Andrew Cockburn here, standing in for niftywriter who stood in for NNNE yesterday. It’s chaotic around the GNR newsroom this week.
The purpose of the GNR is to combat the negative bias in news reporting. Hate, disgust, and fear make for the best clickbait headlines. Instead we chose to highlight love, tolerance, and hope. If that recipe sounds bland and boring we season it with a hearty topping of schadenfreude.
The bleak midwinter is an especially challenging season. But midwinter is also a time to look inward and remember joy.
Science stuff
Medical miracle- transplanting a genetically modified pig heart into a human.
Pigs are physically very similar to humans- twenty years ago surgical training often involved pigs as subjects. But, just as we can’t use blood from someone with a different blood type for a transfusion, we can’t put pig tissues into a human. The main problem is the sugars that decorate the outside of the cells and allow the immune system to distinguish between self and non-self. For years geneticists have been working to modify the pig genome to remove the pig-specific markers. Maybe they have finally succeeded.
COVID
Dan Goodspeed has created a series of dynamic charts that show US COVID statistics over time. I found the state-level partisanship one especially illuminating. In July 2020, when Jared the Boy Wonder was directing tfg’s non-response to the pandemic, deaths were mainly hitting urban Democratic-majority states. So they decided to let it alone since it was killing their political enemies. Since the vaccines came out, and especially since the delta wave this summer, it has mainly been hitting rural Republican-majority states. This is no big news scoop but it is mind-blowing to see the graph showing this happening.
Pope Francis said it is a “moral obligation” to get vaccinated.
Vaccines
Vaccine research has been neglected for years. Drug companies can’t make much money on them: if a vaccine works there isn’t a followup market. What they want is something a person will take regularly for the rest of their life, like opioids or dick pills. Kos’
Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi were exceptions and have developed a cheap and stable COVID vaccine using older technology. Because they didn’t have industry or government support their invention isn’t bound up by patents and they are giving the details out to everyone.
EVs
I have an EV (Chevy Bolt) and am in love with it. 7th term is small published a diary about EVs and northern winters on Sunday that got a lot of attention (including from me). It isn’t as geeky as the usual EV diaries and focuses on his personal experience.
Hats off to Georgia for beating Alabama to capture its first college football national championship in 41 years.
But at least one Georgia player should have left his hat off during the on-field celebration, because it was an Alabama cap.
Georgia linebacker Nakobe Dean was reveling in the moment while wearing a title commemorative hat with Alabama’s “A” logo on it.
My wife and I both worked at the University of Florida. My sister-in-law is a die-hard UG fan. So there has been some family conflict over that rivalry. Last week I told her I was rooting against Alabama and she said she would take it. Maybe that hatchet is buried. It could get nasty again if UG ever plays WVU, though.
WV political stuff
My senator, Joe Manchin on the insurrection:
One year later, we know without a doubt that the intent of attackers who stormed the Capitol was to prevent Congress from certifying an election for the first time in our nation’s 245-year history. Their intention was to prevent a peaceful transfer of power and to overthrow our government. The insurrectionists that day were violent, destructive and vengeful.
The whole thing is worth reading. Like everyone else here I am frequently frustrated and infuriated at his antics. But he is way better than any Republican. He’s my good senator. The other is quiet, well-behaved, and totally evil.
Redistricting
WV Democrats created multi-member state house districts as a way to leverage their strong numbers in most cities. It didn’t work that well, in my opinion. Here in Morgantown, a college town which is the most heavily Democratic area of the state, they created a five member district that had the city as well as outlying rural Republican parts of the county. The idea was the city voters would swamp the rural ones.
That has worked for the best candidates- the top vote getters are usually the top Democrats. But in order for the strategy to work for the party the worst Democrat has to beat the best Republican. That has only happened here once. In 2018 I led a Working Families canvass to elect all five Democrats and I also convinced the candidates to run as a team. The worst Democrat got 85% of the vote compared to the top Democrat; the top Republican got 80%. Unfortunately last year one Republican got in.
The Republicans decided that anything the Democrats did was evil, so they passed a law eliminating multi-member districts when they took over in 2016. So the 2022 redistricting map has all single-member districts. Our multi-member district has become six single member districts. The redistricting committees in the legislature were careful to put each of the five incumbents into separate safe districts (who says bipartisanship is dead?). One of the four Democrats is running for an open state senate seat so there are two open house seats. We have at least one candidate for both and are gearing up to support them in the general election. It will be much easier since the three Democratic incumbents running for the house won’t need much help.
The promised Schadenfreude
The stable genius whose crack legal team lost 60+ lawsuits trying to overturn the 2020 election now is facing a slew of lawsuits brought by prosecutors, legislators, and private citizens. Here are Tuesday’s top nominations for the prize of first nailing his sorry hide to the wall:
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis
New York Attorney General Letitia James
House lawmakers and Capitol Hill police officers
Here is a betting market on whether he is indicted by April 1. Remember, gamble responsibly.
GOP senators dissing tfg:
Lisa Murkowski thinks his endorsements are weird
Mike Rounds says Biden won the election (as did Scott, Hawley, and Tuberville).
SemDem has a more complete roundup: Romney, Cramer, Thume, Capito, and Johnson agreed with Rounds afterwards.
Cruz has also done so many times but tried to recant this weekend. It didn’t go well.
Fauci ouchie
Senator Marshall is a moron.
Dog cleanser
Rats and other animals laugh when they get tummy rubs. Buster and Scamp say dogs feel the same way.
Mike Bergey, my housemate in graduate school, became a veterinarian and then a science fiction/fantasy author. The eponymous narrator of his book New Coyote explained in detail the importance of tummy rubs to canids.