In two weeks, I’m going to be attending the American Atheists convention in Minneapolis. I went back and forth on whether to go or not. I’ve never questioned the fact that I’m an unrepentant atheist, but I have struggled with the implementation of the atheist movement.

The last time I was actively involved with an organized atheist event was in 2016. Nine years ago! And that event was a glorious trip to Beijing, China to talk to a group of scientists/the public, organized by American Atheists. I enjoyed it immensely, visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, all the tourist sites. I was paired with David Silverman, then president of the group, who was fun to be with, especially since I wasn’t a woman. Unfortunately, shortly after we got back to the US, all hell broke loose, Silverman was fired, his family rejected him, it was incredibly ugly — it was sexual abuse and potential misuse of organization funds, etc. Was I disillusioned with the whole atheist movement, again? You betcha.

I considered dipping my toes back in the waters, especially since it was so conveniently close. Now I’m going to dive in and see what people are doing. American Atheist’s organization seems to be rightfully on track, with good people running the show — Silverman was replaced by Nick Fish, which was a huge improvement in values, if less flamboyance. The problem with atheism is that, as we all know, there are plenty of assholes who are members of the group, and you can’t expect to avoid jerks by hanging out with atheists. In fact, when the speaker list for the Minneapolis conference was published, I saw there was one colossal asshole featured, which was discouraging, but I figure I can tolerate one — it’s inevitable — and I just won’t be attending their talk and will be avoiding them scrupulously.

There are plenty of good atheists in attendance, but I wouldn’t mind if a few more of you were to attend and dilute the bad ones a bit more.

Anyway, I’ll let you all know how it goes. If nothing else, it’ll be a weekend in the big city.

Jay Bhattacharya is the new director of the National Institutes of Health. He says,

As NIH Director, I will build on the agency’s long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine by fostering gold-standard research and innovation to address the chronic disease crisis.

Sure. Sounds great. How does he plan to accomplish that?

There is no step 2.

NO STEP 2. Just fire everyone.

Every few weeks, I get a fresh comment on an old video I made a about a year ago about Gilbert Ling. It’s low level stuff, remarkable only for the persistent trickle of comments I get, and because there are apparently people on the internet who practically worship this guy, Ling, who most people — even professional biologists — have never heard of.

Quick summary: Ling was an old scientist who, in the 1940s, concluded that the molecular engine that drives ion gradients in cells, the sodium-potassium pump, didn’t exist. That was a reasonable doubt in the ’40s, but became quixotic and bizarre as the evidence accumulated over the subsequent decades. Ling invented an idea he called the Association Induction hypothesis, and later the Polarized-Oriented Multilayer theory of cell water, neither of which have any empirical foundation, while the sodium-potassium pump is one of the better characterized molecules in the cell.

I think that explains the longevity of the support for his crackpottery. People love weird models of water, especially the quacks, who greatly appreciate having a cheap, ubiquitous substance that they can spin mystical jargon around to inflate the appearance of value. There are lots of miracle water claims on the internet, like Gel Water, H₃O₂, and its unlikely chemical structure.

I think I’m getting criticized by quacks who revere Ling as a credentialed scientist who legitimizes their opposition to scientific authorities and provides a pseudoscientific framework for their rationalizations.

Also, all the people whining about the oppression of poor Gilbert Ling can’t read, can’t understand the content of a video even, and can’t comprehend even a lay explanation of a biological phenomenon. This guy, for instance, tries to summarize what I wrote and doesn’t even come close.

Yeah. What I said.

Here’s a provocative idea from Gregory Paul: the churches are dying.

One might think that the religion in its vast array of guises continues to be a potent force in human societies. And of course in some ways it remains so, especially in the conservative, reactionary, often proautocracy, sometimes violent flavors that are causing so much trouble around today’s world – think of the Russian Orthodox church in bed with Putin and his war, and the Evangelical driven MAGA fast working to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy. But at the same time theism is in grave crisis as it suffers enormous losses in popularity in much of the world. Most of the first world has been highly secularized for decades. Even the United States, long thought the last bastion of popular western religion Christianity especially, is seeing the churches losing ground like a downhill skier, with membership down forty percent since the turn of the century to under half the population, The Southern Baptists are shrinking, those who do not believe in God were a mere few percent when Ike was president, hit near a tenth in the 2000s, and are nearly a fifth if not more these days. Bible literalism is down to a fifth as creationism is slipping, while support for evolutionary science grows. As Ronald Inglehart detailed in Religion’s Sudden Decline, theism is in big demographic trouble in much of the second and third worlds as well. So much so that about half of the people of the globe and even more among Americans no longer think religion has the answers to societies problems.

An anecdotal observation in support of this idea is that I’m seeing a lot of strident, desperate apologetics in my in-box and online, and all of it is stupid. Seriously. William Lane Craig? Lee Strobel? Josh McDowell? Frank Turek? Greg Koukl? These people are the worst, and their arguments are all old and tired. Then there are there followers, who are even worse.

It would be nice to imagine that people are finally waking up, that there is new wave of rationalism that is causing people to abandon old dogmas, that atheism is finally winning. Paul makes a case that that helps, but that it can’t be the main impetus for people losing their religion. Just look around you — is MAGA a rational movement? Is the American government a shining beacon of reason?

Paul argues that there is something else driving people out of the churches.

But there is another aspect of modernity that is giving popular religion a sucker punch in its vulnerable supernaturalistic belly, an item as far as I know what not been discussed to date. And that secularization force is….

Aliens.

Especially, ancient aliens.

Not actual ancient aliens that visited our pretty little planet in ancient times and in the process set up human civilizations while being mistaken for the gods that silly people then worship. The possibility that they really existed being very, very minimal to say the most. It’s the new, thrilling and hip belief in ancient astronauts, the exciting new and modern creation myth, that is helping wreck that old timey, yawn inducing religion.

He points out lots of circumstantial evidence for that. There’s this new wave of gullibility demonstrated in popular TV programming. How can Ancient Aliens be so popular? I tried watching Graham Hancock once, and couldn’t cope with his combination of ignorance and confidence. Science fiction and fantasy have taken over the movies, which us SF fans might think is benign, except we aren’t wondering why people flocked to Star Wars.

Paul is also a science popularizer, and he’s running into a rising class of inquiry. Did ancient aliens kill the dinosaurs? That’s a question I never even thought of until now.

While flat earth geography remains fringe, AA is transforming the culture. When folks learn I research dinosaurs they often ask me the Big Four – are birds dinosaurs (yes like bats are flying mammals), were dinosaurs warm-blooded (yep), how do we know what color they were (we usually don’t, but of late preserved color pigments are giving us clues), and did the asteroid really kill them off (looks like, although massive volcanism going on down in India may have played a role). But I have of late received a new query. It starts with the asker looking at me as if I am going to tell them the real truth! So they make the ask. Was it aliens that actually killed off the dinosaurs to clear the way for humanity? I say no – can then see their disappointment that I am part of the conspiracy to hide the plain truth – and proceed to explain why the documentary biz is all about making money in part based on my personal experience and they don’t care what kind of schlock goods they put out as long as it generates revenue from the viewers whose interests are low on their priority list. I hope to at least sow some seeds of doubt. Worth a shot.

Come to think of it, I was also surprised by how many people have asked me whether octopus were of alien origin, an idea I would never have taken seriously.

Apparently I need to go back to bed and shut down all social media, because this is the dreck I’m getting now on Bluesky.

I can’t resist, let’s look a little more closely at the supposed contrasts in this illustration.

The average atheist pretends to understand science, while the average Christian understands science. I’m an atheist who has an advanced degree in biology and teaches evolution, and I guarantee you that the average Christian apologist does not know the first thing about science — I’ve been debating them for a few decades. All I have to do is point out that this illustration was created by a fanatical Christian who thinks Darwin is to science as Jesus is to Christianity.

The atheist doesn’t believe in right and wrong while the Christian believes in right and wrong. Atheists do believe in right and wrong, they just reject the unthinking authoritarian right and wrong, the rule-following idea that Christians have that they already possess absolute inviolable Truth in their mish-mash of a Bible.

The atheist secretly hates god while the Christian loves god. Nope. God doesn’t exist. We don’t feel much of anything about the invisible man. Now Christians, on the other hand…

The atheist doesn’t care about evidence while the Christian cares about evidence. The one thing about most debates between Christians and atheists is that the atheist will spend most of his time asking for evidence to back up the Christian’s assertions, while the Christian will gish-gallop all over the place, making a whole series of baseless claims. These debates get boring and predictable.

See also the atheist refuses to defend his atheist worldview while the Christian defends his worldview. This is not true, the two approach this concern from two different angles. The Christian thinks a recitation of dogma is a defense, while the atheist expects to give and take evidence.

The atheist has no purpose while the Christian has a real purpose. All purposes are constructed frameworks we use to explain why we do what we do. Atheists have them, they just don’t accept that they are fixed and absolutely assigned by a deity who communicates them to us through an old book. Christians real purpose is an arbitrary bit of nonsense, to serve God, which is dangerous and destructive since that God is observed by following a lot of out-of-date rules that don’t apply to the society we live in.

Then the whole image collapses into scattershot nonsense because the artist couldn’t think of comparable contrasts.

I’m not particularly terrified of dying, I’m sort of resigned to the reality — but I will resist it even as I know it’s inevitable. I don’t believe that Christians are unafraid of death or ready to die and go home, they will fight it as hard as I will.

I don’t think I’m just an evolved fish. Fish are pretty amazing organisms. I respect my lineage, I don’t deny it like the average Christian does.

I do understand the moral argument. That’s just the idea that a moral norm is an objective truth that is only explainable as a command from a God, or a kind of created instinct. I understand it, I just reject it.

I don’t want to be god. Can Christians ever get it through their thick skulls that we don’t believe in gods?

I’ll add another label. The average Christian believes in pious bullshit and readily lies about others.

It’s been a while since I mentioned Joseph Mercola, the alternative medicine cancer quack with a vast empire of snake oil supplements.

If anti-vaccine influencers had a king, it would be Dr. Joseph Mercola, the osteopathic physician whose supplement empire has netted him a tidy fortune of $100 million. Mercola has been a power broker in alternative medicine circles for years—as my colleague David Corn has reported, he received a publicity boost more than a decade ago from celebrity doctor and erstwhile US Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who called him a “pioneer in holistic treatments.”

You’d think he’d be riding high right now, given that the quacks have been been put in charge health, science, and medicine in this country. But it seems his fake drug companies are getting a bit of a shakeup.

This week, the supplement industry trade publication Natural Products Insider reported that last week, Mercola suddenly fired four members of his executive team. He also announced that his company would be going in a new direction, reportedly informing his staff in a video that “my new goal is to reach billions, literally billions, around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.”

He doesn’t have a grand plan. What he’s got are delusions of grandeur, fueled by a psychic. The con man has been thoroughly conned!

The details of Mercola’s “new goal” and “new paradigm” are scant, but according to the article, he made the changes in management after extensive consultations with a psychic named Kai Clay, who sometimes goes by the name of Bahlon.

Janet Selvig, Mercola’s sister, was one of the executives who was fired. In an interview with Natural Products Insider, she expressed concern about Bahlon’s influence on her brother:

Selvig said she confronted her brother about the odd behavior on Jan. 31 after seeing hours of videos of his trance channeling sessions with Bahlon. “I just felt immediately that he was being taken advantage of,” Selvig said.

The confrontation did not go well. Selvig said her brother was very dismissive of her concerns and defended his work with Clay. “He thinks the book is going to save the world,” Selvig said. “He believes that he’s [Mercola] a god and he’s been reincarnated. And he even referred to himself as the new Jesus.”

On Feb. 2, Selvig was shown an email sent to a coworker from Mercola’s address announcing the doctor’s intention to fire Selvig, Rye, Boland and a fourth executive. The email offered the CEO spot to a different Mercola team member who later turned down the position. The email went on to explain “reasons for the mutiny,” describing the Catholic church as a “global cabal” that controls “50% of the world’s worth” and “created all the pain that most people experience.”

Who is Kai Clay? Who is Bahlon? Just ask him.

Ever hear of channeling? Or Light Language?

Meet BAHLON an ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane channeled by Master Trance Channel Kai Clay.

The messages and healing energy shared during their packed group events are always uplifting, are often staggeringly predictive—filled with the Divine healing energy of Universal love, hope and healing.

And now sometimes when available, his 10 year-old daughter Sera joins with Bahlon to share full conversations in Light Language (and interpret these in English for all) followed by Light Language meditations so powerful many say they can “feel it in the bones of every past life, present and future life.”

It’s nice that Mercola has been taken in by a New Age crackpot, but…Bahlon has also roped in his 10 year old daughter Sera. A ten year old! That is child abuse. I found a video of Bahlon and his daughter babbling (and that’s all it is, babble) at each other, if you’re curious about what “light language” is. It’s horrible and gross, and I only listened to a few minutes of it before I had to close it. Maybe you’re made of sterner stuff? I hope not, because no one should want to listen to this creep lying to a child.

Bryan Johnson — you know, the Bryan Johnson who wants to achieve eternal youth by turning himself into a plasticine android — has taken the next inevitable step. It’s not a bold new medical innovation. It’s turning his lifestyle and his weird recipes and behavior into commodities that he can sell to gullible people, especially now that RFK jr has conveniently tagged all the dupes with the MAHA label. Johnson set up a conference that you can attend for the low, low price of $249 ($1799 for the premium package), and he and his associates will lecture you on how to don’t die by buying a subscription to his $15-$20 per plate food delivery service. You could live forever on this kind of meal:

I knew this was going to happen. Bizarre schemes by Trump-lovin’ rich people are a natural consequence of the world we live in now. Maya Vinokour attended the first event in New York, and blesses us with a lengthy breakdown of all the nonsense and banality that went down. Really, it’s long — but all you need is the conclusion.

I overhear a young woman telling her friends, her voice hesitant: “I guess this was ever so slightly overpriced?”—laughable from my perspective, as a severe understatement. Even at the Premium tier, the summit’s health “insights” were either overly familiar or extravagant and outlandish. The most daring proposal I heard all day was that we can save our messy human selves from technological obsolescence by capitulating to algorithms in advance. Is that a good idea? In keeping with this authoritarian moment in American history, what Johnson’s Blueprint and its commercial ecosystem does, ultimately, is invite us to understand our own dehumanization as a form of empowerment.

If that has whet your appetite, Bryan Johnson is taking his medicine show on the road, and is going to be bringing it to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Get your tickets now.

I’ve done multi-city traveling lecture tours on the past, and they’re grueling, even when all I did was talk for an hour and then go to a restaurant and spend a night in another hotel room. They’re bad for your health. Somebody should tell Johnson that he’s going to reduce his lifespan by doing this.

The latest “health” craze is all about condemning “seed oils”. I’m a guy with a family history of heart disease, so I pay attention to doctors’ dietary recommendations, and I never heard anything about “seed oils” until recently, and the complaints were always coming out of the mouths of fools.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new health secretary, has said Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils and has called for fast-food restaurants to return to using beef tallow, or rendered animal fat, in their fryers instead.

Recommendations from RFK jr tend to make me run in the opposite direction, but apparently there are a lot of gullible Americans who readily adopt any claim made by an anti-scientist. And then every corporation stampedes to follow the money.

In response to consumer concerns, some food-makers have stripped seed oils from their products. Restaurants like the salad chain Sweetgreen have removed them from their menus. Many Americans say they now avoid seed oils, according to a recent survey from the International Food Information Council, an industry trade group.

The seed oil discussion has exasperated nutrition scientists, who say decades of research confirms the health benefits of consuming such oils, especially in place of alternatives such as butter or lard.

“I don’t know where it came from that seed oils are bad,” said Martha Belury, an Ohio State University food science professor.

I know! I know! It comes from wellness influencers. All you need is a tiktok channel and a lot of unfounded confidence, and you too can promote weird random ideas under the guise of making people “well”. You don’t need a medical degree! You don’t even need to be a college graduate! Wellness isn’t a real scientific/medical discipline — it’s just a buzzword that has no regulatory oversight or any basis in empirical data. We all want to be well, but to have any authority in medicine requires years of training and constant updating from real sources.

I found something called Your Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Successful Health and Wellness Influencer. It’s revealing. The way to become a wellness influencer is a) find something you’re passionate about, b) connect with a community of wellness influencers, and c) land a brand deal. That last one is obviously the most important. Nowhere does it say you should study medicine or nutrition, or read scientific studies, or even be capable of understanding scientific studies. Just promote whatever random bias is floating around in your head!

It also helps to be young and slender and capable of doing yoga poses. Here’s a whole page of wellness photos you can use to build a page promoting your brand. Take a look and let me know if there’s anything illustrating knowledge or expertise; there is a common theme, and that’s not it.

In that article dismissing the seed oil obsession, you instead find studies and numbers.

Belury, who has studied fatty acids for three decades, says that claim is based on an oversimplification and misunderstanding of the science. Studies have shown that increased intake of linoleic acid, the most common omega-6, does not significantly affect concentrations of inflammatory markers in the blood, she said.

“Scientists who study omega-6 and omega-3 think we need both,” Belury said. “Seed oils do not increase acute or chronic inflammation markers.”

In addition, research from the American Heart Association and others has consistently shown that plant-based oils reduce so-called bad cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke, especially compared with sources high in saturated fat.

That’s found in new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital scientists as well. A study of more than 200,000 adults over more than 30 years released Thursday found that people who ate the highest amounts of butter had a 15% higher risk of dying than those who ate the least. People who ate the most plant-based oils — including seed oils — had a 16% lower risk than those who ate the least.

Dr. Daniel Wang, who led the research, said new modeling data suggests that swapping less than a tablespoon a day of butter for equal calories of plant-based oils could lower premature deaths from cancer and overall mortality by 17%. Such a small daily change could result in “a substantial benefit,” Wang said.

Gosh. Belury and Wang are never going to be rich, famous, and popular at that rate. Americans don’t want to be told about data, they want to see a glossy image of sexy people sipping a drink with an umbrella in it while sitting on a beach in Costa Rica. That’s wellness, not a bunch of studies showing what’s actually effective in reducing mortality.

I think I’ll just listen to boring doctors in Minnesota who tell me to eat less red meat and consume more olive oil and salmon. It seems to be working; most of my ancestors seem to have died in their 50s, and I’ve made it to almost 70, and I haven’t made any major sacrifices in my lifestyle. A Mediterranean diet is delicious and good for you.

Unfortunately, I don’t look like a 20-something model and I don’t have a wellness supplement to sell.