I drove by the local grocery store, and there, on the other side of the street, was a…was a…you won’t believe this, but I actually saw a…
TACO TRUCK!!!
In Morris! I don’t know if it’ll be here for long, but we were promised this way back in 2016. At last it has been accomplished, at last it is done.
(I didn’t actually stop at the taco truck — there were several people in line, but I don’t do that anymore.)
Shock. Horror. The Chinese have been infiltrating and colonizing US scientific research programs!
Concern has continued to grow over China’s infiltration of American virus research labs after recent reports highlighted three Chinese military scientists trained by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who arrived at U.S. universities and research institutions in the late 90s only to later become involved in the COVID-19 saga.
They don’t say who is “concerned”, but this is the most trivial news. Throughout my career, I’ve worked with Chinese students, British students, Canadian scientists, German scientists, French scientists, Spanish scientists, Chilean scientists, Indian scientists… That’s the way it works. We don’t care about your borders. I’ve also had American colleagues who studied in the UK, the EU, Russia, where ever (I don’t know any who studied in China — the language barrier is a major obstacle, I think). Are we horrified if, for instance, someone studied infectious disease in Toronto and then takes a position at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center? Would that be an example of colonizing Canada to steal their precious medical expertise? It is, I guess, but there’s nothing nefarious about it. It’s routine.
On part of this, many believe China has colonized U.S. virus research programs. Important to mention is these programs are funded by the U.S. government or in other words — the U.S. taxpayer. There’s very little these U.S. virology programs do that China isn’t aware of and for many that’s a threat far too large to be ignored any longer.
Yes. We shouldn’t ignore it. We should encourage more of it. The free exchange of ideas assists the progress of science.
I have to note, though, that they use an evasive construct again: many believe
. Who? It’s a sign of bad journalism when the writer plays this game. Name your sources, guy. I’m sure “many” would agree that we’ve trained many Chinese scientists (and scientists of many nationalities), but few would call that “colonization” or think it was a problem. China has a cadre of US-trained virologists? Yes, please. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re experiencing a pandemic, more will occur in the future, and we need more virologists.
Of course, OAN has an agenda. Wouldn’t you know it, they’re trying to suggest that COVID-19 is the product of hostile Chinese military research.
One Chinese whistleblower claimed COVID-19 originated in laboratories overseen by China’s PLA by using bat coronaviruses ZC-45 and ZXC-21, which were then characterized and genetically engineered under the supervision of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing and the Research Institute for Medicine of the PLA Nanjing Military Command.
As of now, the World Health Organization (WHO) has yet to confirm the origin of the virus. However, efforts to investigate have largely been obstructed.
Research into the origins of the virus has not been obstructed, unless by obstructed
they mean that it fails to support the usual conspiracy theories. SARS-CoV-2 is not remarkably artificial at all — it is closely related to bat viruses, there is no discernable obstacle to their natural origin, and no evidence that they were manipulated in a lab. Novel variants have been popping up all over the place — do they think Chinese scientists around the world are tweaking the virus? (I shouldn’t say that, they might think that.)
Also, the Chinese military must be remarkably incompetent to have released their deadly engineered virus in China and disrupted their own economy, first.
Mitch McConnell really doesn’t want the Democrats to change the rules to enable laws to pass with a simple majority. He’s making threats that are simultaneously revealing and dishonest.
He knows that with a unified Democratic caucus and Harris wielding the gavel, his mouth is writing a check that he lacks votes to cash. McConnell, self-advertised master of intricate Senate rules, at best can make himself a nuisance by gumming up the legislative process.
McConnell is even trying to intimidate Democrats with warnings of what Republicans will do if they regain the Senate — for instance, imposing a nationwide right-to-work law, defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities, passing sweeping right-to-life legislation, authorizing concealed-carry firearms reciprocity in all 50 states and the District, and hardening southern border security.
What empty threats. The guy who happily defied senate rules and tradition to block the nomination of Merrick Garland is now trying to tell us he’s been gracious and deferential for the last four years, but he’s willing to get mean if we prevent his shenanigans from continuing? Yeah, right. Pull the other one.
Most interesting, though, is that he’s openly stating what he wants to do if he weren’t restrained by the Democrats: bust unions, shut down women’s health clinics, ban all abortions, gut even the mildest gun control laws, and crack down on immigrants. This bozo is dangerous and bad for the country: do everything you can to frustrate the Republicans, Democrats!
I’m getting my shoes on, I’m going into the lab, I cleared my schedule and the whole morning is MINE. I’m going to go hang out with the spiders.
Unfortunately, the afternoon is not me time thanks to #$!#% committee meetings.
Once upon a time, when this blog was a simple little thing that I ran off a server in my lab, I was recruited to join ScienceBlogs. It was a great place — I shared the space with a lot of smart, interesting people, many of whom I still follow on social media. I was also enticed by the generous payments they made, with a significant sum based on traffic issued to the bloggers. Also great. I was making about $8000 month there.
Yes, I was stunned, too. I didn’t know how they were doing it: it was supposed to be ad-based revenue, but what it really was was massive investments by rich people with lots of money to throw around who were trying to promote a science-based perspective, and who hired popular writers to kick start the whole thing. Of course, the other people writing there will tell you they got nowhere near that amount — it was just the first wave who benefited most from all the publicity. And later, they started revising the fee structure, always downward, and then they sold it off to National Geographic who quickly ejected the old bloggers and brought in new ones who better fit their desired path. I had no ill will about the changes. I saw that first lucky wave as a windfall that I did not expect to last.
When Ed Brayton and I set up Freethoughtblogs, we also discovered that the game was up. We had no deep-pocket investors. We tried to make a go of it with entirely ad-based revenue, with a mistaken idea of how easy that would be, based on our experiences at Scienceblogs. It’s all a scam! You’re going to make peanuts off of ads, unless you want to play games with link farms and ludicrous SEO and other gimmicks. We just wanted a nice place to write and be read.
Then, of course, we were learning that the real winners at the ad game were…the ad services. Not us. We were supported by the Patheos ad machine, which was a horror. Inappropriate ads, and tons of them, and they also offered us extra pennies if we allowed them to try bizarre gimmicks. Anyone remember the sliding page ads? You’d log in, the whole page would jerk to the right, and an ad bar would slide in from the left, and fucking annoy everyone. Hated it. Hated it all. I finally gave up on ads altogether, and we run Freethoughtblogs at a loss — I figure I got rained on by the money tree a few years ago, I can coast on supporting this site for a good long while without the nuisance ads.
Now I hear, though, that there’s a hot new blog syndication site called Substack that’s all the rage — they’ve got some very well known people writing there, and apparently lured them in with big money.
Uh-oh, I thought. I’ve been there before. I can guess where this is going, and where it will end up in 10 years. Somebody is pumping money into another blogging enterprise, and they aren’t getting rich off ads. Someone wants to promote a certain set of authors.
Annalee Newitz spills the beans. They’re luring in lots of writers by paying a top tier “Pro” group large sums of money, and all the other people next to nothing, and sucking in lots of people to support them. Again, it’s almost a Ponzi scheme. If you aren’t in that first wave with the lucrative deals, you aren’t going to get rich. You can’t. The economics of blogging don’t support it.
Worse though, Substack has an agenda. (So did Scienceblogs, but their’s was just to promote science and tech. I think.)
It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
As Jude Doyle explained in their newsletter:
Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.
Glenn Greenwald started his Substack by inveighing against trans rights and/or ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, is currently using it to direct harassment at a female New York Times reporter, and has repeatedly used his platform to whitewash alleged rapists and domestic abusers. Freddie de Boer is an anti-“identity politics” crusader who became so infamous for harassing colleagues, particularly women, that he briefly promised to retire from the Internet to avoid causing any more harm; he’s currently using his “generous financial offer” from Substack to argue against “censoring” Nazis while pursuing a personal vendetta against the cis writer Sarah Jones. Matt Yglesias, who publicly cites polite pushback from a trans femme colleague as the Problem With Media Today — exposing the woman he named to massive harassment from Fox News and online TERFs alike — reportedly got a $250,000 advance from Substack. It’s become the preferred platform for men who can’t work in diverse environments without getting calls from HR.
Doyle notes that Substack also seems to have a secret list of writers who are allowed to violate the company’s terms of service. These people dish out hate speech, but remain on the platform with paid subscribers. Among them is Graham Linehan, who was already booted from Twitter for hate speech against trans people, and whose Substack is entirely devoted to the idea that trans women are a danger to cis women and should be stopped.
So all the ‘little people’ on Substack are there to provide an illusion of popular support to an ‘elite’ that consists of people like Greenwald, Yglesias, and Linehan. Charming. I shouldn’t be surprised, though.
I never want to see what the local police are saying about the citizens they “serve and protect”. I suspect that some of it will be like what was exposed when text messages between Eureka, CA police officers were leaked. It’s a lot of contempt for the homeless and mentally ill, sexual descriptions of women they see on the street, and macho promises to shoot and beat hippies, drug addicts, and protesters.
Among the most appalling stories there was that the local public health department was asking these untrained, unprofessional, abusive thugs to check up on people who contracted COVID-19. The police called them “outbreak monkeys”. And these are the people expected to aid public health officials? Inappropriate much?
Take away a big chunk of the money spent on assholes with guns and recommit it to EMTs and social workers and people who actually know something other than how to threaten and harm others. At least some people are aware of what needs to change.
Banter like that captured in the Eureka text messages shows the rare, unvarnished reality of how some officers view their work, said Stinson, who used to work for a police department himself.
“This is the police subculture of that agency unmasked,” Stinson said. “This is the officers in their natural habitat, talking amongst themselves. It’s an us-versus-them mentality. It’s a sexualized environment where policing is violent. It’s ugly.”
The messages also show an environment resistant to change in the city, which for years has also struggled with a swell of drug abuse, homelessness and overwhelmed social services.
One officer in the Eureka texts appeared to ridicule efforts to ban chokeholds and other deadly restraints against suspects. In one text exchange, an officer shared a YouTube video about “control techniques” being barred in New York City. “(Gov. Gavin) Newsom is already j—- off with excitement hoping he can get it here I’m sure,” another officer wrote.
“At the end of the day, whether somebody was joking or not joking, or intended to to be offensive or not, we have to be responsible and accountable for our words and our actions,” Watson said. “And we have to be careful that everything that we do on and off duty reflects in a positive light, that reinforces trust with our community.”
Robinson, the former chief in Phoenix, said comments like those in the text messages are detrimental to the good work the vast majority of law enforcement officers are trying to do — especially given the recent reckoning facing law enforcement.
He said, based on the text messages, they need a cultural change.
Yeah, right. Two of the officers responsible for some of the worst messages have been put on paid leave; their co-conspirators in the department are probably just waiting for the heat to die down so they can put them back on the streets.
I noticed quite a few people yesterday trying to argue that the fact that a murderer walked into three Asian-American businesses and killed 6 Asian-American women wasn’t an act of racism, which kind of blows my mind. Of course it was! It was also an act of misogyny. And also of gun fanaticism. And puritanical religious self-loathing. And ignorance. And general hatred of unfamiliar cultures. It can be all of these things at the same time!
Have people never heard of the concept of intersectionality? Or have you just swallowed whole the conservative rejection of the idea?
Here’s another dirty concept to the conservative brain: Critical Race Theory. In part, that’s the idea that white supremacy exists, and is supported by our legal system (and, by the way, needs to be rooted out). The law turns a blind eye to racism. Hoo boy, does this Georgia police department do that. Why did that murderer kill those women? He had a “bad day” (I’ve been having a lot of bad days lately, never thought to vent by going on a killing spree). He was mentally ill (oh my, isn’t that a familiar refrain?). He was a sex addict (who focused his addiction on Asian women). The police asked him if his crime was racially motivated, and he said “no”…and they believed him. Why would a white boy from a good Christian family lie about that? The police department is rotten to the core. I’m going to guess that many of the officers are closet white supremacists themselves.
Watch this dissection of that appalling press conference.
Then there’s this Facebook post by Captain Jay Baker (the bald fuck in the video), in which he chortles over Trump’s claim that the virus was imported from “Chy-na”.
Jesus. Fire him. Cut out the rot. Defund the police.
Although he does provide a beautiful perspective into why Critical Race Theory is important and valid, I will at least say that for him.
It stings when someone you once considered a friend, who you respected as a thoughtful, philosophical feminist, goes off the deep end into TERFdom and starts making shallow, irrational arguments. You might be able to figure out who it is — she used to have a blog here. Now she likes to sneer at trans people. It’s very disheartening.
She’s responding to the recent article about Elliot Page. That’s a good article; her response, not so much. Even the first sentence is a sneer.
So, in the article, Page mentions being emotional about talking about his transition. Clearly, this is wrong.
No, because men don’t cry, especially not before the interviewer has even said anything besides “Hello.”
So he can be dismissed…with a gender stereotype? Seriously? I’m a man, brought up in the era of repressed masculine emotions, and I have a hard time expressing my feelings. I don’t think this is a strength at all. I’m glad Page has escaped that trap.
Then the article mentions that more people are transitioning now: “1.8% of Gen Z compared with 0.2% of boomers”. This, apparently, is bad.
Let’s think about this. “Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans”…which can be seen as tolerance and liberality, or as social contagion that encourages “young people” to make drastic and irreversible changes to their bodies. It can be seen as both.
I just mentioned how I, a boomer, have difficulty expressing my emotions, and that I don’t consider this a good thing. I am caged up in old notions of masculinity. Why would a feminist dislike the idea of a new generation liberating themselves from stereotypes?
And then, this idea that transitioning is a product of “social contagion”…what nonsense. Does she think men just wake up feeling feminine one morning, and on a whim, toddle down to the local clinic to have their penis snipped off, and the clinic cheerfully obliges? Or that, because several of my friends are trans men and women (or gay, or ace, or bi), that I decide to change my sexual identity to conform? You know, the majority of the people I associate with are still cis het — note that 1.8% of the general population is considered a soaring frequency — why aren’t we considering that all the social pressure from friends and family and TV and the internet is forcing everyone to conform to a pure masculine/feminine dichotomy and not be who they want to be?
As for drastic and irreversible changes to bodies…medical transitioning, the irreversible bits, is preceded by months and months of clinical evaluation. I really can’t walk into a clinic and ask to have it snipped off. I couldn’t even get a vasectomy without doctors tut-tutting and insisting that I make sure this is what I want, and refusing to do the procedure. I know women would have even more examples of the medical establishment refusing to carry out surgical sterilization.
So you think people just do this because they saw a post on Instagram or an article in Time magazine? This is nuts.
it’s not just conservatives who see that “increased social acceptance” can be a euphemism for “social contagion” and that the latter is not always beneficent. Given the inherent absurdity of what people mean by “trans,” it’s inevitable that it’s not just conservatives who think the whole idea is futile and destructive. Constantly framing “trans” as the latest expansion of human potential rather than a perverse and anti-reality daydream just throws more wood on the fire.
Again with the sneering belittling. Being trans is not a product of “social contagion”, nor is it inherently absurd. The people who make this change are acutely aware of what reality is, experience huge amounts of pressure to accept a socially determined gender role — even trivial matters like “men don’t cry” are fiercely enforced — and are taking deliberate steps after much thoughtful consideration to be who they want to be. Respect that. Accept people for who they say they are, rather than demanding that they be what you want them to be. Like this:
Nobody is debating anyone’s existence, what we’re disputing is the description. We think you’ve got the description wrong.
My god. Who are you to tell another person how best to describe themselves? Can I also dispute some descriptions?
She goes on to defend JK Rowling, who opposes transgender equality in the name of feminism.
No, not in the name of feminism. She really is a feminist, she’s not faking it. It’s funny how fans of the ideology think changing sex is completely real while feminists who call themselves feminists are fake.
Oh. JK Rowling really is a feminist, because she says she is one. But someone who rejects stereotypes, who goes through the pain and expense and social stigma of transitioning, can’t be who they say they are, because a TERF declares that you aren’t allowed to change sex.
I note that she does not disagree that Rowling opposes transgender equality, which is the real reason she is disliked. I’ll take that as stipulated, then, that JK Rowling is an opponent of equality.
P.S. Changing sex is completely real. People do it all the time. Why do TERFs deny reality?
Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God…and racism. Mustn’t forget the racism.
I grew up with a grossly racist grandfather — he survived the Pacific War of WWII and came out of it with alcoholism and an abiding contempt for the Japanese. I heard so many racial slurs! He knew them all, and hated them. What I got out of it, though, was the stark contrast between what he said and what I knew. This was in the Pacific Northwest; I had many friends of Asian descent, I worked my way through summers in high school in the employ of Taki Nagasawa, who’s ethnicity you might guess from the name. What I learned from the experience was that my drunken grandpa was full of shit. That’s all. That when a racist starts spewing racism you should simply disbelieve everything he says.
So when Donald Trump started babbling about the “Chinese Flu” or the “Kung Flu”, what I saw was Drunk Grandpa raging from his armchair, sloshed to the gills on Budweiser. He’s wrong. I can ignore everything he says. Unfortunately, I can’t ignore the criminally moronic people who believed him, now fueling a wave of anti-Asian violence.
Hatred against Asian-Americans is being expressed far more freely now.
Asian Americans reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents during the pandemic, a number that experts believe to be just a fraction of the true total.
From 19 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, Asian Americans from all 50 states experienced everything ranging from verbal abuse to physical assaults, from getting coughed on to getting denied services because of their ethnicity, according to a report released on Tuesday by Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition tracking incidents of violence, discrimination and harassment.
More than 68% of the abuse was verbal harassment or name-calling, while 11.1% was physical, the report found.
Once again, I find myself looking from my Asian-American friends to these abusive assholes, unable to comprehend how wrong they are. It’s madness. Why are you saying these outrageous untruths, why are you treating your fellow citizens with such contempt?
I haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of the hatred. Yesterday, a man deliberately walked into three Asian-American businesses and opened fire, killing 8 people, including 6 women of Asian descent. It’s a clear case of racial targeting and mass murder. They’ve caught the murderer, a scraggly-bearded 21 year old white man. We’re already hearing what a good kid he was.
Long was described as a religious person by a former classmate at Sequoyah High. The 21-year-old graduated in 2017. The classmate said Long’s dad was a pastor, and he had seemed “innocent” and “nerdy.”
“He was very innocent seeming and wouldn’t even cuss,” the classmate told The Daily Beast. “He was sorta nerdy and didn’t seem violent from what I remember. He was a hunter and his father was a youth minister or pastor. He was big into religion.”
Social media posts from the Crabapple First Baptist Church show Long and his family had a lengthy history with the church. Long’s father is not listed as a pastor at the church. The elders of the church released a statement to Heavy.com, saying they were “grieved” and “heartbroken.”
“We are grieved to hear the tragic news about the multiple deaths in the Atlanta area. We are heartbroken for all involved,” the statement said. “We grieve for the victims and their families, and we continue to pray for them. Moreover, we are distraught for the Long family and continue to pray for them as well.”
Posts indicate he attended the church with his mom, dad and his younger sister. His mother organized events at the church, like a movie night with a cotton candy machine.
He wouldn’t even cuss! But he could draw a gun and cold-bloodedly kill young women.
His mom sponsored movie nights! With a cotton candy machine! I bet the movies were all rated “G”, too. But she raised a son with a broken moral compass.
Long was also involved with the church’s Student Ministry Team as recently as 2018, according to minutes from a meeting of the elders. He was one of 11 people who served as team members, which “exists to see students receive Jesus Christ as Lord, and walk in Him, being rooted in the faith.”
The Daily Beast reported an Instagram account that “appeared to belong” to Long professed his love of God and guns.
“Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life,” a tagline for the account said.
Maybe the church and his family taught him the wrong things, and failed to teach him the important things.
You know what else perpetuates the bigotry? That we know this much about the shooter, that we’ve been served up these little dollops of presumably worthy things about him — religion, cotton candy, guns, prayer, nerdy, innocent — and we know nothing about his victims, who are all faceless Asian women who worked at a spa (wink, wink), and whose lives aren’t summed up with a list of trite objects. Now they’ve been reduced to objects themselves, the murderer is the subject, the verb is “killed”. Maybe eventually they’ll send a junior reporter off to get a quick summary of their lives, but it won’t be a front page story.
I wonder if some editor is thinking now that it would be a good idea to send a young Asian woman reporter off to cover that story (and get traumatized all over again) that’ll get buried somewhere in the back of the paper, and looking over the newsroom, is dismayed to notice they haven’t hired anyone to fit that role.
They also need to find someone to rewrite the puff pieces they’ve done on the murderer, to point out that he was a hate-filled gun-waving homicidal Jesus freak from a morally bankrupt family, with no excuses.
If only this weren’t a common response.
It is an actual quote from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country,Mr Morrison told Parliament.
This is a familiar defense of the status quo. You want equality? With ME??!? You should be grateful that we didn’t shoot you. It is the ubiquitous old white man defense of their privilege, which allows them to perpetuate the inequities that exist now, because they can always find someplace else that is much worse. The existence of a sliding scale of misery is used to justify itself — that protesters are shot in Myanmar allows us to smugly pat ourselves on the back when people in our country protest injustice because This is a triumph of democracy when we see these things take place,
and not do anything. Then why are they protesting?
It’s the same old story, substituting an old white man from Australia for an old white man from England.
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
We are reduced to comparing the weight of the chains of the oppressed so we can ignore the existence of the chains altogether.
