Don’t forget the pandemic, you all!

I know it’s easy to do — so many distractions! And the powers-that-be are eager for you to cast all caution to the winds! — but this is an ongoing, world-changing catastrophe. So here’s a refresher.

The global COVID-19 death toll may be three times higher than official tallies suggest, according to a systematic analysis of excess mortality during the pandemic.

From Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021, global deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 reached 5.9 million, yet estimates put excess deaths during this period at a staggering 18.2 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 17.9-19.6), Haidong Wang, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and the COVID-19 Excess Mortality Collaborators reported in The Lancet.

India had the highest number of excess deaths (4.07 million, 95% UI 3.71-4.36), an estimated eight times higher than its 489,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, which was followed by the U.S. (1.13 million, 95% UI 1.08-1.18), where the official count reached 824,000 by the end of 2021.

Just remember, human beings, we can deal with more than one problem at once. It’s hard, but problems don’t disappear when a new one rises up.

Shut up about Joro Spiders, already

OK, enough with the spider freakout. I’ve been rolling my eyes so hard for the last few weeks that my ocular muscles are sprained. I’m talking about headlines like this:

Don’t journalists have a few other things they should be concerned about right now? This isn’t one of them. This is a great big nothingburger, unless you’re concerned about invasive species and the fate of their naturalized cousin spider, Trichonephila clavipes, which has been here in the southeast US for over a century, is about the same size as Trichonephila clavata (the Joro spider), and is just as harmless.

Oh, you’re not? Then shut the fuck up.

These are big spiders, but T. clavata is harmless. They’ll eat big bugs, but have no interest in you and can’t even bite through your skin. They’re also about the same size as Argiope, which we have in huge numbers up here in Minnesota, but T. clavata is only slightly more cold resistant than T. clavipes and has the potential to slightly extend their range. I only regret that I probably won’t find any way up here in the North.

But so what? Here’s where T. clavipes lives now (in blue), and where T. clavata has been found (in red). Don’t panic. They’re big, but they’re beautiful, and they’ll eat lots of grasshoppers and stinkbugs. Welcome them!

Read this for the True Facts.

Just so you know: last summer, we transplanted several Argiope from the edge of town to our natural garden in our backyard. They did well! I was a little concerned that we wouldn’t have enough food for them — I usually find them in open fields that are swarming with grasshoppers — but the female and male pair were thriving all through August, before they disappeared, as Argiope usually does when the weather cools. We’re hoping they managed to produce an egg sac or two to overwinter, which, with a little luck, will lead to clouds of little baby spiders ballooning over the neighborhood, and a repopulation of our garden. This is nothing to be feared! They’re gorgeous animals.

It’s unlikely that they’ll populate most of the yards in our neighborhood, unfortunately. Lawns are bad. They don’t produce enough big insect biomass to feed these animals.

The standard of humor on YouTube must be really low

A guy decided to do a “prank” in a university classroom, I presume to get clicks. I was curious to see the level of humor behind this prank, and here it is:

He walks into a lecture hall as if he is an enrolled student (he isn’t), pulls out a typewriter, and starts banging on it while occasionally yelling at the professor to speak up.

After leaving the lecture hall to retrieve his typewriter, Adams then entered the room a second time. He continued to type loudly and shouted, “Professor can you repeat that last part real quick?” A woman speaking from the front of the room, whom The Harvard Crimson identified as a professor named Hopi E. Hoekstra, could be seen telling Adams, “You’re being incredibly disrespectful and incredibly disruptive of this class.”

Adams’ bag and typewriter were confiscated again by the professor, and when Adams left the room, he was told by a second man that university police had been called to the scene.

Adams could then be seen walking outside the building when he encountered a man who appeared to be a campus police officer. The man asked Adams if he was a student at Harvard. When Adams said he wasn’t, the man said, “You shouldn’t enter any Harvard buildings if you’re not affiliated.”

The Harvard Crimson reported that Berry asked staff to call the Harvard University Police Department, who arrived after the YouTuber had left the lecture hall.

At the end of the video, Adams said, “I feel like that went as horrible as it could have and also as best as it could have,” adding, “I literally didn’t do nothing. I mean, I guess I was being annoying, but I’m always annoying.”

That’s it. Is that funny? It sounds like a guy disrupting a class, nothing more. It barely even constitutes a “prank”.

I found his video about this “prank” on YouTube.

3 million views.

Fuck me. It’s just monetized assholery.

Sixty Five (65)

I wish to register a complaint. I have now reached the age when my employer is supposed to hand me a gold watch and a fat pension, and then I retire to my rustic cabin on the scenic lake with my beautiful wife, and then I spend my golden years fishing and dandling grandchildren on my knee. I got the beautiful wife, but the rest of it ain’t happening. What went wrong?

For that matter, this whole dang timeline stinks. Wars and pandemics? No sirree, that weren’t on the retirement pamphlet. I’ve been sold a bill of goods here, and I want my money back.

I’m going to keep on doing the same things over and over again, until I get a refund or a complete timeline reset and I get my goldang idyllic, peaceful retirement. How’s them apples?

I might just keep on writin’ like a crotchety ol’ geezer rockin’ on the porch, occasionally hawkin’ up a wad into the spittoon. That’ll teach ya. Remind me to pick up a spittoon next time I take the buckboard into town.

Idaho: Stupid as potatoes, evil as Black Scurf

More than 100 people rallied on March 3, 2020, at the Idaho Capitol in support of transgender students and athletes during the 2020 legislative session. The Idaho House on Tuesday passed a bill that would criminalize providing gender-affirming medical care for trans minors.

The state is a playground for racists, white nationalists, and the religious right, which I guess should make it no surprise that their house of representatives passed a hateful, regressive bill to make health care for trans kids a felony.

The Idaho House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would bar gender-affirming medical care for transgender children. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, would alter current state code that outlaws female genital mutilation. The new code would make it a felony to provide minors with puberty blockers, which stop or delay puberty, hormones or transition-related surgeries. The House passed the bill on a near-party-line vote. Rep. Fred Wood, R-Burley, a retired physician, opposed it. Other Republicans said the bill will preserve the ability to procreate and would protect children from regretting gender reassignment later in life.

I guess it’s something that one Republican opposed it, but also understandable: he’s a doctor, and this is a bill that targets doctors.

I am fascinated by the Republican rationale. It’s about “preserving the ability to procreate”, but puberty blockers don’t affect that, they just delay it, which ought to be considered a good thing, unless you really want 13 year olds to have children. Which is odd, since Idaho has long had a reputation for being the place to go for cheap, fast weddings. I can thank Idaho for my existence, since my parents eloped to Idaho to get married against my grandparents’ wishes when my mother was somewhere around 17 years old. (I think they’ve tightened up their laws a bit since the 1950s.)

It’s going to be a long struggle for Idaho lawmakers if they think their mission is to prevent teenagers from ever having regrets.

The sponsors of the bill are sick, sad puppies.

The ability to procreate is a fundamental right that must be protected, Skaug said. Don’t let their bodies be sterilized. Rep. Ben Adams, a Nampa Republican, quoted the Bible’s account of gender, after saying his transgender cousin had a mental health problem.

Again, puberty blockers don’t sterilize people. Some transgender men can still have children, and some transgender women can still impregnate other women. Procreation is a choice, not something that Republicans get to enforce, and no, the only mental health problem on display in the Idaho house is Republicanism. If they really cared about mental health, maybe they should ask qualified people how to treat it, rather than the Bible. Those qualified non-bigots seem to have a different take on it.

“It is so disappointing that some politicians in Boise have decided to follow Texas and Alabama down the path of imposing felony criminal penalties upon doctors who are simply doing their jobs. By making it impossible for doctors to provide care for their patients, transgender youth are denied the age-appropriate, best practice, medically-necessary, gender-affirming care that a new study just found reduces the risk of moderate or severe depression by 60% and suicidality by 73%.”

“Every kid in Idaho deserves the chance to grow up feeling safe and respected for who they are. Denying someone medically-necessary health care simply because you don’t approve of who they are is textbook discrimination. Decisions about what kind of care is appropriate for young people should be left up to the young person and their parents, in consultation with health care professionals, not by politicians looking to score political points at the expense of the well-being of transgender youth. It’s critical that the Senate listens to medical professionals, parents, and kids and refuse to entertain this flagrantly discriminatory legislation any further.”

This is all part of conservative agenda. Ever hear of ALEC? They write the laws.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play network of conservative state lawmakers and business lobbyists that writes model legislation, claims that it no longer works on social policy. But videos of ALEC-led events, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), tell a very different story.

At the 40th anniversary meeting of the Council for National Policy (CNP) in May, ALEC leaders boasted about their extensive efforts to advance state legislation to severely restrict access to abortion and limit the rights of trans students, as well as voter suppression bills.

I am not surprised. Idaho Republicans are stupid potato-brains who need a lot of help writing their evil laws.

I support the Minneapolis teachers’ strike

Families have struggled for the last few years with pandemic issues, and you’d think everyone would by now realize how important schools are to both parents and kids. We should be in agreement that we should provide more support to public schools and their staff, and not be trying to cheap out on an obviously indispensable service. That’s what we’ve been trying to do, though, and now it’s going to bite some communities in the butt. Teachers in Minneapolis went on strike yesterday.

Their demands are reasonable. They primarily seem to be about giving support staff a living wage.

The union wants Minneapolis Public Schools to raise the starting salary for educational support professionals from about $24,000 to $35,000. More than 1,500 educational support professionals work for the district, according to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. They help with transportation, language translation, one-on-one assistance for kids with special needs, and before- and after-school programs, among other things.

Union leaders are also seeking class-size caps, increased mental health support and “competitive salaries” for teachers, noting that their compensation lags many districts in the Twin Cities metro area. The average salary for Minneapolis Public Schools teachers is about $71,500, according to state data.

Let’s be fair and look at the other side’s situation.

At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Minneapolis Superintendent Ed Graff said proposals from the union and district are “still very far apart.” The total cost of the union’s current proposals is “an additional $166 million annually above what we’ve already budgeted for,” he said.

I can believe that they did not budget adequate funds for the work they expected to be done, but that is not an excuse! That is a management problem, not a worker problem. When we had a contractor do some work on our house a few years ago, we did not have the option to tell him after he was done that “you did $10,000 worth of work, but we only budgeted $5,000 for the job”. That’s not how any of this works. It is the teacher’s job to teach, it is management’s job to fund the work they expect to be done.

I do have some sympathy for the school superintendent. It’s not easy to get support for schools because we’re coping with a 19th century solution to funding schools (property taxes) that promotes inequality and makes life most difficult for the poorest districts. However, the solution is to change the system, not to gouge cash out of the lowest-ranked workers.

Seizing territory isn’t winning the war

The Russian convoy in Ukraine is fascinatingly horrifying. It just goes on and on, miles and miles of trucks slowly approaching their target, completely obvious to the satellites watching from above. I guess this is modern war, mostly the long tail of the supply chain delivering food, fuel, and ammo to the deadly beast at the head.

The question is…how effective is the cutting edge at the head? How vulnerable are the logistics of that supply chain? I don’t know. We’ll find out in the next few weeks, I suppose, at the expense of all the Ukrainian civilians fleeing.

Fuel trucks are exactly the sort of “soft targets” that the Ukrainians should be aiming to attack as they attempt to undermine the more sizable and powerful Russian army’s ability to fight, according to Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), an Army veteran who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and visited Ukraine in recent weeks.

“You don’t hit the combat units. You don’t hit the tanks. You hit the fuel trucks, the ammunition trucks,” Crow said. “You cut off their supplies, and you also try to strike terror into the minds of the enemy.”

The sight of the stretch of Russian vehicles appears to be helping bolster public opinion toward providing more military aid. Government officials, once reluctant to escalate involvement in the conflict, are now talking about providing aircraft and additional munitions to help Ukraine resist the ongoing invasion.

“I call that 40-mile convoy, by the way, the biggest, fattest target in Ukraine,” retired Navy admiral James Stavridis, who previously led NATO forces as the supreme allied commander Europe, said on MSNBC. Put certain fighter jets “in the hands of the Ukrainians,” he added, “and watch that thing blow up.”

Please don’t. I want the war to end, but escalation won’t end it, it’ll set the whole region on fire. I don’t pretend to understand Russian tactics at all, but dangling that big, fat target out there, inviting the US and NATO to blow it up, might be one of Putin’s escape routes. It’s not his fault that his army is bogged down and his soldiers are getting killed, it’s the evil imperialist West ganging up on holy mother Russia, we must redouble our efforts and marshal all of our patriots to fight on…and keep Putin in power.

As it stands, what I’m seeing is overwhelming force being steadily applied with increasing intensity to pressure the Ukrainians into surrender. This isn’t a blitzkrieg, it’s Russia doing what has always worked for them: pouring raw manpower and resources into the conflict, burying the enemy without finesse. They might not be stoppable by Ukraine, although they will bleed the Russians badly. It’s a horror show on both sides. So let’s not ramp it up.

Send the Ukrainians the matériel they need to hold out and fight back themselves, but please no, don’t engage the Russians directly. That’s how this turns into WWIII.

I say that even while I’m hoping Ukraine wins and the Russian army has to retreat back home.

Another thing I don’t understand. If Putin is “denazifying” Ukraine, and hopes to bring the nation back into the embrace of the Russian empire, why is he bombing civilians who are running away? Why put land mines in the “humanitarian corridors” that are intended to allow civilians to evacuate? He’s sowing the seeds of a prolonged rebellion, even if his gigantic convoy manages to secure the capitol.

I know. War never makes sense.