Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. (February 20, via) "The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital."

2. How China’s ‘Ne Zha 2’ Beat ‘Inside Out 2’ to Become the Highest-Grossing Animated Film in History (February 25) There's a new cartoon movie in theatres, "Ne Zha 2" (pronounced "neh ja 2") and it's HUGE. It's breaking records. Not sure if y'all outside of China have heard about this?

3. Rain, Ruin, Repeat: The Chinese Villages Caught in Climate Chaos (February 25) "At 1 a.m. on July 27, villages across the region awoke to a relentless barrage of phone alerts, broadcast warnings, and the deafening clang of gongs — a rural alarm meant to signal immediate danger."

4. A child has died in the Texas measles outbreak (February 26) This is really sad. Everyone, make sure your kids are vaccinated.

5. Over 7,000 from scam centers in Myanmar are awaiting repatriation after crackdown (February 27) "Amy Miller, who is Southeast Asia director of aid group Acts of Mercy International and is based in Thailand's Mae Sot on the Myanmar border, told the AP she has never seen such a large-scale release of potential victims of human trafficking."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Btw, I don't actually believe in "the" antichrist. I just call that felon "the antichrist" or "the orange antichrist" because it's BONKERS how the people who were always on the lookout for the antichrist (signaling the end of the world is coming), who speculated endlessly about every major world leader possibly being the antichrist (is the pope the antichrist? is Obama the antichrist???), on the lookout for a leader who is greedy and dishonest and immoral and yet the crowds love him and he's even deceived Christians - THOSE PEOPLE are the ones who are now bowing down and selling their souls to him. It's just so unbelievable to me.

Here's what I want to say to them: When Christians say, "Jesus is Lord," what we mean is "Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not." Get it right.

2. "See You In Court": Maine Gov Responds to Trump's Face Over Anti-Trans EO At Governor's Address (February 23) "In a statement, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey vowed to 'defend Maine’s laws and block efforts by the president to bully and threaten us.'"

Also from Erin in the Morning: Nazis Burned Trans Books To Usher In Fascism: Now Trump Does The Same (February 25) "Trump’s digital erasure of transgender people is more than policy—it is a declaration that the very existence of certain human beings is unwelcome in the official record. This is not a hallmark of a democratic leader respecting courts and laws; it is the move of someone intent on atrocity."

The evangelical position on this has always been that being trans is not a real thing. I'm not surprised that now that they have power, they want everyone to act like being trans is not a real thing. 

We have to resist. 

3. Data Rescue Project (via) A site summarizing the efforts to archive government data because it's being removed from government sites.

4. “We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled”: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump (February 13, via) "Since 1979, the department’s civil rights arm has worked to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination laws in schools. It operates under a congressional mandate to uphold the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the federal laws that prohibit discriminating against students because of gender or disability."

5. Federal computers are hacked to show fake AI video of Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet (February 25) "'Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs,' Kabas said, quoting an anonymous agency source."

6. Bad Bosses are not beloved (February 25) "This, again, is part of the definition of a Bad Boss — sneering contempt for whatever it is that you do resulting in interference with your ability to do it."

7. People Are Mass-Emailing Elon Musk In Response To His "What Did You Do Last Week?" Message To Federal Workers (February 25, via) Oh it turns out we can all email Elon at hr@opm.gov and tell him 5 things we did.

8. Jeff Bezos' revamp of 'Washington Post' opinions leads editor to quit (February 26) "'We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,' Bezos wrote in a memo to staffers announcing the changes." What on earth.

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."

Blogaround

1. 2024 Arrives With A Sudoku Miracle (January 1) 1-hour-54-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this ruleset is very complicated. I'm super impressed by Simon solving it.

2. If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He? (January 5) "The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election."

3. 'Jane Roe' is anonymous no more. The very public fight against abortion bans in 2023 (December 31) "Now, it's different. 'Women and pregnant people in this country are so angry and so shocked at the treatment that they are receiving at the hands of the state that they have been compelled to tell their stories,' she says."

4. UN experts alarmed by Alabama plan to kill prisoner using untried gas method (January 3) [content note: death penalty] "In a joint statement released on Wednesday in Geneva, the four independent UN monitors call on the US government and Alabama to halt the execution scheduled for 25 January. They accuse the state of rushing ahead with an experimental execution technique that could inflict grave suffering on Smith in violation of the international ban on torture."

5. Epiphany: One Of Us (January 7) "And then God Almighty — God who laid the foundation of the earth, who determined its measurements when the morning stars sang together, God who commands the morning and causes the dawn to know its place, God who bound the chains of the Pleiades and loosed the cords of Orion — wept."

6. WHO Guideline for complementary feeding of infants and young children 6-23 months of age (October 16) New guidelines released by the World Health Organization, about how to feed babies, and WOW there are big changes here! This link has the very long report documents, I will try to see if I can find a shorter summary. But just to give you an idea of how big the changes are: They are now saying that babies can start having cow milk rather than formula at 6 months old (used to be 12 months!). Still saying breastfeeding is best, and recommending that you continue to breastfeed until the baby is 2 years old, and beyond, but wow big changes in the guidelines around formula.

7. Changing Course: Why More Chinese Students Are Eyeing Southeast Asia (January 9) "For instance, in Thailand, Chinese students comprised the majority of international students in 2022, with 21,419 enrollments, a 130% increase from 9,329 in 2012."

8. Who Gets to Be a Person? (January 4) [content note: miscarriage] "In pursuing the case, prosecutors deny Watts the full expression of her grief. They deny her the right to feel pain and shock at her miscarriage, to act like a traumatized human being. Even if the grand jury does not indict her, she has experienced hell."

And an update on that: Ohio woman who miscarried at home won’t be charged with corpse abuse, grand jury decides (January 12)

The main thing here is... a miscarriage at 22 weeks, that's horrible. That's devastating, to lose the baby when you're already 22 weeks into the pregnancy. Watts needs compassion and support; she needs to be allowed to grieve, because that's a terrible thing to go through. But instead she was treated like she had done something bad to her baby.

9. More delays for NASA’s astronaut moonshots, with crew landing off until 2026 (January 10)

10. Do pregnant women have a right to urgent medical care? No, according to a US court (January 10) This is just BONKERS. Doesn't the Texas abortion ban supposedly have an exception for "life of the mother"? So why is Texas now arguing that ERs shouldn't be required to do abortions which are necessary to save pregnant people's lives? So that whole "exception for life of the mother" thing was totally fake, then?

11. In Hottest Year On Record, US Cut Carbon Emissions. Good Start! (January 11)

12. China rolls out new measures to facilitate foreigners’ visit to country (January 11) I saw this in the news, but I don't understand what it actually means in practical terms (like, I'm an immigrant in China, is this gonna benefit me?). We'll see.

Blogaround

1. First Amendment protects satanic display in Iowa, but GOP lawmaker took abuse for saying so (December 12, via) Yessss, Representative Dunwell is saying that he *personally* does not like the satanic display in the Iowa State Capitol, but by law we have freedom of religion and that means the government cannot and should not decide which religious displays are okay and which are not. This is my favorite part: "The display is an inanimate object that has no real power in and of itself. We have nothing to fear."

And then an update on that: If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine (December 15) 

2. Laudatory categories (December 13) "In politics, people are quite committed to the idea that their own political ideology is the good stuff, and the stuff that isn’t good doesn’t count."

3. Real vs Artificial Christmas Trees: Which is Killing Us Faster? (December 15) "Overall, those are the reasons why most sustainability experts say that a real tree is better for the environment than a plastic tree." Yes, really great to have actual numbers to attach to questions like this. I think people's tendency is to think "real trees are wasteful because you only use it a few weeks and then throw it away, artificial trees are sustainable" but that's not *automatically* true- you have to do the math. 

I saw a similar site recently which calculates whether your carbon footprint is bigger for using disposable or cloth diapers for your baby- it depends on a lot of factors! Reusable is not automatically "more sustainable."

And I've also seen discussion in some mom groups about "I bought a big sack with my child's name on it, to put her Christmas gifts in so we don't need wrapping paper. Wrapping paper is so wasteful." Well, I don't know if buying a bag that you use for many years is actually better or not- you have to do the math. Depends on how many years you use it, and how much wrapping paper (and what kind of wrapping paper) you would have used otherwise, etc.

4. Meghan Trainor gets candid about painful intercourse and vaginismus diagnosis (April 27) "I thought that every woman walking around was always in pain during and after sex. I was like, ‘Doc, are you telling me that I could have sex and not feel a single bit of pain?’" Oh my goodness that's so real. 

I missed this news when it happened back in April. Glad to see more people are talking about vaginismus.

Also this: Meghan Trainor’s comments about painful sex helped me realise I had vaginismus (May 10)

5. Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows (December 7, via) Recently I've heard people talking about "greedflation" which means companies are raising prices and causing inflation just because they want more profits and not because their costs are actually higher- and to me this explanation doesn't add up. Wouldn't the market correct for that? If that's really what's happening, wouldn't it create an opportunity for other companies to swoop in and set their own prices more reasonably, and attract all the customers away from these "greedflation" companies? So I didn't really believe that "greedflation" was a real thing.

(Also this seems to be a US thing. It's not happening in China. So I don't have direct experience about it.)

Well this article has some actual data to back it up. Specifically, the actual numbers show that profits have grown much faster than wages and other business costs. So, I guess there is something to this "greedflation" concept- though I still feel like there's a lot that doesn't add up. Why is this happening *now* specifically, when surely companies would always like to raise their prices and get higher profits? (Like this is talked about as if suddenly these companies had this amazing idea that they had totally never thought of before, "hey let's raise prices for no reason, just because we want to.") And why isn't the market fixing the problem on its own?

(Maybe in the long run, the market will fix this, but in the short term this happened because of the societal disruption caused by the pandemic?)

6. How Can This Sudoku Be Real? (December 11) 1-hour-19-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, very interesting ruleset. I like this one because you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what's even possible under the ruleset, before you can even start the sudoku.

7. More Chinese Fathers Helping, Yet ‘Widowed Parenting’ Persists (December 18) "The data shows a significant disparity in caregiving roles: About 80% of children are dropped off and picked up from school by their mothers or grandparents, while only 7% primarily receive this support from their fathers."

And these ones also from Sixth Tone:

Amid Rescue Efforts in Quake-Hit Gansu, a Race Against Time and Cold (December 19) 

Meet Rural China’s ‘Wonder Woman’ (December 19)

8. The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. (November 22, via) "Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies. Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of 'divisive concepts' about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers."

9. Jonathan Majors Guilty of Harassment and Assault (December 18) [content note: domestic violence] He's the actor that plays the villain Kang in the Marvel Cinematic Universe- but, not anymore.

10. Thailand to legalize same-sex marriage (December 13, via) Great!

11. They just won a $148M verdict against Giuliani. Now they’re suing him again. (December 18) "Three days after a jury delivered the massive decision over Giuliani’s false claims that the pair engaged in fraud in the 2020 election, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss filed a new lawsuit Monday seeking to block Giuliani from repeating those allegations — as he repeatedly did during and after last week’s trial."

12. A nation where there is no refuge to seek (December 19) "The sick and cynical strategy that opponents of reproductive freedom will use is definitely going to be to blame doctors for failing to perform medically necessary abortions, while refusing to at any point withdraw the threat of prosecution."

Also from Lawyers, Guns, Money: Exceptions to abortion bans are a fraud (December 12) "'I think it’s the clearest message you could have possibly received from an anti-abortion state that they never meant the medical exemption to mean anything at all,' said Duane."

Blogaround

1. 12/27 Flashback: ‘Rash’ (December 27) "And that’s monstrous — almost as horrifying as the original story. Those well-meaning Sunday school teachers all assumed, as Jephthah did, that he was absolutely bound by his vow, no matter what. And thus they all repeated Jephthah’s error — assuming that such vows and rules might somehow matter more than the life of Jephthah’s daughter."

2. 14 Nights [content note: sexually-explicit drawings, NSFW] A webcomic about an asexual man who agrees to try sex things with his boyfriend, for 14 nights.

3. Two romantic songs about being in a long-term relationship. I love both of these. They make me think about my husband.

Taylor Swift - Lover 

Justin Timberlake - Mirrors (Official Video)

4. NY Gov. Kathy Hochul’s veto of a secular addiction treatment bill makes no sense (January 4) "As things stand, that option already exists, but most people are oblivious to it. They just assume AA is secular (it’s not) or that any treatment program would inherently be non-religious (nope). This bill would put the decision of seeking religious or non-religious addiction treatment in the hands of the person going through it, not a judge who doesn’t know any better."

5. How Thailand Honors the Disabled (January 3) "It signifies that the royal family holds him or her in high favor because she has granted this wheelchair to the individual."