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.

You have annoyed the Great and Mighty Professor Bostrom!

Nick Bostrom paced about his chambers, agitated and offended. The puling mob had accused him of racism for merely writing Blacks are more stupid than whites in his youth, and then refusing to admit that thinking entire ethnic groups, nay, even the population of whole continents, could be genetically inferior was racism. It was science! He was not going to repudiate Science!

He must rebuke these irrational people. They are distracting him from his important work. He must deliver a stunning riposte. He considers the most effective way to crush them. He shall accuse them of being…mewling infants? Lowing beasts? No — they are buzzing insects.

Hunkering down to focus on completing a book project (not quite announcement-ready yet). Though sometimes I have the impression that the world is a conspiracy to distract us from what’s important – alternatively by whispering to us about tempting opportunities, at other times by buzzing menacingly around our ears like a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitos.

Perfect. Accusing those damned SJWs of being a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitos will strike exactly the right chord with his fanbase of libertarian/conservative free speech warriors.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

I’m a 16

This is a good time of year to just vanish — take a long walk into the empty fields around here, hunker down in a bit of brush, and freeze to death as the snow covers your corpse. Or fall into a frigid river and drown under the ice. There are lots of ways to go, and I’m not even considering the nefarious actions of evil-doers.

But now the Columbia Journalism Review has posted an an analysis of how much press your disappearance is worth. I took the little quiz which gathers your age, race, and sex and determines how interested the press would be in your demise. As it turns out, not very.

That settles it. I won’t plan on wandering off to die mysteriously any time in the near future. It’s just not worth it.

So what’s your newsworthiness? I have the advantage of being white, but the local newspapers aren’t going to get worked up over the fact of another old man disappearing.

Rot in hell, Pell

Admire this work of art.

That’s beautiful.

As you’ve probably heard, Cardinal Pell is dead and will be buried in the Vatican tomorrow. The news has been strange — I’m not seeing much talk about his child sex abuse history, since he was acquitted, after all. All was forgiven, the Catholic church was relieved to be let off the hook.

On the day of Pell’s acquittal in 2020, Francis offered his morning Mass for all those who suffer from unjust sentences, which he compared to the persecution of Jesus.

Ironic, then, that the latest scandal is the discovery of a memo written by Pell.

Australian Cardinal George Pell was lying in state on Friday, with funeral preparations overshadowed by revelations that he was the author of an anonymous memo that branded Pope Francis’ pontificate a catastrophe.

You don’t expect loyalty from a junkyard dog, do you? He was just a mean-spirited, nasty little man. He was the kind of rabid conservative who hated science and did immense harm to society.

The late Cardinal George Pell left a legacy of climate science denial which – in his later years – became ever more distanced from reality and the position of the Catholic church.

For decades in newspaper columns and speeches, Pell popularised climate denial talking points to dismiss the science of global heating and to brand environmentalists as hysterical and in the grip of a pseudo-religion.

What’s impressive is that Pell was one of the few people who could make a positive contribution to humanity by simply dropping dead.

Nick Bostrom wrote an email

Two of them, actually, the second to repudiate the first. They’re both pretty bad.

One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers has apologized for writing a racist email in which he used an appalling racial slur and said he believed it was “true” that “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”

Before we get to the flaming racist bits, I have to question that. “One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers”? Nick Bostrom? Seriously? He’s a bloodless weirdo who writes bizarre fantasy stories about the world being a simulation that seems to be mainly taken seriously by Libertarian Silicon Valley tech-bros. Is he really a celebrated philosopher? Or a fringe goofball who caught the imagination of a tiny group of rich dudes? Let me know, philosophers. And if that’s true, you all have some in-house cleanup to do.

Anyway, snapping back to the content…Bostrom was dismayed to learn that someone was snooping around in the archives of an old listserv he participated in, and was rushing to pre-empt the disclosure of some ugly things he shared 26 years ago. Among these unpleasant exposed bits of rubbish, which he’d intended to share with only the cozy fellow white dudes of this listserv, was this bit about “offensive communication styles,” where, as an example, he wrote:

Blacks are more stupid than whites.

I like that sentence and think it is true.

He then goes on to say that he thinks it probable that black people have a lower IQ than mankind in general (which is weird in itself — aren’t black people part of mankind?), and throws in a racial slur. He then explains his point:

My point is that while speaking with the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity would be appreciated by me and many other persons on this list, it may be a less effective strategy in communicating with some of the people “out there”. I think it is laudable if you accustom people to the offensiveness of truth, but be prepared that you may suffer some personal damage.

Please note precisely what he is saying: here is what he really believes, but it wouldn’t be expedient to say it in public. Honesty is admirable, but only if it is strategic, and otherwise, DON’T SAY THE QUIET PARTS OUT LOUD. But now, uh-oh, the normies are uncovering the stuff they weren’t supposed to here, and it’s time to cover his butt.

That was the message a quarter century ago. Now that it’s being exposed, yeah, it’s butt-covering time. That’s the whole point of Nick Bostrom’s new email, which you can read at the link. It’s an interesting exercise in loudly repudiating your old views while not actually repudiating them. He announces in bold:

I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

OK, good, now stop. Stop, I said. Shut up! Dear god, why do you have to keep on babbling on, undercutting your own repudiation? Yeah, he did not shut up. After listing all the charities he donates to (see? He really is a good person), he decides to expand on that black IQ business.

Are there any genetic contributions to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise [So shut the fuck up already!], and I don’t have any particular interest in the question [So disinterested he can’t shut up about it]. I would leave it to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role.

That’s how he “rejects utterly” his racist ideas from 26 years ago…by saying, oh gosh, I don’t really know, maybe my more racist friends ought to talk about it a lot more.

Then he goes on to ask, What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? Hold on there. The old email doesn’t say anything about eugenics — why do you suddenly feel the need to go on and on about it? Are there some other emails you haven’t told us about where you talk about policy to take care of inferior races that you’re feeling guilty about? Really, you should definitely shut up.

If you’re curious about his position on eugenics, he is in favor of some uses and against others, which fits perfectly with his declaration of complete repudiation and utter rejection. It’s just more waffly shit.

So we’re now left to make a choice: should we believe his old email, which argues that you should like to hide your offensive views from us people “out there,” or should we believe his new email that claims his offensive views are totally false while being unable to simply say so?

It’s like a philosophical dilemma that is trivially easy to solve!

How do you tell someone their dad was a world-class jerk?

It’s a familiar story about Svante Pääbo being awarded the Nobel prize for his work on sequencing ancient DNA. It’s all very interesting, but I’ve heard it many times before…and then it gets upstaged by a tale from his personal life which I did not know about.

Behind the scientific success story is also one of considerable personal challenge. “My father had two families and we were the undisclosed one, the other was the official one. My father would show up on Saturdays, have coffee or lunch with me and my mum and then disappear again.”

WAIT, WHAAAT? Your father kept you as his ‘secret’ family?

His mother, Karin, who died in 2013, would have been “proud and thrilled” about his prize, he says. She came to Sweden from Estonia in 1944, escaping the Soviet invasion, and overcame linguistic and financial barriers to become a chemist.

The fact that his father, Sune Bergström, a biochemist, was himself awarded the Nobel prize (also for physiology or medicine) in 1982 for his work on prostaglandins, had little influence on Pääbo’s own scientific path he says. “Only to the extent that my mother met him through her work. It was rather her great fascination with science that was transmitted to me. She hugely encouraged my curiosity and supported me when I changed from medicine to natural sciences. She was by far the greater influence.”

When his father received the award in Stockholm, he was a graduate student in Uppsala and followed the ceremony on television.

“I had a different surname to him and only very few people even knew we were related,” he says. It wasn’t so much having to keep his famous father secret from his colleagues that was painful to him, “rather that his other, ‘official’ son knew nothing about us. We had several intense rows about it. I even threatened to seek out his family and explain it to them. So my father said he would tell them, but it never came to that,” he recalls.

In 2014 he told the Observer his father’s other family found out when Bergström died in 2005. “It was only then my half-brother learned about me. Fortunately he adjusted and we get on all right,” Pääbo said.

That is so fucked up, and Bergström sounds like a terrible father. That had to have left a few scars.

The things we don’t do in lab

I’ve told the story of Leeuwenhoek’s prudishiness to my students in the past — it’s amusing that the father of microbiology, who had horrified the public with the discovery of ‘animalcules’ living in drinking water, was himself disgusted by what came out of his own body, and was horrified that semen contained squiggly squirmy little creatures. He even wrote to the Royal Society to say he wouldn’t mind if his discovery was suppressed.

“If your Lordship should consider that these observations may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your Lordship sees fit.”

Then there was the bit where he was practically falling all over himself to assure everyone that his sample came from proper conjugal relations, not from the sin of onanism or by any other less than blessed mechanism. It was weird, man.

“Without being snotty, Leeuwenhoek (the ‘van’ is an affectation he adopted later on) was not trained as an experimental thinker,” explained Matthew Cobb, a British zoologist and author of the book “Generation: The Seventeeth Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth.” Cobb recalled by email that when Royal Society Secretary Henry Oldenburg asked Leeuwenhoek to look at semen, the Dutch draper initially did not reply “because he felt it was ‘unseemly.'” Even though he eventually overcame his reservations, Leeuwenhoek added so many caveats to his semen research that it is clear he remained somewhat uncomfortable.

“He reassured the Royal Society that he had not obtained the sample by any ‘sinful contrivance’ but by ‘the excess which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations,'” Cobb explained. “He wrote that a mere ‘six heartbeats’ after ejaculation, he found ‘a vast number of living animalcules.” A few months later, he wrote the aforementioned letter saying that he would not at all mind if his discovery was suppressed. After all, in addition to being grossed out, Leeuwenhoek was not under the impression that he had found anything special.

Unfortunately, after laughing at such Puritanism in lecture, I once went to lab and discovered that a student had made a quick trip to the lavatory and made his own slide, which he proudly showed off in class. I had to be the modern prude and explain that we discouraged the collection of human fluids in lab because they are a source of infection and contamination, and handed him a bottle of 70% alcohol and told him to sterilize all the gear he was using and dispose of his sample in the biological waste container.