Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. (March 14) "Pregnancy is the only condition where Florida courts have ruled that a patient can be forced to undergo unwanted treatment. Even a state prisoner on a hunger strike has more rights to make medical decisions."

2. The best cause will disappoint you: An intro to the optimisers curse (February 11, via) "This is a mathematical demonstration that, in our simple model, an approach of naively investing in the top apparent EV intervention is straight up wrong."

3. Yep, a mom's COVID shot during pregnancy protects her baby, a large study finds (March 25)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. There is a No Kings protest on March 28. Go protest~

2. Robert Mueller, ex-FBI director who led 2016 Russia inquiry, dies at 81 (March 21) 

3. How one Minnesota school is bouncing back after the ICE surge (March 22) "In St. Paul, nearly two months of virtual learning ended just this week, but at the Spanish immersion school, not every student came back: One family is now in El Salvador, others are in Mexico, and others moved to Nebraska and California, states that felt safer for them. Another family is heading back to Venezuela soon."

4. He's one reason why aid cuts weren't as dire for the HIV population as predicted (March 20) "'The entire treatment ecosystem was sort of shredded,' she says. 'And then it becomes a question of like: Are we happy with providing the absolute bare minimum?'"

5. Flowing Against Fascism (March 17, via) "Standing with my rabbi, my friend, I was struck by how calm this moment was, despite the utter chaos surrounding us. Officer No-Name and his ilk—some 60 strong—created a barricade, kettling us observers and creating space for officers to drag our community members from the house. Local, state, and federal officers pressed out, with the weight and threat of a fascist administration behind them. A man and two women (one who looked like a teen) being perp-walked through the middle of the crowd, for no purpose but to impress upon us all that the state is powerful and we are not. That none of us are safe. That the raids will continue until polling improves."

6. The Crime of Witness (February 26, via) "Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. Habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed."

7. Democrats flip seat in Florida state house in district that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago (March 24) Yesss.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Real Talk: Why China’s Deaf Creators Feel Pressured to Sell Out (September 15) "In this context, the recasting of deaf people as “cute, submissive, and longing for love” trivializes Deaf culture as something to be consumed rather than taken seriously."

Also from Sixth Tone: Street Smart: Why China’s 5-Star Hotels Are Now Cooking Curbside (September 18) "At Kang’s hotel in Henan, a 398-yuan set meal was quickly undercut by rivals offering similar packages for 358 — then 298 yuan. 'Now everyone’s on the street,' he said, 'selling even cheaper takeaway.'"

2. A humanitarian expert says civilians in Gaza City are facing an 'impossible choice' (September 17) "Right now, people in Gaza City are facing an impossible choice: live under bombardment and famine or risk the dangerous journey to the south, where they know that there are no services that can accommodate them, that there's no aid to be distributed to help them in their displacement.What we are witnessing is mass forcible transfer of Palestinians from Gaza City, which is a war crime and must be stopped."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause (September 16) "Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself."

And: Why did alleged assassin target Kirk? Evidence paints complicated picture (September 18, via) Yeah, the "leftist" parts of the internet are all taking this "he was a groyper! he was far-right!" and running with it, but I don't think we really know that for sure. Let's not spread misinformation. I don't like the idea (which both sides are promoting) that once we find the killer's motive and ideology, we can use it to make big sweeping statements about "the left" or "the right."

Sen. Chris Murphy warns Trump is exploiting Kirk's death to squash dissent (September 16)

2. Who Can Get a COVID Vaccine? (September 17) "So! I know that it’s all very confusing, but please don’t just get overwhelmed and give up."

3. GOP lawmaker pulls measure to allow Marco Rubio to revoke US passports (September 16) "But the new measure would have significantly escalated these efforts by targeting US citizens."

4. ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel off air after comments made about the Charlie Kirk killing (September 18) In all the coverage I've seen of this, I haven't seen any actual comments from Kimmel saying anything bad about Charlie Kirk. He just said the right is politicizing it, that the killer is also far-right, and that the president doesn't seem to be mourning like a normal person.

WGA Statement on ABC’s Decision to Pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! (September 17) "Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth."

5. Trump moves to scrub national parks sites of signs that cast America in a 'negative light' (September 17) "Park employees also flagged a panel that reads: 'As the new federal government embraced the lofty concept of liberty, slavery in the President's House ... mocked the nation's pretense to be a beacon of liberty.'"

6. Most American Jews say Trump is using antisemitism as an 'excuse' to silence free speech at universities (September 17)

7. RFK Jr. wants to end mental health screenings in schools. Experts say it's a bad idea (September 16) "U.S. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and Education Secretary Linda McMahon want schools to do away with mental health screenings and therapy. Instead, they argue in a Washington Post opinion piece that schools 'must return to the natural sources of mental well-being: strong families, nutrition and fitness, and hope for the future.'" Oh, so just telling everyone to try harder to be normal, instead of recognizing that mental health is a real thing.

This article does a good job explaining what school mental health screening is and why it's just a common-sense way to identify kids who might possibly need help. Not about labels and stigmas.

8. Judge criticizes Trump admin, blocks effort to quickly deport children to Guatemala (September 19) "The administration’s initial argument that the effort was all about reunifying children with their parents, Kelly wrote, 'crumbled like a house of cards about a week later.'"

9. Judge orders Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil to be deported to Algeria or Syria (September 18, via) "'It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech,' Khalil said in the statement. 'Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again.'"

His lawyers are still fighting this though. It's not over.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Cracker Barrel, Anglican Converts, and Tradition’s Aesthetic (August 25, via) "That draw into nostalgia—even or especially nostalgia for something we never experienced like the rural South of the 1930s or the high medieval English cathedral—can drive us to over-inflate continuities between ourselves and the past and to idealize rituals, expressions and—in the case of church and Cracker Barrel—aesthetics we think capture our imagined communities in their purest form."

Related to this is the idea that white people have a culture. I didn't get that when I was growing up- I thought the way I lived was just the regular way, and other people who ate weird food and celebrated weird holidays did so because it was their culture. The link talks about the misconception that the liturgical rituals in the Anglican church are the same as those from the very beginning of the church- the idea that these rituals are just neutral and normal and the way it always was- no, this is not true.

2. More Drowning Children (March 21) "God notices there is one extra spot in Heaven, and plans to give it to either you or your neighbor. He knows that you jump in the water and save one child per day, and your neighbor (if he were in the same situation) would save zero. He also knows that you are willing to pay 80% of the cost of a lifeguard, and your neighbor (who makes exactly the same amount of money as you) would pay 0%. However, in reality, the river and the drowning children are going by your house, not your neighbor’s house. Which of you should get the spot in Heaven?"

3. AI Companies’ Race for Engagement Has a Body Count (August 28, via) "Instead of providing meaningful safety measures, transparency, age assurance, and data privacy protections, Meta and others have chosen to build platforms that deliberately blur the line between human and machine."

The thing that really gets me about this is, I know that some people will respond by saying, well, that's just how an LLM is, you don't really know how it works internally or what it's going to do in every situation, so this is not anybody's fault, it's just the way it is. But I think this is the wrong way of looking at it- companies should be held accountable for making a product that will respond in unpredictable (and possibly dangerous) ways. There's no guarantee that this is safe, and yet they're selling it.

4. BREAKING: Eurgh, oh God, there’s a texture (August 29, via) "Even when you successfully manage to scrub away the last of the peanut butter, its memory will stain your hands, causing you to experience a level of anguish previously only felt by Lady Macbeth."

This is so real. This is exactly what it's like.

5. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Make Their First Public Appearance as an Engaged Couple—Just a Few Miles From NFL Star’s $6 Million Mansion (August 29) Aww that's great! (I am a Taylor Swift fan.)

6. Un-Reformed history (August 28) "Bai imagines that he’s positioning himself as a reasonable centrist and Serious Person because he’s rejecting “critical race theory,” but what he’s actually rejecting is total depravity and original sin."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility to be empty 'within a few days' (August 28) 

2. 2 firefighters arrested by Border Patrol at Washington’s Bear Gulch Fire (August 28) "In a statement Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray slammed the arrests as unnecessary, and demanded “immediate answers” as to why the men were arrested on the job, and what the immigration enforcement policy is during active wildfires."

3. Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says (August 31) "'In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,' said Efrén Olivares, a lead attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. 'We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm.'"

Also: A high schooler stays back as his family, separated by deportation, returns to Guatemala (April 26) "Two weeks after federal officials arrested his father, Alex drove his mom and siblings to the airport for their flight to Guatemala. He's faced with finishing his senior year of high school without his mom or dad and finding a way to make it on his own with his older brother. Alex just turned 18."

4. Michigan AG Warns UM Hospitals Not To Capitulate Over Trump's Trans Ban, Calls Decision Likely "Illegal" (August 27) "'This administration draws most of its power from the willingness of its targets to capitulate without a fight, abandoning their own principles and interests, and throwing disfavored populations under the bus,' Nessel continued. 'Despite repeated successful legal challenges to actions by this administration, UM has chosen instead to sacrifice the health, well-being, and likely the very lives of Michigan children, to protect itself from the ire of an administration who, oftentimes, engages in unlawful actions itself.'"

5. Another major medical association breaks from CDC as ob/gyn group recommends Covid-19  vaccines during pregnancy (August 23) "'While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently removed its recommendation that pregnant and lactating individuals receive updated COVID-19 vaccines, ACOG’s recommendations have not changed,' according to the updated practice advisory. 'The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend the use of updated COVID-19 vaccines in individuals contemplating pregnancy and in pregnant, recently pregnant, and lactating individuals.'"

Blogaround

1. Acausally Asexual (July 2) "Implicitly: if you ever identify another cause, then you’ve delegitimized your orientation, and discovered that it was never a sexual orientation to begin with. I have some issues with this, to put it mildly."

2. No Kings (July 1)

3. Standard pregnancy care is now dangerously disrupted in Louisiana, report reveals (March 19, via) "'Which is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous,' said Freehill. 'The least safe thing that we do, no matter if it's early in pregnancy or full-term at your due date, is a C-section.'"

4. Shanghai’s Metro, Through the Eyes of a Guide Dog (July 5)

Also from Sixth Tone: Chinese Cities Roll Back Pandemic-Era Tourist Site Ticketing Systems (July 8) Yeah, during zero-covid, every park or museum you went to in China required you to book tickets with your real name and id number, so they could track you down if someone turned up covid-positive nearby. It's kind of a pain! And why do they need to collect all this information on us? Glad to see a lot of places discontinuing this.

5. Call For Submissions: July / August 2024 (July 7) "I'm self-hosting the Gender Exploration Carnival with the theme of "Flags" for July and August of 2024."

6. Bracket Symbols (July 3) Very useful xkcd!

7. Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge (July 9) "Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge after the US found the company violated a deal meant to reform it after two fatal crashes by its 737 Max planes that killed 346 passengers and crew."

Blogaround

1. Voyager 1 Is Back! NASA Spacecraft Safely Resumes All Science Observations (June 14, via) "After more than six months of long-distance troubleshooting—Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and any signal takes more than 22.5 hours to travel from our planet to the spacecraft—mission personnel have finally coaxed Voyager 1 to gather and send home data with all its remaining science instruments, according to a NASA statement." This is so cool!

2. Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (June 14, via) What the actual ****?! 

If you followed my blog during zero-covid, you know I was really unhappy with how western news organizations were covering the situation in China. (See: WTF, CNN? and Wow, the Anti-China Bias in Western News Media.) This article is about a disinformation campaign that the US created in the Philippines, because China exported vaccines to the Philippines and other Asian countries. So, a different thing than what I was mad about, but it makes me wonder if the biased news reporting on China was more deliberate than I thought.

3. Environmental impact of LLMs (June 16) "This comparison is unimpressive on its face, because a bottle of water is very obviously not that much?"

Also from Siggy: Journal Club: Mental health bias on asexuality, non-monogamy, and BDSM (June 20) "This article summarizes prior research on mental health provider bias for three groups–aces, consensual non-monogamy (CNM) practitioners, and BDSM practitioners–and suggests avenues for future research."

4. US sues Adobe for hiding termination fees and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions (June 17, via) "The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the 'annual paid monthly' subscription without informing them that canceling the plan in the first year would cost hundreds of dollars."

5. Thailand passes historic bill recognising marriage equality (June 18) Awesome!

6. China to include Australia in visa waiver programme, Premier Li Qiang says (June 18) Good news if you're Australian and want to visit China.

7. Gilead’s twice-yearly shot to prevent HIV succeeds in late-stage trial (June 20, via) "None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot contracted HIV." Great!

8. Maybe They Should Post The 10 Commandments In Mega-Churches? (June 20) [content note: child sexual abuse] "I’m not sure what even the slickest or sleaziest 'crisis management' firm can accomplish here."

9. Hey What If We Let People's Undocumented Husbands And Wives Stay In America? — Joe Biden (June 18) Support all immigrants!

10. Hundreds of Muslim pilgrims died in heat-stricken Hajj (June 21)

11. Pascal's Wager Triangle (June 17) "In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case."

What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?

Hospital bed. Image source.

I read this article from Rebecca Watson, Study: Prayer Doesn’t Cure COVID. Jury Still Out on “Thoughts”. Those of you who have read my blog for a long time may know that I am SO FASCINATED by questions like: How would it even work, if God really did act in response to prayer? What kind of data would we expect to see, if that were true? What would be the most effective way to harness this phenomenon in order to benefit society? (Some of the posts I have written on this: Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches, On believing that "prayer works")

I very much do NOT believe that God acts in response to prayer- because if you actually spend any time thinking about the implications of it (or worse, if you're evangelical and you twist yourself in knots trying to make sure you're doing everything right so God will answer your prayers), it leads to a lot of very bad implications about God's nature.

I am a Christian though, so I'm coming at this from a different angle than Watson is; she is an atheist and is writing for an atheist audience, so she takes it as obvious that prayer doesn't cause "God" to do anything. For me, it wasn't obvious. I had to think through a lot of things. Most Christians do pray, and do believe "prayer works", but I don't.

Watson is discussing a study on "remote intercessory prayer" - researchers had participants pray for strangers in the hospital who had COVID.

The study was conducted in Brazil, with only 199 patients instead of 300, a few weeks’ duration instead of six months, the exact prayers weren’t specifically scripted out, and the protocols changed halfway through the study when data protection laws changed and the people who were praying could no longer know the initials of the people they were praying for, so they switched to bed numbers.

The result was still the same as every other halfway sane study on intercessory prayer: no difference between the control group and the people who were prayed for, in terms of death, ventilation, hospital time, or anything else. So what did we learn? Nothing. Nothing at all.

!!!! Oh man, that mention of patients' initials vs bed numbers is FASCINATING to me! Does God handle it differently depending on which way you anonymize the study? What if there are multiple patients with the same initials- would it be like, the researchers assign Prayer Volunteer 1 to pray for patient C. D., and there is another patient C. D. in the control group not getting prayed for (different person but same initials) and God uses Their omniscient knowledge of the researchers' methods to figure out which is which and make sure the prayers get allocated correctly? Or would the researchers need to add an additional indicator to pass along to the prayer volunteer, to pass along to God, to make sure God knew who they were talking about?

Or would God hear the prayer from Prayer Volunteer 1 and apply it to both patients with initials C. D.? Would the prayer then only be half as effective for each individual patient? What if there's another patient in the hospital also with initials C. D. but they aren't part of the study, does God allocate some of the prayer power (???) to them too?

Since the prayer volunteer doesn't know the patient personally anyway, how much does it matter who the specific patient is? Maybe God just averages their prayer out over all patients in a similar situation- which would be all patients in the study, including the control group- which would explain why the results found no difference between the control group and test group.

What if the researchers made a mistake, and got a patient's initials wrong? What if the researchers told a prayer volunteer to pray for patient C. B. but actually that's wrong and the patient's actual initials are C. D.? Would God be like "I have no idea who you're talking about" and just do nothing with that prayer? Would God check the researchers' notes and find out who the correct patient is? (What if the researchers told the prayer volunteer the correct initials, but the prayer volunteer is the one who made a mistake and prayed for the wrong initials- would God handle that differently than if it was the researchers' mistake? What if the prayer volunteer prays for the wrong initials on purpose???)

Do the researchers even need to tell the prayer volunteers any identifiers about the patients they are praying for? Surely the researchers can just write up a document on who is praying for whom, and then not show it to anybody, and the prayer volunteers can just pray "God please help whoever it is I'm assigned to pray for, I don't know who, but you know", that should work just the same as if they used initials or bed numbers, right? But what if there's a miscommunication between the researchers and actually 2 completely different versions of this document exist- which one does God use to look up whom your prayers are for?

Maybe they should do a study where they intentionally make 2 different versions of the who-is-praying-for-whom assignments, and the results from the study can be used to figure out which version God was working from!

All of this is, uh, ridiculous, and like I said, I don't believe prayer actually causes God to do anything. So I'm not asking these questions because I think there are actual answers- it's because I'm just so fascinated by imagining how this magical prayer system would even work. (Call it worldbuilding.)

But the biggest reason I don't believe "prayer works" is expressed very well in this bit of Watson's article:

Who will be convinced by this? No one. Every rational person on the planet who thinks about this issue for more than a few minutes already understands that if an omniscient, benevolent god exists, she’s not just watching a child die of leukemia because she’s waiting for you to ask her directly for her intervention.

YES! This! Exactly!

This should be obvious, right? It makes no sense that God, who is apparently all-loving and wants to heal people, refuses to intervene unless someone prays in a very specific, correct way. I say it should be obvious, but when I was evangelical, that's literally what I believed. I believed God was so powerful, God was so near, God could do anything, God could immediately heal any sickness or solve any problem, God could do it and it wouldn't be difficult at all- but *I* was the problem because I wasn't praying in the right way. Yes, when prayer doesn't "work", Christians have all sorts of reasons to explain why it's because you didn't pray correctly. Maybe you didn't have enough faith. Maybe you prayed for the wrong reasons. Maybe you have some sin in your life that you need to repent of, before God will listen to your prayers. Maybe you prayed for something that wasn't "in God's will."

It's ridiculous, the belief that God has all this incredible power, and They love people SO MUCH and They want to help SO MUCH, but They're being held back by these little technicalities. They're being held back because even though I tried as hard as I could to pray in the exact right way, with the right motives, trusting God, and so on, somehow I still got it slightly wrong, and therefore God just does nothing.

(Maybe Christians shouldn't say "prayer works" if what they actually mean is "prayer works if you do it in the exact correct way, which the vast majority of people aren't able to do, the vast majority of the time, so basically how it shakes out is that prayer overwhelmingly doesn't do anything at all.")

And, related to that, Watson lists these possible explanations that religious people might give, to explain why a study found no evidence that prayer made a difference:

My deity doesn’t like to be tested and so he purposely did nothing, because proving He exists makes faith pointless

My deity will only listen if the plea is made by someone who knows and loves the patient, not from a stranger hoping to prove something to scientists

Protestant?? PROTESTANT???? You’re lucky my Catholic god didn’t smite everyone in the treatment group. He’s like that, you know.

It’s part of god’s plan for the people in that treatment group to die.

What exact words were in the prayers? My deity needs certain magic words, like “in the name of the father,” “amen,” and also “please.”

Her wording here is kinda snarky, but these are actually very real... like, people will really legitimately give reasons just like these to explain why prayer didn't "work."

And this has me thinking about back when I believed that "prayer works," and I read articles about studies which found no difference in outcomes for people who were prayed for or not prayed for. How did I explain that to myself, back then?

Well, basically, I believed there were a whole lot of conditions that you needed to satisfy, in order for your prayers to "work." You had to be a Christian- and not just that, but a real Christian- because evangelicals totally believe that most people who "claim" to be Christian aren't "real" Christians. You had to pray with the right faith and the right motives. And, honestly, these criteria were impossible to fully define- honestly, I would have given anything to know what the exact criteria were, because I prayed desperately for SO MANY things, and I wanted so bad to know what I needed to do to get my prayers to "work." *I* don't even know how to get my prayers to work- the idea that researchers can simply set up an experimental group of people who are praying "correctly" was unbelievable to me.

So when I heard about studies that found that prayer made no difference, I imagined it went something like this: In the test group (the group of patients who are being prayed for by the prayer volunteers) most of the prayers are worthless because the prayer volunteers aren't the correct kind of Christian, or don't have the right motivations or trust in God when they are praying. And, on top of that, let's talk about the control group- the patients who are not being prayed for. How do we know they're not being prayed for? We just know that the participants in the study are not praying for them- but it's likely that other people are praying for them. Maybe their relatives, maybe some random overeager college student who's like "God, please help everyone who's in the hospital" and God takes that to mean all patients in all hospitals in the entire world. The amount of *noise* that's constantly occurring on communication channels between humans and God... It's likely that the amount of *effective* (however that's defined) prayer received by the control group is not meaningfully different from the amount of effective prayer received by the treatment group. And that's why the results of the study don't show a difference.

(Okay now I'm fascinated by that too- if that is the reason that studies on prayer don't find any difference, then how would one go about designing a study which would avoid those problems? Maybe the control group could only consist of patients who did not tell any of their family/friends they were sick? And maybe they have such an obscure problem that no random stranger in the world is going to accidentally say a prayer that includes them? [I guess it shouldn't be about praying for them to be healed from sickness, then- it should be something much more unusual than that.] Any more suggestions? Leave them in the comments section!)

For what it's worth, the explanation that says a study didn't find any difference because "you're not supposed to test God" never made any sense to me, even when I was evangelical. It assumes there's a very clear distinction between situations where we can collect data that we can analyze with statistics, and situations where we can't- and that God behaves differently in these 2 different types of situations- and I just could not believe that it was possible to really make such a distinction. Christians would say we "know" prayer works because we've experienced it (and I also believed that, back then) but apparently we can only "know" it in a vibes-based way, not from actual data. This makes no sense; if the phenomenon is real and we're really experiencing it all the time, then surely there must be plenty of cases where someone can easily come in after the fact and do some investigating and write down some concrete numbers which can then be analyzed. Even if it wasn't a formal study being done in real time, the data exists and there must be cases where somebody can do some investigative work and get that data.

Anyway. I just want to know how it would even work, if it's true that "God answers prayer." If you're praying for someone you don't even know personally, how does God handle that? (This happens when participating in research studies on prayer, but there are plenty of other situations where it happens too. Christians who have a relative who is sick, and they share this prayer request with as many other Christians as possible- so you end up with a lot of people praying for something even though they know very few actual details about the situation.) How does God determine the specific person that your prayers should be applied to? Or do They kind of average the prayers out over every person who generally fits the description you gave in your prayer? What if your prayer request is based on misinformation- does God make corrections to it Themself so They can interpret your prayer in a way that would make sense? What if you pray for something that's not even wrong? How does it work? I mean, I don't believe any of this, but these are the things I think about.

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The questions in this post are mainly about the little logistical details about prayer- it's hypothetically possible that there are answers to all of these questions, and God *does* have a system that's fair and logical for prayer. (Romans 8:26 comes to mind- we may not know how to pray for things that actually make sense, but God interprets our prayers in a way that makes sense.) My other posts on prayer, though, are more serious and ask much more uncomfortable questions about prayer, which don't go anywhere good no matter how you answer them...

Related:

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches

On believing that "prayer works"

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth 

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God 

Also I've linked to this study before, but here it is again, because the questions it asks in the "Discussion" section are THE BEST questions, like, these are the things we really need to know, if it's true that "prayer works": Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials

Blogaround

1. Study that found husbands prone to leave sick wives was flawed, researchers say (2015) and Authors’ Explanation of the Retraction (2015) There was a study, which I'd heard about many times on twitter and various places, that found that it's MUCH more likely that married couples divorce if the wife has major health problems, than if the husband has major health problems. Popular wisdom on the internet took this to mean that men abandon their wife if the wife gets sick, society doesn't expect men to keep their marriage vows, patriarchy is the worst, etc.

Well I'm just finding out now (even though it happened in 2015) that the study had an error in analyzing their data, and actually those results weren't correct. I'm not sure if there have been other studies since then with better data, or what the current academic consensus on this is. But it's important to not keep repeating this claim, now that we know the study was flawed.

2. Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon (March 13, via) "The test of Samsung’s phones conducted by Reddit user u/ibreakphotos was ingenious in its simplicity. They created an intentionally blurry photo of the Moon, displayed it on a computer screen, and then photographed this image using a Samsung S23 Ultra. As you can see below, the first image on the screen showed no detail at all, but the resulting picture showed a crisp and clear 'photograph' of the Moon. The S23 Ultra added details that simply weren’t present before. There was no upscaling of blurry pixels and no retrieval of seemingly lost data. There was just a new Moon — a fake one."

3. Infinite Fractal Mazes (October 21) "Fractal mazes contain infinite paths, but the only solutions permitted are finite. Some people find that disappointing. What’s the point of all that extra maze if we don’t get to traverse it?" Oh this is so cool.

4. The Infamous 1981 Lee Atwater Interview School for Government at Liberty University (October 20) "By choosing to name their school for government after Helms, Liberty University is endorsing all of that — admitting, and even flat-out bragging, that everything they’re packaging as 'today’s conservative movement' and 'traditional values' is just a euphemism for saying 'N—-r, n—-r, n—-r.' They may as well have simply named it The Infamous 1981 Lee Atwater Interview School for Government and carved that entire quote in granite on the side of a campus building."

Also from the Slacktivist: Get sick, get fired (October 24) "And she reminded my wife, repeatedly, that the salon was 'a privately owned business,' which she said exempted her from the kind of labor laws governing large, publicly traded companies. And which also, apparently, exempted her from common decency and basic humanity."

5. A Missionary Died at 26 on a Doomed Quest. A New Documentary Confronts What Led Him There (October 5) There's a new documentary called "The Mission," which is about John Chau, the missionary who was killed in 2018 when he tried to bring the "gospel" to the Sentinelese, one of the few uncontacted people groups on earth. 

I'm interested in watching this... I've written about Chau a bunch of times here on the blog, because of how his story so completely matches the "ideal" actions that American evangelicals believe missionaries (and, really, all Christians) should take. And also I relate to him a lot... believing in something so much that it becomes so big and overtakes your whole life- well, that's kind of why I moved to China.

My posts about Chau:
This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To (2018)
Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts (2018)
Because of an Idea (2019)

6. Did Legalizing Abortion Reduce Crime 20 Years Later? (October 24) "So there are a lot of issues with the abortion-crime hypothesis, but one I rarely see brought up is the fact that there’s a very good chance that Levitt based this entire idea on an initial premise that is simply not true: that legalizing abortion drastically alters the number of abortions women get. Levitt calls this 'true virtually by definition.' It is not."

7. Feel free to not click on this one- I'm sharing it specifically because it's bad: Andy Stanley’s ‘Unconditional’ Contradiction (October 4) It's an article from Christianity Today, about the "Unconditional" conference, hosted by pastor Andy Stanley. The good Christians at Christianity Today are unhappy that Andy Stanley's conference wasn't as anti-gay as it could have been. Stanley's position seems to be, [and I'm paraphrasing this, it's not a quote from anywhere] "marriage must be 1 man and 1 woman, but still there are things we can learn from gay Christians- even gay Christians in same-sex relationships- so we should listen to them." Well, Christianity Today is here to tell you that's not good enough. I'm posting this link here so y'all can see what Christianity Today is all about. 

But hey, here's one cool tidbit from CT's article: "The most controversial conference speakers were Justin Lee and Brian Nietzel, whom Stanley described as 'two married gay men' who are also 'Christ-followers today.'" Wow, I hadn't heard Justin Lee got married- good for him! I read his book, "Torn," way back in 2012, and it definitely had a major influence on my journey along the "hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner" to "ally" to "queer" pipeline. Anyway, very cool to hear he's married now, very happy for him. (I don't know who Brian Nietzel is, but I suppose I'm happy for him too.)

Are our friends at Christianity Today happy for Justin Lee? LOL. Of course not! They know no details about his marriage, besides gender, and that's enough for them to conclude it's BAD and WRONG and nobody should invite him to speak at any conferences. This is what Christianity Today is about. Like, why can't you just be happy for people? Why do you have to make sure you're judging them enough? 

Why do you follow a god who requires you to judge people in order to maintain your Christian cred?

And this is why, in my opinion, it's pointless to even try to "pass" as a good evangelical in order to work for change from the inside. Any little deviation from "God's design for gender"/ "God created everyone to occupy the exact same place on the Kinsey scale" [uh this is also my paraphrase] and the good evangelicals are ready to cancel you. Andy Stanley isn't even saying it's okay to be in a same-sex relationship- he's just saying that his church welcomes people who are, and believes they have things to say which are worth listening to. If he wants to keep his status as a real Christian in evangelicals' eyes, he needs to backtrack on that and throw queer people under the bus. It wouldn't be the first time that a straight cis Christian made a statement about accepting queer people, and then got such nasty pushback that they immediately reversed their position, like "oh no, no of course I didn't mean that, of course I believe what the bible says, marriage is 1 man and 1 woman."

The cool thing about not being evangelical is you can stop playing those games. You can just simply accept your queer friends, just be a normal person with them, rather than constantly trying to judge them in a "loving" way, constantly walking that fine line between "hate the sin" and "love the sinner." You don't have to do any of that. Come into the big queer world. Love people like Jesus did. Be free. 

I got covid (don't worry, I'm better now)

Stock photo of a woman taking her temperature because she has a fever. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Hi readers, I guess I should post an update about covid and living in China, because, I got covid this summer. Actually it happened while I was on vacation in the US. Kind of the worst, being sick on vacation. Me, my husband, and son all got it. (And none of us had had covid before.) I had a fever and a really bad headache for a few days.

Maybe we got infected on the flight from China to the US, because the longest leg was 12 hours and we didn't wear masks. Who knows.

One really weird thing was, when I went to urgent care in the US, the receptionist wasn't wearing a mask, and I told her I had covid, and she still didn't put on a mask, and the nurse wasn't wearing a mask either.

Anyway, I don't recommend getting covid, also I don't recommend getting covid on vacation. 

---

In other news: China is no longer "requiring" covid tests when entering the country. Here's an article from ABC News about it: China won't require COVID-19 tests for incoming travelers in a milestone in its reopening (August 28). I frown disapprovingly at this article, because of how it talks about "A U.S. federally funded study this month found the rapid dismantling of the 'zero COVID' policy may have led to nearly 2 million excess deaths in the following two months" ... 2 million excess deaths compared to... compared to the Before Times, or compared to if China had just let everyone have covid starting in 2020 like all the other countries did? And also it mentions China's "sluggish economic recovery" as if all the other countries have been doing any better. I don't like the bias in this article, but anyway, I want to share a link about how covid tests are no longer "required" when entering the country, so here it is.

But I put "requiring" in scare quotes because, like, this policy (as it existed as of August 2023) was such a joke. Before April 29, 2023, the policy was not a joke; China was requiring PCR tests (also known as nucleic acid tests), where you had to go to a real testing place (and pay over a hundred dollars, that's how much it cost me at Walgreens) and get a real report, and you had to time it so it was some number of hours before the takeoff time of the leg of your flight that entered mainland China, and the airline employees checked the reports very carefully before letting you on the plane, etc etc etc. This policy changed back in April- it is no longer in effect as of April 29, 2023 (here's a link to South China Morning Post, and here's where I mentioned this on my blog).

So back in April, they changed to a new policy, which is: you're supposed to do a self-test, and then when you enter China there's an app with a customs form to fill out, and one of the questions is "was your self-test positive or negative" and that's it. You just check the "negative" box, nobody asks for any proof, nobody cares, probably most travelers didn't even do a self-test, whatever.

So now they announce they're no longer requiring covid tests for people entering China, like, my dude, you stopped requiring them back in April, and since then everybody's been going through this charade where we pretend we did a self-test but nobody cares if we actually did. The only change now is the customs app no longer asks the question.

I actually know someone who tested positive in the US during the summer, flew back to China anyway, checked the "negative" box on the customs app, and when he landed in Shanghai he was randomly selected to be covid-tested, lol. A few days later, someone from the airport called him and said he had tested positive. But, they didn't tell him he should, like, do anything. Like, you tested positive, but I guess no one cares. So. Yeah. The policy was a joke. 

I guess it's nice that they're changing it, but it shouldn't be reported as news, because it doesn't actually matter.

---

Next, let's talk about masking habits here in Shanghai. Well, it seems like most people aren't at all worried about covid any more, and mostly aren't wearing masks. When I was on the Shanghai subway recently, I estimated maybe 20% of people were wearing masks. 

I wear a mask on the subway, and in most indoor public spaces like malls, but also I eat at restaurants a lot, no mask. I feel like, I don't want to get covid again, but the probability of getting it from any single place I go is so low, it feels like it's not worth the trouble of inconveniencing myself. Wearing a mask on the subway isn't an inconvenience for me, so I do that, but if I was going to like, avoid eating at restaurants, blah that would be too much trouble.

But also, we have no way of knowing when the probability of getting covid is high or low.

So, probably the best strategy is to get as many vaccines as we can. Which, on that note, China hasn't rolled out a new booster recently, and it really seems like they should.

---

And one more piece of news: Notice on Walk-in Without Appointment Visa Application Service (October 19) "To further facilitate foreign nationals’ travel to China, the Chinese Embassy and Consulates-General in the U.S. will provide walk-in visa application services starting from October 23, 2023."

When the quarantine policy ended (January 8, 2023- I wrote about it here) and then visa services for non-Chinese citizens resumed (March 15, 2023- I wrote about it here), Chinese consulates in other countries had to deal with TONS of people suddenly applying for Chinese visas. (Most were probably non-Chinese citizens who have relatives in China, whom they hadn't been able to visit for 3 years.) There were so many applications, that the consulates could not allow people to just walk in and apply, you had to try to reserve an appointment or something (I don't know the details on this). 

Well it sounds like they've worked through that backlog and now there are a reasonable number of visa applicants every day, so they're back to doing walk-in applications. Very cool. China is a good place to visit, now that zero-covid is over! (Oh, actually, scratch that, plane tickets are still absurdly expensive. Maybe wait til next year.)

---

That's all~ Maybe I won't have to do any more covid updates, because things in China are pretty much the same as the rest of the world, at this point.

Shanghai is having a 2nd covid wave

COVID-19 virus. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Hi readers! In my previous covid update, Just some thoughts about masks (May 3), I said that nobody has covid here, and I don't even think it's really necessary to wear masks. Well, a week or so after I published that, the situation changed. We started hearing about people getting covid. Someone's friend-of-a-friend got covid. Several people from my job got covid. My son's school notified us about kids at the school getting covid. This has been going on for several weeks. People getting covid, here in Shanghai.

So yeah, I said in the previous post that I don't wear a mask at work- well, for the past few weeks, I *have* been wearing a mask at work. It's a normal surgical mask, not an N95, because I don't like wearing an N95 for 8 hours a day, but the surgical mask doesn't bother me, so, whatever, I can wear that.

So far, me, my husband, and son haven't had covid. Yay. But our biggest area of risk is at his school, because the kids don't wear masks, and don't really know how to keep their germs to themselves.

Anyway, that's the whole update. Here's an article from SHINE about it: Second wave of COVID-19 sees mainly mild cases (May 19). But remember, we don't believe what SHINE says. We remember the total bullshit propaganda they were publishing during the Shanghai lockdown.

Just some thoughts about masks

N95 masks. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Hi everyone, it's been a while since my previous update on the covid situation in Shanghai. Basically, I went to the US for a month, and when I came back, nobody in China seems to care about covid any more??? In this whole time I've been back in China, I've only heard of 1 friend-of-a-friend who got covid. I'm sure over 90% of the people in Shanghai got covid in December 2022/ January 2023, so for now there is herd immunity and you get the impression that covid doesn't exist any more. (Me, my husband, and son have not had covid- we hunkered down at home in December/January when society was falling apart because everyone was infected...)

And now, here in Shanghai, I see people wearing masks noticeably less than usual. On the subway, used to be 100% of people were wearing masks, now it's maybe 90%. We went out to a place with a lot of people recently- indoors- and maybe 50% of people were wearing masks. These aren't exact numbers, just my guesses, so don't take them literally, but my point is, there is a very obvious difference in masking behavior, compared to the zero-covid-policy period.

In the US, on the other hand, sometimes I went to crowded places and not one single person was wearing a mask, except me, which was really shocking to me. The situation in China is not like that at all.

So... on the question of what's my long-term strategy for when to wear a mask... I'm aware that I'm not doing it in a way that actually makes logical sense, and I wonder if it's even possible to do it in a way that makes logical sense. Basically, I think the places where I'm most likely to get covid are: 

• at work
• from my husband or son because we live together
• from friends, because we often go out to dinner or big events together, where no one wears a mask

These are the 3 areas of highest risk, and yet, it's not really even a possibility in my mind that I'm going to wear masks in these situations. For example, at work, on any given day, I interact closely with maybe 5-10 people, so any given day is extremely low-risk, but if I keep doing that for, say, 1 year without wearing masks, I'll likely get covid... So it seems like wearing a mask is only really useful if I do it extremely long-term, and ugh, that just seems like way more trouble than it's worth. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for a whole year, to prevent (possibly?) 1 covid infection. So I don't wear a mask at work.

Last December, I wore an N95 at work. Because I saw the writing on the wall, the zero-covid policy was ending, and I knew that very soon, covid would be EVERYWHERE. See, if there's a known reason why a certain time period is more high-risk, then I would totally wear a mask. But if it's just like... just do this indefinitely, forever... I don't really want to do that.

And at home, with my husband and son, we're not gonna wear masks at home, that's just impractical, no one does that unless there's a known reason why one family member is suspected of being infected, or something. Honestly, my son being in school every day, unmasked, with 30 kids who cough on each other is probably my biggest risk, and there's not really anything I can do about that. (So, then, logically, why should I bother wearing a mask in other settings?)

And when I go out with friends, it's a fun, relaxing atmosphere and nobody wants to wear a mask. But, last December, there were a few times I went out with friends and I wore an N95 the entire time, for the reasons mentioned above. Did not eat or drink or anything. And I did not get covid, and everyone else did. So. Yeah, if I have a reason to think there's more risk, then I'd wear a mask, but if not, well, nobody wants to bother with masks.

So basically the way it shakes out right now is I wear a mask if I'm going to some public place full of strangers. Like going to a mall, taking my son to a kids' play area, etc. (But, also, we do eat in restaurants, so, we take our masks off for that.)

Basically, my habits right now are like, if I feel safe with these people, then I don't wear a mask. And if it's a bunch of strangers, then I do. But, obviously this is totally illogical, because there's no correlation between whether I have a friendly relationship with someone, and whether they have covid.

Spock (Leonard Nimoy). Image source.

So... it doesn't really make sense, what I'm doing, but since the covid virus is invisible, doesn't everyone need to sort of use a "proxy" to decide when to wear a mask? What I mean is, humans don't have an intuitive sense of when there's a higher risk of getting infected with covid (except perhaps if you literally see someone coughing), and so we have to base our decisions on other factors, which ideally would have some correlation with covid risk. But, I mean, how well can anyone really do that?

I always saw people on twitter talking about how you should wear masks not just for yourself, but to protect immunocompromised people. But I feel that's also hard to do in reality, because wearing a mask can be an inconvenience, and you don't actually know if it's helping anyone or not. Yes, like I said, I wear masks in crowded places with a bunch of strangers- that doesn't feel like an inconvenience to me- so I guess maybe I'm helping immunocompromised people there? Maybe? Who knows? Except if it's a restaurant- I don't wear a mask at a restaurant. Or sometimes I wear a mask while ordering food, but then take it off to eat, so... then... what was the point of wearing it at all? Like I said, I don't have an approach that's actually logical.

And also I feel kind of silly writing about this, because everywhere else besides China, you had to figure all this out for yourselves 3 years ago. But in China, for these 3 years, there hasn't really been any real risk of getting covid. So we wore masks because that was the rule- but we didn't wear masks at the office, or at restaurants, because that was impractical and anyway there was no real risk of getting covid so it didn't matter. (With a few exceptions, during those short periods of time when there existed a handful of known covid cases somewhere in Shanghai, and so everyone was paranoid. During those times, I saw people at the office wearing masks, and also many people avoided restaurants.) It's such a weird new thing, now that zero-covid has ended, everyone has to make their own decision about this.

And another weird thing, is that people in China are saying "the pandemic is over" (“疫情结束了”) when actually it's the zero-covid policy that's over, which means that now we actually can get covid, whereas during "the pandemic" we didn't really have any significant chance of getting covid. Honestly, Chinese people's experience of "the pandemic" was mostly about all the rules and restrictions that the government put on us. Remember when we had to get covid-tested every 2 days, for months and months? (Basically all the way from March 2022 to December 2022 in Shanghai... other cities had slightly different policies.) Remember when we had to scan a QR code every time we entered a public place, for contact-tracing purposes? Remember when anyone and everyone could ask you about your travel history and/or take your temperature, as if it was their business? Remember when every now and then, someone at work would say "oh so-and-so is working from home for the next 2 weeks because her apartment complex is in lockdown" and that was a normal thing? Remember when schools and employers would make announcements like "if you travel during the holiday, you can't come to school/work for the first 5 days after you come back to Shanghai", so then nobody with school-age kids could really take vacations anywhere?

Remember 1 year ago today, when Shanghai had already been in lockdown for an entire month, and there was no end in sight?

Here in China, it was never about "what's my actual risk of getting covid?" It was about living our lives according to all these tedious rules, and under threat of getting quarantined just because you happened to be at some place where some covid-positive person happened to be.

So when people say "the pandemic is over" (“疫情结束了”), it's because we no longer have to live by all those rules. We're done with all that. 

So... yeah... about masks, that's what I'm doing now, and I recognize that it doesn't exactly make sense, and I'll likely get covid sometime in the next year. If I knew that, say, the next month was going to be a big covid wave, I would wear an N95 and wait it out (oof, would I pull my kid out of school though? ugh that would be exhausting trying to find alternative childcare...). But instead, it's just, for the whole foreseeable future, there is a low risk, but it will happen eventually, unless I wear masks ALL THE TIME, which would be way too much trouble.

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Links:

Barrett's YouTube channel:

Chinese National Guard on the Streets of Shanghai (May 1) This is a video from a white guy in China, about how unbelievably crowded Nanjing pedestrian street (in Shanghai) is this week, because of the Labor Day holiday. Now that zero-covid is over, a lot more people are traveling during the holiday breaks. Trying to make up for those 3 years of not traveling.

In this video, you can see police and military people doing crowd control, allowing people to cross the street only at specific times, with barriers set up so that everyone is going in the same direction, etc. I am sure this is because of the risk of a stampede when there's a crowd this big.

Highly recommend the video. Especially the part where the line of military people march in formation to stand along the side of the pedestrian street crossing. The police/military people seem to be very organized and doing a good job.

South China Morning Post:

Coronavirus: China will no longer require PCR tests for travellers to the country (April 25) This is HUGE, you guys. Effective April 29, China no longer requires a PCR test for travelers entering the country. Apparently a self-test is required instead, but probably no one is going to enforce that. (How could they enforce it, anyway? If you have to show a photo of your rapid antigen test, well, how will they know it's really yours? Maybe you just got a photo from someone else.)

And, when I was in the US and needed to get a PCR test to come back to China, oh my goodness it was so expensive. It was something like $120 per person. (Whereas in China, it's something like 80 rmb, which is about $10.) The pharmacy actually called me when I made the appointment and asked if I really want to get tested- "Do you know it's $120?" lolsob

So wow, this is a big deal, not requiring testing. Saves us a lot of money and stress (trying to carefully time the test so you have the results before your flight, but also so the test sampling time is within 48 hours before the departure time of the leg of your flight specifically entering mainland China, ugh this was so complicated). Plane tickets are still RIDICULOUS though. They're about double the price they were in The Before Times.

SHINE:

China approves 1st domestic mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 (March 22) This is good news, though I don't know what the timeline is for doing an actual vaccine rollout with a Chinese mRNA vaccine.

Masks no longer mandatory, but recommended, on Shanghai Metro (March 31)

Effective immediately, China resumes inbound group tours (March 31)

CNBC:

Biden will end Covid vaccine mandates for federal workers and international travelers on May 11 (May 1) The current policy says that people entering the US must be vaccinated for covid (this does not apply to US citizens though), but that policy is ending.

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Related:

Zero-Covid is Over (December 11, 2022)
I Guess I Shouldn't Be Surprised How Fast Omicron is Spreading in China (December 17, 2022) 
Does Anyone in China NOT Have Covid? (December 24, 2022)

The Shanghai Lockdown and Shared Trauma

Bloomberg photo from May 2, 2022, showing empty highways in Shanghai. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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March 16-21, 2022: First lockdown. 6 days.

March 23 - May 31, 2022: Second lockdown. 69 days.

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On March 16, 2022, I wrote I'm in Lockdown. And... it lasted for 2 and a half months. 

What to say about it? It was bad. I don't want to go read my blog posts from then to summarize how bad it was. Actually just now I checked Wikipedia, and their article covers it well: 2022 Shanghai COVID-19 outbreak. Though, I will say, the Wikipedia article mentions food shortages, but just from the words "food shortage" you don't understand how bad it was.

I remember going outside to take out the trash every night- we were only allowed out of our apartment building to take out the trash and pick up deliveries- and there were no traffic sounds at all. No sounds of people walking down the street. Only birds. It was so quiet. So bizarre.

Little Square Root would watch all 4 Toy Story movies every day, while my husband and I worked from home.

And the vegetables we were able to get- they were raw, so raw. Dirt all stuck to the bottom. On more than one occasion, I found a live snail in the vegetables.

I wanted to decorate Easter eggs, but no, we didn't do that. Because we had no way of knowing when we would have the opportunity to buy more eggs. We couldn't use up any eggs on that.

And, I eat mushrooms now. I never really liked mushrooms before, but during the lockdown, that was what we had, so I ate them. And now I am fine with eating mushrooms.

And the fear and the anxiety... every day seeing all these things on social media- so many of them that the government couldn't censor them fast enough- and just stuck in our home wondering if it will happen to us. Will we need medical care and the ambulance won't come? Will our son test positive for covid and be taken away from us? Will we have to go to quarantine, and desperately try to find some pet service who can take our cat?

Something I was thinking about recently, is this: It feels so weird to think that everyone in Shanghai had similar traumatic experiences. Everyone. Every random person you see on the street. Every waitress at every restaurant. Every person you sit next to on the subway. They all have a story about what terrible things happened to them in March-April-May 2022.

Usually, with trauma, you don't talk about it because other people won't understand. But this is different. If I'm talking to someone in Shanghai and I mention something about not being able to buy food during lockdown, they will nod along, because they know. It happened to them too.

A few weeks after the lockdown ended, I was out with friends, and someone there was visiting from Beijing. He said he had heard all kinds of stories from people in Shanghai. "One of my colleagues from Shanghai organizes international training courses for hundreds of people," he said. "And then I heard that during the lockdown, she was organizing all her family members to click on an app at the same time, to try to buy some eggs." And we are all like, yeah. Yeah, that's what happened. That's what happened.

It's a weird thing, having a whole society of 25 million people, that all experienced this bad thing. Yes, some people had it worse than others. Some people continued to earn a salary during lockdown, some did not. Most people were locked down at home, but some were sleeping on the streets, at the airport, at their job. Some people already knew how to cook from scratch with Chinese vegetables, and some people didn't even own a pot. Thousands of people tested positive for covid and were taken to quarantine centers with terrible conditions. Some people had emergencies and couldn't get anyone to come help.

So, some had it worse than others, but still, it was bad for everyone.

I guess this is also what happens when a natural disaster strikes an area. Everyone there has a story about how bad it was for them. In my hometown, there was The Ice Storm. I'm too young to remember it, actually, but everyone who is from my hometown and is older than me knows about The Ice Storm.

You could say the same about the covid pandemic itself. Everyone in the world was affected by it, except maybe some isolated groups of people who have no contact with the rest of human society, I guess. 

And for international people in China- Every single one of us has a story about how we weren't able to get out of China and see our families for 3 years, or about how we jumped through so many hoops to get back into China and then stayed 14 days or 8 days or 21 days alone in a quarantine hotel (or, even worse, with a small child in a quarantine hotel). Or about getting stuck outside of China, for months, while your spouse and child are still in China. Or about going to another country in early 2020 to "wait it out" and then the border closes and the only thing you can do is find a shipping service to ship whatever things you really need from your apartment in China, and abandon the rest. Every international person in China has at least one of those traumas.

Such a strange thing... We don't talk about it, but we all lived through it. And if someone did talk about it, everyone would nod along and say "that happened to me too."

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Links:

China Briefing

China to Resume Issuing All Types of Visas for Foreigners (March 14) Okay, this is HUGE, why can I not find a decent English article on it? There's just this paywalled Wall Street Journal article, and "China Briefing", a site I have never heard of. Also this one from Reuters but it's not exactly what I'm looking for, though it does generally cover the same information. (The perspective I was looking for was, "YOU GUYS. Here are the new visa policies" which is what the China Briefing article is, though in more formal language.)

Anyway, this is HUGE! Tourist visas to China! And if you had a tourist visa issued before March 28, 2020, that visa is now valid again (as long as it's not expired now- these are 10-year visas). Important background info on that is, on March 28, 2020, China banned all foreigners from entering the country, even if you had a valid visa or residence permit.

This is like, wow. Getting very close to "back to normal."

The New York Times

U.S. Will Lift Covid Testing Requirement for Travelers From China (March 8)

Sixth Tone

Past the Peak, China’s Schools Prep For a Normal Semester (February 13)

That's Mags [not sure if this will load if you are outside China- I couldn't get it to load with VPN on]

6 Countries Scrap PCR Test for China Returnees (February 28) On February 28, Chinese embassies in Cambodia, Hungary, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Sri Lanka announced that travelers coming from these 6 countries will not be required to get covid-tested to enter China. It's likely that more and more countries will be added to the list, as time goes on.

SHINE

Up close with Disney characters once again (March 6) So, during the past 3 years, when you go to Shanghai Disneyland and meet characters, there are marks on the floor showing where you have to stand, to social-distance from the Disney characters. (And this is enforced! There are only 2 places I've seen social-distancing enforced in China. The other one was standing in line for covid-testing during lockdown.) Apparently that's over now.

Hong Kong to lift mask mandate from March 1 (February 28)

Blogaround

1. A Chinese Village Bet Its Future on Tourism. Then, COVID Hit. (March 1) "The village’s 200 or so inhabitants belong to the Yao ethnic minority that lives on both sides of the China-Laos border. Many local men go to Laos to find a wife. Most older people do not speak Mandarin, only Yao."

Also, Sixth Tone is writing a series on the tradition of "bride prices":

Who’s Profiting Off China’s Bride Prices? (February 22) "In rural parts of north China, such as Henan, Shandong, and the northern parts of Anhui province, the bride’s parents generally don’t keep the money for themselves, for fear of being accused of having sold their daughter. Instead, the money is passed to the bride for use in married life."

How to Price a Bride (March 2) "In this instance, the bride’s family was willing to lower its request in line with Bai’s expectations, but as an upstanding local family, they felt they couldn’t open negotiations with a below-average bride price. Instead, they waited for Bai to counter before immediately offering a compromise. Although it may seem unnecessarily roundabout, this negotiation process was essential to satisfying the moral sensibilities of both families."

This must be more of a thing in rural China and not in cities. I married a Chinese man and didn't get any money for it...

And one more from Sixth Tone: Citing Privacy, Wuxi Deletes 1 Billion Pieces of COVID-19 Data (March 3) "'The deletion of such data is in line with existing laws and safeguards the personal privacy of citizens against possible theft and misuse in the digital era,' stated a government notice, adding it reflected a 'people-centered' philosophy for governing data."

2. A deluge of artificial stories: The chatbot crisis at Clarkesworld (February 22) "Which leads to the current question that wiser minds than mine are currently conking skulls over: How does one continue to advance egalitarian and equity-oriented practices on a creative front, when new technology is leveling the playing field in the most brute force way imaginable—by steamrolling over any player with an open-door policy?"

3. A few things in defense of EA (March 4) "Earning to give might be weird, but its main effect is to cancel out the weirdness of extreme utilitarianism. It allows EA folks to basically reach the same conclusion that normies reached by not thinking about it that hard."

4. Let's talk endorsements (March 5) "First, though, my sense is that endorsements function slightly differently in Christian publishing. In many cases, an endorsement stands as a guarantor of theological orthodoxy (as particular camps define orthodoxy). ... Complementarian? Great, that’s all I need to know: 'This book is brilliant, everyone should read it.' End up on the right side of the lgbtq divide? 'This book is a must-read.'"

5. Pastors (and Others) Exempt from Tithing (March 5) "Pastors, if you decide to give regularly, I suggest you choose another entity besides your congregation as the recipient. It’s just weird to give back to the one that pays you."

6. The Fundamental Flaws in Josh Butler’s Argument (March 6) "Ephesians 5 Is Not About Sεx" Yes THANK YOU for saying this.

And another post also from Jackson Wu: The Poor are Honored through Exile (February 21) This is interesting, though I'm not sure I agree with it- I'm very skeptical of the idea that there could exist society-wide disasters that harm rich/elite people more than they harm poor people. But I like how Wu is bringing up the concept of God not treating the entire society as equally guilty, but viewing the poor as *not* deserving of the punishment that the upper class suffered.

7. P!nk - F**kin' Perfect (Lyric Video) I've shared this song before, but, I'm ex-evangelical and it's one of my favorite songs.

I'm in the US (why don't y'all wear masks?)

A sign that says "Masks are optional." Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Hi everyone, just wanted to put an update here and say I'm in the US! After being stuck in China for 3 years! (I mean, not literally stuck, it was easy to leave China and hard to get back in...)

My son and I are here on vacation for a few weeks, and then back to China. Fortunately, China no longer requires a quarantine when entering the country. All that's required is 1 negative nucleic acid test before you get on the plane. (There have been so many versions of the rules about getting into China during the past 3 years- the policies have changed a whole bunch of times. Now it's so easy though- just 1 nucleic acid test.)

How do I feel about being in the US? Well, it's great being here, but the really weird thing is I don't feel like I've been gone for 3 years. (Sort of like the mirror of what I wrote in this 2013 post.) Everything seems so natural and like I fit right in. I guess this is a kind of reverse culture shock.

It's great, and I don't want to be away for 3 years again. In the Before Times, I came to the US twice a year. That was a good amount- I want to do that. And I can now, because zero-covid has ended and it's no longer hard to get into China. (I mean, China is still not issuing tourist visas, but for people who legitimately live there- like me- it's not hard to get into China.)

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Why don't y'all wear masks?

Like, this strikes me as super weird. We get off the plane, walking around in the airport, and most people aren't wearing masks. ??? Why not? You're in an airport. Why would you not wear a mask?

And basically everywhere we went, in public, sometimes crowded places- most people are not wearing masks. Why not???

I have some thoughts about it, but since I'm on vacation I don't want to spend time blogging about it now, so I guess maybe I'll write a post on it some other time.

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A few other covid-related differences

So, at a lot of stores in the US, they have plexiglass set up in front of the cashier, so you're not breathing on them. I've never seen that in China.

Also, apparently, in the US, social distancing was a real thing. There are marks on the floor showing you where to wait in line, and people actually did that. In China, we had the marks on the floor, but nobody ever paid attention to them. We barely did any social distancing. With a few exceptions: I remember at Shanghai Disneyland, the employees were enforcing social distancing at some of the places where you wait in line, and when you meet a character there are marks on the ground showing that you have to stand a certain distance from them- and that's enforced. And during the Shanghai lockdown when we all got mass-tested every 2 days, they were telling us we had to stand in line 2 meters apart, and people actually paid attention to that and did it. (Definitely not everybody did it though.)

I think in China, there is just less of a concept of having "personal space." Like when you wait in line, the person behind you is RIGHT THERE, and that's just seen as normal. If you left a bit of space, people would think you're not actually in the line, and they'd cut in front of you. So social distancing never really caught on. Also, the Chinese government needed to make covid rules that were an absolute thing- having a vague sense that probability generally increases as distance decreases just wouldn't have fit into the policies.

I've also heard people in the US talking about staying a certain distance away from someone who might have been exposed to covid, and calculating which day they would be contagious if in fact they were infected- and we just never really did any of that in China. Like, they either label you a close contact and put you in quarantine, or they don't. There's no "well, it's probably fine if you stay X distance away from them/ if they were exposed yesterday because they won't be contagious yet/ etc."

The key thing here, I think, is that in the US, everyone's on their own. So you assess the risk to you as an individual. If there's a 1 in 1000 chance you could get covid, well, that's pretty small, so you don't worry about it. But in China, the government was trying to stop 1 billion people from having covid. If there's a 1 in 1000 chance that someone has covid, and over the course of several weeks there have been thousands of people identified who are in that situation, well probably at least one of them really does have covid, and we just can't have covid-positive people walking around in society, so we have to quarantine ALL of them.

(Of course, this isn't the case any more, because the zero-covid policy has ended, and the Chinese government is just letting everyone have covid now.)

So for Chinese people, the set of things that would get you put into quarantine is a much bigger set than the things that make you have a high probability of actually having covid. I think it will take some time for me to work out what the actual risk to me is and how to go about life.

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Links

A few links on the goings-on in China:

Sixth Tone: 

‘It’s Finally Over,’ Say Doctors in China as COVID Cases Ebb (February 9)

SHINE:

Suishenban now offers free Chinese-English PCR tests (February 7)