Society

Something is rotten at the University of Guelph. Just what deceased creature has gotten stuck under the floorboards remains unclear, but a strong odor of something that’s not right assails the nostrils when one reads the open letter recently penned by Dr Byram Bridle, an immunologist and tenured professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, addressed to the president of the university. What has happened at Guelph is a useful case study for everyone, because vaccine mandates are spreading like the plague they aim to cure.

There is a trope in science fiction movies in which some alien or machine intelligence determines that humans are a scourge, and that in order to protect the galaxy, humanity must be eradicated. There is no shortage of examples, but some personal favorites include The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien and Planet of the Apes. And who could forget the T-800’s grim prognostication in Terminator 2 that 'it’s in your nature to destroy yourselves'? Back in the real world, we aren’t quite at the point of developing an artificially intelligent Skynet that will take control of our nukes and bring about our collective demise. But a Vox piece from last week leaves me concerned that we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Anthony Fauci's rolling audition for Dancing With the Stars continues. Fauci this week appeared in yet another interview on CBS, where he was asked about the possible impact of the coronavirus on the holiday season. He replied that it was 'too soon to tell' whether Americans would even be able to gather safely for Christmas. Which got me wondering: how far are these seasonal COVID restrictions supposed to go? I have no problem, for example, socially distancing by a factor of 10 from anyone who orders a pumpkin spice latte. But double-masking the Indians in a Thanksgiving play could prove more than a little historically insensitive. Is Fauci serious? Think of the demographics most likely to flout COVID restrictions: Texans, barflies, Democratic governors.

Really, the Facebook outage should not have been as entertaining as it was. As Jon Stokes, the founder of Ars Technica, observes, if Facebook, with its hyper-sophisticated software and security practices, is vulnerable to sudden collapse, what does that say about energy infrastructure run on 'old Windows installs'? The potential for far greater carnage is tremendous. But it was entertaining, and I think what it made so was the fact that the damage was so comprehensive that security systems in the Facebook offices crashed and its employees could not enter the building to fix the problem. Here were some of the smartest people in the world and they could not get through a door. You can imagine the coffee cooling in their paper cups.

There was a factory. Now there are mountains and rivers. If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower. I thought we’d start over, but I guess I was wrong. And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention. Don’t leave me stranded here. I can’t get used to this lifestyle. So go the lyrics to the 1988 Talking Heads song '(Nothing But) Flowers.' As bitterly cynical as it is catchy, the tune is an environmentalist anthem written from the perspective of some laggard who cannot adapt to life after a cataclysmic refashioning of society into a paradise not unlike Rousseau’s state of nature. I think of it as my personal hymn in the age of COVID. Could there be a more fitting song for the present?

Am I ‘fully vaccinated’? For the last few months I was sure I was — but recent events are making me doubt myself. Take Monday, when President Biden rolled up his sleeve and presented his unusually hirsute arm for his third Pfizer shot. This followed some federal health advice last week that people over 65, as well as 18-to-64-year-olds with ‘underlying health conditions’ or ‘jobs that increase their risk of developing severe COVID’, are eligible for a third dose of Pfizer. ‘The booster line is if you're fully vaccinated — the bottom line is that if you're fully vaccinated and — you're highly protected now from severe illness, even if you get COVID-19,’ explained the President with his trademark clarity.

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

After the House of Representatives decided yesterday that it would be, well, a bit much to leave millions of Israeli civilians at risk of being blown up in their own beds, the 'progressive' wing of the Democrat party was devastated. 'Minutes before the vote closed, Ms Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies,' ran a heartrending report in this morning's New York Times, describing the House’s 420-to-9 decision to approve funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. 'The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.

Aspiring hermits Prince Harry and Meghan Markle retreated to the notably reclusive borough of Manhattan today to visit the One World Observatory and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The not-so-royal couple were accompanied by Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. But neither New York politician saw fit to don a face mask outside — nor did they ask their esteemed guests to. Instead, Hochul, de Blasio, his wife Chirlane McCray and their son Dante, bared their faces and posed up close for photos with the Sussexes in front of the gathered crowd. https://twitter.

Does humanity deserve a prolonged existence on Earth? Cockburn begs the question after learning that tonight is Climate Night on America’s late-night ‘light entertainment’ programs. ‘7 Shows. 1 Planet. Hot Enough For You?’, asks the poster, which depicts TBS’s Samantha Bee brandishing a whiteboard, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah, CBS’s Stephen Colbert and James Corden posing with globes, NBC’s Seth Meyers holding a pot plant…and stock images of his network mate Jimmy Fallon and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who presumably care about the climate a little, but not enough to actually strike a pose for it. https://twitter.

The biggest shock amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been the discovery that the virus may have been released during an illegal collaboration on so-called 'gain-of-function' research between the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Recently revealed National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents show that American taxpayers directly subsidized this joint effort, despite a federal government ban on any experiment that might give pathogens the ability to leap species. Even worse was that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak tried to shut down any debate on whether the coronavirus had been leaked from a lab by getting 27 prominent scientists to endorse a March 2020 letter to the medical journal the Lancet.

We recently left the country for the first time since the pandemic began. I could say that we’d always wanted to go to Iceland, but the truth is, we’d wanted to go to Iceland ever since we heard how sanely they handle visitors. Even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, they didn’t require COVID tests for children. They still don’t. Iceland is the world’s most vaccinated nation, with 86 percent of the country having gotten the jab. A recent ‘spike’ (they peaked at 170 cases per day in mid-August) led to an indoor mask mandate, but it doesn’t apply to kids. The mandate is also very loosely enforced. There are no Karens shrieking at people to mask up in shops, and I saw many unmasked Icelanders indoors.

I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate. Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let's examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept.

The first time I heard about ivermectin was from my doctor early on in the Era of COVID-hysteria. The United States still had a functioning president, we had yet to arm the Taliban or give them lists of Americans and Afghan 'allies' they might want to execute, and a vaccine against the worst scourge since the Black Death was, if the experts were to be believed, years, maybe decades away. Of course, the experts weren’t to be believed. Donald Trump’s Manhattan Project approach to getting a vaccine developed in record time bore fruit. Pfizer had the first vaccine ready to go before the 2020 election, but selflessly waited until just after the election to make the announcement.

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn. And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn. On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID.

What do you do when a health crisis gets politicized beyond reason? You send in a bunch of hyper-partisan agencies to investigate, of course! For months, anyone who doubted that the coronavirus originated from a wet market in Wuhan was labeled a fringe, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. The 'serious people' in our media, as Jonathan Karl labeled them, mocked the likes of former president Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Rand Paul for even broaching the subject. However, towards the end of Trump’s administration, classified information revealed that in November 2019, three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to a hospital due to flu-like symptoms. The press would have been totally fine ignoring this inconvenient information.

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.

Well, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so bad now, does he? I don’t say that because Joe Biden has turned out to be as competent or less, but because at his press conference in reaction to the fall of Kabul, he sounded Trumpian. By which I mean, honest. Honest that staying in Afghanistan so long was a mistake, that their government was corrupt, that if its army wasn't prepared to defend itself then we shouldn't do it for them, and that this is what a withdrawal looks like: horribly, brutally honest. The endgame was a disaster because America’s intel was wrong, so the US had less time to get out than it thought, and because Biden lacks the acuity to respond to changing conditions. Biden looks like Brezhnev after heart-attack number seven.