There’s ordinary evil, and then there’s greedy, grasping, gratuitous evil

We’re going to have to work on our categories, I see. This one is a mess about profiteering, lawyers who serve greed rather than justice, and an astonishingly selfish view of a pandemic as an opportunity to exploit everyone. Patent trolls are trying to block companies that make COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It’s a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you’ll ever see. They are representing “Labrador Diagnostics LLC” a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you’ll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos — the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle.

However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right?

So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, “Labrador Diagnostics,” which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.

This is shaking up my perspective — I thought conservatives were the apotheosis of evil and Satan incarnate, but these guys seem even worse. Irell & Manella are American lawyers based in Los Angeles, so the only hope for my equanimity is that they’re also Republicans.

They’re trying to snatch all of my joy away!

We’ve been sent a letter from our university president. As of Wednesday, 18 March, everything is shutdown. How’s this for a thorough expulsion?

As I communicated this weekend, I expect all employees to work from home by no later than Wednesday, March 18. This is not optional for faculty and staff at all levels of the organization systemwide, and I expect supervisors to honor this decision.

Not optional. This isn’t a choice for a lot of faculty who maintain live animal labs. Or the greenhouse. Or anything that requires regular maintenance.

A little further, it links to more details for us slaves to other organisms.

Each lab should develop a list of essential operations to continue ongoing experiments and research that would suffer a major impact if temporarily discontinued, such as loss of years of effort, data, or loss of a major investment. Work that maintains essential equipment and safe standby mode in labs or maintains essential samples and animal populations also meets the criteria for essential operations.

Other laboratory research is to be discontinued. The only expansion of research that is allowable during this time is research related to the COVID-19 virus.

Examples of essential operations for projects unrelated to COVID-19 include (but are not limited to): 1) maintaining liquid nitrogen levels in storage tanks, 2) maintaining ongoing animal experiments where stopping the experiment would compromise the project, 3) feeding and caring for animals, 4) maintaining critical cell cultures, and 5) processing specimens for those clinical trials that will remain open during this period.

So I’m supposed to continue all research? If I go in to throw flies at spiders, I can’t even spend an hour or two on the microscope? I really work solo most of the school year, and have a few students — if I’m lucky — in the summer.

So right now I have no family, no students, I have to do all my teaching through a computer screen, and everything is frozen outside so I can’t go spider hunting, and now they tell me I can’t even work alone in my lab? I’m just to be trapped inside my big empty house with an evil cat all day, every day? I might snap. Mary will eventually come home to a gibbering madman. Well, more gibbering and more mad than usual.

Hmm. I could bring the spider cages home, and an incubator, and at least my dissecting scope. Then Mary could come home to less gibbering, but a house full of spiders and lab gear instead.

Sacrifices. We all must make sacrifices.

Aww, heck. If Idris Elba has been diagnosed and is staying home, I have to buck up and hang on here, too.

I haven’t been tested, and can’t be — we still have too few testing kits.

On the other hand, does Idris Elba have a colony of spiders he has to take care of? I think not.

In other dismal news…

I just learned in their newsletter that the American Arachnology Society meetings are cancelled this year. Aw, darn — I was looking forward to that. The thing is, too, that they were scheduled to take place in early July, at UC Davis, so this is right now the most proactive cancellation I’ve encountered yet. Meanwhile, my university is pretending we’ll be back in business in 2½ weeks, which is rather absurdly optimistic. The other con I regularly attend in the summer is Convergence, around the end of August. There aren’t any whispers about cancelling that, at least not yet.

The AAS newsletter also has a nice article on teaching kids to be comfortable with spiders, so that’s a plus.

I think I’ll be spending the whole summer right here in Stevens County.

I throw a terrible party

I decided that the only way I could celebrate my anniversary this year was to take care of Mary’s birds, so I scattered some popcorn out in the yard, put up some fresh suet, and hung some strange log of pig fat and seeds that I got at the store. They were not fooled. Mary’s not here, so they knew better than to come around to some crotchety old man’s idea of a party. It was a flop. All very high school, to be rejected.

I stood around outside for a while, and finally some bird came by, spurned all the new stuff I’d put up, and just went for the old suet Mary hung up before she left. I guess it tasted better.

There weren’t even any spiders to cheer me up. It’s still too cold, and we had some freezing drizzle this morning. There’ll be no springtime until my beloved returns.

Why does Dennis Prager still have a Twitter and YouTube account?

I keep hearing that the various social media services were going to start cracking down on disinformation. If that’s the case, why is Dennis Prager still around? His latest “fireside chat” is just an old ignorant man sitting around lying about the coronavirus.

It’s both sad and horrible. I lasted about ten minutes, roughly half of which is Prager talking about his dog. In the remainder, he made 3 stupid points.

  1. He’s a rational person and he hates irrationality, and those libs are all panicking and closing schools. He can’t stand panic.

    The thing is, though, nobody is panicking. Saying they are is about as convincing as saying you’re rational on your god-soaked propaganda channel. My university is closed, but no one was in a panic; this was a calmly made, rational decision based on the best available evidence. In centers of the epidemic, medical services are overwhelmed and people are dying, and since we aren’t particularly keen on seeing our students die, or bringing an infectious disease home to their more fragile grandparents, we decided to do the reasonable, responsible thing and minimize contact.
    Carl Zimmer posted some vivid data that illustrates why a timely response is necessary. In this graph of cumulative cases in Italy, Lodi was hit first and quickly shut down the city; Bergamo had its first case shortly afterwards, and waited two weeks before shutting down. Now the difference is dramatic. Bergamo has a rising number of cases, while Lodi effectively flattened the curve.

    2. Carl Zimmer: Here is a new, real-world demonstration of how social distancing and other measures can flatten the Covid-19 curve. The city of Lodi had the first Covid-19 case in Italy, and implemented a shutdown on Feb 23. Bergamo waited until March 8. From Oxford University, https://osf.io/fd4rh/?view_only=c2f00dfe3677493faa421fc2ea38e295

    That’s the kind of data officials looked at before making a calm decision. There was no panic. Prager is lying and misrepresenting the situation.

  2. The kids are only lightly affected, so why shut down schools? Yeah, that’s the kind of dumb-ass thing a Prager would say. Young people are less severely affected (but they aren’t immune — there have been deaths at all ages, just many more in older people), but they can carry and communicate the disease. The concern is that children will mill around with each other at school, come home, and next thing you know, white-haired avuncular 71 year old grandpa with the nice dog he loves so much is in the hospital with respiratory failure. And so are all the other older people in his family, and there aren’t enough respirators to go around, and the health care workers are all falling sick and told not to come in, and people are dying because little Billy gave pop-pop an affectionate kiss on the cheek.

    You deserve it, you lying fuck, but it’s not fair to put that guilt on Billy’s shoulders.

  3. Tens of thousands of people die of the regular flu everywhere without panicking. I might panic if I or my wife came down with the regular flu. But instead what we do is the rational thing: we get our flu shot every year, we stay home if we’re sick, and if we’re feeling the symptoms, we don’t head out for crowds to shake hands and hug people. That’s something only an insensitive, uncaring asshole like Dennis Prager would do, which he proudly declares that he is doing.

    The difference is that we have vaccines for the influenza that minimize its effects, and keeps the load on hospitals to a manageable level. We do not have a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. We know that it is more severe in its effects than influenza, is going to have a higher death count, and spreads rapidly. In both cases, we are making a rational, non-panicked decision about how to respond.

    If you accidentally set a piece of paper on fire in your home, you calmly put it out. If you accidentally start a grease fire in the kitchen, the curtains and your sleeve are on fire, the smoke alarm is frantically beeping, you don’t walk away, pet the dog, and make a video about how you set a piece of paper on fire and how clever you were to pat it out, and all the fire trucks and the doctors treating the deep burns on your arm are over-reacting.

Prager has billionaires backing him, though, and he can be as stupid and dangerous as he wants, and YouTube will continue to take his money.

Let’s try that again

Yesterday, I tried to have a remote conversation with some smart people. There were problems.

The good news: Zoom performed smoothly and well. We could hear and see everyone, we had a pleasant discussion, and everything was saved nicely locally. That’s mainly what I need for working with students.

The bad news: The parallel display in a live YouTube stream did not come off at all well. The first sign of trouble was that YouTube ignored all my prior planning and set up, and at the last minute spawned a new video stream. I don’t know what happened there at all. Then this new stream showed everyone, but only included my audio. It was a total mess for viewers at home.

When it was all over, I just killed the planned live stream, deleted the recording with only my voice, and re-uploaded the video. Here it is:

I’m going to experiment today with some private videos to iron out the kinks, and then on Wednesday evening I’ll try again with a casual conversation with some wicked SJWs and Skepticon weirdos.

Forty years ago today

Today is our 40th wedding anniversary! Sadly, because of an accursed virus, we have to spend it 800 miles apart. Our relationship is strong, though, so we’ll abide.

I did flip through our old photos, though. Here’s one with my parents and her parents on our wedding day.

To grumble a bit…we’ve got all these ancient photos that I would nowadays immediately throw out. We just had a relative with a cheap kodak point-and-shoot wander about and snap pictures, and it shows — I take sharper, brighter photos of spiders than we’ve got of the early days of our marriage. Oh, well, it’s the life that matters, these pieces of paper will just end up in a landfill in a decade or two.

Now I just have to get her back home, but even that can wait. Better that she avoids the risk and stays healthy, and it’s also important that she not spread a virus on an 800 mile transit (we have no idea whether either of us have been infected, but it’s wisest to pretend we are. We don’t need to kill immunocompromised or elderly people so we can share a cupcake and a glass of ginger ale.)

What are you doing to keep yourself sane while “socially distanced”?

I’m lucky: I have a lab full of healthy, non-infectious spiders with no other people around, so I’m going to go entertain myself by feeding them flies for a while.

I’m also unlucky: my wife flew off to Colorado before all the alerts started going up, and now we’ve decided that she’ll just have to stay there for maybe another month. Or more. Until the risks are lower. At least she has a grandbaby to provide entertainment, which is almost as much fun as a room full of spiders. It does mean my house is empty except for me and the evil cat, and that I have to do all the dishes and clean out the litter box.

I might be a little bit stir-crazy by the time Mary finally gets home.

Bring out your dead!

Reading the news from Italy is depressing. It might be us a month from now.

Now I find myself confined in a place where time is suspended. All the shops are closed, except for groceries and pharmacies. All the bars and restaurants are shuttered. Every tiny sign of life has disappeared. The streets are totally empty; it is forbidden even to take a walk unless you carry a document that explains to authorities why you have left your house. The lockdown that began here in Lombardy now extends to the entire country.

For many Italians, the normal warnings about this virus were simply not enough to change behavior. Denial comes too easily, perhaps. It was more convenient to blame some foreign germ-spreader, or pretend that the news was unreal. Then came a reality check: Last Sunday, Pope Francis gave a benediction not from his normal window at the Vatican but via video, in part to avoid the crowd on St. Peter’s Square but also to send a message. That was the first strong sign to snap out of it.

In contrast, here’s Devin Nunes (and by proxy, the entire goddamned Republican party). The concern isn’t about keeping people healthy and alive, it’s about keeping the money flowing in the economy.

Hey, Devin: if you care so much about the “working people and their wages and tips”, why isn’t your party working to guarantee a living wage? Instead, you demand that they get out, sick or not, and service the people who are still going out to restaurants…where, if the workers are not infected, they will be by all the selfish people carrying the disease who are out there transmitting it.

Can we please not get to the point other countries are reaching, where the dead are kept with the living because no one wants to deal with the bodies?

When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s decaying body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

Quick, everyone, get to the Wal-Mart before all the body bags are off the shelves!