When did you first suspect you were being trolled by fake news?

The recent coronavirus outbreak is serious news and an important concern for world health. It seems there is no worry so great that someone won’t find a way to exploit it. Australians have been getting dire warnings to avoid certain places and certain foods because they have ‘positive readings’ for coronavirus; one clue is that they also try to paint Chinese immigrants as tainted, to get the clueless racists to bite. The Australian health service had to make a statement that these were bogus claims.

A spokeswoman for NSW Health said: “NSW Health has been made aware of a social media post that is being widely circulated warning people to not consume certain foods or visit certain locations in Sydney.
“This post has not originated from NSW Health or any entity relating to us. Further, there is no such entity as the ‘Department of Diseasology Parramatta’.
“NSW Health would like to assure the community that the locations mentioned in this post pose no risk to visitors, and there have been no ‘positive readings’ at train stations.”

Diseasology? Seriously? I get the impression that the trolls don’t respect their victims at all.

Oh, wait! This isn’t the dumbest troll yet. QAnon is telling everyone they can stave off the coronavirus threat by drinking bleach.

As the global death toll from an alarming new coronavirus surged this week, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were urging their fans to ward off the illness by purchasing and drinking dangerous bleach.

The substance—dubbed “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “MMS”—has long been promoted by fringe groups as a combination miracle cure and vaccine for everything from autism to cancer and HIV/AIDS.

It’s a wonder that conspiracy theorists and medical quacks haven’t already gone extinct. Maybe this will do it.

Now I know what spies for China can expect to be paid

Charles Lieber, a Harvard chemist, has been arrested for working with the Chinese. My first thought was that this is terrible, science is an international enterprise, we value cooperation and the sharing of information, and working with the Chinese people and other international students is exactly what a respected scientist at a university ought to be doing. I have students from China in my classes, I think it’s great that they are here and learning.

I think that’s going to be part of the defense strategy. It’s government paranoia, part of a campaign of hostility against China.

Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer who has represented Chinese Americans accused of espionage, said in an email that the Justice Department “has launched an all-out war on any U.S. scientist associated with the 1000 Talent or other Chinese Talent programs.”

He said that is a major shift in U.S. practice after years of lax scrutiny of the issue.

“The government is now expecting perfect compliance for scientists who received no training on how these forms needed to be filled out and no warnings about the dangers of submitting an inaccurate form,” Zeidenberg said. “Treating these mistakes as felonies is entirely inappropriate.”

Except, well, ‘not knowing how to fill out a form’ is a bad tactic when you’re defending one of the most successful scientists in the world, at one of the richest universities in the world. He can probably figure it out, and if not, there is certainly a team of well-paid administrators at Harvard who could figure it out for him.

Then I read the actual charges. He had a contract with the Wuhan University of Technology.

I about choked. He was personally paid $50K per month, handed $150K per year for personal expenses, and awarded a $1.5 million grant? All that was on top of his Harvard salary, which wasn’t stated, but is probably a healthy sum. Man, I’m wondering how I can get on the Chinese spy payroll all of a sudden, because those numbers are not what you get paid for academic work. Just the fact that he’s being given $750K per year as his own cash to swim around in in his vault is abnormal and suspicious, and then we learn that it was all under the table, and he didn’t tell anyone about his secret contract.

The Justice Department says Lieber, 60, lied about his contact with the Chinese program known as the Thousand Talents Plan, which the U.S. has previously flagged as a serious intelligence concern. He also is accused of lying about about a lucrative contract he signed with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.

In an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Plumb said Lieber, who led a Harvard research group focusing on nanoscience, had established a research lab at the Wuhan university — apparently unbeknownst to Harvard.

Universities care about this stuff. Every year I get a little form sent around that I have to fill out, which is basically asking if I’m moonlighting at anything, am I getting paid on the side. They are paying me a salary for full-time work 9 months out of the year; it’s OK if I’m bringing in summer salary, for instance, but they want to know about it, because they want to know that I regard them as my primary employer. If I were to mention that the Chinese government was paying me 10 times what the Minnesota state government was coughing up, they might suspect a conflict of interest.

Lieber lied about his affiliations. Further, and quite amusingly, when WUT started touting their connections to Harvard, Lieber was frantically contacting them to shush, that he was working with them, but Harvard was not, so ix-nay on the Arvard-hay talk, or they’ll catch on.

This ain’t about international cooperation and scientific values, it’s about a greedy American being bought by the Chinese government and lying about it. Throw the book at him.

Maybe the legal strategy of claiming that he was too stupid to fill out a form properly is his best bet after all.

It’s going to be a long semester

Tuesdays I have a morning class and an afternoon lab; sandwiched in between was a discipline meeting. I think I’m plum wore out today.

Just to make it more awful, the first genetics assignment is due tomorrow, and I made an awful hash of it, trying to juggle multiple textbook editions, so the students are all confused. So I made an announcement that the assignment is basically cancelled, ignore everything I said, and I’ll come in tomorrow with a whole new problem set that we’ll work on together. What a mess. I’m exhausted just thinking of sorting it all out.

Dishing out ALL the dirt

Oh, this is going to be fun. Mark your calendar and keep the evening of Sunday 23 February open, because we’re doing a grand celebratory hangout, since we’re finally out from under that ridiculous law suit by Richard Carrier.

By now, you may know that Richard Carrier dropped his remaining SLAPP suits in November. If you read the settlement agreement, you’ll see he even explicitly said we are free to talk about the allegations and the suit without incurring more legal hassle from him. So we’re going to do that.

Save the date for the evening of February 23. We’ve rested, we’ve let the news sink in, and we’re ready to talk. We’ll bring you more news soon as we work out technical details for live streaming and confirm special guests. In the meantime, however, just know that our lips are legally unsealed. We can talk. We will talk.

Yes, we will. We are angry at the unjust and self-servingly stupid behavior by Richard Carrier, and we plan to vent. We have unfair debts imposed on us, and oh boy, are we ready to flame that jerk.

Related: Rebecca Watson has a few words to say about these abusive defamation lawsuits…in this case, about Lawrence Lessig. Fuck ’em all.

A weekend of strangeness in the moviehouse

Over the last few days, I’ve seen a couple of horror movies, one new and one old. The new one is The Color Out of Space, which, unfortunately, is indescribable. Nic Cage is raising alpacas on a farm near Arkham; his neighbor is Tommy Chong, who really leans into the deadhead stereotype. There is a family. For a while. They really come together in confronting the nightmare that has landed in their front yard, which is my way of saying there will be some gruesome body horror. Pity the alpacas. Nic Cage’s mannerisms and accents get weirder as the movie progresses. Tommy Chong finds enlightenment, of a kind of purplish pink wavelength. Everyone dies, but it’s OK, they come back. Wait, that’s not OK. The plot is very Lovecraftian, in the sense that the plot really doesn’t matter at all, it’s just a scenario in which an ordinary family, in the sense of a family that chooses to isolate themselves in rural Massachusetts and milk alpacas is ordinary, get confronted with a malignant cosmic reality that cares nothing for them.

If you liked The Thing, you’ll love this movie. If you enjoy watching Nic Cage acting badly, but with verve, you’ll like this movie. If you watch this movie under the influence of drugs, you’ll probably become one with the movie. If you’re a fan of Cronenberg or Lynch, you’ll want to see this movie. If you like alpacas, you may be profoundly disturbed by this movie. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to see it.

By the way, the color is magenta.

The old movie I watched was The People Under the Stairs. I first saw this one when it came out in the theaters, way back in 1991, when there was a theater around the corner from me in Salt Lake City that would show odd arthouse movies that none of the Mormons would ever go see, but that would appeal to the university crowd. There was a lot of dreck, but two stuck with me: Tetsuo: The Iron Man for its bizarre transformations and horrifying body fluidity, and The People Under the Stairs for it’s remarkably prescient class consciousness.

Here’s a review that spells out the story, but really, it’s obvious: psychopathic rich people control a black neighborhood, taking all the money out of the people’s hands and salting it away in the cellar of their escape-proof, booby-trapped house. They also steal children, and if they don’t behave to their standards, mutilate them and stash them in the cellar, where they’re forced to live on the flesh of burglars. The metaphor is laid on pretty thick, to the point where you begin to wonder if Wes Craven was having prophetic dreams about 2020. Unfortunately, you could see this coming quite clearly in the 80s, so I don’t think he had any magic powers.

Goodbye, Facebook friends. Up yours, Facebook.

I am all done with Facebook. As previously announced, I won’t be posting there any more, because it is a corrupt medium, managed by bad people for evil ends. I can no longer support the company with the tacit approval of my presence, so I am shutting down — my account is still there, and I’ve got a few people on an active project that I’ll still engage with on Messenger, but I won’t post anything new there, and as people forget I exist on Facebook, I’ll eventually kill those as well.

I’m not totally disappearing. I’ll still have an active presence in these places:

Pharyngula on Freethoughtblogs
@PZMyers on Twitter
@[email protected] on Mastodon
PZMyers on MeWe
The Freethoughtblogs server on Discord
PZMyers on Instagram
The Pharyngula IRC channel

Before you tell me that those are flawed, imperfect media too, I agree — I’m just shedding the worst of the worst to start. Maybe eventually I’ll end up in a remote mountain cave, disconnected and unshackled from the bonds of the material world. But not yet!

Picard

I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, and I have mixed feelings.

On the positive side, the humanism is just drooling out of the side of the box. He argues for saving all lives after the enemy’s star went nova, pushes for rescuing even the enemies of the federation, the Romulans, and there’s even some bit about synthetic humans (like Data) and their rights. I like the idea of a show that digs deep into ethical concerns.

On the negative side, there was the usual pointless Trekkie pseudoscience contrived on the spot. Data had a daughter? Who was synthetic, but biological? And the process always creates twins? And Data’s knowledge can be reconstructed from a single neuron? There are teleporting Romulans who want to kill one daughter, but there’s another on a Borg ship? It was too much. Now Picard is somehow getting back on a ship and soaring off to right some wrongs or something, or contrive excuses to bring back old Star Trek actors for guest spots. It’s the first episode, and it’s already too artificial and complicated.

I’ll probably check out a future episode to see how it shakes out, but it looks to me like the stuff I like about Star Trek is going to be overwhelmed by the stuff I detest about Star Trek.