The stark truth

There I was yesterday, teaching, and one of the first things I told my students was that the pandemic was not over, we all ought to be wearing masks and social distancing, but that the university had decided not to enforce any precautions, and I couldn’t do anything to make them do anything even as simple as wearing a mask. The best I could do is offer to teach the class synchronously over Zoom. Of course I was wearing a mask. I might have been the only person in the building doing so. I know none of the students were. I can’t blame them, since everything from the president of the US to local campus policy is telling them the pandemic is over.

It’s not.

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

That last question is a good one. Who is worrying about power?

One good place to check is the World Economic Forum in Davos, where all the richest and most influential people in the world converge every year to talk about controlling the masses. Are they concerned about dying of COVID? Do they have plans to protect themselves from the virus? They sure do.

The first thing attendees get is a rapid COVID test and an electronic badge. The badge is linked to a conference database that controls a little light that only activates if you pass the test. You will not be admitted to the meeting unless your badge indicates that you’ve taken the daily test and are free of the disease.

Tests are free. Masks are free. The staff are required to wear them, but the rich people are not.

Inside the annual meeting’s venues, areas will be cleaned, disinfected, and ventilated several times a day. Additional state-of-the-art ventilation systems have been installed in areas with restricted air circulation. Hand sanitizers will be widely available throughout the meeting venues.

Similar precautions have been taken in the offices and factories of attendees, to protect the workers. Ha ha, fooled you, of course they’re not expected to do that. That would cost money.

Do the richest people in the world know something you don’t? They certainly do, because they’ve been investing a lot of effort in keeping you ignorant and confused. Otherwise, we might demand unthinkable things like improved air circulation in our classrooms and labs, and a routine testing policy, and required masking with good masks provided by the university (to be fair, the university did provide N95 masks to the faculty last year. We got 3. Just 3.)

Do you realize that you’re an exploited peon yet?

Politics is for the kids who never grew out of high school

I may be old, but I still remember high school. Do you? The cliques, the drama, the petty squabbles, the abusive Mean Girls and jocks? It’s all coming back.

The Republican party supported Herschel Walker because he was a football player, never mind that he was as dumb as a post, and Oz, because he was rich.

They’re handing committee memberships to George Santos, despite the fact that he’s a constitutive liar who cheated his way into office.

It’s clear that the Republicans are the Superficials, the in-group of people who strive to look glossy and fashionable, no matter how dull their minds are. What clinched my recognition that we’re back in high school is that Boebert and Greene are bickering.

The crest of the battle was played out on Jan. 7 in the speaker’s lobby ladies’ room, The Daily Beast reports, when a source says, “Greene questioned Boebert’s loyalty to McCarthy.”

Another source reportedly said that Greene asked Boebert, “You were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?”

Unaware Boebert was in the bathroom when she emerged from the stall, the first source told The Daily Beast that Lauren said to Greene, “Don’t be ugly,” and then “ran out like a little schoolgirl.”

Fighting in the girls’ room. Oh, grow up.

What’s particularly appalling is that Jacinda Ardern is resigning from her position as prime minister of New Zealand. What a contrast.

Ardern won praise for her calm stewardship of the Pacific nation through a number of major events, including the coronavirus pandemic, a volcanic eruption and the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack. She spearheaded legislation to ban military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles just six days after the attack, in which more than 50 people were killed.

Can you imagine a Boebert or a Greene in a similar position? Oh hell no.

I want a transfer to that other high school on the far side of the Pacific Ocean.

If it’s on a list, it must be true

And the longer the list, the truer it must be! This gentleman has compiled a list of all the things “women” do not have, and while it starts out reflecting generic gender critical falsehoods, it gets weirder and weirder.

Whoa. Women don’t have muscle mass or lung capacity or hemoglobin? No bones? No hands? What kind of list is this?

Then I realized this person hasn’t actually ever met a woman, and is instead describing a jellyfish. He’s also probably resentful because the jellyfish spurned his romantic advances.

More males!

I mentioned yesterday that I had hit a roadblock: my spider colony was reduced to nearly all females! Those dang feminists have taken over everything.

Some good news today, though. My student’s set of breeding spiders included two more males, so I’m now up to four studs I can rotate around. This is an interesting observation, actually, that males kept in solitary are far more likely to die. These additional males had been sharing cages with females for the last month and a half, where they’d been thriving in connubial bliss. I guess this isn’t surprising, since mature males tend to be much more active, scampering about the landscape looking for mates, so confining them to a convenient container is almost certainly more stressful for them.

Today’s mating efforts were not visibly successful. The males were tentative, but did approach the females, and began with gentle stroking of the ladies abdomens, and the females did respond with a typical butt-waggle, but nothing went further while I was watching. I’ve given them some privacy now, I hope they’ll successfully mate overnight…because tomorrow the males have a date scheduled with a different female.

They also looked a bit worn-out today — I hope that’s a good sign.

Highways are already scary, self-driving cars won’t help

An amusing anecdote: an engineer is out with the family of a man she was dating, and the father tried to turn on the full self-driving option of his Tesla, so she’s practically clawing her way out of the car.

But on the way back his dad started asking me “you work on self driving cars, yeah?” (I do, I’m a systems engineer and have job hopped between a handful of autonomy companies.)

He started asking me how I liked his Tesla and I joked “just fine as long as you’re the one driving it!” And he asked me what I thought about FSD which he’d just bought. He asked if he should turn it on. I said “not with me in the car” and he then laughed and asked how I was still so scared when I work with this stuff everyday.

I was like “Uhh it’s because I…” But stopped when he pulled over and literally started turning it on. I was like “I’m not kidding, let me out of the car if you’re gonna do this” and my boyfriend’s dad and brother started laughing at me, and my boyfriend still wasn’t saying anything.

His dad was like “It’ll be fine” and I reached over my boyfriend’s little brother and tried the door handle which was locked. I was getting mad, and probably moreso because I was tipsy, and I yelled at him “Let me the fuck out”

She’s a systems engineer who works on these self-driving cars, and she wants nothing to do with it? Does she know something the rest of us don’t?

Apparently, she does. Tesla has been faking demos of its self-driving cars, which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone following Elon Musk’s hype parade.

A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.

The video, which remains archived on Tesla’s website, was released in October 2016 and promoted on Twitter by Chief Executive Elon Musk as evidence that “Tesla drives itself.”

But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple (AAPL.O) engineer.

It’s OK, though, because they were trying to show what was possible, rather than what the car could actually do, even if Musk was claiming the car was driving itself.

“The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,” Elluswamy said, according to a transcript of his testimony seen by Reuters.

Like, the idea of cars driving themselves and bypassing the fallibility of human drivers sounds nice, but it’s clear that the car’s software can be even more stupid and flawed than people. I wouldn’t want to share the road with these things, let alone be in a car controlled by some engineering gadget.

You know what I think would be far more useful? Software that detected when the driver was significantly impaired. You’re weaving all over the road, or you’re exceeding the speed limit, or it senses that you’re nodding off, and it fires off alarms to let you know you’re not safe, and if you exceed a certain frequency of warnings, it transmits alerts to the police. That would be a smart car, making sure that the driving software in the human’s head was operating adequately.

Knowing humans, though, there’d be a huge aftermarket in mechanics ripping out the safety measures.

When politicians interfere in health care…

Oh boy, the “partial birth abortion ban” people have moved into the Minnesota legislature, and are trying to ban abortion by inventing fictitious medical procedures and lying about them. Here’s Bill Lieske, a newly installed Republican legislator, trying to make his mark by being a dumbass.

We have born-alive individuals, and we must protect the born-alive. In this case, a partial birth abortion, the child is, in part, born alive.

The women on the committee who spoke out against the nonsensical amendment Lieske proposed were exactly right: politicians should not be practicing health care. They also point out that the amendment is about a non-existent medical procedure — it’s just grandstanding by a baby conservative.

The term “partial birth” is a misnomer.

But “partial-birth” is not a medical term. It’s a political one, and a highly confusing one at that, with both sides disagreeing even on how many procedures take place, at what point in pregnancy, and exactly which procedures the law actually bans.

The confusion is the point. They want you to think all abortions are about murdering babies, when they’re actually about saving the lives of women. All you have to do is look at the source of the term.

The term was first coined by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in 1995 to describe a recently introduced medical procedure to remove fetuses from the womb. Alternately known as “dilation and extraction,” or D&X, and “intact D&E,” it involves removing the fetus intact by dilating a pregnant woman’s cervix, then pulling the entire body out through the birth canal.

There’s a reason for this procedure, and it’s entirely about minimizing harm to the woman. That’s not a factor in Republican thinking.

The further along a pregnancy is, the more complicated — and the more controversial — the procedures are for aborting it. Abortions performed after the 20th week of pregnancy typically require that the fetus be dismembered inside the womb so it can be removed without damaging the pregnant woman’s cervix. Some gynecologists consider such methods, known as “dilation and evacuation,” less than ideal because they can involve substantial blood loss and may increase the risk of lacerating the cervix, potentially undermining the woman’s ability to bear children in the future.

Two abortion physicians, one in Ohio and one in California, independently developed variations on the method by extracting the fetus intact. The Ohio physician, Martin Haskell, called his method “dilation and extraction,” or D&X. It involved dilating the woman’s cervix, then pulling the fetus through it feet first until only the head remained inside. Using scissors or another sharp instrument, the head was then punctured, and the skull compressed, so it, too, could fit through the dilated cervix.

Haskell has said that he devised his D&X procedure because he wanted to find a way to perform second-trimester abortions without an overnight hospital stay, because local hospitals did not permit most abortions after 18 weeks.

Now Lieske is probably going to defend his meddling in women’s health by claiming that he is a doctor. After all, all of his campaign ads announced that he was “Dr. Bill Lieske” over and over. What he doesn’t emphasize is…

He’s a chiropractor.

Also, he has an ugly haircut.

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.