The ignominy

I’ve told you before that the content I made on Scienceblogs years ago has been hijacked — the site was bought up (legitimately, I can’t do anything about it) by a conservative asshole who simply uses it as a vehicle to host ads. It’s a shame, but at least all that stuff I wrote didn’t disappear into the ol’ bit bucket. But now I have learned that they’ve added insult to their legally sanctioned theft.

“pharyngula” (at least they spelled that right) by…who??!?

Man, I ought to give up and have my name legally changed to PZ, just PZ. They couldn’t misspell that, could they?

Oh yeah, they could. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been called PJ.

I thought that was nothing but a weird dream

I dreamt that William Shatner was going to be launched into space, which was odd since I really don’t care about an over-the-hill celebrity and I generally don’t have that kind of random dream. But then this morning I learned that it was really going to happen next week! This was not a prophetic dream, I must have just fleetingly encountered a news item last week that just sunk out of my awareness (I really, truly don’t give a fuck about Shatner) and then resurfaced while I was asleep.

Science fiction will soon become reality, as William Shatner is scheduled to launch on the next crewed spaceflight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

The company plans to fly the Canadian actor, who famously played Capt. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” television series, as one of the passengers on the company’s New Shepard rocket.

The launch is planned for Oct. 12. Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations, Audrey Powers, is joining the flight, with the crew of four rounded out by previously announced members Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen and Medidata co-founder Glen de Vries.

But wait! This is insane! Shatner has no qualifications for this mission, and he’s 90 years old! It’s pure PR. Bezos is just stuffing random attention-getting bodies (and a few of his corporate cronies) into his rocketship to sit quietly and do nothing. This is precisely what the phrase “spam in a can” means.

Also, Bezos has sold $100 million in tickets to willing hunks of wealthy spam. None of them earned the privilege of going into space, they’ve just got connections and money that’s going to give them bragging rights at the next cocktail party. Just lumps of spiced ham, heavily processed, shot into space, and unfortunately returned.

You know what this means? Elon Musk is going to have to bag a Kardashian, or maybe a Star Wars cast member, for his next flight.

By the way, did you know that Bezos is suing NASA for awarding a contract to Musk? Fight, fight, fight! Can they please kill each other, or at least cripple themselves, in a bloody time-wasting spectacle of profligate money-flinging?

How does this deadly nonsense continue?

Have you no decency, Joe Rogan? Here we go again, with the popular podcaster peddling another conspiracy theory.

Joe Rogan’s streak of terrible COVID-19 takes continued this week when he baselessly suggested the White House faked President Joe Biden’s booster shot on live TV out of fear that he could have dropped dead in the moment.

After Biden took questions from reporters while he received his third dose of the Pfizer jab earlier this week, Rogan used his massively popular Spotify podcast to wonder aloud if it was a “real booster.”

When his guest, former CIA officer Mike Baker agreed, suggesting that it was merely “performance art,” Rogan dug deeper into his latest conspiracy theory.

“I don’t think they would take the chance,” the host said. “I think if they were going to give him a booster shot, the last thing they would do is give it to him live on television. What if he dies? What if he blacks out? What if he gets it and faints? Because people have had very bad reactions, like in the moment, for whatever reason.”

Such nonsense. This is a common trope, pretending that the vaccine is actively harmful. It’s not. Claiming that is leads to horrific situations like this, in which an evil quack goes into a hospital and lies to an elderly man suffering with COVID-19.

Watch as 67-year old Joe McCarron, hospitalized with Covid-19 in Ireland, is urged by a fanatical anti-vaxxer and covid-denier to check himself out of the hospital while a doctor calmly, kindly, and patiently explains why that would not be a good idea for someone in his condition and urges him to stay, saying that he was very ill and could die if he went home. But the person with McCarron badgered him to leave and he finally acquiesced. Two days later, he was back in the hospital with breathing problems and subsequently died.

The quack, Antonio Mureddu Gravegliu, literally told the man that the hospital was going to kill him. The Garda are “investigating”, I don’t know what — they’ve got the guy recorded lying to the patient and urging him to leave the hospital’s care.

Rogan is part of the chain of chaos and death. Why isn’t he being investigated?

Clean him out, shut him down

Alex Jones has, by default, lost two lawsuits that accuse him of being responsible for the abuse the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting received. You may recall that he claimed none of the children were killed, that their parents were “crisis actors” trying to profit off the story, and that the whole tragedy was a “false flag” operation to kill the second amendment (which I hope does get killed someday).

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who hosts the right-wing commentary website Infowars, was found legally responsible in two lawsuits for damages caused by his claims surrounding the 2012 Sandy Hook school mass shooting, according to court documents released Thursday.

Judge Maya Guerra Gamble issued default judgments on Monday against Jones and his outlet for not complying with court orders to provide information for the lawsuits brought against him by the parents of two children killed in the shooting.
The rulings, which were first reported by the Huffington Post, effectively mean that Jones lost the cases by default. A jury will convene to ascertain how much he will owe the plaintiffs, the report said.

Oh, boy, I eagerly await news of the penalties. I hope they’re substantial enough to shut down Infowars for good.

ESAD, evil fraud.

I’d call it military cowardice and award them a dishonorable discharge

This anti-vax insanity makes no sense. There are soldiers who are balking at getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

In a recent viral video, a senior airman in the Air Force asks viewers to help find jobs for service members leaving the military because they refuse to take the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine.

The unidentified senior airman, who posted her video on TikTok on Sept. 16, speculated that “a lot of the military is about to take an administrative discharge” for refusing the vaccine, which means they’ll be out of a job and presumably in need of work.

“Some people are doing it for medical reasons, some people are doing it for personal reasons, beliefs, whatever it may be, it’s about to suck,” the airman said. “What I’m looking for right now is if you’re an employer or you know employers that will undoubtedly employ us, a lot of us are looking at discharge and we weren’t expecting this so we have no idea what to plan for and I’m sure a lot of people are trying to plan for their future right now.”

You voluntarily enlisted in a job in which you can be ordered to charge into situations where people are shooting at you, and you will obey. You’re in a job where you can be ordered to kill other people, and you will do it. When you show up for training, they will give you a battery of vaccinations, and you accept it. You may get assigned to serve in tropical locations, and you will get vaccinated against diseases like yellow fever and Japanese encephalitis. You may get vaccinated against anthrax; I’ve never had the anthrax vaccine, how many of us civilians have?

And yet here’s an exceptionally useful vaccine that millions of civilians have taken with negligible deleterious side effects, that prevents a disease that is sweeping through the population, that protects against death and prolonged intensive care, and now you want to chicken out, and further, beg civilian employers for a job?

Or worse, this sanctimonious bullshit.

Earlier this month, Army Lt. Col. Paul Hague claimed that he would resign his commission just short of retirement, saying that he believed that mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations were an “unlawful, unethical, immoral, and tyrannical order.”

You could be ordered to drop a bomb on an Afghan village, and that’s OK, but taking personal responsibility and getting a nearly painless shot that protects the lives of your fellow soldiers and citizens, and suddenly that’s “unlawful, unethical, immoral, and tyrannical”? Jesus. That’s a new level of hypocrisy.

I have no sympathy with George Patton slapping a soldier with PTSD (a soldier who had faced far more serious threats to his life than a needle in the arm, and no, more violence isn’t a treatment for trauma), but by god we need another Patton in this case.

Anti-vaxxers have come to this

They aren’t just refusing to get vaccinated themselves, they aim to waste vaccines so others can’t get them.

A disturbing post has been circulating on Facebook which encourages anti-vaxxers to book Covid-19 vaccination appointments and not show up in a bid to ‘waste’ supply.

The Facebook user has screenshot a Geelong Advertiser article about hundreds of vaccine no-shows in Victoria and written “How to play their game” over the image.

Comments on the post, which is captioned “do it!”, include “great idea”, “just made a booking” and “maybe we should flood their phones with fake bookings and fake names and phone numbers.”

First of all, fuck Facebook.

But secondly, what slime-filled dark cave are these people crawling out of? How have we ended up with a significant fraction of the people denying the efficacy of modern medicine (not even that modern, actually), and why can’t they just die already?

Really, world, I can’t afford much of a drop in life expectancy

The COVID-19 pandemic — you know, the one right-wingers tried to claim didn’t exist, was nothing worse than the flu, and could be treated with horse paste — caused the largest drop in American life expectancy since WWII. Did anyone not take the casualties in WWII seriously?

Of the 29 countries studied by researchers from the University of Oxford, just Denmark and Norway did not see a drop in life expectancy in 2020, according to demographic data.

The U.S. recorded the biggest losses in both men and women—2.2 years and 1.65 years compared to 2019 levels, respectively—something Ridhi Kashyap, co-lead author of the study, said could be partly explained by the “notable increase in” deaths among working aged people due to Covid-19.

USA! USA! Number ONE! We got the biggest numbers. Oh, wait, is this like golf, where the lowest score wins? Whoops.

So what went wrong, America?

The countries that successfully avoided drops in life expectancy (which partly included Finland, which staved off a decline in women only) implemented “early non-pharmaceutical interventions” and had strong healthcare systems. The researchers said these factors likely contributed towards the countries’ successes. The U.S. suffering the biggest drop in life expectancy is unsurprising. It has suffered more Covid-19 deaths than any other country, a burden that has, as many health issues, disproportionately fallen on people of color. Earlier studies have shown the U.S. to have experienced a far worse drop in life expectancy than other high income nations like the U.K. and Sweden. Despite an abundant vaccine supply, every adult (and many children) having been eligible for months and having a head start over much of the world, many in the U.S. remain unvaccinated and the country is facing a huge surge of hospitalizations and deaths.

To make it short, we’re world leaders in capitalism, racism, and stupidity. Yay! Number one again! If only we were playing football rather than scoring deaths.