In case you’d like to name names responsible for the COVID-19 disaster

Rolling Stone tracks all the errors leading to our current unprepared state, and names the names.

Robert Redfield:

The front-line agency built to respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands. Dr. Robert Redfield is a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past. His 2018 nomination was a triumph for the Christian right, a coup in particular for evangelical activists Shepherd and Anita Smith, who have been instrumental in driving a global AIDS strategy centered on abstinence.

Redfield’s tight-knit relationship with the Smiths goes back at least three decades, beginning when Shepherd Smith recruited him to join the board of his religious nonprofit, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP). The Smiths made their views plain in the 1990 book Christians in the Age of AIDS, which argued HIV infection resulted from “people’s sinfulness,” and described AIDS as a consequence for those who “violate God’s laws.” Redfield, a devout Catholic who was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction, calling for the rejection of “false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles.”

Alex Azar:

The CDC reports to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Alex Azar, a former executive for the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly who gained infamy, in his five-year tenure, by doubling the price of insulin.

Azar is a creature of the GOP establishment: He cut his teeth as a Supreme Court clerk to Antonin Scalia, worked with Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton-Whitewater investigation under special counsel Ken Starr, and served as a deputy HHS administrator in the George W. Bush era, before becoming Eli Lilly’s top lobbyist. Azar, 52, is the type of corporate leader Republicans have long touted as capable of driving efficiencies in the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell praised Azar’s nomination in 2017, insisting, “Alex brings a wealth of private-sector knowledge that will prepare him well for this crucial role.”

Stephen Hahn:

Stephen Hahn had been on the job at the FDA for barely a month. A bald, 60-year-old of modest height, Hahn has an impeccable résumé — he served as chief medical executive at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center — but he had no experience running a government agency.

The need to engage the private sector for coronavirus testing was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen — by Trump’s first FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. In a January 28th Wall Street Journal article, “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic,” Gottlieb warned that the “CDC will struggle to keep up with the volume of screening.” He said the government must begin “working with private industry to develop easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic tests.”

If Hahn read his predecessor’s call to action, he did not act on it. Hahn did not lack authority; the FDA has broad discretion to relax the rules that were locked into place with Azar’s declaration. But Azar had, unaccountably, not included Hahn on the Coronavirus Task Force. By default, private test developers were now required to obtain an “emergency-use authorization” from the FDA to deploy COVID-19 testing. “Companies couldn’t make their own lab-developed tests,” Adalja says, “so you had Quest and LabCorp and the big-university labs on the sidelines.”

Donald Trump:

Having plunged the nation headlong and unprepared into the deadliest disease outbreak in a century, President Trump is now proving to be one of the greatest obstacles to an effective national response.

Sebelius ultimately blames Trump for failing to end the infighting and fix the testing failure. “The White House has a unique way to get agencies’ attention, by making it clear that they want a solution, and everybody at the table with that solution within 24 hours,” she says. “If the president wants this to happen, it will happen.” But on his visit to the CDC in Atlanta, Trump had made an extraordinary admission: That he did not want to let passengers from a cruise ship, then suffering an outbreak off the California coast, to come on shore because the tally of patients would rise. “I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said.

There are many other players, like Mike Pence, but these four are singled out for having the greatest responsibility and potential ability to have addressed the problem early on, who then failed and continue to fail spectacularly. Given the US’s historical failure to be able to hold our leaders accountable for anything — we’re treating the war criminal George W. Bush like a statesman now — I suspect they’re all going to emerge from this debacle unscathed, with a hundred thousand dead (or more) at their feet, and they won’t be arrested and tried for malignant neglect of their duties.

I still hold Henry Kissinger guilty of being a monster, and yet he’s still advising governments on how to murder their citizens. He’s a walking, talking declaration to the world that there is no justice.

Give it up, Ray

Oh. Ray Comfort is still making his dishonest videos? Here’s the trailer for the latest, title “Amazing Athiest [sp]: A journey of two atheists”.

Do you know those two guys? Are they supposed to be representative atheists? You know Comfort’s schtick: he confronts random people in the street who probably haven’t thought much about the subject he’s asking about, and then puts up a gloating video claiming that “hurr, hurr, hurr — look at these people who aren’t professional debaters.” Or, as the blurb says, “See their inconsistencies and struggles as they attempt to justify their blind faith.” This looks to be more of the same.

I’ll skip it.

The real Lord of the Flies

What a pleasant story to read! We’re all familiar with the entirely fictional story of Lord of the Flies, in which ship-wrecked boys revert to the natural savagery of all humans and set up a brutal regime and start oppressing and killing each other. It makes for a good story, I guess. Except that similar events happened for real in 1965, with a half-dozen 13-16 year old boys ‘borrowing’ a fishing boat, a storm disabling the boat, and then the boys were stranded on a rocky island in the Pacific for over a year. It all turned out differently.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

I imagine it could have gone badly if there’d been even one psychopath in the group, but then there would have been a year of chaos and self-destruction instead, and the fishing boat that eventually rescued them would have found nothing but bones and maybe some starving kids. Instead, we see that natural selection favored the population that cooperated, shared labor, and protected the weak and injured.

It’s curious that this optimistic true story of survival fell into obscurity, while the more pessimistic, cynical, and fictional story by William Golding sold 10s of millions of copies.

I’m afraid to even mention “Plandemic”

Yikes. My social media are squirming with the maggoty indignation of cranks lit up by this pseudo-documentary, Plandemic, which is actually nothing but an overlong trailer that was live on YouTube and Facebook briefly, before it got shot down and banned for spreading misinformation. I’m not going to encourage anyone to watch it — I haven’t bothered myself — but will instead tell you all to read Orac’s thorough takedown, “Judy Mikovits in Plandemic: An antivax conspiracy theorist becomes a COVID-19 grifter”. I’d heard enough about the lies in Plandemic before this, but Orac puts them all in one place.

Unfortunately, I also read the comments.

Double-yikes. The anti-vax, science-denialist crowd is out in full force in that comment thread. The conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites (???) are howling. It’s kind of informative to see the bad arguments they’re making, but I’m sure glad we don’t have any of those people here.

Alas, poor Amtor

Trivia fact: Edgar Rice Burroughs, in addition to his Tarzan and Mars books, also wrote a handful of pulp stories about Venus, which was called Amtor by the natives, and his intrepid hero, Carson Napier. They were a little different from the Mars series, where John Carter was teleported to Mars by some form of astral projection, in that Napier was a rocket pilot flying to Mars who made a tiny error in his calculation and crash-landed on Venus instead. Then it lapses into the usual formulaic adventure story where Napier finds a Princess (there’s always a princess), falls in love, and the two of them bumble about needing to rescue each other from pirates and communists. Amtor, by the way, is covered by oceans and continents of giant trees, and the cloud cover keeps the planet cool and liveable, except when the clouds briefly break and a brutal sun sets everything on fire beneath the gap.

Unfortunately, the real Venus has surface temperatures of 450°C and a dense and acidic atmosphere. Nothing lives there.

This recent modeling of the Venerian atmosphere suggests that there may have been a long period of relative coolth in the planet’s history. The runaway greenhouse effect wouldn’t have occurred until a period of intense volcanic activity that produced LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces, released even more CO2, and then the temperatures soared.

That surge occurred less than a billion years ago, so it’s easy to imagine warm (mean temperature of around ~20°C, compared to Earth’s current ~15°C) oceans in which life could have evolved before global warming slammed the hammer down and burnt the soup.

I think Carson Napier’s navigation error had to have been off by more than I thought: 150 million kilometers and a billion years. Even then he wouldn’t have found princesses, but at best the equivalent of single-celled prokaryotes, which would have been far more interesting than mere Amtorian princesses.

Anyone want a cat?

I’ve got one I could spare.

I had a suggestion to help with her general pukiness — to provide her with a puzzle feeder to giver something to do. So I did. How did she react? She puked all over it. When I discovered that, I just left and went for a long walk around town.

When I got back, she’d left me a colossal wad of slimy puke in the middle of the kitchen floor.

First come, first served, she’s yours.

This image has been photoshopped

Currently making the rounds:

I was suspicious, though. It’s too good to be true. So I snooped about, and found the original on the ADL website.

OK, now, really — who thought they needed to edit the original sign to make it less evil and more obviously stupid? That was a waste of effort. Just an unretouched photo of these clowns in their costumes with their traitor’s flags and their blatant anti-semitism is appalling enough, don’t you think?

My summer fantasy

Here’s what I do for a little relaxation: I stare at maps. My summer research is a bit constrained right now, so I’ve been planning alternatives, like making day-trips to neglected local spots to do spider-hunting. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of spiders is limited — I know a fair bit about a few species that live in the niches I’ve concentrated on, but relatively little about a lot of species that are in other environments. I need to correct that.

So I’ve been looking at maps and planning lovely little trips. My wife and I will pack the car with a picnic lunch, collecting tubes, my camera, and a drone (for scouting out locations), we’ll dress in long pants and long sleeves and boots, douse ourselves with DEET, and take off in the morning for a leisurely drive with frequent stops. We’ll look for parks and lakes and streams and abandoned farms and tromp around looking for spiders, photographing many, capturing a few, and heading back home in the late afternoon.

It sounds delightful to me. Right now all I can do is look at maps and plan these jaunts until I get all my grades submitted and recover my faithful companion, but it’s nice, and perfect for the pandemic season, because I plan to avoid people and visit places that spiders would like, and spiders don’t carry the virus. I look at the roads and the satellite views that reveal brushy areas where no one in their right mind would want to go — well, some of them might look great to hunters and fisherpeople, and that’s OK, I can share — and look forward to getting dirty and scratched and bug-bitten.

I also keep an eye on the local news. Oh, the Grass Lake restoration project is winding up? I bet there are spiders there. The university is constructing an ecostation? Spider country!

My original plans for the summer were a bit more lab-centered, and I still have some lab projects to maintain, but I’ve been thinking about how to adapt to our new circumstances, and I think I can find happiness in a summer in the weeds.