Didn’t we already know this?

Sydney Powell (remember her? One of Trump’s most ridiculous defenders?) is being sued for defamation, because her lies cost a company that made voting machines a heck of a lot of money. Her defense is a grifter’s work of art.

Right-wing lawyer Sidney Powell is claiming in a new court filing that reasonable people wouldn’t have believed as fact her assertions of fraud after the 2020 presidential election.

The election infrastructure company Dominion Voting Systems sued Powell for defamation after she pushed lawsuits and made appearances in conservative media on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to sow doubt about the 2020 election results. Dominion claims that Powell knew her election fraud accusations were false and hurtful to the company.

Did you believe anything she said? Then Sydney Powell believes you weren’t a reasonable person. Ha ha, don’t you feel foolish now?

I guess that was the kraken, the revelation that Powell was a fraud and a liar.

Spiders everywhere!

There’s a lot of flooding in New South Wales, Australia (can I come visit, please?), and as the floodwaters rise, so are the spiders. You’d think the citizenry would be pleased to meet their usually-hidden fellow denizens, but noooo.

At the same time, rising floodwaters surrounded Melanie Williams’s home, thousands of spiders scaled the fence in her front yard.

“That was enough to really freak me out, I had never seen anything like it before,” she said.

“I am an arachnophobe from way back so I hope they’ve gone back to wherever they came from.”

Wait. How can you be an arachnophobe in Australia? They’ve got such big, gorgeous spiders all over the place! You’re just seeing more than usual right now, and the floods are bring out the cute little cuddly ones.

Here’s a good explanation of the phenomenon.

A plague of spiders might seem apocalyptic, but experts say the episode is easily explained.

Professor Dieter Hochuli leads Sydney University’s integrative ecology group and has made a career out of examining what drives the ecology of animals and plants.

He described the phenomenon as “fascinating” and said the spiders were always there — we just don’t usually notice them.

“All this is happening under our noses, but we just don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

“There’s this vibrant ecosystem happening all the time.

“What happens with the floods is all these animals that spend their lives cryptically on the ground can’t live there anymore.

“The spiders are the really obvious ones as they throw out their webs.

“Just like people, they’re trying to get to higher ground during a flood.”

Exactly. Just like I know there are plenty of spiders around during our long Minnesota winters. They’re just hunkered down in the leaf litter, or deep down in the soil, or under rocks, or in compost heaps, or in my basement. Spring is just when they creep out and start flourishing and bringing beauty and joy back to the world.

Which reminds me…it’s time for my morning spider therapy session. I’ve got to work fast because I teach a class on Tuesday mornings.

America the Insane

I’ve already heard the joke that the pandemic must be over, because we’re back to our regular routine of frequent mass shootings. They’re wrong. The pandemic is still ongoing, and during the latest insane murder spree in Boulder, some of the victims were shot while waiting in line for vaccinations.

All we know is that ten people are dead, that some kind of long gun was used by the scumbag, and that a bleeding person in cuffs was later walked out of the store by the police. Oh, and he was a white man, but there is absolutely no surprise in that. The police probably didn’t take him to Wendy’s afterwards, since one of the victims was a police officer.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that there will be nothing done. No change in the gun laws. No restrictions on the ready availability of murder tools. The demented crazies are already claiming it was false flag operation.

The NRA, without missing a beat, responded by quoting the 2nd amendment.


A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Fuck the NRA, and I hate to say it, but the 2nd Amendment has me thinking, fuck the US Constitution. What good is it if it’s going to be used to shield a corrupt organization’s continuing racket of poisoning the country with weaponry and defending murdering maniacs?

Eking out a little spider time

This has been a stressful year, and I haven’t been giving the spiders the time they deserve. So I’ve recently resolved to spend an hour a day in the lab, even if all my other work is screaming at me, just tending to the basics. It’s soothing, I think, and it’ll make the spiders happy, which is what counts.

I have to go in to the university every morning anyway, to open up the fly lab and check on the status of student experiments, and now instead of rushing back to prepare for a lecture or do some grading, I have a zen-like period of contemplation in which I, for instance, feed the spiders, or wash dirty spider cages, or throw out old accumulated debris. I still have some plumbing and aquarium supplies that I’m moving out to our departmental dumpster a bit at a time. Anyone want a bucket of sand? An aquarium pump and filter? I’m putting those all behind me.

This morning I fed the babies; I’m trying out a daily feeding regimen, rather than twice a week, to see if can get them to grow a little faster. I’ve also moved some of the up-and-coming generation from the 130ml plastic cubes to 5.7l adult cages, to see if the expanded space promotes expanded growth. They look so tiny and lost in there! But they are cobwebbing them up well enough. I just hope that the flies aren’t getting lost in all that volume.

I’m also working at spiffing up the lab a bit, picking a stretch of bench every morning, cleaning it up and scrubbing it down, and just generally making it all shiny and tidy. I’ve been neglecting my patrons at my patreon account, and on my list of things to do is, in addition to more spiders as they emerge this spring, a video tour of my spider lab, maybe in the next two weeks (next weekend is hellish with grading, but maybe the weekend after that). This will initially be a patron-only video, but maybe I’ll make it public the month after. Sign up if you want to see the premiere! All the money donated every month goes to pay off our legal debt! I look forward to clearing that debt in the next few years so I can sink the money into the lab instead.

The victims, a great loss; the killer, no loss at all

The identities of the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings have been published, and they are revealing. Note that the murderer has been claiming that he was afflicted with a sex addiction, and that he was lashing out at all those temptresses working in Asian sex palaces. It seems that that isn’t even close to describing the situation (although, also, it would not justify his actions at all if they were houses of prostitution). What comes out of the account is that these were … women working at a spa, giving massages and pedicures and such, and they were 50, 44, 63, 51, 74, and 69 years old. One of the victims was a 33 year old client and recent mother who had come in with her husband to treat herself to a massage. One victim was a handyman who did work around the building.

Previous accounts allowed the killer to define the narrative, portraying the dead as faceless sex workers who were less important than the white guy with the gun — the kind of standard portrayal you see in video games or cop shows. The people he killed were mothers and grandmothers and hard-working people trying to better themselves and their families (as are many sex workers, never forget), and what he did was to cold-bloodedly slaughter people who served in their community.

This is the information the news ought to deliver first, before they tell the killer’s story, in which he is only going to dehumanize the human beings he killed. Oh, and hey, maybe video games and cop shows ought to be telling their stories more from the perspective of the usually expendable mobs that exist only to be gunned down.

Maybe justice will be served

There are a lot of people who participated in the recent insurrection who are pooping their diapers right now, and I’m here for it. They seem to be shocked that they are actually being held accountable for breaking the law. It’s hilariously stupid.

Take, for instance, the case of Debra Maimone and Philip Vogel, two business owners from Pittsburgh. One of the slight surprises emerging from these proceeding is how many of these people are reasonably well-off, middle class small business owners by day, and shrieking MAGAts the instant they get on the internet. Maimone and Vogel are definitely in that category, and the capitol insurrection was their opportunity to bring their online persona out into real-world action. They still tried to hide their identities behind masks, but poorly, and the police have thoroughly documented their presence in the event (pdf). All those security cameras caught their every move, including when they briefly took the mask off to take a selfie (brilliant criminal minds at work), when they broke in, when they moved into very offices, and when they stole stuff from capitol security. In some ways, it’s rather chilling how completely they monitored every movement of these individuals.

They also got a bonanza of information from Parler. Hoo boy, Parler was like the Rosetta stone to break far-right coding. People had to register with real names and all kinds of confidential information, so once the police got that, they could trace all kinds of loud-mouthed assholery made under the cloak of anonymity (they thought!) straight to idiotic small business owners. Like this absurdity from Debra Maimone:

She praises those brave patriots who occupied the government building FULL OF TYRANTS in one breath, and in the next insists oh no, she wasn’t in there. She was. She’s a chickenshit who just revealed that she knew her actions were illegal, but is going to deny it to avoid the consequences.

I’ll be mildly surprised if she gets the full ten-year sentence from the court, but I’ll be even more surprised if she escapes conviction or gets a trivial sentence — the case against her is awfully strong. She and Vogel are now out on $10,000 bail, but the tyrants have told her she can’t have any guns while awaiting trial.

Here’s their business, Vera General Contracting & Cleaning Services, and the Yelp reviews are amusing.

Super gross company. Owners are rude and outwardly racist. Asked me why I have a BLM sign in my yard saying they don’t work with people who support them. Umm… gee Karen how about because I’m black and I believe in equality.

I’m also a Christian so I forgive those who display hateful behavior–but it’s clear they are not because when I referenced John 13:34 they had no clue and seemed confused. Typical.

To add insult to injury they quoted me one price on the phone, but when they saw me they doubled it before even going inside my home.

It’s obvious that when they realized I’m a black woman they decided to try and screw me over.

This one is a little more succinct.

They promised me they’d do some work for me this weekend but now cannot as they have been arrested for being domestic terrorists.

Awww…

Giving up

Yesterday I procrastinated by cleaning up my home office. This morning I’m going in to the lab to feed the little beasties and wash some more glassware. Then I’m going to come home and buckle down to nothing but grading for the rest of my life. It’s all over, I’m resigning myself to nothing but drudgery for eternity. Goodbye, everyone. Time to crawl into the pit of despair and make it my own.