How about if we take all the billionaires’ money?

I think it’s a rule that all rich people have to have their “let them eat cake” moment before they’re trundled away to the guillotine. Here’s Bill Gates’ moment.

Speaking at a forum in New York with New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates came off as far from enthusiastic about Warren 2020. Speaking about the wealth tax, Gates said there’s a limit to what he would be willing to pay.

“If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine,” Gates said. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”

Let’s do a little math — very little math. Bill Gates has money worth $107 billion. Take away $100 billion, that’s … $7 billion left over. Oh, how will he live on a mere $7 billion? If he were to live another 70 years, that would leave him with only $100 million dollars a year to live on! How could he possibly stretch his budget to survive on that pittance?

What he’d really lose his unwarranted clout. He loves having that power and influence, able to lecture people on education policy and economics, despite being a college dropout from a wealthy family who made his money by luck and ruthless capitalism.

Elizabeth Warren has already responded to reassure him that her wealth tax wouldn’t cost him anywhere near $100 billion. I’m disappointed in her. Why not? Go ahead, take 99% of the money Gates didn’t earn.

Gates isn’t done, though. He’s got another foot to stuff in his mouth.

Then, Sorkin posed a scenario which, for the moment, is a hypothetical — albeit one which appears to have more of a chance of happening by the day. The Times writer asked Gates who he would back in a general election: Warren or President Donald Trump.

And despite being a vocal Trump critic in the past, Gates would not commit to supporting Warren to defeat the president.

Good god. He’s so selfish about his absurd excess of wealth that he’d consider supporting an incompetent, treacherous buffoon for the presidency, rather than getting taxed 6%? I was considering wheeling the guillotine away and just confiscating his ill-gotten riches, but now, sorry, guillotine is back in play.

You want more fun? Here’s a billionaire hedge fund manager, the classic capitalist parasite, breaking down in tears at the thought of the government deciding how to distribute his money, skimmed off the labor of workers. He was planning to leave half of it to his kids, who had done even less to earn it.

That guy, Leon Cooperman, seriously believes he worked hard enough to earn $3 billion. Let’s disillusion him.

Seriously, billionaires weeping at the thought of a Warren presidency is the best advertisement for her ever. I think Sanders would make them cry just as hard. Let’s get one of those two into office!

By the way, did you know that after retiring, despite his carefully calibrated charitable donations, Bill Gates’ net worth has been going up? Somehow, he manages to dole out money to his own foundations in such a way that none of it actually costs him anything, while claiming to be a generous philanthropist.

Here’s some more fun with math.

Gates has to know this, or he’s even less deserving of his wealth than I thought.

I am giving an exam today

You know what that means, boys and girls? A sudden flood of email from students letting me know they are sick today, or have some other major conflict, and can I please take it on Friday, and gosh I’m sorry. And I get so mad.

Because I want to write back to them and tell them to never ever feel bad for being sick or stressed. I’m not here to make anyone miserable or force them learn stuff while I hold a whip over their head, and if you tell me you’re struggling or have encountered unavoidable problems, my job is to say OK…what can I do to help you get through this? If it just means giving you a few days to overcome, I’ll always say yes. Just do it. Don’t apologize.

Now we are working within a system here, and that system says I have to evaluate you and say something about how well you’ve mastered the material in the course. I also know that I have to incentivize keeping everyone focused and working steadily to keep up with the material, because last-minute cramming is a terrible way to learn, but ultimately all I care about is that you know it all well enough to be competent in the next course in the curriculum, and that you at some point graduate with broad knowledge of biology. That’s my goal! Making you take an exam while sick is not part of that.

Some people do have this idea that I’m supposed to train you in servility and fitting into capitalism with bosses telling you what to do. I’m not a boss. That’s not my vision of the teacher-student relationship. If I’m told I’m doing students no favor for their future in the workplace by cutting them some slack, that isn’t telling me I need to change — it says we need to change the world.

So get better and go do that.

In case you’re wondering where all the spiders go in the winter…

Easy. They’re in my house.

It’s been consistently cool out here in Minnesota — temperatures have been right around 0°C, we’ve had a little light rain, a little snow. It’s not a happy time for spiders outdoors, and not at all good for their prey. The mosquitos are mostly dead! I see an occasional fly, but mostly the local arthropods are busy diapausing or retired to refugia or migrating away, while some are in their larval stages hiding away in lakes and streams. It’s not easy being a spider right now.

Mary of the piercing eyes spotted these little ones spinning away in out of the way places in our kitchen, though. They’re tiny, little more than dots, but they’d put up barely visible webs under a windowsill, possibly hoping to catch the rare fruit fly from the produce we keep on the counter. I had to zoom in with my camera lens to recognize them, and yes, they’re Parasteatoda.

They’re lucky, now they get to go into my lab where they’ll get a more reliable diet.

P.S. They’re not all in my house. There are some hanging out in your house, too.

Phillip Johnson is dead

The last time I talked about Phillip Johnson it was to say I am honestly happy that Phillip Johnson is still alive — I wanted him to witness the ignominious decline of his baby, Intelligent Design creationism, and live to suffer with it’s irrelevancy and routine rejection and abysmal failure to challenge science at all. I said then:

I make no bones about the fact that I consider Johnson to be an intellectual criminal.

The reason is simple: Jason Rosenhouse is right. Intelligent Design is dead. I want Johnson to suffer the pain and frustration of knowing that he has wasted his life, and that he’ll be remembered as a failure.

His book was a cobbled together hodge-podge of specious reasoning, using legal logic to raise unwarranted doubts over concepts he couldn’t understand. He was no scientist; neither are his followers. He was a pettifogging lawyer coming off a divorce and a midlife crisis who tried to find redemption by lying for Jesus. It didn’t work.

I guess, then, I should now be sad that Johnson has joined his movement. Phillip Johnson is dead, but I’m not. I don’t care. He died as Intelligent Design did, barely remarked, recognized mainly by his cult sympathizers and the people who fought against his nonsense. We’ll just remember, as Larry Moran said, that Johnson was the very best of the Intelligent Design creationists.

There are no victories

There were elections yesterday, and the results were encouraging. Virginia flipped their state senate, and is now a Democratic majority state. Kentucky threw out their lickspittle Republican governor. This is all good news.

I’m seeing lots of happy liberals and leftists gleefully declaring that McConnell must be pissing his pants, Trump must be trembling in fear, Republicans must be dreading next year’s election. I just want to say…no, they’re not. We’re the ones who should be worried.

McConnell isn’t afraid. He’s scheming right now: what laws can he abuse, what palms can he grease, what arms can he twist, what rats need fucking, to make sure there is no November 2019 repeat in 2020. Trump is less subtle. He’s angry and is thinking about what minorities he can slander, what country he can attack, and who will be his scapegoat. He’s going to lash out and it’s going to get ugly.

Remember, when fighting sewer rats, backing them into a corner doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing to victory now.

Meet a few of my Texas gals

This morning I set up some housing for a few of my new Texas imports, moving them out of their cramped vials and into big roomy spaces with cardboard frames. As usual, they were a bit frantic and were scurrying all over the place at first — I found the easiest way to shift them was to let them come out onto my hand, and then hold them gently over their new digs, and often they’d just drop a dragline and rappel down into their new home, and if they didn’t, a gentle nudge with a paintbrush would send them on their way.

They’re still a little bit stressed. After running around in circles for a bit, they found a comfy corner of the frame and just hunkered down and refused to move further. I left them a few flies and then took some photos before leaving them alone to settle in. I assume they’ll saturate the space with webbing and then hang somewhere comfortable, but that’ll take a few days.

Here are a few photos of them sullenly occupying a corner. They are all Steatoda triangulosa.

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No respite from the gloom. Must be winter for sure.

Oh no. Even warm cozy Earth isn’t safe from the nihilism of the void. Here’s a story about parasitic wasps that lay their eggs on spiders. It’s another horrible tale of zombie arthropods, their endocrine system hijacked by wasp larvae to force them to build a nice silken web to house the wasp.

After the web is spun, the nearly mature wasp overlord injects the spider with poison, finally killing it. But in terms of free will, Eberhard says, the spider has been dead all along.

“Once the spider has been stung by the female wasp, it’s effectively reproductively dead,” Eberhard tells Newscripts. “It’s maybe going to live for another couple of weeks, but it now has that egg on it, and later the larva, and so it’s done for.”

Unfortunately for the spider, it doesn’t end with death. After killing the spider, the newly hatched wasp regurgitates digestive fluid onto the host body and sucks out its insides for nutrients. Dracula, surely, would be proud.

We live in a dark universe, obviously.