The current spider egg case I was hoping to see hatch out with a new generation of spiders isn’t looking so good. I opened it up to find way too many dead eggs, and then made a time lapse to see babies just fading away. It’s sad and miserable. I’m putting it here to document my dismal Christmas eve.
I’m gonna have to cancel Christmas. There is no reason for anyone to celebrate.
You know the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee is packed with Republican science denialists, right? We ought to be embarrassed to be a technological society with government oversight provided by a gang of corrupt, miseducated yahoos who promote policy based on lies. The chair of that committee, Lamar Smith, is chummy with the Heartland Institute, that right-wing think-tank rich people use to promote anti-environmental propaganda.
That makes this story particularly interesting: while denying climate change and aiding the fossil fuel industry, Lamar Smith is himself filthy rich from oil extracted from his Texas “ranch”.
From 1986 until 2016, Smith made at least $2.4 million and as much as $11.1 million through business dealings affiliated with the ranch. Members of Congress report their income in ranges and bundle the types of income they receive. That practice makes it difficult to track sources of payment, business arrangements and specific dollar amounts in receipts.
Hey, I have an idea.
Let’s prohibit the rich from holding high political office. Put a cap on it: you can’t run for a political office if your household income is higher than, say, five times the American median household income. That’s around $60K, so if you’re making more than $300K, you don’t get to run. You don’t get to simultaneously hold political power and economic power. That’s a separation of powers for an egalitarian state I could get behind.
It’s not a flawless suggestion. I can guess already that some might put their money in a temporary trust while they’re in office, so while they’re actually rich in reality, they’re not on paper. The Koch brothers wouldn’t be stopped from their practice of buying up proxy goons (<cough>Scott Walker) to do their dirty work for them. But really, don’t you think every decision Lamar Smith made in Congress was tainted by his financial ties?
Also, since our country was founded by a mob of Rich White Guys with a constitution full of compromises to help Rich White Guys, I can imagine that such a proposal would be considered unconstitutional for religious reasons, our worship of the Founding Fathers.
No ghastly snowmen in Morris this Christmas — the snow on the ground is patchy and thin, and we don’t expect more until the end of the week.
To look for spiders, of course. Mary and I were getting into the spirit of the season and were surveying the area for spiders this morning. We were heartened by the fact that she discovered a salticid in our house — I’d given up on looking, assuming that no self-respecting spider would be out and about in late December in Minnesota, but there it was. So we donned our headgear and started scrutinizing window frames and dusty corners, and we also trooped over to the science building on campus and checked out the hallways and the basement.
Mary caught me in dynamic action pose, staring at cobwebs.
Unfortunately, the spider population was sparse or in deep hiding. We found another salticid in my office, and the husks of a few dead pholcids (lots of pholcids thriving in our basement, though), but no Theridiidae. There were also a few abandoned funnel webs outside. One problem is that the university custodial staff do a really thorough job of demolishing cobwebs and making an inhospitable environment for spiders…and I don’t think there are very many insects to eat there, except maybe in relatively unreachable places, like crawlspaces.
It’s also cold outside. I’ll be interested to see how the population changes in the Spring.
And I just missed it, fortunately. There was a conference going on in Florida, and these were the headliners.
Jesus. And that’s not all. Also speaking at this event were Laura Ingraham, Nigel Farage, Sebastian Gorka, Dennis Prager, Jesse Watters, James O’Keefe, Wilbur Ross, and a mass of other shoggoths. It’s over now, but wow, the worst people on Earth were all gathered in one spot at the same time, and a meteor did not strike, a chasm did not yawn open, thunder and lightning did not scorch that locus of evil into a puddle of burning grease.
Which proves that there is a hell, but there is definitely no god.
I was bragging about Vera’s great skill in capturing multiple prey in minutes, so I thought I’d show you. Basically, whenever I put live flies in the spider’s vial (I feed her 3 times a week), she is off like a shot, immediately charging in to snare them.
She reminds me a lot of my cat that way.
It was tricky keeping her in frame and in focus, but I think you’ll get an idea of how spiders use their webbing to immobilize prey.
Also, I’m going to start doing everything “spider-style”.
He’s not going to be able to wiggle out of this one, although I’m sure he’ll try: Jordan Peterson is a climate change denialist. That link has all the evidence, direct quotes, tweets, etc. He praises some loon who thinks CO2 is steadily declining, leading to the extinction of all life on Earth in 2 million years, and that we ought to praise the heroic oil companies for releasing sequestered carbon and saving the planet. One of his sources is Richard Lindzen, prattling away in a Prager U video. He’s a fool on this subject, and many others.
But why would a well-educated college professor plunge so deeply into ignorance? The article has a good explanation.
But as his former mentor at UofT said, Peterson loves the rhetorical patterns of demagogues. He loves that when they said something and got roars of approval, they repeated it more loudly, and then honed in on the subset of things that got them the biggest roars.
That’s all Peterson is doing. Saying things that his audience loves to hear, reveling in their roars of approval, then repeating himself.
And since his audience is mostly younger, white, conservative men, and that audience has a strong tendency to be climate change deniers and to love trolling liberals, when he says ‘climate change stoopid’, they roar their approval.
Given that he makes a very good income out of this audience, just as Shapiro and Coulter do, this is actually smart, even if venal, ugly, and intellectually dishonest. But Peterson has shown every evidence of venality and intellectual dishonesty while spouting often ugly things — enforced monogamy anyone? — he later pretends were misunderstood for a couple of years. This is just par for the course.
Young, white, conservative men are the root of the problem, I suspect. Of a lot of problems. And it’s wealthy, older white men who are feeding them the poison.
Quick update: here’s a shiny new Parasteatoda postembryo. Nothing exciting happens in this video — it’s nothing but 3 minutes staring into the eyes of a baby spider. It twitches a bit. It waves a leg around, floppily. But so much is happening in its nervous system!
This is one member of the new clutch of Gwyneth’s grandchildren. I’ll be sorting them out this weekend and putting them in individual vials, and maybe by early March they’ll be making Gwyneth’s great-grandchildren.
Every once in a while, kind of like a cycle, some men on the internet get really mad about menstruation, and they start explaining how it’s filthy, unnatural, and disgusting for women to bleed from their vagina. “Why?” they wonder, and the obvious answer is that woman are unclean, they’re eating too much junk food, so menstruation must be their repulsive horrible body’s way of cleansing itself of toxins.
Obvs. I’m kind of curious about this “academia and the arts” cure, though, but not curious enough to wander over to the Art building on campus and ask the women faculty and students about their periods. I suspect they would, if they didn’t call the police, tell me that they’re perfectly normal and didn’t notice any decline in frequency when they entered college.
I’m also interested in this claim that “Men are the superior sex and they don’t have periods because we know how to look after their bodies.” So I could look for some fat lazy slob (why are you looking at me that way) watching trash TV (I didn’t!) and gossiping (I never!) and ask them if they’ve been menstruating lately (no, I’m not going to ask myself) (and no, I’ve never menstruated). I’m wondering if I could take up a diet of Twinkies and cheeseburgers now, and look as svelte as those ladies in the tampon commercials, if only I could start bleeding out of my bottom every month. It might be a fair trade.
It’s not just men who make these claims! Freelee the Banana Girl made similar arguments a while back. If you menstruate, you must have been wicked and accumulating toxins that your body needs to purge.
And don’t forget Yada the Hotep wackaloon. He got really angry when his daughter started menstruating, and went on a quest to find a magic bark and a magic diet that would make her stop. He also claims that animals don’t menstruate…except they sort of do. One way to stop menstruation is to get pregnant, and most mammals only thicken their endometrium seasonally, and typically don’t shed that tissue until they go into labor. Humans have the curse of year-round fertility, so that’s the problem, not that they menstruate, but that they are constantly preparing for a potential pregnancy.
I wrote about this before. It’s not about toxins or cleanses — it’s about maintaining a defensive boundary against those highly invasive mammalian embryos — put up a wall of soft vascularized tissue against the chance that you might get pregnant some month, and then discard it when fertilization fails to occur.
I have never actually been to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, although it’s only an hour north of here, and I’ve driven by/through it many times on my way to Fargo and points north and west. It’s a good-sized city as those things go in this region — about 13,000 people — and I’ve had students from Fergus in my classes. Recently, though, Fergus Falls was libeled by a perfidious German reporter.
I blame Der Spiegel. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there’s a bad trope where some big city newspaper decides to send a reporter to flyover country to figure out how the yokels could have elected an idiot like Trump, and they come in with expectations: they’re going to find a bunch of inbred hicks with no education, no teeth, and a meth or oxycontin addiction, who are slavishly following the orders of their preacher in some benighted Protestant cult (if you’re from the New York Times, you’re also expected to find anything but racism as the cause; foreign papers don’t feel that need). It’s true that if you look you’ll find people who meet your preconceptions, and that you can find them even in the big cities, but the reality is always more complex than that — we have college towns, we have public radio (not just Rush Limbaugh), we have atheists and liberals, and historically, the upper midwest used to be a major center of socialist political activity, and some of those old Democratic-Farmer-Labor people are still around. So don’t show up in our neighborhoods expecting a wash of Republican Red, you’re going to find a much messier story here.
Claas Relotious was not prepared for that. He was assigned to spend a month in Fergus Falls, getting to know the orcs and trolls who lived there, and write a substantial expose for Der Spiegel that would reveal the truth about the Mordor of the Midwest. Because he’s an incompetent journalist, when he didn’t find the facts that fit the story he wanted to write, he made up the facts. So he told readers in Germany that next to the “Welcome to Fergus Falls” sign, there was a second sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out”. He wrote up an interview with a local coal miner…there are no coal mines in Fergus Falls, or anywhere in the state: “There is no history of coal mining in Minnesota, as the state has little or no coal reserves.”
His article was one giant collection of transparent lies, unbelievable garbage that had no connection to reality. He won awards for his “journalism”. Then people complained. Someone at Der Spiegel noticed. Relotious was recently fired.
But Der Spiegel still makes money off of it.
Too late now, of course. Relotius is out of a job and his reputation is shot all the way to Pelican Rapids.
The article, however, lies and all, is still online.
Der Spiegel says it has added notes to Relotius’ articles, indicating they will not be changed until its investigation is completed. If there’s one attached to the Fergus Falls article, one only sees it after one pays a buck-and-a-half to read it.
Der Spiegel now says they were hoodwinked by a con artist. They really do have fact checkers, they insist, who just didn’t catch his lies. It wasn’t the editors’ fault, they say.
Already, every text printed in DER SPIEGEL goes through a thorough fact-checking and vetting process to review the accuracy of every fact stated in an article. When Claas Relotius wrote in his first major feature for DER SPIEGEL, “At Home in Hell,” that the city of Marianna is located “an hour by car west of Tallahassee” in northern Florida, a DER SPIEGEL fact-checker reviewed whether that detail was accurate.
Great. But then they have to reveal that this guy has done all these major stories in the US, in Mexico, in Syria, etc., that he got these amazing interviews with people like Colin Kaepernick’s parents, that he’d published 55 articles in their magazine over 14 years, and had simply made shit up. It wasn’t the editors fault, though, because they wouldn’t have reprimanded him if he’d failed to find a story, oh no. It’s only one bad reporter, and no one else.
When asked about the Fergus Falls story, he admitted that he knew perfectly well that the editors wouldn’t have reprimanded him if he had dropped the whole thing. “I think,” Relotius said last week, “a normal person would have said: ‘Listen, this just isn’t working. I’m stuck and we can’t do the story.'” But Relotius is evidently no normal person. “I tend to want to have control,” he said, “and I have this compulsion, this drive, to somehow make it happen. Of course, you don’t make it happen. You make a fabrication.” When he says “you” here, he can only mean himself and no one else.
Their whole revelation of the scandal reads like a desperate attempt to deflect all blame away from themselves. Relotious was a bad guy, no doubt, but when your fact checkers are so thorough that they double-check the reported distance between two Florida cities, but they can’t figure out that the central figures in his stories do not exist, there is a big problem at the top. They should be embarrassed.
