Yes, please: death to the lawn!

If only everyone would pay attention to this video.

Lawns are deserts for living things. Rip ’em up and replace them with diverse species, even the “weedy” ones. We’re trying to evolve our yard away from the boring monoculture, but doing so gradually; Mary has been actively planting a lot of things that are not turf grass, like milkweed.

Also, I work at a so-called ‘green’ university, which is green in some ways and terribly destructively traditional in other ways. We’ve got vast empty grassy lawns, which I suppose are great for scenic views of students playing frisbee, but not much else. I recently found out that those nice fields of grass are regularly sprayed with Q4, and a few years ago I discovered that we were hosing the shrubbery with an insecticide, specifically to kill the grass spiders that would accidentally end up in the buildings. Could we not? Could we maybe let wild nature take over? We’ve got some areas planted with native prairie grasses and forbs, and they are freakin’ gorgeous — the campus would be so much more attractive if the whole place were covered in exuberant foliage, rather than the stubby boring green stuff.

The spiders would be much happier, too.

Exploring underground

It wasn’t quite as thrilling/perilous as a D&D dungeon crawl, but we did walk through the steam tunnels beneath campus, and survived. I think we saw two living spiders, a moth, a few mud dauber nests, and some ghastly slime, but that’s about it.

It is impressive how extensive the tunnels are…and we never really notice them. Apparently we can get to every building on campus without stepping outside, except that most of the access doors are locked for safety reasons: there are asbestos covered pipes everywhere, cables snaking around the ceiling, and hot metal supports that it would be unwise to touch.

But now I know how to get into them whenever I want!

Perspectives on the apocalypse

Émile P. Torres has a provocative perspective on the historical views on Human Extinction. He breaks it down into five periods of general ideas about the possibility of humanity going extinct, and here they are:


(1) The ubiquitous assumption that humanity is fundamentally indestructible. This mood dominated from ancient times until the mid-19th century. Throughout most of Western history, nearly everyone would have said that human extinction is impossible, in principle. It just isn’t something that could happen. The result was a reassuring sense of “Comfort” and “perfect security” about humanity’s future, to quote two notable figures writing toward the end of this period. Even if a global catastrophe were to befall our planet, humanity’s survival is ultimately guaranteed by the loving God who created us or the impersonal cosmic order that governs the universe.

(2) The startling realization that our extinction is not only possible in principle but inevitable in the long run — a double trauma that left many wallowing in a state of “unyielding despair,” as the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1903. The heart of this mood was a dual sense of existential vulnerability and cosmic doom: not only are we susceptible to going extinct just like every other species, but the fundamental laws of physics imply that we cannot escape this fate in the coming millions of years. This disheartening mood reverberated for roughly a century, from the 1850s up to the mid-20th century.

(3) The shocking recognition that humanity had created the means to destroy itself quite literally tomorrow. The essence of this mood, which percolated throughout Western societies in the postwar era, was a sense of impending self-annihilation. Throughout the previous mood, almost no one fretted about humanity going extinct anytime soon. Once this new mood descended, fears that we could disappear in the near future became widespread — in newspaper articles, films, scientific declarations, and bestselling books. Some people even chose not to have children because they believed that the end could be near. This mood emerged in 1945 but didn’t solidify until the mid-1950s, when one event in particular led a large number of leading intellectuals to believe that total self-annihilation had become a real possibility in the near term.

(4) The surprising realization that natural phenomena could obliterate humanity in the near term, without much or any prior warning. From at least the 1850s up to the beginning of this mood, scientists almost universally agreed that we live on a very safe planet in a very safe universe — not on an individual level, once again, but on the level of our species. Though humanity might destroy itself, the natural world poses no serious threats to our collective existence, at least not for many millions of years, due to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Nature is on our side. This belief was demolished when scientists realized that, in fact, the natural world is an obstacle course of death traps that will sooner or later try to hurtle us into the eternal grave. Hence, the essence of this mood was a disquieting sense that we are not, in fact, safe.

(5) The most recent existential mood — our current mood — is marked by a disturbing suspicion that however perilous the 20th century was, the 21st century will be even more so. Thanks to climate change, biodiversity loss, the sixth major mass extinction event, and emerging technologies, the worst is yet to come. Evidence of this mood is everywhere: in news headlines declaring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could annihilate humanity, and the apocalyptic rhetoric of environmentalists. As we will discuss more below, surveys of the public show that a majority or near-majority of people in countries like the US believe that extinction this century is quite probable, while many leading intellectuals have expressed the same dire outlook. The threat environment is overflowing with risks, and it appears to be growing more perilous by the year. Can we survive the mess that we’ve created?

I don’t know — it seems to me the big shift was between (1) and (2), and (2) through (5) and more subtle distinctions about how and when the species is going to die. He also argues that these transitions are fairly sharp and clear, but really, Alvarez ended the uniformitarian hypothesis? I don’t think so. But then, I haven’t read his book yet.

Also, just to complicate things, there are a lot of people today who are stuck in the (1) mindset. He gives one horrifying example, of a man who got elected to the American presidency.

As I write in the book, end-times prophesies are both rigid and highly elastic, often able to accommodate unforeseen developments as if the Bible predicted them all along. Ronald Reagan provides an example. In 1971, while he was governor of California, he declared that,

for the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. … It can’t be long now. Ezekiel [38:22] says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. They exist now, and they never did in the past.

For Reagan and other evangelicals, the possibility of a nuclear holocaust was filtered through the lens of a religious hermeneutics. Consequently, their mapping of the threat environment was completely different than the mapping of atheists like Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell. The latter two did not see nuclear weapons as part of God’s grand plan to defeat evil. Rather, a thermonuclear Armageddon would simply be the last, pitiful paragraph of our species’ autobiography. Whereas for Christians, the other side of the apocalypse is paradise, for atheistic individuals it is nothing but oblivion. In this way, secularization played an integral part in enabling the discovery and creation of new kill mechanisms to alter the threat environment and, with these alterations, to induce shifts from one existential mood to another.

Man, Reagan was a batshit lunatic fuck, wasn’t he? And he thought a nuclear holocaust would be a good thing. When Torres says our current mood, that has to be interpreted as a rather narrow “our” because I think a scary huge percentage of the public don’t share that mood with us.

Today is Dungeon Adventure Day

As you must know, it’s legendary that universities are built on top of a network of tunnels full of steam pipes and cables and mysterious lost undergrads. My university is no different. We have one functional, accessible tunnel between the science building and the student union, but nothing else is easy to get to. We occasionally get a glimpse of more when the physical plant crew opens up a door to work on arcane things back in the mines.

Today, though, I made arrangements to get an official tour of the maze under our feet. The students and I are going to equip ourselves and enter the university’s very own dungeon. I don’t expect to find trolls or CHUDs or ancient artifacts or cunning, centuries-old traps that still work — ostensibly, we’re looking for the invertebrate inhabitants of the underworld. I know there are cockroaches down there, at least, but maybe spiders? Giant albino spiders lurking in the darkness?

One can always hope.

If I don’t make it back, all I know right now is that the access portal is somewhere on the east side of the humanities & fine arts building. I’ll expect you to organize a rescue party.

This. Is. CONSERVATISM!

It’s getting awfully gossipy up there in the highest governmental institutions. Boebert and Greene are fighting.

It’s no secret that the relationship between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert has never been worse. They’ve yelled at each other on and off the floor. Greene recently called Boebert a “little bitch” to her face. And Boebert supported Greene’s removal from the Freedom Caucus.

But, lawmakers told The Daily Beast, the situation between the two is still even worse than most people think.

“A fistfight could break out at any moment,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told The Daily Beast.

Can we get some hair-pulling, too? Screeching and clawing with long nails? Is this an episode of Housewives of Washington DC or what?

Another Republican lawmaker who is close to both Greene and Boebert told The Daily Beast that the situation was a tinderbox.

“You can’t have too many of these rifts for too long,” this lawmaker said.

Another GOP member suggested that one of them would destroy the other—they just didn’t know who would come out on top.

“They will be nailing that coffin shut,” this lawmaker said, “and one of them is still in there kicking and screaming!”

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) compared Greene and Boebert’s battle to that of a “two-way sword.”

“I just think that whatever is there, could be utilized both ways,” he said, adding that “people make decisions that they have to work and live by, and you kind of hate being in their shoes.”

After Greene called Boebert a “little bitch” to her face on the House floor, Greene was summarily booted from the House Freedom Caucus. And while Boebert could have probably helped save Greene from that embarrassment by defending her to the group, she instead chose to agree with fellow Freedom Caucus members, voting for Greene’s dismissal.

The “Freedom” Caucus was already a joke, with some of the worst people in congress gathering together to pressure everyone else to bow to their terrible politics, but this just makes it simultaneously worse and more laughable.

While the HFC was founded on not allowing showier, less serious conservative voices to join its ranks—like Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA)—that thinking has been a thing of the past for years. The Freedom Caucus eventually even let Gohmert join its ranks. (Both members are now gone from Congress.)

By the time Greene and Boebert arrived in Congress just days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Freedom Caucus was allowing almost any rambunctious conservative to join. It had, after all, primarily become a pro-Donald Trump group and less of the ideological organization formed to fight for a more open process in Congress.

And now it’s a forum for petty high school drama. I hope this makes it less effective.

Remember when Congress was all about dignity and decorum? Nah, I don’t either.

How to make the medical establishment very angry

Just publish the truth about their history.

During the mid-nineteenth century, medical schools embraced a white supremacist belief in black inferiority and subhumanness. Racism was a social sport upper-class men played to solidify a professional identity rooted in whiteness (figure 1). These heinous ‘educational’ activities included torturing enslaved black people with ‘experiments’, graverobbing their bodies from cemeteries and attempting to detect whether they were faking illness while torturing them as ‘treatment’ (Willoughby 2016). This white supremacy persisted long after legalised slavery ended. The 1910 Flexner Report closed five of the seven black medical schools, preventing 35 000 black physicians from graduating in subsequent decades, amidst deadly black–white health inequities (Campbell et al. 2020). The American Medical Association (AMA) sanctioned this disregard for humanity, banning black physicians from local AMA chapters through the 1960s, thereby denying licensing, board certification and hospital privileges (Baker et al. 2008). This anti-black racism was nothing new. During the early twentieth century, organised medicine cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the Ku Klux Klan, promoting its white supremacist conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality and their related violence (Antonovich 2021). White psychiatrists diagnosed black men protesting during the Civil Rights movement with a dangerous ‘protest psychosis’. Pathologising black people’s resistance to oppression while normalising white people’s violently oppressive behaviour is a long historical arc. It is reflected in diagnoses like drapetomania from the mid-nineteenth century and the overdiagnosis of conduct disorder in racially minoritised children today (Metzl 2010).

That photo is genuinely horrible and shameful. The account is true, every word, and damning. Yet the article that was from triggered outrage from medical institutions. It shouldn’t. I like this comment from Dr Brandy Schillace, about how they should respond:

That’s how we build. That’s how we have real conversation and community. There is amazing relief, Grace, growth, in admitting we are wrong AND acknowledging that the wrong has deeply hurt others. Then both apology and amendment will be genuine, and accepted as such.

Ken Ham is a disingenuous fraud on climate change

I’m sorry, I feel stupider for having read this: it’s Ken Ham talking about climate change. He reports the headlines:

Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend here in the US, headlines proclaimed: “For the third day in a row, Earth’s average temperature breaks record highs.” Last week on July 5, 2023, the average global temperature (according to one university’s “Climate Reanalyzer,” “a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition”) was a record 62.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 17.18 C), beating the “record” set on Monday. But is this really a record?

Yes.

But Ol’ Ken questions it.

…was last week really a record? Well, it might have been—but we don’t really know! Humans have only been recording climate data since the 1880s, and we’ve only had robust data since satellite data collection began in the 1970s. So we have no idea how warm the warmest day on earth was in all of the earth’s history! (But we do know, based on the fossil record, that the earth’s climate was much warmer before the flood!)

You idiot. We have over a century of robust climate records, and this was the highest temperature on record, therefore, yes, it was a record high temperature. Words mean things, you know. They weren’t saying this was the hottest the planet had ever been — that probably occurred about 4½ billion years ago, when the planet was a molten ball of rock — but the hottest since we humans have been carefully tracking the climate. OK, you fucking stupid charlatan?

But he goes on to top that disingenuous word game. He claims that he believes in climate change.

Not only do I believe in climate change, but I’m a climate change alarmist, and I do believe humans have caused climate change!

Except…just not the way scientists do, with their measurements and data and records. No, he believes in a coming Biblical catastrophe.

Well, I’m not referring to a supposed slight global temperature increase allegedly caused by humans burning fossil fuels. I’m referring to the ultimate catastrophic climate change everyone should be aware of when one day in the future, Jesus will return, and the earth (and the whole universe) will be judged with fire, and God will make a new heavens and earth.

He then goes on to say that humans are the cause of this coming catastrophic climate change, because of our sin in Adam…except he then goes on to say that we’re not going to be the cause.

So, man is not going to destroy the earth! We can boldly proclaim that humans aren’t going to destroy themselves or the earth because God is in complete control, and he will determine when the ultimate catastrophic climate change will occur. So, the climate change countdown clock is absurd! We need to understand and believe in climate alarmism in a biblical context.

This is a bait-and-switch game AiG plays all the time. They have multiple articles with titles like Science Confirms Climate Change and The Globe Is Warming, But It’s Not Your Fault! and I’m a Climate Change Alarmist! that, when you actually read them, are denying all the scientific evidence in order to claim that the basis of their belief rests entirely on Bible prophecy, and that, of course, the way to prepare for climate change is to pray and go to church and give Answers in Genesis your money. The only reason you should worry about environmental catastrophe is if you don’t fear God.

Lord, I despise these liars.