Teaching outside my comfort zone

Today is a busy, frightful day. I volunteered to stop by the Morris Area High School to give away some spiders and talk in general about the importance of spiders, and I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. College students are one thing, but middle school and high school kids are completely different beasts. I’ve done this before, and mainly what I come away with is the feeling that we don’t pay teachers enough.

I’m meeting with 7th and 10th grade biology classes this morning and afternoon. I’m bringing in a lot of baby spiderlings which are tiny and hard to see, not impressive at all, and a couple of larger adults. I’ve also got several egg sacs, one of which is very, very close to eclosion — maybe we’ll get a sudden eruption of spiderlings, which would be exciting. I’m going to propose leaving a half dozen spiderlings in the classrooms, along with a supply of wingless fruit flies, and recommend that they take care of them for a few weeks, and then on some bright spring day, to release them in a grassy area near the school.

I’ve been researching lesson plans lately, and unfortunately, almost all of them have been geared for younger kids — K-6. I’m not going to talk down to this group, so I figure I’ll just explain a few scientific details and open the floor to questions.

They’re going to eat me alive, aren’t they?

You didn’t think it was only going to affect the gays and the transes, did you?

Seriously, you had to know it wasn’t going to stop with banning drag shows.

Let’s close the libraries in Missouri. They’re just full of seditious blasphemy.

Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives have voted to defund their state’s libraries after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state for banning numerous LGBTQ+ books as “explicit sexual” materials.

The April 4 vote removed $4.5 million of state budget funding for libraries as well as “costs for diversity initiatives, childcare, and pre-kindergarten programs,” WCPT 820 Radio reported. The removal now requires an additional state house vote and state senate approval before heading to the governor’s desk to become law.

In Texas, they’re starting small. Give ’em time.

A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.

The Llano County commissioners have scheduled for Thursday a special meeting in which the first item on the agenda is whether to “continue or cease operations” at the library.

You might wonder what horrible books they tried to ban.

The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

Last year, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after he read “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The reason? Because the book used words like “butt” and “fart” and included cartoon images of a child’s butt.

Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.

I guess we’ve moved beyond hiding the books that talk about sex and race to silencing anything that mentions farts. Don’t straight white people do that, too?

Layers and layers of grifting

In its heyday, Silicon Valley was flush with money (OK, it still is), and was a magnet for tech talent…and also for the con artists who wanted to skim off the surplus. Among the many frauds is Eliezer Yudkowski and his LessWrong community. Here’s a fascinating letter that boldly airs the accusations.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.

MIRI was founded as the Singularity Institute in 2000 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent thought leader in the Less Wrong “rationalist” community. Less Wrong is a community blog (also founded by Yudkowsky,) that claims to be dedicated to the art of human rationality. Yudkowsky has written over 300 blog posts, several books, and a popular fanfiction that gained him the status of a minor celebrity, especially among fellow “rationalists.” The “rationalist” community in the Bay Area, which is fairly tight-knit, features group housing, where members live together and sometimes work together.

Yudkowsky’s ideas had members of the Less Wrong community convinced that Yudkowsky would bring about singularity and save the world. Yudkowsky has positioned himself as one of a small class of people focusing on global catastrophic risks, while teaching his followers that the ethical thing to do is to either work directly on AGI, or get a high-paying job and donate to MIRI. Many of the people in the Less Wrong community took Yudkowsky and MIRI very seriously. Until recently, most of MIRI’s donations came from within that community, with some members donating tens of thousands of dollars to the cause. The original team at MIRI was composed partially of top contributors to the community’s blogs, like Nate Soares, Luke Meuhlhauser, and Anna Salamon.

While these bloggers weren’t as popular and admired as Yudkowsky, they were widely trusted by the community. And at events like the Workshop on AI Safety Strategy (WAISS) run by CFAR, people would suggest ideas like taking out life insurance that would pay out to MIRI, and then committing suicide to further the cause.

Working at MIRI conferred a kind of special respect as someone who Yudkowsky and other prominent members thought were worthy to save the world. To young teenagers enamored with the Less Wrong community and its stated ideals, it’s easy to see how kids could’ve been coerced into having sex with adults working at MIRI.

Yeah. They actually suggested that members of the community with mental health concerns take out life insurance policies, that it would be a greater benefit to the high ethical causes of the group than their continued existence. They also recruited (dare I say “groomed”?) teenagers to join up and frolic with their middle-aged leaders.

Testimony from community members alleges that several underage young teenagers were having sex with the 30- and 40- year old researchers working at MIRI, especially between 2007 and 2014. The list of people accused includes (but is not limited to) the director and senior research fellow, and a former executive director who is now working at the Open Philanthropy Project, a major donor to MIRI.

Perhaps relatedly, this was going on around the time MIRI was accepting significant financial support to the tune of $50,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, even after his conviction for prostituting children. Yes, that Epstein.

MIRI’s entanglement in statutory rape was one of the worst kept secret in the Bay. Many rationalists are keen to say that the age of consent is an arbitrary number, and favor treating young people as fully-grown adults. So, it wasn’t much of a secret that older individuals in their 30s and 40s were having sex with teenagers. And perhaps that’s why when nearly a hundred people in the Bay Area Rationalist Community Safety Discussion group (BARCSD) saw insiders discussing whether the perpetrators had successfully evaded the statute of limitations for statutory rape in reference to MIRI, the members of BARCSD collectively shrugged. Additionally, one of the former underage teenagers was in the group, and admitted to having sex with much older adults, though this failed to interest the BARCSD.

Multiple comments were edited or deleted once members realized legal consequences were possible.

This is a group that communicated online extensively, and it’s revealing that now it’s sinking in that they’ve left a trail behind them, and are busy deleting old posts that might incriminate them.

Yudkowski always did seem like a pretentious phony to me, and it’s good to see that some people are catching on.

Time is fleeting…madness takes its toll

The Red Scare was mostly over before I was born — Joseph Welch squelched McCarthy with his question, “Have you no decency?” in 1954 — but we still see echoes of that paranoia today. I did survive the great Dungeons & Dragons panic of the 1980s, and I followed the insane McMartin preschool case which destroyed lives over hysterical claims of child sacrifice in tunnels that didn’t exist under a preschool. Then we got the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory in 2016, and all the QAnon craziness. It’s total madness.

Now — right now, today, all around us — Republicans are leading the charge under the banner of homophobia and transphobia. They’re freaking out over drag shows.

Florida Republicans are pushing forward a bill that seeks to ban drag shows from allowing someone under the age of 18 to be in attendance.

But the bill is so vaguely worded, using the term “adult live performance,” that even Republican lawmakers have admitted it would prevent a high school kid from watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show or even the musical Hair.

The puckered sphincters who get elected as Republicans also want to shut down all Pride celebrations.

The bill also explicitly targets Pride parades and celebrations, by preventing a government entity from issuing permits to an organization that may put on such a performance. If a violation occurs, say in a city like St. Petersburg, which hosts the largest Pride celebration in the state, the person who issued the permit could be charged with a misdemeanor.

In addition, any establishment that violates the law would be subject to license suspension or revocation and liable to large fines and a misdemeanor charge. One violation would spur a $5,000 fine; subsequent incidents would spur $10,000 fines.

Remember when these assholes assured everyone that they were only concerned about trans people, they were just dropping the “T” in LGBT, they were still supportive of everyone’s sexual orientation? And everyone else knew what was coming and predicted that they’d be expanding those restrictions until it was criminal to be anything but a straight white man? Those days are here already, and they aren’t shy about saying it.

It’s not just Florida and Texas that are a nexus of Puritanical oppression, Tennessee is definitely joining the crowd. Watch this woman testify against allowing a Pride parade by making up lies.


It started out as Pride coming in and I thought everything would be ok…it ended with a rainbow room where 8-12 y/o kids were given butt plugs and dildos.

You know what else is curious about this phenomenon? In every case, without exception, the justification is rooted in conservative Christianity, America’s curse.

The Renfield protocol

They don’t tell you about the dirty jobs involved in spider care. Last week, I fed all the adults nice big juicy mealworms, which they promptly killed and then spent several days sucking on their vital fluids. Even when they’re very thorough in their consumption, though, they still leave behind a sack of chitin with organic leftovers inside.

Then it rots.

It rots thoroughly, turning black and soft and turning hairy with fungus. It has a sulfurous reek to it, as well. Then the spiders turn to me and peremptorily demand, “Renfield! Oh, Renfield! Do clean up the rotting corpses, will you? That’s a good Renfield.”

Renfield is me, if you haven’t figured that out. This morning I got to go through all the cages and pluck out decaying mealworms with a pair of forceps. This is my job. That, and regularly bringing them fresh bodies to turn into rotting corpses.

Oh well. I also got to play with my shiny new camera and take photos of my masters.

You’ll have to go to Instagram or Patreon if you want to see photos. (Hmm, I didn’t do a very good job of promoting those links with all this talk of decaying corpses, did I…)

What are they teaching in journalism school nowadays?

Another mass murder by an asshole with a rifle, on a day ending with the letter “y”. But this article! Jesus!

The suspect in a Monday morning massacre at a Louisville bank has been identified as a 23-year-old former varsity hoops star and finance grad-turned-banker who livestreamed the horrific attack.

Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the suspect as Connor Sturgeon, who worked at Old National Bank’s downtown Louisville branch.

Gwinn-Villaroel said Sturgeon was livestreaming as he used a rifle to open fire at about 8:38 a.m. in the Old National Bank Building, which houses the bank and a variety of other businesses, killing four people and injuring nine more, including three police officers. Sturgeon was killed after exchanging gunfire with officers, she said, but it’s unclear if he was killed by police or by self-inflicted gunshots.

The article briefly mentions the victims by name, but after that, it’s got a more important job to do. It spends 22 fucking paragraphs going on and on about what a nice normal guy the killer was. The governor of Kentucky has to tell us what an “incredible friend” he was, they interview old high school friends and buddies from his college fraternity, they reach the depths of banality by getting a quote from the husband of a neighbor.

Sturgeon “seemed like a real normal dude, every day he’d wave to me,” Allgeier’s husband, Michael, added.

What the fuck? The mass murderer was known to sometimes wave to people? This is news? I learned nothing from it other than that the killer was otherwise a mundane person who lived an ordinary, if privileged, life before going on a shooting rampage. The article says nothing about the victims, short of naming them, and should have been slashed to bits by an editor before publishing.

And it took three ‘reporters’ to cobble together this unquestioning story about a bad man.

I hope they feel a little bit of shame today.

What meritocracy?

Elon Musk is doing a fine job of wrecking the reputation (what there was of it) of rich people. Here’s his idea of a clever joke.

Juvenile. Stupid. He bought this thing for $44 billion, and now he spends all his time mocking it and literally deprecating it. He threw away over $20 billion so far, and is determined to destroy all the rest.

Worse is what he’s doing to Matt Taibbi. I don’t much care for Taibbi — he’s also juvenile and gullible — but he was defending Musk, incompetently, and was paid by Musk to fire off that damp squib called the “Twitter Files,” but now Musk is cutting off Substack, where Taibbi makes his money, and has gone so far as to ‘shadow ban’ Taibbi on Twitter.

Musk is a petty 3 year old child. I browsed his Twitter feed to see what’s going on in his brain, and even his deep thoughts are shallow and trivial. Like this one:

Wait, what? Your left arm is the same age as your right, and the two are genetically identical, and typically have similar environmental exposure. How is this an example of precision? How does this tell us that aging can be fixed?

Although…I did once meet a man, a truck driver, whose left arm was ruddy, scaly, and weathered, while his right was pale and smooth. He liked driving with the side window down, and his left arm resting on the door. I guess I’ve cured aging, then — simply stay out of the sun.

Texas takes another step into the abyss

Daniel Perry was an uber driver who ran a red light, drove into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, and when one of them approached his car carrying an AK-47 (which, stupid and dangerous as it is, is legal in Texas), opened fire with a handgun and killed him. He was found guilty of murder in a jury trial.

In Texas. After he threatened to kill someone online.

Perry’s defense team argued that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might “kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

A friend responded, “Can you legally do so?” Perry replied, “If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.”

Guess what? The governor wants to free him immediately.

Abbott wants an army of undisciplined thugs who will murder people he doesn’t like. It’s the authoritarian mindset.

“It’s what happens in Uganda or El Salvador,” said Cofer, a former prosecutor. “Total abrogation of the rule of law. And what’s even worse is that Abbott knows better. He was a smart Texas Supreme Court Justice. He knows this is legally wrong. Profoundly wrong. Pure politics.”

But it works! I know I would never consider living in Texas. I won’t even visit the state anymore. Abbott is doing a great job of driving anyone who would oppose him away.