Bloody Republicans

I guess today we all get to learn about “replacement theory”, which isn’t a legitimate theory but more a reactionary conspiracy theory held by kooks. You know, big name, rich kooks like Tucker Carlson.

The “great replacement” theory has been a favorite of Carlson’s for some time now. This particular paranoid hypothesis is deeply rooted in neo-Nazi and other white nationalist circles. A cabal of rich Jewish people, the theory holds, has conspired to “replace” white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control. Carlson doesn’t actually say “Jews,” and generally blames the sinister plan on Democrats, socialists or unspecified “elites,” but otherwise has kept the conspiracy theory intact. (Antisemitism remains the mix by singling out individual Jewish people especially Soros, as the alleged ringleaders.) It’s not like Carlson only invokes this narrative on occasion. As Media Matters researcher Nikki McCann Ramirez has documented, Carlson is obsessed with this idea that the people he calls “legacy Americans” — a not-so-veiled euphemism for white Christians of European ancestry — are under siege from shadowy forces flying the banner of diversity. He uses anodyne terms like “demographic change” to make the point, but has gotten bolder more recently, using the word “replacement” to make it even clearer that he’s borrowing his ideas from the white-supremacist fringe.

According to a New York Times analysis, in fact, Carlson has invoked the “great replacement” theory in over 400 episodes of his show, one of the most popular cable news shows in the country.

We have to remember, though, that it’s not just Carlson — getting him canceled wouldn’t change the fact that he has a huge audience of gullible Average Americans who all lean racist. He ought to be fired, of course, but we’ve got to somehow reach those people whose brains he has tainted. Before they kill us.

Rolling Stone also explains what “replacement” means in the minds of racists.

Five years ago, when white supremacists walked down the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and carrying tiki torches, few people understood their intent – the fact that they were referring to replacement theory. The idea seemed outlandish, even incomprehensible; at the time, it was a fairly obscure rallying cry, based around a 2012 book by French novelist Renaud Camus fearmongering about a nonwhite-majority Europe, absorbed into the fetid stew of white-supremacist cant, where it acquired a vicious antisemitism. For many white supremacists, it is Jews who are orchestrating the “reverse colonization,” as Camus put it, of white countries, in order to more easily manipulate a nonwhite and therefore more malleable general populace. In Gendron’s manifesto, after explaining in detail why he picked the particular supermarket he did — it was in a majority-Black neighborhood with a majority-Black clientele — he felt the need to explain why he did not choose to attack Jews. “[Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now, it is a matter of survival we destroy them first,” he wrote, before listing his weaponry in detail with price points included — a manual for future murders. While Gendron’s choice to engage in mass slaughter puts him on the radical fringe of those who enforce their beliefs with bullets, and his overt antisemitism differs slightly from vaguer blame of “elites,” “Democrats” and “globalists,” his fixation on white birthrates and demographic change are neither fringe nor particularly unusual. The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.

The Washington Post chose to talk about a Southern Democrat, Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator who pushed the same notion. I don’t think it was to place equal blame on both parties (especially since a Southern Democrat in the 1940s was equivalent to any Republican in the years since Reagan) but to point out that even the most conservative people in the country found him repugnant.

But while the great replacement theory has inspired horrific violence in the past five years, it’s a lot older than that. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization.

Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat, had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History.

An equal-opportunity racist, he addressed some of his letters with slurs against Italians and Jews, depending on the recipient. But the bulk of his loathing and fear was reserved for Black Americans, as spelled out in his 1947 book “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.”

Despite the fact that he was despised, though, the only thing that expelled him from the senate was oral cancer and death. I can’t sit here and wish the same would happen to Carlson — cancer is too evil.

I can sit here and say that “replacement theory” is stupid. It draws on the conceit that your personal immortality is built on your children, that biology is destiny, that when you procreate, you are creating little copies of yourself who will have the same goals as yourself. It doesn’t work that way, as anyone with kids can tell you. As I explain to students every year, mitosis is a process that allows a cell to perpetuate itself and make identical copies. We don’t reproduce by mitosis, though, but by meiosis…and what meiosis does is generate diversity, and the fusion of two gametes produces more diversity. There is no white race that is going to be preserved if you repudiate miscegenation. That reduces the pool of genes your progeny can draw from, and isn’t going to help you propagate, it’s just going to delay the mingling of your genes to a later generation which can see the folly of your racist schemes.

Also, I don’t share much in common culturally with the kinds of white people who believe in “replacement theory”. I sure hope my kids don’t marry any of them!

Unfortunately, the Republicans of today have picked up the banner of “replacement theory” and are running with it. It’s just another example of conservatives losing touch with reality.

The bigotry is leaking in everywhere

I’ve long struggled with what to think of Richard Dawkins, once a hero, now a muddled old man. Here is a revealing tweet (I also think he uses Twitter as a shooting range, with his foot as the main target), in which he praises Douglas Murray, of all people.

I have not read any of Murray’s books, I’ve started a few of his shorter articles and given up at the pain, and I’ve listened to a few of his interviews on video. I have never seen the reason for his popularity among a certain sector, except that he’s very good at putting a shiny semi-scholarly sheen on some very bad and bigoted ideas, and his anti-immigrant position is popular among conservatives. Here’s a devastating follow-up tweet:

Yikes. Do I ever want to read anything by Murray ever again? No I do not. He’s probably going to get more face-time with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris, though.

Jesus. The West, the West, the West. What is it? What is he trying to defend? He sure does hate and fear immigrants, or “the developing world” which is invading/assaulting “the developed world”, not recognizing that if any assault has been going on, it’s been in the other direction, for centuries. And there on the first page of his book, he has to misrepresent his critics: “they” (leftists? communists? the Jews? This is just bad writing, invoking vague boogeymen) talk about equality but don’t support equal rights, talk about anti-racism but are racist themselves, “they” equate justice with revenge. This “they” seem to be a really confusing grab bag of miscellaneous weirdos, and I come away with the sense that “they” are just a faceless, amorphous straw man on which the reader can slap any resentments they might have.

The kicker is the excerpt from the Buffalo mass murderer’s manifesto. Yeah, that guy, the white man who charged into a grocery store with an assault rifle to gun down black people.

Yikes. The West, the West, the West. The mischaracterization of Leftists: they hate the West for its crimes, but love the “socialist countries” who do the same thing. And it’s all at the bidding of George Soros, the Jew.

You know, I haven’t read any books by Soros, nor any articles, and I’ve never viewed any videos of him. I haven’t the remotest idea what he sounds like, and barely recognize his face, and only because I’ve seen caricatures of him drawn by Nazi wannabes — if I passed him on the street, I wouldn’t give him a second glance. Yet somehow, he is our master.

Apparently, though, the murderous asshole’s manifesto goes on at length about “the great replacement”, which is the same garbage Tucker Carlson rants about.

Somehow, Richard Dawkins, who always votes Left, has found himself in the same camp as Douglas Murray, Tucker Carlson, and the Buffalo murderer. If I were him, it’s at this point, if not earlier, I’d stop and ask myself, “could I be wrong?” (Wait a minute, I did question my association with a community of bad actors about a decade ago, and got out quick, but maybe not quick enough.)

Physics is an atavistic form of biology, then

I have addressed the nonsense about cancer as an atavism multiple times here, and I even made a video about it. Paul Davies is a medical crackpot, and his pal Charley Lineweaver is just as goofy, but it seems they noticed me, and I got a nice polite email from Lineweaver about it.

Hi PZ,

I just came across your video

I plead innocent of subscribing to the Haeckelian view that

“Development stages recapitulate adult evolutionary stages”

at 14:38 of your video.

If you remove the word “adult” then I would agree more with the statement.

You might be interested in our two recent papers (attached).

Also, as a biologist, you might be interested in an online video course
I just put up at arewealone.us

It’s got a lot of biology in it.

If you find any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Yours for better science,

Charley Lineweaver

First, I would note that removing one word doesn’t help: “Development stages recapitulate evolutionary stages” is just as bad as “Development stages recapitulate adult evolutionary stages”. Development does not recapitulate the evolutionary history of the organism. Are we going to claim that mammals evolved from an ancient ancestor with a trophoblast that attached to a larger organism to leech off its fluids? Of course not. Mammalian extra-embryonic membranes are great examples of an evolutionary novelty appearing at a time in development that does not reflect a phylogenetic sequence.

As for his claim that cancers are atavistic reversions to a primitive state, see the links I posted above. Enough said. It’s garbage science. I’m just mildly horrified that yes, he sent me two more papers on the subject, published in 2021, and the idea is still getting published in respectable journals. Maybe I’ll dig into those papers some other time, but I think it’s sufficient to dismiss them out of hand since they provide no new information, and are just more exercises in frantic handwaving. Flap, flap, flap, oh look, we made another paper. Flap, flap.

I was mildly intrigued by the web site he mentioned, calling it an “online video course”, which it isn’t. It also doesn’t have much biology in it. But you be the judge: visit arewealone.us for yourself.

It was very nice of him to include a video summary of the “course”, titled “The Course in 7 Minutes”. Great, I can spare 7 minutes!

I didn’t even give it 7 minutes, I’m afraid. I skipped a lot, missing nothing of substance, because all it is is an excerpt from Beethoven’s Fifth played while random images flash by. There is no content there. There are no words, no explanations, not even an attempt to stitch any kind of story or explanation to it. It’s an incoherent mess. It is an accurate summary of the “course”, I’ll give him that.

I dug deeper, and he does have kind of a syllabus.

Week 1 – What does “Are We Alone?” Mean?
Week 2 – Our Evolution Over 20 Million Years
Week 3 – Our Evolution Over the Past 500 Million Years
Week 4 – Our Evolution Over the Past 3 Billion Years
Week 5 – Our Evolution Over the Past 4 Billion Years
Week 6 – Origins of Life: What is Life?
Week 7 – Intelligent Extraterrestrials?
Week 8 – More Conversations with Experts

Each of those entries is a link to more videos, and once again, we descend into chaos. Lineweaver’s approach seems to be to ask various of his science friends to let him interview them, and he drops by and sets up a camera in their office and asks a bunch of questions, like these:

This video-based course probes the question “Are we alone?” Unlike SETI scientists, Mars rovers and planet-hunting astronomers, we take a biological approach and ask: “How did WE get here?” Like salmon swimming upriver to the pond where they were born, we are led upstream from whence we came. We take a pilgrimage into the past to the origin of life 4 billion years ago. During this evolutionary odyssey with astrobiologist Charley Lineweaver, we ask: Who is “we”? Why did our brains get so big? How did life get started? Are viruses alive? What is life? Answers to these questions may help us get from How DID life start? to How DOES life start?

This leads to a confusing collection of short (typically 5-6 minutes) video interviews. There is no synthesis. There are no answers, not even an attempt to assemble some kind of consensus. I watched a few and then gave up.

If I were asked, “are we alone?”, my answer would be something like, “I don’t know, but probably not. I think the prebiotic chemistry that led to life is probably universal, so it could be common, but we’ve got an n of 1 so far. If we found signs of ancient life on Mars, though, that would increase the probability of life of some sort being common.” That’s all we’ve got so far. I also think that anyone who says yes, absolutely, or no, absolutely, isn’t worth talking to further.

I would turn the questions about, though, and ask how Charley Lineweaver, an honorary associate professor at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Research School of Earth Science at the Australian National University, a man with an advanced education that is entirely in physics, who has a PhD in physics from Berkeley, gets to call himself an astrobiologist, and does that mean I get to call myself an astrophysicist, despite an education that was almost exclusively in biology, and despite having a position as a biology professor?

Oh, wait. He also says he is “the son of a high school biology teacher”, so I guess he inherited his parent’s qualifications. With that logic, that means that my father’s line of work means I get to call myself a diesel mechanic now. Or maybe an astro diesel mechanic?

Please don’t let this goober be our next governor

Right now, Minnesota has a conservative/centrist Democrat as governor. It would be nice if we had a reasonable set of alternatives to vote for in the next election, but I fear I’m going to have to vote for gun-nut Walz again, because the Republicans have announced who they’re putting on the ballot: Scott Jensen, an MD from Chaska, one of those suburban towns that ring Minneapolis/St Paul and that spawn horrible creatures like Bachmann who embarrass us with their open endorsement idiocy.

Guess what his positions are: he thinks COVID wasn’t as bad as the government says it is, and didn’t warrant the disruption of our economy. When all the piles of dead people were pointed out to him, he trivialized them and claimed that the numbers were inflated.

I think that what we have, when you say killed, I would say that COVID-19 may well have played a part. I would say that if this is a person who’s dying of stage 4 colon cancer, and COVID was diagnosed in the last 48 to 72 hours and it was put down as a COVID death I think that’s problematic.

How nice to know as I get older, the value of the days of my life are less and less valuable.

You can trust Dr Jensen, though! He’s an authority!

I studied epidemiology in 1976 and ‘77 when I was in dental school.

Wow. He took a class more than 40 years ago, so now he’s an expert.

He’s also anti-choice. He wants to ban all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

I would try to ban abortion, I think that we’re we’re basically in a situation where we should be governed by … there is no reason for us to be having abortions going out. We have tremendous opportunities and availability of birth control. We don’t need to be snuffing out lives that if left alone will produce a viable newborn, that may go on to be the next Albert Einstein. We can be so much better than we’ve been. We do not need to be having Hillary Clinton casually discuss the value and the reasonableness of late third trimester abortions, when you’ve got literally, you’ve got a life that’s a few inches away from passing through a birth canal and being the source of tremendous love. And we’re saying no, if mom changes your mind, she can go ahead and slice and dice it and be done with it. I don’t think that’s where we want to be.

I guess our lives are on a sliding scale, from incredibly precious before birth to casually discardable in your old age. What’s most important isn’t the life you’ve lived, but rather the potential of the days you have remaining.

I guess I’ll be punching Walz’s name in the next election.

One way to stop cancel culture: cancel the internet altogether

Texas is screwing the rest of the country, again. They passed a law against internet “censorship” that is nothing but ludicrous aggravation about certain people (e.g., Donald Trump) getting moderated and banned, so the conservatives are pushing through a law that will have the trolls and spammers dancing in the streets.

CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.
(b) This section applies regardless of whether the viewpoint is expressed on a social media platform or through any other medium.

I am not a lawyer, but even I can see problems here. I’ll let someone else explain it.

So, let’s break this down. It says that a website cannot “censor” (by which it clearly means moderate) based on the user’s viewpoint or geographic location. And it applies even if that viewpoint doesn’t occur on the website.

What does that mean in practice? First, even if there is a good and justifiable reason for moderating the content — say it’s spam or harassment or inciting violence — that really doesn’t matter. The user can simply claim that it’s because of their viewpoints — even those expressed elsewhere — and force the company to fight it out in court. This is every spammer’s dream. Spammers would love to be able to force websites to accept their spam. And this law basically says that if you remove spam, the spammer can take you to court.

Indeed, nearly all of the moderation that websites like Twitter and Facebook do are, contrary to the opinion of ignorant ranters, not because of any “viewpoint” but because they’re breaking actual rules around harassment, abuse, spam, or the like.

While the law does say that a site must clearly post its acceptable use policy, so that supporters of this law can flat out lie and claim that a site can still moderate as long as it follows its policies, that’s not true. Because, again, all any aggrieved user has to do is to claim the real reason is due to viewpoint discrimination, and the litigation is on.

And let me tell you something about aggrieved users: they always insist that any moderation, no matter how reasonable, is because of their viewpoint. Always. And this is especially true of malicious actors and trolls, who are in the game of trolling just to annoy in the first place. If they can take that up a notch and drag companies into court as well? I mean, the only thing stopping them will be the cost, but you already know that a cottage industry is going to pop up of lawyers who will file these cases. I wouldn’t even be surprised if cases start getting filed today.

Great. I know I posted a comment policy for this little ol’ site, but it’s buried in the archives somewhere. Guess I’ll have to dig it and make it more prominent.

I have another grievance with this law, though. I should be able to block people on the basis of their viewpoint! If someone starts commenting about how women don’t deserve to be regarded as equals of men, for example, I ought to be able to say, “No, we’re not going to tolerate that nonsense here. Bye.” The law doesn’t apply to places like Freethoughtblogs — it sets a cap, where you have to have over 50 million monthly users for it to go into effect — so I’m not about to get sued by the hundreds of people on my blocklist, but in general, a lot of the big social media sites are going to become unusable if all the trolls are set free, and you know the authors of the bill would love to go after every website left of center.

Also bad: they want to liberate spammers.

And, that’s not all. Remember last week when I was joking about how Republicans wanted to make sure your inboxes were filled with spam? I had forgotten about the provision in this law that makes a lot of spam filtering a violation of the law. I only wish I was joking. For unclear reasons, the law also amends Texas’ existing anti-spam law. It added (and it’s already live in the law) a section saying the following:

Sec. 321.054. IMPEDING ELECTRONIC MAIL MESSAGES PROHIBITED. An electronic mail service provider may not intentionally impede the transmission of another person’s electronic mail message based on the content of the message unless:

(1) the provider is authorized to block the transmission under Section 321.114 or other applicable state or federal law; or

(2) the provider has a good faith, reasonable belief that the message contains malicious computer code, obscene material, material depicting sexual conduct, or material that violates other law.

So that literally says the only reasons you can “impede” email is if it contains malicious code, obscene material, sexual content, or violates other laws. Now the reference to 321.114 alleviates some of this, since that section gives services (I kid you not) “qualified immunity” for blocking certain commercial email messages, but only with certain conditions, including enabling a dispute resolution process for spammers.

There are many more problems with this law, but I am perplexed at how anyone could possibly think this is either workable or Constitutional. It’s neither. The only proper thing to do would be to shut down in Texas, but again the law treats that as a violation itself. What an utter monstrosity.

Back in the old days, when Pharyngula was run off a Macintosh in my lab and I had full access to every nut and bolt in the server software, I had all kinds of protections in place to automatically block spammers. A few times, as an experiment, I’d turn off the filters and was astonished at how many bad actors were constantly probing, trying to hack in or flood the system with spam — hundreds per second. And I was just a tiny little PowerMac sitting in a little lab somewhere.

I just checked my email spam folder, which gets purged every week: 830 messages trying to sell me CBD Gummies, extended warranties, real estate, lawn care products, and oh, cool, an offer to be named a joint author on a paper to be submitted to an Indian research journal for only a few hundred dollars.

The internet cannot operate without extensive content moderation. The judges and legislators who signed off on this law are clearly incompetent and unaware, and are probably a gang of Republicans terrified of “cancel culture”.

“What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women.”

It will not make any difference, because the people who have made the decision do not respect scientific or medical evidence, but the cover of The Lancet is about the Alito decision, with a strongly worded opinion inside.

“Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” So begins a draft opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, leaked from the US Supreme Court on May 2, 2022. If confirmed, this judgement would overrule the Court’s past decisions to establish the right to access abortion. In Alito’s words, “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives”. The Court’s opinion rests on a strictly historical interpretation of the US Constitution: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” His extraordinary text repeatedly equates abortion with murder.
The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has been the main foundation underpinning the right of American women to an abortion. That 1868 Amendment was passed during the period of American Reconstruction, when states’ powers were being subjected to certain limitations. The goal of the Amendment was to prevent states from unduly restricting the freedoms of their citizens. That guarantee of personal liberty, so the Supreme Court had previously held, extended to pregnant women, with qualifications, who decided to seek an abortion. Alito rejected that reasoning. He argued that for any right not mentioned in the Constitution to be protected, it must be shown to have had deep roots in the nation’s history and tradition. Abortion does not fulfil that test. Worse, Roe was an exercise in “raw judicial power”, it “short-circuited the democratic process”, and it was “egregiously wrong” from the very beginning. It was now time, according to Alito, “to set the record straight”.
What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women. History and tradition can be respected, but they must only be partial guides. The law should be able to adapt to new and previously unanticipated challenges and predicaments. Although Alito gives an exhaustive legal history of abortion, he utterly fails to consider the health of women today who seek abortion. Unintended pregnancy and abortion are universal phenomena. Worldwide, around 120 million unintended pregnancies occur annually. Of these, three-fifths end in abortion. And of these, some 55% are estimated to be safe—that is, completed using a medically recommended method and performed by a trained provider. This leaves 33 million women undergoing unsafe abortions, their lives put at risk because laws restrict access to safe abortion services.
In the USA, Black women have an unintended pregnancy rate double that of non-Hispanic White women. And the maternal mortality rate for Black women, to which unsafe abortion is an important contributor, is almost three times higher than for white women. These sharp racial and class disparities need urgent solutions, not more legal barriers. The fact is that if the US Supreme Court confirms its draft decision, women will die. The Justices who vote to strike down Roe will not succeed in ending abortion, they will only succeed in ending safe abortion. Alito and his supporters will have women’s blood on their hands.
The 2018 Guttmacher–Lancet Commission on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights For All concluded that these rights, which included the right to safe abortion services and the treatment of complications from unsafe abortion, were central to any conception of a woman’s wellbeing and gender equality. The availability of an essential package of sexual and reproductive health interventions should be a fundamental right for all women—including, comprehensive sexuality education; access to modern contraceptives; safe abortion services; prevention and treatment of HIV and other sexually transmissible diseases; prevention and treatment for gender-based violence; counselling for sexual health; and services for infertility. What kind of society has the USA become when a small group of Justices is allowed to harm women, their families, and their communities that they have been appointed to protect?
The route forward is unclear and perilous. This Court’s argument suggests possible future attacks on a raft of other civil rights, from marriage equality to contraception. Despite urgent pleas from some members of Congress, the long-overdue encoding of Roe into law by the Biden administration is highly unlikely. That a Court is about to force through a health policy supported by only 39% of Americans is dysfunctional. Indeed, if the Court denies women the right to safe abortion, it will be a judicial endorsement of state control over women—a breathtaking setback for the health and rights of women, one that will have global reverberations.

Signing out for a while

I mentioned that I was messed up with some nasty lower back pain — I got in to the doctor this morning, and oh boy, I got some good drugs. I’m going to be doping myself with cyclobenzaprine three times a day for a while, so I don’t expect to be particularly perky for a while.

The pain has been pretty bad. On my personal scale I’d give it a 9 (10, the worst I’ve ever felt, was a ruptured eardrum). To put it in perspective, though, my wife went through labor and delivery three times, so it might have been a 3 or 4 on that scale.

Somehow I’ll have to wade through the lethargy and get the grading done. Maybe this will improve the student’s grades.

Oooh, it glows so prettily!

There it is: the black hole at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A*. Hi there, big fella! You’re very pretty, please don’t swallow us up!

It was quite an achievement, but weirdly, so many of the articles about it try to downplay it. OK, there are bigger black holes out there.

The M87 black hole is far more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*, situated about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. In disclosing the photo of that black hole, the researchers said that their work showed that Albert Einstein, the famed theoretical physicist, had correctly predicted that the shape of the shadow would be almost a perfect circle.

Yeah, yeah, we know. M87 is impressive, but the mass of four million suns, like Sagittarius A* possesses, is nothing to sneeze at. Also extraordinary and impressive.

The worst comes from an astronomer talking to the Washington Post.

Feryal Ozel, a University of Arizona astronomer, described the achievement as “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.”

WTF? Our black hole is not gentle at all — it’s a snarling, spitting, shrieking maelstrom of lethal radiation and deadly cosmic forces. I will not tolerate this diminution of our all-engulfing pit of chaotic darkness.