Lovely eggs!

It’s been one of those days. We’ve got another chemistry job candidate today with a busy schedule, and we’re making him suffer for this position. Flight delays, bad weather, drifting snow…I’m impressed that he made it all. Shortly I have to do my own bit of suffering, attending his job talk. I’m sure it will be good, but I’m not a chemist, and I know what to expect. It’ll start off gently enough, with alcohols & alkenes & alkynes, names I’ll recognize, and then within minutes I’ll be lost in exotic reactions with wild catalysts and I’ll have no idea what’s going on.

But before that, happy news from the lab: after a long dry spell, we have a new egg sac!

Are they not luscious and beautiful? I think two things might have uncorked an oviduct: I’m teaching fly genetics, which means we get an excess of flies, and everything that doesn’t get used in our crosses gets showered upon the happy spiders; and we spent a day adjusting humidity in the cages, which seems to have been one of the triggers.

Now…off to organic chemistry.

North Dakota Republicans…enough said

They’re up to their usual tricks, pushing more hate bills.

Six Republican members of the North Dakota Legislature introduced a bill Wednesday that would send a clear message to nonhuman-identified students: You’re not wanted in the Roughrider State.

The two-page bill, which is primarily a measure seeking to prohibit schools in the state from accommodating transgender youths,

Wait. Stop there. The bill is mainly about discriminating against trans kids, but that isn’t newsworthy enough anymore, so the news article is focusing on…furries. It turns out the sponsors of the bill have been listening to propaganda about litter boxes. To resume…

includes a subsection aimed at a different — and theoretical — category of students.

“A board of a school district, a public or private school, or a teacher in a public or private school may not … Adopt a policy establishing or providing a place, facility, school program, or accommodation that caters to a student’s perception of being any animal species other than human,” the bill, labeled an “emergency measure” by its authors, states.

This section of the bill appears to be connected to an urban myth about litter boxes in U.S. schools that spread among conservative Republicans ahead of the November election. An NBC News report published in October found this myth — about schools providing accommodations, like litter boxes, for children who identify as cats — to be untrue.

Do you think this is stupid? Wait until you hear directly from the ditz behind it all. She’s posing in front of some sort of Christian slogan, which is totally unsurprising.

The interviewer asks exactly the right questions: “Do we have any confirmed sightings of furries in North Dakota schools?” I don’t specifically have a confirmed number on that. She doesn’t know any. And she repeats the litter box myth. This is all a purely hypothetical exercise. Then she says it is happening in Minnesota! No, it’s not. You don’t get to use my state as a shield for your stupidity, lady.

But let’s not forget that she’s using this nonsense about furries as a stalking horse for her real agenda: she’s a transphobe elected to state congress who wants to implement her hate and religious dogma in North Dakota law.

Troll farming is a growth industry

Behold the social media harvest! Pay me!

This will not end well, as we’re already seeing. Elon Musk recently pardoned a whole army of right-wing scumbags, allowing them to tweet freely, and then got reminded why they were banned in the first place. Nick Fuentes, the Nazi-loving anti-semite, took advantage of his new bullhorn to declare, We love Hitler…bitch!, and got banned again within 24 hours. You know, this was entirely predictable. That’s what Fuentes always does, ramping up the hatred to get his followers excited. He can do nothing else — if he toned down the rhetoric, his rabid base would evaporate.

Now Facebook/Meta/whatever mask Zuckerberg is wearing now, announced that they’re unbanning Donald Trump. They didn’t offer a good reason.

In an interview with Axios, which first reported the news, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said the company had decided to allow Trump to regain access to his account shortly ahead of the 2024 election cycle.

Clegg added that he hoped Trump wouldn’t want to “delegitimize” the 2024 election as he did the 2020 election, should he decide to return to the platform.

“We just do not want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election, much as he sought to discredit the 2020 election,” Clegg said. “We’ve always believed that Americans should be able to hear from the people who want to lead the country.”

Oh. They let him back because they “hope” he won’t continue to do what he’s been constantly doing for the last several years. That’s not very rational. These bozos really need to read the fable of the scorpion and the frog.

I think Amanda Marcotte has figured out the real reason they want him back online. Meta has been an embarrassing debacle and is bleeding money. Trump is a trick to provoke more traffic.

This isn’t about fairness, free speech, or democracy — all values Trump has spent the past 8 years trying to destroy. It’s likely not even that much about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s well-documented willingness to be bullied by right-wingers. This is almost certainly about one thing and one thing only: money.

It’s not just the money that Trump’s campaign will spend on Meta. Trump himself, by being the most famous and repugnant troll in the world, is just big business for social media. His fascism, his bigotry, his cruelty and even his poor spelling and grammar all draw attention from fans and haters alike, creating a whirlwind of clicks and engagement that more responsible content simply can’t match. As tech journalist Kara Swisher notes, “Enragement equals engagement.” Trump makes liberals angry, makes his fans angry at liberals, causes fights and incentivizes dunks. Every post generates huge numbers of reposts both praising and condemning him. Democracy can’t stand a chance against the sheer profitability engine that is his unique combination of stupidity, ego, and hatefulness. He’s the worst person imaginable, but that is all the more reason we can’t look away.

Exactly. The social media companies have figured out that troll farms are the cheap way to harvest clicks. They will then go to the capitalist companies and trade their bounty of clicks for real money, and the companies have not yet figured out how to tell cheap rage clicks from valuable quality clicks, so they pay up. The social media giants have been working very hard to devalue their product, and I hope someday everyone catches on.

Marcotte accurately describes what Facebook is currently selling.

At this point, Facebook has little choice but to lean into the userbase it still has: aging Boomers who believed they were joining to share pictures of grandkids but end up spending hours of the day on the site further alienating themselves from their kids through their addiction to COVID-19 denialism memes and conspiracy theories about “antifa.” Not injecting Trump into that situation is, from a profitability standpoint, like marketing a cruise line to retirees that doesn’t feature an all-you-can-eat buffet. In this case, all they’re eating is fascist propaganda.
…
Even more than Fox News, Facebook is why your grandpa thinks the city you live in is a burned-out husk where BLM protesters and “antifa” won’t let you out of your house unless you change your gender. From a purely business standpoint, leaving Trump out of that is like not stocking Coca-Cola in a grocery’s soda aisle.

Tossing Donald Trump into that barrel of garbage isn’t going to put Facebook on the comeback trail, for sure.

A complete story with a satisfying conclusion

Act I: The story begins with a Christian apologist named David Falk making some scathing comments about a Biblical scholar named Francesca Stavrakopoulou.


From what I’ve seen of Stavrakopoulou, she seems professional and competent. Falk, on the other hand, has something wrong with his brain.

Act II: a fellow named Dan McClellan replies and calmly minces him to a fine pulp. Wow, this is thorough.

Act III: Falk makes a pathetic not-pology.

Act IV: The Vancouver School of Theology, where Falk used to be employed, follows through with a finishing move.

Post-credits teaser: “I’ll have my revenge!” cackles a vanquished Falk.

Stay tuned for the sequel! Oh, wait, Netflix already cancelled it.

Saying dumb stuff for fun & profit

I wish I’d jumped on this bandwagon ages ago: just fart out incredibly stupid things with no context and no reason, and then reap the harvest of attention, while never having to justify what I just said. It’s too late for me, though, because Jordan Peterson has already cornered the market.

Atheistic hedonists unconsciously worship Pan.

Look at that! Just 5 idiotic words, and here I am paying attention. The thing is, I can’t resist a puzzle, and the puzzle here is to decipher what’s going through his drug-addled brain to prompt this blurt.

“Atheistic hedonists”…atheism and hedonism are not linked properties. There are theistic hedonists — they probably outnumber the atheist kind — so I don’t understand why he narrowed the subject so much. I suspect it’s more about stringing together seven syllables to sound fancy than about actually making a point.

“Unconsciously worship”…OK, how do they do that? What’s involved in worship that you can do it without intent? What other things does Peterson think human beings worship? He’s using that word rather casually, I think to provide a jarring contrast with atheism, which we don’t generally associate with worship, at least not with the kind of practice followed by theists. So what’s the point? Is he trying to talk about atheists, or hedonists?

After all, the next thing he mentions is an ancient god, Pan. No, atheists don’t worship Pan, consciously or unconsciously. Hedonists might, but not atheistic hedonists who I’d expect to explicitly deny the existence of a god driving their desires. You can be a hedonist for secular reasons, you know.

This is one of those deepities, isn’t it? He subsequently claims we worship Priapus, which suggests an ulterior cause. Priapus was the Greek god of fruits and vegetables, as well as the male genitalia. That hints at another deepity:

Constipated authoritarians deny the divinity of phallic vegetables.

Think about that one for a while. Too bad I’m not on the inanity gravy train like Peterson.

About how I feel about the latest political contretemps

I’m not impressed with the fools who think the two on the left are equivalent to the crook on the right. Those two tell us that the system is sloppier and leakier than it ought to be, the guy on the right is directly practicing his personal criminal intent. It’s that simple.

Also, I think Luckovich’s caricature of Trump is the best out there.

Rapacity

It was the first day of fly lab in genetics. I prepare well in advance, setting up stocks of the red-eyed, scarlet-eyed, and brown-eyed flies the students will need for their very first cross, and I always prepare an excess. The students only need about a dozen flies for this first experiment, and I give them hundreds, just in case. They figure out how to tell males from females, distinguish the different eye colors, how to set up the culture media, and how to carefully set up a defined cross. They got it done.

At the end of lab, I do the clean up. I’ve got containers full of anesthetized flies. I pour them all together, red with scarlet with brown, and then take the small mound of sleeping flies to my lab, where the horror begins.

I think my spiders love the semester I teach genetics, because we generate such a surplus. I made hundreds of extra flies this week, in two weeks the students will generate thousands more, and once they’ve scored them and set up the F1 cross, where do you think the leftovers end up? My lab. Where I just shovel all these unconscious flies into the spiders’ cages.

I have to imagine it from the flies’ point of view. One moment they’re happily frolicking, mating, and laying eggs in a paradise for flies, the next they’re knocked out while the humans tinker with them. Then the majority later wake up in a strange barren box. They groggily stir, rise up, and try to fly away, only to get snagged on the lines of silk strung everywhere. There is no escape. They struggle, they see many of their peers similarly trapped, and then…the spider creeps out and industriously starts wrapping everyone up. Helpless, they can only wait until their turn to be envenomated and sucked dry.

To the spiders, it’s like Christmas. And that makes me Santa Claus.

You should see the spiders right now. It’s just rapacious gluttony everywhere. It’s glorious.

Any train people out there?

We have a new blogger, Bill Seymour at long long short long, and he was writing about trains. That got me thinking: I have two summer trips tentatively planned, and maybe I should go by train. I like a nice leisurely train trip!

The first is to the American Arachnological Society annual meeting in Ithaca, NY.

The second is to Skepticon in St Louis.

I haven’t ridden a train in decades. Would it be practical to take Amtrak from Minneapolis/St Paul to either of those places? I tried perusing the Amtrak site, but good god, if ever there was a web page designed in the 1950s, that’s it.

Freethoughtblogs has a Mastodon server!

HJ Hornbeck has been plugging away at the technical details of setting up a local Mastodon server, Freethought.online. He describes the process at length in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, and I’m already worn out and intimidated. It’s supposed to be easy, isn’t it? OK, William Brinkman distills it down to the minimal basics. It’s currently an invitation-only instance, but you can leave a request to join here.

…shoot my sperm into an incubator and give it 9 months…

Yes, Virginia, people this ignorant do exist. This little cabal of arrogant men get together to tell each other they’re like gods, that men alone can create life, and the explain the science of it: a man can shoot his sperm into an incubator, and 9 months later, a baby. For reals.

He should try the experiment. That’s all I have to say. Put up or shut up.