An unusually long day

I got up early today, because I was giving a new lecture today, and while I got most of it done last night, I was plumb wore out then and told myself I’d finish it in the morning…which I did. Then I had to give the lecture, and immediately afterwards run over to the hospital for an echocardiogram.

This was routine, my doctor just wanted to check that I have a heart, or that it kinda sorta works. I do, and it does, but there was a little accident. They put in an intravenous line so they could inject me with some kind of contrast agent, and when they punched in, it sprayed out — a little jet of blood splattering me, the bed, and the doctor (sorry, doc). It was much messier than it needed to be, and made everything a bit splatterific. I didn’t mind, but it was just that kind of day.

Then I had to teach a lab for a few hours: this lab was all math, basic unit conversions, volume calculations, etc. Most of our bio students aren’t comfortable with calculations and managed to twist their brains around multiple times, so I had to explain why yeast cells probably don’t have a volume measured in liters and how a lake a kilometer across probably has more than 100 microorganisms floating in it.

Now I’m all wrung out, and am counting the minutes to bedtime.

Wohl and Burkman sneak back into politics!

These two clowns, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, have a long history of failed ratfucking.

In 2020, the two hired actors to stage a fake FBI raid on Burkman’s house and tricked The Washington Post into writing up the phony incident. Wohl used the Klein surname in that incident, too.

The year before, Wohl was charged in California for selling an unregistered security as part of a plot to create fake news items to make money in political betting markets. He pled guilty to four felony counts and was sentenced to two years of probation, according to court records in Riverside County.

Wohl and Burkman drew attention a few years ago by trying to frame multiple public figures, including former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for sexual assaults. They conducted other outlandish smear campaigns, including hiring a woman to say that Anthony Fauci had assaulted her and allegedly stealing a USAID employee’s phone to send out tweets blasting the foreign aid agency as “anti-Christian.”

Among the conspiracy theories that Wohl has pushed include saying in 2020 that Biden had tested positive for Covid and would die in 30 days, that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had a relationship with a former Marine and that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t eligible to run for president in the 2020 cycle.

There are other instances, like the time they came to Minneapolis to ‘prove’ that Ilhan Omar was incestuously married to her brother, and called the west bank of the U of Minnesota “little Mogadishu”. My favorite flop, though, was when they hired an ex-Marine to claim he’d been scarred by violent sex with Elizabeth Warren. They’re absolutely nuts and impressively bad at their con games.

They’re so bad that now they operate under pseudonyms.

A Washington startup pitched as a service to integrate AI into lobbying is covertly run by a pair of well-known, far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons who are using pseudonyms in their new business, according to four former employees as well as photo and email evidence.

LobbyMatic was founded last year by Jacob Wohl, who in 2022 was convicted along with his longtime associate Jack Burkman of felony telecom fraud after running a robocall campaign in largely Black neighborhoods in several states telling people not to vote by mail. An Ohio judge ordered them to spend 500 hours registering people to vote, and the Federal Communications Commission fined them $5 million.

In his role as a founder and CEO of the new firm, Wohl uses the name “Jay Klein,” according to the former employees and emails obtained by POLITICO. Burkman uses the pseudonym “Bill Sanders,” the former employees said.

Ha ha, you laugh. Nobody will fall for this.

Their lobbying group has already signed up some big name clients, including Toyota. The corporate lobbying game in Washington DC is a fruitful market for grifters, I guess.

What’s the least you can do to address climate change?

This opinion piece is so on-brand for the New York Times: “I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too”. We’re facing a serious threat from global warming, so let’s tell all the little people to get off their butts and fix it rather than addressing the systemic contributions of capitalism and the petrochemical industry.

Most of those savings were likely the result of using fans instead of air-conditioning. We also kept other appliances and devices turned off as much as possible because they, too, generate heat. Dishwashers are double trouble, putting out heat and humidity. We don’t have one.

You can’t unplug the refrigerator, of course, but we keep ours set for just under 40 degrees, the highest safe temperature, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And we dry our laundry on the clothesline out back.

When it gets too hot, we lightly spray water on our arms, legs and faces; the water helps dissipate a lot of heat. A quick, cold shower or a little time spent with that all-American favorite, the lawn sprinkler, also can bring relief.

In summer we’ll spend as many of our at-home hours as we can outdoors, in the shady city park down the street or on our screened porch.

Well, fine. I agree with all that. We do many of those things, too — we’ve got an ’emergency air conditioner’ in the window of our bedroom that we’ve used for about a week this year, but otherwise, yes, we mainly get by on low-energy alternatives. I think it’s a good idea to be mindful about how our lives impact the environment, and turning off an appliance now and then is smart and helpful. But does this actually substantially offset the fact that we live in cities that are dependent on the automobile? Worse, we’re surrounded by pervasive marketing telling us to buy massive trucks, that we have to go to a mall with a gigantic parking lot to buy cheap plastic widgets we don’t need made in China, while wearing clothes from Shein that we’ll throw into a landfill next week. There are a lot of sensible changes we could make in our lifestyles that the New York Times would get in trouble with their advertisers if they started promoting them.

OK, here’s the Batagaika Crater in Siberia.

That’s a huge “retrogressive thaw slump”, a hole that is visible from space and is steadily growing as the permafrost thaws and its edges collapse. Here’s a drone photo of the slow-motion disaster:

Spectacular and horrifying.

Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.

One study estimated that permafrost thaw could emit as much planet-warming gases as a large industrial nation by 2100 if industries and countries don’t aggressively rein in their own emissions today.

How big is the contribution of this one feature in the landscape to climate change?

In a study published in the journal Geomorphology in June, researchers used satellite and drone data to construct 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.

They found that about 14 Pyramids of Giza’s worth of ice and permafrost had thawed at Batagay. The crater’s volume increases by about 1 million cubic meters every year.

“These values are truly impressive,” Alexander Kizyakov, the study’s lead author and a scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told BI in an email.

“Our results demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs,” he added.

The researchers also calculated that the megaslump releases about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. That’s about as much as the annual emissions from 1,700 to 2,100 US homes’ energy use.

If only everyone in the USA would sprinkle a little water on their arms rather than turning on the air conditioner, we could compensate for that problem. Or better yet, think of all the energy you could save by cancelling your subscription to the NY Times!

Really, though, we need something more than these piecemeal token changes in individual behavior.

“Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Remember Robert Morris? Pastor at one of the largest megachurches in the country, Gateway Church, that draws in a 100,000 suckers every week? Or did you manage to erase him from your memory after learning that he was guilty of molesting a 12 year old girl? If so, good for you, and stop reading because I’m going to remind you of the man.

There have been developments.

Last week, a pastor who oversaw all of Gateway’s campuses departed amid an undisclosed “moral issue,” becoming the latest in a series of changes for the church: The cancellation of its annual conference. The departure of Morris’ successor. The renaming of its Houston campus and an exodus of worshippers.

An “exodus of worshippers” sounds great, and is what I’d expect: empty megachurches as parishioners wake up and realize that it’s all a sham run by con artists and that they can do better with their life than getting their morality from a pedophile. I’m relieved to see that some people did exactly that.

For Emily High, the 17 years she spent as a church member came to a halt because she felt betrayed, she said.

“It’s anger, it’s all the range of emotions,” High told WFAA. “Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Yes! Except…Ms High represents a minority.

The church has seen a decrease of 17% to 19% in weekend services attendance, a church spokesperson told CNN.

I can do math. That means there are still 80,000 fools and tools shuffling into those churches every weekend. The Christian grift continues!

JD Vance has so many skeletons in his closets

They just keep tumbling out. It doesn’t do any good to tell him to shut up because, for a young politician, he has spoken volumes of bullshit in his past, and it’s all coming to light. In particular, he does not like women.

In 2021, he was interviewed by The Federalist (big red flag right there).

“To be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” said Vance, who is currently the Republican senator from Ohio.

Though he generally didn’t specify the gender of the childless people he was criticizing, the context of his remarks made it seem he was primarily speaking to women.

Citing a conversation that had recently unfolded on Twitter, Vance described a “ridiculous effort by millennial feminist writers” to talk about why there are good reasons not to have children and how some of them were glad they didn’t have kids and even to encourage “people who had had children to talk about why they regretted having children.”

He ripped these unnamed “mediocre millennial journalists” and suggested that if they’re advocating for women to focus on advancing their careers over making babies, they are “pathetic.”

“Not enough people have accepted that if they put their entire life’s meaning into their credential, into where they went to school, into what kind of job they have ― if you put all of your life’s meaning into that, you’re going to be the sort of person who asks women to talk about how they regret having children,” Vance said.

He added, “You’re going to be a sad, lonely, pathetic person and you’re going to know it internally.”

I don’t need to say anything in response. I’ll just quote the early 20th century Japanese feminist and political radical, Kanno Sugako.

“Among the many annoying things in the world, I think men are the most annoying. When I hear them carrying on interminably about female chastity, I burst out laughing…. I greet with utmost cynicism and unbridled hatred the debauched male of today who rattles on about good wives and wise mothers. Where do all of these depraved men get the right to emphasize chastity? Before they begin stressing women’s chastity, they ought to perfect their own male chastity, and concentrate on becoming wise fathers and good husbands!”

Kanno Sugako was later hanged for threatening the Emperor. Vance probably thinks that was righteous.

You need an atheist to explain you should respect grieving families?

If you want to see a classic case study of how the American media has degenerated into uselessness, look at how they’re handling the Arlington scuffle. They’ve been skirting around the issue, trying to avoid the blunt truth: the Trump campaign is run by a gang of boors who are incapable of courtesy and restraint. At least the Columbia Journalism Review tells it like it is.

On Tuesday, NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman broke the news that Trump and members of his campaign appeared to violate federal law during an appearance at Arlington to mark the third anniversary of the deadly attack on US troops that punctuated the deeply flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Members of Trump’s staff had sought to film the event for a campaign video, and got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who tried to stop them. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign official, strongly denied that any altercation had taken place and said the campaign was ready to release a video to prove his point. (They have yet to release it.) It wasn’t surprising that these two NPR pros with deep knowledge of the military, and sources among veterans, were the first with the news. The Washington Post followed with a story the same day, as did the New York Times. The public took note.

As more publications followed suit, the Arlington stories suffered a dreadful fate: they all started to sound the same. News outlets ended up with articles bogged down in parsing federal law, carefully defining what exactly counts as an altercation, and quoting milquetoast official statements like “There was an incident and a report was filed.”

Look. I’m a heretical atheist who is blunt and sometimes rude about disrespecting religious traditions, but even I know that you have to be kind and circumspect with grieving families (do I even need to say something so obvious?) I spent some time in civilian cemeteries in July, and even there I knew you don’t make a scene. You don’t annoy people in those circumstances, and you don’t make excuses. You apologize, you back away, you stop what you’re doing. Not the Trump campaign!

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially those with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and, crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign team had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.

I don’t care if you found someone who invited you to caper in a graveyard, you’re supposed to be considerate to all the people visiting. Trump was of course politicizing the most recent deaths so he can criticize Biden. It was tacky and inappropriate.

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them. Section 60, the part of the cemetery where the incident occurred, is one of the most sacred places for this generation of troops. It is where those who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. Those graves are visited not by tourists looking for historical figures, but by mothers and fathers visiting their fallen son or daughter. In Section 60, wounds are still raw. Political activity there is never appropriate, and under the law, only cemetery staffers and approved photographers are permitted to film or take pictures there.

Readers needed to know that, when you visit Arlington, you might not know exactly what you’re supposed to do when confronted by those rows of headstones, but you damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. But the coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol. It focused on bland horse-race coverage so common during election season, rather than clearly stating what really took place: an egregious and willful violation of long-standing norms. What was missing from the coverage was a willingness to quickly and decisively state what a grievous insult the whole debacle was to the dignity of Arlington. The sacred had been profaned.

I don’t believe in the sacred, but otherwise, yes: the Trump campaign has insulted the military and the dead. Own it, Donald. Making excuses just makes it worse. It’s time for him to apologize…which may not be possible for him.

They’re not really that big

The headline says, “Giant spiders the size of rats make comeback in UK after nearing extinction, RSPB says“. Nah, I know these spiders. That’s Dolomedes. We call them fishing spiders here in the colonies.

They are large spiders, but not as big as rats…unless you’ve got nothing but stunted, runty, starveling rats out there in the UK, scarcely big enough to put onna stick.

I’m surprised that they (the spiders, not the rats) were endangered — they seem to be doing fine here, in a part of the country with lots of wetlands that get some protection (but not enough) because they’re a haven for game birds. It’s good to hear that Dolomedes is making a comeback, though, in part because the zoos are raising more spiders.

That looks familiar, that’s how I raise my spiders. I hope they have many more vials than that, if they’re hoping to repopulate the whole of Britain.

I don’t think even minuscule UK rats would fit in those vials, you know.