Leni & L.Ron?

What a weird story, yet somehow unsurprising. L. Ron Hubbard and Leni Riefenstahl worked together on a movie script. It never got made, but just imagine Battlefield Earth shot by a master cinematographer — somehow, I think it would make the story even worse.

They weren’t working on a cheesy skiffy, though: the story was one that Riefenstahl had previously made a movie of in the 1930s, The Blue Light (you can watch the whole thing), and it reads as though most, if not all, of it was from Riefenstahl. She might have been good with a camera, but she seems to have been suckered into one cult, Naziism, and hopped over to another, scientology. Although her dalliance with a notorious scientologist didn’t last long.

Do animals feel pain?

I’ve been thinking about pain, a litte bit, lately. It’s an interesting question, whether humans are unique in their perception of pain compared to other animals, and I used to have to deal with it fairly frequently because, for a few years, I specifically studied sensory pathways in fish. Even larval fish are surrounded with a tight mesh of sensory processes, with a substantial spinal pathway that shuttles information up the fish’s brain, and so when some local fisherman asks if fish feel pain when they’re hooked, I’d answer “You betcha. Lots of sensory fibers in the face and jaws of fish.”

But then someone would come along and tell me no, they don’t. Pain needs a consciousness to be felt, so while we may rip and tear neurons that mediate the peripheral sensation of pain, they aren’t aware of a feeling of pain. They’re just meat robots.

I’d usually give up at this point, because my next argument would be, “But then, humans are just meat robots. Do you deny that humans feel true pain?” And then we’re off into philosophy and I’d rather talk about neurons.

Recently I learned that one (actually, several luminaries) have been arguing that other animals don’t feel pain. It’s a rather bizarre argument, made to justify inflicting pain on animals rather than a sincere attempt to argue from the evidence, and it’s from…William Lane Craig! People take him seriously? I guess so.

Anyway, Craig is troubled by a theological problem. Do animals feel pain? But why? Were they subject to problems cause by The Fall? But the bunnies and the fishies didn’t nibble on the apple, so why would a just god make them suffer for Eve’s mistake?

Craig proposes a few explanations. The first I’ll mention and dismiss because it is stupid.

…we must consider this question: “What is the supposed connection between Adam’s Fall and animal pain?” A number of answers have been proposed. But they all boil down to roughly one of two explanations: either (1) by sinning Adam and his ancestors surrendered their role as stewards of the animals and thereby surrendered them to the wiles of nature, or (2) the very act of Adam’s sin sent shock waves through creation that transformed animals, which formerly could not feel pain, into pain wracked predators and prey. In either case, however, it is hard to see why God would have made the integrity and well-being of nature, and of the innocent creatures in it, susceptible to the faithful obedience of humans (an obedience God knew they would not sustain). Why was nature made so very fragile in this way? Is not that fragility itself a defect (or evil) in creation?

Just so you know, Craig is an old earth creationist, although to be honest, I don’t think he thinks about the chronology very deeply. So according his reasoning here, until humans defied god and ate some fruit, an event that happened sometime in the last hundred thousand years, all animals lived in peaceful coexistence, and there was no pain in the world until that relatively recent sin turned them into “pain wracked predators and prey”. That implies that there were no predators and prey for the first four billion years plus of the Earth, and that everything was just snuggle-bunnies during the Cretaceous, but I’ll just punt on this argument because, like I said, Craig doesn’t think very deeply about his explanations, doesn’t understand biology or ecology (were there no food webs in the Garden of Eden?), and would probably happily ditch this entire line of argumentation as it got him deeper and deeper into trouble.

He’s also taking as his premise the idea that nature was purposefully created by a benevolent god, and that by golly, god wouldn’t be so mean as to intentionally inflict the ability to suffer on his creation. I don’t see any reason to accept that; why not instead assume a malevolent god who made sure Adam had creature-victims he could torment and make squeal and squirm? A lot of what his god does seems to be all about causing agony, they needed to be able to feel pain for him to have any fun.

The more interesting argument he makes is this one:

A second (though unpopular) response to this problem is to deny that animal pain and suffering is real or morally relevant. Most will react to this response with incredulity: “Isn’t it just obvious that some animals experience pain and suffering?” The answer to that question is yes and no. We do think it an item of common sense that animals experience pain and suffering. But the scientific evidence for this is not as strong as you might think. Of course, scientists all acknowledge that many animals display behaviors that make it look like they are in pain. But that is not good enough. To see why, consider the phenomenon of “blindsight.” Patients with blindsight claim to be blind, and yet are at the same time able to point to objects and, in some cases, catch balls–something they could only do if they could in fact see. So are they blind or not? Well, it depends on what you mean by “sight.” They can see in the sense that they can use visual information to regulate their behavior. But they are not consciously aware of the fact that they can do this.

When it comes to pain, then, the question is: might the behaviors that we associate with animals that look to be in pain constitute something like “blindpain”–showing all the behavioral symptoms of real pain, but without the conscious awareness? Amazingly, given what we know about the functioning of the brain, the answer might be yes. Those parts of the brain most closely associated with consciousness of pain, are also the parts that were the last to arrive among mammals: the pre-frontal cortex.

So animals exhibit the superficial symptoms of pain, but experience none of the deeper, crueler feelings of pain. It’s sensation without awareness. You can go ahead and kick a kitten, and while it might exhibit all the superficial behaviors of pain, like bleeding, or limping, or mewing, or just lying there in a lump of broken bones whimpering, deep down inside the kitty consciousness it’s not feeling a thing. He later argues that they express a simulacrum of pain sensation useful for avoiding danger in their environment, but that’s not the same thing as actually being aware of the phenomenon of pain.

Which had me thinking of Chinese rooms and Turing tests. Could William Lane Craig convince me that he truly feels pain? If he were strapped to a gurney and I was given leave to artfully apply a razor blade to his body, what would he do to prove he was really suffering, deep down? I’m sorry, the screaming sounds like an artifice to me, a ploy to get me to stop slicing, but hey, could he do better than a kitten to persuade me to stop torturing? I don’t think so. If I were a psychopath, I could make Craig’s same argument — the expression of pain is not the same as the perception of pain, allowing me to go on a bloody rampage with all the local pets, and work my way up to torturing human beings because, after all, they’re just meat machines with some reflexes and patterned behaviors they learned from watching horror movies. My victims aren’t really suffering, because they’re not truly aware. Unlike me.

Let me reassure you that I have no interest in torturing anyone or anything, because I reject Craig’s proposal. I think all animals, including us, can experience pain and also degrees of conscious awareness. I couldn’t torture a kitten or WLC without feeling their struggles are an expression of a deeper experience that I would share if I were in their position.

Craig is about to dive into an argument from brain anatomy, which I despise even more than his other arguments. It’s a bogus claim based on an ignorance of neuroanatomy and a failure to understand the flexibility and plasticity of brains — they’re not as dependent on the kind of extreme modularity he wants to propose. It’s a kind of neurological reductionism that I don’t find at all credible.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to explain all that later. My CPU is going all fuzzy because the drugs I’m taking to alleviate peripheral pain are mucking everything up — it took me hours to type out this short post and I think my eyeballs are roaming around looking for an escape route. Later? Tomorrow? Once my brain stops idling? I’ll type up some more. Until then, I’ll leave it to you commenters to take on WLC.

(I should add that I do find his idea of “blindpain” interesting, I just don’t think it can hold up.)

Man, these drugs are a downer

This past week I’ve been afflicted with some serious pain issues — my back is all knotted up, and once I find a comfortable position, I have to stay in it or I’ll get these agonizing spasms. I’ve seen a doctor about it, and am currently taking 600mg of ibuprofen and cyclobenzaprine, a muscle relaxer, and am starting up physical therapy next week. I am getting better, I don’t instantly lock up with stabbing pains when I stand up or sit down, but I’m not exactly enjoying the new side effects.

My brain is currently operating at half speed, and it’s hard to concentrate on reading anything — the letters and words swim around on the page. Also, most distractingly, if I close my eyes, I don’t see darkness, I see an odd rippling moire texture. It’s a bit like a mottled red silk cloth rippling in a breeze, with folds going in and out of focus. Fortunately, it’s not interfering with my sleep, since all I have to do is close my eyes for a few minutes and never mind the groovy optical illusions going on, I’ll pass out wherever I am.

This is not optimal, but then neither is pain lancing up my spine. I’m going to have to put up with being a white punk on dope…

…sorry. Just went into a fugue state and had to listen to the Tubes for a bit. That’s where my brain is right now, and I haven’t even taken today’s dose yet. I think, though, one good weekend of zombie-like R&R should do it for me, and then just ibuprofen and physical therapy to get over this. I have spiders to chase, you know.

Consider that your extra-sensory perception is not as accurate as you think it is

Just yesterday, I completed my universities training on sexual discrimination and harassment. One of things they did was have little skits illustrating the phenomena we have to watch out for. One of them was about an attractive young woman being followed around in her work by a helpful but over-eager male colleague, who touched her in the small of the back while leading her to a different room. It was so quaint. I agree that he was being overly familiar, but yeesh — there are plenty of stronger examples in real life. Perhaps the next time they could act out these little dramas from the life of University of Michigan computer science professor Walter Lasecki. He’s been investigated by the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) andthe Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Here are a few examples of his behavior:

In the final report released by OIE, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily, Jane alleged that Lasecki encouraged her to drink throughout the meal, at one point asking the waiter to make her a “double.” She also alleged that he briefly placed his hand on her thigh.

Later that night, Jane said Lasecki helped her return to her apartment. He then touched her sexually, she wrote in her OIE statement. The OIE report notes that Jane said she “did not give any nonverbal cues to indicate that she was interested nor uninterested in physical contact.”

A second non-University graduate student — who will be referred to as Rachel in this article — attended four conferences that Lasecki also attended between 2017 and 2019. She alleged that he touched her sexually at all four conferences. In her statement to OIE, which was obtained by The Daily, Rachel described the pervasiveness of Lasecki’s alleged harassment.

“When [Respondent] is around me when he is drinking, he is consistently physically affectionate with me,” Rachel wrote. “I can’t count the number of times he’s touched me in intimate and inappropriate ways. I’m anxious at events that he will come up to me and start touching me — it bothers me so much that I’ve started scanning the room at poster sessions, receptions, and parties to watch where he’s at.”

A third non-University graduate student wrote in her statement to OIE, also obtained by The Daily, that she experienced similar harassment at an industry conference in 2016. In this article, she will be referred to as Alex. Alex alleged that Lasecki groped her while she was talking to a group of people.

“His behavior was overly familiar, touching me at first in small ways as we were talking to other people,” Alex wrote. “At some point, he leaned closer to me and essentially reached his hand between my legs. I was uncomfortable the whole time, but I distinctly remember knowing he was faculty and well-regarded, and so thinking I should be flattered. At the point where he groped my crotch, though, I knew that was past a line.”

At least there’s no evidence that he touched their backs! Then he’d be out of work, for sure. He still seems to happily employed by the University of Michigan, though. The ACM found that he had violated its Policy Against Harassment, banned him from ACM events for at least five years (that’s all they could do, since he’s not employed by ACM). Strangely, Michigans Office of Institutional Equity concluded that he had not violated any university policies and let him off scot-free. That’s interesting, because I would think getting students drunk and fondling and groping them would be actionable behavior. But no! No sanctions against the gropey professor!

So how did he get off? It may be a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Also, a lot of those foxes seemed to have taken residence in the henhous.

In January 2020, Provost Martin Philbert — who previously oversaw OIE — was placed on leave and later resigned after multiple allegations of sexual harassment against him were reported to the University. The allegations were later investigated and corroborated by law firm WilmerHale. Another WilmerHale investigation released earlier this month found hundreds of credible allegations of sexual abuse against former University doctor Robert Anderson over a 37-year period. The Anderson report concluded that the allegations represent a “devastating pattern” of abuse that was known to University officials.

Everyone noticed. A letter was sent to the university president saying they had no confidence in the university administration.

Lisecki is denying everything, although he does use a second excuse.

Lily wrote that Lasecki touched under her shirt later that night and that she repeatedly attempted to stop his advances. Despite these attempts, the harassment continued, she claims. She remembered how Lasecki tried to justify his behavior.

“Oh, sorry, from the way you were angling your body towards me during our meeting before, I figured you wanted me to,” she alleged that he replied.

Watch out, ladies, now “angling your body” at a particular angle is apparently considered consent. I don’t know what angle that is, unfortunately. Maybe women have been begging me for sex and I’ve just been oblivious. Alternatively, maybe Walter Lisecki’s mind-reading abilities don’t work.

What also comes to mind is Geoff Marcy, another academic whose career took a nosedive when he was found to have been inappropriately touching his students. He also had an interesting excuse:

“My engaging and empathic style could surely be misinterpreted, which is my fault for poor communication,” he said. “I would never intentionally hurt anyone nor cause distress.”

His empathy must have been on the fritz when all those women were saying “no” and trying to get away from Dr Handsey. Marcy lost his job and his career, and has now been expelled from the National Academy of Sciences.

Unlike Marcy, though, Lasecki has not been censured in any way, and is scheduled to be teaching undergrads in the fall. Now that is disturbing.

Q was just the beginning, now it’s preparing to metamorphose into its next form!

Here’s something else I don’t understand: QAnon. I watched the HBO documentary, “Q: Into the Storm” which covers the phenomenon from its beginning to just after the election, and it suffered from being too close to the problem. It centered almost entirely on Jim Watkins and his son Ron, who were running the various chan boards that hosted Q, with some time spent on prominent QTubers — the documentarian clearly proposes that Ron Watkins is Q and makes a good case for it. What I mainly learned from the documentary is that all of the people behind Qs raging popularity are huge, obnoxious, pompous assholes. It made it hard to watch, when the primary protagonists are these preening twits who have learned the deep secret behind all religions: be cryptic and vague so your followers can read their own beliefs into your pronouncements, promise secret knowledge (even if you don’t have any) so your followers will pay close attention, and be sure to recruit apostles who will do most of your work for you.

It’s an unpleasant spectacle of singularly unpleasant people doing next to nothing but successfully duping hordes of ordinary people to join the cult. But, as I said, it suffers too much from its tight focus on the Watkins duo, who mainly smirk and act evasive. And then it ends, just as the media, like Facebook and YouTube, were finally shutting off the conduits that allowed them to proselytize easily, and it just sort of end. The documentarian has fingered the guilty party — Ron Watkins is Q! — and then it ends. What next? How are the victims of Q propaganda coping? What’s to prevent this from happening again?

At least CripDyke tells us what’s next: more of the same, only worse. As Q gets blocked and banned everywhere his acolytes turn, GhostEzra rises to add more fire and brimstone to followers of Q.

For in the shadow of the valley of Vice it has been revealed that a messiah has come, a prophet named GhostEzra, who comes to rule the denizens of the QAnon world exactly as we would expect. Vice reports that GhostEzra, who now runs one of the biggest if not the biggest QAnon accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, began as upbeat, portraying Trump as the victim of election fraud but also portraying the election fraud as inevitably unsuccessful, something that the QAnons were clearly destined to overturn. But before much time passed, GhostEzra went from being relentlessly upbeat to excoriating followers if they, themselves, were not sufficiently upbeat.*1 It’s one thing to tell others, “Have hope!” and it’s another to tell them, “I will beat you until your morale improves.” GhostEzra, apparently, went all in on the latter.

GhostEzra adds even more of that crucial spice, hate, to the recipe. Hey, if a little anti-Semitism was enough to jazz up Q followers, just think what pouring an overwhelming amount of Jew-hatred will do!

Good morning news for the environment!

I have to say I’m happy with this outcome, I think, but I don’t have the foggiest idea what was done or the mechanics of the process. I guess there was some kind of rebellion within ExxonMobil, and the good guys won.

ExxonMobil shareholders voted Wednesday to install at least two new independent directors to the company’s board, a resounding defeat for chief executive Darren Woods and a ratification of shareholders’ unhappiness with the way the company had been addressing climate change and its lagging financial performance.

The votes were part of a day of reckoning for an oil and gas industry already struggling over how to deal with climate change. In Europe, a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell, considered one of the more forward-thinking companies in the industry, to make deeper-than-planned cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. And in the United States, Chevron lost a shareholder vote directing the company to take into account its customers’ emissions when planning reductions.

The balloting at the storied oil giant ExxonMobil “sends an unmistakable signal that climate action is a financial imperative, and leading investors know it and are demanding change,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “This is a watershed moment for the oil and gas industry. It’s no longer tenable for companies like ExxonMobil to defy calls to align their businesses with decarbonizing the economy.”

Near as I can tell, the disparate groups who are major shareholders in ExxonMobil had a big vote to decide who was to lead the company. These voters are people outside the company who own many shares of stock, in the form of things like hedge funds and pension funds, and they flexed their muscles and forced ExxonMobil to take a more aggressive position on protecting the environment. They were led by a hedge fund called Engine No. 1, which owned 0.2% of the stock, and I’m already exhausted from trying to figure out how this works, so don’t ask me how such a tiny shareholder could have that much influence. I can cope with the twisty business of molecular genetics, but high finance baffles me.

The court decision is entirely separate for the ExxonMobil internal coup.

Separately, a Dutch court on Wednesday ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels in a landmark case brought by climate activist groups. Shell said it would appeal. The Hague District Court ruled that the Anglo-Dutch energy company has a duty to care about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that its current reduction plans were not concrete enough.

I would like to understand how this all happened, but it sounds like growing public awareness of the danger of climate change is percolating upwards and finally having a material effect on these companies that directly control the flow of carbon.

One of the ardent supporters of the Engine No. 1 slate said the hedge fund found eager supporters because of the widening realization that climate change is a financial issue.

“Investors are no longer standing on the sidelines hoping for the best,” said Simpson. “Climate change is a financial risk, and as fiduciaries we need to ensure that boards are not just independent and diverse, but climate-competent.”

Ah, that’s what we need more of.

“A happy ending is ultimately had by all in this delightful if politically incorrect concoction”

Way back when I was a kid, the local television station would occasional broadcast a matinee showing of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I never watched it. I probably caught a few minutes of it here and there, but it was a musical singing about getting girlfriends at a time when one of the other four channels was probably showing a Gamera movie or something.

But other people paid attention, like Devorah Blachor at McSweeney’s. You mean to say the seven brothers were going to kidnap the seven women and rape them? The movie is based on the rape of the Sabine Women? You mean people in the 1950s just overlooked that it was all about mass rape and even nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar award?

I mean, this was pretty blatant.

I am forced to conclude that the America I grew up in was even more fucked up than I thought, and all that saved me from this kind of indoctrination was a fondness for cheesy sci-fi/horror movies. Did you know that the first Godzilla movie came out in the same year as this dreck, but did it get a best picture nomination? Noooo.

The NY Times doing what it does best: waffling

The NY Times sent me an explainer for the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19. It’s long. It’s very careful to present Both Sides at length. It’s what I’ve come to expect from the NY Times, a diligent, earnest explanation that gives equal weight to every position that requires some technical expertise to see through the bullshit to recognize that A) we’re in a realm of uncertainty, and B) that doesn’t mean every explanation is equally valid, and C) they’re giving disproportionate attention to a theory that has no supporting evidence. We don’t know every single intermediate step in the evolution of COVID-19, and can never know the full details of its origin, but that doesn’t imply that a claim that an intelligent Chinese designer intentionally constructed the virus in a lab.

So they cite a letter to Science signed by 18 people that says, “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” The letter doesn’t include any evidence. It doesn’t explain why we should consider the lab-leak hypothesis reasonable, while citing a WHO report that considers a lab accident to be “extremely unlikely”, only to dismiss it.

They cite an article in the Wall Street Journal as evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is “plausible”. Did they read the same article I did? Because that article starts with a group of Chinese miners who came down with a serious respiratory illness after collecting bat guano in an abandoned copper mine. Unless you think the Wuhan biological warfare scientists store their samples in bat shit in old caves, that only tells us that bats harbor all kinds of interesting and potentially horrible viruses, not that the viruses are intentionally created. The WSJ and the NYT do share a similar disease, though, bothsideritis. Notice the one-two punch in this short quote: first they tell us that lab origin is extremely unlikely, and then swivel to say the question divides the scientific community.

“If the world wants to shut down work that was not gain-of-function because of a conspiracy theory, that’s a huge mistake,” Dr. Daszak said earlier this year. ”This virus, it’s extremely unlikely that it came from a lab. If we focus on the lab issue and ignore what really happened, we do so at our ultimate peril.”

One question now dividing the scientific community is whether such experiments could have created SARS-CoV-2, either accidentally or as part of a deliberate effort to see which viruses could evolve into ones dangerous to humans.

I don’t think the scientific community is divided. There are a few scientists who think the lab leak hypothesis is possible and should be investigated more (but they lack any evidence), while the majority are saying “Wha…? But we already know viruses evolve rapidly, and that there are vast numbers of unknown viruses lurking in natural reservoirs, so why are you asking us to waste time on the least likely explanation?” And so it will go, round and round, with major news organizations feeding the conspiracy theories and paranoia.

Meanwhile, the strongest piece of evidence the conspiracy theorists can muster is the claim that the Chinese have been dodgy about allowing investigators in. This is nonsense. The head of the Wuhan labs, Zheng-Li Shi, explains.

Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Chinese Academy of Sciences, has engaged in a long-term study on natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV[16–18] and is among the first institutions that identified the SARS-CoV-2 after the COVID-19 outbreak.[2,19] In addition, WIV discovered a virus sequence (RaTG13) that shows a 96.2% genomic sequence identity match with the SARS-CoV-2 genome, in its archived bat samples collected in 2013.[2] These results lay a foundation for understanding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, development of diagnostic methods, antiviral drug screening, and vaccine development; the findings also provide an important clue pertaining to the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Sadly, WIV was at the center of the misleading speculations regarding the origin of the virus, which were not fully clarified until a recent joint study was performed by an international expert team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese experts.

The joint expert team has been working in three groups, the epidemiology, molecular research, and animal and environment groups.[20] The experts have been working together through video conferences, onsite interviews and visits, and extensive discussions. Over the course of 4 weeks, the joint team studied massive volumes of epidemic-related data and visited some facilities, including the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (Wuhan P4 laboratory) run by WIV; in addition, they also visited the Huanan seafood market. The team interviewed local medical workers, laboratory researchers, scientists, market managers, residents, and recovered COVID-19 patients.

The joint team visited the Wuhan P4 laboratory, a facility which is the most widely speculated place of origin of the SARS-CoV-2. The Wuhan P4 laboratory is the first of such facilities to be constructed in China and runs high-level biosafety checks. The laboratory is a state-of-the-art design by French experts, jointly constructed by French and Chinese engineers and accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS). It was designed to be a laboratory studying highly classified pathogens and an international collaboration research center on emerging infectious diseases. All activities in this laboratory on specific viruses were qualified by the China National Health Commission (CNHC). All administration and management have been strictly regulated and regularly examined and reviewed by these two Chinese authorities. It has been examined by CNAS and CNHC four and three times, respectively, since its opening at the end of 2017. Currently, this laboratory is approved to study the Nipah virus, Ebola virus, Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus, and SARS-CoV-2. This laboratory has played a pivotal role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic by way of animal model studies and inactivated vaccine development, drug screenings and tests, and basic research for understanding SARS-CoV-2.

The WHO joint team has had extensive exchanges with the laboratory manager, scientists, and staff and has highly appraised the cooperation, transparency, and openness of the WIV leadership and staff. The team concluded, “They upheld a very stringent and high-quality management system. Also proceeding from the current evidence, we regard the lab leak hypothesis as extremely unlikely” in a statement released to the media on February 9, 2021, Wuhan.[5]

Shi summarizes their goals.

In the past several decades, more than 70% of emerging or reemerging infectious diseases are zoonoses and were transmitted to humans from their animal reservoirs through intermediate hosts. A huge number of unknown viruses exist in their natural reservoirs and continue to evolve, which results in the generation of new strains. Many of these viruses may have intrinsic characteristics that enable them to cross species barriers and infect humans. The rapid global economic development, including urbanization, land usage, animal domestication, and intensive agriculture, increases the chances of contact between humans and wildlife, thereby increases the risk of interspecies transmission of viruses carried by wild animals. To prevent future zoonosis, the best strategy is long-term and extensive surveillance based on science. We need to learn about unknown viruses, assess the potential risks of interspecies transmission, pinpoint the hotspots of animal-human interfaces, and eventually prepare diagnosis methods and use them for monitoring high-risk animal and human populations. With this prophylactic strategy, we can rapidly identify and limit the rapid spread of emerging pathogens at the very early stage and prevent the next epidemic. To this end, it is necessary to unify experts from different disciplines, including microbiologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, clinical specialists, ecologists, sociologists, and policymakers, to work together on the basis of science.

Exactly. The Chinese labs are right there at the forefront of studying how zoonotic diseases emerge from animal reservoirs. It doesn’t help if, when a population is infected with a disease of natural origin, they grab the torches and pitchforks and descend in a mob on the laboratories that are trying to control the disease. Yeah, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is studying coronaviruses, because they knew these were a potential source of human pandemics; do you want to shut them down? Do you really think that an institution that was studying viruses is therefore the source of a virus?

The New York Times earned my contempt over a decade ago with their he said/she said approach to Intelligent Design creationism. They presented then their notion of balance, with long articles that highlighted creationism with equal weight to scientific studies of evolution. It drove me crazy then, and this is exactly the same thing here. The idea that the COVID-19 virus was the product of intentional design can be dismissed with a simple statement: we have no need of that hypothesis. Instead, the NY Times will quote Matt Yglesias and Tom Cotton insisting that we do, and conclude with this:

So what’s the truth?
We don’t know. Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible. And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.

Let’s pretend they’re equally plausible, and then find an excuse to blame China. That’s what this was really about.

Hbomberguy is back

After a very long hiatus, Hbomberguy has come out with a new video, about vaccines and the anti-vax movement. And it’s…ONE HOUR AND 44 MINUTES LONG???!?

Oh well, I’m currently doped to the gills and melting over my chair, so I guess I’ll watch it. At least, have it in the background while I stare vacantly into space.

Everything must be done as awkwardly and inefficiently as possible!

That seems to be my university’s motto. This morning I completed “Preventing Sexual Misconduct, Discrimination and Retaliation for Employees”, an online and required training module that ate up a few hours. I am entirely sympathetic with the purpose of the exercise, and I appreciate the reminder, but sheesh, it was awful. Cheesy animations, irrelevant clip art, bad acting in skits, pointless interactivity (click on the card, it spins!), all interspersed with bad audio and bad cinematography of talking heads, and worst of all, pop-ups of state and federal laws that you had to scroll all the way through in order to progress on. Imagine a EULA that was punctuated with recorded zoom calls from executives telling you how important it was to pay attention, with occasional stiff, wooden, but colorful cartoons where figures just stand there wiggling their arms. I cringed. I moaned. I wept at how bad it was at presenting important information. If I taught a course this badly, I’d deserved to be hauled in and rebuked.

I also got in for a check-up of my back agonies. On the negative side, Mary just had to pipe up and remind them that I was also due for a colonoscopy, and I’ll probably get to do that in July. On the positive side, I’m getting an appointment for physical therapy and a prescription for some good drugs. I’m going to celebrate completion of my obligatory painful training course by spending the afternoon all mellowed out and high.