This Sunday at 3pm Central I’m convening a small group of my Patreon patrons and FtB bloggers to have a science-based conversation about all the pseudo-scientific nonsense floating about.
What I’m hoping to do is much more than just sneer at stupid ideas, but to talk about how we can persuade and inform people about why some of their ideas are bad, and what are better approaches. Let’s put together some positive science communication!
I got word from a colleague* that their compost bin was accumulating spiders again — they had a swarm of them last spring, that disappeared over winter — so I had to check it out. I opened the bin and was disappointed at first, because while I saw lots of cobwebs all over the decaying vegetable matter, there was nowhere near the number of spiders I’d seen in the spring.
I finally spotted one in a corner. Steatoda borealis, the same species that had thoroughly colonized the bin before.
Steatoda borealis is an interesting theridiidid. They seem to be the native species to this area, with the more common house spiders being immigrants from either Eurasia or South America, depending on the species. These beasts are bigger than the others, and I haven’t seen them in houses or garages much, mainly outdoors or in special environments like this compost bin. I’ve got some in the lab, and they seem less active than Parasteatoda or Steatoda triangulosa, but that may be because I’ve only observed them in the day.
I spent several moments poking around in the bin, taking a bunch of photos, making a note to myself to come back in a week or two. Then I started to lower the lid. The lid I’d been holding up all this time with my left hand. Only then did I notice that it was covered in webbing, and there were all the spiders, lots of them, gettin’ busy busy beneath my oblivious fingertips. Squeee! Jackpot!
So I had to take a bunch more photos. These spiders were paired off all over the place, mating furiously! I took photos of these wonderful piles of tangled legs, 16 at a time with agitated bodies having a grand time.
You’ve probably heard about female spiders killing their mates and eating them, but that doesn’t happen so much in environments rich in food. Steatoda and Parasteatoda can happily coexist in sprawling web communities where lots of insect life is rising up from a festering mass, and they don’t do the cannibalism thing in those circumstances.
I did notice one lonely male off to the side of a mating pair, staring intensely. I hope you find your true love soon, little guy!
Definitely going back here later. It’s a wild little hotspot for spider orgies.
This post also appears on my Patreon account, complete with spider photos. The photos are also posted on Instagram and iNaturalist.
*A colleague in math. Curious fact: two of the professors in our math discipline have the most interesting spider populations in their yards. Is it something about mathematicians that attracts spiders?
Here’s how the NY Times reports on yesterday’s White House briefing:
“dangerously, in the view of some experts”…what the hell? This is not a situation that requires some cautious ambiguity. In the view of all experts and your mother, injecting bleach or lysol or other surface disinfectant is a bloody stupid idea that will do great harm. UV is dangerous — it’s what’s going to give you all painful sunburns as summer arrives — you should not lightly irradiate your delicate internal tissues with it.
“muses”? Fucking “muses”? We do not need the pig-ignorant musings of a rambling fool. I would point out to you that Ecuador is suffering massive pandemic deaths. Ecuador is on the equator. Ecuador is soaking in sunlight. Light is not a sufficient remedy.
Just for comparison, here’s an actual Fox News headline.
I can’t tell the two apart. Some are saying that the NY Times soft-selling of a crisis is dangerous. Some are saying that the tepid reporting of the NY Times is once again going to lead us to disaster. Some are saying the NY Times is the propaganda organ for the status quo. Some are saying you should cancel your subscription. Some might even say that Dean Baquet and the entire editorial staff of the newspaper ought to be tried for their responsibility in misleading the public, and thrown in jail with Judith Miller.
Oh, wait. Judith Miller is not in jail. She was promoted to a position at Fox News.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Trump had another of his daily talks today.
After the presentation, Trump asked whether UV light could be used to help people with the virus, whether sunlight could be brought “inside the body,” or whether disinfectant materials could be used to cleanse bodies in the same way they disinfect surfaces.
“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way,” Trump said, adding it “sounds interesting.”
He turned to the power of disinfectants, ad libbing about what it could do inside the human body.
“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out [from a surface] in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that [by] injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number,” Trump pondered.
Good god. Our best hope anymore is that Trump and his trumpkins start shooting up bleach or gargling isopropyl alcohol. Please, start a rumor that cyanide is an effective anti-viral.
That man is spewing criminal misinformation. He’s killing people.
I’ve seen what happens when you inject surface disinfectant into your body and the result was so bad I’d probably be put in Twitter jail if I posted a photo.
Fist-sized holes. In your person. Where the tissue died and rotted away. https://t.co/GTlWT0jbmT
— Claire Zagorski, MSc, LP (@Claireific) April 23, 2020
Unimaginable stupidity.
An anti-vaxxer got arrested in Idaho. She had organized an act of defiance, leading a mob of similarly inclined parents and their unfortunate children to take over a closed playground, ignoring social distancing rules, and then, as we’ve come to expect from a flock of Karens, sternly arguing with the police who came to shoo them away. “Officer, you don’t want to do that,” they karened karenly, as the police lost patience with her refusals. Of course, being a white woman doing stupid things, she didn’t have to worry — she was gently handcuffed and led away, rather than getting the usual stranglehold, tased, and/or shot routine she would have experienced if she were a different color. I wish the police would deal with everyone as politely and deferentially as they did Sara Brady.
“Officer, you don’t want to do that.”
My god, the privilege is astounding but unsurprising pic.twitter.com/ggNnS11p2e
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 23, 2020
It’s disturbing to see someone who is fervently anti-vaccination shepherding so many kids around. There is no vaccine for the coronavirus, but there are other childhood diseases about, and this anti-science mother seems determined to flout even the simplest restrictions to make sure her kids get to wallow in everything.
I’m no fan of the cops, but even I am feeling a little sympathy for the officers who were enforcing the closure of the park, because now Ammon Bundy and his gang are harassing the police who were involved. He’s also complaining about Governor Brad Little for all the wrong reasons — Little is an unpleasant transphobe, but in this one case he’s in the right, enforcing a stay-at-home order for his state that the right-wing loons like Brady and Bundy are eager to violate.
Good news — my daughter sewed me a mask, and it arrived today!
So comfortable…now I can go rob a liquor store and no one will know who it is! Or whatever this is for.
Unfortunately, almost no one is wearing any kind of mask when they go out in Morris. We need a few thousand of these here in town.
Our Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, who oversees the CDC and FDA, responded to the need for focus on COVID-19 by…looking around and picking an old pal. Who previously ran a labradoodle breeding business.
Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”
He has absolutely no qualifications for running a national response to a public health crisis.
Harrison, 37, was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields. In 2006, he joined HHS in a one-year stint as a “Confidential Assistant” to Azar, who was then deputy secretary. He also had posts working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the Department of Defense and a Washington public relations company.
Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.
I work at a state-funded institution. There are so many rules on hiring…I can’t just tap on old college chum on the shoulder and say, “Hey, we need someone to teach biochemistry. Would you like to…?” and then they say “But I work in construction!” and I tell them “Wing it, I’m sure you could do it” and fill out all the paperwork to get them a salary and the university rubber stamps it and next thing you know, we’ve got some seat-warmer running our biochem class by having the students sit and watch episodes of “Planet Earth” on a VCR. That’s what this feels like.
Instead, we convened a committee, wrote a detailed description of required qualifications, met with HR to get the ground rules explained to us, advertised the position nationally, screened a hundred applications, had phone interviews with 10, brought 3 to campus for a job/teaching talk, argued over the choices, and finally, after months of work, got an agreeable candidate, so we could submit paperwork to our division chair, who passed it on to the chancellor of our university, who got the approval of the president of the university and all its branch campuses, which meant we could finally put this person to work. All that, to hire one professor at a small liberal arts university in rural Minnesota.
We don’t put anywhere close to that much effort in selecting the national coordinator of our pandemic response? This is a problem. This is how idiots get placed in positions of power and influence when there is no process and no required minimal qualifications for an important job.
I do kind of wonder what Brian Harrison honestly feels about this appointment. I have more qualifications than he does — at least I have a biology degree — and if Alex Azar had mysteriously asked me to take on this job, I would have turned him down flat and said he needed to get someone with far more experience in public health than I do. Does the labradoodle breeder now sit in his office wondering how the hell he got there and having no clue how to start, who to contact, how to prioritize critical tasks with no knowledge about what any of the tasks are? Or is he so Dunning-Kruegered that he’s supremely confident that he can fix things, and is more happy that he can brag to his friends and family about how important he is?
No, really, if I suddenly swapped places with Brian Harrison I’d be having a total nervous breakdown right now, and trying desperately to find some better person to take my place. But then, I’ve never bred labradoodles.
It feels like a major accomplishment. I didn’t go far, just circling my house, looking for spiders, and I found lots of them! Mainly wolf spiders and lots of zebra jumping spiders. I threw photos up on the usual places: Patreon and Instagram and iNaturalist.
It’s true! The Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque will be playing the adhan five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. You may recall that that was the Minneapolis neighborhood visited by Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer in their quest to find the Muslim terrorists lurking there.
The Muslim call to prayer will be broadcast the traditional five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, beginning with the start of Ramadan this week and continuing through the end of the religious holiday in May.
I checked out a few sites where this news was being reported. There’s a lot of Jesus-freaking going on, but I thought this comment merited my attention.
We need to shut this down. Where are all the “principled atheists” and “skeptical scientists” to oppose this? They’ll sure put up a fuss if there’s a cross outside or a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse. Cricket noises when the city pays* for loudspeakers to blast Muslim propaganda into neighborhoods.
He put the asterisk there because there isn’t actually any sign that the city paid for it, he just thinks they did. But hey! “Principled atheist.” “Skeptical scientist.” He might as well have written by name in there, because that’s me, and I do have a response.
I titled this “shocking” because the story implies that Muslim communities were not allowed to make the call to prayer before this. That’s just wrong! The Christian believers are always ringing bells and singing Christian carols between October and January and inviting people to church without a single qualm. But Muslims haven’t been allowed to do the same for their religion? Why? If the Catholic church down the street from me can ring their bells multiple times a day on Sundays, why can’t the muezzins do likewise for their faith, within the limits of noise ordnances? If singing “God is Great” and “There is no God but God” is propaganda, then so is saying “Jesus is Lord”, and you can’t ban one without banning the other.
Freedom of religion means you can’t impose your religion on me, and I can’t force my godlessness on you, and that all religions and non-religions ought to be treated equally. I have no problem with this practice, any more than I complain about the nearby Catholic church. I’d go further and say we shouldn’t disallow it once Ramadan is over, within any limits on frequency and volume that must be equally applied to all churches as well. Also, to me, if ever the urge strikes me to go outside and bang pots and shake my fist at the sky and yell about religions being false.
It’s especially good to allow this practice if it makes Jacob Wohl pee his pants.
A Minnesota resident, Ben Dorr, takes credit for the recent surge of nitwits protesting in regional state capitals. The article calls him an “activist”, but a more accurate term would be “parasite”.
Amid the honking cars and the chants of “USA, USA,” the group’s leader, Ben Dorr, took credit for helping draw supporters to the rally.
“We’re done being quarantined, we’re done having our freedoms taken,” said Dorr. “It’s time to open up America.”
Across the country, Dorr and his older brothers, Chris and Aaron, have long opposed Republican legislators for not being conservative enough on issues ranging from guns to abortion. Their detractors say they spread disinformation to sow confusion among voters.
That’s right, this is not a new thing. The Dorrs are fanatical gun fondlers, and likewise fanatical anti-abortionists. If there’s a right wing mania about anything, the Dorrs will crank it up to 11 and monetize it.
Based on publicly available tax documents, the Dorrs’ efforts in Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio have raised more than $2.9 million since 2013, with at least a third of it going to a direct mail printing company in Iowa owned by the Dorr family.
This is how they make money, and quite a bit of it, by making swarms of Facebook groups and using them to whip the far right into a froth and compel them to make donations. They’re all about god, guns, and domination over womankind. Primarily, though, they are masters of Facebook, and have figured out the strategies behind the media and use it to recruit followers and radicalize them and empty their pockets.
Jeez, but I despise Facebook.
On the Reopen Minnesota page, which has 22,000 followers, members have likened coronavirus to the flu (coronavirus is more deadly), have questioned the science of wearing masks, even though it’s recommended by public health officials in Trump’s administration, and suggested that death rate numbers are being inflated to scare people into compliance.
They also like to oppose education and keep people ignorant. There’s more profit in stupid people, you know. Isn’t it amazing how Facebook has turned the internet into a tool for ignorance?
Aaron, Chris and Ben Dorr’s father Paul is also well known for fighting public school referendums in Iowa and in the Midwest. Motivated by his belief that children should be home-schooled or within a religious community, he’s also created Facebook pages, websites and videos to make his case.
One thing that’s amusing about them is that the Minnesota Republicans hate them with a passion, because they routinely take political positions so far to the right of the Republicans, and then target Republicans as milktoast wimps. They created a website to specifically explain that the Dorrs are scammers. “Right now, Senate Republicans are the only thing stopping Democrats from passing radical gun control”…how dare the Dorrs criticize us for not being radical enough?
They’re also fake activists. They talk the wild and crazy talk, but they don’t walk the wild and crazy walk — they just amble back to their computers to lie and beg for more money.
While Ben and his brother Chris are registered as lobbyists, Daudt said they do little to advance issues at the Capitol or support legislators during campaign season.
He recalled seeing Ben Dorr filming a video on the Capitol steps several years ago:
“He was just going on and on about how he’s going to turn around right now and go to so-and-so’s office and I’m not going to leave until they take a meeting with me,” Daudt said. “Then they cut the video … and they just wandered off to their vehicles.”
“They are definitely misleading people to make people think they are involved and engaged here,” Daudt said.
And that’s the kind of person behind the current wave of phony protests. There are exploiters out there who can mobilize the fringe to do stupid things that get their faces on the news.
