I found the next Patient Zero!

This doesn’t sound like my childhood swimmin’ hole.

“Swimming and wading are not allowed due to high bacteria levels,” the National Park Service states on its website. “Stay out of the water to protect streambanks, plants, and animals and keep you and your family (including pets!) safe from illness.”

In addition to the high levels of bacteria, the waterway also has “other infectious pathogens,” making swimming, wading, and any other water contact a “hazard” for humans and pets alike.

I wouldn’t go anywhere near it, and I’m a guy who went swimming in a cow pond when I was 14, wondering what the squishy stuff I was wading through was. I’ve encountered places like that before, I would never do that again! One thing worse would be wading into human waste.

“Getting into Rock Creek anywhere inside the Beltway is sort of weird and kooky, getting into Rock Creek downstream from the National Zoo is bugnuts. Basically begging for a zoonotic parasite. Forget Chinese wet markets, this guy is cooking up COVID-25 inside his grandkids.”

Yeah, don’t bring children into such a place. Who would do such a thing? Would you believe the head of Health and Human Services?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went swimming with his grandchildren in Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., even amid warnings that the waterway isn’t safe for swimming because of high bacterial levels.

Kennedy wrote on X that he went on a “Mother’s Day hike in Dumbarton Oaks Park with Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick, and Jackson” and took “a swim with my grandchildren, Bobcat and Cassius in Rock Creek.”

The 71-year-old posted a number of photos, showing him shirtless, jeans on, in the water in the Potomac River tributary.

The man is an absolute legend. He’s bathing in effluent and eating rotting road kill; of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, he’d be Pestilence. And he’s in charge of American health!

I’d spider-watch it

I am so tired of super hero movies, but they keep drawing me back in. I’m not going to be tempted until 2026 by Spider-Noir, at least.

This is apparently a limited television series, not a movie, built on the limited bits and pieces of Sony’s IP investment in Spider-Man.

I don’t understand these weird IP rules at all. Why not just start from scratch with a stylish movie about a completely independent spider-associated person? No one owns the rights to spiders, I hope.

What is wrong with California?

It’s a beautiful state with a fabulous climate, when it’s not on fire, but what’s going on with their politicians? This question was prompted by an observation about their current governor, Gavin Newsom.

After two months and a gratuitous 15 episodes — including interviews with far-right talking heads Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, Obama-era Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein — guess how many women the governor of California has deigned to interview on his podcast, “This is Gavin Newsom”?

One.

That (dubious) honor went to Amie Parnes, a senior political journalist at The Hill, who shared the interview with Johnathon Allen, a political journalist with NBC News. The two co-authored “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” about the 2024 presidential election, which was released in April.

Good for her. But in a state that’s home to nearly 40 million people, more than half of whom are women, the governor really can’t find any of them to interview for his little podcast project? Yikes.

I know — that’s not the worst thing he has done with his little podcast, that honor belongs to his willingness to throw trans athletes under the bus. That podcast, which I’ve never listened to, seems to be a self-constructed catastrophe to his political aspirations, and he keeps on doing it. There was a time a few years (or eternities) ago that he was considered a solid presidential candidate, but would I ever vote for him? No. It’s incredibly shallow of me, I know, but just the hair kills my impression of him. He looks like an insurance salesman or a preacher. His policies make me think he’s in the pocket of Big Tech. He’s definitely not progressive at all.

But then I started wondering — California is a populous and rich state, where are the national leaders it should be turning out? There’s Richard Nixon, the least said the better, who was our only president born in California. Then we had Ronald Reagan, the man responsible for starting the country’s downward spiral, who wasn’t born there, but was governor and is always associated with the state. Why do so many awful political careers start there? Is it something about Sacramento?

I’m already biased against California presidential candidates, so let’s not ever nominate another one. I hope Gavin’s political career has reached its apogee.

Speaking of big powerful states with an appalling political culture, dare I mention…TEXAS?

Useful insight to begin the day

A plea for moderation in the face of fanaticism:

You don’t have to be that gung-ho on trans rights to realize that a world where girls’ genitals need to be inspected before they can play any sport is worse for girls than a world where once in a while there’s a trans girl on a girls’ team.

Being aware of the consequences is a good perspective to have for any goal.

There are an awful lot of extremists running the game right now who need to be sat down and told to grow up and shut up. They’re making the whole damn world worse for everyone.

Why Lamarck was wrong

I teach (in the distant future) a first year class in genetics and evolution. I’m going to have to use this comic when I discuss the inheritance of acquired characteristics — I think the bit about helicopter moms might resonate.

But not now! No teaching until January 2026! I’ll just file this away for now.

There will be nothing left after the billionaires are done with us

It’s a toasty 33°C (93°F) here in this northern state, and the White House has fired our researchers who contributed to the National Climate Assessment. 400 scientists abruptly got the axe. I guess if they destroy all the thermometers, we won’t notice how hot it’s getting.

Goddamn these Republican scumbags to hell. If and when violence arrives at their doorstep, don’t expect me to express the slightest regret or remorse.

Also, fuck all you Democrats who sat out the last election.

Two signs of the end of democracy

This first one is obvious and is a knife aimed at the heart of our country: the Trump administration is talking about suspending habeas corpus, and clearly their pet rat-weasel, Stephen Miller, is floating the idea to the press.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court.

If carried out by President Donald Trump, the suspension of habeas corpus would be a dramatic escalation of his administration’s immigration policy by significantly curtailing a right enshrined in the Constitution.

This is what tyrants do — they want the ability to silence critics by throwing them in prison while denying them the right to defend themselves. Never mind that they are busy draping themselves in the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, because he suspended the right during the Civil War (we are not in a war, no matter how insincerely they insist we are being “invaded”), this is a fundamental attack on the rule of law.

The second sign of imminent doom is that Dan Three Arrows is returning to posting video essays. The United States is so fucked right now.

I predict that there will be blood in the streets before this is over; if he suspends habeas corpus, why not suspend the 2026 elections next?

If all that isn’t enough for you…

ADepartment of Homeland Security (DHS) official confirmed Saturday that arrests of Democratic members of Congress “is definitely on the table” following a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey.

This statement comes after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on Friday at the Delaney Hall detention center, sparking a dispute over what actually occurred during the incident.

We will never colonize Mars

Or anywhere else off planet for that matter. Jennifer Ouellette has an enlightening interview with Adam Becker, the author of a new book titled More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which sounds like my kind of book — he tears apart the claims of the tech billionaires. They’ve become increasingly detached from reality since the days when I first stumbled across Yudkowski and Kurzweil, who were patently bonkers then, and since then have only increased in both influence and insanity.

More Everything Forever covers the promise and potential pitfalls of AI, effective altruism, transhumanism, the space race to colonize Mars, human biodiversity, and the singularity, among many other topics—name-checking along the way such technological thought leaders as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, William MacAskill, Peter Singer, Marc Andreessen, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Jeff Bezos, and yes, Elon Musk. It all boils down to what Becker calls the “ideology of technological salvation,” and while its uber-rich adherents routinely cite science to justify their speculative claims, Becker notes that “actual scientific concerns about the plausibility of these claims” are largely dismissed. For Becker, this ideology represents a profound threat, not the promise of a utopian future.

“More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us,” Becker writes in his introduction. “But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”

That list of “thought leaders” is damning in itself — they aren’t champions of thought and science and technology, they’re cheerleaders for fantasy and greed. Every one of them ought to be dismissed from any consideration of respectability. The lunatic fringe is running the show, and prospering greatly.

One of the points of the interview is that they’re all out of touch with reality. They’ve absorbed all these wild ideas from science fiction, but never consider the science part. For instance, they apparently don’t understand thermodynamics.

I’ve got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they’ve misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they’ve got to grapple with it because it’s the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase.

They are all fanatical capitalists, a philosophy founded on the premise of infinite and eternal exponential growth, so of course they reject the science, or fall for twisted, perverse wish-fulfillment versions of the science.

Part of this bad science is Elon Musk’s hype about colonizing Mars. It’s not going to happen.

…all of the interesting places in space are really far apart. Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy. The gravity is too low. The radiation is too high. There’s no air. The dirt is made of poison. There’s very little water. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does because it’s closer to the asteroid belt. And the prospects for terraforming technology in any meaningful way are not great. Making Mars as habitable as Antarctica during the polar night would be the greatest technological undertaking humanity has ever taken by many orders of magnitude, in order to create a place that nobody would want to live, and where the gravity would still be too low. It’s a deeply unpleasant place.

From a biological perspective, humans are not in any way adapted for life in space or on Mars. We come from a long line, 4 billion years of optimization for life on a planet the size of Earth, with air and water freely available, under certain narrow ranges of temperature and pressure, and we simply lack the biochemical and physiological equipment to cope with a totally alien environment. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible for life to find a way, but if we did artificially modify ourselves to produce descendants who could live on Mars, they wouldn’t be human anymore. We’d probably have to scrap sentience and all the other baggage we’ve accumulated, that we consider so important to the human experience, to generate an ecosystem of creatures that could survive in some way on a mostly airless and waterless frozen ball of rock. There isn’t any point in aspiring to such an artificial state.

Don’t even get me started on Ray Kurzweil. I first read one of his hopelessly delusional books over 20 years ago. Hated it. He was just making shit up about the technological progression he imagined was going to occur, all in service of his pathological fear of death. We’re also not ever going to be immortal.

Kurzweil tries to get around this by saying that you’re not going to be immortal, but you can live as long as you want to. Sure, that gets around some of it. But Kurzweil also thinks that we’re going to find a way around the second law of thermodynamics, which we’re not. I do think that fear of death is at the root of a lot of this, if not all of it. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say that death is what gives life meaning. I would say that the human experience is defined by the limitations that death imposes, the fact that our time is limited. If you remove that constraint, that would fundamentally alter the human condition in ways that very well might not be pleasant.

Silicon Valley isn’t about technology, it’s about selfishness and greed, and weird little gnomes with stupid ideas who have made a niche for themselves by burrowing into junk science. We’re not going to become near-immortal short of turning ourselves into jellyfish. Well, maybe Henrietta Lacks is immortal, but at a price no one would want to pay.

Maybe that explains what’s going on: the worst and richest people in the world are working hard to become mindless, cancerous jellyfish.

None of these people have contributed anything to our understanding of the world, but are experts at accumulating personal wealth by leeching off everyone else.

An interesting psychological insight

Adam Conover notices that an awful lot of far-right weirdos and fanatics are addicted to group chats, and speculates that maybe the group chats themselves are responsible for the increasing insanity of our government. It’s clear that some people seem to be literally addicted to their phone chats — Mike Waltz was caught chatting under the table at a cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth seems to have replaced alcohol with his phone, and Marc Andreesen has a reputation for non-stop chatting with multiple groups at all times.

It’s an interesting suggestion that group chats are wrecking the brains of all the participants, but it sounds a bit like the accusation that video games are damaging the youth. I am quite willing to consider an alternative, that all of these horrible people were fucked up in the head before they picked up an iPhone. Maybe certain kinds of personalities are simultaneously authoritarian and demanding a constant feed of approval and dominance?

The experiment is straightforward: enroll typical, normal people in one of these group chat thingies, and see if they turn into raging stupid assholes under their influence. I’d be a candidate, because I’m not involved in any of these real-time kinds of online conversations, and never have been. I’ve got a couple of email groups that are closed and confidential, but those tend to be low-key and focused on business. My biology discipline at the university has one — it’s all boring announcements and questions about classes and that sort of thing, there’s absolutely nothing particularly juicy about it, and if anyone tried to salt it with digressions and abuse they would be shut down with a face-to-face complaint.

I wonder if Facebook might have suffered from this phenomenon. It’s not quite real-time, but some people do have their strange little subgroups that they hover over, constantly refreshing, and they do get quite nasty and personal…and also some of them are annoyingly obsessed with their status. I left Facebook because of that ingrown stupidity having free reign.

Maybe the real problem is obsession with social dynamics, which is a real problem when the online tool’s purpose is to facilitate a real, practical project, like bombing Houthis or discussing classroom assignments.

No, don’t put me into your group chat. I might turn into a monster.