There are no living pterosaurs, and “ropen” is a stupid fantasy

I was recently getting dunned by kooks insisting that a live pterosaur had been found. I’d love to see a pterosaur, but I’m afraid they’ve been extinct for over 65 million years; I’d also like to have a conversation with my great-great grandfather, John Page Hurt of Saylersville, Kentucky (I’m pretty sure he fought in the Civil War…on the wrong side), but I think we can be realistic about the likelihood of that happening. I took a look at the pterosaur information anyway, though, and discovered something interesting. There isn’t any evidence. There’s just one fanatic.

Here’s the kind of evidence they present. You’d expect a blurry photo of some flying creature, right? Or maybe claw marks, or scattered fewmets…none of which would be particularly persuasive. But no — we don’t even get that much. We get photos like this:

Professor Peter Beach tells Whitcomb how the bright light quickly flew up from the tree

Professor Peter Beach tells Whitcomb how the bright light quickly flew up from the tree

That’s it. Not a picture of the creature, but a picture of a guy pointing to a place where he claims to have seen a glowing light. Or sometimes we get this:

wonder-al-Daniel-Boone-Nat-Forest-KY-c868b4_z-300x200

A generic picture of some trees in Kentucky, where some guy said he saw a pterosaur. Twice, no less.

These stories are terrible and pointless. There is no evidence here.

And then something else emerges — all the sources sound dreadfully familiar. Here’s a list of some of the sites I found, and the authors’ names where available.

Same stories, same pedantic, boring style, same lack of understanding of what constitutes evidence. It turns out that they’re all by the same guy, Jonathan Whitcomb, who’s been busily dropping turds all over the internet to make it look like there is an active community of researchers tracking down the wily pterosaur. There isn’t. And he confesses to rampant sock puppetry!

If you had Googled something like “live pterosaur” in 2005, the first page may have included a site that included the words “stupid,” “dinosaur,” and “lies” in the URL. Yes, it was libel, and that site is probably still out there; but try searching on “live pterosaur” today and you won’t see that libelous site listed on the first three pages of Google. You will find that most of the pages are positive about the possibility of modern living pterosaurs. The few that are negative are at least not libelous.

My purpose in using the pen name “Norman Huntington” differed from that of Alice Sheldon, but is was equally valid. I got around potential bias in readers by using that name instead of my own. The difference is this: I was trying to attract attention to the basic idea of modern pterosaurs, not to my own writing ability. (In fact I altered my writing style for those blog posts using “Huntington.”)

But it’s OK that he’s playing these circular SEO games, because he’s not trying to peddle his writing commercially — it’s just so gosh-darn important that everyone know about these pathetic pterosaur stories, so he’s just got to play these sneaky games to avoid criticism and get his essential story told.

There’s another motive, too: he’s a creationist who thinks finding a ptersoaur would defeat evolution, and he’s using his book and web pages to promote the Mormon religion.

Consider Helaman 5:50, regarding the conversion of many Lamanites, after the miracle in the prison with the brother-missionaries Lehi and Nephi. Lamanites who did not see the miraculous fire believed the words of the eyewitnesses who did see it: “And it came to pass that they did go forth, and did minister unto the people, declaring throughout all the regions round about all the things which they had heard and seen, insomuch that the more part of the Lamanites were convinced of them, because of the greatness of the evidences which they had received.” Latter-day saints rejoice for those who listen to the spiritual testimonies of those who had received confirmation of the truth by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as missionaries may appear, on the surface, to differ from those they teach, eyewitnesses of strange flying creatures are from various countries and cultures, appearing to differ from those who have been raised in Western countries in which universal-extinction ideas are taken for granted for dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

Greatness of the evidences, indeed.

There’s also another place where you can find the story of the living pterosaur: the wikipedia article on “ropen”. It’s pure mush regurgitated from Whitcomb’s pages; the only sources cited are from Whitcomb, with the exception of mentioning two paranormal reality TV shows, “Destination Truth” (on SyFy) and “Monster Quest” (on the History channel). It’s a completely credulous and pro-bullshit page, and is a perfect example of why I don’t let my students ever cite Wikipedia. It’s also got Whitcomb’s fingerprints all over it — he was formerly an editor going by the name “jondw”, although he seems to be an ex-editor now. The page that contributes to his PR efforts for the totally fictitious creature “ropen” still stands, though.

Chris Rufo figured out how to erase part of his history

If nothing else, this is an accomplishment. I know Chris Rufo as a shill for the Discovery Institute — that anti-science, anti-evolution think-tank running on the fumes of rich conservatives’ money, pumping out nonsense about Intelligent Design creationism and fronted by pompous, but ignorant, pseudo-philosophers. If I had that in my background, I’d be deeply ashamed and would want to bury it as deeply as possible. I’d change my name, move to a new city, deny knowing all my old friends, etc. I’d dread someone uncovering my embarrassing past, forcing me to change my name and move again. I’d desperately desire a magic eraser to blot out that past shame.

Chris Rufo has done it! Here’s a prominent article about Chris Rufo that doesn’t even mention the Discovery Institute or creationism! How did he do it?

It is incredibly easy. All you have to do is associate with something even more repulsively stupid than creationism, and Rufo has managed to slather himself with filth so grossly disgusting that there’s no point in even mentioning his relatively minor dabblings in ignorance. He’s buddying up with a site called Aporia.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

Now he’s all tangled up with Bo Winegard.

Winegard, a psychologist, was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted protests and coverage in student media.

In that speech an audience member reportedly said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.

Winegard has continued to write in this vein on Aporia up to the present. In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin by noting that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).”

As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn – a white nationalist, according to the SPLC – and the late Arthur Jensen, whom the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism”.

Also, Noah Carl!

Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has also been the subject of previous academic controversy.

Carl is a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that appointed him discovered that alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism.

One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. It was for decades funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, and the journal has been described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.

Now mix in Emil Kirkegaard.

Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.

These are the writers and pseudo-scientists Rufo recommends to others.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All of these ideas have been debunked over and over again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have been historically used to justify terrible acts including genocide.”

Other recent articles on Aporia include Winegard’s “The case for race realism”, which reasserts that “underlying race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired professor of finance, which argues for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.

Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.

Aporia is contemptible racist garbage, and Rufo is promoting it. Rufo is a nobody, a hack with no serious background in science (or anything intellectual at all, for that matter) so sure, creationism, racism, they’re both popular ideas among uneducated ideologues, so he’ll push them — he hasn’t get the education to understand how terrible they are.

On Rufo’s recommending the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate on biology or evolution or genetics that’s really been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding: “Pointing people towards that is pointing them toward unambiguous white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.

“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions happening in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”

Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it’s not surprising to find that a person who is playing footsie with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard”.

By linking to Aporia and appearing on its podcast, she said: “Rufo is helping to bring back this despicable material and mainstreaming it.”

Keep in mind that Rufo has been elevated to high advisory positions in the Florida government, and is making decisions about the universities in that state. Nothing in his background has prepared him to make competent decisions on much of any of the institutions he now has his thumb on.

Oh, he does have one qualification that doesn’t bother me at all but might alienate him from his fans. He has a Masters Degree…in Liberal Arts. Work on erasing that from your CV, guy.

Another good article on sociogenomics

Do you want to know how sociogenomics works? Here you go.

If this is “the science,” the science is weird. We’re used to thinking of science as incrementally seeking causal explanations for natural phenomena by testing a series of hypotheses. Just as important, good science tries as hard as it can to disprove the working hypotheses.

Sociogenomics has no experiments, no null hypotheses to accept or reject, no deductions from the data to general principles. Nor is it a historical science, like geology or evolutionary biology, that draws on a long-running record for evidence.

Sociogenomics is inductive rather than deductive. Data is collected first, without a prior hypothesis, from longitudinal studies like the Framingham Heart Study, twin studies, and other sources of information—such as direct-to-consumer DNA companies like 23andMe that collect biographical and biometric as well as genetic data on all their clients.

Algorithms then chew up the data and spit out correlations between the trait of interest and tiny variations in the DNA, called SNPs (for single-­nucleotide polymorphisms). Finally, sociogenomicists do the thing most scientists do at the outset: they draw inferences and make predictions, primarily about an individual’s future behavior.

Sociogenomics is not concerned with causation in the sense that most of us think of it, but with correlation. The DNA data often comes in the form of genome-wide association studies (GWASs), a means of comparing genomes and linking variations of SNPs. Sociogenomics algorithms ask: are there patterns of SNPs that correlate with a trait, be it high intelligence or homosexuality or a love of gambling?

Yes—almost always. The number of possible combinations of SNPs is so large that finding associations with any given trait is practically inevitable.

I’m not just being mean when I say it’s garbage science. “Chewing up data and spitting out correlations,” especially when correlations are ubiquitous, is not a productive approach to much of anything.

Where will it take us? That’s easy to see.

Advocates of sociogenomics envision a prospect that not everyone will find entirely benevolent: health “report cards,” based on your genome and handed out at birth, that predict your risk of various diseases and propensity for different behaviors. In the new social sciences, sociologists will examine the genetic component of educational attainment and wealth, while economists will envision genetic “risk scores” for spending, saving, and investment behavior.

Without strong regulation, these scores could be used in school and job applications and in calculating health insurance premiums. Your genome is the ultimate preexisting condition.

There’s precedent. The article mentions how Simon Binet invented the IQ test as a tool to identify and help students who were lagging in school…and then within decades discovered “that people were being sterilized for scoring too low”. I know that if I’d been assigned a genetic “risk score” with my family history, I and my brothers and sisters would have been doing manual labor for our short lives.

Also, I still want to know how this pseudonymous eugenics research program with it’s 15 new hires of “young, often charismatic scientists” is getting funded. Following the money would be a good idea here.

What are the responsibilities of geneticists?

Still works. Just replace “philosophy” with “genetics”

Janet Stemwedel has published an essay in Scientific American. It’s good. You should go read it. It’s also on a subject that I, someone who teaches genetics to college students, worry about. All you have to do is look at racists on the internet, or any of those gomers of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, and you’ll find them chattering away about their version of genetics, citing genetics papers they’ve read or glanced at, but barely understand, and drawing sweeping, and unlikely, conclusions from, for instance, GWAS studies. We’re all so interested in what we can do that we aren’t cautious enough about saying what we can’t do, and what are the invalid interpretations that can trap people searching for genetic certainty in their genomes.

She has some strong suggestions.

For one thing, they [scientists] must be frank and vocal about the weakness of studies that purport to find correlations between race and differences in traits like intelligence or propensity violence. This includes methodological weaknesses like treating IQ as a good proxy for intelligence, or treating “race” as something with clear genetic grounding. A finding that particular genes or sets of genes are associated with a complex behavior does not demonstrate a causal relation or rule out the importance of environmental factors—and indeed, the assumption that genes and environment vary independently is usually false. An average difference in a trait associated with a set of genes between two populations does not rule out that the individual variations within those populations may be greater than the average difference between populations. All of which is to say it’s hard to draw conclusions that are strong, clear and well-supported from much of this work. To the extent that race science is just bad science, scientists have a duty to call it out, rather than letting it stand unchallenged.

I’ve been thinking that I ought to incorporate one of Richard Lewontin’s books into my genetics class — something like It Ain’t Necessarily So : The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, maybe. The catch is that in a traditional genetics course, we have an obligation to teach the core concepts, and taking time to teach about how genetics is misused is sometimes premature.

For another thing, scientists must do some soul-searching about why they are so motivated to look for evidence that traits like intelligence or propensity to violence are written in our genes, or that they would be different for people in different racial groups. Of all the bits of truth they could discover about our complex world, why this focus? Could it be that scientists are following their preexisting hunches, biases that come from being humans living in a culture built around those biases—or that funders are seeking scientific validation for their biases? Any scientist who dismisses this possibility has forgotten that objectivity requires the communal project of scrutinizing scientific conclusions to find how they might be mistaken.

I’ve got a few awful books on my bookshelf, often written by evolutionary psychologists, that make me wonder about the mental state of the authors. They have some grand theory about human behavior that I know can’t possibly be backed up by significant genetics research, but apparently the public wants that nice pat answer to explain why everything is the way it is.

Also, a lot of those kinds of books seem to be written by professors of marketing. Seriously, if you see a book that purports to be about biology, and the author is employed in a business school, don’t waste your time. Which leads into Stemwedel’s next point…

There’s a further question scientists ought to ask themselves when reflecting on why they study the scientific questions they do: What will the knowledge I’m building be good for? How could it be put to use? Do scientists imagine that a finding of genetic differences in intelligence among racial groups would be used to drive more school funding to Black and brown communities, or as a justification to focus school funding on white communities? Or that a finding of genetic differences in propensity for violence among racial groups would be used to do anything but double down on current overpolicing of communities of color?

In the case of James Watson, for example, I think he’s made a career of trying to buttress evidence that he is an intrinsically superior person. They didn’t call him Lucky Jim for nothing — he stumbled into a major discovery, and I wonder if he wonders what might have made him so fortunate. It can’t possibly be that anyone with the right training could have done it, so he finds a refuge in the fact that he’s Scots-Irish. Others know that the status quo has treated them well, so they want to perpetuate what is currently a racist society for the benefit of themselves and their children. Others, I think, are so steeped in a culture of racial bias that they don’t even think about it — black people must be inferior, so let’s search for a rationalization for holding what is an odious belief.

It’s probably a messy mix of all of those things, and more. I’m pretty sure that if genetics has broad fuzzy edges that psychology is probably even worse.

Wanking over the Drake Equation, again

Oh, this is so silly. It’s a paper titled A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy. All it is is an exercise in modeling the hypothetical distribution of hypothetical intelligent life in the galaxy, taking into account the age distribution of stars.

In the field of Astrobiology, the precise location, prevalence and age of potential
extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) have not been explicitly explored. Here, we address these
inquiries using an empirical galactic simulation model to analyze the spatial-temporal variations
and the prevalence of potential ETI within the Galaxy. This model estimates the occurrence of ETI,
providing guidance on where to look for intelligent life in the Search for ETI (SETI) with a set of
criteria, including well-established astrophysical properties of the Milky Way. Further, typically
overlooked factors such as the process of abiogenesis, different evolutionary timescales and
potential self-annihilation are incorporated to explore the growth propensity of ETI. We examine
three major parameters: 1) the likelihood rate of abiogenesis (λA); 2) evolutionary timescales (Tevo);
and 3) probability of self-annihilation of complex life (Pann). We found Pann to be the most
influential parameter determining the quantity and age of galactic intelligent life. Our model
simulation also identified a peak location for ETI at an annular region approximately 4 kpc from
the Galactic center around 8 billion years (Gyrs), with complex life decreasing temporally and
spatially from the peak point, asserting a high likelihood of intelligent life in the galactic inner
disk. The simulated age distributions also suggest that most of the intelligent life in our galaxy are
young, thus making observation or detection difficult.

<sigh>. Why? I sympathize with the idea of having fun with math, but the Drake equation is simple-minded algebra, not particularly interesting, and isn’t going to produce testable results.The authors seem to have confused their model with reality. This makes no sense:

We also concluded that at the current time of the study, most intelligent life in the Galaxy is
younger than 0.5 Gyr, with values of probability parameter for self-annihilation between 0 – 0.01;
with a relatively higher value of the annihilation parameter (≥ 0.1), most intelligent life is younger
than 0.01 Gyr. As we cannot assume a low probability of annihilation, it is possible that intelligent
life elsewhere in the Galaxy is still too young to be observed by us. Therefore, our findings can
imply that intelligent life may be common in the Galaxy but is still young, supporting the optimistic
aspect for the practice of SETI. Our results also suggest that our location on Earth is not within the
region where most intelligent life is settled, and SETI practices need to be closer to the inner
Galaxy, preferably at the annulus 4 kpc from the Galactic Center.

But…but…they’re talking about the parameters of their simulation! Their “probability parameter for self-annihilation” is something they set. All of the numbers they plug in are guesstimates, with varying degrees of reasonable justification. Of course they make an optimistic conclusion about SETI! But why should anyone accept their conclusions about an appropriate region for searching for intelligent life? Fudge their parameters a little more and you could shift the zone of likelihood where ever you want. They’ve added nothing to our understanding of the universe, unless you think that multiplying a bunch of numbers by a different bunch of numbers giving you a new result is earthshaking.

I really have to ask…why don’t reviewers simply stamp papers that are all about manipulating the Drake equation with a big red REJECT label? It would save them time and reduce the clutter in the scientific literature. Is there any value in YAWOD (Yet Another Wank Over Drake)? Who finds these informative?

Is there hope for atheism?

Maybe. As disgusted as I am with the regressives making the most noise (and the most profit) in the current iteration of the atheosphere, there are some promising indicators. Gregory Paul has an encouraging article, The Great and Amazingly Rapid Secularization of the Increasingly Proevolution United States, that is full of surveys and graphs that show a steady, consistent trend: secularism is growing. Maybe not your usual aggressive atheists, but lots of people are fed up with the efforts of a minority to impose theocracy on us. The United States is a weird outlier with greater religiosity than other ‘first world’ nations, but we’re getting better.

As for the demographic future, there is every reason to expect the USA to continue to secularize more towards the western norm at a fast pace despite the frantic but inherently insufficient effective counter efforts of organized theism. The unprecedented nonreligiosity of youth and the dechurching power of modernity cannot be overcome, which is why there never has been a serious religious revival in any advanced democracy. Because the rise of proevolution atheism is a largely automatic, casual lifestyle conversion in response to subtle but powerful socioeconomic forces usually done without deep thought, it will remain true that neither side can do much to alter the course of events one way or another.

Atheist evangelism isn’t going to be effective, but just setting an example and letting the churched drift our way naturally might.

My personal cause, accepting naturalism as the best scientific approach, also gets a mention — he favors what the NCSE has been doing in broadening their science outreach beyond just evolution, although he’s not enthusiastic about the success of trying to prop up theistic evolutionists.

As for the proevolution effort, the tactic of trying to educate theists to accept the evolution of humans over deep time is at best marginally effective – there is no such thing as a developed democracy that is both proevolution and highly religious and probably never will be – but if in the unlikely event it can be made to work it is the only means of speeding up the acceptance of bioevolution. The most practical strategy is to wait for the organic increase in the size of the atheist cohort to automatically boost proevolution opinion. As such the recent deemphasis of proevolution activity by the NCSE and AAAS is logical; but of course educational and legal efforts must continue as long as creationism is a serious societal and antiscientific issue – after all, we’re still dealing with flatearthers (whose views are often Bible based BTW).

Hey, let’s look on the bright side of Donald Trump! He’s been doing an excellent job of yanking out the moralizing rug from under the feet of the evangelicals. Given how often Christians whine about atheist morality or the lack thereof Trump is a useful tool for atheists.

And for as much trouble as it is causing, the theocon minority – in alliance with an increasing secular white nationalist cohort – has handed Ameroatheism a big gift that will last forever – that a socially deranged faith-based theocon collective helped make Trump president bares like nothing else that they have long been pulling a colossal, cynical con as they proclaimed that as followers of the perfect creator they are the advocates of principled, unchanging morality and decency. By exposing themselves as in the main morally relative opportunists with a propensity towards neoracism, theocons have permanently wrecked their hypocritical pretense of having high moral principles, so much so that a minority of theocons are in despair over what has happened to the future prospects of their ideology. They can never take it back, and for decades to come when theocons start going on about their godly morality we can always bring up Trump.

He may tear down the Republic and the rule of law, but yeah, he is a poison pill for evangelical Christianity otherwise. Hooray?

In another appeal to native pride, Mark Silk reports that The Pacific Northwest is the American religious future.

Early in this century, the academic center that I direct undertook a research project to examine religion and region in American public life. Of the eight regions we divided the country into, the most distinctive was the Pacific Northwest (PNW)—Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.

The distinctiveness had everything to do with the region’s low degree of religious identification—something that had been the case ever since Anglo-Americans began settling the place in the 19th century. For that reason, we subtitled the volume dedicated to it “the None Zone.”

He argues that the low levels of religiosity in the region compels the religious to be more cooperative in order to get anything done. So while the region isn’t majority atheist, the non-believers are dampening the competitive fervor among the evangelical types. I guess we’re like the boron control rods in a nuclear reactor, keeping the nuclear reactions of the masses from going critical.

Another feature of the region is environmentalism — and interestingly, that’s driving a greater polarization between the moderate religious/atheists and evangelical Protestantism.

The main avenue of religious common cause was environmentalism, which in our view had become the region’s dominant world view—its civil religion if you will. A gospel of sustainability and biodiversity was strongly in evidence in the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, the non-Christian and New Age faiths, and among the Nones themselves. Yet the PNW also had its counterculture, located above all in its sizable evangelical community, where the region’s religious entrepreneurship was especially on display.

As one would expect, PNW evangelicalism was ranged against the dominant culture on abortion and gay rights. Most strikingly, however, the PNW was the one region where a majority of evangelicals took a negative view of environmentalism. Clearly, in this regional version of the national culture war, environmentalism had become part of a spiritual ideology that evangelicals felt obliged to set themselves against.

That brings back memories. There were people who hated environmental causes — loggers and ranchers, who were typically very conservative — against the majority I knew, who took it for granted that the natural beauty of the place needed to be cared for. I don’t recall associating the difference with degree of religiosity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a correlation.

I really wouldn’t mind if the social attitudes of the whole USA became more like that of the Pacific Northwest…which also includes a nice chunk of Canada, don’t forget. It’s not perfect, but it would be better in many ways.

I’ll also note that there is a strong connection between Minnesota and Washington state, especially in my experience with my family, and many of the residents with Scandinavian roots. Minnesota also has an affinity to Canada. Maybe it’s not the lessened religiosity that makes a difference, but the bigger influence of Canada in these states. However it works, I’ll take it.

Didn’t see it coming

The Florida mass-murderer had a lot of problems: he was a “loner” (uh-oh, so was I!), and other kids thought he was “weird” (damn, that’s me again), and he’d also been treated in the past for mental health concerns (I was not, but there should be no stigma with getting help). Those all seem like irrelevant points to me, not associated with going on a shooting rampage, but there were other signs, which his foster family didn’t even notice.

Jim Lewis said the family is devastated and didn’t see this coming.

Maybe it’s because people don’t pay attention to the right signs. Like this one:

Victoria Olvera, a 17-year-old student, said Cruz was expelled last school year after a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. She said Cruz had been abusive to his girlfriend.

“Abusive to women” — that one warrants a great big check mark in a large box at the top of the checklist. If you can’t respect one class of people, you’re probably already well-practiced at dehumanization and lack empathy.

He was in a fight so severe that he was expelled from school? There’s another sign, a propensity for violence. Unfortunately, once you’re kicked out of school, there isn’t a fallback institution where this kid’s problems could be corrected.

What else might have been a concern?

According to the family’s lawyer, who did not identify them, they knew that Cruz owned an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet. He did have the key, however.

Teenagers do not need an AR-15. I can sympathize with someone enjoys target shooting or hunting, although I don’t do either, but that’s a weapon that’s not particular good for either hobby. It’s good for stroking while you have bloody power fantasies.

Mutchler recalled Cruz posting on Instagram about killing animals and said he had talked about doing target practice in his backyard with a pellet gun.

Target practice with a pellet gun? Fine. Killing animals? Bright red flashing lights and a siren going off.

“He started going after one of my friends, threatening her, and I cut him off from there,” Mutchler said.

“Threatening people” is one of those things that has been treated as perfectly fine on the internet — it’s just free speech, man, you know you can’t say anything against free speech. Unless you threaten to kill the president, of course. Then for some reason they’ll think you might be a real danger to an Important Person, so they investigate further and open a file on you. Threaten an ordinary citizen…well, suck it up, ignore it, even if he does have an AR-15 and instagrams photos of dead animals and has a history of physical abuse.

“There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus,” Gard said.

They knew.

The parents, the school administrators, his peers, they all saw it coming. They knew this kid was a powder keg ready to go off. But you don’t get to condemn guns or abuse of women as a serious warning sign — those things are OK in this culture — so they did nothing.

Well, they did nothing except abandon the kid to his own devices, where he festered and got worse. Let’s see a stronger, more active response to dangerous people than neglect.

And let’s take their damn guns away.

Regulations require you to plan ahead

No wonder Republicans hate them! Planning and responsibility — who has time for that crap? Especially when it costs money.

Who needs review and ethical approval of drug trials, after all? These are just things we put in our mouths or inject into our veins, so sure, let’s just go crazy and shoot up whatever. It can’t hurt. If a rich tech vampire endorses it, that should be good enough for everyone. Especially if they are testing it, just not on Americans — those brown guinea pigs on Caribbean islands are good enough.

Heavyweight tech investor and FDA-critic Peter Thiel is among conservative funders and American researchers backing an offshore herpes vaccine trial that blatantly flouts US safety regulations, according to a Monday report by Kaiser Health News.

The vaccine—a live but weakened herpes virus—was first tested in a 17-person trial on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts without federal oversight or the standard human safety requirement of an institutional review board (IRB) approval. Biomedical researchers and experts have sharply rebuked the lack of safety oversight and slammed the poor quality of the data collected, which has been rejected from scientific publication. However, investors and those running the trial say it is a direct challenge to what they see as innovation-stifling regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.

Yeah, that’s their motive: skip the whole structure of regulatory fol-de-rol and fast-track testing by throwing it on a non-American population. The work was done to benefit a pharmaceutical company, which was plugged in the manuscript that the author attempted to publish (conflict of interest much?) and was done on a tiny population. What work was done put subjects at risk and also had negligible statistical power, but hey, the PI, Halford, and Thiel were stickin’ it to the Man and bypassing those onerous regulations, so it ought to get extra brownie points for that.

Other researchers and experts strongly disagreed with Halford’s stance and handling of a live, attenuated virus vaccine, which can cause infections in the uninfected or severe side-effects in those already infected. “What they’re doing is patently unethical,” Jonathan Zenilman, chief of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division, told KHN. “There’s a reason why researchers rely on these protections. People can die.”

Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner during the Obama era, agreed. “There’s a tradition of having oversight of human experimentation, and it exists for good reasons,” he said. “It may be legal to be doing it without oversight, but it’s wrong.”

You can read the reviewer’s comments on the paper for yourself. They are polite, professional and scathing. A sample:

4. The author presents results of 2 experiments on humans, the first one a safety study that he conducted on himself. While self-experiments are generally permitted, these still require IRB review. Please provide assurance that this protocol was IRB reviewed and that the participant signed an informed consent. Unfortunately, data on 1 person does not prove safety of a product.
5. The subsequent Phase 1 study was conducted on a Caribbean island nation. Again, no information about IRB for this study is provided, and the trial does not seem to be listed on clinicaltrials.gov. The data for efficacy are based on self‐report on participants who were questioned by the author and other staff before and after. As the author states “self‐reported cessation of genital herpes… should be viewed with skepticism.” Agreed.
6. On Figure 8, there is an impressively small p value. However, how it was derived is not shown. Given that there were only 17 persons in this study, it is unlikely that an appropriate statistical test for performed to obtain this result.

Someone also saw right through the whole game.

6. Flying U.S. trial subjects to St. Kitt for the immunizations and then flying them back to the US is ethically questionable. Who is giving the immunizations in St. Kitt and who is following them medically when they return to the US? Where is the clinical protocol based? Is this an end run around the FDA?

It is true that IRBs are a pain in the butt, and sometimes you just want to scream that they are unnecessary — that you know how best to care for your subjects, you have years of experience, why do you need to document basic stuff that everyone in the field knows you have to do? Well, just imagine that a Peter Thiel gets hired by your university. That’s why we have to go through the nitpicky rigamorole, because there are bad guys looking for excuses to do stuff you would never imagine doing.

For another example of disastrous lack of planning and oversight, look south to Houston. Texans are notoriously defiant about regulations and little things like zoning, so Houston grew willy-nilly, with industry flourishing for the short term with the relative lack of demands for safety and disaster planning, and factories and chemical plants sprouting little clouds of residential housing around their dangerous facilities. I’m sure it made commuting convenient, and also helped pay for desirable amenites like schools, but still…would you want to live next door to a bomb?

In Crosby, Texas, there is a place called the Arkema chemical plant where they work with something called organic peroxides. This plant is located amid a residential and business district where, remarkably, human beings live and work. If the cooling systems in the plant fail, as they apparently have, these organic peroxides can explode. A 1.5 mile radius around the plant has been evacuated.

The state and plant owners have been lying lately about the hazards

“[The Harris County fire marshall] said that they don’t expect like a shock wave kind of explosion,” Matt Dempsey, a data reporter for the Houston Chronicle, told Maddow. “That’s in contradiction to the expert said who said we’re sitting on a powder keg type of situation here.”

“Experts on one side are saying it’s a huge thing, and I have the government officials and the company saying it might not be that big,” Dempsey continued. “It’s hard to tell for sure.”

Dempsey went on to detail a back-and-forth he’d had with Arkema’s CEO, who refused to make the plant’s inventory public and who hasn’t answered questions about whether the plant has industry standard fail-safes that deplete the stock in case of disasters like Hurricane Harvey.

Oh, no, they say, it’s safe — that big container of highly reactive peroxides isn’t going to explode if neglected and without power. It’s fine. You can trust the CEO who’s not saying anything about their safety measures or even what’s stockpiled there.

Guess what? This morning, it exploded. Twice. And there are concerns that multiple storage sites means that more explosions will occur. But don’t worry, while tons of toxic chemicals are now pouring into the flood waters, we can all hope they’ll catch fire and burn.

Still, the company said Wednesday, “the most likely outcome is that, anytime between now and the next few days, the low-temperature peroxide in unrefrigerated trailers will degrade and catch fire. There is a small possibility that the organic peroxide will release into the flood waters but will not ignite and burn. … In the alternate, there could be a combination event involving fire and environmental release. Any fire will probably resemble a large gasoline fire. The fire will be explosive and intense. Smoke will be released into the atmosphere and dissipate. People should remain clear of the area.”

The Associated Press reported that Arkema was previously required “to develop and submit a risk management plan to the Environmental Protection Agency, because it has large amounts of sulfur dioxide, a toxic chemical, and methylpropene, a flammable gas.”

Good luck, Texans. Your water is poisoned, your neighborhoods have been washed away, and what’s left is on fire, with clouds of sulfurous black clouds in the air. Yeee-hah!

These are human beings suffering from the consequences of generations of irresponsible neglect — where business has flourished at the expense of people’s long term health and happiness. We can blame all of this on the Republican party, which has built its popularity on this kind of contempt for government and regulation.

This is probably going to end up being the costliest disaster in American history. Who do you think is going to pay for it? Not the shareholders in the Arkema chemical plant. Not the legislators who shirked their responsibility. Not the rich capitalists who took advantage of the lax regulatory environment in Texas. It’s going to come out of the pockets of the victims.

Hurricane Harvey could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history with a potential price tag of $160 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from private weather firm AccuWeather.

This is equal to the combined cost of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and represents a 0.8% economic hit to the gross national product, AccuWeather said.

“Parts of Houston, the United States’ fourth largest city, will be uninhabitable for weeks and possibly months due to water damage, mold, disease-ridden water and all that will follow this 1,000-year flood,” said AccuWeather president Joel Myers.

The Federal Reserve, major banks, insurance companies and other business leaders should begin to factor in the negative impact this catastrophe will have on business, corporate earnings and employment, Myers said.

That last paragraph says what is wrong with this country. Oh, gosh, the bankers, insurance companies, and CEOs are going to suffer so much! Screw ’em. They’ve been exploiting the people who are now actually suffering for decades.

Can Maher be the next guy knocked off his pedestal? Please?

Would you believe Bill Maher is claiming credit for putting the brakes on the Milo train? Of course you would. His ego is just that big.

Given all that has transpired since Friday’s show, how do you feel now about your decision to have Milo Yiannopoulos as a guest, and how those segments transpired?

Well, let’s recap. About a week ago, I went on Van Jones’s show, and somebody asked me about the booking. I hadn’t really gotten into the details of M1l0 yet. He was just getting on my radar. I said, specifically, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Then we had M1l0 on, despite the fact that many people said, “Oh, how dare you give a platform to this man.” What I think people saw was an emotionally needy Ann Coulter wannabe, trying to make a buck off of the left’s propensity for outrage. And by the end of the weekend, by dinnertime Monday, he’s dropped as a speaker at CPAC. Then he’s dropped by Breitbart, and his book deal falls through. As I say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. You’re welcome.

Jebus. Maher gave a softball interview in which he called Yiannopoulos not unreasonable for thinking transgender women were just crashing bathrooms to rape people — he’s one of the Yiannopoulos enablers. You don’t get credit for knocking someone off a pedestal when you’re one of the people who put him up there.

Listicles get published in peer-reviewed journals!

psychhelp

I used a cruel headline, but this is actually a useful list: Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. It’s not just the popular media that mangle scientific language, but also more technical works sometimes slip into misleading shorthand. For instance, #1 on their list of bad terms:

(1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997). For example, in 2010, The Telegraph (2010) trumpeted the headline, “‘Liberal gene’ discovered by scientists.” Nevertheless, because genes code for proteins, there are no “genes for” phenotypes per se, including behavioral phenotypes (Falk, 2014). Moreover, genome-wide association studies of major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suggest that there are probably few or no genes of major effect (Kendler, 2005). In this respect, these disorders are unlike single-gene medical disorders, such as Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis. The same conclusion probably holds for all personality traits (De Moor et al., 2012).

Not surprisingly, early claims that the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is a “warrior gene” (McDermott et al., 2009) have not withstood scrutiny. This polymorphism appears to be only modestly associated with risk for aggression, and it has been reported to be associated with conditions that are not tied to a markedly heightened risk of aggression, such as major depression, panic disorder, and autism spectrum disorder (Buckholtz and Meyer-Lindenberg, 2013; Ficks and Waldman, 2014). The evidence for a “God gene,” which supposedly predisposes people to mystical or spiritual experiences, is arguably even less impressive (Shermer, 2015) and no more compelling than that for a “God spot” in the brain (see “God spot”). Incidentally, the term “gene” should not be confused with the term “allele”; genes are stretches of DNA that code for a given morphological or behavioral characteristic, whereas alleles are differing versions of a specific polymorphism in a gene (Pashley, 1994).

[Read more…]