What kind of ridiculous poison will they ingest next to avoid a simple vaccination?

Back in the long-ago, when I did animal surgeries, I was familiar with Betadine. It was a routine part of our prep work. You anesthetize the cat, and then you put lots of Nair on the surgical field to remove the hair, then you wipe off the hair with the Nair and use a razor to shave off any remaining stubble, and finally, you swab the skin thoroughly with a Betadine solution to sterilize it. It was potent stuff. End result: a bald cat with clean bright reddish-orange skin.

I would never have dreamed of drinking or gargling that stuff. Why would anyone in their right mind do something that stupid?

I did not consider the lunacy of anti-vaxxers.

As if attempting to one-up last week’s stupidity with regards to ivermectin, anti-vaxxers on Facebook and Twitter are advocating for a new and unproven Covid-19 treatment: Betadine, an antiseptic used to treat cuts and scrapes.

Povidone iodine, often sold under the brand-name Betadine, is an iodine-based treatment largely for topical use that kills bacteria. It’s a “commonly used cleanser in the ER and OR,” says Kenneth Weinberg, an emergency room physician in New York City. “If you’re in the ER and someone has a wound to sew it up, you use it to clean with.” When told that anti-vaxxers had taken to gargling with Betadine, Weinberg said, “Fuck me! Of course they are.”

They’re also using 1% Betadine eye-drops. This is insane.

Needless to say, the side effects of ingesting Betadine can be nasty. Weinberg said that when he was doing his residency, he treated a patient who went into kidney failure after drinking iodine and had to be on dialysis (he eventually recovered, but only after he’d started urinating reddish-brown). “I’m sure it would cause all kinds of GI symptoms as well if you ate or drank enough of it,” he says. When asked if gargling Betadine could reduce the effects of Covid-19 or prevent transmission, Weinberg said, “Fuck no.”

I think I like that doctor.

If I may make a suggestion: these people are using it improperly. In my experience, you always had to treat with Nair first, then the Betadine. I’m sure it would improve the efficacy if they first drank a few tablespoons of that stuff, then gargled with Betadine. (SUGGESTION MADE IN JEST: do not consume calcium hydroxide. I don’t want to see that the next mad fad among these wackaloons is something I joked about.)

Hey, everyone. GET THE VACCINATION. Jesus.

Facebook has been lying to us? Say it ain’t so.

Is anyone surprised by these revelations?

Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame.
In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

I’ve noticed. Some people get to say anything they want, especially if it’s disinformation about medicine or politics, while others (you know, the peons) get slammed if they post a selfie that looks funny. It’s not just me that sees the inequity, though — it’s Facebook’s own self-examination.

A 2019 internal review of Facebook’s whitelisting practices, marked attorney-client privileged, found favoritism to those users to be both widespread and “not publicly defensible.”
“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

Note: internal review. This wasn’t some competitor trying to take an axe to the company, it was their own lawyers.

Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite Congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.
Sometimes the company held back for fear of hurting its business. In other cases, Facebook made changes that backfired. Even Mr. Zuckerberg’s pet initiatives have been thwarted by his own systems and algorithms.

Gosh. Sure sounds like a tobacco company. They’re not going to fix anything, because it might hurt their revenues. I use Facebook to keep in touch with family, but half my feed is click-bait and ads for things I don’t care about.

One area in which the company hasn’t struggled is profitability. In the past five years, during which it has been under intense scrutiny and roiled by internal debate, Facebook has generated profit of more than $100 billion. The company is currently valued at more than $1 trillion.

What’s weird there is that they rake in all this money, but their CEO still can’t get a haircut that makes him look human.

Break them up, nationalize the social media services, and hand Zuckerberg $50 and directions to a barber shop that doesn’t cater to androids.

German engineering! Also, German history

Yesterday, I learned about the history of some microscope companies. I was a little surprised.

In the business of biology, there is a hierarchy of prestige. The highest rated microscopes are typically made by Zeiss, and the price reflects that. They really are sweet machines with excellent optics, and rock solid, reliable mechanicals. I adore the old Zeiss Universal, and if one dropped into my lap I would be overjoyed in spite of my shattered femurs. Second on my list would be a Leica scope, but the ranking is a little unfair — it’s based partly on reputation, not necessarily the quality of the modern instruments, and one of the reasons Zeiss is prized is pure status-seeking. Then there’s Nikon and Olympus, two Japanese companies with excellent scopes…but they aren’t German. There’s a strong cachet to German engineering, but really, the Japanese optics are pretty darned good.

My lab microscope is a Leica and I’m very happy with it. We also have a fair number of student microscopes made by American companies, and I confess with some patriotic embarrassment that they’re junk. Cheap, but junk. I had the displeasure of working with some student scopes yesterday and was dismayed at the lack of that silky smooth feel and crisp, clear optics, but then, we can’t afford to drop $10,000 each on the 30 scopes we might need to equip a student lab.

Notice that my top two microscope brands are German, and these are old companies, established in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And that makes one wonder…what were they doing during WWII and the rise of the Nazis? It’s an uncomfortable question, and a little bit unfair, since every German company had to make accommodations to coexist with the Nazis, and it’s not as if they could have shuttered their factories and labs and moved to a different country in 1933. We could ask how enthusiastically they cooperated with the regime, however.

There, Zeiss disappointed me. Zeiss used forced labor from the concentration camps during the war.

On October 18, 1944, 200 female workers were allocated to the ZEISS Goehle-Werk, an additional 300 women had been transported from Auschwitz on October 28, 1944, and yet another 200 were transported on December 14.

According to prisoner statements, the prisoners were guarded by female SS members who were armed with rubber truncheons, which they used. Some of the guards had previously worked at ZEISS-Ikon. The women were housed on one level of the factory, and they worked two or three levels below.

The ZEISS Werk Reick, located in the southeastern part of Dresden, was one of four ZEISS-Ikon AG plants in Dresden. Like the ZEISS-Ikon Goehle-Werk, it became the site of a subcamp in October 1944. However, unlike the other subcamps with female prisoners in Dresden, the Werk Reick is less well known. That may be because of no trial was held, in contrast to the case of the Goehle-Werk. The camp evacuation took place in mid-April 1945 after the allies occupation.

Moreover, there was evidence that during the war (1941-1944), ZEISS has utilized thousands of forced labor workers, which comprised about 30% of all its employees. Furthermore, according to reports, ZEISS also provided direct economic support to the national and local Nazi-party organizations (Reference: 6. Carl Zeiss. Die Geschichte Eines Unternehmens. Band 2, 2000).

Yikes. They profited from slave camps.

You might argue that, well, they had to. Optics were critical to the German war effort, and the Nazis basically held a gun to the head of every company in their territory. They just did what they had to do. But then, I read about Leica during WWII and the Leica Freedom Train.

“Under considerable risk and in defiance of Nazi policy, Ernst Leitz took valiant steps to transport his Jewish employees and others out of harm’s way,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. “At a time when the Nazis were steadily advancing their nation on a path toward war and the Holocaust, Leitz had the courage to defy their directives while risking his life to save others. In the moral void that engulfed the world in those nightmarish days when the cruelty of the Nazis ran rampant, Ernst Leitz had the Courage to Care. If only there had been more Oskar Schindlers, more Ernst Leitzs, then less Jews would have perished. We remember and honor his act of selfless moral courage in the face of absolute tyranny.”

Yeah. The company saw what was coming and started hiring Jewish workers and assigning them to foreign offices to get them out of harm’s way.

As early as 1933 and continuing as late as 1943, Leitz quietly established what has become known as the “Leica Freedom Train”, a covert means of allowing his Jewish employees, their families, and even non-Jews to leave Germany under the guise of being ‘assigned’ overseas. These refuges were sent to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States. They were trained, housed at company expense and paid a stipend until work was found for them in the photo industry.

As new Leitz “employees” arrived in New York they made their way to the Manhattan offices of E. Leitz Inc., each with a symbol of freedom around their necks – a new Leica Camera. The total number of escapees has never been established but may have been as high as 200-300 in the United States alone.

Unfortunately, the company wasn’t large enough to employ 6 million people overseas.

I am now a little happier with my Leica DM (although I really had no complaints about it before), but I’m giving a few dirty looks to my Wild (a Zeiss-associated company) M3C, even though it is an objectively magnificent tool.

“They aren’t shooters. They are poseurs.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been posturing again. And she has been caught.

I wouldn’t have noticed that. I know next to nothing about guns, and am not at all interested in learning more. There is a great deal of detailed gun knowledge out there, and serious people who can instantly see the deeper problems with that photo. The fellow who noticed that error went on at length about the foolishness of firing a .50 BMG. Here’s the conclusion; if you don’t do Facebook (you are brilliant), I’ve included Joohn Choe’s full comment below the fold.

Trashy weapon, threatening posture, and always, a thin veneer of Instagram “gun-bunny” posturing overlaying stark ignorance and rank mediocrity: that is Taylor-Greene’s other gun pic, that’s Boebert’s “guns to books ratio” pic from earlier this year, that’s Cawthorn, that’s Gaetz, that’s pretty much the entire Q caucus if you look back at them.
Read “threat” and “scary” into this behavior and you are, to some degree, falling into the trap they want you to; and it’s not even an accurate reading, because the truth of this behavior is even less flattering than being a threat.
It’s just crass, unoriginal posturing; it’s all show and no go.

Let’s get Taylor-Green and Boebert and Cawthorn and Gaetz out of congress, OK?

[Read more…]

I’m mad as hell, too

Like Amanda Marcotte, I’m tired of the WATBs who have decided to perpetuate the pandemic as a political game.

…who I am mad at is the willfully unvaccinated, people who, out of irrationality and often raw Republican tribalism, got us into this mess in the first place. I am incandescent with rage that millions of Americans are putting it on the rest of us to protect them from COVID-19, just so they can avoid a simple, free shot that is available at every pharmacy.
Republicans, always ready to destroy lives for some perceived political gain, aren’t even hiding anymore that they think being pro-COVID is good politics. As CNN reports, there’s “a GOP-wide effort to use the fears and frustrations of Americans worried about another round of school closures and lockdowns as cudgels against their Democratic opponents.”
But, of course, the return of restrictions is the direct result of Republican efforts to dissuade Americans from getting vaccinated and keep those COVID-19 case rates high. It’s important to remember that this is still a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Case rates are rising rapidly among the unvaccinated, who tend to reject other prevention measures along with vaccines. There are also breakthrough infections, though they affect fewer than one-third of 1% of the vaccinated.

It’s not just the inconvenience of wearing a mask these awful people are rejecting — it’s the vaccine, which is incomprehensible to me. It only takes a few minutes, you walk in to a pharmacy, you fill out a little paperwork, and you walk out with greatly enhanced resistance to the virus. Why would you not do that? The right-wingers have to invent all kinds of nonsensical excuses about microchips and imaginary serious side-effects to justify their recalcitrants. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to suffer the larger inconvenciences, and the pandemic continues on.

Or worse. Here’s a professor at Texas A&M who had the experience of a student dying.

It’s not worth it if even one student has to die to get an education. And Texas is one of the worst.

In Texas, Republican leadership and right-wing ideology has led to low vaccination rates and subsequently to hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients. Gov. Greg Abbott, being a Republican, refuses to do anything to mitigate the spread of the disease. So instead, he’s leaning on hospitals to deprive other people of necessary medical care, such as delaying surgeries, to keep hospital resources free to tend to the waves of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. However angry I am at losing my gym class (also important for physical health, I’ll point out), it likely pales in comparison to the rage of someone who has to put off surgery to fix a debilitating but not fatal condition, all because some Fox News junkie thought a quick jab in the arm takes away his “freedom”. Not being able to walk because your knee surgery keeps getting delayed is the far greater loss of freedom.

I’m doing my part, wearing a mask indoors everywhere I go. My university now requires a mask for everyone, and has also mandated vaccines, but everywhere I go in town, no one is wearing a mask…and we know that only 50% of the population of Stevens county is vaccinated, in part because this is a largely Republican part of the state. Would you believe that only 46% of the Trumpkins are vaccinated? They’re dragging the rest of us down!

Aubrey de Grey exonerated! Not.

I guess the Aubrey de Grey affair, in which he was accused of sexual harrasment and lost his job, has been concluded with the release of the independent investigation’s report. De Grey has his own peculiar twist on it.

Now that the relevant portion of the independent investigator’s work is finished, and especially because her report quoted the full text of the email in question, I am at last in a position to apologise – which I gladly do publicly – to Laura Deming for my email to her in 2012, about which I had forgotten until the investigator reminded me of it. As STAT reported three weeks ago, I consider that that email would have been a mistake even if she had been five years older, because we were in a mentor-mentee relationship. I catgorically deny Laura’s current (though, as she made clear on August 10th, not contemporaneous) view, shared by the investigator, that I sent that email with improper intent – but my email does not become OK just because improper intent is now being misread into it. It’s also no excuse that I had interpreted the email from Laura to which I was replying as light-hearted, rather than as expressing “concerns about mentors doing stuff like that” (as she wrote on August 10th), and allowed myself to be emboldened by it. Laura: I unreservedly apologise.

So only now can he apologize, after the investigators published his offensive email in full. If they hadn’t published it, he wouldn’t need to apologize? It’s nice that he apologizes now, but notice that he says nothing about the final results of the independent investigation, which found him guilty, guilty, guilty. It’s pretty scathing, actually, but I guess he’s in denial.

After a thorough review of the evidence, we make the following findings by a preponderance of the evidence.

First, we find Dr. de Grey purposefully and knowingly disregarded multiple directives (from the acting Executive Director, this investigator, and his own counsel) to retain the confidentiality of the investigation. In his interview, Dr. de Grey not only admitted to this conduct, he made unreasonable efforts to justify it (e.g., downplaying it as a “transgression” that “worked.”)

Second we find Dr. de Grey misrepresented facts to the Recipient. He suggested the investigation concluded Complainant #2’s claims were “100 percent fictitious.” Yet when pressed as to the source of that information, Dr. de Grey acknowledged he extrapolated this interpretation from Fabiny’s comment that he was going to be reinstated. We note in a Facebook post published after his termination on August 21, 2021, Dr. de Grey seemingly acknowledged taking liberty with Fabiny’s comment, characterizing his interpretation of her comment as “exaggerated.” We also note that after Dr. de Grey learned the following day that the investigation had in fact sustained Complainant #2’s claims against him, he made no efforts to correct his earlier misstatement, either to the Recipient or to his Facebook audience (having reposted on August 21, 2021 his original message referring to the claims as “100 percent fictitious.”)

Third, because of the public nature in which this investigation is being played out – including Dr. de Grey’s continued social media comments and his supporters’ prolific responses – we find it reasonable that key witnesses with material information (perhaps even more complainants), would be deterred and intimidated from meeting with the Firm. This deterrence and intimidation could seriously compromise the Firm’s ability to conduct a thorough investigation into ongoing sexual harassment claims, as the Board directed we undertake.

Fourth and similarly, Dr. de Grey’s message to the Recipient – incorrectly declaring the investigation was concluded in his favor – suggests he was privy to details of the investigation before others. Both aspects – that he had advance notice and that it was contrary to the actual findings – inaccurately portray the Firm as lacking impartiality and independence to potential witnesses and parties.

Fifth, we find Complainant #2 reasonably interpreted Dr. de Grey’s message to the Recipient to be a threat to her career. She heard from the Recipient that Dr. de Grey referenced her “career will be over soon.” This is consistent with his actual email. It is undisputed Dr. de Grey made the following statement, suggesting he alone could save her career, but only if she did his bidding: “I find [Complainant #2’s] career is absolutely over as things stand, and the only reason it actually isn’t is because I am a man of honour who refuses to let somebody (especially a meteoric rising star) be burned at the stake while an actual villian gets away scot free and is thereby emboldened.” While Dr. de Grey characterized his proposed course of action in the email to the Recipient as “rescuing” Complainant #2, we do not find this plausible, given the language he used. Dr. de Grey’s message to the Recipient did exactly what the confidentiality admonitions were designed to prevent – attempt to interfere with an investigation by influencing a party’s allegations. Dr. de Grey’s ill-advised message to the Recipient was in fact conveyed to Complainant #2. Indeed, Dr. de Grey intended this course of action by stating, “And you need to tell her so, as probably only you can. Go to it.”

Next, we find Dr. de Grey’s message an attempt to distract from his own conduct – part of which he admitted (sending a sexual message to underage mentee Complainant #1) – and to point to another individual as the “actual villain.” Regardless of anyone else’s motives or conduct in pursuing an investigation, the fact remains that Dr. de Grey is responsible for his own conduct, regardless of how it came to light.

Finally, we find the fact that Dr. de Grey sent the emails to the Recipient from his SRF email account was yet another attempt to unduly influence, at best, and threaten, at worst, the Recipient into taking the actions Dr. de Grey wanted, namely putting pressure on both the Recipient and Complainant #2. In this regard, we note Dr. de Grey’s subject line to the Recipient – “You will thank me.” – suggests Dr. de Grey was doing him a favor by asking him to put pressure on Complainant #2. This can only be interpreted as a demand the Recipient interfere with a confidential investigation and unduly influence a witness.

In closure, Dr. de Grey’s unapologetic interference with the investigation by reaching out to a witness through a third party, and repeatedly posting about the investigation, has generated angry attacks on the accusers and perpetuated misinformation (i.e., that he has been exonerated). This compromises the Firm’s ability to retain credibility and trust with witnesses. We find his attempt to influence a party may chill, and likely has chilled, others from coming forward; was an effort to alter and sidetrack the investigation; and, was reasonably threatening to a party.

De Grey’s response to all that was to announce, with a sigh of relief, that he can finally apologize to one of his accusers for one thing, while denying everything else, in spite of the fact that the investigation found him clearly in the wrong on everything. Furthermore, the investigators noticed all the squirrely stuff he was doing on social media to mislead and lie…it was danged obvious to everyone, except of course, to his cult-like fans who truly believe that Aubrey de Grey is going to cure death.

A husband’s revenge

Yesterday was Mary’s birthday. I performed the ritual.

“What can I get you?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Can I take you out for a nice dinner?”

“No.”

“Can I cook you a nice dinner? Whatever you’d like.”

“There’s some acorn squash we need to use up.”

“That’s it? Just bake some squash?”

“Yes.”

So I obeyed. Nothing special. One squash, baked. Done.

Today is the day after her birthday. The geas is lifted, I can do whatever I want. So tonight I whipped up some Cod Provençal: cod cooked in fresh tomatoes from her garden, onions, garlic, olives, mushrooms, corn, and lots of basil. Don’t tell her it was almost as easy as the squash.

See what happens when you don’t give me good ideas?