Give it up, Ray

Oh. Ray Comfort is still making his dishonest videos? Here’s the trailer for the latest, title “Amazing Athiest [sp]: A journey of two atheists”.

Do you know those two guys? Are they supposed to be representative atheists? You know Comfort’s schtick: he confronts random people in the street who probably haven’t thought much about the subject he’s asking about, and then puts up a gloating video claiming that “hurr, hurr, hurr — look at these people who aren’t professional debaters.” Or, as the blurb says, “See their inconsistencies and struggles as they attempt to justify their blind faith.” This looks to be more of the same.

I’ll skip it.

IMPORTANT: do not learn anatomy from reddit or twitter

Or from men, apparently.

Men can’t possibly commit sexual assault, because there’s no way they’d be able to find their way about in a woman’s nethers. They’ll just fumble about and end up poking her in a dimple in her knee, or something.

Or they’re just grossed out by the arrangement of parts.

I think we all want that guy to continue to be repulsed by all women. It’s best for everyone.

Property values in Alex Jones’ neighborhood must be plummeting

He is a scary, sick man. He fantasizes about chopping up his neighbors and feeding them to his daughters. Where is CPS?

Speaking of values plummeting, Elon Musk murdered the price of his stock with a tweet. One tweet about the price of his stock being too high, and investors promptly wiped out $14 billion of his company’s worth (and $3 billion off his personal worth). That ought to make you wonder: if tweeting 6 words demolishes all that money in a day, doesn’t that tell you that stock prices are mostly a shared fiction? If I had any personal investments in the stock market, I’d want to bail out fast and invest in something real…like, maybe, tulips.

We should also wonder about something else. All these famous “influencers” — Jones, Musk, Jordan Peterson, probably many others — are exposed as flawed, fragile people who seem to have been broken by fortune and fame to the point where any little thing seems able to tip them over into a slide towards self-destruction. It’s a long slide, too, where they continue to be newsworthy even as they expose themselves to be merely human and far too damaged to be authorities or leaders in much of anything.

Hoo boy, the Discovery Institute is pathetic

Everyone seems to be “pivoting to video”, including the creationists, so I might as well join in the fun. The Discovery Institute put out a quasi-animated video with a young hipster narrator to promote science denialism — they want to claim that the whale transitional series is bogus, and that all those fossils are just a random jumble of unconnected species that somehow just appeared, and none of them are really intermediates. So I had to expose the flaws in their thinking. Unstylishly, of course.

If I look a little bit squinky-eyed, it’s because I only noticed after recording it that the sun was glaring in through the window to one side. Next time I do one of these, I’d better draw the blinds.

Shocking: Muslim call to prayer broadcast on the streets of Minneapolis!

It’s true! The Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque will be playing the adhan five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. You may recall that that was the Minneapolis neighborhood visited by Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer in their quest to find the Muslim terrorists lurking there.

The Muslim call to prayer will be broadcast the traditional five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, beginning with the start of Ramadan this week and continuing through the end of the religious holiday in May.

I checked out a few sites where this news was being reported. There’s a lot of Jesus-freaking going on, but I thought this comment merited my attention.

We need to shut this down. Where are all the “principled atheists” and “skeptical scientists” to oppose this? They’ll sure put up a fuss if there’s a cross outside or a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse. Cricket noises when the city pays* for loudspeakers to blast Muslim propaganda into neighborhoods.

He put the asterisk there because there isn’t actually any sign that the city paid for it, he just thinks they did. But hey! “Principled atheist.” “Skeptical scientist.” He might as well have written by name in there, because that’s me, and I do have a response.

I titled this “shocking” because the story implies that Muslim communities were not allowed to make the call to prayer before this. That’s just wrong! The Christian believers are always ringing bells and singing Christian carols between October and January and inviting people to church without a single qualm. But Muslims haven’t been allowed to do the same for their religion? Why? If the Catholic church down the street from me can ring their bells multiple times a day on Sundays, why can’t the muezzins do likewise for their faith, within the limits of noise ordnances? If singing “God is Great” and “There is no God but God” is propaganda, then so is saying “Jesus is Lord”, and you can’t ban one without banning the other.

Freedom of religion means you can’t impose your religion on me, and I can’t force my godlessness on you, and that all religions and non-religions ought to be treated equally. I have no problem with this practice, any more than I complain about the nearby Catholic church. I’d go further and say we shouldn’t disallow it once Ramadan is over, within any limits on frequency and volume that must be equally applied to all churches as well. Also, to me, if ever the urge strikes me to go outside and bang pots and shake my fist at the sky and yell about religions being false.

It’s especially good to allow this practice if it makes Jacob Wohl pee his pants.

Welcome to real skepticism

Some anonymous guy wrote a popular blog post in which they proposed a radical new idea that the real mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 action was that the virus invaded red blood cells, displaced iron from the heme group in hemoglobin, and thereby both reduced the O2 carrying capacity of blood cells, and released large amounts of toxic iron. They had no expertise in medicine, molecular biology, or epidemiology, and their hypothesis was total bollocking nonsense. The post has since been taken down.

Now there is a thorough post up that utterly demolishes the original claim. I’m not a fan of the hyperbole of saying someone was “destroyed” by a blog post, but in this case, the word applies. The author is an MD/PhD with a specialization in the molecular biology of mammalian heme globins, and he tears into the claims at every level and burns them to the ground. It’s wonderfully entertaining, if you enjoy good science and despise quacks.

His conclusion also brings up a very good question: why do people promote pseudoscience?

The above discussion is by no means an exhaustive list of the blog post’s incorrect statements or conclusions. Nonetheless, I hope it has been sufficient to make clear that the blog post, and even the scientific article that likely inspired it, should not be viewed as a source of any meaningful insight into SARS-CoV-2, how it affects patients, or how the virus might be treated. What I still don’t know is why the blog post author, under a pseudonym, chose to present such an incorrect description of this disease and the underlying pathophysiology with such confidence. That they would go so far as to suggest treatments for the disease despite a lack of any medical training, and in virtually the same paragraph condemn “armchair pseudo-physicians” who push incorrect information, is truly mind-boggling. Tragically, whether it arises from genuine malice, unfounded arrogance, or just simple ignorance, this sort of misinformation about a deadly pandemic can genuinely put lives at risk, and it’s up to those of us who work in this field to fight back against it in whatever way we can.

I wish I understood this phenomenon myself. It comes up all the time in evolution debates — some clown makes grand, sweeping statements dismissing evolutionary biology, and when he gets quizzed on the subject, it becomes rapidly apparent that they know nothing about the subject, and their colon is packed with so much misinformation it’s backing up their throat and dribbling out their ears. Yet somehow the frauds get all the acclaim, get paid well, and bring in adoring mobs of followers who love to see the experts get dissed…oh wait. I think I might have just answered my own question. It’s all money and ego.

Note: there are also skeptics who are all about the money and ego. I’ve known a few.

Watch party on 30 April!

Mark your calendars — the makers of We Believe in Dinosaurs are hosting a watch party of their movie on 30 April. What that means is…

  • Sign up for a seat at the link. You’ll be sent a Zoom URL so you can join a group of people online.

  • Get a copy of the movie on your streaming service. It’s $3.99 on Amazon.

  • On 30 April, before 7pm, make popcorn, log in to zoom, get your movie queued up.

  • Precisely at 7, hit play, watch the movie and listen to commentary from the makers.

  • You can, I presume, use the chat feature to make text comments of your own.

If you’re wondering what the movie is about, it’s a documentary about Answers in Genesis’s Ark Encounter. He’d rather nobody saw it, so you’ll get the bonus thrill of pissing off Ken Ham.

One Theory to rule them all

I’ve been slow on the uptake on all these conspiracy theories. I was completely unaware of all the “5G causes COVID-19” goofiness until all the cell phone towers being set on fire stories hit the news, for instance. Now Orac informs me of another wacky tale. Did you know glyphosate causes COVID-19? How about glyphosate and vaping? Maybe glyphosate in biofuels? Glyphosate in automobile emissions? Glyphosate in jet fuel? Meet Stephanie Seneff.

I am a senior research scientist at MIT [in computer science]. I have devoted over 12 years to trying to understand the role of toxic chemicals in the deterioration of human health. I have been particularly focused on figuring out what has been driving the skyrocketing rates of autism in America and around the world. My research strongly suggests that glyphosate (the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup) is a primary cause of the autism epidemic in the United States. When the COVID-19 pandemic began its march across the world, I started to consider whether glyphosate might play a role.

If there is indeed a connection between glyphosate and COVID-19, understanding why and how they’re connected could play a critical role in combating this pandemic.

The only thing missing is a claim that glyphosate in contrails causes autism and COVID-19. Maybe it’s already there if I were to dig deeper, but I’m disinclined to dig even shallowly.

Personally, my theory, which is mine and that of every moderately sensible biologist on the planet, is that COVID-19 is caused by a moderately infectious virus that has nothing to do with glyphosate or jet fuel or rivers or I-5. But that’s just me. And most educated persons.