Home at last

Well, that was unpleasant. I caught a red-eye from SeaTac at about 1am last night — cranky already. I had a seat mate who had to keep getting up, so I didn’t get much sleep on the plane — crankier. Then I had my usual 3 hour drive from the airport to home, in this unpleasantly humid Minnesota weather — crankiest.

When I finally got home, I went to the office to pick up my mail backlog. I was sent a new book to review, one of those atheist books about morality and purpose which I would have thought has been done to death, but OK, I’ll take a look and see, maybe it’s new and inspiring. But then, blazoned on the cover, I saw…”Foreword by Michael Shermer”. Jesus fuck. People still go to that rapey guy for recommendations on morality? It’s like seeing a cookbook on cooking with subtlety and finesse, “Foreword by Guy Fieri”. Nope nope nope nope. I tossed that book straight in the trash.

Maximus crankiestiest.

Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya has been arrested

But he’s such a holy man!

The guy who authored that genuinely bizarre creationist text, The Atlas of Creation, and who ran a weird television program featuring heavily made-up “kittens” robotically endorsing young earth creationism, seems to have fallen spectacularly in a bust by the Turkish government. Singing the praises of the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, doesn’t seem to have helped him.

Notorious Muslim televangelist Adnan Oktar, known for leading a cultish group, was arrested by Turkish police in Istanbul on Friday over a number of serious charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.

Police said they are conducting a widescale operation led by the financial services department spanning five Turkish provinces. Authorities are looking to detain 235 of Oktar’s followers, and police said they had detained around 150 so far.

It’s clearly not just the arrest of a single man, but a huge crackdown on the entire cult. I have no sympathy for Oktar and his perversity and foolish ideas, but I also don’t much care for tyrannies and totalitarian police states. He’s a crook and a fraud — fine, arrest him for financial improprieties. He’s running a sex cult — pick him up for human trafficking and assault. I’m not too keen on arresting him for violating religious purity.

Following the court ruling, the head of Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs, Ali Erbas, criticised his TV show.

“There are certain religious references [on his TV show] and he makes belly dancers dance. Is such a thing possible? He has most likely lost his mental balance. He now says he is a freemason but he was punished previously for his remarks about freemasonry,” Erbas said.

“He was also jailed for insulting [founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kamal] Ataturk in the 1980s and 1990s, But now he speaks of himself as the greatest Kemalist. He’s a corrupted person.

“It is not right to watch a TV channel like his,” Erbas added.

You know, it’s not as if they lacked sufficient grounds to charge him on serious crimes without arresting him for featuring belly dancers.

Other charges Oktar faces are sexual intercourse with minors, kidnapping children, sexual harassment, blackmailing, holding people captive, menace, political and military espionage, fraud by exploiting religious feelings and beliefs, money laundering, violation of privacy, forgery of official documents, opposition to anti-terror law, coercion, slander, alienating citizens from mandatory military service, insulting, false incrimination, perjury, aggravated fraud, opposition to law against smuggling, opposition to tax regulation law, bribery, preventing one’s right to education and civil rights, torture, illegal recording of personal data, and violating the law on the protection of family and women.

Wow. Wouldn’t want to be him. I think we can now say that the biggest organization in Islamic creationism has been thoroughly crushed.

Facebook lies

Facebook claims to be cracking down on “fake news”, but in a press conference with journalists to announce their great progress, the Facebook flak was asked one simple, penetrating question. What about Alex Jones’ InfoWars site? Is that going to be blocked?

Guess what…no. They aren’t touching this one extraordinarily prominent source of patent bullshit. Nope. This one is an obvious no-brainer, yet somehow they make excuses to avoid an easy target that would demonstrate a real commitment to cleaning up their service.

During yesterday’s session, Su argued that Infowars operates in a gray area — often toeing the line of provably false but not always crossing it — and, according to CNN, suggested that the company was focusing its takedown efforts on outlets that “can be proven beyond a doubt to be demonstrably false.”

Huh. Which one of these InfoWars claims can’t be demonstrated to be false? How stupid are the people at Facebook?

I would like to know which of these Mark Zuckerberg thinks might be true. I want to see his personal testimonial for each and every one of them, or I’m calling shenanigans on the frauds at Facebook.

Shermer will slide out from under this — it’s like slime on a slug’s back

Here we go again, another exposé of Michael Shermer’s deplorable behavior. He’ll just shrug this one off, too, and no one will care and no one will abandon Shermer. But it does have some interesting points.

If you want to make Shermer cry, hit his pocketbook.

That evening, Shermer told me, he noticed his talk was poorly attended. At dinner afterward, his faculty host told him about Napoleon’s message. Upset, Shermer responded by sending a long email to the SBCC all-campus list in which he accused Napoleon of defamation, said that both Wallace and Napoleon had aimed “to personally harm me,” demanded that The Channels retract its “libelous article,” and told both the school and the student newspaper that they “will pay” for any book sales affected by the coverage unless they pulled the piece.

Carol Tavris disappoints, deeply.

Napoleon says that this was not her intention, and while she did hire a lawyer, she was unimpressed by the threats from Shermer and his legal team. “If they specialize in libel and defamation,” she told me, “they should know that me sharing public articles about you from 2014 is neither libel nor defamation.” Napoleon says she was also surprised to receive an email from Carol Tavris, a prominent psychologist and a writer for Shermer’s magazine, asking her, “in the spirit of feminism and fair play,” to consider that Shermer had been falsely accused, and to apologize for her email.

In the spirit of feminism and fair play, how dare you try to silence women who complain about Shermer’s sexism.

And surprise! Shermer claims not to be litigious, and to have never sued anyone!

“Shermer is notoriously litigious,” said PZ Myers, who received legal notice from Shermer after originally posting the allegations in 2013. “You know that as soon as you say something, he’s going to come down on you with his lawyers.” (In an email, Shermer responded to Myers’ claim by defining litigious as “prone to engage in lawsuits,” and adding: “I have never sued anyone.”)

Right. He just threatens people with lawsuits to bully them into silence. I wonder how many times he has done this and succeeded? Does it outnumber the times he has tried and failed, as he did with me? It’s also ironic that he’s making this claim in an article about the time he tried to threaten a school paper with a lawsuit.

Still, good to know for other people he blusters at: by his own admission, he has never followed through on his threats.

Also interesting that the faculty member who invited Shermer and angrily defended him was, at the time, already under Title IX investigation.

What everyone seems to agree on is that events quickly veered in unexpected directions, and the interaction set off campus-wide discussions at SBCC. Prolonging the controversy, the school recently chose not to rehire the professor who hosted Shermer on campus, Mark McIntire, an adjunct philosophy instructor who taught at SBCC for more than 20 years. The college, McIntire says, told him that he was not being rehired because of deficiencies in teaching. McIntire was also under a Title IX investigation at the time for personal emails he sent to female faculty members after the Shermer incident, which some women reported as threatening. Shermer and McIntire have characterized it as political retaliation.

Birds of a feather. Although McIntire was eventually cleared, sort of.

The Title IX investigation, which was completed in June, cleared McIntire of wrongdoing in his emails to faculty members, but did reprimand him for unethical behavior.

I wonder if he learned his ethical behavior from reading Shermer’s books?

The paper tiger, though, once again admits to his impotence.

Meanwhile, Shermer says he has racked up $3,000 in legal fees. “From where I sit now, I wouldn’t have done anything,” he said, expressing concern over McIntire’s situation.

I also have to sympathize with Raeanne Napoleon, the chair of the chemistry department at SBCC, who posted the letter that got Shermer so upset.

“I didn’t think twice about sending that email,” Napoleon said, adding that she now feels naïve. “I sent that email thinking this is the right thing to do. This is what you do. I watched the #MeToo movement happen!” Napoleon said. “I thought you spoke out against this stuff. I didn’t realize that speaking out would be so hard.”

Yeah, I spoke out. It’s been 5 years since, watching everyone let an accused rapist slide right on by, with no repercussions on his career at all.

A suggestion for Elon Musk

He wants to be a hero, so he rushed to build an impractical, inflexible torpedo to haul through a twisty convoluted cave in Thailand. Apparently, he’s never had to haul a bed frame up some stairs and through a door that you were sure it would fit through because it was only a half-inch too narrow for the frame, and you think maybe if you twist it just right it will fit. Those ingrate Thais just went ahead and rescued the kids without him, and now Musk sounds a bit petulant and pouty about it.

But while Narongsak Osatanakorn, the head of the joint command centre co-ordinating the operation, acknowledged Musk’s offer he said that the mini submarine would not have been practical for the cave rescue.

“Even though their equipment is technologically sophisticated, it doesn’t fit with our mission to go in the cave,” Osatanakorn told reporters.

In response, Musk said Osatanakorn was “not the subject matter expert”, adding that he believed he had been “inaccurately described as rescue chief”, and should be more accurately referred to as the “former Thai provincial governor”.

Musk is the rescue chief! And the expert on cave diving! And he’d be a better Thai provincial governor!

Poor Elon. I have an idea for him: did you know that Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have drinkable water? If he would fly in with a team of engineers and put together a water purification plant, even I would stand up and applaud him.

Except that I’m afraid he’d decide the cleverest solution would be to build an electromagnetic cannon to launch water balloons into the city.

Let’s all hope the Ark eventually sinks

Yet another video on the Ark Park:

I agree completely with Matt Dillahunty’s impression of the Ark: it’s not that impressive. It’s filled with pointless bric-a-brac — wooden box after wooden box filled with nothing, or filled with a static model of an ancient organisms. The “information” inside consists of wall after wall of posters. I’ve said it before: they were so focused on building a great big boat-like object, they put little effort into what goes inside.

I also agree that the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was a bad idea. I think Nye pulled it off, because Ham was such an obtuse twit that he gave away the show. Nye got the basics right, but there thousands of people who’d have been just as competent at the debate side, and wouldn’t have granted Ham the prestige of a famous opponent.

In other news, the latest assessment of the attendance figures show that Ham has been…exaggerating. He’s been claiming to have had a million visitors in the last year, but the tax payments say that they’ve had 750,000 visitors in the last 11 months, and it’s unlikely that they had one quarter of their entire yearly attendance in one month. Either Ham is lying about his attendance, or he’s been shortchanging the county tax assessors. Either one is possible, I suppose, but neither are particularly ethical.

Faception is phrenology for the 21st century!

What? You never heard of Faception? It’s amazing!

Faception is first-to-technology and first-to-market with proprietary computer vision and machine learning technology for profiling people and revealing their personality based only on their facial image.

Faception can analyze faces from video streams (recorded and live), cameras, or online/offline databases, encode the faces in proprietary image descriptors and match an individual with various personality traits and types with a high level of accuracy. We develop proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist. Ultimately, we can score facial images on a set of classifiers and provide our clients with a better understanding of their customers, the people in front of them or in front of their cameras.

In short, they claim to be able to take a picture of you, and in a fraction of a second, in the absence of any other information, be able to determine your personality. It’s done with computers, so you know you can trust it.

But, you know, we have these meat computers in our heads that have been trained through millions of years of evolution and throughout our development to be extraordinarily sensitive to faces. We can respond to an eyebrow that lifts a fraction of a millimeter, a lip that curls just so, a pupil that dilates by a hairs-width. We are really, really good at reading emotion and incredibly subtle social cues from facial expressions. There are autistic individuals who have more difficulty than most at picking up on those cues, but I suspect they’re far, far better at it than any computer program.

But even with this amazing sensitivity, do you really think you could look at a snapshot and accurately judge whether someone is a poker player or a terrorist? Don’t you suspect you’d get very different perspectives on the person’s personality if the snapshot were taken at a party, vs. taken at a funeral? Have you ever discovered that your first impression of someone, on the basis of their appearance, proves to be totally wrong once you get to know them better? Just on the face of it, this is an absurd claim they are making.

We haven’t even gotten to the actual “science” that they claim supports their thesis.

The face can be used to predict a person’s personality and behavior.

This claim relies on a combination of two known research observations

​

OK. They’ve got two justifications. Here’s the first. The second isn’t going to get any better.

1. According to Social and Life Science research personalities are affected by genes.​

In fact genes play a greater role in determining key personality traits like social skills and learning ability than the way we are brought up by our parents, researchers claimed.

Researchers from Edinburgh University studied more than 800 sets of identical and non-identical twins to learn whether genetics or upbringing has a greater effect on how successful people are in life. Writing in the Journal of Personality, the researchers found that identical twins were twice as likely as non-identical twins to share the same personality traits, suggesting that their DNA was having the greatest impact.

There’s an obvious problem with this argument: identical twins don’t have identical personalities. I’ve known a few identical twins, and it’s true that it may be hard to tell them apart visually, but try talking to them. They’re different people. Shocking, I know. Also, I think every twin has heard the joking question about which one is the evil twin, which the good twin (and is tired of it). How does software that only examines the most superficial aspects of a person fail to recognize this fundamental issue?

And, oh Jesu, they bring up that nonsense about measure the relative roles of genetics or upbringing. It doesn’t work that way! Both are interdependent. Genes will be expressed differently depending on the environment. Anyone who brings up nature/nurture as if they are competing hypotheses should be kicked to the curb and ignored.

But now watch the magnificent flying leap they have to make to argue that personality and facial features are linked.

2. Our face is a reflection of our DNA​

Researchers have identified five of the genes that shape a person’s face. Researchers previously knew that genetics played a large role in determining face shape, since identical twins share DNA. However, little was known about exactly which genes are involved. Three genes were thought to have roles in the arrangement of facial features, and the new research confirmed their involvement.

There are more than 3 or 5 genes involved in face development. Facial structure, like all complex traits, is almost certainly omnigenic. In point of fact, though, claiming that only a small number of genes affect face shape effectively contradicts their own argument, because that implies that these genes could do their job in morphology while another, completely different set of genes work to generate personality. Do these guys even understand what they’re talking about?

Working on mice, researchers have identified thousands of small regions of DNA that influence the way facial features develop. The researchers said that although the work was carried out on animals, the human face was likely to develop in the same way. In fact, It’s already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone.

Let it be stipulated that genes play a role in morphology, and that individuals who are genetically identical will develop very similar facial features. This is not a point of contention. The question is whether there is a correlation between physiognomy and personality. Do people with the same shape of nose have similar political stances, for instance? Is there a connection between bushy eyebrows and charitable giving? Is ear shape linked to gambling skill? These are the questions they need to answer.

They claim on their “classifers” page that this is the face of a pedophile, for instance. I think that looks like about half the white dudebros who work in tech. Are you comfortable with that suggestion? Because I’m not.

It does make me wonder if they’ve run their own photos through the machine, and whether the software has been optimized to weed out all the non-flattering descriptors. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first pass of the alpha version classified everyone as “asshole”, and they worked assiduously so it would instead classify them as “genius”.

But where is the evidence that face and personality are linked in a predictable way? Here we go.

And indeed, researchers were able to demonstrate that “Internal facial features are signals of personality and health. While these type of affirmations are quite recent, in Chinese history, there have been people that have studied the “mapping of the face” for thousands of years.

Also, the epigenetics phenomena has recently demonstrated, in academia researches and March 31th 2017 Science magazine.

Vague reference, no specific citation.

Vague reference to Chinese tradition.

Handwavy mention of epigenetics buzzword.

This is bad stuff. It’s just more hocus-pocus, like astrology or phrenology or iridology or tea-leaf reading or Myers-Briggs tests or any of a thousand gimmicks that have been used to make false claims throughout history. This Faception boondoggle is going to be no more effective at detecting terrorists than it would be at ferretting out witches.

Worse, it just genetic determinism coupled to racism as an excuse. Cesare Lombroso lives! It does make one wonder if his pickled head doesn’t actually dictate racist pseudoscience to bad writers and software authors.

Narcissistic, oblivious arrogance: that’s the New York Times

The New York Times wastes some more space on that whiny turd, Alan Dershowitz.

But this summer, Mr. Dershowitz says that because he has expressed views that back President Trump, he no longer feels so welcome on the Vineyard, a summertime epicenter of progressive values, money and sheer Democratic power in the United States.

He’s being “shunned”, he says, and for his plight, he gets a write-up in the New York Times. I don’t give a rat’s ass for Alan Dershowitz, but this is so symptomatic of how bad the NYT has become. It’s not just that a cranky old man (hey, where’s MY feature?) gets a sympathetic article, but that phrase: Martha’s Vineyard is the “epicenter of progressive values”? Martha’s Vineyard, vacation spot of the rich? If there’s any clearer picture of the delusions of the NYT and the Democratic party, this idea that Martha’s Vineyard matters, I’d like to see it.

But then, the NYT and the Democratic party have been ongoing oblivious catastrophes for years. Now a former executive editor has a few words to say about that.

I’m feeling about the NYT now like I did when my son cheated on a test in 10th grade. I loved him to death, believed he was a thoroughly wonderful young man, but he needed a course correction. So I left my desk at The NYT, where I was DC [Bureau] Chief, met his school bus and read him the riot act. He needed a course correction.

So does the NYT… it’s making horrible mistakes left and right.

This sums up her litany of complaints:

More narcissism: It’s always about us. Yikes. Distance is part of journalism’s discipline.

It’s that narcissism that allows them to think they are doing good by including a line-up of deplorables on their opinion pages, and printing complete garbage with a straight face. Like this piece by Matt Schmitz, an editor at First Things, a website that claims to present a “theological perspective on life in America today”. It got past an editor because the editors at the NYT all have their heads up their asses.

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children* as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska. Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order.

Mr. Trump’s purple family values may even explain some of his populist appeal. Global leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker appear to have stable and loving marriages. But their childlessness makes them worse exemplars of family values in the eyes of some non-elites than divorcees who have multiple children — a category that includes Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League party, and Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally party, as well as Donald Trump. Contempt for elite respectability is reflected not only in the respective party platforms, but in the personal lives of these populist leaders.

First hint to any NYT editor with the flexibility to swivel their heads in their colon and peep out with one eye through their anus: reject any submission that uses “elites” in that way. They’re talking about a grifter billionaire, but to them, the “elites” are working class Democrats.

Do not accept the normalizing of misery and the pathologizing of women. It is not normal to find alienation from your children’s mother as admirable. It happens, it happens all the time, but it’s a consequence of poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. Jesus, guy…listen to some country western songs. Alienated families are not a happy outcome. Single mothers are in for a world of struggle. He portrays these “red” families as moral monsters, who are just fine if their daughters experience marital difficulties and grief and alienation, and consider Trump to be an exemplar of an admirable lifestyle. These are lies. These are the excuses Trumpist bigots tell themselves to pretend they have good intentions.

And then…oh my god, look how he twists the perspective to make fascists look like the true models of familial unity. They have children! That’s enough to make them good people. But then he makes it seem that a few more liberal world leaders have been rejected by the American “non-elites” (Jesus fuck, how does this usage persist? Thanks, NYT) because they don’t have kids…as if those red-staters are so familiar with the family lives of European politicians. One thing we do know is that they were familiar with the fact that Hillary Clinton has a daughter, and that there seems to much love and respect between them, because Rush Limbaugh called her a “dog” and because they hated her. They knew that the Obamas had two daughters and a strong family, because those “non-elites” loved to fling racist vitriol at them.

If there was even a hint of truth in Schmitz’s bullshit, wouldn’t those wingnuts in Nebraska that he cites have been admiring Clinton and Obama, and cheering on the family values that they claim to love so much? But no, that would undermine his argument that good Americans love Nazis for their kinder.

But the New York Fucking Times published it. Because the NYT is a garbage rag that is completely out of touch with reason and reality that blithely publishes right-wing propaganda.

*One word comes to mind: Tiffany.

Now I understand.

What is wrong with the National Education Association?

I expect teachers to do better. I expect them to have some standards and some social awareness. So why, at the expo held in Minneapolis this year, did they allow these regressive scum to have a booth there?

That’s the NEA Ex-Gay Educators Caucus. They’re working to eliminate intolerance and discrimination against ex-gay students, teachers, and their supporters, but not so much working to eliminate intolerance and discrimination against gay students, teachers, and their supporters. They’re big pals with the Patriarchy Research Council, promote Walt Heyer, and are all entangled with conservative religious dogma. It’s a group dedicated to spreading misinformation and bigotry, and there they are, accepted by the NEA.

Here’s another group that was represented at the conference.

WTF? What is the NEA thinking? This is an anti-science group supported by Answers in Genesis!

For 17 years, Answers in Genesis has voluntarily supported the Creation Science Educators’ Caucus at the largest meeting of public educators in the world—the NEA (National Education Association) convention. It is one of the most liberal organizations in America today, promoting homosexual behavior, abortion, etc.

AiG as a ministry would not normally be allowed to have a booth at such a humanistic convention, but AiG has been invited by the Caucus to be a major part of staffing its convention booth and providing resources to be given away to public school teachers and leaders. Over the years, tens of thousands of books, booklets, DVDs, and other resources have been freely put into the hands of public school teachers, and each year hundreds of educators have been engaged by our witnessing team at the Caucus booth.

Here’s one reason this lunacy persists: money.

In all, over $70,000 worth of resources (a significant amount of the funds for this was given by special donors) including about 2,000 Check This Out DVDs, plus 2,000 other DVDs, 1,100 books, and 600 magazines were freely given to the public school teachers over the six day conference!

But there’s also another one: history. The NEA is stuck with bad caucuses because of antiquated rules.

Even more curious: The NEA Creation Science Educators’ Caucus. This one apparently was formed decades ago under earlier rules, when a caucus needed only one member to win recognition. It still has only one member, its founder, whose primary purpose is to distribute materials that argue for an alternative to evolutionary science. Tony Ramsek, a volunteer for the group—not a delegate—told me it plans to give 3,000 DVDs away at the convention. He emphasized that they’re not for classroom use: “We want to educate the educators,” he said.

Here’s an idea, NEA — join the 21st century, purge the anti-science, anti-human bullshit from your meetings, and support good education. Right now, you’re setting a terrible example. The Creation Science Educators’ Caucus is clearly a single kook being used as a tool to allow AiG to pour money and lies into the conference. Plug that leak.