Good morning! Thanks for the birthday greetings!

Hey, all, I took a blog break yesterday — it’s been a long semester so far and I just decided to cut off one thing for a bit. It was…different (that’s Minnesota slang, I’ll let others translate). I’ll ease back in today.

First on the agenda: my birthday was on Friday, and I got inundated with greetings on Twitter and Facebook and all those social media places, and I did not reply to them. Not because I’m a bitter, hateful old man now, but simply because there were so dang many of them that if I tried I would have been sitting there all day typing the same short phrases over and over again. So I will now simply broadcast one mass “THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I HAD A LOVELY TIME. I’D HAVE INVITED YOU TO THE PARTY BUT THE WEATHER WAS TERRIBLE AND I DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH CAKE. SINCERELY, PZ.” Although actually I had tacos, but if I’d told you that you would have been even more annoyed that I didn’t invite you. Sorry. But really, thanks!

For those of you hoping for news from the future, I have to tell you that so far being 61 is awesome. It’s a prime number, you know, and you get all kinds of superpowers on prime birthdays; now I have to wait 6 more years before I get another base power boost. It’s also the sum of two squares, so you get to feel as good as you did when you were 5, 6, 25, and 36, which is nice.

All in all, I highly recommend living until you are at least 61. I encourage all of you young’uns to do so.

Friday Cephalopod: Kleptopirates of the deep!

This is a sad, wounded, immature giant squid dying in a harbor in Spain.

It was wounded by fellow giant squid, bigger than she was, and hungry.

Off of northern Spain, giant squid often feed on schools of fish called blue whiting. The schools swim 400 meters or less below the surface, while the squid prefer to hang out around a mile deep. The squid must ascend to hunt, probably seizing fish from below with their tentacles, then descend again. In this scenario, a squid could save energy by pirating food from its neighbor rather than hunting its own fish, Guerra says: If the target squid has already carried its prey back to the depths to eat, the pirate could save itself a trip up to the shallow water. Staying below would also protect a pirate from predators such as dolphins and sperm whales that hang around the fish schools.

If a pirate happened to kill its victim, it would also reduce competition. The scientists think that’s what happened with the Bares squid: Its tentacles were ripped off in the fight over food. “The victim, disoriented and wounded, could enter a warmer mass of water in which the efficiency of their blood decreases markedly,” the authors write in a recent paper in the journal Ecology. “In this way, the victim, almost asphyxiated, would be at the mercy of the marine currents, being dragged toward the coast.”

It’s a squid eat squid world out there.

What will destroy America now?

We’ve got a crumbling infrastructure, we’ve got a know-nothing fool in the White House and a mob of sycophants for Wall Street in congress, climate change is going to inevitably wreak havoc on us, and kids are taking AR-15s to show & tell so they can murder their classmates. All these are minor concerns compared to the true danger to our way of life: the Academy Awards. The wingnuts’ heads are spinning over who won an Oscar.

“The Academy Award ceremonies this week provided the best film and best director Oscar to a violation of the worst possible sexual sin mentioned in Leviticus chapter 18,” Swanson said on his radio program today. “Maybe I’ll just leave it there, I don’t want to defile the ears of my listeners. But this was another milestone in the moral degradation of Hollywood and the nation itself. What it did was it presented the ultimate sexual depravity—and, again, I don’t want anyone thinking what this is—but the ultimate sexual depravity as presented in Leviticus 18 is presented in this movie as a tender and romantic and a beautiful thing. Even saying that is just disgusting.”

Swanson proceeded to read a passage from Leviticus 18 in which God warned the Israelites that they would be destroyed if they dared to engage in such depravity.

“God says, ‘Be careful, I might just bring this to you if you violate my law to the level of egregiousness contained in the moral commands in Leviticus 18,’” Swanson declared. “It’s these abominable practices that are being committed in this nation today and glorified at the highest echelons of the nation.”

The psychology of these people is actually kind of interesting. There are large numbers of people who are obsessed with a distorted version of sexual purity, and they gather in large numbers in buildings called “churches” or “congress”, and they reassure each other that they are the clean ones and everyone outside their narrow little group is dirty. This is not a movie about bestiality; it’s a movie about a sentient being with physical differences from human beings, and that has them frothing in revulsion.

I wonder if they’ve actually seen it. I haven’t seen a lot of fundamentalist fury at the other aspect of the movie that is in defiance of their puritanical mores — the casual acceptance of masturbation and female sexuality as perfectly normal and healthy. It might be a good idea to smuggle showings of The Shape of Water into megachurches to show to the congregations. It might have the same effect on theocrats as Slim Whitman’s yodeling had on the invaders in Mars Attacks.

Just when you were thinking the skeptic movement couldn’t get worse

Ooh, 16 September? I’m sorry, I think I have an appointment to scald my skin off with a bucket of boiling hot vomit that night. I guess I’ll have to pass.

Lawrence Krauss should look at that and be reassured that this too shall pass. You can be an alleged rapist and still be invited to share the stage with one of the Big Names, and that Big Name will still welcome you. It’s quite the cozy little boys’ club.

I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It

How often have you heard those fiercely principle free speech activists say that? Too often. How often do they actually mean it? Rarely.

Here’s a perfect example.

On March 3, a small team of conservative activists converged on Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif. live-streaming their actions on Facebook with this description: “Infiltrating Berkeley’s Marxist Hive.”

“Fucking Commie scum,” shouted one conservative activist, taunting the bookstore employees who met them at the door. He wore an American flag on his shoulders and a “Make America Great Again” hat. “We’re gonna burn down your bookstore, you know that right? he said.

I’ve been to Revolution Books in LA, and they also have stores in New York and Chicago that I know of. I like the people there. They also have a thoughtful and wide range of books, and they’re about more than just selling books — they’re community activists, and they work hard to support the poor, ex-cons, anyone. They’re about as Christ-like an organization as you’ll find anywhere, far more so than most churches. So it’s shocking/not shocking at all to see the MAGA crowd threatening to burn them down, and actually making prolonged assaults on their right to exist.

Marxism is at the heart of the bookstore, founded upon the ideals of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party and author of The New Communism. These values make the store a favorite target of conservative activists, and 2017 brought a wave of intimidation and confrontation. Last September, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos made a brief visit to Berkeley, an event that drew police from around the region. That evening, a band of between 30 and 40 right-wing activists stormed Revolution Books. The attackers also recorded that episode on video, rattling windows and confronting patrons.

Following that initial incident, activists orchestrated eight more visits to the store—posting their exploits in online videos. In one clip, a protester elbows a bookstore supporter in the face, smashing his glasses.

The harassment extends beyond physical confrontations. Right-wing activists also “dox” their targets, sharing opponents’ personal information online. In digital forums, these activists have released contact information for bookstore employees, patrons, and supporters. Revolution Books has received up to 60 calls a day from people mocking or threatening the store.

OK, I can’t get into Bob Avakian myself; if you don’t either, fine. But that shouldn’t matter. How can you use free speech to such an extent that you demand that Nazis be given free reign, while threatening and harassing people who sell books? The alt-right has killed people; Revolution Books offers them employment, help, and information. Yet I’ve heard almost nothing until now about this kind of abuse.

The “free speech” pretense is all a lie.

It’s International Richard Herring Explains to Clueless Men That 19 November is International Men’s Day Day

It’s International Women’s Day! Congratulations, ladies, on the one day a year we’ll acknowledge your existence, but you still aren’t getting a raise, and hey, why should we hire you anyway when you’re just going to get pregnant and go goof off with babies instead of doing your work?

To add further insult, the internet is going to be full of indignant stupid men whining about why women get a special day and they don’t, which means someone has to clean up the garbage. Richard Herring has volunteered to do the cleanup, and has begun his long day of informing dull plodding fools that there is also an International Men’s Day on 19 November. It will be simultaneously entertaining and infuriating.

He’s also using it as an opportunity to raise money for Refuge, a charity for women and children who are victims of domestic violence, so you could also donate to that.

It’s not just the internet

I was listening to Monette Richards and Steve Shives talking about #MeToo this morning while preparing for my class. It’s a good discussion, and I only objected to one thing: they talk for a bit about how social media, YouTube, Facebook, etc. was enabling a bold new wave of rotten people. I’m old enough to remember a time before any of those things, and before the internet even.

It was bad then, too.

But it was different. Case in point: look at the John Birch Society. They were thriving in the 50s — they were more mainstream then — and the 60s, and they were peddling some heinous, hateful shit, even without a YouTube channel. They were recruiting racists, they were putting together marches, they were setting up their own private conferences. Even as a pre-teen I was exposed to their horrid dogma (and was repulsed by it — you know you’re pushing bad propaganda when even an 8-year-old can see through it). They were a minority, but they were influential, in a very bad way, and they were more cloaked.

I think the difference is that back then, if you supported an evil organization, whether it was the KKK or the John Birchers, you would proudly tell them, but you didn’t have a bullhorn to announce to the public at large that you were signing on with the bad people. It was more of a surreptitious growth, just as damaging, but you weren’t seeing it flamboyantly displayed. Nowadays when you think the alt-right is just peachy, you openly support it with an upvote or repost on Facebook, or you leave an ugly misspelled comment on YouTube, and everyone knows, oh yeah, those assholes have another fan.

But the point is that those supporters were doing the same thing way back when. It was just quieter. Nowadays the big difference is that everyone is wearing big bold colors that declare where you stand. I don’t know whether that’s better or worse, because the awful reactionary conservatives were pretty pernicious even without their own Facebook fan page.

You can also wear big bold colors that say you are on the side of righteousness by supporting the conference Monette is organizing, Secular Women Work. Attend or get a t-shirt by donating to their kickstarter.