Consult your local school board and city council for all your medical decisions

Getting surgery is a lot like requesting a zoning change, you know.

Once again, Oz has opened his mouth and willingly given Fetterman a delightful bon mot for his campaign.

A woman can’t possibly decide to get an abortion on her own! She must have a doctor who decides for her, and a small troop civil servants and bureaucrats crowded into the clinic to vote on the procedure. The authorities must be involved in every step of a pregnancy!

Play the game, you lose; don’t play the game, you lose

You’ve all heard of this Christian Nationalism nonsense, right? It’s all the rage with old people and conservative freaks and Facebook readers.

So what is Christian nationalism? It’s an ideology that says Christianity is the foundation of the United States and that government should protect that foundation. Political scientist Ryan Burge has found that the term “Christian nationalism” was mentioned in more tweets in July 2022 than in all of 2021.

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news first: it’s declining a little bit!

We did find that agreement grew slightly from 2007 to 2017 from 27 percent to 29 percent, as other scholars have found as well. But since then, the proportion of Americans who affirm this explicit Christian nationalist statement has mostly declined to somewhere around 19 percent, a statistically significant drop.

When a fifth of the country thinks we’re a Christian nation, in defiance of the principles we were founded on, that’s still a problem…but they’ll be outvoted, right? Unfortunately, here’s the bad news: the people most prone to this fallacy are more likely to vote, and there are all these wealthy special interest groups propping up the idea.

But while fewer Americans say they agree with a core Christian nationalist tenet, its influence on our political life may nevertheless be expanding. The U.S. Census reports older Americans like those ages 65 to 74 vote at rates about 25 percent higher than Americans ages 18 to 24. Our research finds older Americans are also most likely to embrace Christian nationalism. And powerful people and lobbying groups like the Family Research Council, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) are working to promote Christian nationalist policy goals in government, the courts, and at the polls.

Recent experimental research shows when Christian Americans are told their numbers are declining, they respond with a greater commitment to Christian nationalism and Trump support. In other words, learning that they are or may soon be a minority pushes them toward extremist beliefs.

So get out there and vote! That last bit is concerning, though, because if these jerks lose elections, they’ll leap deeper into extremism, and they won’t mind follow criminal strategies to win in spite of losing. They’re already gearing up to compromise elections.

The Republican National Committee and its allies say they have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to monitor voting and lodge complaints about next month’s midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, party officials have boasted about swelling the ranks of poll watchers to six times the total from 2020. In Michigan, a right-wing group announced it had launched “Operation Overwatch” to hunt down election-related malfeasance, issuing a press release that repeated the warning “We are watching” 10 times.

Supporters of former president Donald Trump who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen have summoned a swarm of poll watchers and workers in battleground states to spot potential fraud this year. It is a call to action that could subject voting results around the country to an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt.

“We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, OK?” one-time Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said on a recent episode of his podcast. “We don’t care if you don’t like it. We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.”

Bannon? Isn’t he in jail yet? You know he doesn’t care about the law, or ethics, or common decency. He’s going to lie and cheat to get his way, and then…uh-oh.

Election administrators say they welcome more participation from the public but worry that improperly trained observers could try to enforce rules that they are misinterpreting. Even a handful of bad actors, they note, can inject chaos into the voting system and sow distrust.

“The problems don’t need to be in a thousand polling places,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C. “If there’s a violent incident in one polling place, that’s enough, because the election deniers have been pouring gasoline all over the country, and it just takes one match.”

I am dreading 8 November, when the midterm elections take place. I won’t be watching the returns, because I sense a national crisis coming our way.

If the Republicans come back and win, and retake any portion of the government, we face years of stalemates and continued losses, and a strengthening of the loony faction. If the Republicans lose, there is going to be such a shriek of protest and armed assholes rampaging and years of legal wrangling over nothing.

We sane Americans can’t win.

One shining ray of light in the new UK government

There’s one less pompous supercilious twit in the cabinet — in a snit, Jacob Rees-Mogg has quit before he could be fired.

The move comes despite Mr Rees-Mogg suggesting he would be ‘open’ to a job in Mr Sunak’s cabinet. In u-turn on previous criticism of the new PM, he told the Telegraph today that he no longer considered Mr Sunak “a socialist.” He added that the Conservative party should unite around the new leader.

But these overtures have not been enough and Mr Rees-Mogg – who was a close ally of both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – has left the government today.

He did make me laugh with his exit. Rishi Sunak, a man with hundreds of millions of pounds, a socialist?

From Dickens to Wodehouse to the Goons to Monty Python, Britain has always been a source of great comedy. Somebody needs to inform the people that you’re not supposed to elect the buffoons to high office, though.

I get comments

Somebody who calls himself Truth Matters, who has been telling me I’m chicken for refusing to debate criminal creep Kent Hovind, now is trying the pity approach.

dude I feel sorry for you, you are messing with the wrong God. A square inch on your skin is more complex than every building throughout all history and everything we have ever created including the internet combined. The Bible mentions hydrothermal vents thousands of years ago and you know that the didn’t have submarines back then. You still have some time left I suggest you pray to Jesus and ask Him to save you or else you are going to be judged (and nobody paid for your sins so guess who is going to pay for your)

Expressing my contempt for Kent Hovind is not messing with the wrong God. I might suggest that he stop worshipping a certain false god, though.

The complexity argument is not an argument for a deity — it’s an argument that supports my claim that biology is a product of a long trial-and-error process over millions of years, which would produce the details we observe. Claiming it was all made by divine fiat is an unconvincing copout.

Not in the Bible

The Bible does not mention hydrothermal vents. I think he’s referring to the fountains of the deep that spurted huge volumes of water to flood the Earth. Moses didn’t see those, and if they were the source of the flood waters, Noah would have been cooked and poisoned.

The concept that Christians can sin because a religious fanatic was murdered 2000 years ago is one of the most perniciously evil ideas Christianity ever invented. It’s the source of the arrogance this kind of person exhibits — and it’s ironic that his messiah preached humility.

Nope. I’m not going to debate that wretched cretin, Hovind.

Things you never knew about water

I think I poisoned my brain on Sunday reading these claims about different phases of water. Or, at least, I poisoned my Google algorithms because now this crap keeps gurgling up.

Here’s one that’s so over-the-top it was almost amusing, except that it’s a commercial site using ludicrous claims about biology to sell miracle water.

Dr. Gerald Pollack is a biomedical engineering research scientist from the University of Washington that discovered a new state of water beyond liquid, solid and vapor. H3O2, sometimes called gel water, structured water or exclusion zone water (EZ water), is in between a solid and a liquid. An extra hydrogen molecule and an extra oxygen molecule make it silkier than H2O. This matters because that 70 – 90% you’ve heard about in your body is actually H3O2. That’s why water doesn’t come gushing out of you like a hose if you get a cut. Your cells are full of the thicker, H3O2.

Oooh, silkier. How do they measure that? Also cool that they think I’d turn into a firehose if I only contained normal water.

Water in nature is naturally structured even though you can’t see any form in it. At a molecular level, under a microscope water has shapes that are organized in geometric patterns. Spring water, waterfalls and glaciers are structured. And the water in fruits and vegetables is naturally structured. What Dr. Gerald Pollack has revealed to us is that if we want to get our bodies into alignment with nature and health, we need to be thinking about hydration with structured water.

Yes. Put water under a microscope and you’ll be able to see the geometric patterns. I guess it’s supposed to look like this:

If your water looks nothing like that, you can buy a tube full of quartz crystals that will structure your tap water for the low, low, low price of only $1799.

Man, this is an amazing racket.

Is this really the best way to illustrate world population?

This chart is very pretty and colorful, but all it’s really doing is plotting a single variable, population size, against the arbitrary names of political subunits. It’s hard to read and difficult to extract any information about relationships from it. I think the creators need to go back and re-read (or read for the first time?) Edward Tufte.

This is what you get when someone is told to make some visual candy that really pops, rather than to transform information into a visual medium. My eyes are simultaneously stimulated and offended.

One way to be Less Wrong is to avoid faulty premises

While I was digging into the question of who this Gilbert Ling character was, I ran into lots of sources that didn’t make the final cut. Unfortunately, most of those sources were from fringe or unsavory places — I did check my collection of textbooks, too, and nowhere does he get any mention. So it’s down into the sewers after all! Like this article on Less Wrong.

The Association-Induction hypothesis formulated by Gilbert Ling is an alternate view of cell function, which suggests a distinct functional role of energy within the cell. I won’t review it in detail here, but you can find an easy to understand and comprehensive introduction to this hypothesis in the book “Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life” by Gerald H. Pollack. This idea has a long history with considerable experimental evidence, which is too extensive to review in this article.

No, it has a 70 year history all centered on the long-winded writings of a single crackpot. There is no experimental evidence for any of it other than the willful distortions of one Gilbert Ling. Pollack is utterly batty, and not a credible source.

Worse still, this guy is using Ling’s theories as a starting point for discussing how we can use this information to potentially increase IQ.

So this suggests a ‘systems biology’ approach to cognitive enhancement. It’s necessary to consider how metabolism is regulated, and what substrates it requires. To raise intelligence in a safe and effective way, all of these substrates must have increased availability to the neuron, in appropriate ratios.

I am always leery of drawing analogies between brains and computers but this approach to cognitive enhancement is very loosely analogous to over-clocking a CPU. Over-clocking requires raising both the clock rate, and the energy availability (voltage). In the case of the brain, the effective ‘clock rate’ is controlled by hormones (primarily triiodothyronine aka T3), and energy availability is provided by glucose and other nutrients.

Oh god. Nerds discussing overly simplistic analogies between brains and computers always makes me leery, too, so just stop already. Especially when your ‘over-clocking’ idea is built on a bogus model of cellular metabolism that has been known to be wrong for the entirety of its “long history”.

I know I started this by dissing the Less Wrong forum, but I will say that, to their credit, most of the commenters were tearing that article apart.