Sorry. We can try poking the University of Austin with a stick, but it seems to be just lying there, inert, after the scathing laughter at the announcement of its existence. I guess Doonesbury is going to try prodding it a bit.
Do the kind of people who found fake right-wing universities read Doonesbury? Probably not. The corpse will continue to lie there, rotting.
I was pumped to read the Discovery Institute’s summary of their three greatest achievements in 2021. Finally, the existing paradigm will be smashed! Evolution’s on the run now, boys! Get ready for the evidence! As the author, Brian Miller, says:
The situation resembles a poorly constructed dam holding back water that is continuously rising. Streams of water are breaking through at increasing numbers of locations, and the flow at each location is hastening. The key question is not if, but when the dam will collapse.
Here, I will discuss just three of the highlights from 2021 for the Center for Science & Culture. I will also describe how these successes are hastening the erosion of the materialistic philosophical assumptions hindering scientific progress. And I will assess their implications for the future of the intelligent design movement.
All right! I’ll put on my galoshes and get ready for the challenge of the rising flood…except, sorry, all we get is a fine mist that evaporates as fast as the Discovery Institute squirts it out.
Their first triumph is that Steven Meyer published another book. They all sound the same, and I’m afraid the only good point of it is that Meyer’s continuing exercises in masturbation are unlikely to result in incest…although seeing a fellow DI maggot fellating it does come close. Score: 0.
Their second victory is that a couple of DI lackwits published a bad paper on the waiting-time non-problem. It sunk without a trace. You might appreciate this review of the paper by Mikkel Nif Rasmussen.
It’s also another example of creationist papers focused on so-called “waiting time problems” with evolution, which are typically based on the entirely imaginary – and totally dubious premise – that there are “target sequences” that evolution must find and evolve towards without any input by natural selection, by mutating incrementally from some random ancestral sequence until the correct (or almost correct) “target” sequence is produced by the chance accumulation of mutations.
To nobody’s surprise, the longer the target sequence is, the longer it will take before chance mutations happen to produce it or something very near to it.
Oops? Is it raining yet? Score: still nada.
Their third devastating discovery is that there was a conference, sponsored by the Discovery Institute, that was attended by Dembski and Behe, that will have ripple effects…for years to come
. No, it won’t, and a gang of creationists pandering to the presuppositions of a few engineers isn’t going to trouble our well-engineered, strongly-reinforced dam. The DI goes 0 for 3!
I’m putting away the boots and the caulk gun, and cancelling that bid on a canoe on eBay. Those highlights
were…pathetic. I guess the creationists are truly desperate.
Meanwhile, here in the rational, evidence-based world, PLoS published a roundup of the top 7 discoveries in just human evolution (the list would be far too long if they included discoveries in bacteria, or even spiders). These stories include:
I think the gang at the Discovery Institute could have just opened any issue of the journal Evolution and seen far more substance backing up the science of evolution than the feeble gleanings they managed to scrape together for a whole year of creationist apologetics.
Last night, I got this bulk email.
Dear Prof. Asher,
I have just learned that Philosophia about to publish an article by Kevin MacDonald, emeritus professor of sociology at CalState Long Beach, at doi: 10.1007/s11406-021-00439-y
MacDonald has long been outspoken in his conviction that Jews are driven to destroy the cultures of the countries they live in. He is a Holocaust denier. He argues that Jews should be subject to civil disabilities, proscriptions, and special high taxes. He openly supports white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations.
The paper you are publishing is as full of the falsehoods and bile as is everything else he has written. As part of the endeavor of philosophy and as part of the civilized world you as editor-in-chief ought immediately to retract it.
I have BCC’ed this email to every philosopher I know, and some other scholars, asking them to join in protesting this publication.
—Bennett Gilbert
————————————————————————————–
Bennett Gilbert
Assistant Professor in University Studies, History, and Philosophy
Portland State University
How bad could it be, I thought. I don’t respond to these mass calls for action without checking. So I did. I looked at the article in question.
Oh my god. That’s just the abstract. Every paragraph of the article is essentially, “The Jews are conspiring to steal our essence”, and the editors of Philosophia (“Philosophical Quarterly of Israel”) didn’t notice? Have they no reviewers? Do they just have a policy of allowing any old crap they find in their in-box to be published without criticism?
Apparently, Kevin MacDonald squats in his office, simmering in a constant state of hatred of Jews, convinced that they are running a massive conspiracy theory to destroy all non-Jews, and in particular, scrawling out long missives objecting to any criticisms of his past work, all dedicated to proving that The Jews run the world. What a horrible little man, and shame on Philosophia for publishing his bile, and extra shame to CalState Long Beach for allowing him to lie in the name of their university.
Here’s the editor of that journal.
If anyone is tempted to think that Philosophia is publishing this garbage (including previous garbage they published) because of a naive commitment to free speech, please remember that Asa Kasher, the EIC, is this Kasher here. pic.twitter.com/edDR8oKOFQ
— Sergio Tenenbaum (@sergioten) January 3, 2022
I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he was flattered by MacDonald’s claim that he and his co-religionists run the planet?
First, I must remind everyone that billionaire Rupert Murdoch elbowed his way to the front of the queue to get the vaccine as soon as it was announced, and that all those blithering conservative on-air personalities on Fox News are required to be vaccinated, just to put this story on Fox News’ promotion of quacks in perspective. It lists ten of the COVID denialist and anti-vax and tepid apologists for inaction who have been featured on the network many hundreds of times. Names you should learn to recognize and scorn: Marc Siegel, Martin Makary, Nicole Saphier, Rand Paul, Brett Giroir, Janette Nesheiwat, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Harvey Risch, Scott Atlas, and Peter McCullough. They all have the title of “Dr”, but you should know that the majority of doctors disagree with these scam artists; Fox News has been carefully distilling the population of MDs to purify and isolate the most untrustworthy scum to selectively display on popular programs by even more reprehensible filth like Carlson and Ingraham and Kudlow. You don’t get a prime time opinion/bloviation slot on Fox if you hold a reasonable view of the science.
Contrast that with this genuinely excellent interview with Jonathan Eisen, a biologist at UC Davis. Eisen simply and plainly says what every biologist and informed citizen knows about SARS-CoV-2.
The Omicron variant is way more infectious [than Delta]. It’s horribly contagious. Even people who are boosted are still getting infected. [The vaccine] does not seem to provide a huge protection against getting infected. I think that’s part of why it’s spreading so fast—people who have been vaccinated and/or boosted have mistakenly thought they were not going to get infected, and so they were going maskless everywhere. But if you have five times as many people infected, that’s going to create havoc, and that’s what is happening in New York and the Northeast, where the hospitals are full. They’re already sending people away who have any other types of emergency or nonemergency health needs. I think we’re in for some tough times; that’s my prediction.
Exactly. This is what I’m expecting, too. It’s also what everyone who isn’t brainwashed by Fox News can figure out. So what should we do?
All the evidence right now shows that vaccines are incredibly effective in reducing the risk of severe illness and death from Covid. And this is true even for new variants such as Delta and Omicron, even though the vaccines were not specifically designed for them. One can reduce the risk of severe illness even more by getting a booster shot. This reduction in risk is very, very clear from all the data. The one issue with Omicron that is different than with other variants is that just getting the regular vaccine dose (e.g., two Pfizer shots) does not reduce the risk of severe illness as much as it did for other variants. In other words, to reduce the risk of severe illness or death, it seems that a booster is very important here.
This is what infuriates me. Everyone wants the quick fix, the easy treatment, the simplest, most painless way to prevent this disease, and science provides one: the vaccine. Go in to the clinic or pharmacy, poke, you’re done, death averted. And what happens? People who listen to Fox News whine, “I want an insta-fix, but not that one.” They’d rather dose themselves with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or bleach or betadine, treatments that don’t work, than take the medicine proven to work.
In a world with people who refuse the treatment that works, and other people who can’t, for other medical reasons, get the vaccine, what can we do to protect ourselves. That’s also easy. Wear a mask in public.
What I’m hoping is that people do a lot of behavioral intervention that can slow down the spread of the Omicron variant. It goes back to the whole “flattening the curve” thing from before, and there are many things we can do. If you’re in crowded indoor spaces, you can avoid doing things where you have to take off your mask—so, no eating. But even with your mask on, not all masks are created equal. There’s new guidance that has come out in the last few days that cloth masks just aren’t going to cut it against Omicron. They just do not, on their own, filter enough particles out to reduce your exposure when airspace is getting filled with virus. What you want is a KN95 or N95 mask.
Yes. Masks aren’t the imposition the whiny-ass-titty-babies of conservatism pretend they are. When I’m teaching, I wear them continuously all day long with no difficulty, other than that I’m generally soft-voiced and muffling me doesn’t help (I’m working on it by TALKING LOUDER with my teaching voice). I tried to order some N95 masks in time for spring classes, but right now they’re backlogged and horribly expensive, so I settled for N94…still expensive with slow delivery — I think they’re all coming from South Korea — but I’ll double-up with a cloth mask until N95s become more available, I hope. If they do.
Eisen mentions also that he avoids big indoor events, even restaurants, and won’t fly, although he thinks if everyone on the plane takes reasonable precautions it’s probably safe. It’s just that too many people have been infected with the Fox brain-rot. Just glance at YouTube fights over masks on airplanes — people are getting into brawls in the aisles because they refuse to wear a mask. It’s nuts.
I avoid going out because I live in a county where practically no one wears a mask, ever. Even when our governor imposed a mask mandate, briefly, a lot of people ignored it, and our local business wouldn’t enforce it — and even then, half the population was incapable of figuring out that the mask covers your mouth and nose. It was good news when my university reluctantly decided to require masks and vaccines for all of our incoming students, but we’re a tiny island of common sense in an ocean of conservative denialists of basic medical facts.
We also need to worry about the long-term consequences of infection. Idiots like those talking heads on Fox News want to pretend it’s just a kind of flu, you get over it and carry on, but COVID has complications you ignore at your own peril.
That is one of my biggest concerns with this attitude of not worrying about Omicron too much because it might cause less severe symptoms. We know that long Covid is a problem for the other variants. It’s a big problem that is poorly understood medically, but is very clearly a real thing. These are real medical problems that people are having for months to now years after infection. Some people are saying everybody is going to eventually get Omicron, and that’s just the wrong attitude. We can make it so that not everybody gets it, and therefore reduce the risk of long Covid in too many people. We can’t just let it spread to everyone on the globe, because that’s going to be a medical catastrophe. Now is not the time to do nothing and hope for the best. It is the time to take measures while at the same time trying not to damage people’s lifestyles and lives and the economy.
Eisen’s is the kind of sensible voice we ought to have been hearing all along in our news media, providing accurate, honest information. I guess Rupert Murdoch knows that that doesn’t sell, unfortunately. And that’s why we’re screwed right now.
I was inspired by this essay by Amal El-Mohtar, who is building a tradition of finding A New Year’s Bird. I like it, it seems like a lovely way to start the year, but I’m not much of a bird person — that’s my wife’s thing. By the way, Mary is right next to me, staring out the window at the visitors to our bird feeders as part of her participation in FeederWatch. But you know me, I’m more of a spider person. Sorry. Not sorry.
It was clear, though, that I need a New Year’s Spider. I began my quest.
One easy possibility was that, this morning, as I showered and reached into the soap dish, I startled a small cellar spider, which scurried frantically away. I girded myself with my camera and walked the few feet to our bathroom to search for the little fellow.
I failed. It was not there any longer. That was OK, though, because that is how all quests must begin, with failure and frustration, and we then find redemption through struggle. I will find the beast.
The bathroom had to be explored. The lights above the bathtub are separated by a grid, a hot spot for spider webs, and there was plenty of spoor. The space was dusty and full of cobwebs, and I searched everywhere, finding diaphanous fluff everywhere, but not a hint of the spider. They are cunning and cautious, and are good at finding small cracks in the walls and hiding in the space between the drywall and siding, inaccessible to giants like me.
Where must I go? There’s no doubt. At some point in a quest, we must descend into the underworld. Our basement, that is — a dark, cold place, neglected and unfrequented by people, where we never dust or clean, where spider-kind can flourish. But again, this is mid-winter, and even spiders struggle when the cold obliterates their prey, and survival is a matter of patience and stillness and long waiting. I lit a torch, opened the creaking, little-used door, and descended the narrow stairs into the cavern.
The space is mostly empty, containing a few dusty relics from a time when it was inhabited by boisterous teenagers, but now barren of anything that might attract a human visitation, except, in my case, billowing cobwebs. Those cobwebs were all empty of life, unfortunately. Not even spiders find this basement an oasis in the depths of winter — too cool, too empty of food, too gloomy. I searched the main room and found a few traces of previous occupation, mainly molted skeletons lying about like the carcasses of facehuggers. Where are they now, I wondered? What victims were drained of blood after they shed their cuticle?
Further. I went deeper, and found the basement ogre: a large sheet web, a meter across, with scraps of cuticle scattered about, and imbedded in the area the skeletons of large prey, houseflies and bumblebees, that had stumbled into this cursed place and found their doom. There was movement on the sheet! I briefly glimpsed a large funnel weaver, horrified by the bright light I’d brought into their domain. It immediately scuttled back into it’s lair, refusing to face me. I could not count this as my New Year’s Spider. I needed a bold creature that would face me, stare into my eyes, and not retreat like a coward. There was no honor in this spider.
Deeper still, I went into the small twisty rooms in the back, where the furnace burned. What I immediately found was…death. The spiders had retreated into the faint warmth as cold seeped into the underworld, finding final refuge where the hot heart of the house dwelt, and many had died in the process. So many spider corpses! So many large carcasses dead in their webs, on the wall, on the ceiling.
I knew I was close. How else would a quest go? First the barren land, then the monster in the dark, then death, then finally, the grail and revelation. There she was, queen of the dark world, my New Year’s Spider, resting on the underside of a shelf, gazing unafraid and unmoving at me.
Returning to the land of light, I can now rest with a sense of accomplishment, perhaps ready for a new year. As one who has returned, I can now give you a quest, to find your own New Year’s Spider.
Or bird, I guess, if you prefer.
(I know way too many people here are Bird Persons who don’t much care for spiders, so I only posted the text here, with none of the photos of horrifying spider webs, dead spiders, and the Queen of Darkness. You could see all the grisly photos if you’re subscribed to my Patreon, or you can see the spider queen on Instagram.)
I had to look at what they were saying about these beautiful animals, and <shock, horror> they are lying about their evolution. Oh well, it gave me a chance to compare ID creationists to YE creationists. There is a little difference there.
Script below the fold for all of you who hate watching videos.
New year, same as the old year. In 2020, I went into the spring term worried about this new virus everyone was talking about, and then it just got worse and worse until all in-person classes were cancelled mid semester and everything fell into chaos as we struggled to turn our courses into something new.
I’ll be content if 2022 doesn’t turn into a reprise of 2020, or 2021, or 1350.
