Living next door to the worst

I live just a few miles from the North and South Dakota borders. This situation makes me a bit uncomfortable, since if the entire country has been slack about dealing with the pandemic, the Dakotas have been the slackest.

The current rates of infection and deaths per capita in South Dakota and previously restriction-free North Dakota are what Dr. Ali Mokdad would expect to see in a war-torn nation — not here.

“How could we allow this in the United States to happen?” asked Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This is unacceptable by any standards.”

North Dakota’s COVID-19 death rates per capita in the past week are similar to the hardest hit countries in the world right now — Belgium, Czech Republic and Slovenia — according to Saturday New York Times data. That data also places South Dakota’s recent per capita deaths among the world’s highest rates.

And there’s currently nowhere in the U.S. where COVID-19 deaths are more common than in the Dakotas, according to data published by The COVID Tracking Project.

It’s a situation “as bad as it gets anywhere in the world,” Dr. William Haseltine told USA TODAY.

It’s taken getting death rates to the highest in the world for those states to even begin to implement basic procedures to limit the spread. Not to excuse Minnesota, we’ve just been dragging behind on good policy, but not quite as badly as either Dakota. It helps that we’ve got a Democratic governor, unlike Noem (fanatical mad woman) and Burgum (coward).

Haseltine, president of ACCESS Health International and author of My Lifelong Fight Against Disease, blamed politicians — especially South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem — for ignoring public health measures that have been successfully used to curb the spread of the virus elsewhere in the world.

Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying that she’ll leave it up to the people to decide. She has said the virus can’t be stopped.

Burgum, also a Republican, had pleaded with people to wear masks and praised local towns and cities that have mandated masks. He had avoided requiring masks and refused to enforce limits on social gatherings and business occupancies until late Friday.

The disgraceful thing is that this isn’t even a question of following the will of the electorate — a majority of citizens favor a stronger state response.

A survey in late September and early October by the state health department found that 55% of respondents supported a mask mandate and 68% said they wore masks. Surveys of mask usage show North Dakota lags behind most of the nation — but now has reached about 80%, according to Facebook surveys mapped by Carnegie Mellon University.

We’ve let a fanatical minority of incompetents take the wheel and drive the country into a ditch.

The wrong way to relax

I’m so buried in grading that I shouldn’t take a break, and in particular, I shouldn’t take a break to look at the news…

AAARGH. FUCK! SHIT NO! Do not trust this man ever. I’m seeing all this nonsense about how we ought to be conciliatory now that we won one election, and my rage knows no bounds. I’m just someone who is seeing those MAGA chuds trying to destroy and criminalize mere science, I can’t even imagine how people whose very existence has been targeted for annihilation would feel. No. Just no. No apologies to Republican scum. Their poisonous ideas need to be hounded out of the body politic — they can go join the Nazis in the hall of infamy.

This is how I feel about these people now saying it’s time to make nice.

Give up nothing. Fuck Charles Koch.

I guess I’m going to go play a game of Among Us with people who aren’t toxic assholes, before I get back to grading.

Gladsome tidings!

Could it be…is it possible that QAnon is imploding? Q went silent after the election (and his predictions failed), one of the top administrators at 8kun resigned, and the mob of True Believers is dismayed.

Trump’s loss plunged many Q believers into a crisis of faith. “It’s hard to keep the faith when your wife and daughters have left you and we didn’t get the decisive MOAB [mother of all bombs] win we deserved on election night!!” one representative post on a Q forum read.

Some posts, potentially from trolls, in Q’s home subforum on 8kun this week insisted that the poster had died by suicide.

Other movements on the scene suggested at least one high-profile Q influencer was priming to pull the plug on QAnon—and blame 8kun in the process. NeonRevolt, a pro-Q blogger and author of a book on the topic, shared a “blind item” days after the election, alleging that Q’s 8kun account might have been compromised.

Well, yes, it is difficult to maintain your enthusiasm when you’ve ripped your family apart and discover that all the prophecies of your cult flopped. Unfortunately, that just leaves the QAnon cultists desperate for a rationalization to validate their awful decisions, so that kind of catastrophe never ends the belief, it just squeezes it out into another, equally disastrous body of life-ruining fantasies, as we’ve seen in every doomsday cult that’s ever existed.

Just wait for the emergence of “R” (oh, wait, that cult already exists — S, then). Also expect schisms. It’s going to be fun, but not for the faithful.

Why is the cruise ship industry?

Just why. The first cruise ship tour resumed sailing the Caribbean, and guess what happened? Coronavirus, of course. The passengers are concerned and complaining, but I just want to know why you thought cramming yourself into a confined space with 119 other people would be a fun outing.

Sloan, who is a senior reporter for cruise and travel at The Points Guy, reported that the Covid scare started when the captain informed passengers of the preliminary positive test over the ship’s intercom system shortly before lunchtime on Wednesday.
Passengers were instructed to return to their cabins and remain isolated there, he said.

Great. You signed up for a cruise of the beautiful Caribbean, and now you get to sit in a cramped stateroom and maybe, if you’re lucky, stare out a porthole. Even in times without a pandemic, I fail to see the appeal.

At least they aren’t spewing out both ends as the usual outbreak on a cruise ship goes. Instead, they might end up struggling for breath and dying. The industry is constantly trying to upgrade the experience, you know.

Tommy Tuberville needs some remedial civics lessons

Are you smarter than an Alabama football coach? Here’s one who just got elected to the senate. Let’s see if you can spot the errors here.

I wonder if my European readers will see what’s wrong with this story.

Then he accidentally erased the Supreme Court and the entire judiciary, which may not be such a bad thing.

Maybe we need some kind of qualifying exam before you can run for office.

Grrrr, Cancel Culture: now men are getting fired for masturbating on Zoom, where will this end?

If you hadn’t heard, Jeffrey Toobin is unemployed.

He tastefully avoids talking about why he was fired. It was for masturbating while on a zoom call with professional associates. Strangely, people are trying to defend him now, suggesting that he deserved a slap on the wrist rather than a firing. I disagree.

I am an authority on these matters, you know. As a cishet male, with white privilege and the credibility of someone with a respectable position (mostly) in society, and with a healthy interest in sex and a strong sex life, I can confidently say that I am entirely capable of participating in Zoom meetings while maintaining my full focus on the topic of the discussion. This goes for other events in my life, too: I can go for a walk, eat a meal, see a movie, all of these common mundane things, without masturbating.

Restraint is not a super-power.

Toobin engaged in unprofessional conduct that made the people he must work with extremely uncomfortable, and that compromised his credibility and status as a serious journalist. Of course he should have been fired!

Now the HR contingent and the moral outrage brigade are probably shouting in chorus: “Even if the camera was off, that level of, ummm, self-aggrandizement has no place at work.” I agree wholeheartedly. Except Toobin wasn’t at work. He was working, but he was at home. And if one if going to engage in such activity, I can’t think of a more appropriate place than in the privacy of one’s home. I might even go so far as to say it’s the only appropriate place for such individualistic indulgences, but then teenagers might never visit their local libraries.
This is where 2020 has blurred some vital lines. With so many of us now working out of our homes, should office norms apply to our private domiciles during work hours?

The lines aren’t that blurred. I’m also now working mainly out of my office at home, but I am quite capable of recognizing that when I’m teaching a class, advising a student, or attending a committee meeting, I am engaged in the professional activity for which I am paid, and which carries expectations of a certain level of appropriate conduct. I’m not so stupid that I think being in my house means I can turn into a wild and crazy guy and dance around naked during office hours.

Wait until office hours are over to open up the whisky and put a lampshade on your head. It’s really not that difficult. Draw the lines yourself and recognize the boundaries that will allow you to do what is needed.

If you can’t, well, maybe Jeffrey Toobin needs to get himself an OnlyFans account.

How did such a stupid idea get even this far along?

I think we’re going to have to accept the fact the the sole real talent of billionaires is for grifting. Case in point: Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, which just had a “successful” test. You’d think someone would notice the word “HYPE” in the name.

Shocking news! In an incredible breakthrough for American mass-transit engineering, the transportation technology company Virgin Hyperloop this past weekend successfully moved two people 500 meters across the barren Las Vegas desert at a top speed of just over 100 mph, setting a new world record for the absolute most pitiful thing anyone not named “Elon Musk” has ever tried to pass off as “high-speed rail.”

Now watch an executive try very hard to inflate the stock price with unbelievable predictions.

You know what I’d like? A restoration of regular train service at a reasonable price. We had trains running on a routine schedule between Morris and the Twin Cities in the 1960s! I guess the rails have degraded so much that they’re no longer compatible with passenger service anymore, but if we can’t get simple maintenance of existing rail infrastructure, what makes these Muskians think we can get state and municipal support for his pie-in-the-sky, mostly nonfunctional and useless Hypeloop shell game? Even if we had connections between major urban centers, where’s the rest of the transportation support?

I hope the stock price of all of the companies associated with that clowning fraud Musk collapse.