Yeah, that’s me, the tough guy.
What I don’t usually mention is that Mom is a gentle sweetie and not at all intimidating, and she didn’t raise me to be a tough guy. It doesn’t show, does it?
Do something nice for your mom today, if you have one. I would, but I have been judged unfit for the company of women and am in solitary confinement today.
Oh. Ray Comfort is still making his dishonest videos? Here’s the trailer for the latest, title “Amazing Athiest [sp]: A journey of two atheists”.
Do you know those two guys? Are they supposed to be representative atheists? You know Comfort’s schtick: he confronts random people in the street who probably haven’t thought much about the subject he’s asking about, and then puts up a gloating video claiming that “hurr, hurr, hurr — look at these people who aren’t professional debaters.” Or, as the blurb says, “See their inconsistencies and struggles as they attempt to justify their blind faith.” This looks to be more of the same.
I’ll skip it.
What a pleasant story to read! We’re all familiar with the entirely fictional story of Lord of the Flies, in which ship-wrecked boys revert to the natural savagery of all humans and set up a brutal regime and start oppressing and killing each other. It makes for a good story, I guess. Except that similar events happened for real in 1965, with a half-dozen 13-16 year old boys ‘borrowing’ a fishing boat, a storm disabling the boat, and then the boys were stranded on a rocky island in the Pacific for over a year. It all turned out differently.
Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.
Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”
They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
I imagine it could have gone badly if there’d been even one psychopath in the group, but then there would have been a year of chaos and self-destruction instead, and the fishing boat that eventually rescued them would have found nothing but bones and maybe some starving kids. Instead, we see that natural selection favored the population that cooperated, shared labor, and protected the weak and injured.
It’s curious that this optimistic true story of survival fell into obscurity, while the more pessimistic, cynical, and fictional story by William Golding sold 10s of millions of copies.
Yikes. My social media are squirming with the maggoty indignation of cranks lit up by this pseudo-documentary, Plandemic, which is actually nothing but an overlong trailer that was live on YouTube and Facebook briefly, before it got shot down and banned for spreading misinformation. I’m not going to encourage anyone to watch it — I haven’t bothered myself — but will instead tell you all to read Orac’s thorough takedown, “Judy Mikovits in Plandemic: An antivax conspiracy theorist becomes a COVID-19 grifter”. I’d heard enough about the lies in Plandemic before this, but Orac puts them all in one place.
Unfortunately, I also read the comments.
Double-yikes. The anti-vax, science-denialist crowd is out in full force in that comment thread. The conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites (???) are howling. It’s kind of informative to see the bad arguments they’re making, but I’m sure glad we don’t have any of those people here.
Trivia fact: Edgar Rice Burroughs, in addition to his Tarzan and Mars books, also wrote a handful of pulp stories about Venus, which was called Amtor by the natives, and his intrepid hero, Carson Napier. They were a little different from the Mars series, where John Carter was teleported to Mars by some form of astral projection, in that Napier was a rocket pilot flying to Mars who made a tiny error in his calculation and crash-landed on Venus instead. Then it lapses into the usual formulaic adventure story where Napier finds a Princess (there’s always a princess), falls in love, and the two of them bumble about needing to rescue each other from pirates and communists. Amtor, by the way, is covered by oceans and continents of giant trees, and the cloud cover keeps the planet cool and liveable, except when the clouds briefly break and a brutal sun sets everything on fire beneath the gap.
Unfortunately, the real Venus has surface temperatures of 450°C and a dense and acidic atmosphere. Nothing lives there.
This recent modeling of the Venerian atmosphere suggests that there may have been a long period of relative coolth in the planet’s history. The runaway greenhouse effect wouldn’t have occurred until a period of intense volcanic activity that produced LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces, released even more CO2, and then the temperatures soared.
That surge occurred less than a billion years ago, so it’s easy to imagine warm (mean temperature of around ~20°C, compared to Earth’s current ~15°C) oceans in which life could have evolved before global warming slammed the hammer down and burnt the soup.
I think Carson Napier’s navigation error had to have been off by more than I thought: 150 million kilometers and a billion years. Even then he wouldn’t have found princesses, but at best the equivalent of single-celled prokaryotes, which would have been far more interesting than mere Amtorian princesses.
I’ve got one I could spare.
I had a suggestion to help with her general pukiness — to provide her with a puzzle feeder to giver something to do. So I did. How did she react? She puked all over it. When I discovered that, I just left and went for a long walk around town.
When I got back, she’d left me a colossal wad of slimy puke in the middle of the kitchen floor.
First come, first served, she’s yours.
Currently making the rounds:
I was suspicious, though. It’s too good to be true. So I snooped about, and found the original on the ADL website.
OK, now, really — who thought they needed to edit the original sign to make it less evil and more obviously stupid? That was a waste of effort. Just an unretouched photo of these clowns in their costumes with their traitor’s flags and their blatant anti-semitism is appalling enough, don’t you think?
Here’s what I do for a little relaxation: I stare at maps. My summer research is a bit constrained right now, so I’ve been planning alternatives, like making day-trips to neglected local spots to do spider-hunting. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of spiders is limited — I know a fair bit about a few species that live in the niches I’ve concentrated on, but relatively little about a lot of species that are in other environments. I need to correct that.
So I’ve been looking at maps and planning lovely little trips. My wife and I will pack the car with a picnic lunch, collecting tubes, my camera, and a drone (for scouting out locations), we’ll dress in long pants and long sleeves and boots, douse ourselves with DEET, and take off in the morning for a leisurely drive with frequent stops. We’ll look for parks and lakes and streams and abandoned farms and tromp around looking for spiders, photographing many, capturing a few, and heading back home in the late afternoon.
It sounds delightful to me. Right now all I can do is look at maps and plan these jaunts until I get all my grades submitted and recover my faithful companion, but it’s nice, and perfect for the pandemic season, because I plan to avoid people and visit places that spiders would like, and spiders don’t carry the virus. I look at the roads and the satellite views that reveal brushy areas where no one in their right mind would want to go — well, some of them might look great to hunters and fisherpeople, and that’s OK, I can share — and look forward to getting dirty and scratched and bug-bitten.
I also keep an eye on the local news. Oh, the Grass Lake restoration project is winding up? I bet there are spiders there. The university is constructing an ecostation? Spider country!
My original plans for the summer were a bit more lab-centered, and I still have some lab projects to maintain, but I’ve been thinking about how to adapt to our new circumstances, and I think I can find happiness in a summer in the weeds.
This story is a bit on the nose.
Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month shutdown of the park. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, even though the velociraptors are still on the loose, we will be opening Jurassic Park back up to the public!
I mean, it really hammers on the comparison. You can’t miss it. No one will accuse it of subtlety.
As some of you know, Dr. Ian Malcolm, our lead safety consultant, had recommended that we wait until the velociraptors have been located and contained before reopening the park, so he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the news. I believe his exact words were “you were so preoccupied with whether you could reopen the park, you didn’t stop to think whether you should.” Talk about a guy on a high horse.
That said, you’ll be pleased to know that, rather than double down on our containment efforts, we’ve decided to dissolve the velociraptor containment task force altogether, and focus instead on how we can get people back into the park as quickly as possible. So rather than concentrating on so-called life-saving measures like “staying in designated safe areas” or “masking your scent,” we’ll be focusing on the details that will get our customers really excited, like a wider selection of fun hats, a pterodactyl-shaped gondola ride to the top of the island, and a brand new Gordon Ramsay designed menu at the Cretaceous Cafe.
Unfortunately, I find the thought of teeny-tiny invisible viruses flourishing in almost invisible droplets of water in your breath to be far more terrifying than dog-sized reptiles with pointy sharp teeth. I’d rather the streets were overrun with Cretaceous carnivores — they’d be much more manageable, and the first people they’d eat are those assholes out protesting about stay-at-home orders.
Lung & oral cancers are nature’s way of cleaning out the barn.
Tell me if this strategy sounds familiar.
That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and Warren, and their balloons collapsed so fast they sounded like a fast wet fart. Would you believe Wohl and Burkman have done it again? Only you may not have heard about it because the press doesn’t believe them anymore.
“He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair. He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs,” Rodriguez wrote of her fictional meeting with Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. After detailing some ineffective hotel bed wrestling and managing to flee with her honor intact, Rodriguez closed with the statement, “Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story.”
And that would have been that—until Saturday’s email, which included Andrade telling me, “The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” taken when they were romantically involved. Also, that Wohl and Burkman “had me do something like this…back in January.”
To put the frosting on the cake, though, Andrade called Wohl and Burkman to express her unhappiness with her role, and most wonderfully, recorded the entire call, so we get to see the two con artists rationalizing their lies. It’s something.
“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”
Andrade counters that he and Wohl are not taking COVID-19 seriously. “It’s not just any virus. I mean, it’s a huge deal….I think you guys think it’s something made up, and it’s not.”
“Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often,” Burkman counters. “How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it’s real, it’s a positive thing, for God’s sake.”
“So, what? Survival of the fittest?” Andrade asks, a bit more pique in her voice. (The sense you are dealing with people who have an enthusiasm for eugenics can do that.) But Wohl’s not having it.
“Diana, look, can you just do this for me?” he says. “Can you just keep your mouth shut and just…just do it for me.”
Uh-oh. They said the quiet part of the Republican strategy out loud. It’s OK if the virus kills 400,000 people, because half of them are old and the other half are “the bottom of society”.
They don’t seem to have noticed that they themselves are the dregs.
