They get away with it because they can get away with it

I find this jarringly horrible. Some people in Florida are driving around in a truck projecting Nazi imagery on buildings.

They also put up messages, like “Kanye was right about the Jews,” but showing a swastika intertwined with a cross is particularly revealing. Christian nationalism, anti-Semitism, blatant bigotry, all proudly displayed, and no one is doing anything about it. Try to do that in my neighborhood, and I’d be part of the mob taking bats to the projector and flipping the truck over.

What mystifies me is that there are subsets of the population in the US that revere Nazis and don’t react to this kind of hate speech with the kind of shuddering revulsion I feel. This is evil stalking our streets. It should not be tolerated, and the people perpetrating it need to understand the visceral disgust they trigger in others.

Unfortunately, these people are also close kin to all the rabid conservatives who hate “wokeness”.

Now what?

This morning was supposed to be hot sexy breeding time: I had set aside ten very large, pulchritudinous, eager virgin females in special containers where they could build a cozy little silky nest, and then I had a larger pool of smaller young’uns to draw some lucky males from. I went through that pool first thing, and what do I find? Only two males. Everyone else is female.

This is thanks to the fact that males are generally smaller, weaker, and less robust, and there’s been slow attrition of the population over the last month or two that selectively weeds out males. This is not good. This is going to be a bit of a bottleneck. I’ve got 24 eager females and only two males to service them.

I guess what I’m going to do is pair up the males with a different female every day, rotating them through a harem. Unfortunately, this harem is hungry and out-muscles their partners by quite a bit, so it might be more like a gauntlet, and those two males are going to end up at best exhausted, and at worst, dead.

I also have one egg sac that will hatch out by the end of the month, but it will take another 4-6 weeks beyond that before any males will be ready to get to work. These females are ripe, can they wait that long?

One bad apple

Here’s a horrifying list of crimes committed, and admitted to, by one man in the UK.

24 counts of rape
nine counts of sexual assault
five counts of assault by penetration
three counts of coercive and controlling behaviour
three counts of false imprisonment
two counts of attempted rape
one count of attempted sexual assault by penetration
one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent
one count of indecent assault

That’s bad enough, but to make it worse, he was a police officer who used his privileges to run a little corrupt empire of violence and abuse.

Must be a case of “one bad apple,” right? Except that this villain, David Carrick, had been on the police force for over 20 years, and had a history of abusive behavior.

The Met has apologised after it emerged he had come to the attention of police over nine incidents, including rape allegations, between 2000 and 2021.

A senior officer said his offending was “unprecedented in policing”.

Oh, really? “Unprecedented”? His fellow officers knew about his reputation, and joked about it; they had formal complaints about his crimes spread over two decades. They did nothing. Now members of the police force are standing around, shrugging, claiming they had no idea this sort of thing was going on, hrumph.

Assistant Commissioner Barbara Gray, the Met’s lead for professionalism, said: “We should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation.

“We are truly sorry that being able to continue to use his role as a police officer may have prolonged the suffering of his victims.

Everyone else knew, though.

Harriet Wistrich, director of campaign group the Centre for Women’s Justice, said: “We have known for some time that there has been a culture of impunity for such offending by police officers.

“Recent reports show a woefully deficient vetting and misconduct system and a largely unchallenged culture of misogyny in some sections of the Met.

“That Carrick could have not only become a police officer but remain a serving officer for so long whilst he perpetrated these horrific crimes against women, is terrifying.”

A first step: fire every police officer who has been charged with domestic violence immediately. Just as a start.

Oops, there goes 40% of the police force. That’s a good start, but probably not Draconian enough. What else can you do when the whole barrel is rotten, to the point the staves are decaying?

You know what’s worse than a faceful of spiders?

Anti-vaxxers.

Harriet Hall, a well-known doctor who had been prominent on the skeptic circuit, died last week of heart disease. This was unfortunate, but one thing she didn’t die of was COVID…not that that would stop the ghouls from announcing that she died of a COVID vaccination. They wedged her into their “died suddenly” meme.

It makes no sense to me. This is no “died suddenly” event: a 77 year old woman with a history of heart problems and several years of declining health dying of congestive heart failure is not “sudden”, nor is it in any way correlated with vaccination. But then, facts don’t matter in the anti-vax crowd: if a critic of their fallacious doom-squealing did die suddenly by being hit with a bus, even then I’d expect them to claim it was vaccine-related.

David Gorski talks about the dishonesty of quacks at length, you might want to give that a read.

This “died suddenly” phenomenon is not unique to vaccines and antivaxxers. It is, rather, a subset of a more general phenomenon in which those who deny science-based medicine blame deaths on the intervention or preventative, rather than the disease itself. Long before the pandemic, I was writing about how quacks and cranks would seize on the deaths of celebrities of cancer to blame chemotherapy, rather than their cancers, for having killed them. Examples are numerous (some catalogued here) and include David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Tony Snow, Farrah Fawcett, Elizabeth Edwards, Patrick Swayze (with a particularly despicable use of a photo showing how emaciated he was). Alternatively, they “lament” how a celebrity with cancer might have lived if only he had chosen (or stuck with) alternative medicine, such as Steve Jobs. The ghoulishness is a feature, not a bug, of the denial of medical science.

It is a denial that Harriet dedicated her post-Air Force life to combatting and that we here at SBM will continue to do. Antivaxxers can try to claim that vaccines killed Harriet all they want, but we know the truth, that unfortunately there are things medicine can’t always fix or prevent and that none of us gets out of here alive. All we can do is to use what time we have to do as much good as we can while we are still breathing, which is what Harriet tried to do. Ironically, by trying to add Harriet to their “died suddenly” conspiracy theory, antivaxxers gave her one last chance to help push back against quackery. I hope, but can never know, that she approves.

How I think of arachnophobes

In what I consider among the most cringeworthy videos of all time, a whole family of arachnophobes notice a small house spider on the ceiling, and freak out. There is much screaming and whining and indecision by daddy chickenshit, mama chickenshit, and a couple of shrieking baby chickenshits. They should all be ashamed.

I include the video just to document how stupid these people are, but I don’t recommend actually watching it — there’s way too much over-the-top drama over a harmless animal.

You’re going to hate me for this, but when someone tells me they’re afraid of spiders, I’ll always picture these people in my head.

The feminine isn’t an absolute

I’m not going to take advice from anyone with the word “alpha” in their username, a rule that seems to work fairly robustly.

It’s strange that anyone would have such a binary view of how women should be. You know that it’s possible to appreciate spiders without chugging beer and smashing cans on your forehead, right? And that arachnophobia isn’t a parameter on the femininity spectrum? People are more complex than that.

But who am I to talk? My vision of idealized femininity was fixed in the 1960s.

I wonder what she thinks of spiders? I’m pretty sure she would have seen them as one of our fellow creatures, man, you know, like part of nature.

Nothing will ever be done

Siouxsie Wiles explains the sneaky shenanigans behind COVID PR. It’s literally PR for the disease.

In late 2020, the WHO started naming Covid-19 variants after letters of the Greek alphabet. Omicron was the letter given to the variant that emerged in late 2021.

Just looking at the data on the cumulative number of confirmed Covid cases worldwide, which we know is an underestimate, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Omicron has probably infected more people in the last year than caught Covid in the first two years of the pandemic put together.

All those Omicron infections mean the virus has also continued to evolve, but so far, the WHO hasn’t given any of the Omicron offshoots a new Greek letter. That’s why the world has been drowning in an alphabet soup of Omicron subvariants, from the BA’s and BJ’s to the BQ’s and XBB’s. I guess if we gave any one of them a new Greek letter, it would spoil the idea that the pandemic is over, and we don’t have to worry about Covid any more.

You’d think the dead bodies would be a clue — China has revealed that they’ve had 60,000 deaths since December — but no, we’re all in denial. A few people are trying to bring attention to an ongoing problem.

Inspired by someone on Twitter who nicknamed BA.2.75 Centaurus, last year Professor Ryan Gregory, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, started compiling a list of nicknames for Omicron subvariants based on mythological creatures. Which is easier to remember? That BJ.1 and BM.1.1.1 combined to form XBB, which evolved into XBB.1, and then XBB.1.5? Or that Argus and Mimas combined to form Gryphon, which evolved into Hippogryph and then into Kraken?

It’s something, I guess, but I feel like tactics to draw the public’s attention to our evolving pandemic aren’t going to be effective if the public simply doesn’t care. The general citizenry is just opposed to taking any action to slow the spread of the disease. No one is asking much — Siouxsie explains what a common sense response would be.

Am I concerned about Kraken? Regular readers will know I take all variants seriously. What concerns me more is that we are no longer working collectively to reduce the spread of Covid.

That doesn’t mean I want us to return to the days of lockdowns. I just want us to use the tools we know to reduce the transmission of not just every variant of Covid so far, but also many other airborne infectious diseases – high-quality masks, clean air and staying home when infectious. We’ll reap the rewards in the long run.

“Masks”? Tyranny!

I, for one, will welcome our new State Religion

Robert Garcia, a newly-elected Democratic representative, has chosen the book upon which he will swear the oath of office, and it is not a Bible.

Like any other lawmaker, Rep.-elect Robert Garcia will swear his oath of office on a foundational text. He chose the US Constitution over the Bible or another religious book, and when the time comes, he’ll also take his oath with three sentimental items, including the first edition comic of Superman.

“I’ve read almost all genres, but Superman is always the character that stood out and spoke to me the most,” Garcia, a Democrat from California, told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday.

Reporters on Tuesday spotted the vintage comic book among the items laid out in the House of Representatives in preparation of the swearing-in of newly elected members. In a tweet, Garcia, who describes himself as a comic book nerd in his Twitter bio, acknowledged it was for him. He said he will be sworn in to Congress with the Constitution as well as a photograph of his parents, who both died during the pandemic; his naturalization paperwork from when he became a US citizen; and the first edition of Superman, which he borrowed from the Library of Congress.

I’m happy to see that someone chose something wholesome, rather than that archaic book of misogyny, racism, and violence. Immigrants have to stick together, too.

I am prepared!

Genetics class begins this week, and I am ready for the first week. Syllabus: done. This week’s lectures: done. This week’s lab: done. I can sit back and relax and maybe go for a walk today, that bit of stress is gone.

Now the lab for the second week…that’s another story. That week the students are supposed to start breeding flies, and I got my fly stocks all set up in December, and I was supposed to be at the stage of expanding the colony to have a surplus in time to hand them out. Some of the lines have been duds. Wild type flies are doing fine, the scarlet mutants are proliferating like gangbusters, but the white miniature forked mutants are barely getting by, and I’m down to a handful of brown flies, because they keep dying off. Fresh stocks have been ordered, but I’m going to be cutting it close — every step in these crosses has to be carefully timed in order to get results that don’t conflict with those stupid interruptions in our schedule, like spring break.

So I’m fine this week except that I’m going to be panicking about next week. There’s always something to elevate my anxiety.