Are all my pets psycho?

I’ve mentioned my crazy evil cat before, but here’s another of my little friends, my greenbottle blue tarantula, Blue.

They are just coming down off a massive threat posture, which is a change. For a long time, they’ve been skittish and timid. I turn on the lights in the lab, they run and hide. I rattle the door a little bit when I go to feed them, they run and hide. A shadow moves across their container, they run and hide. I figured I’d adopted a cowardly spider.

Lately, though, as they mature — I can tell by how their pigment is darkening to a deep blue from the prior orange — they’ve gotten aggressive. Now they boldly stand in the middle of their space and turn to face me when I walk up to them, but not in a friendly way. When I put a mealworm in their face, no more fleeing, but instead, they rear up on their 4 hindlegs and threaten with their forelimbs, and flash their fangs at me. I’m feeding them! Calm down!

It’s becoming a trend that any animal I take care of gets psycho hostile.

Whoa, wait…could it be me?

Another dishonest website down in flames

I suspect that most people who read this site don’t read the Gateway Pundit blog. I don’t either, but I know of it because that blog was founded a year or two after Pharyngula, and quickly skyrocketed to amazing amounts of traffic — it made me wonder what the secret was. It turns out that the secret was to lie constantly and make crap up, a strategy I wasn’t willing to adopt.

It was also run by Jim Hoft, The Dumbest Man on the Internet. I also wasn’t willing to lobotomize myself to compete.

Don’t waste your time reading it, though — Wikipedia has the short and extremely accurate summary.

The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.

It’s also going away, I assume. Gateway Pundit is bankrupt fiscally in addition to morally.

The founder of the Gateway Pundit, the infamous conspiracy theory site, announced on Wednesday that the company had declared bankruptcy.

Jim Hoft published a message on the website that read, “TGP Communications, the parent company of The Gateway Pundit, recently made the decision to seek protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Southern District of Florida as a result of the progressive liberal lawfare attacks against our media outlet.”

They told one lie too many. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss won a lawsuit against them for their false report that they’d rigged the presidential election. One more propaganda outlet down!

This. Is. UTAH!

That is not a photo of jr high kids dressed as furries

A classic moral panic is growing in Utah. The target: furries. Or, rather, imaginary furries. A few middle school kids wearing headbands has been inflated into wild stories of kids in animal costumes rampaging through the school, bullying and harassing the conservative kiddos.

Last Wednesday, dozens of students skipped class to gather outside a Payson, Utah, middle school for hours and chant, “We the people, not the animals!”—a protest launched over the dramatic accusation that their classmates were running wild as “furries” and attacking other students without consequence.

Much of the hysteria, however, has been blown out of proportion.

Footage from the scene showed them hoisting signs declaring, “Compelled speech is not free speech,” “We won’t be compelled,” and “We just want to learn.” A fourth sign read, “You can’t ignore us,” with a drawing of an animal print covered with a prohibition sign.

“They’re sitting on all fours in class,” one student told conservative livestreamer Adam Bartholomew as the kids (and some parents) lined the road to Mt. Nebo Middle School. “They’re wearing animal costumes. They’re growling at us, barking at us in class, it’s very distracting.”

“It’s very sexual and inappropriate,” the pupil added of their tween classmates accused of being “furries,” a subculture that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals and which has become a conservative bogeyman.

“They’re wearing butt-plug tails underneath skirts. They’re wearing dog collars to school with leashes hanging off. It’s not OK.”

As you might guess from the right-wing buzzwords on the signs being paraded by the offended parents and their dutiful offspring, this is a ginned-up controversy. They’ve got Glen Beck and Libs of TikTok riled up, which is exactly what they want, but none of the ‘extreme’ events they’re talking about have actually happened.

“We’re not really sure how it exploded as quickly and as crazily as it did, but what we can tell you is there have been zero incidents of students biting, licking, all of those things that have been claimed,” Sorenson continued.
…
“We’ve never had any reports, either from students or any observations by teachers or administration,” Sorenson said. “We do have cameras in our buildings, so we can see literally every inch of the building. And we have not captured any of those types of events occurring. So those, as far as we’re concerned, are just completely fictitious.”

Sorenson said the district doesn’t allow kids to wear masks or costumes, but the accused “furries” were asked to stop wearing headbands with ears; they complied immediately.

Further, all you have to do is look at the parents to see where these stories came from, and why.

“I’m glad this is going to go national,” wrote Eric Moutsos, a dad and former cop who once made headlines for refusing to ride at the front of a Salt Lake City gay pride parade.

The chat also included Bartholomew’s wife Cari, who is running for the Utah State Board of Education and has decried the “hard left educational turn” in the state.

One parent of a student organizer insisted that her daughter single-handedly planned the protest and a petition that collected over 1,000 signatures. “If you are hearing otherwise, YOU ARE BEING LIED TO. #LIVE NOT BY LIES.”

Some messages, however, seemed to indicate the parents shaped the kids’ protest posters.

“The kids really want to hammer this home,” the woman wrote in an earlier message. “WE HAVE TO CHANGE OUR POSTERS. The message needs to be: I will not comply. Compelled speech is not free speech. Live not by lies.”

Pledger, in her own message, advised parents to tell their kids to remain calm and not engage in teasing or bullying. “THE OPPOSITION SIDE WANTS OUTRAGE!” she wrote.

I think I know who is benefitting from outrage, and it isn’t kids, or furries, or the school. Outrage is what the Libs of TikTok and far-right freaks live on, and if they have to, they’ll make shit up.

Wait, what’s weird about them?

Bethany Brookshire is wondering about how to justify writing about weird little animals.

Sometimes, I write about weird animals, I post weird anatomy facts, because I need to feel a little bit of wonder. Curiosity. Joy. I want other people to feel that way too. I know how much we are witnessing. I know how much we need little things to remind us that yes, there’s pain, but there’s joy in this life too. Sometimes, it’s romance novels or bad TV or funny Tiktoks. Sometimes it’s sea squirts. The world is, indeed, awful. But it’s also wonderful, and bizarre, and fun. We need the wonder as much as we need to witness.

I want to reassure everyone that it’s OK to write about bizarre creatures. You know, like odd specialized species that are seeing all the related species in their clade failing so spectacularly that they’re going extinct. Or strangely specialized organisms that have expanded a single organ in their bodies to such a freakishly large size that everything else is diminished in comparison. Or animals with such inefficient and unusual means of locomotion that they persist in despite every predator they’ve got being capable of outrunning them.

So yeah, I guess it’s OK to write about people.

But what’s weird about all the other animals? I spent part of my morning tracing silk to find the teeny-tiny juveniles that are bouncing back from winter, and then I was in the lab hanging out with my girls in the spider colony, and all it takes is an hour of that and you begin wondering why you have so few limbs and such a paltry collection of eyes, and hey, wouldn’t some venom come in handy when you get drafted into a committee meeting? We’re the weird ones, not them.

I’m waiting until we crack the ice on Europa, then maybe we’ll find truly weird critters…or more likely, I’ll start to identify with them and humans will look even more creepy and strange.

Springtime, and one’s thoughts turn to spider breeding

I was walking into work this morning, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the wolf spiders were underfoot, and I saw all these delicate lines of silk draped over everything (once your eye is attuned to spotting silk lines, you discover that they are everywhere, on every fence post and bush.) I stopped by the lab and saw that the temperature in the spider incubators was a comfortable 27°C, and the humidity is rising at last to about 35%, so I checked the colony. Nobody is laying eggs yet, but they are looking plump and healthy and ready for a season of fecundity.

Steatoda triangulosa

Once the semester is truly over, in about a week and a half, I’m going to be doing some matchmaking, and that lovely virgin is going to take a lover.

Arrest those tolerant peaceniks for…something!

Caitlin Flanagan is one of those creepy conservatives who manages to get regularly published in so-called liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and simultaneously is loved by right-wing free speech warriors. She gets away with saying things like this, somehow.

Dear NYPD: Please, please, please arrest these faculty members, says the free speech warrior.

What, exactly, are these faculty members supposed to be arrested for? Is it for peacefully protecting the rights of minority students to express their political opinions? I thought that’s what we are supposed to do!

I mean, for decades now I’ve let creationists and far-right students state their beliefs in my classroom (of course, I would then tell them they were wrong, and why, but they could speak their minds). It would have been so much simpler if I could have just called campus security on dissenters from my holy opinions and had them hauled away. Do I get to do that now?

They’re trying to wear me down

I get email from creationists all the time, and it is so discouraging: there are a few people who manage to pump out so much noise and garbage, and there are a few people willing to engage their nonsense, and I guess I’m one of them. But I can’t possibly keep up! For instance, one obnoxious creationist has sent me a couple of links to his horrible website, Darhiwum, which just goes on and on with bogus misinterpretations at endless length. This particular article first quotes Conservapædia, and then explores the author’s misbegotten thesis, which is…let’s see if you can figure it out.

The cause of evolution does not exist in evolution. Evolution as a cause does not contain a response to the cause that makes it consequent. It does not give an account of itself, why is evolution possible in the first place? It is merely a programmed biological process on an assembly line.

“Evolutionary units must know the “trick” of reproducing, they must have heredity, hereditary variation… The basic problem is that the first evolutionary units could not have evolved in an evolutionary way, because they did not have the necessary properties at that time.” /Evolutionary biologist Eőrs Szathmáry/.

Where did they get this “knack” – they have no idea!

A pre-existing ability cannot be developed afterwards, and if the ability to evolve /reproduction, mutation, variation, natural selection, heredity/ is not there in the first place, the evolutionary process cannot even start. Evolution can only work if all its components are present and working simultaneously. Where do we get these capabilities by which the alleged evolution takes place?

First, I have to get something out of the way, this contemptible habit creationists have of quote-mining scientists. Eőrs Szathmáry is a theoretical biologist who published with John Maynard Smith, wrote articles presenting the mechanisms for evolution, and was never arguing for creationism. This creationist, though, throws out a mishmash of Conservapædia and established scientists to somehow lard his ideas with some trace of authority.

Their article goes on for thousands of words, but their central stupid idea is that evolution needed to evolve a specific mechanism for mutation, but evolution cannot proceed without mutation. Error is apparently intentional and designed; error is the “capability” that needs to be put in place by design.

I tried to read this bozo’s work with an open mind, but as it sank in what he was trying to argue, I realized that he was just stupid and not worth the effort.

Better send in the riot squad

Tom Cotton has a plan to deal with those rioting students at Columbia.

The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight. If Eric Adams won’t sen the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs.

The “mob” of “Jewish brethren” holding Seder.

Jewish students celebrating Passover with the protesters.

Has anyone else noticed what a colossal ass Tom Cotton is?

TV killed journalism in America

I’m glad Jon Stewart is around to point out the absurdity of our news media.

Yes. Following Donald Trump’s car on his commute to the court is not news. Reporting breathlessly on the courtroom artist’s rendering of the scene is not news. Endlessly describing what Trump, a man who hasn’t changed his wardrobe in decades, looks like is not news. Reporting on the ongoing minutiae of court procedure is not news. It’s all boring stuff that could be summarized in 5 minutes at the end of the day…and on days when nothing dramatic happens (that is, most of them), it’s overkill.

I did not care for the short segment near the end when Jessica Williams complains that Stewart is being a killjoy. Just let the press have “fun,” she says, it’s entertainment. The consequences of this trial may be important. It’s a serious matter. And our bored journalists are stretching out the thin daily story into a tedious, superficial gloss on the substance of the trial. Who needs to consider corruption when can instead talk about whether Trump is “glowering” or “pouting” while he’s sitting there?

Behold, our new king

These little guys, wolf spiders of the genus Pardosa, are everywhere right now. Mary brought this one home from work because apparently she thinks we don’t have enough of them here.

No worries, it scurried away shortly after I took this photo, and now owns our living room.