In political analyses of political races in the US, the kids in the media these days like to use the metaphor of lanes to signify where candidates stand with respect to their rivals. Traditionally, the lanes had labels such as progressive, liberal, centrist, moderate, and conservative that, while hardly precisely defined, gave one a vague sense of whether that person was aligned with ones own values or not. One could make the distinctions more fine-grained by separating them on economic/fiscal and social polices, so that one could describe someone as a fiscal conservative who is socially liberal and so on. So in principle one could identify many different ideological lanes that people could be pigeonholed into. (Warning: This post is going to overwork the lane metaphor to death.)

But when it comes to current Republican politics, all that has to be thrown out of the window because since Donald Trump, the lanes are no longer defined by ideology. What we have is the Trump lane and the non-Trump lanes. The Trump lane is defined by whatever Trump thinks serves his own interests and will enable him to win and that ideologically amorphous structure makes it harder for his competitors to find their own lanes, since the Trump lane can weave erratically across ideological lines, as he opportunistically seizes on any issue to attack his opponents, even if it involves flat-out lying about them and himself. For example, his stance against cuts to Social Security and Medicare makes those who are on record as favoring privatizing or cuts (such as Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence) vulnerable to attacks from him. He has already started doing so.

The non-Trump lane is also forced to stick very closely to the Trump lane since they do not want to alienate his fanatical base which makes it even hard for them to articulate why they should be preferred over Trump. In a crowded primary race, it is possible for someone to gain the nomination with just a plurality and not a majority of delegates or votes, and the person most likely to benefit from that is Trump since he starts out with such a big advantage in name recognition and with his ability to get media attention. I have no doubt that even if the Republican primary race is bitter and divisive, the party will rally round the eventual winner if it is Trump, just like they did in 2016, in which the party establishment and candidate after candidate tried and failed to bring him down using all manner of attacks.

The main problem would be if he does not get the nomination. In such an...

We might have a special guest participant: ChatGPT.

Elon Musk keeps sinking to new depths. In his latest escapade, one of his employees was so baffled by the confusion that reigns at Twitter, he asked for clarification on whether he was still employed or not. He responded by firing him, insulting him, and ridiculing him for having a disability.

Thats a lawsuit right there. The mans disability is muscular dystrophy hes going to die from it. Also, one of the reasons for the confusion is that his employment was a special case. Hed founded a company that Twitter bought for $100 million, and hed generously taken his buyout in the form of wages over an extended time, and the whole sum will come due when his employment ends. Like, when Musk fires him.

Also, he seems to be a genuinely good guy, a kind of anti-Musk.

Musk keeps detonating these bombs of incompetence. I agree with this fellow who thinks Twitter is doomed, and the collapse is coming fast.

Its already real bad over there. Elon Musk said yesterday that ad revenues have fallen 50%. The site is experiencing major outages almost once a week. During the most recent outage earlier this week, Elon was laser-focused on the important stuff: reply-guying Jordan Peterson. The Twitter Blue rollout has been such a disaster that he fired almost the entire team. The company isnt paying rent on its office space. It recently tried to create a new income stream by selling office plants to employees.

But take a deeper look and the company is in even worse shape than it appears. Twitter has two financial time bombs waiting to go off. My hunch is that Elon will file for bankruptcy as soon as one of these time bombs self-detonates. I cant say exactly when that will be.

I give it about six months.

The two time bombs are 1) a battery of lawsuits from all those fired employees for unlawful termination, and 2) a collection of massive fines from the FTC and the EU. He cant avoid those. He paid too much for a company he bought as a present to his ego, and hes been making it cataclysmically worse. Im just biding my time, waiting for the inevitable and spectacular splash when Musk crashes.

This one is too easy I spotted it at a glance. But then my eyes have become finally tuned for spider-spotting. Do you find this easy, too?

Hint if youre struggling: look for the eyes.

David Silverman, the disgraced former president of American Atheists, floated a trial balloon on Twitter.

If I created a non-woke atheist convention, focusing on atheist activism and fun, starring notable canceled speakers and stars, would you be
Very interested 23%
Somewhat interested 18%
Not interested 59%

Who are the canceled speakers and stars hed invite? Its not as clean an identity as he imagines. Is Richard Dawkins one of them? Because people have expressed their strong dislike of his views, but hes not exactly broke and living on the street, and he would still be a strong draw. Would I be one of them? Ive been canceled by a huge number of atheists, and never get invited to speak at conferences anymore .

Its interesting that even in the limited, select group of regressive atheists who follow David Silverman, his poll couldnt even break 50% in favor. Not that it actually matters, this is a kind of Elon Musk non-poll where the pollster is going to just ignore the numbers.

P.S. Im only going to attend if there is a ball pit.

After Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was arrested for massive fraud in November, there has been a reckoning in the EA movement to which SBF belonged. Ive linked to several critics discussing how SBFs actions could have been attributed to EA philosophy and practices, and even offered my own humble commentary.

Of course, its very easy to get distracted by philosophical arguments, and miss whats staring in our face. The much more obvious takeaway from the whole affair is: EA was overinvested in cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is evil, why were they invested in it at all?

Yes, fraud can come from any sector, and no, not every person involved in crypto is fraudulent to the same degree as SBF. No, SBF is not proof of the depravity of crypto. What SBF proves, is that EA has been supportive of, and dependent on crypto. EA insiders must have already known, and maybe some readers already knew, but I didnt know! I didnt know EA had so much crypto in it! Why is that? And why dont they stop?

The most likely and obvious answer is that many people in EA are convinced that crypto is good, or at least not convinced that its bad. And if any EA folks are anti-crypto, they are either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

In general, I am pessimistic about ever persuading people in EA of anything, because theyre the sort of people who demand conformity to their own rigorous style of argument. No, I dont have any new arguments as to why crypto is evil. Instead, I observe that crypto-skepticism is curiously muted in EA. Rather than expecting someone like me to supply a criticism of crypto, EA should be spending its own damn analytical, educational, and institutional resources to learn how to invest ethically.

Lets look at what people have said about crypto in the EA forums.

Crypto as a cause area

From February 2021, The Transformative Potential of Cryptocurrencies. This is an article proposing that crypto as a possible cause areathat is to say, something EA could donate to in order to produce good in the world. Among other things, they make the absurd argument that crypto is good for the world because some people get rich from it.

2) Smart individuals (or lucky early-adopters) can become, or have become quite rich by utilizing the enormous growth of the crypto market which...

Back in October, I posted a Mnecat video dismantling the bullshit of body language experts, and one of the problems she points to is the destructive use of these so-called experts in the instead of body language, we have cops and their ilk analyzing 911 calls, and arbitrarily deciding whether they think the person making the call is lying. This fits in well alongside polygraph tests and lying about evidence, as another tool police can use to try to bully or gaslight a person into making a false confession:

As you heard, her [20 year old] son initially said that his mom had killed herself, before realizing that she had been bound with a belt and stabbed many times.

The cops pulled him into an interrogation room and kept him there for 13 hours, convinced that he was the murderer. Why? Well, why on earth would he have assumed his mom committed suicide? (3:23)

They were convinced it was him, but eventually, the cops checked his location data on his phone and found that he was nowhere near his home when his mom was murdered, and DNA at the scene was connected to a man who had been arrested multiple times for burglary in the past and who was eventually convicted of the crime.

In the Rebecca Watson video below, you can hear the 911 call (theres a content warning before that point, in case you need it), and yeah the kid sounds all over the place, and initially mis-understood what he was seeing. Based on that, and some cops opinion of what he would do under those circumstances, they interrogated him for 13 hours. I think most of us are aware of how miserable it would be to be locked in a featureless room with a cop for 13 hours, constantly being accused of murder, and fed stories about what a shitty person you are. How much worse would that be if your mother had just been murdered? If you had found her body?

And all they had to do to avoid tormenting that poor man was check the location data on his phone, or wait for the DNA evidence. They didnt do that first, because they care more about getting a conviction any conviction than they do about the danger of imprisoning, or executing, an innocent person. The more you dig into the policing system in the U.S., the more examples you find of cops just absolutely wrecking peoples lives because theyre too lazy, too cowardly, too sadistic, or too full of themselves to do their jobs properly.

Now, I don&#...

The Board of Regents is visiting campus, and I found this invitation slipped under my office door. (Not from the Regents, obviously.)

This is clearly a dig at a certain regent who made some stupid comments. Id like to go, except

1. My attendance would contribute nothing to diversity
2. Nobody from the Board of Regents will bother to show up
3. Thats my birthday! Cant I find a better way to celebrate it?

My counterarguments would be

1. But it would show that even old white men support diversity
2. I care what the students think, not the Board of Regents
3. No.

I guess thats my Thursday evening planned out then.

In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantiss record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls wokism, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.

The Republican party, in terms of its policies and rhetoric, seems to have gone all in on appealing to white, older, xenophobic, and conservative voters. And yet, at the same time, it seems to be able to put forward, and get elected, people of color for various offices, and also attract some people of color as supporters. This article looks at what is going on with that seemingly contradictory dynamic.

Does [the Republican party] continue to move rightward, exciting its base by stoking white racial grievance?

Or does it pursue a multiracial strategy that can expand the partys reach?

Recent trends in the GOP suggest that it wants to do both and that indeed the two strategies are not so much at odds as it might appear.

In a striking development, Michigan Republicans selected in February 2023 a Christian nationalist and election denier as chair of the state party.

This rightward shift of the party is not itself surprising.

Whats striking is that Kristina Karamo, a Black woman, was elected over a white male candidate who also had Trumps endorsement.

The same voters who elevated Karamo also cheered Trumps supercharged racist rhetoric against Black people, immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims and nonwhite countries more generally during his campaigns and presidency.

And yet Karamo is hardly an anomaly.

While the party has made no substantive changes or moderation to its politics or policies around long-standing racial justice issues, it is slowly but steadily growing more racially diverse in its grassroots base, elected officials and opinion leaders.

Nikki Haley, a child of Indian immigrants, has announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is Black, is also expected to do so fairly soon. How do people of color overcome the white supremacist underpinnings of many Republican policies?

Polls show that roughly 70% of Republicans believe the great replacement theory, a baseless belief that the Democratic Party is attempting to replace the white electorate in the United States with nonwhite immigrants.

Those same conservative voters are consistently motivated by white racial grievance in issues concerning public education, law enforcement, voting rights and affirmative action.

But what is interesting is that these same voters seem to be willing to accept candidates of color, provided they embrace those policies.

Yet studies also suggest that white conservatives will indeed support candidates of color, not out of a commitment to racial justice or even representation, but because they see it as a way to advance partisan and ideological interests.

A 2015 article in Pub...

I love it when creationists decide to attack evolution by way of developmental biology. Yes, come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Our home is our terrible weakness, Im sure youll be able to frolic and thrive in our little domainheh heh heh <twirls mustache>

This fellow, David W. Swift, whose knowledge of development is maybe an inch deep and obtained entirely from information taken from basic textbooks, followed up by a conscious misreading of a few scientific papers with an eye to extracting only bits and pieces that support his conclusion, has decided that embryology is evidence against evolution.

It is quite well known that at a relatively early stage the embryos of a wide range of vertebrates look similar a so-called phylotypic stage and this is generally regarded as evidence of common ancestry.

What is not well known is that before this stage the early embryonic development of vertebrates is very diverse right from the earliest stages which clearly refutes their common ancestry.

Hes partly right. It is well known that there are embryonic similarites between vertebrates, and of course thats evidence for common ancestry. There is a lot of evidence for common ancestry, and that is one small piece of it.

Hes wrong when he says that it is not well known that early development is more diverse. Any developmental biology textbook that discusses comparative embryology is going to tell you that. We developmental biologists ALL know that. Its been a hot button topic of discussion for at least 50 years, probably longer. Mr Swift perused a select bunch of papers and just skipped over any that brought the topic up, so he could pretend he was the perceptive creationist who noticed, for the first time, a weakness in evolutionary theory? Such arrogance. Its especially annoying because he says nothing novel that he couldnt have found prominently discussed in the scientific literature.

Also, the known evidence that early development is a complex process with diverse patterns of execution in different organism does not refute common ancestry. The creationists seem unable to get into their heads that a short-sighted process driven by chance as a core mechanism, running over millions and billions of years, is going to generate complexity and diversity by its very nature. Observing that something is complex and diverse is evidence that an evolutionary process created it, rather than an engineer.

That doesnt stop him from expanding that claim into a whole tedious paper, published in the Discovery Institutes fake journal, Bio-Complexity...

A Fire in the Shadows: A Bolingbrook Babbler Story

A Fire in the Shadows is out today. If you placed a preorder, you should have it today, and thank you for your support. Great American Satan has a review up. Anthony Avina reviewed it as well. It has a 4.29 star average on Goodreads. I will enjoy it while I can before the Goodreads trolls attack.

It is a complete story, but its also an introduction to Lydia, a vampire who regained her ability to feel love and compassion. Shell play an important role in the future Bolingbrook Babbler Stories.

Heres the description:

Vampire, intelligence scout, paranormal protector, and emotional liability

Bolingbrook has long been rumored to be a hub of paranormal and alien activity and Lydia should knowshes a vampire. But that doesnt mean she fits in. Not when shes a target for other vampires and reliant on her blood familys protection because of her inconvenient inclination to experience feelings.

Except right now, Lydia has bigger things to worry about than her recent rejection by a human or her blood sister Auroras relentless teasing. An army of weredeer are gathering near town and they need to gather intelligence fast.

When enforcers from one of Chicagos vampire kingdoms threaten the Bolingbrook Babblers stunning chief editor, Aurora accuses Lydia of having feelings again. But even if Lydia does have a crush on the unsuspecting Sara, she deserves their protection.

Only Lydia hadnt counted on how powerful their enemies are. Or the sort of unexpected revelations that will come to light if Lydia dares to risk rejection again

Get a Fire in the Shadows to find out what Lydia will risk.

If you want to support a local independent bookstore, you can order a copy through Bookshop.org. You can also ask your local library to ord...

FreethoughtBlogss own William Brinkman is at it again!  He has a new story set in his Bolingbrook Babbler Literary Universe, and I got an advance reader copy of it.  The rest of you rabble can order it tomorrow, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.  This is my review.

Like Williams The Rift, A Fire in the Shadows is action-packed genre fiction, set in the Weekly World News -inspired setting of his Bolingbrook Babbler articles.  At around 12k words, its long for a short story, but only covers a few short events.

Theres a lot of information around those events, and the author wants the story to stand on its own, so the exposition can land like bricks upside the head.  The references to events in The Rift feel particularly unnecessary, beyond the important fact of the weredeer incursion.  I do like being able to include a sentence like that in a review.

Still, as I said before, its fun to see SFF genre fiction that isnt beholden to the conventions laid down by the titans of Intellectual Property.  Theres stuff here to enjoy.  The vampire battle strategizing reminded me of a bit in From Russia with Love where James Bond was thinking about how he could totally judo chop through his opponents chest if he wanted to, but now wasnt the time for it.

One thing that struck me odd.  The vampire characters seem to regard their own human ethnicities as a thing to be disdained, and Im not convinced theyd have any reason to feel that way.  This element seemed like a ploy to spell out the characters backgrounds without breaking from the plot and dialogue to do so.  In general, the bitchy attitudes of the vampires were unappealing, and while that may have been intentional, its not interesting to me as a reader.  I know some other readers like it, so YMMV.  I did like the main character Lydia being a lovefool like The Cardigans.

Williams writing style spells out a lot.  Show, dont tell is one of the central dogmas of 20th century literature, but there are situations where even back then it was ignored....

Since I write stories set in Bolingbrook, Illinois, I should mention there was a triple murder last night. The suspect broke into a house and killed three people, two of them teenagers. The police arrested the suspect, who, according to the Daily Herald, was dating one of the victims.

While I have no personal connection to the family, it still strikes me as a tragic loss. Even sadder is that its one of many gun deaths occurring in the United States. My thoughts are with the family tonight.

A little while back, I shared the good news that the so-called clathrate gun was apparently no longer a serious cause for concern. I remain happy about that, but unfortunately there are other big sources of methane all tied to fossil fuel extraction that are contributing to climate change in a major way.

More than 1,000 super-emitter sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

This is why the focus on individual lifestyle choices has always been a massive red herring, and why I focus more on systemic/societal change. I havent owned a car since late 2009, and any decrease in humanitys emissions from that choice was more than wiped out by the methane coming from any one of those facilities. Do what you can on the individual level, but if we dont chance society, that wont end up mattering. Thats doubly true, because fossil fuel corporations fully intend to extract every drop they can, no matter the harm done to everyone else:

Separate data also reveals 55 methane bombs around the world fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

I guarantee you that there are more than 55 places around the world where new extraction is planned, and from which a horrifying amount of methane will leak. These 55 are just the really exceptional ones. Regardless, these findings support the long-standing view that we need to act a lot faster than we have been. The upside is that eliminating or dramatically reducing these emissions should, technically, be pretty easy:

Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a scary surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.

The two new datasets identify the sites most critical to preventing methane-driven disaster, as tackling leaks from fossil fuel sites is the fastest and cheapest way to slash methane emissions. Some leaks are deliberate, venting the unwanted...

State Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-OK) has penned several bills loosening gun restrictions, including the nations first anti-red flag law. He thinks these bills protect the Second Amendment and that they make us safer. We think it's probably one or the other. Watch it on @AppleTVPlus. pic.twitter.com/T7fLFLjTQ5

The Problem With Jon Stewart (@TheProblem) March 3, 2023

Joe Biden sometimes surprises me. I never had a high opinion of him, seeing him as epitomizing the neoliberal centrism of the political establishment, a caretaker of the status quo and an appeaser of the right wing. My support of him during the last election was driven by my horror at the thought of the lying, grifting, narcissist Donald Trump getting to be president for another four years. But I must admit that Biden has done better than I expected. True, he is no Bernie Sanders when it comes to advancing progressive policies but he has managed to push through some important pieces of legislation in his first two years that have made real improvements in the lives of ordinary people.

A big test is the one that will occur this June or so when failure to raise the debt ceiling will reach a crisis point. Republicans were clearly planning to use that issue as a hostage to obtain cuts in spending. What cuts? They refuse to specify but their target has always been programs that benefit those who are in need. (For a list of the programs that they are likely targeting, see here.) But their main target has always been the Big Three: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs are expensive but extremely popular and cutting them will cause a backlash. Republicans know this and thus they seek to create a crisis so that cuts to them will be seen as inevitable and have Democrats share at least part of the blame.

But in the opening maneuvers, Biden seems to have gained an advantage. In his State of the Union speech, he needled the Republicans in Congress into loudly opposing cuts in those programs and even after that he continued to pummel them on this issue in speeches, forcing Republican senator Rick Scott, who had proposed sunsetting all programs after five years and requiring them to be reauthorized, to grudgingly backtrack, saying that when he meant all programs he had actually meant to exclude Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans benefits, and other essential services.

The White House wasted no time in gloating over the reversal.

We congratulate Senator Scott on joining the post-State of the Union red wave of Republicans acknowledging that they have, in fact, been attempting to put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block. For the past year he has explained the absence of an exception by saying, If its worth keeping, were going to keep it. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement.

But make no mista...

Spider webs, especially cobwebs, are so complex that it can get annoying. Theyre also hard to photograph so many thin threads going every which-way in 3 dimensions, its easy to get lost. Ive been gratified lately to find that I can confine spiders to make mostly two-dimensional sheets using a wooden frame in a plastic container (they prefer natural substrates), but I have no illusion that this reflects the sophistication of their natural behavior. Its mainly a good way to get them to pose nicely for me, and to simplify moving them from one place to another.

But some people manage to capture those 3-D webs.

Forget about spider man and his meek two-dimensional webs! Even though spider webs have been around for at least 140 million years, we have never managed to preserve, measure and display their webs in a three dimensional form. Toms Saraceno has opened our eyes to the intricate geometry of spider webs with his newly invented scanning instrument that digitized for the first time a three-dimensional web. In fact, there is no single museum in the world with a collection of this kind. His spider web sculptures are a breakthrough in both science and art, and thanks to his methods and technique he has enabled much needed comparative studies in mathematics, engineering and arachnology, opening new fields of studies.

(Peter Jger, Head of Arachnology, Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt am Main, and co-author of the World Spider Catalog, 2015)

There are lots of pretty pictures at that link. Everybody loves orb webs, but cobwebs are much more intricate and confusing.