Greetings, Comrade MAGAts!

This is a brilliant strategy: engage a red-hat-wearing Trump worshipper as a peer, talk about the class issues that they claim to be concerned about, and lead them down the path to solutions. Next thing you know, they’re agreeing that the big banks need to be broken up, the work place should be collectivized, and they’re all for seizing the means of production.

You do have to avoid some of the buzzwords — the target would probably recoil if you whispered the word “socialism”, and for many of them, you’d have to hide the black folk, at first — but it’s an approach that might get them thinking, anyway. That’s a good first goal, to just get the wheels turning despite being crusted with Republican snot and semen.

Dead mealworms stink

The feeding regimen for my spiders is fruit flies every other day, and once they get above about 2.5 millimeters long, a mealworm once a week. Flies are easy. They die, they get sucked dry, the empty husks of their bodies lie around until I clean up the containers. Mealworms…not so nice. They’re much bigger than the spiders, but they’re still doomed, and in short order they’re trussed up, filled with venom and enzymes, and their guts liquify and are mostly consumed.
That “mostly” is doing a lot of work there. The worms are much bigger than the spiders, remember, so they get turned into a bug milkshake which has about ten times the volume of the predator. They can’t eat the whole thing.
So it rots. It rots spectacularly, since it’s predigested soup. I usually let the spiders sup on the corpse for two days, but then I pull out the blackened, shriveled worm and throw it out.
The spider containers are usually odorless, or nearly so, but these dead mealworms produce an unholy reek. Gooey dead bugs produce a whole new level of unimaginable putrid. Worst part of the job.
Today I was a renfield, tasked with purging the cages of their decaying victims.
While I was at it, I also measured how well they’re growing. A couple are over 5mm long now. One shrunk, I’m not sure why — they are developing into a male, they didn’t eat their mealworm, so maybe they’re in an adolescent funk. I’ll keep an eye on him.

In related news, while I’ve been consistently using the same microscope magnification (16x), that’s not going to work anymore. Some of them barely fit in the field of view, so I’m going to have to switch it down to 10x from now on. Look at this rolypoly monster (sorry, exclusively Pharyngula readers, it’s on Patreon.) You can also see how well the triangulate pigment pattern has developed.
I’m thinking I’ll continue measuring the growth of this batch of spiders for about a week more, ending at 60 days. Then I’m moving them to the grown-ups cages. The plan would be to relocate the females first, and then after a few days to establish a nice homey web, move in the horny males and see if I can get some courtship going…and then maybe the females can start investing some of the energy they currently use to grow to humongous size in producing eggs.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should

As usual, First Dog on the Moon scores.

Oh yeah. This again. Some molecular biologists with no training in population genetics or ethics think they can go into a lab and resurrect an extinct species.

Almost 100 years after its extinction, the Tasmanian tiger may live once again. Scientists want to resurrect the striped carnivorous marsupial, officially known as a thylacine, which used to roam the Australian bush.

The ambitious project will harness advances in genetics, ancient DNA retrieval and artificial reproduction to bring back the animal.

They won’t succeed. At best, they’ll assemble a maladapted hybrid something or other to be exhibited in some freak show of a zoo. It won’t be a thylacine, it’ll be a Frankenstein’s monster of an extant marsupial with no home environment and no prospects for the future and no population of conspecifics with which to live and no history. So much bugs me about this story.

They talk about “the thylacine genome”. There’s no such thing. A living population has many genomes. How many individuals are they sampling? How many individuals will they generate? Where will they live? These are carnivores — what will they feed on? Or are they just planning on conjuring up a technology demonstration that they’ll put in a cage and then move on to some other “project”?

They make a token nod towards the problem of extinctions, but aren’t very convincing.

“We would strongly advocate that first and foremost we need to protect our biodiversity from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowing down in species loss,” said Andrew Pask, a professor at the University of Melbourne and head of its Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab, who is leading the initiative.
“This technology offers a chance to correct this and could be applied in exceptional circumstances where cornerstone species have been lost,” he added.

No, it won’t accomplish any of that. The species is extinct because their habitat is destroyed and people killed them. That’s where you start, by rebuilding their environment, not with PCR machines and microinjection apparatus and flasks in incubators. It’s no surprise who is behind this: a guy with impressive credentials in molecular biology who thinks every problem is a lab exercise.

The project is a collaboration with Colossal Biosciences, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, who are working on an equally ambitious, if not bolder, $15 million project to bring back the woolly mammoth in an altered form.

Yeah, right. He was claiming that he’d be bringing back the mammoth within two years…five years ago. He was also working on a dating app to eliminate genetic diseases (I guess he never heard of eugenics?).

Church has also speculated about resurrecting Neandertals. Nope. Not going to happen. If his thoughts on these matters were more than a millimeter deep, he wouldn’t be jumping onto high profile media to promote these sci-fi fantasies. It’s bad science.

It’s a JBP Socratic Monologue!

Jordan Peterson is so absurd. @thebadstats has posted a series of excerpts from his latest interview, each only a minute or two long, which is about the longest stretch of listening to this bozo I can take. Listen to him expound on his definition of “matter”, which is just him getting confused by homonyms, which leads to him being so moved by his own profundity that he starts crying.

The man is just losing it. This is what happens when you become a cult leader and begin squirreling about in your own head and believing in the deepities you pass off as wisdom.

Here’s another one where he explains that you have to believe in “ontological transcendence” in order to be a scientist.

I don’t think the fact that scientists don’t believe they know everything is quite the same as believing in whatever weird god occupies Peterson’s thinking.

As we all know, women don’t win

The next phase of the misogynists’ process has begun. Going after trans women was just the entry point for recruiting all the conservative normies; now it’s time to go after the cis women. Ladies, you better not be too good at sports!

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

David Spatafore, the UHSAA’s legislative representative, addressing the Utah Legislature’s Education Interim Committee on Wednesday, said the association — without informing the student or family members about the inquiry — asked the student’s school to investigate.

The school examined the students’ enrollment records.

“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female,” he said.

And if she hadn’t been, what would they do? Would that make it okay to target a student for investigation?

Women aren’t allowed to run too fast or play too hard or score too many points, lest they be accused of not being women. There’s another sin they must not commit.

Spatafore said the association has received other complaints, some that said “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

Having your makeup on point and your hair prettily styled is now mandatory for all female competitors.

And for Jesus’ sake, don’t win! That would be so unladylike!

Crossing the Rubicon

Back into hell with you!

I did it. I threw away a coffeemaker, just before the start of classes.

We had this Black & Decker coffeemaker, which ought to have been a warning sign — don’t get your kitchen appliances from a company that makes the kind of power tools you keep in the garage. It was needlessly complicated, with timers and a built-in grinder, and it had modes. I don’t need modes — I just want to push a button and have it make coffee. That’s it.

This one had a tortuous internal path to deliver coffee to the carafe, and it kept clogging up. The last straw this morning was when three quarters of the coffee ended up on the counter top, and I still have enough pride that I refused to lap it up. Instead, I swooped in, grabbed the infernal device, and threw it into the trash.

Now I’m committed. We’re going to Alexandria today to buy a new, simpler, more reliable coffeemaker. I also have to get some new shirts for the school year, and restock the refrigerator. Now I can’t put it off any longer, because waking up without coffee tomorrow morning would be intolerable.

There’s no such thing as a good boss

I was suspicious (just because I’m always suspicious of good stories), but ultimately I was fooled. This Seattle CEO, Dan Price, was doing wonderful things — he slashed his own salary to $70,000, he gave all his employees a uniform raise to $70,000, he seemed to be doing all the right stuff to be a fair and just employer.

Of course it all fell apart. It turns out he was an egotistical glory hound who was doing it all to get laudatory tweets and followers. “He is definitely obsessed with how seemingly you can just become famous,” And women. He wanted lots of women. He divorced his wife.

Mr. Price told media outlets that his divorce several years earlier was amicable. But his former wife, Kristie Colón, had given a TEDx talk in October 2015 in which she described their relationship as abusive.

“He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again,” Ms. Colón read from her old journal. “He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face.” She recalled once locking herself in a car, “afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.”

His activities on the dating scene were less than savory.

Mr. Price messaged Serena Jowers, a fitness coach near Seattle, in December 2020, after she liked some of his posts on Instagram. On their third date, Ms. Jowers said, he pulled up videos on Pornhub, to show her what he liked. After she resisted watching pornography, he pressured her into having sex, she said. She realized he was touching her with only one hand, then saw him holding his phone. He was recording them.

Ms. Jowers jumped up and grabbed the nearest blanket, yelled at him, and fled, she said. The next morning she texted him, saying the filming made her feel like she was not in control of her own body. “I want you to delete any video/pics you took,” she wrote.

“I’ll do that,” he immediately texted back. Three other women, two of whom he also first messaged on social media, also told me that they learned Mr. Price secretly filmed them.

Porn sites are not a good place to learn about sex, and surreptitiously recording an encounter is more than a red flag. Then there were multiple other reports.

In January, they had dinner at a restaurant in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where she said they discussed politics. What happened next was detailed in interviews, a police report and text messages.

As the restaurant closed, her Uber app wasn’t working, and Mr. Price suggested they stay warm in his Tesla as she downloaded it again.

Sitting in the front seats, he tried to kiss her and grabbed her throat, she told the police.

“He did not let go of my throat right away,” she recalled.

“After I rejected him,” she said, “he transformed.”

Ms. Hayne called her boyfriend, pretending he was her brother, and asked him to rush and get her. Mr. Price sped north, driving her to a Park N Ride.

She was scared because he was “very drunk,” the police report said.

“Hurryyyyyyy,” she texted her boyfriend.

Mr. Price raced up to the top floor of the parking lot, drove the car in doughnut circles and pulled into a spot, she told the police. He reached over to kiss her and grabbed her throat again, his hand pulsing in and out “for minutes,” the police report said.

“SQUEEZING HARD,” she would text a friend the next morning.

And then, he let go. “I’m too drunk,” Ms. Hayne recalled him saying, as he went into the back seat to pass out.

Well, now he’s front page news in the New York Times. He definitely figured out how to become famous.