It’s so vindicating to see the kinds of people who oppose simple rules for public health

An anti-vaxxer got arrested in Idaho. She had organized an act of defiance, leading a mob of similarly inclined parents and their unfortunate children to take over a closed playground, ignoring social distancing rules, and then, as we’ve come to expect from a flock of Karens, sternly arguing with the police who came to shoo them away. “Officer, you don’t want to do that,” they karened karenly, as the police lost patience with her refusals. Of course, being a white woman doing stupid things, she didn’t have to worry — she was gently handcuffed and led away, rather than getting the usual stranglehold, tased, and/or shot routine she would have experienced if she were a different color. I wish the police would deal with everyone as politely and deferentially as they did Sara Brady.

It’s disturbing to see someone who is fervently anti-vaccination shepherding so many kids around. There is no vaccine for the coronavirus, but there are other childhood diseases about, and this anti-science mother seems determined to flout even the simplest restrictions to make sure her kids get to wallow in everything.

I’m no fan of the cops, but even I am feeling a little sympathy for the officers who were enforcing the closure of the park, because now Ammon Bundy and his gang are harassing the police who were involved. He’s also complaining about Governor Brad Little for all the wrong reasons — Little is an unpleasant transphobe, but in this one case he’s in the right, enforcing a stay-at-home order for his state that the right-wing loons like Brady and Bundy are eager to violate.

Cronyism

Our Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, who oversees the CDC and FDA, responded to the need for focus on COVID-19 by…looking around and picking an old pal. Who previously ran a labradoodle breeding business.

Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”

He has absolutely no qualifications for running a national response to a public health crisis.

Harrison, 37, was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields. In 2006, he joined HHS in a one-year stint as a “Confidential Assistant” to Azar, who was then deputy secretary. He also had posts working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the Department of Defense and a Washington public relations company.

Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.

I work at a state-funded institution. There are so many rules on hiring…I can’t just tap on old college chum on the shoulder and say, “Hey, we need someone to teach biochemistry. Would you like to…?” and then they say “But I work in construction!” and I tell them “Wing it, I’m sure you could do it” and fill out all the paperwork to get them a salary and the university rubber stamps it and next thing you know, we’ve got some seat-warmer running our biochem class by having the students sit and watch episodes of “Planet Earth” on a VCR. That’s what this feels like.

Instead, we convened a committee, wrote a detailed description of required qualifications, met with HR to get the ground rules explained to us, advertised the position nationally, screened a hundred applications, had phone interviews with 10, brought 3 to campus for a job/teaching talk, argued over the choices, and finally, after months of work, got an agreeable candidate, so we could submit paperwork to our division chair, who passed it on to the chancellor of our university, who got the approval of the president of the university and all its branch campuses, which meant we could finally put this person to work. All that, to hire one professor at a small liberal arts university in rural Minnesota.

We don’t put anywhere close to that much effort in selecting the national coordinator of our pandemic response? This is a problem. This is how idiots get placed in positions of power and influence when there is no process and no required minimal qualifications for an important job.

I do kind of wonder what Brian Harrison honestly feels about this appointment. I have more qualifications than he does — at least I have a biology degree — and if Alex Azar had mysteriously asked me to take on this job, I would have turned him down flat and said he needed to get someone with far more experience in public health than I do. Does the labradoodle breeder now sit in his office wondering how the hell he got there and having no clue how to start, who to contact, how to prioritize critical tasks with no knowledge about what any of the tasks are? Or is he so Dunning-Kruegered that he’s supremely confident that he can fix things, and is more happy that he can brag to his friends and family about how important he is?

No, really, if I suddenly swapped places with Brian Harrison I’d be having a total nervous breakdown right now, and trying desperately to find some better person to take my place. But then, I’ve never bred labradoodles.

Shocking: Muslim call to prayer broadcast on the streets of Minneapolis!

It’s true! The Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque will be playing the adhan five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. You may recall that that was the Minneapolis neighborhood visited by Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer in their quest to find the Muslim terrorists lurking there.

The Muslim call to prayer will be broadcast the traditional five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, beginning with the start of Ramadan this week and continuing through the end of the religious holiday in May.

I checked out a few sites where this news was being reported. There’s a lot of Jesus-freaking going on, but I thought this comment merited my attention.

We need to shut this down. Where are all the “principled atheists” and “skeptical scientists” to oppose this? They’ll sure put up a fuss if there’s a cross outside or a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse. Cricket noises when the city pays* for loudspeakers to blast Muslim propaganda into neighborhoods.

He put the asterisk there because there isn’t actually any sign that the city paid for it, he just thinks they did. But hey! “Principled atheist.” “Skeptical scientist.” He might as well have written by name in there, because that’s me, and I do have a response.

I titled this “shocking” because the story implies that Muslim communities were not allowed to make the call to prayer before this. That’s just wrong! The Christian believers are always ringing bells and singing Christian carols between October and January and inviting people to church without a single qualm. But Muslims haven’t been allowed to do the same for their religion? Why? If the Catholic church down the street from me can ring their bells multiple times a day on Sundays, why can’t the muezzins do likewise for their faith, within the limits of noise ordnances? If singing “God is Great” and “There is no God but God” is propaganda, then so is saying “Jesus is Lord”, and you can’t ban one without banning the other.

Freedom of religion means you can’t impose your religion on me, and I can’t force my godlessness on you, and that all religions and non-religions ought to be treated equally. I have no problem with this practice, any more than I complain about the nearby Catholic church. I’d go further and say we shouldn’t disallow it once Ramadan is over, within any limits on frequency and volume that must be equally applied to all churches as well. Also, to me, if ever the urge strikes me to go outside and bang pots and shake my fist at the sky and yell about religions being false.

It’s especially good to allow this practice if it makes Jacob Wohl pee his pants.

Minnesota has its own nest of plague profiteers!

A Minnesota resident, Ben Dorr, takes credit for the recent surge of nitwits protesting in regional state capitals. The article calls him an “activist”, but a more accurate term would be “parasite”.

Amid the honking cars and the chants of “USA, USA,” the group’s leader, Ben Dorr, took credit for helping draw supporters to the rally.

“We’re done being quarantined, we’re done having our freedoms taken,” said Dorr. “It’s time to open up America.”

Across the country, Dorr and his older brothers, Chris and Aaron, have long opposed Republican legislators for not being conservative enough on issues ranging from guns to abortion. Their detractors say they spread disinformation to sow confusion among voters.

That’s right, this is not a new thing. The Dorrs are fanatical gun fondlers, and likewise fanatical anti-abortionists. If there’s a right wing mania about anything, the Dorrs will crank it up to 11 and monetize it.

Based on publicly available tax documents, the Dorrs’ efforts in Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio have raised more than $2.9 million since 2013, with at least a third of it going to a direct mail printing company in Iowa owned by the Dorr family.

This is how they make money, and quite a bit of it, by making swarms of Facebook groups and using them to whip the far right into a froth and compel them to make donations. They’re all about god, guns, and domination over womankind. Primarily, though, they are masters of Facebook, and have figured out the strategies behind the media and use it to recruit followers and radicalize them and empty their pockets.

Jeez, but I despise Facebook.

On the Reopen Minnesota page, which has 22,000 followers, members have likened coronavirus to the flu (coronavirus is more deadly), have questioned the science of wearing masks, even though it’s recommended by public health officials in Trump’s administration, and suggested that death rate numbers are being inflated to scare people into compliance.

They also like to oppose education and keep people ignorant. There’s more profit in stupid people, you know. Isn’t it amazing how Facebook has turned the internet into a tool for ignorance?

Aaron, Chris and Ben Dorr’s father Paul is also well known for fighting public school referendums in Iowa and in the Midwest. Motivated by his belief that children should be home-schooled or within a religious community, he’s also created Facebook pages, websites and videos to make his case.

One thing that’s amusing about them is that the Minnesota Republicans hate them with a passion, because they routinely take political positions so far to the right of the Republicans, and then target Republicans as milktoast wimps. They created a website to specifically explain that the Dorrs are scammers. “Right now, Senate Republicans are the only thing stopping Democrats from passing radical gun control”…how dare the Dorrs criticize us for not being radical enough?

They’re also fake activists. They talk the wild and crazy talk, but they don’t walk the wild and crazy walk — they just amble back to their computers to lie and beg for more money.

While Ben and his brother Chris are registered as lobbyists, Daudt said they do little to advance issues at the Capitol or support legislators during campaign season.

He recalled seeing Ben Dorr filming a video on the Capitol steps several years ago:

“He was just going on and on about how he’s going to turn around right now and go to so-and-so’s office and I’m not going to leave until they take a meeting with me,” Daudt said. “Then they cut the video … and they just wandered off to their vehicles.”

“They are definitely misleading people to make people think they are involved and engaged here,” Daudt said.

And that’s the kind of person behind the current wave of phony protests. There are exploiters out there who can mobilize the fringe to do stupid things that get their faces on the news.

There are more important things than living?

According to the Lt. Governor of Texas, anyway.

I’d like him to expand further on that line of thinking, beyond just vague platitudes about “saving the country”. Is allowing a large fraction of the country to die compatible with “saving the country”? He emphasizes “opening the markets” — are markets more important than the people in them?

I think he means it is less important that the poors should die, than that his wealthy friends should be compelled to make less money.

We really have to kill the Republican party.

Tighten your belts!

I knew this would be coming. We just got an email from our university asking us to respond to a suggestion to temporarily reduce faculty salaries. So, at the same time we’re expected to work even harder to maintain our commitments, we’re also asked to take a pay cut.

We must be thoughtful, fair, and equitable as we consider financial strategies, and we believe that a temporary reduction in the compensation for faculty must be considered. The FCC [Faculty Consultative Committee] is mindful of the extensive workloads and expectations put on faculty, and that many of us are stretched thin by our obligations and our own financial circumstances, but we are also mindful of those whose employment is threatened. We also support including in the proposal a sliding scale, reflecting the diverse circumstances of different categories of faculty, which is consistent with the requirement that any temporary reduction be “allocated to faculty in accordance with a mathematical formula or similar device.”

OK, I’m willing to accept a pay cut in order to prevent the university from simply firing any of my colleagues (which is partly a selfish decision on my part, because losing anyone would mean I’d have to work harder). I’m missing some information here, though.

  • What “mathematical formula”? That sounds sciencey, but a mathematical formula could be anything. Be specific.
  • I notice that all of the cuts are to faculty pay. I’d be much more supportive if the administration led by example and told us first what kind of salary reduction they’re taking right now.

Interestingly, they also note in their letter that the cuts only apply to non-union faculty. Do we now have an incentive to unionize, finally? If I were a member of a union that similarly agreed to temporary pay reductions, at least I’d be satisfied that I was represented by people who were making choices to benefit me and my peers. As it is, our watchdogs for our self-interests are…the administration.

Distract yourselves with pretty moving pictures!

In news to help us drag ourselves out of the slough of despond, the Science Museum of Minnesota is closed to the public. Wait, no, that’s badly phrased — that’s not the good news. The good news is that the Science Museum of Minnesota is making their big screen science movies freely available to the public. Right now, you can just click and watch “Dinosaurs Alive!” and “Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs” and “Wild Ocean” on your computer screen.

Your computer screen is probably not a giant dome that you view in front of and above you from a reclining chair, so when the museum reopens you might want to book a visit to get the full experience and thank them for providing the service.

P.S. I’ve seen the dinosaur one, it’ll keep kids’ attention for a while. I’m going to watch “Wild Ocean” myself this afternoon, as a distraction from grading.