Notices by Alex Wild (alexwild@mastodon.online), page 3

The invasive Joro spiders everyone’s freaking out about do not eat monarch butterflies, recognizing them as distasteful even though the two species have no history together.

#Spiders #JoroSpiders #science

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/15/5/309

Every now and again I put a few photos into the public domain.

Here's a gallery:

https://www.alexanderwild.com/Professional/Public-Domain

@blogdiva SmugMug is great. I've been with them since 2008 and they still have excellent customer service and great design.

UT Austin, my employer, beats and jails students engaged in peaceful protest, then manufactures propaganda that deeply misrepresents what the students were doing and had planned to do.

How am I supposed to work at an institution willing to hurt any students I recruit to come here? This is untenable.

#UTAustin #Texas

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2024-05-03/uts-war-on-students/

Biology faculty at UT are meeting today to talk about a hiring plan. I really don't envy their job of trying to make a department located in Texas attractive.

We're in the middle of an ongoing purge of black staff, the adminstration just called in the state police to beat and jail students, and no one in their right mind would want to risk pregnancy to have a family here. It's bleak.

The UT Austin Reddit has a large collection of student perspectives on the protests and administrative response. And it does not look good for the administration.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UTAustin/

Campuses aren't being rocked by protests.

They're being rocked by politicized administrators ordering students beaten and jailed to satisfy the political elite.

Let's be clear who is causing the violence.

Jay Hartzell, President of the University of Texas at Austin, yesterday broke the single most important compact that academics have with each other and their institutions: do not intentionally hurt students.

The TX governor, for his own political purposes, sent state troopers to campus before a student protest even began. Hartzell both let these outside law enforcement agencies in, and provided cover for the violence they inflicted on dozens of peaceful, unarmed UT students.

#UTAustin

Moved into a new house last fall. The yard was fine, but mostly neglected. The sprinkler system had broken at least 5 years prior and was never fixed. Infrequently mowed.

Imagine my surprise this spring when a sizable chunk of the front yard did this:

Joe Lieberman was one of many rich Americans who used his status to make life harder for almost everyone else in the country.

His death is preceded by the preventable deaths of many he could have helped save, but didn’t, because doing so might make billionaires less wealthy.

Joe Leiberman's legacy.

The white supremacists like Chris Rufo who are attempting to purge non-whites from universities aren't pulling their 6-figure salaries and flying all over the country from thin air. It's money from places like Heritage.

We have lots of great reasons to change from fossil fuels to renewables, but one underappreciated one is that oil money funds a disproportionately large portion of the resurgence of white supremacy.

People acting surprised when the white guy paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by rich white supremacists to purge black leaders from educational institutions turns out to be racist.

Klansman linked to white supremacy. Shocker.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/rightwing-activist-christopher-rufo-ties-scientific-racism-journal

As someone who lived with actual subsistance farmers for a couple years, I have to roll my eyes at survivalists and other farm romanticizers who blithely talk about "we'll grow our own food!" as if that were the easier option than keeping our society's ship afloat.

Farming to feed yourself is hard. Really hard. Y'all have no idea.

Twitter/X suspended numerous journalists overnight, with no reason given.

#Twitter

I have seen two news stories in the past 6 months about Jackson, Mississippi.

1. The white state government is removing the locally-elected judiciary of the majority black city and replacing it with unelected, white-appointed courts.

2. Hundreds of bodies have been found buried behind the jail, many of people never charged with a crime who were reported by families as “missing”.

These are fundamentally the same story.

#WhiteSupremacy #Mississippi #Jackson

@hankg I’m sure it’ll be fine. https://ktvz.com/news/accidents-crashes/2024/01/05/alaska-airlines-flight-makes-emergency-return-to-pdx-after-large-panel-on-side-of-boeing-737-max-9-blows-out/

Our oligarchs are so rich they don’t need to hire assassins to take care of the pesky journalists who cover their crimes, like they do in less wealthy countries.

They just obliterate the truth tellers and fact checkers with money.

#Meta #Harvard #Disinformation #Corruption

https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-press-release/