Crap from various places on the internet: Bear Edition

 We're doing this. It's technically not "Crap from Facebook" this time because I saw it crop up through various internet media. Because I have apparently not learned to leave well enough alone after all this time, I was lured into finding this stupid article (written by one Kate Lister). Well, here we go...

There is a fascinating theoretical discussion currently playing out across social media: would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear? Overwhelmingly, women have chosen the bear. They didn’t have to take their time with it either, just said “bear” straight away.

The first thought that came to mind when I first heard this stupid meme was, "Well yeah, you'd get the same answer if you reversed the gender." Ask men whether they'd rather be stuck in the forest with a woman or with a bear. You'd get similar results. Neither result is really meaningful, by the way.

I'll just say this part now because I need to get it out of the way early on in my rebuttal. The reason that the result is "overwhelmingly" bear for women, and it would also be for men, is because the question itself is inherently silly, and most people pick up on that right away. It's a bizarre, vague, hypothetical scenario. The respondents do not seriously believe that they'll ever be in this situation. The whole thing is a joke, even to the people taking it seriously.

Of course "bear" is the better joke answer! By its nature, the question is setting things up for that. Also, some feminists hate men so much that they'd answer "bear" and truly mean it, with venom behind the answer. But even non-misandrists are primed to answer "bear" in a whimsical sort of way. Hell, I'd probably render such an answer myself.

The answer came as quickly as if they were asked if they would rather have a basket full of kittens or a swift kick in the teeth. “Men are scary,” one woman said. “I said bear because the advice to stay safe is to play dead, but that won’t always work with a man,” said another.

I somehow doubt that the woman in question has ever successfully foiled a bear attack by playing dead.

I’ve been asking myself the same viral question again and again for most of the last week. Man or bear? Bear or man? I still can’t make my mind up and that troubles me. This should be a very easy question!

Yes and no. On the one hand, the question offers no specifics. What does it mean to be "stuck in the forest"? Why would one be "stuck"? What kind of forest is it? How long is one "stuck"? The question doesn't mention things like hypothermia, dehydration, shelter, distance traveled, etc. There are plenty of relevant variables to consider if we're to take the scenario seriously. Under some conditions, having another human with you in a forest could provide safety in numbers and dramatically improve your odds of survival. In other conditions, having two human mouths to feed could rapidly worsen your odds of survival. Even if we ignore the bear entirely and even if we ignore the gender issue entirely, there's not a definitive right answer for whether you want another person with you when you're "stuck in the forest."

On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that the right (non-joke) answer is "man." 

I want to say the man, I really do, but I can’t shake the idea that I would be safer with the bear. I am not sure if it is men or bears that are being most maligned in all of this, but there is no denying that is this a very revealing question.

No, that's just stupid.

I have put this thought experiment to most of my female friends now, and the response is always the same: there’s a pause and then they ask, “what kind of bear?”

I'd have thought that at least one of them asked, "What kind of man?"

That’s not good. Even if they eventually chose the man, the fact they wanted more information on the bear first is concerning. Watching my mum weighing up her options of surviving a polar bear attack before finally settling on “man” was a sobering experience.

Polar bears don't live in the forest, you fucking moron.

The experiment doesn’t work as well if you change the parameters with specifics. If you identify the man or the bear, for example, then it becomes a much easier question to answer. “Would you rather be stuck in the woods with Tom Hardy or a panda?” Tom Hardy.

Wait, what?

“Would you rather be stuck in the woods with Boris Johnson or a grizzly bear?” Then it’s the grizzly, obviously. 

Shouldn't the panda and the grizzly be switched in order to make this point? From what I can gather, the author is citing Boris Johnson as a repulsive man, and presumably finds Tom Hardy attractive. But in that case it would be easy to make the comparison with the pairings of attractive man vs. scary bear and repulsive man vs. innocuous bear.

 At this point I'm legitimately questioning whether the author simply messed up and switched the two bears in the example, or whether there's something else I'm missing.

The beauty of the question lies in its vagueness because that forces you to work with averages. On average, is a woman safer in the woods with a man or a bear?

Man. Easy.

Let’s start with the bears. Bear attacks are highly sensationalised but rare. According to research published in the Nature journal, there are around 40 brown bear attacks on humans worldwide each year and most of these are when the bear feels threatened. Of these 40 attacks, 14.3 per cent were fatal. Between 1870 and 2014, there were 73 attacks worldwide on humans by wild polar bears, 20 of which were fatal. Black bears attack and kill around one human per year in America, and because of humans encroaching on their territories, black bear attacks are on the rise in Japan.

Statistics like this aren't really helpful for your scenario. To illustrate this, consider a different hypothetical: one in which you are tossed into a large tank with a shark swimming around inside it. It's pretty obvious that your danger from a shark attack before you were thrown into the tank was zero, and the danger now that you're in there with a shark is much higher. Real-world statistics on animal attacks aren't pertinent here because the scenario, by its very nature, establishes that you're "stuck in the forest with a bear."

 It would be patently idiotic to be forced into this bizarre hypothetical, to be stuck in a forested location with a black bear staring you down and to think, "Black bears only kill around one human per year in America. Seems like the odds are pretty good that it's not me!"

Bears generally leave humans alone and will alter their behaviour to avoid us where possible. In fact, we pose a far greater danger to them than the other way around. According to Western Wildlife Outreach, 50,000 black bears are legally hunted in North America each year alone, while over 800 polar bears are killed by humans every year. I don’t know if anyone is asking the bears who they would rather be stuck in the forest with, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t choose the man either.

Oh yeah. I didn't even cover the "do you have a gun in this hypothetical?" issue.

Now for the men. Male violence against women is incredibly common and not sensationalised nearly enough.

Considering that it's just about the most sensationalized thing on the entire planet, I'm wondering when enough will finally be enough.

On average, two women per week are murdered by their partner or ex-partner in the UK.

Hold up. You can't make the hypothetical just use some random bear but then immediately bait-and-switch a random man for "my murderous ex."

According to the UN, 55 per cent of all female homicides worldwide are committed by intimate partners or other family members, at a rate of five deaths every single hour. Their research also found that “most violence against women is perpetrated by current or former husbands or intimate partners. More than 640 million or 26 per cent of women aged 15 and older have been subjected to intimate partner violence.”

If more women were dating bears, then I bet the bears would overtake the men pretty easily on the whole intimate partner violence thing.

According to an investigation by UN Women UK, “71 per cent of women of all ages in the UK have experienced some form of sexual harassment in a public space – this number rises to 86 per cent among 18-24-year-olds.”

How many of those instances of sexual harassment took place in a forest?

An estimated 41 per cent of women have been cyber-flashed online.

Oh, come on.

While one in four UK women will experience a physical sexual assault during their lifetimes. (That rises to one in three globally.)

What does this have to do with being stuck in a forest?

Now can you see why the bear is the obvious answer for so many women? When all’s said and done, no bear has ever followed me home or sent me a photo of his penis.

What are the statistics on men seeking out isolated women lost alone in forests and forcing them to look at dick pics? How often does that happen?

If we are looking at averages, the plain truth is that women are safer in the woods with a bear than they are with a man, and that is just incredibly sad.

Well, it's wrong and you're an idiot. So there's that.

A bear will act like a bear. It’s predictable and it’s going to avoid you if it can.

What if the bear is hungry and you're made of meat?

It’s not going to pester you for a date and then monologue about the Godfather trilogy.

Uh, that example sounds rather specific.

It’s not going to try and have sex with you or get violent if you turn it down.

If the bear tries to have sex with you and you do turn it down, then you can be sure it will get violent.

The bear won’t stalk you if you break up with it.

Will too!

Bears are not killing five women every hour and if they were, action would be taken to stop it immediately.

What? That's not how statistics work, even if they were relevant here.

Then there is the fact that if I was attacked by a bear, no one would tell me I was making it up.

I would.

I wouldn’t be asked what I was wearing, if I was drunk, or what I had done to provoke the bear.

Actually, yes, you would probably get asked those questions too.

It wouldn’t matter if I had seen the bear before in the past, or if I am the kind of woman who likes seeing a lot of bears.

Again, all of those would also matter! You're remarkably bad at this.

No one would say I was asking for it, and as far as I am aware, #NotAllBears has never trended on Twitter.

I don't know anything about Twitter, but considering the author's track record, I'm going to guess that this is, somehow, also wrong.

The online response from men has largely been one of bafflement and confusion. “Why on earth would you choose to be around an apex predator that could overpower and kill you in seconds if it wanted to? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You can’t reason with a bear or ask it to leave you alone if it becomes aggressive. This is madness!”

The only response I've seen from men has been making fun of how stupid this is.

I hate to tell you this lads, but for many women, this is the same risk that comes with dating a man. 

Dating them while stuck in a forest?

Is it all men?

It had damn well better be. Or else shut up.

No, of course it’s not, but when 71 per cent of women have been sexually harassed by men and 26 per cent of women will experience intimate partner violence, how can you tell which man will hurt you and which one will not? You can’t.

You usually can.

There is no way of knowing who is dangerous until it’s too late, so women have to play the odds and assume all men are a threat. In much the same way as you should assume all bears could hurt you in the woods.

Whenever this topic comes up, I see women concoct this twisted fantasy in which men are not merely stronger than they are, but are invincible killing machines. If a woman stabs me in the neck with a knife, I'm just as dead as if a man had done it.

Men are statistically more prone to employ direct, violent attacks and are statistically more likely to have physicality that could make such attacks successful. We can acknowledge this. But when this particular topic comes up, I see women, as a whole, portrayed as utterly harmless, always victims, never attackers. And I see men portrayed as unpredictable whirlwinds of destruction.

In fact, quite a lot of the bear safety advice is applicable to a woman trying to get away from a creepy man in the pub. Keep calm, talk to it in a low tone so it recognises you are not a threat, and no sudden movements. Don’t feed it, leave the area as soon as you can, and never travel alone. Oh, and always remember your pepper spray.

What?

As a group, men pose a far greater threat to women than bears do, and humans kill far more bears every year than the other way around. The thought experiment is fun but flawed as it sets up a false dichotomy. Humans don’t live in close proximity with bears like we do with each other. If we did, we might have far more incidents of violence.

 Congratulations, you got there! Better late than never.

I’m no zoologist but I imagine bear attacks on humans would rocket if we tried to move in with them and have their kids.

OK, so I can't believe I have to say this, but bears and humans are not genetically compatible. They cannot produce offspring with each other.

But what the question does is expose is the fact for many women, a strange man in the woods is still an obvious threat. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is.

That cuts both ways. A strange woman in the woods could be an obvious threat to a man. She could stab him or hit him on the head with a rock. She could wait until he falls asleep and then steal all of his supplies or whatever. Yeah, if she's simply going to give him warning, unleash a battle cry, and charge in with her bare hands, then most men would have an advantage. But unless she does that specific thing, the differences between the sexes aren't really a big consideration here.

I hope that we are collectively working towards a world where gender-based violence is a thing of the past, but we are not there yet, not by a long shot. Maybe future generations will look back and laugh at the absurdity of anyone choosing the bear, but for now, give me Yogi and BooBoo any day of the week.

Ooh, I didn't realize that "What kind of bear?" extended to cartoon bears.

It's OK.

I preface this post with my obligatory statement along the lines of "I can't believe that this stupid bullshit is the thing that is bringing me back to my blog." At this point, it's a tradition. I don't like it, but for now, I must accept this truth.

I generally reserve the CPA as my outlet for longform content on the topic of Magic: the Gathering. On occasion, I find myself wanting to opine on something that I just don't deem suitable for the CPA as a forum. Seems a bit strange considering that the CPA has effectively been a dead website since 2018 or so, and it's limping along just because a few people happen to visit regularly and post whatever they want to post. Most of my content there receives no engagement anyway, so what's the big deal? Well, I do still have some sense of propriety here, and I tailor my CPA posts to, at least theoretically, be meaningful relevant to hypothetical CPA lurkers. And some things, despite being Magic-related, go much too far in evoking the image of me standing on a soap box. As a courtesy to no one in particular, I self-censor enough to confine that sort of content to this blog space, rather than to my posts on someone else's forum.

Just over a decade ago, there was a controversy of sorts in Magic, which I vaguely recall. I had a lot going on at the time. I can't quite place where I saw this topic crop up back then, nor whether I had any sort of response or even opinion at the time. Like I said, I had a lot going on. In my hazy memories, this controversy was mostly insignificant. Then again, it got enough press that I heard about it, so maybe my impression there is overstated. Well, I was just reminded of this by an article on Commander's Herald, written by one Ciel Collins. I'll excerpt the relevant portion.

In the year 2013 (over a decade ago, egads), there were a grand total of 41 planeswalker cards, depicting 22 distinct characters. Of those characters, 14 were men and only 6 were women (Karn and Ashiok both exist outside the binary, though the terms weren't fully developed). This would be brought to Wizards of the Coast's attention in due time. I dug around some old forum posts and saw... timely discussions of the matter that wouldn't be worth the mental hazard to bring up, but there were posts from Mark Rosewater that I remembered from the era.

Two in particular are of interest, linked here and here and show below. Just bear in mind that these are relics of an older design philosophy, and Rosewater has since noted this line of reasoning was erroneous.

Although I truly believe that I remember this being an issue somewhere back when I was a college student, there's actually nothing special about the year 2013 when it comes to planeswalkers, and anchoring things to that year seems, in hindsight, pretty arbitrary. The Mark Rosewater "tumblr" posts cited in the article are from 2012, and it's worth noting that Mark Rosewater was not part of the Creative team, so he presumably had no say in what the gender of planeswalkers depicted on planeswalker cards would be. He may have been knowledgeably representing the viewpoint of someone else within WotC who was responsible for this, or he may have just been spitballing. From what I've seen of Mark Rosewater's statements over the years, both possibilities seem equally likely.

So I'll admit that as soon as I read this part of the article, I started doing some searches on Scryfall, skeptical of the whole controversy. Why pick 2013? Why not 2007, when planeswalkers were first introduced? Why not 2017, on the tenth anniversary of planeswalkers being introduced? Why not 2012, when those Mark Rosewater posts were originally published? Why not 2018, before War of the Spark introduced a deluge of planeswalker cards? Why not right now? And why count clearly monstrous planeswalkers as one gender or another? Ajani is a leonin, a lion-man. Does he have a lion-dick or does he have a man-dick? I don't think it's ever come up! Does a lion-man really count as being part of the boy's team? Nicol Bolas is a dragon! Presumably he has a dragon-dick. Or not. I don't know dragon anatomy. I guess Nicol Bolas was always canonically a "he." But then again, so was Karn, and yet this very article seems to be claiming Karn for the "non-binary" column. Why? Why can Nicol Bolas be masculine, but not Karn? And why the emphasis on the individual planeswalker characters that appear on cards? Do the ones that get a card, or the ones that didn't get a card yet not count? Counting by character instead of by planeswalker card is a choice too, because you can tally Tezzeret, Venser, and Koth all in the "man" column, but is it not also significant that Chandra, a woman, has always held the record for getting the most individual planeswalker cards? For whatever reason, WotC's track record for most of the history of planeswalker cards has been to introduce more male characters, but to usually only give them a single card or to wait a very long time before giving them a second card, while female planeswalkers have more frequently gotten multiple planeswalker cards much sooner, and in greater numbers. Does that even matter? The article on Commander's Herald frames this in a discussion about planeswalker cards, and even despite doing this in the context of talking about planeswalker characters that have lost their planeswalker spark and have since appeared as creature cards instead of planeswalker cards, there's actually some conflation here, because if you care so much about tallying up genders or whatever, there's a distinction between planeswalker characters and planeswalker cards. For instance, Dyfed is a planewalker character, but not a planeswalker card. The Royal Scions is a planeswalker card, but not a planeswalker character. Grandmother Sengir is a planeswalker character and is also a card, but is not a planeswalker card. So if we're going to tally these things, we have to decide which thing we care about.

I was coming up with all these questions and more, reflexively probing the weaknesses of this whole dredged-up controversy as presented in the article, scrutinizing the entire argument from multiple angles. And then I paused, took a moment to back away from the whole issue, and pondered the matter from the beginning. I realized that I'd been sucked in. I'd seen someone pointing at something and calling it sexist, and I'd perhaps gotten a bit defensive on behalf of people I don't even know. So let's start at the beginning here.

However you tally things up, whether you're counting creatures, planeswalkers, characters, cards, characters on cards, characters not on cards, planeswalker characters, planeswalker cards, planeswalkers named in flavor text on cards, or whatever, no matter what category you decided to focus on, once the count is done, you'll probably have a difference. You probably won't have an exact 50/50 split between men and women. And that's OK. It's OK for there to be more planeswalker characters on cards that are men than ones that are women. There's nothing wrong with that. The article accidentally baited me into getting hung up on details, but once I step back, I realize that this whole "controversy" is silly to begin with. And I don't just mean something so dismissive as "it's silly because this is all just a card game anyway." Rather, I mean it's silly because the controversy is premised upon the idea that "representation" matters here, and that notion, on its face, is pretty ridiculous in this context.

Koth is a man with metal spikes built into his body. His hair is made of metal. His body glows with the heat of a a forge and he can magically control metal, earth, and stone. Sorin is a man whose grandfather forced him to become a vampire, and he has lived for over 7,000 years as a vampire. Garruk is a man who has used magic to enhance his own size and strength to superhuman proportions, and who can control animals. I am a man. I do not especially relate to any of these fictional characters because they are also men. I am not "represented" by them on account of our shared maleness.

I see this in other places too. People seem to believe that if they tally things up and there's a difference between the categories they tallied, that this is proof of some injustice. It isn't. It's OK for there to be more male characters on planeswalker cards than female characters on planeswalker cards. It would be OK for it to be the other way around. There's nothing good or bad about this. It's all happenstance after decades of storytelling by swaths of people who have come and gone, all working to tell fantasy stories in a fantasy world that gets used in a card game. Expecting gender ratios in every conceivable part of this mess to be perfectly balanced is silly. Finding them imbalanced is OK. It's OK to be male.

 

Crap from Facebook for December 13th, 2023

Image has a poll with the title "What's your favorite tech innovation?" The choices are "Illegal cab company", "Illegal hotel chain", "Fake money for criminals", and "Plagiarism machine."

My choice, which isn't listed in this poll, would be "The privilege of living in a world in which some idiot creates this poll in the first place." And I don't even mean that in the classic sense of noting that modern technology has given us an unprecedented quality of life, although that's true too. What I mean is that modern technology has allowed us to build a society in which some smoothbrained jackasses have been able to base their entire personalities around complaining about technology, while using technology to do so. I'd say that it's a sign we're doing pretty well.

I was amused enough to put this one on the blog. I was just going to include my initial thought, which I've captured in the above paragraph. But now that I've already typed that up, it occurs to me that some would get "fall of the Roman Empire" vibes from this. They see vile, useless people using lazy misrepresentations to lash out at the very society that gives them all of the comforts they take for granted and they think, "This is a cancer. This is a sign that things are going bad." Something like that. Well, I disagree. It's a topic that's better suited to some long-form essay, and not one of my wistful "Crap from Facebook" posts. So I probably won't get around to that. But I disagree. Ask me about it some time.

It's been 510 days since I posted anything in this space.

There's a lot I want to write about on this blog, but I never seem to have the energy or to take the time for that. I am breaking my silence with two topics that have been bugging me recently, both related to Magic: the Gathering. They're not necessarily related to each other, though. Two things happened last month, totally unrelated to each other. Both times, I'd thought that I should write something. And then I procrastinated. Well, earlier this week, I read an article that annoyed me and brought both topics back to the surface of my thoughts.

I don't really know where this is going. I'll probably rant a little. But don't expect a persuasive essay or for this mess to even have a central thesis at all. This is how it goes. I'm rusty at the whole blog thing. It's been like a year and a half since our last little chat.

Event One

In late 2003, I came across a Magic: the Gathering website called "The Casual Players Alliance." A little later, I got my own account there and started participating in discussions on their forum. I've been active at the "CPA" this whole time, for more than 21 years of my life. It could be said that the forum is slowly dying, that our site is a relic of an earlier age of the internet. We're down to about eight to ten active users, and only about half of those seem to be checking in consistently. But I'm one of them, and I've been logging in just about every day.

The main admin, also the most active user of the forum, is in the habit of posting well wishes right before major holidays, especially if he's going on vacation himself and wants us to know he'll be out of touch for a bit. Sometimes he'll pop in after a holiday and create a thread anyway, just telling us he hopes we had a good holiday. Pretty innocuous. So far, so good. Not much to talk about there.

On July 5th, a thread was created for the recent Independence Day. The message was just, "Hope it was safe and grand!" Two of us popped in to echo the same sentiment (we used to have more international members, but all but one of the people I've seen post anything lately have been Americans).

And then we got a post that said, "You're kidding, right?" There was a crying emoji after that. So the rest of us were worried and asking this person what was wrong. The result was this exchange (which I stayed out of). I'll color-code the participants rather than using their user names here. I rather like everyone involved, and I don't want this to in any way appear to be a gripe about them. It's not about that.

No, but [Highland Park, where a mass shooting was perpetrated at an Independence Day parade] is not too far from my house. I'm just more actually depressed about the way the country's going altogether right now. On the one side we have the Fascists, who tried to overthrow the government once already, who've gotten into bed with the Christofascists (a theme emerges) who've started dictating policy through the Supreme Court. On the other, a president that tipped his hand way too early on green energy, leaving himself vulnerable to the oil companies who want him voted out and will keep oil prices high as long as they can to blackmail us into abandoning environmental issues. They're pretty much already there anyway from what I understand, after SCOTUS pulled the EPA's "teeth" leaving them unable to enforce penalties, but those guys are kinda vindictive (and more money is, after all, more money) so we'll see just what happens to gas prices.

And SCOTUS, again, starting to rule on gun laws misinterpreting the 2nd Amendment (they always forget about the "well-regulated militia" part, even though it's right up front) and making it okay for idiot punks with a death wish to buy any weapon they want and all the damn ammo they can carry and go kill innocent people.

I guess I'm not feeling too patriotic atm...

Mmmm.... I know what you're saying. But from what I understand, it was Manchin who has really derailed/controlled the agenda bc his vote is necessary (since no Republicans are going to cross over) but he didn't go along with it all.

I think it's more the control that SCOTUS has demonstrated, and that we seem to have no real way to fix it besides impeaching/adding more justices. I'd love to see them impeach Clarence Thomas (especially after the bit about going after contraception and same-sex marriage in his opinion on the Roe travesty), and Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and ACB all lied during their job interviews, but that'll likely end like Trump's impeachments did when not enough Reps broke ranks to get a conviction. And I'm not in favor of expanding the court based on the number of Circuit Courts, unless you want to change the way the justices are chosen and have them be representative of their court districts (not a bad idea, but no way they go for that...lol).

I also think the filibuster serves a purpose, and Manchin isn't entirely wrong. As much as the thought depresses me, come 2024 if Biden hasn't been able to fix things things by then we'll be looking at a regime change. If the Dems lose control the only thing standing between us and total tyranny might be the filibuster, and since our government usually ping-pongs between the parties (over the years) it's bound to eventually happen. Lord knows it's been used against the Dems often enough.

Look, I'm kind of a centrist (politically). I think both parties (at their core) have solid values and bring important perspectives to any negotiation. I think our government works best when bipartisan actually happens. This polarization of our parties is just stupid, and it will destroy us if we let it. And it's getting worse, though the J6th Committee using lifelong Republicans testifying under oath to tell their story is meaningful, and may plant seeds that will encourage at least listening to the other party and maybe even being more open-minded to what they propose.

I'm so naive...

SCOTUS "only" got that way thanks to the McConnell and the Republican stranglehold on Senate, which in turn is due to massive gerrymandering, which in turn is due to the Republican control of the majority of state statehouses, thanks to them "waking up" after the 2008 elections and realizing that the Dems gained power and they were about to lose it for the next decade if they didn't do anything. Which sadly the Dems didn't realize themselves...

I totally agree that the filibuster should stay and I don't know the details of Manchin's objection of all of the attempted Dem bills, but he was pretty much the lone holdout that without his vote, none of them could pass, like the ones on green energy and environmental issues that you originally mentioned. I don't know how Biden "tipped his hand early", as you say, because he realistically only had 2 years to try to get anything done while the Dems had a majority in the Representatives and an even split in the Senate, because now there's a good chance the Repubs will gain back the majority and nothing will have a chance to being done.

Now, if only we had alternatives to voting besides two parties...

technically we do but the current system is *way* stacked against them

Yeah, thanks to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the creation of Citizens' United it makes it too easy for the two party system to keep Americans firmly divided against each other when we should be working against the actual politicians...

The thing that gets to me here isn't that this was a political discussion. In fact, this forum used to have lots of political discussions, often heated ones. And the people I quoted here were among the more sane, mediating voices back then. And that is the part that gets to me. When the forum was thriving and had far more participants, at the height of the Bush presidency and with all the political crap that entailed, these were the guys who tried to to bring reason, caution, levelheadedness, etc. to the discussions. They seemed grounded back then. They didn't go around calling people fascists. 

It's not so much that I disagree with the talking points here (although generally, I do). It's that I remember when political debates came up in other threads 15 or so years ago, these were the guys asking pointed questions, using logic, calling out spurious claims, and such. I don't want to call it "Trump Derangement Syndrome." I think this is all far more complicated than that. But I'm left wondering what the hell happened.

• There hasn't been an attempted fascist overthrow of our government. Fascism is a dead 20th century concept from Italy that became vaguely dissociated from its original definition and became a pejorative in America. Occasionally some idiot will self-identify as a fascist, but that's an idiot talking. There are no fascists in America. Stop using that label.
• Christofascism isn't a thing. Come on, man.
  
• The Democratic Party has been attempting to use the Supreme Court to "dicate policy" since FDR. It's disingenuous to become mad about it only once they go against that party line. Want to force the Supreme Court to stick to constitutional interpretation and to have the law of the land go through the proper channels? You've not only got me on board, you've probably got most of the Republican Party, virtually all independents, third parties, and probably even most of the justices themselves. Better late than never, I guess?
• "Green energy" is not in competition with oil companies and never has been. Oil companies are some of the biggest, most successful supporters of "green energy."
• Gas prices are practically a red herring. They do matter, but not in the way that either major political party has ever presented them in discourse. Don't fall for propaganda.
• The Second Amendment does not say that the right to bear arms is contingent on the existence of a well-regulated militia. It says that the security of a free state is contingent on the existence of a well-regulated militia.
• Joe Manchin did exactly what he was meant to do. If you think anything else, I've got a bridge to sell you.
• "The Supreme Court did something I don't like. Pack the bench!" What is this? 1937? Are you for real?
• A judicial confirmation hearing is not a "job interview." No one thought that way before the Trump presidency, and it's disconcerting how a stupid meme meant to distort the functions of our government can just spread so easily and infect normal people.
• If you think that one of the two major political parties represents tyranny and the other one represents the vanguard against tyranny, then I'm sorry. You've gone off the deep end. You've been turned into a useful idiot.
  
• Weird how all the "I'm a centrist" folks are either falling in line with the Democrats at every juncture or insisting that the Democrats don't go far enough. The Overton window. Where's it at?
  
• I said myself, after the 2020 elections, that regardless of whatever else happened, the Democrats effectively had a mandate. I didn't mean a moral one, just in the practical, political sense. And the corollary to that was that whatever they fucked up, we'd all know it was them fucking it up. They couldn't blame Republicans. Not this time. Well, how's that going?

 Of course, I didn't say any of that. Not in the forum, anyway. But it's what I was thinking. Have I gone soft? And if I have, is that a bad thing? I don't know.

Event Two

That first one is only related to the game of Magic because it happened on a Magic-related website. This one deals with the game itself. On June 10th, 2020, Wizards of the Coast made an announcement castigating seven of their own old cards for "racism." There were some circumstances surrounding this at the time and I delved into this topic pretty exhaustively back then, just not on this blog. I'm not inclined to use this space for recapitulating the whole affair. If you're curious, feel free to ask for details.

On July 21st of this year, Wizards of the Coast announced that they'd been including freshly-opened packs of archival 1994 product in the upcoming set (which releases next month). This brought the "Salty Seven" cards and the allegations of racism back. They didn't actually come out and say that more cards were racist, but they did publish a list of cards that would not be included in booster packs. Four cards on that list were from the existing list of seven "racist" cards. No surprises there. But the implication seems to be that the other twelve cards they have elected not to seed into the new booster packs are also deemed offensive. Since they've remained silent on the why, there's been rampant speculation on the matter.

I don't know if it's a coincidence, but this coincided with the introduction of a new column at the Commander's Herald website called "Beyond Rule Zero." The topic for the first article in the series was tame, tepid, and generally something I'd agree with. It also set the tone for the rest of the series. These articles seem disjointed, rambling, and lacking in a central thesis. Whatever structure is present seems haphazard and possibly edited in afterward at the last minute. Sort of like this blog post, actually. But yeah, that first article offered primarily points I agreed with or was neutral toward.

The second article? Not so much. It was about creating safe spaces, and much of the article seemed focused on the idea that local game stores should post codes of conduct for public viewing. I wanted to dispute almost everything in the article, but I kept silent. Like I said, I think I've gone soft. The third article dealt with the notions of "racist" cards, though. So here we go again! Well, kind of. The article brought up several cards, but the biggest focus seemed to be on a card that the author didn't really understand, and I don't mean that in some disparaging or condescending way. The card is called "Reparations." It has some unusual artwork, and discussions of what the artwork means or implies have come up in the past. Even the guy who wrote the flavor text for the card was confused by the artwork, and he originally wrote the flavor text as a gag based on this, but then it ended up being used in the final version of the card. The story has come up before in various places. Since this article seemed to go with the notion that the art and flavor text were one offensive package, I chimed in without disputing any of the stuff that bugged me, but simply clarifying this bit about the flavor text. I guess that I thought it might be informative. I might have also been using that as a way to keep myself from arguing with the article. If I just stick to the facts and leave it at that, then I can feel like at least I've done something.

All this left me pondering why I'm inclined to bother. A company that publishes a game decides that one of its old game pieces from 1994 is racist. I disagree with their conclusion. So what? It's just a game. It's their game and their decision anyway. So what if think they're wrong? I think that lots of people are wrong about lots of things all the time. I don't usually spend much time on it. It's a game, not a lifestyle.

I've built 31 EDH decks this year, at a rate that would be one per week except I missed a single week back in January. I've piloted those decks at tables in a local game store every Wednesday evening, and I take some time to write about them too. I've been playing Magic for over 25 years. Between all the time I've dedicated to playing decks, testing decks, building decks, writing about the game, talking about the game, reading about the game, sorting cards, trading cards, buying cards, collecting cards, and organizing it all, I've spent more of my time on Magic-related activities than some people spend on their religions. Of course it's not my religion, but have spent more time on it than a lot of people do. So yeah, I know it's "just a game." I don't think that I've lost sight of that. It's also a game I'm invested in, financially, creatively, emotionally, etc.

Also, there's this bit in that article.

There is this pervasive thought in spaces like the Magic community that politics should be kept separate from the general dialogue. When they say politics they often mean anything involving what is often categorized as identity politics. That is to say the issues revolving around marginalized ethnicities and identities. Because let's be transparent - there is no real worry about a thread opening up in the Magic subreddit on local election primaries or the philosophical differences between socialism and communism. They just don't want to hear the minorities get uppity.

And there it is. Tell us how you really feel.

Crap from Facebook for March 21st, 2021

 

This has what appears to be a headline: "Snowflake students claim Frankenstein's monster was 'misunderstood' — and is in fact a VICTIM"

Someone responds with, "but that's........that's the book. that's what the book is about"

Unlike most of my "Crap from Facebook" blog posts, I actually commented when I saw this one. My initial response was...

He murdered a five-year old child and framed the babysitter for it because the kid happened to be related to his creator.

It was before I went to bed this morning. I was tired. It seemed like a suitable response at the time. No one replied to me, so don't worry about me having gotten into an argument on this one. But I thought about it again and it bugs me. Mostly, it bugs me that I can't get away from Frankenstein. I find myself impelled to think about this book more than almost any other book, and it's a pretty bad book!

I mentioned it in another Crap from Facebook entry, back in May of last year, but I'll always associate this book with poor Hank Galmish, who picked it for variety as part of the curriculum in a college class about novels. I watched it dawn on him that he'd messed up, that he'd forgotten just how bad of a read Frankenstein actually is. And he just wanted to escape. He was bored out of his mind reading the book himself and possibly even felt like he owed the class an apology for picking it as one of the books we'd all read that quarter.

If I remember correctly, the post last year dealt with the idea that Frankenstein was "the first science fiction story." What I didn't talk about then was the idea that "it's a tragedy." On the one hand, this could be less annoying because it's true. Frankenstein definitely uses tragic elements. It's fair to classify the story as a tragedy. On the other hand, at least the "it was the first science fiction story" is mostly unique to Frankenstein, and not a tired excuse trotted out for lots of other shitty "classics."

Without regurgitating everything I can remember about the plot of Frankenstein, I'll note that it involves a lot of stupid decisions by both Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Some of those are morally wicked things too (like the bit I mentioned in the Facebook comment), but mostly, they're just foolish approaches to situations that could have been mitigated with even a jot of forethought. The book is about bad people doing bad things and having bad things happen to them for it. Some innocent victims get caught in the crossfire, but they're not the focus of the story anyway.

The whole structure of the narrative, in the first place, is superfluous and annoying. The plot is tedious. The prose is bland. The characters have essentially no development and behave strangely. Reading this book for any reason, even in the most cursory and clinical sort of way for literary analysis, is a dull experience. However, the genre classification in this case is correct: Frankenstein is a tragedy. Well spotted indeed. The parallels to tragic tales already well-known in the literary canon at the time are evident. The book tells a tragic story and Mary Shelley wrote it that way on purpose. So good job: you figured it out. It's a tragedy.

You wanna know what else is a tragedy? That anyone ever had to read the damn thing. By the way, I'm not mad at Mary Shelley. She was 20 when she wrote the book. If some crap I'd written at 20 were touted as a great classic, it would be crappy too. No one is a great writer at 20. Developing those skills takes time, practice, and experience.

Big impromptu influenza things from my dad's Facebook...

A little over a week ago, as a result of something kind of stupid that my dad shared on Facebook, he sincerely asked a scientific question about viruses.

You have me curious as to the major differences in the Flu Vaccine, and these (now at least 4) Covid-19 Vaccine? I would assume their are similarities--- and of course I wonder and even can speculate some of the differences.

That was a surprisingly reasonable way for him to ask about this topic, given the usual crap I see on Facebook. So I wrote a long answer. Since I spent a bit of time just typing the answer up, I decided to save a copy of it here, where it will be easier to find if I ever want to look at it again in the future. Also, if anyone happens to read this blog post and spots an error in my description, please let me know! I was typing most of this up from memory and my biology classes are many years behind me. Anyway, I thought I did a decent job of explaining these concepts to someone like my dad, and while that won't necessarily translate to an explanation that would work for someone else, maybe it could work? I don't know. I found it worth preserving. So deal with it...

There are some pretty big differences. To start with, I need to recapitulate something you might have learned a long time ago.

 

In our cells and (most of) the cells of any animal, there are different membranes holding structures, and all those little bits are made out of mostly proteins and lipids, with smaller components made up of sugars and of certain kinds of RNA. There's a big membrane in the middle of a cell called the nucleus, and that's where the DNA for the cell is stored, bundled up around little balls of special proteins. In order for cells to live, they need to make lots of different proteins and each protein has to have its own shape, which is very specific. It's the DNA that stores the information for which building blocks to use, and in which order, for making those proteins.

 

The nucleus uses chemical signals to control which parts of that bundled up mess of DNA gets unwound, and then special proteins follow the DNA like a track. As the protein moves along the DNA, it puts a building block of the corresponding RNA up and makes a new track out of RNA. So remember how the building blocks in DNA are A, C, G, and T? The proteins that move along the DNA do a process called transcription, and for every C they put down a G, for every G they put down a C, for every T they put down an A, and for every A they put down a U (not a T, for reasons I won't get into right now). Once the segment of DNA has been transcribed, you have a segment of what's called mRNA (short for messenger RNA). The DNA stays in the nucleus, but proteins ship the RNA out of the nucleus, where it gets fed into globs of rRNA (ribosomal RNA) and protein called ribosomes. The As the mRNA is fed through the ribosome, sections of it get matched up to sections of tRNA (transfer RNA), with A matching to U, U matching to A, C matching to G, and G matching to C.

Each piece of tRNA has two business ends. One end has three building blocks (AAG, CUA, etc.) and the other end fits onto a specific nucleic acid. As the tRNA gets lined up on a ribosome, it forms a sequence of amino acids in a specific order, and that string of amino acids is the first step in building a new protein. This process is called translation. Generally the mRNA will also present signals that cause certain parts to get trimmed or other parts to be fitted onto the protein, but that depends on what you're building.

 

That's a long refresher, but I needed to explain transcription and translation because different viruses hijack these systems in different ways. Some viruses have DNA. Other viruses have RNA. All viruses have protein because they need to do three things...

Step 1: Get inside the right kind of cell. Not just any cell will do. The proteins in a virus are adapted to do their own in a specific environment, and might not work properly in the wrong kind of cell. Each virus has proteins on the outside of it that are shaped in a way to hijack receptors on the outside of a certain kind of cell. It simply "docks" onto a receptor. Once docked, there are a few different ways in, which I'll gloss over for now.

Step 2: Hijack the proteins and ribosomes of the host cell and use those to build the proteins of the virus instead. The DNA or RNA in the middle of the virus stores the information for what it will hijack the host cell into building. It will also cause copies to be made of its own DNA or RNA, and those copies get assembled into new copies of the virus.

Step 3: Get the new copies of the virus out of the host cell so that they can spread out and infect more cells. There are a few different ways to do this. Just like there are different ways to get into a cell, there are different ways to get out, but I'll gloss over those for now.

 

Coronaviruses and influenzaviruses are both RNA viruses. They don't make their own DNA. Some viruses do, but we can ignore those for now and focus on RNA viruses only. So they both use RNA, but right from the start, there's a huge difference in how they use it. A coronavirus has what's called "+ssRNA." Basically, once proteins in the coronavirus sneak their own RNA into a host cell, is masqueraded as regular old mRNA, like what would normally have come out of the nucleus of the cell. That RNA, which is viral +ssRNA but is being presented as mRNA, gets translated and the proteins that the RNA codes for get built in the same way that a regular protein would get built, but these are proteins that the virus uses instead. Ultimately, the new viruses exit the host cell. This doesn't kill the host cell right away, but it's an energy-intensive process.

 

Like a lot of viruses, coronaviruses use a little trick to lock down the ribosomes that the are translating their RNA. So those ribosomes would normally get refreshed and prepared to receive new mRNA, but the viral RNA keeps them jammed up, copying viral RNA over and over. That means lots of new viruses. The process that coronaviruses use to exits host cells (called exocytosis) is energy-intensive. The host cell uses its own energy to build a membrane around the viruses, transport that membrane to the outer membrane of the cell, and then push those packets from the inside of the cell to the outside. Cells can only keep doing that for so long before they break down.

Now, coronaviruses use +ssRNA, but influenzaviruses have -ssRNA instead. Unlike a coronavirus, an influenzavirus contains RNA that cannot be fed directly into a ribosome as mRNA. Influenzaviruses take a different approach. While a coronavirus would have a mechanism to enter, and then try to get its proteins hooked up to the parts of the cell that have the most ribosomes, influenzaviruses have a two-stage entry sytem. They enter the cell membrane, then the parts that are left over form a new package that itself gets inside the nucleus. Remember how the nucleus is where mRNA first gets made? Well, the proteins in the influenzavirus snag some of that, and then have their own RNA tag along for the ride. They form a complex that makes strands of mRNA by stealing mRNA that the host cell was making, and those strands get exported by the normal systems to the ribosomes, which dutifully read them and inadvertently build new viruses.

 

In some ways, the proteins that the influenzavirus makes are quite aggressive. They don't just passively form new viruses, but start breaking down RNA that cell was using for other things, so that more material will be available for making new viruses. They also line the cell membrane with proteins to build the outside layers for new viruses, and a whole bunch of viruses start budding off from the host cell, which kills it.

 

So you see, even though coronaviruses and influenzaviruses have some things in common, and even though both of them contain single-stranded RNA, they also have some pretty extreme differences. Most of what I've said has to do with what the viruses do while inside a cell. But the outsides of the two viruses also look different from each other, because the systems they use for docking and entering host cells are different too. Coronaviruses got their name because under an electron microscope, their spike proteins look like a halo, and people thought that it looked like the corona around the sun. The outside of the virus is a lipid membrane with three different types of protein embedded in that membrane. The "spike" proteins are the ones that stick out the furthest and form the "corona", and they're the ones that dock onto host cells.

 

Influenza viruses are bigger and more oblong than coronaviruses (sometimes only a little oblong and sometimes they can be very oblong). It has a protein-based shell that sits inside a larger membrane. Compared to the size of the overall virus, its spike proteins don't stick out as far, but they're embedded in that outer membrane in a similar manner.

 

As you might imagine, these differences have some implications for vaccines. There are two big issues I'll get to when it comes to vaccines specifically. But for now, I'm out of time. More later.

 

At this point I took a break. So my dad responded.

It’s nice having a Scientist in the Family. Who can also write and explain that even a high school educated good looking guy can understand. I appreciate it!

You and I have talked about this before... I had a friend who is a doctor, who also served in the Coast Guard Reserves, who wrote his Thesis on the Swine Flu Epidemic in the early 70s ...I think around 74... Anyway, he made a case for only getting essential Vaccines because of (either I am not sure— White Cell memory or T Cell memory) has set capacity. And if you get every flu shot annually and a ton of low risk Vaccines introduced into your body’s defense system you are actually compromising your body’s defenses.

I personally believe there is logic to it. However, I would think anybody at a High Risk should protect themselves. But Don’t Believe Everything You Read....especially is Sound Bites!

Thanks Again! You Are Awesome—- like your Dad

The Compromise of the Defense System... His point was because you have already committed those cells and now have a lower Threshold.

Now back to me...

 

So, T-cells are a kind of "white cells." There are lots of different specialized cells in the immune system, and some of them have very specialized functions. Some cells are part of the "innate" immune system and others are part of the "adaptive" immune system, which can grow cells targeted at specific things called "antigens." An antigen is usually a molecular structure on the outside of a cell or virus, and the adaptive immune system can learn to recognize those structures and target them. Generally, these are the B-cells and the T-cells. B-cells produce immunoglobulin antibodies, and those have business ends that form shapes to match the shapes of antigens, like little molecular jigsaw puzzle pieces. The antibodies latch onto their antigens. On a virus like an influenzavirus or a coronavirus, the antigens that you want to get targeted are those spike proteins that I mentioned earlier. This does two things. Firstly, the spike proteins that have antibodies latched onto them cannot dock onto a cell. So once a virus gets hit by enough antibodies, it loses its tool to invade cells. Secondly, this tags the virus, which makes it easy for other cells in the immune system to recognize it as a threat.

 

T-cells use lots of little proteins called "cytokines" that act as signals to control other cells in the immune system. They'll send signals like "these are the wrong B-cells for this infection, bring me different B-cells" or "there are a lot of antibodies tagging invaders here, bring in the big eaters to come eat these invaders." Scientists still aren't sure what all of the functions are for every kind of T-cell, but they've figured out a lot of this. Sadly, one of the main reasons that they've figured so much of this because HIV messes with the function of T-cells and it also mutates a lot, so there is a large population of human subjects who have had their T-cells messed with by a virus. That has let researchers see the effects that happen when T-cells aren't doing their jobs correctly.

 

The question has come up as to whether the adaptive immune system can become "overloaded" or run out of memory. There are B-cells and T-cells that are called "memory cells" and they do store information on their own unique antigens. Do we eventually run out of those? The answer seems to be no, not really. At least, not under normal circumstances. The vast majority of memory cells that get created have nothing to do with vaccines, nor with when you're very sick fighting off a severe infection. They're just part of day-to-day life, and they barely take up any room. Your immune system doesn't store huge amounts of cells targeting every kind of virus, bacteria, or parasite you've ever been exposed to. Instead, it keeps tiny reserve amounts of those memory cells, and then when it find it needs a certain kind, it sends signals to clone a whole bunch of that one kind. And then, once the infection is gone, it decommissions most of those cells. It turns out that healthy people, even ones who are super-old like you, have plenty of spare memory cells ready to be activated in response to new antigens. Like other parts of the body, the immune system does start having problems with age, but that isn't because the immune system is running out of cells! In fact, it's kind of the opposite problem. Most of the age-related problems with the immune system are because some kind of physiological breakdown means that there are too many of the wrong kind of cell, and the aging immune system stops correcting for this in the way that it used to.

 

This is a matter that has been very well-studied, by the way. There's been some concern in medicine over whether vaccines need to be spaced out or if they'd interfere with each other. That doesn't seem to happen. There can be problems with vaccines (mostly allergic reactions), but none of that seems to be linked to scheduling too many vaccines.

 

Now, there are two traditional types of vaccines that have been in use for a long time. The first kind is a dead virus vaccine (also called an inactivated virus vaccine). To make that, a pharmaceutical company grows a bunch of viruses and then kills them, usually by heating them up, but sometimes by exposing them to chemicals. The second traditional kind of vaccine is a live attenuated virus vaccine (also called a weakened virus vaccine). To make that, a pharmaceutical company grows a bunch of viruses in a medium (usually eggs, but sometimes animals) that causes it to basically breed viruses that are weaker versions. Once they get a strain that can infect human cells without doing much damage, they use that to make the attenuated virus vaccine. Influenza vaccines used to be made with both approaches, but it turned out that the influenzavirus was a poor candidate for an attenuated virus vaccine. So flu shots are made using dead viruses.

 

Dead virus vaccines are pretty common, but they've had issues that have been known for a long time. Here are some issues with these vaccines...

 

1. The immune system might not respond at all. These aren't active viruses, so once they get into your body, they're just rapidly degrading clumps of protein. They'll get broken down on their own. If that happens, it can't hurt you, but it also means you don't get any immunity.

2. The innate immune system might respond before the adaptive immune system formulates a strong response itself. If cells in the innate immune system (such as phagocytes) destroy the dead viruses before the adaptive immune system finishes working on them, then you might not get immunity.

3. Because these are dead viruses, they tend to get broken up. There's a chance that the adaptive immune system might pick the wrong thing as an antigen. If you had a real infection, then that response wouldn't work and the adaptive immune system would keep trying until it got it right (or until you died). But since this isn't the real thing, your adaptive immune system might start working on the wrong protein or on a broken version of the right protein. It will most likely select the correct antigen, but might also generate antibodies that don't properly stick to that antigen. In a real infection, you'd be making a lot more of the cells that produce the immune response, so you'd get the right kind of memory cells eventually. But with a vaccine, your T-cells and B-cells might create a less effective response.

4. In a real infection, your T-cells can learn to target not just viruses themselves, but cells that are infected with viruses. You don't get that kind of immunity from a vaccine. If you get an immune response so good that it's killing the viruses before the have a chance to infect very many cells, that's not a problem. But if your response is too weak, then this issue compounds that.

 

Despite these issues, it's sometimes better to use dead viruses than weakened ones. They've tried making influenza vaccines using live attenuated viruses, but it didn't work very well. Also, even though these issues mean that a dead virus vaccine might not always work, that doesn't mean the vaccine is no good. For one thing, vaccine researchers have come up with better techniques to make influenza vaccines have a better rate of success than they used to. The flu shots in the last few years have been better flu shots than what used to come out every year. For another thing, vaccines that are only mostly successful can help create herd immunity. That's the reason I get the flu shot. If I became infected with an influenzavirus, I'd probably be fine. But if we have lots of healthy people getting the vaccine, then people who are immunocompromised or vulnerable to the virus are less likely to ever come in contact with it. Until relatively recently, we'd wiped out measles in this country with a live attentuated virus vaccine. The vaccine didn't work on 100% of the people who got it, but it does work about 97% of the time. And if almost everyone who could get the vaccine got it, there'd be no way for the virus to spread, even if someone from another country brought measles here, there wouldn't be enough non-immune people coming into contact with that person for it to spread through our population. That was true for a long time, but by 2018, antivaxxers had made it so that there were enough unvaccinated children for measles outbreaks to happen in the U.S.

 

There's one more issue with vaccines that's specific to influenza and doesn't apply to most other viruses, and unfortunately it's a big one. Remember how I said that the genome of the influenzavirus is made up of -ssRNA? Well, in some viruses, the genome would be "circular." In an influenzavirus, the RNA in its genome comes in eight separate strings. You could almost think of them as being like chromosomes. What sometimes happens is that a person or animal gets infected by two totally different strains of influenzavirus at the same time, and that two viruses with two different genomes both infect the same cells. So a string of RNA from one influenzavirus can get swapped into copies of another influenzavirus that is being built in a cell. Sometimes, this makes a new virus with different features. Whenever you've heard about issues with swine flu, that's why. You might get a virus that is really nasty, but it can't spread from birds into humans, so it's not a threat to us. And then you might get another virus that isn't as deadly, but is better at jumping between species. If a pig gets infected with both viruses and lots of its cells are being exposed to them, you could get a new virus that can jump to humans and is also deadly to humans. This is called "antigenic shift." It has happened before, and it caused the 1968 "Hong Kong flu." After the deaths from that flu, it was something doctors were really worried about, which led to an event you probably remember: the 1976 "swine flu scare." In that year, there was a vaccine that was poorly tested and its administration was poorly documented, so it was blamed for bad side effects in the elderly. There's been a lot of debate since then as to whether that 1976 vaccine actually killed anyone or not, but it became controversial anyway. For many years, it was believed that antigenic shift caused the 1918 flu pandemic. But in 2005, studies on a frozen body that had been exhumed in Alaska proved that it wasn't antigenic shift, but that instead a more normal type of mutation or "antigenic drift" had caused that pandemic.

 

Birds, migratory waterfowl in particular, have lots more strains of influenzaviruses than other animal populations. Part of the improvement in flu vaccines has been related to tracking what kind of viruses are dominant in those waterfowl before they make their way to the biggest areas where humans and chickens live together (southern Asia). In some past years, researchers developing vaccines had poor information or guessed wrong, and flu vaccines didn't really do anything because they were to the wrong strains of flu. Those were bad seasons for flu and more people died from it. But the past couple of years have been pretty good, mostly because researchers learned from the mistakes of the past.

 

Making new vaccines is part science, part art. The researchers who do this work have different tools and apply them in patterns based on what has worked in the past. So if a virus is similar to one that researchers have been able to make very strong vaccines to in the past, there's a good chance they'll be able to apply their techniques and make a good vaccine to this new virus. They've been making influenzaviruses for a long time and they've gotten pretty good at it. But even though coronaviruses have been around for a long time, there hadn't really been successful vaccines against them, at least not in humans. The tools that worked on other viruses weren't as effective with coronaviruses. So how do the coronavirus vaccines work and what are the differences between them? Well, because of how big of a deal COVID-19 has been, different companies have been trying some different approaches, and a few of them work pretty well. But let's focus on the approaches that have actually been through clinical trials and have been approved.

 

The ModernaTX vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are both mRNA vaccines. This is a different type of vaccines that was pioneered in the 1980's, but abandoned back then for human use because it didn't seem to work very well in humans back then. Why not and what changed? Well, the idea behind an mRNA vaccine is that you make a string of mRNA that only contains the protein in the virus that you want, the antigen. So you'd get a sequence of mRNA that, when fed through ribosomes, would make the spike protein of a virus and only the spike protein. This is tricky, though: cells have other parts besides just ribosomes. There are proteins that act as gatekeepers and regulate what kind of mRNA gets fed through ribosomes. A real virus defeats those safeguards in some way. Influenzavirus does it by hijacking real mRNA in the nucleus of a cell, then replacing it partway through with is own RNA. Coronaviruses have built in disguises that gets past the safeguards inside a cell. So in order to make an mRNA vaccine, you have to modify the RNA to similarly protect it from these safeguards. A set of laboratory techniques called "nucleoside modification" is used to accomplish this. Fortunately, these techniques have been improved since since when researchers were trying to use them to make vaccines back in the 1980's. And just like a real virus, you need to get it into cells in the first place. One way to do this is to wrap the mRNA up in a package that can easily be recognized by the innate immune system. Cells called phagocytes (eater cells) gobble up the package, which then releases the specially modifed RNA. Phagocytes have their own ribosomes for making their own proteins, and the vaccine basically hijacks that like a virus would. But instead of making all the parts for viruses, it only has the RNA to make the spike protein on the outside, the antigen. So lots and lots of spike proteins get made inside these cells.

 

As we've gone over, a real virus would need a mechanism to exit from its host cell. Thankfully, the vaccine doesn't actually need to do that. Part of the natural life cycle of phagocytes is called "antigen presentation." They basically show the T-cells and B-cells some examples of what they've eaten, so the adaptive immune system can build countermeasures against antigens, if phagocytes provide correcte examples of those antigens. In a real infection, they gobble up some viruses present bits of gobbled-up virus to the T-cells and B-cells. But by the time the adaptive immune system grows the right kind of cells to fight the virus, there are already lots of infected cells, so the immune system has to do a lot of work to fight back. If pharmaceutical companies tried to make a vaccine out of inactivated viruses, as they've been able to do with some other viruses, the antigen presentation wouldn't work well enough for there to be a good chance that you'd get a good response against the spike protein. These new vaccines are different: they've had the very cells that are doing the presentation to your immune system being used as stooges to make loads and loads of the exact protein that you want to protect against. Instead of having to puzzle over molecular detritus that phagocytes scooped up and exposed to digestive proteins, they're getting large quantities of pristine antigen to work with. And because there's so much of it coming in, they get extra chances to form a good response. So the new mRNA vaccines to COVID-19 are very effective. They're a lot more effective than the dead virus vaccines used against influenza and almost as effective as the live attenuated virus vaccines used against measles.

 

Most of the technology used to make the mRNA for these vaccines has been around for a while, but the lipid package that makes protects the mRNA and gets it into the right cells so that it can work as an effective vaccine requires some pretty specialized and expensive new facilities that there aren't a lot of yet. So while those vaccines were being developed, other companies tried other approaches. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are not mRNA vaccines. They're another type of vaccine called a "viral vector vaccine." This type of vaccine uses the techniques developed for gene therapy: they build their own virus-like structure. It's modified from a small type of virus called an adenovirus. This is yet another kind of virus, very different from influenzaviruses and coronaviruses. Much like an influenzavirus, an adenovirus gets its genetic material into the nucleus of a host cell. But the genetic material in an adenovirus is DNA, rather than -ssRNA. Instead of stealing mRNA from its host, an adenovirus simply has the proteins in the nucleus of the host cell build RNA for it. But while a real adenovirus would have DNA that would get transcripted into RNA that would then be translated to build its own proteins, this modified viral vector only has the DNA that corresponds to an antigen. It makes that same spike protein. Even aside from COVID-19, viral vector vaccines have become more popular with biotech companies in recent years, and some other companies around the world are working on their own versions, but the Oxford-Astrazeneca version and the Johnson & Johnson version are the two big ones for this.

 

There have also been attempts at getting a regular old dead virus vaccine to work with COVID-19. Nothing in the U.S. yet, but some Chinese companies are trying this, and there are also versions in India and one in France. So a dead virus vaccine could be considered the third major type of coronavirus vaccine. There are some other companies trying more exotic approaches, but nothing so far that looks to compete with these ones. So, to return to your original question about the difference between the different coronavirus vaccines: ModernaTX and Pfizer-BioNTech use mRNA vaccine technology, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson use viral vector technology (so does the Russian vaccine if you've heard about that one, as well as some vaccines made by smaller companies), while Sinovac Biotech and Bharat Biotech as well as the new French Valneva vaccine use inactivated (dead) virus.

Token

About six and half years ago, I wrote a blog post about a family dog dying. I got more time with Token than I ever did with Scout, which probably means that I'll miss him even more. I'd been spending time with my family, so I put this one off for a couple of days. But it's time. I wish I had something more pleasant to write about. Well, here we are.

In 2008, my brother Josh got a puppy. He named his new puppy "Token" after the character on South Park, although it became apparent that he didn't actually have a good grasp on what the word "token" meant, nor why the South Park character was given that name. Also, he didn't know how to spell it, so the first name tag that the dog had read "Tokin." If I'm making Josh sound like a dumbass here, I'm maybe a tiny bit sorry for that, but he kind of was. He's doing better now, though.

Token was Josh's dog, but was more reliably looked after by our mother, who referred to him as her "grandpuppy." She spent a lot of time with him. Her dog, Asiak, was still young and healthy enough at the time to be a playmate to the tiny puppy. My mom would also take Token with her on car rides. When I was working on finishing my A.S. degree at Green River and was going to have my mom pick me up from campus to take me to my first day at my new job at the Covington library, my mom was late showing up and I was freaking out. She pulled up to the curb with Token in the passenger seat of her car, explaining that she'd had to make a detour home because she couldn't bear the thought of leaving the puppy at home with no companionship. I was livid, but then it turned out that some minor incident at the library had management so distracted they didn't even notice that I was late, and shrugged it off when I brought it up myself and apologized.

Later that year, when Josh brought Token to his girlfriend's house, her cat ambushed Token. Josh punted the cat. I had Token home with me before my shift at work and noticed some residue around his eye. I called Josh and told him that I thought his puppy might have an eye infection. Then I learned about the cat attack. Perhaps because the first veterinarian to inspect the eye mistook the wound for a shallow laceration and prescribed medicine that was insufficient for a deep puncture wound, or perhaps because the puncture was just too severe anyway, the eye grew worse and had to be removed. In the same visit when Token was neutered, his left eye was removed. It was at this point that Token became the Dreaded Cyclops Puppy.

Token was naturally skittish and afraid of strangers. We'd take him on walks and people would see this terrified pit bull missing an eye, so they sometimes asked if he'd been rescued from a dog-fighting operation or something. Nope. He was just a spoiled dog that lost an eye when he was a baby and also might have been slightly schizophrenic or something. Seriously, sometimes he'd bark at nothing observable.

Whenever Josh wasn't home and didn't have Token with him, Token would snuggle with me and sleep on or near my bed. But usually, Token wanted to be wherever Josh was. So I'd try to get Scout to snuggle with me instead, but my teddy bear was extremely fluffy and preferred cooling his body on the coldest floor tiles that he could find. I forget when, but Josh's path in life took him across the country. He moved to Florida and then moved to New Jersey to be with Alex (they're married now and still live over there). He did not take his dog with him, so I became Token's full-time snuggle-buddy until my mom moved out of the house and took the dogs with her. We were reunited when I moved over to Rachel's house, and again when my mom moved in to my house and brought the dogs (Token and Chief) with her.

The last time (so far) that Josh visited Washington was in July of 2019, for Rachel's wedding. I took Josh to my place so that he could visit Token for a bit. About a month later, Matt moved in with me, so Token didn't have Josh, but my mom, my youngest brother, and I were all living with him. In September of 2020, Matt and my mom got a house together and moved out. They took Chief, but left Token with me. We remained snuggle-buddies and went on walks together around Les Gove Park.

Token was born on February 29th, 2008. So he was about to turn 13. I knew that age would catch up to him at some point, but I hoped that I could give him a good life in the meantime. And it seemed to be going really well. A week ago, I took him to visit my mom and we walked with Chief around part of Pipe Lake. Token seemed perfectly healthy at that time. He'd devoured Chief's food, so my mom convinced me to get a bag of that same food at the store where she got Chief's food. On Monday, he ate a bunch more of that food, but seemed agitated in the evening and I was worried that he was sick. After we went to bed, it was clear that something was wrong. He kept crying and wanting to go outside. I let him out three or four times and eventually he climbed into the recliner in my living room and fell asleep. Later that morning, I texted my mom. She came and picked Token up, then scheduled him for a vet appointment the next day. She speculated that maybe he was allergic to the new food. Token had his appointment on Wednesday, and we got the bad news on Thursday: cancer in his prostate and lymph nodes.

I'll miss him. Or rather, I'm missing him. Partway through typing this, I absentmindedly turned and looked at my bed to check on the dog. I've been randomly finding myself thinking to check if he has enough water in his dish or if he needs to go out. This sucks.