So that’s how you deal with lobsters

Christie Wilcox describes a terrible experiment. Investigators were mystified by an area around a Pacific island that was empty of lobsters, so they dumped a bunch of lobsters there to see what happened. And then…

“Visibility was great that day, and virtually the entire sea bottom started to move,” he said.

That movement was countless whelks. They started to climb onto the newcomers, sticking to their legs. “I didn’t know then, but they’d started to suck them alive, basically. It was like a horror movie,” Barkai said. “It actually was a bit frightening to watch.” The lobsters simply didn’t know how to respond. They were outnumbered and overwhelmed.

“To my horror, in about 30, 40 minutes, all the lobsters were killed.”

Barkai managed to bring two whelk-coated lobsters back to the surface to show the crew—which is when the first photo in this piece was shot. The bewilderment on his face says everything. On the ship, they carefully pulled the whelks off—over 300 per lobster. “When we removed the whelks from the lobsters, they were empty shells. There was no meat left at all whatsoever. They were simply empty shells,” he recalled. “Basically the only thing that kept them together was the whelks, so the moment we removed the whelks, the lobsters just fell apart.”

But perhaps the most awful part was seeing up close how the whelks had done the lobsters in. They had penetrated every single soft tissue that they could find with their tubular mouthparts—the lobsters’ eyes, joints, anywhere with even a little give. “You could see these very long pipes coming in from the inside of the lobster,” Barkai explained. The poor lobsters—”they didn’t have a chance.”

So, to oppose the lobsters, one must be a whelk. Which is interesting, because the lobster-devouring whelks don’t seem to exhibit much in the way of hierarchical behavior, and do have some anti-lobsterian social behaviors.

Pity the male of the marine whelk, Solenosteira macrospira. He does all the work of raising the young, from egg-laying to hatching — even though few of the baby snails are his own.

The surprising new finding by researchers at the University of California, Davis, puts S. macrospira in a small club of reproductive outliers characterized by male-only child care. Throw in extensive promiscuity and sibling cannibalism, and the species has one of the most extreme life histories in the animal kingdom.

Now that I’ve stuck the knife in, let’s twist it a bit.

“The promiscuity in the female snails is extraordinary,” Kamel said, noting that some females mate with as many as a dozen different males.

Whelks: the lobster’s worst nightmare. I’ve been saying for years you’ve got to admire a good mollusc.

That’s not how anything works

MGTOWs. They’re what you get if you take an evil MRA and scour out half their brain with ignorance.

A man can be proud of his perfectly lovely testes, which are alive and full of living cells, but it’s just stupid to think a woman’s ovaries are not equivalently full of life. This idea that a “man puts life into the womb” that is otherwise just a dead cave is so Fourth Century BC — the male and female contributions are equally vital. But, you know, even Aristotle thought the woman contributed living matter that was quickened by the organizing principle of the masculine seed, so it isn’t even that sophisticated.

So wrong. But then ol’ @RedBeardHam has to get even more foolish.

Guy. Do you even realize that 50 million sperm die every time you use your fleshlight or blow-up doll or hand?

Dinner at the Petersons’

I think I’d pass. Following the lead of the daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, she and her father, Jordan, eat a diet that consists entirely of “beef, salt, and water”, and they never, ever cheat. Well, not exactly. Mikhaila admits I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon, which is nice — one does wonder what else she can tolerate.

Jordan Peterson admits to also drinking club soda, which, after being told is just water, he feels compelled to clarify.

“Well, when you’re down to that level, no, it’s not, Joe. There’s club soda, which is really bubbly. There’s Perrier, which is sort of bubbly. There’s flat water, and there’s hot water. Those distinctions start to become important.”

Context! Speaking precisely! It’s all very important! What you eat, not so much.

The author of the article asked an expert about the consequences of an all-beef diet.

“Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea,” Jack Gilbert, the faculty director at the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center and a professor of surgery, told me during a recent visit to his lab. “A terribly, terribly bad idea.”

Gilbert has done extensive research on how the trillions of microbes in our guts digest food, and the look on his face when I told him about the all-beef diet was unamused. He began rattling off the expected ramifications: “Your body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the by-products of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn’t be able to regulate your hormone levels; you’d enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated.”

While much of the internet has been following this story in a somewhat snide way, Gilbert appeared genuinely concerned and saddened: “If she does not die of colon cancer or some other severe cardiometabolic disease, the life—I can’t imagine.”

I’m also thinking of the consequences of a lack of fiber, and the strain on your kidneys, and of a 26 year old with severe gout. Beef and alcohol, that’s what you’re going to get. Unless, of course, you’re just like the Breatharians, who claim to live on air and sunlight, yet have regularly been caught cheating.

But he says he never ever cheats! Well, that’s exactly what a cheater would say, and isn’t it odd that he asserted that when no one had accused him of doing so?

I thought this was the meat of the article, the real conflict in what they’re promoting:

The popularity of Peterson’s narrative is explained by more than its timeless tropes; it has also been amplified by the fact that her father has occasionally cast his spotlight onto her story. Jordan Peterson’s recent book, Twelve Rules for Life, includes the story of his daughter’s health trials. The elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at first seem an unlikely face for acceptance of personal, subjective truth, as he regularly professes the importance of acting as purely as possible according to rigorous analysis of data. He argued in a recent video that American universities are the home to ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective, that all sex differences are socially constructed, and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems. In his book, he writes that academic institutions are teaching children to be brainwashed victims, and that the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight.

He demands adherence to an objective truth, but happily wanders off into the weeds on the basis of anecdotes. Actually, if you ever listen to his lectures, all he’s got are subjective opinions that spring out of the twisty morass of his brain, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s endorsing dietary quackery. What he says has an extraordinarily tenuous connection to what he does.

My daughter is roughly the same age as Mikhaila Peterson. I’m proud of how Skatje turned out sensible and reasonable and living a well-balanced life, although she’s probably not going to get as rich off bunkum with as little work as Mikhaila.

Also, my daughter is a vegetarian, which kind of makes her the anti-Mikhaila.

The movie this week is…The Spy Who Dumped Me

My wife and I visited the Morris theatre to see The Spy Who Dumped Me. I have mixed feelings about this one — it’s got actors I generally like, it whizzed along at a good clip, and there were a few laughs in it, but the story. Jeez, the story.

I can sort of imagine how this thing was pitched, as a mish-mash of common tropes. It’s a fish out of water story, and it’s a spy story, and it’s a buddy movie, and the two buddies are women. There’s a mcguffin! Also, it’s got John Wickian moments of ultra-violence! Plus, clever moments of subtle comedy, where female spies have the advantage of a special place where they can hide the mcguffin. It’ll be great!

On the positive side, Mila Kunis is good, and Kate McKinnon is…antic. I like McKinnon, but the eye-bulging mugging is more appropriate for impersonating Giuliani, and got to be a bit much (a phrase used within the movie to describe her character). She’s not really acting here, but is going over the top ala Jim Carrey. I’m looking forward to the day she calms down and tries to build a character on a serious foundation.

This is supposed to be a comedy, but it is also set in what looks like a very dark universe, populated with mostly evil characters. Kunis meets the spy (the one who will dump her) in a bar, and later it turns out that the bar is full of other spies watching her. They later have to try to exchange the mcguffin in a Vienna cafe, and everyone there, patrons, waitstaff, bartender, everyone, is armed to the teeth and trying to get their hands on the mcguffin, and it erupts into a fierce gun battle in which everyone is shooting at everyone else, there’s no sense of who is on what side, and you don’t really care who wins. But it’s an excuse to double-tap people in the head, knife them, break necks, and leave a bloody tableau of corpses sprawled all over the floor and furniture. It’s a bit much, and doesn’t mesh well with any sense of comedy.

While it moves along from moment to moment, with fragments of entertainment no matter how discordant with each other, the overall plot is a mess. The ending feels like something that was cobbled together without regard for prior events, just to bring it to a conclusion, and there’s no sense of continuity in the story. Mild plot spoilers below — but trust me, they don’t really matter, because it’s not as if knowing them affects the flow of the story, or that there is a story that needs to be resolved.

[Read more…]

Praying for a resurrection

I don’t want Jesus to come back, I’d much prefer to see Mars Rover Opportunity rise from the dead. It’s been silent for almost 3 months as a massive dust storm prevented its solar panels from charging, but that storm is finally subsiding, so there’s hope it will recharge and start transmitting again.

It’s been working for 14 years, which is amazing. I’ve had cars that lasted that long, but we brought them in for tune-ups every year. It’s sister robot, Spirit, went dead in 2010. Mars Rover Curiosity landed in 2012 and is still cruising around. These robots are a pretty good deal — I don’t think an astronaut would last anywhere near as long, and he’d be too busy growing poop potatoes to get much science done.

Iowans with better food

Rob Tibbetts, father of a young woman who was murdered by a criminal man, spoke out on his appreciation of the Hispanic community.

Speaking Sunday afternoon to more than 1,000 people at a ceremony at his daughter’s former high school, Rob Tibbetts didn’t directly respond to comments by President Donald Trump and others who quickly seized upon the suspect’s citizenship to argue for changes in immigration laws. Rob Tibbetts has not publicly commented on the issue. But in his eulogy, he highlighted how the local Hispanic community had embraced him as he searched for his daughter in recent weeks. While in Iowa for nearly six weeks, Hotel Grinnell put him up for free. During that time, he said he ate at a number of Mexican restaurants, where employees were sensitive and kind. They knew when he needed space or when he needed to joke, he said.

“The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans,” he said, including an emphasis on family. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.”

Exactly. As the Hispanic community here in Minnesota has grown, we’ve also seen more and more tasty food, so I’m not complaining.

Meanwhile, over in Wingnuttia…

Who is the better human being, Rob Tibbetts or Tomi Lahren?

Trick question. Tomi Lahren is soft white cotton bag filled with cockroaches.

I think one important role of the federal government is to shut down the NRA

A core function of government is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens, according to the NRA. The NRA does not make me feel safe, therefore the organization ought to be dismantled.

Especially when they’ve got loons saying nonsense like this:

Texas is asking to spend federal Department of Education grant money to buy firearms for teachers that have gone through the states school marshal program. Teachers trained to carry firearms in school, in firearms, and the state needs permission to use federal money to do that. As you can imagine, the left is melting down. Anti-gunner’s outrage that the government would soon be funding firearms to put in the hands of educators. I would argue — of all the things schools use federal grant money for, this may be the most legitimate. It falls into the core functions of the federal government, provide for the safety and security of its citizens. In fact, using federal tax dollars to buy guns for teachers is more in line, and more in the boundaries of what the federal money should be used for than even textbooks or after-school programs. Guns in the hands of good guys has a direct impact on our safety, a core function of government.

Although he does have one point: education is not one of the core rights granted in the bill of rights. That’s more of a failure of the Constitution than an excuse to shut down education, and it’s certainly not a justification for arguing that educators ought to be supplied with guns before books.

Better than syrup of ipecac!

Just in case you were looking for a reason to vomit today, here’s Dinesh D’Souza interviewing Richard Spencer.

What’s so great, I asked him, about the white race? Spencer spoke of what he termed its “Faustian spirit. The white race is expansive whether in terms of conquering, in terms of exploration of the seas or space, or scholarship and analysis of science. We possess something that’s peculiar to use, and it makes us special.” And was that something, I inquired, in the genes? “It is,” Spencer replied. “No question. Everything is in the genes.”

Everything? So, for instance, language is genetic? I guess that explains how all those English-speaking parents have children who speak English, and Spanish-speaking parents produce little kids fluent in Spanish. It’s all in the genes.

D’Souza is rather primly disapproving of Spencer throughout the interview, but he doesn’t object to the racism, strictly speaking, but because he declares that Spencer is actually a Democrat, and we know how much he hates Democrats.

In a purely logical sense, Spencer should be a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats invented the ideology he espouses, and even today the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic identity politics. Spencer’s problem, however, is that the Democrats mobilize black, Latino and Asian identity politics against that of whites. Since whites are now the all-round bad guy, Spencer’s brand of progressivism is no longer welcome at the multicultural picnic.

…

Why, then, did Spencer vote for Trump? Why does he consider himself on the right? The simple answer is that Spencer has no place else to go, so he is trying to carve out a niche for himself in the only party where he can find some measure of agreement, however small. Trump isn’t embracing Spencer’s agenda; rather, Spencer is embracing Trump’s agenda because his own is politically irrelevant.

Note the cunning trick, there. He is logically a Democrat, in D’Souza’s mind, but then the convicted felon declares that Spencer can only find a small measure of agreement with the Republicans. D’Souza can simultaneously think he ought to be aligned with Democrats, while also saying he has no point of agreement with Democrats. Alrighty then.