Midwestern rivers sure are loopy

I did a little river-rafting this morning. This page is a map of the continental US, and if you click anywhere it traces the path of a raindrop to the ocean for you. Morris, Minnesota is a long way from the Caribbean, and the rivers wind and loop constantly. It’s a short hop from my home town to Puget Sound.

Warning, though: I tried to trace where a raindrop in Salt Lake City, Utah goes, and it’s really short — a few kilometers to the Great Salt Lake — and then the program hangs interminably. I guess it doesn’t like that it doesn’t reach an ocean.

The cat is going to be insufferable if she finds out

So don’t tell her she looks exactly like the first cat of the emperor of Japan.

I was going to take a photo of her to demonstrate how much alike they are, but I just noticed that we’ve been adapting the house to suit her. She has a strong preference for resting on black surfaces, so we’ve been putting down black blankets for her to reign from. I’ve got a black backpack — if I leave that on the floor I’ll come back to find her nesting there. We’ve been able to control where she sleeps in our bedroom to a small degree with a black cloth in a corner. You try taking a picture of a cat whose color is like the deepest ink, who likes to disappear at night.

Wait a minute — why is this cat acting like a ninja in our home? What is she scheming?

Nice big experimental animals

Prison populations are hotbeds of COVID-19 infections, and they’re full of surplus people society doesn’t really need, and gosh, a lot of them are black, even, so you know what we should do? An experiment!

An Arkansas doctor under investigation for prescribing an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin to jail detainees with COVID-19, even though federal health officials specifically warn against it, has said that those patients took the drug willingly. But several inmates at the Washington County jail say that is not the case — that they were given the pills with no indication of what they really were.

CBS News spoke with 29-year-old Edrick Floreal-Wooten over a video call from the jail on Friday. After testing positive for COVID-19 in August, he said he and other inmates went to “pill call” and were given several pills with the explanation that it would help them “get better.” He said he and others asked repeatedly what the pills were.

“They said they were vitamins, steroids and antibiotics,” Floreal-Wooten told CBS News. “We were running fevers, throwing up, diarrhea … and so we figured that they were here to help us. … We never knew that they were running experiments on us, giving us ivermectin. We never knew that.”

Except it wasn’t even an experiment. The doctor, Rob Karas, took it upon himself to dose the patients, despite the fact that every credible medical organization says it is dangerous and not recommended.

Karas, who has treated people at the jail for six years, confirmed prescribing the drug to CBS News on Friday, saying that vaccines are a “tremendous asset in the fight against COVID,” but that their availability “does not change the day-to-day reality of caring for sick patients.”

Karas said in an email he obtained ivermectin from a licensed pharmacist “in dosages and compounds formulated for humans” to give to COVID patients.

“I do not have the luxury of conducting my own clinical trial or study and am not attempting to do so. I am on the front line of trying to prevent death and serious illness,” he told CBS News. “I am proud of our track record in both of my clinics and at the jail in particular.”

Karas is now under investigation by the Arkansas State Medical Board. That’s weak sauce — he’s been poisoning his patients, and needs a rather more severe and immediate punishment.

But what the hey, they’re just prison inmates, they probably deserve some mild poisoning.

Satan will not save you

Good try, but no, I don’t think this tactic by the Satanic Temple will work.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday night allowed the state to implement a ban on the procedures after six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant, with no carve-outs for rape or incest. Until it is blocked or overturned, the law effectively nullifies the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision — which established abortion as a constitutional right — in Texas.

Enter The Satanic Temple.

The “nontheistic” organization, which is headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, joined the legal fray this week by sending a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration demanding access to abortion pills for its members. The group has established an “abortion ritual,” and is attempting to use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which was created to allow Native Americans access to peyote for religious rituals) to argue that its members should be allowed access to abortion drugs like Misoprostol and Mifepristone for religious purposes.

The people who support anti-choice policies deeply and sincerely (and wrongly) believe that an abortion kills a human being. They’ll simply turn around and say we can’t allow the “abortion ritual” for the same reasons we don’t allow a “human sacrifice ritual”.

One side gaming the laws will just encourage the other side to game the laws right back. This approach also skips right over the crux of the argument: the autonomy of women. Do women have the right to control their own bodies or not? Falling back on the bogus sanctity of religious privileges does not address that at all, and further empowers the religious viewpoint that generates the problem in the first place.

Today I learned about Terrain Theory

I’m so sorry. I stumbled into a den of rabid naturopaths who were just oozing this malarkey to justify their beliefs, and now I’m exposing you to it. It’s just a quick exposure, you’ll develop resistance quickly enough.

First I have to point out that calling something a theory doesn’t make it true. A valid theory has to be supported by a wide base of observation and experimental evidence — you don’t get to label something as a theory because you think it would dignify your brain fart. I will point out that Haeckel’s recapitulation theory was a theory, too, which was built on nothing but speculation and misinterpretation, and it collapsed thoroughly.

Secondly, theories are not sanctified by attaching a 19th century scientist’s name to it, allowing you to ignore all work ever since. Haeckel was, I think, a pretty good guy, but that doesn’t make his ideas valid. Likewise (and this is a common creationist mistake), Darwin wasn’t the be-all and end-all of evolutionary thinking, and glorifying or trashing Charles Darwin has no effect on whether evolution is true or not.

I mention these two things because they are the totality of the evidence for Terrain Theory: it is called a theory, therefore it is a theory, and it was formulated by a 19th century scientist named Antoine Béchamp, a rival of Louis Pasteur, and Pasteur was a fraud who recanted Germ Theory on his deathbed, therefore Béchamp wins. That’s kind of it. It’s an archaic hypothesis that did not survive the testing grounds of science a hundred years ago, but now it’s been resurrected by anti-vax loons who are waving the banner of Béchamp and Terrain Theory, never mind the evidence.

So what is it? Here’s one definition from a Dr Karen (note: linking to her site is not an endorsement. She’s a kook who sells nutritional supplements and cleanses and superfoods, all the latest grifter buzzwords).

Terrain theory states that diseases are results of our internal environment and its ability to maintain homeostasis against outside threats. Terrain theory believes if an individual maintains a healthy terrain, it can handle outside invaders or threats which cause diseases. When terrain is weak, it favors the microorganisms. Hence, the health depends on the quality of an individuals’ terrain.

She’s understating it. Most scientists and doctors wouldn’t find the overall idea objectionable: your ability to resist disease is going to be affected by your general health, that poor nutrition will impair your ability to fight off bacteria and viruses, and hey you, get out and exercise more and eat a healthy diet. That aspect is fine. Where Terrain Theory goes off the rails is when it becomes a complete denial of the role of microorganisms in disease. Polio, for instance, isn’t caused by a virus, the virus is just a symptom of the lousy condition your body is in. Cancer isn’t caused by mutations in cells that lead to overproliferation, it’s a product of your pH. You’ve probably seen garbage like this — cancer cures that are all about eating the right foods to adjust your body chemistry, or purging yourself of toxins with magical cleanses.

Here’s another quack, “Dr” Young (again, linking is not an endorsement, Young is an evil creep. See Gorski’s take-down as a “cleanse”).

Béchamp was able to see bacteria, and other nano materials emerge from the cell, as opposed to coming
from outside the cell, like most people have been taught.

Dr. Young doesn’t believe that corona, ebola, or zika can infect a human being, let alone exist at all.
“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return” Genesis 3:19

Béchamp proposed that the environment of the body, determines what can live and not live. Young says that the source of common disease, is chemical poisoning, which can come in many forms, such as pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified foods, and vaccines. All of which, do not come from nature. They are produced by the military – industrial – pharmaceutical complex.

There’s a lot of familiar tropes in Young’s “work”. There’s the referring to himself in the third person, the false authority of a title (he has a doctorate from a diploma mill), the irrelevant Biblical reference, the pretense of idolizing a long-dead scientist, the denial of all contemporary evidence, and the choice of convenient scapegoats, the military–industrial–pharmaceutical complex and Louis Pasteur. He also cites this weird claim that Pasteur recanted germ theory on his deathbed. What is it with these people? They also claim Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed (he didn’t), as if any of that would matter. Both Pasteur and Darwin died quietly in their old age after long illnesses; they had more important things on their mind, and weren’t busily marshaling arguments for an academic debate. They were busy dying. The people who cite Béchamp are quacks.

I expect we’ll hear more about Terrain Theory now and in the future. The anti-vax brigade will rush to endorse anything that sounds sciencey, while doing their damnedest to ignore 150 years of good, solid, evidence-based science that shows that germ theory is still valid.

Sheesh. If you’d told me 40 years ago that in the far future, in the 2020s, I’d have to defend the germ theory of disease, of all things, I’d have to ask what cataclysmic disaster had destroyed civilization and reduced us to a post-apocalyptic wilderness. But no! All it took was Fox News and the Republican party to shatter the public understanding of science.

By the way, at least Robert Young was convicted of multiple counts of grand theft and conspiring to practice medicine without a license a few years ago. So I guess some vestiges of justice still linger in our desolation.

Also, not this Robert Young.

None of these spider pants make sense

OK, I’m trying to parse these images, but any spider limb diagram that incorporates the abdomen doesn’t work. The coxa (the proximate segment of the limb) attaches to the cephalothorax, not the abdomen, so the first two images simply do not fit. The third, maybe, but only if the pants hang so low they don’t cover the coxa, trochanter, and femur.

Maybe this diagram of the ventral cephalothorax will help.

I’m sorry if my pedantry ruins the joke, but spiders wouldn’t wear pants.

Must every American story be built on a racist foundation?

OK, so after a long theater hiatus, I broke down and saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. There were some good bits, in particular the fight in the bus at the beginning, but after that it was a long slide down to end in a lot of CGI goop to wrap it up and incorporate the hero and Awkwafina in some kind of Avengers/superhero gemisch.

The big flaw in the movie was that there was so much exposition and so many flashbacks that the story never really got any momentum going. It’s a martial arts movie! Why are you stopping the kicking and punching and flying leaps to fill in a rather humdrum back story?

There’s a good reason for that, though. We have no cultural background on which to frame the story — they had to explain everything, because you won’t find it anywhere except in comic books from the 1970s. Shang-Chi was invented by two white American guys, based on their assumptions about Chinese culture, which were in turn formulated by an English novelist in the early 20th century. This has zero connections with Chinese culture and mythology — except for the idea that all Chinese guys should know chop-sockey.

Furthermore, that English novelist is best known for … Fu Manchu.

According to his own account, Sax Rohmer decided to start the Dr Fu Manchu series after his Ouija board spelled out C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N when he asked what would make his fortune. Clive Bloom argues that the portrait of Fu Manchu was based on the popular music hall magician Chung Ling Soo, “a white man in costume who had shaved off his Victorian moustache and donned a Mandarin costume and pigtail”. As for Rohmer’s theories concerning “Eastern devilry” and “the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese,” he seeks to give them intellectual credentials by referring to the travel writing of Bayard Taylor. Taylor was a would-be ethnographer, who though unversed in Chinese language and culture used the pseudo-science of physiognomy to find in the Chinese race “deeps on deeps of depravity so shocking and horrible, that their character cannot even be hinted.” Rohmer’s protagonists treat him as an authority.

Rohmer wrote 14 novels concerning the villain. The image of “Orientals” invading Western nations became the foundation of Rohmer’s commercial success, being able to sell 20 million copies in his lifetime.

Marvel originally based Shang-Chi on that concept. Shang-Chi was the son of the evil Fu Manchu. He was renamed in the movie as Xu Wenwu, because Marvel lost the rights to the Rohmer character. I notice, too, that although the movie has an amazing Asian cast, these are the writers:

Cretton, at least, is Asian-American, born to a mother of Japanese descent, but otherwise, this is a story by white guys built on a framework created by a racist idea of the Yellow Peril. At least Marvel is doing a bit of white-washing of its ugly history.

Correction: David Callaham is also Chinese-American, so two of the writers have appropriate connections.

I’ll also add that the movie has significant Asian contributions, and representation is important. I just think the source material has a troubling derivation.

What were they trying to hide?

Would it be suspicious if, after you committed murder, you immediately deleted your email records and shredded all your files? Because that’s what the Minnesota police did after they killed George Floyd, just ripping apart anything that might allow investigators to figure out what they were doing.

Minnesota State Patrol officers conducted a mass purge of emails and text messages immediately after their response to riots last summer, leaving holes in the paper trail as the courts and other investigators attempt to reconstruct whether law enforcement used improper force in the chaos following George Floyd’s murder.

In a recent court hearing in a lawsuit alleging the State Patrol targeted journalists during the unrest, State Patrol Maj. Joseph Dwyer said he and a “vast majority of the agency” deleted the communiqués after the riots, according to a transcript published to the federal court docket Friday night.

This file destruction “makes it nearly impossible to track the State Patrol’s behavior, apparently by design,” said attorneys for Minnesota’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the state patrol and Minneapolis police on behalf of journalists who say they were assaulted by law enforcement while covering the protests and riots.

“The purge was neither accidental, automated, nor routine,” said ACLU attorneys, in a court motion that asks a judge to order the State Patrol to cease attacks on journalists who are covering protests. “The purge did not happen because of a file destruction or retention policy. No one reviewed the purged communications before they were deleted to determine whether the materials were relevant to this litigation.”

Quick, check their dictionaries — you’ll probably find they also deleted the word “accountability”.

They also deleted case files, throwing some drug prosecution cases in peril (which seems like a good thing).

The revelations come as Minneapolis police say they’re also investigating why officers in the Second Precinct — across the city from where the riots took place — shredded case files during the riots last summer. Attorneys say police destroyed key evidence to charges in a drug prosecution and have asked a Hennepin County Judge to throw out the case.

In the July 28 hearing, Dwyer said they were not acting on an order from on high to delete records, but it’s “standard practice” for the troopers to so.

“You just decided, shortly after the George Floyd protests, this would be a good time to clean out my inbox?” asked ACLU attorney Kevin Riach.

Dwyer answered in the affirmative.

Now I’m curious. If there was no coordination, and no instructions from on high, why did so many police officers suddenly get in the mood to do some serious house-cleaning, and how many policemen were involved? It’s not necessarily a conspiracy — I mean, I get in the mood to clean up my office when I’ve got a major deadline in my face and want to procrastinate — but something motivated these officers to up and throw out evidence. What was it, if not a command from a superior?

Could it be…guilt?

Why academia doesn’t lean right

Dang, this is a good video, succinct and to the point.

Why are there so few conservatives in academia? Because the the things conservatives want to argue about are no longer debatable. You can’t seriously operate as a biologist, for instance, and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old…much less put together a class within the curriculum that tries to teach that nonsensical idea. I’m not as familiar with other disciplines, but are there economics professors who aren’t fringe cranks who teach trickle-down economics, Laffer curve and all that, when the evidence makes it patently clear that it just doesn’t work?

Don’t get me wrong, I know professors who are more conservative than I am — very few of us actually go so far as to suggest that the proletariat must rise up and seize the means of production — but we do tend to exclude the extremist positions. The problem is that modern conservatism consists entirely of extremist madness. Your typical professor is not some wild-eyed radical, but a cautious, moderate advocate for incremental improvement of society, and just that level of tepid support for betterment is antithetical to conservative thought.