Brain permanently scarred, but pennies saved

The sale of my mother’s house is imminent — closing is on 3 January. I have spent my afternoons since last week trying to cancel utilities and various services to the house, and it hasn’t been easy. I’ve sat on hold on the phone for an awful lot of time, because, as it turns out, most of these services are reluctant to lose a paying customer, even if she is dead. Much of what I’ve had to do is call, wait for an answer, get told an email address to send a death certificate and letters testamentary, and then wait for a verification phone call. And then discover that the electric company had misspelled her name, which was not an obstacle when billing her, but becomes a problem when telling them to stop billing her.

But finally, it’s all done! The house goes dead on Friday, only to come back to life with new owners.

Next step is to go through a long list of annuities and get them cashed out. Also, a minor thing, I have 21 silver dollars that were in her bank deposit box, I’ll have to get those appraised. I checked out a few of them on the web, and they were selling for somewhere between $10 and $50 each, but I have to wring every penny I can out of everything before I’m done.

On Meta, nobody knows you don’t have a personality

It’s hard to believe they can actually do this, but Meta plans to make the Internet objectively worse.

Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta’s AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT.

“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.

Meta has already started dumping this crap online, allowing their bots to spawn on Facebook and Instagram. Isn’t Facebook already bad enough? Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been good enough yet to explain why we need to give every yahoo who uses their services the ability to create more fake personas.

The AI characters aren’t a new feature. Meta has long invested in AI and has spent the past year stuffing all kinds of generative AI tech into its existing products. That included the release of its AI Studio in the summer, which quickly became a hotbed of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.

Oh. You need a fake boyfriend or girlfriend? Zuckerberg prefers mindless bots to real human beings, I guess.

Another sign of the coming dark ages

I was running some simple errands this morning — I need a short bit of ethernet cat8 cable, something I figured I could pick up locally for $5-$10. I went downtown to what used to be the Radio Shack, that was my usual convenient place to get necessary bits of cheap tech. It was gone! The store had been cleared out and all the merchandise replaced with…Jesus crap. Well, I sure wasn’t going to get my printer connected with a prayer and some slogan praising Jesus silkscreened on it.

This is getting worrisome. A lot of the businesses around town have been gradually replaced with pious garbage that I will not shop at. This one, no, they’ll never get my business. Especially since the hours are 4-8pm on weekdays, longer on Saturdays, and of course never on Sundays. That doesn’t sound like a particularly good business plan to me, but what would I know? I’m not their market.

Anyway, if you’re in need some non-essential fluff and want to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up, the place is called Kings Media & Merch. They sell nothing at all useful, and only at inconvenient hours.

The eugenicists have gotten sneaky

Lots of biology teachers show their students this map in their classes. I’m one of them. The US has an ugly history of involuntary sterilization, using the excuse of eugenics. Personally, I like to point out that our progressive state of Minnesota sterilized over a thousand unwilling people, all in the name of helping society.

But that’s from 1935! We don’t do that anymore, right?

The state of California had to pass a law to compensate all the women they have sterilized in the last decade. Now they’re squirming to avoid paying out.

Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody.

But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.

How do you sterilize 800 people against their will by accident? This would be grounds for massive malpractice suits, except that it happened in prisons.

In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.” They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.

The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.

So a woman gives birth, and the prison doctor goes back in and scrapes out her endometrium? That’s unjustified and should be treated as criminal behavior.

Don’t worry. Some of the doctors have a perfectly good excuse — they were doing these women a favor.

The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,” he said in 2013.

“Heinrich”? Really? Did he have to have such a German name? Regardless of nationality, doctors should never carry out a medical procedure without informed consent, that the patient does not want, because they think they know what’s best.

Only fools believe in genetic determinism

It is so delicious that even before Trump is signed into office, MAGA is ripped with an internal war.

Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.

On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.

The battle is over immigration, between those who want perfect purity and every non-white expelled from the country, and those who want to allow a few brown people to stay to work in their factories and tech industries. It’s really that simple — are you so racist you don’t want to even see a brown person, or are you so racist you want to exploit their labor? Unfortunately they’re still in total agreement on the racism part.

One of the problems is that the leaders of these two factions, Trump and Musk, are ignorant buffoons with fallacious ideas about genetics.

Among the many charming aspects of their partnership is a fondness for some highly unsavoury views on genetics. Trump is an enthusiastic advocate of “racehorse theory”, which he shares with white supremacists; the belief that he is personally superior and that this is rooted in his “good genes”. It’s a vapid idea, but it directly informs his toxic views on immigration, where he argues the country needs to be shielded from the “bad genes” of outsiders.

Meanwhile, Musk has his own equally baffling take on genetics, infused with a characteristic messiah complex. Like some of his fellow tech moguls, he is determined to “save humanity” by producing as many offspring as possible, convinced that our future depends on it. This might all be laughable were it not for the fact that Trump and Musk now wield more power than they ever have before. The shared thread running through their rhetoric is genetic determinism: the idea that who you are, and what you can achieve, is all down to your DNA. Nothing else matters.

Do I need to explain why these ideas are bogus? I’m tired. I’ll let Jonathan Roberts do it for me.

In debates surrounding genetics and social policy, it is easy for the language of genetic determinism to lure you into an ill-advised “nature v nurture” debate. You know this debate: maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s the pervasive conditions of social inequality? But this debate misses the bigger picture entirely: it should not be seen as a binary choice. The truth is, humans are born with genes that require a good environment to thrive. It’s not either/or, but a complex interaction between the two that determines who someone becomes. We have a nature that requires nurture. Good science accounts for this complexity, rather than reducing it to a simplistic binary.

No matter how the “civil war” is resolved, we’re still screwed because all of these people are stupid assholes.

Jimmy Carter has died

Gone at age 100, a life well lived. My very first presidential election was in 1976, and of course I voted for Carter — it was actually an election that gave me a misleading optimism in future presidential elections that was repeatedly dashed.

He wasn’t the greatest, most successful president, but he was a damned good human being. I’d vote for any decent person who’d run against these venal, corrupt jerks who have been running over the last few decades.

I reaffirm my support for the Freedom From Religion Foundation

Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.

Their latest post on their website declares Freedom From Religion Foundation supports LGBTQIA-plus rights. They admit that they erred in permitting someone (Coyne, of course) to publish an article in their newsletter that was ignorantly prejudicial against transgender individuals.

However, advocacy is rarely perfect, and progress is not always linear. Recently, we published a guest blog post as part of an effort to provide a forum for various voices within the framework of our mission. Although we included a disclaimer that the viewpoints expressed within the post were not necessarily reflective of the organization, it has wrongfully been perceived as such.
Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, we recognize mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth. Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.
Moving forward, we are reviewing our content guidelines and internal processes to ensure our public messaging consistently reflects our values. We are committed to learning from this experience.
We stand firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community and their allies in advocating for equality, dignity and the freedom to live without fear of religiously motivated discrimination. Our mission to keep religion out of government is inextricably linked to preserving and advancing these fundamental rights.
Together, we will continue to champion a society where all people — no matter their sexual orientation, gender identity, beliefs or nonbeliefs — are treated equally under the law.

That article is currently flooded with comments criticizing the FFRF — many of them seem to be coming from the horde of haters at Coyne’s blog. The gist of many of their comments seems to be that the FFRF is the transphobic one, which is ludicrous and little more than a childish playground taunt. I think we can ignore that nonsense.

Some of them are claiming that Coyne’s claim that sex is totally binary is scientific, and that it is unscientific to argue for a more complex continuum of traits. This is also nonsense. Don’t argue with me, though, take it up with the Society for the Study of Evolution’s position on transgender identity from back in 2018.

We, the Council of the Society for the Study of Evolution, strongly oppose attempts by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to claim that there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait (male/female) determined by genitalia at birth. Variation in biological sex and in gendered expression has been well documented in many species, including humans, through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as “male” and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum.* Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits. Beyond the false claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex or gender, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genitalia one is born with do not define one’s identity. Diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans. As a Society, we welcome this diversity and commit to serving and protecting members regardless of their biological sex, gender identity or expression, or sexual orientation.

*Here we are speaking of the multi-dimensional aspects that underlie male-ness and female-ness, including hormones, physiology, morphology, development, and genetic aspects. We acknowledge that many of these aspects are bimodal. Furthermore, some of these aspects are discrete categories (e.g., XX/XY, SRY presence/absence, gamete size, sperm production vs egg production, presence/absence of certain genitalia), but these categories don’t always align within individuals, are not always binary, and should be irrelevant to the determination of a person’s legal rights and freedoms.

There’s a second letter there, too.

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the attempt by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to claim that there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait (male/female) determined by genitalia at birth.

Variation in biological sex and in gendered expression has been well documented in many species, including humans, through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as “male” and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum. Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits. Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex or gender, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genitalia one is born with do not define one’s identity.

Diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans. Our three scientific societies represent over 3000 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. If you wish to speak to one of our experts or receive peer-reviewed papers that explain why there is a continuum of sexual expression, please contact us at president@evolutionsociety.org.

Sincerely,

Dr. Hopi Hoekstra
President, Society for the Study of Evolution
Professor, Harvard University

Dr. Sharon Strauss
President, American Society of Naturalists
Professor, University of California, Davis

Dr. Susana Magallón
President, Society of Systematic Biologists
Professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Hmmm. Hoekstra has published with Coyne in the past, so maybe that will have some weight with him.

I look forward to Coyne’s resignation from the SSE, as well. Or maybe he’s waiting and hoping for a purge of all those woke scientists from the Society? He might get his wish, given the ascendancy of the ideology he favors in our government.

Breaking news: Richard Dawkins has also resigned from the FFRF! And there was much rejoicing!

Why should I trust an organization that honors the worst among us?

Actually, in my experience the decay is spread everywhere

A commenter made me aware of a conflict I’d completely missed. The FFRF, an organization I’ve always appreciated, published an article by Jerry Coyne. It was the usual anti-trans, anti-scientific, hateful heap of bogosity; the FFRF retracted it, too late; Coyne was chagrined by the retraction; and I just missed it all. Here’s a good summary.

If you believe gender-related issues are tangential to atheism, I assure you that religious conservatives believe the topic is perfectly intertwined with their faith. Just as they used religion to fight marriage equality and abortion rights, they’re using the Book of Genesis in defense of their anti-trans beliefs. If you don’t want religion dictating our laws, and you believe LGBTQ people deserve civil rights, then you understand why these are issues atheist activists ought to care about.

And yet some prominent figures in our loose movement have spent years arguing the opposite, allowing white evangelicals to control the debate on LGBTQ rights—and often taking their side. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, is another one of those atheists who has spent years spreading anti-trans rhetoric on his website. His blog is now mostly a cesspool of blockquotes from his favorite conservative writers. A deep dive through his “sex and gender” posts will rid you of any respect you may have had for him. (Coyne gave a similar anti-trans talk at the Center For Inquiry’s CSICon in October. Dr. Steven Novella, who spoke at the same event, rebutted it here.)

Accurate. That’s one of my complaints about the atheist movement. Coyne is still a member of FFRF’s honorary board; Richard Dawkins is still a big name in the atheist community; his handpicked agent, Robyn Blumner, still runs CSI. The rot isn’t just a scattered subset of the community, it’s rooted deep in the leadership, and it’s not going anywhere soon. It makes me wary of wading into even the shallow end of the pool.

Do I want to hang out with atheists any more?

I’m tempted. American Atheists national convention is being held in Minneapolis on April 17-20 in 2025. Hey, that’s just down the road! It would be easy for me to attend!

I used to enjoy these events, and liked being part of the community. Unfortunately, I am actively hated by a subset — I still get hate mail from atheists — and I don’t know who the speakers at this event will be yet, so I feel some hesitation. Maybe I can just show up, sit quietly in the back, and see how it goes. Maybe if some of the sensible atheists from the upper Midwest show up I’ll be comfortable with the event.

I like this Neil deGrasse Tyson fellow

Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.

I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.

Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.

Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.

By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.

I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.

That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big. Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.

Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.

The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.

It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.

They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.

Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.