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.

oh crap it’s thursday

Every semester has a worst day of the week, and for me this term it’s the dreaded Thursday: lab, my writing class, committee meetings, sometimes a senior seminar, and as always grading. Lab this time around demands a 2 hour prep ahead of time, as well.

I kind of like Mondays this term. I’ve recovered over the weekend, I’ve just got one big cell bio lecture, and labs don’t start for me until Tuesday. I can plunge into a Monday still fresh and optimistic, but I’m afraid that has totally worn off by Thursday.

Oh hey, I’ve also got to tend to the fly crop and the spider colony today. I hope you all appreciated the fly I sent off to Utah yesterday. I just told it to go west and find the biggest shithead you can smell, land on it, and teabag it for the cameras. The spiders are on the way to lay eggs in his ears, I hope the timing is good so they hatch out on election day.

Catholicism…REVOKED!

Were the right magic words spoken during your baptism? If not, you might not be truly Catholic, according to the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

For centuries, the baptismal formula in the Roman Catholic Church has been: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Most Protestant churches have also used this formula.

Toward the end of the 20th century, however, a few baptismal ministers began tinkering with the formula. A few ministers have said “We baptize” to bring out the familial or community dimension of the baptism.

For example, a priest might say, “In the name of the father and of the mother, of the godfather and of the godmother, of the grandparents, of the family members, of the friends, in the name of the community we baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

In June the congregation, which deals with doctrinal issues, ruled that a baptism was invalid if the minister said, “We baptize” instead of “I baptize.…”

This kind of literalist stickling has led to major imaginary problems! One priest saw in a video of his baptism that the guy said “we” when soaking his head, and that meant his life was a lie, and he was never a Catholic or a priest.

But since his ordination in 2017 was invalid, people who went to Hood’s “Masses” did not really attend Mass and did not receive consecrated bread at Communion. It also means that his absolutions in confession were not sacramental. His confirmations and anointing of the sick were also invalid. When he performed these sacraments, he was not even a Christian, let alone a priest.

And look at this — clearly, SJWs and their goofy pronouns are servants of Satan, undermining Christianity by spawning hordes of the unshriven.

This isn’t the first time the formula, which the congregation holds was mandated by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, has been tested. Some priests have tried gender-neutral nouns: “I baptize you in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier.” Others used “Creator, Liberator and Sustainer.”

As an atheist, I have to ask why some Catholics think God is so stupid that he can’t understand meaning and is ridiculously focused on the precise formula of the words. I mean, this is the same god who accepts Catholics baptized in Latin, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian, and Chinese, where the specific words are entirely different from English, so shouldn’t he be fully capable of grasping a range of minor variations in phrasing? He sounds a bit like my bank voice recognition system, which only accepts a limited range of words as input and gags if I mumble a bit.

Still, I halfway wish it were true. It would be hilarious if I got to heaven and got admitted because my childhood priest said the right incantation while the Pope got kicked out on a technicality. Although it would also kind of suck if you were condemned to an eternity in hell and had to tell your roomie in the Pit that you were there because your priest used gender-inclusive language, while he gets to brag about being an axe-murderer.

The lies that form the popular misunderstandings of genetics

Marcus Ranum discusses an outrageous article on racist abuses of genetics.

It’s really depressing if you study the history of how Darwin’s great idea was immediately grabbed and warped into social darwinism (racism), and scientific racism (racism) with a sprinkling of pop psychology and garbage social science thrown in, to create a witches’ brew of wrongness that is still with us, to this day: [politico]

“You’ve never seen him sick. You’ve never seen him without energy,” Brenden Dilley, a self-described “MAGA life coach,” told his viewers on his radio show Friday. “[He’s] not walking around with weak-ass, p—- f—— genetics. He ain’t got those liberal genes. These are, like, god-tier genetics; top 1-percentile genetics.”

That’s a nearly perfect summary of the stupidity and ignorance of scientific racism. I’m not going to try, but I’m pretty sure one could write a book, or a goodly thick pamphlet, just digging into what’s wrong about that chucklefuck’s stated beliefs.

You could, but it would be exhausting and would have to start with teaching biology from scratch. Just the idea that there is something called “god-tier genetics” or “top 1-percentile genetics” has me reeling at the depth of the misconceptions in this guy’s head. There’s no such thing, he has no idea of what genes Trump has, and he probably couldn’t even explain what a “gene” was if you pinned him down on it, or what makes for “god gene” vs a “mere mortal gene”.

That Politico article, by the way, is just horrible lazy “journalism” — it quotes MAGA twit after MAGA twit, reporting their idiot takes without taking any time to point out that they’re all wrong, anti-scientific, and based on nothing but ignorance and fantasy. Brendan Dilley is a high school graduate (at least he got that far) and is now a “MAGA life coach” and “works in the world of commercial real estate development” and has now had his dumbass ideas about genetics promoted far and wide without any pushback from Politico. This is one of the ways we got into this situation, journalistic outlets dumping bad ideas on the media without any critical thought…and further, specifically seeking out the very worst ideas to publish for their entertainment value.

Where’s the evaluation of their sources? Where’s the statement that Brendan Dilley is an unqualified buffoon who is wrong about genetics? At the very least, where’s the “he said she said” journalism, the lowest form of reporting, in which they balance the bullshit with comments from real geneticists who know what they’re talking about? Politico can’t even do that. Journalism has a responsibility to inform in addition to dumbly reporting the opinions of fools.

The Raccoons of the Resistance have a realistic perspective

As long as they can avoid getting all duckist.

Yes! Recognize the flaws in our democracy, but the first step in correcting them is to vote for a party that isn’t amplifying them. It’s a tiny step, and don’t assume voting for Biden fixes anything — it’s just the beginning of the fight.

The choice also ought to be easy for any reasonable person: that other party is the home of QAnon, the emerging prion disease that is eating brains softened by decades of Republican propaganda. QAnon alone is the one issue that ought to resolve the debate for any atheist (not you, David Silverman), because that crap is one terrifying cult.

Sometimes, the Nobel Committee does the right thing

There has been an ongoing and ugly legal battle over rights to the CRISPR/Cas technology for gene editing, which has swiftly become an important tool in the molecular biology toolbox. I think most of us agree that the people most responsible for the discovery are Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, but then the Broad Institute under Eric Lander saw a hot topic, threw bodies at the problem, and rushed to get their fingers in the pie, including, as a sneaky tactic, publishing a review article that downplayed the role of Doudna/Charpentier. It was a nasty, greedy game they were playing, and I’d hoped people would see through it.

Apparently they did, because now Doudna and Charpentier have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Justice served!

It’s clear now that history has stamped Doudna and Charpentier with the credit for this scientific discovery, which is nice. I doubt that that will matter much to the legal system which determines who gets stamped with all the money from the patents, but it is a step forward.

Gladiatorial games, now open to the public

I’ve got a research student, Ade Atolani, and we’ve been in the lab recently, learning the basics…which mainly involves learning how to configure and aim a camera at a spider, throwing in a few flies, and talking about what’s going on during the bloodthirsty gladiatorial games. Then we do a few things to figure out how to transfer files and upload them to YouTube. Here are a couple of examples, nothing too exciting, but just the ordinary routine of getting a student comfortable with observing spider behavior.

This one is an adult:

This is a month-old juvenile:

Maybe we should start selling tickets to the spectacle? We can’t do betting, though, because the spider always wins.

Shilling for Big Vitamin!

Hey! Attention, consumers! I need to give you Important Informations!

I used to be like you, tired, worn out, full of aches and pains. It used to be a regular feature of my life that one joint or the other would flare up and start misbehaving. I’d injure myself rolling over in bed. I’d plan my summers around my annual knee eruption, which I could do nothing about but suffer. I’d think, well, this is just life, this is what getting old feels like, it’s just going to get worse and worse until one day I shatter my spine by breathing, and then it’ll be over.

Last spring, though, I had a routine check up with my doctor, and he mentioned casually that, you know, a lot of Minnesotans, we of the Northern climes, have vitamin D deficiencies — the vitamin you can synthesize with sunlight — because while we do have plenty of sunshine, we tend to huddle indoors all winter long to avoid freezing to death, and some of us have jobs that are performed under fluorescent lights even in the summer. I think he may have noticed my pasty-pale complexion and had reason to suspect I was one of those subterranean creatures who shun the light and live like mushrooms.

So I’ve been taking vitamin D supplements every day, and I just want to say…I think it worked. This has been my most pain-free summer in years, and I haven’t had a single knee or ankle or other random joint explode on me even once! It’s a miracle!

Anyway, just drop my name or use promo code…oh, wait, I don’t have a promotional deal with Big Vitamin, so never mind. These things are fairly cheap and seem to have made a big difference for me*.

It’s also given me exuberant hair growth and a minor derangement of some sort, but that’s a small price to pay.

*Possible confounding variable: I did a lot of summer research outdoors, so a fair bit of walking and far more sun than usual. That might have helped.

OK, also, major dietary change. My wife and I have thoroughly embraced the Mediterranean diet, so a bit of keto (but not over the top), lots of fish and olive oil and green vegetables and eggs. Possible slight contribution there.

Yeah, and I’ve lost 25 pounds or so since March. No way that could have done anything, right?

Oh, and I’ve been avoiding filthy, disease-ridden humans for half a year. Nah, that couldn’t possibly have any health effects.

It’s the little bottle of vitamins, yeah, that’s the ticket! But seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d been running a vitamin D deficiency for several years, so it’s probably a good idea to have corrected that.