Did you know that God explicitly bestowed the ability to generate explosive diarrhea on Cyclospora, and that this is true science?
I just threw this together outside, never mind the screeching squirrels. They’re more pleasant to listen to than Georgia Purdom.
That you can use your home computer as a spider incubator?
I keep several containers of Parasteatoda on top of my Mac Mini, where they thrive in the warmth and provide endless hours of entertainment while I’m working. All four of these contain egg sacs, and three of the four have hatched out this morning!
The Shadow League
How exciting! I’d like to say thank you for the honor, I appreciate the efforts of all the little people who have lofted me to join this distinguished company, and is there a stipend, an honorarium, some token that would help me buy groceries?
Of course there isn’t. The Shadow League
is an imaginary organization invented by Calvin Smith of AiG Canada, and it only pays in shadow money, which is as imaginary as his shadowy god. What this really is is a truckload of bullshit dumped in my lap, on this morning I had intended to work on my nefarious plan of instruction in cell biology, which begins in two weeks. I don’t really have time to deal with all the Christian nonsense in this video right now.
While I appreciate the loving attention he gives to my head shots, he really doesn’t understand my words. I think it is true that there is no moral law, dispensed by an invisible man in the sky, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as morality, or that we are free to murder and steal without consequence. The nonexistence of a deity makes it a necessity to find a moral foundation in something other than stupid words in an old book, and my solution is humanism and the development of principles of empathy and equality. He complains that the idea of evolution is leading to the slow collapse of Christian churches, and I say good — the false morality of authoritarian should be dismissed and abandoned.
There is a lot more I would say, but responsibility is leaning heavily on me today, and I should pay attention to that, because I have a social contract and an obligation to do the best job I can to present the scientific facts of biology to my students. In two weeks! Yikes!
I will return to this inane video sometime soon. For now, I’ll leave it to you all to make comments and give me tips for a future episode of shit-shoveling.
Time to party!
That isn’t the only clutch to emerge today. Here’s another:
These little guys are popping out everywhere — we’re surrounded by a cloud of little baby Parasteatoda.
You may ask which member of the Trump administration I’m talking about, because they are all compulsive liars. I’m referring to the guy with the brainworm, the barely literate incompetent who has fundamentally shut down science research in this country, the fraud who has been vomiting up medical misinformation, the one, the only, RFK jr, the man who has poisoned the Kennedy name for all time.
In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles.
Kennedy’s appearance came in the wake of a congressional hearing with Fauci last week, when the infections disease expert invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 100 times, as Republicans lambasted him for his role in handling the pandemic.
In his frantic attempt to claim that Fauci was a murderous monster directly at fault for COVID, he made an exaggerated claim of special American victimhood, asserting that we were number one in deaths.
“We had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth,” Kennedy said. When host Dana Bash challenged him, Kennedy doubled down: “What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID.”
It was not accurate.
But during the pandemic’s height, 2020 to 2023, the U.S. did not lead the world in its overall rate of death from the illness. Peru did.
In its tracking of global COVID-19 cases and deaths through March 2023, Johns Hopkins University found that Peru’s population was hit hardest with a rate of 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people.
The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that with 341.11 deaths per 100,000 people. That is the 14th highest rate. Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania were a few of the countries with higher per capita death rates than the U.S.
He does not care about the numbers. Details schmetails. He’s just stirring up hatred in the mob. He did go on to lie about the origins of COVID, the growing measles epidemic, and vaccines and autism, and food policy, all debunked here. This is nothing new. Do you remember that he volleyed a similar barrage of lies a year ago? This is what he does, all the time, every time.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made myriad false and misleading claims on Thursday as he fielded questions examining his seven-month tenure leading the nation’s health agencies at a contentious three-hour hearing.
Kennedy ignored government data, twisted legislation and pointed to unsubstantiated treatments while addressing topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, rural hospitals and school shootings.
He was still allowed to hold office last year. I predict that he’ll cling to power like a tick after this year. There will be no consequences for him…just for the scientists he torments, and for the children who will die.
Crime is down. It’s so down, that the local prison in Appleton was shut down several years ago.
Now it’s being re-opened to serve the needs of ICE.
The city of Appleton built the prison, but CoreCivic purchased it in 1997 to hold state prisoners, then shut it down in 2010 because of decreased demand. It was once the largest employer in the Swift County city.
Now it will hold up to 1,600 immigrant detainees.
No one should be pleased to see the prison-industrial complex expanding…but my Republican state representative and evil servant of Satan is thrilled.
Rep. Michelle Fischbach, who represents the 7th Congressional District where Appleton is located, told MinnPost at Farmfest on Tuesday that she was happy to hear the prison was reopening.
“I know that the community has been very supportive of making sure that we can open that up, and it makes sense,” she said. “There’s an existing facility there, and so there doesn’t have to be anything new built.”
We gotta get her out of office, I can’t stand her and her wicked policies. Her opponent is more in line with my opinions.
Her opponent, Democrat Erik Osberg, tied the prison announcement to last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” saying he’s against the reopening and wants to repeal the legislation that enabled it.
“There’s a $180 billion detention center and deportation-industrial complex in that legislation,” he said. “That’s what this is about, and guess who gets to build and run them? Private companies.”
You’ve got my vote, Erik. You didn’t have to say a word, but you’ve got it.
The conservatives are eating their own! And it’s all over food prices.
It started when a college student involved with Turning Point USA complained that a burrito costs $20, NJ.com reported. Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet shared the complaint online, saying the “lived experience is the same: it just feels like basic things cost too much.”
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen dismissed the gripe. “Cry me a river,” Thiessen wrote. “The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”
That drew a sharp response from Vice President JD Vance, who wrote that Thiessen had “never missed a burrito,” according to NJ.com.
Crenshaw weighed in later on Thursday with an attack on food insecurity.
“Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates,” Crenshaw sneered on X, wading into the fight.
He went further, asking whether critics of rising food prices were “a communist” or “an American adult male capable of handling his own s—.”
The backlash from the right was swift.
“The Republican Party is still dominated by traitors who got rich off of insider trading but mock you for thinking that you should be able to eat meat in a first world country,” conservative commentator Auron MacIntyre wrote on X.
They’ve all got guns. Maybe they should use them on each other?
I do have to mention that having a meal plan is expensive — you’re not getting free burritos in college. Also, our students are on a budget, living in small dorm rooms and getting by on the high-starch diets they’re fed in the cafeteria, and occasionally splurging by going out to Taco John’s, where a burrito will set you back about $8, which is still overpriced, but I think the TPUSA goon was probably getting a fancy high-end burrito in California.
Now I’m craving a burrito, but this week we’re getting by with a big pot of bean soup. You know, beans and rice are still the economical way to get a healthy diet, and tossing them onto a tortilla with a little cheese, some spices, and a splash of hot sauce is a tasty way to survive. But beans and rice are also going up in price. Telling people to consume a less expensive version of what they want while even the cheap stuff is more expensive than it was last week does not address the problem.
Hey, I’ve got tortillas, I got beans, I got hot sauce, I got cheese. I think I’ll fix something to snack on while watching the spectacle of conservatives snarling at each other.
We have a big container here in the house for raising mealworms, but it starts getting decrepit after a few months. It’s more frass than food, the adult beetles start taking over, and while it’s still productive for now, the writing is on the wall — a few more months and I’ll be dumping it into the compost bin. If I were smart, I’d start a fresh mealworm colony now, before the old one fades away.
I am smart, S-M-R-T, so that’s what I did this morning. Here’s what a mealworm paradise looks like:
I poured in a mix of oats and cornmeal, with some barley for variety, and chopped up some old carrots for gnawing on. Then I transferred a bunch of larvae from the old colony, and also a few adults to start laying eggs. The cardboard and toilet paper rolls are for shelter, and they also lay eggs on those. Now I wait for the population to explode, and then I can start harvesting the worms for the more important spider colony.
Biology is so easy. Provide the right environment, and your subjects proliferate with little effort on your part.
I live in Morris, Minnesota, which is on the western edge of the state. This part of the state is called the Prairie Pothole region, which isn’t particularly glamorous — “potholes” are not generally regarded as a positive feature — but it’s nicer than it sounds. We’re part of a larger geological feature.
This is a part of the world that was scoured by glaciers, but not deeply. The countryside is full of these shallow dimples that still fit the description of a lake, but they are kind of crappy lakes. Not deep, more marsh than clear open water, not the kind of lake that you imagine building a cabin next to and putting in a dock and cruising around in your bass boat. Don’t get me wrong, tourists, there are also plenty of deep fishing lakes around here, but we also have this thick scattering of dimples. And these dimples are important!
Today, more than 300 bird species depend on the Prairie Potholes, including the endangered Piping Plover, iconic White Pelican, and elegant Marbled Godwit. But the region is best known for sustaining waterfowl: half of North America’s breeding migratory waterfowl are hatched and reared in this region, earning it the nickname “America’s Duck Factory.”
So yeah, I live in a duck factory. Big chunks of the land around us are set aside as “waterfowl production areas” and “wildlife management areas,” which has the advantage that they are left undisturbed and unplowed and are also great “spider production areas” although they are never displayed as such.
But the potholes are under threat. We have regulations to prevent local farms from building what are called “drain tiles” too close to the potholes — these are perforated pipes that facilitate drainage of the land, and which have the potential to suck a shallow lake dry.
One of the biggest threats to these wetlands comes from drain tiles — perforated pipes buried underground to move water within agricultural soils. These systems help farmers manage moisture levels, but when placed too close to Prairie Potholes, they can siphon water away and shorten or eliminate the annual life of these vitally important wetlands.
Existing rules establish minimum safe distances between wetlands and drain tiles to prevent farmland drainage from harming these fragile habitats. This combination of science, site-specific considerations, and good-faith agreements has successfully kept the wetlands wet while allowing landowners to use the rest of their properties as they see fit.
Unfortunately, some people would prefer to have more land for growing corn than “wasting” that acreage on migratory birds and want to squeeze out the potholes by placing more drain tiles next to them.
Now, a new request for information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signals a departure from 60 years of successful, bipartisan policy by reducing the allowable distance between drain tiles and Prairie Potholes. This proposed change could dry up vitally important wetlands, threatening one of North America’s most important breeding grounds for ducks and other bird species.
You probably don’t live in our duck factory, but if you like ducks and geese and other native birds, you can sign a petition to protect our environment. It’s a good thing to do.
Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan primary!
Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination in the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party.
El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress.
It was close, but I’m glad that Stevens is out (she was a weird shrill Zionist), and seeing a progressive candidate emerge in the Democratic party suggests that maybe the party will eventually shift.
Also, the late Ed Brayton, co-founder of Freethoughtblogs and Michigander, would no doubt be pleased by this outcome.
