Jeff Bezos is launching himself into outer space on 20 July. Great!
Then I learned that he’s planning to come back. Huge disappointment.
He’s saying that seeing the Earth from space changes your perspective on the planet and on humanity…while auctioning off seats on the pointless rocket ride for $2.8 million. Somehow, I don’t think his views will change much.
The US Army is making a token acknowledgment of crimes against American Indians by digging up and shipping back to their homelands the bodies of 10 children who died in their care. A lot of the Indian schools in the US and Canada were run by Catholic missionaries (including the one at the site of my university), but there were also some, like the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in Pennsylvania, that were administered by the US government. They were all equally heartless and fundamentally racist. At Carlisle, the goal was to “Kill the Indian: Save the Man”, which tells you all you need to know about their appreciation for the culture the children they forcibly stole from their parents.
180 children died at Carlisle, and were buried on a local plot; many more died, but their bodies immediately shipped back to their homes. Apparently, the children who died of infectious disease, especially tuberculosis, were buried locally to prevent the spread of disease. Lots died because conditions were minimal and care rudimentary.
Now, finally, some of these kids who died over a hundred years ago are being sent back to families who have almost no memory of them.
The remains of 10 children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Cumberland County between 1880 and 1910 are slated to be exhumed this summer.
Aleut family members will return the remains of one child to Saint Paul Island in Alaska, and Rosebud Sioux descendants will take nine children back to a tribal veteran’s cemetery in South Dakota or to private family plots.
Impressive. So we just rounded up kids from completely different nations, with different languages and customs, and threw them together in a dormitory far, far away from their homes. We took everything away from them, including their names.
Historian Barbara Landis wrote an essay debunking ghost stories surrounding a Rosebud Sioux child whose name translated to Take the Tail and who died within months of her arrival in Carlisle. Her name was changed at the school to Lucy Pretty Eagle and later used in a children’s historical fiction book as part of the Scholastic series, Dear America.
Landis and a group of non-native and native women wrote a review pointing out stereotypes and inaccuracies in the book, including its depiction of Lucy Pretty Eagle.
“She was not this ghost story,” she said. “She was a little girl who passed away far away from home under horrible circumstances and her remains were never returned to her home community.”
Take the Tail’s remains are among those of eight children being returned to Rosebud Sioux family members this year.
Picture this young girl ripped from her family in the fall of 1883, taken to this barracks 1500 miles away, and told that she was not allowed to speak any language but English. They take away her name and translate it literally into English as “Take the Tail”, and even that isn’t good enough, so they tell her her new name is Lucy Pretty Eagle, which has nothing to do with her culture, her history, or her family.
Then she dies in the spring of 1884. Her family gets a letter, nothing more. Her death is logged on a couple of 3×5 cards and mentioned in the school newsletter.
Finally, to complete her erasure, she’s turned into a character in a ghost story and historical propaganda.
To make up for all that, well, at least we’re sending her bones back to South Dakota now. What a feel-good story! Although her history won’t be complete until Disney makes an animated movie about her.
I do wonder what her name actually was — I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a string of English words, or a traditional European first name.
The SARS-COV-2 virus is certainly benefiting from the power of natural selection. It’s spreading rapidly through a vulnerable population, that is us, and we’ve been half-assing our response, which simultaneously allows it to proliferate in large numbers and yet also favors variants that can overcome what barriers we do put up. What that means is that new strains will continue to pop up and take a run at our immune systems, and some of them will do better than the original strain. On an abstract, very academic level, it’s kind of cool. On a human level, it’s a disaster that threatens to get worse.
Right now, we get to deal with the Delta variant. It seems to have arisen in the giant petri dish we call India, but now it’s everywhere.
The B.1.617.2 coronavirus variant originally discovered in India last December has now become one the most — if not the most — worrisome strain of the coronavirus circulating globally. Recent research suggests it may the most transmissible variant yet and has fueled numerous waves of the pandemic around the world. B.1.617.2 has already spread to at least 62 countries, including the U.S., and undoubtedly contributed to the massive wave of cases that has inundated India in recent months. It also appears to have become the dominant strain infecting unvaccinated people in the U.K., and may be more likely to infect people who are only partially vaccinated than other strains. Below is what we know about B.1.617.2 — also known as the Delta variant.
How is B.1.617.2 different from other variants, and why may it be more dangerous?
The Delta variant has multiple mutations that appear to give it an advantage over other strains. The most important apparent advantage is that the mutations may make the strain more transmissible, which would also make it the most dangerous variant yet. One study indicated B.1.617.2 may be up to 50 percent more transmissible than the B.1.1.7 (U.K./Alpha) variant. Professor Neil Ferguson, a leading epidemiologist at Imperial College London and one of the chief pandemic advisers to the U.K. government, said on June 4 that the “best estimate at the moment” is that Delta is 60 percent more transmissible than Alpha, which is itself more transmissible than the original strain of the coronavirus that emerged in China in late 2019 — and that is why scientists believe it became a dominant variant globally.
Ah, yes, the terrible beauty of evolution. It works a little too well sometimes, and it’s the fast-breeding, large population size species that benefit most. I suppose a disease that’s going to hit anti-vaxxers hardest could be seen as a brutal Darwinian benefit, except remember that all those unvaccinated people are an easy reservoir for further experimentation by the virus.
A variant with higher transmissibility is a huge danger to people without immunity either from vaccination or prior infection, even if the variant is no more deadly than previous versions of the virus. Residents of countries like Taiwan or Vietnam that had almost completely kept out the pandemic, and countries like India and Nepal that had fared relatively well until recently, have fairly little immunity, and are largely unvaccinated. A more transmissible variant can burn through such an immunologically naïve population very fast.
Increased transmissibility is an exponential threat. If a virus that could previously infect three people on average can now infect four, it looks like a small increase. Yet if you start with just two infected people in both scenarios, just 10 iterations later, the former will have caused about 40,000 cases while the latter will be more than 524,000, a nearly 13-fold difference.
This is going to have further human costs. The Delta variant has tragically cropped up in Finland now. This is a global pandemic — you may think you’ve got it under control in your neighborhood, you may be getting cocky and think it’s time to party, but it’s not over yet, and the disease kills human beings.
THE OUTBREAK of the Indian coronavirus variant in Kanta-Häme Central Hospital in Hämeenlinna, Southern Finland, has resulted in nearly 100 infections and, directly or indirectly, 17 deaths.
Sally Leskinen, the chief medical officer at Kanta-Häme Hospital District, revealed yesterday in a news conference that the chain of infection started early last month with a patient who had contracted the transmissible variant from a close contact who had travelled outside Europe.
Further infections were detected in two hospital wards on 12 May, prompting the hospital to begin widespread screening of patients and staff.
“The virus had spread from the first patient through asymptomatic staff members,” said Leskinen.
A total of 57 patients and 42 staff members have been infected in the cluster, with 17 of the patients dying after being infected. Of the infected patients, 41 had received the first dose and two both doses of a coronavirus vaccine. While the infection is estimated to had a direct link to three-quarters of the deaths, it was not ruled as the primary cause of death for the remaining one-quarter due to a serious underlying illness.
One of the deceased patients had been vaccinated twice and 11 once, whereas five of them had yet to receive the first vaccine dose. The ages of the deceased ranged from 60 to 100, with the mean being 80.
Remember, people are fragile. We’ve got a disease that exploits that fragility and is expanding its power. Don’t think it’s done yet.
Naomi Wolf first appeared on my radar with the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Gore, where she was, incomprehensibly, a presidential advisor. She has just been kicked off Twitter. In case you were wondering why…
Twitter suspended Naomi Wolf yesterday so I put together a tribute pic.twitter.com/uI4Wg4Ijno
— The Real Truther (@thereal_truther) June 5, 2021
OH NO — CANCEL CULTURE!!1!.
I’m getting a little tired here, gang, of all the “lab leak” nonsense. It’s pure, distilled, refined conspiracy theory stuff. Did the Trump presidency so exhaust us with conspiracy theories that we no longer have the ability to recognize them?
None of the scientists I know are giving any consideration to the lab leak bullshit. Here’s Larry Moran with a couple of videos of qualified scientists discussing it (I don’t consider myself a particularly well qualified scientist — I’m not a virologist, microbiologist, or epidemiologist. But I recognize the skills you need to have to do virology, microbiology, or epidemiology.)
The WHO scientists want to emphasize three things: (1) it is extremely unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was being studied at WIV so it couldn’t have escaped from there; (2) there is no evidence to support the lab leak conspiracy theory but if any evidence shows up they are perfectly willing to investigate; (3) it’s very likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally in the wild and all efforts should be focused on the most likely scenario and not on an extremely unlikely scenario.
After the interview is over, the three hosts talk about the lab leak conspiracy theory. You should hear what they have to say about Nicholas Wade and his failure to understand the furin cleavage site (1:10 minutes)! And they have lots to say about everything else in the Wade article. Everyone needs to watch that discussion if you are really interested in science and not half-baked conspriacy theories.
Even if it were accidentally released from a lab, it’s not a bioengineered virus, but something that had been collected in the wild during extensive sampling of, for instance, bat caves. It would have originated there, not in a lab. I agree that it’s important to study where these viruses arise, because there are more out there, lurking in the complexity of the natural world, but thinking the only danger can come from intentional manipulation in a lab is going to mislead you into underestimating the risk.
Also, you can never trust anything that comes out of Nicholas Wade. He’s not competent and he’s got strong biases.
The current crop of New Atheists take a brutal beating. Phil Torres takes the approach of looking at the atheists who get all the attention today, and asking whether they were actually good moral people who represented the ideals of atheism well.
The answer is “No.”
So if you want to read about how the atheists who rode the glory train of the atheist resurgence 10 or 15 years ago to fame and fortune now are doing, check it out and be depressed. The faces of the New Atheism are Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, and Steven Pinker, and if just that list is harrowing enough, wait until you read the dissections. To make it even worse, they’re all converging on the Intellectual Dark Web, which ought to be renamed the New Fascism.
What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.
Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.
At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about “moral progress,” but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of “free speech,” they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.
When I think back to that period when we were all giddy with the possibilities of a strong atheist movement, there are many other names that come to mind of eloquent, activist atheists who got left behind by that glory train — people who I thought were fantastic representatives of a progressive atheism. Think about Greta Christina, Mandisa Thomas, Jey McCreight, Lauren Lane, Rebecca Watson, Monette Richards, Sikivu Hutchinson, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and a few hundred others who should now be the names and faces we see on CNN whenever they go looking for a representative atheist perspective. They’re still around, but not getting the attention they deserve. Instead, Richard Dawkins is still the figurehead of atheism, with those other guys getting an occasional nod. I wonder why? Are the people on my list missing something? Or is it just their estrogen vibe?
Think back just a decade, and what happened to atheism? A massive anti-feminist backlash that hounded so many good people out of the movement and left the assholes in charge. We still feel the repercussions.
At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious people. It’s a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.
Oh, what could have been…
The science building at UMM is full of spiders! I didn’t do it, though, these belong to species I do not keep in the lab, so they’re not escapees.
A few days ago, I posted a video about Steatoda borealis. The specimens I used were all fairly light-colored, with lots of tan and orange. Here’s one my wife caught in the stairwell. [Read more…]
I guess the simple answer is that if they lost their positions, it would decimate the Republican party.
The treachery is blatant, though. Look at this story about an Oregon representative who intentionally breached security, and planned it ahead of time.
Just days before Rep. Mike Nearman helped armed protesters enter the closed Oregon Capitol building in December, endangering fellow lawmakers and Capitol employees, he coached constituents on the exact steps to get his help breaking in.
A video shows Nearman, a Republican from outside Independence, walking constituents through the step by step process of where to stand, how to text him and what help he would provide that would allow them to break the rules and get into the Capitol during the Dec. 21 special legislative session.
NEW FOOTAGE: watch Oregon's @RepNearman tell people, step-by-step, how to breach the Oregon Capitol… with his assistance.
Days later, the breach happened.
Videos adapted from @Oregonian
Story https://t.co/9tNZpxZHnH pic.twitter.com/pEQO6KsiaB— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) June 5, 2021
He does so with a wink and a nod, interspersing the instructions with disclaimers that he’s not giving out a real cell phone number (he is and it’s his number), that he knows nothing about the planned “Operation Hall Pass” and that nothing like that will actually happen.
In fact, exactly what he described did occur, prosecutors and investigators say. Protesters gathered outside the Capitol’s west entrance in obvious protest of the closure, Nearman left the House chambers where lawmakers were gathered doing state business and he walked out a Capitol entrance, leaving the open door hanging long enough for angry citizens to grab it and enter.
The session during which he coached constituents was livestreamed on Dec. 16 and is posted to YouTube under the account of “The Black Conservative Preacher.” Nearman said he was speaking from the office of the Freedom Foundation, a group tied to conservative billionaires that pays Nearman to serve as a senior fellow.
My first thought was this had to be one of the conservative wackaloons from Eastern Oregon, but no — his district is just outside Salem, about halfway between Eugene and Portland in Western Oregon. These blackguards are everywhere.
He is facing some penalties, though, particularly since he’s done this before. From his Wikipedia page:
During a December 21, 2020 special session, Nearman let armed protesters into the Oregon State Capitol to protest against health restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Oregon. Joey Gibson, political activist and founder of Patriot Prayer, posted a video on Parler indicating a state representative let the group into the capitol, and in January 2021 security video was released of Nearman allowing similar right-wing protesters to enter the Oregon State Capitol Building through a door.
Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek fined Nearman $2,000 and stripped him of his committee assignments and appointments. Kotek also asked him to resign. Kotek and others are planning on filing a formal complaint about Nearman’s actions creating a hostile workplace. Nearman also gave up his Capitol building badge; he agreed not to let unauthorized people into the building and must give 24 hours notice before he enters the building. Oregon State Police opened a criminal investigation against him.
On April 30, 2021 prosecutors charged Nearman with official misconduct in the first degree (Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum 364 days in prison and a US$6,250 fine) and criminal trespass in the second degree (Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum of 30 days in jail and a $1,250 fine). Nearman did not appear in court on May 11 when he was arraigned on the charges, and his attorney did not file a plea. Nearman must appear in court in person or remotely for a June 29 hearing.
In June 2021, video was discovered of a meeting at the office of the Freedom Foundation on December 16, 2020, during which Nearman detailed his plan to allow protestors entry to the capitol, which he dubbed “Operation Hall Pass”. He couched it in a layer of irony, claiming to know nothing of the plan and saying that the cellphone number he gave out was just random numbers.
Lock him up.
One of my goals for the summer is to get some hot and heavy breeding going on in the lab.
Or how about an online dating service?
Oh boy, we get to relive Elevatorgate again. Thanks, Atheists for Liberty, for revisiting it.
You are a proud atheist in the emerging New Atheist movement attending one of the most impactful and energized conferences in your community. In June of 2011, you are in Dublin, Ireland, attending the World Atheist Convention, an event celebrating atheism, science advocacy, and secularism with some of the most famous freethinkers of the time.
Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. I was one of the speakers at that conference.
<Thomas Sheedy whispers, stage left: Not you.
>
What?
<I wasn’t talking about you.
>
Oh. OK. <sits back down>
Sheedy titled his little essay “Ten years after Elevatorgate | What we should learn from our past mistakes”, but unfortunately demonstrates that he didn’t learn much. He continues with his saga:
You enjoy the attendees and speakers so much that you stay up in conversation at the hotel bar until four in the morning. You see an attractive speaker retiring for the night, and you follow them to an elevator to ask them if they would like to join you for a cup of coffee.
Yes, I was in that hotel bar late at night, but I retired a little earlier, and no one followed me into the elevator.
<Another whisper: Not you.
>
What, again? Are you saying I’m not an attractive speaker? It’s no fair. I never get addressed by my handsomeness, it’s always the women who get singled out for their appearance. I wonder if that says something about the culture…
The speaker declines. You then go to your hotel room, alone. Afterwards, the speaker that you were attracted to goes online to decry what you did. The speaker, and other extremists, denounce the New Atheist movement, a healthy and growing movement, as sexist. What you did becomes a catalyst for extremists to infiltrate and destroy the New Atheist movement.
Extremists! Destroyed! New Atheism! That speaker was Rebecca Watson, who shattered the nascent atheist movement with the four little words, “Guys, don’t do that.” So much power. Such extremism. Sheedy even quotes Rebecca’s vicious, hateful commentary, as if he is oblivious to its actual mildness.
Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don’t do that. I don’t really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you. I, don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
Yes. Like when commentators think it’s perfectly natural for a man to follow an “attractive speaker” into an elevator and ask them to join them in their hotel room. And for half the atheists in the world to erupt in rage at the idea that a woman might question their right to hit on them.
The idea that the New Atheist movement was systemically sexist is a blatant lie.
Sorry. It was and is systemically sexist, but for one brief moment we extremists thought it could get better, that there was hope for some introspection and growth. We were wrong.
Claims like the ones these infiltrators have made over the years only hinder our community, a community that so many of us fought to develop. If anything, these infiltrators downplayed the problems of real systemic sexism that still exists in other parts of the world, as explained by Richard Dawkins in a sarcastic response to Watson, in what became known as the “Dear Muslima letter:’’
Yeah, he then quotes the “Dear Muslima letter” and says that Dawkins was right.
Here’s the deal. Sheedy keeps talking about these “extremist infiltrators”, but they weren’t infiltrators. We were there all along. That “impactful and energized conference” featuring “the most famous freethinkers of the time”? That included people like Rebecca Watson and me. We didn’t sneak in a side door, wearing disguises. We were part of the movement, and we had helped popularize it. We also weren’t particularly extreme — suggesting that women should be just as respected as men is not a particularly radical idea.
But of course saying that there is a real systemic sexism that still exists in other parts of the world
implies that there is no sexism in America or Europe. He claims that atheist circles downplayed the injustices of the Islamic world. Many of the extremist infiltrators have silenced or critiqued criticism of Islam by non-woke atheists.
This is not true. That there is sexist injustice in the Islamic world does not imply that the non-Islamic world is free of them. I read somewhere, “Why do you focus on the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? How will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye,’ when, in fact, you have a beam in your own eye? Hypocrite!” We should be working on both the specks and the beams, you know.
Sheedy goes on, becoming increasingly ridiculous.
After their success in taking over the movement five years later,
Wait, what? Rebecca Watson took over the atheist movement? Or maybe it was me. I don’t know, he keeps snubbing me because I’m not attractive enough, but you never know — maybe I’m secretly in charge now. He keeps talking about these extremist infiltrators who have taken over, but he doesn’t name any. Is it Nick Fish, of American Atheists? Maybe Robin Blumner of CFI, who was put in charge after it merged with the Richard Dawkins foundation? Wait, Dawkins…? Could it be he’s the secret extremist mole? Not very likely.
But then he goes on to name all the types of people who’ve been thrown out of the atheist movement.
several groups of atheists, the majority of the movement’s supporters, men and women alike, were seen as pariahs at atheist conferences.
You know, all those kinds of people are still prominent in atheism. Rebecca Watson and I and many of the other people who spoke out against the casual (and sometimes not so casual) sexism and racism are out. I don’t know what he’s complaining about, since as far as I’m concerned, the assholes won. Have you looked at YouTube atheists lately? He could have been much more specific about who these pariahs are simply by listing the board of advisors for Atheists for Liberty.
That’s a real rogues gallery of racists, rapists, evolutionary psychologists, and dishonest scum. It’s as if they went looking for people who should be pariahs and tried to elevate them! These are the kinds of people who still get invited to atheist conferences, you know. When was the last time you saw Rebecca Watson or me at a conference? Or on the board of advisors for an atheist group?
Who were the extremist infiltrators who conquered the atheist movement again?
Wait, before I stop, look back at the title of Sheedy’s screed, What we should learn from our past mistakes
. What has he learned?
Unlike other organizations who tolerated such infiltration and subversion of the movement, Atheists for Liberty will not make the same mistake. It is because of the weakening of the movement that Atheists for Liberty exists in the first place!
Got it. So he’s going to reject tolerance, and not let feminists and egalitarians into his movement.
That’s nice.
