Kent Hovind is a busy, busy man

Wow. Kent has a full schedule this month, with lots of debates to brag about. He’ll “win” them all, too!

I am a bit dismayed. I’ve never heard of any of his opponents, they’re all “debating” exactly the same topic — which tells me that Hovind set it — and also, they’re all hosted on the same “impartial” YouTube channel, Standing for Truth Ministries. You’ve been suckered, gang. You’re getting gamed. These are all a sham. Why do people keep falling for this nonsense?

I can guess why. Hovind is stupid, shallow, and repetitive; you listen to him talk and you think, “that’s all wrong, I know enough to counter that argument,” and you confidently challenge him to a debate. But then you let him set the agenda, since he’ll refuse to talk to you if he doesn’t, and he decides the venue, because, again, he’ll refuse if you don’t let him. Then when you do engage him, he just says the same dumbass crap every time. Evolution is the dumbest religion in the world. Do you believe you came from an amoeba? Cats have never given birth to dogs. Yadda yadda yadda.

You might precisely and eloquently deliver the facts that demonstrate he’s wrong on every point. You think you’ll get him this time, because you listen to a few of his “debates” and discover that they never change, he always says exactly the same stupid things, so you will be prepared. It doesn’t matter, because Hovind will consider it a victory if he obtusely refuses to accept anything you say. He’s got the mind of a two-year-old who has learned the word “NO”. He’ll sail through your debate, rejecting all evidence and reason, and emerge at the end not having learned anything, and then he’ll sign up another sucker who will let him execute the same performance.

Stop doing this. Show a little spine. If you really want to debate him (I can’t understand why, it’s not going to look good on your CV), then demand a debate on a much narrower topic, and get a moderator who is not a fawning lickspittle creationist like SFT, one who will actually shut you down if you veer off topic. This is the way. It is the only way.

You’ll at least get the satisfaction of seeing Kent Hovind yip-yip-yip as a runs away from your conditions.

Neuralink is feeling the heat

Neuralink is pumping out a flurry of PR to counter the reports of animal neglect at the company. Here’s Ryan Tanaka making excuses for them:

Tanaka is an odd one — he claims to have no affiliation with the company, he just loves them so much that he has a YouTube channel dedicated to fluffing Elon Musk and Neuralink. Even here, notice how the justification is I think it’s worthwhile to keep the long-term goals of the team in mind — the end justifies the means. Then he trots out a string of Neuralink employees to say how wonderful the company that pays them is.

That’s worthless.

The goals of Neuralink are sci-fi nonsense and hype about mundane technological developments. They’ve got a chip with more channels than previous efforts…but that’s not where the questions lie. Just throwing more needles into the brain does nothing if you don’t understand the interactions, or the long term consequences of healing, repair, and response to exogenous signals. It’s really a brute force approach to physically interacting with a mammalian brain, and it’s going to be increasingly disastrous as these people fumble about crudely under the directives of an incompetent narcissist.

I don’t want to hear what paid employees say. This is a case where an independent review is necessary by people who don’t get a paycheck from Elon Musk. I’d still like to know why UC Davis no longer supports Neuralink’s animal research. Is it under an NDA? That wouldn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I bet all those employees have a threatening NDA stapled to their backs.

If you want to see something really sad, though, check out Tanaka’s YouTube channel. Read the comments on this video, for example, but they all sound alike. They’re full of desperate people looking for hope. ‘Please sir, cure my seizures/paraplegia/tinnitis/depression/autism/Parkinson’s/multiple sclerosis/schizophrenia. Will it let me talk to animals?’ That’s where the fervor comes from. Musk is the messiah who will heal everything.

Then there are the sci-fi fantasies.

Very ambitious! Nope, not gonna happen.

I want an invasive, dangerous electrical device imbedded in my brain to help with my homework! Sheesh, CS nerds.

That could help with the research. Using an unreliable device and Tesla software to assist you in driving your motorcycle will generate a huge number of test subjects.

Oh, and all the people asking to sign up for the experimental trials! It’s madness. No, don’t do this. Don’t. Just don’t. One of the signs you’re in a cult is the willingness to let the cult leader do experimental neurosurgery on you. It will never end well.

Will this finally kill Jordan Peterson’s career? No, it will not.

That’s quite a list of critics of the Rogan/Peterson circle jerk. All these people with relevant, advanced degrees in climatology are explaining that Peterson is childishly inaccurate and foolish, as if maybe at some point people will wake up and realize that he is a lying incompetent.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick:

“He seems to think we model the future climate the same way we do the weather. He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.

“He has no frickin’ idea,” she said.

Dr Gavin Schmidt:

“Guys, for the love of everything holy, please, please, have somebody on who knows what the heck a climate model is!!!”

Schmidt told the Guardian he was reminded of a quote from the famous British statistician George Box.

“Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’,” Schmidt said.

Prof Steve Sherwood:

Peterson was “making the ancient climate sceptic error of mixing up weather and climate”.

“Anyone who has taken an introductory course in climate or atmospheric science would spot this problem,” he said. “Errors in a weather forecast indeed accumulate such that after a couple of weeks the forecast is useless.”

But with climate, Sherwood said, the models work differently to project how the climate will respond to different factors, such as higher levels of CO2.

“[Peterson’s] argument is like saying we can’t predict whether a pot of water on a flame will boil, because we decide in advance what variables to put in our model, and can’t predict each bubble.”

Prof Christian Jakob:

Peterson’s comments were “ill-informed” and that he’d “mixed up weather prediction with climate projections.

“People are entitled to their opinions, but science and climate modelling isn’t about opinion. If you’re not well informed about how something is done then it’s not right to make comments about it on a large platform.”

Prof Michael Mann:

Peterson’s comments – and Rogan’s facilitation of them – was an “almost comedic type of nihilism” that would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Peterson’s claim that the climate was too complicated showed “a total lack of understanding of how science works” and could be used to dismiss physics, chemistry, biology, “and every other field of science where one formulates conceptual models”, according to Mann.

“Every great discovery in science – including the physics that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast their ridiculous conversation – has arisen through that process,” he said.

Prof John Abraham:

the episode was “a word salad of nonsense spoken by people who have no sense when it comes to climate.”

“To say that climate model errors increase like compound interest is laughable. Jordan Peterson displays a near complete misunderstanding of climate change, and the tools climate scientists use to understand what is happening to our planet.

“It’s as if someone, with zero expertise and knowledge, made comments about something he knows little about.”

You know, people have been blasting this message since he first squelched his way into the public consciousness with his wrong interpretations of an anti-discrimination law, his wrong explanations of gender, his wrong ideas about evolution and neuroscience, his wrong notions of epidemiology and disease, all undergirded by his wrong opinions about religion and supernatural phenomena, and his foundation in the wrong ideas about psychology (his profession!) built on a bizarre Jungian framework. His audience doesn’t seem to care. They just seem to like that he’s blissfully confident about his wrongness, and that’s what they love about him.

Wacked again

Kent Hovind featured me on his wack-an-athest segment last night on YouTube. It was the same ol’. As usual, he never listens to anyone, so he spent a bunch of time telling me that I really do believe I came from a rock, and then he skipped through a few pages of Campbell Biology, reading excerpts from their short history of the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, condensation of the Earth, etc., to declare that that textbook also says we came from a rock. He also said he’s been in 260 debates, and that he has won every one of them, and that even the professors and atheists all agreed that he had defea-Ted his opponents, while his Igor, Matt Powell, nodded vigorously over his shoulder and his claque jeered in the background.

The man is delusional and insane, and he’s got a cult who believes his every word. He invited me to come on down to his Alabama compound again, but who in his right mind would do that?

I won’t link to him, you’ll have to look it up on YouTube yourself, but only if you’ve been very naughty and feel the need to be punished. Hint: he misspelled my name as Meyers in the title, because of course he did.

Oh, cool. Now Brett Keane is piling on. I’m being dragged down into the slime for sure.

Jordan Peterson is talking out of his ass again

Of course he’s peddling more conspiracy theories. These new COVID variants that require booster shots are apparently the product of convenient whims of Big Pharma.

When is that a variant? How about whenever it’s convenient for the pharmaceutical companies?

The man is firmly in Joe Rogan territory. We recognize variants by their genetics and by their phenotypic effects on their host, things that we can actually measure. The pharmaceutical companies can’t just conjure up new strains of a virus that is already infecting millions of people.

Peterson is a fucking idiot.

By the way, he’s putting on a show in my backyard, at the State Theater in Minneapolis, on my birthday. Tickets are in the $200-$400 (absolutely astonishing), and I want you to know…that would be quite possibly the very worst birthday present I could imagine getting. Fortunately, no one on Earth hates me enough to inflict that on me.

Don’t try to tell me creationism isn’t a science stopper

Oh boy, Answers in Genesis has published their assessment of the James Webb Space Telescope. They’ve already decided that it’ll be great for taking pretty pictures of stars, which they’ll no doubt use to illustrate their beliefs, but it’s bad, fallacious science. It’s secular, naturalistic, and saturated with evolutionary thinking!

So obviously, there are some awesome observational science aspects (observable, testable, repeatable) to this mission, such as observing and studying the farthest regions of the visible universe that were previously hidden to us. However, as seen from the many news reports published by the media (especially from NASA), the overall objectives for JWST are saturated in evolutionary (and really naturalistic) thinking. For example, NASA states on one of their websites, “The primary goals of Webb are to study galaxy, star and planet formation in the universe. To see the very first stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe, we have to look deep into space to look back in time (because it takes light time to travel from there to here, the farther out we look, the further we look back in time).”

You must understand the binary distinction that AiG makes about science. Good science is “observational” science: the work that just describes what you see right now, that doesn’t draw any inferences about cause and effect, past or future. It’s fixed and static. That leaf is green. That rock weighs 80 kilograms. The temperature right now is -24°C.

Bad science they lump into a category called “historical” science, because, as we all know, historians don’t draw any conclusions from the past, don’t make inferences about causes, don’t see any kind of links between historical events, ever. It’s all lists of dates and battles and kings, you know, kind of like what you see in the book of Genesis, which is good “observational” science. All that stuff about hypothesis testing, and induction, and experiment, and theory, and interpreting and predicting connections between events, the tools that scientists have relied on and found productive since at least the days of Francis Bacon…well, that’s just bad, with only occasional exceptions.

Note, these objectives fall into the category of science that’s called historical science (making assumptions about the past based on evidence in the present), which, by the way, can be useful in certain applications (like in forensic science when analyzing crime-scene evidence) but only when used through a biblical “lens” and logical worldview.

OK, so you’re allowed to use historical science, but only to solve murders. And all murders must be viewed through a biblical “lens”! I think that means they’re all committed by witches.

In case my sarcasm is obscuring this fact, no, these distinctions that AiG makes between observational and historical science are total bullshit. They make this bogus dichotomy all the time — it’s practically the first thing they tell you in the entranceway to their Creation “Museum” — but all it really is is a way for them to throw out otherwise totally unremarkable scientific ideas that they find objectionable because they reveal that their interpretation of the Bible is false. They don’t like that we can look at the universe and see that reality contradicts their biblical version of events.

Therefore, the JWST is a priori wicked and false.

However, in this instance, these statements for the JWST are clearly secular (and unbiblical), which inevitably means they’re also fallacious (this is the result of every unbiblical worldview). Notice the claim of “looking” back in time (when looking at objects deep in space) in order to see how everything in the universe began through cosmological evolution (i.e., the big bang). But note that when making this claim, they’ve already merely assumed cosmological evolution (by assuming star/planet formation occurred in the early stages of galaxies) in order to prove cosmological evolution (via “looking” back in time). This is a logical fallacy called begging the question.

Wrong. Science builds on prior observation and experiment to build models of how the world works, which are then continuously tested with further observation and experiment. The space telescope is built on a body of science and technology, driven by the fact that there are things we can’t observe now with existing technology. It was lofted into orbit to see phenomena that we were unable to see before, and that’s the entire point: if we could just assume that we already have all the answers, then there would be no need to spend $10 billion to make a better telescope. Astronomers will use this tool to test their predictions about what lies out there.

It may generate new theories, or it might provide further confirmation of cosmological evolution. That’s what the creationists actually fear, that this OBSERVATIONAL science will provide even more information showing that their HISTORICAL interpretation of biblical history is petty and silly, and that the “science” in their book of Genesis is nonexistent or false.

One thing I don’t miss from Salt Lake City

Yikes, there’s something off about the whole story

Really, it’s a lovely place to live, and it’s usually easy to overlook the Mormons. The Salt Lake Tribune is also a good newspaper, except…they have a tendency to soft-pedal Mormon absurdity. Case in point: their coverage of Mormon archaeology. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Mormon religion was founded by a 19th century con artist who wrote this pretentious, long-winded piece of fan fiction about the lost tribes of Israel colonizing North America and creating, out of whole cloth, a pseudo-history of pale-skinned people building cities and fighting wars all across the continent. There’s no evidence for any of this nonsense. But the Salt Lake Tribune reports it as if this is legitimate history and archaeology, and the religious kooks digging around for support for their myths are heroic.

Forget Indiana Jones. Try Iowa John.

Yes, John Lefgren and other supporters of the Heartland Research Group aren’t hunting for the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, but they are searching high and low — in this case, really low — for archaeological evidence supporting the church’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon.

Right now, they’re on a quest to find Zarahemla … in southeastern Iowa.

They’re using light detection and ranging sensors — along with carbon dating, magnetometry and other technological tools — to pinpoint the ancient Nephite capital, which they believe is waiting to be discovered underground just outside of Montrose.

Nope. There were no Nephites. There was no Nephite nation. There was no Zarahemla. Montrose, Iowa happens to be just across the Mississippi from Nauvoo, Illinois, where Joseph Smith and his followers fled to after they were chased out of Missouri — Smith just incorporated anywhere he found himself into his fantasy fictional history. So they’re digging in a random spot and claiming any evidence of human habitation supports the Book of Mormon.

The Heartland Research Group thinks it may have found the site of Zarahemla—a notable city in the Book of Mormon—outside of Montrose, a small southeast Iowa town located on the banks of the Mississippi River.

John Lefgren of the Heartland Research Group said in his faith, Zarahemla would be comparable to Jerusalem for Christians. The exact location of Zarahemla has not been verified, so being able to pinpoint it would be a milestone.

“Iowa is an important place,” Lefgren said. “In the fourth century, Montrose, Iowa, had the largest city in North America.”

According to Lefgren, in its heyday of AD 320, Zarahemla had a population of about 100,000 and it was the largest city in the Americas.

Nope. Nauvoo/Montrose are on the Mississippi, about 200 miles from Cahokia. This was the heartland of the Mound Builders culture, which actually existed, and was thriving at the time the Mormons claim there was an entire Hebrew civilization living in the same place, riding horses and wielding iron swords, somehow replacing the real human beings who lived there. They’re going to misinterpret everything they find.

One method they hope can help verify Zarahemla’s location is by finding fire pits. The group theorizes that with a population of about 100,000, there would be one fire pit for every 10 residents within a mile or so of the city center.

“We’ve gone down into the ground with core sampling to get charcoal/carbon from fires that are 1,700 years old,” Lefgren said. “It’s all serious stuff; all serious stuff right here in Iowa.”

The samples will be sent to the Vilnius Radiocarbon Laboratory in Lithuania for carbon-14 dating to determine the age of the recovered charcoal.

Let’s just pretend there wasn’t a thriving American Indian culture right there 1700 years ago, and that those people cooked their food in their villages along the banks of the Mississippi. They’re going to find ashes and declare victory, they found proof that Joseph Smith’s grand con was true.

And the Mormon newspapers will go along with it.

Hovind gets banned! Hovind rises from the dead! Hovind is still a mindless zombie.

I noticed that Kent Hovind wasn’t posting any videos on YouTube lately — apparently, he’s been banned, for how long I don’t know, but it’s about time. If you’re going to police misinformation on your social media site, Hovind is one of the worst offenders.

Unfortunately, these bannings are just for show and have no teeth to them. For a while, he was getting his videos hosted by Matt Powell (if you don’t know who he is, consider yourself lucky — he’s a young Hovind wanna-be), but now Hovind has created a whole new channel and resumed his cartoonish, ignorant ways. The good news: he has plummeted from having a channel with 190 thousand subscribers and each video getting tens of thousands of views to one where he has fewer than 200 subscribers and his videos get a few hundred views. He’s down in my territory now! Although I suspect he will grow fast as he is rediscovered, at least until he gets banned again.

Sorry, I’m not linking to him, if you must you’ll have to search a bit to find his new, pathetic channel, same as his old, pathetic channel.

He’s still doing his whack-an-atheist schtick, to a much smaller audience, though. His latest target is Emma Thorne, and you will notice…I do link to her. Notice also that he’s still condescendingly stupid, he’s still reciting the same tired cliches (“you believe you came from an amoeba!”), and he’s still totally wrong (no, we didn’t descend from a complex, specialized protist like an amoeba). You don’t need to watch any new Hovind, or Powell, videos — he’s still parroting the same tired lies and jokes he was doing thirty years ago, and he hasn’t learned a thing.

Matt Ridley’s steady descent into dangerous British loonhood

Matt Ridley is definitely a smart guy, and he also writes well. I enjoyed some of his earlier books, like The Red Queen and Genome, but I became less appreciative as he became more openly libertarian, and espoused a Whiggish view of the world that was only a rationalization for why he was so wealthy and privileged (he’s kind of the British version of Pinker, only worse). He’s the 5th Viscount Ridley, don’t you know, he is to the manor born (Blagdon Hall, Northumberland, specifically), he’s a member of the House of Lords, he endorsed Brexit, he owns coal mines, he used to own a bank, but he ran it into the ground and it was taken away from him and nationalized. On climate change, he’s argued that global warming is going to be a net benefit, increasing rainfall and the growing season, and that human ingenuity will overcome any minor disruptions. He even coauthored a book with Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg and a host of the usual denialist suspects, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, which ought to alarm anyone who wants to think he’s just being objective. I guess that comes of owning coal mines and being an enthusiastic endorser of fracking — when your prosperity is a product of spewing as much fossil carbon into the atmosphere as you can, your very smart brain will work very hard to find excuses.

That doesn’t explain why he’s become such a dedicated proponent of the lab leak “theory” for the origin of COVID-19, though. He’s not an epidemiologist, and it shows, but now he’s authored a book, with a post-doc, Alina Chen, titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Unfortunately for him, it has been dissected by the formidable Lindsay Beyerstein.

The lab leak theory, for the uninitiated, is the notion that the Covid-19 virus that has now devastated the globe is not of purely natural origin but rather escaped from a lab after it was harvested from the wild or engineered by Chinese scientists. It’s not actually a single theory but, rather, a grab bag of possible scenarios by which the virus might have been unleashed on the world—all of them implying some level of shady or incompetent behavior by Chinese scientists. And in trying to take each of these scenarios seriously, Viral’s authors have unintentionally exposed the entire farce of the lab leak discourse—showing both the exceptional flimsiness of the lab leakers’ narrative and also why this very flimsiness makes the lab leak conspiracy theory so hard to eradicate. By relying on an ever-growing arsenal of seemingly suspicious facts, each pointing in a slightly different direction, lab leaker discourse renders itself completely unfalsifiable.

Like I said, Matt Ridley is a smart guy, and he knows he can’t take a strong stance on any idea, whether it’s climate change (he calls himself a “lukewarmer”) or this lab leak nonsense, where he practices a performative neutrality. It’s his evasiveness that reveals his biases — he tries so hard to dodge around his beliefs that the shape of them is recognizable.

The book is structured around a set of themes, which I hesitate to call arguments because the authors decline to argue for anything in particular. (In this sense, the book aligns perfectly with what academics have been saying about conspiracy theories for years: that the theories rely on people poking holes in the official narrative without committing to a single plausible alternative.) First, the authors attach great importance to a mysterious pneumonia outbreak linked to the abandoned Tongguan mineshaft in Mojiang, China, in April 2012, which lab leak theory adherents see as a critical episode in the history of Covid-19, because researchers with the Wuhan Institute of Virology later found the bat virus RaTG13 in that same cave, and RaTG13 was briefly the closest-known wild relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. Second, the authors focus on the purported evidence of “preadaptation” of Covid-19 to human hosts. Finally, they examine gaps in the epidemiological record that purportedly call into question the current scientific consensus that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, following a “spillover” event in which the virus passed from a live animal to a human.

That’s a good tell for recognizing that you’re dealing with a conspiracy theorist — they spend all their time trying to find errors or inconsistencies in good theories, which they can use to claim their unsupported, extremely wobbly, speculative alternative must be the correct answer, an illogic that they never quite grasp. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s exactly what creationists have been doing for decades. Intelligent design creationism, in particular, relies on Ridley’s strategy. They’re not about to give you positive evidence for what they’re claiming, they trust that finding gaps or even errors in modern biology will give their supporters sufficient excuse to lapse into what they’re biases predispose them to believe.

Ridley’s mistake here is that he gave away enough of his own beliefs that holes are being poked in them in turn. There is a heck of a lot of work being done on bat viruses now, which Ridley has no competence to address.

A series of recent discoveries, however, has undermined Viral’s central themes: Newly discovered wild bat viruses from Laos have proven not only more genetically similar to the Covid-19 virus than any previously known to science, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s RaTG13 sequence, but also directly infectious to humans via the same mechanisms that the Covid-19 virus uses to infect human cells. These findings make Viral’s breathless speculation about the Mojiang mine and the origins of RaTG13 completely obsolete. This discovery also suggests that whatever “preadaptation” was needed to make Covid-19 infectious to humans could have happened in the wild over many years of natural selection. The Laos bat preprint was published in mid-September, by which time it may have been too late to address it in the book.

Meanwhile, a reanalysis of early Covid cases published in November in the journal Science has confirmed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the likely site of a zoonotic spillover event. Another paper, which gets a brief discussion in the book, established beyond a reasonable doubt that, contrary to Chinese government denials, live wild-caught animals that could be prime viral vectors were illegally sold at the Huanan market through November 2019—including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and Siberian weasels, all members of the carnivorous mustelid family, which is known to be susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses.

Every time Ridley opens his mouth on the pandemic he exposes his own ignorance. Back in the fall of 2020, Ridley was arguing against basic health measures.

It is counterintuitive but the current spread of Covid may on balance be the least worst thing that could happen now. In the absence of a vaccine, and with no real prospect of eradicating the disease, the virus spreading among younger people, mostly without hitting the vulnerable, is creating immunity that will eventually slow the epidemic. The second wave is real, but it is not like the first. It would be a mistake to tackle it with compulsory lockdowns (even if called ‘circuit breakers’), whether national or local. The cure would be worse than the disease.

If you cannot extinguish an epidemic at the start, the best strategy is for the healthy to get infected first. Lockdowns ensure that the vulnerable and the healthy both get infected with similar probability.

Yeah, similar reduced probability. Ridley endorsed that lump of Libertarian poppycock, the Great Barrington Declaration, a massive bit of misguided stupidity that killed people.

The alternative to lockdown is not ‘letting the virus rip’, as Boris Johnson puts it. The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by over 20,000 doctors and medical scientists (but disgracefully censored by Google’s search engine), calls for focused protection: help the elderly and vulnerable stay at home, but let the young and invulnerable go out and achieve immunity for us all, while earning a living. The extraordinary truth is that a student catching Covid might be saving Granny’s life rather than threatening it.

In support of that claim, he cites the example of Sweden, which refused to enforce any lockdowns. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see what a mistake that was: Sweden has had more cases and deaths than neighboring Scandinavian countries.

Ridley doesn’t have to worry, though. He still has plenty of high profile supporters.

That man just keeps embarrassing himself. I wish he’d stop.