Spider before dawn

Forgive me, I include a photo of a spider down below. Maybe the fact that it is rather blurry will soften it a bit — I took it before sunrise when everything was a bit dim, and I just did a casual handheld shot. What impressed me, though, was the web, which is about 60cm across. Last night, this Argiope‘s web was a tattered broken mess, with big holes punched in every quadrant (the spider had a busy day catching bumblebees). When I went to bed, it was a pathetic few radial strands with a still intact stabilimentum, and the spider calmly poised in the center, mistress of a ruin.

I was up this morning before sunrise, and thought I’d take a quick look at the wreckage. Mirabile dictu, the orb web was restored, pristine and perfect! She apparently had a busy night.

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Patron Q&A coming up on Sunday!

I’m dreaming of Halloween in August: cool weather, a nice frost, creepy things crawling out of the falling foliage, and me, appearing in a Patron Q&A. If you joined my Patreon account, you could even appear in the video with me. If not, you’ll have to settle for watching, or leaving questions in the comments, or asking them in the chat on Sunday.

Also, don’t forget Skepticon the 13th this weekend!

That’s what I call gardening!

We have a small nature garden in our backyard — lots of local plants and flowers, all growing wild and untended, and it’s full of flowers…and bees. Step out there, and it’s just buzzing nonstop. This was all Mary’s idea, and she did all the planting.

It was missing something, though. Yesterday we went out to a local grassy field and collected some new specimens. Warning: you can guess, given my participation, what the new residents are.

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“It’s evil! Don’t touch it!”

Actual photo of Emil Kirkegaard (center)

I’m sorry. I’m going to mention Emil Kirkegaard now. He popped up on my cursed Twitter feed lately.

Kirkegaard, if you never heard of him, is a pretentious Danish pseudoscientist whose main claim to fame is that he’s a loud “race realist”, that he has defended child pornography, and has made the suggestion that we could make pedophiles happy and children safe from psychological harm if we…

Hang on. This is truly repulsive and vile. You can stop now if you want.

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Welcome to the apostolic cult

I’ve been watching the smart people at the top of the university hierarchy slowly realize that there’s still a pandemic going on, and that they should have sane policies in place to protect the students and staff — you know, the people who do the actual work of the university and interact with students, which they, fortunately for them, don’t have to do. So we have restored mask requirements in university buildings and will be imposing a vaccination requirement, all sensible, practical actions that I’m surprised took them so long to do. I’d applaud, except that it could only be interpreted as mockery because it would be a bit like giving the rich kid in the class an “A” because he drove to class in his Maserati one day. You don’t get prizes for doing the bare minimum.

Well, maybe I should praise them a little bit more because jesus fucking christ, look at Morris Area Schools, our public school district, has established as the rules for the coming school year. The school board thinks the pandemic is over!

So, no face masks, social distancing is treated with ambiguity (there isn’t going to be any social distancing), there will be no distance learning option, and oh hell no they aren’t going to require vaccinations for anyone. You may notice that there is a jarring difference in one aspect of the public school experience: the kids have to wear masks on the bus, and they have to be fairly thorough in cleaning them. That’s because the buses are regulated by state and federal laws, while once the kids are released into the schools, local control is imposed.

Here’s what you need to know to understand the basis for this lack of sense: Morris public schools are under the control of an apostolic religious cult. They pack the school board — they can do that, because they all vote as a bloc under the influence of their religious leaders — and they have undue influence because they threaten to pull all their kids out of the Morris high school and send them to another small town district, and enrollment affects state funding. It goes without saying that of course they are profoundly conservative wankers who voted for Donald Trump. They’ve also been expanding their business holdings in Morris, which is worrisome. Stevens County is darned close to becoming a theocracy, where the women are all required to wear dresses and grow their hair long and pin it up into a bun. It’s just weird and rather disturbing.

I guess we can hope they all die off thanks to COVID-19, except…why did they have to start with infecting the kids? The children don’t deserve this.

Here’s one strong response from a mother responding to the similar ineffectuality of the Chattanooga school district:

Although it won’t help to be able to opt out of an irrational pandemic response, because the threat requires communal cooperation.

There’s a headline to freak out the white supremacists

I expect this will terrify the right-wingers — will Tucker Carlson be giving everyone his confused look over it? (No shock there — stupefaction is his only expression).

I’ll just say meh. It’s no big deal, this is a demographic shift that everyone has seen coming for a long time.

The first race and ethnicity breakdowns from the 2020 Census, released Thursday, show a more diverse nation than ever in the nation’s history.

The report marks the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790. The White population fell from 223.6 million in 2010 to 204.3 million in 2020, a decrease of 8.6 percent.

The country also passed another milestone on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in the coming decades: For the first time, the portion of White people dipped below 60 percent, slipping from 63.7 percent in 2010 to 57.8 percent in 2020.

That first paragraph is nothing but good news. If anything will erode the endemic bias in this country, it’s more diversity.

The decline is not a consequence of persecution or deaths. It’s a combination of a more rapidly increasing non-white population, more interracial children, and wealthier people (a lot of white people in that category) electing to have fewer children. Big whoop — my white children and grandchildren are not harmed by a shift caused by more brown people thriving. This is not ‘replacement’. The gene pool still contains many white gametes (it feels weird to write that, since gametes do not have a color), they’re just intermingling more. This is a good thing.

We can hope for a more egalitarian future, in which the color of your skin does not make a major difference in your success in life. Keep in mind, though, that history is going to reverberate for many generations to come.

They found a way to end atheism!

Today is the day of the Global Prayer to End Atheism, so I checked their website this morning to prepare. You know, I wanted some warning before I wink out of existence, or my brain is erased, or whatever.

I discovered that their prayer page has ceased to exist and is no longer available.

There is the possibility that their prayer had the reverse effect, and God reached out and smote them all for their temerity, which would be nice, and if true, would actually persuade me that some kind of deity existed (or, possibly, Mark Zuckerberg, who is more of a malignant evil).

The most likely explanation, though, is that their strategy to end atheism is to firmly close their eyes and stop up their ears and sing “la la la la la” until we go away, which has always been their go-to method.

Skepticon this weekend!

My favorite con is happening, starting tomorrow, so you’d better get on over to the Skepticon page to find out what’s happening. It’s entirely online again this year, it’s entirely free as always, so you have no excuse to not attend, or pop in for an event or two, or at least see my panel with Erin Maxson, Larry Mendoza, and Shanon Nebo on Saturday at 1:30 CST.

Somehow I have to come up with a favorite creepy-crawly in two days. I don’t know of any, maybe you can suggest some.

Monologuing at the microscope: you can wake up to me trying to say nice things for a change

Don’t laugh too hard. I’ve been wallowing in despair and stress for a year, and it’s not good for me, so I thought I’d try to force myself to say good things about my self. Think Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” except I don’t go so far as to claim people like me — I’ve got to be realistic in my affirmations.

Anyway, I had to spend some time in some tedious light microscope work, so I just started babbling at the camera while poking at baby spiders with a paintbrush and forceps.