Dr. Tony Fauci, who served as director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, retired as a federal employee yesterday. He plans to write a memoir and accept speaking engagements to encourage people to choose careers in public service. He also says he’ll show up for House Republicans’ planned show trials if asked.
Republicans have relentlessly vilified Fauci, starting with Donald Trump, whose juvenile sneering was eagerly taken up by a vile parade of imitators like Rand Paul and Ron DeSantis. Maybe their innate amorality reacts on a cellular level to Fauci’s inherent integrity. It’s unsurprising but especially outrageous, considering the tremendous debt this country owes Fauci.
I’m old enough to remember when AIDS was an automatic death sentence that was killing so many gay guys in my friend set in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fauci was on the job then too, and from the earliest days of the crisis, he was working with activists who were reviled by mainstream medical establishments, politicians and news outlets. Fauci worked his ass off to try to get answers on treatments and encourage GOP administrations to care about the carnage.
Peter Staley, an early member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, wrote a guest essay for the NYT on his working relationship with Fauci and the friendship that grew between them over the years. Here’s a gift link and excerpt:
The regular meetings [Fauci] had with an ACT UP member, Bill Bahlman, continued even after Larry Kramer, one of the group’s founders, wrote an open letter to Dr. Fauci in The Village Voice calling him a murderer and comparing him to the Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann. But there Dr. Fauci was, meeting with me and my comrades, branded radical homosexuals, to discuss our policy proposal for upending longstanding Food and Drug Administration strictures against public access to drugs before they are approved…
Within months, hundreds of ACT UPers were surrounding his building at the N.I.H., and I was the first one arrested, after climbing onto its portico. Cops wrestled me down, bound my hands behind me with a zip tie, then hauled me through the building to a police van. The burly cop pulling my shoulder was dumbfounded when a familiar short man in a white lab coat walking toward us down the hallway yelled, “Peter, are you all right?” Laughing, I replied, “I’m fine. Just doing my job. How about you, Tony?”…
When Covid hit and the rest of the world got to know Dr. Fauci, he leaned on us for guidance… I’ve always been a politician among the activists, and it’s been the honor of my life that he leaned on me hard during his tumultuous year navigating “team normal” and “team crazy” in President Donald Trump’s orbit.
Because he crossed Mr. Trump, Dr. Fauci was turned into a villain for the MAGA crowd, providing fodder for those who thrive on conspiracies and hate. There has rarely been a larger gap between a mob’s viciousness and its target’s decency.
Emphasis mine because it’s the plain truth. As Staley notes, Dr. Fauci has his faults like everyone else, but he did an extraordinarily hard job competently, and he dedicated his life to saving lives. Bullies like Trump and DeSantis aren’t fit to shine Dr. Fauci’s wingtips. I hope he has a long, enjoyable and productive retirement and lives to see the goons who vilified him disgraced and shunned as they deserve.
Open thread.
zhena gogolia
Thanks, Dr. Fauci.
I loved his bit with Stephen Colbert recently where they went to a drugstore together to get the booster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6hzXaShwlk
WaterGirl
Amen!
WereBear
The very idea of public service is anathema to Republicans. They can’t be trusted with a lemonade stand.
chrome agnomen
@WereBear: as is the very concept of decency.
Baud
Well earned accolades.
RedDirtGirl
Thank you for the article link. A great read!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I look forward to a retired Dr Fauci testifying. Not that I’m expecting fireworks, just less of an effort to hide his contemptuous exasperation
RepubAnon
Pity that Faux News wil only show the Republican baseless allegations thinly disguised as questions.
Kay
I just have nothing in common with these conspiracy theorists. Fauci could have continued with his perfectly nice life and wildly successful career and never jumped into covid at all. The idea that he did to “control” 30 million idiot wingnuts is just not a credible theory.
Gretchen Whitmer is a pragmatic, popular governor. She didn’t put covid restrictions in to “control” people. She would have much preferred NOT to put them in. They were a huge pain in the ass, bad for the economy, controversial, and work intensive.
Kay
And what is the end game? When does the promised authoritarian crackdown due to covid restrictions appear?
The theorists told us these physicians and politicians and public health authorities made this all up to control us. But to what end? Wouldn’t we know by now? “They told us to get vaccines because…..(some evil plan)” But what’s the plan?
Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan invented covid to keep Michiganders from ….going to bars? Was that her end game?
VOR
Dr. Fauci’s real sin was not being a sycophant for the Great Orange One. Fauci gave advice to take the problem seriously when TFG wanted to treat it as a PR problem, important only because it could impact the election. I remember an early meeting where TFG was asking when vaccines would be ready. Fauci said “12-18 months”. TFG said, no, I want them faster. Fauci repeated “12-18 months” and you could see TFG was annoyed. TFG didn’t want fact-based advice, he wanted Yes Men.
Even Dr. Birx (“Trump is so attentive to the scientific literature“) fell out of favor eventually. Loyalty in Trumpland was a one-way street.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: It’s a strange conceit, that all these powerful people are out to control the conspiracy theorists. Who thinks like that? Now we know!
Barbara
@VOR: Birx eventually gave up dealing with Trump but apparently spent a lot of time meeting with public health officials. She badly miscalculated in her approach to handling Trump.
Chetan Murthy
Even now, I still rely on Dr. Fauci’s wisdom to guide my life. He said “we can relax our mitigations when we get down to 100 covid deaths/day nationwide”. I’m still waiting for that threshold to be reached.
Baud
@Kay:
After we strip the Patriots of their will to fight, we put black people in charge and force Real Americans to be gay.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara: I guess in her defense, Birx found herself in trump’s orbit and tried to make it work, she wasn’t one of the endless parade of “grown-ups” who sought proximity because they thought they could manage The Beast (Mattis, Kelly, Mnuchin, the Exxon CEO…)
feebog
The venom and hate directed at Dr. Fauci by the antivax crowd is astonishing. The man could have retired 10 years ago with a full pension and avoided all this bs. Instead, he used, and is still using his position to convince people to do things that will save their lives. And a not so small portion of this country villify him for that.
scav
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: But it’s also odd how absolutely little disposition to forgive her I have after watching her bleach performance live on stage. Maybe not a doormat with ambitions, but still.
trollhattan
I spent a lot of time in the covid era imagining though balloons above Dr. Fauci’s head while he dealt with Republicans and Fox reporters. Let me tell you, they were always spicy.
Thanks for your service, doc!
Setting the flippers and snorkel aside FTM as we get one sunny day to dry out and pick up after the Big Storm, until the next arrives tomorrow. From the future here in California, lemme tell you it’s interesting to get all your year’s rain in one day. The future is at least not boring.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ignoring the Obama pandemic manual left for them was as big a crime against America and Bush II closing the Bin Laden desk on arrival at the WH. And had a lot more victims.
Mike in NC
Fat Bastard urged people to fight Covid by drinking bleach. A pity thousands of MAGAts didn’t do it.
marklar
@feebog: “The venom and hate directed at Dr. Fauci by the antivax crowd is astonishing.”
Pure speculation on my part, but it may be in part to his past work on treatments for HIV. In some minds, he interfered with God’s judgment regarding punishing homosexual men. Once they saw him as part of the ‘secular elitist groomers’, anything he did was going to be tainted.
Chetan Murthy
@marklar: There are so many ways in which that hatred could have come about: it was overdetermined for sure.
scav
@scav: Let me clarify. Not a doormat with ambitions of controlling Dump, but sure seemed a doormat with personal ambitions and if paved with people drinking bleach, so be it.
Super Dave
@Kay: Same thing with our pretty good governor Steve Sisolak here in Nevada. He did reasonable things to save lives, and was rewarded for his efforts by losing his job to right wing nutjob Joe Lombardo. As Mencken said, “the voters get what they ask for, good and hard.”
David_C
He was my boss’s boss’s boss. He had a tremendous, and well-earned, influence in the scientific community. When biodefense money started flowing to NIAID, he made sure that it could also be used for emerging infectious diseases. Those investments paid off. One of my projects made it to his Congressional testimony so I had the opportunity to brief him on a conference call. I was happy, and greatly relieved, that I was able to answer his questions.
He will appear before House committees and will give honest answers and will be unflappable. Scientists know that what we say will not always be popular. Natural laws do not bend to our will.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Me too, especially if Rand Paul is doing the “questioning.” Dr Fauci always comes across as competent, dignified, smart, and compassionate. Rando — the exact opposite of those things.
trollhattan
@marklar: I doubt one Republican in a thousand could have named Fauci prior to covid, and had he been represented by a Roomba in a lab coat named Dr. Vacuum, the response would be the same. He presented information that made their Lord and Savior Trump, look bad.
Never mind that the person making Trump look the worst was named Trump.
waspuppet
I’m hoping he’s the one to test my long-standing question, “What if someone responded to every Republican question with ‘LOL fuck off clown’”?
It’s the sole reason I hope to someday be called to testify before Congress.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne: What was the technical issue little Rand was trying to push Fauci on, only to be told by Fauci it was gibberish? It was like watching a schoolkid tell Shakespeare that Hamlet was really about pastry.
sab
@marklar: I think that explains a lot of my RWNJ brother’s animosity to Fauci. But then they all jumped onto the Fauci conspiring with the Chinese to develop bioweapons bandwagon. Crazy stuff but a lot of them believed it. I guess a lot of people just need to relentlessly hate anyone who disagrees with them.
Kay
@Super Dave:
I’m in the “let them die” camp for the next one. I can’t stand the incessant whining. I’m willing to sacrifice them to get some peace.
I knew vaccine nuttery was going to extend to all childhood vaccines, too, and of course it has:
of course it’s Ohio– the center of Trumpian idiocy.
trollhattan
No matter how your NYE went, just know it could have been much worse.
Hell on earth–more than just a concept.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: Maybe this one: https://youtu.be/kz7OGxb9X6E?t=149https://youtu.be/kz7OGxb9X6E?t=149
“there you go again, you just do the same thing every hearing”
“you’re absolutely incorrect as usual senator”
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Sounds like the “covid came from a lab” bullshit.
ksmiami
@chrome agnomen: The only way we survive as a nation is for the GOP to die. It has nowhere to go now – no way to be a positive contributor to the US and its future.
Sister Golden Bear
@Betty Cracker: “Mass movements can rise & spread without belief in God but never without the devil. The strength of the mass movement is proportionate to the vividness to the vividness & tangibility of its devil.” — Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
And thank you Dr. Fauci!
ksmiami
@Kay: Come sit by me; I just feel bad for the innocent people they will harm, but yeah, this country will be better off without the toxic MAGats…
Kay
@trollhattan:
Oh, yay, the Palm Beach Post. Nothing better than celebrity gossip on aging, D list celebrities.
“The Red Carpet” – guffaw.
ksmiami
@trollhattan: Should have wished for a meteor…
prostratedragon
@WereBear: Shades of The Apprentice. And you are so right.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy: That’s as good as any clip I’ve seen, and there are a few.
“Harvard, Oxford, Stanford” Li’l Rand is throwing them out in appeal to authority fashion when 99 times out of 100 he would be throwing rocks at them for being out-of=touch bastions of liberal miseducation.
Kay
@ksmiami:
I live in a 70% Trump county. I listened to them for more than a year, sympathetically, trying to find some commonality I could latch onto. Failed. They never once gave me any rational reason why all these politicians would deliberately create a fake pandemic. It goes against all rational political incentives.
I won’t waste time next time. I don’t give a shit if they get vaccinated, are on a ventilator, any of it. I don’t care. I’m not as nice as Dr Fauci.
I’m sorry only that their children are ending up in hospitals due to measles. They’re innocent victims.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: I have to say, I would have difficult not shouting the bastard down. And the only civil thing I could have done would be to take a piece of paper, write “I will respond once you’ve finished your rant” in big letters, and hold it up while he babbled on.
different-church-lady
@trollhattan: The red carpet? Or just a red carpet?
Another Scott
@feebog:
You misspelled “totally predictable”.
TFG’s spell over his minions depends on him not being questioned. He’s right and everyone who doesn’t say, with tears in their eyes, “Sir, how high, Sir!?” is an enemy.
Fauci didn’t play TFG’s games, and wouldn’t be silenced, so he was enemy #1. If Fauci survives criticizing Dear Leader, then others might think that they can do the same thing. And then the monster’s hold weakens…
I hope Fauci has a long and happy retirement, and let’s the monsters know that he has receipts when they call him to testify…
Cheers,
Scott.
Redshift
@ksmiami: I ran the meteor strike simulator with Mar-a-lago as the target. It was kind of satisfying, but it’s really hard to have the well-deserved destruction without killing a lot of innocent people. (If you make the meteor small enough to avoid that, it burns up in the atmosphere.)
Redshift
@Another Scott:
As I’ve often said “shocking but not surprising” is a phrase I never used before the TFG maladministration…
Chetan Murthy
@Redshift: not even during the chimperor’s reign?
oatler
The silly price I pay for hate-reading the Ricochet site is to witness the elaborate world-building these MCU fans expand their energies on. In this “universe” FDR is New Deal Lucifer, Vatican II was a hippy orgy, and Jimmy Carter was a sleazy wimp. And on Fauci, there’s an actual body of literature devoted to the demon, with artwork, poetry and music. Religion and Marvel movies.
M31
and remember that Trump started doing those daily news conferences because of the attention Andrew Cuomo was getting with his
Redshift
@marklar:
The same thing occurred to me. It probably would have happened anyway, but I can’t help wondering how many of the people driving the hate were either old enough to remember, or googled him and saw his role in advancing HIV treatment and destigmatizing AIDS as “the gay plague,” and believed that made him evil.
Wishing Dr. Fauci a pleasant retirement, we were unbelievably fortunate to have had him working for us all these years.
Glory b
@feebog: Right. I remember some researcher saying back then that he could have resigned with a full pension and would have been immediately inundated with offers from around the world for his choice of positions.
Amazing he didn’t tell Trump and the US to go **** ourselves and move to another country.
Redshift
@Chetan Murthy: Weirdly, no. Not that it wouldn’t have fit, it just didn’t occur to me then. (Or to whoever I got it from; I didn’t think it up myself.)
However, the Bush Administration was what drove me to find and read On Bullshit, because I was mystified at why they told really obvious lies instead of plausible ones.
Chetan Murthy
@Glory b: IIRC Italy *did* offer him a job, to entice him to resign.
Another Scott
@Glory b:
Fauci’s h-index in Google Scholar is 230. (The h-index is the count of the number of papers with at least that many citations – so he has 230 papers with at least 230 citations. That’s a stratospheric number – a researcher generally (with lots of caveats) wants to have an h-index at least as large as their number of years as a career researcher.)
He could, and can, write his ticket anywhere. The US (and the world) was fortunate to have him working so long in public service.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
In fairness, DJTJ probably wasn’t invited. Just an oversight. Maybe it got lost in the mail
WaterGirl
@scav: To clarify my position on Dr. Brix – she brought shame upon herself, upon her position, upon her profession.
And her “going along with Trump” surely cost lives. I think she is lower than low.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: Junior and Ivanka were AWOL at the low-energy 2024 announcement too, according to Olivia Nuzzi in the Sunset Blvd.-themed “Final Campaign” article. Trump seemed pretty defensive about it too:
Right…
Still sort of amazed that Trump called Nuzzi of all people to do an interview. Maybe he has an unconscious self-destructive streak. Maybe she has long blond hair.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: 100% agree. Retconning doesn’t count for *shit*: what matters is what you did when it counted.
I remember a term from Nazi times: “internal emigration”. It referred to academics who chose not to participate actively with the Nazis, but stayed in Germany and just stuck to their knitting, doing nothing whatsoever to resist. And as they say, “neutrality is the same as support of power”.
She faced no real penalty for resigning in loud protest. None at all. And she did no good while she was there, b/c completely compromised by TFG. Unlike Fauci, who refused to let TFG affect his day job (which was *not* being part of that covid task force, thank all our stars).
scav
@WaterGirl: I think it’s a large page we share.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
She does.
In one the J-6 transcripts, somebody (the dope himself?) says Junior only heard about the rally because Eric tweeted about. Which of course raises the question: Who told Eric? Probably Lara.
Ruckus
Dr Fauci remained human and professional during his entire career. Those asshole hate mongers on the right, who wouldn’t know an actual human being if they walked up to them and said hello. I’ve known many gay people in my life and have even been related to some of them and every one of them is a better human than the shithead conservative assholes who think that they get to tell other people how to be human when they do not have a damn clue themselves.
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Mystery solved then!
kalakal
@Baud:
And ram it* down their throats.
*Whatever it is. Right wingers have a weird obsession with things being rammed down peoples throats. It says something about them
Steeplejack
@trollhattan:
What a blast at Mar-a-Lago!
Ruckus
@VOR:
Loyalty in Trumpland was a one-way street.
It always is in conservative land. They have zero idea of how to be human, they want constant feedback that their bullshit is actual life.
And they wouldn’t know actual life if it kicked them in the junk. Which it should, often and hard.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: no doubt key to getting Rudi to take her on that infamous pre-lunch Bloody Mary mini-bender. I believe Rudi was between once and future ex-wives at the time…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
He sure dodged that bullet
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Can you *imagine* ? Having to live in Tuscany ? All that food, all that wine … I don’t think I could stand it.
Ruckus
@Kay:
You are over thinking this. They don’t have an endgame other than being right. And they have zero idea or concept of that because they think that life is only one way and can not be any other way or they are wrong. They do not understand choice or difference in any way because if they did then that would make them wrong. And in their world there is only one way. They are afraid of difference because difference means their world doesn’t exist, their control doesn’t exist. Their type/klan have been told this for thousands of years and they have swallowed this bullshit whole.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: Well, and, there’s also the justification for doing exactly what Kay describes, the next time they have power. “B/c the Dems did it ….”
Miss Bianca
@waspuppet:
You know, I find it a little disturbing how much this scenario is making me LOL myself.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
I remember a bit of time back in1969 in SoCal where we got rain for weeks. The LA river was more than full. I remember thinking that maybe an ark wouldn’t be bad for commuting and every thing that even resembled a creek in the San Gabriel Valley was so full that water was sometimes splashing/flowing over the road surface.
IOW this storm, not so much. Sure it doesn’t rain here as often as other places but it has, in the past, and may do so again in the future. But this storm, nothing like I’ve seen here, rarely but still.
Here’s a picture https://images.app.goo.gl/cJAu8M2iLawuWkaz6
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: Apparently Sacramento got so much rain they’ve got evacuation warnings for parts of the area (Wilton) b/c the levees are imminently gonna break.
Alison Rose
NYT with their Alison-specific clickbait headlines:
There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be Short
First line: “From where I stand — at five feet even — being tall is a widely held fantasy of superiority that long ago should have been retired.”
I am also five feet tall and I second that emotion.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
Oh I know. I’m just saying this about the LA area. We’ve had just a tad worse than this one storm. Yes it’s been a while but some of us do remember a time that this is just a rainstorm.
I’ve also lived north of SF Bay and it tends to rain there just a bit more than here in LA. I’ve also lived in snow country, and this ain’t that
Click on that link and check out pictures of the same part of the river when it’s not raining.
chrome agnomen
@kalakal: ‘it’, of course, is aborted fetuses.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: They never admit when the things they fear monger about don’t appear, “death panels” being one prime example
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
A pretty weak defense. It’s not like she was hired in the first year of the administration and thought it might be okay. She was elevated well after anyone one with her training & experience could see he was off the rails.
But I suspect Colonel (ret.) Dr. Birx maybe didn’t object to Trump & his ways as much as we might expect.
Everybody who worked for Trump knew who & what he was & they promoted & protected him anyway. Remember this quote?
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: I’m 5’8″, and for a male, that’s shorter than the median. She’s probably right for women. For men? Uh, *no*. In a way it’s good that she’s writing this article from the POV of women, and discounting the male perspective. We need more of that in our culture.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
They are selfish idiots that think the world is only big enough for them. Their political “ideas” are bogus and controlling because they need to be controlled and think that everyone else does as well. And yes there do have to be limits upon humanity because some will always decide they are better and that anyone not like them has to be killed. For current example, Ukraine and that ass who thinks he owns the world, vlad the dipshit.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: Keep in mind that after the storm in the photos you linked to, the Army Corp of Engineers came to LA and built flood control(concrete lining the LA River, dams along the LA, San Gabriel and Rio Hondo).
CaseyL
I’m not surprised that Trump/the GOP attracts the most awful bipedal life forms on the planet outside of Russia; I am shocked (and disgusted) by how many of them there are.
I try to tell myself this could be a useful thing: Trump acting as a kind of crystalizing agent, precipitating them out of solution, so to speak, so they’re clearly identified and visible.
But that’s only a good thing if, having done so, they can be eliminated, the way you would tumors.
Instead, they’re allowed to live, breed, manage megacorporations that affect peoples’ lives, and hold public office.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, I’m 5’4″ and being short for a guy isn’t a positive, I get called ma’am about once a day by customers. I, of course, ignore those customers.
Alison Rose
@Chetan Murthy: I think her aim is more to try to make society stop acting like being tall matters or should be valued over being average or below-average height. I’ve known a lot of men who were quite short, including my father who is only 5’5″, and even for the ones who don’t turn into total douchebags over their inferiority complex, it’s still damaging sometimes for them to think that there is something defective about them. I like the notion of doing away with height as a thing people give a shit about.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
Thanks, Biden.
EarthWindFire
@Mike in NC: Throughout the Obama era, I joked that if BHO did a PSA on the danger of drinking bleach, thousands of wingnuts would die overnight. Now I can’t figure out if my joke had the element of truth in all good humor or not.
Ruckus
@sab:
I guess a lot of people just need to relentlessly hate anyone who disagrees with them.
Well if you disagree with them then that makes them mistaken, wrong, or actually stupid. And admitting that is not something that many humans understand because it makes them smaller, lowers their macho, effectively nuder’s them in their mind. I’m not saying it makes sense, humans are wrong all the time, some on a quite regular basis and they can still breathe in and out, mainly because their autonomic brain function does that, not their non thinking functionality.
trollhattan
@Ruckus: @Chetan Murthy:
Dang, those are some impressive pics.
CA 99 is flooded, Cosumnes River levees have failed, the trans-Sierra highways are closed, Folsom Lake doubled its storage in two days [eta small exaggeration: it went from 330k to 600k acre-feet in two days, capacity is just under 1m af], we had 145,000 customers w/o power last night–it’s been interesting.
Versus a 1,000,000-acre wildfire, probably a tradeoff most will take.
Winter is young, but two more even average months mean a welcome break from endless drought.
trollhattan
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: IIUC there are now schemes underway to capture and store storm runoff for freshwater supply, rather than hustling it to the ocean.
trollhattan
Dark Brandon move?
Another Scott
@Ruckus: I remember being startled when I first saw this Scientific American article (from 2013):
[eta:] Another article about it.
Geologically, it was yesterday.
Be careful out there!
Cheers,
Scott.
Glory b
@James E Powell: Yeach, that’s when I knew she was full of it.
RaflW
I will always believe that part of the reason Fauci was targeted by the GOP during Covid has been lingering anger that he cared about gay men and other marginalized people who were at high risk for HIV. They have long, evil memories.
I am thankful that the good doctor really lived up to the ethical ideals of medicine, and wanted to work that hard for that many years! I hope he enjoys a productive and active – but also restorative – retirement!
Alison Rose
@RaflW: Reminds me of this bit from a Colbert monologue when Ron Johnson accused Fauci of overhyping Covid like he did with AIDS. The zinger from Colbert is fantastico.
(ETA obviously Fauci did not “overhype” AIDS — that’s Johnson’s BS)
jonas
@trollhattan:
Paul was trying to get Fauci to admit that the NIH had collaborated with the Wuhan virus lab on secretive experiments with coronaviruses in which they were being bioengineered to be extra infectious (aka “gain-of-function” research) — the implication being that one of these superbugs escaped the lab, or was released, leading to the pandemic. Fauci responded in no uncertain terms that Paul was a lying sack of shit and had no idea what he was talking about.
trollhattan
@Another Scott: It will happen, when being the only question. ARK (atmospheric river 1,000 year) pushed so much freshwater into SF Bay for so long, it killed most of the saltwater creatures. The Central Valley can only conduct so much volume before no more can drain.
And my house is about 20′ msl.
UncleEbeneezer
There was a great New Yorker piece on Fauci from early in the pandemic “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor.” And I heard an interview with someone in the field of epidemiology who noted that Fauci has been The Guy in his field for decades. Like, there was no question who the leading expert in the world was. When Ebola or Bird Flu or whatever popped up, no matter what country it was in the world’s leading scientists would all say “Get me Fauci” as their first step. I personally believe this is one of the reasons the chuds/Nazis hated him so much from the beginning. Obviously, Trump had a lot to do with it, but Fauci was also the perfect example of actual scientific expertise, who got to where he is through excellence and merit: just the type of person people on the Right loathe and resent.
jonas
@Ruckus:
It was before my time, but my parents still talk about that 69 SoCal flood. Their car was saved because it was in a garage for repairs over the weekend and the mechanic had left it up on the lift. The shop was flooded with 6 feet of water, but the car was ok!
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose:
It’s a laudable goal. And for women, achievable. For men? na-ga-ha-pen. Us shorties are just stuck with the (uh) short end of the stick. Wishing things were different won’t change them.
I mean, it’s like beauty: pretty women (and men too!) get things that ugly people don’t, just *handed* to them. Wishing it were different won’t make it so.
Alison Rose
@Chetan Murthy: Trust me, as a…let’s say, not-pretty woman, I hear ya. I mean, there are a whole lot of dudes who seem to consider it a felony for any woman they don’t deem fuckable to exist anywhere they can see them.
jonas
Well put. Their theory is that you just need to be a loudmouthed asshole to get things done and people like Fauci with actual expertise are just “know it all” elitists.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: So, uh, height (for men) is somewhat like that. I have a friend who’s six-foot-and-change, and he assured me that it’s a complete magnet in bars (where almost by definition, it’s not your sparkling repartee that’s gonna make the introduction happen).
To be clear: just as you surely feel, it is what it is, and ain’t like we’re changin’ it, and it’s been this way for millennia, so again, it’s like gravity.
RaflW
@Alison Rose: Wow, thanks. I needed that!
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
In 1969 there was talk of the second coming because it rained for 40 days, most of them a lot of rain. I’ve seen water in the LA river in my 73 yrs, sometimes a lot of water, but 1969 was by far the most I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen it rain a lot in other parts of the country, but never every day for 40 days. I’ve been in storms crossing the Atlantic in winter but never like that one. I’ve been above the Arctic Circle several times, and some during winter and never seen rain like that. I have seen 40-50 foot waves for days on end crossing the Atlantic with rain as well, but still, never like that.
Alison Rose
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, it’s frustrating. I wish things like “beauty” (which is so subjective and often rather racist) didn’t fucking matter. I wish the notion of caring about someone’s height or bone structure or breast size or whatever was as bizarre and unheard of as judging someone on, like…the exact date at which you got your first tooth. Like, someone saying “Oh, that guy? No way, he cut his first incisor at 7 months and five days. No thank you.”
Old Dan and Little Ann
I took a backroad drive near Batavia, NY last week. Over the last several years I’ve seen the random drumph sign flag. But this day within a span of 2 miles the there was a tractor trailer rig in front of a machinery ship with a huge drumph 2024 painted on it. Then up the road another house with the 40+ flag pole flying the Fuck Biden flag. Makes me fucking sick how brainwashed these people are. At least the community tool down there Confederate flags for the winter.
kalakal
@Alison Rose: Oh that’s brilliant. Thank you
rikyrah
Thanks, Dr. Fauci👏🏾
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: [full disclosure: I’ve got a very pronounced lazy eye, many friends think I’m blind in that eye: so much for facial bilateral symmetry]
Uh, from what I remember, assessments of beauty are significantly correlated with bilateral symmetry and even skin tone, and both of those are (in women) correlated with propitious gestational environments. Height in men is strongly correlated with success in life money-wise, and of course in premodern times, with success in battle, e.g. height is strongly correlated with upper body strength.
We’d all like to pretend these things don’t matter anymore.
Sister Golden Bear
@Ruckus: LA floods are dangerous for in part because to the short, steep gradient from the mountains to the sea. So water in the storm channels can easily hit 30-40 mph or more. Saw some pretty impressive stuff when I lived in Montrose in ears ago.
UncleEbeneezer
@jonas: Not just their theory, it’s their goal! On a lark, we decided to watch the Maltese Falcon because I was in the mood to check out some Noir films and that one was available for free. The biggest problem I had was that the whole thing just really highlights how white men are supposed to just be allowed to be angry, loud, obnoxious whenever they damn well please for even the slightest reason and everyone around them (women, Black people etc.) are all supposed to just roll with it or even coddle them. I know it’s a sign of the times but it sure is hard to watch nowadays.
Ruckus
@ksmiami:
Those idiots will never all go away in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Some human beings will always take all the ignorant sides of every argument, stupidity, irrelevancy, idiotic insane theory, conservative dogma ever presented, precisely because it is ignorant, stupid, irrelevant, idiotically insane, and/or conservative. We, as a species, have had these people among us since 3 of us walked the earth. And that’s been a day or 3, so they aren’t going away any time soon. Education won’t change them, some religions are some of the reason they have persisted and will continue to, but the main issue is some will never believe their eyes, ears, truth, or especially a majority. It is against every fiber of their beings to believe the world was not made from magic pixie dust.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Sister Golden Bear: I lived in Montrose for almost 20 years, those empty storm channels fill up real fast.
Ksmiami
@Kay: Michigan could use you and it’s a lovely place…
Chetan Murthy
@Ksmiami: If enough D(irty)F(uckin’)H(ippie)s moved to MI, I’d move there too!
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Another thing that interesting about the Crescenta Valley is that if you drive along the 210 through it, there are places with narrow overpasses, those are not for pedestrians, those are the flood control channels passing over the freeway.
Ksmiami
@Ruckus: but agw related pandemics could greatly reduce their numbers
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
That’s one of the reasons that the LA river exists in it’s current form. On that page with the picture I linked is another one of what it looks like “normally.” There is a shallow channel in the middle that almost always has some water in it, but that picture will show how big the LA river is and believe me, when it’s full and moving rapidly that is a hell of a lot of water. That same storm had mud flowing in the town just north of me with mud up to the roofs of homes. The San Gabriel River is the other big river in LA county and is just west of where I live. It has 2 major dams and large settling basins so that the rain water from the San Gabriel Mountains just north of me that has an average rainfall of 35 inches water can be fed into the water supply rather than just flow out to sea. The San Gabriel River is about 1/4 mile wide that is normally a creek but in a big rain storm will be full and can be 20 feet deep. Here are pictures of the 210 freeway bridge over the river which is being upgraded in a huge project.
geg6
@Redshift:
TBH. I’ve been in that neighborhood. A lot of really shitty people with estates there. Most of them would be positive collateral damage. As long as my friends in Stuart and Palm City could survive or be warned in time, I’d be fine with it.
Geminid
I just think going after Fauci is poor play. This will resonate with their base and incense politically engaged Democrats, but I think a majority of people will either shake their heads or yawn, or both.
I realize Republicans don’t have a lot of good issues to exploit but they ought to be able to find something better than to complain about how Anthony Fauci somehow took Donald Trump’s lunch money from him.
mrmoshpotato
@Geminid:
What single good issue do the bastards have to exploit?
Ruckus
@Sister Golden Bear:
I was born in the same hospital as my mom, Queen of Angels, in central LA, that doesn’t even exist any more. OK it’s been a few decades but still…. I live in a suburb about 5 miles from where I lived my first 20 yrs and have lived most of my life in various cities in LA county. I know about LA rain and floods. I’ve seen a few of them. Hell we were medium distance neighbors when you lived in Montrose and I am related to people that lived there, it’s only a hop, skip and long jump away.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
I see the link I put in didn’t take Because it wasn’t a link, dummy.
Copy and Google – san gabriel river bridge 210
Kay
Someone should ask the Right about this. No one pushed shitty, cheap “virtual learning” like those on the Right, until the pandemic, when they all switched, overnight, to claiming virtual learning was a civil rights violation.
Jeb Bush has a multi-million dollar lobbying/grift operation that pushes for replacing (expensive) in person schools with (cheap) garbage “virtual academies”
We’re all just supposed to ignore this? Now they all go back to shilling for “e-learning” like they didn’t spend the last two years screeching about how kids need to be physically in school?
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
@Alison Rose:
I remember a segment of a network general affairs show where a group of women were asked if they would consider dating a selection of men shown in video clips and given manufactured biographies. Tall men, average looking to handsome, outperformed other men. A very short man was rejected, even when he was very good looking and given a biography that made him a rich and successful doctor who was practically the savior of mankind.
I come from a family of fairly short men and women. When I was a pre-teen, I estimated that I would be 5 ft 6 as an adult. This bothered me because, true story, in middle school I was tormented by the most popular girl in school, whose name was A– Short. I was the new kid.
I later had a growth spurt. I have also noted that in the real world, many short men find ways to overcome initial resistance, especially if they are not jerks. And short men are well represented among the most successful groups, especially actors, musicians and political leaders.
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
You always ask the easy questions.
NONE.
Geminid
@mrmoshpotato: Beats me. I was thinking in relative terms. I doubt if they have any good issues as far as you and I are concerned, but they might be able to get traction within the larger electorate on some issues. But not this one.
SFAW
There was a local (central MA) NextDoor “conversation” initiated by an anti-vaxxer, wherein someone said Dr. Fauci should be tried for “crimes against humanity,” because of “his” [sic] lockdowns. I think that moron also included Biden for his 2020 lockdowns, which he (i.e., the moron) then backtracked and said some lockdowns were done by “outgoing” TFG. Fucking moron.
These people are not on a first-name basis with Reality, so to speak.
jonas
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
Western NY is, well, Western NY. Whaadyagonnado? Here in my *slightly* less batshit corner of Upstate, I’ve noticed less and less Trump swag lately, actually. A couple of prominent “Trump 2024” yard flags have quietly come down. One local guy recently replaced his “Fuck Biden” banner with one of those “Don’t Tread On Me” flags. The Trump stink is real, I think, and is only going to get more noisome as it becomes clear that he really doesn’t have the energy (or money) to mount another campaign, and the legal problems keep mounting. We’ve still got the Fulton County, GA election interference investigation, as well as all the SC stuff still to come. 2023 will be a bad year from TFG.
StringOnAStick
I have friends in quite red western Colorado; he’s trying to sell a pickup truck and one guy rolled up into their HOA common parking area, left his truck and took my friend’s to go get it inspected. The potential buyer’s truck had his business sign on each door, and a huge “Fuck Biden” sticker on each side of the bed. also important to the story is that a home recently sold within the HOA’s area. When this wingnut returned an hour later, someone had taped a sign over each Fuck Biden sticker that said “If you are the new homeowner, please remove this sign as it is not welcome in this neighborhood”. The guy ripped it off, crumpled it and threw it on the ground, then drove off in a huff.
I was surprised someone took the initiative to counter the wingnut’s stickers, because Grand Junction is in Boebert’s district and pretty red.
James E Powell
@Glory b:
It was a rare moment when even the usually Trump loving press/media reacted with “Wha? No way!”
James E Powell
@RaflW:
I think you are giving the MAGA mobs too much credit for knowing anything other than what FOX told them in the last 72 hours. He was a target because their great leader said that COVID was nothing and Fauci said otherwise.
Alison Rose
@Chetan Murthy: I’m not sure why the “Uh” is there, unless in response to me saying beauty standards are often racist, but they are. Western standards of beauty very often elevate traits and characteristics associated with white people and denigrate those associated with people of color, especially Black people. I’m not saying there aren’t other elements at play, but racism absolutely plays a role in many countries.
Also, I don’t want to make this into some kind of oppression olympics or anything, and I do not discount the garbage that short men have to deal with. But I highly doubt it is anything approaching what “ugly” girls and women deal with all their lives. I could go into detail about what I have experienced but I’d rather not. Let’s just leave this discussion where it is.
Kay
@Brachiator:
Secret of success :)
Another Scott
@Ruckus: Thanks for the pointer.
The Wikipedia article is interesting:
Hmm… There might be a lesson there?? :-) Hehe.
Thanks.
Good luck!!
Cheers,
Scott.
karen marie
@Kay: Meanwhile, in Texas …
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I grew not a smidgen from 7 till almost 13. I was the shortest in my HS class, it was not even close. 4’11,” at best. If I had walked up on stage during the entire school event in the auditorium when they asked each shop (a tech HS, all boys) to send up to the stage the shortest freshman and I said “NO, not going.” Which I had to repeat and added a word “NO, not fucking going,” they sent the next shortest. He won the contest to be the shortest kid in school and was mocked endlessly, starting on stage with the vice principal, a catholic priest. Rather needless to say, I rather hated that school.
I started growing a bit and by sophomore yr I was about 5′ 1.” Graduated HS about 5′ 9″ and still was growing at 20 yrs old. Now 5′ 10 1/2.” Or was anyway, now I’m old and likely starting to shrink. Once was always returns, just to make sure you recognize it.
Brachiator
The pandemic next time…
Republicans have lost their minds and insist on persecuting Fauci for two reasons. He defied Trump. And he represents all the health officials who committed the unforgivable sin of slowing down the economy in order to save lives.
Because Covid did not have a sexual connection like AIDS, right wing lunatics could not invoke the God’s Divine Justice excuse. But right wingers in the US have consistently tried to frame their objections on free market and right wing principles. And so, they came up with the following lies and excuses:
Fauci and public health services are simply the arm of Big Government, which is liberal and inherently evil. And Covid could be dealt with by letting each individual decide how to protect themselves. Closing schools and businesses was totally unnecessary and simply used to let liberals control people. Covid was never a major threat because it only hurt non-white people and old people who were going to die anyway.
If the GOP ever win a majority in Congress, and also win the presidency, they will cut public health funding and will deny the effects of the next pandemic, allowing countless numbers of citizens to be harmed.
ETA. There is a similar attempt to undermine public health authorities in the UK. Early on, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted that you could defeat Covid if you were strong-willed.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I understand, Kay.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
The beginning of the OPEN THE ECONOMY CROWD in 2020 came right after it was revealed that COVID was disproportionately killing NON-WHITES.
I said what I said.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
But this was more wish fulfillment than reality. The other big lie was that Covid was killing more people in blue states than in red states.
Right wing idiots are never good at critical thinking or data analysis.
ETA. There was also a continuing element of denial. Some conservatives would insist that white people in rural areas were dying of the flu or other illnesses, and not Covid. Other idiots are still denying that there was a significant amount of excess deaths during the pandemic or the clear impact of Covid deaths on life expectancy.
These people are also furiously cherry picking data to “prove” that masks and social distancing was ineffective.
As I note, conservatives are doing everything they can to ensure that the next pandemic does more harm than Covid. And Florida governor DeSantis may be the poster child for this deadly idiocy.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: No, it was the word “subjective”. Maybe I’m taking that word to mean “capricious” or “not based on externally-measurable factors”. I’ve read enough about the strong effects of bilateral symmetry and even (as in not-varying) skin tone, that it seems pretty not-subjective.
Chetan Murthy
@rikyrah: that’s pretty well-documented, and I certainly remember it.
scav
@Chetan Murthy: We all still critters. Some of what drives us is pretty hard wired (“Lookit that damn useless tail on that peacock!” “That hummingbird’s J-dive is wobbly — yuck.”) and then there’s the nonsense we add on top (“Those are so last year’s Adidas — next!”)
Chetan Murthy
@scav: Yes. I remember reading a study of sexual dimorphism in humans. That is, a study of the size differences in humans between males and females, and it argued that the evidence was that the difference in size (with females smaller) was correlated with industrial societies. Less-industrialized meant less difference. They conjectured that less-industrialized meant less access to modern medicine, which meant less chance for smaller women (== smaller pelvic girdles) to surviive difficult childbirths.
Soprano2
@Kay: The latest “Serial” podcast is about a woman whose father and brother died of Covid three weeks apart. She didn’t even know her father was sick until her brother texted her that he died! (She lived in NY, they were in CA). The brother and father lived together; neither were vaccinated. The brother believed things like “vaccinated people shed the Covid virus”. I felt bad for her, because she tried to persuade her father to get vaxxed, but I didn’t feel bad for her brother or father at all. It was a fascinating story. So I guess I’m team “let them die” too. I’m tired of trying to persuade them.
Haydnseek
@Ruckus:
Test Test
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
This is demonstrably false on so many levels. There is a moderate amount of sexual dimorphism in humans, chimps and bonobos, but industrialization is too recent and too localized to have had any significant or measurable effect on humans.
But you can easily see effects of improved nutrition on human growth. Or just more food, not even better food.
As for beauty. Some caution here as well. A lot of this comes from idiot evolutionary psychologists. Even if we just read history or even folk tales, we cannot always match descriptions of beautiful people with actual images of what was considered beautiful.
I also recall reading some papers about beauty and noted that the photography and paintings used to confirm the study almost exclusively depicted women who would be considered beautiful by modern American and European standards.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: Huh, seems that that paper [about sexual body size dimorphism] didn’t pan out; I see no papers that substantiate that hypothesis; seems like the current theory is it’s just sexual selection.
Soprano2
@Kay: SIlly, that’s because when the pandemic happened it made their kids have to learn virtually. They don’t want their kids to learn from screens and ebooks; that’s for poor kids who don’t have a future. /s/s Also, they didn’t make any money from virtual school during the pandemic; that offends them.
Another Scott
@Brachiator:
I blame Harvard and the Venus de Milo:
White men with power and authority, especially those with a Greek and Roman fetish, messed up so much of the world…
Cheers,
Scott.