Except that it’s kind of firm and fluid filled. And it hurts. And it wobbles when I walk on it.
[Doctor shouts from stage left: “Then don’t walk on it!”]
OK, imaginary doctor, if you say so.
[Futurist shouts from stage right: “Would you like robot limbs, and a jetpack?”]
Yes, imaginary futurist, sign me up! Can you get me those before this sloppy aching mess heals up?
[Futurist whispers: “no.“]
Shut the fuck up, stupid futurist.
Lynna is your curator. How are you all holding up, America? Not well, I guess, since this is the hardest working thread ever.
Now a military historian confirms it. Of course, if you view it as an opportunity for a lot of pretty people to pose dynamically as they converge on a foregone conclusion, then maybe it makes sense.
Especially with this new attraction, An Immense Concentration of Orb-Weaving Spiders With Communal Webbing in a Man-Made Structural Habitat. You had me at “Immense Concentration”, but then they doubled down with “extreme spider situation”.
In late October, 2009, the managers of the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Baltimore, MD sought assistance in mitigating what they described as an “extreme spider situation” in their sand filtration facility. The building, consisting of almost 4 acres (16,099m2) under a single roof but with no side walls, had been prone to extensive colonization by orb-weaving spiders since its construction in 1993. However, the present infestation was considered worse than normal, and the facility’s maintenance and operations personnel had voiced concerns over the potential risk of bites.
OK, I’m already gurgling with anticipation, but then the article is full of photos and graphic details about the magnitude of the webbing. It is amazing and beautiful. They used the volume of webbing and density of spiders to estimate the total population in this building.
Over 100 million spiders! And just yesterday I reported counting 63 in my garage. I feel so inadequate.
I said there were photos. Behold and be awed.
You know the one, where people elect demented lunatics who think the universities are all out to destroy Freeze Peach and the economy and society as a whole, so they form lists of evil academics.
We, educators and researchers working at Dutch universities and research institutes, applied universities and research institutions, are alarmed at the recent actions and statements of the political party, Forum voor Democratie (FvD), and their party leader Thierry Baudet.
With this letter, we heed the message of the minister of Education, who expressed her indignation at Baudet’s attempts to cast universities as suspect institutions and who has called for the protection of academic freedom. We also join university students, teachers, and academics who have expressed their concerns about Baudet and FvD’s position on universities and schools.
In his post-election speech last week, Tuesday, Baudet claimed that ‘our boreal world’ was being ‘destroyed’ and ‘undermined’ by ‘our universities, our journalists, and those who receive our arts-subsidies and design our buildings.’ Such statements are meant to conjure up a conspiratorial atmosphere in which academics, journalists, artists and architects are not only seen as suspect. They are deemed guilty of the ‘destruction’ of our society, and portrayed as the enemy of the people.
These statements are especially worrying because the FvD is attempting to put Baudet’s rhetoric into practice by opening the ‘meldpunt indoctrinatie op scholen en universiteiten’ (hotline for reporting indoctrination at schools and universities). They have called upon individuals to report ‘biased tests, politically tinted exam questions, one-sided textbooks, oikophobic projects, and prejudiced teachers.’ Given the strong interest Baudet expresses in dismissing climate science and promoting history based on national pride, it is clear that this initiative is not genuinely interested in reducing bias in academic institutions. Rather, it is interested in selectively discounting knowledge that does not fit its political and ideological aims.
Funny, isn’t it, how the people who complain the loudest about bias in the schools think the solution is to force more patriotism into them.
Anyway, if you’re a Dutch academic and care about this effort to insert propaganda into your work, follow the link and go sign the letter. I’d sign — I’d volunteer to be put on the FvD’s list! — if only I were Dutch.
Poor man. His empire of lies is falling down around his ears. He can’t even sell his hokey ‘supplements’ (he was making $20 million a year off that nonsense!) because he’s finally been banned from all the social media sites he needed to peddle snake oil. His lies have been killing people, though, so my sympathy is non-existent.
Jones, who tells his viewers that his wild claims are based on “deep research” and high-level government sources, admitted that he actually relies on anonymous internet message boards and random emailers. Unable to justify his past conduct, an uncharacteristically subdued Jones blamed “psychosis.”
The deposition, filmed March 14 and published online last Friday, was released as part of a lawsuit filed by Scarlett Lewis, the mother of a child murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre. Lewis, one of several parents currently suing Jones, says that she has been a target of harassment as the result of Jones’ repeated claim that Sandy Hook was a “hoax” and no children died.
Jones accused grieving parents of being paid actors complicit in a far-reaching government conspiracy — and many people believed him. Throughout the deposition, Jones expressed little remorse.
Last week another Sandy Hook parent who faced harassment, Jeremy Richman, died in an apparent suicide.
How can one lone crank like Jones have so much impact on people? The answer is…he had enablers and promoters. There were people who were happy to have a representative of the lunatic fringe to push to the forefront, to take all the blame, while they made sure their audiences were exposed to the toxic garbage. The article names names. These are the people behind Alex Jones, who profited from the conspiracy nut and used him to advance their agenda.
Donald Trump.
In December 2015, as Jones was smearing the Sandy Hook families, Trump appeared on Jones’ Infowars show. Already a leading candidate for the Republican nomination, Trump lavished Jones with praise.
“[Y]our reputation’s amazing – I will not let you down – you will be very very impressed. I hope and I think we’ll be speaking a lot,” Trump said.
The Drudge Report. I’d almost forgotten that slimy rag existed, but I guess it has a large audience among the wrong sorts of people.
Trump gave Alex Jones the patina of legitimacy. But Matt Drudge delivered Jones something even more critical: website traffic.
One thing you learn from reading Alex Jones’ deposition is that he claims nearly every major tragedy is a hoax or government conspiracy. At one point Jones admits in rapid succession that 9/11, Columbine, and Oklahoma City were all “false flags.”
Nevertheless, Matt Drudge repeatedly links to Infowars on his popular news aggregator, the Drudge Report. Drudge’s site, which is one of the most popular in the United States, features two permanent links to InfoWars. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, Drudge links to specific Infowars stories regularly.
Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson remains one of Fox News’ most popular hosts, drawing millions of viewers each night. When PayPal recently severed its relationship with Alex Jones, Carlson came to his defense.
Carlson said in February that Jones’ ban was part of an effort to undermine the First Amendment by making “it impossible for people who say the wrong things to make a living in this country.” Carlson said that PayPal wanted “utter conformity, a world where only approved opinions are allowed.”
You know, if Alex Jones is to be held accountable for his destructive misinformation, those guys have to be up against the wall next.
It’s been a while since I had anything new to report — the colony is just sitting there, waiting for me to provide the ladies with some males, since they ate all of them. But we’re gearing up for a field season, so there were a few things I was able to try.
I’ve written up a protocol for our summer spider survey. It’s mainly a series of steps we’re going to carry out as we scan a garage, because consistency is important. We’re not going to be able to see every spider in every place — they’re sneaky, quiet little buggers — so we need to survey each environment in the same way, so that we can compare the residences, even if we know we’re going to miss animals. So Mary and I put on headlamps, plunged into our frigid garage and went through the motions to see how practical my plan was.
We didn’t expect much. It’s been a hard winter, and while today felt much warmer and the snow is melting, it really is still only 2°C, hardly happy weather for spiders, and not any better for their prey. We went spider hunting anyway.
As expected, there wasn’t much alive out there, maybe. The only spiders we saw were cellar spiders, Pholcidae, and they didn’t seem to be up to much. In fact, they might have all been dead. They were all inert and unresponsive to touch, but were still strangely plump and life-like, if still. They could be little frozen corpsicles, or possibly estivating. We couldn’t tell. We counted them anyway, if they looked intact and like, maybe, they’re going to rise from the dead at some point. It was all practicing the protocol, anyway.
The end result is that our cold and unpleasant and rather cluttered garage, 5.3m wide and 6.1m deep, has walls that are all covered with cobwebs, especially any part of the wall that is more than just a bare surface. If there was so much as a nail sticking out of a sheet of fiberboard, there was a cobweb on it. We counted a total of 63 zombie pholcids in that little space, and also found 11 egg cases of at least 3 different types. We’re starting to think our biggest challenge will be counting all the spiders in a reasonable amount of time once summer arrives with the mosquito season and the happy little beasts start fornicating fiercely.
One neat little surprise: along a back wall, there’s an area with a rack of shallow shelves, and Mary excitedly tells me that she has discovered spiderlings! I was skeptical and thought that was metabolically improbable given the ambient temperatures, but when I looked, sure enough, there were sheets of webbing in all of those shelves, and in all of them there was an explosion of tiny white dots with itty-bitty hairlike protrusions. They were of the right size, and that was the kind of scattering I’ve seen in newly hatched spiders in the lab, but I couldn’t imagine they might have survived a Minnesota winter, and they didn’t.
I twirled a patch of cobweb with the putative spiderlings onto a brush, and brought it into the lab, and sure enough…spiderlings. Well, the molted cuticles of many adorable baby spiders. Here’s a photo.
The Nones have just passed the Catholics in numbers, at least according to one survey. And the Evangelical Protestants may have passed their peak. That’s all good news.
It looks like a lot of the gains among the nominally godless have come from the Mainline Protestants, though — so, basically, the people with a pragmatic, already fairly unsuperstitious perspective have shifted labels, abandoning a specific church affiliation. In that sense it’s not a major transition.
Note also the absence of the label “atheist”. It’s kind of padding the ranks to just lump together all the diverse beliefs ranging from outright denial of all gods and supernatural powers to blissful confidence in a divine creator who is not accurately represented by established religion into one catch-all category, “no religion”. The message isn’t so much that more and more people are adopting rationality as it is that more and more people are finding the spectacle of religious fanatics unsavory. That orange line is an impressive granfalloon.
But I’ll take it. It’s a good step forward. Now if only we could put an end to organized atheism’s embrace of the unsavory, too.
Uh-oh. New ContraPoints. ‘Ware the comment thread.
Honestly, I learn so much from every ContraPoints video.
All else follows.
