Uncle Keith has been very busy

James O’Brien always says what makes sense.

Sometimes, though, I think the government is run by a bunch of bumbling Uncle Keiths who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t ever look at the evidence. For instance, here’s what the omicron variant is doing right now:

Deaths are down from last year, which is very good — we’ve got a better fortified population of people who have been vaccinated. This disease is still raging, though, which makes this decision by the St Paul school district incomprehensible to me.

Just as coronavirus cases are surging after winter break, St. Paul Public Schools is considering no longer identifying and excluding unvaccinated students who come into contact with an infected person at school.

Contact tracing is taxing school health personnel, and extended quarantines are hard on families, said Mary Langworthy, the district’s health and wellness director. She said many students have had to stay home for 10 days on three different occasions.

“Our parents are struggling to get to their jobs, they don’t have daycare options. … That’s a hardship for many of our families to endure,” she told the school board this week.

That is quite the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard from someone who’s supposed to be sensible and reasonable. We’re seeing many students being exposed to COVID, so our solution is…to close our eyes and stop testing, so we don’t see them anymore.

I know what a hardship it is to have your rigidly scheduled work life disrupted by natural causes, we used to have kids in our home. Somehow, though, the American solution is to pretend the problems of health and illness don’t exist, because work must carry on as if no pandemic existed. We can’t possibly decide that work must compromise and develop a greater flexibility to accommodate the needs of the people in this time of stress. Oh no, you have sick children at home? But how will these widgets get made? How will luncheon be served to those wealthy matrons? How will these boxes of Amazon goods get next-day delivery, and how will Jeff Bezos be able to afford a new rocket? Your priorities are maladjusted and out of alignment with American values! There are bosses and landlords whose pockets must be filled!

While we don’t have kids at home anymore, if my wife got sick, my number one priority would be helping her, and my job would have to work around that fact. If I got sick, my next goal would be to not drag my sniveling, virus-infected respiratory system back to the classroom to share my viral load with the students. I’m weird that way.

Also, public schools are not a baby-sitting service, even if some school officials think that’s their most important role.

Kent Hovind wacked me again!

Hovind responded to my challenge, which was to leave me out of his rigged debates and just go read a good book, by making me the subject of his “wack-an-atheist” show and most obviously, not reading a single goddamned book. I should have expected that.

I’m beginning to suspect he’s a liar, a fraud, and a fool. Just beginning.

This one isn’t any more cheerful

What nonsense, you may wonder, is going to afflict us next? Surely we’ve hit rock bottom. Nope.

Cult-like extremist movements appear to provide an antidote to the potent mixture of isolation, uncertainty, changing narratives, and fear we have experienced during the pandemic by offering a skewed form of safety, stability, and certainty, along with a cohort of people who are just like us, who believe us and believe in us. As the activist David Sullivan—a man who devoted his life to infiltrating cults in order to extricate loved ones from their grip—pointed out, no one ever joins a cult: They join a community of people who see them. In 2022, this appeal of cults will only grow, and those that arise next year will make QAnon seem like the good old days.

Yeah, great, I’m going back to bed. Wake me up in, oh, 2025 and I’ll reassess.

A little Sunday morning despair

High on my list of evidences that it’s all the media’s fault: that Tim Pool, a shallow, incompetent hack has gotten incredibly wealthy off of YouTube’s inscrutable algorithm.

It’s not just Pool and YouTube, though. I see the entire lineup of commentators on Fox News, FaceBook’s bizarre promotion of quackery everywhere, and the rise of 4chan (or whatever they call it nowadays) and its enabling of conspiracy theories. It’s everywhere. The entire damn country is soaking in a cesspool full of idiots bobbing at the top, and there are no checks on them anywhere. The only checks they see is the money billionaires sow to fuel a chaos they can profit from.

Finally! I’ll be able to use my new bottle brush!

The water in the science building was restored the other day, but yesterday when I used the faucet nothing but rusty brown horrible water was coming out of it. I’m going in today and will flush the pipes in my lab for a while, and then, at last, I will get to use my glorious new bottle brush to wash all the glassware. I am so excited! Wouldn’t you be? Doing the dishes, making everything all shiny, getting all the clutter put away…this is exactly why I got a Ph.D.

I’ll also be able to indulge in some spider therapy. You people don’t know what you’re missing by not spending time with a whole lot of eyes and twitching legs and fanged bodies walking the tightrope of an intricate web. You’re all invited to come on over (as long as you’re masked and vaccinated) and take in the restful spectacle. Maybe you can wash a bottle or two while you’re here?