Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in

It’s no secret that I am greatly disillusioned with organized atheism — it usually seems to organize around the idea of the status quo minus churches, and not much else. It leaves a great big gap where ethics and equality and social justice ought to be, all in the name of not alienating the unctuous asshats…and there are a lot of those in atheism. So I’ve just stayed away, which is very depressing, because I still think the core truth that there are no gods is important.

Tomorrow, Sunday at 2:00, Minnesota Atheists (which is a good group, one of the exceptions that is strongly committed to social justice activism) is hosting Jim Helton of American Atheists, one of the big orgs that has burned us all fairly recently, and he promises that things are changing. Here’s the topic for the day:

What is an “atheist issue”? American Atheists redefines what that is. They challenge the status quo. In doing so, they lay out a plan to fight for equality and the true separation of religion and government. If you are not happy with the way things are, then the time is now to make a change.
Jim G. Helton, the National Field Organizer for American Atheists, will be visiting freethought groups in Minnesota over the course of four days in mid-October to bring us up-to-date on what American Atheists is doing, how they can help us, and how we can help them.

That’s a bit vague, but August Berkshire, who is one of the good guys, vouches for him. He is correct that I am “not happy with the way things are”, but I don’t know if he’s referring to the way atheism is, or if he’s talking generically about the rising power of evangelical Christianity. Do I really want to get my hopes up and attend? I’m thinking about it. AA has the power to change a lot, I’ve just been disappointed so many times before.

Swedes & Norwegians

Saga Vanacek, the young woman who found a Viking sword in a Swedish lake, has written her story. She is commendably practical about her future plans, and has refused the offer to be Queen of Scandinavia.

This month, the archaeologists finally came to search the rest of the lake and they found a brooch that is as old as my sword, and a coin from the 18th century. Then they announced the news and I could finally tell everyone at school. I came back from gym class and the whiteboard said, “Saga’s sword” and there were balloons, and the whole class got to have ice-cream.

I had to give the sword to the local museum – Daddy explained that it’s part of history and important to share it with others. I felt “boo” that it’s gone away, but “yay” that other people will get to see it. I’m going to try to raise some money to make a replica sword that I can keep.

People on the internet are saying I am the queen of Sweden, because in the legend of King Arthur, he was given a sword by a lady in a lake, and that meant he would become king. I am not a lady – I’m only eight – but it’s true I found a sword in the lake. I wouldn’t mind being queen for a day, but when I grow up I want to be a vet. Or an actor in Paris.

Balloons and ice cream are much better than being royalty. I approve.

If you wish you could be a true master of aplomb, you should follow these lessons in how to be more Swedish.

1. Drink a lot of coffee.
Even if you think you drink a lot of coffee, double it right now and still not out-do the average Swede. We drink more coffee than anyone in the world, (except the Finns). Go for strong filter coffee.

2. When you get up in the morning, follow this ritual:
2 slices of crisp bread, 1-2 boiled eggs, a squirt of Kalles creamed cod roe with your eggs. Some sliced cheese, if you are feeling fancy. Drink a large glass of milk. Coffee.

There is a lot more, of course. Much of it seems to be about coffee and food. I speak from experience: this is all true. My wife is 100% Scandinavian (I’m only 50%), and I’ve noticed that she consumes twice as much coffee as I do, and she drinks it twice as fast. Must be genetic.

Or, if you’d prefer, you can aspire to the rigors of being more Norwegian. It’s not easy, but you can look forward to looking down on Swedes. This was also true of my family — even the ones who were half-Swedish liked to tease the Swedes with 20 Swedes ran through the weeds chased by one Norwegian. They overlooked that the song mainly praises the Irish, because as we all know, Knut Rokne is a good Norwegian.

Somehow, the attitude or Norwegian superiority survives the Law of Jante, which Saga Vanacek follows without a moment’s thought.

Warning: I grew up with the Scandinavian customs of a century ago, so traveling to Norway and discovering that they’re now committing the heresy of hot dogs on their lefse was a shock. Cultures change.

By the way, you could also try to be more Finnish, but that would be weird. Only true Finns want to be more Finnish. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

These are the scariest Halloween costumes ever

Zombies, ghouls, and miscellaneous brain-dead monsters:

It’s for a homeschooling conference titled Teach Them Diligently, with the motto “Strengthen Your Family Through Biblical Homeschooling”. Would you pay money to have these jokers teach your children lies?

Hmmm. I’ve got a strong family with children who grew up to make me proud, and we never had to indoctrinate them in biblical foolishness to accomplish that. What does their audience have to be so insecure about? That maybe, unless they lie really loudly, their children will grow up to ask questions and abandon dogma? Most of us consider that to be a desirable outcome.

Saudi princes are real GEMs, just like our Republican overlords

The latest excuse from Saudi Arabia for the death of Jamal Khashoggi is that he started it — he started a fist fight with a team of 15 professional killers, and they had to defend themselves by hacking him apart with a bonesaw. Our president* might well be willing to accept that story, but it’s out of character for Khashoggi and not compatible with the intent of Mohammed bin Salman and the ruling class of Saudi Arabia.

The murder is nothing new: the regime has been vicious and repressive for a long time, and this is just one case that has erupted into the public eye — it is actually a major error by Mohammed bin Salman, who has been trying to misrepresent himself as a progressive reformer. He’s not. He’s just another criminal thug who has been handed vast sums of money and excessive power by an archaic political system. We’ve seen all the warning signs that he was not a power for reform. Remember Raif Badawi?

The kingdom has long been an absolute monarchy that does not tolerate open dissent, but this kind of repression is new. In earlier times, Saudi rulers restricted behavior, often under severe interpretations of Islamic law, and carried out barbaric punishments. We have often called attention to the unjust treatment of blogger Raif Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 1,000 lashes — 50 were delivered in a public square in Jeddah before it was stopped — and 10 years in prison for online posts that challenged the religious authorities to allow a more pluralistic and moderate practice of Islam. The system was intolerant and harsh.

The powers-that-be in Saudi Arabia have been reshaping their laws to allow themselves greater latitude to oppress.

Almost all prosecutions of political and human rights activists have been channeled through the Specialized Criminal Court, originally established in 2008 to handle terrorism cases, where defendants often do not have lawyers during the investigative phase, and pretrial detentions can be arbitrary and lengthy. In October 2017, the kingdom updated its counterterrorism law, which was already overly broad, to add a host of tripwires to criminalize free expression. For example, the definition of terrorism was extended to those who “describe” the king or crown prince “in any way offensive to religion or justice.”

Oh, great. Now I’m a terrorist, because I’m going to openly say that the king and crown prince are goddamn evil motherfuckers.

That actually felt good. I’m going to have to curse the elites of Saudia Arabian society more often.

I remember, once upon a time, feeling that maybe Saudi Arabia was making progress — like when they started allowing women to drive. I was mistaken. It seems that one good reason to allow women to drive is that it gives you an easy way to tag a female dissident.

A good example of how the environment has changed is the case of female activists who had long sought the right to drive, and to change the guardianship system, which gives men the authority to make critical decisions on behalf of their female relatives. For years, the women had carefully pushed for change while staying largely within bounds the government could accept. But the new crown prince could not tolerate their voices. He granted women the right to drive — and then punished those who had worked for that reform. In May, 11 of them were arrested. Several remain in jail, accused of serious crimes that could bring long prison sentences, including “suspicious contact with foreign parties” and undermining the “security and stability” of the state. They have been vilified in the media; a pro-government Twitter account posted images of those arrested with the word “traitor” splattered in red across their faces, Human Rights Watch reported.

Cancel that arms deal our goddamn evil motherfucker of a president is so proud of. It’s the least we can do. Unfortunately, our GEM of a president aspires to by the tyrant ruler of a pariah state, just like the Saudi king, and is going to do nothing.

Biochemistry, it turns out, is not a creationist’s friend

Oh, look. Biochemists have found a recipe that spontaneously produces all four nucleotides used in RNA.

Carell’s story starts with only six molecular building blocks—oxygen, nitrogen, methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen cyanide, all of which would have been present on early Earth. Other research groups had shown that these molecules could react to form somewhat more complex compounds than the ones Carell used.

To make the pyrimidines, Carell started with compounds called cyanoacetylene and hydroxylamine, which react to form compounds called amino-isoxazoles. These, in turn, react with another simple molecule, urea, to form compounds that then react with a sugar called ribose to make one last set of intermediate compounds.

Finally, in the presence of sulfur-containing compounds called thiols and trace amounts of iron or nickel salts, these intermediates transform into the pyrimidines cytosine and uracil. As a bonus, this last reaction is triggered when the metals in the salts harbor extra positive charges, which is precisely what occurs in the final step in a similar molecular cascade that produces the purines, adenine and guanine. Even better, the step that leads to all four nucleotides works in one pot, Carell says, offering for the first time a plausible explanation of how all of RNA’s building blocks could have arisen side by side.

Why do Nazis equate “free speech” with a right to a platform?

Because that’s how they bankroll hate speech. The cries of “Free Speech!” have devolved into whining about “no-platforming” because it was never about expressing their ideas — they can still do that all they want — it was about getting paid. What really has them upset that the money train is being derailed.

“I wouldn’t say they’re faring very well,” Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Splinter of the “alt-right’s” financial status. “The vast majority of outspoken white supremacists or otherwise extremist groups have lost access to fundraising platforms like PayPal, Google Pay, and others like [them] have started enforcing their longstanding terms of services.” The white nationalist movement has by no means been entirely taken out by these efforts, but they’re not exactly rolling in dough right now.

One largely under-reported contributor to these circumstances is the meticulous, ongoing work of anti-racist and anti-fascist activists and civil rights groups. Using a common anti-fascist tactic called “no platform” which denies a person or group a platform to speak or organize (it’s sometimes called “de-platforming”), activists have helped make it difficult for white nationalists to fundraise online, stymying fascist activism by cutting off their income and fundraising capabilities. In a financial context, no platform means cutting the far right off from fundraising—both from crowdsourced fundraising platforms such as Patreon, and from collecting money directly via their own websites.

It’s all part of an anti-fascist strategy — yeah, paranoid far right goons, they are coming to get you. This is even better and more effective than punching them in the face.

Identifying which platforms continue to enable the far right fundraising is tedious and constant work, but restricting their fundraising capabilities is of the utmost importance. “Like with anything, if you take money out of the equation, it’s going to fold, or at least not flourish,” Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder and executive director of the anti-fascist organization One People’s Project, told Splinter. “The best way to cure fascism is to starve it to death, and that’s exactly what people are trying to do,” he said.

No one should be profiting from hate. Shut ’em all down.

By the way, Twitter is still a festering shithole of misogyny. When will that be fixed?

Spider update (no spider photos)

I’m getting a little anxious — my spider family is in a quiet phase right now. I have 6 breeding pairs of adults (well, Gwyneth ate her consort after mating, so 5½, and maybe bred pairs is the better term). I’m down to one egg sac — again, from Gwyneth, who is a sick Goth freak because she knitted an ugly, sloppy sac with the dead corpses of her prey imbedded in it, but it does have developing embryos inside it. She also littered the floor with decapitated fly heads. Gwyneth scares me sometimes.

But otherwise, I’m just waiting for them to produce more. My goal is to have a steady reliable output of eggs, and these little hiatuses are nerve wracking, but also understandable, since the colony is so small yet.

I do have a lot of tiny little juveniles coming up, at least. They’re getting a little overwhelming — these are my spider-children, in these little vials I picked up at JoAnn Fabrics (they’re intended for storing and sorting beads, but I have perverted them to my own wicked ends.) Thirty vials, thirty hungry little babies.

I have to go in every couple of days and tend to them. Put one or two flies in each vial (I made a little fly-shaker out of an Eppendorf tube — it’s like a salt shaker, only when you shake it flies come out), give ’em a spritz of water from an atomizer, and agonize over their health and predatory instincts. As they get big enough, I move them to an adult-sized tube, and when I’m confident of their sexual maturity, I’ll pair them up.

But right now it’s a waiting game with placid little beasties (except for Gwyneth) quietly tending to their webs, nibbling on flies and crickets, making me fret over when they’re going to spawn again.

By the way, over half the vials I’m cultivating contain Gwyneth’s progeny — she’s a fecund little monster. I’ll be interested to see if her distinctive behaviors carry on into the next generation. I’m planning on doing some inbreeding of her offspring to see if I can get a brood of savage spider mothers.