That didn’t take long

You know that obscene revolting troll who comes by every once in a while with a new pseudonym, who then drops a torrent of racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic comments? And then I have to take a few minutes to delete every one of his abusive comments, and ban another pseudonym?

Imagine if I didn’t carry out that last step. Most of you wouldn’t be coming back, and the nastiness would pile up without end until all value in the conversation was lost. Curating and policing the comments section is an essential part of running a site.

Or imagine a grocery store where no workers responded to those “clean up on aisle 5” requests. It would quickly become a filthy, neglected garbage dump that no one would want to shop at.

You can stop imagining. All you need to do is observe Twitter in the near future.

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network Thursday, raising fears of how his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.

Twitter has struggled to enforce its rules against harassment and extremism, and the company has not yet published any broad-scale changes to its content-moderation policies.

But Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has fiercely criticized the company’s previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive and said he would work to overturn some of the company’s main enforcement mechanisms, such as indefinitely suspending accounts.

Already. The trolls leapt into furious masturbatory action at the first opportunity.

“Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K—S AND N—–S,” said one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. “I can freely express how much I hate n—–s … now, thank you elon,” another said.

Thanks so much, Elon.

One account, created this month, included a Nazi swastika as its profile picture and retweeted quotes from Musk alongside antisemitic memes. Another tweet, showing a video montage glorifying Nazi Germany with the comment, “I hear that there have been some changes around here,” was liked more than 400 times.

Racial slurs were posted rampantly overnight. One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 500 times and liked more than 4,000 times. It was tweeted at 9 p.m. Thursday night and remained online nearly 12 hours later.

Twitter was never particularly responsive to racist trolling, and I would guess that now, when the employees are looking at only a 1 in 4 chance of being retained, they are even less motivated to do a cleanup. I can tell you as someone who maintains a teeny-tiny site on the internet, keeping it tidy and functional requires constant vigilance.

Hey, advertisers! Unless you’re selling MAGA hats, Confederate flags, and chloroquinone — that is, those kinds of trolls are your customers — I don’t think Twitter is going to be a useful medium for long. The only good part of that sentence is the idea that Musk just burned up $44 billion dollars.

Noted.

Not a great start

You know, all the rich sociopaths have to buy their own social media site to make sure no one can talk about how awful they are. Facebook, Parler, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, now all absorbed by greedy rich people trying to build cozy little nests for their abhorrent views. Well, Elon Musk now owns Twitter. What is the first thing a committed Free Speech warrior would do, to demonstrate that commitment? How about firing a bunch of people?

Elon Musk became Twitter’s owner late Thursday as his $44 billion deal to take over the company officially closed, marking a new era for one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

As one of his first moves, he fired several longtime top Twitter executives, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. One of those confirmed the deal was complete.

He has also said he plans to cut the Twitter workforce by 75%. At the same time, he’s been anxious to reassure advertisers that oh no, he’s not going to turn Twitter into a free-for-all hellscape.

After all, he just sank $44 billion into this purchase, he’d rather not see it immediately collapse. Most of that money came from other financial backers, too, and they don’t want to see their investment callapse, either. I expect we’re going to see only slow changes in the service for a while.

Like letting Trump back on.

The one thing I know for sure is that the new ownership is not going to lead to improvements in Twitter. It’s all going to go to shit, with the only question being how quickly. Start preparing for your departure, if you’re on Twitter at all, right now! I’ve had a presence on Mastodon for a long while now, and it’s good, in a lot of ways better, than the bird site, just with less volume and fewer precious celebrities.

But then, was the money really real?

Kanye West’s poisonous anti-semitism seems to have come home to roost.

Kanye West has responded to being dropped by several major partnerships, including Adidas, CAA, MRC and Balenciaga.

Ari Emanuel. I lost 2 billion dollars in one day. And I’m still alive. This is love speech. I still love you. God still loves you. The money is not who I am. The people is who I am, West wrote on Instagram. The post comes days after Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, urged companies to stop doing business with West.

He was “worth” $2.5 billion last week, now he’s “worth” half a billion dollars. Was he actually worth that much? Is he worth that much now? Is anyone? This tells me that all those wealthy people are actually much more fragile than they’d like you to think.

Also, a ‘death-to-Jews’ speech is not love speech.

Now I’m worried about how to escape a python attack

This poor woman.

Jahrah, a rubber-tapper reportedly in her 50s, had made her way to work at a rubber plantation on Sunday morning.

She was reported missing after failing to return that night, and search parties sent out to find her. A day later villagers found a python with what appeared to be a large stomach.

Locals later killed the snake and found her body inside.

“The victim was found in the snake’s stomach,” Betara Jambi police chief AKP S Harefa told local media outlets, adding that her body appeared to be largely intact when it was found.

I have questions. Pythons don’t move that fast, so how do they catch their prey? They just lie in wait and throw coils over their victim? Speaking from ignorance, that doesn’t seem that dangerous. Pigs have tusks, deer have sharp hooves, humans have knives and machetes — it seems like a good way for the snake to be seriously wounded. How quickly can they constrict? There is another article about how they attack.

They can reach lengths of more than 10m (32ft) and are very powerful. They attack in an ambush, wrapping themselves around their prey and crushing it – squeezing tighter as the victim exhales.

They kill by suffocation or cardiac arrest within minutes.

I guess I’m mystified by the actual, initial process, in the first few seconds of a python attack, which isn’t well explained. How does a 10m long muscular tube leap into action to surprise an animal? I’m missing something in the mechanism.

I’d rather not go to Indonesia and find out in person. Any snake experts able to explain it?

Humanity’s imminent, mysterious extinction

You want something more to fear? Try this on for size.

Across the world, there’s evidence that spider populations are in danger of collapse. A landmark 2019 study in Nature found that the number of spiders, insects, and other arthropods dropped precipitously in Germany from 2008 to 2017, with the total number of different species researchers counted declining by 33 percent and total biomass dropping by 40 percent. Remember the Australian trapdoor spiders I told you about? They’re disappearing, too. After a century of settlers clearing land for crops and raising livestock, they’re becoming harder and harder to find. It’s all but certain that entire species of spiders will go extinct before we even have a chance to discover them, falling victim to industrial agriculture, pesticides, and climate change.

Then there’s this:

Alaska canceled the snow crab fishing season for the first time on Monday, as crab populations mysteriously plummet.

An estimated 1 billion snow crabs suddenly disappeared from the Bering Sea, according to CBS News. The collapse deals a heavy blow to Alaska’s biggest crab industry, and could drive many fishers out of the business.

“Mysteriously.” What a useful word. We send out trawlers to shred the seafloor, we drop traps and snatch away millions of crabs, and we spew garbage and microplastics into the ocean, and then shrug and say it’s a mystery why populations abruptly and catastrophically crash.

Another example: we’re seeing fewer vehicles with dead bugs splattered all over them.

From 1996 to 2017, insect splatters fell by 80 percent on one of the routes Moller regularly travels. On the other, longer stretch, they plunged 97 percent. Conventional measures show similar trends, and more recent observations have seen even sharper declines, Moller told us.

This article takes the somewhat interesting approach of speculating about alternative causes — which is fine, they’re being thorough, but we’re eventually going to have to face the reality that something “mysterious” is also happening to insect populations.

So, given this uncertainty, isn’t it possible that our spookily clean windshields are caused by factors other than rapidly declining insect populations? After all, we still see bugs everywhere, we just don’t seem to mash them with our cars as much.

Many smart people we spoke with, including entomologists and wheat farmers, speculated that maybe the cars have changed, not the bugs. As vehicles become more aerodynamic, the thinking goes, their increasingly efficient airflow whisks the bugs away from the windshield instead of creating head-on splatters.

Um, no. That’s a very silly explanation, as the experts they consult state, but also for obvious reasons. Car grills have not become more aerodynamic, nor have radiators. Also, the cars…or rather trucks people are driving are not particularly sleek. In fact, the trends are for more aggressively blunt, large, flat front ends. A lot of column inches get wasted on this ridiculous hypothesis, which can also be dismissed experimentally.

But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.

So then we get another off-the-wall hypothesis. It’s not that insects are in decline, it’s that there are fewer insects splattered by individual cars because we’ve vastly increased the number of cars on the road. I’m losing patience with their efforts to find any explanation other than that we’re poisoning the environment, but OK…being thorough is good.

Americans now drive three times as many miles as they did in 1970, and the explosion of trucks and SUVS means many of us do it in cars with much, much larger windshields. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests acreage of windshields out on the American road has tripled. And that’s probably an underestimate in some places: A large majority of our increase in driving has come on a narrow set of major urban roads, according to our analysis of Bureau of Transportation Statistics data. And as Kenny Cornett of design-software giant Autodesk points out, more traffic means more vehicles riding in each other’s bug-free aerodynamic slipstreams.

So in our little thought experiment, which makes the depressingly accurate assumption that bugs are a finite resource, our bugs-per-windshield metric would have been cut by two-thirds even if the number of bugs had remained constant.

I…I don’t even. This would only work if, instead of sampling a tiny fraction of the extant population with our windshields, we were exhaustively extracting enough bugs with one car to deplete the population for the next car. If that were the case, then maybe tripling the number of cars would be responsible for the population crash. But that’s not the case. The column of insects wiped out by the passage of a car is minuscule compared to the population in the fields, over the lakes, around our homes.

Treating the excessive driving habits of Americans as a rationalization for insect extirpation rather than as part of the problem is troubling, too.

Weirdly, the article concludes that the problem may not be as big as we think because…we have so many cars?

So, simple math hints that the very real ecological disaster of the collapse of insect populations may look even more apocalyptic thanks to the parallel rise of another ecological time bomb: the world’s intensifying love affair with ever more and ever bigger automobiles.

No. This makes no sense. We’ve got other methods of sampling insect populations that are not bug-splatters on cars. When I first moved to the Midwest, a regular feature on the news was when vast clouds of mayflies and midges would hatch out and rise from our lakes to appear on weather radar. Nope, not so much anymore. I would go outside and marvel at the dense masses of flying insects that would cluster around streetlights — nowadays, all summer long, the lights are lonely and shining into an emptiness. I wanted to use spider populations as a proxy for insects, and spiders aren’t leaping in front of cars on the freeway…and see the first article cited, they’re in decline, too.

What’s going on? Oh, I know the answer: it’s something “mysterious”. Problem solved.

Don’t worry, though. We don’t even like bugs, so who cares if they disappear. Then, when they’re gone, the birds and fish and reptiles will fade away, but they’re not our pets, so who cares? Unexpected crop failures…well, we’ll come up with a technology to deal with that. And finally, when humans mysteriously go extinct, there will be no one left to worry about it, and all the windshields on the decaying cars we leave behind will be shiny and clean and their grills will gleam unspattered. No one will be standing around wondering what happened to all the people, and best of all, there will be no one standing around smugly to utter the non-answer, “It’s a mystery.”

I’d include a photo of a spider, but I’ve learned how that usually ends

Stupid bird. No one is afraid of you.

Someone understands! Here’s an article by a man who discovered the joys of spidering. They’re beautiful and exotic and weird! How can anyone settle for mere bird-watching once you’ve seen a few spiders?

My first spider—the one that started all this—was black, with a head like a garden shovel’s blade and eight beady eyes that all but disappeared against the velvet of its upper body. At the end of its abdomen, two fat spinnerets poked out like the notched tail of a fish; on its back, a cream-colored strip stood in contrast to the black. As spiders go, it was unremarkable. And as I watched it scuttle across the carpeted floor of my in-laws’ basement, I had no idea that it was about to send me down the deepest rabbit hole of my life.

It was September 2021, and I was having some trouble adjusting. My wife, our one-year-old son, and I had temporarily relocated from Colorado to her parents’ house in Lincoln, Nebraska, after my wife’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. I occupied my free time as best I could, but within a couple of months I had hiked all of the few local trails. After a decade in the Front Range, where I could explore somewhere different every week, it felt claustrophobic.

In need of a new, Midwest-friendly way to get outside, I decided to try birding. I spent hours watching my in-laws’ bird feeders through binoculars, jotting down sightings of house finches and northern flickers. But when I tried to branch out and cover more ground, I ran into a roadblock: my toddler son, who came along on most of my outdoor adventures and was constitutionally incapable of sitting still. On our first trip to a local wildlife refuge, I raised binocs to my face and immediately heard him beating feet down the trail. After spending 30 minutes trying in vain to corral the giggling imp, I gave up and headed home.

One night after putting him to bed, I was sitting on the couch when I spotted something dark moving across the off-white carpet: that little black spider. Inside my brain, something clicked. There were spiders living inside the house. If I could bird-watch, why couldn’t I spider-watch. too? Ignoring the crawling sensation on my skin, I took out my phone, got down on my hands and knees, and snapped a photo.

Unfortunate side-effect, though: way too many people are arachnophobic, and very few people want to talk about spiders with you.

Sharing my new hobby was turning out to be difficult, however. If you think people tune out when birders start talking, try telling them about the wolfie you saw walking around with several dozen spiderlings clinging to her abdomen, or the fishing spider you watched shish-kebab a moth. My wife tried to be supportive, even though spiders make her hair stand on end. When I asked friends if they wanted to see pictures of my most recent find, their mouths said, Sure!, while their eyes said, Please don’t. For every new spider appreciator I converted, a dozen people told me about their spider bites, asked me if I was afraid of black widows, or just warned me to be careful.

They’re almost never spider bites. But try telling them that? That’s not what they want to hear.

The good thought here is that love of spiders can be infectious — if you can get anyone to really look, they can learn to appreciate them.

If the human fear of spiders is indeed genetic, you wouldn’t have known it watching my son. In the months after my spider-wakening, I took my new obsession from the backyard to the trail, mostly with Rhys in tow. Maybe it was because he could look at them face to face, but spiders fascinated him in a way that birds hadn’t. I remember the hikes we did together mainly in connection with the new species we saw. One time we spotted an enormous banded garden spider hanging upside down in the reeds at Lincoln’s Pioneers Park Nature Center, its body like a wasp-striped football and its legs in a perfect X. Later, at Colorado’s North Table Mountain, a rust-red Apache jumping spider climbed onto a tree root and looked at us, cocking its head as Rhys knelt down and did the same. Sometimes he spotted them before me, pointing at an orb web or a wolf spider blending in against a rock. Once or twice, perhaps possessed by the spirit of John Crompton, he tried to lick them.

You’ll have to let me know if my obsession has positively or negatively affected your opinion of arachnids. I will say it’s probably not a good idea to start licking them.