Death will find a way

I was getting all gloomy at the thought that classes resume in 6 weeks, but this cheered me right up: at least we’re not experiencing a Great Dying right now! Geologists have come up with a plausible explanation for the cause of the Permian extinction, 250 million years ago. Massive, prolonged volcanic eruptions in Siberia released clouds of halogens into the atmosphere that destroyed the ozone layer worldwide, having catastrophic effects on plant life.

Here’s an easy-to-digest video on the subject.

I don’t know about you, but awareness of our inevitable doom always makes me happy to live life in the moment. If it isn’t rocks falling from space, it’s our planet’s crust rupturing and spewing poisonous gases into the atmosphere, or permafrost melting and releasing ancient pathogens, or our own stupidity putting Donald Trump or Boris Johnson in charge. I think Ian Malcolm was wrong: the correct phrase is “Death will find a way.”

Portal to the void

We kind of wrapped our July spider survey today — there are a few homes on our list where the owners were absent, and we’re a bit reluctant to barge into people’s garages without permission. We might check into a few of those tomorrow, but otherwise, it’s time for me to sit down and enter all this data into the computer.

Just for fun, I wandered about the science building taking a few photos. Here, for instance is a lovely funnel web I found in a corner of one window, on the outside. There was also a large dark body lurking deep in the funnel, but dang, macro photography has problems with depth of field.

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Sciencing the accusations against antifa

I approve this use of the scientific method to debunk the Portland police. They fed this stupid rumor that antifa was mixing quick-setting cement into milkshakes to do more harm to the fascists they were protesting. There was no evidence of such behavior, but it quickly became a right-wing talking point.

So Willamette Week tested the assertion. They made vegan milkshakes, then stirred in cement. It can be done! Unfortunately for the accusers and the credibility of the Portland police, it can’t be done surreptitiously.

Neither the Portland Police Bureau nor any witness has been able to produce credible evidence that a single cement milkshake was thrown June 29. But a concrete milkshake is distinctive, as we learned. It’s gritty, clumpy and a dark color. If such concoctions weren’t seen June 29, that is almost certainly because there weren’t any.

Cement milkshakes also won’t set, confirming what I heard from many people that sugar interferes with the process.

The entanglement of science with money and crime

The system in the USA has led to deep systemic flaws in all kinds of important institutions. One of the arguments Lawrence Krauss used to try to dissuade me from criticizing Jeffrey Epstein was that he gives so much money to so many scientific enterprises. He’s a friend of science! He donated to Krauss’s Origins Project at ASU. He was dropping millions of dollars on various universities. Look at Harvard, they were happy to take cash from a child rapist.

My university is a small liberal arts college, not well known at all, so I don’t think anyone as perverted as Epstein has donated to us, but I have to be honest. We’re always cash-strapped, so if Epstein had called up and said he wants to give us a million dollars, our administration might well have leapt at it. It’s hard to blame the recipients of corruption when our country is trying so hard to make our educational institutions so desperate (not Harvard, though — Harvard never has any excuse, other than that they’re greedy and grasping for more).

Read this long thread from Nathan Oseroff-Spicer to see how deep the rot has gone.

He highlights two big names, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker. They are not accused of participating in any of Epstein’s sex crimes. Instead, what you see is an unhealthy respect for the wealthy, which motivates them to actively defend a child rapist, or in more generous circumstances, to kindly turn a blind eye to his activities. They are part of the silencing machine of rape culture. Epstein, and many others, are exploiting the system to rape and abuse, but even larger numbers of well-connected people are conspiring to keep it quiet. They wouldn’t even think of raping a child, but hey, that guy who would — he’s bringing megabucks to our research program. Let’s keep his activities out of the public eye, let’s minimize the complaints of his victims, let’s accuse anyone who criticizes rapists of inciting a “moral panic”. As Rebecca Solnit writes:

Monsters rule over us, on behalf of monsters. Now, when I think about what happened with Strauss-Kahn, who was subsequently accused of sexual assault by several other women, and with cases like his, it’s the secondary characters who seem to matter most. These men could not do what they did without a culture—lawyers, journalists, judges, friends—that protected them, valued them, devalued their victims and survivors. They do not act alone, and their might is nothing more or less than the way a system rewards and protects them, which is another definition of rape culture. That is, their impunity is not inherent; it’s something the society grants them and can take away.

You want a particularly vivid example? Just look at Alexander Acosta, the attorney who negotiated that absurdly evil sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein in Florida. He arranged a slap-on-the-wrist prison deal for Epstein — he was free to go about his business, but just had to report in to the prison at night for 13 months — and as a reward, Acosta was promoted to US labor secretary. Now in his elevated position, he’s using his power to cut the budget of the agency responsible for combating child sex trafficking by 80%. Solnit was understating the problem.

Our country is run by a wealthy sex predator who elevates amoral people who have defended other wealthy sex predators to positions where they can protect more sex predators. Meanwhile, academics at wealthy institutions tut-tut those who point out the obvious conflict here as part of “a growing sexual-assault bureaucracy” that “maintains a vested interest in fueling the panic”. We’re being impressively gaslit by these apologists for rape culture.

There’s very little penalty for actively working to maintain rape culture. I learn from Rebecca Watson that Krauss is being rewarded with cruise to Cambodia and Vietnam, with his good buddy Richard Dawkins, funded by the Origins Project — you know, the foundation that used to be funded in part by Jeffrey Epstein. You too can join this luxurious 8-day / 7-night riverboat cruise with Krauss and Dawkins for the low, low price of $10,000.

Krauss is still the president of the board of directors of the Origins Project Foundation — his dismissal from his position at ASU doesn’t affect that in the slightest. Take a look at all the well-known people serving on that board. Some of them I’ve met and engaged with in the context of the atheist movement, and there they are, willingly serving a known sexual harasser and creep. I can sympathize with wanting to support a good cause, but they’re doing it by enabling a bad man. That’s how rape culture thrives.

I’m glad to be out of it. Especially since Rebecca is going to launch all those moral cowards into the sun.

ICE abhors a vacuum

Do you have an empty prison in your neighborhood? ICE will fill it up for you, no matter how dilapidated and horrid it might be.

When members of Congress reached a bipartisan deal to end the government shutdown in February, they gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement a simple instruction: Stop detaining so many people. Instead, ICE pushed its detention population to an all-time high of 54,000 people, up from about 34,000 on an average day in 2016 and well above the 40,520 target Congress set for ICE.

Now, just after Congress rejected another request for more detention money, ICE is continuing to spend money it hasn’t been given. Mother Jones has learned that ICE has started using three new for-profit immigration detention centers in the Deep South in recent weeks. One of them has seen the death of three inmates following poor medical treatment and a violent riot in 2012 that left a guard dead.

That one is the Adams County correctional facility in Mississippi, which was so awful and poorly run that the Justice Department shut it down…but nothing can be too bad for housing immigrants and immigrant children.

Don’t overlook the key phrase there: for-profit detention centers. The Adams County facility is run by CoreCivic, the largest such organization in the country, and which was founded by — hold on to your hats — a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists. These vermin need to make money somehow, so they’re happy to get government contracts to abuse people.

CoreCivic also owns the Prairie Correctional Center, a currently empty 1600 bed facility just down the road from me, in Appleton, MN. You can bet they’re drooling at the thought of turning it into a money mill once again for ICE.

You know, for-profit prisons of any kind are an abomination. They all ought to be closed. And the laws ought to change so they stop throwing hordes of people into any prison at all — one sign that we might be a nascent fascist nation is that we’ve got the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.

Spider population explosion!

The numbers don’t lie: the results in progress say the spider population has been surging since June (which is, well, not unexpected and won’t get us published in Nature). I’ll be curious to see if it continues to rise in August, and since we’re seeing a fair number of spiderlings everywhere, I expect it will.

We’re already talking about extending the study a couple more months, at least until the first snow, so we can catch the expected decline. The only problem with that is that we can’t do the intensive survey in September and October that we can in July, since I’ll be back to work teaching, and the students will be back to work learning. Maybe we can do a representative subset, though.

Also, I don’t think my bones can handle simultaneously teaching and doing field work. I’m pretty much worn out already, and am getting up in the morning to take prophylactic NSAIDs to keep going. The exercise is good for me, right?

Totally unsurprising Epsteinism

You just knew that Jeffrey Epstein had to have had this conversation over and over again.

“He hates every story starting with ‘billionaire pervert,’” Mr. Hay said. “Jeffrey had long stories about the difference between pedophilia with very young children and tweens and teens a little older.” He added, “It was his way of trying to talk his way around it.”

“Long stories”? Oh, do tell. Let’s hear them. Was Lawrence Krauss a receptive audience for these stories?

On second thought, no. I don’t have a puke bucket on hand. These may come out in the trial, though, so I think I’m going to have to avoid reading the transcripts.

Here’s something else to avoid reading: the official charges against Epstein. Not safe for work if you move your lips while reading.

Pulp artists needed cephalopod anatomy lessons

I am OFFENDED. There’s this collection of pulp magazine covers featuring cephalopods, and they’re terrible.

Look at this one: I have a thousand questions. Why are they exploring an alien planet in skimpy clothes? Why is the man wearing a space helmet, but the woman apparently doesn’t need one? Why does the cephalopod have its mouth in the wrong place, and why does it have teeth?

Nice headlights, octopus-man. Also, why is his human face a couple of stories tall? Does the artist know nothing of perspective?

This is the worst one of them all. It’s asymmetric, with some arms on the left improbably long, while the ones on the right looking different. It’s got this hunchbacked, bug-like look with appendages coming off the mantle. This was drawn by a person who apparently never saw a cephalopod.

I swear, I’m going to stop this time-machine and turn it back 70 years just so I can slap a couple of bad artists.