Hush now — coup in progress

Trump hasn’t conceded yet. That’s not supposed to happen. We should be getting worried, because it’s not just one delusional madman in power, we’ve also got the Senate Majority Leader saying there’s no reason for alarm over his intransigence, and when Moscow Mitch declares that there’s nothing to be worried about, it’s time to panic. We’ve got senators like Roy Blunt saying that Trump may not have been defeated at all. The Secretary of State has announced there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, hordes of fanatics are building a defiant mob on social media. Trump is all about sucking up to his “fans”, so he’s going to continue to shy away from that graceful admission of defeat, if a narcissist like him were even capable of such a thing.

There’s also this:

It’s a purge to pave the way to seizing military control.

You’d think the election is now over, with some continuing ballot counting in a few states that won’t be enough to overturn anything. The Republicans do have a trick up their sleeve, though — abusing our archaic electoral college to override the popular vote. Apparently, there is a convenient loophole in which a state legislature could override the appointment of electors to stack the deck, and Pennsylvania, as one example, is a state where the Republicans control both houses.

At Trump’s urging, the state’s legislature — where Republicans have majorities in both houses — purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the state’s presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the state’s presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the “true” outcome.

The state’s Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the state’s legislature, but the legislature’s two chambers proclaim that the governor’s assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the state’s governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.

They’ve also got the Supreme Court in their back pocket.

While we were dreading the possibility of an October surprise, and marveling that their efforts were so pathetic, maybe we should be more concerned about a January surprise. There is precedent.

Indeed, refusing to wage a much more organized, public campaign to challenge Trump’s coup attempt is exactly the kind of strategy Democrats went with 20 years ago in Florida during the Brooks Brothers riot — and look how that turned out. We got an illegitimate Bush presidency that gave us the Iraq War and a financial crisis that ended or ruined millions of lives.

This time around it could be even worse — the end of whatever’s still left of American democracy.

Remember that empty, exhausted, defeated feeling we had as the lawyers took over Florida and nitpicked their way to effectively shutting down ballot counting, and the Supreme Court declared Bush the president? And then most of us resigned ourselves to accept it, saying that Bush couldn’t be so bad that it warranted our side disrupting democratic institutions in the way the Republicans were doing? Are you ready to feel that way again?

Oh my, I have some favorite tweets

I couldn’t give up Twitter, there are so many candid self-owns on there. Like this “totally crap analysis” from James Lindsay, who explains to us his interpretation of feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory.

All three really deserve a spit take. Feminism sees men as the ideal… we can just stop right there. It’s projection, through and through. Only a heterosexual white man would look at people protesting oppression by a heterosexual white male establishment and think, “Oh, they’re just jealous and want to be heterosexual white men”. He’s making the superficial smooth brained interpretation of everything. Please do have fun eviscerating his words.

But then, just when I thought I’d found the dumbest tweet of the week, along comes Dean Browning, former Lehigh County Commissioner and Christian conservative.

He seems to have forgotten that he had to log in to his sock puppet account.

That’s a very Christian conservative thing to do.

Oh man, that last story just gets twistier by the minute.

You implement preventive measures before the problem worsens, Governor Walz

The numbers of the infected are surging in Minnesota, so now our governor says “Whoops!” and decides maybe we should refrain from wild partying.

Gov. Tim Walz strongly indicated during the Monday opening of a new saliva testing center in Minneapolis that he will soon announce restrictions on bars and restaurants as a way of stemming an explosion of COVID-19 infections in Minnesota.

Walz stood with Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm to announce another expansion in testing, this time at the Minneapolis Convention Center, but both officials further lamented an increase in both infection numbers and positivity rates. The state saw 10,000 new infections over the weekend and passed a 10 percent positivity rate.

Walz said health department information is seeing three infection sources: social events such as weddings and funerals, large family gatherings and bars and restaurants. The latter dovetails into another concern of health officials — the large number of 18-to-35 years olds who may be infected but asymptomatic. Those people can be efficient spreaders.

Barn doors, closed, after cow escapes, etc. OK. I think the citizenry have already learned to be slack about these things, unfortunately, and there is also going to be a subset of the population — you know the ones, the conspiracy theorists — who are going to see this as a validation of their belief that the Democrats want to steal muh freedoms.

In more positive news, I’ve been reading the news about the new potential vaccine. It’s an RNA-based vaccine? Cool. That’s an intriguing approach, except for the fact that RNA is remarkably fragile. My concerns were confirmed by this little bit of information:

Pfizer’s vaccine must be stored at ultra-low temperatures, which complicates the massive endeavor to distribute a vaccine throughout the population. Pfizer’s logistical plan includes using dry ice to transport frozen vials. Health facilities can keep the vaccine for up to six months at minus-70 degrees Celsius, or minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit. But many hospitals lack the special freezers that can get that cold.

So that’s like dry ice temperatures, but at least it’s not liquid N2 temperatures. I guess that’s doable, but it’s going to add to the expense and mostly force communities to upgrade their medical infrastructure a bit. Otherwise, though, the idea of using RNA to put the patient’s immune system to work making viral antigens is just kind of brilliant. I hope it’s working soon, and that maybe Governor Walz gets ahead of the game this time and starts making grants to regional medical institutions so they’re ready as soon as the vaccine is available.

Yeah, and closing the bars would have been a brilliant idea, too…last month.

Coincidences!

Well, good for Clallam County (if you have no idea where that is, it’s on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. Port Angeles? Nirvana? Does that help?). They voted for Biden, and now have a 40 year winning streak in ‘predicting’ the outcome of presidential elections.

Clallam County is on quite the winning streak — one that no other county in the United States can claim.

According to the latest count on Monday from the Clallam County Auditor’s office, 50.43% of voters cast their ballot for former Vice President Joe Biden and 46.72% voted for President Donald Trump.

That means the county has picked the correct presidential winner in every race since 1980.

Going into this election cycle, Clallam County was just one of 19 counties nationwide to hold that voting record.

With just over 50% of the county’s votes going to Biden, it is now the only county in the country to have kept up such a winning streak.

The county residents don’t know how they are so good at this. I have an explanation, though: it’s chance.

40 years is just ten presidential elections. Because of the way our system works, it’s a binary choice, basically — so like a coin flip. The likelihood of calling 10 coin flips in a row is 1 in 1024. There are more than 1000 counties in the country, so I’d guess that the chance of one of them having a ten election streak is pretty good. Also the fact that it’s not really a 50:50 chance — one outcome proves to be slightly more likely after the fact — and that Clallam has a nice demographic mix, with the slightly urban Port Angeles plus all the conservative loggers and fishers, and it’s not surprising at all.

Then, of course, look what xkcd posted:

None of that will prevent Washington state journalists from descending on Clallam county in 2024.

And yet she liked him

Rebecca Watson weighs in on The Amazing Randi’s complicated legacy. Randi was probably the most charming human being I’ve ever met, and like Rebecca, I always enjoyed our moments together, but…

Perhaps it was that stubborn disbelief that led to our eventual falling-out nearly a decade ago. As one of the more prominent female skeptics, I began campaigning for the male majority in the movement to be more accepting of (or to at least to stop randomly groping and awkwardly propositioning) women. Many men pushed back, sending me rape and death threats. When a man announced on Twitter a few days prior to 2011’s TAM that he planned to “cop a feel” if he saw me, Randi refused to even bar the man from attending. I felt like it was too late to drop out, so I attended and felt awful the entire time. I didn’t go anywhere alone. It was the last time I spoke at TAM.

Privately, Randi apparently complained to mutual friends about me pushing feminism, trying to change the culture of the movement that he had fostered for the past few decades. He thought that by asking skeptics to be better, I was making the movement look worse. I suppose I was, and in the years that followed the attendance at his conference dropped and Randi’s organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation, officially blamed me for scaring women away. Randi retired from JREF later, and though there were people involved who wanted it to go on as a charitable organization, it quietly disappeared.

It also didn’t help that some (not all!) of the people Randi routinely promoted and featured in his conferences were so awful that they drove me away. Being a sexist asshole was never an obstacle to being welcomed to Randi’s big tent. Sadly, that diminished his long-term impact.

Now can we get back to doing something about the pandemic?

One distraction, as important as it may have been, is over, so now can we take the pandemic seriously? Please?

New cases are soaring here in Minnesota, and our state government seems reluctant to act.

COVID-19 is sweeping across Minnesota at an unprecedented pace, breaking records for new cases and daily deaths and raising concerns over the ability of hospitals to keep up.

The Star Tribune reports Saturday’s tally of 4,647 new cases — a figure that would have easily set a record during the first eight months of the pandemic — wasn’t even close to the biggest single-day count of the past week. For the seven-day period ending Saturday, Minnesota reported more than 25,000 new COVID-19 cases, or more than 10% of the state’s cases since March.

The Minnesota Department of Health reported another 34 deaths on Saturday, bringing the week’s total to 168, the second highest one-week count since the start of the pandemic. Hospitals, meanwhile, are scrambling to treat more COVID-19 patients even as the virus threatens to sideline more health care workers.

We really need to clamp down: shelter in place, mandatory masking, active test and trace. We are getting free testing today and tomorrow here in Morris, but there doesn’t seem to be much urgency, and people are still fairly casual. I’m on my last week of in-person labs, and then I’m locking myself down and staying home and doing everything over the internet.

I’m not shy about saying this: I’m afraid. The question is, why aren’t you?

Last 3 weeks!

The end is in sight! I’ve laid out all my lectures for this final part of my cell biology course.

  • This week: cell signaling.
  • Next week: multicellularity and cell motility.
  • Final week: cell origins.

It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.

Now that I’ve got complete plans for the remainder of the course content, I can focus on just grading, my least favorite part of teaching, which means that now on top of sky-high stress levels I get to add nonstop tedium and misery. At least class itself should be fine! Maybe I should just stop handing out assignments so the work doesn’t pile up.

Next, though, a take-home exam comes due tomorrow, and I have vowed to get it completely graded by Friday. The nightmare continues.