I see a pattern here

In the US and Canada, we’ve had a tremendous number of cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests — over and over, with the church hierarchy concealing and actively shuffling criminal priests about. But maybe it’s just us Americans? Or Canadians? So let’s see what’s going on in other countries. It’s another horror.

A major report released Tuesday said French Catholic clerics had abused more than 200,000 minors over the past 70 years, a systemic trauma that the inquiry’s leader described as deep and “cruel.”

The report’s findings could trigger a public reckoning in a country where church officials long stalled efforts to investigate complicity. The findings also add to the picture of country-by-country trauma within a religion that has tended to find abuse on a stunning scale anywhere it has looked.

I know, you find it hard to believe, but the common link seems to be … the Catholic priesthood! Who could have guessed that?

I think the appropriate response would be to disband the church, for governments in every country to seize their assets, and for everyone to look on Catholic priests as we would Nazis or the KKK.

That last is only a minor punishment in the USA.

I think, though, we know what to expect from the Vatican: empty pieties and disingenuous regret. But Jesus, 200,000 abused children, how are they going to gloss over that?

The Nobel acknowledges global warming, again

This year’s physics Nobel goes to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi for “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warmings” and “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales” and for giving us something more to talk about in our Saturday podcast.

And yet, there are still people — Republicans, mainly, who I will grudgingly admit are still “people” — who deny the science.

Let’s be fair, though. There are also a lot of Democrats who are dragging their heels and refusing to do anything but the bare minimum they can get away with.

A tight ball of rage

Day 2 of the Hungering

Checked on the fly nursery today. No adults yet.

“They’re pupating,” I told the spider children, “Any day now.”

“We hunger,” hissed the spiderling between the veil of its legs, one glittering eye glaring out at me. “We will be fed. Any taut sac of fluid-filled flesh will do as well as another.”

I bowed and retreated. More flies for the horde will spawn soon. I hope.

[Read more…]

How does this deadly nonsense continue?

Have you no decency, Joe Rogan? Here we go again, with the popular podcaster peddling another conspiracy theory.

Joe Rogan’s streak of terrible COVID-19 takes continued this week when he baselessly suggested the White House faked President Joe Biden’s booster shot on live TV out of fear that he could have dropped dead in the moment.

After Biden took questions from reporters while he received his third dose of the Pfizer jab earlier this week, Rogan used his massively popular Spotify podcast to wonder aloud if it was a “real booster.”

When his guest, former CIA officer Mike Baker agreed, suggesting that it was merely “performance art,” Rogan dug deeper into his latest conspiracy theory.

“I don’t think they would take the chance,” the host said. “I think if they were going to give him a booster shot, the last thing they would do is give it to him live on television. What if he dies? What if he blacks out? What if he gets it and faints? Because people have had very bad reactions, like in the moment, for whatever reason.”

Such nonsense. This is a common trope, pretending that the vaccine is actively harmful. It’s not. Claiming that is leads to horrific situations like this, in which an evil quack goes into a hospital and lies to an elderly man suffering with COVID-19.

Watch as 67-year old Joe McCarron, hospitalized with Covid-19 in Ireland, is urged by a fanatical anti-vaxxer and covid-denier to check himself out of the hospital while a doctor calmly, kindly, and patiently explains why that would not be a good idea for someone in his condition and urges him to stay, saying that he was very ill and could die if he went home. But the person with McCarron badgered him to leave and he finally acquiesced. Two days later, he was back in the hospital with breathing problems and subsequently died.

The quack, Antonio Mureddu Gravegliu, literally told the man that the hospital was going to kill him. The Garda are “investigating”, I don’t know what — they’ve got the guy recorded lying to the patient and urging him to leave the hospital’s care.

Rogan is part of the chain of chaos and death. Why isn’t he being investigated?

I’m telling you, Hovind is a total wackaloon

In case you didn’t realize this already, he’s got all the kook symptoms. Kent Hovind is a young earth creationist, and now, quite clearly, a vaccine denier. This is a short excerpt from a much longer conversation with another creationist, in which he apparently felt comfortable letting his hair down. Watch it while you can, it wouldn’t surprise me if it gets taken down.

To summarize, he thinks the Tribulation (which isn’t in the Bible) is about to start this year, or has already started. He thinks the Rapture (also not in the Bible) will occur in 2028. He believes that there are microchips (mark of the beast!) in the vaccines, and that the government will be tracking you by shining UV or blue lights on you.

I guess I’ll have to cite Deuteronomy 13:1-5.

1 If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder,
2 And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;
3 Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
5 And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God…

Also Matthew 24:36.

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.

Those actually are in the Bible.

Molecular neurogenetics gets the nod from the Nobel committee

The Nobel in medicine this year goes to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their work in identifying the receptors that transduce heat and touch into signals in the nervous system.

So now you know the proximal sensors that are activated when you hug someone, or when you nibble on some ghost pepper. It’s TRPV and PIEZO channels!

Now they just have to figure out what’s going on in the central nervous system when those channels are triggered.

This could be bad

Day 1 of the Hungering

I miscalculated. Now I’m getting a little panicky.

I have a large number of young spiders growing in my incubators. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I was running through my fly supply faster than I anticipated, because I have so many young’uns to feed, so I doubled the number of fly bottles I set up. Then, last week, the fly cultures were all used up. I was calm, I had many bottles that were primed to spawn thousands of flies. I went in today expecting I’d be able to sate the spiderlings savage hunger, and…

They weren’t ready. My lab has been unpleasantly chilly — an unfortunate and common consequence of the vagaries of the temperature regulation in this building — which I think slowed them down. I was unable to feed them! The few flies I had left I used to set up some more fly bottles.

I think this is the opening of a classic horror story. Mad scientist creates an army of monsters; fails to keep them supplied; they rise up in fury and destroy their master. If anyone finds my dessicated, bloodless body suspended in a meshwork of cobwebs in the next few days, this is a clue to what happened.

As long as I still live, I will continue to relate the story in epistolary blog posts.

Twisting the story to fit your weird obsession is disrespecting the victim

A truly horrific case has rightfully caught the attention of the media in the UK, the murder of Sarah Everard. She was abducted by a police officer who raped and murdered her.

Yesterday, Sarah Everard’s killer – serving police officer Wayne Couzens – was sentenced to a whole life order. In kidnapping her, Couzens, who was a firearms officer at the time, showed Everard his warrant card and placed her in handcuffs, having ‘arrested’ her under Covid-19 powers. The 48-year-old then drove Everard 80 miles, before raping and murdering her.

It’s not just the personal horror of what happened to Everard, but the betrayal of a public trust, as we’ve witnessed over and over again here in the US. George Floyd was in terror of getting into a police car, and can you blame him? Imagine being a woman, expecting the police to protect you, but then they put handcuffs on you and lock you in the back of a police car, helpless.

That trust wasn’t violated by just one wretched awful person who deserves a long prison sentence, though — it’s the whole damn police culture.

But, this morning, it has emerged that five of Couzens’ colleagues are facing criminal investigation after sharing racist, misogynistic and homophobic material with him over WhatsApp. This follows earlier reports that Couzens had been nicknamed “the rapist” by former colleagues for making women feel uncomfortable. Numerous incidents of indecent exposure, including two at a McDonald’s, which should have been linked to his vehicle just 72 hours before the kidnap, rape and murder of Everard weren’t properly investigated. Couzens’ criminality was facilitated by the incompetence and blasé attitude to misogyny embedded within the institution that he worked for.

But wait. This is being reported in the UK media. You know what else the media over there is obsessed with, even more than the US news? You may have guessed it. Certain people are already, somehow, turning this from a “cops are bad” story into “let’s blame the transes”, which is rather remarkable given that neither the murderer nor his victim are trans. Would you believe that Catherine Bennett is using this crime as an excuse to deny trans women safety? Of course you would.

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, was among the prominent men tweeting their abhorrence: “Enough is enough. We need to treat violence against women and girls as seriously as terrorism.”

Sometimes, you gather, it’s acceptable to discuss endemic male violence against women and girls and sometimes it’s not. Just before the Everard verdict, Lammy had angrily dismissed women exercised by this very subject as “dinosaurs”. Women who value women-only spaces – where they feel safe from male violence – he characterised as “hoarding rights”.

Lammy, along with some Labour colleagues, simultaneously denounces male violence, then, taking victim-blaming to as yet unprecedented levels, is furious with any women concerned about losing the few places that individuals he depicts as terrorists can’t access.

These single-sex spaces – from refuges to hospital wards and rest rooms – historically protected women by excluding men where women were particularly vulnerable. #Notallmen, of course, but that’s safeguarding. “Preventative measures,” as Professor Kathleen Stock writes in Material Girls, “are usually by necessity broad-brush. They aren’t supposed to be a character reference for a group as a whole.”

She is quite wrong. Lammy called TERFs “dinosaurs”, not women who are exercised by misogynistic violence. Expecting the rights and safety of trans women to be respected is not synonymous with denying cis women any preventative measures.

Also, citing Kathleen Stock is an insta-nope from me.

I have to say I find it very disconcerting to read UK media and find such a wildly different focus with one conservative obsession that is somewhat different over here. Mainstream US news doesn’t usually turn every bad news story into an excuse to rail against trans women quite like a media culture saturated with transphobic mumsnet culture. There’s a difference there in our social media that’s probably worth serious study sometime down the road.

But not now. Now is the time to deal with the more pressing issue of police violence and corruption, and how some weird media figures try to place the blame on the blameless as a distraction, or how they play “blame the victim”.