This is not normal

Do you get days off? It’s sort of sinking in that what I take for granted might be a little odd to most people.

I spent all day Saturday preparing my lectures for the coming week. That’s routine. I’ve heard rumors that most people can relax on weekends.

This morning I went into the lab early. I needed to feed the spiders and shuffle the males around to new females and replenish their water supply and check on the egg sacs (there was a new one today!), and then I’ll spend the time crunching data. This is Sunday, the day of rest, I hear?

Weekends are just the time I don’t have committee meetings or classes or lab sessions or meeting with students so I can get all the work done I’ll need to have complete for the weekdays.

It’s not all pain, though. I’m setting aside time to watch The Last of Us at 8pm tonight, and I usually read for half an hour to an hour before I go to bed.

Who was afraid of the big bad balloon?

I just couldn’t get worked up about it. It was an elegant, efficient piece of technology, but even if it was spying on the US, I don’t know what they’d see that their satellites hadn’t already shown them.

In fact, I’m all in favor of more transparency.

In case you were worried, though, the US has popped the balloon.

U.S. fighter aircraft, acting on an order from President Biden, downed a Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, the Pentagon said, ending what senior administration officials contend was an audacious attempt by Beijing to collect intelligence on sensitive American military sites.

OK, I guess.

POP!

America is safe once again.

Never mind the corpses, the pandemic is over!

Yesterday, I participated in a mundane committee meeting, one where we were making decisions on the distribution of in-house grant funds. It was fine, there were a fair number of really good proposals, we didn’t have to struggle over funding anyone’s work. However, at the end, someone made a comment about how we didn’t have to deal with COVID accountability anymore, and we weren’t going to have to provide extra money for COVID, because the pandemic was over.

My heart sank at that. People actually believe we beat the virus because a politician announced that we had. I’ve got news for those guys.

On Monday, the White House announced that it will let the Covid-related public health emergency declarations expire on May 11, 2023. Ashish Jha, Biden’s national Covid response coordinator, framed the announcement in true “accentuate-the-positive,” “we’re back to normal” fashion, tweeting that the emergency was being lifted because the country was “in a better place and “getting through the winter without a big surge or run on hospitals.” He even threw in the Biden administration’s favorite line: “We have the tools to manage this virus.”

Jha can tweet whatever he likes, but as I’ve said again and again, the numbers don’t lie. As Alyssa Bilinski and Kathryn Thompson from the Brown School of Public Health, along with Ezekiel Emanuel from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association in November: “The US continued to experience significantly higher Covid-19 and excess all-cause mortality compared with peer countries during 2021 and early 2022, a difference accounting for 150,000 to 470,000 deaths.” Last week, more people died of Covid than perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Don’t be fooled. The pandemic is not over. This is all about rolling back Medicaid coverage and little things, like not having to pay for the accommodations for COVID prevention that professors are expected to make. It’s about fostering political delusions — ‘vote for me, I ended COVID!’. It’s about unleashing the greedy fucks at pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, both Pfizer and Moderna are hiking their prices on Covid vaccines. And this isn’t a little uptick in the price tag—both Pfizer and Moderna are proposing 400 percent increases. Again, this is going to put vaccines out of the reach of many low-income uninsured Americans, dissuade others from getting the jab, and sock insured people with potential premium increases as insurance companies pass on the pain to the rest of us. The White House has issued strongly worded statements about the price hikes, but many have called for bolder action against this predatory behavior. As of now, there are crickets from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We failed to control the pandemic because the only thing we were committed to was half-assing it. The policy of neglect and denial will continue as thousands will die. They’re mostly old people, though, so who cares, and we’re all going to close our eyes and pretend long COVID isn’t a thing. We’ll just keep on riding the roller coaster.

Wheeeee!

Good luck with accreditation, New College of Florida!

This is how Ron Desantis wants to handle higher education: fire everyone! Kick the faculty and administration out!

He somehow seems to think that a university is just a collection of buildings, rather than people and traditions and a well-established curriculum. So he hires a couple of clueless goons, Chris Rufo and Eddie Speir, and tries to put them in charge of everything.

Somebody should explain to them that their accreditation is not a piece of paper glued to a building. It’s part of a process that involves active engagement with the faculty and administration — you know, all the people that they want to dismiss — and when they go, the institution evaporates. It’s gone. All the currently enrolled students are screwed. The university will have to start over completely from scratch, rebuilding a reputation and a curriculum that was just annihilated.

New College is a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m at the University of Minnesota Morris, a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m going to have to take this a bit personally.

Royalty is ridiculous

Creepy ol’ Prince Andrew, Epstein’s pal, is reportedly being evicted from Buckingham Palace. He’s been an embarrassment to the family — and embarrassing that family is an amazing accomplishment — especially since he settled out of court with Virginia Giuffre, who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her multiple times. It’s an unsavory, ugly story that so far has resulted in the death of Epstein in prison, the sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell to 20 years for sex trafficking, and Andrew reduced to a shameful laughingstock.

But the ugly absurdity isn’t ending yet. Andrew wants to overturn that settlement, and is apparently doing some maneuvering to get it tossed out. Some of Maxwell’s friends have provided “evidence”, they claim, that proves the unsavory stories of Andrew assaulting Giuffre in a bathtub can’t possibly be true.

If the tub doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Yeesh. That’s a rather roomy bathtub, so I don’t see what it demonstrates, other than that these people are idiots. So on top of his “I don’t sweat” defense, he’s adding “I don’t fit in a large bathtub”?

Oh well, it was printed in Britain’s Best Quality Newspaper, so it must be true.

Any train people out there?

We have a new blogger, Bill Seymour at long long short long, and he was writing about trains. That got me thinking: I have two summer trips tentatively planned, and maybe I should go by train. I like a nice leisurely train trip!

The first is to the American Arachnological Society annual meeting in Ithaca, NY.

The second is to Skepticon in St Louis.

I haven’t ridden a train in decades. Would it be practical to take Amtrak from Minneapolis/St Paul to either of those places? I tried perusing the Amtrak site, but good god, if ever there was a web page designed in the 1950s, that’s it.

What lesson should I learn?

I’m still awfully sick with a nasty ugly cold, but I showed up in class today to teach, feeling like I have no choice in the matter. Precautions taken: I wore a mask (I always wear a mask anyway), I canceled all personal appointments where I’d have to meet with students one-on-one, and I’m just generally staying away from all contact. I can’t imagine canceling class, which would have all kinds of downstream effects — canceling the second week of class? For a bad cold? Why not just abort the semester, you wimp?

I ended up just channeling my inner university administrator. We don’t care about no infectious disease, we’re about delivering product to our customers, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

I was providing synchronous zoom access, and about a half dozen students were taking advantage of it. If a bunch of students come sniffling up to me in the next week complaining about feeling as bad as I do right now, I will be fully sympathetic and do what I can to accommodate them. But otherwise, I just have to follow the American model of handling disease.

I hope I don’t wait 10 years to bust loose

I’m 65. Barry Mehler is 75, and he’s still teaching. Well, he was. After he gave this introduction to one of his classes, his university fired him.

I agree with all that he said (except I don’t use a Calvinist predestination method to assign grades). I did chastise my students for not masking up this year, without the profanity. I guess I have an aspirational example to follow.

So they fired him. After a legal wrangle, he settled for $95,000, which is a nice retirement payout. Another aspiration to meet.

I guess the administration is going to have to keep a close eye on me over the next few years. I’ve already been called to the carpet once for expressing my contempt for the university’s cowardly COVID policy in public.

Fog, two different kinds

Here’s the pretty kind. We’ve been getting dense fog and sub-zero temperatures, which does interesting things to the trees.

Then there’s the horrible kind, brain fog. I thought I was over my cold, but it has come roaring back with stuffed up sinuses, a bad cough and sniffles, and some kind of brain goo. I’ve been struggling with it this weekend, just trying to get Monday’s lecture in shape, and it took far, far longer than it ought to.

One consolation: I ran out to the store to pick up some cold relief and cough drops and the like, and the place had been cleaned out! Bare shelves! I couldn’t get anything, but at least I can tell myself the entire goddamn town is suffering with me.