I wouldn’t have recognized this spider from last week!

Before I left for the Twin Cities this weekend, I’d fed the spider colony fat juicy waxworms, and they fell upon them furiously. Today I checked on them, and boy were there a lot of bloated, indolent spiders lounging about in their webs, reluctant to even move. One surprise…I took a peek at Yara, who I’ve photographed before, and the change was striking, not just in her size, but in her pigment patterns.

Look how dark she is! This isn’t just the lighting, either — I tinkered a fair bit to get good illumination. Compare it to the previous photo, where she’s much lighter in color, and I would have said she was one of the more lightly pigmented members of the colony. Now I’m wondering how rapidly they can change color and what prompts it, especially since I’ve been following pigment development in the babies.

I was also looking at cobwebs today. There might be some potential for student projects here.

My wife went to Colorado and all I got was… #SpiderSunday

Mary has been away the last few weeks, helping Skatje and Kyle handle a ravening, demanding 15-month old, Iliana. She finally got back home last night, and she brought me a present! It was a spider. No one is surprised.

Well, I was, a little bit. Spiders show so much variation — I’m pretty sure this is Steatoda triangulosa, as it’s obviously a theridiidid, and it’s got that pretty pair of zig-zag stripes down the abdomen, but it’s so golden, and it’s got more zigs than I usually see in S. triangulosa here in Minnesota, and the patterns break up in a messy and different way. Species are so goddamned complicated. Why did I ever leave my nice, inbred, isolated zebrafish?

Anyway, she was guarding a nest in my daughter’s garage, and Mary brought back 6 egg sacs, all of the fluffy type we see with S. triangulosa. Most, probably all, are hatched out, but I’ll find out when I take them into the lab later.

Rainbows are so wicked and perverted

Kayla Kenney was expelled from a private Christian school for flaunting rainbows and sending unorthodox signals about her sexuality. Well, good for her! She should count herself lucky!

But was this really about a Christian school expelling a teenager for being gay? There’s a lawsuit pending, so the school is frantically trying to get the idea across that she was being kicked out for her naughty behavior, not for her sexual preferences.

In an interview earlier this month, Kimberly Alford said her daughter had been on probation since October for “some behavioral issues,” including cutting class and being caught with an e-cigarette. But while she said school administrators claimed “in a roundabout way” that the probation wasn’t about her daughter’s sexuality, there were signs that administrators were singling the teen out for her “perceived sexuality.”

Oh boy, he said she said. This will be an ugly one to settle in court.

However, I’m getting mixed signals from the Christians. The Christian school is trying to make the case that it was an expulsion for cutting class, but…I get email from the IFI, the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, and right now they are tying themselves in knots. On the one hand, they are accusing the Evil Mainstream Media of misrepresenting the case, arguing that the school did no wrong — she was a wicked girl who had so many disciplinary offenses that she needed to be punished. On the other hand, oh boy, this letter is a frothing mad rant about homosexuality as an offense against god.

God’s rainbow has not been weaponized—well, at least not by Christians. Homosexuals have appropriated it, perverted it, and weaponized it against Christians.

The rainbow symbolized God’s promise not to again destroy the earth by a flood, which he had just done because of the sinfulness of man. It’s a reminder of God’s covenant with man and of his grace and mercy. God loves his creation and at the same time detests much that fallen humans feel, desire, believe, think, and do. God is loving, merciful, holy, and just. And Judgment Day is coming. He has told us in his Word that he will one day judge the world—not by water but by fire—and those whose names are not written in the Book of Life, will be cast into the “lake of fire” for eternity.

That’s just the warmup. The Alford family consulted the heretic and radical inclusivist John Pavlovitz on the subject, and he declared that God loves gay people, and hoo boy, did that throw them into a rage.

Why, when theologically orthodox Christians affirm the clear words of Scripture on homosexuality or marriage, are they guilty of “claiming the moral high ground,” but when Pavlovitz cites Scripture to condemn them, he’s not guilty of “claiming the moral high ground”?

I wonder if Pavlovitz believes those who affirm biblical prohibitions of consensual adult incest, polygamy, or bestiality are guilty of “claiming the moral high ground” and of “completely lacking understanding of the empathetic heart of Jesus”?

They’re right, you know — Pavlovitz has no more authority to claim that he understands the intent of a cosmic deity than IFI does. We’re forced to rely on empathy and a common awareness of the needs of humans, no gods involved, to make that judgment, but I think it’s clear that Pavlovitz is expressing a humanist ideal gussied up with god-talk. No wonder they’re mad! They claim to be making a “righteous judgment” by condemning homosexuality as a sin.

Christians are called to judge with righteous judgment. We are not permitted to judge the eternal status of others or to judge hypocritically. But we are to judge between right and wrong action and to express those judgments. Scripture commands Christians to “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” How can we avoid participating in unfruitful works of darkness if we aren’t told what those are?

Unfortunately, this leads them to conclude that “regressives” (that is, the libs) are wrong to claim that schools shouldn’t expel students for being gay, that Christians have that right.

Regressives don’t object to private schools having rules of conduct that reflect moral beliefs. Nor do they object to private schools expelling students for violating rules of conduct. Regressives object to anyone holding the moral belief that homoerotic acts and relationships are immoral. Instead of trying to create the impression that this school expelled a teen for an innocently decorated cake, why don’t regressive news sites just be honest and say a teen was expelled for intentionally violating rules based on Scripture that leftists abhor.

But wait! The school’s defense is that they were impartially expelling a girl for bad behavior, not for her sexuality. IFI started out by saying that was right, that the MSM was wrong, but by the end of their screed they were so indignant about The Gays that they completely reversed that — now it’s all about how it was righteous to expel her for homoerotic acts (that is, having a rainbow on her sweater & birthday cake) because they are justified by Scripture to punish gays.

At least they finally wound up being honest. Still ugly, though.

Goodbye, Facebook friends. Up yours, Facebook.

I am all done with Facebook. As previously announced, I won’t be posting there any more, because it is a corrupt medium, managed by bad people for evil ends. I can no longer support the company with the tacit approval of my presence, so I am shutting down — my account is still there, and I’ve got a few people on an active project that I’ll still engage with on Messenger, but I won’t post anything new there, and as people forget I exist on Facebook, I’ll eventually kill those as well.

I’m not totally disappearing. I’ll still have an active presence in these places:

Pharyngula on Freethoughtblogs
@PZMyers on Twitter
@PZMyers@Octodon.social on Mastodon
PZMyers on MeWe
The Freethoughtblogs server on Discord
PZMyers on Instagram
The Pharyngula IRC channel

Before you tell me that those are flawed, imperfect media too, I agree — I’m just shedding the worst of the worst to start. Maybe eventually I’ll end up in a remote mountain cave, disconnected and unshackled from the bonds of the material world. But not yet!

Picard

I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, and I have mixed feelings.

On the positive side, the humanism is just drooling out of the side of the box. He argues for saving all lives after the enemy’s star went nova, pushes for rescuing even the enemies of the federation, the Romulans, and there’s even some bit about synthetic humans (like Data) and their rights. I like the idea of a show that digs deep into ethical concerns.

On the negative side, there was the usual pointless Trekkie pseudoscience contrived on the spot. Data had a daughter? Who was synthetic, but biological? And the process always creates twins? And Data’s knowledge can be reconstructed from a single neuron? There are teleporting Romulans who want to kill one daughter, but there’s another on a Borg ship? It was too much. Now Picard is somehow getting back on a ship and soaring off to right some wrongs or something, or contrive excuses to bring back old Star Trek actors for guest spots. It’s the first episode, and it’s already too artificial and complicated.

I’ll probably check out a future episode to see how it shakes out, but it looks to me like the stuff I like about Star Trek is going to be overwhelmed by the stuff I detest about Star Trek.

A dignified white Christian

Check out these tweets from a resident of Kent, Washington, where I grew up.

One of Kayryakoff’s tweets called Mexicans one of the “ridiculous immature vile cruel and extremely evil cultures that need to be genocided!”

Another called Mormonism “an illegally recognized religion that is covertly operating for the Muslim nation.”

“Jews dont belong in Christian countries what do they not understand?” read one tweet. “I only associate with dignified Christian people & more so focus on white Christian people We are the success in the world!” she tweeted on another occasion.

Would you believe she was a first grade teacher? Would you believe she got her job despite having two misdemeanor battery convictions on her record? That she terrorized her students? OK, I know all my fellow Washingtonians will be unsurprised by one fact: she’s a California transplant.

But get this: she wasn’t fired. She was shuffled out of her school, she was demoted to being a PE teacher (those were always the worst), and reassigned to a different elementary school. She also shut down her Twitter account; maybe she’s on Gab now?

Puerto Rico leads the way!

The people of Puerto Rico have set up a guillotine in front of the governor’s mansion.

Excellent. Unfortunately, it’s only symbolic.

That would be a good message to send to the Republican in Washington DC, too.