THREE HOURS OF JORDAN PETERSON?

If it were just 3 hours of Peterson alone, it would be hellish. As 3 hours of exposing Peterson as a shallow right-wing grifter, though, I found this entertaining. Infuriating. Infurataining? Try it as a kind of background anti-ASMR, maybe.

Hey! If you’ve got a little time after that, Abe and I seem to have similar tastes, so you can go over there and spend an additional hour watching Thoughtslime explain how hard work is a grift.

By the way, life hack here: I usually play videos at 1.25 speed, which doesn’t wreck listenability too bad, and if you’ve got a little free disk space, use an app (I use one called ClipGrab) to download the whole video and play it from there — it removes the annoying commercials which are currently a plague on YouTube.

Alex Jones is in bigger trouble now

Whoa. If this were on a cop show, I wouldn’t believe this twist in the Alex Jones case. Jones’ lawyers apparently screwed up and sent the complete text contents on Jones’ phone to the opposition lawyers “by mistake” (?), and sprung them on Jones right there in court.

They’re also catching him in calling the judge a pedophile on InfoWars.

I get the impression that lawyers dream about moments like this.

So he perjured himself, grossly insulted the judge, and a whole bunch of incriminating data is going to be passed on to law enforcement. I almost feel pity for Alex Jones.

Nah, not a bit of it. A villain is getting the comeuppance he deserves.

I am kind of wondering what happens to Jones’ lawyers after all this, though.

Also…I’m wishing Ed Brayton would rise from the dead to join me in laughing our asses off at this debacle.

Another week, another data point

The data collection plods on. I’ve added body length measurements for my growing Steatoda triangulosa babies, and they’re coming along nicely. What you’re seeing here is body length in mm vs days after emergence.

They molted on day 22, which accounts for the slower rate between the 2nd and 3rd timepoint — once they shed that constraining cuticle, growth rebounded nicely.

There is some variation in the individual growth rates. The smallest baby is 2.1mm long, the largest is 3.4mm. They’ve also gotten much harder to measure, because they’re more active and get more annoyed at being put under the microscope. I had to drop two of them from this week’s measurement because they wouldn’t cooperate and lie in an appropriate orientation.

I’m experimenting now with an alternative method of keeping the ones I’m recording: I made simple paper strips in a circle, sandwiched between two petri dishes. The plan is to get them to build their cobwebs in that, and then I remove the petri dishes and have the spiders hanging in a ring that I can orient any way I want and get some more standard alignments for comparison. The poor babies hate being shuffled around, but they also like hanging stationary, so it might work — the initial manipulation might get them agitated, but then if I’m patient they’ll settle down and pose for me.

Isn’t it fun to tinker in the lab?

A sign of hope…in Kansas

Look at all the happy Kansans.

You know, conservative, flaming red, pro-Trump Kansas, which I’ve long felt was a lost cause? They just voted to protect abortion rights.

In a major victory for abortion rights, Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected an effort to strip away their state’s abortion protections, sending a decisive message about the issue’s popularity in the first political test since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

And look at this!

With 90 percent of the vote counted, 60 percent of voters wanted to maintain those abortion protections compared with 40 percent who wanted to remove them from the state constitution. Turnout for Tuesday’s primary election far exceeded other contests in recent years, with around 900,000 Kansans voting, according to an Associated Press estimate. That is nearly twice as many as the 473,438 who turned out in the 2018 primary election.

November is going to be interesting. Republicans may have finally gone too far.

I guess I was too hasty in writing Kansas off.

More like this

This country is going down an insane path, led by an ugly minority of racists and misogynists and theocrats and billionaires. It’s time to fight back!

The red states have declared war not only on abortion rights and women’s equality, but also on the bedrock principles that allow states to co-exist in a functional federal union. They have set us on a course of rancor and division, of escalating provocation and reprisal. Blue states have no choice but to act decisively to protect our rights and our people. Red states want a culture war? Let’s give ’em one.

Returning abortion to the states means calling the question at every level of society and in every center of power. From the biggest U.S. state to the scrappiest union local, from the tiny abortion fund to the massive hospital system. Every kind of power must be brought to bear: legal, economic, and cultural.

Blue states have already started to overhaul their abortion infrastructure to accommodate an influx of new patients from red states. Eliminating unnecessary restrictions on abortion care in blue states is a first step to ramping up capacity. For example, some states still have outdated laws that restrict abortion care to doctors, despite years of clinical experience that have shown that other health professionals—like nurse practitioners, nurses, and midwives—can safely manage many abortions. Eliminating those regulations would increase capacity.

There are lots of good ideas — and changes in the works — in that article. One thing I’d like to see is the criminalization of these crisis pregnancy centers that are a blot on the landscape. I so despise these things, and they’ll be promoting their fake ‘services’ at the Stevens County Fair next week.

I guess I’m going to have to find a new genetics textbook

I’ve been using Klug’s Concepts of Genetics for over 20 years, despite my annoyance at the cheap-ass behavior of the publisher. I’ve mentioned before that the primary differences between editions (which come out every year or two) is that they rearrange the order of the problems at the end, to justify making students buy the latest edition. It doesn’t work, because I scan or retype the problems that I hand out, so I can tell students that they can buy any used edition from the last decade, no problem.

I don’t think I can make workarounds for the publisher, Pearson, any more, though. They’re diving deep into the greed pit.

Textbook publisher Pearson plans to profit from secondhand sales by turning its titles into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), its chief executive has said.

Educational books are often sold more than once, since students sell study resources they no longer require. Publishers have not previously been able to make any money from secondhand sales, but the rise of digital textbooks has created an opportunity for companies to benefit.

NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item by recording it on a decentralised digital register known as a blockchain. Typically these items are images or videos, but the technology allows for just about anything to be sold and owned in this way.

After the release of Pearson’s interim results, CEO Andy Bird explained his plan to sell digital textbooks as NFTs, allowing the publisher to track the ownership of a book even when it changes hands, Bloomberg reported. “In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale,” he said, explaining that “technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life”.

Nope. Nope nope nope. Textbook publishers already gouge the students — the latest edition of Concepts of Genetics costs $197.00 — and that’s not enough for them, they want to get coin for every resell. That also hurts the students, because if nothing else, they can recover some of the expense buy reselling them (at an extreme markdown, by the way), and now Pearson wants to snatch some of that resell value away from them.

I think I can find some online texts that will do the job at no cost to the students. When the bookstore puts out its annual call for textbook purchases, I wonder what they’ll think if I tell them not to order any? That’s going to hurt their business a bit.

You know who else is hurt by Pearson’s greed? William Klug, Michael Cummings, Charlotte Spencer, Michael Palladino, and Darrell Killian, the scientists who are authors of the textbook. It’s already a low-paying job to write textbooks, and they’ve done a good job, but now the grasping selfishness of Pearson will cost them royalties.

An excuse to make everything worse

What was this guy thinking?

Firefighters in Utah County fight a blaze reportedly started by a man trying to burn a spider with a lighter (Picture: Provo Fire and Rescue)

A man suspected of starting a wildfire in Utah told authorities that he was using a lighter to try to burn a spider.

He’s caught starting a wildfire. He knows he’s in trouble. His brain is scurrying frantically in circles in his skull, trying to come up with an excuse. It was an accident, officer, I was just trying to torture a small helpless animal when the flames got out of control. It’s not just the petty evil of his excuse, but that he thought a fellow human being would be sympathetic.

What a sideshow at the American circus

While I was away, I missed all the news about Alex Jones’ trial. Would you believe he’s been brought before a court now to answer for his cruel lies about the Sandy Hook shooting, ten years ago? Justice is a slug.

Anyway, he’s being sued for defamation by parents of children murdered, because Jones was such a dishonest asshole about their pain and sicced mobs on them. The parents are still in fear for their life, because they’re still being harassed by Alex Jones fans. Jones himself has been dodging the trial — his lawyers probably told him his testimony would be a liability, although he is scheduled to take the stand today — so instead we’ve got the testimony of Owen Shroyer. Owen Shroyer! I’m sorry, that guy was an obvious stooge and dullard from the beginning of his career with InfoWars, and it must have hurt to have to rely on that bozo to represent the organization. I hope it hurts worse from now on.

Here’s a bit of Shroyer’s defense against the charge that he’d defamed Neil Heslin, the father of a six year old girl killed at Sandy Hook.

It was brutal. And yet Karpova was only the second worst witness of the day, because after her came Owen Shroyer. Shroyer is an Infowars host who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, called for former President Barack Obama to be lynched, and is currently charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, an action he likens to those of Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Kyle Farrar got the ball rolling by getting Shroyer to agree that deceptively editing videos is bad. Also airing unvetted stories and videos from random sources, because people can get hurt, and that, too, is bad.

Golly, wherever could this line of questioning be going?

Surprise! It was going to Shroyer using a deceptively edited video from some rando on the internet without doing a single moment of vetting in an apparent effort to smear Heslin and get back at Megyn Kelly.

In a spectacular act of cruelty, Shroyer took a “story” from an anonymous internet source to suggest that Heslin was lying when he told Kelly he’d held his dead son in his arms. Based on a snippet of video from the coroner explaining that the bodies were so riddled with machine gun fire that he’d opted to allow the parents to identify their children by photograph rather than in-person, Shroyer inferred that the state had confiscated the bodies and never returned them to the parents at all.

“You would remember if you held your dead kid in your hands with a bullet hole, that’s not something you forget,” Shroyer said gleefully in the broadcast, played multiple times for the jury.

“I could have done a better job,” Shroyer conceded.

“You could have done a job,” Farrar shot back.

When Shroyer protested that he was live on air when the story came to him and didn’t have time to check it, Farrar pounced

“Is ‘I didn’t have time’ an excuse for defamation?” he demanded.

Shroyer conceded it was not.

Jones knows this is not going well, and has filed for bankruptcy to escape the $150 million judgment that is barreling down the tracks at him. This is for one set of parents and one child! I hope all the others join in and hammer this fraud deep into the ground.

It’s a lesser issue, but the court also hammered the InfoWars cronies about the “supplements” he sells. It’s all one big marketing scam for selling quack pills. Would you believe he makes $600,000 per week on that crap? And he can’t shut his mouth — he’s going on air on his program to brag about how he’s gaming the system.

Wreck him. Wreck him bad.

Where’s Paul Joseph Watson in all this? Did he bail on InfoWars to escape the wrecking ball?

There is such a thing as bad publicity

Having just spent 20+ hours in our little Honda Fit over the weekend, I can still say I’m content with it. It’s solid and reliable, economical, and has held up well over the past decade — I hope we can get another decade out of it. I’d like to switch to an electric or hybrid car someday, but no hurry, and I can say that I’m not in the market for a new car right now.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if I were, I would not be looking at Tesla. Too much ugly baggage.

Before it was reported Musk had an affair with Sergey Brin’s wife, which he’s denied; before his slipshod deal, then no-deal, to acquire Twitter Inc.; before the revelation he fathered twins with an executive at his brain-interface startup Neuralink; before SpaceX fired employees who called him “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment”; before his daughter changed her name and legal gender after his history of mocking pronouns; before an article said SpaceX paid an employee $250,000 to settle a claim he sexually harassed her, allegations he’s called untrue; Musk’s behavior was putting off prospective customers and perturbing some Tesla owners.

Not to mention that I am disinclined to contribute to the bottom line of a loathsome billionaire. Or that the whole outfit is rather fishy.

It’s kind of weird that a 7 year old company with relatively low revenue and no profits which ships only 1% of the cars of GM and Ford can be valued higher than GM and Ford – but that’s where we are today.

I guess Elon Musk has a lot of people fooled, but not me.