This whole vertebral column thing was a bad idea

I’m sitting here with a writhing lump of chronic ache at the base of my spine. It’s a cruel beast that occasionally stabs out with daggers of pain, and it’s capricious in that there are no rules specifying when it will lash out. I’m lying in bed, unmoving: knife up the right side! I’m walking carefully, everything moving smoothly: lance that kidney! I reach out to flush the toilet: oh, don’t do that, here comes the spiked mace. I’m having a tough time finding any motivation to do anything.

There is good news: I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in an hour! Modern medicine will fix me right up, won’t they? Of course modern medicine has to first figure out what’s wrong, and modern medicine hasn’t done the greatest job of that the last few weeks.

In other good news, the first wave of textbooks expelled from my shelves has reached various recipients. If you haven’t got it yet, it’s coming. Meanwhile, there’s a third giveaway waiting for volunteers to accept the burden of knowledge.

This timeline is increasingly insane

I read this story and thought it was too stupid to be The Onion, but maybe was pointless enough to the Babylon Bee…but no! It’s from the Daily Beast!

Far-right provocateur and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos has found a new gig: Capitol Hill intern for MAGA firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Yiannopoulos, 37, posted to Telegram on Monday morning a photo of what appeared to be a newly issued congressional badge, placed atop a Louis Vuitton briefcase.

“I’ve finally been persuaded out of retirement,” wrote the British right-wing media troll. “But my skills are a bit rusty, so the best role I could land was an unpaid internship with a friend. Pray for me!”

He added: “Mummy always said I’d end up in government.”

Yiannopoulos didn’t respond to a request for comment. But in a statement provided via her spokesperson, Rep. Greene confirmed to The Daily Beast that Yiannopoulos is interning in her office.

“So I have an intern that was raped by a priest as a young teen, was gay, has offended everyone at some point, turned his life back to Jesus and Church, and changed his life,” Greene told The Daily Beast. “Great story!”

I had to check other sources, because this is nuts. Mediaite? Check. Vice? Check. Newsweek? Check. Forbes? Check. Salon? Check. Washington Post? Check.

There’s no avoiding the truth here. The circus is in town, and the clowns have set up shop in the capitol.

I picture all the writers at the satire sites throwing up their heads in despair, and crying at their desks.

Winding up for a knock-out set of speakers at Skepticon

Skepticon is announcing their speakers for this year’s conference, and they started with the least of them. The roster gets better, I promise!

Oh, they’re also organizing rideshare for the event. I’d offer to help out, but I’m planning a spider-collecting trip around the drive, and I’ll be annoying with frequent stops, and then the car will be full of spiders.

The right heart, but too few

A small group of women disrupted (in a small way) Joel Osteen’s megachurch protesting their stance on women’s rights.

More of this. The only reason Osteen could ignore it is that there weren’t enough protesters. If you live near one of these hideous, oppressive megachurches, do try to get out now and then and let them know what you think of their ideas. They had 13 activists in the pews, they were kind of swamped out by this gigantic, opulent temple to gullibility.

OH NO! If that’s the audience, I don’t want to be popular

This is an odd looking graph of traffic to my latest YouTube video.

You might want to congratulate me on that sudden surprising surge of traffic in the middle of the night, but don’t. Apparently, that’s when the magical YouTube algorithm started recommending the video to others, and it brought an influx of Peterson worshippers, as the comments reveal.

all these years and you still can’t get 10 k subs??? JP just hit 5 million and growing. You’re in the final stage of your life, stop being so jelous. Btw, you shpould check out JP’s interview with Roger Penrose, eat your heart out.

But here’s the thing: I’m not concerned about traffic. I look at the most popular videos on the medium, and it’s garbage like Pewdiepie and the Paul brothers and bizarre twisted animated children’s videos designed to milk clicks out of babies. I’m content with my tiny little niche. I’ve also got a real job, fortunately, and the $50 my channel brings in every month is fine.

Then there are the feeble defenses of Peterson:

Peterson clearly states that what he is saying is highly speculative. If your going to critique the man at least do it honestly.

There’s a whole bit in my video where I point out that Peterson is flinging about the word “speculation” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Useful speculation has to be built on some kind of empirical, testable framework. Peterson is lazy and doesn’t do the work of justifying it.

Most common, though, are the people who deny his transphobia (the thing that made him famous!) and have a knee-jerk hatred of social justice.

I realize Peterson’s claims about consciousness traveling up and down the micro and macro levels is nonsense, but so are the accusations of transphobia towards Peterson and Dawkins. Myers never really bothers to explain how they’re transphobic. At least not in this video. I think Myers should maybe spend more time investigating his own biases and irrationalism than those of Peterson if he has such obvious blind spots.

I thought Peterson’s transphobic comments have been so thoroughly covered elsewhere that I didn’t have to discuss them, and could focus on where he intrudes stupidly on my area of expertise, biology. I guess I was wrong. Do I need to make my next video about that? I’d rather not, because Peterson is such a twit.

Of course, there are still swarms of anti-SJW clowns out there.

I am not going to talk much about Peterson, but here is my problem. PZ Myers is supposed to be a scientist and yet he let’s social justice which has nothing to do with Science leak in.

I help a Transgender person overseas and help feed him and fix his bike, so this isn’t about hate or anything, but pronouns and having many sexes is against the Scientific data.
It’s more like a problem with the mind itself and social justice should not be mixed with Science.

This is why I am upset, because if you are a Scientist, you should have NOTHING TO DO WITH STUFF THAT”S NOT SCIENCE AT ALL, it’s more pseudoscience than actual real science.

Disappointed in you PZ, I thought you would be better than that.

This is really shameful and I think that’s worse than whatever Peterson is going on about.

What Scientific data is against pronouns and having many sexes? I suspect he couldn’t name anything.

I’m also unsurprised that there are people who think social justice should not be mixed with Science, but then have no problem at all with the irrational, unjust garbage that Peterson freely mixes in to his science-free babbling.

I guess I’m going to have to make more spider videos to flush away these clowns and get my traffic down where it’s supposed to be.

How long until we get to Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Someone asked Elon Musk when we’d be landing people on Mars.

His answer: 2029. In seven years.

I’d like to know when everyone finally realizes that Musk is completely out of touch with reality. The current big project his hired engineers are working on is the Starship (such hubris…) heavy lifter — they’re making bigger and bigger rockets, and that is supposed to take off this year. But that isn’t even touching the real problem of getting people to Mars. It’s a 7-9 month one-way trip! 21 months if you plan to bring them back home…not that I’m at all confident that Musk would care about that, he’s not going, after all. He’s nowhere near working out the problems of sustained life support in an incredibly hostile environment, where the crew would be completely isolated from any chance of aid, and where they’ll be soaking in radiation. No one is going to be ready in seven years. The tech won’t be here.

I’ll remind you that we got to the Moon six times, with astronauts hopping around for a few days each time, and that was it. We haven’t gone back. It’s doable, I could imagine people could make a few more trips in the 2030s to the Moon, but that’s trivial in comparison to going to Mars.

I’ll also remind you of the history of Musk’s grand projects. He was going to solve traffic with tunnels, remember.

It turned out to be a pitiful short, but expensive, tube that a few cars at a time could drive through. When Musk promises, expect something far short of the dream.

He might be vaguely aware of that.

That first comment is a lie. He doesn’t love humanity — maybe he has a few idealistic fantasies about his vague vision of “humanity”, but he’s an out of touch billionaire who is totally isolated from the herd. That’s why he hates traffic and mass transit, he wants to live in a bubble.

That last bit though, that oh-look-a-squirrel moment, is perfect. Yeah, I believe he’s capable of marketing pez dispensers.

Saying the quiet part out loud

This is sickening. Some of the Gender Critical assholes think they’ve achieved critical mass to begin their program of eradicating transgender people.

Helen Joyce says every person who is transgender is damaged and is a huge problem to a sane world and we’re going to have to accommodate them for 50,60,70 years, and their solution is reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. This is some kind of Nazi shit. But she’s not being heartless, oh no! It’s for the greater good! You gotta dehumanize your target (they’re damaged), present them as a “problem”, suggest the preliminary step is to prevent them from proliferating, and then the ground will be prepared for the final solution.

I can recognize eliminationist rhetoric when I see it.

Textbook Giveaway #3!

I’ve told you the way this works a few times now. Just leave a comment telling me which book you want and why, and I’ll choose someone to receive a free book. These are generally not easy to read popular books — these are reference texts, kind of on the dense and heavy side, but full of information.
Your choices this time are:
Fundamentals of Human Physiology, by Stuart Ira Fox. Yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’ve taught A&P. I hope I never have to again, so I can bear to part with this one. I’ve still got several others.
An Introduction to Biological Evolution, by Kenneth Kardong. This is a fairly slender paperbound text, a little on the light side for what I want when teaching evolution. It’s not bad, though.
Neuroscience, by Purves and others. Also pretty good, if not the massive magisterial monster text of Kandel. This one I think is already earmarked for someone who asked for a neuro text in Giveaway #2. (Trust me, you don’t want Kandel unless you need to press a witch to death.)
There are many more on my shelves. If you don’t get it this time, check again next month for a different selection.

This is as announced on my Patreon page, but you don’t need to sign up to win a book.

I f’in hate evolutionary psychology

Sorry, I saw this evo psych study and had to vent.

Here’s the protocol: subjects were primed with powerpoint slides of modern economic devastation with an explicit slide with text saying the 21st century is a “harsh and unpredictable world”. The controls, near as I can tell, saw the same slides without the text. Then they flashed a slide of topless women’s torsos with breasts of varying shapes and sizes, and asked the subjects to rate the women.

Let me just say that if you’re doing any kind of psych study that ends with a request to rate women’s breasts, you’re doing something wrong. I can’t even begin to unpack all the assumptions you’ve pre-loaded into the work.

And then the results are underwhelming: a bunch of bar graphs that show very little variation in the responses, with a few showing statistically significant but totally unimpressive differences. Overall, men rated women with larger breasts as more attractive, fertile, healthier, reproductively successful, and likely to befriend. The n was 144, all drawn from college students at a midwestern American university, so of course we can infer universal principles of human evolution from it.

Here’s the kind of graph you can make as an evo psych goofball.

Dazzling information. If you hate yourself as much as I do, you can read the paper, too. It’s awful. So many statistics to strain to extract something significant from noisy data already compromised by cultural indoctrination.