Polis may well run for Senate in 2028. If he does, and gets the nomination, I'll probably vote for him, because he's practically guaranteed to be better than whoever is the Republican nominee. But I'll oppose him every step of the way before that.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
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Polis may well run for Senate in 2028. If he does, and gets the nomination, I'll probably vote for him, because he's practically guaranteed to be better than whoever is the Republican nominee. But I'll oppose him every step of the way before that.
Vaccine mandates are not something to be "defeated." They're among the most effective public health measures in history. Every rational person knew Kennedy's "shaking up" would mean the destruction of HHS, FDA, and every other agency whose work is based on science rather than murderous ideology.
One specific quote from Polis really jumped out at me: "[RFK Jr.] helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up #HHS and #FDA."
Antivaxers are mass murderers. Decent people do not "look forward to working with" traitors to humanity. Say if I found out Vladimir #Putin was just as much into paleontological science fiction as I am (probably not) I still wouldn't invite him to collaborate on my time travel stories.
The article doesn't exonerate Polis. Quite the opposite.
One prominent Democrat endorsed the nomination: Jared Polis, currently Governor of Colorado. Since that happened, I've seen many otherwise rational people make excuses for him, often citing this Guardian article: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...
When Donald #Trump announced #Kennedy as his nominee for Secretary of #Health and Human Services, most Democrats reacted with alarm and disgust. Kennedy has amply justified that reaction: I've written at length about it and no doubt will again, but that's not the point here.
About Jared #Polis and #RFK Jr. ⚕️ 🧪 🧵
From comments on a years-ago Facebook conversation: "Well, okay, I used to be #Chekhov, and on my good days I still am. But I can feel myself turning into #Bester." The transition is just about complete now.
"Don't poke the bear," "You have no idea who you're messing with," etc. Yeah.
"I was too smart to enlist and they didn't want me as an officer because I raise too much hell." "Officially, there's no record of my service." "I'd've punched out the DI the first time he got in my face." Did I miss any?
Link, for the curious: thinktankredux.quora.com/Im-still-goi...
I do so love it when someone tells me to "read a basic textbook" in a field where I've not only read basic textbooks, but some advanced ones as well—and as it happens, that I'm getting paid to work on *right now*. Well no, I don't love it, but it does at least provide some brief amusement.
RFKjr gave orders to Dr. Susan Monarez for her not to speak to US Senators. He put a gag order on the senate-confirmed CDC director. Scream this story from every rooftop. Impeach and remove RFKjr.
The leading cause of death in the United States is the Republican Party. 🧪 ⚕️ #medsky
We are all Steve.
Okay, we're clearly at the beginning of a movie. Now, is this a wacky comedy with incompetent gangsters who take ever-more-ridiculous pratfalls in a futile attempt to recover their loot, or a gritty thriller where the viewpoint characters are in way over their heads? Help me figure it out ... fast.
"I am humorously pretending not to understand context so I can deliberately misinterpret your statement! Look at me! I am very clever!" Whoever first said puns are the lowest form of humor might have had a different opinion if they'd lived to see the internet.
31,000 followers? Thank you! You're all quite daft, but thank you anyway. As long as you're here, buy some books, too. Please.😜
I thought it might be another right-winger, but I didn't think of the Groypers specifically. Probably I should have, though: I thought it was possibly a Nazi looking for an opportunity to do damage to "ZOG", and the Groypers are pretty much the modern incarnation of that.
It truly is. 😐
But maybe she'll at least get to go on record telling the alleged people who enabled this horror exactly what they've done. Every disaster movie begins with ... you know the rest. Future historians will remember that not everyone was complicit, if there's any such thing as history at all.
Dedicated traitors to humanity have dug it up and brought it back to life, to shamble through our streets rotting and stinking and hungry for living flesh.
We're about to learn again. Monarez and many other dedicated people at the #CDC did their best to keep that memory buried in the past, and it wasn't enough.
We have forgotten the terror carried by even the whisper of plague. #AIDS and #covid, terrible as they were and remain, are the merest echoes of the horseman's hoofbeats. This is a *good thing*.
#Infectious #disease taken as a whole has killed more people throughout history than any other cause of death, and it's not even a particularly close race. Most people living today have never experienced a world without #vaccines and #antibiotics.
I'm still going to try to keep from posting about politics in general, but I'll make an exception for matters of medicine and public health. Not only is it of course a subject near and dear to my heart, in the big picture it may be the most vital issue of our time, and of any time. 🧪 ⚕️ #medsky 🧵
Continue Charlie’s work, huh?
When a right-wing man murdered Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, progressives asked MAGA to tone down the rhetoric to prevent more violence. Within hours of Kirk’s murder, motive still unknown, the right is demanding that the government wage a campaign of violence against their enemies.
I mean the worry isn’t that this is the tipping point for general violence, the worry is that this is the justification for state violence given the target. Minnesota was never going to be anything because it was one of their guys. It’s all asymmetrical.
You know, tomorrow is definitely going to be the second weirdest 9/11 of our lives
Okay, I lied: now would be a great time to listen to some Small Faces.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. And that's all I'm going to say about that.
This is why I still can't be that worried about Skynet.
Guess I need to start posting about the Civil War again so I can get more ads for the Stonewall Jackson Commemorative Zippo. Which it would take an act of God to get me to buy, but I'm still more likely to pay for that than "American Paladin." Please.
Compared to these clowns, I'm Nebula and Hugo and Pulitzer and Nobel material all in one.
I don't think I'm a great writer. I do think I'm pretty good, and getting better as I knock the rust off my skills. Enough people seem to agree that I plan to keep doing it this time. (Like I did all the other times, but let's not talk about that.)
Even by those standards ... Larry Correia? Really?
I have shelves full of books I've read many times and will happily read again. Also a fair number I've either never read, or read so long ago I've forgotten all the details, but remember enjoying. It takes a lot to make me add to the book mountain, these days.
Yeah, I know: "never judge a book by its cover" is a maxim for a reason. But when the ads are most likely written by the authors themselves, and they include excerpts that read like fingernails down a chalkboard ... well, there are only so many hours in a day, you know?
About a third sound absolutely awful. Mind-bogglingly bad. The characters and situations are irredeemable cliches. The plots are absurd. The writing style, the way words are put together, is cringe-inducing. The dialog sounds like nothing no actual person would ever say.
Most just come across as mediocre, and a few as quite good. I've bought at least one book due to a Facebook ad, and been pleased with the results.
At least I assume that's why I'm getting them. I know when I've been talking about other topics, I tend to get ads for things related to those topics. Not with dinosaurs, oddly, even though I know there's a bunch of paleomerch out there. Everything else, yeah.
Because I talk a lot about #writing on Facebook, I get a bunch of book ads on my feed. 🧵 ✍️ 🚀
Yes. It seems days like that happen ever more often lately.
And let's face it, "velociraptor" is just a really cool, evocative name.
No paleontologist now doubts they each belong in their own genus. Unfortunately, since Jurassic Park has so thoroughly cemented the idea of the big V, I doubt it will ever go away.
However, there are enough other differences between Deinonychus and Velociraptor that even Paul has long since admitted this was a mistake.
Consider #Panthera, the big cats, which contains species from P. uncia, the #snowleopard, to P. tigris, the #tiger—even though tigers are generally about five times the mass of snow leopards, similar to the ratio between D. antirrhopus and V. mongoliensis.
This isn't entirely a crazy idea. Lots of modern genera have species with similar body plans but enormous size differences.
But even he never claimed they were the same species. Rather, he put them into the same genus, making #Deinonychus into another species of #Velociraptor, i.e. V. antirrhopus instead of D. antirrhopus.
Paul is a notorious #lumper, who likes shoving distantly related organisms into the same taxonomic category. (The opposite of lumpers are #splitters, who try to put every specimen into as distinct a category as possible.)
Although the poor creatures still have broken wrists and a severe case of mange.
Michael #Crichton's main reference when writing #JurassicPark was Gregory Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. That's how we ended up with human size "velociraptors," later retconned to the considerably larger #Utahraptor.
This subject comes up fairly often, so I'm putting my mini-essay here as an easy reference. Feel free to share, or copy and paste with attribution, as you see fit. Comments, suggestions, and corrections are welcome. 🦖 🧪 🚀 ✍️ 🧵
People pretending not to understand the difference between "I personally think this person is guilty" and "the law should treat this person as gulity" is one of my favorite spectator sports. Double if they should know better.
The jackasses who listened to shills like Oz instead of the CDC failed themselves, and everyone else. Now this jolly crew of mass murderers are making that failure national policy. Noem may slay her thousands, and Hegseth his tens of thousands. But Kennedy will slay his millions.
Which is something these clowns never do, because they don't have one.
Quantifying biological uncertainty is pretty much my whole job, and I like to think I'm pretty good at it. Lots of room for debate, like I said, on all kinds of things. But anyone who wants to claim vaccines do more harm than good, or evolution isn't real, had better bring their A-game.
I know there's a lot of work to do harmonizing it with quantum mechanics, but at the scale of what we can see with our own eyes or through telescopes, it's remarkably predictive.
Physical processes appear to be stochastic too, at the smallest levels, but the randomness gets smoothed away pretty quickly when you're talking about anything bigger than molecules. Which is why relativity works, I guess.
And of course there's plenty of room for debate about what food additives are safe and in what quantities, etc. That's part of what makes biology simultaneously fascinating and frustrating: the processes of life are stochastic, not deterministic.
There's a big gap between "science is not impeccable" and believing that a well-tested theory has been overturned by some jackass on the internet. 🙂
Yeah, but "lived with his mom" plays into the whole "lots of book-larnin' but no common sense" stereotype.
This is how "intellectual" #creationists and #antivaxers sound to #biologists, BTW. 🧪
Grow the hell up.
NO THE FUCK THEY WEREN'T. They were very useful in their time, but the modern versions are *better*. Which is why it's difficult to find a card catalog or a Polaroid camera these days, and a payphone is practically impossible.
" #Cardcatalogs were our #Google! #Polaroids were our #Instagram! #Payphones were our #iPhones!"
Not posted for agreement, if you share from my post please leave my commentary intact, terms and conditions apply, see your local grumpy scientist for details ... This type of so-called #humor is shit. 🧵
Or as we say in #Colorado, "Tuesday."
After making a #vampire joke elsenet, I suddenly thought of a portmanteau I can't get out of my head: "#hempire." This is, of course, the word used to describe a giant chain of #dispensaries owned by a bloodsucking creature of the night.
Someone else will have to write this one. 😀
Traditionally, rabbits *are* the experts.
It's really one of the stupidest things any electorate has done to itself, and given how the electorate has changed over the decades since its passage, I'm puzzled and angry over our apparent lack of will to get rid of it entirely.
"Colorado governor cuts spending on Medicaid, higher education and grants to plug $750M hole in state budget" Or, yannow, we could have had a special election to repeal #TABOR. I've been sick of #Polis' shit for a while, but I'm pretty disappointed in the #legislature too.
The only thing tragic about her death is that more of her fellow traitors didn’t join her.
Yeah, there are no skeptics left on this issue. Anyone who refuses to accept the *overwhelming* evidence that covid vaccines are safe and effective is just a denialist.
Good night, and good luck.
No doubt the #Einsatzgruppe will eventually get around to banning #mRNA vaccines entirely, followed by all covid vaccines, followed by all vaccines. Secretary Brainworm *definitely* wants to kill you. For now, though ...
Oh, and if not, that means your doctor wants to kill you. Run.
If you have *any* of the listed conditions, any decent #physician, physician assistant, #nurse practitioner, or other #provider with prescribing authority should be willing to write you a #prescription. This will make your life dramatically easier, not to mention longer.
"High risk" isn't actually defined, because fortunately, most of these bedbugs in human form are as stupid as they are evil—and they're pretty fucking evil. The linked #CDC page, however, lists a variety of #medical conditions which may be enough to convince health care providers that you qualify.
As you may have heard, #HHS Secretary #Brainworm and his jolly crew of mass murderers have placed restrictions on the updated round of #covid #vaccines. Specifically, they've restricted recommended #vaccination to those over 65 or at high risk.
You can still get useful health information from some US government websites, if you know what you're looking for. Here's an example, which I'll explain. 🧪 ⚕️ #medsky
Yeah. I skimmed them and it's nightmare material.
I hadn't heard about the case, but it's awful. Also not a surprise, and yet another warning of how very unlike human intelligence "AI" is. Still not worried about Skynet, but it's like putting a toddler behind the wheel of a semi.
I guess they should have used better priors.
Sometimes I realize a lot of people I think of as being generally on my side, and vice versa, inhabit an entirely different moral universe than I do. Really I've known this for a long time. Getting smacked in the face with it is still weird. #nocontextforyou
Thank you!
Thanks!
Writers who are confronted with this accusation usually don't take it well. I get that, because I've been one of them. But if we're going to make a big deal about looking into the abyss, our own motivations are a good place to start.
He won't do it, of course, but he takes great satisfaction in imagining he could. There are many others, most lacking Mamet's fame but with the same Walter-Mitty-as-played-by-Christian-Bale nest of snakes in their heads.
Consider for example David #Mamet, who after decades of building a reputation as an unflinching observer of the worst excesses of #masculinity, has now shown that he desperately wants to be the protagonist of his own stories.
And whether they know it or not, they're very often living out their own fantasies.
They know over-the-top caricatures are one of the quickest ways to get lauded as "realistic" by audiences and critics.
They know the awful things the characters do will make them appealing, not as cautionary tales or examinations of the ugly parts of the human psyche, but because they're "dark" and "gritty" and "edgy."
They know a substantial part of their audience will identify with these characters. They know many fans will see the bad behavior as desirable, and while most won't have the guts to act that way in real life, some will.
A big part of the problem, which I don't see acknowledged very often, is that #writers who create #antiheroes generally know exactly what they're doing. ✍️ 🧵
And we wore onions on our belts.
The effectiveness of this rhetoric is a big part of the reason why we currently have mass murderers in charge of our medical research system. They may kill you, and they will almost certainly kill at least a few people who matter to you. Do not forget.