I’m losing confidence in the “intelligence” community

I’m not saying it was the CIA, but it was the CIA.

We’re suffering from a spate of UFO reports…endorsed by the CIA and the military. This is a bit like hearing that the president believes the Earth is flat, or senators babbling about how evolution is false.

Oh. I guess that last bit happens fairly regularly.

Anyway, suddenly there are all kinds of unconvincing videos from military planes flooding media. I’ve looked at a few — they are garbage. It’s as if people who are supposed to be good at distinguishing camera artifacts from actual stuff on the ground or in the sky have lost the ability to see common noise and optical problems. I saw one video where the supposed UFO was just plain old ordinary bokeh. You don’t have to be super-sophisticated to debunk this stuff, which means, I guess, that CIA directors aren’t particularly knowledgeable.

Late last year, former CIA director John Brennan, appearing on a podcast hosted by George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen, said it was “a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.”

Yes? I believe there is almost certainly other forms of life in the universe. The hard-to-swallow bit is the idea that they’re here.

And last month, former CIA director R. James Woolsey said in an interview with the Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal sightings, that he wasn’t “as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly, but something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.”

I’ve known a few pilots. Nothing about their occupation requires particularly deep intelligence (nor is it antithetical to being smart). Even if they were super-geniuses, you should still be skeptical of the reports. Have none of these people even read Feynman?

Hey, why is a former CIA director giving interviews on “a website that collects paranormal sightings”?

The authenticity of the videos has been confirmed by Pentagon officials. Some of them were recently featured on “60 Minutes.”

I have looked at these videos, and they actually truly are videos, rather than hallucinations. There. Confirmed.

I suppose this could also mean they have confirmed the sources, and they weren’t made by guys photographing pie plates thrown in their backyard. What they haven’t confirmed is that they are videos of alien spaceships.

“I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots,” Brennan said, “and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them.” He added, “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

Right. Bokeh. Lens reflections. Sensor artifacts. Brennan doesn’t understand optics. There is almost always an alternative, mundane explanation that doesn’t involve faster-than-light travel by intelligent aliens who are cruising our planet in flotillas of glowing spaceships, yet somehow are incredibly concerned about not being seen, which is why they look like flares dropped from airplanes.

Of course, eventually we figure out why all these people are being gullible and foolish. It’s about money. All it takes is a few easily fooled people with access to government funds to open the purse strings and fuel all kinds of nonsense.

It only took about 10 minutes to persuade his colleagues, Stevens and Inouye, to support approximately $22 million in funds for the Pentagon to start a program to investigate. Stevens was a particularly easy sell, [former Senate Majority leader Harry] Reid recalled, because as an Air Force pilot during World War II he had seen some pretty weird stuff, including an object that didn’t appear to be a plane that mimicked his movements in the air.

Here on planet Earth we call those objects “reflections”.

All right, for $22 million I’d be willing to highlight ambiguous videos, shrug, and declare in interviews that “well, it could be aliens.”

Would you pay me $2.2 million for the service?

$220,000, cheap.

Very well then, $22, but you also have to buy me lunch.

I get email

It’s not much, but I’m getting ready to head out the door for my long trek home, so it’s all you’re going to get.

By the way, they sent a link, but it’s just that butchered Ray Comfort interview from years ago. You can skip it.

You love Satan but he hates you!
Just spotted you acting all sophisticated and claiming to be atheist on this youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaReWoUyyQ.

Why don’t you grow up, get a copy of Darwin’s Worms book and try reason through that irrefutable fact he established – WORMS MAKE TOPSOIL AT THE RATE OF ONE INCH PER FIVE YEARS.

You seem to have sufficient intelligence to read the Worms book so why don’t you do it and stop promoting Satan?

Uh, OK. I have read the worm book. It doesn’t refute evolution — you know there are multiple processes at work in creating topsoil, including erosion taking it away, right? — and I presume this person is playing some weird game about the thickness of the soil supporting their young earth delusion.

By the way, you note that I said I’m an atheist. Perhaps this will shock you, but atheists don’t believe in Satan, either.

Besides, I only worship spider gods now.

The quacks are calling from inside the house!

Yes, I would like to support my emotional well-being. No, I will not subsidize the Center for Spirituality and Healing to do it. My university has this stupid but well-funded garbage-hole in our midst, the CSH. It’s a disgrace. This is a unit associated with the nursing school that does helpful thinks like bring Deepak Chopra to campus, or teach nursing students Tellington Touch, a technique for waving your hands over a patient to diagnose and heal them. They are very good at leeching off of revenue streams, though.

So I get email to my official university promoting CSH nonsense, and this is a new low, informing me of opportunities to spend money on CSH.

The Center of Spirituality and Healing is offering an online three part workshop, “Mind and Body Tools”. For each session completed, you can earn 25 points. Suggested registration fee is $15 per workshop, sliding scale rates available. See attached flier for additional details and registration information.

Yeah, see attached flier.

Here’s what rubs me the wrong way. The university knows their faculty have been struggling with their workload and with ancillary phenomena like depression and fatigue. This is the first time they offered any kind of assistance for dealing with that sort of thing, and it’s from that nest of quacks they sponsor, and it’s going to be a vague online seminar — you can guess how fed up we are with all that. Then, to add injury to insult, they want to charge us for it.

The points bullshit is part of our “wellness” program. Earn 500 points for various activities, and they’ll cut $500 off our insurance premiums. Yay. We can support an insurance company and a quack center together, just by spending a few hours on a zoom call listening to spiritual pablum. You know what would ruin my emotional health further? Sitting through 3 hours of blithering snake oil salespeople telling me about my chakras.

I’ve got a better idea. Disband the Center for Spirituality and Healing, and take the money saved and invest it in your useful and overworked faculty.

Oh, look. They offer a summer course in aromatherapy! Oh, fuck you, CSH.

Name and shame

Would you buy a cancer cure from this man?

Social media are a cesspool — it’s not so much “social” as it is “manipulative commercial/capitalist propaganda media”. It’s a net of a thousand lies, and Facebook and Google are its eager, willing enablers. It wouldn’t take much to improve it, but they won’t, because they make too much money off frauds and lyin’ politicians.

For example, would you believe that 65% of all the vaccine lies are driven by just 12 people? You can read all the details, but I believe it — there are people who are really good at wielding the megaphone of the internet, and have no other skills or learning at all, and they have an outsized influence. Here are the Disinformation Dozen:

  1. Joseph Mercola
  2. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
  3. Ty and Charlene Bollinger
  4. Sherri Tenpenny
  5. Rizza Islam
  6. Rashid Buttar
  7. Erin Elizabeth
  8. Sayer Ji
  9. Kelly Brogan
  10. Christiane Northrup
  11. Ben Tapper
  12. Kevin Jenkins

These are the people responsible for most of the memes and assorted garbage that’s poisoning minds all over the world. Mercola, for instance, has a huge and profitable quack empire, selling supplements and snake oil, and giving away lies for free. In the complete analysis, it goes through each of the twelve and states whether they have active accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram…would you believe that Mercola, who has been a notorious quack for decades, is active on all three? He doesn’t get any pushback at all, despite peddling cancer cures that don’t work, as well as claiming that COVID-19 doesn’t exist, but if it does, you can treat it with hydrogen peroxide. He’s been getting filthy rich off this nonsense, which explains why his accounts weren’t instantly yanked.

Kennedy is also active on Facebook and Twitter, but at least he was banned on Instagram.

The Bollingers: active on all three. They’re anti-vaxxers who claim the vaccine kills children.

Tenpenny claims masks don’t help and suffocate wearers. She was banned on Facebook, but still trumpets her noise on Twitter and Instagram.

Islam claims to have beat COVID-19 with chicken soup. Banned from Facebook, still lying on the other media.

Buttar claims that the vaccine will sterilize you. Still active on all three.

Elizabeth claims vaccines are part of a conspiracy theory to make everyone sick. Still active on all three.

Ji claims that the vaccines killed more people than the disease. He’s been kicked off Twitter and Instagram, but is still on Facebook — he runs a snake oil store.

Brogan partners with Ji, and has been booted from Facebook but still babbles on Twitter and Instagram. Nice synergy — between the two of them, they’ve got the big three covered.

Northrup is one of those hydroxychloroquine promoters. Still active on all three.

Tapper is a chiropractor, anti-vaxxer and anti-masker who says stupid things like “There is a total lack of evidence that viruses can live outside the body” — which makes no sense and is not even wrong. Still active on all three.

Jenkins seems to be riding Kennedy’s coattails. Still active on all three.

These twelve people are all using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to spread misinformation, and are doing it with very little complaint from the social media companies. Ban them. Ban them now. I know another dozen will just rise up to take their place, but if they just had real policies against medical quackery that they actually enforced, they could quickly ban those, too.

It’s kind of obvious that the idea of policies that inhibit active fraud on social media are considered a joke by Google and Facebook.

Plumbing the depths of psychic research

Does anyone else roll their eyes when they see that Dean Radin has come out with another paper about psychic powers? His latest is Genetics of psychic ability – A pilot case-control exome sequencing study, so you can see he’s now going to pretend he’s got genetic and molecular evidence. Let’s take a look at the abstract!

Introduction
It is commonly believed that psychic ability, like many mental and physical traits, runs in families. This suggests the presence of a genetic component. If such a component were found, it would constitute a biological marker of psychic ability and inform environmental or pharmacologic means of enhancing or suppressing this ability.

“Commonly believed” is not evidence, so claiming that a “common belief” justifies “suggesting” there is a genetic component is a huge reach. If this paper wasn’t rejected at the first sentence of the abstract, it should have been thrown out at the second.

Then to say they’d have a marker of psychic ability if they found a genetic component is absurd. This is like saying, “If I had some bread, I could make a ham sandwich, if I had some ham” (literally on the nose, I have neither ham nor bread in my house right now.)

Methods
A case-control study design was used to evaluate differences between psychic cases and non-psychic controls. Over 3,000 candidates globally were screened through two online surveys to locate people who claimed they and other family members were psychic. Measures of relevance to the claimed abilities (e.g., absorption, empathy, schizotypy) were collected and based on those responses, individuals with indications of psychotic or delusional tendencies were excluded from further consideration. Eligible candidates were then interviewed and completed additional screening tests. Thirteen individuals were selected as the final “psychic cases,” and ten age-, sex-, and ethnicity-matched individuals with no claims of psychic ability were selected as controls. DNA from the saliva of these 23 participants was subjected to whole-exome sequencing. Two independent bioinformatics analyses were blindly applied to the sequenced data, one focusing exclusively on protein-coding sequences and another that also included some adjacent noncoding sequences.

They found their “psychics” with an online questionnaire. They invited people to basically write in and claim they had paranormal abilities, and got lots of submissions. I guess I’ll have to look at their results beyond the abstract to see what’s going on. Boy, was the population full of super-powered people…at least, on self report. They got 3,162 people writing in saying they had all kinds of powers!

The psychic cases reported various ages when their abilities began, with “0-10 years old” being the most commonly reported answer (n = 9). The psychic cases endorsed the following abilities in descending order (number of psychic cases in parentheses after each ability): claircognizance (psychic “knowing,” n = 13), clairempathy (psychic “feeling,” 13), emotional healing (13), precognition, premonition and precognitive dreams (12), animal communication (11), clairvoyance (11), mediumship (11), telepathy (11), astral projection (10), aura reading (10), clairaudience (10), clairsentience (10), lucid dreaming (10), channeling (8), clairalience (8), nature empath (8), remote viewing (8), physical healing (7), retrocognition (7), psychometry (6), geomancy (5), psychokinesis (4), automatic writing (3), levitation (1), and psychic surgery (1). Clairgustance and pyrokinesis were not endorsed. On average, cases endorsed 9.5 +/- 8.9 abilities.

Of course, they’re not so stupid that they’d simply accept them on their say-so. They winnowed out the real crazies with an online psychiatric test, and then subjected them to one of those online psychic power tests. They were very rigorous. They got the number of subjects down to 13. Before you get too excited, though, they actually failed most of the tests, but got accepted anyway.

The cases’ performance was better than controls on most tasks, although this difference only reached statistical significance on the Remote Viewing test.

The “Remote Viewing test” was basically, “What does my table look like?”. That’s it.

So, using a sloppy lazy test, they picked a tiny random group of 13 people to spit in a test tube, and they shipped the saliva off to a company to sequence the exons — that is, the part of the genome that was transcribed and translated to produce proteins. I’m going to have to criticize their methodology again. Not only is their sample so tiny that they have no statistical power, but also what they’re looking for is vague and unspecified. They’re fishing for any kind of silly correlation.

What’s really surprising is that they didn’t find any!

Results
Sequencing data were obtained for all samples, except for one in the control group that did not pass the quality controls and was not included in further analyses. After unblinding the datasets, none of the protein-coding sequences (i.e., exons) showed any variation that discriminated between cases and controls. However, a difference was observed in the intron (i.e., non-protein-coding region) adjacent to an exon in the TNRC18 gene (Trinucleotide Repeat-Containing Gene 18 Protein) on chromosome 7. This variation, an alteration of GG to GA, was found in 7 of 9 controls and was absent from all psychic cases.

That’s right. They got diddly-squat.

No significant results were found when comparing psychic samples with general population samples obtained from a large-scale public sequencing database. This analysis followed standard practice
and excluded consideration of intronic regions.

They make a big deal of how they’re only looking at exon sequences in the methods, but then, when they found nothing, they decided, well, hey, let’s look at some introns. Again, this is bad design. They’re desperately looking for anything that might correlate with their “psychic” population. They found one thing.

However, probing intronic DNA adjacent to coding regions in exomes did find one non-coding region with a variation from the wild-type DNA sequence in 7 of the 9 control samples that was identical in all case samples and matched the sequence most commonly found in humans (i.e., wild-type). The variant was a modification from GG to GA in the intron region of the TNRC18 gene (Trinucleotide Repeat-Containing Gene 18 Protein) on chromosome 7 (rs117910193 position 5,401,412).

This is unimpressive. This is bad. They went trawling through billions of nucleotides to find a variant that might show up preferentially in their ridiculously defined “psychic” population, and they found one in an intron, a class of the genome that they initially excluded from their analysis. They demonstrate a truly pathetic incomprehension of probability and statistics.

But then, incomprehension of probability and statistics is a prerequisite for being a psychic power researcher.

And then…

Discussion
The most conservative interpretation of these results is that they result from random population sampling. However, when the results are considered in relation to other lines of evidence, the results are more provocative. Further research is justified to replicate and extend these findings.

Wow. The only reasonable interpretation is that their result is the product of random population sampling. Their statistical power is feeble, they got no statistically significant results, except when they ignore their experimental protocol and reach for any variation that they can weakly correlate with their test population — which also showed no significant psychic ability, except that they were able to guess the color of a table.

You might be wondering what these “other lines of evidence” might be. So am I. I read the discussion, and they don’t give any. Not one bit. Instead, they offer a lot of excuses for why their results were so pathetic. For example:

For example, one cross-cultural sociogenetic hypothesis that potentially explains the observed variation is that the rise, spread, and prevalence of Christianity in the Early to Middle Ages may have contributed to the reduction of the wild-type variant across populations. Christianity has been historically associated with an extraordinary degree of cross-cultural success, both in terms of the extent of its spread and temporal persistence across populations, relative to other religious creeds. The historical spread of “Western Church” Christianity, or Roman Catholicism, measured using an indicator of historical Church exposure, was found to be responsible for psychocultural variation among contemporary Western populations, including low rates of consanguineous mating, high rates of monogamous marriage, and individualism. This would be consistent with the action of culture-gene co-evolutionary selection pressures stemming from the historical (and contemporary) tendency for Christianity to favor these sorts of behavioral and reproductive patterns. Christianity also strongly proscribes mystical and psychic experiences, such as mediumship, outside of a limited range of contexts (e.g., monasticism in some cases). Thus, as part of this broader psycho-cultural “syndrome,” Christian cultural values, once established, may have historically attenuated the fitness of those prone to these and other sorts of psychic experiences (i.e., wild-type carriers). Conversely, the alternate allele carriers’ fitness (controls) may have been enhanced

Now I’m no fan of Christianity, to say the least, but to claim without evidence that Christianity is at fault for extinguishing the genes responsible for granting psychic powers because they couldn’t find anyone with psychic powers with a molecular correlate to their non-existent powers is a bit loony.

The paper is embarrassingly bad. But then, it’s typical of the journal, Explore, that had the lack of standards to allow it to publish it.

EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing addresses the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine. It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.

Yeah, right.

No one, other than trolls and corporate lawyers, likes DMCA takedowns

Rebecca Watson has been getting lots of them, and threats of lawsuits, in a tangled web of complaints from a couple of parties fighting over porn addiction vs. no porn addiction. I don’t want to even try to untangle it, but it sounds like Rebecca is just a civilian casualty taking friendly fire, or not-so-friendly lashing out by one side of the argument. I’ll let her try to explain it.

I’ve been there. It always seems like those most religious about free speech who fling around SLAPP suits and try their hardest to silence everyone else. I’m with Team Rebecca on this one: I’m not going to sue anyone no matter what they say about me, and it’s just abuse of the legal system to play these games. Did Richard Carrier or Ben Radford improve their reputations with their shenanigans? No.

A few other comments:

You too can support Rebecca Watson on Patreon!

I’ve noticed that she generally seems much happier and more relaxed since she kicked the atheist/skeptic movements out of her life and replaced them with surfing and a dog. There’s a lesson there. I’m replacing them with photography and an army of spiders.

Everyone congratulate her on her recent elopement! That seems to be a wise decision, too: my parents eloped, my niece is eloping at the end of the month. Getting out from traditional demands is another recipe for happiness.

Science words!

You don’t need to understand the meaning, as long as you string together a few science terms you learned in grade school, it must be true.

Do I really need to say it? Being injected with an RNA vaccine does not replace your entire nuclear genome with RNA.

Although…it does make me wonder what would happen if a magic enzyme added a hydroxyl group to all your ribose sugars to convert DNA to RNA. Yeah, changing the chemical properties of all of your chromosomes to make them more labile and prone to rapid breakdown and unrecognizable to most of the key proteins for transcription, among other things, would be kind of catastrophic and thermodynamically costly.

There’s probably some vicious Hebrew abuse going on there, too, but I wouldn’t know.

Wait, does this mean that when you die, your soul retains some kind of DNA-based organic structure?

No, stop, don’t over-think this. Trying to puzzle out serious meaning from that text leads to madness.

Please stop showing off how stupid atheists can be

Once upon a time, the growing atheist community was shattered by the emergence of a disruptive faction who thought there is more to this business than just disbelieving in gods. They were tyrants who wanted to force atheists to do more than yell slogans about how religion is a cancer, and maybe build constructive communities. These were the wicked Social Justice Warriors, or SJWs. They committed the abominable crime of bringing feminism into atheism, of being anti-war and anti-racism, of supporting equality with even LGBT people, and tainted the idyllic purity of true Reason and Rationality with…with values <hack, spit> and ideology (atheism was free of ideology before, existing in a realm of pure thought). These SJWs dared to dismiss the great good Old Guard of Atheism when all they did was exhibit a little light misogyny or xenophobia or corruption. They dared to criticize other atheists! They must be punished!

Well, I confess: I am one of those SJWs. Some people think I’m one of the ringleaders of this diverse group of terrible egalitarians and idealists, and therefore, they are entirely justified in coming to my blog and…actively demonstrating that I was right all along, and there’s a deplorable subset of atheists who aren’t very rational at all? I don’t get it, but regular readers of Pharyngula have noticed a series of abusive, nasty, misogynistic & homophobic & transphobic & anti-semitic & just plain vile comments showing up lately. Like these:

Just so you know, these are all from one lone vigilante, out to prove that he is a smart, reasonable, logical representative of modern atheism by going on an obsessive crusade against SJWs, using obscene slurs against everyone who is not a white Anglo-Saxon cis het man. He’s gone through dozens of hotmail accounts and made hundreds of these short, thoughtless posts to make his point, whatever it is, and I’ve just been blacklisting his accounts and deleting his obscenities almost as fast as he makes them. I don’t understand why, but he seems bound and determined to prove that some atheists can be deplorable, hateful, and illogical by making an example of himself.

So, I’m sorry to say, I’ve switched on the commenting feature that holds a new commenter’s first post in a queue awaiting my approval. This shouldn’t affect regular commenters, but if you’re new here, there might be a delay in your comments appearing. All because one atheist is an asshole.