I presume he’ll be arrested and tried for treason and extortion now?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The presidential candidate who infamously claimed he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters is putting his belief in his immunity to the test by openly trying to convince the Georgia secretary of state to change the election results to make him the winner. Just like that. It’s an attempted coup, right in front of our eyes, in a recorded phone call, and the response of a select subset of Republicans (like Cruz and Rubio and Rand) is to refuse to recognize the criminality, and instead conspire to overthrow the certification of the results in the Senate.

The Post reports: “President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.” In the call, Trump asked Raffensperger to change the certified vote that was subject to multiple recounts: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

In fact he threatened him. The Post reports, “During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.” Trump, sounding like a mobster as he often does, said, “That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Nice career, there Brad. Shame if anything happened to it.

You can listen to, or read the transcript of, Trump’s hour-long phone call.

It’s an embarrassing spectacle. Trump is whiny and desperate, a rat frantically scratching at the walls of his cage, accusing the FBI and everyone else involved in verifying the results dishonest and incompetent, bringing up every ridiculous conspiracy theory he found on Twitter, just lashing out absurdly. This was Trump’s Captain Queeg moment, and he’s caught in this recording rolling his ball bearings around and looking like a demented fool.

Trump and Meadows dominated the phone call, talking non-stop and mostly incoherently. When he could get a few words in edgewise, Raffensperger quietly shot down all of Trump’s accusations. Here’s a few words from the Georgia secretary of state.

Well, I listened to what the president has just said. President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won. And we don’t — I didn’t agree about the 200,000 number that you’d mentioned. I’ll go through that point by point.

What we have done is we gave our state Senate about one and a half hours of our time going through the election issue by issue and then on the state House, the government affairs committee, we gave them about two and a half hours of our time, going back point by point on all the issues of contention. And then just a few days ago, we met with our U.S. congressmen, Republican congressmen, and we gave them about two hours of our time talking about this past election. Going back, primarily what you’ve talked about here focused in on primarily, I believe, is the absentee ballot process. I don’t believe that you’re really questioning the Dominion machines. Because we did a hand re-tally, a 100 percent re-tally of all the ballots, and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result. So I guess we can probably take that off the table.

I don’t think there’s an issue about that.

Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised.

But they — I guess there was a person named Mr. Braynard who came to these meetings and presented data, and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong.

Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.

It’s a remarkable criminal performance by the president. It’s going to be our eternal shame if he is not prosecuted for his blatant abuse of power.

Showing their teeth as a sign of smug arrogance

Oh look! It’s Officer Friendly! He looks nice, all clean cut and smiling, like he belongs on a poster for community outreach.

He has a Parler account where he brags about wanting to murder nurses who give vaccines, and an assortment of liberal politicians. He wants to smash down their doors and shoot them.

He has quite the gun collection, naturally.

He has also been fired.

Oh look! It’s a cheerful white woman! She’s some kind of upper-level Karen, though. Notice the Trump hat, and the mask shielding her chin in case it explodes. It’s not obvious from the photo, but she got her picture snapped as she was saying, “Have a nice day, n****r!”

She had boarded a plane in Seattle and refused to wear a face mask during the flight. She just stood there grinning, forcing the airline to disembark all the other passengers so the police could kick them off the plane.

She and her friend have been banned for life from ever flying on Frontier Airlines.

Yeesh. Happy smiling white people are the scariest monsters of them all.

I haven’t cleaned the trinoc since when?

This morning I resolved to figure out what was going on with my muddy images from microscope. The first step was a general cleaning, and I discovered a real horror. Here’s the trinoc head for my Wild M3C:

See that tube on the right, for the camera? I looked down it. GAAAAAA. Dust and dirt and I swear, cobwebs all over. It’s a 30 year old microscope, and we’ve had microscope technicians come through every couple of years to do general maintenance on all the teaching scopes, but that tube may not have been cleaned ever in all that time. There’s a very important mirror down at the bottom of that L-shaped widget, and I think the only way I can get at it properly is to dismantle the whole device — there are a couple of tiny metric hex bolts holding it all together, and I guess I’m going to have to take it apart and try not to break everything.

Anyway, I did push the dirt around a little with a microfiber cloth, and it’s slightly better, but I think it’s filmed over with something that is fouling the image. I took a test photo of this little guy, and it’s an improvement, but still far from perfect. The image through the eyepieces is beautifully crisp, so I’m definitely blaming the problem on that little mirror and decades of neglect.

‘Ware spider below the fold!

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12 million?

The Nashville suicide bomber may have had some peculiar motivations.

NBC News reported Wednesday that investigators have obtained evidence that Anthony Quinn Warner, who died in the explosion, may have subscribed to a conspiracy theory that many of the world’s most powerful figures, from Barack Obama to the late Bob Hope, are actually evil, lizard-like extraterrestrials in disguise. Officials told NBC News that investigators, who have been questioning friends and acquaintances and searching for clues of a possible motive for the bombing, have become aware of statements Warner made about the lizard people conspiracy theory — though it wasn’t immediately clear what those statements were. Authorities also reported that Warner made statements to others about hunting possible aliens during previous camping trips he took in his RV.

The so-called lizard people conspiracy theory has taken a back seat to some of the newer and more widely publicized baseless beliefs that have come to dominate the conspiracy landscape in recent years. But in 2013, a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling found that 12 million Americans believed that the country was run by lizard people in suits.

I’m only going to believe in the lizard people if it turns out that there are 12 million of them, and they’re not the “world’s most powerful figures”. That’s a rumor contrived to distract us from who the lizard people really are.

School portrait day

The spiders had to line up for their pictures today. I had a fixed routine, like a real portrait photographer.

  1. Fetch a spider condo cube from the incubator.
  2. Take a low power photo of the label, so I have a record of who is who on the camera ‘roll’.
  3. Carefully remove the lid to avoid startling the spider. They’ve already built elaborate cobwebs criss-crossing the chamber, so that didn’t always work. I wanted them still so I could get a focus series.
  4. Shoot a bunch of pictures.
  5. Spritz them with an atomizer of distilled water to gently convince them to change position. It also waters them — what was neat was watching them drink. A drop of water was roughly softball sized relative to the spider — they’d gather a droplet, bring it to their mandibles, and then you could see the droplet rapidly shrink as they slurped it down.
  6. Take another set of pictures.
  7. Flick a fly or two into the container as a reward.
  8. Put the condo back in the incubator.

It was a fun process, but I’m a little unhappy with the quality of the images — they’re not coming out very crisp. It may require some tweaking to compensate for the microscope adapter. Everything looks great through the eyepieces, but kind of squidgy in the camera output of the trinoc.

I’ll put one example below the fold.

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Beware of Cenobites offering Puzzle Cubes

It looks like the world didn’t magically fix itself at midnight last night. Crass, stupid religion still exists, and there is a Cube for sale. You can buy this!

Ooops, sorry, wrong Cube. Although when you see the actual cube, you might prefer my mistake.

The “Inspiration Cube” is a $50 box with pre-recorded phrases from Joel Osteen. You know that since Joel will want to profit off this, that it’s going to be cheaply and cheesily made, and the output is going to be crap, both in tech and content. But look at all the buttons! The only one I like is the bottom-most, the “OFF” button.