Good news/bad news

You get the good news first.

  • Warnock has definitely defeated Loeffler in Georgia.
  • Ossoff has a strong lead over Perdue that will probably strengthen as mail-in votes are counted.
  • Democrats will gain control of the Senate, narrowly.
  • Moscow Mitch’s stranglehold will be broken.

Now the bad news.

  • These were close races. Almost half the voting citizens of Georgia voted for two rabidly conservative, corrupt Republicans.
  • The Democrats are a conservative party, just less mad than the Republicans. Don’t expect rapid advancement of progressive legislation.
  • The Blue Dog will have his day. The Democrats will be trying to appease Joe Manchin, the West Virginia DINO, so that he doesn’t defect to the other party.

It’s going to be interesting. Watch the Democrats drag their heels over doing the right thing over and over again, and then watch them lose in the next round of elections. At least they won’t be able to hide their sympathies anymore!

COVID-19 vaccine is available in Morris!

Good news! Of course, then I looked at the priority rankings.

  • Rank 1a are health care providers and nursing home residents.
  • 1b are essential workers (police, fire, teachers, etc.) and those over 75. (this might be me.)
  • 1c are those older than 65 and with underlying conditions.

I suspect I might be in 1b, although I don’t get exposed to as many people as public school teachers.

My wife is in none of the above, which does not make me happy. I suppose if I had the opportunity, I’d get the shot before my wife, with the understanding that I’ll be locking her in the house and doing all the shopping until they give it to her.

A mundane cleaning day

Did you know classes start in 2½ weeks? It’s astounding; Time is fleeting; Madness takes its toll…but rather than doing the time warp, unfortunately, I spent several hours doing basic custodial work in the lab. First, a colleague and I scrubbed up the cell biology lab, shuffling computers into storage and putting away glassware, because that space will be used for a different course Spring semester. It’s tidy! And shiny!

Then I went into my lab, which is cluttered and grimy, and I need to make a few trips to a dumpster and polish up a whole lot of stuff — the sink is piled high with empty spider vials that need washing, for one thing. Today I set aside all the menial labor, though, and instead dismantled my microscope and cleaned up all the optics. That was fun! I may do it again tomorrow!

The filth wasn’t as bad as I feared, fortunately. One glass surface had accumulated a bit of dust and grime, and was fairly easy to wipe clean. I did have to take apart a few subassemblies, but thankfully, good German engineering made it easy.

I had to test it out with a few photos, but whereas the engineering was cooperative, the spiders were not. The entire interior of their condo cube was an intricate network of spider webs everywhere, so opening up the cube always tore their webs, making the kids frantic and excited, so they were mostly unwilling to sit still for their portrait.

I put a sample spider photo below the fold, and you’ll see what I mean — it’s all criss-crossed with silk, and I played a few lighting games to make it visible. Also note that the image is much, much better than the last spider photo I posted here.

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I’m adding Bang to my collection of rage-emailing punctuation!

Some people are just obsessed. There’s one who goes on sporadic binges of email — I’m calling him Bang, because of his fondness for exclamation points, but I’ll spare you his real name. He apparently had some time off for New Year’s and chose to send me a string of messages. These are all from 3 days around New Year’s Eve.

Ahmad Al-Qloushi, Steven Hinkle, Jonathan Bean and Sukhmani Singh Khalsa
The four individuals above were targeted by the leftist censors and thought police that you claim don’t exist. I suggest you look them up. Maybe you already have! I doubt you’ll acknowledge them though! You ignored the ordeal of Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Hadley when it was brought up to you by his brother on Twitter, falsely accusing them of lying! It just like how Ray Comfort ignores the evidence for evolution when it is presented to him!

Nope, sorry, I don’t know any of those people, and I’m not really interested in looking them up, especially after seeing the names of all the other people he thinks are just ducky.

The Only Bigot is you, asshole!
How dare you call Ben Shapiro and David French bigots PZ! After you called Michael Nugent the Irish Wanker! After you claimed that conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals were all dishonest frauds, said that they didn’t think but clung to prejudices and demanded people accept them! After you said falsely that Regressive left was created by rightwingers who were all terrible! Maajid Nawaz, a liberal Muslim invented the term Skunkwipe! After you slimed Sam Harris as a right wing neocnservative, and said such people should be removed from the atheist movement!
After you banned a man for criticizing commenters that used the words Honkey, Hetero, and Straighty Mcstraighterson!

Wait, what? I had to look that one up, and found a thread where I did ban someone…for consistently defending racists. Someone hasn’t changed.

It’s a thread from 2013. He’s been stewing over this for over 7 years.

Tiredness
I’m tired of you P.Z you asshat! I’m tired of your lies, misrepresentation, defamation, Blancophobia, Ameriphobia, Androphobia, violent statements, anti-police hatred, anti-capitalist claptrap, and especially you thinking you can disqualify someone from the atheist movement because their politics don’t match yours. I’m also sick of you ignoring facts that contradict your leftist worldview. Like that people who challenge leftist orthodoxy in universities are persecuted. Peter Ridd, Brett Weinstein, James Damore, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bruce Giley, and many others have suffered because of communist, socialist, thought policemen like you! I’m sorry I ever liked you PZ! You’re not tired of me, if your were you wouldn’t keep mentioning me on your site! Why haven’t you posted any of my other emails on Pharyngula! That one you listed in September 2020 was posted ages ago, and I’ve sent many more! Including a response to you and the commenters who insulted me when you first posted about me! That by the way wasn’t even the first one I sent you! The first I sent was about Sam Harris and how he wasn’t right wing, or a neoconservative, that Greenwald didn’t dismantle him, that he responded to Greenwald’s screed, and that you had no right to deceive who could and couldn’t be apart of the atheist movement. Are you afraid of my criticism, you Skunkwipe?!

Gosh, he used to like me? I’m blushing.

Yes, I mentioned him and his incessant, over-the-top ranting emails once before. That doesn’t mean I “keep mentioning” him — every thread about conservative racists isn’t actually about Bang. Yes, he does send a lot of angry email, as he admits, it’s just that it gets filed in spam and I only notice every once in a while.

If Bang is tired of me, there’s an easy solution: stop reading my stuff. I’m actually easy to avoid.

Defamation= Lawsuit

If you ever defame me, PZ,nthe way you’ve defamed Harris, Condell, Luciano, Knight, Mehta, Coyne, Ali, Mason, Dawkins, Hitchens, Ngo, Saad, and numerous others, I will sue you so bad that you’re grandchildren are going to need lawyers!

It’s hard to defame an anonymous email stalker, but I’m willing to try.

Your Awfulnes
PZ you defend Antifa’s assault on Andy Ngo, you misrepresent Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, you call Michael Nugent an Irish wanker and accuse him of defending a haven for rapists, you call for a revolution to erase the stain of America, you allow commenters to use the words honkey, hetero, whitey, and mcstraighterson, you brand all police officers as bigots, you brand all conservatives as dishonest frauds who don’t think, but cling to prejudices and demand people accept them, you slander Steven Pinker as alt-right and a right-wing shitweasel, and you have the audacity to call Smalley and Silverman horrible! Fuck you, modern-day Caiaphas!

Bang does have a talent for picking the worst. I mean, really, have you seen what Silverman has been up to for the last few years? Yeesh, after seeing the names of all the people he’s defending, I’m so glad to see I’m definitely on the opposite side of that rift.

Caiaphas, though? I’m not a high priest of anything, I have no power or influence — I’m just a guy who writes words on a blog — and I’d be curious to know who he thinks the modern day Christ I’m scheming to have murdered might be. It can’t be Bang himself, because I already crushed him and ground him into the dirt of ignominy, way back in 2013, and all he can do now is wail impotently, with lots of exclamation points.

So now I’ve got a Bang to go with my Comma. I need to collect all the punctuation! I want lots of angry, upset email from Period, and Semicolon, and Mdash, and Ellipsis…

Why are we dawdling?

This fellow is talking about containing the Ebola virus, but the basic lesson are applicable to all epidemics.

One thing he doesn’t address is another emerging problem: the longer you wait, the more you let the virus proliferate, the more evolution you get — the more opportunities for the virus to mutate and act as a shifting target. We’re already seeing COVID-19 variants. It’s nothing to panic over yet, but the longer you wait, the greater the opportunity for the virus to hit the jackpot.

When the virus wins, we lose, you know.

I presume he’ll be arrested and tried for treason and extortion now?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The presidential candidate who infamously claimed he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters is putting his belief in his immunity to the test by openly trying to convince the Georgia secretary of state to change the election results to make him the winner. Just like that. It’s an attempted coup, right in front of our eyes, in a recorded phone call, and the response of a select subset of Republicans (like Cruz and Rubio and Rand) is to refuse to recognize the criminality, and instead conspire to overthrow the certification of the results in the Senate.

The Post reports: “President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.” In the call, Trump asked Raffensperger to change the certified vote that was subject to multiple recounts: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

In fact he threatened him. The Post reports, “During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.” Trump, sounding like a mobster as he often does, said, “That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Nice career, there Brad. Shame if anything happened to it.

You can listen to, or read the transcript of, Trump’s hour-long phone call.

It’s an embarrassing spectacle. Trump is whiny and desperate, a rat frantically scratching at the walls of his cage, accusing the FBI and everyone else involved in verifying the results dishonest and incompetent, bringing up every ridiculous conspiracy theory he found on Twitter, just lashing out absurdly. This was Trump’s Captain Queeg moment, and he’s caught in this recording rolling his ball bearings around and looking like a demented fool.

Trump and Meadows dominated the phone call, talking non-stop and mostly incoherently. When he could get a few words in edgewise, Raffensperger quietly shot down all of Trump’s accusations. Here’s a few words from the Georgia secretary of state.

Well, I listened to what the president has just said. President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won. And we don’t — I didn’t agree about the 200,000 number that you’d mentioned. I’ll go through that point by point.

What we have done is we gave our state Senate about one and a half hours of our time going through the election issue by issue and then on the state House, the government affairs committee, we gave them about two and a half hours of our time, going back point by point on all the issues of contention. And then just a few days ago, we met with our U.S. congressmen, Republican congressmen, and we gave them about two hours of our time talking about this past election. Going back, primarily what you’ve talked about here focused in on primarily, I believe, is the absentee ballot process. I don’t believe that you’re really questioning the Dominion machines. Because we did a hand re-tally, a 100 percent re-tally of all the ballots, and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result. So I guess we can probably take that off the table.

I don’t think there’s an issue about that.

Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised.

But they — I guess there was a person named Mr. Braynard who came to these meetings and presented data, and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong.

Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.

It’s a remarkable criminal performance by the president. It’s going to be our eternal shame if he is not prosecuted for his blatant abuse of power.

Showing their teeth as a sign of smug arrogance

Oh look! It’s Officer Friendly! He looks nice, all clean cut and smiling, like he belongs on a poster for community outreach.

He has a Parler account where he brags about wanting to murder nurses who give vaccines, and an assortment of liberal politicians. He wants to smash down their doors and shoot them.

He has quite the gun collection, naturally.

He has also been fired.

Oh look! It’s a cheerful white woman! She’s some kind of upper-level Karen, though. Notice the Trump hat, and the mask shielding her chin in case it explodes. It’s not obvious from the photo, but she got her picture snapped as she was saying, “Have a nice day, n****r!”

She had boarded a plane in Seattle and refused to wear a face mask during the flight. She just stood there grinning, forcing the airline to disembark all the other passengers so the police could kick them off the plane.

She and her friend have been banned for life from ever flying on Frontier Airlines.

Yeesh. Happy smiling white people are the scariest monsters of them all.

I haven’t cleaned the trinoc since when?

This morning I resolved to figure out what was going on with my muddy images from microscope. The first step was a general cleaning, and I discovered a real horror. Here’s the trinoc head for my Wild M3C:

See that tube on the right, for the camera? I looked down it. GAAAAAA. Dust and dirt and I swear, cobwebs all over. It’s a 30 year old microscope, and we’ve had microscope technicians come through every couple of years to do general maintenance on all the teaching scopes, but that tube may not have been cleaned ever in all that time. There’s a very important mirror down at the bottom of that L-shaped widget, and I think the only way I can get at it properly is to dismantle the whole device — there are a couple of tiny metric hex bolts holding it all together, and I guess I’m going to have to take it apart and try not to break everything.

Anyway, I did push the dirt around a little with a microfiber cloth, and it’s slightly better, but I think it’s filmed over with something that is fouling the image. I took a test photo of this little guy, and it’s an improvement, but still far from perfect. The image through the eyepieces is beautifully crisp, so I’m definitely blaming the problem on that little mirror and decades of neglect.

‘Ware spider below the fold!

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12 million?

The Nashville suicide bomber may have had some peculiar motivations.

NBC News reported Wednesday that investigators have obtained evidence that Anthony Quinn Warner, who died in the explosion, may have subscribed to a conspiracy theory that many of the world’s most powerful figures, from Barack Obama to the late Bob Hope, are actually evil, lizard-like extraterrestrials in disguise. Officials told NBC News that investigators, who have been questioning friends and acquaintances and searching for clues of a possible motive for the bombing, have become aware of statements Warner made about the lizard people conspiracy theory — though it wasn’t immediately clear what those statements were. Authorities also reported that Warner made statements to others about hunting possible aliens during previous camping trips he took in his RV.

The so-called lizard people conspiracy theory has taken a back seat to some of the newer and more widely publicized baseless beliefs that have come to dominate the conspiracy landscape in recent years. But in 2013, a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling found that 12 million Americans believed that the country was run by lizard people in suits.

I’m only going to believe in the lizard people if it turns out that there are 12 million of them, and they’re not the “world’s most powerful figures”. That’s a rumor contrived to distract us from who the lizard people really are.