Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Tom has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
This made me smile on what has been a sad day at the blog.
(Also: Beethoven had it coming, ya follow?)
The thread. It is open. In particular, though, any truly wacky musical links gratefully appreciated.
ETA: Twitter friend (and real-life science engagement colleague) John Dupuis sent me this to come at the same experience from a different angle:
Sharing is caring, amirite?
I know that Cheryl and Adam have both weighed in on the serial folly that is the “debate” about the origins of the SARS-CoV2 virus behind the pandemic. It’s been bugging me too, and I’ve had a couple of pieces go up at Nautilus Magazine over the last several days to vent my pique. One was on the lacuna that seems to have bothered no editors in major media as their reporters come up to them with assertions of the risks involved in biological research. That’s a kind of indirect criticism of media failures, about which a little more below.
The other, which posted just last night is a more direct engagement with one of the many facets of the bullshit crystal at the core of the latest flurry of interest in branding China as the malign actor at the heart of the pandemic. It takes up race-science purveyor Nicholas Wade’s proposition that features in the viral genome are nearly certain indicators of human manipulation of the virus, performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That indictment gained traction in the wider media ecosystem in part, perhaps large part, because Nobel laureate and former Rockefeller University and Caltech president David Baltimore told Wade that there was indeed within a particular feature of the genome a “smoking gun” for human intervention.
Baltimore has since walked that back a bit, retreating to a “just posing the question” kind of stance. But the damage is done, and its made worse by the way major media–The Washington Post, NYT, and Vanity Fair, to name a few, have decided to assign follow up stories to political reporters, or China bureau staff, or a non-virology checked out investigative reporter.
This is where I froth at the mouth. Science is hard to do; science journalism similarly so (with different failure modes). One of the most important skills for a science reporter is being able to figure out who is truly an expert, not just in the general area of a given line of research, but on the particular nuances of the story to be covered. This is true in any science, but most people, certainly most editors, have no idea just how true this is for modern biology. Handing off a story that turns on questions like what drives codon frequency in different organisms to someone who thinks journalism is getting one quote from a Republican and then another from a Democrat (I almost wrote, “and then one from another Republican”) is…
…sub-optimal.
Anyway…go read those pieces if you’re interested, and if you’re not, use this as yet more thread on which to open up.
Here’s that General Milley CRT*-in-the-military response everyone’s been talking about.
(OT, but I’d like to know what he found of military use in those Mouse books he mentioned, but that’s for another time.)
This isn’t quite as enamel-removing as that Austalian general’s blistering message on sexual abuse, but it’s exactly what is needed from our senior military leadership and elected officials.
The Republicans are weaponizing White nationalism–race based fascism–by dressing it up as “concern” for historical accuracy or American idealism or what have you. They are trying to regain power by denying the reality of our past and present, using very clever marketing to do so. You don’t win that fight by correcting them fact by fact. You win it by punching them (metapohorically) in the face.
General Milley does that within the bounds set by his uniform and his obligation to respond to civilian authority. Now we need our elected to go full bore as well, with the added freedom of expression they have compared to a serving member of the armed services.
Some are. More need to. And we need to work the media as hard as possible to shift the representation of this fight there. Twitter warriors, mount up!
Oh…and open thread.
*No, no, no…not those old-style TVs that some supply sergeant may still have to account for.
I was going to do something more serious, but it’s a flat out gorgeous day here, I’ve just come back from clambering over the rocks and staring out towards Ireland in the coastal village in which I may retire (not soon, alas, but not infinitely far off either…). I even managed to forc my obligate-free-lancer-brain-self to take an actual whole weekend off, so why not a bit of why-yes-my-gob-is-well-and-truly-smacked delight/horror at the near perfect, crossing-of-the-streams level malign stupidity to be found in this story.
I now know why I have not yet made the fortune that would hasten my translocation to the seaside. I haven’t taken advantage of the right advice to guide my investments in what really, truly, absolutely aren’t ill-conceived pump and dump scams in digital dress:
Anything with a verifiable birthday or creation date has a birth chart that can be read and, according to astrologers, gleaned for predictive information. That means there’s astrology for relationships, pets, political movements and, yes, bitcoin.
There’s a name for this new field, which is yet one more thing we have to thank the socially-mediated enstupiding of society that so chaps our collective asses right now:
“People can learn about astrology in small, digestible ways through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter,” said fellow financial astrologer Robert Weinstein. “Social media is this amplifier for everything in general. And astrology is just one of the things I think is really benefiting from it.”
The Washington Post’s piece centers on a young practitioner of this “art” named Maren Altman, who reassures the reporter that “I’m a really serious person.” She’s now a TikTok star, offering her star-driven financial advice with a video persona that mixes flirtation and woo.
In early January, Maren read bitcoin’s chart, using its creation date, Jan. 3, 2009. “New moon in Capricorn, January 13th, looks big for bitcoin,” Maren says in the video. “Little before that … Saturn will join the bitcoin Mercury exact by degree on January 11th, which looks like some corrections with Mercury and Saturn. It could be news about something that leads to a drop momentarily. But with this new moon, sun moon Pluto, right on top of bitcoin’s Jupiter, this is like atomic-level new beginning.”
In other words, Saturn and Mercury’s position might indicate a drop in value, but Jupiter and Pluto signaled bitcoin’s price would rebound from any correction and continue to rise.
“It looks like such a bull run,” she adds.
I haz a said, though, over the way the article plays out. The reporter followed the passage above with the coy line that “sure enough” bitcoin prices dropped briefly and then doubled by April.
Sure enough…
Oy.
He did both-sides it a little, writing that “many financial planners see it as a load of hooey,” then quoting one who does sort of get at some of the problems with astrological guides to the market. But he then wrecks any possible useful impact by giving an devotee the last word:
“Astrology has always been more of an esoteric kind of initiate, secret knowledge,” Weinstein put it. “It really never was for the masses.”
Translating that statement into news you can use: If you don’t know who the mark at the table is, look in a mirror.
I’m split between mere spectator glee — I’m happy to watch the follies of my fellow anthropoids from a safe distance — and despair. This is how societies become dumber (and more vulnerable to the radical allure of the right, in our current circumstance), not just in the silliness of one young woo-merchant on the web, but the kewl-kid indulgence at the level of major media. I’d bet sawbucks to donuts that the Washington Post’s leaders aren’t trading bitcoin by the planets, but they’re happy to play such silliness for laughs in a venue and framing that conveys one message to those in on the joke, and a very different one to those who are not.
Yeah, that’s a bit grumpy, I guess. But it’s hard enough being a science writer without this kind of help. What the hell. Pointing and laughing releases stress, and can be done here with no mean impact on the target of the ridicule. She (and they) are off to the bank while we’re cavorting on this almost top ten thousand blog, so who’s the clever one anyway.
Hmmmm. That wasn’t any kinder, was it?
I should stop. Happy Solstice, everyone. Have some thread, open as it gets…
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. The obvious choice, I know, and chosen because it is so damn obvious.
There was this story in the Boston Globe a few days ago about a woman who switched from an Obamacare compliant plan to a “healthcare sharing ministry”–aka a Jesus be-draped sham plan:
Hargreaves, 58, of Chatham, a self-employed real estate agent, said the religious aspect of the plan was not the primary reason she chose it. She was shopping for savings.
Hargreaves said she had purchased traditional health insurance through a broker since 2015, but began discussing alternatives a couple years later when her premiums rose significantly. At the time, brokers were free to sell sharing ministry plans, and Hargreaves signed on to one such plan in March 2019 and switched to OneShare at the beginning of 2020.
So, not a religious move, but an economic one, which is fine; health insurance can be damn expensive in the Hub of the Universe, and lots of people try to save whatever they can.
But you can guess what came next.
For a while it worked, cutting her monthly premium by hundreds of dollars.
Then, in March, she had double hip-replacement surgery to relieve acute pain, followed by a four-day stay in the hospital and extensive physical therapy.
The surgery was successful, but Hargreaves’s “insurer” refused to cover any of the costs, saying her surgery was the result of a preexisting condition. She was saddled with nearly $75,000 in medical bills.
There are a couple of morals to draw from this utterly predictable tale. First is that “religious” business will be as vicious as any secular one in defense of the bottom line. Assuming otherwise is a mark’s move.
Another is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you buy “insurance” that says right on the box it isn’t insurance, well…
At the bottom of its website homepage, OneShare says it is not an insurer. In an e-mail, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit told me it’s different from a traditional insurer because it does not assume the risk of medical expenses incurred by its members, does not promise to pay expenses, and makes no guarantee of coverage.
Instead, it collects monthly “contributions” — the equivalent of premiums paid to insurers — from members and coordinates the payment of eligible medical expenses among members according to its own established rules.
This is why I do have some sympathy for Hargreaves. She is a minnow, swimming with sharks:
Still, the nonprofit shares some of the look and feel of an insurer with its offerings of various coverage packages with names like “Catastrophic,” “Classic,” and “Complete,“ each with a schedule of per-visit payments (looking a lot like copayments) and different in- or out-of-network rates. (Hargreaves has the “Complete” plan, which is the most comprehensive.)
And the operation does try to put plenty of lipstick on their pig:
Health care sharing ministry members have “a common set of ethical or religious beliefs and share medical expenses in accordance with those beliefs,” according to the exemption in the ACA. Many of them are aligned with Christian ideals or principles.
The OneShare website displays biblical quotations, including one about carrying “each other’s burdens.”
Maybe they’ll carry your groceries across the street, especially if your hips aren’t doing well…but there are clearly limits to “Christian” charity in this instance.
So, yeah: these not-insurance insurance scams are just that…fine if you don’t need them, a possibly fatal, certainly expensive shit show if you do. The good news in Massachusetts is that since 2020, these “plans” can’t be sold in the state by brokers or agents. You really have to work at it to get one now.
But that still leaves Hargreaves on the hook, and, as noted while I do have some sympathy for her circumstances–hell, a lot from one angle; $75,000 is a potentially life-wrecking sum to have to pony up–there are limits, and this detail in the story tests them:
Hargreaves assumed coverage would be routinely approved. Her ailment was degenerative, attributable to aging, not a preexisting condition, she said.
Hargreaves said she did not hear back from OneShare on her request for preapproval of coverage until the day before her surgery on March 4. She said she was shocked by the denial.
Hargreaves said the surgery went forward nonetheless, in the belief that coverage would be granted on appeal.
But it wasn’t. In its denial, OneShare focused on her 2019 checkup, when her primary care physician wrote that Hargreaves had “osteoarthritis in both hips,” based on Hargreaves’s own description of pain and reduced mobility.
It’s the “I’ll win on appeal” assumption that gets me. I can think of ways to describe the thoughts and emotional perspective that might lead one to bet on that assumption, but perhaps that should be an exercise for the commentariat.
And last, this line is the one that we all could have anticipated:
“If I knew [OneShare] was this difficult and restrictive, I would have stayed clear of it,” she said.
Well…
This thread: open is it. Is it? It is.
Image: Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Étude de léopard, c. 1732
The Leopards Claim Another Party Member…Post + Comments (99)
So a George W. Bush appointed federal judge in California has decided that the state has no compelling interest in banning assault weapons, inter alia declaring that:
“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment…”
I’ve always found my AR-15 to be the perfect tool for opening beer bottles–just make sure you hit the neck cleanly, and that no one’s behind the bottle for a few hundred yards.
Fuck that judge. Just fuck him. I’m not going to bother fisking his masturbatory 97 (NINETY-SEVEN) page opinion that seems to think that because other states permit weapons of mass murder, California must too. I’m not going to trot out careful arguments or mortality data or international comparisons or suicide numbers or any of that stuff because this is not a reasoned, coherent legal decision.
It’s just guns=good and if the tree of liberty gets watered from time to time, too bad.
I’m done. Guns wreck civil society. There’s no justification for allowing some asshole who has doubts about his sexual prowess to make life/death decisions whenever and wherever they want. Etc.
And note what I’m reading as a pretty damn clear signal in the quote-fragment above. Californians who are not sworn LEOs or members of the armed forces need “homeland defense equipment”?
That’s coup talk.
Fuck these vicious assholes. The state of gun jurisprudence since Haller is a murder-suicide pact and we have to get rid of it.
That’s all I got.
Open thread.
Image: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Slaughter of the Innocents, between 1308 and 1311.
I needed a cigarette (chocolate) after this from the Washington Post:
On the Internet, former president Donald Trump is sliding toward something he has fought his entire life: irrelevance.
Online talk about him has plunged to a five-year low. He’s banned or ignored on pretty much every major social media venue. In the last week, Trump’s website — including his new blog, fundraising page and online storefront — attracted fewer estimated visitors than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish.
It.Gets.Better:
In March, Trump’s senior adviser, Jason Miller, said a new Trump social media platform would be revealed within three months and draw “tens of millions of people” to become “the hottest ticket” in social media.
“It’s going to completely redefine the game,” he said in a Fox News interview, “and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does.”
Trump’s team unveiled their new website this month by circulating a cinematic trailer, in which soaring orchestral music plays as the camera zooms from space into Mar-a-Lago over the words: “In a time of silence and lies, a beacon of freedom arises.”
Or not:
The long-hyped site was just a blog: a primitive one-way loudspeaker that lacked most of the technical features that define the modern Web, like the per-post comment sections that older blogging sites such as LiveJournal have had for 20 years. The blog, Miller tweeted, was separate from the new social media platform he had promised, which he said would still be coming “in the very near future.”
Hey, when even a top-10,000 politics, pets, gardening and crankitude blog can handle comments, the Trump team grasp of modern media is…underwhelming.
My favorite bit, I have to say, was the awesome return of Death Star Man himself, Brad Parscale:
Trump advisers say the blog is low-quality and unimpressive and have faulted Brad Parscale, the former Trump campaign manager whose company built the site and runs the political campaign software Campaign Nucleus, for several technical glitches and inexplicable delays.
Say not so, says suspiciously enriched tech-bro-remora Parsale:
“These comments came from the same people who have never done anything for Trump but talk. My company spent the last six years building products that helped the president spread his message around the world. And we happily continue to do so,” Parscale said. “The website is built exactly as we pitched it.”
“Exactly as we pitched it” is, I believe, what the Titanic’s designers had to say on April 16, 1912.
Go read the whole thing. You deserve a giggle.
This thread, it is open. Viciously gleeful comments especially appreciated.
Image: Hendrik Gerritsz Pot, Wagon of Fools, 1637. This image is close to my heart, because not only is it an allegory of folly in general, it is a satire specific to the Tulip Mania that was ancestral kin to the South Sea Bubble on which I’ve spent a fair amount of blood, sweat and tears. Enjoy!
Sunday Evening Schadenfreude: The Incredible Shrinking Former GuyPost + Comments (75)