Almost tempted

I hear distant echoes of a possible Biden/Harris victory, but I refuse to believe it until the hammer drops and the evil orange turd is declared a loser, and fired. Until then, I’ll just read The Rude Pundit’s take.

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump’s appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was “Suffer, motherfucker.” If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seems to believe he will, this excruciating ballot count will have been worth it because Donald Fucking Trump was dragged down into the shit he created, watching it all fall apart. Sure, a swift ending would have been preferable, but this is so obviously tearing his tiny brain and his titanic ego to shreds that I’ll take it.

I’m almost tempted to tune into the preznit’s Twitter feed or to watch one of his press appearances just to see the meltdown in progress, but I shall resist. Get him out first, then let’s sweep out the rest of the slime.

But I’m not celebrating yet. I’ve witnessed too many years of Republican ratfucking.

Spiders!

It kills me that every time I see a splendid spider photo, I can’t share it here — too many people are freaked out by arachnophobia. I wish I could cure it by constantly rubbing more spiders in your faces, but I know that doesn’t work, so I’ll just gently point you in the direction of a couple of collections of gorgeous spiders, and you can choose to go look, if you want.

The Great Fox Spider has been rediscovered in Britain! These are related to wolf spiders, so you probably know what they look like, but it has the most wonderful mottled markings. I know some people are fans of the more garishly colorful spiders, like peacock jumpers, but I’ve come to appreciate the subtlety of the more variable and muted markings, like the ones I see on Parasteatoda. If you must do something bold, go for something simple and clean, like the distinctive swoosh on Steatoda borealis.

You want more variety? Check out Science Friday’s collection of spider photos. My favorite there is the Pirate Spider — there’s something about a gracile spider with delicate line art on its body and long bristling spikes on its legs that I find appealing. But if you’re into big bearish brute mygalomorphs, get an eyeful of that black purse-web spider with its massive chelicerae.

One more photo I wish I had: yesterday, Mary spotted a tiny juvenile cellar spider descending on a strand of silk, and she brought it to me (I’m desperate to see more live spiders, it’s gotten too cold for them). I tried to catch it by snaring its thread, but it got away fast before I could get my camera ready. We think it landed on my pants. So while I didn’t get a picture, I’ve got that going for me, that maybe a baby spider has taken up residency in my clothing. It’s too bad I’m not going to be able to do laundry, ever.

Man, it’d be easier to be a popular blogger if I had an obsession with cats.

The Woke are gonna get you!

The Right is trying their best to invent imaginary enemies. They’ve been whining about Antifa™ for a while now, worrying over their growing membership rolls, and how their leadership was scheming to overthrow everything they love, when antifa is actually nothing but a loose sentiment, with no formal structure and no hierarchy of bosses running the show. Conservatives just can’t imagine any movement without a rigid hierarchy, so they conjure one up in their fever dreams.

It makes me wonder…would the atheist movement be in better shape if no one had tried to pretend it was at all structured? No President of Atheism, no Four Horsemen, just people who thought for themselves? As soon as a pretense of leadership appeared, they formed a target and started exposing themselves and everything went downhill.

Anyway, the increasingly ridiculous James Lindsay has started blaming everything on a scary phantasm, The Woke or Wokeness.

He thinks that if Joe Biden gets the presidency, it will be an expansion of the Woke’s tentacles of power. Joe Biden. I don’t know. If I were trying to imagine a King of the Wokes, it wouldn’t be an old white centrist Democrat who has been grasping for the presidency for decades. He isn’t even a Jewish billionaire! How are you going to motivate your legion of neo-Nazis if the figurehead you’re targeting is as cluelessly Aryan as they are?

Lindsay also thinks The Woke are a concrete, formal organization with finances and funding run by religious fanatics.

Yeah, right. That’s simply palpable paranoia and projection, and it’s ironic that Lindsay himself is a bought and paid for tool of Michael O’Fallon, Catholic reactionary, and his Sovereign Nations grift.

I wonder…have I been triple-dipping as a Captain (ret.) of Atheism™, foot soldier of Antifa™, and now, Padre of Wokeism™? Why aren’t I rich yet? Maybe my salary is just late this decade. I hope it gets here in time for the Raging Twenties, coming soon!

Did native Americans have more equality 9000 years ago than we do now?

A pretty picture of a Peruvian hunter from 9000 years ago, bringing down vicuna with her atlatl and spear:

The image is based on the remains of the dead hunter, and an analysis of grave goods.

At Wilamaya Patjxa, an archaeological site in southern Peru, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a young woman whose people buried her with a hunters’ toolkit, including projectile points. The find prompted University of California Davis archaeologist Randall Haas and his colleagues to take a closer look at other Pleistocene and early Holocene hunters from around the Americas.

Their results may suggest that female hunters weren’t as rare as we thought. And that, in turn, reminds us that gender roles haven’t always been the same in every culture.

“The objects that accompany [people] in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life,” Haas and his colleagues wrote. And when one young woman died 9,000 years ago in what is now southern Peru, her people buried her with at least six stone spear tips of a type used in hunting large prey like deer and vicuña (a relative of the alpaca). The points seem to have been bundled along with a stone knife, sharp stone flakes, scraping tools, and ocher for tanning hides.

I also learned a new genetics fact! The bones were fragmentary, and the bits that you use for a morphological assessment of sex had crumbled to dust. But you can sex a skeleton by looking at the proteins that make up tooth enamel.

Tooth enamel contains proteins called amelogenins, which play a role in forming the enamel in the first place. The genes that produce these proteins are located on the X and Y chromosomes, and each version is slightly different. As a result, people who are genetically female have slightly different amelogenins than people who are genetically male. The proteins in the ancient hunter’s tooth enamel had a distinctly female signature, with no trace of the Y chromosome version.

The hunter from Wilamaya Patjxa is a young woman with the tools of an activity usually associated with men. If the objects people are buried with are the objects they used in life, then that raises some questions.

Maybe she was some weird outlier, I hear you ask. So they surveyed what was found at other grave sites, and it looks like a significant fraction of ancient hunters in the Western hemisphere happened to be women.

The hunter from Wilamaya Patjxa raises a similar question: was she the exception that proved the rule, or does her burial suggest that (in at least some ancient cultures) women were sometimes hunters? To help answer that question, Haas and his colleagues looked for other ancient people who had been buried with hunting tools. In published papers from archaeological sites across the Americas, they found 27 people at 18 different sites: 16 men and 11 women.

…the fact that so many apparent women turned up on that list is surprising. “Female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial,” wrote Haas and his colleagues. They suggest that as many as a third to half of women across the ancient Americas may have been actively involved in hunting.

The final line in this article is perfect.

Based on animal bones at Wilamaya Patjxa, large game like vicuña and taruca (a relative of deer) were extremely important to the community’s survival. In that case, hunting may have been an all-hands-on-deck activity. Haas and his colleagues also suggest that letting other members of a community keep an eye on the kids while the parents hunted might have freed more women up to bring home the bacon—or venison, in this case.

In other words, whether women hunted or fought probably depended on social factors, not biological ones.

I thought I ought to let David Futrelle know about this, since it makes the title of his blog even more ironic, but he beat me to it and has already posted about how She Hunted the Mammoth.

Suck it, Jordan Peterson

One of the agenda items in my pile of university meetings was a discussion of this bit of official University of Minnesota policy. The discussion was brought to the table by oSTEM@Morris, a new student club for LGBTQ+ students in the sciences.

Name, Gender Identity and Pronouns

  1. University members may, without being required to provide documentation: use a specified name that differs from the name listed on their legal documents, use a gender identity that differs from their legal sex and/or sex assigned at birth, and/or specify the pronouns and other gendered personal references used to refer to them.
  2. University members can determine whether, how, and with whom to share their specified names, gender identities, and/or pronouns or other gendered personal references used to refer to them.
  3. University members and units are expected to use the names, gender identities, and pronouns specified to them by other University members, except as legally required. University members and units are also expected to use other gendered personal references, if any, that are consistent with the gender identities and pronouns specified by University members.

Privacy

Units must take reasonable steps to maintain the privacy of the pronouns, gender identities, and legal sexes of University members that are maintained in University records. Only school officials with a legitimate educational interest in knowing the pronouns, gender identity and legal sex of a student maintained in University records should access, or be provided access to, this information. Only individuals whose work assignments reasonably require access to the pronouns, gender identity and legal sex of any other University member maintained in University records should access, or be provided access to, this information. In addition, where a University member has indicated a specified name, units should maintain the privacy of the University member’s legal name when possible.

Data Collection
Where possible, a University unit or member who is collecting information about University members’ legal sexes, sexes assigned at birth, and/or gender identities should explain at the time of collection the reason for collecting the information and how the information will be used. University members do not have to respond to requests to disclose their legal sex, sex assigned at birth, or gender identity, except when legally required or when there is a legitimate University-related reason for the request.

Programs, Activities and Facilities

  1. When the University provides housing, restrooms and locker rooms, it will provide individuals of all gender identities with the opportunity to access housing, restrooms and locker rooms.
  2. University members may access gender-specific facilities that correspond with their gender identities and may participate in University activities and programs consistent with their gender identities including, but not limited to, housing, restrooms, locker rooms, recreation services and activities, and camp programs.
  3. University members will not be required to use gender-specific facilities that are inconsistent with their gender identities, or to use gender-inclusive facilities: 1) because their legal sex differs from their gender identity, or 2) because of their gender expression.

The students also told us that we were already doing a good job supporting diversity in our classrooms! Yay, us! Always nice to have a happy item in the discussion.

There was no dissent or concern from our university faculty on the issues, so it’s also nice to have an agenda item that doesn’t drive endless argument, and instead has everyone giving a thumbs up to the policy and smoothly moving on.

By the way, oSTEM looks like an excellent organization. Check it out.

Eastern Oregon is where the losers dropped out of the Oregon Trail

Isn’t it strange how rural voters don’t understand the concept of democracy? There’s the idea of making a decision based on the consensus of a majority of the citizens that conflicts with their belief that they should always get their way, in spite of the desires of the vast majority. And that’s why two Oregon counties voted to recommend that someone study the possibility that they maybe secede from the state and join Idaho. While I agree that the rights of minority citizens must be protected (do you think they’d see what I did there?), and that there’s power in forming coalitions with shared values, it’s still a really stupid idea.

The rich part of Oregon is the western side of the state, and especially the city of Portland. They want to cut themselves off from that — I guarantee you that those two counties receive greater benefit from the state of Oregon than they contribute — and join with a poorer state with less influence. Just more cows and sheep. But cows and sheep don’t vote, and neither does acreage, another concept that hasn’t yet sunk into the selfish conservative mind.

But then, I guess we should expect these kinds of contradictions and failings in a nation founded by wealthy white male landowners virtue signaling about freedom and equality and justice while arranging the laws to benefit slave owners, and setting up a powerful Senate that favored large empty states with low populations over dense states with many people. Oregon ranchers just want to follow those poisonous traditions!

They probably also want their hispanic immigrant workers to count in inflating their population size (maybe only as 3/5 of a white person?) while preferring that they don’t actually vote. Although maybe that’s why central Oregon, with a larger immigrant worker population, didn’t sign on to this silly initiative.