First lab a success!

Hey, I survived my first lab of the year! It’s a bit strange to me that it’s taken until early October to get around to having an in-person lab, but it’s what we had to do, and I would have started two weeks ago if I hadn’t been quarantined. But we did it! It worked!

The students filed in quietly (eerily quietly) and impressed me by doing their work professionally and efficiently. Did I mention that they were quiet? That’s one thing I missed today — usually there’s a lot more back-and-forth and conversation, but we’re not doing group work this year and everyone is wearing masks and staying two meters away from each other, which does seem to squelch the typical lively interactivity. We can keep going, at least.

At least until we all catch COVID-19 and die! No, that won’t happen. It’s just my ongoing existential dread speaking.

Ugh. Lab.

I have to go in to prep a student lab 2 hours before it starts, which means my day starts at 7am today. Gotta get the yeast started, which means at least I’ve got something in common with a baker.

I’ve also got to don my armor, lab coat, goggles, face shield, and mask. Having to wear PPE is the insult added to the injury of an early start.

Am I terrible for thinking…

…every one of the people in this charming video from 124 years ago is now dead? Even their children are dead?

Yes, I must be feeling morbid. But I also want to know what happened in the rest of their lives.

Bloody-minded stupid people bother me

I thought I was pissed off when Trump took a joyride after being hospitalized with COVID-19. That was disgracefully irresponsible and exposed who knows how many people to his disease — at least his driver, that’s for sure — to accomplish nothing, other than to advertise his insensitivity. I mean, I had a few symptoms two weeks ago, and went in for a coronavirus test that turned out to be negative, and I was still told to quarantine myself for 10 days in case it was a false negative, and I did. That was ten days in which I didn’t even leave my house, and my spiders were hungry and I was desperate for escape, and I was scrupulous in following the recommendations of my doctor.

Trump was diagnosed with a positive case, the disease is spreading rapidly through the White House staff, and he decided to do a ridiculous publicity stunt? Fuck him, and all his little sycophants.

But my annoyance is nothing compared to this woman’s.

I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine. My family has been spared so far, but I fear every day that the slapdash stupid way we implement basic hygiene procedures is going to catch up to me and mine personally, and I’ll probably snap and turn into the avenging angel who wanders through the local grocery store punching every ignorant asshole who wears a mask below their nose in the face.

Hey, Americans — do you even realize how idiotic you look when you wear a mask below your nose, or worse, below your chin?

Does it even cross their little, selfish minds that their irresponsibility might cause suffering?

Old drama, and TERFs revisiting

I seem to have recently stirred up the TERFs, who have been making the usual TERFy accusations, including this one.

Apparently, the only reason I support trans rights is that if I don’t, the all-powerful Trans Lobby will rise up and cancel me and cast me into the outer darkness for all eternity. There are just a few little problems with that imaginary scenario. For one, my accuser says she was one of my “gaggle of blog subscribers”, and I wasn’t so protective of her views at all, since I drove her away.

She canceled me! Oh, nooooo! Appeasing my readers is all I live for, as everyone knows.

Her complaints caught the eye of the one of our “best bloggers” to whom I gave “the witch treatment”. Ophelia Benson had a few things to say about that.

He didn’t defend me. He refrained from joining the other bloggers in trashing me, for a time, but he sure as hell didn’t defend me. He privately begged me to stay, while doing nothing to defend me in public.

Then, in the end, he broke down and did a post saying I needed to “own” my mistakes.

Also, I wasn’t dismissed. I left. That “her dismissal” is a lie. He may have forgotten by now, but the fact is I left.

I will most definitely accept that final correction: before Ophelia could be dismissed, she stomped off in a huff, in the same way that Richard Carrier was not kicked out, but eagerly left the network before we could investigate the accusations against him. They both knew the inevitable conclusion would disclose that he was a harasser, and she was a TERF, and neither are acceptable around these here parts.

But I disagree with the claim that I didn’t defend her, or that it wasn’t public. How else did it happen that I antagonized so many good people in the lead-up to her departure? I struggled with that. She was one of our best bloggers, writing frequently and well, and I was in total denial that such a good progressive feminist could also be hateful towards trans people — I defended her, but did not defend her repulsive views, and kept hoping that reason would bring her around. It did not. She turned out to be far more rigid in her beliefs than I expected, and thus her departure was just a matter of time, and a question of whether she’d leave willingly or we’d kick her out.

Finally, though, it seems to be an article of faith among internet TERFs that I’m held hostage by immense numbers of trans people who give me clicks, and that is the only reason I argue for trans rights. That’s nonsense. If I wanted blog hits, it would be far more profitable to cater to the mobs of cis bigots, who far outnumber the tiny minority of trans individuals. The reason I support trans people is more nefarious than that: I’m a biologist, steeped in the dogmas of biology, which state that sex determination and expression are far more complicated than most people can imagine, and that there are more possible outcomes of the process than just two, and that humans are much more socially and functionally diverse than can be encompassed in a mere two categories, as if we were primitive ants with two castes. I held those views since long before I became aware that TERFs actually exist and think that they understand biology.

That’s particularly galling. All weekend long I was getting indignant messages from TERFs telling me that I don’t understand biology and that real biologists agree that sex is a discrete binary. It’s a bit like being harassed by flat-earthers trying to tell me that a globe violates all the principles of physics, or by creationists confident that more and more True Biologists are abandoning the theory of evolution every day. These are claims that are contradicted by reality and by the experts in the fields, yet they persist in their delusion, and no amount of arguing will convince them otherwise.

I should know that by now, but I have my own delusions.

I voted last week, and I already regret it

Collin Peterson does not belong in the Democratic party.

I made a mistake in my ballot, and I can’t correct it. I mailed it in last week. I voted Democratic party across the board, and I came to Collin Peterson’s name (our conservative DFL representative, who is anti-choice and anti-conservation), and I hesitated — I generally don’t vote at all for that guy because he’s a regressive dinosaur. But then I thought, maybe this one time, because we have to crush the Republican party. And then I thought of all the laughable attack ads the Republicans made against him, painting him as hippy-dippy liberal who votes with Nancy Pelosi 4 out of 5 times, and … I moved my pen and blacked out the spot next to his name. I felt bad about it. But I felt worse about his Republican challenger.

Then I read this account of an encounter with Collin Peterson.

“Do you have any comment as to why you defended Ilhan Omar?” an employee with the National Republican Congressional Committee asked Peterson on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“I don’t defend her. She doesn’t belong in our party,” the 16-term lawmaker responded.

When asked to clarify himself, a COVID-19-masked Peterson repeated, “She doesn’t belong in our party,” as he walked away.

I will have Collin Peterson know that an archaic toad who panders to the right-wing jerks that populate rural Minnesota and has spent his entire long career walking the line to avoid offending conservatives doesn’t belong in my Democratic party, while a Muslim woman who promotes progressive ideas and aligns herself with forward-thinking colleagues does. I won’t ever make the mistake of voting for him again. I feel like I voted for a Republican last week, and it leaves me feeling tainted.

I possess a little spirit of vengeance

Donald Trump has been admitted to Walter Reed hospital “as a precaution”. More likely, the big ol’ bullying coward has been taken by a fear of death — he’s suddenly realizing that the Secret Service cannot protect him, nor can Mitch McConnell, and that he could become one of the statistics that he treats with so little regard.

Awww, poor little preznit. Cheer up! Here is a happy song for him.

Personally, I’m torn, because my humanist values tell me every life is valuable and we should do all we can to alleviate human suffering and even a creature as contemptible as Trump should have a right to basic human dignity…but at the same time, I want him to suffer long and terribly, I want him intubated, I want him to emerge from his ordeal a month from now drained and broken and weeping and helpless to discover that he’d lost the election by a landslide and that his creditors have snatched away all his assets and that the law is serving him a stack of subpoenas and that he has lost everything his greedy, amoral heart thinks is precious. I want him to discover that his trusted inner circle of friends have all been laid low by his own stupid, unconscionable policies. I want karma. I want retributive justice. I want what Damon Young wants.

Normally, I detest those stupid, lazy political cartoons that emerge after the death of a well-known figure, showing them arriving in an afterlife, but I’d make an exception for one that showed a screaming, feculent corpse of an orange man rocketing downwards, jet-propelled by a column of fire shooting out of his ass, with a splashdown in a flaming pit of feces. No pearly gates for that guy. Get to work on that, cartoonists. Just in case.

I feel bad for feeling this way, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and I have to acknowledge my feelings.

It’s going to be a good day, I hope

I am no longer quarantined, so I have big plans for today.

  • I fed all the adult spiders yesterday. They missed me, I could tell, and were pleased to see dinner.
  • I’m going into the lab this morning to feed all the hundreds of babies. I’m more worried about them; the gap in their feeding schedule is more likely to have consequences on their rate of growth.
  • More egg sacs hatched while I was away! I have to sort out more spiderlings.
  • More egg sacs were made! It seems to be a common response at a certain age to start desperately producing a new generation.
  • I’m going to get a flu shot. Vaccines are good.
  • Late this afternoon, Mary and I are driving to Eau Claire, Wisconsin where my daughter and her family have moved. A 4-hour drive is manageable, and probably worth it to see our granddaughter (our grandson is 21 hours away, not a casual drive). I’ll be coming back on Sunday, but once again, my wife is leaving me for a few weeks because I guess she prefers Iliana’s company.

That’s it! That’s my day! Spiders and grandchildren, always a good plan.

Pray for the Preznit

O Lord, the President says he has COVID-19.

We thank you, Jesus, for this once compelling Donald to tell the truth. You did tell him not to lie this time, right? It’s a bit out of character for him, so if he actually has the disease for realz, it would be a kind of divine revelation, I think, a true sign from God. I am praying that his infection is real and true and a sign that he has been touched by the aerosolized Holy Spirit. Hallelujah!

Please, God, make sure he is touched hard.

Forgive him, Lord, for his lapse in listening to the sweet seductive whispers of Satan and getting tested in the first place. We know he’d be fine if he hadn’t tasted of the PCR Test of Knowledge of Positive and Negative Results, and the disease would have just disappeared if he hadn’t peeked. Please forgive him for testing your wisdom, too, and I’m praying real hard that you don’t cast him out of the Rose Garden for his weakness. The temptation was great, he was so desperate for a positive result, any result, of his presidency, and he reached for the one that was in his range.

Sweet Jesus, I beg you to not let him sicken and die, or to spread the plague among the Republican leadership, especially not to Mike Pence, who is surely so holy that he probably does not need chastisement. Oh, wait, Pence is getting tested, too? Never mind. Whip him with your sacred disease, for he surely knows that his suffering would be just.

O Lord, praise You for finally reaching the mind of this worthless <snerk> atheist, getting me down on my knees and beseeching the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to deliver <choke> Donald Trump of this totally imaginary disease that disappeared over the summer and is just like a little flu <hork> and was created by the Democrats conspiring with the Chinese if it were real, which it isn’t <HAAaaa!>.

No, Lord, I’m not sniggering. I’m…I’m…speaking in tongues, that’s the ticket. Now if you don’t mind, I have to get back to praying like a motherfucker for that wretched soul. It’s the least I can do.