Bill Maher made an announcement.

I agree. That is very unfortunate.

He kept writing, and made it even worse.

He’s a scab. OK, it’s coming back, only now with no writers and just his trademark smarmy ignorance.

I haven’t watched his show in years, maybe a decade or so. I’m confident that it has not improved, and this will simply be another inflection point in which the quality of the show nosedives for the garbage heap.

I just waved goodbye to my daughter and granddaughter — they’re driving back to Wisconsin. We had an exhausting weekend with a 4 year old (soon to be five!) who was full of energy and was running circles around us.

No sooner had they left than I sit down and read about Ruby Franke.

Ruby Franke, the family vlogger behind the now-defunct YouTube channel 8 passengers has been formally charged with six counts of felony child abuse by a Washington County attorney in Utah, court documents show.

Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested last week after Franke’s 12-year-old son climbed out a window and ran to a neighbor’s house asking for food and water.

The neighbor, noticing duct tape around the child’s ankles and wrists, called the police. The responding officer said the child appeared severely malnourished and had sustained “deep lacerations” from being tied up with a rope.

When police searched Hildebrandt’s home, they found Franke’s 10-year-old daughter in a similar condition and transported both children to the hospital for malnourishment. In total, the four Franke children still living at home were taken into the care of Utah’s Child and Family Services. Her two other children are adults.

Hildebrandt was also charged with six felony counts of aggravated child abuse.

I am at a loss. I cannot imagine doing that to a child. But I can see three factors in the story that would drive a person to child abuse, not that it excuses it.

• Conservative bullshit. There is an old-time conservative tradition that children must be beaten — “spare the rod, spoil the child,” all that crap. Not in my immediate family, fortunately, but I knew kids who came to school with welts, and some of my relatives could be fierce with a switch. These people still exist.
• Religious sadism. If God says it’s OK, then swat that child. It’s even in the ten commandments, when it’s read as “Honor your father and mother…OR ELSE.” It’s especially strong in Mormonism, where so many children are literally thrown out of the house to fend for themselves if they don’t follow arbitrary Mormon rules.
• Capitalism. Family vlogging or mommy vlogging can be extremely profitable, but only if the kids are doing interesting things, and if the parents are willing to expose their private struggles to the world. If there isn’t enough drama in day-to-day life, then make some. And if they kids aren’t sufficiently profitable in their trained chimpanzee antics, well, then they must be punished.

Now Franke’s sisters have issued a statement.

“For the last 3 years we have kept quiet on the subject of our sister Ruby Franke for the sake of her children. Behind the public scene we have done everything we could to try and make sure the kids were safe,” the statement began.

“Ruby was arrested which needed to happen. Jodi was arrested which needed to happen. The kids are now safe, which is the number one priority.”

Oh, yeah? You knew about this for three years and said nothing?

Her neighbors commented.

The neighbors of recently-arrested YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke were reportedly not surprised to see her Utah home swarmed by police. Some were just happy that the authorities weren’t pulling bodies from the house.

“Everyone is just breathing a collective sigh of relief because we thought they were going to come out of that house with body bags,” one of her neighbors told NBC News.

It was so bad that you were anticipating dead children, but you didn’t call CPS? This is just disturbing, that everyone knew and everyone kept kept quiet, and that Franke also had 2 million subscribers to her creepy YouTube channel, and all those people just watched.

That’s a little unfair. At least some of them complained enough that YouTube finally took the channel down. She just moved on to another inappropriate grift.

The channel was taken down earlier this year amid a growing chorus of criticism over Franke’s strict parenting tactics, which included threatening to take away meals.

In recent weeks, Franke had been collaborating with Hildebrandt on ConneXions, a mental health counseling service that also faced criticism for its parenting advice, including shame-based learning and shunning those who don’t share your values.

Hildebrandt is another piece of work, an ex-therapist who had her license revoked.

The founder of the company, Jodi Hildebrandt, is a therapist who had her license suspended in 2012 after she disclosed a patient’s “porn addiction” to his Mormon church leaders, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

It’s astonishing that anyone would take mental health advice from either of those two losers.

By the way, their Instagram channel, Moms of Truth, is still up and available if you are really interested in seeing a pair of hypocrites complaining about “woke.”

Finally, one quack goes down. The notorious anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny has had her medical license suspended, at long last. It should have been done long ago.

Two years ago, a Cleveland area physician strode into the House Health Committee room and told state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize their hosts and “interface” with cell towers.

Her comments, the subject of widespread ridicule, triggered a swarm of 350 complaints to the State Medical Board and a chain of events that led to the regulators indefinitely suspending the medical license Wednesday of anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny.

Oh, yeah, the magnetized people claim. It’s as stupid as it sounds.

It was June 2021, just as scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines began to wane and health officials focused on the yeoman’s work of convincing hundreds of millions of Americans to take up the novel products. However, many conservatives sought to undercut this campaign, often under arguments about “medical freedom.” Tenpenny, speaking before a crowd of anti-vaccine activists, warned of purported dangers of vaccines with a firehose of debunked and misleading statements.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny said to the panel of lawmakers.

“They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks … There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.”

Behold my magnetic powers!

Although…it’s true. I’ve received many vaccinations, and I just tested it, and look, I can make pennies stick to my forehead! I’ve been able to do this for my whole life, though, and I can’t say it’s particularly useful. I guess I could entertain my granddaughter for a minute and a half with that trick. Or drive an anti-vaxxer into a frothing fury for a couple of years.

Unfortunately, stripping Tenpenny of her medical license won’t slow her down in the slightest. It’s not as if she’s been practicing medicine all this time, she instead peddles “alternative” treatments to the gullible. Being denied a license by The Establishment will probably enhance her reputation among her clientele.

Her podcast is still squawking lies into the æther, and she has the ear of influential people — such as Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general of Florida.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo recently appeared on the podcast of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, where he continued to make claims about vaccines that are contradictory to widespread medical consensus.

Medical experts have said Ladapo’s claims are dangerous, and that his very presence on the podcast — and other recent appearances on shows promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories — gives credibility and support to anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Lapado’s latest comments are part of a litany of dubious claims that have alarmed public health officials in Florida and across the country since he got appointed surgeon general more than a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

This is a guy who says the risks of the COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits for most people, who has blocked the use of COVID vaccines in Florida, and refuses to use a mask — but he is a Harvard graduate, you know. He’s also blatantly ideological and conservative, making his comments to Tenpenny particularly ironic.

Despite being the head of Florida’s Department of Health, Ladapo bashed a majority of the nation’s physicians for their vaccine beliefs, saying they cannot separate themselves from their ideologies and politics.

“Our colleagues, for the most part, can’t be brought back into alignment with reality,” Ladapo said on the podcast. “I don’t have any faith that most of our physician colleagues, sadly, can be rehabilitated.”

Tenpenny went so far as to compare current doctors with those in Nazi Germany who participated in or didn’t oppose the mass killing of and experimentation on people, namely Jews, citing a passage written into the first page of the foreword of Ladapo’s own book, which he promoted on the podcast.

Kudos on getting a license suspended after years of talking, but Tenpenny isn’t going to hesitate and is going to continue to poison the discourse for many more years to come — and she’ll make bank off it, too.

Yesterday, I asked “How can obvious fraud Avi Loeb continue to bamboozle?”, and of course lots of people were happy to answer. He has a sugar daddy named Charles Hoskinson.

Charles Hoskinson, the charismatic founder of Cardano, one of the foremost blockchain platforms, has embarked on an unprecedented expedition to investigate the mysteries of outer space. Hoskinson has taken his passion for exploration to new heights by searching for aliens and UFOs in uncharted regions of the universe. This audacious endeavor exemplifies Hoskinson’s daring and the insatiable human curiosity that compels us to explore uncharted territories.

Charles Hoskinson’s search for aliens includes examining claimed UFO encounters and anomalies and examining them from a scientific perspective. He works with specialists from various disciplines, such as astrophysics, astronomy, and data analysis, to learn more about these puzzling events. Hoskinson hopes to create data-driven approaches that can help discover trends or anomalies that might point to extraterrestrial activity by utilizing his knowledge of blockchain technology.

Oh. It’s a science fraud milking a crypto fraud for money. Parasites on parasites on parasites all the way down. Somehow, that’s less distressing than learning they’ve pulled shenanigans on legitimate scientific institutions, but still, at the root, they’re taking money from gullible investors and pouring it into a big magnet at the bottom of the ocean.

I also learn that Hoskinson is a backer of George Church’s pie-in-the-sky company Colossal, that plans on using biotechnology to resurrect mammoths and dodos and thylacines. They won’t. But they’ll all get lots of press and persuade non-scientists to cough up cash.

Hey, any rich people with a deficit in understanding and reason want to fund my research on comparative life histories of local spider populations? I could make it weirder by speculating that spider webs reveal linear seams between the polygons that make up our universe, and therefore could be a means to access outer dimensions of existence. I could do a lot with $1.5 million, the amount wasted on Loeb’s expedition.

I should be grateful to Avi Loeb. He’s done so much to besmirch the power of the phrase “Harvard professor,” which journalists like to deploy as evidence that someone must be a super-smart guy when it means nothing of the kind. Someone must be able to see through the bullshit in his latest claims, right?

A Harvard professor said Monday he may have uncovered evidence of alien life in the universe and told Americans it would fundamentally change their understanding of their existence.

Harvard Professor Avi Loeb said Monday on “Fox & Friends” that he examined an object moving through space faster than 95% of stars near the sun that had material strength and was tougher than most rocks.

The professor, who is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, explained that he could not quantify the object that he was studying just yet.

He’s got nothin’, but he’ll babble about nothing to get his airtime on Fox News and his tabloid coverage.

What actually happened is that a meteor plunging through the atmosphere over Papua New Guinea melted and exploded, and Loeb rushed to the area, trawled a magnet through the ocean, and pulled up some tiny metal spherules that he wants to pretend are alien artifacts.

Here, want to see some of his evidence?

Enhance!

Yeah, that’s it. They’re doing an isotope analysis and plan to publish a paper on it. I’m not sure what result that they expect to get that would constitute evidence of alien life — they’re going to find that they’re mostly iron, and any reliable isotope data might show that they’re billions of years old, as we’d expect from an extraterrestrial rock.

Fortunately, some scientists are speaking out.

Now, though, a number of scientists have countered Loeb’s claims. The New York Times piece, for example, points out that Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, explained that the meteorite would have been completely incinerated entering Earth’s atmosphere if it was traveling at the speed that Loeb claims.

Desch went as far as saying that Loeb’s comments constitute “a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method, and it’s so demoralizing and tiring.”

Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario, concurred, suggesting that Loeb shouldn’t make such bold proclamations during the early analysis phase — it’s not uncommon for detected events to appear interstellar at first only to be chalked up to a measurement error.

I think the reason that Loeb still has his position and his appointment to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is that it is “so demoralizing and tiring” to deal with gullible journalists who’ve fallen for this ridiculous charlatanry.

Hey, journalists: here’s the real question that popped into my head when I read this story. Avi Loeb was able to charter a ship (expensive!) and crew (more expensive!) and load it with some specialized mining gear (not cheap, I imagine) and drag it back and forth across the ocean floor, while getting photos taken of his smug, grinning face. He has sent samples to various labs around the world to be assayed, not something you’ll pay for out of pocket.

Who’s paying for it? I would be shocked if this barebones speculation and literal fishing expedition could have passed peer review, and if it did, there are some committees at NSF that need to be flensed.

So please, this is journalism 101. Follow the money.

I keep hoping we can crush them under the weight of the evidence, but they can scuttle into very tiny space.

George Doutsiopoulos

Our congress is currently wasting time on hearings about UFOs, or UAPs as they’re calling them now. It mystifies me how anyone can believe the crap the UFO weirdos spew.

One of the witnesses is a guy named David Grusch, who sits there making amazing claims that he can’t back up.

David Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee alongside two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with UAPs.

Grusch served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating UAPs until earlier this year. He told lawmakers that he was informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” during the course of his work examining classified programs. He said he was denied access to those programs when he requested it, and accused the military of misappropriating funds to shield these operations from congressional oversight. He later said he had interviewed officials who had direct knowledge of aircraft with “nonhuman” origins, and that so-called “biologics” were recovered from some craft.

Note: he has not seen any non-human biologics, he has heard second hand from unnamed officials that they had seen them.

Grusch said he hasn’t personally seen any alien vehicles or alien bodies, and that his opinions are based on the accounts of over 40 witnesses he interviewed over four years in his role with the UAP task force.

“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony,” Grusch said, adding that the trove of evidence has been intentionally kept secret from Congress.

It’s a secret, he claims. He constantly deflects when pressed by saying that he can only talk about this extremely confidential information in a SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility”. Right. Why is he there if he has only hearsay to report, and can’t give any details?

The fact is that when we do get details, they’re typically evidence of noisy technology, or reflections. When pilots report that non-aerodynamic objects are flitting at thousands of miles an hour at low altitude, while completely silent, that then abruptly disappear, I think it’s safe to say they’re not chasing physical objects — they are seeing optical artifacts, or technical glitches in their electronics. I don’t find these recordings at all convincing evidence of any kind of alien, or even material, phenomena.

This, for instance, is also not any kind of evidence, except evidence for credulity in some of the people reporting this nonsense.

A 22-year-old from New York City who asked to remain anonymous — “due to stigma that still persists around the subject” — told NPR he made plans to attend “knowing that it’s something that could be a historic moment.”

From an overflow room with about 100 other enthralled spectators, he watched as Grusch, Graves and Fravor — men with long careers in the military — shared their experiences.

Out of context, he said, their stories “sound fantastical” but given the credentials of all three witnesses, he said he’s a believer.

And he wasn’t the only one.

“There was definitely a gasp and everyone was definitely a little bit shocked,” he said, “when Grusch was talking about non-human biologics.” There was a similar response when Grusch later touched on the personal retaliation he suffered, according to the man.

A dubiously reported “gasp” from a meeting of congress means nothing. No history was made.

Grusch is not a credible source.

According to UFO researcher Joe Murgia, Grusch began peddling his UFO story when he attempted to convince Skinwalker Ranch aficionados and dubious UFO weaponizers George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell to help him take it public on their podcast while he was still employed by the government. The two declined, though not before taking him to a Star Trek convention to meet with ufologists, so he turned to the credulous team of reporters connected to his friend, Lue Elizondo.

He’s part of the usual assortment of “UFO researchers” and Star Trek convention attendees, unqualified fantasists with no credentials at all. The association with Skinwalker Ranch is a nail in the coffin. Skinwalker Ranch is an old property in Utah that was bought by con artists who then ginned up an imaginary history of cattle mutilations, Bigfoot, crop circles, and poltergeists, that got turned into books and a Netflix series. It’s bullshit.

Skeptical author Robert Sheaffer believes the phenomenon at Skinwalker to be “almost certainly illusory”, given that NIDsci found no proof after several years of monitoriing, and that the previous owners of the property, who had lived there for 60 years, say that no supernatural events of any kind had happened there. Sheaffer considers the “parsimonious explanation” to be that the Sherman family invented the story “prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow”, with many of the more extraordinary claims originating solely from Terry Sherman, who worked as a caretaker after the ranch was sold to Bigelow.

In 1996, skeptic James Randi awarded Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award for funding the purchase of the ranch and for supporting John E. Mack’s and Budd Hopkins’ investigations. The award category designated Bigelow as “the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult [claim]”.

In 2023, ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, criticized the $22 million research program led by James Lacatski. He emphasized the lack of any documentary evidence from the ranch after many decades of exploration and characterized Skinwalker as “always in the business of selling belief and hope”.

I tried watching the series. It’s ridiculous. Ten episodes of silly people making up stories about pixels, dead cows, and people in cowboy hats walking around in the sagebrush and complaining about bad cell phone reception. And this is the culture that is spawning these hearings? Nonsense. This is a clear example of the combination of grifting and cultural contagion.

You don’t believe me? Here’s a map of UFO sightings.

Notice anything unusual in the distribution? UFOs seem to be an odd confabulation fueled by English-language media. Yet Chuck Schumer and other congressional biologics found it necessary to stuff these hearing requirements into a defense budget bill. There’s nothing there.

But sure, wheel a gurney bearing the dead body of an alien into the hearing room, and I’ll pay attention…but that won’t happen.

Tom the Dancing Bug

Really, dealing with creationists teaches you a degree of cynicism in your expectations.