Elric!

Someone thinks they can make a television show about a demon-worshipping, god-killing, inbred albino warrior-wizard with a drug habit and incestuous lust for his cousin, who slaughters his family in dynastic warfare? That would be awesome.

Of course, it’s only at the stage where some writers have bought the rights and are shopping it around. At some point, the networks will recognize how deeply weird and heretical the source material is, and they’ll reject it from further consideration or they’ll butcher it beyond recognition.

Maybe they should try selling Moorcock’s Behold the Man around. That would be a hoot. The heart attacks in network boardrooms would clear a lot of deadwood, anyway.

Every family dies a different way

Michael Chabon’s father died slowly, over the course of days and weeks, and he sat by his bedside writing Star Trek scripts. Now he’s written about how he felt during that long lingering time.

I’d tried talking aloud to my father a few times in the hours since he’d lost consciousness, telling him all the things that, I’d read, you were supposed to tell a dying parent. There was never any trace of a response. No twitch of an eye or a cheek, no ghost of a tender or rueful smile. I wanted to believe that he’d heard me, heard that I loved him, that I forgave him, that I was thankful to him for having taught me to love so many of the things I loved most, “Star Trek” among them, but it felt like throwing a wish and a penny into a dry fountain. My father and I had already done all the talking we were ever going to do.

He made me think of my father’s death, which was different in every way possible. No slow decline, no confinement to bed, no slipping into unconsciousness for my family. The last time I heard his voice was in a phone call on Christmas day — I talked to my mother for a while, she asked if I wanted to talk to my father, and “Sure,” I said. She called out to him, where he was working on Christmas dinner, a very Dad thing for him to do, and all I heard in the distance was a strangled yell and “GOD. DAMNED. CAT!” and Mom laughed and said he can’t come to the phone right now.

So those were my father’s last words to me. I have tried to live by them ever since.

The next morning my mother called to say he had died in his sleep. I missed my chance to talk back and tell him all the things Chabon said to his father. Oh well. We were never estranged, there was never any conflict between us, so I guess we just lived those things instead.

I’d still like to have that conversation, though. God damned cat.

Someone is unfamiliar with the idea of pareidolia

You know what it is.

pareidolia
[ˌperēˈdōlēə]
NOUN
the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines.
“there could be a mysterious stone coffin on Mars, or, more likely, it’s just the latest example of pareidolia”

We’ve all seen shapes in clouds, or Jesus on a pita, but Mars seems to be a magnet for this phenomenon. This week, William Romoser, a well-known entomologist, presented a paper at the Entomology society meetings in St Louis titled “Does insect/arthropod biodiversity extend beyond earth?”

There is ample evidence to answer the question posed by the title in the affirmative. For several years, I have been engaged in study of the NASA-JPL photographs transmitted to Earth from the surface vehicles sent to explore Mars, Curiosity Rover in particular. These photos are available to the public via the internet. In this poster, I present and discuss numerous examples of insect/arthropod-like forms (fossil & living) found in Mars rover photos. Examples include insect-like forms displaying apparent diversity, clearly recognizable insect/arthropod anatomical features, and flight. Evidence of a fossil reptile-like (serpentine) form and reptile-like forms preying on insect-like forms is also presented. Each example is documented. These findings provide a compelling basis for further study and raise many important questions.

This is the new hobby for old cranks: poring over blurry photographs from exotic places, or odd-shaped rocks, and then leaping to the grand conclusion that it looks vaguely like X, therefore X lives in this place. Remember Mark McMenamin? He found fossil vertebrae, thought they were arranged in a pattern, and decided they were art created by an ancient kraken. Mars is a great font of pareidolia, with Schiaparelli thinking he saw canals, then Percival Lowell thinking likewise, and then there was the Face on Mars, which produced an explosion of very silly books and web pages in the 80s.

Now this guy is spotting all kinds of insects in still photos from the Mars rovers.

“Once a clear image of a given form was identified and described, it was useful in facilitating recognition of other less clear, but none-the-less valid, images of the same basic form,” Romoser said. “An exoskeleton and jointed appendages are sufficient to establish identification as an arthropod. Three body regions, a single pair of antennae, and six legs are traditionally sufficient to establish identification as ‘insect’ on Earth. These characteristics should likewise be valid to identify an organism on Mars as insect-like. On these bases, arthropodan, insect-like forms can be seen in the Mars rover photos.”

Distinct flight behavior was evident in many images, Romoser said. These creatures loosely resemble bumble bees or carpenter bees on Earth. Other images show these “bees” appearing to shelter or nest in caves. And others show a fossilized creature that resembles a snake.

I’ll let you be the judge. Do these look like Martian insects to you?

They look like fuzzily photographed rocks with circles and arrows and labels scribbled on them to me.

Besides, as everyone knows, there aren’t any beetles on Mars — they’re from Liverpool. Mars is supposed to have spiders.

We’re going to have to pay more attention to Nick Fuentes now

It’s painful, but he really is one of the worst of these right-wing monsters. Watch this smug, slimy scumbag execute standard old holocaust denial with a smile on his face.

Ick.

Ungrateful wretches

Today was a feeding day, and since I’m trying to include some variety in their diet, I gave the spiders mealworms. Nice plump mealworms, conveniently placed directly in their webs.

They all turned up their noses, or what passes for noses, at them. They didn’t exhibit the slightest interest, which was disappointing after their spectacular voraciousness when fed waxworms last week. I don’t know whether it’s that they’re still full, or they just don’t like mealworms, or they’re just being obstreperous. I told them, “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?” and even that left them cold and uncaring.

So no pudding today, ladies.

All right. One spider is nibbling on the delicious meal I prepared. Gilly gets pudding!

The pudding being served today is Jellied Beetle Grub Guts. I hear it’s very popular in England.

And now, a word from the Illinois Patriarchy Institute

These guys are always flooding my mailbox with their hand-wringing screeds about the gays and the trans and the non-god-fearing Americans, and lately they’ve been particularly wound up. Why? Because Chick-fil-A Betrays Principles and Faithful Customers. If you can’t trust a soulless giant capitalist chicken-killing and meat-processing restaurant to bash the gays, what are you going to do?

In a stunning act of betrayal, Chick-fil-A’s charitable foundation, the Chick-fil-A Foundation, has announced it will no longer donate to the Salvation Army, Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), or Paul Anderson Youth Home (PAYH). Though Chick-fil-A has not publicly acknowledged the reason for its betrayal, everyone knows what it is. Chick-fil-A is attempting to curry favor with the “LGBTQ+” community that is shredding our social fabric. This policy shift constitutes a cowardly betrayal of Chick-fil-A’s Christian ethos and its Christian customers who have stood by Chick-fil-A through all its trials at the hands of legions of supporters of sexual deviance. #LoveofMoney

Broods of vipers identifying as apostles of justice, equality, tolerance, diversity, inclusivity, and compassion have been protesting and maligning Chick-fil-A since 2012 when Dan Truett Cathy, chairman and chief executive officer, made some public statements in an interview with the Baptist Press supporting true marriage and opposing the legal recognition of homosexual unions as marriages. After homosexuals got wind of Cathy’s theologically orthodox and unremarkable statements, some part of hell broke loose and raged against Chick-fil-A. Fortunately for Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Christians turned out en masse all across the country to show their support with their time and money for Cathy’s stand for truth.

Wow. I haven’t been called a brood of vipers in days, and usually it’s by angry atheists on an anti-SJW crusade. It’s good to see a Christian organization returning to its roots and its heritage of hatred, and the True Meaning of the words of the Bible.

They should have waited, though. Don’t you worry, Chick-fil-A still hates those non-Christian sexual deviants!

Chick-fil-A says it will now focus its charitable efforts in three areas: education, homelessness, and hunger. But when asked more specifically, it did not go so far as to say that it will no longer donate to organizations that oppose LGBTQ rights.

“No organization will be excluded from future consideration–faith-based or non-faith-based,” Chick-fil-A President and COO Tim Tassopoulos said in a statement to VICE.

See? The door is still open for a policy of bigotry. You just have to cater to their desire for dollars, as Jesus would expect you to do. This change is only motivated by money, as they see all those potential customers walking by their doors on the way to Popeye’s Chicken. That’s really all this is, a cautious ploy to expand their customer base in the face of competition.

Despite attempts to move away from politics, the company has been unable to shake its homophobic reputation. Just last month, Chick-fil-A was forced to close its very first location in the U.K. after only eight days following protests and pressure from groups promoting LGBTQ rights.

Disclosure: I can’t claim to have boycotted Chick-fil-A, because I’ve never eaten there, never been tempted even before they revealed their bigotry. And now I don’t eat there because of the vegetarian thing.

I have eaten at Popeye’s, decades ago, and it was really good. I guess if I had to break down and eat a dead bird, I’d prefer to go there anyway, no matter what openly Christian Chick-fil-A said to make amends. Although I really doubt that Popeye’s management is full of secularists and atheists.

In my day, we called it “Helter Skelter”

If you’re looking for a good summary of accelerationism and neo-reactionism, Zack Beauchamp provides it. It’s all about increasing chaos until the whole system breaks down, so the wealthy or ruthless can pick up the pieces. I knew the name of Charles Manson would come up somewhere in there.

Their main inspiration on how exactly to “accelerate” this process came from James Mason, a previously unheralded neo-Nazi writer who produced a newsletter called Siege in the 1980s. In Siege, Mason uses the collapse of George Lincoln Rockwell’s political strategy to claim that any attempt to work inside the parameters of normal politics was doomed to failure. A better approach, he argued, was pioneered by serial killer Charles Manson — a correspondent of Mason’s who deeply influenced the theories developed in Siege.

The murders committed by Manson and his disciples served, in his mind, as a model of decentralized violent action that would be hard for authorities to stop. If neo-Nazis emulated Manson on an individual level, killed and tortured select targets, eventually they could help spur a white uprising against the system — accelerate the pace of a societal collapse already made inevitable by Jewish and non-white corruption, and set the stage for its replacement by a Fourth Reich.

It’s really just crude violence and destruction dressed up in pretentious bullshit by people like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin. People get all worked up about post-modernism, but if you really want to see a spectacular word salad of absurd nonsense, try reading anything by Nick Land. It’s hard to believe, but his pseudo-philosophical babbling actually appeals to some people.

But then, some people think Jordan Peterson has anything worthwhile to say, so there’s no accounting for taste. You’d think they’d reflexively draw the line at a philosophy of world-wide chaos, mass murder, and a restoration of feudalism, though.

Starving the colleges

Here’s a simple fact everyone ought to know, but most don’t.

Most Americans believe state spending for public universities and colleges has, in fact, increased or at least held steady over the last 10 years, according to a new survey by American Public Media.

They’re wrong. States have collectively scaled back their annual higher education funding by $9 billion during that time, when adjusted for inflation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, reports.

No, really! Universities don’t want to raise tuition, ever — we think our mission is important enough that we ought to be providing college educations for free — but every year our administrators have to go before the state congress and outright beg for support, and almost every year the politicians see the education budget as something they can raid for other pet projects. Every tuition increase is a response to declining state support.

I didn’t know this, though.

And the United States remains 13th in the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds who have some kind of college or university credential, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development says.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago we had the most highly educated population in the world,” said Kevin Reilly, former president of the University of Wisconsin System, who now runs a program at the Association of Governing Boards called the Guardians Initiative to help university trustees push back against public and political skepticism about the value of higher education.

Falling behind the likes of South Korea, Canada and Russia in the proportion of people with degrees “is not a trend we can tolerate if we’re going to continue to be competitive in a global knowledge economy,” said Reilly. “More and more of our people are going to have to be competent at higher and higher levels of knowledge and skills. We’re really damaging the future of our competitiveness and I would argue even our security.”

“Make America Great Again” seems to translate to “Make America Stupid Again”. Or maybe stupider? I don’t know, can’t grammar properly anymore. Brain slipping away. Feed me knowledge before I become a Republican.