Don’t worry about the next pandemic

There is a plan. The FBI will put together a manhunt to catch the people who cause it!

As we read and process reports of a new COVID strain emerging, | want you to know that we are actively investigating, in multiple field offices, the cover-up of the origin of the COVID virus, along with associated matters requiring our attention. You deserve answers.

Yeah, Dan Bongino. Get a crack team of G-men together, give ’em tommy guns, and send them out there to track down, and arrest or kill, the gang responsible for genetic drift. That’s how authoritarian brains work.

I suggest we call it the “Unread Journal of Stupid Ideas”

Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.

“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.

Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.

The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.

Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.

I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?

To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.

Look what I found in the compost bin

Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!

I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.

Spider Baby!

I was home over lunch, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a shipment of spiders, so I decided to indulge myself in a legendary movie from 1964: Spider Baby. It’s delightfully bizarre and macabre, and yes, it does include lots of spiders.

If that isn’t sufficiently enticing, check out this still:

It stars Lon Chaney jr., and look: a young Sid Haig! The plot — don’t watch it for the plot — centers on a twisted sort of Addams Family group afflicted with an imaginary genetic illness called Merrye Disease. The afflicted go mad and steadily regress to a savage state in which they become voracious cannibals. Along the way, they just develop weird obsessions. One girl likes to play spider, a game that culminates in the spider girl stinging her partner with a pair of butcher knives.

It makes no sense, but everyone seems to be having a ghastly good time playing up the grisly psychos. Recommended!

I am sad to report that my package of spiders hasn’t yet arrived. It may not get here until tomorrow.

The Big Beautiful Bill is a joke

The only BBB I might appreciate is the Better Business Bureau. This new bill the Republicans are foisting off on us is a blatant grift, and we’re just sitting here watching it pass.

What the Big Beautiful Bill contains is a give-away for the rich, while taking away any benefit to the poor and removing any limits on Trump’s power.

If this passes, we won’t have another election.
To those of you who don’t know what’s buried in this Big Bogus Bill… Prepare yourself for what’s coming.
If the Senate passes the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and Trump signs it, that’s it.
It becomes law. And here’s what that really means:
« He can delay or cancel elections—legally.
« He can ignore Supreme Court rulings for a year or more. « He can fire government workers for political disloyalty.
« Judges can’t enforce their own orders.
« Protests can be tracked and criminalized.
» LGBTQ+ rights, education, health care, and media? Gutted.
« Your VPN? Tracked. Your vote? Suppressed. Your speech? Flagged.
This bill doesn’t break the law. It rewrites the law so Trump never has to break it again.
We don’t need to wonder what would happen if authoritarianism came to America.
It’s here—in 1,100 pages, dressed up as “freedom.”
If you’ve ever said, “It won’t be that bad” or “The courts RS TR T just know: this bill makes it so they can’t.
Share this. Speak up. Show up. Now.
Because if this passes, the next vote might be the last one that matters.

It’s going up before the Senate next, the sanctuary for privilege, so I don’t have a lot of hope that it will be shot down. We are so screwed.

Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” budget squeaked through the US House of Representatives last Thursday – a shiny populist package hiding a brutal class agenda. No taxes on tips! Bigger child tax credits! But look closer and the bill is a sleight of hand. The middle-class perks expire in 2028 – just as Mr Trump’s second term would end – while permanent tax cuts for the rich, and delayed cuts to means-tested welfare, entrench inequality. It’s not a budget. It’s a bait-and-switch. It turns Democrats’ fiscal caution into a liability – one that punishes their own base. Republicans understand what Democrats still don’t: deficits aren’t the danger. It’s what you do with them that matters.

This bill supercharges inequality: a $1.1tn giveaway to Americans earning more than $500,000 a year – funded by pushing poorer families off Medicaid and food assistance. It slashes green energy subsidies. Experts say it could add $3.1tn to the debt – but it’s more than millionaire tax breaks. It raises Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding by 365% for detention, 500% for deportations – fuel for Mr Trump’s crackdown.

It’s breathtaking how quickly the USA flushed itself down the crapper.