No respite from the gloom. Must be winter for sure.

Oh no. Even warm cozy Earth isn’t safe from the nihilism of the void. Here’s a story about parasitic wasps that lay their eggs on spiders. It’s another horrible tale of zombie arthropods, their endocrine system hijacked by wasp larvae to force them to build a nice silken web to house the wasp.

After the web is spun, the nearly mature wasp overlord injects the spider with poison, finally killing it. But in terms of free will, Eberhard says, the spider has been dead all along.

“Once the spider has been stung by the female wasp, it’s effectively reproductively dead,” Eberhard tells Newscripts. “It’s maybe going to live for another couple of weeks, but it now has that egg on it, and later the larva, and so it’s done for.”

Unfortunately for the spider, it doesn’t end with death. After killing the spider, the newly hatched wasp regurgitates digestive fluid onto the host body and sucks out its insides for nutrients. Dracula, surely, would be proud.

We live in a dark universe, obviously.

The loneliest little robots

It’s feeling chilly here in Minnesota this morning. Then I realized it could be worse — I could be adrift in a soulless, nearly empty void, sensing a sharp drop in the frequency of encountering rare particles in the vacuum as I crossed a boundary into interstellar space. Yeah, I was just reading about Voyager 2 leaving the heliosphere.

It’s far, far away.

From beyond the heliosphere, the signal from Voyager 2 is still beaming back, taking more than 16 hours to reach Earth. Its 22.4-watt transmitter has a power equivalent to a fridge light, which is more than a billion billion times dimmer by the time it reaches Earth and is picked up by Nasa’s largest antenna, a 70-metre dish.

It’s traveling at 55,000 km/hour, it’s been zooming out there for about 42 years, and it’s only 16 light-hours from Earth? That puts those silly SF novels in their place. 8,760 light-hours in a single light-year…Voyager has barely started out.

The two Voyager probes, powered by steadily decaying plutonium, are projected to drop below critical energy levels in the mid-2020s. But they will continue on their trajectories long after they fall silent. “The two Voyagers will outlast Earth,” said Kurth. “They’re in their own orbits around the galaxy for 5bn years or longer. And the probability of them running into anything is almost zero.”

Maybe…maybe I should just crawl back into bed and snuggle up under the covers. It’s warm in there, and I’ve only got a little while.

Train people are definitely strange

A quote from J. K. Huysman’s Against Nature:

Does there exist here below a being, conceived in the joys of fornication and born amid the pangs of childbirth, whose figure and whose form is more dazzling, more splendid than that of those two locomotives adopted by the Northern railway line?

One, the Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, her long delicate body imprisoned in a glittering corset of copper, as supple and sinewy as a stretching cat, a showy, gilded blonde whose extraordinary grace is frightening, when, stiffening her muscles of steel, beginning to sweat on her warm flanks, she sets in shuddering motion the immense rosette of her slender wheels and springs forward, eagerly, across hill and dale!

The other, the Engerth, is a dark and monumental brunette with a deep husky cry, her brawny loins constrained by a cast-iron girdle, a monstrous beast with a dishevelled mane of black smoke, and six low, coupled wheels, what a crushing force she has when, making the earth tremble, she slowly, ponderously pulls the heavy tail of her goods-wagons! ‘Certainly there’s nothing to match such delicate slenderness and terrifying force in the dainty beauty of the blonde and the majestic beauty of the brunette; one can surely say that man, in his own way, has done as well as the God in which he believes.

(From Helena Constantine’s MeWe page, which is not at all safe for work)

Seriously, dude, no one should get that hyperbolically erotic about anything that isn’t a spider, but you be you.

If you think I’m hostile to Bill Maher…

…you need to read David Gorski about the latest episode of Real Time. He’s got the full quarter hour of Maher chatting with an anti-vaxxer.

The interview started off with Maher introducing Dr. Jay as a “noted author and pediatrician who gives vaccines to children, to adults, and to himself but who has been called an ‘antivaxer.’” Things went rapidly south from there. As always, Maher’s smugness was something to behold. After the standard pleasantries when introducing any guest, Maher opined about how “it’s courageous today just to speak at all about the subject of vaccines,” leading Dr. Jay to interject, “They do take shots at you.” Of course, some “shots” are deserved. When you promote antivaccine misinformation on a national stage, hell yes, Mr. Maher and Dr. Jay, I am very likely going to “take shots” at you because you deserve it. Maher, as usual, went smugly on about how vaccines are one thing in this culture for which there is only “the one true opinion” and how “we don’t play that game here”, which is his usual self-serving arrogant nonsense when he wants to spout nonsense about “Western medicine.” The only reason Dr. Jay and Mr. Maher get so much pushback is because they promote dangerous antivaccine misinformation.

The smugness when he said those words, “we don’t play that game here”, might be a lethal dose all by themselves, but Maher goes on and on, raging about those doctors who don’t know anything.

Needs more Nazi-punching

A group of cowardly jerk-offs gathered at the Emmett Till memorial, which they can’t shoot up anymore because it’s been made bullet-proof, to whimper a bit.

We are here at the Emmett Till monument that represents the Civil Rights Movement for blacks. What we want to know is, where are all of the white people?

Huh. Strange question. I can at least say they aren’t lying in a coffin, battered into unrecognizability, because they were the ones doing the battering. Did they expect a complementary monument to the racists who beat Till to death, shot him, mutilated his body, and threw him into a river? I don’t see any heroics or sacrifices made by those white people, because they got acquitted by an all-white jury.

Nothing has changed. Want to hear Richard Spencer rage about Jews and black people, saying My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit? We have been blessed with a recording.

I guess that partly answers where all the white people were.

You know, Richard B. Spencer still has a Twitter account, still gets invited to pontificate on CNN, is still favorably regarded by the alt-right.

Are people still arguing about whether it’s good or bad to punch Nazis? Because think that debate is now settled.

Sunlight + fertilizer is no longer a good disinfectant

I remember when James Randi exposed the supposed psychic faith healer, Peter Popoff by revealing that he was receiving secret radio messages from his off-stage accomplices. That was smart skepticism. That was when we could say “Sunlight is the best disinfectant!” and argue that putting these frauds under a spotlight was a good and effective move in discrediting them (never mind that after that setback, Popoff is still bilking gullible people out of their money with the same schtick). It’s the kind of activity I imagine as a fruitful approach for skeptics to take, and it’s as old as Houdini.

But now imagine a different flavor of skepticism, in which Randi had instead given them a literal spotlight, putting them up on a podium, shining a bright light on them, aiming cameras at their faces, and then letting them do their spiel, pretending to “heal” audience members, and all the while he sat back with a smug look on his face. Then he sits them down and has a sincere face-to-face talk with them, praising their people skills, agreeing with them that science doesn’t have all the answers, suggesting that their showmanship provides “food for thought”. Then, when he gets criticized for fluffing a fraud, he declares “Sunlight is the best disinfectant!”

Would anyone else see the problem with that? Because, while I can’t imagine Randi pulling such a shady stunt, that is exactly what Bill Maher does every week. He provides a platform for awful people under the pretense of bringing nonsense into the daylight, but he never really confronts any of them. He certainly never confronts them effectively.

So this week Maher brought an anti-vaxxer and a far right propagandist onto the stage.

The latest edition of Real Time featured the “edgy” funnyman jousting with Dennis Prager, the right-wing propagandist behind PragerU (a conservative, fact-averse YouTube-video factory posing as a university whose greatest hits include an anti-immigrant manifesto by Japanese internment-defender Michelle Malkin; a spiel about how police actually don’t discriminate against black men; and a whole lot of “War on Christmas” content), and Dr. Jay N. Gordon, one of the leaders of the anti-vaxx movement who once defended not administering the measles vaccine to his patients by calling it “a benign childhood illness.”

First up was Dr. Gordon, and lo and behold, Maher not only declined to challenge the controversial pediatrician’s anti-vaxx views, but agreed with them.

“You know, to call you this crazy person—really, what you’re just saying is slower [vaccinations], maybe less numbers, and also take into account individuals,” said Maher, in response to Dr. Gordon’s comments that vaccines may cause autism. “People are different. Family history, stuff like that. I don’t think this is crazy. The autism issue, they certainly have studied it a million times…and yet, there’s all these parents who say, I had a normal child, got the vaccine…this story keeps coming up. It seems to be more realistic to me, if we’re just going to be realistic about it.”

“Maybe is my whole point with this. We just don’t know so much,” Maher added, calling vaccines “the beginning of the debate” and saying that he’s “concerned about what happens down the road.” (Virtually the entire medical community is in agreement that vaccines don’t cause autism.)

Next came Dennis Prager, who joined USC journalism professor Christina Bellantoni and former Obama undersecretary Richard Stengel for the panel portion of the show.

“The Russia collusion thing didn’t turn out to be anything,” offered Prager in a stunning denial of reality. No pushback from Maher. Russia “didn’t undermine our democracy” during the 2016 election,” offered Prager in a stunning denial of reality. Minimal pushback from Maher. There was some silly back-and-forth sniping about whether or not Trump is a fascist, whether or not he was guilty of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, Hillary Clinton’s email server (because of course), and the two closed things by suggesting that the allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh may have been false.

These people love to come on Maher’s show because they know he won’t challenge them in the slightest — their crazy ideas will even be normalized, treated as just the usual bit of banter. Maher occupies this strange middle-ground where he gets to pretend to be controversial and edgy, simply by sharing the screen with a wide range of views, but he doesn’t expose anything. What he provides isn’t sunlight, but a kind of murky twilight in which every idea blurs into a dim ambiguity, and in which he gets defended by everyone, atheist, skeptic, conspiracy theorist, quack, because he’s got them all fooled into thinking he’s on their side.

Skeptics: your whole raison d’etre is the idea that you’re harder to fool. So why do you put up with this charlatan?