Why am I seeing variants of this same story everywhere?

You know the one…the one where a white American thinks you’re only allowed to speak English.

Xiara Mercado walked into a Starbucks in Hawaii dressed in her Air Force uniform, ordered her drink, and was casually talking on the phone to someone in Spanish. As she left, a woman tapped her on the shoulder — not to thank her for her service, but to scold her for speaking a language other than English.

“You shouldn’t be speaking Spanish, that’s not what that uniform represents,” the woman said, telling Mercado that her choice to speak Spanish in public was “distasteful.”

Where is this coming from? I’m an out of touch ivory tower guy from a culture where we think it’s fabulous when people are fluent in multiple languages. This resentment against people with different backgrounds feels wrong, like there’s a side of America that doesn’t want to believe that they are not the definition of reality.

It’s also weird to see this kind of demand in Hawai’i, which has an indigenous population as well as a substantial Asian population in addition to us colonizers. Isn’t it wrong to be speaking English, or Japanese, or Spanish there with this kind of attitude?

Cargo cult science in defense of right-wing bias

I found this article on Gateway Pundit. GP doesn’t get enough attention simply because it is run by the dumbest man on the internet and publishes the dumbest articles, so people tend to ignore it, except for its audience of very dumb people, but I thought I’d dredge up some of the sludge because this one pretends to be Science™. Why, just look at this illustration!

Image 1: Sample of the facial analysis results for one video frame out of about 120K frames analyzed.

That looks like a color glossy with circles and arrows, sure enough, and it’s probably got a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against Omar. It’s also got polygons! And multiple graphs! And lists! And colors! It’s just densely packed with barely legible information, and kind of reminds me of computer screens from science fiction movies in its generally uninterpretable and confusing layout, designed to bewilder with the awesome technology of it all.

You will not be surprised to learn that this heap of pseudoscientific, meaningless noise is being used to accuse Ilhan Omar of being a liar, since this is Gateway Pundit, after all.

An study of Ilhan Omar through facial, speech and virtual polygraph analysis shows Ilhan Omar is a pathological liar or just not being honest about her stories related to her immigration to the US!!!

Huh. Real polygraphs are useless and inaccurate, I wonder how reliable a virtual polygraph would be? All this “analysis” comes from a crank conspiracy theorist named Yaacov Apelbaum who has software that goes through video clips frame by frame and assigns emotional values to every facial expression, that counts blinks, “umms”, and pauses, and arrives at an interpretation defined by the user, that is, Yaacov Apelbaum. It’s garbage science, mangled by a biased kook, presented as fact.

Does this even count as real data?

Impressive multi-colored squiggles all over the chart, but the end result is a smear. She’s talking about an encounter her family had in Somalia with armed militia who shot up her home, and her stress about that event is being interpreted as proof that she is lying about everything. Worse, though, is that every change in her expression is twisted to mean she’s faking her story, rather than that she is recounting a traumatic incident in her past.

Remember this, everyone. If anything awful has happened to you, the only trustworthy to tell it to anyone is with a stony impassive face, no blinking, and with no pauses or stumbles or stutters, or it’s going to be judged by crackpots like Apelbaum or the goons at Gateway Pundit.

First instar, here we are!

If you compare this photo to yesterdays, you can see that yesterday the embryos were in the process of molting, with the prosoma free and the abdomen and legs still trapped in the old cuticle. Today the legs are free and the old cuticle is a shriveled white mass at the end of the abdomen.

We have lots of healthy looking babies from this clutch, which worries me…we’ve got three more egg cases that will probably hatch out this week, and we’re going to be swimming in baby spiders. I’m going to need a lot more flies, I think.

Here’s a closer look at its cute l’il baby face.

The Atheist Experience is going away

I’ve emailed the president of ACA, the vice president, and the board, and have received no response. We’ve discussed the matter on the FtB backchannel, and the comments there so far have been unanimous: the ACA is now incompatible with the mission of Freethoughtblogs. Therefore, and regretfully, I have disabled comments on the AXP blog and demoted all of their administrators. Nothing is irreversible yet, but I can’t imagine what kind of defense they could put up that would reverse our decision.

Ideally, they’ll contact me soon and we can make arrangements to transfer all of their blog content elsewhere. If the silence continues, I’ll simply archive everything and remove references to them from our main page by the end of this week.

There are many things we will not tolerate on any of the blogs here: racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are all grounds for ejection from the network. The ACA is guilty of the last.

Stop talking to billionaires, start listening to climate scientists

A gang of billionaires — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson — were asked why they were spending so much of their ill-gotten gains on space travel. They answered that they’d been inspired by the space programs of the 1960s, and then, the usual stupid bullshit.

“We humans have to go to space if we are going to continue to have a thriving civilisation. We’re in the process of destroying our planet. We’ve sent robotic probes to every planet in the solar system; this is the good one. We have to preserve this planet. We can do that using the resources of space.”

That’s Bezos. He seems to have a superficial understanding of the fact that we’re wrecking our home, but his excuse is that we can go get stuff from space to reduce our drain on the system, which is nonsense. There’s no oil in space. Mining is always going to be more difficult, expensive, and dangerous on asteroids. The kinds of resources that drive the material development of society are going to be more destructive to the environment if we haul in more of them. If you’re serious about saving Planet Earth, work to end capitalism and build sustainable, renewable institutions.

But I don’t give a damn what self-serving excuses greedy rich fucks give for their profligacy. Skip to the end where Michael Mann (not a billionaire) gives his rebuttal.

“I’ve confirmed that Mr Bezos carries the collected works of the great Carl Sagan on his website. I would advise that he read what Carl Sagan had to say on this topic,” says Michael Mann, a climate expert and professor of Earth sciences at Penn State University.

“Sagan loved space exploration as much as anyone, and he envisioned us eventually travelling out into the cosmos. But he harboured no illusions about the near-term prospects for making that happen. That’s why he devoted the latter decades of his life advocating for the protection of this planet.

“Mr Bezos needs to absorb the sage advice of Sagan and invest his funds in efforts – environmental preservation and, especially, action to avert catastrophic climate change – that might actually accomplish his stated goals.”

He’s polite not to mention that we should also end the concentration of wealth in the hands of people who only believe in concentrating wealth even more.

Farrell’s is no more

The last restaurant in that ice cream chain has closed. It was popular on the west coast when I was growing up, and was best known for the dishes of legendary size they would serve.

I can’t say that I went there very often, but I do remember that my friends took me there on my 21st birthday, because although I was now old enough, I couldn’t drink, since I had a biochemistry final the next day. Damn, but I was stodgy and responsible. Also, damn biochemistry, that was a tough course.

Do not touch the preemies!

There was some concern about a clutch of embryos that I accidentally removed from the egg sac prematurely. I was worried that they wouldn’t develop properly. Well, concerns allayed. They’re busy making legs just fine.

One catch, though, that I discovered to my horror. There’s a reason for that protective silk egg sac: at this age they’re just a delicate membrane over a ball of fluids, and they rupture at the slightest touch. I’m going to have to leave them alone until they’re tough enough to walk about on their own.

The Atheist Community of Austin has drifted out of sync with FtB

Tracie Harris, Jen Peeples & Clare Wuellner got on YouTube to discuss the right-ward slide of the Atheist Community of Austin, and their experiences with the transphobic takeover of that organization.

You may have noticed that FtB hosts The Atheist Experience, the blog for the call-in show of the ACA. Although I’m sure the blog isn’t a major contributor to their popularity — it’s primarily driven by YouTube traffic — it does get a good number of comments each week.

We’re currently discussing dropping the blog from our network in our backchannel, because it has drifted into incompatibility with our mission statement, which I’ll remind you is:

Freethoughtblogs is an open platform for freethought writers. We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and in addition, we recognize that the nonexistence of deities entails a greater commitment to human values, and in particular, an appreciation of human diversity and equality.

We are for feminism, against racism, for diversity, against inequity. Our network of blogs is designed to encourage independent thinking and individual autonomy — freethoughtblogs.com is a vehicle for giving vocal secularists a venue for discussion of their values and interests.

Transphobes do not belong here, since we stand for human diversity and equality, and the ACA has abandoned that principle. We’ve just begun the discussion with our bloggers, but we’d also welcome input from our readers, so leave comments here. Write fast because we’ll probably move fast!

Also, to Tracie, Jen, and Clare: it’s also been mentioned that you’d be fully compatible with our values, so if you were looking for a place to blog, let us know.

Home again from Duluth

I’m back! I have to say that, after drinking margaritas with Iris, the next best part was the spider tour, and in particular this one place, the Thompson Hill Information Center and Rest Area, which was magical.

I had a good feeling when I saw all the plants growing up right next to the building, and I was right. I went to the left behind the shrubbery and there in the corner, I saw this:

All those dark dots running down the center? Spiders. All Parasteatoda. I counted 9 in just this one little strip, and there were more and more all around the building, and then there were multiple picnic shelters that were home to many more. It was a spider bonanza!

Want to see a few? Look below the fold.

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