Last week, I watched this incredibly stupid, badly acted, big budget piece of crap called F9. It’s currently a bit of a joke on the internet, with memes featuring Vin Diesel saying “family” all the time. It’s appropriate — the movie was noise, and occasionally Diesel would occasionally piously say “Family” as if it was sufficient justification for driving cars in outer space. Hated it.

So this week, I saw Black Widow, which, strangely enough, actually is about family. The story starts with a “fake” family of Russian spies hiding in the United States — the father, Alexei, the mother, Melina (the smart one, a scientist), and two daughters, Natasha and Yelena, adopted as part of their cover — while Melina steals American (that is, Hydra) mind control secrets. The family is torn apart at the beginning of the movie when their cover is blown, and they all have to frantically flee to Cuba, where they are separated. Alexei gets thrown into a Russian prison for life, Melina is buried away in a secret lab run by the chief villain, Dreykov, and the two girls are taken away to something called the Red Room, a secret and brutal training room for ninja super-assassins who are all mind-controlled by Dreykov. Natasha later breaks free and defects to the US, joining the Avengers and appearing in a number of big budget superhero movies, the American dream.

That’s the setup. That’s the foundation for the whole plot. From that point on, it’s more James Bond than classic superhero movie: Dreykov has planted his mind-controlled female assassins all over the world, controlling them from his base, the Red Room, and Natasha, the Black Widow, must smash his nefarious plans and free all of his mind-slaves. Along the way, she’s going to find the scattered, disaffected members of her family, and together they will learn to live, laugh, and love as a true family, while blowing the shit out of everything.

I joke, but the movie works best if you view it as a family drama between the four principle actors (who actually can act! And do a good job with the story) surrounded by explosions and fights and an improbable giant flying super-villain fortress. All the interesting moving parts of the plot are wary conflict between two sisters, Natasha and Yelena, the uncovering of the hidden deep affection their spy-scientist mom had for them, and how they rescue their bumbling, blustering dad, who turns out to be Russia’s version of Captain America. That all works. I enjoyed watching those four interact.

I guess the super-spy/super-hero parts of the plot also worked. At least, there were many spectacular action set-pieces, and there was a spectacularly violent conclusion, and there were many fast-paced fight scenes with lithe beautiful women kicking butt. If that had been all there was, though, I would have left the theater feeling “meh”, instead of carrying away a residue of affection for Natasha, Yelena, Melina, and Alexei. That’s what made the film.

Okay, criticisms:

• Waaaay too many moving parts. The plot is complicated, and it flits all over the world, from Ohio to Hungary to Morocco to a mysterious location above Siberia. It’s de rigueur for a James Bond movie, but here it just felt like they had so much money they could treat the principal cast to filming in exotic locations.

• As is also common in these kinds of movies, the world-threatening villain is unimpressive. He only exists for the two hours of this one movie, so why invest in developing him? He’s bad, he has a super-weapon, that’s all you need to know.

• The accents. Yuck. At the beginning, the family speak clear, unaccented American English. In Russia, they all talk to each other with heavy Russian accents. Stop it. It’s especially annoying because they’re setting up Yelena to be the new Black Widow in future films, and you know she’ll be talking without the accent in the next movie.

• The one significant male lead, Alexei, is comic relief. He’s fat and barely fits into his supersuit, he keeps saying the wrong things, he’s a bit vain and talks too much, he’s Homer Simpson in a fancy red costume. The actor, David Harbour, brings a little more depth to him, but I suspect his character will go nowhere in future films. He’s also a bit of a crude Russian stereotype.

• There is an unspoken premise throughout. Why women? Why nothing but women? Say something about it! The villain has a world-spanning network of female assassins under his control, he puts cadres of women assassins through a vicious training regimen that, they say at one point, only one women in 20 survives. Give a reason (“women can blend in better,” “women are more agile than men”, anything, no matter how bogus), or I’m just going to assume some weird awful exploitive psycho-sexual sadism that the story lacks the courage to confront.

• The big problem: in spite of the promising title, there is not one spider shown in the entire movie. Not one. Not a single leg waving in the corner of the screen, not one non-speaking walk-on role, no little cameo anywhere. They apparently forgot what the movie is really about, Latrodectus.

I’ve been waiting for a coherent, responsible university policy decision to address the ongoing pandemic (did you know it’s not over?), but generally all we get is minimal effort to muddle along with the status quo. In particular, we’re not demanding that students be vaccinated in order to return to school in the fall, which seems to me to be a really easy requirement to ask for.

Well, some of our faculty are just as disappointed as I am.

In an e-mail to the University of Minnesota community sent on June 14, President Joan Gabel announced that the U will not require students, faculty and staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 prior to the start of the fall semester. As members of the U community, we are disappointed by this decision.

The U is the flagship educational institution in the state. It boasts the largest medical school, with a faculty of world-class clinicians, educators and researchers; it also serves as a scientific and economic engine to the state. As such, the U should be expected to be a leader in the fight against COVID-19 by supporting science-based policies that create the safest and least-disruptive environment possible.

The U is also a community, comprising thousands of people from across the state, country and world, of all different ages and in all states of health. Its commitment to the community should be the same: to follow the science to create the safest environment possible, especially for its most vulnerable members.

This refusal to insist on the best mechanism we have for dealing with this disease is absurd. When we enroll kids in elementary school, there are requirements for vaccination; they maintain records for that sort of thing, and they’ll send kids home if they don’t meet the requirements. Yet we don’t bother at the college level? Instead, the administration tells us to make accommodations to cope with the effects of the pandemic. So all last year, I happily did what I could. It meant greatly increasing my workload, halving lab size so we could at least give them a taste of lab work, and at the same time, coping with the disruption of students having to go into quarantine or going home for funerals. This was miserable for all concerned. Shouldn’t we do everything we can to end this ugly experience?

You know numbers are currently going up, and new viral variants are killing more people, right?

Unvaccinated people made up all of Maryland’s reported coronavirus deaths last month, as well as the vast majority of new cases and hospitalizations, the state reported Tuesday — data that public health officials say demonstrates the effectiveness of vaccines.

The numbers come as experts try to persuade the vaccine-hesitant to get shots and protect themselves against a virus that has killed more than 22,000 people in the region and nearly 4 million worldwide.

We keep taking every improvement in the situation as an excuse to abandon every policy decision that led to that improvement. Can we please just stick with something until we’ve beat it?

If I had my druthers, here’s what I’d do.

• Require vaccination for public participation. Everyone should carry proof of vaccination and be ready to show it, or be thrown out.
• Masks are still required when indoors with other people, like in a classroom.
• We continue remote instruction, and labs are reduced in size to allow for social distancing.
• And this is important: we keep in mind that vaccination does not make you totally immune. It improves resistance, but there’s still a chance of infection, especially in the context of new variants that are allowed to proliferate because we’re so slack about maintaining common sense harm reduction.

It’s still time to be aware and cautious!

I do wonder if Walter Hussman was aware of what his $25 million donation to UNC would do to his reputation. He’s standing out as a central villain in the denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure.

But as news stories revealed the extent of pressure from conservatives, including Arkansas media magnate and UNC mega-donor Walter Hussman, Hannah-Jones said returning to her alma mater to teach seemed less logical.

“Once the news broke and I started to see the extent of the political interference, particularly the reporting on Walter Hussman, it became really clear to me that I just could not work at a school named after Walter Hussman,” Hannah-Jones said. “To be a person who has stood for what I stand for and have any integrity whatsoever, I just couldn’t see how I could do that.”

The journalism school was renamed for Hussman after receiving a $25 million donation from him in 2019. The school also committed to etching what Hussman calls his “core values” into stone on the building. No one, including the school’s dean Susan King, said they foresaw that Hussman would assume the gift granted him far more than naming rights.

When King told Hussman she was pursuing Hannah-Jones for the school’s new Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, he objected. When King stood firm, Hussman peppered Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Vice Chancellor David Routh, who oversees charitable giving at the school, with emails detailing his opposition. They included complaints about “The 1619 Project,” the award-winning, long-form journalism project originally published in The New York Times and conceived of by Hannah-Jones — she won a Pulitzer in commentary for her opening essay — that’s been the target of criticism from many conservatives. Hussman also personally objected to her views on reparations to Black Americans for slavery. Hussman shared his emails critical of Hannah-Jones’s work with at least one member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. The board subsequently decided not to consider her tenure application.

So here’s this rich old fart who smugly assumes that he could buy the curriculum and faculty of a university, and that his one-time major donation made him a permanent consultant in hiring decisions. If anyone wants to donate millions of dollars to my university, we will be grateful and deeply appreciate it, but not if you think it gives you the right to meddle.

It actually makes me think we need to tax the rich more to remove their temptation to think they’ve got the right to own everything.

You can watch, and you can leave questions in the comments, but if you’re on my Patreon, you can also appear on the show and join in the conversation! And maybe answer the questions for me.

That’s on Sunday, 11 July, at 11am Central time. See you all there!

The giant cargo ship that blocked the Suez canal in March is no longer holding up billions of dollars in world trade, but it’s still stuck…in legal limbo. It’s currently docked, unmoving, it’s $700 million in containers on deck, while lawyers are battling to fix the blame. And get the billion dollar salvage fee.

The vessel is stuck once more – this time by an almighty international legal row. By mid-April, it had been impounded, with the Suez Canal Authority, or SCA, slapping a claim against its owners in an Egyptian court. The salvage fee? Nearly $1bn. “I’ve seen cases like this but on a much smaller scale,” explains maritime solicitor Jai Sharma of law firm Clyde & Co, which represents the insurers of more than $100 million worth of cargo on board the Ever Given. “What sets this apart is the amount of money being requested – it’s far, far beyond what anyone in our industry would expect.”

With negotiations at an impasse, the Ever Given’s Indian crew remain stuck on board a ship that cannot sail. And there’s only so much work to do for a ship that’s going nowhere. The Ever Given does at least have Wi-Fi to help pass the time and stave off cabin fever. There’s also a toll-free counselling helpline for the crew and their families. “Being in anchorage for so long definitely dampens the spirits,” says Abdulgani Serang, who heads the National Union of Seafarers of India, which has visited the crew on board. “But, in this case, it comes with the baggage of the Suez Canal incident, which adds to their trauma.”

The Ever Given was due to dock at Rotterdam on April 3, where much of its estimated $700m worth of cargo was to be offloaded and forwarded on to the rest of Europe. In the time that it’s idled, more than 4,000 vessels have passed it by on Great Bitter Lake. The delay has been so long that seven crew members have returned home following the end of their contracts. But the SCA’s requirement that the ship is operational means that six replacement seafarers have been drafted in from India – notwithstanding the Delta variant of Covid-19 that has torn through the country.

The amount of money tied up in this one boat is mind-boggling, and the fact that a group of people are trapped aboard the thing by all the legal machinations is depressing. At least I learned the cost of shipping: one 40 foot container (which is big and can hold a lot of merchandise), from China to Europe: $10,522. Out here in the painfully rural Midwest we’ve come to rely on services like Amazon to get our fix of toys and gadgets and useful tools, and it’s daunting to look at the tracking info and see how many of those things come from China — almost everything on my work desk has been on one of these ships or a cargo plane, and was delivered to me from half a planet away. We tend to take the global supply chain for granted, until something disrupts it.