He is a very stupid man

I don’t even need to name him, you all know who I am talking about. He’s challenging Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Jasmine Crockett to an IQ test, because he’s decided that the are ‘low IQ individuals’, on some basis. He’s also very racist.

You give her an IQ test. Have her pass the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. I took– those are really hard. They’re really aptitude tests, I guess in a certain way. But, they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think Jasmine– the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to ten and twenty and twenty five, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.

He did not take an IQ test. He took a basic cognitive exam, which is very, very easy to pass, unless you have serious cognitive deficits. I don’t know that he passed it as he claims, because he has obvious age-related cognitive problems, and I doubt that he’s in better mental shape than either of two young healthy women.

He’s making these claims while on a diplomatic trip to Japan, embarrassing us all.

Good god, how much longer do we have to suffer with this fool in charge?

History repeats itself, again

It is my habit to read quietly before bed every night, and I vary between cheesy sci-fi and classic literature. Lately I’ve been re-reading (after a long interval) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, because I figured I’d better catch up on my anti-white American history before it gets banned by the Republicans.

It is not an uplifting story.

It is a story of continuous betrayal and horrific murder, and white Americans do not emerge as heroic or noble. The Indians are also not particularly heroic — they just want to live their lives, and sporadically explode in violent reprisals, and are also capable of horrific, monstrous acts. White America, though, has the numbers and the guns and the willingness to use them that leads to the carving up and seizure of Indian lands, and the confinement of tribal peoples to reservations. It turns out that Americans are not good or honorable people.

For example, here’s an excerpt, an account of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

Robert Bent, who was riding unwillingly with Colonel Chivington, said that when they came in sight of the camp “I saw the American flag waving and heard Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and there they were huddled—men, women, and children. This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen. When the troops fired, the Indians ran, some of the men into their lodges, probably to get their arms. … I think there were six hundred Indians in all. I think there were thirty-five braves and some old men, about sixty in all … the rest of the men were away from camp, hunting. … After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. I saw one squaw lying on the bank whose leg had been broken by a shell; a soldier came up to her with a drawn saber; she raised her arm to protect herself, when he struck, breaking her arm; she rolled over and raised her other arm, when he struck, breaking it, and then left her without killing her. There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out. … I saw a little girl about five years of age who had been hid in the sand; two soldiers discovered her, drew their pistols and shot her, and then pulled her out of the sand by the arm. I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.”

This Chivington SOB is a truly monstrous villain.

In a public speech made in Denver not long before this massacre [the Sand Creek massacre] Colonel Chivington advocated the killing and scalping of all Indians, even infants. Nits make lice!” he declared.

The book was written in the context of the Vietnam War and it’s clear that we learned nothing in the intervening century. But I kept thinking, not of Vietnam, but of Israel. They learned well from us.

You are trying to occupy a land inhabited by indigenous people, who you outgun and confine? Ethics be damned, you can murder them at will, because your manifest destiny gives you that right, and any resistance is an excuse to slaughter. There are just too many parallels.

I would hope that we could learn from our past and have sense of humility and shame. I fear though, that we are going to outsource our history to PragerU and we’ll learn nothing.

Not all astronauts know much about geology

The latest xkcd makes the point that science changes over time, and that the early days of space flight preceded the widespread acceptance of plate tectonics. Ha ha, there were astronauts in the 1960s who hadn’t yet caught up on the latest ideas in geology, and thought the continents were static.

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
—xkcd

How far we’ve come. Now, in the 2020s, we have astronauts who think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the continents zipped into their current position at hyperspeed, four thousand years ago.

Somebody should tell Ken Ham that most astronauts weren’t selected for their scientific knowledge, and that he is intentionally selecting from the bottom of the spaceman barrel.

The silence of the worms

I’ve been experimenting with feeding regimens for the spiders. What I’ve been doing is feeding twice a week with an excess of fruit flies until I feel like they’re big enough for mealworms. My feelings about their readiness for larger food are not reliable, and lately I’ve been seeing that these spiders are eager to hunt big game. Maybe I’ve been underestimating them.

So I lined up 15 containers with juvenile black widows, ranging from little guys about 5mm long to roughly twice that, and put a mealworm in each one. Then I left them alone, going to a meeting for an hour. I came back to a horrible sight.

Mealworms are like the cows or sheep of the invertebrate feedstock. They are quiet grazers that eat our vegetable scraps and don’t move very fast. I came back to all these containers of frantic, squirming, wiggling worms, they were writhing, flailing as if in agony. The spiders, even the smallest, were darting in to deliver small bites. A full grown spider would inject enough venom to kill quickly, within minutes, but these little fellows required multiple attacks to get a slow kill. It was ugly, and I felt sorry for the worms.

I came back the next day. All of them were dead, but in various states of digestion, from drained to blackening. My little carnivores are fierce and ruthless.

I’m going to have to change up my feeding schedule, switching from Drosophila, which are apparently little more than quick snacks to them, to mealworms as soon as they’ve got fangs big enough to puncture the cuticle. I should be able to cut back feeding from twice a week to once a week. I’ll just have to swallow my guilt.

The era of destruction

Deservedly or not, Harvard is the premiere research institution in the US, internationally renowned, magnificently endowed, so it’s shocking that Trump is demolishing our research capabilities nationwide.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.

We’re used to thinking that STEM departments are safe…but no more.

The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.

The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.

This isn’t just Harvard — universities across the country are tightening their belts to the point that whole disciplines are getting chopped. How do we recover from this?

All Trump knows how to do is destroy, just like he’s demolishing the east wing of the White House.

That’s symbolic of how this administration will be seen by history: a flag waving over a wrecking crew.

I waited too long to prepare for winter

I am resting at home, weak and weary, my knees knackered, because I have been on a quest that sent me staggering all over town. A quest that has ended in failure.

Where it began was the weather, freezing cold, bitter and blustery, conjoined with the fact that my wife labors every night until almost the midnight hour, when she comes home, tired and cold, to fall into bed seeking warmth and rest. I, on the other hand, am already in bed at that hour, and I am well insulated and tending to run hot; I’ve nestled down in snug pocket of sheets, blanket, and quilt, a cozy burrow of comfortable warmth, sleeping contentedly. My wife naturally reaches over to my side of the bed with feet like blocks of ice and fingers like icicles. This is a shocking trauma every night.

I decided to implement an easy, inexpensive solution: a pair of hot water bottles, low-tech and simple. The idea being that they would warm her side of the bed before she got in, she would clutch one to her chilly breast, and rest her frosty toes on the other, sparing me the frosty nightly surprise. Surely, this would be an easy quest!

First I visited the pharmacy on the far side of town. They were pleasant and helpful, and not so helpfully pointed out the shelf where these items were normally available. It is the onset of winter in Minnesota, unsurprisingly, the shelf was empty.

I crossed the street to Dollar Tree, it’s aisles cluttered with boxes and its staff hard at work taking down the Halloween supplies and putting up Christmas decorations. “Already?” I thought, but asked a clerk anyway. They had no idea if they ever had such things.

Disappointed, I trudged up the street to Homestead, a Walmart wanna-be run by a local fundamentalist church. I was reluctant, because I have been in this store before, and it hurts my brain…but at least they weren’t taking down the Halloween displays, because they never put them up in the first place, and their Christmas displays were just the Jesus merchandise they always have on show. They have a housewares section and a pharmacy, so maybe they would serve my needs, even as the constant tinkly worship music battered at my ears, frustrated at my lack of soul. I wandered about, before asking clerk if they had water bottles. “NO!” she exclaimed with outraged confidence, as if she feared I had sinful plans with such a diabolical device.

My last hope was the Ace Hardware store in town, which has an eclectic collection of miscellaneous household gear, but alas, no hot water bottles.

So I have come home, a frustrated failure, and turned to Amazon to order from the wicked Bezos.

They will not arrive until Friday.

I dread tonight, when in the darkness I hear the door open at midnight, and I will lie trembling in bed for the ice queen to slip between the sheets and reach over with Arctic claws to rip down my spine.