Michael Shermer is scum

In her latest video, Rebecca Watson covers a lot of the same ground I brought up in my last post, but there’s one additional thing she mentions.

I was surprised/not at all surprised to learn that Michael Shermer is defending the murder of Renee Good, as well as being generally pro-Trump and pro-ICE. I do not read anything by Shermer anymore, so good on Rebecca for having the intestinal fortitude to dig through the shit he vomits up.

Fuck Michael Shermer and the rest of his rightwing pro-murder pro-fascism sniveling grifters, who spread this lie even as we see ICE now enabled to literally go door to door, breaking into people’s homes, and dragging them away with zero accountability. They are filling their pockets with no concern that they are personally supporting Nazis. Tim Pool and Dave Rubin at least got paid millions of dollars by the Russians as a reward for spreading obvious lies…I wonder if Shermer is getting anything other than a handful of views on his shitty YouTube channel? I’m not sure which would be more pathetic, to be honest: if he was doing it for Russian disinformation money or for free in the desperate hope that he lands another spot on Joe Rogan.

‘Round about 2010, I was hanging out with Shermer, going to conferences where he was a fellow presenter, knowing nothing about what an execrably slimy fascist he was. I’m glad I’m no longer associated with that crowd of libertarian apologists, except…he still gets invited to conferences, but I don’t. I think Rebecca is excluded, too. We just have to trust that history will condemn those who joined the American Nazis.

Fortunately, I’ve never used door dash

But other people do. Here’s a horrific example of a door dash gone incredibly wrong, wrapped up in some wry commentary by Reese Waters.

For those who’d rather not watch a video for 38 minutes (I don’t blame you, although I do find Waters entertaining), the short summary is that a family in Minneapolis ordered a food delivery through door dash, and ICE followed the delivery driver, and arrested one of the people in the car (his whereabouts is currently unknown, ICE tends to whisk people away without documenting their actions). The woman driver fled into the home of the family waiting for the food, and she was clearly distraught and crying and trying to communicate through the wails in Spanish.

The woman in the house is also greatly distressed. She’s in this house, most of her children are away at school, she’s got one child there who is less then two years old. She doesn’t know what to do. She is freaking out as ICE agents surround her home and start pounding on the door, and her first impulse is to get rid of this stranger who has made her family a target.

I can’t blame her. This creepy squad of armed vigilantes are wandering about in her yard, hands on their guns, demanding that she surrender the woman she is protecting. She is more concerned about her child, and starts to lead the weeping woman to the door. You can hear her resolve gradually steeling itself, though; she demands a signed warrant before she’ll let her go.

They don’t have one. Of course they don’t have one. They’re just cruising around looking for brown people to intimidate.

The neighbors are coming outside after hearing all the commotion. They are blowing whistles (the latest thing to sound the alarm about ICE thugs, rather like what prairie dogs do when predators are around. I should probably get a whistle, too). The woman is now yelling, threatening ICE with exposure. The cowards back down, and start retreating to their cars. Hooray for community action! Teach ICE to fear us.

One thing we all have to work on is how to get that community support, beyond just blowing whistles. During this event, the homeowner is on the phone, having called 911 to get help. The police dispatcher is worse than useless, advising her to simply surrender the woman — they’re not there to defend every citizen, just the white English-speaking ones, and that is contemptible. Our police need to learn a lesson from Philadelphia.

Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal recently made a declaration.

And so we stand here today with all those who stand against the made-up, fake, what you can call ICE, professional law enforcement, I don’t call them none of that. I call them made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement because what they do is against not only legal law but the moral law.

Yes! That’s what I want our police to do — just shut down this invasion of armed thugs who are harrassing, detaining, and killing the citizens they are supposed to serve and protect.

I don’t know what I’d do in a similar situation. I know for sure I’d be terrified — my house has a lot of windows, and seeing those men standing around, peering through windows in their tactical gear, reminds me of scenes from a horror movie. I think I’d make sure all the doors were locked and tell them to go away, but then, we all say we’d have defended Anne Frank from the Gestapo, but apparently lots of people didn’t. I might try calling the local sheriff’s office, but this is rural America, and I don’t know what the odds are that they would actually help rather than join the besiegers.

I didn’t learn what to do from this one example. I have learned that many of us are living in a state of fear and uncertainty, just the way MAGA wants us.

Welcome, little one!

It’s going to be a good day. I was in the kitchen early in the morning, fixing a cup of tea, when a very tiny friend came to visit. She was exploring the cupboards when I made her sit down for a quick photo shoot.

Attulus fasciger

Even in the depths of winter spiders can always find refuge in my home.

Oh no! Another major data leak!

A whole bunch of sensitive information about some government employees has been released.

Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.

The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees.

The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to be the largest ever breach of DHS staff data. It appears to include names, work emails, telephone numbers, roles, and some resumé data, including previous jobs of federal immigration staff.

ICE List founder, Dominick Skinner, told the Daily Beast: “It is a sign that people aren’t happy within the U.S. government, clearly. The shooting [of Good] was the last straw for many people.”

You think?

DHS is very concerned.

Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast that its “law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists,” but that “thanks to the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians, they are under constant threat from violent agitators.”

Let’s not forget all the people they arrest, like “terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists” and agricultural workers and door dash delivery drivers and brown people and students and 37 year old soccer moms. It’s a long list!

Gosh, I sure hope none of those leaked ICE agents get shot three times in the face. That wouldn’t be just.

Pray for the gallant heroes who must meet this behemoth

I have two male Latrodectus left. Only two. Males are more fragile and die off more readily, and also, they’re so small compared to the females that I wasn’t confident that they were fully mature, so I held off and held off on bringing the sexes together, and I think some of the males died of frustration.

So only two masculine males with swollen dripping pedipalps. I finally got brave enough to release them into cages with two females, the mighty Guinevir and the devious secretive Morgan. They are huge.

They’d eaten well yesterday, and looked virtually spherical. I was cautious, and introduced the males into complex environment of the female’s lairs. They immediately scurried deep into the tangle of moss and silk, and I will have no idea if a successful mating has occurred until I see egg sacs.

If I see the males alive again in the next few days, I’ll mount a rescue mission and extract them so I can introduce them to some of the other females.

Let’s hope they succeed in their mission of boldly penetrating the secret spaces of these sex-starved females.

Ars Technica loses its mind

There is a huckster named Skyler Chan who is raising money from the tech bros in Silicon Valley to build a chain of hotels…on the moon. He has ambitious plans.

Those first two steps are just tests, delivering expandable modules to the moon. However, he is talking about building a habitat on the moon in six years, with even more extravagant plans for the future.

I’m sorry, but this is fucking insane. It’s just a grift to suck money out of techno-optimists who are already unmoored from reality. So why is Ars Technica posting an optimistic review of the idea? It’s not April First.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.

So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.

If you’re a sucker for these kinds of stories, you shouldn’t be writing them. Has Ars Technica no editors?

To think that lunar tourism is a hot prospect for the commercial development of the moon is ludicrous. Why would anyone want to go there like it’s a trip to Bali? Popular tourist destinations here on Earth tend to require a large support staff — there are deep infrastructure demands that you don’t see on the vacation brochures, like the small non-luxury houses of the staff, and the buses to transport them to your glamorous accommodations, and an extensive supply source for the gourmet meals. Who builds the more elaborate structure on the right? Why does it look like it has huge glass windows?

Also unreal: he explains that space travel is currently supported on two economic legs, government funding and the largesse of billionaires. He thinks he can provide a third leg by building tourist hotels that will cost people a half-million dollars per night, not including travel expenses. Who’s going to stay there? Your average middle-class college professor?

There is something wrong with people who look at the white paper put out by the promoter and think it is a serious document. I mean, this is their “master plan”.

  1. Build the first hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off-world surface habitations.
  2. Build America’s first Moon base (roads, mass drivers, warehouses, physical infrastructure on the Moon).
  3. Repeat on Mars.
  4. Once the Overton window increases and this moves from non-consensus to consensus, GRU owns property on the Moon and Mars (i.e., The Hudson’s Bay Company owning Rupert’s Land).
  5. Use the money to re-invest in resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond that are fed into the growing economies and civilizations in space. Reach our final form — Galactic Resource Utilization.
  6. Humanity reaches Kardashev scale Type III.

Put the comic books away, kid. That’s fantasy from step 1. But hey, Ars Technica promoted it, so that’ll help con some dim-witted venture capitalist out of some cash, which will allow Skyler Chan to live the high life for a while until reality pops his bubble.

You will not be surprised to learn that Chan graduated from college in May, 2025, and that he interned at Tesla.

Here’s a fanciful artist’s imagining of the GRU Hotel.

Artists rendering of a lunar hotel

Why does it have big windows directly to the exterior? Why is it warmly lit like a Thomas Kinkade painting? Why is there a conventional door to the outside?

Why would anyone go in or out of that fucking door, Skyler?

Why is genetics hard?

First day back in the classroom, teaching genetics, and I speculate for a bit about why so many people find the subject difficult. I’ve had smart students who struggled with the concepts. I think the answer is that many people don’t get the whole idea of chance and probability and the statistical nature of inheritance.

The autofocus on my camera was a bit goofy. Someday I’ll get this all figured out.