Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The current spider egg case I was hoping to see hatch out with a new generation of spiders isn’t looking so good. I opened it up to find way too many dead eggs, and then made a time lapse to see babies just fading away. It’s sad and miserable. I’m putting it here to document my dismal Christmas eve.
I’m gonna have to cancel Christmas. There is no reason for anyone to celebrate.
You know the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee is packed with Republican science denialists, right? We ought to be embarrassed to be a technological society with government oversight provided by a gang of corrupt, miseducated yahoos who promote policy based on lies. The chair of that committee, Lamar Smith, is chummy with the Heartland Institute, that right-wing think-tank rich people use to promote anti-environmental propaganda.
That makes this story particularly interesting: while denying climate change and aiding the fossil fuel industry, Lamar Smith is himself filthy rich from oil extracted from his Texas “ranch”.
From 1986 until 2016, Smith made at least $2.4 million and as much as $11.1 million through business dealings affiliated with the ranch. Members of Congress report their income in ranges and bundle the types of income they receive. That practice makes it difficult to track sources of payment, business arrangements and specific dollar amounts in receipts.
Hey, I have an idea.
Let’s prohibit the rich from holding high political office. Put a cap on it: you can’t run for a political office if your household income is higher than, say, five times the American median household income. That’s around $60K, so if you’re making more than $300K, you don’t get to run. You don’t get to simultaneously hold political power and economic power. That’s a separation of powers for an egalitarian state I could get behind.
It’s not a flawless suggestion. I can guess already that some might put their money in a temporary trust while they’re in office, so while they’re actually rich in reality, they’re not on paper. The Koch brothers wouldn’t be stopped from their practice of buying up proxy goons (<cough>Scott Walker) to do their dirty work for them. But really, don’t you think every decision Lamar Smith made in Congress was tainted by his financial ties?
Also, since our country was founded by a mob of Rich White Guys with a constitution full of compromises to help Rich White Guys, I can imagine that such a proposal would be considered unconstitutional for religious reasons, our worship of the Founding Fathers.
No ghastly snowmen in Morris this Christmas — the snow on the ground is patchy and thin, and we don’t expect more until the end of the week.
To look for spiders, of course. Mary and I were getting into the spirit of the season and were surveying the area for spiders this morning. We were heartened by the fact that she discovered a salticid in our house — I’d given up on looking, assuming that no self-respecting spider would be out and about in late December in Minnesota, but there it was. So we donned our headgear and started scrutinizing window frames and dusty corners, and we also trooped over to the science building on campus and checked out the hallways and the basement.
Mary caught me in dynamic action pose, staring at cobwebs.
Unfortunately, the spider population was sparse or in deep hiding. We found another salticid in my office, and the husks of a few dead pholcids (lots of pholcids thriving in our basement, though), but no Theridiidae. There were also a few abandoned funnel webs outside. One problem is that the university custodial staff do a really thorough job of demolishing cobwebs and making an inhospitable environment for spiders…and I don’t think there are very many insects to eat there, except maybe in relatively unreachable places, like crawlspaces.
It’s also cold outside. I’ll be interested to see how the population changes in the Spring.
And I just missed it, fortunately. There was a conference going on in Florida, and these were the headliners.
Jesus. And that’s not all. Also speaking at this event were Laura Ingraham, Nigel Farage, Sebastian Gorka, Dennis Prager, Jesse Watters, James O’Keefe, Wilbur Ross, and a mass of other shoggoths. It’s over now, but wow, the worst people on Earth were all gathered in one spot at the same time, and a meteor did not strike, a chasm did not yawn open, thunder and lightning did not scorch that locus of evil into a puddle of burning grease.
Which proves that there is a hell, but there is definitely no god.
I was bragging about Vera’s great skill in capturing multiple prey in minutes, so I thought I’d show you. Basically, whenever I put live flies in the spider’s vial (I feed her 3 times a week), she is off like a shot, immediately charging in to snare them.
She reminds me a lot of my cat that way.
It was tricky keeping her in frame and in focus, but I think you’ll get an idea of how spiders use their webbing to immobilize prey.
Also, I’m going to start doing everything “spider-style”.
He’s not going to be able to wiggle out of this one, although I’m sure he’ll try: Jordan Peterson is a climate change denialist. That link has all the evidence, direct quotes, tweets, etc. He praises some loon who thinks CO2 is steadily declining, leading to the extinction of all life on Earth in 2 million years, and that we ought to praise the heroic oil companies for releasing sequestered carbon and saving the planet. One of his sources is Richard Lindzen, prattling away in a Prager U video. He’s a fool on this subject, and many others.
But why would a well-educated college professor plunge so deeply into ignorance? The article has a good explanation.
But as his former mentor at UofT said, Peterson loves the rhetorical patterns of demagogues. He loves that when they said something and got roars of approval, they repeated it more loudly, and then honed in on the subset of things that got them the biggest roars.
That’s all Peterson is doing. Saying things that his audience loves to hear, reveling in their roars of approval, then repeating himself.
And since his audience is mostly younger, white, conservative men, and that audience has a strong tendency to be climate change deniers and to love trolling liberals, when he says ‘climate change stoopid’, they roar their approval.
Given that he makes a very good income out of this audience, just as Shapiro and Coulter do, this is actually smart, even if venal, ugly, and intellectually dishonest. But Peterson has shown every evidence of venality and intellectual dishonesty while spouting often ugly things — enforced monogamy anyone? — he later pretends were misunderstood for a couple of years. This is just par for the course.
Young, white, conservative men are the root of the problem, I suspect. Of a lot of problems. And it’s wealthy, older white men who are feeding them the poison.
Quick update: here’s a shiny new Parasteatoda postembryo. Nothing exciting happens in this video — it’s nothing but 3 minutes staring into the eyes of a baby spider. It twitches a bit. It waves a leg around, floppily. But so much is happening in its nervous system!
This is one member of the new clutch of Gwyneth’s grandchildren. I’ll be sorting them out this weekend and putting them in individual vials, and maybe by early March they’ll be making Gwyneth’s great-grandchildren.
