I’m dreaming of Halloween in August: cool weather, a nice frost, creepy things crawling out of the falling foliage, and me, appearing in a Patron Q&A. If you joined my Patreon account, you could even appear in the video with me. If not, you’ll have to settle for watching, or leaving questions in the comments, or asking them in the chat on Sunday.

Also, don’t forget Skepticon the 13th this weekend!

1930s, 2020s, it’s all the same number if you’re innumerate enough.

Don’t laugh too hard. I’ve been wallowing in despair and stress for a year, and it’s not good for me, so I thought I’d try to force myself to say good things about my self. Think Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” except I don’t go so far as to claim people like me — I’ve got to be realistic in my affirmations.

Anyway, I had to spend some time in some tedious light microscope work, so I just started babbling at the camera while poking at baby spiders with a paintbrush and forceps.

Joe Rogan is probably the most popular “news” source on the internet right now, but goddamn, it would be nice if the popular sources actually knew anything. Thanks, YouTube, your algorithm is one of the primary enablers of evil in America.

His latest inanity, the latest among many, is that he is spreading COVID misinformation.

Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. You can watch the video below [Nah, I’m not including a Rogan video here–pzm]. But before you do, the lead scientist and author of the study who spent 10 years conducting this research has something to say. Because he’s horrified.

“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” says Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State. “He’s taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.”

Right. Rogan claimed that vaccinated people were a reservoir of variation in the human population. This is not true, as the author of the scientific paper plainly says.

“Evolution, at the moment, is all happening in the unvaccinated. That’s where the majority of cases are. That’s the majority of transmission. Every time a virus replicates, it can mutate. So the evolution is, right now, occurring in the body of people who are not vaccinated. Rogan is completely wrong trying to deduce anything else.”

If you were to listen to Rogan’s video, you’d see it’s one meathead having a conversation with another nobody, misrepresenting the work but claiming that he has a scientific paper proving his point (it doesn’t) while complaining that you have to get vaccinated to hang out in a bar, followed by a lot of conspiracy theory bullshit. That’s the discourse. This is where we’re at, the state of public science communication of significant information is now in the hands of assholes.

Speaking of assholes and misinformation, have you ever heard of Tim Pool? He’s big. He’s making millions of dollars off YouTube programming and biased lying to the public. The Daily Beast just posted a lengthy exposé on Pool.

…Pool has discovered a style of commentary and audience where a lack of knowledge or journalistic skills might not prove an impediment to success. In some ways, incuriosity and incapacity serve as valuable attributes in this medium. Not solely because of the political valence but thanks in part to how YouTube itself functions: rewarding the kind of high-volume, sensationalized, and sloppy churn Pool specializes in.

And it has made Pool both exceedingly rich and one of the most-watched independent YouTube political pundits in the country—over 3.3 million subscribers, 1.5 billion views, and, by all estimates, hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month. He earned $600,000 just in August 2020 and “most of it” came from YouTube, Pool claimed in the recorded conversation.

It’s stunning that that much money is cheerfully forked over to an incompetent grifter by YouTube and Google. You’d think somebody at those companies would look up and notice that they’re enabling some of the worst journalism on the planet, and that maybe they ought to adjust their algorithm to disable its bias in favor of screeching sensationalist jerks. We’ve long been plagued with tabloid-style yellow journalism, but somehow YouTube has figured out a recipe for turning it into even more money.

At the same time, though, some people manage to produce excellent content on YouTube, which will never be rewarded as profligately as the garbage Tim Pool or Joe Rogan churns out. For example, here’s a beautifully detailed dissection of Tim Pool — it’s worth listening to the whole thing, if you have the patience. I was a bit worried at the beginning, because the creator starts by praising Pool’s goals and claims, and I started thinking that this might be a puff piece by a fan…but never fear, as he continues, he carefully shows how everything Pool says is a self-aggrandizing lie by a lazy pseudojournalist. It’s a thoroughly damning analysis.

Give all of Tim Pool’s money to that guy. It’s too bad they won’t, because sensationalist lying and crazy conspiracy theories bring more views and advertising dollars.

On my bad days, I wonder whether this might not be a good idea.

Of course, then I consider the down sides. The expense and energy of making all these mulchers, loading up all the tankers with goo, transporting it to New York, and then spraying it all out into Central Park. The shaping is kind of impossible, too, because I’m pretty sure the slime would slump into a mess that would flow into the streets and drip off the edge of the island into the Hudson and East River.

There might be some other minor difficulties.

It’s ridiculous. The solution is so obvious and clear: require that all faculty, staff, and students at a university be vaccinated. You can get the vaccine for free — here in Minnesota, they now pay you $100 to get vaccinated. So fucking do it already. It’s for the kids.

The number of kids contracting the coronavirus is rising. In the week that ended with July 29, more than 70,000 children got COVID-19, representing nearly a fifth of all cases. Though a vanishingly small number of kids have died of the disease—358 since the start of the pandemic, as of July 29—some states, like Florida, now have dozens of children hospitalized. Few parents want to hear that their little ones may get COVID-19, no matter how low their odds of death.

The problem, of course, is that kids under 12 can’t be vaccinated yet. Until they can be, the best way to protect them is simple: Vaccinate all the eligible adults and teens around them. “The single most important thing parents can do is to get vaccinated and to vaccinate all their kids who are 12 and older,” Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist and pediatric infectious-disease professor at Stanford Medical School, told me.

Kids spend the majority of their time around adults, and existing contact-tracing data suggest that adults are the ones getting kids sick. “There is with Delta, we think, a reasonably high household attack rate, meaning that one person in the household gets sick and other people are at risk of getting sick,” says Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

Look at the stats.

Very rapidly increasing hospital admission for children age 0-17 in the US (CDC data), exceeding previous record. Over 1,200 admissions this week.@Meir_Rubin pic.twitter.com/XbT15RVEmd

— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) August 7, 2021

The public schools here haven’t opened yet. But next week there will be an influx of adults for the county fair (I guarantee that very few will be masked, and a large number will be unvaccinated), and a few weeks after that we’re going to be bringing in young adults from all over the region to attend the university, and then we add kids from all over the county coming in to mingle at the public school. The proper microbiological analogy for this is not a petri dish — it’s a great big flask of growth medium, constantly stirred and agitated.

That steep surge in under 17 infections is not going to plateau or even slow, given these conditions. The least the university could do is get as many adults vaccinated as possible. To do otherwise is insane. Criminally insane. I’ve lost any possibility of trusting my employers ever again.

I get to visit my grandkids one last time this summer before I get thrown into the churning flask that is Stevens County, Minnesota, and then I think I’m going to have to quarantine myself from all children for a while.

In 1969, Night of the Living Dead was unleashed on the innocent children of America. I didn’t get to see it — I was only 12 — but I do recall browsing through my grandparents’ latest issue of The Reader’s Digest and reading Roger Ebert’s notorious review of the movie. He gave away the entire plot (we didn’t worry about spoiler warnings back then), and made it sound like we should dread the corruption of America’s youth by all the on-screen gore.

I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up — and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed.

It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.

I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt.

Man, I really had to go see this thing. I probably didn’t get around to it until I was in college, maybe ten years later. Then I’d be totally unimpressed by the bloody violence, but highly impressed by the scariness and the build-up of fear and the way it subverted most horror movie tropes — at the time, that is. It’s since become practically horror movie dogma. It’s a classic. Many of you will probably remember Night of the Living Dead, it’s still got some impact, despite being a low-budget black-and-white zombie flick about a single night of terror, and most of you will just shrug off the scene of the undead scooping up pig’s intestines out of a dummy lying on the ground. That’s kind of not the point of the story.

In 2021, The Suicide Squad arrived on the big screen, the pandemic had loosened its grip (don’t worry, it’s coming back), and I’m old enough to slip my leash and see it on opening night. I was looking forward to it. I am so tired of grimdark superhero movies, where Batman levels whole city blocks with his tank and Superman smashes through apartment buildings, killing citizens (indirectly and offscreen, usually) and everyone is so damned angry all the time. I also remember the Christopher Reeve Superman movie which was just as radical as Romero’s Dead, because it was all about optimism and hope and a superhero who was truly good, and I feel like I could use some of that light-heartedness. I expected some of that bright comic book color popping off the screen, with a cheerful pop-music soundtrack, and a plot about people coming together through adversity, you know, like James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

Holy christ, this is not that movie.

There is so much explicit death and murder and blood in The Suicide Squad. You know that in a Zack Snyder movie the heroes will be cavalier about meting out justice — cars will explode, presumably killing their occupants, and buildings will collapse in a shower of broken glass and dust and brick, presumably destroying the families inside, but you won’t see the corpses. This movie…well, the chains have been unshackled. It’s about an expendable team of bad guys on a mission to destroy everything on a South American island, and right at the beginning we’re going to see half that team annihilated. I hope you weren’t looking forward to finding out about more of those characters you see in all the trailers, because they’re going to set foot on the island and get faces blown off, literally. Goodbye, Nathan Fillion, Pete Davidson, Flula Borg, and even Sean Gunn as the repellent Weasel — those are little more than walk-on cameos before their characters are blown away in a splatter of fluids and body parts.

If the protagonists are going to get treated as scrap bits falling off the butcher counter, that’s nothing compared to the military trying to defend their island of Corto Maltese. They are literally monster fodder. The shark man eats them alive, and they die screaming. The shark rips off a guy’s head and pops it into his jaws, complete with a shot of the head grimacing, its eyes rolling, blood spurting from the stump of its neck. People are ripped in half, both lengthwise and at the waist, showering everything in blood. The Squad guns down an entire camp of revolutionary allies on accident, and they just say “Oops, my bad”, and the leader of the revolution shrugs it off.

There is a kaiju rampage in the last quarter of the movie, but don’t think back to Godzilla or King Kong marching through a cardboard city. Nope, that wouldn’t be realistic. The streets are full of dead civilians. The monster stomps on fleeing mobs. People are crushed by all the masonry falling from the office buildings. James Gunn is not timid about the slaughter, as Zack Snyder would be…and given that Snyder is a murderous monster towards his characters, that is a surprising sentence.

Otherwise, though, this is a well-crafted movie that skips along lightly, keeps the story going, has distinctive characters, and even is loaded with humor. It’s a black, cynical humor, but sure, I guess bits of it were funny.

I do wonder what the Roger Ebert of 1969 would make of 52 years of cinema progress, though. This isn’t even a horror movie. Genre has lost all meaning.