Lazy Sunday: Frostpunk game review

Frostpunk is a very dramatic city-building survival game. You lead the last survivors of humanity as they build a city based around a gigantic, coal-powered steam generator. Civilization was wiped out by a sudden ice age, and for some reason the only survivors are the ones who decided to live in a crater in the ice, somewhere north of London. I bought it for myself as a birthday present, and I lost track of time, which is why I’m writing this at 4am to make sure I get a post up “today”. The music is melancholy, and often has a relentless feel to it, which pairs well with weather that starts at -20°, and fairly quickly reaches the point where -40 feels like a summer day. It’s chilly in my home today, so I really felt the winter winds, and just seeing the glow from the generator felt a little warming.

I definitely recommend the game, and its expansions. All of them together cost me about $10-15 on Steam, which feels like a pretty good deal.

Edit: Adding in the Stupendium song, since Cubist was nice enough to make me aware of it.

 

Luna Moth Tails: Alluring Display, or Sophisticated Stealth Tech?

The picture shows a Luna moth on some sort of pebbled black plastic object. It's hard to tell how big the moth is, but the picture shows off its lime green wings, with orange, yellow, and white accents. The lower pair of wings have a little more brown mixed into the green, and they both end in long, twisting tails. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Simoneburton

The picture shows a Luna moth on some sort of pebbled black plastic object. It’s hard to tell how big the moth is, but the picture shows off its lime green wings, with orange, yellow, and white accents. The lower pair of wings have a little more brown mixed into the green, and they both end in long, twisting tails. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Simoneburton

I think it would be too much to say that I had a “moth phase” as a child, but I do have a few memories of being very impressed by some of the big moths I encountered in Maine, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia, Canada. I mention the latter because my family took a vacation there when I was a kid. We stayed in camping sites that were often packed with silver Airstream trailers. It was there that I first beheld the majestic Luna moth. These things can have a wingspan of up to seven inches, and while I don’t know how big the one I saw was, I was pretty small at the time, so it certainly seemed huge. For those who don’t know, Luna moths are big, bright green, and have a sort of swallowtail thing going on.

They’re quite pretty, and they barely seem like functional creatures. I haven’t really considered them much in the last couple decades, so if you asked me why they had tails like that, I’d probably guess that it had to do with mate preference and sexual selection. It turns out that they’re actually to misdirect bat echolocation, and scientists have known that for around a decade. More than that, recent research gives us some reason to believe that the tails are only for bat-scrambling, and probably provide no addition benefit or cost when it comes to reproduction or avoiding other predators.

“They have projections off the back of the hindwing that end in twisted, cupped paddles,” said Juliette Rubin, a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History and lead author of both studies. “From experimental work with bats and moths in a flight room, we’ve found that these structures seem to reflect bat sonar in such a way that bats often aim their attacks at the tails instead of the main body.”

Traits that evolve for one specific function can often be co-opted by natural selection for another, and Rubin wondered whether the twisted tails of Luna moths might come with any additional benefits or hidden costs.

Silkmoths have independently evolved tails on multiple occasions across three separate continents, and they can vary significantly in length. Hindwings in some species can extend to more than twice the size of the moth’s wingspan, and the longer the tail, the more likely a moth will successfully thwart a prowling bat.

But far from being drab, utilitarian decoys meant only for sonar-sensing bats, silkmoth tails are often visually stunning, like decorative streamers trailing behind a kite. Across the animal and plant kingdoms, many of the most colorful and alluring structures are used to attract mates or pollinators, and scientists suspected the same might be true of silkmoth tails.

This type of dual function for a single trait isn’t without precedent. The vivid colors of strawberry poison dart frogs (Oophaga pumilio) both deter predators and help males attract mates; male deer and other ungulates use their antlers to fight off rivals and signal their vigor to females; and moths that use clicks or chirruping sounds to disrupt bat echolocation can compose duets using the same sounds during courtship.

Luna moths have neither mouths to produce sound or ears to hear it, but they do have sensitive eyes and powerful scent-detecting antennae. When female Luna moths are ready to mate, they perch in one place and emit a pheromone, a single molecule of which is enough to trigger a male antenna. The males of closely related Indian moon moths (Actias selene) can find females from more than six miles away by following the pheromone plume to its source.

“We don’t know how many males are traveling to a female each night,” Rubin said. “It’s entirely possible she’s able to call in multiple suitors and potentially have her pick.”

Rubin put this idea to the test, setting up mating experiments in which a single, female Luna moth was enclosed in a flight box with two males: One with normal hind wings, and one with its tails removed.

Initially, the data seemed to suggest that females had a preference for males whose wings remained intact, but additional controlled experiments demonstrated this was more likely an artifact of the tail removal. In trials where both males had their wings clipped, and one had the tails glued back on, there was no difference in their mating success.

Personally, I think that if they did have mouths with which to scream, we might not be so cavalier about lopping bits off them, and taping them back on. I realize that moth wing tails aren’t really analogous to my own extremities, but still.

It seems as though this study had a pretty small sample size, so some salt is required, but it is interesting. They also tested whether the tails help with avoiding birds during the daytime. Many moths rely on camouflage to survive during the day, and are only really active at night, so the researchers tested whether the tails affect their ability to hide. They did this by making fake Luna moth bodies by wrapping mealworms in pastry dough, and attaching clipped and unclipped wings to them. These bait moths were then hidden in an aviary by being partially covered with leaves, and the researchers then put Carolina wrens into the enclosure to see whether the presence of moth tails affected how well the wrens found the “moths”.

The image shows a Carolina Wren standing on some sort of black grate against a white wall. The wren itself is a rich brown, with a white stripe running over its eye and back down its head, and a gray chin. it's looking to the right of the image. On either side of it, bait moths are visible, but they're partially covered by what leaves.

The image shows a Carolina Wren standing on some sort of black grate against a white wall. The wren itself is a rich brown, with a white stripe running over its eye and back down its head, and a gray chin. it’s looking to the right of the image. On either side of it, bait moths are visible, but they’re partially covered by what leaves.

I think it’s likely that the wrens can’t smell the pastry dough, so odds are decent that the makeup of the bait moth’s “body” wasn’t a huge problem (you may not know this, but moths are not, in fact, two mealworms in a pastry dough trench coat). I do wonder what exposure these particular wrens have even had to moths in their lifetimes, though, given that they live in an aviary. I also wonder whether other birds might snack on them more regularly?

This isn’t the most compelling research report I’ve ever read, but as I said at the beginning, I think it does give us at least some reason to believe that the tails really are entirely bat-focused. For most of my life, I’ve lumped them in with the elaborate plumage of various tropical birds, both in terms of function, and in terms of increased risk of predation. Apparently I’ve had it all backwards. They provide a clear benefit to survival, during the short window in which that matters, and apparently have nothing at all to do with mating.

For me, I think this is a good reminder that even when I can get a clear look at something, I’m not always seeing what I think I’m seeing. We make conclusions based on what we already know of the world, and that can, very often, lead us astray.

Also, is pastry dough OK for wrens to eat? It seems like it might not be.

 

Furious Friday: NYPD Stole Money from New Yorkers, Spent It on Robots.

At what point does a country become a police state?

I think a case can be made that the US has always been one for people with darker skin, especially with programs like Stop and Frisk in NYC, but there’s a long history of government power being used to suppress left-wing political power, sometimes pretty explicitly. It’s a policy that pairs well with the foreign policy of violently crushing attempts at left-wing governance in the so-called “Global South”, and it makes me worry about what would happen if a left-wing political movement actually got real power in the United States. Conservative wingnuts have poisoned the concept, but the “Deep State” originally referred to official and unofficial policies within the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and other parts of the US government working to suppress the left. This is not just conjecture, either. Leaving aside the obvious stuff like the McCarthy Era, the FBI ran counterintelligence operations to keep progressives out of power, and they spied on Quaker activists (among others) during the time when I was both a Quaker and an anti-war activist.

There’s also ICE, who in addition to terrorizing all sorts of people across the US, also decided to intimidate a comedian for making an edgy joke about the organization. ICE needs to be abolished.

And then, of course, there’s civil asset forfeiture. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s a policy that allows police in the United States to just take stuff from people. If you have something that they decide is “suspicious”, they can just take it. Your money, your car, your house – anything. All they have to do is say that the something in question was somehow involved in a crime (usually drug-related), and then it’s on you to prove that it’s not. They also get to keep that money. It doesn’t go to the general city budget, or the justice department or anything like that, it goes to the department where the cop who sto- sorry, “seized” your stuff works. They use it for all sorts of things, like margarita machines. If you need a refresher, to get yourself good and revved up for what this post is actually about, watch John Oliver’s video on the subject:

At what point does a country become a police state?

If it’s not when the police are literally allowed to just steal from people, how about when they use that stolen money, directly, to buy the latest technology with which to harass and surveil the victims of their theft? Cops legally take billions from people in the US every year, and the NYPD just spent $750,000 of the money they stole from New Yorkers on some fucking robots, to help them oppress and steal from New Yorkers:

Great. No way this could go wro- oh wait, it was already wrong, because they stole the money to buy this shit!

I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate how fucked up this is, and you’d better believe that if anything happens to the robots, they’ll try to charge anyone even tangentially involved with assaulting a police officer. A large portion of USian policing seems to involve around looking for excuses to harass, assault, or rob people, and there is zero question in my mind that every new toy they get will be used for those ends. It won’t be long before some poor New Yorker has their life turned upside down by a robot bought with money stolen from them.

I also don’t think it’ll be long before the cops are putting guns on their robots, given that the concept has already been pioneered. Cops are out of control in the United States, and I think it’s fair to say that in some ways, the NYPD is the most out of control, when you consider that its budget is bigger than those of the armies of many nations. And now they’re using fucking robots.

I honestly have no idea how useful these things will end up being for the cops, but this is very much just the beginning. These robots will keep getting better, because the military-industrial complex loves death robots, and wants more of them. Make no mistake – these are weapons intended to be used against the people, and they will be used in the effort to crush any movement for systemic change. One of the themes of this blog is that climate change is progressing at a frightening speed, and that our governments aren’t doing nearly enough to deal with that. There’s one flaw in that premise, though, and it’s a big one. It assumes some degree of good intent from the ruling class. It’s quite possible – even likely – that they are taking action on climate change.

They’re pouring more money into police and the military, both of which serve them and their interests. A cynical man might conclude that they’re not planning on doing anything to slow climate change or to help society adapt, but rather that they are planning to use force to keep us in line as the world falls apart, trusting climate change to kill enough of us that we won’t be able to get into their luxury bunkers. They’ll keep using human enforcers if they have to, but there’s always a risk that they’ll side with the peasantry. Robots, on the other hand, just do as they’re programmed, and don’t have any of those pesky thoughts and opinions that makes humans so unreliable. As I said, I’m not sure how dangerous the NYPD’s new toys actually are, but at minimum, they represent another step in a very dangerous direction.

It’d be a real shame if the robots somehow ended up in a body of water somewhere, you know, by accident.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

The Party of Child Marriage

Which political party came to mind when you saw the title for this post?

If you’re in the United States, and you’re honest, it’s the Republican Party. They’ve got a long history of opposing efforts to make various forms of child marriage illegal, because evangelical Christians tend to view children as the property of their parents, and they tend to have an archaic view of marriage. Personally, I can’t think of a circumstance in which it would be OK for children to get married, and I’m deeply suspicious of any parents who are on board with such a thing. It reminds me strongly of “purity culture“, in which girls are pushed to pledge their virginity to their fathers, to be handed over, with the daughter, on her day of marriage. It’s just another part of the disturbing obsession that conservative Christians have with sex and children. The grim reality is that child marriage is legal in the vast majority of U.S. states, and it’s Republicans who’re working to keep it that way, as demonstrated by state senator Mike Moon of Missouri, the “destination wedding spot for 15 year old child brides“:

 

Moon later clarified that the person he knew who got married at 12 was actually a couple of twelve-year-olds, one of whom got the other one pregnant. Apparently the correct response to that, according to him and whatever weird subculture created him, is to force the children to marry, and presumably to force the girl – a literal child – to go through pregnancy and childbirth.

These are the same people who’re attempting to eradicate trans people “to protect the children”. This is who they are. This guy, Roy Moore and his defenders, Matt Walsh talking about teenage fertility – the list is far longer than I have the stomach to research. People in general are to be controlled, but children in particular seem to be both property of their parents (if those parents are conservative Christians), and disposable pawns in the culture war. The actual wellbeing of children never enters into the equation, beyond what they believe their tradition and religion say is for the best.

Far too many people are being governed by these gross weirdos, and while I’m aware of all the ways in which the U.S. is not a democracy, it still disturbs me that there’s a real voter base for this. Hopefully, it’s on its way out, but the GOP seems to be making an effort to use the government to impose their bizarre ideology on the country by force.

Reactionary Tantrums and Free Advertising

So, as you may have heard, Bud Light’s new brand representative is a trans woman named Dylan Mulvaney. She’s apparently a big deal on TikTok, but I had honestly never heard of her until the conservative temper tantrum over this brand deal. If you’ve heard about this at all, it’s either because you drink Bud Light, or because you heard about people doing stuff like pouring out their beer, or shooting their beer with guns, or running over their beer with pickup trucks. It’s the most I’ve heard about Bud Light in years, which is the whole point.

You can tell conservatives really love capitalism, because every time a corporation makes a bid for free advertising, the wingnuts fall all over themselves in their rush to oblige. That being the case, I think it’s worth posting this old video from Hbomberguy that explains what’s happening, and why. Bud Light doesn’t give a shit about trans people, they just know that most USians aren’t extremist bigots, which means that this will bring in a lot of profit for relatively little advertising investment.

Wage theft and surplus value: Capitalist greed is unaffordable

I’ve never really watched TV news, but I’ve been given to understand that a great deal of attention is paid to crime. Combine this with the ubiquity of “copaganda” in media, and I can understand how people might be misled into thinking that violent crime is out of control. The reality is that all that focus on criminals, and the paranoia about home invaders and muggers – it all seems to be a distraction from the biggest form of theft in the United States: Wage theft.

For those who are unclear on the concept, this is not another way to refer to the portion of wealth created by a worker that is kept by the boss as “profit”. We’ll get to that later. “Wage theft” is when an employer fails to pay workers what they are owed by law. This happens in a variety of ways. My last landlord in the U.S. would delay payment to his workers, and then underpay them when he did pay, forcing them to fight to get even the pittance that he was legally required to give for the work they were doing. This man, to remind you, owns dozens of homes in Somerville. Zooming out, the bulk of wage theft seems to be from paying less than minimum wage, followed by overtime violations, but all together, it adds up to a truly staggering amount of money, mostly stolen from poor people, by rich people.

Wage theft is a nationwide epidemic that costs American workers as much as $50 billion a year, a new Economic Policy Institute report finds. In An Epidemic of Wage Theft Is Costing Workers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars a Year, EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey and EPI intern Brady Meixell examine incidences of wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—across the country. The total amount of money recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012, almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. However, since most victims never report wage theft and never sue, the real cost of wage theft to workers is much greater, and could be closer to $50 billion a year.

“Wage theft affects far more people than more well-known crimes such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies combined, and can be absolutely devastating for workers living from paycheck to paycheck,” said Eisenbrey. “For low-wage workers, the wages lost from wage theft can total nearly 10 percent of their annual earnings.”

The authors also conducted a study of workers in low-wage industries in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and found that in any given week, two-thirds experienced at least one pay-related violation.  They estimate that the average loss per worker over the course of a year was $2,634, out of total earnings of $17,616. The total annual wage theft from front-line workers in low-wage industries in the three cities approached $3 billion. If these findings are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.

The image is a block chart breaking down the scale of wage theft vs. other forms of theft. The large blue block on the left represents wage theft, broken up into minimum wage violations ($23.2 billion), overtime violations ($8.8 b), rest break violations ($4b), and off the clock violations ($3.2b). The smaller block of "other types of theft" is broken up between larceny at $5.3b, burglary ($4.3b), auto theft ($3.8b), and robbery ($0.34b). The image is from tworkerscenter.org

The image is a block chart breaking down the scale of wage theft vs. other forms of theft. The large blue block on the left represents wage theft, broken up into minimum wage violations ($23.2 billion), overtime violations ($8.8 b), rest break violations ($4b), and off the clock violations ($3.2b). The smaller block of “other types of theft” is broken up between larceny at $5.3b, burglary ($4.3b), auto theft ($3.8b), and robbery ($0.34b). The image is from tworkerscenter.org

This is one part of why the gap between rich and poor keeps growing, and why life is such a struggle for those at the bottom. Even minimum wage is too much for these people. I often talk about the endless greed of the capitalist class, and this is exactly what I mean – they earnestly seem to believe that everything belongs to them by right, and therefor they are justified in doing whatever they can get away with to hoard more. It doesn’t matter that they signed a contract, they don’t even want to pay enough to keep their workers alive.

The problem is that even this is just a part of the whole picture. To start with, it’s not really treated like a crime. There may be fines or prison if theft can be proven to be intentional and the legal team isn’t good, but if the employer maintains that it was just incompetence, or a mistake, or an error in a new system, generally the worst-case scenario for the boss is that they have to hand over what they stole. Minor theft by poor people will result in years in the violent hellscape of the U.S. prison system, but when rich people steal billions, they can be confident that they’re safe.

And let’s not forget that with so many USians living paycheck to paycheck, even if they get back the money, they might have had to take out a payday loan, or been unable to afford medicine, or food. They might have gotten evicted because they couldn’t afford rent, even though they’d held up their end of the contract.

But it seems that all this barely-illegal theft, and all the harm caused by it, is itself dwarfed by the amount of money that has been, quite legally, taken from the USian working class, even as those workers have been increasing their productivity year after year. See, it turns out that we can, in some ways, measure wage stagnation in terms of Wall Street bonuses:

The federal minimum wage in the United States would be more than $42 an hour today if it rose at the same rate as the average Wall Street bonus over the past four decades, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Citing newly released data from the New York State Comptroller, IPS noted that the average Wall Street bonus has increased by 1,165% since 1985, not adjusted for inflation.

Last year, the average cash bonus paid to Wall Street employees was $176,700—75% higher than in 2008 but slightly lower than the 2021 level of $240,400.

The federal minimum wage, meanwhile, has been completely stagnant since 2009, when it was bumped up to $7.25 from $5.15. While many states and localities have approved substantial pay increases in recent years, 20 states have kept their hourly wage floors at the federal minimum.

Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS and the author of the new analysis, wrote Thursday that “average weekly earnings for all U.S. private sector workers increased by only 54.4%” between 2008 and 2022—a significantly slower pace than inequality-fueling Wall Street bonuses.

“The total bonus pool for 190,800 New York City-based Wall Street employees in 2022 was $33.7 billion—enough to pay for 771,520 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year,” Anderson observed. “Wall Street bonuses come on top of base salaries, which averaged $516,560 for New York securities industry employees in 2021.”

There’s a popular misconception that rich people don’t do any work to actually earn their wealth. In reality, they buy influence, create labyrinths of bureaucracy, and put a great deal of effort into taking as much as they possibly can from everyone who is poorer than them. This is the system working as designed. This is the world capitalism provides – one in which those at the bottom are ground down relentlessly, to the point where they’re selling parts of themselves to survive, while those at the top invest obscene amounts of money in military and police to crush the uprisings that such a system will inevitably provoke.

And, lest you forgot about climate change for a blissful moment, those same tools of control are used to put down any other efforts at radical change. They won’t pay you, but they’ll happily chip in to train and pay thugs to beat you down for complaining too loudly. Stories like this are why this “climate change blog” is so often about social and political stuff that’s not directly related. Some of it’s that I feel a duty to talk about things, like the ongoing genocidal attack on trans people, but a lot of it is that all of these things are connected. Money isn’t all they’re stealing. They’re stealing our health, by pouring poison into the world. They’re stealing our time, by ensuring that we have to work most of our lives away. They’re stealing our future, by working to prevent climate action. They’re doing all of that, and they make sure that no matter how many billions of lives they may destroy, it’s all legal.

No system of law that allows this can be considered legitimate.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Research suggests we’re on track for 3 degrees

Have I mentioned that I think we’re being too slow in our response to climate change? I feel like it’s come up. We’re not moving fast enough. We need to end fossil fuel use far, far faster than the current rate, and that is not going to happen if we care more about corporate profits than human survival. Now, I suppose I should say that this is based on the modeling of a research group, and it isn’t currently the “consensus” that we’re headed for three degrees of warming. I’m willing to bet that most climate scientists would agree that we are, or that three degrees is optimistic, but I couldn’t cite you a source on that. What I can cite is this report saying that it’s likely that that’s the trajectory we’re on:

“More and more countries are promising that they will phase out coal from their energy systems, which is positive. But unfortunately, their commitments are not strong enough. If we are to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2-degree target, the phasing out of coal needs to happen faster, and countries that rely on other fossil fuels need to increase their transition rate”, says Aleh Cherp, professor at the International Environmental Institute at Lund University.

The phasing out of coal is a necessity to keep the world’s temperature increase below 2 degrees, compared to pre-industrial levels. In a study by Mistra Electrification, a group of researchers has analyzed 72 countries’ pledged commitments to phase out their coal use by 2022-2050.

In the best case scenarios, the researchers show that it is possible that the temperature increase will stay below 2 degrees. But that assumes, among other things, that both China and India begin phasing out their coal use within five years. Furthermore, their phase-out needs to be as rapid as it has been in the UK and faster than Germany has promised.

The research group has also developed scenarios that they consider to be the most realistic. These scenarios indicate that Earth is moving towards a global warming of 2.5-3 degrees.

“The countries’ commitments are not sufficient, not even among the most ambitious countries. In addition, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risks jeopardizing several of the countries’ commitments”, says Jessica Jewell, Associate professor at Physical Resource Theory, Chalmers University of Technology.

And Biden’s not really helping, either.

To say I’m disappointed would be to imply that I expected better. I suppose I did expect better, a couple decades ago, but world “leaders” have taught me the naivete of that optimism. This isn’t a problem that we can solve by trying to “nudge” the market in a particular direction, because a great many of the most powerful people in the world are already spending vast sums of money to “nudge” things back on track. I’ll be writing a post soon about how the billionaires think all this is going to play out, but the basic reality is that we can’t afford to wait for them to realize they’re wrong, assuming they’re even capable of such a realization. As a matter of survival, we need to take control of society away from them, and put it on a different path.

Video: Rebecca Watson takes on Easter myths and misinformation

Most of my memories from Easter are pretty secular. It’s not because we weren’t a religious household, but more because Quakers don’t much much stock in “holy days”, and my family mostly saw it as an excuse to celebrate and see relatives. We did egg hunts, we got huge baskets of candy from my grandmother – all the usual stuff. I think that’s part of why the claims of a pagan origin for the holiday never really interested me all that much. I believed them, but it didn’t really change how I saw things. This also means that discovering that all the Ishtar/Ostara stuff seems to be bunk also doesn’t really ruffle my feathers. It certainly seemed plausible, but it’s just as plausible that another chain of events led to the odd mishmash that is the modern USian conception of Easter. In fact, it’s apparently more plausible:

I’ll admit that I fully bought into the Ostara story and I was honestly shocked to learn that this story has only one single source, and it’s NOT from anyone who worshiped her, and maybe not even someone who lived in a time when anyone worshiped her. We know of Ostara only because of an 8th century English Christian monk named Bede, who wrote that the local pagans used to hold festivals in Ostara’s honor each Spring, but that with the Christianization of the area, the practice died out before his time. That’s it! A THOUSAND YEARS LATER, Jacob Grimm (of the famous Brothers) took that description and ran with it, asserting with no evidence that Ostara’s festivals directly connect with Easter and are the reason why we do so much weird shit to celebrate Jesus dying, like how we all love to eat “pastry of heathenish form.” That’s a direct quote from Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, and FYI it is now a permanent part of my family’s Easter traditions.

“This binding on of the ‘Easter seax’, or sword-knife, leads us to infer that a sword of peculiar antique shape was retained; as the Easter scones, ôsterstuopha (RA. 298) and moonshaped ôstermâne (Brem. wtb.) indicate pastry of heathenish form.”

Note that in the late 19th century, 150 inscriptions were found in Germany that related to three goddesses that seem to have been known as the Matronae Austriahenae , which linguists say could be related to Ostara, but there’s no proof of it.

With that in mind, maybe this goddess DID exist as a thing that some pagans worshiped, and maybe Bede was right that they held festivals in the spring in her honor, but we have no evidence that any of that is at all connected to present day Easter traditions, especially considering that even Bede said it died out before even his time. It seems that the idea of Easter being based on ancient pagan rites started in the early 19th century with Grimm. If you’d like to know more, Stephen Winick at the Library of Congress went down the, er, rabbit hole on the history of this misconception.

So, why DO we eat eggs laid by bunnies to celebrate a demigod being tortured and killed every spring?  Well, it’s probably because all the things we associate with Easter are associated with spring in general, and with rebirth, which is the entire theme of the Christian holiday: eggs have been a symbol of rebirth for at least two thousand years, rabbits emerge into people’s gardens in the spring, lambs are born in the spring, and as for where the bunny laying the egg came from, nobody really knows! But English folklorist Richard Sermon came up with a guess that I quite like, which is that “a hare’s scratch or form and a lapwing’s nest look very similar, and both occur on grassland and are first seen in the spring.” Maybe it all started with one hilarious parent pulling a prank on their kids.

That’s actually pretty neat! It’s also a good reminder to be skeptical about stories that “feel right” to us, as well as those we’re already inclined to disbelieve. Anyway, happy Easter to those who celebrate, and I hope everyone has a good day.

North Dakota Republicans take food from children while adding to their own plates

It is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase of population must be limited by it, at least after the food has once been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All the children born beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. It has appeared indeed clearly in the course of this work, that in all old states the marriages and births depend principally upon the deaths, and that there is no encouragement to early unions so powerful as a great mortality. To act consistently there- fore we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality ; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.^ But above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases ; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased from 1 in 36 or 40, to one in 18 or 20, we might probably every one of us marry at the age of puberty, and yet few be absolutely starved

When Thomas Malthus wrote that, he was convinced that population growth would inevitably outstrip our ability to produce food. He was wrong, of course, but more than that his solution was eugenics based on the assumption that poor people were the problem, and the solution was to deliberately make their lives worse so they’d die faster. Once upon a time, I might have written that, since we’re more than capable of feeding everyone on the planet, we have  outgrown this misguided and murderous idea. Unfortunately, I think it’s as popular as ever, particularly among those to whom Malthus’ recommendation would not apply. They also seem to love the perspective that poor people are sub-human, and more like livestock to be controlled, than actual people. I don’t know whether capitalists actually believe it, but they all adhere to the dogma that because “anyone can make it” under capitalism, that means that the poor chose their lot in life by not working hard enough. Poverty, under this ideology, is itself proof of unworthiness, and the only way to make people better is to punish them for being bad. They tend to avoid saying as much, but it’s pretty clear when you look at their “solutions” to societal problems.

The newest version of this old idea is probably longtermism/effective altruism, which basically holds that because rich people are “doing” all the important stuff like trying to colonize space, they need to be able to do whatever they want now, because it will make life better for the trillions of humans that will live out in space some time in the future. Poverty, child slavery, workplace death or injury, disease, global warming – none of it matters “in the grand scheme of things”, because Elon’s gonna make us interplanetary. This same self-importance seems to be prevalent throughout the ranks of the rich, including politicians.

This post isn’t about all of that, but I wanted to try to provide some context for the fact that North Dakota Republicans just shot down a free school lunch program – for feeding hungry children – and then gave themselves an increase in their own free lunch program:

Just over a week ago, North Dakota lawmakers voted to prevent giving free school lunches to low-income students. Then, on Thursday, they voted to increase the amount of money they get to spend on their own lunch.

On March 27, the Senate narrowly rejected a bill, which had passed the House, guaranteeing free school lunches to K-12 students in families at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

 

On Thursday, the Senate voted 26–21 to pass a bill to raise per diem meal reimbursements for state employees traveling within the state, from $35 to $45.

Republican Assistant Majority Leader Jerry Klein told local outlet InForum that state employees should be getting a higher sum because inflation costs have made meals more expensive. Klein voted against giving students, whose parents are also being squeezed by inflation, free school lunch.

“I thought today’s vote was very self-serving,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Kathy Hogan told InForum. “How can we vote for ourselves when we can’t vote for children?”

The effort to give low-income students free school lunches for the next two years would have cost just some $6 million, a relatively small price to pay to ensure children don’t go hungry. While the Senate failed to pass the bill, the House is not giving up quite yet, reattaching the provision to a broader school funding bill.

I think that every person running for political office should be made to spell out what they believe society is for. Why are we doing all this? If literally feeding children is not the problem of the government, then what is? For some, it seems like it’s literally just there to serve the whims and interests of the rich, and to keep everyone else in line as the rich destroy everything. These politicians, and all others who oppose free school lunches, are actively choosing to harm the development of children in ways that will likely affect their entire lives. They’re also choosing to weaken the immune systems of poor children, and to make it much, much harder for them to succeed in school. The resources absolutely exist, but whatever these “leaders” view as their responsibilities, feeding starving children isn’t on the list.

I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, US politicians in both parties work to inflict and maintain malnutrition in poor children all over the world on a daily basis. and have done for decades. Honestly, they’ve been working to ensure people go hungry in the U.S. as well, from the enforcement of racial poverty during and since segregation, to the continuation of environmental inequality, to the continual assault on any government program that seeks to improve life for the working class.

Writing about this feels a bit like writing about the train derailment in East Palestine. This isn’t a new problem, it’s just that sometimes reporting on it catches national attention for a little while. This stuff is going to keep happening. It will not stop until the people organize enough to make it stop. There are absolutely politicians who are doing what they can to make the world better, and that work is worth acknowledging. The school lunch program has been attached to another education bill, and maybe the press about this glaring hypocrisy will shame some people into changing their votes, but the resources of the wealthy are on the side of those who want children to go hungry, and unless we take away the power of the wealthy, they will never stop trying to consume everything and everyone to for their own enrichment. Is it eugenics? It’s hard to say what’s going on inside a person’s head, but the actions we can see sure read like those of someone who shares Malthus’ disdain for the filthy poors.

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Biden Betrays Trans Students, Offers Discrimination Guide

Right at the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order protecting trans people from discrimination, including trans children involved in competitive sports. This was before the current moral panic had reached the current genocidal fever, but trans people had absolutely been under growing attack. It was a welcome sign of support from someone whose record didn’t exactly mark him as a reliable ally in the fight for civil rights. Unfortunately, Biden has apparently decided that supporting a minority that’s the active target of a genocidal hate campaign is no longer in his political interest:

The Biden Department of Education has issued new Title IX regulations permitting restrictions on transgender athletes, leaving many in the transgender community feeling betrayed. The new regulations detail numerous ways schools can ban trans athletes while remaining compliant with Title IX, alarmingly echoing right-wing talking points about scholarships and risk of injury. These regulations specify methods schools may employ to determine a student’s sex, including invasive physical examinations. Although the administration will likely try to spin it as a nuanced approach, it will likely only add fuel to the fire of schools trying to ban transgender people from sports.

Just a brief point on the issue of scholarships. It has long been noted that when it comes to trans people, and trans women in particular, it seems that “fair” is often code for “trans women musn’t win”. The obsessive belief that men are always superior in athletics, and that trans women are really men, means that to a transphobe no victory by a trans athlete can be fair. Pretty much any time you hear a story about a cis woman athlete who was “robbed” of her place on a podium, it’ll turn out that she herself had beaten the trans woman in question, or that several other cis women placed ahead of both of them. Trans women can compete, but only if they don’t win.

I think this goes for the scholarship issue as well – the starting assumption is that trans women are inherently undeserving of athletic scholarships. Some some people will pretend to be allies, but only in a very paternalistic way that assumes the trans experience will always be pitiable, When trans people don’t fit that image, that allegiance fades away. They will also side with an exploitative education system over trans rights. Biden’s record on student loan debt is not good, and I think it’s very telling that rather than pushing to create a system in which scholarships so important, he’ll lock certain people out of eligibility. There is no good reason why people should be made to compete for the ability to get an affordable education, just as there’s no reason to discriminate against trans athletes.

The new regulations emerged just hours after a substantial victory for transgender individuals in sports. Today, the Supreme Court delivered its first ruling on the recent wave of anti-trans legislation. West Virginia has tried to ban trans students from participating in sports, with a case currently being heard involving a young transgender girl in the state. Although a federal court has halted West Virginia’s trans athlete ban, the Supreme Court listened to an appeal to temporarily reinstate the ban. In a significant 7-2 decision, Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices, rejecting the appeal and marking a big moment for transgender rights.

However, the celebration for trans individuals was short-lived. Mere hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Biden’s new Title IX regulations surfaced, appearing to include significant concessions to those opposing transgender participation in sports. While the regulations may also displease conservatives by not permitting outright bans on trans athletes, they leave issues like “concerns over scholarships” and “risk of injury” unaddressed and still allow for broad bans for various sports and grade levels. The regulations outline situations in which schools could likely ban trans individuals from sports, making the new Title IX proposal document resemble a guide on how to discriminate rather than a comprehensive protection for transgender people.

[…]

Significantly, the rule does not categorically ban schools and states from enacting sports bans. In fact, the new rule allows for sports bans if they are “substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective” and “minimize harms” to trans students who are denied or banned from sports. While it does not allow for blanket bans, it still allows bans for particular sports, grade levels, and more.

This concession would be significant enough, but the rest of the document is even worse. When discussing the scope of the rule, for instance, the document states that things such as gender markers on birth certificates, invasive “medical examinations,” and medical testing or treatments would all fall under the new rule. It does not ban the use of these tools, and in fact even seems to tacitly endorse them “as long as they minimize harm.”

From what I can tell, Joe Biden has always been pretty conservative. From his opposition to busing as part of desegregation, to his work making student loan debt inescapable, to his dedication to creating and maintaining mass incarceration, he’s more or less the epitome of “well, the Republicans are even worse, so I guess I gotta vote for him”. He was, and is, a better option than Trump, but I continue to believe that he’s not capable of leading the U.S. away from fascism. There are a lot of ways in which one can oppose fascism, but appeasement, historically, has not helped. Give fascists an inch, and they’ll claim that it always belonged to them, and the mere fact that you used to have control is proof that you want to take everything from them, because you’re evil, and controlled by the Jews. Appeasing Nazis, very famously, didn’t work to do anything except help the Nazis.

I’m framing it this way, because I’m giving Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here. I’m assuming that his decision to betray trans people, while they are actively trying to defend themselves against a genocide, was made out of political calculation rather than personal bigotry. The best-case scenario is that he thinks that this will demonstrate that he’s willing to “be the reasonable one” and meet the Republicans halfway. If that’s what’s going on, then Biden is once again demonstrating that he has learned nothing from the last three decades of GOP politics.

“Meet me in the middle,” says the unjust man.

I don’t think this will work, because the fascists have no interest in anything less than the eradication of trans people from public life. What seems more likely, to me, is that the fascists will use this as proof that “the left” secretly knows they’re right about trans people. This will embolden them, because fascists cannot be appeased. They read appeasement as weakness, and they view weakness as an invitation to attack.

As Erin says elsewhere in the article quoted above, these new regulations ignore the lies that are often told about trans athletes. I think one of the reasons why this is such a popular line of attack is that most people don’t really understand how sports came to be segregated by gender, or how transition affects athletic ability. If you like videos, Mia Mulder and Jessie Gender both tackled the subject. Cosmos Magazine also dug into the issue just over a year ago:

While research in this field is still in its infancy, it’s clearer than some think. Not only do trans women not have advantages over cis women in sport in most cases, but cis women playing sports are overwhelmingly not worried about trans women competing alongside them.

First, let’s start with the science. When a trans woman decides to transition, usually one of the first medical steps they’ll undertake is to go on hormones. These are testosterone blockers (also known as anti-androgen medications) and estrogen, both of which are common medications that can also be prescribed to cis women to treat various ailments.

These hormones have a number of effects on a trans woman’s body – they add and change the way fat is distributed, they lower the levels of red blood cells, and significantly decrease strength, muscle and lean body mass.

“In sports cheating via ‘blood doping’, red blood cells are raised,” wrote Ada Cheung, an endocrinologist from the University of Melbourne, in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion article. “The opposite occurs in trans women: oxygen-carrying red blood cells drop to female levels. Trans women gain fat mass and lose bone density.

“Further research is coming. My research group at the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University, have started the GAME research study examining how feminising hormones impact fitness, endurance, physique and gene changes in muscle over time in comparison groups.”

Although hormones will change many facets of a trans woman’s body if they transition as an adult, it won’t change someone’s height; and one study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggested that despite strength and muscle decreasing, they may still have a small advantage over the average cis women.

This is where the controversy comes from. Is it “fair” for someone who went through male puberty to be able to play at the elite level with women? Despite the recent coverage, this is not a particularly new issue. In elite sports, many sporting bodies already have codes in place that allow trans women to play if their testosterone level is below 5–10 nanomoles per litre for a number of months.

But in almost all sports, height or a slight strength advantage are not what gives you the leg-up over competitors. The AFL has called the ideas that trans women will “dominate” on the field, or cause a safety concern to their cis teammates, as “myths”.

“Sporting ability is more than just hormones,” they write in their Gender Diversity Policy. “Like other players, gender diverse players are all individuals and may have a range of physical abilities, fitness, skill levels and different strengths and weaknesses in the multi-skilled game of Australian football.

“For example, a cisgender or transgender woman may be taller and/or stronger than other women competitors but may also be slower and/or less agile.”

The results at the Olympics and other major sporting events back this up. For the very few trans women who have competed in sport at the elite level, there’s been no domination over cis women. Trans women may occasionally win, but they have never broken a world record, or won an Olympic event. If anything, trans women seem very much on an even playing field with their cis counterparts.

It’s also worth pointing out that the cohort of trans girls who transitioned before going through male puberty is only going to increase as more transgender people are able to transition earlier. For example, in 2017 in Australia, a law was overturned in the courts that had required all under 18 trans youth to go to court to be able to access puberty blockers or hormones from their doctor. Although there’s still a long way to go, increased access to gender affirming care for kids means that the issue itself is very likely to get smaller over time.

But, of course, the transphobes are doing everything they can to prevent that last paragraph from being true. They’re fighting to make it impossible for anyone to transition, and they’re starting with children. They don’t want fairness, and they don’t care about the wellbeing of trans people; they just want them to stop existing. They also, as I said, neither know nor care why women’s sports are separated from men’s sports:

This idea that trans women are naturally better at sport than cis women comes back to the impression that men have an innate advantage over women in every sport, which is not true either. Although we’ve mentioned that men are on average taller and stronger than women, at very long distances in ultra-running, research has shown that women start to outcompete men. This seems to be because women are metabolically better suited for endurance. Then there’s sports like figure skating, which became segregated in 1905 after British woman Madge Syers entered what had previously been an all-male World Championships and won silver.

Cis men do have an advantage in some areas, but not in others. I’m sure there are people who believe that men have a “biological advantage” when it comes to marksmanship, for example, but I would hope that none of my regular readers think that. One big reason many competitions are segregated like this, other than protecting men’s egos, is that due to the way history has played out, there are fewer women who go into professional athletics. Having a smaller pool from which to draw talent means that you will have fewer people capable of performing at the very peak. There are other reasons, which are covered by the videos I linked above, but the reality is that the whole situation is a lot more complicated than just “man stronk, woman weak”.

And when it comes to student sports, as the Cosmos article mentions, the point is rarely just to see who’s best. This may come as a shock to some members of the sport-poisoned society of the United States, but when it comes to children, sports don’t exist to train kids for professional leagues. Most of the time, it’s far more about practicing teamwork, getting exercise, building self-confidence, and things like that. If losing a sporting event, as a student, means that you can’t afford to live, or to keep getting your education, something in society has gone very, very wrong.

I don’t know whether this move by the Biden Administration will have whatever political benefits he’s hoping for. As some of the people I follow on Twitter have mentioned, trans people are both a tiny minority, and generally not very popular in USian politics. It’s possible that this will swing some voters in Biden’s favor, and this kind of casual discrimination is better than the wholesale extermination that the GOP is pursuing. Even so, it won’t slake the conservative thirst for blood. You can argue until the cows come home about how this is some sort of cunning ploy, but at the end of the day, it’s still a betrayal. This will directly harm student athletes of all ages, and it will encourage the bigots to redouble their efforts to hurt all trans people. This feels like the trans community is being used as a political pawn by someone who truly does not care of that pawn ends up being sacrificed.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!