Tim Walz has the Democrat disease

Our incumbent governor is running for re-election against a raving loony, a guy who has announced that he would ban all abortions, no exceptions. His opponent is a batcrap cartoon of a far-right conservative wackaloon. So what is Walz doing about it?

Every goddamn day he sends me these fundraising emails. That is all they are about, how much money he has, how much money his opponent has, whether his opponent raised more money than he did in a specific 24 hour window, what the latest dismal poll says, etc., etc., etc. It’s what Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic party does every time, shouting about crisis after crisis after crisis, demanding more donations or the world will end. They have to meet their arbitrary fundraising goal by midnight! Or else!

I agree that his opponent is an evil jerk who must be stopped, but they’re not getting a penny from me if their only strategy is to do a minute-by-minute call of the horserace. This is why Democrats lose, because they lose sight of their principled differences and get the idea that we vote for a candidate based on how much money he has — that the only metric is this one-dimensional parameter of current funding.

Who is advising the Democrats that makes them all sound the same, all irrelevant, and eradicates any difference in policies?

Oh jeez. Just got another one. It begins:

Paul,

I don’t want to scare you, but I need to be transparent. Fundraising numbers from the last public reporting period are out, and we were outraised by Scott Jensen and Matt Birk.

I DON’T CARE. Republicans are bankrolled by wealthy people and corporate interests (actually, so are establishment Democrats) so telling me where you stand in a fundraising horserace means absolutely nothing to me.

And you do want to scare me. It’s just not working.

Fuck. Just now I got another one. Multiple times a day! I’m just going to have to block the word “Democrat” now.

Paul,

Berrett and I are giving a fundraising update to the Governor and Lt. Governor at noon, and I’ll just be frank: given where we’re at right now, it’s looking like it’s going to be a tough conversation.

Please, please, please, learn this: VOTERS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FUNDRAISING. Your money-making suite of guys in suits care. Find something relevant to talk about, and maybe I won’t feel the need to roll my eyes and hit delete again.

I get email

It’s very difficult to take these kinds of criticisms seriously, when they are so profoundly stupid.

Your posts about Jordan Peterson show you as a resentful, bitter man, who doesn’t have even a quarter of Peterson’s intellect or brainpower. I’m not surprised you are so envious of his success and popularity.

You also currently do not have the cognitive depth of thinking to appreciate how profound and ingenious the Bible is – but that can change if you try harder.

I’m not at all envious of Peterson! I would not want to have his mental and physical problems, nor would I want the kind of popularity that puts me in the same room as Ben Shapiro.

I’ve read the Bible — well, I skimmed through long sections of it, admittedly, because it is a badly written, inconsistent bore full of pretentious text — and it’s not particularly profound or ingenious. Much of it is wrong or bad fantasy writing, which undercuts the claim that it is deep and clever.

The one thing interesting about the email is that it openly unifies two bad beliefs, in the profundity of Jordan Peterson and the profundity of the Bible. I pity the author.

Profound:

Bullets are the solution to every problem

Savannah Graziano was 15 years old when her father murdered her mother and kidnapped her. An amber alert went out, and the police gave chase, which is never good. They decided the way to resolve the problem was with guns, obviously, and they had a wild west shootout with Graziano’s father, while she was in the car. At one point, Savannah saw an opportunity to escape, jumped out of the car, and ran toward the police.

So the police shot her dead.

Then they killed her father.

You know, I kind of think that in these kinds of situations the very highest priority ought to be to rescue the child, and even when the bad guy shoots first, the rescuers ought to exercise a great deal of restraint, tempting as it might be to use the only tool your feeble brain has been trained to use to solve all problems.

Oh no, it’s a meme

Herbert Spencer would be so proud.

One quibble: evolution by natural selection isn’t the fundamental concept, it’s evolution, change, by multiple mechanisms.

The red button comic is also relevant.

Yeah, because it’s virtually impossible to teach a creationist anything.

Observations from the Spider Lab

It was a busy morning, good thing I got in early today.

  • I have too many spiders.
  • I fed the growing horde of 2nd generation Steatoda triangulosa. I’m discovering that after their 3rd molt, they are no longer content to wait quietly in their tubes for flies to rain from the sky — they rush for the exits when I pop the tops, which means I have to work fast to feed and re-cork everyone.
  • Two spiders escaped this morning. I let ’em go, I’ve got too many spiders.
  • The first of the 3rd generation hatched out today, after 26 days of incubation. There were 45 of them. These are the progeny of 2g-4 and 2g-7. I put about half of them into individual vials and threw a bunch of flies at the remainder. I have too many spiders.
  • Another 3g egg sac was laid a day after the 4-7 sac. I think that means I’ll have another hatching soon. More spiders!
  • Looking ahead, these 3g spiders should reach maturity sometime in November, I’ll do another round of matings and get some more egg sacs around that time, and then…the 4th generation for Christmas. Even more spiders.

If I keep this up, I do believe I’ll be able to start doing some genetics in the spring, optimistically.

New baby picture at the Patreon.

A nice summary of human evolution

It’s a listicle, of course, but it’s written by an archaeologist, which is good, but she was the recipient of a Templeton grant, which triggers my skepticism. But she makes 6 points about our history:

Species such as Homo Longi have only been identified as recently as 2018. There are now 21 known species of human.

And 20 of them went extinct. We’re part of a dying tree.

Hybrid species of human, once seen by experts as science fiction, may have played a key role in our evolution. Evidence of the importance of hybrids comes from genetics. The trail is not only in the DNA of our own species (which often includes important genes inherited from Neanderthals) but also skeletons of hybrids.

Our sexy ancestors were mating with everything that looked vaguely human. Keep that in mind when the dudebros are whining about how Western women aren’t meeting their high standards of beauty. They’d fuck a chimp if one offered the opportunity.

However, many of the changes in our human evolutionary lineage maybe the result of chance.

For example, where isolated populations have a characteristic, such as some aspect of their appearance, which doesn’t make much difference to their survival and this form continues to change in descendants. Features of Neanderthals’ faces (such as their pronounced brows) or body (including large rib cages) might have resulted simply from genetic drift.

Oh, dear, the evolutionary psychologist won’t like that. Too bad, it’s true.

The origins of our own species coincided with major shifts in climate as we became more distinct from other species at these points in time. All other species of human seem to have died out as a result of climate change.

…and we’re next, at the rate we’re going.

The trail of human compassion extends back one and a half million years ago. Scientist have traced medical knowledge to at least the time of the Neanderthals.

Altruism has many important survival benefits. It enabled older community members to pass on important knowledge. And medical care kept skilled hunters alive.

We should have listened more closely to Kropotkin, rather than the imperialist colonizers who shaped the early perspectives on evolutionary theory. He was on to something (he also considered climate to be a critical evolutionary force.)

Evolution made us more emotionally exposed than we like to imagine. Like domestic dogs, with whom we share many genetic adaptations, such as greater tolerance for outsiders, and sensitivity to social cues, human hypersociability has come with a price: emotional vulnerabilities.

Counterpoint: Republicans and Tories. Human psychopaths seem to have a decided advantage in the acquisition of power.

Why do macho Texans elect such chickenshit politicians?

I am amused. Yet again, a tough-talking Texas pol disappears into the sunset in a cloud of dust, leaving a mess he doesn’t want to deal with behind him. The tale of the process server who tried to deliver a subpoena to Ken Paxton:

Herrera’s affidavit said that he arrived at Paxton’s house Monday at 8:28 a.m. and was greeted at the front door by a woman who identified herself as Angela. When he told her that he was trying to deliver the subpoenas to Ken Paxton, she told him that the AG was on the phone.

Herrera, who said he recognized Ken Paxton inside the house through glass on the door, offered to wait for him. Angela replied that Paxton “was in a hurry to leave,” according to Herrera, who observed a black Chevy truck in the driveway and then saw another car arrive there.

At about 9:40 a.m., Herrera said he saw Paxton exiting his garage. Herrera walked up the driveway toward Paxton and called out his name, at which point “he turned around and RAN back inside the house through the same door in the garage.”

Minutes later, Angela came out to the truck and opened both the driver-side door and the door behind it, Herrera wrote. A few minutes after she started the truck, “I saw Mr. Paxton RAN from the door inside the garage towards the rear door behind the driver side,” Herrera wrote.

“I approached the truck, and loudly called him by his name and stated that I had court documents for him. Mr. Paxton ignored me and kept heading for the truck. After determining that Mr. Paxton was not going to take the Subpoenas from my hand, I stated that I was serving him with legal documents and was leaving them on the ground where he could get them,” Herrera wrote.

“I then placed the documents on the ground beside the truck. Service was completed at 9:50 am. He got in the truck leaving the documents on the ground, and then both vehicles left,” he wrote.

Maybe he was in a hurry to catch his flight to Cancun.

Hey, Texians, did you know that John Wayne was a draft-dodging coward and that you lost the battle of the Alamo?

How ya doin’, Floridians?

This doesn’t look like pleasant weather.

I think you need a sacrifice. I recommend staking out your governor somewhere in the middle of that storm track. Work fast, it sounds like it’s going to be ripping across the state quickly.

If that’s not enough, you’ve also got an ex-president there who is pretty much good for nothing other than propitiating the gods.

Hooke doesn’t get enough respect

This is an impressive microscope. It doesn’t look like much, but this is the kind of instrument Leeuwenhoek used to make his observations, back in the 17th and early 18th century. I did not know until now that it was a mystery how he could magnify specimens 270 times with a simple lens — we didn’t know exactly how he constructed the lens, and he wouldn’t tell anyone. It was his secret, which is not a proper scientific attitude, but OK, it was his key to fame.

Until now, that is. The secret of Leeuwenhoek’s lenses has been cracked! It turns out he borrowed a technique of Robert Hooke’s and improved on it.

But on his most powerful lens, neutron tomography revealed that Van Leeuwenhoek used another technique entirely. It was almost perfectly spherical and completely smooth, without the sharp rim inevitably created by a traditional grinding cup. Even more tellingly, the lens retained the faint remnants of a snapped stem, concealed by the brass plates since the day Van Leeuwenhoek had placed it there.

The stem is a smoking gun. It’s the unavoidable result of forming a lens by melting a thread of glass until a bead forms on its end and then snapping it off. In other words, to make his greatest lens, Van Leeuwenhoek copied Hooke’s simple recipe from the book that likely inspired him. Cocquyt believes this may explain why he was so circumspect when Hooke asked about his methods; he wanted to avoid giving credit to Hooke himself.

Published in Science Advances last year, Cocquyt’s discovery that Van Leeuwenhoek used a well-known technique reveals a deeper truth about the state of microscopy in the 17th century. It suggests that for all the crafting genius required to make his tiny, super-powered lens, Van Leeuwenhoek’s greatest insight may have been that there was something new to see by making one.

I mean, everyone was copying Robert Hooke in the 17th century and then hiding the fact. Hooke was a real genius, and it makes me wonder why no one wanted to credit him for anything. Apparently, he was an unpleasant character, vain and jealous, and that has damaged his legacy. The lesson: be courteous and nice with your peers!