Are we surprised by this story about Dr Oz?

No, we are not.

Even without Fetterman’s highly effective campaign, this kind of quackery is why I don’t want Oz in the senate. He’s a dishonest fraud. So is Dr Phil. In fact, any of the stable of goofballs squirted out of the gullible brain of Oprah ought to be rejected if ever they appear on any political slate.

Noooo! Too slow!

I’ve been tracking the growth of individuals in my Steatoda triangulosa colony, and finally have a whole 3 time points so I can estimate the spider growth rate. Behold, the first preliminary chart!

The line is a linear fit, which is not likely to be what I see in the end, but it’s optimistic, and I can’t really make many assumptions with so little data. But OK, if aiming to raise these spiders to a length of 1 meter, that’ll only take, with that assumption, about…a century? Yikes.

That rate is perfectly appropriate if they max out at 10mm long, like their mommy, but it’s going to be hard to take over the world with tiny little spiders like that. I guess I’ll have to go for numbers.

First I’ve ever heard of a food company wanting to use a spider for PR

There is a spider, Araneus mitificus, AKA the Kidney Garden spider, that sort of vaguely resembles the mascot (?) of Pringles potato chips. Surprisingly, the Kellog company, which markets Pringles, has embraced this idea and want to make the name “Pringles Spider” official.

There’s a petition and a website. If the name change is approved, which they think they can do by persuading “the decision maker” with enough signatures, the first 1500 signatories get one free can of potato chips. Who is the “decision maker”? They don’t know.

Pringles has added a petition to Change.org with the hopes that the International Society of Arachnology, the American Arachnological Society, and other organizations will “do what’s right and recognize this very real spider as the Pringles Spider.”

How awkward. The American Arachnological Society does not determine nomenclature, neither does International Society of Arachnology. You can send all the requests you want to them, and they’re just going to give you the side-eye and block you as spam. There is an International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, but they have very strict rules about the assignment of binomial nomenclature, you aren’t going to change that. Common names are vague and often lazily defined by usage; you can call it the “Pringles spider” if you want, but it has no official weight.

There is absolutely nothing preventing Pringles from putting a photo of Araneus mitificus on all of their packaging and happily calling it the Pringles Spider. They could also make commercials with a smiling anthropomorphized spider touting their product, and get rid of the mustachioed cartoon man altogether. They don’t need a petition for any of that!

Go ahead, Pringles. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.

Spinelessness…confirmed

Go away, Chad.

Remember how Biden was going to appoint an anti-choice fanatic to a federal judgeship in a deal with McConnell, and we were so disappointed in his surrender to the Republicans? Good news!

The White House dropped plans Friday to nominate an anti-abortion lawyer backed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell for a federal judgeship in Kentucky.

I guess all those Democratic voters saying this was a really stupid deal, and that you can’t trust McConnell had an effect, right? Or maybe someone told him that the optics on this one were really bad.

Nope, neither.

The decision to back off the nomination of Chad Meredith came amid a split between McConnell and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, his fellow Kentuckian, over the selection.

Republicans are the only ones with any choice or agency in our government. I’m impressed at how Democrats can look bad even in victory.

What is the “trans question”, anyway?

This is a puzzling headline: The Tories are right to debate the trans question – it’s not a distraction. It doesn’t say what the “trans question” is…we’re just supposed to debate it. How? You can’t just say something needs to be debated without saying what the proposition is.

Or can you?

Here’s a question: rutabagas. Now go — DEBATE. Now. I need the rutabaga question resolved immediately.

There’s some vague something we’re supposed to discuss about the “trans question”, but nothing in this article helps me understand. There are odd hints that they’re trying to get to something deeper, but it’s almost as if they’re afraid to say it openly.

It is to the chagrin of many women on the left that Tory politicians are leading this overdue debate. Keir Starmer has been hopeless on the issue, ignoring letters from feminists and lesbians who are in despair about Labour’s refusal to give clear answers to questions about biological sex. I told him face-to-face in May about the harassment of feminists in the Labour Party, but he’s still trying to sit on the fence. And Labour is losing support among women as a result.

See what I mean? This author thinks there’s some key difference between Labour and Tories on “biological sex”. Does one side think it’s not biological?

OK, to clarify my earlier question about rutabagas: where do you stand on questions about biological vegetables? No, I’m not going to say what those questions are: you must simply debate rutabaga and biological vegetables.

I’m not being disingenuous. You have to be clear on what the issue is. For example, do rutabagas exist, or should they exist, or what is the best way to cut and cook a rutabaga, or is a rutabaga actually just a confused turnip, or was the hybridization of Brassica oleracea and Brassica rapa an abomination before god that must be prohibited by law? Those are proper questions. We could discuss those, except I fear that if the opposition made their issues clearly they’d look silly and their irrational hatred of root vegetables would be clear. (By the way, if this debate is between Tories and Labour, they’d probably call them “swedes” which would open the door to some ugly misinterpretations across the North Sea.)

I wonder if this is related to “the Jewish question”?

Fool me once…

Panic. We really need to worry — the Republicans are playing innocent and saying they wouldn’t do that.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats are pushing to codify other rights that have been left vulnerable by the decision into federal law — including access to contraception, same-sex marriage, and potentially interracial marriage. “I do believe that we should move with urgency,” Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, told Axios Wednesday.

But they may have an uphill battle: Such measures seem to have little appeal to the GOP, whose members insist that those protections are unnecessary because those rights are not under threat. “I’ll worry about hypotheticals at the time we have it,” Ted Cruz told Axios. “I have no reason to believe these precedents are going to fall,” added Lindsey Graham. “Nothing like that should even be thought about by anybody because it’s not endangered in any way,” Chuck Grassley told the outlet.

“I don’t know why people would come to that conclusion,” he added.

Here we go again. They’re going to ban contraception, same sex marriage, and interracial marriage. 100%.

The only university that counts

It isn’t mine or yours, it’s only Harvard, as far as the New York Times is concerned. Read this thread to see what I mean.

It’s depressing. I’ve talked to so many people who consider Harvard the sine qua non of academia, when I’ve never been particularly impressed with the institution. Not that it’s bad, but this country, and other countries, have so many worthy universities that contribute far more to science and other disciplines…but the NYT, and other media, have created this myth of the superiority of one over-priced private whose primary, notable qualification is that rich people go there. See how skewed the headlines are:

Also telling:

In 2019 35% (7.7 million) of college students attended community colleges.

The New York Times mentioned “community college” 100k fewer times than it mentioned Yale University which enrolls approximately 12k students.

This is a vivid illustration of the problem:

(If you’re not up on the lingo, “HSI” is a Hispanic Serving Institution, “MSI” is Minority Serving Institution, and “HBCU” is a Historically Black College or University. I’m at a public and primarily regional college. Not that NYT readers would get exposed to any of that riff-raff. Really, unsubscribe from the New York Times, don’t bother reading it, it’s a bastion of all the inequity and elitism that is wrong with the US.)

(Also, seriously, they still pay David Fucking Brooks to write drivel?)

We have these people in Minnesota, too

It happened in Brooklyn Park, which has nothing to do with New York — it’s a Minneapolis suburb. Biden supporters/antifa/anarchists attacked this poor man, setting his truck on fire and defacing his garage with graffiti.

Oh, the vandalism! The destruction!

Molla reported to police that someone set fire to his camper “because it had a Trump 2020 flag displayed on it,” and spray painted the Antifa or anarchy symbol, “BLM” and “Biden 2020” on his garage door.

Those darn liberals. That’s an incoherent mess on that door — anarchists tend not to favor establishment politicians. Whoever painted that doesn’t even know how to spray paint an anarchy symbol properly. Like this, OK? It’s easy.

Except…it looks like the not-very-bright “victim,” Denis Vladmirovich Molla, was simply practicing a typical Republican grift that he learned from his masters.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says Molla actually lit the fire and defaced the garage himself.

Court documents show that Molla then “submitted multiple insurance claims seeking coverage for the damage to his garage, camper, vehicles, and residence caused by the fire.”

Molla submitted insurance claims totaling more than $300,000, receiving only $61,000 in the process. He then accused his insurance company of “defrauding him.” Court documents show he also yielded more than $17,000 from two GoFundMe accounts.

Oops. Never mind.