I’m about to drive to Minneapolis for the American Atheists conference. I’m not as enthused as I ought to be.

Atheism is an important topic, especially given the ascendance of destructive Christianity in this country, but so much of the atheist movement has become orthogonal to everything else I value — somehow people can be libertarian atheists or conservative atheists without feeling any conflict with the movement, and that bugs me.

I’ve paid for it, and there are some good people there I’d like to see, so I guess I’m going to go anyway. Maybe I’ll be revitalized.

A new paper is out: A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO₂-Global Warming Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence Contradicts IPCC Models and Solar Forcing Assumptions.

Let us examine the authors.

• Grok 3 beta: the first author is AI software, Elon Musk’s pet AI, to be specific. It is competent at stringing words together, but can you trust it?

• Jonathan Cohler: He’s a professional clarinetist with no scientific training (he has written software), but he’s also a vocal climate change denialist. Ironically, he’s also the author of The Puppeteers of Perception: How AI systems are designed to mislead. I guess now he has changed his mind and decided that AI is a path to the truth.

• David Legates: He actually has climatology credentials! But he’s been using them to deny climate change. He’s a creature of the Heartland Institute, and was recently appointed by Trump to a position at NOAA.

• Franklin Soon: He’s a high school kid. He’ll have to grow up a bit before we can kick him around.

• Willie Soon: A notorious climate crank. He’s an aerospace engineer affiliated with the Heartland Institute and a whole slew of far right think tanks. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly many millions, from the fossil fuel industry, but he works damn hard to lie about his ties. He’s generally an awful person, worst of the bunch on that paper. He’s apparently also corrupted a teenaged boy to follow his path in lunacy.

I am unperturbed by the human authors on this atrocity, who have been babbling like this for decades, but am very concerned about the use of AI to churn out garbage. The paper is dense and technical, and mostly impenetrable by me (dammit, Jim, I’m a biologist!), but clearly goes against the climate consensus, denying any role of carbon in global climate change. I’m going to reject its conclusions out of hand because a) it flouts all the information delivered by real, human, scientists who are experts in the field, b) it’s a machine-generated Frankensteinian mishmash cobbled together from cherry-picked sources; c) it was fed by a team of kook climate deniers who fed it garbage in, and got garbage out, designed to mislead. But you know all the climate change deniers are going to be citing this thing without question.

What I dread, though, is when even more denialists pick up on this. You want to argue against vaccines, or a spherical earth, or evolution, or racial equality, it’s easy: crank up Elon’s Lie-Making Machine, feed it trash from any of a number of delusional web sites, and it’ll spit up a technically dense, grammatically competent, flaming heap of bullshit that you can cite in your debates. I imagine the Discovery Institute and AiG and Jay Bhattacharya’s corrupted NIH already have some dumbass intern gearing up to crank out more papers with a shiny pseudoscientific gloss. The Gish Gallop will be mechanized.

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.