“A happy ending is ultimately had by all in this delightful if politically incorrect concoction”

Way back when I was a kid, the local television station would occasional broadcast a matinee showing of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I never watched it. I probably caught a few minutes of it here and there, but it was a musical singing about getting girlfriends at a time when one of the other four channels was probably showing a Gamera movie or something.

But other people paid attention, like Devorah Blachor at McSweeney’s. You mean to say the seven brothers were going to kidnap the seven women and rape them? The movie is based on the rape of the Sabine Women? You mean people in the 1950s just overlooked that it was all about mass rape and even nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar award?

I mean, this was pretty blatant.

I am forced to conclude that the America I grew up in was even more fucked up than I thought, and all that saved me from this kind of indoctrination was a fondness for cheesy sci-fi/horror movies. Did you know that the first Godzilla movie came out in the same year as this dreck, but did it get a best picture nomination? Noooo.

The NY Times doing what it does best: waffling

The NY Times sent me an explainer for the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19. It’s long. It’s very careful to present Both Sides at length. It’s what I’ve come to expect from the NY Times, a diligent, earnest explanation that gives equal weight to every position that requires some technical expertise to see through the bullshit to recognize that A) we’re in a realm of uncertainty, and B) that doesn’t mean every explanation is equally valid, and C) they’re giving disproportionate attention to a theory that has no supporting evidence. We don’t know every single intermediate step in the evolution of COVID-19, and can never know the full details of its origin, but that doesn’t imply that a claim that an intelligent Chinese designer intentionally constructed the virus in a lab.

So they cite a letter to Science signed by 18 people that says, “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” The letter doesn’t include any evidence. It doesn’t explain why we should consider the lab-leak hypothesis reasonable, while citing a WHO report that considers a lab accident to be “extremely unlikely”, only to dismiss it.

They cite an article in the Wall Street Journal as evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is “plausible”. Did they read the same article I did? Because that article starts with a group of Chinese miners who came down with a serious respiratory illness after collecting bat guano in an abandoned copper mine. Unless you think the Wuhan biological warfare scientists store their samples in bat shit in old caves, that only tells us that bats harbor all kinds of interesting and potentially horrible viruses, not that the viruses are intentionally created. The WSJ and the NYT do share a similar disease, though, bothsideritis. Notice the one-two punch in this short quote: first they tell us that lab origin is extremely unlikely, and then swivel to say the question divides the scientific community.

“If the world wants to shut down work that was not gain-of-function because of a conspiracy theory, that’s a huge mistake,” Dr. Daszak said earlier this year. ”This virus, it’s extremely unlikely that it came from a lab. If we focus on the lab issue and ignore what really happened, we do so at our ultimate peril.”

One question now dividing the scientific community is whether such experiments could have created SARS-CoV-2, either accidentally or as part of a deliberate effort to see which viruses could evolve into ones dangerous to humans.

I don’t think the scientific community is divided. There are a few scientists who think the lab leak hypothesis is possible and should be investigated more (but they lack any evidence), while the majority are saying “Wha…? But we already know viruses evolve rapidly, and that there are vast numbers of unknown viruses lurking in natural reservoirs, so why are you asking us to waste time on the least likely explanation?” And so it will go, round and round, with major news organizations feeding the conspiracy theories and paranoia.

Meanwhile, the strongest piece of evidence the conspiracy theorists can muster is the claim that the Chinese have been dodgy about allowing investigators in. This is nonsense. The head of the Wuhan labs, Zheng-Li Shi, explains.

Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Chinese Academy of Sciences, has engaged in a long-term study on natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV[16–18] and is among the first institutions that identified the SARS-CoV-2 after the COVID-19 outbreak.[2,19] In addition, WIV discovered a virus sequence (RaTG13) that shows a 96.2% genomic sequence identity match with the SARS-CoV-2 genome, in its archived bat samples collected in 2013.[2] These results lay a foundation for understanding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, development of diagnostic methods, antiviral drug screening, and vaccine development; the findings also provide an important clue pertaining to the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Sadly, WIV was at the center of the misleading speculations regarding the origin of the virus, which were not fully clarified until a recent joint study was performed by an international expert team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese experts.

The joint expert team has been working in three groups, the epidemiology, molecular research, and animal and environment groups.[20] The experts have been working together through video conferences, onsite interviews and visits, and extensive discussions. Over the course of 4 weeks, the joint team studied massive volumes of epidemic-related data and visited some facilities, including the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (Wuhan P4 laboratory) run by WIV; in addition, they also visited the Huanan seafood market. The team interviewed local medical workers, laboratory researchers, scientists, market managers, residents, and recovered COVID-19 patients.

The joint team visited the Wuhan P4 laboratory, a facility which is the most widely speculated place of origin of the SARS-CoV-2. The Wuhan P4 laboratory is the first of such facilities to be constructed in China and runs high-level biosafety checks. The laboratory is a state-of-the-art design by French experts, jointly constructed by French and Chinese engineers and accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS). It was designed to be a laboratory studying highly classified pathogens and an international collaboration research center on emerging infectious diseases. All activities in this laboratory on specific viruses were qualified by the China National Health Commission (CNHC). All administration and management have been strictly regulated and regularly examined and reviewed by these two Chinese authorities. It has been examined by CNAS and CNHC four and three times, respectively, since its opening at the end of 2017. Currently, this laboratory is approved to study the Nipah virus, Ebola virus, Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus, and SARS-CoV-2. This laboratory has played a pivotal role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic by way of animal model studies and inactivated vaccine development, drug screenings and tests, and basic research for understanding SARS-CoV-2.

The WHO joint team has had extensive exchanges with the laboratory manager, scientists, and staff and has highly appraised the cooperation, transparency, and openness of the WIV leadership and staff. The team concluded, “They upheld a very stringent and high-quality management system. Also proceeding from the current evidence, we regard the lab leak hypothesis as extremely unlikely” in a statement released to the media on February 9, 2021, Wuhan.[5]

Shi summarizes their goals.

In the past several decades, more than 70% of emerging or reemerging infectious diseases are zoonoses and were transmitted to humans from their animal reservoirs through intermediate hosts. A huge number of unknown viruses exist in their natural reservoirs and continue to evolve, which results in the generation of new strains. Many of these viruses may have intrinsic characteristics that enable them to cross species barriers and infect humans. The rapid global economic development, including urbanization, land usage, animal domestication, and intensive agriculture, increases the chances of contact between humans and wildlife, thereby increases the risk of interspecies transmission of viruses carried by wild animals. To prevent future zoonosis, the best strategy is long-term and extensive surveillance based on science. We need to learn about unknown viruses, assess the potential risks of interspecies transmission, pinpoint the hotspots of animal-human interfaces, and eventually prepare diagnosis methods and use them for monitoring high-risk animal and human populations. With this prophylactic strategy, we can rapidly identify and limit the rapid spread of emerging pathogens at the very early stage and prevent the next epidemic. To this end, it is necessary to unify experts from different disciplines, including microbiologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, clinical specialists, ecologists, sociologists, and policymakers, to work together on the basis of science.

Exactly. The Chinese labs are right there at the forefront of studying how zoonotic diseases emerge from animal reservoirs. It doesn’t help if, when a population is infected with a disease of natural origin, they grab the torches and pitchforks and descend in a mob on the laboratories that are trying to control the disease. Yeah, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is studying coronaviruses, because they knew these were a potential source of human pandemics; do you want to shut them down? Do you really think that an institution that was studying viruses is therefore the source of a virus?

The New York Times earned my contempt over a decade ago with their he said/she said approach to Intelligent Design creationism. They presented then their notion of balance, with long articles that highlighted creationism with equal weight to scientific studies of evolution. It drove me crazy then, and this is exactly the same thing here. The idea that the COVID-19 virus was the product of intentional design can be dismissed with a simple statement: we have no need of that hypothesis. Instead, the NY Times will quote Matt Yglesias and Tom Cotton insisting that we do, and conclude with this:

So what’s the truth?
We don’t know. Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible. And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.

Let’s pretend they’re equally plausible, and then find an excuse to blame China. That’s what this was really about.

Hbomberguy is back

After a very long hiatus, Hbomberguy has come out with a new video, about vaccines and the anti-vax movement. And it’s…ONE HOUR AND 44 MINUTES LONG???!?

Oh well, I’m currently doped to the gills and melting over my chair, so I guess I’ll watch it. At least, have it in the background while I stare vacantly into space.

Everything must be done as awkwardly and inefficiently as possible!

That seems to be my university’s motto. This morning I completed “Preventing Sexual Misconduct, Discrimination and Retaliation for Employees”, an online and required training module that ate up a few hours. I am entirely sympathetic with the purpose of the exercise, and I appreciate the reminder, but sheesh, it was awful. Cheesy animations, irrelevant clip art, bad acting in skits, pointless interactivity (click on the card, it spins!), all interspersed with bad audio and bad cinematography of talking heads, and worst of all, pop-ups of state and federal laws that you had to scroll all the way through in order to progress on. Imagine a EULA that was punctuated with recorded zoom calls from executives telling you how important it was to pay attention, with occasional stiff, wooden, but colorful cartoons where figures just stand there wiggling their arms. I cringed. I moaned. I wept at how bad it was at presenting important information. If I taught a course this badly, I’d deserved to be hauled in and rebuked.

I also got in for a check-up of my back agonies. On the negative side, Mary just had to pipe up and remind them that I was also due for a colonoscopy, and I’ll probably get to do that in July. On the positive side, I’m getting an appointment for physical therapy and a prescription for some good drugs. I’m going to celebrate completion of my obligatory painful training course by spending the afternoon all mellowed out and high.

You’d think I’d learn

Every year this happens. I spend the winter and spring snowbound, shackled to my desk trying to keep up with classes, and then May arrives. Classes are over! The snow has melted! I leap up to bolt into the field, and…<SPROOOIING>. My body falls apart. If it’s not my knees, it’s my back. I have to curl up into a little ball of pain until the muscles and tendons readjust, and then move out gingerly, hoping none of the cables snap when I exert myself to, for instance, walk up some stairs.

So this morning, it’s off to the doctor, who I’m hoping will send me off to do some physical therapy, where I will finally learn how to avoid treating this pathetic body stupidly. It’s really wrecking my plans for the summer, too — I have a fair bit of fieldwork planned, but now I’m rethinking and developing some projects I can do sitting down in the lab, just in case.

The Marjorie Taylor Greene disease

There she goes again, opening her mouth and saying stupid shit.

Appearing before the Dalton, Georgia, City Council on June 15, 2020, Greene complained about the movement to remove statues of the pro-slavery Confederacy and Christopher Columbus.

We’re seeing situations where Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all kinds of statues are being attacked, said Greene. It seems to be just an effort to take down history.

She went on to note, And whether I see a statue that may be something that I would fully disagree with, like Adolf Hitler, maybe a statue of Satan himself, I would not want to say take it down, but again, it’s so that I can tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did, and what they may be about.

I don’t believe for a moment that a statue of Hitler is something she would fully disagree with.

Also, the problem isn’t “attacking” statues, it’s attacking the ideas that those statues represent. We put up statues of famous men and then ignore the flaws in those people, so it’s the opposite of teaching history to idolize individuals. What am I supposed to teach children when we stroll by a statue of Hitler in the park? That you aren’t supposed to feel sick to your stomach, that you should respect the principles he stood for?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is stupid and demented. And she doubled down!

Over the weekend, Greene had said during an interview that COVID-related mask rules in the House of Representatives are reminiscent of a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.

A mask is a functional item that benefits the wearer, and most importantly, the people around them. It discriminates against respiratory viruses, nothing else. But maybe she’d like to erect statues to coronaviruses?

It’s not just one loon babbling, either. The whole dang Republican party seems to support her.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy released a statement describing Greene’s newest comments about the Holocaust as “wrong” but also attacking Democrats.

At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he wrote.

Boy, they really hate Nancy Pelosi. But that’s all backwards — the Republicans are where we find the white nationalists and white supremacists and the people who are trying to restrict democracy and oppose immigration. And they call the Democrats anti-Semitic?

I think what they’re referring to is that there are more Democrats willing to recognize the authoritarian oppression of Palestinians by Israel. That’s not anti-Semitism. That’s opposition to genocide by Israeli “defense” forces. It’s also weak sauce, since the Democrats haven’t been particularly effective in opposing the violence.

But the Republicans will just go on propping up the kind of antic poison that will rip this country apart.

I’d join the misanthropy club, but I would probably detest the members

Early on, one of the things that led me to atheism was that so many Christians insisted on things that were patently wrong. Why did I leave the church at a young age? This would horrify Ken Ham, but they lost me precisely because of the anti-science and specifically anti-evolution slant.

Then the racists lost me because they insisted that black people were a parallel (and inferior!) evolutionary line that looked more like gorillas than white people do. I knew a fair bit about other primates, and no, that’s definitely false. It’s absurdly false. So nope, the racists will not persuade me, especially since now I have even deeper knowledge of the subject than I did as a child.

And then there are the anti-feminists.

It is incomprehensible to me how anyone committed to an evidence-based perspective can be opposed to feminism. You hang out with a few anti-feminists and they’re just oozing with bullshit, which was one of the features leading me to part ways with the atheist movement. This stuff is damaging to any social organization, and if you let it thrive, I want no part of you.

Like this:

At that link, there’s a whole series of dumbass assertions by ignorant idiots about biology. Ick. They’re all from those hives of villainy, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. And I realized that my problem isn’t just with Christianity, or atheism, or racism, or misogyny — it’s with all of humanity. Or, at least, that part of humanity that gravitates towards social media. And with that, my heart shrank two sizes that day.

Save our spiders!

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an article about how we need to talk about spider conservation. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue, since spiders are basically the charismatic megafauna of the invertebrate world — where you might think of something like tigers and wolves as the mammalian superstars, spiders fill a similar role among the arthropods.

“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. “Nightmares, anxieties and fears are very frequent reactions in ‘normal’ people,” he concedes.

Perhaps that’s why spiders remain under-represented across the world’s endangered-species conservation plans. Average people don’t think much about them, relatively few scientists study them, and conservation groups and governments don’t act enough to protect them.

That’s a major gap in species-protection efforts — one that has wide repercussions. “Efforts in conservation of spiders are particularly meaningful for nature conservation,” Isaia points out. Spiders, he says, have enormous ecological value as food for birds and other animals. They’re also important to people, both as predators of pest species and as inspiration for medicines and engineering.

My first spider project, started a couple of years ago, was a survey of spider populations in people’s outbuildings — garages and sheds — that I argued would be a useful proxy for studying invertebrate populations. Counting chironomids would be way too daunting, but counting the smaller number of chironomid predators would be much easier. At least that was the plan. We spent one summer knocking on doors, getting permission to invade their storage spaces and sweep for spiders, and I have a little pile of folders and species counts that I’ve assembled into a nice baseline measure…but then this damned pandemic hit, and I haven’t been able to do the follow-up measurements. Maybe next summer I’ll be able to resume it.

It’s a lovely project for undergrads. You don’t need to know anything about spiders, other than to be able to recognize one, so day one you can collect data. I hope we can continue it in 2022, and then I’ll just have to figure out how to deal with a big gap in the series.

I was doing it as a study of the health of the invertebrate population in general, but there are a lot of things we don’t know about spiders in general.

“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.”

This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae. (And perhaps tellingly, it’s worth noting that the Gibraltar funnel-web spider has not currently been assessed for the IUCN Red List.)

I found that about 10 species covered the great majority of spiders in a narrowly defined environment — but if you think about it, 10 different species in the 60 square meters of a large garage is rather impressively diverse. What are all those different spiders doing in that environment? And we’d often also find some other species in any one space that wasn’t universal. Then if we stepped outside into the garden, or walked down by the river, or looked in a barn that had been abandoned for fifty years, yet more species would show up.

I have no idea if any are endangered, because no one else in this area has been looking. More research is required!

I’m losing confidence in the “intelligence” community

I’m not saying it was the CIA, but it was the CIA.

We’re suffering from a spate of UFO reports…endorsed by the CIA and the military. This is a bit like hearing that the president believes the Earth is flat, or senators babbling about how evolution is false.

Oh. I guess that last bit happens fairly regularly.

Anyway, suddenly there are all kinds of unconvincing videos from military planes flooding media. I’ve looked at a few — they are garbage. It’s as if people who are supposed to be good at distinguishing camera artifacts from actual stuff on the ground or in the sky have lost the ability to see common noise and optical problems. I saw one video where the supposed UFO was just plain old ordinary bokeh. You don’t have to be super-sophisticated to debunk this stuff, which means, I guess, that CIA directors aren’t particularly knowledgeable.

Late last year, former CIA director John Brennan, appearing on a podcast hosted by George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen, said it was “a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.”

Yes? I believe there is almost certainly other forms of life in the universe. The hard-to-swallow bit is the idea that they’re here.

And last month, former CIA director R. James Woolsey said in an interview with the Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal sightings, that he wasn’t “as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly, but something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.”

I’ve known a few pilots. Nothing about their occupation requires particularly deep intelligence (nor is it antithetical to being smart). Even if they were super-geniuses, you should still be skeptical of the reports. Have none of these people even read Feynman?

Hey, why is a former CIA director giving interviews on “a website that collects paranormal sightings”?

The authenticity of the videos has been confirmed by Pentagon officials. Some of them were recently featured on “60 Minutes.”

I have looked at these videos, and they actually truly are videos, rather than hallucinations. There. Confirmed.

I suppose this could also mean they have confirmed the sources, and they weren’t made by guys photographing pie plates thrown in their backyard. What they haven’t confirmed is that they are videos of alien spaceships.

“I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots,” Brennan said, “and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them.” He added, “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

Right. Bokeh. Lens reflections. Sensor artifacts. Brennan doesn’t understand optics. There is almost always an alternative, mundane explanation that doesn’t involve faster-than-light travel by intelligent aliens who are cruising our planet in flotillas of glowing spaceships, yet somehow are incredibly concerned about not being seen, which is why they look like flares dropped from airplanes.

Of course, eventually we figure out why all these people are being gullible and foolish. It’s about money. All it takes is a few easily fooled people with access to government funds to open the purse strings and fuel all kinds of nonsense.

It only took about 10 minutes to persuade his colleagues, Stevens and Inouye, to support approximately $22 million in funds for the Pentagon to start a program to investigate. Stevens was a particularly easy sell, [former Senate Majority leader Harry] Reid recalled, because as an Air Force pilot during World War II he had seen some pretty weird stuff, including an object that didn’t appear to be a plane that mimicked his movements in the air.

Here on planet Earth we call those objects “reflections”.

All right, for $22 million I’d be willing to highlight ambiguous videos, shrug, and declare in interviews that “well, it could be aliens.”

Would you pay me $2.2 million for the service?

$220,000, cheap.

Very well then, $22, but you also have to buy me lunch.