Spirit of the Wind

Today, someone attempted to kill Donald Trump. Unfortunately, they failed. I've heard conflicting accounts on if they grazed his ear or if he got hit by glass shrapnel, but he got superficial damage and (unfortunately) a good photo of him standing with his fist raised and blood coming down his face. We know nothing about the shooter except that they are dead. One other person is dead, and someone else is apparently in critical condition. Someone else is, I've heard, in custody but we have no details.

Some people are saying that this is staged. I think that's dumb. Real bullets were used. Someone is dead. Does anyone think that Trump would actually trust anyone to shoot in his direction? I could see him faking something using blanks, I guess (though I suspect he thinks he doesn't need to). I get the desire to find out that this was Trump's idea, since it would be politically useful. Certainly I'd like for it to come out that he knowingly shot one of his own rallygoers. It'd make enthusiasm for him drop. But it's just not true.

What this looks like to me is that someone angered by his politics tried to shoot him... because duh, if you think he's going to become a dictator and threaten the lives of people you care about, you'd be tempted to take a shot if you thought you had no other options and he wouldn't just get replaced. Frankly, this moment is ripe for that. Biden's chances of success look dim and he will almost certainly be the nominee. Trump doesn't have a vice presidential candidate picked out, so there's no clear successor and the Republicans would be fighting over who gets to be the nominee. You remember everyone talking about how a contested convention would be bad for the Democrats? Well it wouldn't be great for the Republicans either, and Trump made everything about him and his personal brand to a degree that no one else really has.

I'm not saying that's why the shooter acted. I don't really know. But it is the reason I wasn't very surprised when I heard someone tried to assassinate him.

Far as what happens now? I'm somewhat hopeful that this doesn't move the needle very much in American politics, simply because a lot of people are wishing the shooter's aim was a little to the right right now and politics are already very polarized. It definitely won't be any help--trying to assassinate someone and failing is the worst of both worlds--but everyone fucking hates each other anyway and there's months until the election.

This said it won't take much to make a Democratic win impossible, at least with the poll numbers we've seen so far.

I do think this portends more political violence. The shooter is dead. But he came pretty damn close to accomplishing their goal and quite literally put the scent of blood in the air. If Trump wins--pretty likely, at this point--I think he's going to be even more comfortable with political violence than he was before. Nearly getting your head blown off tends to make people act more harshly.

The consequences of this will not be pleasant to live through.

Well, I haven't updated this for a hot minute.

Life goes on. I've discovered that New Hampshire has some of the worst medical care of any state I've had the pleasure I've being in. Turns out that every dental office in the state that takes Medicaid is facing a crisis because state Medicaid just started covering dental, so now random-ass places with three staff members (only one of whom is a dentist!) are getting calls from 800 people trying to set up appointments. They're booked months in advance. Meanwhile, the places that don't take Medicaid have no issues scheduling an appointment. I got lucky; I managed to get a discount for a first time visit. And with it being over a year since my last visit (I've been trying on and off to get an appointment for months), I desperately need one.

Seeing a doctor, which is apparently something you're supposed to do regularly even in your 20s, has been similarly difficult. The earliest there was, again, months away. It's all been very frustrating. Much as I love to insult California, you could at least get medical care in California.

My classes for grad school have been progressing well. I'm currently in an internship I won't discuss in a public entry. My thesis (which is about a subject I also won't discuss in a public entry) has been delayed, however. Not officially, thank the gods, but I've been so distracted by life bullshit (the aforementioned medicine, the worst case of hiccups I've ever had, multiple car repairs) that I haven't had time to work on it. I need to, because I'm currently stuck on some statistical issues I wasn't taught how to handle and they need to be handled if I'm going to analyze the data I have.

There was a local Earth First! meeting. The crowd there was a lot higher than I'd expected. You hear about the group and what happened during the Green Scare, and you see the minimal online presence they have, and you expect it to be small as a result, especially when they're meeting in a rural location. But there had to have been dozens of people there at absolute minimum.

I didn't actually get to do much before I had to leave, but I enjoyed the visit while I was there. I don't often get to hang out among other green anarchists, especially those who share my deep ecological sympathies... though these days the social ecologists seem to be trending towards deep ecology; I've seen some supporting nature worship which I'm pretty sure would have Bookchin turning in his grave.

I learned about a rather concerning field trial involving genetically engineered poplars at the event. While I've supported genetically engineered American chestnuts in an attempt to get around chestnut blight (and still do), tweaking plants to be more effective at photosynthesis is a recipe for disaster in my mind. Sure, they say the poplars won't hybridize... but sometimes you get fluke hybrids, and this all relies on no one planting male poplars that can hybridize anywhere near these GMO poplars. Might not happen for the field trial, but what about if they become commonly planted as part of a carbon drawdown scheme?

It's a shame, because I think genetic modification does actually have a lot of potential from a deep ecological point of view. Currently, we rely upon exotic monocultures of crops to produce food and many materials like fiber, dyes, and some medicines (or the precursor compounds, at least). Permaculture techniques can be somewhat more environmentally friendly, but tend to have much lower yields per acre; many still use exotic plants as well.

But though it's not a sure thing, I think that genetically modified plants could allow us to work around some of those limitations, if it was done with the intent of creating an agroecosystem that produced as many of society's needs as possible and where all the cultivated varieties were native, but also less fit in the local ecosystem than the cultivars. It's beyond me to plan out in detail how this would work, but tannins in oaks are a possible example of how. Native oaks produce relatively high yields per acre, even compared to grain, but the acorns require processing to get the tannins out. Breed (or genetically engineer) a kind with minimal tannins, and the natural selection that trait faces might make escaped populations return to the baseline rather than persist.

I'm not a geneticist or a botanist; I'm sure there are reasons why this couldn't work, but it certainly seems more worthy of investigation than these super-poplars.

Oh, and New Trek is now dead to me because, as far as I can tell, the new season of Strange New Worlds is pro-eugenics, and tries to dress it up as being inclusive and equitable by comparing transphobia to being opposed to the creation of designer babies, augmentation arms races, or, you know, eugenics. It is very, very agitating to see that in an era where liberal eugenics is surging, Star Trek is engaging in apologetics for it--and its liberal fans are just lapping it up.

Perhaps I shouldn't be shocked at this point. I think I still am a little, though.

Yep, you knew this was coming. Everyone else is doing it, so here are My Thoughts On The Election. Why the fuck not. They're quite cynical, but such expectations at least prevent me from being taken aback by horrific losses.

1. Joe Biden will probably win. But not by much, if he does, and that it is this close is a clear sign of general incompetence. Probably on the part of the Biden campaign, but honestly there's plenty of blame to go around and I'm not sure how we could tell. You got those stories about What Went Wrong back in 2016 and people are still arguing about it; I think they always will be. Maybe people were just too sexist. Maybe Clinton was historically unpopular. Maybe neoliberal economic policies provide fruitful ground for racist populists to gain power.

To some extent all those things were probably true--but to what extent? How much did they matter? Fuck if I know; don't quite believe anyone else does either.

2. The Democrats will almost certainly not take the Senate. Our chances of doing anything about global warming have gone down from "insignificant" to "basically zero." Our chances of dealing with the biodiversity crisis, separate from global warming, were already pretty much nil but things will get worse faster than they otherwise would.

3. If he loses Democrats as a whole are probably going to react like they did last time around, which means a very substantial fraction of them will blame the social democrats (and the left as a whole). If they lose the Senate but win everything else... fuck if I know.

4. Missouri voters approved a gerrymandering measure that partially reversed the anti-gerrymandering bill they passed two years ago. Congratulations Missourians.

5. Colorado looks set to reintroduce gray wolves, which is one piece of unadulterated good news.

6. Drug decriminalization took a few steps forward, because just like one of the few things the leaders of our parties can agree on is that marijuana should remain illegal, one of the few things the base of our two parties can agree on is that locking people up for smoking pot is fucking stupid. Also shrooms look to be the next marijuana. As they should be.

Could shrooms help depression? Maybe not but it's not like the other stuff worked.

7. I loathe the taste of alcohol.

Anwyway. There's other stuff, but I'm done. This is what I've got out of things; I'm interested in other people's thoughts.

Well, one way or the other, the nightmare that is this election will end tonight. Unfortunately, our nightmare will probably only begin.

I'm not going to be watching the election, both because I'll be in ceramics class at the time and because they don't allow alcohol in the dorms--and I'd desperately need it, because no matter who wins I don't want to confront the implications while sober.

I am worried that Trump supporters might commit violence if he doesn't win (and even if he does win, for that matter). I don't think Clinton supporters would, though if they think Trump can actually do what they think he will, it'll be interesting to see what sort of tactics they think are justified.

I'd be a little less pissy about them, as a group, if they hadn't raised money for a firebombed GOP office. Condemn violence against fascists or not, raising money so they can better organize to pass bigoted legislation seems a *little weird*.


It's been a while since I posted; I'll post an update explaining why later today or tomorrow morning. My apologies for my absence.

Been a month since I last wrote anything. School has been difficult, to say the least. My brain feels like it is full of fog, and doing anything not school-related that takes actual thought and willpower is hard. I could be doing worse, no question about that, but I have a good deal of inertia keeping me in place. The more I'm inactive--anywhere--the harder it is to get the ball rolling again. I'm a creature of habit, after all. And currently the habit is "crawl into bed, blow up enemy ships, and do absolutely nothing."

Which I hate.

I did get a review paper on isopods done, which was interesting to do. Had to do a lot of reading, and learned a lot as well. Among other things, I learned that Bergmann's rule has a long and checkered history, that most people think giant woodlice are cool, and that deep-sea isopods are not nearly as terrifying as old nacho cheese Doritos.

Other students in ZOOL 215 are doing their projects on feral cat colony management, the role of venom and bacteria in Komodo dragons, and turtle evolution. The first and last did fairly well, the middle one did not do enough research. I say that because in the question-and-answer session I asked about a possible test for bacteria uptake that seemed sort of obvious, and she said that that would be a good idea and someone should do that test. When I got back to my dorm, five minutes on Wikipedia linked me to a paper that had that very setup.

Despite the season, it's been cold lately, and it rained heavily today. I was caught outside at the beginning of it; I let volunteer hours slip away from me and I'm having to do a whole bunch at once. And because I'm an idiot and I suck, I missed the bus, so tried to walk over to the Science Center to volunteer. Naturally I got completely lost, but ultimately I did manage to get there... so good for me, I guess. Even if volunteering at the Science Center isn't the most pleasant task, what with all the loud children, it's something.

Formally changed majors from architecture to zoology, and have an appointment on Monday to talk about the possibility of doing field/lab work for graduate studies. I'm skeptical of my chances, given my lack of training, but it can't hurt.

Read some good books lately. The Virals series, which I've always liked, had two books I hadn't read, and some guy named Charles de Lint wrote a trilogy called Wildings which was pretty interesting. Also found some pretty... interesting... music by a person named Vertigo Fox. I usually hate the genre he works in, but the lyrics and general feel are interesting enough to overlook it.


Oh, and apparently we have MRAs on the Werelist. Granted I wouldn't expect anything different from the person who believes that plants "evolved beyond the use of brains," but still, it's rather frustrating.

So, college has started. I’m taking multiple architecture courses, a biology course, and a course on speech communication. So far, the biology couse seems to be the most interesting, even if I will have to negotiate my way out of dissections. Because, if there is one thing I can’t really do, it is dissections of animals. Plants are quite fun to dissect, especially if you can laugh maniacally while doing so.

Went to Philadelphia, and met up with Mobius and Lindiel, who are awesome, at the Philadephia Zoo. Got up to various wacky adventures, ranging from establishing that ducks experience rebellious teenage years to hating Victorian architecture. Also, we are all united in a hatred of small loud children. Also in Philadelphia, discovered the wonders of pub fries with spicy ketchup, high quality gelato, and pistachio cream sauces. *licks lips* And I have found blueberry vanilla goat cheese.

Back home, my mother developed a strange obsession with canning things, which is why there are currently a whole bunch of pickling green beans. I personally doubt it will end well. I also found a whole bunch of vegetarian recipes, which I would dearly love to try cooking.

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Found Souls, joined, and have found it to be a great deal of fun. It’s a post-apocalyptic setting where you play a werewolf (canine changed by a virus, not a human altered—humans don’t figure in the roleplay because they’ve been almost entirely wiped out) called a Lupercai. I’m not a huge fan of the limited lifespan—Lupercai can live maybe 18 or so years at most—but you can hang around as a ghost indefinitely, so there’s that. Aside from the ability to transform, the presence of ghosts is the only magic allowed in the setting.

Haven’t gotten any writing done in a while, so roleplaying in Souls could help stimulate that. I want to get work on Spiritwalkers done, as well as expand the game world for the Pathfinder campaign. Currently on the Australia sourcebook, which has:

* a civilization that spans the entire Indo-Pacific region and rides giant turtles large enough to support entire ecosystems
* the point where life began
* cults, cults, and more cults
* references to the Inferno

I hope to also provide:

* details of Sunhill, both its people and structure
* specifics on the Apocalypse Wars
* the full text of the pact between the greatest powers of the universe that prevents them from acting directly
* a discussion on how the Australian spirit world works (I’ll have to study legends of the Dreamtime to figure this out, though it’ll be in broad strokes—but I’ve been calling Australia the Dreamlands, and Aboriginal legends are too interesting not to include in some capacity)
* hints to the Africa sourcebook, as well as the Antarctic one
* details on how raccoons got to Australia

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Unfortunately I haven’t been paying much attention to the news, though I have heard what happened in Ferguson, and am naturally quite disgusted. Also rather unsurprised that there are the usual apologists saying, "Oh, we don’t know what happened" (okay, I suppose that if there’s no video of the incident that may be technically true) and "He lunged at the officer and the officer shot him in self defense." Of course, police in this country are pretty much immune from real consequences of their actions.

This is why every single officer should have a body camera attached when they are working. They’d be a lot less likely to do such things if they knew they had a camera attached to them, and we’d be able to point to close up video evidence in every single case.

Which is probably why in the places that did this, incident rates dropped like a fucking stone.

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Joined Atlas Obscura, which is full of interesting things, ranging from a bioluminescent bay, to a bioluminescent cave, to a field of lightning rods, to an abandoned missile base, to a place where they keep a bunch of snakes in big outdoor enclosures and use them to produce antivenom. I highly recommend it, and there are even a few locations in Kirksville. Lame locations, but still locations.

Recently, I’d been part of a party of adventurers in a Dungeons and Dragons game that met every Saturday (though we were moving to Wednesdays and Fridays). Note the past tense.

Last night, I was taken aside and informed that group dynamics were “not working out.” Given that my character was straight-laced chaotic good and over half the part was chaotic/neutral/lawful evil (though I really think the chaotic evil character wasn’t that evil, since he was merely a sociopath who killed evil people), I can buy that. Or maybe I somehow managed to piss everyone else off and not notice it, and no one explicitly told me. And the GM is open to, perhaps later in the year, doing another campaign that I can participate in.

I’ll acknowledge that I was a bit upset due to the fact that I hadn’t noticed any such undercurrents, but I guess that’s the price one pays for being autistic and having few social skills. I’m a lot less elegant offline than online. Would have been nice for them to tell me what it was, though. On the other hand maybe it wasn’t anything specific.

In any event. This does give me more time to participate in things like the Wildlife Society (whose last meeting I missed), eskrima (last few meetings missed in part due to being unable to find the location), and various other things. But still, kind of unfortunate.

Would be nice to join another campaign, whether face-to-face, play-by-post, or IRC.

In other news:

1. My echocardiogram was rather bizarre, at least in terms of my experience, though my heart was apparently normal. Also they won’t send me images of my echocardiogram, which is unfortunate because the video was kind of cool.
2. I started a speculative evolution forum called Saecula Novae because the mod on Speculative Evolution did several things I disagreed with, including but not limited to: closing and deleting threads without formal notice, unevenly enforcing rules, and not creating forums for community projects like promised.
3. Fuck anarchocapitalists. (Trigger warning: Sheer, mindblowing insensitivity to rape, which is used to score political points for a stupid ideology.)

I have discovered that I adore neopagan folk music, ever since someone was kind enough to post a link to ”I Don’t Speak Human” on the Werelist. Omnia is very, very good. So I bought some of their music off Amazon, while listening to my mother point out that if I plan on being an architect, I should probably not publicly identify as neopagan, at which point I reminded her that I am:

1. an atheist who is literally incapable of worship (which is, I suppose, not completely true)
2. am in possession of some degree of subtlety, so that if I did suddenly become neopagan, I would not feel the necessity to tell half the planet, nor (to address her other point) would I ever join any religious group without thinking about it heavily

After which she informed me that if I did join a neopagan group, she wanted me to know that my family wasn’t the sort to freak out about that. Which I already knew.


Debate.org is turning out to be rather fun. I won the debate on privatization of science, tied another on gun control (because no one voted), and am currently arguing that developed countries have a moral obligation to mitigate climate change. Also discussing the election on the Werelist, where many people are apparently not voting, and we all got into an argument as to the merits of voting, and then someone raised the issue of the whole ‘Fair Tax’ nonsense, which basically suggests that the solution to all tax problems is a tax on consumption rather than income, and that this will somehow close the loopholes rich people use to evade taxes (by lowering them drastically while allowing them to spend vast amounts of money on foreign goods and thus avoid paying the tax).

Meanwhile, I’ve been mentally beating myself on the head ever since I heard Romney has a five point lead. Good grief; I thought this wasn’t going to be a close race, but Romney seems to be convincing people that he isn’t actually an absurd Tea Party extremist. Which he is. And which he will probably govern as, given that on average political candidates try to fulfill a fair number of their promises. Don’t know exactly how Romney will act, but currently he’s basically the equivalent of an existential threat if he governs at all like he’s said he will, despite being (on the Political Compass) literally a unit to the economic right to Obama. Of course, the Political Compass ranks people according to actions, not promises. And I’m not really sure Romney’s past actions will be a very good predictor of his future actions.

I hate politics here. What passes for the left around here is really quite far to the right. I mean, can you even imagine someone saying, “Yes, I favor socialism and redistribution of wealth, federal funding of arts and sciences, regulations, and single-payer health care” and getting elected in this country? The right’s gone so far right in the past few years… Obama’s individual mandate was originally proposed by the freaking Heritage Foundation, after all.

Wonder what people in Europe are thinking of us right now. Probably that we’re all insane.


Found out that I was looking along the wrong lines if I wanted life in the Sun, and am now looking into plasma-based life, since the kilometer-long solar dragons I originally was planning at the request of siliconshaman  spent most of their life outside the Sun, moving into it as part of their orbit of it. And had to somehow evolve silica aerogel and a biological thermocouple. Which would be fine if these were genetically engineered lifeforms, but they aren’t.

Also, the corona is apparently too hot even for silica aerogels. I’ve heard of substances capable of withstanding the heat there, but they are metals, which are unacceptably conductive to heat.


Currently looking into technoshamanism, mostly to determine what it is, because so far I don’t think I’ve found any really good resources on the subject. Anyone know of good resources?

Apparently, the Heartland Institute, that bastion of insanity in a world increasingly populated by analytical thinkers, has proven, by some of the most insane logic available, that, without a doubt, global warming is false.

Yes, science and analysis is evil, these new billboards have proven that beyond any shadow of doubt! The most famous proponents of global warming are not, as you may have thought, Bill Nye, or various scientists, but actually Charles Mason and Ted Bundy. Yes, these rather nasty individuals believe in global warming, and therefore global warming is evil and degenerate. But they aren’t suggesting that all global warming proponents are like that, oh no!

Some say this goes too far. I say it doesn’t go far enough. What about Mendelian genetics? Many criminals believed in Mendelian genetics. What about gravity? John Wilkes Booth certainly didn’t believe in intelligent falling, a revelation given to me by the all-powerful Flying Sphaghetti Monster, Ramen! My friends, we have an important moral duty to actively disbelieve anything that such individuals as Osama bin Laden or Ted Bundy believed in, even if that would require not believing anything! The sky is not blue. Water is not wet. The Earth is flat and orbited by the sun. And we cannot denounce something until a Ted Bundy or Osama bin Laden has stated that they believe it, because the universe alters what is right and what is wrong based on its natural desire to be the exact opposite of what they think is true, even if that means being two contradictory things at the same time! God exists and does not exist. Various religious texts are true and are not true. True is false and false is true! Truly, this is the world in which we live today, where reality flips on a dime. Today, global warming is false, because Charles Mason believes it exists. But tomorrow, it could... depending on who performs the next horrendous act that gets national attention! Reality is reversely democratic, and your votes are tallied by your body count!

Been a while since I updated.

Seems that over the holidays, quite a few people from the Werelist that I haven’t seen in months have shown up again. Bit of a ‘howliday’, and it’s always nice to see old faces. Don’t know how long all of them will stick around, but still... nice.

Primal Productions appears to be continuing its efforts to sensationalize therians. Naturally, this is rather unacceptable, so I’m drafting a letter to Animal Planet’s ethics department, which is probably the most underfunded department after ‘scientific accuracy’. And it’s probably one dude in a cubicle who spends most of the day playing solitare.

Politics over here have been interesting. The Occupy movement continues. SOPA will probably pass and will probably not break the Internet. NDAA doesn’t get enough Internet attention and, even in the unlikely event that it is constitutional, is flat out wrong. I oppose it just as I do Gitmo, though I understand that as an attachment to a budget bill, it is difficult for politicians to fight.

The holidays are turning out fine. Got a few giftcards and am using them on books- one Clare Bell and two Andre Nortons. I would buy Tomorrow’s Sphinx, but the cheapest copy I could find is a bit less than sixty dollars. And it’s nice to spend more time with the cats and my family. Today we’re making these lovely jelly donuts, which aren’t as fatty as normal donuts.

The algae is hopefully doing well over winter break, and my other projects are in various states of being finished up. I’ll probably revise ‘Therianthropy as a Process’ (for those of you who don’t know, it makes the point that therianthropy doesn’t have to be from a single root cause), finally finish up ‘Voyage to the Deep’ for the Serpent’s Hand, finish uploading the bloody art (not actually bloody in the American sense of the term)... Haven’t been able to spend as much time on things like that recently; I was writing a paper on the link between the counterculture of the 60s and the modern environmental movement, and I do have to read On the Road, but I can always read On the Road on the road.