The Tiger Mafia might lose a kingpin

It’s a small thing in the grand mess we’re in, but it’s still good to see that “Doc” Antle, the insufferable exploiter from that Tiger King documentary, has been charged with felonies for his abuse of animals.

Bhagavan Antle, who is known as Doc and is the owner of Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina, was charged with two felony counts related to wildlife trafficking and 13 additional misdemeanors, according to the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia. Tawny Antle and Tilakam Watterson, daughters of Mr. Antle, are also facing several misdemeanor charges in connection with animal cruelty and alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act.

You know, everyone in that documentary was an awful person. Can we just arrest them all and get it over with?

The arrogance of TERFs

The Royal Society of Biology is celebrating Biology Week 2020, and some random TERFy twit saw it as an opportunity to declare that sex is determined at conception, observed at or before birth and is immutable, none of which is universally true. I’m particularly annoyed at the claim that sex is determined at conception. To a real biologist, “determination” is a specific term with a specific definition — “The normal process by which a less specialized cell develops or matures to become more distinct in form and function” — and sex is most definitely not determined at conception, but emerges progressively over time, requiring many genes and many cellular interactions to reach its final state. In humans, the process isn’t even complete at adolescence!

So take note of how the Royal Society of Biology responds to that TERFy intrusion.

“Please take your transphobia out of our hashtag please. BYE”. Hah.

You know, you can disagree with the consensus of biologists. You can disagree with the major scientific societies. You can disagree with the big name biology journals. But when you do that, you can no longer assert that biology, as a generic institution, supports your claims. To be honest, you have to admit to dissenting from biology, and then you’re likely to make gross errors of fact, as @TriciaFasman did with her claim that sex is determined at conception.

Yet they persist, and there’s Ms Fasman lecturing the Royal Society of Biology on biology to defend a fantasy author’s misconceptions about biology. Sweet. I’m used to TERFs hectoring me about their bogus understanding of biology, but wow, here’s one self-righteously wagging a finger at a whole scientific society. The arrogance is impressive.

But hey, if you really think fantasy authors have more authority in biology than, you know, biologists, you can always find that Neil Gaiman and Stephen King are saying the words “trans rights”, and they’re both far better writers than Rowling.

(Seriously, TERFs, if you try to comment here that you’ve got the backing of biology supporting your claims, I’m going to laugh at you and swing the banhammer, just as I do with racists and creationists who pretend that biology supports their fuckwittery. It doesn’t.)

[random attribute] + [subjective, complex phenomenon] → BAD STUDY

You’d think reviewers and journals would figure this formula out. It’s practically a guaranteed recipe for a bad paper. Pick some random feature, like, say, carrying a guitar case. Then correlate it with some messy, subjective and almost impossible to measure property, like sexual attractiveness. Bingo! You are guaranteed to generate statistics, whether positive or negative, and can find an undiscriminating journal somewhere that will publish it. Then, even better, some tabloid will pick up the story and give you publicity with headlines like, “CARRY A GUITAR TO ATTRACT THE LADIES!”

I didn’t pick my examples at random. There actually was a paper titled “Men’s music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context”, now retracted, that tried to make that claim with crappy (and probably faked) statistics.

The same author, Nicholas Guéguen, also had a paper retracted previously that claimed that high heels make women sexier. Oh, I should have mentioned — another important element of the recipe is to make sure one of the elements has something to do with sexual stereotypes.

Apparently, Nicholas Guéguen has published about 340 papers using the magic formula. Publishers still haven’t caught on. Or they have, and they don’t care, they just want more garbage to churn.

It’s depressing.

Rivers running to the sea!

Trump has something novel to complain about. In addition to failing to rake their forests, California allows their rivers to flow.

To add to the irony, he complains to Hannity that AOC and others are “not-bright people” who “don’t have any experience with the environment”.

Why is this nincompoop still president?

Baby spiders are voracious

As long as I was up early, I darted into the lab and fed my horde of baby spiders. I think I may need to increase their feeding frequency because whoa, they were eager. The tubes they are living in are a dense maze of silk, so you drop a fly in and they are instantly trapped and flailing about, and the babies just home in right away. They’re currently still a little smaller than a fruit fly (but they’re fattening up nicely), making for a nice little battle with a juicy reward at the end.

The adults, on the other hand, are experiencing a bit of seasonal malaise, I think, and are a bit sluggish. I’m going to have to do a major cleanup of their cages and maybe that’ll brighten them up a bit…but that’ll have to wait until after Thanksgiving. I just have too much to dooooooooo…

Dang it, woke up too early

I’m just a simmering mass of anxieties nowadays, so I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

What really annoyed me, though, is that was about the time my dad would wake us up to go fishing on a charter boat. We’d get up at this absurd hour, and head out to the docks where we’d stop at a restaurant full of salty dogs and chow down on a big platter of pancakes. So now I’m craving pancakes.

Then we’d get on the boat and cruise out over the Columbia bar, which was always a thrill ride that put stomachs full of pancakes at risk, but never bothered me much. Now I want a boat ride on 20 foot swells.

A full day of fishing, catching our limit of salmon early, then dropping our lines down deep and catching a load of bottom fish, cod and halibut, then heading home for a dinner of fresh salmon, and brining the rest for the smokehouse. Now I want my salmon.

This is Minnesota, though, and I’ve got a day of lecturing and grading ahead of me. Need ocean, as long as I’m getting up before sunrise anyway. Do early mornings flood native Midwesterners with memories of milking the cows or harvesting the corn or whatever? Because I’m lacking that connection.

We bearded white guys all look alike

It’s creepy. Even the expressions are the same. If one of them committed a crime, I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup.

Fortunately, it’s easy this time, because they all committed a crime. These are some of the Michigan yahoos who plotted to kidnap the governor and start a civil war.

The FBI revealed Thursday that it thwarted a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, unsealing charges against six people who it said contemplated a violent overthrow of the government as state authorities charged seven more who they said wanted to attack police and ignite a civil war.

The plotters, according to an FBI affidavit, seemed to be motivated by their belief that state governments, including Michigan’s, were violating the Constitution. One of those involved complained in June that Whitmer (D) was controlling the opening of gyms — an apparent reference to coronavirus shutdown restrictions. But unbeknown to them, the FBI had confidential informants recording many of their discussions, according to the affidavit.

President Trump has been publicly critical of Michigan’s leaders because of the state-imposed measures to stem the spread of the coronavirus, tweeting in April, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.”

I don’t think they’re antifa supporters. These are members of a right-wing militia, and our president hasn’t yet figured out who is really fomenting the violence. Lock them up, and hey, let’s get a president who can figure out who the real problems are.

Meanwhile, am I going to have to shave? No, wait, then I’d look like a neo-Nazi. Maybe it’s not the beards, or the sullen expressions…is it the skin color? Because I can’t fix that.

Should I regret missing the VP debate?

I’m done for the day at the university — I’ve still got hours of grading to do — and I’m recuperating at home. My voice is gone! I’m hungry, but I have to do dishes first. Then grading.

I finally caught up on last night’s debate. I didn’t watch it, so I’m getting second-hand impressions. Mainly what I’m hearing is that Kamala Harris was the clear winner, but that she was also somewhat restrained and didn’t disembowel Pence on stage like I’d hoped she would. I also heard there were sound political reasons why she was cautious…in particular, that a black woman would never be able to get away with that kind of assertiveness. I would like to point out, though, that no matter how meek and demure she might have been, the Right was going to accuse her of being mean and unladylike.

Also, in a surprising twist of an argument, she isn’t even black. You can trust Dave Rubin, he assures us he isn’t racist at all before springing that on us. She is apparently Indian and Jamaican, which some people say isn’t really black.

Wow. I am so looking forward to Trump using that line of defense.

Also, Harris was “unlikable”, says the smarmiest, sleaziest, dumbest pundit on YouTube.

Perfection.

On a busy day with lots of intermittent distractions, I have to admire Le Guin’s writing schedule.

The thing about the teaching day is that it’s broken up into short blocks sprinkled throughout the day, so blocks of time in which you build up so momentum don’t happen — you get short intervals which you have to spend getting ready for the next one hour chunk of something completely different. It could be better, if we had something like a 4 hour block of teaching, and a 4 hour block of research, but nope, everything is interleaved and we’re trying to mesh with every other faculty member and student needs.

Maybe someday, if I live long enough to retire. Except I notice Le Guin doesn’t include much spidering in her schedule, so there’d have to be a few differences.