Now the insurrectionists want pardons

After all the tough rhetoric about taking over the government, the insurrectionists are now whining that they deserve pardons from Trump because they did what he wanted them to. They seem to think that just being a Trump supporter means not having to face any consequences.

Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate broker who took a private jet to Washington to join the attack on the US Capitol, has pleaded with Donald Trump to pardon her after she was arrested by federal authorities.

After surrendering to the FBI on Friday, Ryan said: “We all deserve a pardon.”

“I’m facing a prison sentence,” she told CBS11 at her home. “I think I do not deserve that.”

Turning to look into the camera, she said: “I would ask the president of the United States to give me a pardon.”
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The radicalization of Kevin Greeson

How could it happen that a man who had voted for Barack Obama and had even traveled from his home in Alabama to Washington DC to witness his inauguration in 2009, became an ardent Trump supporter and ended up dying of a heart attack on the grounds of the Capitol on the day of the insurrection? ProPublica explains how the transformation occurred.

Greeson had undergone a stark political transformation in those intervening years. A longtime Democrat who once championed unions and supported progressive politicians, Greeson had become a staunch Trump supporter by the time he died outside the Capitol at the age of 55.

In the weeks leading up to his death, he gave up Fox News for less mainstream right-wing news sources and wrote a series of posts on the conservative-leaning social media site Parler advocating political violence in response to what he saw as Democrats’ efforts to “steal” the 2020 election from the president.
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Who would have guessed?

It appears that people who worked for Trump are finding it difficult to get jobs after he leaves office.

With less than a week to go in the Trump White House, staffers are reportedly frantically looking for their next gig. They’re not having a lot of luck. 

After two months of the President challenging election results and last week’s attack on the Capitol, the cushy corporate and Hollywood jobs that usually await administration staffers after they leave the White House don’t seem to be there. One public relations recruiter who said more than a dozen staffers inquired about working with them claims that they took on six as clients, but weren’t able to even land interviews for any of them, Business Insider reported.
…

Shockingly, it appears that people who voluntarily worked in the Trump White House have a sense of entitlement.

“They’re all very all about themselves with narcissistic attitudes, thinking any company in the country will want to hire me,” the recruiter told BI. “I listened to one for about 20 minutes, and it was so much baloney, what he was spewing out to me.”

So the people who stuck with Trump to the end are people who are just like him. That figures.

Wine snobbery

I am not a wine drinker so cannot speak from personal experience but know that suggesting to people who consider themselves connoisseurs of wine that some tests have shown that there isn’t that much difference between expensive and cheap wines (and that some tests found that experts cannot distinguish even between red and white wines) is sure to arouse indignation. I know personally someone who when he visits his parents’ home, takes some of their wine and pours it down the sink because he thinks it is inferior. My own attitude to any matters of taste is to follow Duke Ellington’s advice in music that “If it sounds good, it is good.” If you like the taste of something, you should ignore other factors like its cheap price or the attitude of experts.
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The last days of Trump

Trump has been rarely seen in public these days. If you were worried that he was holed up in his bedroom sulking and bingeing on his comfort food of Big Macs and Diet Coke, you can rest easy. His public schedule says that he is hard at work though it is a little vague on details.

As has frequently been the case in recent weeks, Trump had no public engagements had his public schedule blithely stated that the president “will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings”.

I only hope Trump does not overwork himself in his last days in office. He should relax and take some time off to play golf.

Seth Meyers says that moving vans have been spotted arriving at the White House.

The Dutch are so quaint

The Dutch government has resigned en masse. What was the massive scandal that brought them all down? Prepare to be shocked.

Mark Rutte’s government has stepped down after thousands of families were wrongly accused of child welfare fraud and told to pay money back.

Families suffered an “unparalleled wrong”, Dutch MPs decided, with tax officials, politicians, judges and civil servants leaving them powerless.

Many of those affected were from an immigrant background and hundreds were plunged into financial difficulty.

Mr Rutte submitted the cabinet’s resignation to the king.

“Innocent people have been criminalised and their lives ruined,” he then told reporters, adding that responsibility for what had gone wrong lay with the cabinet. “The buck stops here.”
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What did they expect? They’re just the hired help after all

Now that the Trump family is on the way out, people are less hesitant to describe the negative aspects of their behavior such as this.

In a multi-bylined article one of America’s top investigative news outlets has chronicled in leg-crossing detail the apparently extreme difficulty that the Secret Service detail assigned to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have had in finding a place to go to the bathroom.

According to the Washington Post the president’s daughter and her top White House adviser spouse have apparently exiled the squad of men and women assigned to keep them from harm’s way from using the toilets in their sprawling Washington DC mansion.
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The phases of vaccines and drug clinical trials

I have been discussing the nature of the trials for the vaccine and the different phases. This article discusses what each phase involves. I had thought that there were just three phases but it turns out that there are five, at least when it comes to cancer treatments, with just the middle three getting the most attention. I am not sure if that is the case for every new treatment.

Phase 0

Phase 0 trials are the first clinical trials done among people. They aim to learn how a drug is processed in the body and how it affects the body. In these trials, a very small dose of a drug is given to about 10 to 15 people.

Phase I

Phase I trials aim to find the best dose of a new drug with the fewest side effects. The drug will be tested in a small group of 15 to 30 patients. Doctors start by giving very low doses of the drug to a few patients. Higher doses are given to other patients until side effects become too severe or the desired effect is seen. The drug may help patients, but Phase I trials are to test a drug’s safety. If a drug is found to be safe enough, it can be tested in a phase II clinical trial.
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The Skepticamp talks are now online

The Monterey Skepticamp conference on January 2, 2021 where I gave a talk was enjoyable and informative, covering quite a range of topics. All the talks have been posted online. The full program is can be seen here.

The full video for the day’s program is 7 hours 27 minutes long. I give below the starting times for each talk which we were asked to limit to 20 minutes to allow for 10 minutes of Q/A . After the opening welcome remarks by organizer Susan Gerbic and a small quiz by Arlen Grossman, the rest of the talks were as follows:

35 minutes: András Gábor Pintér – Building Bridges – Why we need to organize to bring skepticism forward

1 hour 14 minutes: Janyce Boynton – Facilitated Communication – I Thought That Died in the 1990s!

1 hour 56 minutes: Stuart Vyse – Do Superstitions Work?

2 hours 27minutes: Kelly Burke – Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia

2 hours 54 minutes: Monica Ashly – Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia

4 hours 12 minutes: Richard Saunders (host of Skeptic Zone) –  So you want to do a Skeptical Podcast?

4 hours 53 minutes: Adrienne Hill – Tourette Syndrome: Stereotypes and CAM treatments

5 hours 29 minutes: Kyle Polich – Data Skeptic: “I don’t know anyone who has COVID-19”

5 hours 59 minutes: Mano Singham – The Copernican Myths

6 hours 30 minutes: Rob Palmer – Belief in Psychics: What’s the Harm and Who’s to Blame?