A golden opportunity for quacks

The threat of a pandemic creates so many ways for parasites to prosper. Take Stefanie Kelley Haines, of Eastern Oregon, who is, surprisingly, the director of clinical services for Harney District Hospital.

Stefanie Haines is director of clinical services for Harney District Hospital in Burns. Like many rural health care workers, she plays more than one role in the region’s isolated health care system. Haines owns the only fitness center in a town, which isn’t just a gym. It’s also an affiliate of The Wellness Way, a chiropractic company selling pricey lab tests to diagnose all kinds of ailments. The program also markets treatment plans like the “vaccine detox.”

On her personal Facebook page, Haines advances conspiracy theories about the debunked dangers of vaccinations, while promoting services available through the fitness center. Through memes, articles and her own words, Haines has vilified immunizations that protect millions of people from communicable diseases like measles, influenza and polio.

Before people in the U.S. started dying from the new COVID-19 disease, for which there is no vaccine, Haines told friends and followers, “the flu shot increases susceptibility to Coronavirus.”

Don’t worry about Ms Haines, though. The hospital is distancing itself from her views, but isn’t doing anything about their employee spreading misinformation.

Great. There is always a line of frauds ready to take advantage of people’s fears.

A simple genetics problem I could never put on an exam

My genetics students are learning a bit about sex linkage and modes of inheritance, so I’ve got them thinking about an entirely hypothetic problem outside of class. I’ll be interested to hear their explanations, but this is the kind of problem that would drive me nuts to try and grade. Let’s see how you all do with it.

In Guardians of the Galaxy, the assassin Gamora is bright green. Her sister Nebula is blue. 


a. Invent a genetics of skin color in her species, the Zehoberei, that explains their differences in color, using an autosomal gene and modeling it after human patterns of inheritance, and use it to predict the skin color of their parents. (Note: Thanos is purple, but he’s a different species and is their adoptive father.)


b. Now assume the trait is X-linked. Does it change your prediction for their parents? What color(s) would a hypothetical brother be?


c. A new twist: in Zehobereians, females are the heterogametic sex. What does this do to your model?

The fun part is (a), which could have all kinds of possible explanations (that’s why I couldn’t put it on an exam, the range of possibilities is huge), with the one constraint being that it has to be autosomal. I want to see some dueling discussions about how it would work, brought down to earth by the need to make a prediction about the parents.

Then (b) changes the assumptions, and forces their model to change, and (c) flips it around some more. I don’t want to grade this kind of question, I just want to see how their brains logic their way around it. It should be fun. I hope.

I also had some ideas about the inheritance of color in Minecraft sheep, but decided that was just too weird. Blending inheritance + acquired characters? Heretical. Not very instructive about Earthly rules of genetics.

Of course, it may all be moot because attendance in all of my classes is declining this semester — only half the students showed up today! I don’t know if it’s pandemic fears (no diagnosed cases in Morris), the imminence of Spring Break, or that I’m just horribly boring.

Max von Sydow is dead

He’s gone. He had some impressive roles, he had some cheesy roles, but one thing he always had was presence.

One thing that always struck me about him is that he reminded me of my great grandfather: that slight accent, the pitch of his voice, and that he was tall and physically similar (I think my great grandfather was tall, but I was also very small when I knew him). I kind of hoped I’d grow old to be like Great-Grandpa Westad, or like Max von Sydow, but I think I got too many Myers genes.

Which is scarier, spiders or the stock market?

I don’t follow the stock market at all. Nope, not interested — I have no direct personal investment, although I am sure a lot of my retirement funds may be attached to stocks of some sort. What do I know? Ask me about spiders, cephalopods, or zebrafish and I’ll respond enthusiastically, but money? I don’t have much, so it’s not on my radar.

But I do know enough to guess that “cratering” is not a word you want to see in the financial news. Probably “plunge”, “big losses”, “panic”, and “apoplectic” are not good things to hear from the grown-ups, either.

“The stock market is looking at the oil price plunge as a canary in the coal mine of a disinflationary one-two punch, driven partly by cratering demand for transportation fuels and a wanton price war among the major oil producers” that will result in big losses for U.S. and Canadian producers.

Global markets were apoplectic. Japan’s Nikkei closed down more than 5 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index shed more than 4.2 percent. European markets were tumbling more than 7 percent across the board in midday trading.

Panic pushed the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury below 0.4 percent for the first time in history Monday as investors fled for safe havens. The trajectory could be an ominous sign of a weakening economy, because a low yield can indicate a lack of confidence in economic growth. Yields decline as bond prices rise. Gold, another safe haven, was up 0.4 percent in early trading.

On top of that, Maxine Waters tells some Wells Fargo board members to resign, and…they do! Either Waters is even scarier than I thought, or Wells Fargo is more rotten than I expected and its executives know it, or both. The rats are scurrying to leave the ship.

I don’t like this subject. Can we talk about spiders instead?

Something I wish Democrats would stop doing

They’re still talking about “electability”. STFU, please. Sandersistas are saying Biden couldn’t beat Trump in the election; Bidenites keep arguing that Socialist Sanders can’t possibly win against Trump. Both are wrong.

I’ll pick on Biden for a moment, because I agree that he’s a terrible candidate, just the worst of the Democrats. He’s got baggage. He favors weak policies that don’t correct any of our systemic issues. He’s a patronizing old fool. But, and this is the important thing, Trump is worse on all counts. And if Trump was electable, then Biden is electable. I detest the thought of a Biden nomination and think he would be bad for the country, but he’s better than Trump, so I’ll vote for him and hope he doesn’t screw up so bad that there’s a Republican rebound in 2024.

If the weakest candidate we’ve got is better than the Republican candidate, build on that and beat the Republican in the fall. It’s that simple. What would be better is if Sanders sweeps the remaining primaries (it could happen!) and soars to the nomination. We could also get 150 million people to turn out for the general election and the majority write in “Elizabeth Warren” for president, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.

What isn’t so simple is figuring out why the Democratic party goes through a painful winnowing process that somehow ends up promoting the chaff rather than the wheat.

The dilemma: to fly or not to fly

My wife is currently in Longmont, Colorado. She is scheduled to fly back home in 10 days, which is the problem. Look at the ratfuckery our administration is up to with coronavirus recommendations. They just don’t care what the CDC says, and I trust the CDC far more than I do Trump/Pence.

The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.

So now Mary is considering not flying, and instead renting a car to drive back — it’s 800+ miles and 12 hours of driving. Yikes. I have concerns about that, too.

  • Maybe the CDC recommendations don’t apply to her. She’s a healthy, active 62 year old (yes, I’m a cradle-robber, and I’m not ashamed to admit it). Which also means she’s capable of the drive.
  • If she has to rent the car and return it to an airport, she’s still going to be exposed to all those diseased world travelers.
  • You may not have noticed, but this time of year has unpredictable weather. She could have to drive through a blizzard, an ice storm, or a flood.
  • She flew there, and could already be infected. She might turn into a zombie on the drive back.

I am not helped by the dithering of the incompetents in the White House. I am also not helped by the vague recommendations of the CDC; I don’t consider either of us to be elderly or physically fragile in our ability to respond to disease…although I mentioned that a high school acquaintance of ours just lost her husband to COVID-19, so maybe we are.

Indecision can have terrible consequences, and the Republicans have so thoroughly politicized what ought to be scientific decision-making that now I’m being indecisive.

I have a theory, which is mine, about getting older

Today is my birthday. Yeah, whoop-ti-doo, it’s a work day and I’m home alone and dinner is going to be rice and beans with no cake, so congratulations are not in order. Also, I’m 63, which led to my new insight.

I’m actually 3 vigorous, flighty, strong, bumbling 21 year olds trapped in one body. It explains why I’ve put on weight over the years, and they’re all kind of bummed out about being stuck in here, so they occasionally lash out, which is why my bones ache. It’s a satisfying theory which explains many phenomena.

So now I just need to figure out how to reconcile these three (who I’ve named Chad, Dexter, and Evil Dexter, by the way) to their existence as roommates in a co-op with really strict rules and no escape clause. Things might get better next year at this time when it’ll be three young men and a new one-year-old baby and we can start negotiating the sit-com rights, but until then I’ve got to keep these rambunctious wastrels occupied. Any suggestions?

If it helps, I spent my first 21st birthday in my dorm room, studying for a biochemistry final the next day. That’s what 21 year olds do, right?

Spiders gettin’ fat

I put some more spider photos on my Patreon account — last time I neglected to mention that I also post some on Instagram, where they are free and you don’t even need an instagram account to see them.

I fed everyone big ol’ waxworms yesterday, and today they’ve been turned into big ol’ spider bellies. The ones I photographed are all new additions, spiders that were born here in my lab as tiny little spiderlings, and have now been successfully raised to pulchritudinous maturity.

How many times must Maher show his stripes before he’s seen for what he is?

I knew there was a good reason I long ago stopped watching Bill Maher. His latest: furiously defending Tweety.

Maher claimed that all Chris Matthews did was make a poor “analogy” when he compared Bernie Sanders, a Jew, to the Nazis (“I hope the victims got some closure,” the comic sarcastically cracked); that Matthews was basically branded a “Klansman” for mixing up Jaime Harrison and Tim Scott, two African-American politicians; and that people overreacted to Matthews being “mean” to Elizabeth Warren when he pressed her on why people should believe Mike Bloomberg’s female accusers over the billionaire himself.

And then things got really ugly, as the HBO host targeted Laura Bassett, who accused Matthews of sexually harassing her when she was a guest on his program.

Isn’t it astonishing how being sexually harassed makes you a target again, if you’re forthright enough to tell others the truth? And how dinosaurs like Maher crawl out of the swamp to declare that he did nothing wrong?

According to Maher, Matthews “said some things that are kind of creepy to women,” continuing, “You know, I just, guys are married for a million years, they want to flirt for two seconds. He said to somebody, Laura Bassett, four years ago, she’s in makeup, he said, ‘Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?’ Yes, it is creepy. She said, ‘I was afraid to name him at the time out of fear of retaliation. I’m not afraid anymore.’ Thank you, Rosa Parks. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ! I guess my question is: Do you wonder how Democrats lose?”

I’ll tell you why Democrats lose: because they refuse to stand up for any robust principles of ethical behavior, favoring expediency over everything. Because “liberals” allow any old fraud, like Maher, to pretend to be the standard bearer for reason and virtue.

Then, every week, he brings in a goon squad of terrible conservatives with the pretense of balance.

One of his roundtable guests, the anti-#MeToo writer Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, proceeded to further mock Bassett, saying of her, “How fragile can one woman be?” and insinuating that she was only booked on Matthews’ show because “she probably looked good on camera.”

With that, Maher chimed in: “Is she a compliment-victim or a compliment-survivor?”

Enough already. Maher is just a horrible faux-liberal shit-stirrer who provides a megaphone for even worse people. He belongs on Fox News.