Hey, can we get some of that up in here?

[CONTENT NOTE: sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape and rape culture.)

You know, I have not been able to write about Afghanistan, and this is mainly because I have not been able to think coherently about Afghanistan.* See, I get flooded with All the Feelz, and flashbacks to the war crimes of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice regime, CIA black sites, serious debates at the highest levels of government and across mainstream media platforms about the pros, cons, legality and morality of torture FFS, and every single evil spawned from U.S. conservative war lovers** since the events of 9/11, which were traumatic enough for me thankyouverymuch, and right up to and including the suicide bombing at a Kabul airport gate today.

Nevertheless, I was struck by a sentence in this morning’s New York Times email briefing:

[Read more…]

A visit from jolly old St. Poe!

Readers with memories longer than my own may recall my post a few weeks ago, in which I proffered a flawless, airtight, exquisitely logicked explanation as to why President Dickhead ordered only 100 million COVID vaccines for a country of 331 million people, and then I dared readers who disagreed with my hypothesis to – and I quote – “fight me.”

And fight me some did! Tho I swear, at the time of this bloody savagery, I had already come up with even MOAR flawless, airtight, exquisitely logicked explanations with which to BURY ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS. (In the sweetest, gentlest, most loving and respectful way possible of course, unless you explicitly and enthusiastically consent to liking it rough, and provide a safeword.)

But then a couple things happened. First, I got distracted. Not like oooh!-look!-shiny!-distracted. More like… overwhelmed with medical issues you would not want to hear about (and related calls and conferences you would not want to hear about either), and getting swept up in certain holiday-oriented rituals and festivities including incredibly foolish undertakings of my own (un)doing that sure seemed like super easy and fun ideas at the time haha and yet remain unfinished to this day and now require both international shipping (to New Jersey) AND specialized superpowers which alas, are among those I do not possess.

And second, I remembered something very important about Death to Squirrels. And that is, unless you agree with me, YOU ARE WRONG BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THIS BLOG WORKS.*

So that should have been the end of it, right? I mean, unless and until one of us again finds it mildly amusing to speculate – to the death! – on the exact nature of President Dickhead’s neural misfirings.

But not so fast! For in the wee hours of this very morn, at 3:29am local/EST to be precise, we were gifted with a new and… distinctive contribution to our epic battlethread. It purports to originate from one heretofore unheard of “Christina richards,” and is copied-&-pasted here, unedited, and in its entirety, from my unapproved comments feed because (a) I kinda want to know whether Christina richards is for real or not and I honestly cannot tell, and (b) either way, it’s fucking hilarious:

[Read more…]

It’s Winterfest at Freethought Blogs!

Childlike drawing of house, trees, snowy hills with a bright sun streaming up in the background and a track of footprints, and a banner that reads "Winterfest Fundraiser, FreethoughtBlogs, December 5, 2020."

Today the Fun is Fantastical and Free at FreethoughtBlogs! We’ve got a deliciously diverse lineup of offerings for you to explore and enjoy. What’s your pleasure?

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PZ interviews briefly some Rock Star FtB bloggers! You can put a face (and a voice!) to the names of your fav writers here, and maybe discover new faces and places you will really enjoy.

Megan Rahm of From the Ashes of Faith

Dr. Sarah of Geeky Humanist

Giliell of Affinity

William Brinkman of The Bolingbrook Babbler

TD Walker of Freethinking Ahead

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Our new story chain, “A Martian Odyssey” – the adventure has begun!

arid, reddish, martian landscape.

Part 1 by PZ Myers at Pharyngula transports us to the wild world of our future, where an isolated, conservative Earth has for centuries turned her back on her weird and wonderful offspring now populating the solar system… until now. How weird are we talking? Well, why take 10 million years to terraform a planet into an environment fit for humans when you can quickly whip up a little radical genetic modification to planetform the human to the environment instead?

Part 2 by Yours Truly here at Death to Squirrels picks up with three of PZ’s strange characters – a Marsborn and two Spaceborn – facing a profoundly consequential decision: what to do about Earth. Iris Vander Pluym, having ZERO experience writing fiction except for that one chapter in last month’s story chain, naturally decides to kill one of them off straightaway.

Abe Drayton now has Part 3 up at Oceanoxia, and now it’s up to William Brinkman at The Bolingbrook Babbler to bring it home! (I’ll post an updated link for Part 4 when available.)

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View our Winter Photo Gallery at Affinity! This collection comprises submissions from FtB bloggers and readers in our community – including YOU if you send a photo or ten to [email protected], and the Affinity collective likes your work!

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Creativity for Skeptics — a conversation about secular creativity with TD Walker of Freethinking Ahead. This is the event I’ve been looking forward to most this month. I’ve long loved exploring the topic of creativity, but I find the writing of so-called experts and thought leaders tends to be chock full of flaming woo. As an anti-supernaturalist this is off-putting and disappointing to say the least. I can assure readers that whatever my own process(es) may be, supernatural forces play no part in them, and I would like to learn more about what’s really going on within myself and other artists.

I’m definitely watching this just as soon as I finish…painting a dress for a 6-year old. What? Hardly a big deal since I painted my sofa.

__________

Gaming!

__________

And finally, I’ll let PZ take it away:

“Did you know this will be the one-year anniversary of our legal victory over the Pissant of Evil? Several of the defendants will be gathering to celebrate that happy event!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzbTXTvMpaA&feature=emb_title

Aww, man! Pissant of Evil was totally gonna be the name of my new fake socially-distanced band! But there goes PZ ruining everything again AS USUAL… 🙄

I kid! I kid! Our illustrious Dr. Myers bore the burden of the infuriating SLAPP suit(s) with the same wit and brilliance he does everything else. And for readers who may not be aware, that includes an enormous amount of work behind the scenes at FtB, from tech support to his laissez faire approach to management issues (which I am 100% convinced would be MUCH easier if he simply ran things like a typical tyrant) to herding the proverbial cats – in this case a large litter of curious, opinionated, godless, passionate, lefty bloggers – better than any human I have ever seen. It takes a lot of (mostly thankless) work to make this place a reality, and by far the brunt of it falls on PZ Myers. I’m sure I speak for FtB comrades and readers when I say: THANK YOU. We are very grateful for this place. And all of your arduous work, even through difficult times, is genuinely appreciated.

PZ especially deserves our congratulations for taking on the fight for freedom of speech, and triumphing for himself, his co-defendants, and all of us.

If you can spare some coin to help with the legal costs incurred when you need to fight “Pissants of Evil,” please give what you can via our PayPal.

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A Dark Web: Part Four.

Freethought Blogs - A DARK WEB - Halloween Fundraiser

This is Part 4 of a story chain that some FtB comrades are writing by turns.

If you have not read the first three parts of our story:

Part 1 is at The Bolingbrook Babbler.
Part 2 is at Freethinking Ahead.
Part 3 is at Impossible Me.

This collaborative story is a project for our Freethought Blogs Halloween Fundraiser. If you enjoy and appreciate the work we do here, please consider making a donation to our legal fund. Every single dollar helps, and is greatly appreciated.

 

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A Dark Web
Part 4

From the second Kyle broke through the door of Lucy’s, Connie would be operating on autopilot. Adrenaline, training and experience in dozens of these missions would coalesce in blood and brain to transform her into a singularly focused machine. And Connie’s unique “gifts” would provide a covert advantage no ordinary human could match.

But in that instant before the switch flipped, the events that led her to this precise point in space and time flashed before her in an instant. Images, sharp and vibrant, paraded by, bringing back with them the heavy emotional weight of her journey like an unexpected gut-punch. Connie Herbert remained one of few people alive who had a front row seat for all of it: a witness to the whole world transforming, fundamentally and forever, over the course of a single day twenty years ago.

One could only marvel that over two decades–two decades!–very few people knew anything of it at all. Fewer still knew the full story in all of its grotesque spendor. A 20-year, globe-spanning, total information blackout stood as a towering testament to the Company’s power and reach. An ongoing joke among insiders turned on the unfortunate fact that the most successful Op in company history could never be leaked to Sales & Marketing.

But there had been leaks, of course. A leak sparked the whole mess in the first place. The critical breach occurred one morning when nearly every subject in the study – H. sapiens, Latrodectus or “other” –  manifested a stunning variety of transmutations, all at once. The researchers were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the task of quantifying every one of these strange new phenomena. They called for emergency reinforcements right away.

Connie had awakened that morning feeling oddly out-of-sorts. Once she took in the view of the lab, she puzzled at the sight of Dr. Myers and a half dozen lab techs systematically peering into the dozens of small glass enclosures arrayed against the far wall. Another tech disabled the locks on the lab door and propped it open so the extra staffers could come right on in and get to work immediately–well, immediately after they picked their jaws up off the floor, and remembered how to breathe.

Billy was ranting and pacing in his pod, agitated as ever. Not for the first time, Connie was grateful the glass walls between them provided excellent soundproofing.

Just then, three men in well-tailored suits strode through the open door and made a beeline for Dr. Myers.

“Poor guy,” Connie smirked wryly to herself. “He hates dealing with the suits.” And if the suits were here, it could only mean one of two things: either phase III had just been deemed a smashing success, or something had gone very, very wrong. At the moment she couldn’t tell which. It looked like nobody else was sure, either.

Staffers in crisp white lab coats came streaming in continuously, some of whom she hadn’t seen since phase I or II. Those studies had gone exceedingly well. Phase I investigated human reactions to various Latrodectus venom extracts, as well as Latrodectus reactions to various H. sapiens blood extracts. Phase I yielded very little new information, but it did provide a vast trove of baseline data.

Phase II was similar, except the extracts derived from both species underwent molecular modifications before infusion. Results revealed, among other things, potential applications for modified venom extracts, including non-lethal bioweapons, a broad range of medicinal properties and “neurocognitive effects.” Or, as some of the H. sapiens subjects put it, “Wow, I am really high!” At the time Connie wondered whether the Latrodectus subjects experienced similar effects, and how anyone would know if they did.

In the present day, standing at the back door of Lucy’s Bar and Grill, Connie would wonder whether the “Venom” presently drawing in the Halloween party goers traced directly back to that fateful morning in phase III, or if it was indeed just a marketing gimmick. The cartels and dealers were always branding retail heroin packets with names of exactly this sort.

Phase III had been a much more ambitious undertaking. For one thing, all subjects had undergone cross-species genetic modifications prior to the infusions. Early results in Latrodectus took an interesting turn when the females bore spiderlings that inherited their respective new gene sequences intact. Most of these clusters died off before or shortly after hatching; only two continued to thrive. As these clusters began hatching and maturing, it became apparent that the novel genes had expressed in mutations so profound, these creatures could hardly be classed in the Latrodectus genus at all. They were something entirely new. So was the venom.

Human life cycle constraints naturally prohibited any investigation into Latrodectus gene expression in the offspring of H. sapiens, to say nothing of the Geneva Conventions. The Company was already treading dangerously close to those limits, perhaps even exceeding them.

And those Latrodectus genes roiling around inside ten human subjects were not exactly lying dormant.

Connie was struck with the sense that something was off about Billy today (more so than usual, that is). She turned back for another look. Billy took heaving breaths, wildly contorting his upper body as if he were trying to glimpse the back of his own neck. Strange. But what was all that…that…stuff? Thick, glossy strands and strings clung to his arms and torso, wobbling like jello with every twitch.

No one seemed the least bit concerned about Billy: all attention was focused on the dozens of small glass enclosures lining the back wall. Some of them were moving, in short pulses. A metal cover from one of the higher enclosures came spinning down.

Dr. Myers and the techs descended from their ladders and took slow steps backward.

The enclosures were jumping and jerking more violently now. Metal lids came down. Whole enclosures crashed to the floor, and shattered. The Latrodectus were out.

Billy and a few other subjects were pounding on the glass walls, some throwing furniture and other heavy items. It was all for naught. All eyes were transfixed by the chaos exploding outward from the far wall. In less than a minute hundreds of spiders were trailing sticky silk to every nook and corner in the lab.

Billy swung at the glass with a piece of dismantled bed frame. The wall first cracked, then shattered under the blows. He was now swinging at the other pods, freeing the frenzied subjects inside.

“Get back!” he yelled at Connie. She could barely hear him, until Billy smashed down the wall between them.

The suits were the first to make a run for it. The swarm of techs followed behind them, moving like a single organism and sweeping Dr. Myers right out with them.

Someone had set off the fire alarm: sprinklers showered the room, a siren a strobe light flashed, sirens shrieked, silk webbing criss-crossed the ceiling. The effect was surreal.

Connie knew there were risks when she volunteered to be a subject. But she never imagined anything like this. No one did. The consequences were as yet unforeseen, but they would come, hard and fast, in the form of shockwaves around the globe. Connie or any of a hundred tactical officers like her would be there when they did, mitigating all of the damage, destroying all evidence and ensuring that any narrative taking hold would never lead back to the Company.

Kyle would be first through the door tonight. The others would follow in a practiced and precise routine. Just then, in that breathless last second, Connie wondered what the world might look like if only the last tech to make it out that day had stopped to shut, lock and bolt the lab door behind him.

“On my mark,” she said coolly. “Three. Two. One. Go.”

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Read Part 5 at Oceanoxia!

Again, if you enjoy the work (and the community!) here at FtB, please consider contributing what you can to our legal fund. And by all means, check out more Halloween treats we have lined up for you.

It’s a weird year, to put it mildly. Many Halloween traditions you might have enjoyed in the past may not be possible this year, at least not if you prefer to avoid catching and spreading a deadly virus and you have the terrible misfortune of living among conservatives in the US. So please, if you are celebrating this weekend, have your fun safely. And if you’re looking for something to do, hang out with us here on Halloween!

Freethought Blogs HALLOWEEN FUNDRAISER

Nobody loves me, I’m gonna eat some worms. 👿

I am auctioning off an interview at Death to Squirrels. Bidding starts at ONE DOLLAR, closes in less than three hours (6pm EDT), and nobody wants to talk to me! *sniff* Waaaaah!

You can bid either in the auction thread comments or via email if you prefer: send your bid to irisvpluym [at] gmail [dot] com, with “Iris Interview” in the subject line, and I will post a corresponding comment on the thread that reads “Anonymous bid for $____” along with the timestamp on your email. You know: in case there’s a last minute bidding war! 😂

C’mon, I promise you have nothing to fear from talking to me. Unless you’re a squirrel.

 

I have become a global trendsetter/lifestyle guru/influencer!

[CONTENT NOTE: anti-LBGTQi bigotry and harassment; language most foul.]

You know, I really hate to toot my own horn, people. But it remains a simple fact that I was housebound, taking paranoia-level precautions against infection risk, gorging myself on Netflix, hoarding unconscionable amounts of toilet paper, following the news and shitting myself* long before damn near everyone** on the planet recently decided to live exactly as I do!

You might think that by now, I’d have some timely wisdom to impart to you, hard won over these past few years while I’ve been consigned to countless stretches of involuntary isolation. Maybe I’d be servin’ up some pithy, practical tips-’n-tricks to help you navigate these perilous, life-changing, life-threatening times within the context of a “healthcare system” deliberately designed to generate wealth, in direct opposition to health.

Alas, nope. I got nuthin’. Except:

WELCOME TO MY WORLD, EVERYONE.

Also: good luck with that.__________

*What?! No! I am not going to admit publicly on my blog to literally shitting myself after my (second) ileostomy reversal! I used that phrase only figuratively…yep.

**Oh, I am exquisitely aware that not “everyone” is following my groundbreaking life choices. Just look at these @$$holes popping up today in my morning news scan:

“People filled bars like one in Appleton, Wis., on Wednesday night after the state’s Supreme Court struck down the governor’s stay-at-home restrictions.” (William Glasheen/Post-Crescent/AP)

And by “people,” I think it’s fair to say that The Washington Post editors mean “white dudes” because of course they do. (And because of course they are.)

But there are @$$holes a lot closer to home, too. Take this @$$hole for instance, as seen through my fire escape:

“@$$hole on Hudson Street, 5.13.20”
©Iris Vander Pluym

Now you may have heard that every night at 7pm New Yorkers collectively gather at their windows to make an enormous racket, banging pots and whooping it up, just like when it’s midnight on New Years but waaaaay too cold to leave the apartment. In fact you may have actually heard the noise yourself, because that shit is motherfucking loud. The cacophonous chaos is my beloved city’s daily ritual in appreciation of nurses, doctors, first responders and essential workers of all kinds. No one else here may know what day it is, but we sure as shit know what time it is.

Apparently so does the @$$hole. (And his @$$hole friends, too, who stood on the near corner out of range of my shot). Right on cue at 7 last night, the Maskless Minion of Mindless Misery began waving around his “TRUMP 2020 – KEEP AMERICA GREAT” sign 40 feet from my window.

As the raucous din died down, thence began his spittle-flecked shouting of this message in every direction for all to hear, whilst shoving his sign at the faces of passing people and at the windows of passing vehicles. My neighbors were shouting back things like “Go home!” and “You don’t belong here!” This last, of course, is not only a reference to the infamously liberal borough of Manhattan as a whole, but to the West Village in particular – you know: home of the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the world’s undisputed epicenter of LGBTQi culture and civil rights activism before AIDS decimated the local population and then a monsoon of straight white rich yuppies and super-rich absentee “residents” flooded the neighborhood and drove real estate prices right through the fucking stratosphere.

But this being New York and all, the neighborhood still stubbornly maintains its gritty grip on queerness, which is precisely why the @$$hole brigade was here in the first place – and not pulling this shit in…oh, say, Brownsville. If this were not plainly obvious already, it became crystal clear once their feckless leader began taunting my neighbors with “SISSY BOYS!!!” and “LOSER SOY BOYS, ALL Y’ALL!!!” and “YEAH I’M NOT LIVING HERE WHERE THE SOY BOYS LIVE, LITTLE GIRL!!! LITTLE GIRLY MEN!!! NEIGHBORHOOD FULL OF GIRLY-GIRLS!!!” (I do apologize to readers, but the man was speaking entirely in all caps and with multiple, non-ironic exclamation points.)

The rhetorical heat had risen, though not nearly to the high voltage I prefer when I fuck with conservatives. That’s when I decided to contribute my $0.02 to the verbal volleys and began shouting “Run him over!” at the passing cars and buses, and whining loudly with bitter disappointment as they missed him. Up until this point during his one-man troll show he seemed to be enjoying the back-and-forth jabbing and jeering, but at that he shut up for a moment, lowered his sign and spun around in my direction. “RUN ME OVER, THAT’S NICE,” he harrumphed. Well if anyone would know about “nice” it would be this dude amirite?

There were many, many witty and original zingers like:

“YOU’RE LOSERS!!! LOSER!!! LOSER!!! LOSER!!! LOSER!!! LOSER!!! YOU’RE AAAAALLLLL LOSERS!!!”

“WINNING!!! ALWAYS WINNING!!!”

“LOSERS KEEP WALKING!!! WINNERS CAN STOP HERE AND SHAKE MY [ungloved] HAND!!!”

He did get awfully quiet when a large black man on a bicycle stopped to engage him. Gosh, I wonder why that is?

“Do something else,” I heard someone say. “We’re getting bored.”

As we all know, conservatives are nothing if not boring, and so I would soon turn my attention back to my current Netflix binge.

Today I learned via my upstairs neighbor that these tools also made an appearance at the liquor store around the corner. That’s right: my liquor store. Not to buy booze though, just to taunt the extremely essential worker running the register with more tedious and unoriginal anti-queer barbs. And one of the @$$holes got himself arrested for spitting on a woman who told him to put on a mask.

Good times.

My first thought was I’m so happy these particular people are doing exactly the right things to catch COVID-19. Obviously our world would be a far better place without them in it. Unfortunately, that’s not how the virus or conservatives work. They cannot help but do their worst damage to the most vulnerable and defenseless among us. Kovid Karrying Konservatives are bound to infect not just each other at their junior fascist circle jerks, but other people upon whom they inflict themselves, many of whom have no choice in the matter.

Have a nice day.

CONFESSIONS OF A DEADBEAT BLOGGER.

[CONTENT NOTE: disgusting bodily functions and fluids are discussed and drawn (poorly).]

To my beloved Many Tens of Loyal Readers:

As you may know, in August 2018, our colleague Caine lost her battle with colon cancer. I was and still am devastated to lose my longtime (Pharyngula/SciBlogs-era) friend, FTB comrade-in-arms and sister trauma survivor.

What you probably didn’t know is that Caine and I shared something else in common: the exact same colon cancer diagnosis. She had that bomb dropped on her just a few months after I did. Unlike Caine, however, I am reticent – or chickenshit? take your pick – about exposing much of my personal life online. As much as I admire it, I do not possess even a fraction of the courage Caine did to write so openly about her life and her illness.

By December 2017, after my first four cycles of chemo and 28 doses of radiation, I was still blogging regularly. But cancer treatments had begun to take more (and more important) pieces of my life and myself away from me. Where writing used to “flow” for me, I was now finding myself blinking back at a blinking cursor. Ideas became jumbled, everyday words escaped me, my focus and concentration kept slipping. Writing coherently about anything of substance was (and still is) an often tedious and frustrating process for me. I naturally drifted away from blogging, and from social media too.

When Caine first wrote about her cancer, I reached out to her immediately and shared with her what was going on with me. We stayed tightly connected (privately). When we lost her, I lost my source of so much comfort and strength from the only person in my life who truly understood what I was going through. (I hope that I gave her some strength and comfort, too. I know I made her laugh at least once or twice.)

As the 1-year anniversary of her death is upon us, I find I would like to start blogging again. Not so much “in Caine’s honor,” but more like…in her footsteps? I mean that I would like to be more open about my health and my life. And yes, this is waaaaay out of my comfort zone.

To be honest, these new blogging endeavors of mine may turn out to be a total bust: nothing more than a bunch of cutting-&-pasting items of interest I find on the ‘net, maybe calling attention to worthy candidates, causes and clicktivism, perhaps keeping readers informed of nefarious squirrel activities. Or, you know, I might fizzle out completely (again). Like many things about my future, I don’t really know. I do know that I miss being a part of this community, and I would like to contribute again to the extent I am able.

So I then I got to thinking: what better way to tell the story of the past two years of my life than…a webcomic! Yes! Having never done one before, indeed having rarely even read one unless PZ or someone posts one? PERFECT.

Enjoy?

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Vacay!

Vacation Iris.

Yes it’s vital and necessary work, but I gotta tell you: keeping on top of the enemy rodent menace is exhausting. My partner and I have not had a real break in a loooong time, so we’re headed where the WIFI may be spotty (I may or may not post anything for a week or so), but the rum cocktails will be abundant. It will be glorious! Unless the fucking squirrels show up and RUIN EVERYTHING, of course. So if you kind people could just keep them distracted for a minute while I make my getaway, I would really appreciate it.

kthxbye!