More spiders! But only trustworthy spiders, please

There has been a pleasant change to my in-box. I’m used to getting hate-mail and gay porn, but nowadays I get a flood of spider mail. People are taking photos of the spiders they’re noticing around their house and sending them to me! Some of you might think that’s worse, but I’m thrilled! It means I’m getting through to people and helping them appreciate biology more, which is exactly what I want to do. The only problem right now is that I’m getting so many photos that I can’t acknowledge them all — sorry, but I do like them.

Although I do have to mention one problem. I was sent a link to this article about an interesting spider phenomenon, which reports that “climate change is making spiders more aggressive.” As someone getting more interested in spider behavior, and planning some potential student projects around that kind of stuff I’ll be able to do over the winter. However, the article is about a paper by Jonathan Pruitt, and I have to remind you all — Jonathan Pruitt has been under suspicion of having fabricated data, and multiple papers have been retracted.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt—the holder of one of the prestigious Canada 150 Research Chairs—and it may get a lot worse. What began with questions about data in one of Pruitt’s papers has flared into a social media–fueled scandal in the small field of animal personality research, with dozens of papers on spiders and other invertebrates being scrutinized by scores of students, postdocs, and other co-authors for problematic data.

Already, two papers co-authored by Pruitt, now at McMaster University, have been retracted for data anomalies; Biology Letters is expected to expunge a third within days. And the more Pruitt’s co-authors look, the more potential data problems they find. All papers using data collected or curated by Pruitt, a highly productive researcher who specialized in social spiders, are coming under scrutiny and those in his field predict there will be many retractions. The furor has even earned a Twitter hashtag—#PruittData.

That guy is going to be tainting the field for years, and I can’t trust his work until it’s been replicated.

I’ve had about enough of 2020

John Lewis is dead. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for liver cancer. Canadians had been building monuments to Nazis after WWII. And, well, Portland, Oregon.

If this were an epic fantasy novel, this is the part where all hope is lost, the cause of goodness is doomed, despair overwhelms our brave heroes…and then, a shining silver army crests the hill, eagles swoop in, the evil fortress collapses, and the bad guys fall into lava-filled crevasses. Huzzah! Except this isn’t a fantasy novel, dammit.

Portland is the test case. This is where fascism is practicing its tactics.

A block west of Chapman Square, Pettibone and O’Shea bumped into a group of people who warned them that people in camouflage were driving around the area in unmarked minivans grabbing people off the street.

“So that was terrifying to hear,” Pettibone said.

They had barely made it half a block when an unmarked minivan pulled up in front of them.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.’”

Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.

The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.

Strange men in camo swooping in with unmarked civilian vehicles and hauling people away…where’s the transparency, due process, the goddamned justice? What’s to stop some Proud Boys or other paramilitary jagoffs doing the same thing? You know that they’re planning to spread this tactic to other cities next, and eventually, people getting picked up will be ‘disappeared’.

Perhaps you pin your hopes on the November elections. Just keep in mind that getting rid of Trump won’t instantly erase these people in power within the police and our terribly numerous federal offices that support monstrous thugs like those “police”. This is a new institution metastasizing and growing, and it won’t disappear even if you lop off the head.

No eagles. No shining elves. Get used to it.

There goes the neighborhood

The white supremacists have opened a church just down the road from me, about 40 minutes down the road, between Benson and Willmar. It’s another religion, Asatru. Here’s how the SPLC describes it:

A neo-Pagan religion drawing on images of fiercely proud, boar-hunting Norsemen and their white-skinned Aryan womenfolk is increasingly taking root among Skinheads, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists across the nation.

Asatrú leaders have opened prison ministries in at least five states recently, and their many jailed followers are heavily white supremacist.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

The Asatru Folk Assembly was formed by Stephen McNallen in 1994 as a successor to the Asatru Free Assembly, which dominated the Asatru scene in the United States from its inception in the 1970’s until its dissolution in 1986. Since it’s inception, the AFA has been the premier force in the development and practice of Asatru. The AFA is committed, today and everyday, to building strong and lasting communities and families, embracing traditional values and venerating our holy Gods.

In the late 1960’s, Stephen McNallen embraced the Gods and founded the modern religion of Asatru. In short order, Alsherjargothi McNallen started the Viking Brotherhood which quickly evolved into the Asatru Free Assembly. The Asatru Free Assembly began publishing “the Runestone” magazine as well as starting the first Asatru gatherings called Allthings.

Asatru grew and developed throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. In 1986 the Asatru Free Assembly was disbanded. In the late 1980’s and early 90’s the original values and aims of Asatru were growingly subverted by the decay of cultural marxism [emphasis added] Alsherjargothi McNallen knew he must once again take up the banner and save what his vision and initiative had put into motion. The Asatru Folk Assembly was founded from that day forward to be a solid spiritual force for our Ethnic European Folk and our Ethnic European Faith.

That “cultural marxism” remark is a dead giveaway — it’s a racist, right-wing organization.

For completeness sake, here’s a link to their website. I don’t recommend reading it, because it was designed to kill you. ALL-CAPS white text on a background photograph of light green grass and grey-white stones? OMG, that alone convinced me to embrace cultural marxism. My ancestral forebears apparently had no design sense at all.

Violent anarchists, where are your standards?

This list of dangerous activities committed by Portland anarchists is pitiful.

I do appreciate that every little bit of graffiti is tagged with the label “violent anarchist” (although I’m beginning to wonder if the Department of Homeland Security can actually define either of those two words, or if they just prefer to define them in ways that allow them to imprison citizens), but really, someone needs to look up the Haymarket Affair. Those were the days, when the violent committed violence, and the anarchists were anarchic, and policemen, rather than innocent bystanders, ended up dead or maimed.

I put up a “Black Lives Matter” sign in my yard, does that make me a “violent anarchist” now, or do I need to scribble those words on public property? Because I’ve got multiple sharpies in different colors, and I’m not afraid to use them.

By the way, we need a new slogan. I know ACAB, but we need something much more damning for officials of ICE and DHS, who have taken “bad” to incredible new levels.

Astroturfing education

Look at these poseurs.

The one person who looks to be of an age to be a student doesn’t look very happy to be out there. Those are terrible signs, too, wordy and hard to read and attempting to make scattershot points. “Teachers teach me best”, “e-learning is not for me”, “My kids need…in person learning 5 days a week”, yeah, the agenda is clear: get these damn kids out of my house every weekday. The real giveaway is that every sign insists on “masks optional” — why? It’s such a peculiar conservative shibboleth.

But here’s the deal. I agree with a lot of what they want. I’m not a fan of wearing a mask all day, and you probably aren’t, either. I think in-person teaching is best. Some students will thrive with remote teaching, the majority will have a less enlightening experience. I’m at a residential college, and I agree that immersion in the academic experience is valuable. I must also confess that remote teaching, even while I think it is less effective, requires twice as much work out of me. I’ve got 30 years worth of stuff all prepared and ready to go in a classroom and lab, and you’re telling me I have to start over from scratch? Yikes. I was miserable last spring, I expect to suffer some more this fall (but with a little more time to prepare and cushion the blow, I hope).

So here I am, already agreeing with the sentiments on their little, hard-to-read signs, and they’re not at all persuasive. They seem to have forgotten the whole reason we’re doing all this: it’s because we don’t want their kids to die or suffer life-long consequences of infection — the won’t be playing football with scarred lungs! — and we’re trying to find compromises to allow ongoing progress in their education while not increasing their risks of disease. The signs don’t mention any of that. They seem to be thinking that all of these changes in the schools are just to discomfit their conservative values, rather than protecting the kids.

What I also don’t understand is that, if my situation were different and I was the parent of school-aged kids again, I would be welcoming efforts to keep them out of the plague-pit. Just as every winter I’d make sure they had a warm coat and a scarf when they went out, I’d be nagging them to wear a mask. Just this week my wife and I made a trip to St Cloud to deliver a high-quality mask to our oldest boy. He’s a grown-ass man in his 30s, and we worry! On the flip side, my grown-ass daughter stitched up a mask and sent it to me last month. This bizarrely cavalier attitude about masks tells me one thing: they don’t believe in science and medicine. They probably believe in the two sticks lashed together behind them, and the American flag on their hat, but neither of those things will help them if their daughter gets COVID-19, or if she comes home from their “mask-optional” public school or church incubator and pass it on to them.

My sign would be a little pithier. “MY KIDS NEED TO BE HEALTHY.” I’d sacrifice everything to have that be true.

It was never about “state’s rights”

It’s always been about putting down those uppity Negroes and their race traitor friends. Just come out and admit it, Republicans.

As top federal law enforcement officials arrived in Oregon on Thursday, Gov. Kate Brown accused President Donald Trump of deploying federal officers to Portland to crack down on protesters as a way to boost his flailing reelection prospects.

In an uncharacteristically harsh statement, Brown responded to Trump’s deployment of federal officers to quell Portland’s protests against police violence. Those officers sent one demonstrator to the hospital July 11 with a munition to the face.

“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Brown said. “The president is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.”

Secret police roaming around in unmarked cars, shooting unarmed protesters in the face, with the state propaganda organ, Fox News, cheering them on. All those dystopian novels and video games sure failed to capture the flavor of the real thing, didn’t they?

Our educational system is detached from reality, I guess

The National Academies are recommending that the public schools open. I don’t know the details of their reasoning, since it would cost me $54 to order the publication, but there is a summary. I was boggled at their recommendations.

COVID-19 Precautions for Reopened Schools

The report also recommends schools and districts take the following precautions to protect staff and students:

  • Provide surgical masks for all teachers and staff. All students and staff should wear face masks. Younger children may have difficulty using face masks, but schools should encourage compliance.
  • Provide hand washing stations or hand sanitizer for all people who enter school buildings, minimize contact with shared surfaces, and increase regular surface cleaning.
  • Limit large gatherings of students, such as during assemblies, in the cafeteria, and overcrowding at school entrances, possibly by staggering arrival times.
  • Reorganize classrooms to enable physical distancing, such as by limiting class sizes or moving instruction to larger spaces. The report says cohorting, when a group of 10 students or less stay with the same staff as much as possible, is a promising strategy for physical distancing.
  • Prioritize cleaning, ventilation, and air filtration, while recognizing that these alone will not sufficiently lower the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
  • Create a culture of health and safety in every school, and enforce virus mitigation guidelines using positive approaches rather than by disciplining students.

The report says the cost of implementing these COVID-19 precautions will be very high, totaling approximately $1.8 million for a school district with eight school buildings and around 3,200 students. These costs are coming at a financially uncertain moment for many school districts, and could lead to funding shortfalls. While the size of the funding shortfall will depend on how well-resourced a school district is, many districts will be unable to afford implementing the entire suite of mitigation measures, potentially leaving students and staff in those districts at greater risk of infection.

Wow, let’s highlight the deep structural problems in the US educational system, shall we? They’re arguing that failure to open the schools would widen the inequities in our society, but $1.8 million for a typical school district, in a system stupidly funded by property taxes is going to fracture everything. The poor districts simply won’t be able to afford that, and the richer districts are often Republican suburbs where we can expect freak-outs over masks, among other things. This is a report straight out of fantasy-land. How “well-resourced” do they think our schools are?

Also, if they want to “create a culture of health and safety”, why are they opening schools at all? Everyone is just playing a grand game of chicken, careering towards catastrophe with a promise that they’ll swerve out of the way at the first sign of trouble. Playing chicken ain’t safety.

Grass spiders taking over

Today is the day I dread: I have to go into the lab and scrub fly bottles and do some general clean up. Responsibilities, yo. Shininess will ensue.

Also, we went on a mini-adventure last night, waiting until full darkness fell and then prowled around our house with a UV lamp and headlights. Unfortunately, I was disappointed — lots of active spiders, but they were all grass spiders. Grass spiders are all over the place, and they sort of take over every summer, but I just can’t get excited about them.

Check out the outside of your house — I bet you’ve got lots of funnel webs around with these shy guys hiding within them.

[Read more…]

Rub it in, Canada, why don’t you?

A few hundred miles north makes all the difference.

How did this happen?

The Canadian people have been less divided and more disciplined. Some provinces and territories could have locked down sooner, analysts say, but once measures were announced, they were strict, broadly uniform and widely followed.

“It was completely unexpected,” said Gary Kobinger, director of the Research Center on Infectious Diseases at Quebec’s Laval University. “I thought that people would not accept to stay home. … This also helped.”

Michael Gardam, chief of staff at Toronto’s Humber River Hospital, said provinces have mostly been “appropriately cautious” when easing restrictions, in contrast to those states that never imposed closures or stay-at-home orders or loosened controls prematurely.

Researchers at the University of Toronto studying reopenings found that restrictions in Yukon, a northern territory that had 11 ooronavirus cases and no deaths, are more stringent than those in Texas, where hospitalizations are surging.

Gerald Evans, a professor of medicine at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, said Canada’s single-payer national health-care system also confers “distinct” advantages, allowing people to seek care for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, without fear of out-of-pocket costs.

Analysts also point to differences in political leadership.

That last line? That’s the big one. Having a functional health care system is also important.