The Republicans want to kill us

I could not believe the headlines on the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday. One was that several bars in the city were opening in defiance of the state restrictions on dine-in service, which is just incredibly stupid. Another was that Governor Walz was easing some of the current restrictions, which is just incredibly chickenshit.

I presume all the renewed stupidity/chickenshittery is a consequence of two things: the appearance of vaccines, and the fact that our state statistics had a recent decline in incidence. However, we don’t have the vaccine yet — at least, I don’t have the opportunity to get it yet — and even when it is available, it’s going to require one shot, followed by a 3 week wait before you get a second shot, and then you have to wait a couple more weeks before it is effective. So even if the vaccine was in our hot little hands right now, you’d still be expected to avoid hanging out in bars for 5 or 6 weeks longer.

As for the recent improvement in our numbers, that’s because the lockdown was working. Why do you want to abandon a strategy that is having a positive effect?

Yes, the numbers are going to go back up, inevitably, because people are getting lazy and selfish. So what has the governor done?

“You brought the curve down. You made the sacrifices necessary,” Walz said.

Due to the drop in case counts, Walz said, the state will now permit outdoor social gatherings with a maximum of 15 people between three households and indoor gatherings with a maximum of 10 people between two households. Gyms and fitness centers will be permitted to open at 25% capacity, and youth and adult sports will resume on January 4. Elementary schools will be permitted to reopen on January 18.

Walz did not loosen the ban on indoor dining, one of the more controversial provisions of the four week pause, but did allow outdoor dining to resume at 50% capacity. Bars, restaurants and breweries will continue to be closed for indoor dining through January 11.

Jesus, WHY? You brought the curve down by making sacrifices, so now we’re going to do the experiment of bringing the curve up by making fewer sacrifices? Why, why, why? This makes no sense.

Part of the answer is that the Republicans in the state legislature applied pressure and made threats.

We’re also getting pointed to by the right-wing press. Laura Ingraham, for instance, singled out the upper Midwest showing signs of a modest recovery to tell her viewers that the doctors know nothing, go out and celebrate Xmas with your families, there’s nothing you can do, the virus has a “natural cycle”. This is a case where if we do something that works, the idiot media will tell us all to stop doing the thing that works.

She has Scott Atlas on, the incompetent doctor who was a puppet for the incompetent Trump administration, who thought the best policy was “herd immunity”. They totally politicized Health & Human Services to pursue this strategy.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has sought to distance itself from one of the agency’s former advisors—personally installed by President Trump—who the results of a watchdog investigation published Wednesday show repeatedly advocated for allowing millions of young and middle-aged Americans to become infected with Covid-19 over the summer in a push for the HHS to pursue a controversial “herd immunity” strategy.

The infuriating thing is that these hacks don’t even understand the concept of “herd immunity” — they used the phrase as an excuse to justify doing nothing. You don’t get herd immunity by letting an active virus run rampant; the point of herd immunity is to use a vaccine to prevent a virus from getting a toe-hold in the community in the first place. Do they think we had herd immunity against smallpox because it spread unchecked, killing people and disfiguring others, because the survivors had immunity? That’s like using the principle of firebreaks to advocate for controlling wildfires by burning down the whole damn forest ahead of time.

The good news, at least: the Minnesota attorney general is suing those bars that reopened, and has also issued restraining orders to shut them down immediately.

Ever wonder why so many people are running away from organized atheism?

Huh. I’d almost forgotten David Silverman. Maybe I should peek in at what he’s up to nowadays.

AAAAAAAAAAAIEEEE.

Yikes. That’s some Twitter bio. I wouldn’t need to look any further to know that I want nothing to do with him, ever again. I also discovered that there are 54 people who follow him and also follow me — re-evaluate your life choices, people! Although I do suspect that many of our mutuals follow him to keep track of what horror he’s promoting today (similarly, some of them are probably hate-following me).

It’s an ugly world, there in Silverman’s cranium. While claiming “facts over feelings”, he’s also a pandemic denialist.

Right. 300,000 dead is “hype”. Get in line with Alex Jones, Dave.

Would you believe he’s also retweeting Tulsi Gabbard and transphobic YouTubers, and Tim Pool and Jack Posobiec and Mythicist Milwaukee? Of course you would. He now claims he was wrongly cancelled by “Woke” people. It looks to me like he was rightly cancelled by normal decent people who expected ethical behavior from someone representing an organization they had joined. And now he’s making horrible videos with people like Andy Signore to make self-pitying excuses for “men who cheat”.

Yuck. I feel betrayed, too.

Ethics in Journalism

It’s getting hard to find, and apparently you won’t find it at the NY Post. They ran a sensationalist, titillating story about a NY paramedic who also opened an OnlyFans account to try and make ends meet, sneering at her “racy” content (curiously, also including a few “racy” photos for those who read the NY Post), and ending with a quote from a veteran paramedic who “blasted” her for her choice of a side job, and a quote from the website of her employer that forbids “inappropriate conduct”. The story is clearly trying to stoke Puritanical outrage and get her fired.

Well, Lauren Caitlyn Kwei has fired back at the “journalist”.

Lauren Caitlyn Kwei
December 14 at 7:35 PM ·
Over the past 3 days, my life and the intimate details of it have been made public for millions of strangers to read and judge. There are many people telling me what they think I should do and giving me advice I did not ask for. Let me be very clear: I did not want the NY Post to run this article, much less use my name. When Dean Balsamini first “interviewed” me, he did not tell me what this was about until after I disclosed most of my background. He did not include in his article that I started crying on the phone when he finally did tell me what he was inquiring about. He did not include that he played this “friendly guy” reporter who just wanted to get MY side of the story, since ya know, they were gonna run it anyway, with or without my input. I know my actions have consequences and I know some of you think I was naive. I truly believe whoever “tipped” the post does not know me personally because anyone who knows me knows the kind of person I am. Let me tell you who I am. This is me.
I’m twenty-three years old and from a small town in West Virginia. My mother’s family is from northern West Virginia and my father’s parents were immigrants from China. I am the eldest of 4 children and our family was one of the only mixed race families in my predominately white town. I graduated from Winfield High School in a class of 200, the largest at the time. During high school, I was active in show choir, GSA, NHS, and dance classes. I moved to NYC when I was 18 to pursue my lifelong dream of being on broadway. I completed AMDA, started auditioning, and then decided it wasn’t for me anymore. So I became an EMT. I worked as an EMT for a year then I quit because I couldn’t put myself through paramedic school on minimum wage. I went back to hosting at a restaurant to make ends meet while I worked a year through paramedic school, which was one of the most challenging things I have ever done. I graduated paramedic school in February of 2020 and have been working ever since. I struggled a lot during the height of the pandemic. I was suicidal a lot of this year. I had panic attacks at work and even had a supervisor tell me I should consider another profession if I didn’t grow a thicker skin. I am a damn good paramedic. I LOVE my job and I love taking care of people. I don’t want to quit my day job and get my bag on OnlyFans — I want to serve the city of New York. That’s all I have ever wanted to do. I have always believed in using my voice to speak for those who many not be heard I was raised to ALWAYS show kindness and compassion. The NY Post gave me a voice. So here I am, showing myself to the world. I’m here to tell you all that my First Responder brothers and sisters are suffering. We need your help. We have been exhausted for months, reusing months old PPE, being refused hazard pay, and watching our fellow healthcare workers die in front of our eyes, in our ambulances. At least three NYC EMS workers died by suicide this year and there has been very little action about the lack of mental health care accessibility for first responders. EMS are the lowest paid first responders in NYC which leads to 50+ hour weeks and sometimes three jobs. My brothers and sisters DESERVE CHANGE! Visit emspac.org for a Mission Statement and to see how you can help. How’s that for a story, NY Post?!
Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart for your donations, support, and love. I am so thankful and plan on using this platform to voice the needs of my NYC EMS family. This is just the beginning, folks.
Lauren Caitlyn Kwei

The real story is that young people all across the country are struggling to make a living and are particularly hard hit by this pandemic, even as the rich prosper even more. It is especially tragic that health care workers are made to suffer most even as we need them most. You don’t get to decry individuals making choices about how to earn an income while simultaneously supporting a system that demeans and diminishes their choices, while also setting irrational priorities that harm society. Who hurts us most, a woman taking her clothes off on camera or a billionaire sucking out all the wealth of a nation?

Oh, and fuck the NY Post.

Spiders, like me, are just hard to love

This article on spider researcher Maydianne Andrade struck a nerve.

Spiders are not exactly a charismatic animal in many people’s minds. Do you feel like you have a different experience than someone who works on tigers or cute birds like chickadees?

I have to spend quite a lot of time convincing people that studying spiders is actually important. They are one of the dominant invertebrate terrestrial predators, which means that they take down a lot of insects. And so understanding how they work in their environment is actually important for us, understanding how to maintain the health of those environments.

If you look at the distribution of the diversity of organisms in nature, insects and spiders make up a huge proportion of that diversity. And yet they make up only a tiny proportion of what type of work we’re publishing on, and so it really is the animals with the big eyelashes and the big eyes, you know, the cute mammals and the beautiful sounding birds that the people are studying disproportionately.

Oh yeah, and those bird scientists are just the worst.

She’s commenting on the fact that I added two whole minutes of bird footage shot from my office window to my last video because it’s really hard to find wild spiders in a Minnesota December. Just for that I’m going to have to record some of my lab spiders for the end of my next video, even though I know it’ll trigger squeals of protest, and my subscriber count will probably go down.

You know, some spiders do have big eyes and eyelashes, he says, defensively.

[Read more…]

The Texas bridezilla is the worst bridezilla

We got married in a nice, middling-sized event — 40 or 50 people, I’d guess, in a little wedding chapel, with nothing particularly fancy or expensive. The best part was seeing old friends for a few hours, but if the wedding had taken place in 2020 rather than 1980, we would have skipped the whole thing, just had a tiny private ceremony (or even just a civil ceremony, the two of us signing a paper before witnesses) and been just as happy, and we’d still be just as married to this day. I guess it’s because we aren’t Texans, an alien subspecies with some wacky ideas.

The wedding photographer had already spent an hour or two inside with the unmasked wedding party when one of the bridesmaids approached her. The woman thanked her for still showing up, considering “everything that’s going on with the groom.”

When the photographer asked what she meant by that, the bridesmaid said the groom had tested positive for the coronavirus the day before. “She was looking for me to be like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ like I was going to agree with her that it was fine,” the photographer recalls. “So I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And she was like, ‘Oh no no no, don’t freak out. He doesn’t have symptoms. He’s fine.’”

The photographer, who has asthma and three kids, left with her assistant before the night was over. Her exit was tense. The wedding planner said it was the most unprofessional thing she’d ever seen. Bridesmaids accused her of heartlessly ruining an innocent woman’s wedding day. She recalls one bridesmaid telling her, “I’m a teacher, I have fourteen students. If I’m willing to risk it, why aren’t you?” Another said everyone was going to get COVID eventually, so what was the big deal? The friend of the bride who’d spilled the beans cried about being the “worst bridesmaid ever.”

Did I say wacky? I meant irresponsible. Also, that bridesmaid who was so cavalier about the health of her students needs to be fired, immediately.

The story ends with a nice kick in the butt.

The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.”

That’s one sick culture when the fancy party on day one of a marriage is worth the lives of a few children. There’s this whole bridezilla stereotype that really needs to die.