It’s going to be a good day, I hope

I am no longer quarantined, so I have big plans for today.

  • I fed all the adult spiders yesterday. They missed me, I could tell, and were pleased to see dinner.
  • I’m going into the lab this morning to feed all the hundreds of babies. I’m more worried about them; the gap in their feeding schedule is more likely to have consequences on their rate of growth.
  • More egg sacs hatched while I was away! I have to sort out more spiderlings.
  • More egg sacs were made! It seems to be a common response at a certain age to start desperately producing a new generation.
  • I’m going to get a flu shot. Vaccines are good.
  • Late this afternoon, Mary and I are driving to Eau Claire, Wisconsin where my daughter and her family have moved. A 4-hour drive is manageable, and probably worth it to see our granddaughter (our grandson is 21 hours away, not a casual drive). I’ll be coming back on Sunday, but once again, my wife is leaving me for a few weeks because I guess she prefers Iliana’s company.

That’s it! That’s my day! Spiders and grandchildren, always a good plan.

Pray for the Preznit

O Lord, the President says he has COVID-19.

We thank you, Jesus, for this once compelling Donald to tell the truth. You did tell him not to lie this time, right? It’s a bit out of character for him, so if he actually has the disease for realz, it would be a kind of divine revelation, I think, a true sign from God. I am praying that his infection is real and true and a sign that he has been touched by the aerosolized Holy Spirit. Hallelujah!

Please, God, make sure he is touched hard.

Forgive him, Lord, for his lapse in listening to the sweet seductive whispers of Satan and getting tested in the first place. We know he’d be fine if he hadn’t tasted of the PCR Test of Knowledge of Positive and Negative Results, and the disease would have just disappeared if he hadn’t peeked. Please forgive him for testing your wisdom, too, and I’m praying real hard that you don’t cast him out of the Rose Garden for his weakness. The temptation was great, he was so desperate for a positive result, any result, of his presidency, and he reached for the one that was in his range.

Sweet Jesus, I beg you to not let him sicken and die, or to spread the plague among the Republican leadership, especially not to Mike Pence, who is surely so holy that he probably does not need chastisement. Oh, wait, Pence is getting tested, too? Never mind. Whip him with your sacred disease, for he surely knows that his suffering would be just.

O Lord, praise You for finally reaching the mind of this worthless <snerk> atheist, getting me down on my knees and beseeching the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to deliver <choke> Donald Trump of this totally imaginary disease that disappeared over the summer and is just like a little flu <hork> and was created by the Democrats conspiring with the Chinese if it were real, which it isn’t <HAAaaa!>.

No, Lord, I’m not sniggering. I’m…I’m…speaking in tongues, that’s the ticket. Now if you don’t mind, I have to get back to praying like a motherfucker for that wretched soul. It’s the least I can do.

Voter fraud! By Republicans Wohl and Burkman

We all know who really commits massive voter fraud — Republicans. Intimidation, gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, those are all in their bag of tricks. So it’s not at all surprising that Jacob Wohl and his pal Jack Burkman were robocalling to minority voters in Michigan to tell them that they’d be in trouble with the authorities if they exposed themselves by voting.

The voice on the call attributed to Wohl and Burkman attempts to trick listeners into not sending in mail-in ballots, falsely warning that the information would be used to track fugitives, collect on credit card debts, and enforce “mandatory vaccines.” The calls also told residents to “beware of vote by mail.”

What is surprising is that warrants have been issued for their arrest.

Conservative operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged on Thursday for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote in the November presidential election, Michigan authorities said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a slew of charges against Burkman, 54, and Wohl, 22, including conspiracy to commit an election law violation and using a computer to commit the crime of election law. Prosecutors allege the two political operatives were using a robocall system aimed at scaring Detroit voters away from using mail-in voting ballots. The calls, which were made in August, went out to nearly 12,000 Detroit residents.

Both Wohl and Burkman face four felony counts and a maximum sentence of 24 years in prison.

Oh I wish. This is the fate dim duo have been reaching for all these years, and they’ve consistently acted so stupidly that that they’re not likely to put up a reasonable defense. Please let them choose to be their own lawyers, please!

There’s nothing new about QAnon

It’s an old evil that keeps reappearing over and over again: blood libel, anti-semitism, witch hunts (the real ones, not the fevered persecution fantasies of terrible people), the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, government sponsored genocide, the McMartin preschool moral panic, satanic ritual abuse, and now…QAnon. They’re all the same. Talia Levin chronicles them all, and adds another organization to the ranks: The Republican party.

For now, QAnon remains in a curious position with regard to the formal party apparatus of the GOP. While QAnon adherents have been warmly lauded by the president—“I’ve heard that these are people who love our country,” he said—other elected Republicans have proceeded with more caution. The past few years have proved that there is an enormous amount the Republican Party is willing to absorb; cryptic clocks, coded messages, and the sating of Democratic appetites on child-flesh seem as yet just out of the bounds of propriety.

Nonetheless, the increasing popularity of the theory among the Republican base—which has exploded following the mixed and often conspiratorial messages proffered by the party during the Covid-19 pandemic—has meant that QAnon is no longer relegated to the fringes. The researcher Alex Kaplan, at Media Matters for America, has kept track of no less than 81 candidates for Congress in the 2020 cycle who have “endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content.” Twenty-four of those candidates have made it to the November ballot, by winning their primaries or fulfilling other requirements. (Kaplan has identified an additional 21 current or former candidates for state legislatures affiliated with QAnon.) A number seem poised to win their contests, ensuring a QAnon-believer presence amid the ranks of the political elite next year. One wonders how closely they will monitor their colleagues’ veins for signs that they are pulsing with adrenochrome, extracted from the pituitary glands of tortured children, and how such discoveries will affect bonhomie in the cloakroom.

The McMartin story is illustrative and familiar. I remember the insanity that gripped so many people over that one: there were secret tunnels under the preschool! Children were dragged down there and forced to participate in satanic and sexual rites! Babies were being horribly murdered as part of evil rituals! Of course, there were no tunnels — authorities actually dug up the grounds to search for them — and there was no evidence of tortured, abused children, or of any of the outlandish acts anyone was accused of. Yet lives were ruined and people were jailed and spent years in court, all over this unbelievable nonsense.

Now QAnon is up to the same tricks with claims of tunnels under pizza parlors and Democrats indulging in child trafficking so they can steal the blood of innocents. When will we learn that none of this is happening and these are lies peddled by fearmongers?

It’s always nice to see some good press for the university

We were written up by the Sierra Club.

The Morris Industrial School for Indians closed in 1909, and the federal government transferred the lands and buildings to the state of Minnesota. In doing so, the federal government included a stipulation that the next educational institution built there would provide Native students free tuition.

The exact reason for the tuition waiver is lost to history, but Kevin Whalen, a Morris professor who specializes in Indigenous education, theorizes that it has its origins in treaty law. Many treaties between the US government and Native tribes contained provisions that the government would provide education in return for land. He said, too, that there were some who assumed the treaty waiver probably wouldn’t matter in the long run: Many in the US government at that time expected Native populations to disappear or die out.

When the US government transferred the lands to Minnesota, the University of Minnesota began operating an agricultural boarding school on the site. In 1960, the UMN Morris campus replaced the boarding school, and the tuition waiver requirement carried on.

Now, UMN Morris is a Native American–serving Nontribal Institution, a designation given to colleges that have more than 10 percent Native students. With the tuition waiver program still in place, nearly one-quarter of Morris students are Native American, far above the national average.

Since it’s the Sierra Club, they also play up our environmental focus.

To Olson-Loy, it is no surprise that so many alumni end up working in sustainability or serving tribal communities, or both. Native culture and environmentalism are “embedded” in everything that they do at the school.

“You get this stuff because you graduated from Morris,” Olson-Loy said. “It’s in the water here.”

If I were 18 again, I’d want to come here.

Just another morning spent cleaning up the garbage

There’s a whole ugly underbelly to the blog — the software intercepts comments from banned individuals, or ones containing banned words, and a few innocent comments that it has a spasm over, and shuffles them off into spam and trash folders automatically. It’s a sewer down there, and I have to dive in now and then to salvage mistakes and rescue them. I avoid it for as long as I can because it’s not pleasant, and mostly I have to just skim a few hundred hidden comments, say “Yep, that’s shit”, and hit flush.

But today I found a few comments that were pretty vile and deserve to be exposed to the light of day before being destroyed. These are from Bovarchist, a troll from the slymepit, and it turns out he’s a racist COVID-19 denier who supports Trump.

Let’s bury it below the fold, OK?

[Read more…]

Yet more HP

Since I mentioned my my experience with one Lovecraft movie adaptation, here’s another I discovered as I was looking for some background noise for grading: The Color Out of Space. It’s auf Deutsch, with subtitles, and it’s not bad. Slow and creepy, which was perfect for something I didn’t want to be too distracting (that other recent adaptation of the same story with Nicholas Cage? No way. Way too loud and busy).

It’s surprising how many Lovecraft stories you can find that have been turned into movies.

Now…back to the exam.

A nasty little list — the JK Rowling fan club

There is a petition going around in support of awful transphobe JK Rowling. It’s remarkably stupid.

We are a group of writers, actors, directors, musicians, producers, comedians and artists who wish to speak in support of JK Rowling. She has been subjected to an onslaught of abuse that highlights an insidious authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media. Rowling has consistently shown herself to be an honourable and compassionate person and the appalling hashtag #RIPJKRowling is just the latest example of hate speech directed against her and other women that Twitter and other platforms enable and implicitly endorse.

We are signing this letter in the hope that if more people stand up against the targeting of women online, we might at least make it less acceptable to engage in it or profit from it.

We wish JK Rowling well and stand in solidarity with her.

I’m not sure what the purpose of the petition might be. It’s not urging any changes or action. It just wants everyone to stand on one side of a line in support of transphobia and a ridiculously wealthy writer.

It wants to stop people from profiting by disagreeing with JK Rowling, which is not a thing. Nobody is getting rich from pointing out her ugly ideas.

I don’t see how saying “Eww, ick, I won’t buy her books anymore” is authoritarian. It’s also not authoritarian if I look at that list of over 7000 signatories and think “What a bunch of assholes” and think poorly of them for their association.

Rowling has not been “honourable and compassionate” — she’s been a pious bigot — and if you regard standing in solidarity with a bigot is a commendable position, think again.

But yes, please, do go sign that useless petition if you agree with it. I love it when horrible people drop the mask and slap a clear label on their forehead.

Man, the UK is a weird place, where this flavor of prejudice is still socially approved. It’s bad when an American can say Britain is even worse than we are.