Are some people becoming desensitized to the threat of millions dead?

I think so. It’s certainly the case in the US, where people protest the imposition of mask-wearing over the corpses of a million dead Americans, but this is something else. It’s a post from Adam Something, whose work I normally appreciate, but this is insane.

Let’s talk a bit about nuclear war.

As the invasion falters, Putin will be making more and more nuclear threats – the only thing he has left. These will most likely be just that: threats. I doubt him, or the Russian elite is suicidal.

If it came to nuclear war, Russia would essentially be deleted from the face of the planet, while the West would generally survive in some form or another.

A nuclear war right now would not be the end of humanity. Sure, it would suck, and by that I mean a LOT of people dying, at least a billion plus. However, it wouldn’t erase life from the planet.

Our goal must never be the ‘deletion’ of Russia. There are 140+ million Russian people who deserve as much right to survival, and peace and happiness, as everyone else in the world. Incinerating them in a nuclear war is not a desirable result, ever, under any circumstances. That the West would “survive” does not excuse the act, and “survival” has a wide range of meanings. How many of these Western people would die? If one hundred survive, is that a victory?

Humanity not going extinct is an awfully low standard to meet. A “mere” billion dead is not a trivial number, and I think he’s lowballing it. A limited tactical strike on some battlefields, sure, casualties could be limited, but if we trigger a world-wide spasm of major powers targeting the civilian populations of their opponents, that billion is only what dies immediately…then the collapse of civilian infrastructure follows, killing more, and the riots and wars that break out kill even more, and then the world famine destroys yet more.

Consider how most of our media (movies, games, etc) dealing with nuclear war takes place during the cold war, or its fictional continuation. At that point we did have enough nukes to format the planet. However, since then we have decommissioned 80% of our total nuclear arsenal, meaning a nuclear war would be fought with only a fifth of the firepower.

Also, not all our (as in: humanity’s) nukes are ICBMs. Many of them can’ t even be deployed unless you haul it above a city with a plane. Many are “just” warheads sitting in warehouses, and couldn’t immediately be launched. This is especially true to Russia, as they would be deleted long before any of those warheads could be used.

Another thing to consider is how those strikes would be distributed. Russia has to blanket the whole of Europe and US, possibly more, while the West only has to strike Russian strategic targets. This is a guaranteed death sentence for the Russian elite, including Putin. Hence I don’t think he’ll press the button, or even if he tried, he’d end up with a hole in his head.

Yes, we have gradually reduced the size of nuclear arsenals. But one-fifth of overkill is still mass murder.

Also, assassinating Putin and his cronies sounds like the most desirable outcome of such a war…but this is the crudest, clumsiest, ugliest way of achieving that end. It requires killing tens of millions (at the least) ordinary, innocent Russians to stop a handful of criminals.

Then the following is pollyannaish nonsense:

Otherwise radiation from nuclear bombs dissipates very quickly. You know how in Fallout games everything is still radioactive after 200 years? As far as I know that’s bullshit.
48 hours after the strike, the radiation will have already gone down by 99%, and at 72 hours it should be safe to come out. The tricky part is to not be in the blast radius, or at least be in a basement when a strike happens near you. That, or a sturdy enough building, in which case you should stay in the middle, on the lowest floor. Don’t go to upper floors, as fallout will accumulate on the roof.
Food and drink in closed containers that were inside during the strike should be generally safe to consume, so chances are you won’t die of hunger or dehydration.

To sum up, Putin will threaten with nukes, but it’s unlikely he will actually use them. Even if he does though, the world won’t end, plus your chances of survival aren’t bad if the bomb wasn’t dropped directly on you, and you can stick it out in a basement for 3 days.

Pure madness. Just avoid being in the blast radius! You’re safe as long as you stay in the basement! Fallout will only accumulate on the roof! Also on all the acreage dedicated to growing your food, and on all the reservoirs that supply your drinking water. You won’t die of hunger or dehydration right away, that’s true, but how long will the canned food and bottled water in your house last? Haven’t we learned already about how supply chains can be disrupted? This is a survivalist fantasy, and I hate it.

It is true that biology is remarkably resilient, and we won’t get that video game/syfy movie nonsense of monstrous mutants roaming a radioactive wasteland. Even in the best of circumstances, where the victims are an isolated population that can be supported by the remainder of society, you’re going to see a surge in cancer incidence over many years, and even longer term effects on mental health and social interactions. People have studied these things in great detail. You can look up the long-term consequences of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, for instance, and it wasn’t over after 3 days.

This paper examines long-term consequences of one of the most serious catastrophes ever inflicted on humankind: the atomic bombing that occurred in Hiroshima in 1945. While many victims died immediately or within a few years of the bombing, there were many negative effects on survivors in terms of both health and social/economic aspects that could last many years. Of these two life factors, health and social/economic aspects, the latter has largely been ignored by researchers. We investigate possible long-lasting effects using a new dataset covering the middle and older generations in Hiroshima some 60 years after the tragedy. Our empirical results show that Atomic Bomb Survivors did not necessarily suffer unfavorable life experiences in terms of the average marriage status or educational attainment but did experience significant disadvantages some aspects including the husband/wife combination of married couples, work status, mental health, and expectations for the future. Thus, survivors have suffered for many years after the catastrophe itself.

That’s an analysis of the survivors, and doesn’t include the 200,000 dead, obviously. We’re talking decades of suffering from a single relatively small and primitive nuclear bomb.

Don’t downplay the threat and dangers of nuclear war. Keep it up and you’ll find Jim Bakker running advertisements for his food buckets on your YouTube channel.

One other thing I have to mention: my views on this subject are a product of the 1960s-1980s. In particular, a big influence was George Streisinger, who most of you might have heard of for his essential work as a pioneer of zebrafish research. But also, at the same time, he was a major activist working against nuclear war and for disarmament. There was a whole cadre of biologists at that time who started out as physicists during WWII who then switched to genetics and molecular biology; George was a Hungarian Jew who fled that country to escape the Nazis, and studied viral genetics. He would be shocked to learn that some people now regard nuclear war as a minor setback in their goal of exterminating their enemies.

He was one of the good guys. I’ll always be on his side.

Living the dream

Temperatures have been in the positive degrees centigrade for much of this week, and we’ve started seeing a few spiders outdoors. It’s time for them to start emerging and filling the world with their terrible beauty. Making me king is entirely optional.

Myers vs. Meyers: the final, ultimate showdown

I will finally get to the bottom of this. I have discovered that there will be a YouTube interview with the notorious PZ Meyers today at 6pm Central, and I intend to hunt him down and confront him over his long history of stalking me. I will crash this video and tackle the horrible (although, admittedly, handsome) rascal and settle this once and for all.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t show up, though. Meyers is a coward who has been dodging me for decades.

What is a job at UCLA worth?

Turns out it’s a little less high-status than you might imagine.

I’ve seen this sort of thing a few times before. They’ve created a soft money position for someone — they’re going to provide lab space or an office to someone who is then expected to write grants for their salary. The only difference here is that they were probably compelled by university policy to publicly advertise the position, thereby exposing one of the dirty underhanded secrets of academia to the whole world.

This ought to be criminal, except…this is a way to give someone an opportunity to work in a university for the status, the facilities, and — dare I say it — the exposure. Sometimes it’s done as a way to give a spouse a position.

Republicans grasping at children give me the creeps

Hey, remember Matt Shea? He’s the Republican politician who proposed splitting Washington state in two, and further, wanted to name the new state “Liberty”. He’s a caricature of a far right conservative.

Also, he dropped out when the more rational people of Washington noticed that he was nothing but a provocateur who kept getting tangled up with armed insurrectionists, so he’s no longer in office, fortunately.

Shea was a longtime far-right legislator in the Washington House of Representatives until 2020, when he opted not to run for reelection after a report concluded that he’d engaged in domestic terrorism — the result of his involvement in the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife refuge.

Shea, who the report found had been involved in several armed stand-offs, is also known for his support of a separatist 51st state movement, and for authoring a document, “Biblical Basis for War,” that included steps for killing non-believers (Shea is Christian).

You might be wondering what he’s up to now. He’s in Poland, where he seems to have kidnapped 62 Ukrainian children.

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right Republican who was found by a House-commissioned investigation to have planned and participated in domestic terrorism, is in a small town in Poland with more than 60 Ukrainian children, trying to facilitate their adoption in America.

Shea has said his group helped rescue 62 children and their two adult caregivers from an orphanage in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been bombarded by Russian forces.

No one is actually calling it kidnapping yet — they’re accepting, more or less, Shea’s claim that he “rescued” them. Somehow I doubt that.

But international agencies say, with the chaos and confusion of war, now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine. And Shea’s presence, and the lack of information surrounding the American group he’s with, has raised concerns among some residents of Kazimierz Dolny, the small Polish town where the children are staying at a hotel-guesthouse.

“I asked him many times, ‘What are you going to do with these children?’ and he told me that it’s not my business,’” Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said of Shea. “I got the feeling in my gut that something’s wrong with this guy; he didn’t want to tell me his last name.”

Shea claims he’s doing this on behalf of a Texas adoption agency. It’s a bit dodgy.

Loving Families and Homes for Orphans appears to have a website, but it is nonfunctional.

The group, based in Fort Worth, registered with the Texas secretary of state in 2018. No such group is registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The group is also not registered with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity, the group that oversees American agencies involved in international adoption.

I imagine there are many Ukrainian families who have sent their children out of the country to avoid the terrors of war. Imagine doing that for your kids and then discovering that they’d been scooped up by some fanatical ideologue and shipped off to Texas to be stolen by Western conservative Christians — we don’t even know that these are orphans at this point.

Artur Pomianowski, the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said in a post on Facebook that he’d visited the children and they are safe and being well cared-for. He also said the “case is being investigated and clarified by the relevant authorities” and that the kids would not leave Kazimierz Dolny without consent of the authorities.

“I do not know what Matt Shea and his friends are doing here around children,” Pomianowski said in an email. “Mr. Shea and his friends have given us some contradictory information and, for that reason, it is difficult for us to trust them.”

That’s putting it mildly.

In related news, Matt Shea’s old buddy, Ammon Bundy, is also in the news, and it’s about a child. Bundy is making terrorist threats against a hospital in Idaho, which has responded by going into lockdown and rerouting patients. He is trying to get a baby out of the hospital.

The baby was temporarily removed from from family custody last Friday after officials determined the 10-month-old was “suffering from severe malnourishment” and at risk of injury or death, according to a statement from police in the city of Meridian near Boise.

The baby’s parents had refused to let officers check on the child’s welfare after the family canceled a medical appointment, the police statement said.

I don’t think either Matt Shea or Ammon Bundy ought to ever be trusted with the welfare of any children anywhere, yet there they are. I don’t even understand why these horrible people are still running free, let alone why they have the privilege of claiming they’re working in the interests of children.

Conservative Christian Comedian is an oxymoron

Matt Powell posted a new video last night — it’s a prank, just for fun. He also says This video was made for one of the channel followers who is on his death bed. Want him to be able to have a good laugh… God bless! I’m not going to link to it, but I’ll summarize. Powell drives up to some local businesses — a fast food place, a tire store, a Walmart, etc. — waves over an employee, and says that he just wanted to let them know he’s opening a competing store just down the road, and he’s not afraid of them. This gets nothing but baffled looks from his victims.

That’s it. That’s all it is, multiple times.

Somebody explain it to me. It must be some kind of in-joke, but it’s feeble in conception and execution, if it is.

Also, if I’m dying, and I ask you to tell me something funny so I can laugh one more time, could you please do a better job than Powell? I think maybe you better practice your best jokes in the comments, because if you do something like this pathetic performance by Matt Powell, I’m going to be so disappointed and pissed off.

We must preserve the purity of our essence

Chilling. Putin is decrying the influence of the degenerate West, with their “foie gras, oysters, and gender freedom”, but the most terrible line is this one: “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to respond to any challenges.” Uh-oh. “Purification” is a scary word. The dictator of Russia is talking about cleaning house — here come the purges, in response to his embarrassment in Ukraine.

That is exactly the sentiment that resonates with our authoritarian right wing. If only we could end gender freedom and purify the American people, we would be stronger! The white supremacists, like Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, are eating this stuff up. You know you’re way out on the fringe when even a dumbass like Herschel Walker is backing away from you.

OMG, they’ve also lost wacky conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez! What next? Will Ben Garrison say something nice about a Democrat?

Some celebration

Last night was the night we celebrated our wedding anniversary, and wow, but I am exhausted this morning.

Get your brain out of the gutter. It wasn’t like that.

We went out to a movie — Marry Me, a silly little trifle with an absurd premise (big famous pop star, Jennifer Lopez, discovers the man she was about to marry was cheating on her, so she picks a random guy out of her audience, Owen Wilson, and asks him to marry her. He accepts. Best part of the movie was when they go through the ceremony, the guy is asked “do you take this woman yadda yadda”, and he answers “OK” in a nasal Owen Wilson voice. Perfect. The rest was anticlimactic.)

Normally, I wouldn’t even consider going to this kind of movie, but it seemed thematically appropriate to the occasion.

You might think the evening had nowhere to go but up from there, except…when we visited our granddaughter earlier this week, she had a bad cold and a runny nose. Guess who got it? Me. I have been turned into a horrible snot monster. That’s an actual photo of me. I’ll spare you the sound effects, which are gross and glurbly.

Bad enough, you say, but then Mary got savagely sick. More ghastly wimperings, lying on the bathroom floor, I was kicked out of my slimy sleeping nest a few times.

Then the cat started vomiting in sympathy.

And now, my spring break is more than half over, and I have to get grading done.

I knew it was a horror show when I saw the name Barb Anderson

Everything she touches turns to poison. If you’ve never heard of her, she’s a notorious Minnesota hate-monger, a nasty, more bitter version of Michele Bachmann. She’s the master hater behind the Minnesota Child Protection League, one of those misleadingly-named right-wing organizations that swoops into schools to protect the kids from bullying, which usually translates into defending the bullies right to torment LGBT kids. She’s simply an awful person.

MCPL’s lead spokesperson is Barb Anderson, a ubiquitous figure in the school bullying debate. Anderson has long volunteered as a researcher for the Minnesota Family Council, which led two failed battles against marriage equality. She was also a vocal opponent of LGBT safety in the Anoka-Hennepin School District where she helped launch the Parents Action League. PAL is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its adamant demands to have the ex-gay movement in the Anoka-Hennepin School District.

Anderson has made some extreme statements about LGBT people, so much so that GLAAD has added her to its Commentator Accountability Project.

For example, she once said, “The greatest threat to our freedom and the health and well-being of our children is from this radical homosexual agenda that is just so pervasive.”

She was bad news several years ago, when a wave of suicides was sweeping through the Anoka-Hennepin school district — nine kids dead by their own hand in a couple of years. It was horrific. The school district was highlighted in a Rolling Stone (Massive trigger warning: that article recounts the personal experiences of many young people who were viciously bullied, and graphically describes several suicides).

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies come at a national moment when bullying is on everyone’s lips, and a devastating number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing themselves. Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show that one-third of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

Administrators denied that there was a problem with gay kids being bullied. They want to stop all bullying, which is a common defense for avoiding conflict with special interest groups targeting LGBT rights. They can’t possibly single out LGBT kids for protection, despite the fact that they’re getting bullied because they’re LGBT. They won’t even acknowledge that the behavior of these kids is perfectly normal, so they avoid useful approaches, like inclusive sex education. No, they just close their eyes to the issues, because they’d rather offend families of the bullied kids than the MCPL. They’ll even go so far as to blame “gay activists” for the problems.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

That is explicitly Barb Anderson’s approach. If LGBT kids are being bullied and committing suicide, that’s the fault of the kids themselves and of schools that permissively tolerate the pied piper of perversion and that GSAs [Gay-Straight Alliances] will draw more confused and questioning youth into gay experimentation which will lead schools to affirm sexual disorders, which is why all those kids killed themselves.

Anti-gay backlash was instant. Minnesota Family Council president Tom Prichard blogged that Justin’s suicide could only be blamed upon one thing: his gayness. “Youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk [of suicide], because they’ve embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle,” Prichard wrote. Anoka-Hennepin conservatives formally organized into the Parents Action League, declaring opposition to the “radical homosexual” agenda in schools. Its stated goals, advertised on its website, included promoting Day of Truth, providing resources for students “seeking to leave the homosexual lifestyle,” supporting the neutrality policy and targeting “pro-gay activist teachers who fail to abide by district policies.”

Asked on a radio program whether the anti-gay agenda of her ilk bore any responsibility for the bullying and suicides, Barb Anderson, co-author of the original “No Homo Promo,” held fast to her principles, blaming pro-gay groups for the tragedies. She explained that such “child corruption” agencies allow “quote-unquote gay kids” to wrongly feel legitimized. “And then these kids are locked into a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be disastrous to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death,” Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren’t encouraged to come out of the closet in the first place, they wouldn’t be in a position to be bullied.

It’s deja vu all over again. The Anoka-Hennepin catastrophe, fomented by Barb Anderson and her cronies, was nine years ago. So she pulled up stakes and moved to another school district to dispense her venom. The latest episode? The Becker school district invited the MCPL and Barb Anderson to present an alternative view point at a meeting of the school board.

That’s right. The fools running the Becker school district invited a known hate group to speak to the board about adopting their hateful policies. So they did.

The school board invited the Child Protection League to speak at a special meeting following outrage from some community members when OutFront Minnesota — an organization supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights — presented at an August meeting.

The Child Protection League describes itself as an organization committed to protecting children from exploitation and indoctrination. Barb Anderson helped form the group, along with the Parents Action League, which was designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-gay rhetoric and involvement in the Anoka-Hennepin School District when it saw a rash of suicides and a lawsuit claiming the district didn’t respond to harassment on the basis of sexual orientation.

GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, also lists Anderson on an anti-LGBT watchlist for saying LGBTQ antibullying efforts are the “pied piper of perversion” and affirm sexual disorders.

Anderson was not at Monday’s meeting but Child Protection League Board Chair Julie Quist spoke about children’s books she said violated the beliefs and norms of the community by accepting different gender identities. Quist previously served as district director for U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann. Also speaking were former Becker board members Betsy Armstrong and Chris Klippen.

Armstrong spoke for about 50 minutes and was interrupted several times by protesters — mostly Becker students — questioning her statements or chanting “gay rights are human rights.”

She spoke mostly about what she called the “worrisome” increase in the number of transgender youth in the last decade and cited possible reasons as anxiety, autism or sexual trauma exacerbated by peer and social media influences — something Armstrong called a “social contagion.”

Armstrong also referenced a Bible quote that says God created two sexes — male and female — and said people who follow religious teachings are constitutionally protected and their opinions ought to be given equal consideration.

Notice one aspect of their tactics: emphasizing trans kids. Focusing on gay kids, while still something they do, has had diminishing returns as homosexuality is gradually, increasingly acceptable. Trans kids are fair game! Let’s pick on them until the community wakes up to the fact that this all the same horrendous game of finding someone to ostracize and abuse.

The kids are all right, though. They showed up to protest, and were a lot more intelligent than the sick grownups who brought on this spectacle.

Hundreds of students, parents, and residents in the Becker, Minnesota School District showed up, mostly to protest, a special presentation by an anti-LGBTQ group that offered what it called an “alternative viewpoint” on transgender people. The group, the Minnesota Child Protection League, has been cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“This is disgusting,” said Skyler Seiler, identified by Fox9 as a transgender student at the school. “I can’t believe this, we are humans too. I don’t know why they’re treating us like we’re not. Is it not your job, as school board members, to make students feel safe and welcome?”

The school board on Monday voted to allow the group, which Fox9 says is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, to deliver the special presentation. It’s unclear why the school board agreed to allow a third party organization to deliver a message of hate and discrimination that directly affects the students and families it is supposed to support, protect, and defend. It’s also unclear if that information was vetted or fact-checked before being delivered. Attendees say the group’s information was not from credible sources.

“Human rights don’t have two sides so bringing in another side just doesn’t make sense to me,” Heather Abrahamson told Fox9.

“They were not credible sources that they were citing, and it was completely biased and really offensive and insulting,” Maggie Seiler said. “This is painful, I’m sure those kids in there feel even more ostracized and like the school doesn’t back them and like they have even less rights.”

Those kids would be right. It was school board members who brought in the hate-mongers and who argued that “free speech” trumps the kids’ right to learn in a safe environment. They don’t care about the students, prioritizing the horrid discriminatory religious beliefs of people like Barb Anderson over the experiences of people who have to live with the discrimination.

Look, people, you probably don’t like the optics of citizens turning out en masse to call you a bigot. There’s a solution: never ever pay attention to hate groups like the MCPL or the Parents Action League or the Minnesota Family Council. Don’t invite them to your meetings. Burn their recommendations. Drive them out. Or get more of this from the families you claim to support.