The victims, a great loss; the killer, no loss at all

The identities of the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings have been published, and they are revealing. Note that the murderer has been claiming that he was afflicted with a sex addiction, and that he was lashing out at all those temptresses working in Asian sex palaces. It seems that that isn’t even close to describing the situation (although, also, it would not justify his actions at all if they were houses of prostitution). What comes out of the account is that these were … women working at a spa, giving massages and pedicures and such, and they were 50, 44, 63, 51, 74, and 69 years old. One of the victims was a 33 year old client and recent mother who had come in with her husband to treat herself to a massage. One victim was a handyman who did work around the building.

Previous accounts allowed the killer to define the narrative, portraying the dead as faceless sex workers who were less important than the white guy with the gun — the kind of standard portrayal you see in video games or cop shows. The people he killed were mothers and grandmothers and hard-working people trying to better themselves and their families (as are many sex workers, never forget), and what he did was to cold-bloodedly slaughter people who served in their community.

This is the information the news ought to deliver first, before they tell the killer’s story, in which he is only going to dehumanize the human beings he killed. Oh, and hey, maybe video games and cop shows ought to be telling their stories more from the perspective of the usually expendable mobs that exist only to be gunned down.

Maybe justice will be served

There are a lot of people who participated in the recent insurrection who are pooping their diapers right now, and I’m here for it. They seem to be shocked that they are actually being held accountable for breaking the law. It’s hilariously stupid.

Take, for instance, the case of Debra Maimone and Philip Vogel, two business owners from Pittsburgh. One of the slight surprises emerging from these proceeding is how many of these people are reasonably well-off, middle class small business owners by day, and shrieking MAGAts the instant they get on the internet. Maimone and Vogel are definitely in that category, and the capitol insurrection was their opportunity to bring their online persona out into real-world action. They still tried to hide their identities behind masks, but poorly, and the police have thoroughly documented their presence in the event (pdf). All those security cameras caught their every move, including when they briefly took the mask off to take a selfie (brilliant criminal minds at work), when they broke in, when they moved into very offices, and when they stole stuff from capitol security. In some ways, it’s rather chilling how completely they monitored every movement of these individuals.

They also got a bonanza of information from Parler. Hoo boy, Parler was like the Rosetta stone to break far-right coding. People had to register with real names and all kinds of confidential information, so once the police got that, they could trace all kinds of loud-mouthed assholery made under the cloak of anonymity (they thought!) straight to idiotic small business owners. Like this absurdity from Debra Maimone:

She praises those brave patriots who occupied the government building FULL OF TYRANTS in one breath, and in the next insists oh no, she wasn’t in there. She was. She’s a chickenshit who just revealed that she knew her actions were illegal, but is going to deny it to avoid the consequences.

I’ll be mildly surprised if she gets the full ten-year sentence from the court, but I’ll be even more surprised if she escapes conviction or gets a trivial sentence — the case against her is awfully strong. She and Vogel are now out on $10,000 bail, but the tyrants have told her she can’t have any guns while awaiting trial.

Here’s their business, Vera General Contracting & Cleaning Services, and the Yelp reviews are amusing.

Super gross company. Owners are rude and outwardly racist. Asked me why I have a BLM sign in my yard saying they don’t work with people who support them. Umm… gee Karen how about because I’m black and I believe in equality.

I’m also a Christian so I forgive those who display hateful behavior–but it’s clear they are not because when I referenced John 13:34 they had no clue and seemed confused. Typical.

To add insult to injury they quoted me one price on the phone, but when they saw me they doubled it before even going inside my home.

It’s obvious that when they realized I’m a black woman they decided to try and screw me over.

This one is a little more succinct.

They promised me they’d do some work for me this weekend but now cannot as they have been arrested for being domestic terrorists.

Awww…

Giving up

Yesterday I procrastinated by cleaning up my home office. This morning I’m going in to the lab to feed the little beasties and wash some more glassware. Then I’m going to come home and buckle down to nothing but grading for the rest of my life. It’s all over, I’m resigning myself to nothing but drudgery for eternity. Goodbye, everyone. Time to crawl into the pit of despair and make it my own.

Glory! Welcome the Jubilee!

I drove by the local grocery store, and there, on the other side of the street, was a…was a…you won’t believe this, but I actually saw a…

TACO TRUCK!!!

In Morris! I don’t know if it’ll be here for long, but we were promised this way back in 2016. At last it has been accomplished, at last it is done.

(I didn’t actually stop at the taco truck — there were several people in line, but I don’t do that anymore.)

OAN discovers that science is international!

Shock. Horror. The Chinese have been infiltrating and colonizing US scientific research programs!

Concern has continued to grow over China’s infiltration of American virus research labs after recent reports highlighted three Chinese military scientists trained by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who arrived at U.S. universities and research institutions in the late 90s only to later become involved in the COVID-19 saga.

They don’t say who is “concerned”, but this is the most trivial news. Throughout my career, I’ve worked with Chinese students, British students, Canadian scientists, German scientists, French scientists, Spanish scientists, Chilean scientists, Indian scientists… That’s the way it works. We don’t care about your borders. I’ve also had American colleagues who studied in the UK, the EU, Russia, where ever (I don’t know any who studied in China — the language barrier is a major obstacle, I think). Are we horrified if, for instance, someone studied infectious disease in Toronto and then takes a position at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center? Would that be an example of colonizing Canada to steal their precious medical expertise? It is, I guess, but there’s nothing nefarious about it. It’s routine.

On part of this, many believe China has colonized U.S. virus research programs. Important to mention is these programs are funded by the U.S. government or in other words — the U.S. taxpayer. There’s very little these U.S. virology programs do that China isn’t aware of and for many that’s a threat far too large to be ignored any longer.

Yes. We shouldn’t ignore it. We should encourage more of it. The free exchange of ideas assists the progress of science.

I have to note, though, that they use an evasive construct again: many believe. Who? It’s a sign of bad journalism when the writer plays this game. Name your sources, guy. I’m sure “many” would agree that we’ve trained many Chinese scientists (and scientists of many nationalities), but few would call that “colonization” or think it was a problem. China has a cadre of US-trained virologists? Yes, please. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re experiencing a pandemic, more will occur in the future, and we need more virologists.

Of course, OAN has an agenda. Wouldn’t you know it, they’re trying to suggest that COVID-19 is the product of hostile Chinese military research.

One Chinese whistleblower claimed COVID-19 originated in laboratories overseen by China’s PLA by using bat coronaviruses ZC-45 and ZXC-21, which were then characterized and genetically engineered under the supervision of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing and the Research Institute for Medicine of the PLA Nanjing Military Command.

As of now, the World Health Organization (WHO) has yet to confirm the origin of the virus. However, efforts to investigate have largely been obstructed.

Research into the origins of the virus has not been obstructed, unless by obstructed they mean that it fails to support the usual conspiracy theories. SARS-CoV-2 is not remarkably artificial at all — it is closely related to bat viruses, there is no discernable obstacle to their natural origin, and no evidence that they were manipulated in a lab. Novel variants have been popping up all over the place — do they think Chinese scientists around the world are tweaking the virus? (I shouldn’t say that, they might think that.)

Also, the Chinese military must be remarkably incompetent to have released their deadly engineered virus in China and disrupted their own economy, first.

Oooh, McConnell is threatening us

Mitch McConnell really doesn’t want the Democrats to change the rules to enable laws to pass with a simple majority. He’s making threats that are simultaneously revealing and dishonest.

He knows that with a unified Democratic caucus and Harris wielding the gavel, his mouth is writing a check that he lacks votes to cash. McConnell, self-advertised master of intricate Senate rules, at best can make himself a nuisance by gumming up the legislative process.

McConnell is even trying to intimidate Democrats with warnings of what Republicans will do if they regain the Senate — for instance, imposing a nationwide right-to-work law, defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities, passing sweeping right-to-life legislation, authorizing concealed-carry firearms reciprocity in all 50 states and the District, and hardening southern border security.

What empty threats. The guy who happily defied senate rules and tradition to block the nomination of Merrick Garland is now trying to tell us he’s been gracious and deferential for the last four years, but he’s willing to get mean if we prevent his shenanigans from continuing? Yeah, right. Pull the other one.

Most interesting, though, is that he’s openly stating what he wants to do if he weren’t restrained by the Democrats: bust unions, shut down women’s health clinics, ban all abortions, gut even the mildest gun control laws, and crack down on immigrants. This bozo is dangerous and bad for the country: do everything you can to frustrate the Republicans, Democrats!

I think I might have been the beneficiary of a Ponzi scheme

Once upon a time, when this blog was a simple little thing that I ran off a server in my lab, I was recruited to join ScienceBlogs. It was a great place — I shared the space with a lot of smart, interesting people, many of whom I still follow on social media. I was also enticed by the generous payments they made, with a significant sum based on traffic issued to the bloggers. Also great. I was making about $8000 month there.

Yes, I was stunned, too. I didn’t know how they were doing it: it was supposed to be ad-based revenue, but what it really was was massive investments by rich people with lots of money to throw around who were trying to promote a science-based perspective, and who hired popular writers to kick start the whole thing. Of course, the other people writing there will tell you they got nowhere near that amount — it was just the first wave who benefited most from all the publicity. And later, they started revising the fee structure, always downward, and then they sold it off to National Geographic who quickly ejected the old bloggers and brought in new ones who better fit their desired path. I had no ill will about the changes. I saw that first lucky wave as a windfall that I did not expect to last.

When Ed Brayton and I set up Freethoughtblogs, we also discovered that the game was up. We had no deep-pocket investors. We tried to make a go of it with entirely ad-based revenue, with a mistaken idea of how easy that would be, based on our experiences at Scienceblogs. It’s all a scam! You’re going to make peanuts off of ads, unless you want to play games with link farms and ludicrous SEO and other gimmicks. We just wanted a nice place to write and be read.

Then, of course, we were learning that the real winners at the ad game were…the ad services. Not us. We were supported by the Patheos ad machine, which was a horror. Inappropriate ads, and tons of them, and they also offered us extra pennies if we allowed them to try bizarre gimmicks. Anyone remember the sliding page ads? You’d log in, the whole page would jerk to the right, and an ad bar would slide in from the left, and fucking annoy everyone. Hated it. Hated it all. I finally gave up on ads altogether, and we run Freethoughtblogs at a loss — I figure I got rained on by the money tree a few years ago, I can coast on supporting this site for a good long while without the nuisance ads.

Now I hear, though, that there’s a hot new blog syndication site called Substack that’s all the rage — they’ve got some very well known people writing there, and apparently lured them in with big money.

Uh-oh, I thought. I’ve been there before. I can guess where this is going, and where it will end up in 10 years. Somebody is pumping money into another blogging enterprise, and they aren’t getting rich off ads. Someone wants to promote a certain set of authors.

Annalee Newitz spills the beans. They’re luring in lots of writers by paying a top tier “Pro” group large sums of money, and all the other people next to nothing, and sucking in lots of people to support them. Again, it’s almost a Ponzi scheme. If you aren’t in that first wave with the lucrative deals, you aren’t going to get rich. You can’t. The economics of blogging don’t support it.

Worse though, Substack has an agenda. (So did Scienceblogs, but their’s was just to promote science and tech. I think.)

It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth.

As Jude Doyle explained in their newsletter:

Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.

Glenn Greenwald started his Substack by inveighing against trans rights and/or ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, is currently using it to direct harassment at a female New York Times reporter, and has repeatedly used his platform to whitewash alleged rapists and domestic abusers. Freddie de Boer is an anti-“identity politics” crusader who became so infamous for harassing colleagues, particularly women, that he briefly promised to retire from the Internet to avoid causing any more harm; he’s currently using his “generous financial offer” from Substack to argue against “censoring” Nazis while pursuing a personal vendetta against the cis writer Sarah Jones. Matt Yglesias, who publicly cites polite pushback from a trans femme colleague as the Problem With Media Today — exposing the woman he named to massive harassment from Fox News and online TERFs alike — reportedly got a $250,000 advance from Substack. It’s become the preferred platform for men who can’t work in diverse environments without getting calls from HR.

Doyle notes that Substack also seems to have a secret list of writers who are allowed to violate the company’s terms of service. These people dish out hate speech, but remain on the platform with paid subscribers. Among them is Graham Linehan, who was already booted from Twitter for hate speech against trans people, and whose Substack is entirely devoted to the idea that trans women are a danger to cis women and should be stopped.

So all the ‘little people’ on Substack are there to provide an illusion of popular support to an ‘elite’ that consists of people like Greenwald, Yglesias, and Linehan. Charming. I shouldn’t be surprised, though.

Yet another demonstration of the need to defund the police

I never want to see what the local police are saying about the citizens they “serve and protect”. I suspect that some of it will be like what was exposed when text messages between Eureka, CA police officers were leaked. It’s a lot of contempt for the homeless and mentally ill, sexual descriptions of women they see on the street, and macho promises to shoot and beat hippies, drug addicts, and protesters.

Among the most appalling stories there was that the local public health department was asking these untrained, unprofessional, abusive thugs to check up on people who contracted COVID-19. The police called them “outbreak monkeys”. And these are the people expected to aid public health officials? Inappropriate much?

Take away a big chunk of the money spent on assholes with guns and recommit it to EMTs and social workers and people who actually know something other than how to threaten and harm others. At least some people are aware of what needs to change.

Banter like that captured in the Eureka text messages shows the rare, unvarnished reality of how some officers view their work, said Stinson, who used to work for a police department himself.

“This is the police subculture of that agency unmasked,” Stinson said. “This is the officers in their natural habitat, talking amongst themselves. It’s an us-versus-them mentality. It’s a sexualized environment where policing is violent. It’s ugly.”

The messages also show an environment resistant to change in the city, which for years has also struggled with a swell of drug abuse, homelessness and overwhelmed social services.

One officer in the Eureka texts appeared to ridicule efforts to ban chokeholds and other deadly restraints against suspects. In one text exchange, an officer shared a YouTube video about “control techniques” being barred in New York City. “(Gov. Gavin) Newsom is already j—- off with excitement hoping he can get it here I’m sure,” another officer wrote.

“At the end of the day, whether somebody was joking or not joking, or intended to to be offensive or not, we have to be responsible and accountable for our words and our actions,” Watson said. “And we have to be careful that everything that we do on and off duty reflects in a positive light, that reinforces trust with our community.”

Robinson, the former chief in Phoenix, said comments like those in the text messages are detrimental to the good work the vast majority of law enforcement officers are trying to do — especially given the recent reckoning facing law enforcement.

He said, based on the text messages, they need a cultural change.

Yeah, right. Two of the officers responsible for some of the worst messages have been put on paid leave; their co-conspirators in the department are probably just waiting for the heat to die down so they can put them back on the streets.