Time to make my getaway

I have a plan, a good plan, for today. I’m escaping to my lab for a good chunk of the day to do mindless, mundane stuff. It’ll be fun.

Let’s see…first on my list is to make more flies. Then I’m going to scrub out a backlog of fly bottles and get them into the autoclave. Then I have to start rotating spider cages — I have to wash a half dozen cages and do some repair of frames, move a half dozen spiders from old stinky poopy cages to the new shiny clean ones, so I can wash those cages tomorrow and shuffle around some more spiders. I’ll also do some general tidying up before feeding all the baby spiders and coming home.

So there you have it, the glamorous scientific life. At least it’s all stuff one can do during a pandemic.

I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the Evil Emperor Zurg sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance!

I feel safer in this pandemic and economic meltdown now that Mike Pence has announced the name we must use when addressing members of the Space Force.

This is just such silly-bonkers. There is no space force, except as a line item on a budget that will be funneled off to defense contractors. They’re not guarding us against anything. I hope the Democrats just erase this nonsense off the spreadsheet as soon as they take office (they probably won’t, they love defense contractors, too.)

I do have to wonder what that streak of light on Earth in the bottom left of their logo is. Is that the Guardians launching missiles from Earth at some target in space, or the Guardians bombing some target from orbit?

How much do I despise this man?

The leader of the obstructionist party, the science-denying party, the “let them get COVID & die” party, the party that undermines every attempt to control the pandemic, has rushed to the front of the line to get vaccinated. Him and Rupert Murdoch, even as his networks preach conspiracy theories and denialism.

Every EMT and nurse and doctor who has been risking all to be in the front line of helping people against this disease, and every public school teacher who has been told by their government to get in there and teach potential disease carriers, ought to be infuriated.

Oh, I forgot…the chickenshit party, the draft-dodging coward party, the party of flag-wavers who shoo the cannon-fodder forward.

Also, he’s not working to get relief to the people. His is the party that’s going to whine about the deficit and how they can’t possibly help with college debt relief, or send out emergency aid checks, or make health care available for all, while shoveling cash into the pockets of bankers and lawyers as fast as they can.

In case you were wondering, no, I haven’t been vaccinated, and there isn’t even a whisper on the university email lists about it, yet I’m going back into the student labs in about a month. We did get a video thank you card instead of a bonus, or a raise (no, that’s not happening, the Republicans in the state legislature will make sure of that), or a vaccination.

Yay.

Wait, this is about tradcaths?

I almost didn’t watch this video because, well, look at the thumbnail. It’s about Lawrence Krauss? No thank you very much. But it’s not about Krauss at all, so it’s OK!

It’s actually all about these wacky Traditional Catholics with more money than sense who cunningly put together a movie, a real movie/documentary, with real scientists cleverly questioned to make statements they could splice together to imply that they supported geocentrism. So it’s about how some kooks fooled Lawrence Krauss!

The highlight for me, though, is when the creators are in a conference with Michael Voris, the whirlpool guy. And best of all, they go to a flat earth conference to tell everyone there that they were nuts to believe the Earth was flat, but they were exactly right to claim that the sun orbits around the Earth. Even fanatical Catholic science deniers laugh at flat-earthers!

Anyway, recommended — there’s also useful information about how pseudoscientists manipulate the truth to support their delusions.

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.