Always label every bottle

One of those things every lab person knows: label everything. Write down what’s in it, and also the date it was made. At least the person responsible for this followed the rule.

Several vials labeled “smallpox” have been found at a vaccine research facility in Pennsylvania, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

“There is no indication that anyone has been exposed to the small number of frozen vials,” the CDC said in a statement emailed to CNN.

“The frozen vials labeled ‘Smallpox’ were incidentally discovered by a laboratory worker while cleaning out a freezer in a facility that conducts vaccine research in Pennsylvania. CDC, its Administration partners, and law enforcement are investigating the matter and the vials’ contents appear intact,” the CDC added.

“The laboratory worker who discovered the vials was wearing gloves and a face mask. We will provide further details as they are available.”

You don’t need intent to kill us all, when stupidity and neglect is sufficient.

Facebook is a repository of the dumbest ideas about everything

The past few weeks in my cell biology course have been dedicated to an introduction to DNA: structure, replication, and transcription. I’ve thrown a lot of stuff at the students, but I’m ready to move on to other fun stuff, like developmental regulation and evolutionary origins, but I may have to go back and revise everything I said. I neglected to consult the source of all knowledge, Facebook, and there are so many True Facts I failed to communicate.

We know this is truth, because he says it is. Also NOT JOKING. I had no idea that DNA had so much fuel for trans- and homo-phobic interpretations. I’m also always entertained by by folk etymology.

Dioxy-RIB-o-neuclic-acid [sic] is not a reference to ribs. It does refer to a 5-carbon sugar, ribose, that can be extracted from gum arabic, and is related to another sugar, arabinose, that got strangely contracted and mangled by a chemist sometime in the 19th century to “ribose”. It has nothing to do with ribs. In particular, it has nothing to do with the cosmetic surgery of rib shaving, which is done to narrow the waistline of both men and women, but somehow you’ve got to incorporate a raging transphobic obsession into the storytelling.

DNA is also not an acronym for “Dicks N Ass”. It wasn’t named by depraved, sick, and degenerate clowns. That’s a privilege reserved for the people who invent pseudoscience on Facebook. You know, the ones who complain about “sodomy eyebags” and “turbogay”.

What baffles me, though, is that after that silly rant misinterpreting DNA to distort it into support for the author’s weird hatred of gay and trans folk, he announces that DNA is bogus and fake, because it’s found in bullshit things like dinosaurs and apes, and that DNA has nothing to do with heredity. So why is he making up stories about DNA in the first place?

I had to get this video out fast

I have opinions on this silly University of Austin/UATX nonsense, but I fear the nascent institution is about to become an ex-institution, because its official supporters are rushing to distance themselves from it all. So, before my words become totally obsolete, I put up a video stating my piece.

A year from now, this is going to be a curious artifact of yet another goofy right-wing reach for the straws, and people won’t even remember what UATX was.

Transcript below the fold.

[Read more…]

Minnesota Man truly believes in FREEEEEEEDOM!

It’s not just for Floridians anymore. We have a Minnesota man going buck wild at the airport.

Telling agents he “did not have to stop” because “it’s a free country,” a 44-year-old Minneapolis man is charged with threatening TSA workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The charges state that he also swung a stanchion line post before throwing it at agents, taking his clothes off and masturbating.

<sniff, sniff> It warms the heart to see a True Patriot exercising his rights. Like any other True Patriot, he also has a domestic assault charge hanging over his head.

If only all those Enlightenment philosophers who made all the noise about liberty could see the end result of their work.

I take no joy in seeing a career disintegrate

But whoa, this one needs to die. There was a time when Jonathan Pruitt’s work on spider behavior was exactly my cup of tea, and there was so much of it — so many papers, so many coauthors, it was a rich vein of information. And now it’s all gone swirling down the drain.

Almost 2 years after a Twitter storm erupted over data problems, including the possibility of fabrication, in more than a dozen scientific papers co-authored by behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt, the saga may be nearing a climax. A spokesperson for Pruitt’s current employer, McMaster University, told ScienceInsider on 12 November that the school’s “investigation has now concluded and Pruitt has been placed on a paid administrative leave until the process is complete.”

McMaster’s actions last week include denying Pruitt access to students and research funds. Also, last week researchers learned that the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), withdrew Pruitt’s dissertation from its library system, although it remains unclear whether his Ph.D. has been revoked. Both institutions made their moves quietly, and some of Pruitt’s former colleagues have expressed frustration at the lack of transparency in McMaster’s long-running probe into Pruitt.

Twelve of the ecologist’s papers have been retracted so far and expressions of concern have been posted for 10 others, according to the Retraction Watch database. Nicholas DiRienzo, a data scientist now working in private industry, has been trying to retract several more papers he co-authored with Pruitt. But he says he has been stymied because journals want to wait for McMaster’s findings. “This is a correct and necessary step and one that should have been done much earlier,” DiRienzo says about placing Pruitt on leave. “Letting it take so long when there was a clear signal there was a problem has arguably harmed [his] students.”

Pruitt keeps lingering on. He needs to do everyone a favor and just give up — there is no way his scientific career can be rescued. The integrity of the data has to be paramount, and violating that trust is the kiss of death. Would I ever trust a paper with his name on it? No. I’m not going to be alone in that, either.

I don’t know where he can move on to from this disaster. He’s in Florida; maybe one of those cheap roadside attractions? Or maybe a pest control company could hire him. Anything but science.

Aww, poor John Cleese

Monty Python? Brilliant! A Fish Called Wanda? I larfed and larfed. But this is an accurate portrayal of what John Cleese has come to now.

Yes, John. Learn to be at ease with your own privileged place in society, and stop whining. It’s ruining my enjoyment of your past — I emphasize, past — work.

Take heart in the fact that the Daily Mail will continue to publish your opinions.

How have I not heard of Elaine, Arkansas before?

It was yesterday, just yesterday, I read about the events that occurred there over 100 years ago. I attended respectable public schools, I went to two well-funded undergraduate universities, and I took courses in American history. I come from a blue-collar family with a deep devotion to unions and labor, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, land of the Wobblies, and was informally schooled in union history. I’ve long known who Joe Hill was. But Elaine, Arkansas? What was that about?

Well, as I learned only on 15 November 2021, just by chance, that in 1919 a group of black farmers, sharecroppers, met in a church to organize, form a union, and get better prices for their crops and hard work. Since this was intolerable to the wealthy white landowners who got rich off their labor, and since it was easy to inflame the poor whites in the region against their black neighbors, what followed was four days of slaughter.

When white leaders heard, they reacted with violence. Newspapers reported that white mobs, over four days, chased Black men, women and children, slaughtering them in Elaine and across the green farms and swamps of Phillips County.

All the Black farmers wanted were fair prices, but “that’s like the revolution has occurred because that threatens to shift the entire power structure of the South in the favor of Black farmers,” said Dr. Paul Ortiz, a history professor and director of the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

Historians say the massacre claimed five white lives and more than 200 Black lives, though the true number of Black deaths is unknown and some estimates put it much higher.

What? Furthermore, this was one incident in many which occurred over Red Summer, which I’d also never heard about. There were riots all across the Midwest and South, from Chicago, IL down to Port Arthur, TX. White people were rampaging. And I knew nothing about it.

Yesterday was humbling. I had no idea how ignorant I was. Sure, I’d heard of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921, but did not realize it was part of a vast evil wave of vicious, blatant racism.

But how? How could such horrific events by quietly buried?

White newspapers filled their front pages with sensational headlines about a Black uprising, ignoring the economic inequality at the core of the conflict.

As the U.S. has reckoned with its racist past, the 1919 Elaine Massacre — one of the deadliest acts of violence against Black people in American history — has drawn new attention, especially in the years surrounding its 100th anniversary. That year, hundreds of Black people were killed in at least 25 cities across the country, a violent siege today called “Red Summer.”

The cover-up orchestrated by Elaine’s wealthy white landowners and the government, aided by the white-centric reporting of white-owned newspapers, led to a scarcity of information about the massacre.

…

Headlines such as “VICIOUS BLACKS WERE PLANNING GREAT UPRISING” and “NEGROES HAVE BEEN AROUSED BY PROPAGANDA” were atop the front pages of the Arkansas Gazette on Oct. 3, 1919, and Oct. 4, 1919, respectively.

“NEGROES HAD PLOT TO RISE AGAINST WHITES, CHARGED,” read the front page of the Arkansas Democrat on the third day of the massacre.

Surely, the impartial American justice system would levy righteous retribution on the mob? Nope.

Despite the work of the Black press, white newspapers continued to perpetuate their false story. After hundreds of Black people were massacred, no white people were tried in their deaths.

Black people were rounded up, jailed in Helena and tortured until they confessed a role in the deaths of the five white people — part of a legal cover-up concocted by a committee of wealthy white farmers and businessmen appointed by the governor.

In the end, estimates range between 65-75 Black men were sentenced to long-term prison sentences and 12 were sentenced to death. A years-long legal battle fought by the NAACP resulted in two cases, one of which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Moore v. Dempsey) while the other went to the Arkansas Supreme Court. The high courts agreed that the men’s due-process rights had been violated, and none of the 12 were executed.

Now I think of all the black people murdered in recent history, and it’s clear — this is the arc of our history. George Floyd could be murdered by an armed white thug on the most trivial of pretexts, and the press tells us that Floyd was “no angel”. Trayvon Martin can walk out to buy Skittles and come home to be shot to death by a vigilante…and we hear that he was “no angel”, either, and his murderer is acquitted. It’s all the same story, told over and over again, and echoed and reinforced by our incompetent, unprincipled media.

And so it goes.

Today, of course, the Republican party is animated by a fanatical desire to paper over our shame, to keep our kids ignorant of the systematic injustices perpetrated in this country by whiteness and white people for centuries. I also am the beneficiary of the historical crimes that bled black and brown people to give me some relative prosperity, but I have no desire to close my eyes to it — I want to know. It’s the only way we can end this cycle of oppression. All these complaints about CRT are nothing but attempts to blind us to the truth, and keep the hate going.

God damn it, I’m 64 years old and the media has succeeded in keeping me in the dark almost my entire life.

Steve Bannon is just plain weird…or he’s America’s Rasputin

I guess corrupt old cronies of the Trump administration can’t simply fade away, they have to constantly pop up in the news, over and over again. But at least I learned something new to me: Steve Bannon is one of those creepy fanatical Catholics? Yikes. I thought he was just a garden-variety fascist, but apparently he has a philosophical ethos.

Bannon’s philosophy has been written about quite a bit, including by yours truly [Heather Digby Parton], because it is extremely radical and very, very weird. It’s all wacky mysticism mixed with antediluvian, pre-enlightenment, authoritarianism posing as nationalism based upon the writings of an obscure French writer named René Guénon from the early 20th century and the teachings of one of his followers (and Mussolini adviser) Julius Evola. The school of thought is called “Traditionalism” and it is like no tradition you’ve ever heard of. But Bannon is not alone with this philosophy. It’s held by members of far-right leaders’ inner circles throughout Europe and in places like Brazil and Russia. If there is an intellectual rationale for Trumpism beyond the Dear Leader cult of personality, this “traditionalism” is it.

No, I do not want to know more. But Digby gives a couple of sources, and like a doomed character in a horror movie, I can’t resist the urge to go down into the dark basement alone. So here’s one.

From an early age, Bannon was influenced by his family’s distinctly traditionalist Catholicism and he tended to view current events against the broad sweep of history. In 1984, after Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, Bannon’s parents became Tridentine Catholics, and he eventually followed. Though hardly a moralizing social conservative, he objected bitterly to the secular liberalism encroaching upon the culture. “We shouldn’t be running a victory lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut,” he once told me. When he was a naval officer in the late 1970s, Bannon, a voracious autodidact, embarked upon what he described as “a systematic study of the world’s religions” that he carried on for more than a decade. Taking up the Roman Catholic history first instilled in him at his Catholic military high school, he moved on to Christian mysticism and from there to Eastern metaphysics. (In the Navy, he briefly practiced Zen Buddhism before wending his way back to Catholicism.)

Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-​­century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often called “Traditionalism” (capital “T”), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a “primordial” Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.”

No. Enough. Stop. Wait…what’s that creepy figure crawling out of the television set?

Bannon acknowledges affinities with the philosophies of Julius Evola and Dugin in relation to his conservative vision for world politics. Like them, Bannon believes in an Eurasian Christian empire led by “the church militant” that will reform religious, economic, political and social foundations around the world. Such views underlie his speech about conservative Christianity as a bulwark against liberalism at the Vatican in 2014, and it’s no coincidence that Bannon has been integral to the establishment of the conservative Catholic Dignitatis Humanae Institute in an 800-year-old monastery.

All of this should give pause. These appropriations of the Middle Ages by figures like Dugin and Bannon pose an odd reversal of the problem of calling things we don’t like “medieval.” Yet these appropriations are equally misleading and even more dangerous. The resulting racist, xenophobic, misogynist, “traditionalist” construction of the Middle Ages is pervasive in conservative spheres. This ideology is now not only Dugin’s construction but also the view that informs many right-wing thinkers like Putin, Bannon and Trump.

No more, please. I’m going to have nightmares about Catholic fanatics under the bed.

It’s a little bit difficult to sort out exactly what Bannon does believe since he’s definitely a populist and nationalist. Mostly, it seems, he’s a sort of spiritualist, like the Russian Rasputin. According to Green, Bannon’s most important influences are René Guénon, a French writer whose 1929 book “The Crisis of the Modern World” stated that everything started to go to hell in 1312 when the Knights Templar were destroyed; and Julius Evola, an Italian writer whose 1934 book, “Revolt Against the Modern World,” influenced Mussolini. Interestingly, that book was also a seminal work for the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s most influential ideologue, and the man who once called Steve Bannon his ideological soulmate.

Alexandra Nemtsova at the Daily Beast reported:

According to Alexander Verkhovsky, director of Russian SOVA, a Moscow-based NGO monitoring ultra-nationalist groups, “Dugin is talking about creating some new cross-cultural nation of anti-Atlantic, traditional ideology—his theory often sounds like a pretty fascist approach. He said and wrote a lot, calling for a war in Ukraine; many Russian nationalists who listened or read Dugin’s texts actually joined the insurgencies in Ukraine afterward.”

I don’t think Bannon looks quite strong and healthy enough to put up as much of a fight as Rasputin, but you never know. He could be like Jason, or Michael Myers, impossible to kill.

“This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil,” Yusupov wrote. “There was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates always provides a good start to the day

Even if it is a little depressing. Here he comments on a book by Tony Judt.

I had never read so merciless a book. Tony had no use for pieties—no tolerance for invocations of a “Good War” or the “Greatest Generation.” Power reigns in Postwar, often in brutal ways. Tony writes of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning to Poland only to be asked, “Why have you come back?” He introduced me to intellectuals, such as François Furet, forced to reckon not just with Stalin’s crimes but with a discrediting of a “Grand Narrative” of history itself. “All the lives lost, and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction,” Tony writes of this reckoning, were “just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.” Early in Postwar, Tony quotes the observations of a journalist covering the ethnic cleansings that characterized postwar Europe. The journalist self-satisfyingly claims that history will “exact a terrible retribution.” But, Tony tells us, history “exacted no such retribution.” No righteous, God-ordained price was to be paid for this crime against humanity. The arc of history did not magically bend. It was bent, even broken, by those with power.

That resonates with me, too. There is no trajectory of history in evolution, either, just a story we tell ourselves after the fact. There’s nothing but chance and a directionless, generation-by-generation stumbling, with no goal but survival, and afterwards the survivors pat themselves on the back and pretend it was destiny that they made it.

It’s also why I have no sympathy for Pinkerisms. It’s all retrospective coronations all the way down, self-defeating reassurances from the so-far successful that the status quo will carry us forward into a glorious future. It never works that way. Every advancement is the product of a battle by those who say “Not good enough!” and who strive to do better.

And sometimes the better don’t make it anyway.