Remember the lies

Big Oil would like us all to forget that they lied to us for decades — they tried to tell the public that global warming wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t happening, and if it was, it was all our fault with our great galumphing carbon footprints, while they were innocently serving our needs and using the profits to do great things for the environment. Now that climate change is here to stay and dramatically and conspicuously affecting our lives, they’d like those campaigns to vanish down a memory hole. Don’t let it happen! The oil companies are literally evil villains, conspiring to cause world-wide suffering in service to their profits.

Mobil and ExxonMobil ran one of the most comprehensive climate denial campaigns of all time, with a foray in the 1980s, a blitz in the 1990s and continued messaging through the late 2000s. Their climate “advertorials” – advertisements disguised as editorials – appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and other newspapers and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America”.

Between 1996 and 1998, for instance, Mobil ran 12 advertorials timed with the 1997 UN Kyoto negotiations that questioned whether the climate crisis is real and human-made and 10 that downplayed its seriousness. “Reset the alarm,” one ad suggested. “Let’s not rush to a decision at Kyoto … We still don’t know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet.”

Liar, liar, planet’s on fire. These were prolonged FUD campaigns. Scientists knew what was happening and what was going to happen, and they said so, and Big Oil paid pet scientists to lie. It happens every time a company gets huge and its shareholders get greedy and rampant, raging capitalism kicks in to destroy all restraint. This is what the tobacco companies did when the scientific evidence came pouring in that smoking causes cancer — they lied. And they got away with it. It’s what Big Ag got away with with profligate spraying of pesticides. It’s what the oil companies got away with again with spewing lead into the environment.

How are we going to make them pay if we forget how much they consciously, intentionally lied to the world?

Businnes offer Canon

I was briefly excited by some spam email, forgive me. I can see how sometimes they can get you with just a little bit of plausibility.

Maybe I should have been instantly put off by the subject line, “Businnes offer Canon”, or the Czech return address. But the promise was so enticing. They liked my YouTube channel! They are a PR company who would like to send me Canon products, for free, that I would review on my channel! Awesome! They told me what the value of the products I could choose and keep would be, and it was substantial! They also sent me links to examples of other YouTubers they’d sponsored!

But it’s too good to be true.

I’m small time on YouTube — the channels they claimed to have sponsored had over a hundred times the subscribers I do, and were doing professional photography work, while my videos are crude in comparison. They didn’t ask me for money up front, which would have been a strong tip-off, but I suspect that would come up once they’d hooked me. I tried checking on the company, but they didn’t name it, another troubling sign. They used a generic email distributor, so that was a dead end. My correspondent did give her name, so I looked that up — it led to someone who was a “fraud expert at Capitol One”. Ha ha. Maybe our correspondent had been stung by a fraud expert before, and adopted her name as a pseudonym.

Darn.

The good news, though, is that I won’t be selling out, yet.

Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

We’ve heard about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and betadine, and who knows what else, but now we hit a new low (don’t worry, the bottom keeps receding and they’ll find something else). Another approach to battling COVID-19 is to eat…poop. Cow poop.

A video of a Dr. Manoj Mittal from Haryana, India, has been making the social media rounds. This video showed him walking among cows and then poop there is. He picked up from the ground what appeared to be a handful cow dung. He then selected a piece, put it into his mouth, and began chewing. Here’s a tweet with the video:

Yum!

This is associated with Hindu religious beliefs, so it probably won’t be popular here in the US. I hope.

The letter described how “the Hindu religious system places great value on the products of cows. They believe that the byproducts of cows such as dung, ghee, milk, curd, and urine are purifying agents.” They wrote how “many people are consuming cow dung and urine under branded ‘cow dung therapy’ for Covid cure.” The letter continued by saying, “Some members of the Hindu nationalist party demanded that cow urine and dung can prevent and cure Covid-19. Therefore, the Indian superstitious, fanatic politicians and some other leaders disseminating the propagation that cow dung can cure Covid-19 among the general religious population.” This is all despite the lack of real scientific evidence supporting the use of either cow dung or cow urine against Covid-19.

Christians, at least, don’t believe any of that. They think they can cure everything with prayer, which would actually taste like shit in my mouth, so I’ll duck out of that delusion, too.

To an embryologist, everything looks a bit eggy

This is a nice micrograph of an ascidian egg. A very large egg.

That is definitely the sperm entry point there in the lower half, so it’s apparently a freshly fertilized zygote at this point.

Wait, no, that’s not an egg! It’s Jupiter! I wonder when it will start to gastrulate? I don’t want to be around when it reaches the tadpole larva stage and starts swimming away.

There’s a whole series of Hubble images of the outer planets. Uranus and Neptune are rather blurry, but a very pretty robin’s egg blue, which means obviously that when they hatch they’re going to start screeching to be fed, which will be a bit terrifying, especially when their mama flies back to the solar system.

Not a great weekend

It’s unhappy news all around. This weekend was the time of the Big Cleanup, when I go through all the spiderling vials and cull out the sickly and the spiders who did not make it — I don’t if it’s me or just the expected mortality for any species that spews out progeny hundreds at a time, but I’ve only got a 30% survival rate. It was kind of expected, but it still hurts when you’re going through all the babies you nurtured for over a month, and well over half are dead. At least the survivors got bumped up to larger living quarters and get more flies to eat.

Then, going through my adult colony, two of them had died, for no discernable cause. I think they looked up, noticed we’re almost to December in Minnesota, and decided it was totally unnatural for them to live through this, and decided it was time to die. I saw this last year. Midwinter is like the expiration date for these northern spiders.

Then, just to add more misery to the tragedy, my camera is acting up — it refused to take any pictures, told me it had lost communication with my lovely Tokina macro lens, and ordered me to clean the lens contacts. So I did. It didn’t help. I’m going to tinker with some other lenses and see if the problem is in my favorite lens (oh no, I would cry) or the camera body (more crying — there is no good diagnosis here). Maybe this is a sign that it’s time to upgrade to a full frame camera, like the Canon 5D mk IV? No it is not, because I looked at the price and went into shock.

It was also bad because the spiders were hungry and happy with their new clean quarters and I had so many opportunities for good, dynamic action shots, but no go.

OK, I’m just going to go grade papers for a bit, as a kind of gravy for sorrow.

A jailbird and spouse abuser claims to have debated me — you’d think I’d have noticed

Shock. Horror. Gasp. Kent Hovind tells a lie about me.

By the way, I agree that I look pretty shabby today. I dyed my beard a month ago, and of course it’s coming in gray again, and I don’t feel like dying it again. I’m also shellacked by the booster shot I got on Thursday…getting better, but still horribly achey. I’ve also been wearing a stupid boot to recover from tendinitis, and yeah, I’m tired. You are allowed to call me old and ugly. But at least I’m not a lying moron like Kent.

Texas is polluting the educational system again

This seems to be a never-ending pattern. Texas has a huge collection of schools, and in their usual stupid wisdom, has put a small group of professional assholes in charge of dictating what textbooks they use, and then, because capitalism, all the textbook publishers fall in line and the rest of the country is afflicted with their choices. The Texas Freedom Network tries to oppose the State Board of Education (SBOE), but Texas don’t care. Here’s the latest dollop of poison the SBOE delivers.

This week’s Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) hearing proves once again that the board is where textbooks go to be censored.

In an astonishing series of votes, the SBOE rejected all but one publisher’s health textbooks for our public schools. The reason? Board members caved to critics who attacked the textbooks because they included topics related to sex education or because they acknowledged the existence of LGBTQ people.

The one publisher to gain approval was able to do so only after making significant changes at the behest of the board.

It is a sad day for Texas students who deserve the best information with which to make healthy decisions. It is also a sad day for the LGBTQ young people who are in our schools and the board continues to exclude.

This is a repeat of past instances of the board censoring textbooks. And it is a troubling sign of what is to come in 2022 when the SBOE revises social studies curriculum standards, a process that takes place not long after Gov. Abbott signed a law designed to limit discussions about the true history of racism and inequality in this country.

Fuck Texas. No, really, it’s a drag on the rest of the country. Sorry if you live in Texas, but could you get a little more loud and tear down this terrible system? I can tolerate you using your educational budgets to build nothing but football stadiums, but this is where you’re hurting everyone else, not just yourselves.

Do you think UATX will just fade away?

That absurd “University” of Austin fakeout has been met with satire and ridicule to the point where its board of advisors is crumbling, with members realizing that they really don’t want to be tied to this boat anchor. I suspect the investors behind it aren’t too upset by it, since they have so much money it’s dribbling out of their ears and are probably fine with shifting from “saving Western civilization” to “tax write-off” — it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile, those advisors are adroitly pivoting to a different approach.

Check out FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. It’s got the kind of explicit, praiseworthy title, while being nothing but an anti-woke assortment of prominent defenders, that it was probably named by a Republican, who are masters of lying about their motives. It certainly has a commendable mission.

Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to identify ourselves and each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.

Today, almost 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education ushered in the Civil Rights Movement, there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles. To insist on our common humanity. To demand that we are each entitled to equality under the law. To bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.

Wow. Martin Luther King Jr cast such a huge shadow that all kinds of vermin try to hide beneath it. It’s depressing how that ringing phrase about being “judged by the content of our character” has been adopted by the right wing as the one part of his ethos that they will accept. The first paragraph gives it all away, though. The threat of laws that say you can’t discriminate against people for their skin color, gender and sexual orientation is twisted by these assholes into a claim that we will be REQUIRED to identify ourselves by skin color, gender and sexual orientation, as if that weren’t often already obvious. How dare you notice that I am a white male cis-gender heterosexual? If you recognize that, doesn’t that mean that tomorrow you’re going to discriminate against me? After all, that’s what I’d do.

This is a demand to ignore all sexual and racial characteristics, to bury our differences in a graveyard laid out by the current lords of the status quo, rather than to celebrate them. It will work to successfully recruit the people who are so damn tired of being oppressed that they like the idea of joining the oppressors. It will definitely appeal to the dominant recipients of a system of injustice, because it’s saying that nothing needs to change.

You’re thinking I sound kind of cynical, aren’t you? We liberal lefties want to end discrimination on the basis of skin color and sex, don’t we, so why judge this organization that says the same thing? Greg Laden pointed out that their board of advisors is a rogue’s gallery of the usual suspects. It is commendably diverse, but nestled comfortably in their midst is an assortment of the standard out-and-proud white supremacists. And some of them have just flitted over from the UATX board of advisors.

Oh, look. Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Douglas Murray. Let’s bring in some IDW-adjacent racists for this supposedly anti-racist organization. They’ll need a new gig after UATX folds.

Megyn Kelly? Oh yeah, she’ll bring the shiny luster and glamor of Fox News. (She’s listed as a “journalist”, by the way — oh, how that noble occupation has been degraded.)

Of course Steven Pinker is there. If the organization has a transparent lefty facade but is actually intensely regressive, that’s the slime he loves to writhe around in.

If you want to end gender and sexual orientation discrimination, well, you’ve got to have Abigail Schrier on board. Transphobes welcome! Trans men and women, not so much.

They don’t want to discriminate against racists, libertarians, and white supremacists, so you can signal your open-mindedness about that by recruiting one person: Michael Shermer.

I don’t know most of the names on that list, and maybe the majority have high-minded goals. But I’m sorry, if you tolerate rubbing elbows with those awful people, you’ve already betrayed your cause. There are cuckoos in the nest. I’d find your goals more honest and believable if you were rooting them out, rather than making them comfortable.

Karen has strong feelings about A Christmas Carol

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis put on a performance of the classic Dickens story. I would have been a bit peevish that it was put on before Thanksgiving, but that’s not what set Karen off. No, it was the introduction.

The incident last Friday began shortly after Haj, who directed “Carol,” gave a curtain speech welcoming everyone back to their “theater home.” Then the lights went down on the 47th edition of the Guthrie’s “Carol.” It was perhaps the most diverse production of the holiday classic to date, with a script by a Hindu playwright, staging by a Palestinian American director and a design team whose multicultural backgrounds matched that of the cast.

Then, the screeching began.

It’s kind of hard to understand, but she’s screaming about it being a British play, and at one point I hear her complaining about it being “Shakespearean”, but here’s a summary of her tirade.

The Guthrie also addressed the content of the woman’s vitriol, which delayed “Carol” for 30 minutes and caused some people to leave the theater. The woman objected to a Palestinian director staging “Carol,” which she termed “a Christian play.” She also spewed anti-Black venom, removed her mask and spit on patrons.
…
“She started mumbling right away that this is a Muslim adaptation of a Christian play,” he said. “Soon she started to berate two women taking a selfie. Then she was telling people to go back to the country they came from and calling a Black man a Black [expletive]. She was out for violence.”

The woman had removed her mask, which the theater requires all patrons to wear. When Caldeira asked her to put it back on, he said she was enraged.

“She started coughing and spitting all over me and my friend,” Caldeira said. “It was scary and frightening. I think the Guthrie has to do more to show what their real values are.”

What a nasty little snowflake. Now I feel like I should go check out the play and support the performance.

After Thanksgiving.

Debooted!

Good news: I had a check up at the doctor today, and she said I don’t have to wear the mega-clunky boot anymore! Instead, I’m downgraded to a brace.

It’s progress. Now I just have to wear this clumsy thing for a month, and as long as there is no relapse, I’ll be free before Christmas.