Spinelessness…confirmed

Go away, Chad.

Remember how Biden was going to appoint an anti-choice fanatic to a federal judgeship in a deal with McConnell, and we were so disappointed in his surrender to the Republicans? Good news!

The White House dropped plans Friday to nominate an anti-abortion lawyer backed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell for a federal judgeship in Kentucky.

I guess all those Democratic voters saying this was a really stupid deal, and that you can’t trust McConnell had an effect, right? Or maybe someone told him that the optics on this one were really bad.

Nope, neither.

The decision to back off the nomination of Chad Meredith came amid a split between McConnell and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, his fellow Kentuckian, over the selection.

Republicans are the only ones with any choice or agency in our government. I’m impressed at how Democrats can look bad even in victory.

What is the “trans question”, anyway?

This is a puzzling headline: The Tories are right to debate the trans question – it’s not a distraction. It doesn’t say what the “trans question” is…we’re just supposed to debate it. How? You can’t just say something needs to be debated without saying what the proposition is.

Or can you?

Here’s a question: rutabagas. Now go — DEBATE. Now. I need the rutabaga question resolved immediately.

There’s some vague something we’re supposed to discuss about the “trans question”, but nothing in this article helps me understand. There are odd hints that they’re trying to get to something deeper, but it’s almost as if they’re afraid to say it openly.

It is to the chagrin of many women on the left that Tory politicians are leading this overdue debate. Keir Starmer has been hopeless on the issue, ignoring letters from feminists and lesbians who are in despair about Labour’s refusal to give clear answers to questions about biological sex. I told him face-to-face in May about the harassment of feminists in the Labour Party, but he’s still trying to sit on the fence. And Labour is losing support among women as a result.

See what I mean? This author thinks there’s some key difference between Labour and Tories on “biological sex”. Does one side think it’s not biological?

OK, to clarify my earlier question about rutabagas: where do you stand on questions about biological vegetables? No, I’m not going to say what those questions are: you must simply debate rutabaga and biological vegetables.

I’m not being disingenuous. You have to be clear on what the issue is. For example, do rutabagas exist, or should they exist, or what is the best way to cut and cook a rutabaga, or is a rutabaga actually just a confused turnip, or was the hybridization of Brassica oleracea and Brassica rapa an abomination before god that must be prohibited by law? Those are proper questions. We could discuss those, except I fear that if the opposition made their issues clearly they’d look silly and their irrational hatred of root vegetables would be clear. (By the way, if this debate is between Tories and Labour, they’d probably call them “swedes” which would open the door to some ugly misinterpretations across the North Sea.)

I wonder if this is related to “the Jewish question”?

Fool me once…

Panic. We really need to worry — the Republicans are playing innocent and saying they wouldn’t do that.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats are pushing to codify other rights that have been left vulnerable by the decision into federal law — including access to contraception, same-sex marriage, and potentially interracial marriage. “I do believe that we should move with urgency,” Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, told Axios Wednesday.

But they may have an uphill battle: Such measures seem to have little appeal to the GOP, whose members insist that those protections are unnecessary because those rights are not under threat. “I’ll worry about hypotheticals at the time we have it,” Ted Cruz told Axios. “I have no reason to believe these precedents are going to fall,” added Lindsey Graham. “Nothing like that should even be thought about by anybody because it’s not endangered in any way,” Chuck Grassley told the outlet.

“I don’t know why people would come to that conclusion,” he added.

Here we go again. They’re going to ban contraception, same sex marriage, and interracial marriage. 100%.

The only university that counts

It isn’t mine or yours, it’s only Harvard, as far as the New York Times is concerned. Read this thread to see what I mean.

It’s depressing. I’ve talked to so many people who consider Harvard the sine qua non of academia, when I’ve never been particularly impressed with the institution. Not that it’s bad, but this country, and other countries, have so many worthy universities that contribute far more to science and other disciplines…but the NYT, and other media, have created this myth of the superiority of one over-priced private whose primary, notable qualification is that rich people go there. See how skewed the headlines are:

Also telling:

In 2019 35% (7.7 million) of college students attended community colleges.

The New York Times mentioned “community college” 100k fewer times than it mentioned Yale University which enrolls approximately 12k students.

This is a vivid illustration of the problem:

(If you’re not up on the lingo, “HSI” is a Hispanic Serving Institution, “MSI” is Minority Serving Institution, and “HBCU” is a Historically Black College or University. I’m at a public and primarily regional college. Not that NYT readers would get exposed to any of that riff-raff. Really, unsubscribe from the New York Times, don’t bother reading it, it’s a bastion of all the inequity and elitism that is wrong with the US.)

(Also, seriously, they still pay David Fucking Brooks to write drivel?)

We have these people in Minnesota, too

It happened in Brooklyn Park, which has nothing to do with New York — it’s a Minneapolis suburb. Biden supporters/antifa/anarchists attacked this poor man, setting his truck on fire and defacing his garage with graffiti.

Oh, the vandalism! The destruction!

Molla reported to police that someone set fire to his camper “because it had a Trump 2020 flag displayed on it,” and spray painted the Antifa or anarchy symbol, “BLM” and “Biden 2020” on his garage door.

Those darn liberals. That’s an incoherent mess on that door — anarchists tend not to favor establishment politicians. Whoever painted that doesn’t even know how to spray paint an anarchy symbol properly. Like this, OK? It’s easy.

Except…it looks like the not-very-bright “victim,” Denis Vladmirovich Molla, was simply practicing a typical Republican grift that he learned from his masters.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says Molla actually lit the fire and defaced the garage himself.

Court documents show that Molla then “submitted multiple insurance claims seeking coverage for the damage to his garage, camper, vehicles, and residence caused by the fire.”

Molla submitted insurance claims totaling more than $300,000, receiving only $61,000 in the process. He then accused his insurance company of “defrauding him.” Court documents show he also yielded more than $17,000 from two GoFundMe accounts.

Oops. Never mind.

Grossest family ever

Elon Musk is terrible enough, but I can see that he gets it all from his dear old dad.

Elon Musk’s father has revealed that he had a second secret, unplanned, child with his stepdaughter three years ago.

Errol Musk, 76, and his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, 35, had a baby girl in 2019. Two years before that, he had admitted that Ms Bezuidenhout, 42 years his junior, had given birth to a baby boy named Elliot Rush, who is now five years old.

Jana Bezuidenhout was only four when Mr Musk married her mother Heide. They were married for 18 years and had two children, besides Heide’s three children – including Jana – from a previous marriage.

Ick ick ick ick ick ick ick ick. This is a betrayal of the trust that ought to exist between a father and daughter, and I don’t care if there isn’t a genetic relationship. Something is just not right in that family.

Although, to be fair, the other members of the family know this is totally fucked up.

In 2018, Errol admitted that Ms Bezuidenhout had given birth to a baby the two conceived “in the heat of the moment” when his stepdaughter stayed at his home after her boyfriend threw her out. “You have to understand – I’ve been single for 20 years and I’m just a man who makes mistakes,” he told Rapport at the time.

“I told my daughter Ali about him because I thought she would be supportive and understanding,” he said. “She said I was insane, mentally ill. She told the others and they went berserk. They think I’m getting senile and should go into an old age home, not have a life full of fun and a tiny baby.”

Elon Musk, on his part, has branded his father “evil”. He is estranged from his father and described him as a “terrible human being” in an interview with Rolling Stones in 2017.

“You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he had said. “It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”

The creepy old man does have an excuse, sort of.

While revealing the latest birth to The Sun, Errol Musk seemed to reason that making children was his only purpose. “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” he said. “If I could have another child I would. I can’t see any reason not to. If I had thought about it then Elon or Kimbal [Elon Musk’s younger brother] wouldn’t exist.”

Ah! The philosophy of cockroaches! So that’s where Elon learned the meaning of life.

Spider engineering

Hey! I was watching my spiders do this just yesterday!

(a) An adult Steatoda paykuliana female of the family of Theridiidae (courtesy of Alessandro Kulczycki, Aracnofilia – The Italian Association of Arachnology). (b) A Steatoda triangulosa that captured a lizard (Podarcis muralis) by using lifting technique (courtesy of Emanuele Olivetti). Schematic of the technique used to lift the prey. (c) The prey is detected by the capturing threads and, once it is, (d) the spider starts to attach pre-tensioned threads to it. (e) When the weight of the prey is won by vertical component of the sum of the tensions the prey detaches from the surface and (f) starts to be lifted.

It was a feeding day. Little critters like Drosophila are easily handled — I saw one swoop down on a drag line to a fly walking on the floor, hog-tie it with a couple of quick flicks of silk, and then haul it up in one smooth motion. That was impressive.

However, these guys do kill and consume prey many times their size. I saw one snag a mealworm, which then went into a frantic writhing struggle and broke free, ending up on the floor of the container. The spider dived on it, trussed it up again, and then hoisted it up about 10cm to the heart of its cobweb. They are amazingly strong, and as the diagram illustrates, very clever about leveraging the structure of their web to secure their prey.

I have not tried feeding them small vertebrates yet, but the lab next door to mine is a herpetology lab, full of spider food. Don’t tell Heather Waye, she isn’t personally keen on spiders already, and hearing that they might have designs on her research animal would not be very endearing.

OK, I’ll stick to invertebrates.

Don’t panic, it’s just a spider bite

Fortunately, I’m not as interested in social behavior of spiders as I am in just general development, physiology, and behavior of individual spiders. Here are some recent cool things I’ve read.

I’m working with Parasteatoda and Steatoda in the lab, so of course I’m curious about their venom. Maybe you wonder about what those common house spiders are packing, too. Here’s a breakdown.

Relative abundance and expression level of genes encoding predicted venom enzymes and toxins. (A) Treemap chart of the main classes of venom-related enzymes and toxins present in Steatoda nobilis venom gland transcriptome. The size of the rectangles is proportional to the number of genes in each category, indicated under the labels. The colour represents the log2 transcripts per millions (TPM) of the median expression of the genes in each category. (B) Expression levels of each gene in each enzyme/toxin category. Dots represent the mean expression of individual genes across three biological replicates ± SD; purple: enzymes, orange: toxins.

What’s it all mean? A is showing us the number of genes involved, while B is indicating the expression levels of those genes. It looks like about a third of the genes are toxins, but that those are relatively highly expressed in the venom. The purples are not toxins, those are ordinary digestive enzymes. An important component of the venom is a collection of enzymes that break down proteins and fats and carbs, everything you need to turn guts into a nice soup. The oranges are the actual toxins — all the “latro” prefixes tell you these were identified in Latrodectus, the black widow. There is a lot of similarity in the venoms of black widows and false widows! That α-latrotoxin is the one that we vertebrates have to worry about. Do we need to worry about our common house spiders? Maybe a little bit.

We reveal the striking similarity between the toxins found in Steatoda nobilis venom and that of black widow spiders (Table 1). The most powerful toxin classes (α-LTX, α-LCT, α,δ-LIT) and the enzymatic machinery allowing the venom to more easily spread into the prey (metalo and serine proteases, chitinases) are both present in large quantities. This however does not mean that Steatoda is as dangerous to human beings as some members of the genus Latrodectus. If isoforms of potent toxins are present, our study does not provide information about their potency. Evaluation of toxin toxicity would need to be performed before any conclusion could be reached. Nevertheless, given the composition of the venom depicted in this study, S. nobilis should be considered a species of medical importance and there is no doubt that S nobilis (with Latrodectus tredecimguttatus) is one of the most dangerous spiders in Western Europe.

The easy solution is to not get bit. That’s not hard to do at all, these spiders are really not interested in you. Leave ’em alone, they won’t bother you.

If you are bitten — I’ve heard it’s a bit like a bee sting, although personally I’ve never experienced it — if you experience a strong reaction, the similarity to Latrodectus means black widow antivenin will be effective. As the paper says, though, they have nat assayed the potency of Steatoda venoms, and what I’ve heard is that they’re not as fearsome as black widow venom, so don’t panic. Besides, only one or two people a year die from the bite of the most deadly American/European spider, the black widow, while Steatoda has milder effects.

If you’re still worried, here’s a summary of recommended first aid. Wash the bite (infection is probably a greater danger than the toxins), use an antibiotic cream, and ice the area. Take ibuprofen and/or an antihistamine.