I mocked Ben Shapiro. I shouldn’t have done that. You know he has legions of brilliant defenders who would leap to his defense, and now I am staggered by the sharp-witted repartee.

So that’s the kind of person who loves Ben Shapiro. I guess I better be careful or I might be fucked up by these dazzlingly sharp-witted fellows…

Oh, wait…hard to breathe…I’m choking on my own sarcasm! The poisonous toxins of my very own horrible, laughing bile are rising up to strangle me <choke> <cough, cough> Kharma Agent succeeds in their devious plan to make me die! Tell my…family…that…I love…theaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgghhhhhhh.

P.S. Sorry that I didn’t black out their email address. I forgot, and then I, you know, died.

Don’t watch this video by Christian fanatic Matt Powell. He’s trying to be “funny”, so he made a “prank” video. The “prank” was walking into various fast food places wearing headphones and shouting his order loudly. Then taking the headphones off and speaking normally.

That’s it. That’s all it is.

And then the comments! People are praising him for his brilliant work. Reading those brought home the fact that I’ll never ever understand the fundagelical brain. They’re totally alien.

Back in the halcyon days of my youth, skateboarding was the radical, edgy sport that had the old men shaking their fists and talking about “kids these days”, and then also sired even edgier programming like Jackass. I never got into it. Even then I was too stodgy for such extreme sports.

Put your wheels away, the new up-and-coming street activity is extreme pogoing.

Awesome, dude. I think I’ll pass on the hobby, but more power to all the xpogoers out there. Except, well, I do have a few reservations…

But as rubbery as they may be, they aren’t immune to injury. To that end, when Smith was 13, he went to his first world championship in Salt Lake City. “I qualified for the finals, which I was shocked to make at such a young age,” he tells me. As a result of that shock and excitement, he decided to attempt a double backflip dismount at the end of his final run. “It all built up to that moment; the hype got me buzzed up, and I was ready to fly. I sent the double!” Smith recalls. But he opened up his body too early. “I basically belly-flopped, knees first, into the concrete,” he says.

He would spend the next four months in a wheelchair after shattering both of his kneecaps, all the toes on each of his feet and his nose. (He suffered a major concussion, too.) It hasn’t exactly paid either — at least in terms of dollars and cents. “Most jumpers have another job to supplement like Uber or Grubhub, odd jobs or other service industry stuff,” says Smith. “I make roughly 25-30k a year and live in a converted sprinter van.”

I’m not going to tell anyone not to do it, though — after all, I went into academia, which likewise isn’t going to get you rich, and while you’re probably not going to break bones at it, your mental health won’t be sheltered well. Boing boing away!

How odd. This video of my lecture on extrachromosomal inheritance is blowing up on YouTube — I guess The Algorithm hiccupped and is serving it to random people. That in itself isn’t very interesting, but I am amused by all the comments. It’s very existential, with people wondering “why am I here?” and just generally baffled at how this particularly video ended up in their recommendations. I wonder at this question too.

Of course, the answer to the question is easy: because a program told you to be here.

This is a blip that will quickly fade, especially since today’s topic will be maternal inheritance.

This study is mostly unsurprising, except for the absence of an effect of political ideology. People who don’t comply with COVID health measures tend to be close-minded, or maybe people who are already conspiracy theorists, ready to twist the evidence to fit their preconceptions, are more likely to reject health recommendations. I don’t know which way the arrow of causality goes.

Closed-minded individuals were less likely to adhere to COVID-19 preventive behaviors, such as physical distancing, according to new research that examined data collected from 17 countries. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, provides evidence that analytic thinking styles were more important than political ideology in predicting behaviors during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study was multinational and involved over 12,000 participants, which was good, but also relied on self-assessment (everyone claims to be open-minded!) modulated by a questionnaire to drill down into actual attitudes.

The researchers found open-mindedness was a substantially stronger predictor of adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors than political orientation. Those who agreed with statements such as “If I do not know much about some topic, I don’t mind being taught about it, even if I know about other topics” were more likely to report avoiding physical contact with others, maintaining physical hygiene, and supporting COVID-19 restrictive mitigation policies. In contrast, those who agreed with statements such as “I think that paying attention to people who disagree with me is a waste of time” were less likely to adhere to COVID-19 preventive behaviors.

On the other hand, we have to balance open-mindedness and credulity. I’d say I’m fairly open-minded (unreliable self-assessment again), but is compliance a good aspect of open-mindedness? I’d also like to say I’m usually going to follow CDC recommendations…except that now the CDC is being political and ideological.

In late February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled a new Covid-19 monitoring system based on what they call “Community Levels.” By downplaying the importance of Sars-CoV-2 transmission, the new system instantly turned what was a pandemic map still red from Omicron transmission to green – creating the false impression that the pandemic is over.

Released four days before the State of the Union, the new CDC measures and the narrative they created let President Biden claim victory over the virus via sleight of hand: a switch from standard reporting of community transmissions to measures of risk based largely on contentious hospital-based metrics. The previous guidelines called anything over 50 cases per 100,000 people “substantial or high.” Now, they say 200 cases per 100,000 is “low” as long as hospitalizations are also low.

The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses.

The CDC has been captured by capitalism. The US government is also not following the science.

Some claim that the White House and the CDC are “following the science” and doing the best they can in these times. But if the goal is to prevent infection and suffering, the updated recommendations do not align with science or equity. It’s more accurate to say they’re following the money. They’ve put the desires of corporate America above the needs of our people, and especially our most vulnerable.

Am I close-minded if I don’t comply, in this case?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s good to see someone breaking the “thin blue line” in defense of ordinary decency, though. In this case, a burly police sergeant is bellowing at a man who is arrested, in handcuffs, and in a police car — most ironically, he’s angry that the man “disrespected” one of his fellow officers. Then one of those officers pulls the rager away, which prompts him to then grab her by the throat, an excellent example of disrespecting a police officer.

A police sergeant grabbed a junior officer by the throat after she tried to pull him away from threatening a Black man in custody — watch the shocking moment

(warning: distressing) pic.twitter.com/NW4q5fAqOy

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 2, 2022

The woman cop is being praised by her department, and the bad cop has been suspended. That’s the kind of incremental change we need.