Apres moi le deluge

It’s been dry and miserable all summer here, my lawn is dead, the spiders are panting for a drop to drink, and I arrive at the Minneapolis airport to fly away, and what happens? The skies rip open, thunder and lightning, and everything is drenched. It’s my parting gift to Minnesota, I guess. Don’t worry, I’ll be back on Sunday to resume the desertification.

One thing I should mention on my way out the door is that I’m going to a corner of the US where internet service is spotty. We’re staying at a hotel that assured us they do have wifi, but I’m not sure I believe them, and it’s a little bit of a worry, since I have to teach a class over Zoom every morning. It’s a lesser concern, but if your comment gets hung up in the pending queue, it might be a little while before I can clear it.

Now I have to go get wet, I think. I may step off the plane at Sea-Tac and instantly dessicate the entire Pacific Northwest.

#IStandWithMeb and the latest TERFy nonsense

The contretemps du jour on Twitter is an attempt by TERFs to take over a trans-inclusive bar in Edinburgh (Meb is the bartender who politely threw them out). Marion Millar, a notorious transphobe who is currently awaiting trial for hate crimes against trans people, was one of the organizers who “innocently” (yeah, if you believe that you’re pretty darned gullible) booked a night out with the girls at Doctors, a pub in Edinburgh.

That would be fine, even TERFs get to enjoy some fish & chips and a pint now and then, except…they saw this as an opportunity to hand out inflammatory flyers and put up gender critical stickers in the rest room and argue with the other patrons and the bartender.

Here’s a good summary of the evening.

Doctors bar in Edinburgh and specifically their manager have come under fire from a torrent of abuse from transphobes on social media who have even been review-bombing the bar on Facebook etc. This after a group of transphobes went to the bar wearing transphobic campaigning t-shirts and armed with leaflets which they attempted to litter around the place. They were politely asked to leave, refused and were escorted out by police.

They got what they wanted, to provoke and disturb other people and get in the news with their brand of indignant hatred, and the staff at the bar dealt with it as responsibly as they could. They also found a target for their hate to focus on, Meb, and an exciting new hashtag they can poison.

If ever I find myself in Edinburgh again, I’ll definitely seek out Doctors and give them my custom. They sound like good people.

More mature and sensible than many adults

This is my granddaughter, Iliana. She is almost three.

Yesterday, she went on an adventure. She and her mother flew in an airplane from Minneapolis to Sea-Tac, and then she took a bus to the train station, and a train to Seattle, and another bus to her hotel. It was a long day of traveling.

She wore her facemask all the way, all day long. She didn’t fuss, didn’t shed one tear, and was still cheerful and enthusiastic and excited when they stopped for the night. The mask is just something she has to do when indoors with groups of people, and it doesn’t bother her in the least, and certainly doesn’t interfere with any fun.

Be like Iliana.

I’m going to try. I’ll be following in her footsteps today, and we’ll meet up tomorrow. I’ll try hard to be just as thrilled and not cry as Iliana.

Can schadenfreude kill you?

I’m asking for myself. I’m a bit dizzy and out of breath for all the laughing at the death of a human being, and I feel a little ashamed of that. Phil Valentine, a conservative talk radio host, has died of COVID-19. His brother has spoken up about his illness.

Valentine’s brother, Mark Valentine, also spoke on the radio after his brother’s condition began to deteriorate, saying that Valentine was, “regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination,” according to AP. “For those listening, I know if he were able to tell you this, he would tell you, ‘Go get vaccinated. Quit worrying about the politics. Quit worrying about all the conspiracy theories.'”

Wait a minute…”regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination”? He wasn’t an advocate at all! He used his platform to spread misinformation and actively argued that people shouldn’t be vaccinated.

Prior to his diagnosis, Valentine voiced skepticism about the coronavirus vaccines.

In December of 2020 he tweeted “I have a very low risk of A) Getting COVID and B) dying of it if I do. Why would I risk getting a heart attack or paralysis by getting the vaccine?”

He also recorded a parody song titled “Vaxman,” which mocked the vaccine, according to WTVF.

Prior to his hospitalization, Valentine said on the radio that he was “taking vitamin D like crazy” and that a doctor agreed to prescribe him an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said not to take the medication to treat or prevent COVID-19.

Oh well, there’s the problem. He was a conservative radio talk show host and he was taking a drug that kills worms, botfly larvae, and other parasites. He poisoned himself!

When this pandemic is over, if it ends, I predict that all these rabid anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, the ones who survive anyway, are going to come out and piously belittle their own actions, claiming that they just regret being a weak advocate of all the things they right now strongly oppose.

But seriously, don’t drink horse de-wormer or sheep drench. People who resisted getting the vaccine because their body is a temple and they were not going to taint it with untested, unholy Science are instead rushing out to ingest toxic agricultural chemicals.

I wonder if H. Scott Apley now regrets that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of vaccination. He’s the Texas Republican who was quite vociferously against anything to do with stopping the pandemic.

Apley is a staunch conservative and devout Christian. But based on his social media activity, Apley didn’t believe COVID was going to affect him or his family.

In May, Apley posted an invitation for a “mask burning” being held at a bar in Cincinnati, commenting, “I wish I lived in the area!” A couple of weeks earlier, he posted a news article about giveaways and incentives meant to encourage people to get vaccinated, writing, “Disgusting.” Apley also railed against so-called vaccine passports, which restrict high-risk activities, such as indoor dining, to the fully vaccinated.

Recently, he suggested that mask mandates in Germany were akin to Nazism. And when former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen celebrated good news this spring about the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy, a seemingly outraged Apley called her “an absolute enemy of a free people.”

Ooops, he regrets nothing, because he is dead now of COVID-19.

Aubrey de Grey couldn’t leave well enough alone

So, Aubrey de Grey was accused of sexual harassment, and was under a formal investigation. I guess he wasn’t confident about the outcome, because he tried to apply some pressure to potential witnesses, and got caught.

A “necessary” firing by people who are clearly deep admirers of the guy is an interesting combination. It suggests de Grey has been frantic in his efforts to scuttle the investigation to the point his dismissal was completely unavoidable.

I do wonder where he could go after this. I can’t imagine a university would want to be affiliated with him, but maybe some oddball think-tank somewhere would take him on. Or some quack organization — Mercola has money, he could use a celebrity front to help sell anti-aging snake oil.

Uh-oh. This is just going to get weirder. De Grey just posted his response on Facebook, and it’s wild.

with the investigation. Below is the entire text. Decide for yourself. Remember that my mention of the state of Celine’s career “as things stand” was written in the aftermath of the outpouring of support for me and condemnation of her that followed my first Facebook post 24 hours previously.
Let me close by saying that I am in a perfectly fine position to start a new foundation right now, hiring my loyal staff and proceeding as if nothing had happened, but that that is not my plan. I plan to get the truth known, my foundation back, and the bad actors excised from our community. Meanwhile, let’s just keep going.
Text of the email that precipitated today’s action:
———————————————————-
Rght mate, if you care about your (and my, yes) friend Celine you will listen up. There is a job you need to do that probably only you are in a position to do, largely BECAUSE of your rush to judgement today that will have cemented her trust in you.
The six-week investigation into Celine’s allegations against me has concluded. It was conducted by someone named Sue Ann Van Dermyden – look her up – good luck to anyone who tries to paint her as a whitewasher. It has found not only that those allegations are 100% fictitious, but also that Celine’s account of them in her posts and her testimony to Sue Ann is replete with grave inconsistencies – AND, with features that clearly suggest she was fed false information by a SRF board member (which you will probably also have inferred from my Facebook post last night, but then it was just me saying it).
The consequence (other than my reinstatement, obviously) is that a new investigation is being launched, again by Sue Ann, but this time investigating SRF so as to identify the actual villain. The existence of that new investigation is going to be made public tomorrow afternoon – unless, drum roll, it is obviated/aborted by new information.
I probably don’t need to spell out anything more. Celine’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. Yes she will have to take some lumps for being so gullible, but that’s not such a big deal. BUT, what will completely torpedo my rescuing of her is if she is seen to be resisting the identification of the actual villain. So now, as in tomorrow (Thurs) morning, is the time when Celine needs to find her mojo and spill the beans. As of now, a few people are in the frame as the culprit. Celine needs to name names, and fast, so that no one gets to know that this new investigation is happening as a direct consequence of her insincerity to Sue Ann and the world.
And you need to tell her so, as probably only you can. Go to it.
Cheers A
———————————————————-

“Celine” is Celine Halioua, one of his accusers who has posted a blistering indictment of the man; SRF is the SENS Research Foundation. His defense is…that someone else harassed her? It wasn’t him? He’s just the gallant knight galloping in to rescue her, and her career is over unless she names a different villain. And then he’ll take the SENS Foundation back and purge it of all the bad people who have been conspiring against him. Or start a new foundation of his own. No matter how it turns out, the woman he harassed needs to take a few lumps.

The guy is delusional. I can see why he was fired.

I guess David Sabatini is a failed scientist now

The fall from grace was precipitous, but it should have happened long ago. The molecular biologist David M. Sabatini has been outright fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Whitehead Institute, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he also loses his tenured position at MIT soon enough. Can you guess what prompted his ouster?

An investigation found that he had “violated the Institute’s policies on sexual harassment among other policies unrelated to research misconduct.” No details are available yet, but it’s notable that they were serious enough that he wasn’t merely placed on leave, or slapped on the wrist, or placed under tight restriction on his interactions with student. Nope, just flat out FIRED. Tea will have to be spilled sooner or later, though.

This is not entirely surprising, but I had expected the grounds for his dismissal would be over his frequent cases of forged and falsified data that had already given him a reputation, or perhaps over his amazing arrogance. He’s a guy who, when caught with faked figures in his paper, would turn around and accuse the people who disclosed his errors of being “resentful, anonymous, petty, failed scientists”.

That’s what I thought would bring him down in the end. I hadn’t heard anything about him being a sexual harasser, but we should have figured that that would be a comorbidity associated with terminal cockiness.

Students are smarter than the administrators give them credit for

The FDA is about to approve the Pfizer vaccine, which is good news. The timid beancounters who run this place had announced that they were just waiting for that final bureaucratic hurdle was cleared to declare that vaccination was required to enroll, a silly piece of posing by a bunch of people who have all been vaccinated for weeks to months already. We were supposed to wait for a box to be ticked on a form before making common sense requirements to protect student health? That’s nuts. It’s also been frustrating.

Other universities have already been requiring it, without that legalistic seal of approval, like U-Va. Here’s what I found interesting in that story:

The campus unveiled its vaccine mandate in May and the overwhelming majority of the campus is in compliance, officials said. More than 96 percent of U-Va. students are vaccinated against the coronavirus and 335 students with religious and medical exemptions have been granted permanent waivers, officials said.

An additional 184 temporary waivers were granted to students who have had trouble getting vaccinated but plan to get their shots upon arriving to campus.

Less than 1 percent of students enrolled — or 238 students — are not in compliance, “but only 49 of those students had actually selected courses, meaning that a good number of the remaining 189 may not have been planning to return to the university this fall at all, regardless of our vaccination policy,” said Brian Coy, a school spokesman.

First, a religious exemption? Why? Prayer is not protection. Piety is not an excuse to be a superspreader. I support the medical exemption — some students are immuno-challenged, for instance — but anything else is pandering nonsense.

But secondly, look at those numbers. While the administration has been wringing their hands and moaning about how we shouldn’t impose barriers to students coming to campus, the students have been smart and sensible and getting off their butts and getting vaccinated as soon as they could. I’m confident that UMM students are just as competent as U-Va students, and we’re going to find next week, when classes start, that the overwhelming majority are going to want the precautions, like masking and vaccine requirements, so they can protect their health while getting the education they need. I suspect the hesitation from on high is driven entirely by Republican assholes in the legislature with power over our budgets.

That peculiar plural

There’s a quirk in creationist talk that has long been a tell. The say “evidences” instead of “evidence”, despite the fact that “evidence” is already plural. It’s not a big deal — Doug Theobald documented cases where serious scholars also used “evidences” — it’s just an odd affectation, maybe a holdover from theological writings, but it’s useful when you hear it because it’s a quick clue that you’re dealing with someone with an unusual background. Eugenie Scott even claimed “The only people who use ‘evidences’ (plural) are creationists or people who have spent far too much time reading their literature! ‘Evidences’ is a term from Christian apologetics …”, which isn’t quite true, but it’s a fine approximation.

So I was curious when Michael Harriot brought up another unusual plural used by a specific subset of people: “freedoms“.

Whenever unshowered Americans are confronted with something they don’t want to do, they immediately begin blabbering about their “freedoms.” It’s like the “race card” for white people. While you and I know that the word “freedom” only makes one appearance in the Constitution, apparently there’s a second Caucasian Constitution that I haven’t seen that clarifies this murky terrain.

As you can see, it doesn’t even have to make sense. More importantly, they will never say exactly which specific freedom they are talking about. They won’t cite a specific law or clause in the Constitution that supports their position. That’s because there isn’t one.

Inserting “freedoms” into a random sentence makes one seem more patriotic, like randomly mentioning “the troops.” Basically, “freedoms” is a conservative dog whistle used to justify police brutality, pro-gun legislation and even blackballing Colin Kaepernick.

Weird. Now I’m suddenly seeing it everywhere, used almost exclusively by conservatives to, in some way, amplify the size of the affront to their privilege, and also to put themselves on a safely vague footing. They can’t say their “freedom” is being taken away, since they aren’t going to jail and don’t even seem to suffer any consequences, but putting that “s” on the end somehow implies a numerous and unspecified set of privileges are being taken from them. It’s a useful rhetorical trick, I guess.

And that’s exactly what creationists want to do, too — wave vaguely at some mysterious set of facts that they don’t have to detail.

I guess they possess great wisdoms and cunnings.