Greetings from the Quinault nation!

I’ve arrived on the Pacific coast to my little struggle. The best internet connection I’ve found is at the Quinault beach resort and casino, so I’m going to try and teach my class at 1:00 Central time from here. I just have to find a quiet (or relatively quiet) spot to talk cell biology for an hour.

Not your typical classroom setting

Then this afternoon we’re off to the Olympic mountains for a bit.

Apres moi le deluge

It’s been dry and miserable all summer here, my lawn is dead, the spiders are panting for a drop to drink, and I arrive at the Minneapolis airport to fly away, and what happens? The skies rip open, thunder and lightning, and everything is drenched. It’s my parting gift to Minnesota, I guess. Don’t worry, I’ll be back on Sunday to resume the desertification.

One thing I should mention on my way out the door is that I’m going to a corner of the US where internet service is spotty. We’re staying at a hotel that assured us they do have wifi, but I’m not sure I believe them, and it’s a little bit of a worry, since I have to teach a class over Zoom every morning. It’s a lesser concern, but if your comment gets hung up in the pending queue, it might be a little while before I can clear it.

Now I have to go get wet, I think. I may step off the plane at Sea-Tac and instantly dessicate the entire Pacific Northwest.

More mature and sensible than many adults

This is my granddaughter, Iliana. She is almost three.

Yesterday, she went on an adventure. She and her mother flew in an airplane from Minneapolis to Sea-Tac, and then she took a bus to the train station, and a train to Seattle, and another bus to her hotel. It was a long day of traveling.

She wore her facemask all the way, all day long. She didn’t fuss, didn’t shed one tear, and was still cheerful and enthusiastic and excited when they stopped for the night. The mask is just something she has to do when indoors with groups of people, and it doesn’t bother her in the least, and certainly doesn’t interfere with any fun.

Be like Iliana.

I’m going to try. I’ll be following in her footsteps today, and we’ll meet up tomorrow. I’ll try hard to be just as thrilled and not cry as Iliana.

Can schadenfreude kill you?

I’m asking for myself. I’m a bit dizzy and out of breath for all the laughing at the death of a human being, and I feel a little ashamed of that. Phil Valentine, a conservative talk radio host, has died of COVID-19. His brother has spoken up about his illness.

Valentine’s brother, Mark Valentine, also spoke on the radio after his brother’s condition began to deteriorate, saying that Valentine was, “regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination,” according to AP. “For those listening, I know if he were able to tell you this, he would tell you, ‘Go get vaccinated. Quit worrying about the politics. Quit worrying about all the conspiracy theories.'”

Wait a minute…”regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination”? He wasn’t an advocate at all! He used his platform to spread misinformation and actively argued that people shouldn’t be vaccinated.

Prior to his diagnosis, Valentine voiced skepticism about the coronavirus vaccines.

In December of 2020 he tweeted “I have a very low risk of A) Getting COVID and B) dying of it if I do. Why would I risk getting a heart attack or paralysis by getting the vaccine?”

He also recorded a parody song titled “Vaxman,” which mocked the vaccine, according to WTVF.

Prior to his hospitalization, Valentine said on the radio that he was “taking vitamin D like crazy” and that a doctor agreed to prescribe him an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said not to take the medication to treat or prevent COVID-19.

Oh well, there’s the problem. He was a conservative radio talk show host and he was taking a drug that kills worms, botfly larvae, and other parasites. He poisoned himself!

When this pandemic is over, if it ends, I predict that all these rabid anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, the ones who survive anyway, are going to come out and piously belittle their own actions, claiming that they just regret being a weak advocate of all the things they right now strongly oppose.

But seriously, don’t drink horse de-wormer or sheep drench. People who resisted getting the vaccine because their body is a temple and they were not going to taint it with untested, unholy Science are instead rushing out to ingest toxic agricultural chemicals.

I wonder if H. Scott Apley now regrets that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of vaccination. He’s the Texas Republican who was quite vociferously against anything to do with stopping the pandemic.

Apley is a staunch conservative and devout Christian. But based on his social media activity, Apley didn’t believe COVID was going to affect him or his family.

In May, Apley posted an invitation for a “mask burning” being held at a bar in Cincinnati, commenting, “I wish I lived in the area!” A couple of weeks earlier, he posted a news article about giveaways and incentives meant to encourage people to get vaccinated, writing, “Disgusting.” Apley also railed against so-called vaccine passports, which restrict high-risk activities, such as indoor dining, to the fully vaccinated.

Recently, he suggested that mask mandates in Germany were akin to Nazism. And when former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen celebrated good news this spring about the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy, a seemingly outraged Apley called her “an absolute enemy of a free people.”

Ooops, he regrets nothing, because he is dead now of COVID-19.

Students are smarter than the administrators give them credit for

The FDA is about to approve the Pfizer vaccine, which is good news. The timid beancounters who run this place had announced that they were just waiting for that final bureaucratic hurdle was cleared to declare that vaccination was required to enroll, a silly piece of posing by a bunch of people who have all been vaccinated for weeks to months already. We were supposed to wait for a box to be ticked on a form before making common sense requirements to protect student health? That’s nuts. It’s also been frustrating.

Other universities have already been requiring it, without that legalistic seal of approval, like U-Va. Here’s what I found interesting in that story:

The campus unveiled its vaccine mandate in May and the overwhelming majority of the campus is in compliance, officials said. More than 96 percent of U-Va. students are vaccinated against the coronavirus and 335 students with religious and medical exemptions have been granted permanent waivers, officials said.

An additional 184 temporary waivers were granted to students who have had trouble getting vaccinated but plan to get their shots upon arriving to campus.

Less than 1 percent of students enrolled — or 238 students — are not in compliance, “but only 49 of those students had actually selected courses, meaning that a good number of the remaining 189 may not have been planning to return to the university this fall at all, regardless of our vaccination policy,” said Brian Coy, a school spokesman.

First, a religious exemption? Why? Prayer is not protection. Piety is not an excuse to be a superspreader. I support the medical exemption — some students are immuno-challenged, for instance — but anything else is pandering nonsense.

But secondly, look at those numbers. While the administration has been wringing their hands and moaning about how we shouldn’t impose barriers to students coming to campus, the students have been smart and sensible and getting off their butts and getting vaccinated as soon as they could. I’m confident that UMM students are just as competent as U-Va students, and we’re going to find next week, when classes start, that the overwhelming majority are going to want the precautions, like masking and vaccine requirements, so they can protect their health while getting the education they need. I suspect the hesitation from on high is driven entirely by Republican assholes in the legislature with power over our budgets.

That peculiar plural

There’s a quirk in creationist talk that has long been a tell. The say “evidences” instead of “evidence”, despite the fact that “evidence” is already plural. It’s not a big deal — Doug Theobald documented cases where serious scholars also used “evidences” — it’s just an odd affectation, maybe a holdover from theological writings, but it’s useful when you hear it because it’s a quick clue that you’re dealing with someone with an unusual background. Eugenie Scott even claimed “The only people who use ‘evidences’ (plural) are creationists or people who have spent far too much time reading their literature! ‘Evidences’ is a term from Christian apologetics …”, which isn’t quite true, but it’s a fine approximation.

So I was curious when Michael Harriot brought up another unusual plural used by a specific subset of people: “freedoms“.

Whenever unshowered Americans are confronted with something they don’t want to do, they immediately begin blabbering about their “freedoms.” It’s like the “race card” for white people. While you and I know that the word “freedom” only makes one appearance in the Constitution, apparently there’s a second Caucasian Constitution that I haven’t seen that clarifies this murky terrain.

As you can see, it doesn’t even have to make sense. More importantly, they will never say exactly which specific freedom they are talking about. They won’t cite a specific law or clause in the Constitution that supports their position. That’s because there isn’t one.

Inserting “freedoms” into a random sentence makes one seem more patriotic, like randomly mentioning “the troops.” Basically, “freedoms” is a conservative dog whistle used to justify police brutality, pro-gun legislation and even blackballing Colin Kaepernick.

Weird. Now I’m suddenly seeing it everywhere, used almost exclusively by conservatives to, in some way, amplify the size of the affront to their privilege, and also to put themselves on a safely vague footing. They can’t say their “freedom” is being taken away, since they aren’t going to jail and don’t even seem to suffer any consequences, but putting that “s” on the end somehow implies a numerous and unspecified set of privileges are being taken from them. It’s a useful rhetorical trick, I guess.

And that’s exactly what creationists want to do, too — wave vaguely at some mysterious set of facts that they don’t have to detail.

I guess they possess great wisdoms and cunnings.

Look at Mississippi go!

Impressive statistics.

Remember how that slow rise in frequency back in March 2020 convinced all the universities to shut down and go entirely to online instruction? Good times.

Then how we went through that shocking peak in the summer of 2020, but that it started to show signs of a decline, so the universities all said, “Great! Back to school with masks and social distancing!”, despite the fact that it didn’t drop below the levels that shut everyone down in the spring? There’s something interesting going on in human psychology going on there.

We got an even greater surge in the winter of 2021, but then we got the vaccine, and cases started to plummet, and we all got cocky and figured we got this licked, so the universities start planning to remove all the preventive measures they’d put in place, didn’t even consider requiring vaccination, but a significant proportion of the citizenry have somehow decided vaccines are bad, and then along came Delta.

And that’s how we get Mississippi in August of 2021.

Look at that graph: oscillations, with the peak getting higher each time. Every time numbers start to decline, we slack off so they come roaring back, worse and worse. You’d think someone at some point would realize that this says we’re losing, that the occasional breathers are just setting us up for a rebound. It’s like we have only a three month window of collective memory, only remembering the improvement in spring of 2021, while completely forgetting the peak in January.

It begins

Last night was a bad night — I’m feeling rather battered and my face is sore. Where did they insert that endoscope again? Oh, right, there were some minor problems with anesthesia so I got manhandled a bit while unconscious. I’m feeling it. Bottom half is doing great, but the top half, back and face, were run through a mangler. The aches are already easing up, though, so I’m not worried about it.

I was also advised to go gently on meals, despite being ravenous. I was a good boy yesterday, so it was nothing but soup and toast. There are still strange rumblings and squelchy noises coming out of my guts, so that was a wise decision, but today I surrendered to my hunger and started the day with a mushroom omelette and giant cup of coffee. That should help.

Feeling better already, except…the university has begun its ominous slouch towards opening. Yesterday was the official opening convocation, which I missed for obvious reasons, but today begins with a two hour division meeting (we’re going to talk about budgets and assessment and other such minutiæ ; strangely, there is nothing on the agenda about the pandemic challenges we have to face), followed by a one hour biology discipline meeting, followed by me having to spend some time finishing the genetics lab cleanup so the next lab class can move in for the Fall.

Then I’d better get those class syllabi out to the students. I meet with my new advisees on Monday. They better be wearing masks!

So far, it looks like this school year is starting with an assumption of total normalcy, while ominous horror-movie music has begun rising in my head, and I just know we’re going to reach a crescendo with screeching violins next month. No way am I going to split up and go into the basement in the coming month.