Disappointed

I had big plans for today. I was going to make a day trip to do some spider collecting — today is my wife’s day off, so it was a good time to take the car away. I had it all planned out: the route, I’d identified some parks and likely places to stop, and the trip was going to end at a museum I’ve never visited before, an hour away. We’ve had a week of sunny, warm weather (we hit 91°F yesterday!) so I thought there’d be a good chance some spiders would have emerged.

Then Minnesota weather got in the way. I woke up to a massive thunderclap, and the forecast is for thunderstorms and strong winds. Forget about spidering today.

I think instead I get to go into the lab and scrub fly bottles all afternoon. Gotta get the fly lab cleaned up.

This will not be fun.

Mary was not enthused about the trip anyway. She’s in gardening mode.

The problem with putting limp-dick dumb-ass right-wingers in charge of the military

Pete Hegseth says transgender people “lack warrior ethos, are liars, lack integrity, are not humble, are selfish and can’t meet physical mental fitness requirements.”

Their priorities are all wrong. But then, I had no idea that so many military men lacked virility and needed chemical assistance.

The judge overseeing the case against the Defense Department’s firing of transgender service members revealed that the military spends eight times more on erectile dysfunction medication than on gender affirming care.

While discussing military spending with the Defense Department (DoD) attorney for the ongoing Talbott v Trump case, Judge Ana Reyes said the DoD spends approximately $5.2 million annually on medical care for service members with gender dysphoria.

Comparatively, the DoD spends $42 million a year on medication for service members with erectile dysfunction.

Also, right-wing lawyers don’t read.

At one point, attorneys had to admit to Reyes that they had never read articles which were included as evidence. Reyes then said they had “cherry picked” and “egregiously misquoted” studies put forward by the Pentagon on transgender people decreasing the lethality of the military.

That sounds like legal malpractice to me. But then, ignorance is the lubrication that keeps the Trump train rolling.

I’d spider-watch it

I am so tired of super hero movies, but they keep drawing me back in. I’m not going to be tempted until 2026 by Spider-Noir, at least.

This is apparently a limited television series, not a movie, built on the limited bits and pieces of Sony’s IP investment in Spider-Man.

I don’t understand these weird IP rules at all. Why not just start from scratch with a stylish movie about a completely independent spider-associated person? No one owns the rights to spiders, I hope.

An interesting psychological insight

Adam Conover notices that an awful lot of far-right weirdos and fanatics are addicted to group chats, and speculates that maybe the group chats themselves are responsible for the increasing insanity of our government. It’s clear that some people seem to be literally addicted to their phone chats — Mike Waltz was caught chatting under the table at a cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth seems to have replaced alcohol with his phone, and Marc Andreesen has a reputation for non-stop chatting with multiple groups at all times.

It’s an interesting suggestion that group chats are wrecking the brains of all the participants, but it sounds a bit like the accusation that video games are damaging the youth. I am quite willing to consider an alternative, that all of these horrible people were fucked up in the head before they picked up an iPhone. Maybe certain kinds of personalities are simultaneously authoritarian and demanding a constant feed of approval and dominance?

The experiment is straightforward: enroll typical, normal people in one of these group chat thingies, and see if they turn into raging stupid assholes under their influence. I’d be a candidate, because I’m not involved in any of these real-time kinds of online conversations, and never have been. I’ve got a couple of email groups that are closed and confidential, but those tend to be low-key and focused on business. My biology discipline at the university has one — it’s all boring announcements and questions about classes and that sort of thing, there’s absolutely nothing particularly juicy about it, and if anyone tried to salt it with digressions and abuse they would be shut down with a face-to-face complaint.

I wonder if Facebook might have suffered from this phenomenon. It’s not quite real-time, but some people do have their strange little subgroups that they hover over, constantly refreshing, and they do get quite nasty and personal…and also some of them are annoyingly obsessed with their status. I left Facebook because of that ingrown stupidity having free reign.

Maybe the real problem is obsession with social dynamics, which is a real problem when the online tool’s purpose is to facilitate a real, practical project, like bombing Houthis or discussing classroom assignments.

No, don’t put me into your group chat. I might turn into a monster.

Almost there!

Today is the day, the last day of finals week. My students will soon be finishing up their final exam, as of precisely 12:00 noon today, and then I spring into action and grade everything, and then plug the last numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate the final letter grade, and then I submit them to the registrar. Done! All done! No more teaching obligations until January!

To cap it all off, tomorrow is commencement. I’ll be putting on the silly cap and gown and saying goodbye to the students (and immediately after rushing home for a podcast).

But today…one last push.

Vandals get punished

That is a lovely tree. It’s been posing in a scenic location near Hadrian’s Wall for 150 years.

Then a pair of idiots came along with a chainsaw and did this to it:

The two vandals have been found guilty. They did it for a “laugh” and to fetch a souvenir for one of the men’s newborn daughter — I don’t think she’ll be taking pride in that as she grows up fatherless.

In a bit of good news, saplings have sprung up from the stump and a new tree may arise.