Rest In Peace, Victim Number 5
Posted on January 11, 2016
Back in November of 2013, the Baltimore Police Department had a raid where they arrested a large group of members of Baltimore’s “Black Guerilla Family” gang. One of those arrested somehow managed to escape with handcuffs on and was being sought by the Baltimore Police Department shortly after the escape.
The news article about the escape mentioned that three of those being arrested that day “have addresses listed in the 400 block of Pittman Pl.”
On January 7, the fifth homicide of 2016 in Baltimore was reported to have happened in the 300 block of East Lanvale Street, after police were called for shots fired at the 400 block of Pittman Place. The victim was a 25 year old Black man by the name of Tavon Lee. As you can see from the reports of what happened at that raid in 2013 and the Twitter message from the Baltimore Police Department in 2013, there is good evidence that the two are the same person, that Tavon Lee is “number five” for 2016. Read More
What’s your fall-back plan?
Posted on January 10, 2016 1 Comment
I had a very unfortunate experience at a quick oil change place yesterday. I had never been there before, but I need an oil change and we were in that town visiting. As I drove up to the shop, a man very angrily directed me to park in front of one of the bays. I lowered my window a little bit because he seemed to be saying something. “Get the f*ck over here!” he said as he gestured for me to park next to the bays.
People curse a lot, I thought to myself. So I just parked where he told me to, and then I sat there for ten minutes. As another tech took information from other drivers, he asked the first man about me. “I have this car and this car, and then I have to go take care of that asshole over there,” the first man said. The second man looked at me and walked over to me. He told me it was going to be another twenty minutes.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
“But there’s cars parked behind you,” he responded.
“Well, can you tell them to back up a little bit? I’m not staying.”
As I drove away, I wondered why the first man was so angry. Yes, it was a cold and rainy day, and he seemed to be very busy. Was all that enough to curse like that and call me an asshole? I thought back to my dad and how much he actually enjoyed having plenty of work to do, even when he was overwhelmed. He said it guaranteed money in his pocket and food in my mouth. The only time I ever saw dad turn away someone from his shop was when there was absolutely no place to park a single car, or motorcycle.
Because my brain is what it is, I also started to think about the angry man and what his fall-back plan was. If he kept up that attitude, chances were that he wouldn’t keep his job very long. I could have very well made an enormous stink about his cursing at me to the manager, then what? Is his retirement secure? Has he paid-off all his debts? The way he was acting was the way someone who either has nothing to lose or doesn’t care acts. And he wasn’t some young, punk kid, either.
Punk kids do the best oil changes, though. (Image via InfoCog on Flickr, CC by -NC 2.0)
When I was a teenager, I’d “poke bears with sticks” as young ones do because it made me feel energized. I felt like I was standing my ground on almost anything, and that people would notice me. Well, they did notice me, but not for the right reasons. That adversarial attitude has been attenuated and replaced with a bigger sense for what battles need to be fought, though I still stumble a bit at times and poke the wrong bear.
Then again, I do have a fall-back plan. If I can’t do public health anymore, I’ll work in a laboratory, doing menial lab work or even just drawing blood. If I can’t do that, there are plenty of orchards in Pennsylvania that would welcome me to pick apples — and to translate the bosses’ orders to the other pickers. If that doesn’t work out, I’m not above cleaning toilets a la Good Will Hunting.
Who knows? Maybe the angry guy at the oil change place does have a fall-back plan. Maybe he’s really good at making beds and could pick up a gig at a hotel or something, and here I am being all judgmental. Seriously, though, if you work in a service job and your service sucks, have a good fall-back plan.
The thing about “Star Wars” is…
Posted on January 2, 2016 2 Comments
When I was a child, my father bought an X-Wing Fighter toy that I treasured for a long while. I don’t know what became of that toy, but it was the perfect symbol for a life-long liking of all things Star Wars. See, there was a time in my life when I saw a lot of wisdom in the story of Luke Skywalker and his messed-up relationship with the father figures in his life: Obi Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Darth Vader.
Yes, I also had the Lego toys. (Image via Clement Soh on Flickr, CC by -NC -ND 2.0)
Like Luke, I had a hard time relating to my father when I was younger because I thought I knew better. I thought I was smarter than both my parents put together. Now that I’m a little bit older, I’ve come to understand that they have a certain kind of wisdom from their experiences that I will have when I’m their age. So I’ll always be lagging behind them in the things that they know and the stuff that they know what to do from the things that they know.
But back to Star Wars… Read More
If you don’t see social messages in fiction, you’re not reading well enough
Posted on January 1, 2016 2 Comments
One of my favorite science bloggers got into a bit of a tussle with some dude on Twitter the other day. The dude is a self-described “best-selling philosopher” and seems to think of himself as a big deal in the world of science fiction writing. He also dabbles in science denialism, thinking that he is doing epidemiology by tossing around numbers until they match his ideas that vaccines don’t work. (We’ll leave out his other ideas for the time being, but you can read all about them on his Rational Wiki page.)
The Dude (whose real name is Theodore Beale but goes by “Vox Day”) seems to also have a big beef with today’s science fiction writers. He, and his followers, seems to think that there’s too much “social warfare” going on in science fiction:
“A quick sidebar on Vox Day, one of a handful of this saga’s bold-faced names. In addition to writing sci-fi, he’s a video game designer and early proponent of Gamergate, which, he argues, resembles Sad Puppies in that “both groups are striking back against the left-wing control freaks who have subjected science fiction to ideological control for two decades and are now attempting to do the same thing in the game industry.” He is the second human being to be expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), after he used the organization’s official Twitter feed to slam the award-winning black novelist N.K. Jemisin as a “half-savage.” He questions the need for women’s suffrage. And he believes that our national ills can be partially attributed to “the infestation of even the smallest American heartland towns by African, Asian, and Aztec cultures.” Yes, Aztecs. ANYWAY.”
Yeah, those “left-wing control freaks” are putting their ideas into science fiction, and fiction in general, and ruining things. If only it were that simple. If only the world operated on this racist dude’s ideals… I shudder at the thought.
It may not come as a surprise to you — because you’re a well-educated, smart bunch — that there have always been leftist and rightist ideas in all sorts of fiction. You just have to read those stories for all their worth, and you have to have an awareness of the world in order to recognize the messaging in them.
For example, anyone who has not experienced racism and discrimination may not catch it at first glimpse in reading a story. The dude mentioned above may see an overt act of racism or misogyny and think that it’s perfectly normal to have something like that in a story, or that those characters who engage in those actions are correct. But that’s not how the world works.
The thing is, we have artists — writers, painters, singers, songwriters — who hold up a mirror to society and tell us all about what is going on around us. Some of them do it so well that we don’t get the whole message on the first pass of a book or even a short story. We need book clubs and school lessons to understand Kurt Vonnegut’s satire. Even novels that are a little more clear, like Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, need some deconstruction and analysis.
Image via Faungg’s Photos on Flickr (CC by -ND 2.0)
That is all if you want to find meaning in what you read. If you want to mindlessly be taken away to some far away planet to get away from the daily rigors of this one, then you can find fiction and science fiction that can do that for you, but I assure you that there will be some meaning even in that. See, some things are universal in literature, like the battle between good and evil at all levels, even the personal level. There is also the theme of “Love conquers all” and the theme of the underdog hero.
Sure, we are seeing more female and minority heroes in American and European literature, but that’s not because there is some vast conspiracy for it. It’s because females and minorities are being allowed/attracted into the profession of writing, and publishing houses are happy to expand to a wider audience. It’s not “political correctness” or some sort of conspiracy.
The world just kind of changes and leaves bigots behind, cowering in fear of a world they don’t recognize anymore. The rest of us move on, adapt, learn that the world’s cultures are all mixing together — sometimes violently, most times not — and we are all building a world culture influenced by everyone’s contributions in print, film, music, and any other kind of art. That’s not a bad thing.
2015: The Year in Review
Posted on December 30, 2015 2 Comments
People do this thing where they review the year and they tell you all about how it went. I’d like to do that, but I’m just going to stick to pointing out to you the blog posts I of mine that I think you should read to catch up on all that went on in 2015 in my world. Because, seriously, what else are you going to do?
In January, I tried to compare guns to swimming pools and the ammosexuals showed up in force to defend the guns. Because guns need defending, apparently. I also took part in the yearly ritual of having to defend the influenza vaccine, even if it has a really bad effectiveness record. Also, the folks at ESPN said good-bye to Stuart Scott.
In February, I told you about the people who will be inspired by the things you do, whether you know it or not. Then I told you about how people make a living cleaning up after you, and they deserve your complete respect. And I also told you about Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland talking about the heroin epidemic in Maryland and wondered if he was going to do something about it. (Here we are in December, and it’s mostly the local governments doing something.)
March came around, and I explained to you why I needed my superhero stories to be a little less dark and a little bit brighter. It’s depressing when they try to make superhero movies and television shows as dark as possible in order to attract viewers. Speaking of attracting viewers, PBS re-aired “The Vaccine War” and asked some people to spread the word on social media. I refused to do so because — and I’ve told you this before — the vaccine “controversy” is settled. Vaccines save lives and they do not cause autism. And, speaking of autism, autism awareness day came and went and there were plenty of “awareness” activities all over the place. So I asked you if we were not aware of autism and proposed, like many have done, that we move into a phase of action about autism.
For April, I was having a hard time in a course that I was taking, and it made me think of the two kinds of epidemiologists that exist out there in the big, bad world. In fact, it is that disconnect between public health professionals and policymakers that led to the situation in Indiana where an HIV/AIDS epidemic hit. While those were big mistakes made in Indiana, I also told you about the mistakes I’ve made.
In May, just as I was about to embark on a trip to Colombia, I ended my job at an urgent care center where I was doing lab work and some patient triage. That same month, my wife and I took a trip to San Francisco and ran into some anti-GMO activists doing a lot of protesting. They probably think that vaccines cause autism, or that coffee causes pancreatic cancer.
Between June and July, I traveled to Colombia and got to see how public health is done in a different country. Let me tell you, they do public health very well. I also got to go to a small zoo and take some pictures. I will never forget that experience, and I will never forget the heat. THE HEAT!
Come August, it was time for me to re-visit my thesis intentions after some of the professors almost had a heart attack at the proposed thesis (henceforth “Thesis 1.0”) and what I wanted to do. So I started looking at Baltimore homicide data and coming up with some ideas. As I dug deeper, I was appalled at the statements from the Housing Secretary in Maryland about the causes of lead poisoning in children. And, when the health commissioner in Baltimore invited a quack to gain national attention, I had a little bit of heartburn.
When I tried to tell you about the hacking of an anti-vaccine group on Facebook, this in September, the anti-vaxxers had an aneurysm, looked me up online, and posted my personal information on another Facebook page. That led to some weird phone calls, especially from one dude who kept calling me “sir” in between insults and threats of violence if I ever went to Texas. I didn’t go to Texas. I went to Minneapolis, instead. I was there for a meeting on new ways to do epidemiology, and I came away from it very impressed.
October brought with it one of the most astounding bits of anti-vaccine foolishness I’ve read in a while. A self-proclaimed naturopath wrote a blog post about letting her children live through whooping cough because, well, vaccines are the Devil’s urine or something. This was worse, way worse, than the aunt suing her nephew over an injury caused by the nephew jumping to greet her.
Oh, yeah, my wife and I ran (walked, jogged) a half marathon, too.
For November, I kept it light with a story of me microwaving a human blood product, but then I went the serious route by reminding us that we have forgotten about the Holocaust and by taking another look at homicides in Baltimore this year. I also reminisced about the good old days when teaching children involved more than standardized tests. Today’s kids have it too easy.
Finally, in December, there were some thoughts on death and dying, and I sat on the 9th floor of the School of Public Health wondering what would happen to Baltimore after the first trial in the Freddie Gray case ended. Just for kicks, I threw in a post about the adversarial people in my life, people who just want to be adversarial for no good reason.
So that’s 2015 in the blog world. I hope you enjoyed reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it.
And, for 2016, let’s remember the words of Pope Francis and (continue to) be troublemakers.
“Make trouble!”
The New Epidemiologists, Part 2
Posted on September 30, 2015 2 Comments
I got distracted when I was writing last time about “The New Epidemiologists” because we started our descent into Minneapolis. I wanted to tell you that one of the consequences of new methods to do disease surveillance and data analysis is that we have a batch of “new epidemiologists” that may not have proper public health training at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Lord knows we need a ton of people to address the ton of problems we’re dealing with in public health. Citizen scientists can actually help detect problems early and/or solve the problems that plague us.
It’s a brave new world, to be honest. I’m very excited to see where we’re going to go with all of this.
TRADITIONAL INFLUENZA SURVEILLANCE
Last time, I told you all about disease surveillance and its different tenets. It needs to systematically collect and analyze data, distribute the findings, and something needs to be done with those findings. When it comes to influenza surveillance, the way in which public health agencies has been doing it has not changed a whole lot in the last few decades. It has basically gone through two complete phases and entering a third. Read More
The new epidemiologists
Posted on September 27, 2015 3 Comments
I’m on my way right now — literally on a plane as I write this — to Minneapolis for a gathering of people who want to do disease surveillance a little differently. Seriously, the guest list reads like a who is who of the epidemiological world… Well, the world I’m connected into. The “old guard” of epidemiology is not on that list, and I’m not surprised. The way we want to do epidemiology deviates a lot in its methods from the way that epidemiology is done now, and that’s not a bad thing.
Up, up, and away!
EpidemioLogical 