“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
The latest episode of the Uncover Up Conspiracy Podcast includes a powerful meditation on the nature of society. I highly recommend every minute of every episode the excerpted clip below.
Context: In the 1530s, a doomsday cult of Anabaptists took over the city of Münster. It went the same way that story always goes, be it Branch Davidians or Aum Shinrikyo.
Our intrepid podcast hosts, Professors Ethan Kuhnle and Nathan Radke, rather than fixating on the salacious details, place the incident in its broader context and, in the concluding five minutes, bring it back home to why we, in 2025, should care.
[Clip Transcript:
Kuhnle: In the Christmas season in Canada, North America, maybe Western Europe, there is a certain amount of kind of hand-wringing and consternation that can be discerned if you go looking for it.
Kuhnle:And it is one that says something along the lines of, Western culture is under attack. Our religion and our history is not taken seriously. We should have Christianity, it should be back in the center, etc.,etc.
Radke: Right. I mean, we're overtly seeing that coming from some very influential people, for sure.
Kuhnle: Right. And it was that that I wanted to just pick up on, because I think that what you discover in this story and what happens in Western Europe basically for the next couple of hundred years, quite literally, are just endless amounts of religious wars that destroy Western Europe over and over and over again.
Radke: I mean, this is one of the reasons why Weishaupt starts the Illuminati.
Kuhnle: Yeah. Like, it is just so idiotic. There are wars that last 30 years, 60 years, 100 years.
Radke: There was a war called the Hundred Years War.
Kuhnle: There's a war called the Thirty Years War. And guess what? It was longer than 30 years.
Radke: Yeah, the Hundred Years War was slightly longer than a hundred years too.
Kuhnle: So there are, you can imagine, there are generations that were born and died and had children who were born and who had children, and all of those people only existed in a state of war. And these were wars fought about whether you should be a Catholic or a Protestant, whether that was the right way to get into heaven.
Radke: What happens to this bread when we do this ritual?
Kuhnle: Yeah. Now, what emerges out of that is what I would call a political compromise, and it's secularism. And secularism is an idea that emerges in Western Europe at a particular time and place in response to hundreds of years of religious war.
Kuhnle: And it says effectively, okay, we the state don't really know what the right religion is, and we're not going to make a choice about it. What we're going to do is you're going to, we're going to allow you to make that choice on your own. Now, what that has meant is that Christianity, being one of a number of religions, has, in those countries that have really tried to enact secularism, it has sort of devolved from the main religion of the community to one of a set of different religions that people can believe in, and we have made an attempt, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on which community and culture we're talking about, to not enshrine religious Christian symbols.
Kuhnle: Things like your Christmas tree, you know, I remember there'll always be an article about, oh, they're making us take down our Christmas tree from this school or from this courthouse. But the idea is, yeah, because no religion should have any place of preference, even in a country and in a culture that historically would have identified as Christian. And I think secularism is one of the best ideas to emerge out of Western political history.
Kuhnle: It is a gift to the world.
Radke: It's a gift to religion.
Kuhnle: It's a gift to all of us who don't want to have endless religious wars.
Radke: Well, that too. But it's freedom from religion, because the government can't push around, but it's also freedom of religion, in that you can choose religion, and the government isn't going to push you around.
Kuhnle: Exactly. And so, when I hear these discourses about, oh, we should really have Christianity back, and that's our culture.
Radke: Well, Christian nationalism.
Kuhnle: Right. What I hear is, I would love to have hundreds of years of religious wars and infighting, because that's what you're going to get. That's what you will get.
Kuhnle: That's what you're asking for. Sorry. I know that this is not very much a Christmas message, but I feel like it is very appropriate in the season.
Kuhnle: I think secularism is one of the greatest political contributions that the West has made to global culture.
Radke: Well, I believe it was Jesus who said, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. So like basically, no, there is a distinction. There is a distinction between the state and religion.
Radke: And when those two things mix, yikes, because when you have a theocracy, the person who is the leader also claims to know the mind of God.
Kuhnle: No, exactly.
Radke: And has the authority of God. And guess what?
Radke: I've met humans, and I don't want any human to have that power.
Kuhnle: But of course, it's even worse because the opponents of that person also believe that they are getting divine inspiration from God. Everyone believes it. And then we get wars.
Radke: Yeah. If you care about religion, you don't want the state to enforce religion.
Kuhnle: Exactly.
Radke: You want religion to flourish as itself, not as an arm of state power.
This painting was left intentionally incomplete. Haring began it when he was dying due to complications from AIDS, and knew he didn’t have much time left. The piece represents the incomplete lives of him and many others, lost to AIDS during the crisis.
“AIDS Memorial Quilt” — Multiple
This quilt is over 50 tons heavy, and one of, if not the, largest pieces of community folk art. Many people who died of AIDS did not receive funerals, due to social stigma and many funeral homes refusing to handle the deceased’s remains, so this was one of the only ways their lives could be celebrated. Each panel was created in recognition of someone who died due to AIDS, typically by that person’s loved ones.
“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) — Felix Gonzalez-Torres
This pile of candy weighs the same amount as Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross Laycock, did. Ross Laycock had died due to AIDS-related complications earlier that same year. Visitors who see this piece are encouraged to take some of the candy. As they do so, the pile of candy weighs less and less, like how AIDS had deteriorated the body of Ross Laycock.
The SF Gay Men's Chorus
This photo was taken in 1993. The men in white are the surviving original members. Every man in black is standing in for an original member who lost their lives to AIDS.
“Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers); Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate, 1997” — John Boskovich
After the death of his lover, Stephen Earabino, from AIDS, Boskovich discovered that his family had completely cleared his room, including Boskovich’s own possessions, save for this fan. An entire person, existence and relationship had been erased, just like so many lives during the AIDS crisis. Boskovich encased the fan in Plexiglass, but added cutouts so that its air may be felt by the viewer, almost like an exhalation. In a sense, restoring Earabino’s breath.
“Blue” — Derek Jarman
This was Jarman’s final feature film, released four months before his death from AIDS-related complications. These complications had left him visually impaired, able to only see in shades of blue. This film consists of a single shot of a saturated blue color, as the soundtrack to the film described Jarman’s life through narration, intercut with the adventures of Blue, a humanization of the color blue. The film's final moments consist of a set of repeated names: “John. Daniel. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul". These are the names of former lovers and friends of Jarman who had died due to AIDS.
“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) — Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Created by the same man who created the previous untitled piece, this piece was also inspired by his lover’s deterioration and death due to AIDS. This piece consists of two perfectly alike clocks. Over the course of time, one of the clocks will fall out of sync with the other.
In a letter written to his lover about the piece, before his lover’s passing, Gonzalez-Tourres wrote, “Don't be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, the time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain time in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit were it is due: time. We are synchronized, now forever. I love you.”
Also, gotta say, the VA house of delegates victories are incredible! In 2017, when I volunteered there with a DC group, some very blue places just … didn’t have dems even running for these seats. I did work in VA from 2017 to 2021 along with thousands of others, and all 30 northern Virginia seats being blue today is the result of people’s work over nearly 9 years. Organizing and activism are a long game of more and more people linking arms and handing off batons and doing the quiet, constant work that doesn’t get glory on the internet. And today, we see the results of that 💙
You ever think about how weird hippos are ecologically speaking?
There's literally no other megafauna on earth that spends the entire day lounging around in water, mostly just socializing, only to come onto land to feed at night.
I remember when I used to do education programs on hippos, most people assumed they ate aquatic plants, and that that's the whole reason they were in water. Meanwhile, hippos are basically just giant nocturnal cows that eat only grass.
WaitWaitWait. So. The whole plan to introduce Hippos to the U.S. would have been an even bigger catastrophe because they DON'T EVEN EAT WATER HYACINTH??!!?
Nobody bothered to check if they EVEN EAT WATER HYACINTH before deciding to spread Tactical Aquatic Murder Cows across the Southern U.S.???
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
On this day in 1983, the only reason civilization didn't meet its ignominious end was thanks to the cool head of Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who, as Lee Kuhnle, PhD, puts it, "did not follow orders and thereby saved the world."
I highly recommend listening to the Uncover Up Conspiracy Cast episode about the incident (🍎 🟢 ❤️). They do a particularly vivid job of setting the scene of just how bad global tensions had become, just how much pressure Petrov was under, and just how very extra dead the rest of us would be.
Here's the key section if you don't want to check out the whole thing:
So, today, do as Nathan Radke, MA, instructs and "enjoy the building that you are in not being radioactive rubble, then go breathe the air and appreciate how not on fire the air is." 🚫🔥
the thing so many people don't understand is that the reason wikipedia is generally not accepted as a source has nothing to do with accuracy. wikipedia is (generally) extremely accurate! the reason wikipedia isn't allowed as a source for school is because it's a summary of other sources. wikipedia has correct information, but it gets that information from OTHER places, which are either primary or secondary sources, which lends them credibility that wikipedia technically lacks.
so yes, wikipedia is a GREAT resource to learn new things! but if you want in depth, specific, and creditable sources, don't use wikipedia! use wikipedia's cited sources!!
I suspect it will come as a historical surprise to the Youths™ to learn that before Wikipedia existed, we got that same lecture at the beginning of each semester, it was just "don't cite encyclopedias" full stop. It's only that there has come One Encyclopedia To Rule Them All that the prohibition seems to be singling one source out.
Today's episode, Claire in enjoying a podcast she had subscribed to a while back but only started checking out this weekend. As in, each episode is about an hour and I first started listening Friday afternoon. It is now Sunday evening and I have consumed 26 episodes.
I am enjoying this podcast and have already recommended it to 3 out of my 12 total friends. But, I am absolutely wracking my brain to remember how I found it in the first place.
[Podcast in Question: The Uncover Up Conspiracy Cast — it's really good! Check it out! 🍎 🟢 ▶️ ❤️]
It's towards the end of my list, which I have not organized because it's mostly aspirational "maybe I'll check out someday" queue, so I know I subscribed to it *after* I subscribed to Ghosted by Roz Hernandez. I remember generally when I subscribed to Ghosted, it wasn't *that* long ago. Like within the last year. I remember when I subscribed to the stuff after it in the list—about three months ago. HOW DID THIS ONE GET IN THE LIST?
It's not the kind of podcast I would have dug up searching, mostly because I had years ago given up on ever finding one like this (an academic perspective on conspiracies and cults, etc). And my primary podcast-recommending friend says it wasn't her. HOW THEN?
So, in a commendable display of Personal Growth™, I do not go full completionist and actually just listen to the first 3 episode and then jump around to titles that I find particularly appealing. This is only the second time I have ever been able to do this and the first doesn't count because it was 1) getting back into a podcast I had already completionisted but then let go fallow and also I ended up re-completionisting it again by accident.
This is HUGE for me. My FOMO takes a very non-standard shape. It has zero concept of opportunity cost. I MUST UNDERSTAND ALL THE SUBTLE REFERENCES AND INSIDE JOKES. DO YOU HEAR ME? ALL OF THEM.
I inevitably become that weirdo who is more familiar with a podcast's back catalog than the actual hosts. So, forcing myself to jump to the third most recent episode after the first three is GROWTH, I tell you. SUBSTANTIVE GROWTH.
This podcast has been out 8 years. There are 157 episodes. I listen to 1–3, 155, then go back through downloading episodes with particularly intriguing titles (the fact that I happen to queue these up in chronological order does not need to be observed).
Here I am, 24 episodes of jumping around and I hit one with a guest who whets my interest. Oh! And they're on social, I should follow them. Bioethicists on social are a precious resource to be treasured.
Oh, she looks familiar. Click her linked tree. MYSTERY SOLVED.
About six months ago I came upon this tiktok creator and opened every single link in her linktree (like the good little completionist I am) and *subscribed* to a podcast that did an interview with her, completely forgot ALL OF THAT, and just *happened* to randomly select that episode in my investigation of said podcast.
I am trying *desperately* to finish my current rabbit holes (Pellagra | Women in 1880s Journalism) before getting lured into any fresh rabbit holes. And @jstor is *not helping.* I go to check if a particular journal is included and I get this tempting morsel dangled in front of me:
Then I decide to search by the author's name and I am presented with:
How am I supposed to resist such enticements, I ask you!
I just finished listening to a book that I believe would be well received by the Tumblr community:
God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible, by Esther J. Hamori.
Reasons Tumblr would appreciate this book:
Monsters
Plentiful references to Tumblr-approved pop-culture touchstones, particularly Supernatural and many horror movies
Snark
Here is a sample:
“Television angels show more of a range. Here, we’ve mostly moved beyond the pure as snow and sweet as saccharine Roma Downey on Touched by an Angel. A recent pinnacle of angelic portrayal is Supernatural, which includes Castiel, complex and flawed but noble at his core. But, also countless angels whose sadistic violence is far closer to biblical portrayals than Downey’s role ever was”
Here’s the review I left on Goodreads:
Come for the bestiary, stay for the incisive examination of the nature of God. Hamori manages to be accessible, playful, informative, and profound at once. The Bart Ehrman quote on the cover sums God’s Monsters up perfectly: “For those of us who believe in brutal honesty and in fighting horror with humor, this book is a godsend.”
I have since come across an extended version of the Bart Ehrman quote:
“God’s Monsters is a hilarious treatment of a horrifying topic. With deep intelligence, literary flair, and wicked wit, Esther Hamori pulls no punches in exposing the terrors of the Bible and the multitudinous divine creatures that inhabit it—including the Almighty himself. For those of us who believe in brutal honesty and in fighting horror with humor, this book is a godsend.”
things that happened to me when i was a woman in STEM:
an advisor humiliated me in front of an entire lab group because of a call I made in his place when he wouldn't reply to my e-mails for months
he later delegated part of my master's thesis work to a 19-year old male undergrad without my approval
a male scientist at a NASA conference looked me up and down and asked when i was graduating and if i was open to a job at his company. right before inquiring what my ethnicity was because i "looked exotic"
a random male member of the public began talking over me and my female advisor, an oceanographer with a pHD and decades of experience, saying he knew more about oceanography than us
things that have happened to me since becoming a man in STEM:
being asked consistently for advice on projects despite being completely new to a position
male colleagues approaching me to drop candid information regarding our partners / higher ups that I was not privy to before
lenience toward my work in a way I haven't experienced before. incredible understanding when I need to take time off to care for my family.
conference rooms go silent when I start talking. no side chatter. I get a baseline level of attention and focus from people that's very unfamiliar and genuinely difficult for me to wrap my head around.
like. yes some PI's will still be assholes regardless of the gender of their subordinates but, I've lived this transition. misogyny in STEM is killing women's careers, and trans men can and do experience male privilege.
Addendum* that acclaimed Stanford neuroscientist Ben Barres, MD, PhD, wrote a moving piece about this phenomenon in the July 2006 issue of Nature, titled "Does Gender Matter?"
After his death in 2017, Nature had made the piece open access, but it appears to have gone back behind a paywall.
There's an old PDF here. And if you have any half-way decent library, you should have access to legacy Nature articles, look for:
Barres, B. Does gender matter?. Nature 442, 133–136 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/442133a
I highly recommend it to anyone interested in STEM education or science policy.
At the time, Barres' article garnered coverage in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
*because I am realizing it is 20 years old, and thus probably not as well known to the Internet as it had been
