Saudi princes are real GEMs, just like our Republican overlords

The latest excuse from Saudi Arabia for the death of Jamal Khashoggi is that he started it — he started a fist fight with a team of 15 professional killers, and they had to defend themselves by hacking him apart with a bonesaw. Our president* might well be willing to accept that story, but it’s out of character for Khashoggi and not compatible with the intent of Mohammed bin Salman and the ruling class of Saudi Arabia.

The murder is nothing new: the regime has been vicious and repressive for a long time, and this is just one case that has erupted into the public eye — it is actually a major error by Mohammed bin Salman, who has been trying to misrepresent himself as a progressive reformer. He’s not. He’s just another criminal thug who has been handed vast sums of money and excessive power by an archaic political system. We’ve seen all the warning signs that he was not a power for reform. Remember Raif Badawi?

The kingdom has long been an absolute monarchy that does not tolerate open dissent, but this kind of repression is new. In earlier times, Saudi rulers restricted behavior, often under severe interpretations of Islamic law, and carried out barbaric punishments. We have often called attention to the unjust treatment of blogger Raif Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 1,000 lashes — 50 were delivered in a public square in Jeddah before it was stopped — and 10 years in prison for online posts that challenged the religious authorities to allow a more pluralistic and moderate practice of Islam. The system was intolerant and harsh.

The powers-that-be in Saudi Arabia have been reshaping their laws to allow themselves greater latitude to oppress.

Almost all prosecutions of political and human rights activists have been channeled through the Specialized Criminal Court, originally established in 2008 to handle terrorism cases, where defendants often do not have lawyers during the investigative phase, and pretrial detentions can be arbitrary and lengthy. In October 2017, the kingdom updated its counterterrorism law, which was already overly broad, to add a host of tripwires to criminalize free expression. For example, the definition of terrorism was extended to those who “describe” the king or crown prince “in any way offensive to religion or justice.”

Oh, great. Now I’m a terrorist, because I’m going to openly say that the king and crown prince are goddamn evil motherfuckers.

That actually felt good. I’m going to have to curse the elites of Saudia Arabian society more often.

I remember, once upon a time, feeling that maybe Saudi Arabia was making progress — like when they started allowing women to drive. I was mistaken. It seems that one good reason to allow women to drive is that it gives you an easy way to tag a female dissident.

A good example of how the environment has changed is the case of female activists who had long sought the right to drive, and to change the guardianship system, which gives men the authority to make critical decisions on behalf of their female relatives. For years, the women had carefully pushed for change while staying largely within bounds the government could accept. But the new crown prince could not tolerate their voices. He granted women the right to drive — and then punished those who had worked for that reform. In May, 11 of them were arrested. Several remain in jail, accused of serious crimes that could bring long prison sentences, including “suspicious contact with foreign parties” and undermining the “security and stability” of the state. They have been vilified in the media; a pro-government Twitter account posted images of those arrested with the word “traitor” splattered in red across their faces, Human Rights Watch reported.

Cancel that arms deal our goddamn evil motherfucker of a president is so proud of. It’s the least we can do. Unfortunately, our GEM of a president aspires to by the tyrant ruler of a pariah state, just like the Saudi king, and is going to do nothing.

Biochemistry, it turns out, is not a creationist’s friend

Oh, look. Biochemists have found a recipe that spontaneously produces all four nucleotides used in RNA.

Carell’s story starts with only six molecular building blocks—oxygen, nitrogen, methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen cyanide, all of which would have been present on early Earth. Other research groups had shown that these molecules could react to form somewhat more complex compounds than the ones Carell used.

To make the pyrimidines, Carell started with compounds called cyanoacetylene and hydroxylamine, which react to form compounds called amino-isoxazoles. These, in turn, react with another simple molecule, urea, to form compounds that then react with a sugar called ribose to make one last set of intermediate compounds.

Finally, in the presence of sulfur-containing compounds called thiols and trace amounts of iron or nickel salts, these intermediates transform into the pyrimidines cytosine and uracil. As a bonus, this last reaction is triggered when the metals in the salts harbor extra positive charges, which is precisely what occurs in the final step in a similar molecular cascade that produces the purines, adenine and guanine. Even better, the step that leads to all four nucleotides works in one pot, Carell says, offering for the first time a plausible explanation of how all of RNA’s building blocks could have arisen side by side.

Why do Nazis equate “free speech” with a right to a platform?

Because that’s how they bankroll hate speech. The cries of “Free Speech!” have devolved into whining about “no-platforming” because it was never about expressing their ideas — they can still do that all they want — it was about getting paid. What really has them upset that the money train is being derailed.

“I wouldn’t say they’re faring very well,” Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Splinter of the “alt-right’s” financial status. “The vast majority of outspoken white supremacists or otherwise extremist groups have lost access to fundraising platforms like PayPal, Google Pay, and others like [them] have started enforcing their longstanding terms of services.” The white nationalist movement has by no means been entirely taken out by these efforts, but they’re not exactly rolling in dough right now.

One largely under-reported contributor to these circumstances is the meticulous, ongoing work of anti-racist and anti-fascist activists and civil rights groups. Using a common anti-fascist tactic called “no platform” which denies a person or group a platform to speak or organize (it’s sometimes called “de-platforming”), activists have helped make it difficult for white nationalists to fundraise online, stymying fascist activism by cutting off their income and fundraising capabilities. In a financial context, no platform means cutting the far right off from fundraising—both from crowdsourced fundraising platforms such as Patreon, and from collecting money directly via their own websites.

It’s all part of an anti-fascist strategy — yeah, paranoid far right goons, they are coming to get you. This is even better and more effective than punching them in the face.

Identifying which platforms continue to enable the far right fundraising is tedious and constant work, but restricting their fundraising capabilities is of the utmost importance. “Like with anything, if you take money out of the equation, it’s going to fold, or at least not flourish,” Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder and executive director of the anti-fascist organization One People’s Project, told Splinter. “The best way to cure fascism is to starve it to death, and that’s exactly what people are trying to do,” he said.

No one should be profiting from hate. Shut ’em all down.

By the way, Twitter is still a festering shithole of misogyny. When will that be fixed?

Spider update (no spider photos)

I’m getting a little anxious — my spider family is in a quiet phase right now. I have 6 breeding pairs of adults (well, Gwyneth ate her consort after mating, so 5½, and maybe bred pairs is the better term). I’m down to one egg sac — again, from Gwyneth, who is a sick Goth freak because she knitted an ugly, sloppy sac with the dead corpses of her prey imbedded in it, but it does have developing embryos inside it. She also littered the floor with decapitated fly heads. Gwyneth scares me sometimes.

But otherwise, I’m just waiting for them to produce more. My goal is to have a steady reliable output of eggs, and these little hiatuses are nerve wracking, but also understandable, since the colony is so small yet.

I do have a lot of tiny little juveniles coming up, at least. They’re getting a little overwhelming — these are my spider-children, in these little vials I picked up at JoAnn Fabrics (they’re intended for storing and sorting beads, but I have perverted them to my own wicked ends.) Thirty vials, thirty hungry little babies.

I have to go in every couple of days and tend to them. Put one or two flies in each vial (I made a little fly-shaker out of an Eppendorf tube — it’s like a salt shaker, only when you shake it flies come out), give ’em a spritz of water from an atomizer, and agonize over their health and predatory instincts. As they get big enough, I move them to an adult-sized tube, and when I’m confident of their sexual maturity, I’ll pair them up.

But right now it’s a waiting game with placid little beasties (except for Gwyneth) quietly tending to their webs, nibbling on flies and crickets, making me fret over when they’re going to spawn again.

By the way, over half the vials I’m cultivating contain Gwyneth’s progeny — she’s a fecund little monster. I’ll be interested to see if her distinctive behaviors carry on into the next generation. I’m planning on doing some inbreeding of her offspring to see if I can get a brood of savage spider mothers.

The latest Vitamin C scam

True facts about Vitamin C:

  • It is an effective antioxidant, and can donate electrons to free radicals to neutralize them.
  • Topical Vitamin C is helpful in providing photoprotection.

  • It’s also a depigmenting agent — it can decrease melanin formation in the skin.

  • Vitamin C can neutralize the chlorine in chlorinated water.

  • It’s hydrophilic and readily soluble. It can also be absorbed through the skin.

  • Vitamin C inhibits pro-inflammatory cytokines, so you will sometimes see it in creams and patches to treat conditions like acne.

  • It is unstable and degrades rapidly on exposure to light.

  • Vitamin C has some downsides in topical application: it can discolor the skin (the effective molecule (LAA)is transparent, but it breaks down rapidly to DHAA, which is ineffective and yellowish, and it can cause skin dryness.

  • The dose makes the poison: taking over 100 times the recommended daily dose causes cellular apoptosis and is toxic. It’s really, really hard to take that much Vitamin C.

That mostly sounds great, doesn’t it? It is an essential vitamin, it’s good for you, and it has a really good safety profile. It’s easy to get the required dosage from a healthy balanced diet, so, honestly, taking megadoses does nothing, no harm and no advantage, and only, as they say, helps you make more expensive pee.

But you know what’s totally pointless? This new product of selling people Vitamin shower filters. You attach it to your shower head, and then get an extremely dilute solution of Vitamin C topically applied, most of which then runs off into your sewer. If the dose makes the poison, it’s also the case that you need a minimally effective dose to get the benefit, and this mainly looks like a new way to get money to bleed out of your wallet. Have an orange, eat some strawberries or broccoli, all far more effective at getting the vitamins you need.

If you want to remove chlorine, these filters simply can’t do the job — you’d have to reduce the flow rate to a trickle, optimistically. They’re a scam. They take a little bit of truth and amplify it non-quantitatively and with no empirical analysis, and try to sell it to you with phony promises. Don’t fall for it. If you have a condition that would benefit from topical Vitamin C, see a dermatologist.

I think we can definitively argue that Elon Musk has a cult

Popular Mechanics has published a defense of Elon Musk, and it’s disturbingly creepy. They’ve got multiple contributors, and the first compares him to Mark Twain.

Not everybody liked Twain. They still don’t. He could be scandalous and self-indulgent. He smoked too much. Judgmental. And Twain, a one-time river­boat pilot, made nothing substantial, produced no commodities or goods, except his tales and observations. He took you somewhere. Mark Twain didn’t think for you, you barrel-hoop baron you. But he was out there. Thinking. He spoke past his newspaper editor, directly to the people, to his readers, whether they agreed with him or not. And while he certainly produced outsize, often painful, observations about what we had become as a people, he also offered glaring, satiric propositions concerning what we might want to try to be henceforth. And why. In person, he could be wily, cold, and unpleasant, but Twain stood out as a man who reliably saw the truth of human purpose beneath the weighty mess of human foibles. He had ambitions for humanity. At the very least, he believed that humanity ought to have ambitions for itself.

And now, Elon Musk walks the earth. The pleasure of his presence on this mantle is similar to Twain’s. You might live in Tacoma and make a living working in a consulting firm that helps affordable hotel chains rebrand themselves using urban graphic-design strategies and overlapping pricing platforms. But admit it, among your everyday pleasures is the possibility that you might pick up an item in the news feed on your smartphone concerning Elon Musk’s next great idea. Electric cars. The colonization of Mars. Tunnels beneath Los Angeles. Brains linked to computers.

I mainly pick up on news about Musk because he’s obnoxiously weird. Accusing divers of being pedophiles. Abusing his employees (look up Mary Beth Brown). An ugly divorce. Unable to profit despite receiving millions of dollars from his fellow capitalists. Smoking a joint on a YouTube video.

Electric cars are a great idea — it wasn’t his. He wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity — it won’t. His tunnels are bizarre and impractical. He doesn’t know how to link brains and computers.

He’s no Mark Twain.

Another guy has a different comparison.

Bruce Wayne. Elon Musk. Tony Stark. Three men worth billions of dollars who care more about solving important problems than living comfortably, but only one of them is real.

SpaceX and Tesla cars are great. I don’t know that they make up for the fact that he’s an obnoxious asshole with a cult of personality.