Hello! Sorry for unusually long silence, there was a power failure here, starting at 3:41 yesterday afternoon and ending a few minutes ago at noon 23. There were about 19 (only slight exaggeration) City Light trucks lined up along the block earlier when I went out to look.
Also, because that wasn’t enough, the California smoke has arrived. UGH. All sympathy to the people of California living with this for the past few weeks.
The mayor of Tuscaloosa is letting bars near the University of Alabama reopen on Tuesday, even though the school just reported more than 800 new cases.
800 new cases – hooray, that means it’s time to open up the bars! So that we can try for 8 thousand new cases!
In a press release, Mayor Walt Maddox citied a “positive trend” in results, saying an overall decline in community positivity rates “provides an opportunity for a limited reopening of bars which have sacrificed a great deal to protect our healthcare system and economy.” At the same time, the university reported 846 new cases over the last week—the largest increase in a single week since classes began.
Which Maddox is defining as a decline. Isn’t epidemiology fun!
Even some students were outraged with the decision. One who identifies himself as a freshman at the university tweeted that the mayor was making a “huge mistake” and that the decision made him feel less safe on campus.
Despite being alcoholics. Why is there such an entrenched idea that university students are all chronic drunks? Some university students are actually there to learn things.
Anyway – bars are open, kids, get out there and spread that covid.
Navalny’s condition is slightly improved.
On Monday, the Charité hospital in Berlin said in a statement that Mr Navalny was being weaned off mechanical ventilation.
“He is responding to verbal stimuli. It remains too early to gauge the potential long-term effects of his severe poisoning,” it said.
I think we can assume they won’t be beneficial.
Meanwhile Anna Nemtsova says today’s attack is classic KGB.
Men in civilian clothes with masks covering their faces grabbed the woman inspiring a revolution in Belarus on Monday. They pushed Maria Kolesnikova into a minivan at about 10am local time (3am ET)—the opposition leader hasn’t been seen since.
Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ brutal leader for the past 26 years, has been cracking down on protests and threatening to arrest members of the opposition Coordination Council for an alleged “attempt to seize power,” but this is not simply a case of heavy-handed policing. It was a classic abduction, a technique of repression favored by the likes of the KGB and its Russian successor the FSB for generations.
The Belarusian KGB has been known for making people “disappear” since the early years of Lukashenko’s rule; for more than a quarter of a century, he has chosen to repress his opponents. His willingness to abuse power is the main reason so many Belarusians want to see him forced out of office and put on trial.
It’s quite a good reason, too. Making people “disappear” is…you know, murder, or if you do enough of it, genocide. Doing it to terrorize opposition is political murder/genocide. It’s not what you want in a government.
Two other members of the 600-strong Coordination Council also went missing on Monday. Frantic opposition staff and their lawyers have been touring the prisons and police stations in a desperate search for their kidnapped colleagues.
This is bad.
People can be so stupid. Voluntarily stupid, stupid because not paying attention and not giving a shit, as opposed to unable to help it.
Like setting off a pyrotechnic device in Southern California while fires rage all over the state and the Santa Ana blows.
A smoke-generating pyrotechnic device used during a gender reveal party sparked the El Dorado Fire burning near Yucaipa, which has charred more than 7,000 acres, officials said Sunday.
And doing it at a “gender reveal party” for fucks sake.
According to the Cal Fire San Bernardino Unit, the El Dorado Fire was caused by “a smoke generating pyrotechnic device” used during the party in El Dorado Ranch Park. The fire spread from the park to Yucaipa Ridge, which separates Mountain Home Village and Forest Falls from Yucaipa.
“Cal Fire reminds the public that with the dry conditions and critical fire weather, it doesn’t take much to start a wildfire”, the agency said in a press release. “Those responsible for starting fires due to negligence or illegal activity can be held financially and criminally responsible.”
People shouldn’t need reminding.
A lot of people had to be evacuated.
More than 600 personnel were battling flames, along with 60 engines, three fixed-wing aircraft and six helicopters, according to the San Bernardino National Forest.
That’s a lot of expensive flame-battling for the sake of creating smoke during wildfire season. Jesus, people.
I hope the kid decides to be enby at age 5 and never deviates from that decision.
Nicholas Wade wrote a book on race, published in 2014 to scathing reviews. One of the reviews was in American Scientist. (I didn’t notice at first that it’s written by someone I know slightly: Greg Laden.)
In his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, science writer Nicholas Wade claims that race is real—that Darwinian natural selection has resulted in a number of biologically separate human populations characterized by distinct, genetically determined social behaviors. He asserts that many of these differences have emerged over the last 10,000 years and that they explain much of human history. He writes that recent science has “established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional” and uses this framework to account for regional variations in economic power and cultural pursuits.
As soon as it appeared, Wade’s book touched off a firestorm of controversy—as he surely knew it would. It’s the latest in a series of dispatches concerning human variation, whose authors in recent decades have starkly divided into two camps, one centered in anthropology and the other in psychology, political science, and economics. Wade is in the latter camp. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a widely read text by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray in 1994, proclaimed intractable human differences in ability between races; the authors based their views on disputed work published by Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton in the 1980s and early 1990s. Meanwhile, anthropologists had developed a divergent concept of human variation, reaching the collective conclusion that the human species is not compartmentalized in races or subspecies (interchangeable terms in zoology). In 1998 the American Anthropological Association adopted its Statement on Race asserting that the best available research shows race to be a social construct that is biologically invalid.
Early reviews of Wade’s book show a familiar division: Anthropologists mostly take a critical view, whereas psychologists and economists generally like the book. Agustín Fuentes, a zoologist and anthropologist, and Jonathan Marks, a geneticist trained in anthropology, are among the more negative; Bell Curve coauthor Murray and famed geneticist James Watson, a supporter of the biological race concept, land on the positive side. The favorable reviews almost invariably echo one of Wade’s key themes: Disbelief in the existence of race results from biased science driven by a left-leaning political agenda. Wade suggests that “any researcher who even discusses issues politically offensive to the left runs the risk of antagonizing the professional colleagues who must approve his requests for government funds and review his articles. . . The result is that researchers at present routinely ignore the biology of race.”
So is Wade right? Are there human races? Is the variation seen between different cultures and locations best explained by genetic differences between human populations? And have anthropologists been turning a blind eye to the evidence in front of them?
There is no shortage of scientific information, and it gives a clear answer: no.
He then gives a quick sketch of the scientific information, and sums up:
Without boundaries or predictive value, race isn’t a valid biological concept. Human races may have existed in the past—just as there are subspecies of a number of different mammals, including chimpanzees—and they could exist in the future. Nonetheless, to this point the history of Homo sapiens has not led to a known emergence of distinct races. We evolved recently, spread quickly, and in many regions interacted readily. Race is a powerful and important social construct, and in that way it is very real, but it is not a biological useful concept for understanding human diversity.
And guess who else weighed in.
Our letter to the New York Times criticizing Nicholas Wade’s book on race
That’s Jerry Coyne criticizing Wade’s book on race.
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review (already up) features a letter signed by 139 population geneticists, including myself. It is, in essence, a group of scientists objecting en masse to Nicholas Wade’s shoddy treatment of race and evolution in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.
The book was about the genetics of ethnic and cultural differences, and while it made a valid point that ethnic groups do show small but significant genetic differences across the globe, there was no evidence for Wade’s main thesis: that differences in behavior among groups, and in the disparate societies they construct, are based on genetic differences. While that might in principle be true, we simply have no evidence for that conclusion, and it was irresponsible of Wade to suggest that such evidence existed.
I was asked to review Wade’s book for a major magazine, but after reading it became so dispirited that I simply didn’t have the stomach to eviscerate it (pardon the pun). But Allen Orr did a good job in the New York Review of Books; and it was telling that even the Times’s own review, by David Dobbs, was pretty critical. (The Times Book Review is infamous for going easy on books by the paper’s own writers, and Wade has written for the paper for donkey’s years.)
I find that interesting in light of the discussion (especially Coel’s part of it) on A biocultural mélange.
Unidentified masked men snatched the leading Belarusian opposition figure, Maria Kolesnikova, from the street in the centre of the capital, Minsk, on Monday and drove her away in a minivan, witnesses told local media.
Kolesnikova was one of the campaign partners of the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who claimed victory against the long-ruling president, Alexander Lukashenko, in disputed elections on 9 August.
Kolesnikova was reportedly seized soon after 10am local time while walking close to Minsk’s national art museum. Three other members of the opposition coordination council have also vanished, in what appears to be a targeted attempt by the authorities to wipe out the protest movement.
After, it appears, rigging the election.
Lukashenko’s victory – in a poll widely seen as rigged – has sparked mass protests. On Sunday, more than 100,000 people marched on the president’s residence, calling on him to quit. Riot police wearing balaclavas arrested 633 people. Gangs of pro-government thugs beat up protesters on their way home.
This is very bad.
The NY Times reports on how Trump pays for all those lawyer hours:
He has drawn on campaign donations as a piggy bank for his legal expenses to a degree far greater than any of his predecessors.
Probably because his predecessors weren’t so eager to break the law.
In New York, Trump dispatched a team of lawyers to seek damages of more than $1 million from a former campaign worker after she claimed she had been the target of sexual discrimination and harassment by another aide. The lawyers have been paid $1.5 million by the Trump campaign for work on the case and others related to the president.
Couldn’t he have just paid someone to torture her to death while he watched? Would have been cheaper.
The RNC has paid at least $2.5 million in legal bills over Trump’s relatives’ meddling with Russia and Ukraine.
In California, Trump sued to block a law that would have forced him to release his taxes if he wanted to run for reelection. The Trump campaign and the RNC have paid the law firm handling this case, among others, $1.8 million.
…
It is also hard to differentiate between legal clashes the president has initiated and those in which he is the target of opponents. But an examination of spending by his various campaign arms documents how the intermingling of his presidency, business interests, campaigns, defense against the Russia investigation, impeachment and eagerness to penalize rivals have led to millions of dollars in donor money going to help bankroll litigation.
It’s expensive to be a crook.
The filings do not address the value of work for which he has not been charged, like Rudy Giuliani’s unpaid position as his personal lawyer. Nor do they account for the legal support Trump, as president, receives from the Justice Department, which has helped defend him on issues that blur the line between his public and private roles, like the constitutional prohibition on a president receiving benefits from other governments and efforts to obtain his tax returns and financial records.
He’s a very expensive toy.
Well that will certainly change everyone’s mind!
Yes indeed, Sarah Sanders who told countless lies to us at the behest of the chronic liar who lied and cheated his way into the presidency – she is just the person to convince us her lies about Trump are the truth.
Trump had other business that fateful day in Paris:
Trump pointed out a Benjamin Franklin bust, a Franklin portrait and a set of figurines of Greek mythical characters, and insisted the pieces come back with him to Washington. McCourt, the ambassador, was startled, but didn’t object, according to people briefed on the incident. Trump later quipped that the envoy would get the art back “in six years,” when his potential second term in office would be winding down.
…
The White House claims that Trump brought the pieces back so that they could be displayed for the American people. The problem is that the pieces are being displayed in the Oval Office, which is not open to the public.
…
Interestingly, the art that Trump loved so much that he just had to take it, were replicas, so a fake president stole fake art and then lied about displaying it in public,
He didn’t really “steal” it, since it’s government property whether in the embassy or in Trump’s second best toilet, but if the story is true he did rudely help himself to it for no apparent reason. Seems typical.
More on the efforts to silence Claire Chandler:
Addressing the Senate on Thursday evening, Liberal senator Claire Chandler said a complaint had been filed against her under Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act in relation to an opinion piece on free speech published in a Tasmanian newspaper earlier this year and an email related to the piece.
In the opinion piece, Senator Chandler said women’s sports, women’s toilets and women’s changing rooms were designed for people of the female sex and should remain that way.
So we’re now in a world where legal bodies can punish women for “discrimination” for saying women are women and men are not women.
“Being summoned by a quasi-judicial body to appear and explain why I say that males shouldn’t be in female change rooms or in female sporting competitions is an indictment on the state of free speech in this country.”
It doesn’t say much for the state of people’s thinking, either.
“It is yet another example of the assault on truth and the assault on the very meaning of the word women by activists who are determined to remove every sex-based right that women around the world have and allow anyone who identifies as a woman into women’s sports and women’s spaces,” she said.
And to take jobs and promotions reserved for women, and claim to have fulfilled rules that require a fair proportion of women in particular jobs and political parties and the like. Men who say they identify as women can take everything reserved for women, and then punish women who object.
But Equality Tasmania spokesperson Charlie Burton said with free speech came a responsibility to exercise that right in a way that does not harm others.
Meaning what? Does it harm people to refuse to say their fantasies are true? If the answer is yes, does that have to be balanced against the fact that it harms everyone else to be required to endorse other people’s fantasies? Especially when those fantasies involve usurping and appropriating the ontology of other people?
Charlie Burton goes on:
“Tasmania’s law against humiliating and intimidating language has been upheld by state Parliament twice which indicates it has widespread community support.”
Yes but how is it humiliating and intimidating to say that men are not women? How does it work to say that a woman is intimidating and humiliating men by not agreeing that they are women? News flash: men as a group have more power than women as a group, so punishing women for saying men are not women looks like a very bizarre warping of ordinary understanding of how power and intimidation work.
Dr Burton invited Senator Chandler to meet young transgender Tasmanians and their families to help her understand their lives and the impact of discrimination.
“We want Senator Chandler to hear what life is really like for Tasmania’s trans and gender-diverse young people and their families, including their desire to be accepted just like everyone else, and how negative stereotypes and misinformation can cause deep harm,” Dr Burton said.
I think Dr Burton should meet female Tasmanians and hear what life is really like for Tasmania’s women, including their desire to be treated fairly just like men, and how negative stereotypes and misinformation can cause deep harm.
A motorcycle rally is worth dying for, right? And worth killing people for?
More than two weeks after nearly half a million bikers flocked to South Dakota, the tally of coronavirus infections traced back to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has surpassed 260, an estimate that is growing steadily as more states report cases and at least one death.
…
A Minnesota man in his 60s who went to the rally was later hospitalized for COVID-19 and died earlier this week, said Kris Ehresmann, head of infectious disease for the Minnesota Department of Health.
Minnesota has counted more than 45 cases tied to the rally, and that only includes people who got tested and then notified state health departments about their possible exposure at Sturgis.
Which means it’s only a small fraction. How many people willing to ignore the warnings thoroughly enough to go to the rally are going to get tested afterwards? Not that many, I would think.
The event attracted national media attention and became a flashpoint in pandemic politics.
South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem – a strong ally of President Trump — encouraged people to attend the rally, despite warnings it could seed outbreaks in her state and across the country.
Noem has resisted pandemic precautions like requiring people to wear masks while in public or limiting large gatherings. In the last few weeks, South and North Dakota have emerged as coronavirus hot spots with the highest rates of new cases per capita in the country.
So that’s nice. The governor at the very least encouraged people to add to the burden on hospitals and medical staff.
Here’s the tweet:
President Donald Trump is continuing to wage battle against interpretations of history which he claims are un-American.
So the true-American or yes-American interpretation is that slavery was a benign arrangement that worked out very well for everyone, especially the slaves? In other words an enormous lie? That’s affirm-American?
In a Sunday morning tweet, the President said the US Department of Education would investigate whether California schools are using the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in [the] public school curriculum. The Pulitzer-Prize winning collection reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America’s shores.
The message came after the President on Friday night banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to “white privilege” and “critical race theory.”
This is the guy who noisily insisted that Obama wasn’t born in the US, the guy who paid for a full page ad in the New York Times demanding the death penalty for 5 Black teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit, the guy who was sued by the federal government for refusing to rent his apartments to Black people. This is the guy who has been using his bully pulpit to incite racism for nearly four years now. This is scum.
The 1619 Project was launched by the New York Times Magazine last year. After the launch, the Pulitzer Center was named an education partner for the project and announced its education team would develop educational resources and curricula for teachers to use. The 1619 Project curriculum is available online for free through the center.
What’s the problem? It tells the unpleasant truth about the history of this country. Trump wants to bury that truth…or more to the point, he wants to whip his fans into a frothing rage about the telling of that truth.
The President and Attorney General William Barr have said that they don’t believe systemic racism exists in the United States.
I’m sure they’d say the same about systemic sexism. Easy for them, isn’t it.
I can see only the first two paragraphs but that’s plenty. Iain Gately in The Sunday Times:
It’s been nearly six months since we were first asked to work from home, and one of the early silver linings of lockdown was — I think we can all agree — not having to spend a large proportion of every morning and evening with our nose pressed into a stranger’s armpit on a packed train or bus.
But, with a half a year to reflect, did we wish our commutes away too readily? If you’re not back at your desk, isn’t a small piece of you missing that daily ride to and from the office? For many of us, the commute is part of who we are — and it serves a useful purpose.
Oh yes, I’m sure millions of people are missing the privilege of squandering a huge amount of money and an even huger amount of time to get from where they live to where they work. I’m sure they miss the expense and tedium and discomfort and waste. Who wouldn’t rather be sitting in a crowded train or a boring car going from X to Y than taking a walk or playing with the kids or slicing up some veggies from the garden?
Trump doesn’t want any more of that god damn anti-racism training around here, understood?
Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.
You know, racism is kind of divisive too.
To be fair, I’m not sure I trust the people who do mass trainings of this kind to do it well, having sat through some silly bullshit even just working for the Seattle Parks Department, but on the other hand I trust Donald Trump a whole lot less than that.
The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.
Because there is no white privilege? Come on now.
Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.
We definitely want Fox News telling us how to do things. That will work out very well.
“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added.
No, he does not. Not even slightly. He has the opposite of that. He has a proven track record of stamping on those whose voices have long been ignored. He’s an evil malevolent psychopath, so shut up.
Jessica Krug won’t be teaching her classes this year.
In a statement released on Friday night, the University provost, Brian Blake, and dean, Paul Wahlbeck, wrote: “Dr Krug will not be teaching her classes this semester. We are working on developing a number of options for students in those classes, which will be communicated to affected students as soon as possible.”
…
Krug’s biography on the GW website lists imperialism and colonialism and African American history among her areas of expertise. Her writings center heavily on issues of African culture and diaspora.
In itself there’s nothing wrong with that. People should be interested in other cultures and histories. But she faked it, which is another matter.
In Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities, published before the revelations, she paid tribute to her apparently invented past in the acknowledgment section. She wrote: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”
Back in my day being Jewish was good enough. Kids today want it all.
I jest, but I do find it pretty icky, battening onto other people’s history of oppression. That bit about her ancestors who bled life into a future (meaning, who produced her) is really ugh.
Krug’s public persona comes across in a video testimony to a New York city council hearing on gentrification from June. Referring to herself as Jess La Bombalera, Krug refers to “my Black and brown siblings” in the anti-gentrification movement and criticizes “all these white New Yorkers” who “did not yield their time to Black and brown indigenous New Yorkers”.
An exhibitionist, in short.
A parade of boats in Texas celebrating their support for Donald Trump ended in disarray when multiple vessels got into trouble on apparently choppy waters leading to several sinking and a slew of distress calls being made to rescue officials.
Well, buddying up to Trump tends to end that way.
The event, called the Lake Travis Trump boat parade, had been organized on Facebook with images of Trump campaign slogans adorning a variety of boats.
Does Antifa have submarines?
Meanwhile Trump is playing golf.
Donald Trump visited one of his own golf courses on Saturday amid one of the worst recent scandals to his presidency in recent months and after expert warnings that up to 400,000 Americans could die of the coronavirus before the end of the year.
A guy’s got to relax you know. It’s hard work screaming nonsense into a microphone and telling lies to reporters.
CNN, which tallies Trump’s visits to golf courses, reported that this visit was the 295th trip to one of his own golf courses during his presidency.
A guy’s got to relax every three days, okay?
During his campaign for the White House in 2016, Trump was a harsh critic of the amount of golf Barack Obama played during his time in office. Yet once in the White House, Trump has played far more often than his predecessor.
Well, Obama didn’t have to spend all his time telling lies.
In a public post in a public Facebook group, a discussion of what to tell contact tracers.
Layperson looking for feedback. So I am in training to be a contact tracer, I have a trans family member so I escalated the way we were initially asking these questions. For epidemiological reasons we are required to ask for the following information:
Sex at birth
Gender identity
Sexual orientation
I have now been asked to create the verbatim myself that will go out to all the trainers for current and future training. The reason for this post is I am hoping to hear what would be prefered in terms of the verbiage for how a tracer would ask for that info.
Preferred meaning what? The goal here is getting accurate information. The goal is not flattering the feelings of people who think they have bespoke genders. This is a pandemic, people, not a meeting of the Self-obsessed Society.
But sure enough – the third reply proudly announces a policy of not telling the truth.
Speaking as a layperson, quite frankly regardless of the method used, if someone came to me asking me these questions, I’m going to give you answers to those that Will probably make those data points irrelevant. I would flat out refuse to answer any questions about my sexual orientation, and I’m going to match my sex at birth to my gender identity Because there’s no way I’m outing myself to you. It’s nothing personal to the contract [sic] tracer, but I don’t know them, and I don’t know what’s being done with this *public* data on the back end, and I don’t want anything to come around and bite me later with someone who might decide to misgender me in the current political climate. I despise the idea that some researcher somewhere will decide to use my sex and birth information to make decisions about what data set I belong in which may or may not be actually medically accurate depending which transition steps I may or may not have done. As a contract [sic] tracer, you’re not my doctor; I have no personal relationship with you. Thus, I have no vested interest in giving you accurate answers to these questions.
16 likes and loves; no dissents.
We’re doomed.
Who is that fascinating man?
Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US, has said Boris Johnson is fascinated and inspired by Donald Trump, and is intrigued by the US president’s patchy relationship “with the facts and the truth”.
Well, “patchy” – more like non-existent. Trump’s relationship with the facts and the truth is like Trump’s relationship with Tiffany: it doesn’t exist. Trump wouldn’t even recognize facts and the truth if they came up to him at a party and sat on his lap.
Darroch wrote that Johnson had been “fascinated” by Trump on his visits to Washington as foreign secretary before he became prime minister, with particular focus on the president’s use of language.
This includes “the limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth”, the former diplomat wrote.
In other words Johnson was fascinated by the fact that Trump has the intellect of a very young and bad-tempered child and yet he is the head of state of an all-too-powerful country.
After Darroch left the diplomatic corps following a 42-year career, Trump fired back with a range of epithets, calling him “the wacky ambassador”, “pompous”, and “a very stupid guy”.
As I say – the intellect of a very young and bad-tempered child.
Aw, he mad.
The Atlantic magazine published a story that described how Trump said he cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers”. Other outlets confirmed the news and detailed more incidents of Trump’s insulting attitude to American soldiers.
Among those was the Fox News national security correspondent, Jennifer Griffin, who confirmed in a Twitter thread that Trump called soldiers “suckers”, had questioned why anyone would want to become a soldier, and had not wanted to honor war dead at the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France.
That’s gotta hurt. Et tu Vulpes?
H/t Acolyte of Sagan
