Careless selfishness and the harm done to the most vulnerable

Read Ed Yong. He’s explaining how 3% of the country — 7 million people — are immunocompromised for various causes, and vaccine and mask resistance (and outright denial) are putting them at risk. We seem to have just written them all off.

Finding and keeping jobs can be very hard for people with chronic illnesses such as lupus, which can leave them feeling powerless to advocate for themselves. With “close to no say about your working conditions, you can only do so much to protect yourself,” Levantovskaya, the literature professor, said. Several immunocompromised people have been told that they’re holding the rest of society back. In fact, it is the opposite: They’re being forced to reintegrate with no regard for their residual risk.

And perhaps worst of all, immunocompromised people began to be outright dismissed by their friends, relatives, and colleagues because of the misleading narrative that Omicron is mild. The variant bypassed some of the defenses that even immunocompetent people had built up, rendered several antibody treatments ineffective, and swamped the health-care system that immunocompromised people rely on. And yet one of Wallace’s patients was told by their sister that no one is dying anymore. In fact, people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

The pandemic is not over, despite people insisting they’re done with COVID. COVID’s not done with us.

Meanwhile, over on the Washington Post, they dedicate a long article to Chris Crouch. “Who?” you might ask. I did. Reading the article didn’t help explain why he gets all the attention. He and his wife Diana were deniers.

When the vaccines came along, Chris became outspoken against them, espousing views that were common in his workplace and much of Texas but that put him at odds with his mother, sister and the close friends he had grown up with in the Heights, a liberal bastion in Houston. Despite his family’s pleading, Chris and Diana were adamant they did not need to be vaccinated. They did wear masks, but only when required.

Chris felt that vaccine mandates infringed on personal liberties, a perspective promoted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other prominent Republicans. And Chris and Diana also worried that the shots had been developed too quickly. As he liked to say, “God gave us our immune system and we can fight the viruses with our own immune system.” Diana, meanwhile, was leery of anything that might hurt the developing baby she carried. She knew that early stories linking the vaccines to miscarriage and infertility were false, but thought avoiding them was the prudent thing to do, like skipping wine, raw fish and unpasteurized cheese — especially given some of the medical community’s early hesitation. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend that all pregnant people get vaccinated.

So…stupid asshole with the usual array of bogus arguments.

But then, it turns out that pregnancy is one of those complicating factors for COVID-19. Diana came down with a savage case, spends months on a ventilator and in a coma, has a series of small strokes, her lung collapses, the doctors expect that her chances of survival are very, very low, and that the pregnancy was a seriously debilitating factor.

Chris Crouch decides “he had to try to save them both.” That was a jarring statement. HE is going to save his wife and the fetus? I don’t know that there is much he could do, and further, his wife was unconscious and on a ventilator, the doctors and nurses were doing all the work. I guess he alone decided that he would maintain the elevated risk for his wife. If I were in a similar situation, I’d have instantly made a different choice, but ultimately would have wanted my wife’s opinion. It’s her body, her life, the husband is not the one suffering and close to dying.

“I didn’t know if one or the other was going to live, or both were going to die,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was going to go back home without anybody.”

Oh no! Pity poor Chris Crouch! Then he has a revelation.

During those long hours alone, he struggled with how strongly he had held to beliefs about the vaccines without really examining them. Increasingly, he felt a responsibility to warn others about his mistakes, so he began writing to friends, family and even strangers on Facebook, urging them to get the shots. Somewhere along the way, he got vaccinated himself.

“When you sit there and you see your wife on life support because of covid, you throw out politics,” he said later. “None of that matters anymore.”

Jesus christ. Almost a million dead in the US alone, with doctors and scientists telling you all along that this was a serious disease and that precautions are necessary, and now, at the last minute, when one person close to you is dying of the disease you belittle, NOW you decide maybe you could have been wrong, and that you shouldn’t have let your politics wreck public health policy. You dumbass. You goddamn selfish, self-centered, poisonous little asshole.

Then, the icing on the cake: Chris Crouch gets a whole long story in the Washington Post, entirely centered on him, on his struggle, his encounter with COVID, his difficult months watching his wife wasting away in a hospital bed, his wrestling with his conscience. It’s all him, him, him, him.

His wife survived. Her baby survived, delivered by C-section in the midst of her suffering. Why wasn’t she the heart of this story? Fuck Chris Crouch. He’s one of the reasons COVID has been as crippling and deadly as it has been, and I am totally out of patience and sympathy with his kind.

Aaaaaargh

Long day, many frustrations. The big problem right now is that my go-to home computer, an M1 Mac Mini, is being a pain in the butt and straining to make any kind of network connection. It’s been progressively degenerating for the past month, but now it’s to the point where Chrome will try to connect to a URL and just sit there for minutes before maybe loading something very very slowly.

The other night I tried to upload my class video…it took 11 hours! Where it is usually significantly under an hour. I’ve got another one I’ve got to upload now, and it simply can’t connect to YouTube.

It’s not the network, it’s not my router, it’s specific to this one computer. I’ve got a Linux machine right next to it (that’s what I’m typing on right now), and that’s working slick and smooth. I guess I’m going to transfer my file to an external storage device, put it on here, and upload it. BUT I WANT MY COMFY MAC TO WORK! Anyone have any suggestions about what could be going on?

Also, it’s all got a low priority for now. Tonight is Mary’s colonoscopy prep night, and I have to go in with her to the hospital tomorrow. Yeah. I’m not having any fun, but she is really not having fun.

This is some unbelievable alternate history nonsense!

Jonathan Turley is a lawyer and professor at George Washington University, and he brings shame to the profession.

Oh my god yes. What if they had cracked down on the Civil Rights movement, or arrested Martin Luther King? What a horrible, unimaginable what-if to propose!

What’s that? They did? How odd that a goddamn professor would never have heard of Letters from a Birmingham Jail, never seen the photos of police dogs and fire hoses turned on black citizens. I guess that’s the state of conservative education nowadays.

He goes on to whine that the police are treating the anti-vaxx protesters like terrorists. There is no comparison between these bozos and the civil rights protesters. After the murder of George Floyd, freeways in Minneapolis were choked with people demanding their civil rights and freedom from oppressive policing. These truckers are ignorant yahoos demanding the right to be plague rats in society. They are terrorists. Easily triggered terrorists who will melt down if you whisper the words “ram ranch” to them.

Physics so bad it offends a biologist

The local theater has been running a nominally SF movie for going on two weeks, and I have been tempted. I do love a glossy, shiny science fiction action movie with spaceships and derring-do and all that, but I have resisted, for two reasons.

It’s a Roland Emmerich movie. He’s a hack whose every movie has been an insult to the viewer’s intelligence, and while I can enjoy mindless entertainment, I cannot stomach anything as stupid as the trash he churns out.

It’s called Moonfall. I saw the trailer, and I swear to god, the premise is that the Moon…falls…into the Earth. I’m a mere biologist, but I am educated enough in basic physics to know that the idea is absurd. The whole idea of the movie smacked me hard in the brain, erasing all desire to actually see it.

But then, a third reason to avoid it popped up in my browsing. The Moon falling into the Earth? Ha ha. Do you think that was idiotic enough for Emmerich? No it was not. Here’s more.

When the moon’s orbit is found to be getting closer to Earth, it sets off tidal waves, upsets gravity, and interferes with the atmosphere. The moon is discovered to be an artificial megastructure, rather than an organic body, that is hollow inside, with the Apollo 11 mission having discovered its abnormalities and kept it secret. It transpires that a hostile artificially intelligent nano swarm has been drawing energy from the megastructure’s energy source – a captured white dwarf at its centre – which is the cause of the moon’s destabilization.

A small team including John Bradley’s conspiracy theorist, Halle Berry’s NASA executive, and Patrick Wilson’s disgraced former astronaut, heads inside the moon with the intention of destroying the nano swarm using an EMP device. While there, they discover that the megastructure was built by humanity’s technologically advanced ancestors as a way of conserving life and repopulating after their AI became sentient and intent on destroying them. The trio learns that the moon – and other megastructures like it – was constructed and seeded with their ancestors’ genetic code as a kind of ark designed to seek out new hospitable parts of the universe in which to rebuild life. The nano swarm, we are told, is programmed to seek out organic matter in electronic environments, its primary purpose to seek out humanity and destroy it.

Did I just spoil the movie for you? Too bad. Tough. I’ve done you a favor. You don’t really want to see it anyway, do you? Unfortunately, someone read that script and decided to plop down millions of dollars to actually make it. The only question I have is whether it will out-stupid The Core.

Further spoilers: I haven’t seen it, and haven’t read any other plot summaries, but I predict that at the end our intrepid heroes will stumble across a techno-gimmick that abruptly and completely ends the threat, and everyone lives happily ever after. I don’t need to see it to know that. It’s a Roland Emmerich pile of shit.

The rotten heart of the story

Here’s a painfully long story about a mass murderer, the wretched guy who went on a shooting spree in Denver. It doesn’t need to be so long. We can get the gist of the story from three short paragraphs in the middle.

“He was a dick to women, and he just didn’t really like women at all. He didn’t like women having any kind of say,” said Costilow. “He just did not think a woman should really even speak most of the time; he was just such an asshole.”

The manosphere works as a well-known pipeline to extremist groups, and hatred of women is an entry point for many extremists.

“He actually hated, openly hated women… I never experienced a man who openly showed that he held no respect whatsoever for women,” said Andre Thiele, a German onetime fan of McLeod who interacted with him online and who eventually was turned off by him in late 2020 because of his increasingly extremist views. “And yet he was surrounded by women. He had women supporting him in every horrible situation that he created. He couldn’t have made it one single month in his life without a whole bunch of women constantly supporting him with everything he needed.”

You can stop right there. I’ve got enough information already to understand his twisted motivation. He wasn’t a complex character at all.

Oh, one other piece of information is good to know. He’s dead now, shot by a woman police officer. Somehow, that’s a rare cop killing that seems just.

Good Irish common sense

I have learned the appropriate response to an invitation to a “gender reveal” party.

A mortifying disaster of epic, reputation ruining proportions was avoided by a Waterford couple after friends and family intervened to successfully reason with them, WWN can reveal.

Sarah and Michael Corkley (both 26) had circulated the idea they intended to have a ‘gender reveal party’ following the happy news Sarah was pregnant with the couple’s first child. However, the idea was labeled at best ‘a load of American horlicks’ and at worst ‘would you two eejits ever cop on to yourself before you ruin the Corkley name for generations to come’ by those closest to them.

“I flat out pretended I’ve never heard of that awful ‘reveal’ shite when they told me. I told them I’d march straight into the hospital and steal the scan and tell them the baby’s gender if they didn’t wise up,” Sarah mother Jackie explained to WWN.

I have no idea what “horlicks” are, but it sounds about right to me.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to turn down such an invitation, since my relatives, friends, and colleagues all seem to be level-headed intelligent people who would similarly recoil at the idea of putting on such a silly spectacle.

Genetics can reach way, way back

A few years ago — in 2016? Yikes, time passes quickly when you’re miserable — Jennifer Raff gave a talk at Skepticon on The Misuse of Genetics in Pseudoscience. It was good stuff, right in my battery of interests. She debunked popular nonsense, like ancient astronauts, abuses of archaeology, ‘scientific’ racism, garbage notions about IQ, etc. It was recorded, so you can watch it now!

Dr Raff is even more famous today, and I’m sure it would be difficult to book her for a small convention anywhere, if we had them anymore, because she has just published a book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, to a phenomenal reception. It’s deserved, too. The book touches lightly on the subjects in her talk — you can tell that the blatant foolishness of popular ideas about prehistory rankles — but mainly the book is about her work in the anthropology of the Americas, viewing the history of this part of the world through a genetic lens…but also from a humanist perspective. She respects indigenous culture, and it shows.

There’s a fair bit of technical information here, but it’s a pleasant read. I tore through it in two evenings of bedtime reading, and probably would have finished it in one if that obnoxious habit of sleeping when tired hadn’t interrupted me. Here I am teaching at a university with a mission to serve the American Indian community, and it ought to be required reading in these parts. In your parts, I don’t know, but I think you’d enjoy it and learn a lot.

My Valentine’s Day lecture was nothing about romance

I’m still plugging away at my genetics course, and will be until May — so get used to me plopping in these long academic tutorials 3 times a week. You can ignore them, my students can’t.

I’m trusting that the students now have solid foundation in basic Mendelian genetics, so now it’s time to start cutting the mooring ropes so we can drift off into more complex and difficult waters.