I mean, really, the Republicans hate evolution so much they’ll kill everyone out of spite

If you’re looking for some fun summer beach reading, I can’t recommend this article, The origins and potential future of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a summary of the past year of the pandemic.

One year into the global COVID-19 pandemic, the focus of attention has shifted to the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs). After nearly a year of the pandemic with little evolutionary change affecting human health, several variants have now been shown to have substantial detrimental effects on transmission and severity of the virus. Public health officials, medical practitioners, scientists, and the broader community have since been scrambling to understand what these variants mean for diagnosis, treatment, and the control of the pandemic through nonpharmaceutical interventions and vaccines. Here we explore the evolutionary processes that are involved in the emergence of new variants, what we can expect in terms of the future emergence of VOCs, and what we can do to minimise their impact.

Oh, right, I really don’t want to hear about how “several variants have now been shown to have substantial detrimental effects on transmission and severity of the virus”, but they do, and it’s a worry. Here, for example:

So the reassuring (and unsurprising) fact is that the virus isn’t really being selected directly for lethality. Doesn’t that make you feel better? All the virus ‘cares’ about is increasing the number of viruses, of increasing the viral load, and it could do that by having milder effects on their host. The B.1.1.7 variant isn’t doing that. It is increasing the load in your cells with no ameliorating mutations, and so is having more severe effects.

In case you were wondering, B.1.1.7 is going by the common name of the Alpha variant. It’s not nice. At the end of that excerpt, it says a bit about the B.1.167.2 variant, which is even nastier, with 64% greater transmissibility. You probably know it better as the Delta variant, which is now the dominant strain in the US.

You know there are also Beta, Kappa, Theta, and Zeta variants, right? I can’t keep track of them all. I guarantee that more will be arising. Isn’t evolution amazing? If only we lived in a country where the power of evolution was appreciated.

The article tries to be encouraging in its conclusion.

As COVID-19 transitions from a pandemic to an endemic disease, VOCs present new global challenges to health by virtue of increased transmissibility and virulence and evasion of natural and vaccine-induced immunity. In this article we have explored the selective forces that shape how VOCs emerge and become established. We also identify possible steps that we can take to limit their emergence and, when they do arise, their impact. Moving forward, we must also consider how SARS-CoV-2 transmits to and amongst other animal species, placing both them and us at further risk. It will therefore be important to adopt a multidisciplinary One Health approach for future pandemic management that accounts for the interrelated nature of human, animal, and ecosystem health.

Oh, good, steps to limit the emergence and impact of variants…[quickly flips back a few pages to see what those are].

More broadly, we can reduce the rate of emergence of new VOCs and slow the spread of existing ones by reducing overall case numbers through vaccination at a global scale and by maintaining or enhancing the non-pharmaceutical interventions that have contributed to controlling the pandemic (case detection and isolation, contact tracing and quarantine, masking and personal distancing, and improved ventilation). Having low case numbers makes it easier to test and genotype a high fraction of cases and increases the efficacy of contact tracing measures to stop onward transmission. Furthermore, mathematical models predict that measures that reduce contact rates with susceptible individuals will not only slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 overall but will also reduce the relative advantage of variants that have a transmission advantage. Thus, the measures taken to reduce contacts and limit the number of COVID-19 cases may have the added benefit of slowing the rate at which VOCs with a transmission advantage overtake the wildtype. This predicted pattern, with selection weakening as stringency measures are increased, appears to be borne out in data for B.1.1.7 from England and British Columbia.

So, all we need to do is vaccinate everyone, keep wearing masks and maintain social distancing…how is that working out for you, America? It’s basic stuff, it’s all within our reach, but it’s Republican policy to deny every one of those actions. Keep it in mind that their policies aren’t just killing their constituents, they’re also increasing the likelihood of new variants that will harm non-Republicans, even in Democratic states, and even in foreign countries that want nothing to do with our contemptible politics.

To be fair, I shouldn’t blame only Republicans. My university is opening up in the fall with no vaccination requirement, and is debating reducing the social distancing requirement.

Now that’s stolen valor

Another election fraud case by Sydney Powell and Lin Wood is going down in flames as a Michigan judge finds their affidavits of voting shenanigans in Detroit were not responsibly vetted. “There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement … that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said. They had not.

Going through the list of rejected claims, one jumped out at me.

One declaration came from a witness referred to by the lawyers in court documents only as “Spider.” In his sworn declaration, he claimed to be a former military intelligence expert who had discovered server traffic revealing that Iran and China had tampered with the election. But The Washington Post revealed in December that “Spider” was actually a 43-year-old Texas-based information technology consultant named Joshua Merritt who never worked in military intelligence.

Records show he enrolled in a training program with a military intelligence battalion but never completed the entry-level course, an Army spokeswoman told The Post. Records show that Merritt spent most of his decade in the U.S. Army as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic.

How dare he steal the honorable name of “Spider”! Can he be arrested for that?

I suspect that the more serious accusation is that he lied about his credentials and expertise. Being a “wheeled-vehicle mechanic” is an honorable job that does require considerable skill and knowledge — my father was a mechanic, too — but it probably doesn’t prepare you in military intelligence or cybersecurity, and doesn’t involve any training in cracking the information communications going on in Iran and China.

This kind of thing is all Powell and Wood have — people swearing that they saw a mysterious bag that could have held ballots, that sort of thing, and the lawyers didn’t carry out even a superficial scrutiny of the claims.

If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.

Yes, please.

By the way, you may have heard that one of the lawyers was weeping, and later resigned from the Wood/Powell team. This wasn’t because she was humiliated in court. She later said she wasn’t crying, she was just furious because no one was defending her hero Donald Trump as he deserved.

“Google, show me the naturalistic fallacy”

Here we go, Rob Schmitt, an announcer on Newsmax illustrating not just the naturalistic fallacy, but also diving deep to show us how conservative news networks are in a competition to represent the dumbest possible take on everything:

Obviously, I’m not a doctor. But I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. I mean, if there is some disease out there…maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.

Then he brings on Dr. Peter McCullogh, the latest “expert” who has been making the rounds of the conservative talking heads talk on TV about how we don’t know about the side-effects of vaccines and you don’t really need to be vaccinated and COVID-19 isn’t that dangerous, and he doesn’t push back at all on that garbage — instead he tells us that “natural immunity” is superior.

I can’t watch Fox News, so I’m sure not going to be able to avoid death by apoplexy if I started watching Newsmax or OAN. Fortunately, other people do. Here’s Sam Seder and his crew dismantling this nonsense — really, you don’t need a Ph.D. in Science to see what’s wrong with that argument, or to list a whole lot of “unnatural” things that people naturally do.

Unfortunately, pointing out the bad science doesn’t address the real problem in that “news” cast, which I think is embodied in the statement that he thinks about the way everything works. He’s got a larger model in his head of what Nature is that incorporates all these assumptions about teleology and purpose and the proper functioning of the world, and the reason he’s embracing this absurd notion of vaccines being an intrusion on nature is that that clicks with all of his priors. It’s not that he’s actually thought about vaccines in any coherent way, it’s that he’s cobbled up a way of thinking about the world from non-rigorous, ideologically anti-science institutions and authorities, that make him more comfortable with adopting a lie than with accepting an idea that would shake up his notions of how the world properly works.

He’s also driven by tribalism and fear. Schmitt also complained that it is despicable that the high and mighty Left and the media [are] ridiculing so many people for questioning vaccines, and look, he’s getting ridiculed, confirming the truth of his beliefs!

He’s also indulging in an amazing amount of projection.

It’s become so politicized, and many liberals will pump these vaccines into themselves and to their children simply to prove their loyalty to ‘science,’ ’cause that’s the in-thing to do right now.

Uh, I don’t want my children vaccinated because I’m virtue-signaling at science, or because it’s fashionable. It’s because I do have an ideological commitment to accepting the facts, and right now 99.5% of the COVID-19 related deaths are hitting the unvaccinated. That’s the brute reality that’s pounding on Rob Schmitt’s head, trying to tell him his mental model is invalid.

Well, also, there’s an emotional revulsion against the idea that a certain amount of people need to be “wiped out”, which is a sociopath’s creed.

This cannot end well, Tennessee

The insanity is going too far. Tennessee (or rather, Republicans in Tennessee) want to shut down access to vaccines. All vaccines.

The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.

The health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one such event this month. The decisions to end vaccine outreach and school events come directly from Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey, the internal report states.

Additionally, the health department will take steps to ensure it no longer sends postcards or other notices reminding teenagers to get their second dose of the coronavirus vaccines. Postcards will still be sent to adults, but teens will be excluded from the mailing list so the postcards are not “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the report states.

That’s amazing. I’m used to Republicans opposing fundamental ideas in science, but now the prion disease that rots their brains has progressed so far that they want to silence information about basic health care. There will be dead teenagers as a result of this policy, and this will lead to another spike in coronavirus infections.

And these changes will take effect just as the coronavirus pandemic shows new signs of spread in Tennessee. After months of declining infections, the average number of new cases per day has more than doubled in the past two weeks – from 177 to 418. The average test positivity rate has jumped from 2.2% to 5.4% in the same time period.

Oh, it already has.

Republicans are a menace to society.

Off to be needled and poked

Today is the day I get my big annual physical — I’m going to spend my morning getting bled and inspected and told that I’m an awful mess who is probably going to die soon. It’ll be fun! If I were a masochist, I’d be paying good money to strip naked and sit in one of those humiliating hospital gowns while my woman doctor tells me all the things that are wrong with me. If I’m really lucky, she’ll be joined by a doctor from the Twin Cities and my horrid shape will also be captured by video cameras.

Except I’m not a masochist and I don’t get off on humiliation, darn it.

I get to do this every year, until I’m dead. Looking on the bright side, maybe it won’t be too many more years.

I’m back. All the tests came back fine, even improved from last year. My inevitable demise has been slightly delayed. Unless, that is, Death is just trying to lull me into a sense of false optimism before springing a big surprise.

No one ever talks about how it was a tender parent and affectionate partner

No. It’s always “underwater killing machine” this and “largest creature of its age” that. Consider the accomplishment of growing to become one of the largest animals on the planet during the Ordovician, instead.

Look at you! Scarcely out of the Cambrian, and already 2.5m long, with a sophisticated sensory system, clever system for maintaining equilibrium in the ocean, and beautifully adept tentacles. Be proud, great brave mollusc! You were more than just a murder monster.

Baked in their shells

Who guessed this would happen? The recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest basically cooked all the coastal marine life. It’s an ugly way to die.

“Barnacles very high on the shore can survive temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” Harley said. “But the rocks got up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which is far too hot for even those really, really tough animals to live through.”

“We saw the moon snails crawl out of their shells to get away from the heat,” biologist Teri King with Washington Sea Grant said. “We saw shore crabs die.”

Some mobile animals like crabs and sea stars may have been able to flee with the tide and stay underwater, and some deeper-residing clams like geoducks may have been able to burrow far enough into the mud to avoid lethal temperatures.

Shellfish farmers who saw the forecast for unheard-of heat could try to reduce their losses.

“We tried to get everything out that we could beforehand,” said Justin Stang with the Hama Hama Oyster Company on Hood Canal. “We told everyone, ‘Let’s get shellfish out to the restaurants before the big heatwave hits.’”

I hate to break the news to you, guy, but rushing to get your oysters to restaurants doesn’t exactly save them. But to continue our concerns about just us…

Beyond the immediate dieoffs, Teri King said she worries about longer-term effects.

“We’re still going to have nutrients running into Puget Sound that are still going to be fueling phytoplankton,” she said.

With fewer filter feeders like clams and oysters to slurp up plankton, harmful algae might be able to bloom unchecked, which could threaten the sound’s water quality and lead to fish kills.

This is bad. The animals we rely on to clean up the crap that runs off from our farms and cities have died! What shall we do?

All the little things add up. We think a heat wave that lasts a few weeks will cause us some substantial discomfort, but everything is interconnected, and the consequences will ripple outward. Pile up a few ripples, and soon enough you’ve got a killer wave that devastates more than your air conditioning bill.

Look who’s moving into our yard!

Cicada-killers!

Yes, please, make yourself right at home. Do you have more family you can invite over? August is coming soon, and it’ll be time for a feast. Please do. Kill all those wretched noisy shrill shrieking beasts and dismember their bodies and chew on their guts, thank you very much.