A price gladly paid for a new spider legion

As you sit on your throne, savoring your power, a beautiful woman comes before you.

“I have been searching the kingdom, and have found a gift for you,” she says. She lays an army of spiders at your feet.

You gasp with joy. “Exactly what I wanted! What boon can I grant you in return?”

She looks deeply into your eyes. Her full lips part, and she says, achingly, “There is but one thing I desire most of all…”

Eagerly, “Yes?”

“A soufflé.”

“A soufflé? You mean for dinner?”

“Yes. I crave your soufflé.”

You are taken aback. Your kingdom is small, little more than a snug hovel. You have no servants. You have never in your life made a soufflé. You’re not quite sure how to make such a thing.

What do you say?

[Read more…]

Egnorance, political propaganda, and transphobia

I should be linking to others on FtB more often — there’s good stuff here. I just take it for granted that you’re all looking at the groovy stuff on the sidebar, as I am, so I’ll just mention a few things that jumped out at me this morning.

  • What the heck is wrong with neurosurgeons? I know Ben Carson has been making a fool of himself lately, but it’s easy to forget (please do) about Michael Egnor, the dogmatic neurosurgeon laboring to make intelligent design look even more foolish. Egnor is now asserting without evidence that only humans are capable of this intangible thing called “reason”. Wrong.

    Of course, if you understand the theory of evolution, you realize his claim is likely to be utter nonsense. Abstract thinking is not a black-white thing; it’s a range of capabilities that, even among people, we see a huge variation in. Any capability with huge variation is subject to selection, and so it can evolve. Since people are descended from earlier ape-like creatures, it is quite believable that non-human animals would also display the ability for abstract thought, in varying degrees. And they do! Ethologists, who actually study this kind of thing, disagree with Egnor. (Also see baboons and crows, to name just a couple more examples.)

    Hey, I know my cat is cunningly scheming all the time. She’s lying on a futon next to me right now, and she has all kinds of strategems for tricking me into serving her desires.

  • You’ve probably heard that the NY Times has been fluffing Hope Hicks, who has been subpoenaed to testify about her former employer, the Trump administration. According to Maggie Haberman, apparently the decision to comply is an “existential question” which can only be answered with some flattering portrait photography. I have a better answer to that question: ask your lawyer, and do what they say. They’ll tell you that noncompliance isn’t an option. This has been a short answer to a stupid question.
    Unfortunately, that the “newspaper of record” even considers this a worthy question tells us that the NY Times is not on the side of the people.

    The anti-democratic limits on acceptable discourse accepted and propounded by the Times must be opposed. The Times and Haberman and her editors are not worthless. Ignoring the Times is not a principled and logical and effective way to deal with their anti-democratic trolling. Instead, the Times must be countered each and every time they embrace the ideology of an accountability-free elite. We must never forget that the Times isn’t portraying the Trump administration as wise and sympathetic philosophers working to divine the best possible response to problems of Gordian convolution and unsolvability. The upper ranks of the Times (including Haberman and her editors) are portraying the Trump administration as wise and sympathetic philosophers because they, too, believe themselves better off in a world without accountability for the US elite.

    It’s easy to condemn Fox News as a propaganda organ for the Republicans. It’s distressing to see that the NY Times is, too.

  • The latest controversy that is roiling the atheist community is that a YouTuber, Rationality Rules, made a video about transgender athletes that was a seething mass of boiling bullshit — it was wrong on the facts, made up “facts”, cited Joe Rogan as an authority, and made a sweeping (and false) conclusion that women’s sports were about to be overwhelmed by a horde of Y-chromosomes taking hormone replacement therapy so that they could pwn the little ladies and win trophies. It was blatant nonsense, demolished Rationality Rules cultivated perception of being a ‘scientific’ observer, and even he was forced to admit that he got some things wrong, although he’s been slow to confess to specifics. The Atheist Community of Austin, which had recently had him on The Atheist Experience, made a statement repudiating his transphobic comments, and that’s when the shit hit the fan.
    Another deep rift has formed, between the people who can clearly see the glaring transphobia in Rationality Rules’ video, and those who have decided that this must be overlooked and forgiven because, dang, he’s such a good atheist defender of reason.
    Oh, jesus, we’ve been here before. Somehow being right about one thing, the nonexistence of gods, means you must be right about everything, especially if you hold poisonously regressive views.

    Anyway, HJ Hornbeck tries to summarize the chaos (there’s more than one video, an apology video, all kinds of vehement denials everywhere), and he’s right that there is one clear conclusion: Rationality Rules made lots of transphobic statements and assumptions. If you’re arguing against that crystal-clear fact, you ought to turn in your Official Skeptical Atheist card. If you’re arguing that such attitudes are acceptable, please stay on your side of the rift.

Find your gender-swapped persona!

Snapchat has this new gender swap feature, where it will modify your photo by applying filters to fit certain gender stereotypes. I do not use snapchat, and this one feature does not interest me at all, so I haven’t tried it (but I’m sure I’d be lovely if I did).

But then I ran across this: 99 D&D Female Character Art Pieces. They’re fabulous! Some amazing art in there. For a moment, though, I felt that twinge of regret that I, a male, am not represented at all in that collection.

(Pause for a moment to give all the women out there a chance to smirk and say “Oh you poor dear. Now you know how it feels, white man.” Fair enough.)

But then I had an idea: forget Snapchat, can you gentlemen find a gender-swapped version of your ideal D&D self in that collection? Mine was easy to spot — I couldn’t be that lean, grim warrior archetype. This would be me:

Your turn. Link to your fantasy gender-swapped self-image in the comments.

Here’s an equivalent Fantasy Art Males page so the women can play, too!

Perfectly on point for Wenatchee

Every state has a little Florida Man in it. In Wenatchee, Washington, Cameron Wilson was carrying a gun in his front pocket — we’re already in the territory of Bad Ideas — when it went off and sent a bullet ripping through his testicles.

Upon arriving at the hospital, a doctor was operating on the gunshot wound when a balloon of marijuana slipped out of Wilson’s anus, court records show, according to the report.

So he was smuggling marijuna in his rectum, in a state where marijuana is a legal drug. That’s just brilliant.

I grew up in the lush, cosmopolitan, progressive Western side of Washington, and it’s terrible to say, but Mr Wilson is representative of how we saw the Eastern half of the state, which was the domain of conservative ranchers, feral teenagers, and a thriving drug trade. And now, there’s a proposal to split Washington in two! It makes sense at a cultural level — East and West are very different places — but it makes no sense at all that Eastern Washington would want it. They’d lose all the economic benefits of sharing resources with the wealthy Puget Sound region, and they’d no longer be able to check the more progressive policies that come out of Seattle. They’d be a poor, arid, politically weak rump of a state.

Worse, the proposal is coming from Matt Shea, a Christian Identitarian who wants to wage Biblical war on sodomites, atheists, communists, and heretical Christians (“Biblical war” means, to him, killing any man who resists and taking their women and children as slaves), and who was divorced for spousal abuse, and who organized and led a hate group in Spokane. He’s completely wackaloony.

Shea claims his breakaway state of Liberty would rival Texas in prosperity. Except, or course, that Eastern Washington lacks oil or a seaport or much of anything in the way of industry or trade. They do have cows. And sagebrush. Pretty scenery. Rocks.

Oh, and real estate and a massive nuclear waste site.

And though Liberty would have far fewer people, it would gain national political clout and rival or surpass many other Western states in population and wealth. It would be larger than Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. It would continue to capture billions of federal dollars to clean up the Hanford nuclear site.

It’s also populated with people who shoot their balls off. The kind of people who would vote for Matt Shea.

Has everyone figured out that Musk is charlatan yet?

Elon Musk proudly announced the great achievement of his Boring Company.

The video compares one car driving in traffic to a specific destination, with a Tesla driving through a specially built tunnel with no traffic to the same destination. We are supposed to be impressed that the car on a solitary dedicated path won.

Yes, for those keeping score, in a mere two years we’ve gone from a futuristic vision of electric skates zooming around a variety of vehicles in a network of underground tunnels to—and I cannot stress this enough—a very small, paved tunnel that can fit one (1) car.

The video’s marketing conceit is that the car in the tunnel beats a car trying to go the same distance on roads. You’ll never believe this, but the car that has a dedicated right of way wins. Congratulations to The Boring Company for proving dedicated rights of way are important for speedy transportation, something transportation planners figured out roughly two centuries ago. I’m afraid for how many tunnels they’ll have to dig before they likewise acknowledge the validity of induced demand.

He has apparently scaled down his vision of a high speed “hyperloop” to just this, a car in a fixed, unidirectional tube. It’s kind of like mass transit, except they’ve dropped the “mass” part — everyone gets their own personal subway tunnel.

Man, he’s like a super-duper megagenius or something.

I like fighting evil, and reading books

I think that means I’m a natural for the Morris Public Library summer reading club, even if it is mainly geared for children.

You can also win a coupon for a Dairy Queen ice cream cone for reading enough books! I could trample all over those poky little kids for that.

Perhaps more my style is their Silent Reading Club, where you show up, sit quietly, and instead of talking, you read a book. That’s my kind of social event. Next one is tonight at 5. I’m currently reading Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin — it’s got intelligent spiders and cephalopods in it, so it’s like it’s stimulating all of my cerebral erogenous zones.

I spent a day with…students!

It was strange. I’ve got to get used to this again. Today was another day for registering incoming first-year students, so I was guiding newbies through the process and making sure they were taking the right courses (for biology majors, it’s easy: take general chemistry. We can fix just about any other omission in your schedule in this first year, but if you don’t take that chemistry prerequisite for just about everything else in the curriculum, you’re screwed.) Once the required courses were set up, we wedge in a few other things, and voila, they’re on track. Then we let them toddle on home until August.

I also spent some time with the spiders, since I’ve finally got a male. I encouraged a mating, but he was shy, so I had to leave them overnight together, with a swarm of fruit flies, which I hope will dissuade her from munching on her lover. I’ll be in tomorrow morning, hoping I don’t find a corpse in the bridal bower.

Game of Thrones was a metaphor for the Democratic Party!

It’s all clear now. The series came to a slow, awkward close, by having all the complex story lines that had been building for years wrapped up by having a band-aid slapped on them. I’ll say that for it — it did end.

Then, to resolve who finally is going to sit on the throne of the seven kingdoms — you know, the whole core premise of the conflicts in the show — all the surviving noble leaders sit down and talk it out instead of murdering each other, which was weird and out of character. To decide who would be king, they then announce that stories are important, which I can agree with, and that the person who should be king is the one who has the most compelling, interesting life story, an idea only a writer could come up with. They think about it.

Would it be Arya, who fled the execution of her father, wandered up and down the country having adventures, trained in an exotic land to be a magical assassin, and who killed all of the zombies?

Would it be Sansa, the woman who went from a fawning child mooning over kings and queens, through a series of dynastic marriages and rapes and abuses to emerge a hardened, cynical queen of the North?

No, don’t be silly. They’re women.

Instead, they picked the most boring, mediocre guy in the whole show, the guy who spends most of his time staring vacantly into space, who just followed along in the wake of all the heroes in the series, who did nothing but pretended to know everything. He gets the throne for showing up. It seems “interesting story” is defined as “safe, harmless story”.

Obviously, the council of aristocrats who decided who is to be king is the DNC, and the show is prophesying that they’ll nominate Joe Biden, because he is the most mediocre white man they can find.

Only in this real world no one bothered to eradicate the zombie horde with Valyrian steel, so that pat decision isn’t going to end the conflict.

Winter is coming, we’re screwed.