Time to go to…work. I have to go into my lab/office and get my class in order for the start of Fall term in two weeks.
Oh well. Next year at this time I’ll be retired, and nobody can tell me to go to work ever again. (Also, my “work” is enjoyable stuff anyway.)
As I was walking into work, I spotted a bouquet that reflects my feelings perfectly.
A little more time, and those flowers will be buried in snow, and I won’t have to look at them anymore.
The fundamental feature of Christianity is that its believers are all committed to the idea they are especially beloved by a super-being, which makes them particularly insufferable. Mel Gibson is the pinnacle of this brand of intrinsic narcissism.
Mel Gibson: I was not chosen by men, nor by Hollywood, nor by the powers of this world.
I was chosen by God.
The Lord put a fire in my bones and a cross on my shoulders.
I will carry it until my last breath.
No darkness, no enemy of this age will stop what Heaven has already decided.
Betty Bowers called it: “Is there a more potent brand of blasphemy than a shitty narcissist claiming they are the way they are all because of God?”
Don’t watch Mel Gibson movies.
They are a demonstrably effective repellent of bad ideas. You don’t even need to use them! Just wheel them into an area and watch the parasites scamper away.
Mary and I thought our yard Argiope was looking lonely, so we visited a local breeding ground and snatched up a couple more. This is a new female, already adapting to life in our yard.
We also grabbed a couple of smaller Argiope, which might be males, or are simply too young to have the markings. They’re lurking somewhere in the underbrush.
We’ve got a few monarch chrysalides around the house, but we’ve also noticed a lot of mortality among the caterpillars, which is normal. This morning we spotted this caterpillar, motionless and dying, clinging to the side of the house.
There’s something horrible stuck to its side. I don’t know what it is, so I present it to you, all you caterpillar MDs. Any diagnosis?
Did you know that God explicitly bestowed the ability to generate explosive diarrhea on Cyclospora, and that this is true science?
I just threw this together outside, never mind the screeching squirrels. They’re more pleasant to listen to than Georgia Purdom.
That you can use your home computer as a spider incubator?
I keep several containers of Parasteatoda on top of my Mac Mini, where they thrive in the warmth and provide endless hours of entertainment while I’m working. All four of these contain egg sacs, and three of the four have hatched out this morning!
The Shadow League
How exciting! I’d like to say thank you for the honor, I appreciate the efforts of all the little people who have lofted me to join this distinguished company, and is there a stipend, an honorarium, some token that would help me buy groceries?
Of course there isn’t. The Shadow League
is an imaginary organization invented by Calvin Smith of AiG Canada, and it only pays in shadow money, which is as imaginary as his shadowy god. What this really is is a truckload of bullshit dumped in my lap, on this morning I had intended to work on my nefarious plan of instruction in cell biology, which begins in two weeks. I don’t really have time to deal with all the Christian nonsense in this video right now.
While I appreciate the loving attention he gives to my head shots, he really doesn’t understand my words. I think it is true that there is no moral law, dispensed by an invisible man in the sky, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as morality, or that we are free to murder and steal without consequence. The nonexistence of a deity makes it a necessity to find a moral foundation in something other than stupid words in an old book, and my solution is humanism and the development of principles of empathy and equality. He complains that the idea of evolution is leading to the slow collapse of Christian churches, and I say good — the false morality of authoritarian should be dismissed and abandoned.
There is a lot more I would say, but responsibility is leaning heavily on me today, and I should pay attention to that, because I have a social contract and an obligation to do the best job I can to present the scientific facts of biology to my students. In two weeks! Yikes!
I will return to this inane video sometime soon. For now, I’ll leave it to you all to make comments and give me tips for a future episode of shit-shoveling.
Time to party!
That isn’t the only clutch to emerge today. Here’s another:
These little guys are popping out everywhere — we’re surrounded by a cloud of little baby Parasteatoda.
You may ask which member of the Trump administration I’m talking about, because they are all compulsive liars. I’m referring to the guy with the brainworm, the barely literate incompetent who has fundamentally shut down science research in this country, the fraud who has been vomiting up medical misinformation, the one, the only, RFK jr, the man who has poisoned the Kennedy name for all time.
In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles.
Kennedy’s appearance came in the wake of a congressional hearing with Fauci last week, when the infections disease expert invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 100 times, as Republicans lambasted him for his role in handling the pandemic.
In his frantic attempt to claim that Fauci was a murderous monster directly at fault for COVID, he made an exaggerated claim of special American victimhood, asserting that we were number one in deaths.
“We had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth,” Kennedy said. When host Dana Bash challenged him, Kennedy doubled down: “What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID.”
It was not accurate.
But during the pandemic’s height, 2020 to 2023, the U.S. did not lead the world in its overall rate of death from the illness. Peru did.
In its tracking of global COVID-19 cases and deaths through March 2023, Johns Hopkins University found that Peru’s population was hit hardest with a rate of 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people.
The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that with 341.11 deaths per 100,000 people. That is the 14th highest rate. Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania were a few of the countries with higher per capita death rates than the U.S.
He does not care about the numbers. Details schmetails. He’s just stirring up hatred in the mob. He did go on to lie about the origins of COVID, the growing measles epidemic, and vaccines and autism, and food policy, all debunked here. This is nothing new. Do you remember that he volleyed a similar barrage of lies a year ago? This is what he does, all the time, every time.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made myriad false and misleading claims on Thursday as he fielded questions examining his seven-month tenure leading the nation’s health agencies at a contentious three-hour hearing.
Kennedy ignored government data, twisted legislation and pointed to unsubstantiated treatments while addressing topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, rural hospitals and school shootings.
He was still allowed to hold office last year. I predict that he’ll cling to power like a tick after this year. There will be no consequences for him…just for the scientists he torments, and for the children who will die.
