The pandemic is/is not over

I know everyone is acting as if it’s won and done, but it isn’t.

The number of new coronavirus cases rose by 18% in the last week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally, according to the World Health Organization.

The U.N. health agency said in its latest weekly report on the pandemic that the worldwide number of deaths remained relatively similar to the week before, at about 8,500. COVID-related deaths increased in three regions: the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

It’s annoying how the people who actually know the science are saying one thing, while politics is pretending the opposite.

“This pandemic is changing, but it’s not over,” Tedros said this week during a press briefing. He said the ability to track COVID-19’s genetic evolution was “under threat” as countries relaxed surveillance and genetic sequencing efforts, warning that would make it more difficult to catch emerging and potentially dangerous new variants.

Here’s a fun one. I want to know what reasonable precautions I can take in my classes, but here’s how my university dodges the issue:

So sure, you can ask your students and colleagues to take reasonable action to protect you and each other, but they are allowed to ignore you, and you will respect their decision to endanger everyone’s health.

Great. This is going to be the year I get COVID. Hope I don’t die!

I waded through the filth so you don’t have to

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Kent Hovind, creationist, is bad enough, but Kent Hovind, groomer, is enough to disgust anyone. There have been some developments in the revelations about what goes on at Dinosaur Adventure Land. Unfortunately, no one involved in discussing the story can write, so you have to sit through long rambling videos to extract the facts.

I’ll spare you that. If you must drill down through the slime, there’s a video on YouTube by Cindi Lincoln (Hovind’s ex-wife) and another on UGetTube, a right-wing conspiracist site, by a YEC who doesn’t like Hovind. I had to sit through a commercial for MyPillow to see that one.

OK, here’s the short summary. Kent Hovind has a good buddy named Chris Jones — they’ve been friends for 30 years, Hovind says — who showed up at DAL with a young boy in tow. The problem: Chris Jones has been “convicted on multiple charges of lewd acts against minors” and is on a sex offender registry. The kid is not related to Jones.

Normal people in that situation would ask many pointed questions of their pedophile friend and would call the police. No, not Kent Hovind! He says the charges against Jones were trumped up, just like the charges against him that put him in jail for ten years. Most of us would be extremely suspicious of a convicted pedophile showing up with an 11 year old boy, but what Kent did instead was put the man and his mysterious child in an empty house, with nothing but a mattress on the floor, for 5 days.

And then the kid disappears. People are looking for him, but Kent says it’s fine, his pedophile friend had the permission of the child’s mother to take charge of him. Now he’s been found, and his mother is grateful for the return of her boy, and has reported Chris Jones to the police.

Hovind still defends Jones. He went on the awful Brett Keane YouTube show to protest his innocence, and in the process, admit that he put a convicted child molester and a child in a house, unsupervised.

Does evangelical Christianity have the molestation of children as one of its precepts? Get out while you can!

Another development: the boy is pressing charges against Chris Jones, so Kent Hovind calls him a “moron”. Not Jones, his victim.

His heart’s desire!

Jordan Peterson announced a while back that he was leaving Twitter for good. Strangely, he was back to posting frantically only a few hours after that.

You’d think a psychologist would be able to recognize an addiction when he sees one.

Anyway, now Twitter has suspended his account. Over this:

I’ve had people try to tell me that Peterson is not transphobic –he’s just highly principled and dedicated to the ideals of free speech. That tweet was just hate and disgust and contempt for others. So much for admirable principles.

He’s been off Twitter for a couple of days. His daughter is begging Elon Musk to help him. He might be able to console himself with his new ticket to the right-wing gravy train.

Peterson, who joined the staff of conservative podcast outlet Daily Wire on Thursday, is infamous for his anti-trans stance. He once claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that being transgender is a result of a “contagion” and similar to “satanic ritual abuse.”

I’m starting to pity Texans

It’s easy to hate the demented fucks they keep electing, but then the citizens of the state have to live under the inanity they produce. Maybe some day they’ll figure it out, but until then, they get to suffer the consequences of their actions.

So now they’ve got conservative ‘educators’ who specialize in double-think.

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction.

The group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum change requests. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms.

Uh-oh. If the goal is to not “feel discomfort”, there goes math. You know, one of the things we need to do in education is stretch brains a little bit, which does cause some stress. Hiding the reality of slavery behind euphemisms is not education.

The TERFs have science on their side!

A remarkable letter sent to Julie Bindel congratulating her on her ‘service’.

The remarkable bit is this paragraph:

The usual number scientists talk about is 200,000 years for modern humans, give or take. She’s only off by about 2500 times.

She beat the creationists, who claim humans have only been around for 6000 years, so they go the other way, but are only off by about 33 times. Yeah, they also claim that the whole dang planet has only been around for 6000 years, rather than 4.5 billion, so they do get somethings even more wrong.

What’s cute about her 500 million year guess is that puts us back in the Cambrian, and the basal state for chordates (actually, for all animals) was almost certainly hermaphroditic, back then.

Wanna see a bag of spiders?

I’m afraid no one will, and that makes me sad. They’re so cute! They’re like a bunch of puppies, all awkward and bumbling, stumbling out of the egg sac to try and figure out this messy ol’ world. So I made a video of Steatoda triangulosa spiderlings that, like my usual spider videos, will flop. I don’t quite know what to do about that — I’ve got to carry out a world-wide campaign to readjust everyone’s attitude towards spiders.

So I made my video into a YouTube premiere. You won’t be able to watch it until 7pm Central tonight, and I think the idea is to build a little anticipation and promote it before it’s available, as if maybe people will tune in expecting something more than 20 minutes of baby spiders.

Surprise. It’s 20 minutes of baby spiders. I simply can’t hide the truth.

Check it out in about 12 hours. They’re lovely and will melt your heart, if you give them a chance.

It’s never actually about women’s sports

The Washington Post ran an Katie Ledecky, a swimming champion. She looks impressive.

In truth, there’s no debate. The greatest D.C.-area athlete in history — by far — is Bethesda’s Katie Ledecky.

She is the greatest women’s swimmer in history — also not a subject for debate. She added to her legacy this past week at the world championships in Budapest, winning gold medals in the 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyle. She added a fourth gold in the 4×200 freestyle relay, charging from behind on the third leg to give the United States the lead for good. The 200 is Ledecky’s “weakest” race, yet she produced the fastest split among the 32 swimmers competing in the relay final.

The article is all about her and her abilities and how successful she has been. Twitter addresses it a little differently.

On the one hand, there are the people who look at her and announce that she is trans. She isn’t.

Then there are the bigots who know she’s AFAB, but are so wedded to the idea of trans women’s inherent physical superiority that they’re sure she couldn’t compete against a “biological male”.

No, Lia Thomas (a trans woman) does not perform anywhere near the exceptionally high level of Katie Ledecky.

There is a lot of back and forth along these lines. There are apparently many ignorant “gender criticals” who are happy to embarrass themselves.

Katelyn Burns is collecting primo examples of this behavior.

These people are shameless idiots. The ones I feel sympathy for are Katie Ledecky, whose victories are being belittled by dumb ideologues, and Lia Thomas, whose abilities are respectable, but she has the pressure of being inappropriately compared to a world-class gold medalist.

Leave them alone, you pathetic wankers.