Colonoscopy phase II: Completed!

I did it. I drank all 4 liters in 4 hours.The cat was clearly hoping to gnaw on my dying flesh, but all she got was a couple of dead soldiers.

I have to say…it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. God help me, I was even beginning to sort of half-like the flavor by the end, and was a little disappointed. There were all these warnings about how I might feel nauseous and it’s OK if I took a break…but it was relatively easy, didn’t even feel a twinge. Also, a bonus: I haven’t eaten in 24 hours now, but I’m so full of fluid that I’m not hungry in the slightest.

The worst part was just the volume. I slosh when I walk now.

The next step is to just get through the night. I’m supposed to drink another liter of water after midnight and before 6am, to be hydrated for the procedure.

Colonoscopy, Phase II: The nasty stuff

OK, I’ve begun guzzling down this solution.

(Note: evil cat lurking on windowsill, waiting for me to show a moment of weakness.)

I’m following some commenters’ suggestions — I made it up warm, to go into solution, chilled it, and am sucking it down with a straw. It’s not too bad so far. I wouldn’t drink this stuff by choice, as it’s mainly just thick and salty and flavorless, but I’m feeling like it’s doable right now. Of course, I’ve just started, and I have 4 liters to go.

I’ll post proof that I’ve finished it, if and when I finish it.

Milo’s fate

It’s so sad and pathetic, and exactly what he deserves. Alex Jones “stormed” a Google Fiber office to see the “big AI supermachine” while raving and wandering around and confusing everyone, and he brought along a friend who tittered and joined in all the feeble fun — Milo Yiannopoulos. The clerk they talked to didn’t recognize him, and just seemed baffled by it all. Then they get kicked out and go to a bar and start babbling about evil technology.

They recorded the whole thing. It’s 40 minutes long, but it gets boring fast. Watch it yourself. You won’t be impressed.

How to Logic

I am amused. This preacher gives everyone a lesson in Logic.

It’s amazing. I don’t like to get on the subject of evolution with atheists because they just freak out. They’re like, “Oh my! I can’t believe you don’t believe in evolution!” Why would I? It’s stupid. You have to actually defy science. “Oh, it’s scientific.” Well what about this? “I never thought of that. It’d really never even crossed my mind.”

Except he never tells us what the this is. Then he tells us that evolutionists are not taught to logic, not taught to reason. Then he thanks God he was in a home where [he] at least got taught to Logic.

Which immediately leads to a demonstration of Christian logic. Watch the whole thing. It’s hilarious.

You know what all these atheists have in common? Go on. You know what it is.

VIDEO GAMES!, he yells.

And HARRY POTTER!

They drink COKE ALL DAY!

And that’s why evolution is false. LOGIC!

It begins: colonoscopy time!

Four tiny little pills.

That’s bisacodyl, trade name Dulcolax. I just took them. My colonoscopy prep begins…NOW.

I’m also on a 24 hour fast, which shouldn’t be intolerable, since I’ve got padding to spare. Then this afternoon I’m supposed to guzzle down an awful lot of this stuff called NuLYTELY, which is basically just polyethylene glycol + salt, which doesn’t sound good.

I optimistically think I’ll be able to finish up my grading while doing all of this. Right? No problem? Reassure me!

Then bright and early tomorrow morning I get some good drugs, an anal probe, and a surprise. Will it be a good surprise, like a new kitchen set and an all-expenses paid vacation for two in Cabo? Or will it be a goat? It’s like “Let’s Make A Deal” in my colon!

More death and destruction

I’ve had my head down wrapping up my grading for the semester, and I look up and see…Israel has murdered over 60 Palestinian protesters this week. 60. Israeli snipers just gunned down human beings who were protesting their oppression.

And what triggered this latest round of violence? Among other things, Trump pointlessly decided to move the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, ignoring the tangled complex history of the place. Ivanka and Jared Kushner celebrated with Netanyahu in the courtyard while tanks rolled through Palestinian slums. The US brought in Robert Jeffress and John Hagee to bring an appropriate piety to the event — Jeffress and Hagee are notorious anti-semitic bigots who only want to inflame the Middle East to bring about their hateful prophecy that ends with all Jews dead or converted. (By the way, Trump also appointed gay-hating bigot Tony Perkins to head the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom…all the best people.)

Israel can get away with this because the US is an unquestioning supporter of all the evil that their country does. It’s time to take away the carte blanche — the US could be a force for change in Israeli policy, if we had the will, and if we could get rid of the self-appointed holy men who are trying to trigger Armageddon.

But also — Trump and his advisors once again reveal themselves to be bungling incompetents. It’s not hard to imagine a craftier kind of evil that got their way in the Middle East with some subtlety. That is not Trump. Trump is the wild boar, rotten and corrupt, stupidly raging through the world.

The poster child for the invulnerability of white men

It’s James Watson. He’s got a Nobel prize, which means he gets to lecture incompetently about black people and women, write a bestseller full of sexist garbage about Rosalind Franklin, and basically push all the boundaries in a regressive direction, and what happens? He gets publicly shamed one week, but the next week everyone invites him back to praise him. It’s kind of amazing. You would think some of this stuff would stick, but no. He was just recently lauded in a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor.

No, really, look at all the white people joining him on stage and applauding! I guess he did contribute to a global community, of sorts, mainly by driving a lot of people away.

You will be pleased to know that the circle of life continues unending, because after that bit of public shaming, Eric Lander has apologized, predictably. I further predict, though, that we only have to wait a few weeks, possibly a few months, and there will be another event at which Watson will be fulsomely praised by a group of oblivious white guys, to begin the cycle anew.

Maybe it’ll be his funeral, who knows? I’m pretty sure that event will not be the quiet, dignified interment attended by a few loving and bereaved family members, but an opportunity yet again for distinguished white men to ignore all the careers he’s stunted, institutions he’s poisoned, and racist garbage he’s peddled with the authority of his Nobel. I am not looking forward to that at all, and rather hope he lives forever with his reputation.

The scouring of Lake Sammamish

Most salmon are bold adventurers. They’re born in freshwater streams and lakes, spend a happy childhood frolicking in those relatively safe waters, and then strike out for the rich, salty waters of the sea where there’s far more food, and also far more predators. Orca and sea lions, to name a few, love to welcome the visitors to their maws.

But there always some who decide to stay at home. These are called kokanee salmon, and they stay in their freshwater homes all of their lives. They tend to be smaller than the relatives who go to sea, and they form their own unique population structures and gradually set themselves apart from others. I’ve always pictured them as the hobbits of the salmonid world, the comfortable homebodies.

There’s a price to pay, though, because their bucolic homes are at risk as humans intrude. Lake Sammamish in Washington state is one of those places where a population of kokanee live. It used to be an idyllic lake, surrounded by forests that sheltered it, but even when I was a kid I heard about the tribulations — the trees were cut down, the lake cabins went up, then the expanding suburbs of Seattle started to encroach. It’s just east of Bellevue and south of Redmond. It became surrounded by parking lots and city streets and office buildings, and the runoff from the regular rains was no longer filtered by the forests, but instead carried a toxic soup of engine oil and lawncare products right into the once-pristine habitat of the kokanee.

And now it’s worse. Five years ago, 18,000 kokanee lived in the lake; now it’s down to…twenty. Not 20,000, just 20. What has killed them?

County biologists are now tasked with studying the unexpected problem to determine what is causing the species to disappear. Parasites, bacteria, and other diseases are suspects. But a likely factor is the increase in high temperatures throughout the year. Recent years have been warmer, with hotter streaks. This warms the water and lowers oxygen levels for the fish.

Now the lesson you might take from this is don’t be a stay-at-home, get out there and explore the world and set broader horizons for yourself. Getting trapped in a single habitat is risky, and all those intrepid wanderers of the salmon world have escaped this peril on the high seas.

I would suggest an alternative interpretation, though. The lakes are warming first, but the oceans are also warming, more slowly and more irreversibly. The anadromous fish have a refuge now, but we humans are coming for them, too, and they’ve only delayed the inevitable. The real lesson is that all populations are vulnerable, that what we think of as a tiny, incremental change, like a few degrees of temperature rise, can lead to catastrophic collapse. They can be resilient and bounce back from some changes, but eventually they can no longer compensate and will fall apart with terrifying swiftness. From 18,000 to 20 within a few years — that’s an apocalypse for one special population of salmon.

Look what you made me do!

Wow, the New York Times opinion pages keep reminding me of what a craphole they’ve become. The latest entry is by Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, who appears to wag a finger at those dang liberals who keep pointing out that the electorate that voted Trump into office were mostly conservative white folks who were driven by racial bias.

Racist is pretty much the most damning label that can be slapped on anyone in America today, which means it should be applied firmly and carefully. Yet some people have cavalierly leveled the charge against huge numbers of Americans — specifically, the more than 60 million people who voted for Mr. Trump.

In their ranks are people who sincerely consider themselves not bigoted, who might be open to reconsidering ways they have done things for years, but who are likely to be put off if they feel smeared before that conversation even takes place.

“Consider themselves not bigoted”…well, now I’m convinced. They don’t believe the things they do and say, or that Trump does and says, are bigoted, therefore they aren’t. You know, that’s not how the universe works.

And worse, he’s arguing that if we point out the racist/sexist awfulness of the Trump administration, they’ll then become even more racist/sexist out of spite. Please stop. This isn’t how people operate. You don’t become something you despise because people call you a mean name — you might exaggerate what you really are, but you don’t become the antithesis of your beliefs.

All Alexander’s complaints are is a litany of abuser’s cliches: “You made me do hit you!” “It’s all your fault — if you did the things I told you to do, I wouldn’t be angry!” “I don’t like smacking you around, but how else will you learn?” “I’m not the bully, you are!”

Look at the horrible things liberals do.

Pressing a political view from the Oscar stage, declaring a conservative campus speaker unacceptable, flatly categorizing huge segments of the country as misguided — these reveal a tremendous intellectual and moral self-confidence that smacks of superiority. It’s one thing to police your own language and a very different one to police other people’s. The former can set an example. The latter is domineering.

Yes, we can disagree with conservatives, and we can say so. Don’t you believe in free speech?

It’s true, some speakers are unacceptable. If they want to come to campus and declare that lesbians, or Republicans, need to be murdered, we ought to shut that poison right down.

Obviously huge segments of the country are misguided — they elected a corrupt, incompetent charlatan to run the country. QED.

It is a very different thing when someone uses their speech to incite violence and hatred, but it’s not that much different from when you use your own speech to provoke violence and hatred. Alexander is basically arguing that it’s not liberals’ business if right-wingers spout racism and misogyny — that they get a free pass on doing that because they’re not liberals.

Sorry, guy, you’re an American, supposedly. There exists a commonality that requires some agreement on civil behavior.

The whole piece is an exercise in hypocrisy and false equivalency. You tell me one thing that liberals have done that is worse than bombing foreign countries, throwing away environmental regulations, poisoning the water in Flint with lead, fomenting a tragic rise in racism & hate crimes, separating immigrant mothers from their children, enabling the NRA to turn our country into a war zone, or wrecking the economy? If you do, I’ll probably suggest that yeah, we should stop that. It doesn’t mean you’ve got an excuse to continue destroying the United States and all the people within it.

The only good thing about that essay that once again my decision to never, ever give a penny to the New York Times was affirmed. Where do they dredge up these awful people?