The grill is blue, therefore the racism is true

Creationist logic is soaking into the general discourse, I’m sorry to say. As we’ve all heard, Donald Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and some people have been desperately trying to validate that. Among their ranks we have Chris Rufo, the professional racist, destroyer of universities, and flailing idiot trained in the heart of the Discovery Institute, who attempts to mimic skeptical reasoning in a post titled…

The Cat Eaters of Ohio
The establishment media called it a racist myth, but is it?

Yes. Yes it is.

He’s going to get to the bottom of this story.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

“Not exactly” is doing a lot of work here. To translate, he’s saying “not even close to what Trump described,” which he interprets as reasonable doubt that any rebuttals are valid.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

I watched the video. It’s true, there are live cats on camera, and there is a barbecue grill, and there is something unidentifiable cooking on the grill, and there is a man vocally accusing them of grilling cats. That’s it. One ambiguous video yanked off of TikTok. That’s Rufo’s evidence.

He does go a significant step further, and he or someone he’s associated with contacted the creator of the video, and even visited the neighborhood to ask questions. It’s a significant effort, but all he’s going to get out of it is a lot of irrelevant details. As any creationist knows, piling on random detail is an adequate substitute for actually confirming a hypothesis.

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

Point of order: there has been no evidence presented that it was a cat on the grill. Having the initial accuser repeat the accusation adds nothing.

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

So, not a Haitian. Telling us the country of origin of the accused does not in any way confirm that they were eating cats — we keep drifting further and further away from the initial claim — but it does contradict the story we were told.

But hey, people from Africa, people from a Caribbean island, they’re all the same. They’re black. Is Rufo trying to establish that yes, it sure is a racist myth?

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

At this point, we’ve lost the plot. Now we’ve got the testimony of someone in the neighborhood saying that she had a neighbor, not necessarily the same person as the one accused in the video, was from Africa. In Rufo’s mind, this is a connection sufficient to establish guilt, and he had a knife, and he was reputed to have hunted for meat in the neighborhood.

Somebody had a blue grill, the same color as the grill in the video, therefore they must have been cooking cats.

There are many cats wandering about, further evidence. I’m going to have to confess: there are many feral and pet cats living in my neighborhood. I’m going to be in big trouble if ever I’m accused of cat-eating, because they’ll be able to point to a random cat strolling by and announce “A-ha! Opportunity! Therefore, guilty!”

Rufo imagines himself a reasonable man, so he offers a reasonable interpretation.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

It does not confirm any particularity of Trump’s statement. It’s a different city and a different nationality. Notice how he now segues from a video of something indefinite on a grill to a definitive statement that “cats alone were on the grill,” something that has not been established by this investigation. The question he should be asking is — what was Trump’s source for this garbled, ugly claim? I know, he’s just going to say it was people on television, but what ought to be engaging Rufo is not whether there is some thin, tenuous thread of circumstance that can be attached post-hoc to Trump’s claim, but what was the actual basis for the claim?

Also, the fact checkers never insisted that this has never happened. Every account I’ve read points out that there was an isolated instance of a mentally ill person eating a cat, so right away there’s an awareness that it’s entirely possible that there have been individual cases of such incidents. The expression of racism arises from the fact that Rufo and Trump and a whole wing of conservatives are flatly accusing an entire group of people of reprehensible behavior on the basis of the flimsiest evidence. It arises from the fact that Rufo can blithely equate Congolese with Haitian.

It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger.

Keep in mind that the hypothesis that Rufo is falsifying is the idea that no one has ever eaten a cat, which is both trivially false and a hypothesis that no one has proposed. An honest broker would not suggest that this is the premise in contention; the concern is that it has become a Republican talking point that an entire large community of immigrants is habitually preying on household pets in Ohio.

This is simply not true.

You also cannot extrapolate from one poorly documented possible case in Dayton to conclude that it must be happening on a larger scale in Springfield. You also don’t get to plop down the claim that pet-eating is endemic in Congo and Haiti without a source and without evidence, trusting only in the assumed racist bias that of course, black people everywhere engage in behaviors that good, civilized white people deplore.

Rufo has managed to confirm only that a) he’s racist as fuck, and b) has no grasp of elementary logic. It’s about what I’d expect from a creationist fool and professional hatemonger. How can we doubt that Haitians are eating your cats if he has photographic evidence that blue barbecue grills exist?

One should always take recommendations from five year olds seriously

My granddaughter told me I should watch this anime she’s been watching, titled Delicious in Dungeon. I’m not normally a fan of anime (why must the characters always react with such extreme expressions and noises?), but OK, I half-watched a few episodes.

The premise is straight-forward old-school D&D — a mixed-class party of adventurers march through the levels of a dungeon, murdering monsters as they go. What makes it different is that the focus of each episode is the adventure of cooking and eating what they kill, producing fabulous meals from slimes and parasites and giant bats.

I can see how it might be a good show for picky eaters. One character, Marcille (?) is always horrified at what gross, horrible thing they plan to eat, and always comes to the conclusion, after taking a bite, that it was delicious. I can’t relate to her — I’ve always been an omnivore with a weird palate — but I can appreciate the presentation of exotic meals in every episode.

She even looks a bit like Iliana.

An attempted assassination is hardly worth writing about anymore

Another obsessed jerk-off tried to take a shot at Trump. He didn’t get one. Ryan Routh has been arrested.

Apparently, he was a former Trump voter who was disappointed over Ukraine policy; he’d flown to Ukraine and attempted to organize a military unit to support them, and failed. He had an arrest record for some over-the-top stunt with a machine gun.

He also was charged in December of that year [2002], when, according to an account from the News & Record newspaper, Routh, armed with a machine gun, barricaded himself in a United Roofing building in Greensboro for three hours. Authorities say the incident began after he was pulled over for a traffic stop. Police ultimately arrested him without incident.

He is just a loser who achieved a measure of notoriety by virtue of cheap, easy access to lethal weapons, a forgettable nobody.

Boeing on strike!

Union members cheer during a news conference following a vote count on the union contract at the IAM District 751 Main Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, US, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Boeing Co. factory workers are poised to walk off the job, crippling manufacturing across the planemaker’s Seattle commercial jet hub after members of its largest union rejected a contract offer and voted to strike. Photographer: M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg

One of my major complaints about growing up in Seattle is that it was essentially a one-company town. My dad worked at Boeing when he could, but was frequently laid off — they could do that, just fire thousands of people on any downturn — and later rehired. The population was just a sponge that would serve the Boeing workforce as necessary, and when there was a major layoff the entire region would suffer. As a kid, my parents were good about insulating us from the major consequences, but did notice when suddenly we’d have to move to a more run-down house, and we’d have a lot of tuna casserole for dinner, and our dental appointments were cancelled.

Seattle has diversified since then, but Boeing is still the elephant swimming in Puget Sound, and when Boeing goes on strike, it hurts the entire region. The workers have good cause, though.

Alex Mutch, a striking aircraft inspector, said he had been saving up for the strike since he was hired five years ago.

“We have been left hanging on a leash for almost 16 years and missed out on a lot of opportunities for cost-of-living adjustments, especially with the rate inflation has gone up,” Mutch said. “My grocery bill has doubled since I moved down here. Not to mention the cost of rent.”

It’s not just Boeing that has caused this strike — it’s the whole damn system of predatory capitalism. Food prices have shot up where I live, while the grocery stores make record profits, and you can’t blame that on Boeing. There’s a whole industry thriving everywhere on buying up houses and renting them out to workers, at massive advantage to landlords. Seattle has a massive homelessness problem, with these horrible fences put up all over my old neighborhoods to prevent people from camping there, and no, they’re not building enough housing, because that would dilute the landlord’s profits. I’m supposed to be selling my mother’s old home, and I’ve gotten offers sight unseen from real estate companies that want to scoop it up fast and cheap.

Boeing offered a huge salary increase, and it wasn’t enough.

Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer failed to take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.

There’s another major factor affecting workers. People don’t want to leave Washington state. It’s a beautiful, pleasant place to leave, but management would love to relocate the plants to a cheaper, less idyllic location, where they could save money with a new assortment of less highly trained workers. This has happened multiple times, where they announce that they want to relocate people who have built lives in that gorgeous state.

Union members said they have been frustrated for years with Boeing’s tactics, including threats to move airliner production out of the region.

My dad always wanted to work at Boeing, where the pay was good and the benefits were great, but I guarantee you that if he’d been told he was being relocated to Oklahoma he would have quit on the spot. Sorry, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’re a lovely state, but compared to the west coast…no, just no.

This issue comes up in multiple stories, but it’s always understated, for some reason. The WaPo has an article titled Why Boeing workers voted to strike after rejecting proposed deal, which doesn’t actually say much about why, except this one sentence, which also mention the relocation concerns.

Boeing machinists, who build the company’s flagship planes, have not had a new contract in 16 years and have been bargaining for months over higher pay, better benefits and a promise from the company that it will keep assembling its planes in Washington state.

I think this is probably a bigger issue than anyone is reporting. Boeing has a deep scar in its heart from the McDonnell-Douglas merger that ended up replacing expert, engineering-based management with a gang of clowns with MBAs who moved everything to Chicago, leading to the current crop of woes, such as airplane doors blowing out and a space capsule that wasn’t safe to return in. The damage to the company’s reputation was directly caused by the displacement of skilled leadership, so it’s no surprise that workers want assurances that they’re not going to be similarly replaced.

This is another consequence of predatory capitalism. You know who else is feeling the effects? NASA. A couple of billionaires decide to exploit the expertise generated by NASA, and suddenly there’s a brain drain that’s dismantling an institution. A panel met to review the status of the agency, and they did not have good things to say.

A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.

SpaceX has not been an entirely positive force on the space industry.

The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency’s workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.

This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. “Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions,” the panel wrote.

“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor,” said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.

This chart shows the condition of NASA facilities, divided by center and discipline. A red circle means poor, yellow means fair to marginal, and green means compliant. The size of the circle corresponds to the number of facilities at each center.

Capitalists always undervalue the importance of people and expertise — they treat them as trivially fungible. I’m just reminded that one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Notre Dame, or building a new, equivalent construction, is that the knowledge and skill of expert stonemasons has faded away over the centuries. We’ve got stone, we’ve got timber, we have machines that enable heavy construction work, but we don’t have the deep knowledge of generations of masons anymore, and we’d have to reconstruct the appropriate technologies all over again, at great expense.

Boeing and NASA are repositories of practical knowledge that you can’t quickly replace, especially not when our current system would think you can just swap in Elon Musk to take over 75-100 years of hard-earned expertise.

At last! Someone as pessimistic about Mars colonization as I am

Mars is for robots, not people. I’ve thought that for a long time, and as someone who reads a fair bit of science fiction, I can say that there are many books I have hurled across the room for proposing that we can save humanity by building colonies on Mars…which, admittedly, is the second most hospitable planet in the solar system. Unfortunately, there’s a huge distance between #1 and #2.

I’ve compared colonizing Mars to colonizing Antarctica, to set the bar really low. Except for a few scientific research stations and a few obsolete whaling stations, no one has built long-term, productive homes in Antarctica. It’s just too hostile. But still, it does have air and plentiful water, unlike Mars.

Here’s a better comparison, though: why haven’t we colonized the upper reaches of the Himalayas?. There, air and water are scarce, but not as scarce as on Mars, and it’s only a difficult hike, or a risky helicopter ride, from human population centers. It’s all right there! We can shuttle to and from the place in days, pessimistically, and not months, and it doesn’t require multi-million dollar spaceships to get to it!

The summit of Mount Everest is around 8,800 meters above sea level, squarely within those balmy Earth latitudes that get nice long sunlit days all year round. Compared to anyplace on Mars, it is the very womb of God. No plant life grows there. No animals live there.

Even with steady year-round subtropical sunlight, even with conditions infinitely more nurturing than those found anywhere on Mars, the summit of Mount Everest cannot support complex life. It’s too cold; the air is too thin; there is no liquid water for plants and animals to drink. Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest. Even microbes avoid it.

Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?

I could be wrong. The author of that essay could be wrong. I think Elon Musk ought to build a mansion on top of Mount Everest as proof of concept, along with a weed farm and an artificial womb. I think he should move there permanently, just to prove it can be done, and sit there happily stoned and make mountaintop babies.

Except…I think Elon Musk is almost as pessimistic as I am. He has to know he’s not going to be establishing a Mars colony in his lifetime, but he also knows it’s a successful grift to pretend he’s going to.

We got our soundbite

It slaps.

I don’t really care what the intent of the creator was, it shows what a buffoon this guy is.

Who needs fly paper?

We don’t have air conditioning, which means we don’t have the house buttoned down tight in the summer, which means the occasional fly wanders in and heads to the kitchen, always the kitchen. But they don’t last long, because we’ve got a tangle of cobwebs under our cupboards, which are occupied by fierce fly-killers. This is a Pholcus phalangioides caught in the act of ‘explaining’ to a housefly that we don’t care for their kind comin’ round these parts.

I didn’t notice the teeny tiny gnat snared in the web by the spider’s hind leg when I took the picture.