The Renfield protocol

They don’t tell you about the dirty jobs involved in spider care. Last week, I fed all the adults nice big juicy mealworms, which they promptly killed and then spent several days sucking on their vital fluids. Even when they’re very thorough in their consumption, though, they still leave behind a sack of chitin with organic leftovers inside.

Then it rots.

It rots thoroughly, turning black and soft and turning hairy with fungus. It has a sulfurous reek to it, as well. Then the spiders turn to me and peremptorily demand, “Renfield! Oh, Renfield! Do clean up the rotting corpses, will you? That’s a good Renfield.”

Renfield is me, if you haven’t figured that out. This morning I got to go through all the cages and pluck out decaying mealworms with a pair of forceps. This is my job. That, and regularly bringing them fresh bodies to turn into rotting corpses.

Oh well. I also got to play with my shiny new camera and take photos of my masters.

You’ll have to go to Instagram or Patreon if you want to see photos. (Hmm, I didn’t do a very good job of promoting those links with all this talk of decaying corpses, did I…)

What are they teaching in journalism school nowadays?

Another mass murder by an asshole with a rifle, on a day ending with the letter “y”. But this article! Jesus!

The suspect in a Monday morning massacre at a Louisville bank has been identified as a 23-year-old former varsity hoops star and finance grad-turned-banker who livestreamed the horrific attack.

Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the suspect as Connor Sturgeon, who worked at Old National Bank’s downtown Louisville branch.

Gwinn-Villaroel said Sturgeon was livestreaming as he used a rifle to open fire at about 8:38 a.m. in the Old National Bank Building, which houses the bank and a variety of other businesses, killing four people and injuring nine more, including three police officers. Sturgeon was killed after exchanging gunfire with officers, she said, but it’s unclear if he was killed by police or by self-inflicted gunshots.

The article briefly mentions the victims by name, but after that, it’s got a more important job to do. It spends 22 fucking paragraphs going on and on about what a nice normal guy the killer was. The governor of Kentucky has to tell us what an “incredible friend” he was, they interview old high school friends and buddies from his college fraternity, they reach the depths of banality by getting a quote from the husband of a neighbor.

Sturgeon “seemed like a real normal dude, every day he’d wave to me,” Allgeier’s husband, Michael, added.

What the fuck? The mass murderer was known to sometimes wave to people? This is news? I learned nothing from it other than that the killer was otherwise a mundane person who lived an ordinary, if privileged, life before going on a shooting rampage. The article says nothing about the victims, short of naming them, and should have been slashed to bits by an editor before publishing.

And it took three ‘reporters’ to cobble together this unquestioning story about a bad man.

I hope they feel a little bit of shame today.

What meritocracy?

Elon Musk is doing a fine job of wrecking the reputation (what there was of it) of rich people. Here’s his idea of a clever joke.

Juvenile. Stupid. He bought this thing for $44 billion, and now he spends all his time mocking it and literally deprecating it. He threw away over $20 billion so far, and is determined to destroy all the rest.

Worse is what he’s doing to Matt Taibbi. I don’t much care for Taibbi — he’s also juvenile and gullible — but he was defending Musk, incompetently, and was paid by Musk to fire off that damp squib called the “Twitter Files,” but now Musk is cutting off Substack, where Taibbi makes his money, and has gone so far as to ‘shadow ban’ Taibbi on Twitter.

Musk is a petty 3 year old child. I browsed his Twitter feed to see what’s going on in his brain, and even his deep thoughts are shallow and trivial. Like this one:

Wait, what? Your left arm is the same age as your right, and the two are genetically identical, and typically have similar environmental exposure. How is this an example of precision? How does this tell us that aging can be fixed?

Although…I did once meet a man, a truck driver, whose left arm was ruddy, scaly, and weathered, while his right was pale and smooth. He liked driving with the side window down, and his left arm resting on the door. I guess I’ve cured aging, then — simply stay out of the sun.

Texas takes another step into the abyss

Daniel Perry was an uber driver who ran a red light, drove into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, and when one of them approached his car carrying an AK-47 (which, stupid and dangerous as it is, is legal in Texas), opened fire with a handgun and killed him. He was found guilty of murder in a jury trial.

In Texas. After he threatened to kill someone online.

Perry’s defense team argued that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might “kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

A friend responded, “Can you legally do so?” Perry replied, “If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.”

Guess what? The governor wants to free him immediately.

Abbott wants an army of undisciplined thugs who will murder people he doesn’t like. It’s the authoritarian mindset.

“It’s what happens in Uganda or El Salvador,” said Cofer, a former prosecutor. “Total abrogation of the rule of law. And what’s even worse is that Abbott knows better. He was a smart Texas Supreme Court Justice. He knows this is legally wrong. Profoundly wrong. Pure politics.”

But it works! I know I would never consider living in Texas. I won’t even visit the state anymore. Abbott is doing a great job of driving anyone who would oppose him away.

Noah was a prevert

I never thought of it from this angle before, but maybe Noah was a devious guy with a bestiality obsession, and he invented that whole flood nonsense as an excuse to check out animals’ genitals. That makes more sense than the book of Genesis, that’s for sure.

It also suggests how we ought to view all those weirdos today who are insisting on laws to check out children’s genitals. There’s no social catastrophe, just a lot of perverts who think they have a cunning excuse.

My genetics class is going ‘woke’!

I’ve been teaching the students all this basic transmission genetics all semester, and while it’s important and fundamental, it can have a bad effect on people’s brains. I cringe when I hear people talking about human traits using simple Mendelian terms like “dominant” and “recessive” because, while it works for many things, for others it misleads and is overly simplistic. I want my students to come away from the class knowing that genetics is complex and subtle and everything is polygenic and epistasis matters, and that’s hard to do when they’re trying to figure out the basics of doing a fly cross.

It’s also a problem because instilling only the basics of Mendel is a good way to make Nazis — it’s easy to distort simple concepts they barely understand into props for your biases. I’d like to forestall that. Also, I’m in Minnesota, and Minnesota has a smug white people problem.

“The racism you see in Minnesota is the type of racism where people say there is no racism. The only race is the human race,” Myers [not me, no relation] said. “How can we say the only race is the human race when all the people with dark skin are people with higher unemployment rates, dying from COVID, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be beaten by police and murdered? How does that happen when there’s no race?”

So I’m going to wake up all the smart students in my class. My strategy involves handing them a digital folder full of articles from science journals as well as newspapers, telling them to pick one, and present it to the class (I’m sure not going to just lecture on these things — I want students to think about them.) They’re getting the folder today, have to pick an article by Wednesday, and are going to prepare a ten minute summary and review for two weeks from today. It’s going to be fun, right?

Here’s a list of just the titles they have to choose from:

A framework for enhancing ethical genomic research with Indigenous communities (2018)
A review of the Hispanic paradox: time to spill the beans? (2014)
Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education (2022)
Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics? (2015)
Eugenics and scientific racism, (2023)
Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA (2011)
Genetic Evaluation for Hereditary Cancer Syndromes Among African Americans: A Critical Review (2022)
How to fight racism using science (2020).
Implications of biogeography of human populations for ‘race’ and medicine(2004)
National Academies calls for transforming use of racial and ethnic labels in genetics research (2023)
Population genetics, history, and health patterns in Native Americans (2004).
Race and Genetics: Somber History, Troubled Present (2020)
The apportionment of human diversity, (1972)
Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research (2023)
Women’s Brains, Gould (1980)

It’s an eclectic mix of sources, since I’m trying to capture a range of interests and abilities.

By the way, I do warn them that Lewontin’s “The apportionment of human diversity” is an important classic paper, but not for the faint of heart — it’ll be a challenge for even the most advanced students in the class. Some students love a challenge, though.

It’s all inbreeding

I just learned about a curious connection. Remember UATX, that fake conservative university, is having another summer session this year (you’re too late to apply, I’m afraid). Again, it’s going to be held in Dallas, not Austin, because they’ve been granted the use of some buildings in an office park called Old Parkland.

Guess who owns it?

Conservative billionaire and corrupt villain of the week, Harlan Crow.

The more I learn about these people, the more incestuous they look.

Here we go again: cis man aggressively ‘protecting’ children has…can you guess?

Man, these stories keep popping up, and they’re not even interesting for the irony anymore. Yeah, another crusader ‘protecting’ children was found to have a stash of child porn.

Michael Dolce, a 53-year-old lawyer known for representing child sexual abuse survivors, was recently arrested by FBI agents at his West Palm Beach, Florida home. Dolce, who founded a group called Protect Our Kids First Inc., was allegedly laying in his bed and downloading sexually explicit images of children when agents broke down his front door.

According to an FBI affidavit, after Dolce’s March 15 arrest, agents found 1,997 images and five videos of child pornography on his computer. The images were of male and female children ages five to 12, including several of a prepubescent girl in a subfolder titled “Sweet Pedo Stars.” Dolce could receive a minimum of 20 years in prison if found guilty of possessing child pornography.

The police are brutal, but sometimes they have good timing.

Except…OK, this Michael Dolce is a sick scumbag, he deserves to lose his job (he already has), and should be mocked and howled at for his hypocrisy, and should never be taken seriously ever again. There ought to be some penalties for his behavior, but twenty years in prison? In our prison system? Is that just? Especially when the article points out what he’s going to face.

If Dolce is found guilty of possessing child pornography, he’ll likely face a “living hell” behind bars, CBS News reported. Inmates with sexual interests in children often occupy the lowest rung of the prisoner hierarchy, with other inmates sometimes defecating in their cells, using them as sex slaves, or targeting them for violence and murder as a way to gain prestige. Even when such offenders are placed into protective custody, they remain widely despised by other inmates, the news outlet reported.

Child pornography is a deplorable crime that rightly deserves to be punished, but you know what else is a deplorable crime? A state-run rape factory that allows inmates to torture each other. I also have to wonder how the police had such good timing — there are serious issues of privacy here (uh-oh, is the FBI going to break down my door and uncover my vast stash of spider images?).

It’s unclear why the FBI was monitoring Dulce and whether he had any anti-LGBTQ+ views. However, he is one of the countless cisgender men who have been arrested for child pornography while right-wingers continually accuse LGBTQ+ people, drag performers, and their allies of being “pedophiles” and “groomers.”

What is up with that? I’m cis, but never had the slightest interest in child porn — it’s repulsive, and if anyone were to send me any, I’d be forwarding their messages to the police.

I like religious pluralism for keeping Catholic fanaticism in check

Here’s a fine Easter message for you: The world would be better if every man, woman, and child were Catholic. You are misusing freedom of religion when you use it to promote pluralism and false religions.

Oh yeah, the Church Militant never fails to provide entertaining intolerance for public consumption. It’s a strange mixed message, though. This guy is yelling about how pluralism is a good thing, and you shouldn’t be angry about it because everyone should be free to make the right choice (Catholicism) and the wrong choice (every other religion), but you should be getting mad that every single minor Catholic festival isn’t promoted as heavily as Christmas and Ramadan and Diwali. But have you ever looked at calendar of Catholic holy days? This week alone we had Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, and Black Saturday. Get to work and complain to your HR department that they aren’t sending out announcements and memos about every single Catholic holiday! If my university started spamming me about every single religious holiday — Catholics aren’t alone in packing the calendar with noise — I’d have to block their email.

And darn those rainbow flags. Offensive to the Church Militant! There are no gay people in the True Catholic church.

Anyway, I’m doing nothing for Easter at all other than grading and making a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. I hear that my granddaughter is going on a family Easter egg hunt, and that’s about as religious as we’re going to get. I guess I better get started on the holy rite of marking my students’ sins with a red pen.