If the virus were the size of dinosaurs, maybe people would appreciate the danger

This story is a bit on the nose.

Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month shutdown of the park. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, even though the velociraptors are still on the loose, we will be opening Jurassic Park back up to the public!

I mean, it really hammers on the comparison. You can’t miss it. No one will accuse it of subtlety.

As some of you know, Dr. Ian Malcolm, our lead safety consultant, had recommended that we wait until the velociraptors have been located and contained before reopening the park, so he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the news. I believe his exact words were “you were so preoccupied with whether you could reopen the park, you didn’t stop to think whether you should.” Talk about a guy on a high horse.

That said, you’ll be pleased to know that, rather than double down on our containment efforts, we’ve decided to dissolve the velociraptor containment task force altogether, and focus instead on how we can get people back into the park as quickly as possible. So rather than concentrating on so-called life-saving measures like “staying in designated safe areas” or “masking your scent,” we’ll be focusing on the details that will get our customers really excited, like a wider selection of fun hats, a pterodactyl-shaped gondola ride to the top of the island, and a brand new Gordon Ramsay designed menu at the Cretaceous Cafe.

Unfortunately, I find the thought of teeny-tiny invisible viruses flourishing in almost invisible droplets of water in your breath to be far more terrifying than dog-sized reptiles with pointy sharp teeth. I’d rather the streets were overrun with Cretaceous carnivores — they’d be much more manageable, and the first people they’d eat are those assholes out protesting about stay-at-home orders.

Jacob Wohl rides again!

Lung & oral cancers are nature’s way of cleaning out the barn.

Tell me if this strategy sounds familiar.

  1. Pick a target, any target, as long as the Trumpkins hate ’em.
  2. Pay a non-credible source to make up an unlikely story of sexual malfeasance.
  3. Hold a press conference in which the story palpably unravels.
  4. Profit!

That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and Warren, and their balloons collapsed so fast they sounded like a fast wet fart. Would you believe Wohl and Burkman have done it again? Only you may not have heard about it because the press doesn’t believe them anymore.

  1. They tried to discredit Anthony Fauci.
  2. They found a woman, Diana Andrade AKA Diana Rodriguez, willing to make up a story about Fauci.

    “He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair. He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs,” Rodriguez wrote of her fictional meeting with Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. After detailing some ineffective hotel bed wrestling and managing to flee with her honor intact, Rodriguez closed with the statement, “Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story.”

  3. They tried to recruit the media to report on the story. They mostly failed. Andrade later wrote to journalists confessing that she’d been paid.

    And that would have been that—until Saturday’s email, which included Andrade telling me, “The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” taken when they were romantically involved. Also, that Wohl and Burkman “had me do something like this…back in January.”

  4. I fail to see what they gain from this nonsense. Does anyone believe anything they have to say any more?

To put the frosting on the cake, though, Andrade called Wohl and Burkman to express her unhappiness with her role, and most wonderfully, recorded the entire call, so we get to see the two con artists rationalizing their lies. It’s something.

“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”

Andrade counters that he and Wohl are not taking COVID-19 seriously. “It’s not just any virus. I mean, it’s a huge deal….I think you guys think it’s something made up, and it’s not.”

“Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often,” Burkman counters. “How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it’s real, it’s a positive thing, for God’s sake.”

“So, what? Survival of the fittest?” Andrade asks, a bit more pique in her voice. (The sense you are dealing with people who have an enthusiasm for eugenics can do that.) But Wohl’s not having it.

“Diana, look, can you just do this for me?” he says. “Can you just keep your mouth shut and just…just do it for me.”

Uh-oh. They said the quiet part of the Republican strategy out loud. It’s OK if the virus kills 400,000 people, because half of them are old and the other half are “the bottom of society”.

They don’t seem to have noticed that they themselves are the dregs.

Can we petition to have everyone who says the word “god” punished?

Like Minneapolis, the city of Mississauga is allowing mosques to broadcast the call to prayer during Ramadan, which seems reasonable, since 12% of the population is Muslim. The only problem is that some people are objecting, for bogus reasons.

An open letter attached to three petitions, two of them hosted on Change.org, calls on Mississauga to reverse the decision, arguing that broadcasting the Islamic call to prayer amounts to a “violation of human rights.”

“Those who would like to celebrate religious holidays should be allowed to do so without infringing on the rights of others,” the letter said.

It also suggests that hearing the Islamic call to prayer would trigger PTSD in soldiers who served for Canada in the Middle East. (Veteran Affairs Canada didn’t answer if any soldiers actually experience PTSD from hearing prayers but said any personnel needing help can reach out to them.)

I don’t get the argument that public religious practices are a violation of human rights. I am offended by the erection of churches all over my town; I can’t walk to the grocery store without passing 3 churches. Have my rights been violated? Hell no. If that’s a violation, that someone could argue that putting a giant spider outside my door for Halloween was violating their rights.

The PTSD argument needs more consideration, but is hard to take seriously in the absence of any individuals who are actually complaining about the problem. It also makes me wonder about the actual root of the problem: soldiers who were sent to Islamic countries to attack Muslims now get to come home and complain about Muslims because they acquired an aversion to the culture while they were bombing it? OK, PTSD is real and irrational, but I don’t think you get to blame the victims of a military operation for your problems. These soldiers, if they exist, should get help for their condition, but putting the problem on the shoulders of Muslim citizens is inappropriate.

And change.org? Really? Once upon a time that site seemed like a good idea, but it has become a morass of petitions, petitions, petitions, all of them destined to be ignored, and they have diluted what influence they might have once had to an absurd degree. Does anyone bother to read those petitions anywhere?

Will no one point out that hosting rogue mercenary outfits is bad?

“Venezuela!” is the reflexive argument of the right-wingers against socialism, so it’s not surprising that a cocky gang of American thugs would decide they could just swagger in and topple the Venezuelan government — 62 stupid mercenaries against a nation of 28 million people. They were so arrogant that the head of the mercenary organization (tell me again why we tolerate these assholes?) tweeted proudly at Donald Trump about it as the military operation began.

Why? The invasion was bonkers and criminal, why would you brag about it as your men were attempting an illegal coup against a foreign nation? The whole thing was unprofessional and incompetent, not to mention an unprovoked act of militarism. All the shrieking about “Socialism!” on the US right seems to have convinced the people behind this nonsense that the people of Venezuela would welcome them with parades, rose petals, and delirious declarations of “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!” in the same way they fantasized about the invasion of Iraq. Only they encountered something very different (but the same as they saw in Iraq).

“They came to Venezuela thinking the people would greet them like some kind of Rambos, with applause,” Maduro said on Wednesday. “But the Venezuelan people … captured them, tied them up, and the police had to intervene so there were no acts of violence against them.”

No sympathy for this gang of bumbling clowns

Maduro is not a good guy, just another authoritarian. But imagine if some other nation landed 60 mercenaries on the Potomac, intending to march on Washington DC and ‘liberate’ our country from the dictatorship of Trump. Some of us might think the general idea of arresting Trump is great, but would object to the extra-legal way it was being done, and would argue that this would do nothing to change the citizenry; others would harden in their attitudes and strengthen their support for our president, and it would push the whole country farther down the road to a dictatorship, even if it succeeded (which it wouldn’t). The whole operation was stupid and misguided and criminal.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is trying to walk a tightrope, working hard to avoid saying anything harsh about the mercenary invasion.

Come on, Joe. No malarkey, remember? It’s not hard to flat-out condemn the idiots behind Silvercorp, rejecting this kind of flagrant anti-democratic militarism. That’s what we ought to be doing. Not saying the US should do everything in their power to ‘rescue’ that American jerks now imprisoned in Venezuela, but recognizing that they are dangerous, armed criminals who ought to be tried by the government of the country they tried to overthrow. You may not like Maduro, as I don’t much care for him, but there are legitimate, democratic ways to depose him, just as there are legitimate, democratic ways to depose Trump. I hope.

Interviewed by Democracy Now! early on Wednesday, economist and foreign policy expert Jeffrey Sachs, who directs the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and Professor Miguel Tinker Salas of Pomona College discussed what they both agree is the dangerous and counterproductive agenda that leaders like Trump, Bolten, Biden, and Pelosi are now pushing in Venezuela.

“What’s so stupid about these American policies, these neocon policies,” said Sachs, “is they do create disaster, but they don’t achieve even the political goals of these nasty people like Bolton. It’s not as if they’re effective and nasty; they’re completely ineffective and totally nasty at the same time.”

While acknowledging that Maduro has certainly made mistakes and legitimate criticisms of his government exist, Tinker Salas said the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America—not to mention elsewhere in the world— shows overthrowing governments in this manner “doesn’t produce the change that most people want. And what it does is it aggravates conditions for the majority of the population.”

Sachs—who last week released a detailed study along with economist Mark Weisbrot on the devastating impact that U.S.-imposed sanctions have had on the Venezuelan economy—added that people backing Guaidó and the coup effort are really just embracing “normal U.S. right-wing foreign policy, nothing different.”

Nothing new here. Attacking South and Central American nations with deniable squads of mercenary thugs has historically been the standard way the United States keeps those nations under control. It’s too bad we’re not going to be able to vote for a party in November that treats our brothers and sisters to the south as equals.

It’s just astounding to me that our politicians pussy-foot around a blatant disregard for international law so casually.

The ‘elites’ will be fine, the merely competent will suffer

We sometimes speak of the American university, as if it is all one thing, where you’ll attend and be pampered for four years and pop out at graduation to a job and a well-paid career. Corey Robin exposes the inequities of the university system by comparing City University of New York, a massive public university, to the Ivy League colleges.

For decades, a handful of boutique colleges and powerhouse universities have served as emblems of our system of higher education. If they are not the focus of discussion, they are the subtext, shaping our assumptions about the typical campus experience. This has remained true during the pandemic. The question of reopening has produced dozens of proposals, but most of them are tenable only for schools like Brown; they don’t obtain in the context of Brooklyn College. The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a more equal society. It’s time for a similar conversation about the academy.

In academia, as in the rest of society, a combination of public and private actors directs wealth to those who need it least. While cuny struggles to survive decades of budget cuts—and faces, in the pandemic, the possibility of even more—donors lavish elite colleges and universities with gifts of millions, even billions, of dollars. Sometimes these donations fund opportunities for low-income students, but mostly they serve as tax-deductible transfers to rich, private institutions, depriving the public of much-needed revenue. What taxes federal and state governments do collect may be returned to those institutions in the form of hefty grants and contracts, which help fund operating budgets that Brooklyn College can only dream of. This is the song of culture in our society. The bass line is wealth and profit; the melody is diversity and opportunity.

It seems that massive endowments only get more massive year after year, while the smaller public colleges are reduced to begging for scraps from state governments. We’re expected to do just as much as universities swimming in money from wealthy alumni, for less, with less support and less press.

There’s also a significant distinction: rich people send their kids to the already-rich private universities; everyone sends their kids to the community colleges, the state universities, the small public colleges. When you pretend an Ivy League college is representative, and when you starve the state-funded institutions, you are making the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer. You are also killing a major engine of class mobility, which I sometimes suspect is the actual purpose.

Yet, for all the talk of the poor and students of color at the Ivy League, the real institutions of mobility in the United States are underfunded public universities. Paxson [Brown University president and the deputy chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, because that’s the kind of person who ends up running wealthy universities] may believe that “a university campus is a microcosm of any major city in the U.S.,” as she told NPR, but cuny is no microcosm. With nearly two hundred and seventy-five thousand students and forty-five thousand staff—a population larger than that of many American cities—it is what the Latin root of the word “university” tells us higher education should be: the entire, the whole. More than seventy-five per cent of our undergraduate students are nonwhite. Sixty-one per cent receive Pell Grants, and the same percentage have parents who did not graduate from college. At City College and Baruch College, seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students, respectively, start out in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles. For hundreds of thousands of working-class students, in other words, a cash-starved public university is their gateway to the middle or upper-middle class.

In my career, I’ve been educated at state universities and only taught a state universities. I’ve visited the famous big name schools, like Princeton and UPenn and Yale, and mainly been struck by the disparities in privilege, not any differences in quality of content. We have to work harder in state colleges, and even harder in community colleges, but we bring the same information to the students, and the same opportunities. The only advantage to the expensive private schools is the opportunity to mingle with other people who can afford them — you don’t learn more, if that’s what you’re after, you just get to make connections with other spoiled rich kids.

What worries me now is that I see state legislatures, which are always keen to take a butcher knife to education at all levels, seeing the pandemic and economic failure as a reason to cut education to the bone, which is incredibly short-sighted, fails to see the need for building long-term investment in the human infrastructure of our society, and is going to hit the poorest population, the people who have the most to gain, hardest, while the wealthy institutions are unaffected. The economic inequities in the US have been expanding for a long time, and are a source of inefficiency and corruption already, and they’re just going to grow further in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Boy, the extinction spiral is a wild and depressing ride.

Michelle Malkin still has a fanbase? And it’s enhanced by including Milo?

Milo Yawannapissoff and Michelle Malkin have been collaborating, and the results are even more awful than you can probably imagine. They decided to work together to create an “America First” reading list for their followers. Just from their choice of subject you can tell it’s going to be a collection of racists’ greatest hits.

So what’s on it? Lots of Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza, obscure racist tracts and not so obscure racist fiction, like The Turner Diaries, Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Vox Day, and categorized as “U.S. politics, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The cherry on top? They include The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They also toss in a scattering of genuine Western classics like The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy, but really, they’re only there to put a shiny sugary glaze on the pile of shit they think are valuable contributions to the canon. It’s also rather demeaning to lump A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome.

They provide summary blurbs to go with the books. The Iliad is “What it’s like to be around an unstoppable killing machine.” Mein Kampf is “History’s most demented autodidact sets out his political vision.” Kevin MacDonald’s deeply racist and anti-semitic book, The Culture of Critique, is a “Highly controversial historical survey of the roots of anti-semitism”.

Say what you will about the classic Western canon of literature — it is full of Old Dead White Men — but I don’t think that a compilation of recent racist propaganda and fleeting pop culture nonsense is an improvement, especially when it’s driven by a blatant far-right conservative agenda, and written by a pair of not-very-bright boobs.

Need to visit my doctor more often

I’m back from my doctor’s visit! It was nothing but good news. The outside walls of the clinic are covered with swarms of chironomid midges!

Everywhere I looked, there they were, clinging to the brickwork. This is one big buffet for spiders that I’ll have to check again later, but I didn’t see many today — just one lone jumping spider hanging about. There has to be more.

Oh, yeah, I’m also fine.

I have a doctor’s appointment today?

I was scheduled to get a routine physical a while back, cancelled for obvious reasons, and last week Stevens County Medical Center called me to come in for it today, which feels odd. I guess our local clinic has not been overwhelmed — there have been zero reported cases of COVID-19 in Stevens County, perhaps because the closure of the university meant we had a net outflow of residents as the pandemic hit — but I’m a little nervous about visiting a place that could be a disease vector.

Also, I was called in on this specific day because it is “reserved for senior citizens”. What? But I’m a young buckaroo! Oh, well. I guess they’re just doing what they must to separate susceptible populations, so I’m not going to complain. I’m also thrilled at the possibility I might actually talk to a human being face-to-face, something I haven’t done in a month and a half.

Behold! The Face of God!

I’ve always wondered what he looked like.

You may be somewhat disappointed. You haven’t yet seen the mind behind that rather ordinary face, though, which will leave you a lot disappointed.

A Republican Ohio state representative cited his religious beliefs to explain why he would not wear a mask as recommended by Gov. Mike DeWine (R) to help limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“This is not the entire world,” state Rep. Nino Vitale wrote in a lengthy Facebook post on Monday morning. “This is the greatest nation on earth founded on Judeo-Christian Principles.”

“One of those principles is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. That image is seen the most by our face. I will not wear a mask,” he continued.

  • This is not the greatest nation on earth — we are one among many, and we need to throw out these politicians who preach American exceptionalism. This unfounded arrogance hinders any effort to make the country better.

  • We were not founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which is not even a thing. We are a secular nation. Or should be. Kick out these religious fanatics.

  • It’s a rather limiting conception of the nature of the hypothetical supreme being of the universe to imagine he is an anthropoid ape with a human face, or even a gaseous vertebrate of some kind, as Haeckel put it. Nino Vitale is some kind of shallow Biblical literalist, I guess. We should also evict those. They aren’t smart enough to govern.

  • I hope he is consistent in his beliefs to the point where if he comes down with COVID-19 or any other respiratory disease that he refuses to be intubated or to wear a mask; if he needs surgery he should do it without any anesthetic gas or oxygen. I want him to go to his maker with his bare face shining splendidly.

Vitale also doesn’t understand the data.

“This is not based on logic, this is based on fear and propaganda and every statistical, data driven study done in the last 2 weeks says death counts are low, the models were wrong, and this is more like the flu,” he continued.

Wrong on all counts. The data says we’ve been underestimating the effects, due to the lack of available testing, and that it isn’t anything like the flu.

It does not fill me with confidence that our government is packed with ignorant religious zealots who want to make policy counter to the evidence. It’s no wonder this country is screwed.