Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
I was home over lunch, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a shipment of spiders, so I decided to indulge myself in a legendary movie from 1964: Spider Baby. It’s delightfully bizarre and macabre, and yes, it does include lots of spiders.
If that isn’t sufficiently enticing, check out this still:
It stars Lon Chaney jr., and look: a young Sid Haig! The plot — don’t watch it for the plot — centers on a twisted sort of Addams Family group afflicted with an imaginary genetic illness called Merrye Disease. The afflicted go mad and steadily regress to a savage state in which they become voracious cannibals. Along the way, they just develop weird obsessions. One girl likes to play spider, a game that culminates in the spider girl stinging her partner with a pair of butcher knives.
It makes no sense, but everyone seems to be having a ghastly good time playing up the grisly psychos. Recommended!
I am sad to report that my package of spiders hasn’t yet arrived. It may not get here until tomorrow.
Now dreading 1939.
Big Beautiful Billis a joke
The only BBB I might appreciate is the Better Business Bureau. This new bill the Republicans are foisting off on us is a blatant grift, and we’re just sitting here watching it pass.
What the Big Beautiful Bill
contains is a give-away for the rich, while taking away any benefit to the poor and removing any limits on Trump’s power.
If this passes, we won’t have another election.
To those of you who don’t know what’s buried in this Big Bogus Bill… Prepare yourself for what’s coming.
If the Senate passes the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and Trump signs it, that’s it.
It becomes law. And here’s what that really means:
« He can delay or cancel elections—legally.
« He can ignore Supreme Court rulings for a year or more. « He can fire government workers for political disloyalty.
« Judges can’t enforce their own orders.
« Protests can be tracked and criminalized.
» LGBTQ+ rights, education, health care, and media? Gutted.
« Your VPN? Tracked. Your vote? Suppressed. Your speech? Flagged.
This bill doesn’t break the law. It rewrites the law so Trump never has to break it again.
We don’t need to wonder what would happen if authoritarianism came to America.
It’s here—in 1,100 pages, dressed up as “freedom.”
If you’ve ever said, “It won’t be that bad” or “The courts RS TR T just know: this bill makes it so they can’t.
Share this. Speak up. Show up. Now.
Because if this passes, the next vote might be the last one that matters.
It’s going up before the Senate next, the sanctuary for privilege, so I don’t have a lot of hope that it will be shot down. We are so screwed.
Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” budget squeaked through the US House of Representatives last Thursday – a shiny populist package hiding a brutal class agenda. No taxes on tips! Bigger child tax credits! But look closer and the bill is a sleight of hand. The middle-class perks expire in 2028 – just as Mr Trump’s second term would end – while permanent tax cuts for the rich, and delayed cuts to means-tested welfare, entrench inequality. It’s not a budget. It’s a bait-and-switch. It turns Democrats’ fiscal caution into a liability – one that punishes their own base. Republicans understand what Democrats still don’t: deficits aren’t the danger. It’s what you do with them that matters.
This bill supercharges inequality: a $1.1tn giveaway to Americans earning more than $500,000 a year – funded by pushing poorer families off Medicaid and food assistance. It slashes green energy subsidies. Experts say it could add $3.1tn to the debt – but it’s more than millionaire tax breaks. It raises Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding by 365% for detention, 500% for deportations – fuel for Mr Trump’s crackdown.
It’s breathtaking how quickly the USA flushed itself down the crapper.
You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see my latest video, “An Un-Deconstructed Atheist”.
Unless you’re a Patreon subscriber, in which case you can watch it right now.
One of my responsibilities is academic advising — I help students complete their degree and give them career advice. It’s feeling a bit awkward nowadays.
But that’s OK, I can just focus on the science instead.
Unfortunately, it’s become clear that my job is extremely political.
My grandson Knut is trying on his father’s uniform.
I don’t think it fits.
She looks nice.
That’s Freddie Oversteegen. She was 14 years old and living in the Netherlands when the Nazis invaded. She and her sister got busy.
If the Nazis or Dutch police caught the sisters, they might have killed them. However, the fact that they were both young girls—and Freddie looked even younger when she wore braids—meant that officials were less likely to suspect them of working for the resistance. This might be one of the reasons why, in 1941, a commander with the Haarlem Resistance Group visited their house to ask their mother if he could recruit Freddie and Truus.
Their mother consented and the sisters’ agreed to join. “Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus told Jonker. “‘And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,’ he added. I remember my sister saying: ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’”
In at least one instance, Truus seduced an SS officer into the woods so that someone from the resistance could shoot him. As the commander who recruited them had said, Freddie and Truus learned to shoot Nazis too, and the sisters began to go on assassination missions by themselves. Later on, they focused on killing Dutch collaborators who arrested or endangered Jewish refugees and resistance members.
I have to admire the Oversteegen sisters. They were doing good work. We should be more like Freddie and Truus.
On these missions, Freddie was especially good at following a target or keeping a lookout during missions since she looked so young and unsuspecting. Both sisters shot to kill, but they never revealed how many Nazis and Dutch collaborators they assassinated. According to Pliester, Freddie would tell people who asked that she and her sister were soldiers, and soldiers don’t say.
Consequently, we don’t have too many details about how their “liquidations,” as they called them, played out. Benda-Beckmann says that sometimes they would follow a target to his house to kill him or ambush them on their bikes.
Their other duties in the Haarlem Resistance Group included “bringing Jewish [refugees] to a new hiding place, working in the emergency hospital in Enschede… [and] blowing up the railway line between Ijmuiden and Haarlem,” writes Jonker.
I think it’s time to stop merely punching Nazis.
I don’t ever watch any of that biased punditry that infests broadcast television on Sunday mornings, but if I did, I’d probably see Murc’s Law in non-stop action.
“The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.” This is famously known as “Murc’s Law,” named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even Donald Trump’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012.
In order to be a highly paid influential thought-leader in the American news media, you have to apply the filter of Murc’s Law to everything you say. Oh, also: the “news” isn’t news, you have to suppress it until you’ve landed your lucrative book deal.
We all know the Republicans are hot for the opportunity to strip trans people all of their rights, and are eager to inspect the genitals of every woman who tries to enter a women’s restroom. Of course, I’m a man, and I say I’m obviously a man (some may disagree), so this does not affect me in the slightest, because like a real man I lack empathy and don’t actually care about other people.
At least, that’s how I think they want society to be. Peel off the trans people, a tiny easy minority to target, and that’ll set a precedent and make it easier to oppress all the other people we’re not supposed to like. We must make America pure! I am so lucky to be a member of the ideal subset of humanity that is destined to be privileged even further, because enforcement is coming.
During an interview with reporters last week, Indiana Senator Mike Braun went beyond the usual Republican line that decisions about abortion rights should be left up to the states. The question of interracial marriage, too, he said, should be left to the states to decide.
Braun was responding to a reporter who seemed to be testing how far he would take his states’ rights philosophy: If the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade improperly interfered with individual states’ ability to set their own rules for abortion, as Braun argued, which of the court’s other decisions should be overturned on that basis? Should the court’s unanimous 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, which decreed state laws forbidding interracial marriage unconstitutional, also be overturned?
Braun said, emphatically, “Yes.” States will naturally have differing views on such issues, he continued, adding that “when you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules, and proceedings, that are going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do. That’s the beauty of the system.” He later tried to walk back the statement about Loving, claiming to have misunderstood the question, an implausible assertion given that the reporter reiterated and rephrased the question to check for understanding, which did not seem to bother Braun at the time.
It’s going to be a beautiful system, don’t you worry. We’re going to dictate who can marry, nobody will care about that, it’s all for the best. And that’s all!
Except…well, maybe we’ll also police gay marriage, and start cracking down on contraceptives.
Nevertheless, Braun’s comments reflect a broader shift among Republicans and those in the conservative legal movement. Emboldened by their new 6-3 majority on the high court, conservatives again and again have proven willing to challenge rulings seen very recently as firmly settled law. Case in point: Braun also indicated that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception for married couples, should be overturned, a statement he did not walk back. And he is not alone in that position. Other Republican politicians, including Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and several candidates in this year’s race for state attorney general in Michigan, have also denounced Griswold. And just last week, during Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Texas Senator John Cornyn attacked the court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
We’ve seen this before. The Republicans are just following the true spirit of America, of the sort that inspired another country.
The idea of banning Jewish and Aryan marriages presented the Nazis with a dilemma: How would they tell who was Jewish and who was not? After all, race and ethnic categories are socially constructed, and interracial relationships produce offspring who don’t fall neatly into one box.
Again, the Nazis looked to America.
“Connected with these anti-miscegenation laws was a great deal of American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which race,” he says.
Controversial “one-drop” rules stipulated that anyone with any Black ancestry was legally Black and could not marry a white person. Laws also defined what made a person Asian or Native American, in order to prevent these groups from marrying whites (notably, Virginia had a “Pocahontas Exception” for prominent white families who claimed to be descended from Pocahontas).
The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents.
Won’t it be neat-o when that set of rules is enshrined in our constitution?
