But we’ve already got wooly mice

Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

There are a few problems with those claims.

  • We already have woolly mice. We have all kinds of interesting variants of lab mice with diverse mutations, and one of them is the woolly mouse:

    Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.

  • The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.

  • They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.

So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.

EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD.
And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.

Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.

They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.

As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.

And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.

The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.

If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.

What fathers are supposed to share with their sons

Bryan Johnson, that weirdo millionaire who wants turn aging backwards, taking megadoses of supplements and transfusing himself with blood from his son, has another game he plays with his kids: plethysmography! Every night they strap a measuring device on to their penises, and then the next morning they compare the frequency and duration of their erections.

So far, the kid is winning.

How many of you would make this effort for your kids? And still aren’t in prison?

I didn’t devolve, I just got angry

Did you know that Darwinists are devolving, according to the Discovery Institute? They even have a picture of this devolution, so it must be true.

I guess they haven’t noticed that if you talk to any evolutionary biologists today, they all consistently rebuke the old cartoonish illustration of the ‘descent of man,’ so it’s silly to use that against us. But then that’s all they’ve got, the enshrinement of antique notions that they can attack without ever having to deal with the reality of modern biology. They’re claiming that the proponents of Darwinism seemed to be shrinking in stature unaware of the irony of demanding that we defend Darwin — Darwinism, the narrow set of ideas that formed the core of evolutionary theory in the 1800s, is obsolete and outmoded. We aren’t defending those any more. We’ve got better, more complete models of how evolution works nowadays, and they don’t include illustrations of linear trajectories of changing individuals.

But this article from John West isn’t about the science, it’s about crowing over the defeat of their adversaries, even when no defeat occurred. So he marches through a small set of individuals, bashing them and claiming victory.

Consider Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, author of the anti-ID polemic Finding Darwin’s God in 1999. Miller was a gifted debater, but his arguments all too often relied on citation bluffing and critiquing straw-man versions of the ideas of Michael Behe and others.

Miller is still fighting, why is West using the past tense? Miller was part of the team that achieved possibly the greatest, most decisive defeat of the Discovery Institute’s agenda in the Kitzmiller trial. “Citation bluffing” seems to be the term they use to dismiss the fact that Behe’s claim of no scientific publications on the evolution of the immune system could be addressed by presenting book after book after book on the subject he claimed didn’t exist.

As for the claim of straw-manning creationists, I think it’s pretty silly to do that in an article where West constantly harps on Darwinism.

Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, was even shallower in his critique. Indeed, if you read Collins’s book today, you’ll find that many of his arguments, including junk DNA, have been increasingly thrown overboard by mainstream science.

So who was left to champion the old time religion of Darwinism?

They have this delusion that junk DNA doesn’t exist, and that citing a few articles that have rightly shown some function for some tiny fraction of junk DNA means that the whole of it must be functional, and that their perspective is supported by “mainstream science.” It’s not. And why should they care? Mainstream science says that evolution is true!

Once again, they bring up this claim that Darwinism is a religion. We can criticize Darwinism all we want without being thrown down into the pit of Hell.

Then, oh boy, they remember little ol’ me:

You also had biologist P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota Morris. He too could debate, although the quality of what you got was decidedly second rate. His preferred mode of discourse was invective. As he once instructed his fellow evolutionists, they should “screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots” — by which he meant, of course, anyone who dared to criticize Darwin’s theory.

John West has been crying about that quote since 2005. The Discovery Institute used it in their promotional materials. The suggestion that we stop being polite to known liars, frauds, and incompetents was so terrifying to them that they’ve spent the last 20 years whining about it. I’m kind of impressed with myself.

He still gets it wrong. Please do continue to criticize a theory that was assembled in 1859. I don’t mind that at all. But stop thinking that your primitive, poorly understood comprehension of an old idea is at all relevant or sufficient to rebut modern evolutionary theory.

Also, don’t expect me to be courteous when you dump a bucket of that bullshit on the podium in lieu of debating the science.

I like this Neil deGrasse Tyson fellow

Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.

I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.

Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.

Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.

By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.

I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.

That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big. Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.

Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.

The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.

It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.

They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.

Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.

Have your genes been pacified?

A reader sent me a request to help him debunk an evolutionary psychology paper. It’s easy: it’s evolutionary psychology, which ought to be sufficient, but also it’s by Henry Harpending, notorious white nationalist and spewer of scientific racism nonsense.

To be fair, I’ll give you a chance to read the paper and judge for yourself: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. The premise is that the operation of the death penalty culled out some mysterious genes that gave Western people a propensity for violence, so that nowadays white people are nicer and more civilized. Our violent genes have been “pacified”. I tried looking up this concept of “genetic pacification” in the scientific literature — it seems to be a term of art used only by evolutionary psychologists, without any quantifiable definition. This paper claims to try, though.

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

You will not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no data presented anywhere in the paper. The authors cite a purported correlation between historical endorsement of the death penalty and a decline in the homicide rate, while ignoring all the other complex social changes that were going on over the same period of time, a typical reductionist strategem. The paper fails to provide any evidence that criminality is heritable, but just assumes that it is.

What the authors pretend is evidence is a model they have built, but they don’t report any details about how the model works, and report very few quantitative conclusions from it…which are pointless anyway since they don’t explain how they derived them. What the do tell us about the model makes it laughable, though. Here are the assumptions they’re working from, in addition to their assumption that crime is caused by genes:

1.The death penalty was the only selection pressure acting against personal violence;

2.Without the death penalty, condemned men would have each killed only one person on average over a normal lifetime;
and
3.Condemned men had no offspring at the time of execution.

I think we can dismiss their whole model out of hand, based on the obvious falsity of all three of those assumptions.

At least the authors didn’t feel any need to make the implicit conclusion explicit — that white westerners are genetically more civilized than all those other people in the world.

Do not trust this man with your medicine!

Didier Raoult, quack

We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!

The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.

A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.

There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.

The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.

According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.

28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.

Hey, I can mangle thermodynamics, where’s my million dollars?

It’s been a weekend. My wife pulled a double-shift last night, and I took advantage of the boring silence in the house to wrap up the preparations for my last week of classes, and was up way too late. For my history of evolutionary thought class, I have the laziest plan ever: the students are doing presentations all week, and are also responsible for evaluating their peers. For my intro class, I’ve got one last lecture all queued up and ready to go, and then on Thursday they get an exam. But right now, I’m really tired and should get some sleep tonight.

Now for some light entertainment. A company called Extropic is getting millions of dollars of funding on the basis of this kind of gobbledygook.

Extropic describes itself as building a computing paradigm which harnesses the power of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to fundamentally merge generative AI with the physics of the world. [Extropic, 2023]

There you go. Translate, please.

I’m no physicist, but even I can see that that’s a lot of noise — they’ve garbled up a few thermodynamics buzzwords and mixed them up with the magic word “AI”. Helpfully, they go further to try and explain.

And the hardware wants to be stochastic, if we want to keep scaling. So why don’t we just cut the Gordian knot and simplify things, and implement AI algorithms in, as the stochastic physics of the world. So what we’re building at Extropic is a full stack, Physics-based computing paradigm focused on AI. And we harness the stochastic physics of electrons directly in order to instantiate probabilistic machine learning, which is the parent concept to generative AI.

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I’m just a lowly biologist. Maybe I’d just like to know how someone can con millions of dollars out of silicon valley venture capitalists with that kind of insipid, pretentious babble. Are VCs just not very bright?

All it needs is some goofy AI-generated ‘art’ to make it look like sci-fi…and look, the gullible tech press provides!

Fluff and nonsense

I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.

As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.

She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.

Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.

Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.

Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!

He gives us four things that religion does.

But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.

Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.

Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.

Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”

Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.

I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.

But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?

That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.

You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!

But what about that claim of neuronal reserves that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.

Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.

They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!

That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.

I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.

Do you believe him yet?

Elon Musk revealed the latest generation of his Optimus robot on stage. They didn’t do much: they walked slowly into the audience, accompanied by protective Tesla employees, while Musk hyped them up.

“The Optimus will walk amongst you,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk qips. “You’ll be able to walk right up to them, and they will serve drinks.”

Musk explains it can basically “do anything” and mentions examples like walking your dog, babysitting your kids, mowing your lawn, serving you drinks, etc. He said it will cost $20,000 to $30,000 “long term.”

“I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind,” Musk says.

They had some interacting with attendees, handing out cups of ice and playing rock-paper-scissors, but I’d bet those were remote controlled by other engineers, out of sight. The claim that they’d be able to take care of your pets or kids is ludicrous, coming from a guy notorious for his neglect of, and abuse of, his children.

He’s not going to be able to produce a reliable robot with all those capabilities for $30,000, and no, I’m not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to own a big clumsy machine to take care of my evil cat poorly, and to serve me drinks. We recently had to replace our refrigerator, and we just laughed at the idea of getting one that had internet access and a drinks dispenser on its door…why would we want that monstrosity in our home, when you can’t even store a package of frozen peas in it?

As usual, Musk is just confirming that he’s a very bad salesman whose lies are getting increasingly unbelievable.

This is why the Republicans want to ban NOAA

The mayor of Colleyville, Texas, Bobby Lindamood, made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that we should nuke Milton, after removing the radiation from the bomb, of course.

In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote: For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.

He added, Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.

Spoilsport NOAA has thrown a wet blanket on that idea.

During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

I ask you, who do you want to listen to, some nerd in a lab coat or a proud MAGAt in a cowboy hat?

The big hat must cover a big brain.