They are a demonstrably effective repellent of bad ideas. You don’t even need to use them! Just wheel them into an area and watch the parasites scamper away.
Mary and I thought our yard Argiope was looking lonely, so we visited a local breeding ground and snatched up a couple more. This is a new female, already adapting to life in our yard.
We also grabbed a couple of smaller Argiope, which might be males, or are simply too young to have the markings. They’re lurking somewhere in the underbrush.
We’ve got a few monarch chrysalides around the house, but we’ve also noticed a lot of mortality among the caterpillars, which is normal. This morning we spotted this caterpillar, motionless and dying, clinging to the side of the house.
There’s something horrible stuck to its side. I don’t know what it is, so I present it to you, all you caterpillar MDs. Any diagnosis?
Did you know that God explicitly bestowed the ability to generate explosive diarrhea on Cyclospora, and that this is true science?
I just threw this together outside, never mind the screeching squirrels. They’re more pleasant to listen to than Georgia Purdom.
That you can use your home computer as a spider incubator?
I keep several containers of Parasteatoda on top of my Mac Mini, where they thrive in the warmth and provide endless hours of entertainment while I’m working. All four of these contain egg sacs, and three of the four have hatched out this morning!
The Shadow League
How exciting! I’d like to say thank you for the honor, I appreciate the efforts of all the little people who have lofted me to join this distinguished company, and is there a stipend, an honorarium, some token that would help me buy groceries?
Of course there isn’t. The Shadow League
is an imaginary organization invented by Calvin Smith of AiG Canada, and it only pays in shadow money, which is as imaginary as his shadowy god. What this really is is a truckload of bullshit dumped in my lap, on this morning I had intended to work on my nefarious plan of instruction in cell biology, which begins in two weeks. I don’t really have time to deal with all the Christian nonsense in this video right now.
While I appreciate the loving attention he gives to my head shots, he really doesn’t understand my words. I think it is true that there is no moral law, dispensed by an invisible man in the sky, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as morality, or that we are free to murder and steal without consequence. The nonexistence of a deity makes it a necessity to find a moral foundation in something other than stupid words in an old book, and my solution is humanism and the development of principles of empathy and equality. He complains that the idea of evolution is leading to the slow collapse of Christian churches, and I say good — the false morality of authoritarian should be dismissed and abandoned.
There is a lot more I would say, but responsibility is leaning heavily on me today, and I should pay attention to that, because I have a social contract and an obligation to do the best job I can to present the scientific facts of biology to my students. In two weeks! Yikes!
I will return to this inane video sometime soon. For now, I’ll leave it to you all to make comments and give me tips for a future episode of shit-shoveling.
Time to party!
That isn’t the only clutch to emerge today. Here’s another:
These little guys are popping out everywhere — we’re surrounded by a cloud of little baby Parasteatoda.
You may ask which member of the Trump administration I’m talking about, because they are all compulsive liars. I’m referring to the guy with the brainworm, the barely literate incompetent who has fundamentally shut down science research in this country, the fraud who has been vomiting up medical misinformation, the one, the only, RFK jr, the man who has poisoned the Kennedy name for all time.
In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles.
Kennedy’s appearance came in the wake of a congressional hearing with Fauci last week, when the infections disease expert invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 100 times, as Republicans lambasted him for his role in handling the pandemic.
In his frantic attempt to claim that Fauci was a murderous monster directly at fault for COVID, he made an exaggerated claim of special American victimhood, asserting that we were number one in deaths.
“We had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth,” Kennedy said. When host Dana Bash challenged him, Kennedy doubled down: “What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID.”
It was not accurate.
But during the pandemic’s height, 2020 to 2023, the U.S. did not lead the world in its overall rate of death from the illness. Peru did.
In its tracking of global COVID-19 cases and deaths through March 2023, Johns Hopkins University found that Peru’s population was hit hardest with a rate of 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people.
The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that with 341.11 deaths per 100,000 people. That is the 14th highest rate. Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania were a few of the countries with higher per capita death rates than the U.S.
He does not care about the numbers. Details schmetails. He’s just stirring up hatred in the mob. He did go on to lie about the origins of COVID, the growing measles epidemic, and vaccines and autism, and food policy, all debunked here. This is nothing new. Do you remember that he volleyed a similar barrage of lies a year ago? This is what he does, all the time, every time.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made myriad false and misleading claims on Thursday as he fielded questions examining his seven-month tenure leading the nation’s health agencies at a contentious three-hour hearing.
Kennedy ignored government data, twisted legislation and pointed to unsubstantiated treatments while addressing topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, rural hospitals and school shootings.
He was still allowed to hold office last year. I predict that he’ll cling to power like a tick after this year. There will be no consequences for him…just for the scientists he torments, and for the children who will die.
Crime is down. It’s so down, that the local prison in Appleton was shut down several years ago.
Now it’s being re-opened to serve the needs of ICE.
The city of Appleton built the prison, but CoreCivic purchased it in 1997 to hold state prisoners, then shut it down in 2010 because of decreased demand. It was once the largest employer in the Swift County city.
Now it will hold up to 1,600 immigrant detainees.
No one should be pleased to see the prison-industrial complex expanding…but my Republican state representative and evil servant of Satan is thrilled.
Rep. Michelle Fischbach, who represents the 7th Congressional District where Appleton is located, told MinnPost at Farmfest on Tuesday that she was happy to hear the prison was reopening.
“I know that the community has been very supportive of making sure that we can open that up, and it makes sense,” she said. “There’s an existing facility there, and so there doesn’t have to be anything new built.”
We gotta get her out of office, I can’t stand her and her wicked policies. Her opponent is more in line with my opinions.
Her opponent, Democrat Erik Osberg, tied the prison announcement to last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” saying he’s against the reopening and wants to repeal the legislation that enabled it.
“There’s a $180 billion detention center and deportation-industrial complex in that legislation,” he said. “That’s what this is about, and guess who gets to build and run them? Private companies.”
You’ve got my vote, Erik. You didn’t have to say a word, but you’ve got it.
The conservatives are eating their own! And it’s all over food prices.
It started when a college student involved with Turning Point USA complained that a burrito costs $20, NJ.com reported. Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet shared the complaint online, saying the “lived experience is the same: it just feels like basic things cost too much.”
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen dismissed the gripe. “Cry me a river,” Thiessen wrote. “The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”
That drew a sharp response from Vice President JD Vance, who wrote that Thiessen had “never missed a burrito,” according to NJ.com.
Crenshaw weighed in later on Thursday with an attack on food insecurity.
“Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates,” Crenshaw sneered on X, wading into the fight.
He went further, asking whether critics of rising food prices were “a communist” or “an American adult male capable of handling his own s—.”
The backlash from the right was swift.
“The Republican Party is still dominated by traitors who got rich off of insider trading but mock you for thinking that you should be able to eat meat in a first world country,” conservative commentator Auron MacIntyre wrote on X.
They’ve all got guns. Maybe they should use them on each other?
I do have to mention that having a meal plan is expensive — you’re not getting free burritos in college. Also, our students are on a budget, living in small dorm rooms and getting by on the high-starch diets they’re fed in the cafeteria, and occasionally splurging by going out to Taco John’s, where a burrito will set you back about $8, which is still overpriced, but I think the TPUSA goon was probably getting a fancy high-end burrito in California.
Now I’m craving a burrito, but this week we’re getting by with a big pot of bean soup. You know, beans and rice are still the economical way to get a healthy diet, and tossing them onto a tortilla with a little cheese, some spices, and a splash of hot sauce is a tasty way to survive. But beans and rice are also going up in price. Telling people to consume a less expensive version of what they want while even the cheap stuff is more expensive than it was last week does not address the problem.
Hey, I’ve got tortillas, I got beans, I got hot sauce, I got cheese. I think I’ll fix something to snack on while watching the spectacle of conservatives snarling at each other.
