that can serve as batteries (my ideas go a lot further than that article). Living on a Substack income isn't exactly getting me closer to that dream.

Looks like my beard was fuller and just starting to change colors

Not taking the common road leads to weird places, like Matt Groening's office where I got sucked into the software used to make 3D Homer Simpson. The hour or so that I spent with him is likely proof that I'm a shape-shifting alien who helped the Simpsons writing team predict all those future events.

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Arranging Fights

It looks like this isn't just about fishing or vague smears, but hoping to poison the well with enmity.

In several other posts, Derrick plays me as opposite some famous people in the MFM, which seems primarily a device to use those who see those famous people as heroes to then cast me as the villain. Yaaaawn.

The flurry of attacks is otherwise nearly random.

And here we are, "If you're not saying it the Stew Peters way, you must be okay with the government killing people."

I'm mostly laughing. It will be interesting to see how others react. Sage's…I mean Derrick's substack seems to be popular. But I'm guessing that the readership of such a virtual reality game presentation of plandemonium is mostly niche and self-contained, so unless that ecosystem gets more serious…like maybe LARPing as elite law enforcement, leaving bodies in their wake, I think I'll just ignore it from here on.