Jeffrey Tomkins strikes again!

Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.

Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.

If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.

They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.

It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.

I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.

These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?

Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly because the creationist implications are not there.

It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it.

It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.

I suggest we call it the “Unread Journal of Stupid Ideas”

Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.

“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.

Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.

The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.

Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.

I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?

To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.

Astronauts can be total dumbasses, too

I have talked to many creationists who, when asked for evidence that the universe was created by a god, tell you to look at the trees. They think the fact that the world can be beautiful is sufficient to prove the existence of a supernatural being, and therefore you should be converted to Christianity by contemplating biology, but I’ve been thinking about biology for a few decades, and I look at a tree and am impressed by the chemistry of photosynthesis, and don’t see any Jesus in it.

Look at the trees is shorthand for the most vapid, shallow, stupid kind of creationist argument. In a propaganda coup, Answers in Genesis has found three astronauts who are willing to endorse religious beliefs because they saw the grandeur of the Earth, because people float in space, and the Earth is a beautiful planet. They claim the Bible is absolutely true, it’s inerrant, it’s sufficient for everything we need, it’s not a science book but where it speaks to science it is absolutely accurate, 100%. Watch this video and see your respect for these men plummet.

Nauseating. AiG is hosting them at some event at the big fake Ark this summer (buy your tickets now!), but all I see is a couple of pilots and mechanics who have been persuaded by religious nonsense to believe in anti-scientific ideas. Sad.

Ironically, there’s a chunk in the middle of this video where they get quite irate about people who think the Earth is flat or that the moon landings were fake. It’s utter foolishness. And frankly it’s becoming more concerning, If you can get caught up in that kind of system of belief, you’ve completely detached yourself from the truth. The truth of scripture, that is, he quickly adds, before going on to denounce the wicked lie of evolution.

Bret Weinstein is an ignorant clown

I’ve posted a new video, but I’m making it complicated to see.

OK, I’ve put it on my Patreon account. If you’re a sponsor, you can watch it there right now, ad-free. I’m going to be doing that from now on, I think. Join and you get it before everyone else!

It’s going to go live on YouTube at 6pm Central time today, so if you’re patient, you can get it for free there. YouTube will stick a few ads in it, I’m sorry to say.

Or if you don’t want to wade through this video nonsense, I’ll post a transcript right here at 6pm, so you can just read the damned thing. That’s especially good if you don’t think my amateurish video abilities are worth a half hour of your time

The video is a dissection of Bret Weinstein’s conversation with Joe Rogan about Tucker Carlson’s idiotic denial of evolutionary biology, so it’s not as if this is essential stuff. I try to explain why Weinstein’s vague handwaving about mysterious “layers” of genetic information that no one knows about except him. Here’s some news: we do. We don’t know everything about information in the genome, but we know enough to be aware that it isn’t magic.

Anyway, check back in about 6 hours for my explanation.

[Read more…]

We’ve made Nathaniel Jeanson cry

Jeanson, the creationist who got a Ph.D. to be better able to pretend to be a real scientist, is whining because he can’t get no respect.

Today, creation scientists like me are prohibited from running academic labs. They are denied government funding for their projects. They are forbidden from publishing in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. In short, creation science is excluded from every stage of the scientific process.

To clarify, scientists who happen to be creationists are allowed to run academic labs, to receive government funding, and to publish in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. But only if they never promote creationist conclusions.

Why? Because mainstream scientists are convinced that creationists don’t do science. The specific, technical manifestation of this view is the claim that creation science doesn’t make testable predictions.1 For creation science to be considered science, creationists would have to put in print predictions that future experiments in the lab and in the field could demonstrate to be true or false. In other words, creation science has to be, in theory, able to be disproven. It’s not that evolutionists are waiting with bated breath for creationists to meet this standard. No, they’ve concluded that creationists have not met this standard and never will.

I know the feeling. I can design bridges, I can draw pictures of bridges, I can make predictions that my bridges will not fall down, but do the engineers regard me as a fellow engineer? No. They refuse to let me build my fabulous trans-atlantic bridge, not matter how beautiful my balsa wood model is.

And then they laugh and show that my calculations are all wrong, and do more calculations that show my design is unstable and will fall down. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you, they’re out to get me.

Jeanson has been making predictions. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to make predictions, they also have to be justified and tested multiple times. My balsa wood model of a trans-atlantic model is a “prediction” that could be “tested”, but the fact that it doesn’t fall down when I troop trained mice across it does not mean I am a great engineer. Not even the fact that I dressed them up as clowns matters.

He whines that his mice in clown clothes haven’t been appreciated by the scientific community.

The problem for the evolutionary community? I’ve been publishing, testing, and fulfilling creation science predictions for over 10 years. My early work focused on the origin of species. I made predictions about their genetic rates of change (i.e., mutation rates) and about genetic function.2 I also predicted the genetic mechanisms by which species would form and how fast new species would appear.

That’s nice. I’m sure it impresses the rubes. But when scientists assess his predictions, they all fall apart. Here’s an example from Dan Stern Cardinale:

His books have not been reviewed kindly, either.

Nathaniel Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin could be called pseudoscientific, but arguably this may be unfair. Pseudo comes from the Greek pseudēs for ‘false’ and pseudos for ‘falsehood’. Labeling Replacing Darwin as pseudoscience suggests the participation in a deliberate lie and at the moment I’m unwilling to offer that suggestion. I am happy to grant Jeanson his sincerity. Because the bulk of the errors in Replacing Darwin are errors of omission I lean towards describing it as quasiscientific. Quasi is Latin for ‘as if’ and it is indeed as if what you are reading in Replacing Darwin is science. It is in fact only partially and ostensibly science.

I am also willing to be generous and accept that the majority of these omissions are simply due to an author with no actual expertise in the field he is writing about. The subject of Replacing Darwin is rooted in population genetics, biogeography, ecology, phylogeography, speciation, molecular evolution and systematics, none of which are fields where Jeanson possesses any professional expertise.

I am also unaware of Jeanson ever having someone with any actual expertise in these fields reviewing either his book or any of his articles published on the Answers in Genesis website. As far as I know he’s only had his fellow like-minded creationists chime in on his work or at best someone with some molecular biology background who he has described as a friend and theistic evolutionist. His only attempts at outside reviewers are high-profile popularizers of evolution like Richard Dawkins or P. Z. Myers. With the exception of Jerry Coyne he apparently never solicited a review from anyone with active research in the fields the book covers, despite the fact there are thousands of working population geneticists and systematists out there.

I am embarrassed to note that Jeanson’s Ph.D. was in the field of developmental biology, just like mine, and just like that Intelligent Design creationism fraud, Jonathan Wells (is there something about this field that attracts cranks and kooks? Don’t say yes). The thing is, as I can testify from personal experience, is that developmental biology does not require in depth training in phylogenetics and population genetics. I look at cells and organisms changing over time, I don’t do the mathematics of allele frequencies! So why is Jeanson publishing all these poorly done, deeply flawed analyses of population genetics?

Now I’m worried that if I actually knew anything about materials science & load capacities & stress distribution & geology of the ocean floor, my trans-atlantic bridge might actually have a few problems.

Scale it up, and New York to London, easy!

Mokele-mbembe!

Creationists have been going on and on about a dinosaur living in the Congo, called mokele-mbembe (IFLScience also has articles on it, if you didn’t believe me when I said that site sucks). Answers in Genesis has defended the idea of a dinosaur lurking in the African swamps.

For believers in the prevailing evolutionary view that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, the idea that they might be alive today is hard to accept. This is despite the recent discovery of the living Wollemi pine tree, also believed, from fossils, to have been extinct since the ‘dinosaur age’.

Christians, however, should not be surprised, as the Bible teaches that God created the dinosaurs only thousands of years ago.

It’s bunk. Here’s a good article on the origin of the myth.

Mokele-mbembe is the Congo Basin’s bigfoot. Or that’s what it’s become, anyway — a cryptid. Nobody is sure when the myth originated, but it was born among the basin’s communities, who passed it down as an oral tradition. Locals tell me the myth was spiritual at first — a metaphor, perhaps, for humankind’s delicate relationship with the land. But today, nobody can say with certainty what exactly it meant because foreigners long ago twisted it well beyond recognition.

“Congolese people originally believed mokele-mbembe was a spiritual being, not a real dinosaur,” Oyange told me last year. “But that all changed when the white man came to Africa.” A confluence of European colonial expansion into Africa and the birth of paleontology gave rise to a version of mokele-mbembe that was a literal, flesh-and-blood, swamp-dwelling reptilian beast. Tales passed around by explorers, missionaries and colonial functionaries became warped by notions from Victorian literature and emerging science.

“Everything that we now regard as the mokele-mbembe canon is based on European explorers in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” Darren Naish, a British vertebrate paleontologist and author, told me.

It’s simply another example of the corrupting influence of colonialism. It’s origin doesn’t matter — the idea that there is a dinosaur living in the Congo has become a widely held idea. A guy named David Choe made a short “documentary” about searching for it, but it’s mainly self-indulgent babbling.

They don’t find a dinosaur. But it was good enough to get him an interview with Joe Rogan!

But no dinosaurs — no actual dinosaurs, anyway — are found. In fact, the film ends with a dejected Choe, in a lake, saying to the camera, “We might have to come back. We’ll see,” before he submerges himself into the murky water, prompting the credits to roll. If the film is judged on its success in searching for mokele-mbembe, it was a flop. But if it’s regarded as an exercise in grabbing attention, well, then it was a massive hit. It racked up over 1.7 million views on YouTube and even caught podcaster Joe Rogan’s notice. Several years later, in 2020, Choe appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he told of his multiple attempts to find mokele-mbembe. “When I saw your show,” Rogan tells Choe during the podcast episode, “I was like, ‘Look at this dude, this is crazy. He’s looking for a fucking brontosaurus in the middle of the Congo.’”

Yeah, no. An endorsement by Rogan tells you the whole story is garbage. It’s part of a Western/Christian trend of appropriating myths to distort them into support their dogma

. Talk to the locals, though, and you’ll learn otherwise.

Mayor visited the vine-engulfed temple in 2010. She told me her Cambodian guide, a former teacher, considered the carving a joke. “The amazing, overgrown ruins of Angkor Wat offer a perfect setting for outsiders to imagine a lost, primitive civilization that coexisted with prehistoric dinosaurs,” she said. In her view, just as the outside world has hijacked the story of mokele-mbembe, it has done the same with Angkor Wat — imposing interpretations that distort and even disrespect the original cultural significance.

She also pointed out how the dinosaurization of mokele-mbembe as an oral tradition paralleled how ancient petroglyphs and pictographs in the American West have been misinterpreted as dinosaurs, too. Creationists and young-Earthers argue that certain imagery etched into the rock slabs implies that the Indigenous paleo-Indians must have lived alongside dinosaurs.

The most notorious example, Mayor said, is the two rock art panels at Kachina Bridge in Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument. Some — including creationists — claim that the imagery is a depiction of a sauropod and triceratops dinosaur.

“If our story is told to the world by the oppressor,” I remember Veronique telling me as she clucked her tongue, “then whose story really is it? Ours, or theirs?”

The joke is on the creationists, though. Even if they did find some derived saurischian descendant in the Congo, it wouldn’t refute evolution, and biologists would be scampering joyfully to Africa to study it.

Do not trust IFLScience

I fucking detest IFLScience. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it started as a Facebook page, “I Fucking Love Science,” that later expanded into an independent web site, and it has always specialized in presenting bright colorful images and gushing enthusiastically over them with little understanding and gives the impression of a kid squealing at a cool picture. It’s Facebook science. It’s awful.

Here’s an example.

That’s a photoshopped image. It’s about a technique for inserting red fluorescent protein in a spider silk gland to make silk that can glow. It has an excitation wavelength of 558nm (so you shine a green light on it) and an emission wavelength of 583 (greenish yellow). You have to use a microscope with excitation and emission filters, and the emission filter has a long tail that lets longer wavelengths through, so what you actually see is a dark background with, in this case, a strand of silk glowing a dark red.

That is obviously not a fluorescent image.

The text is even worse.

One of the reasons why this has never happened before is that spiders themselves are difficult organisms to work with within the laboratory. They are a diverse group, have a complex genome structure, and their cannibalistic nature means that they have to be reared individually, otherwise their cage neighbors would be gobbled up. Despite this, new developments in Parasteatoda tepidariorum have allowed this species to become a research model.

That’s bullshit. I’ve found spiders easier to work with than, for instance, zebrafish, and zebrafish are far easier than mice. The cannibalism is routine. Zebrafish will line up behind a female laying eggs to suck them up as soon as they leave the oviduct; anyone who works with mice know that stressing the mothers can induce them to chow down on their newborn pups. This was written by someone with zero knowledge of actual hands-on biology.

For the record, when a spider egg sac hatches, the spiderlings can scamper around their mama with negligible risk that she’ll eat them. The babies will eat each other, though.

Of course, this summary is made from reading a real paper. It’s a techniques paper, just demonstrating the feasibility of KO (knockout) and KI (knock-in) mutations in Parasteatoda. This is what the real fluorescent images look like:

mRFP fluorescence within the major ampullate gland. a) Red fluorescence could be detected in the offspring of the KO mutant spiders in the major ampullate gland (scale bar: 277 µm). b) The cartoon recreates the major structures of the major ampullate silk gland: tail, sac, and spinning duct. c) The highest fluorescence intensities could be observed between the tail and the sac (scale bar: 140 µm).

That’s not sexy enough for IFLScience, though, so they cobbled up a stock photo of a spider and drew a bright red laser line shining out of its butt. That’s just what IFLScience does.

It’s a shame. They’re summarizing what isn’t a great paper, but a useful one, and making a mess of it.

We will never colonize Mars

Or anywhere else off planet for that matter. Jennifer Ouellette has an enlightening interview with Adam Becker, the author of a new book titled More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which sounds like my kind of book — he tears apart the claims of the tech billionaires. They’ve become increasingly detached from reality since the days when I first stumbled across Yudkowski and Kurzweil, who were patently bonkers then, and since then have only increased in both influence and insanity.

More Everything Forever covers the promise and potential pitfalls of AI, effective altruism, transhumanism, the space race to colonize Mars, human biodiversity, and the singularity, among many other topics—name-checking along the way such technological thought leaders as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, William MacAskill, Peter Singer, Marc Andreessen, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Jeff Bezos, and yes, Elon Musk. It all boils down to what Becker calls the “ideology of technological salvation,” and while its uber-rich adherents routinely cite science to justify their speculative claims, Becker notes that “actual scientific concerns about the plausibility of these claims” are largely dismissed. For Becker, this ideology represents a profound threat, not the promise of a utopian future.

“More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us,” Becker writes in his introduction. “But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”

That list of “thought leaders” is damning in itself — they aren’t champions of thought and science and technology, they’re cheerleaders for fantasy and greed. Every one of them ought to be dismissed from any consideration of respectability. The lunatic fringe is running the show, and prospering greatly.

One of the points of the interview is that they’re all out of touch with reality. They’ve absorbed all these wild ideas from science fiction, but never consider the science part. For instance, they apparently don’t understand thermodynamics.

I’ve got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they’ve misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they’ve got to grapple with it because it’s the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase.

They are all fanatical capitalists, a philosophy founded on the premise of infinite and eternal exponential growth, so of course they reject the science, or fall for twisted, perverse wish-fulfillment versions of the science.

Part of this bad science is Elon Musk’s hype about colonizing Mars. It’s not going to happen.

…all of the interesting places in space are really far apart. Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy. The gravity is too low. The radiation is too high. There’s no air. The dirt is made of poison. There’s very little water. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does because it’s closer to the asteroid belt. And the prospects for terraforming technology in any meaningful way are not great. Making Mars as habitable as Antarctica during the polar night would be the greatest technological undertaking humanity has ever taken by many orders of magnitude, in order to create a place that nobody would want to live, and where the gravity would still be too low. It’s a deeply unpleasant place.

From a biological perspective, humans are not in any way adapted for life in space or on Mars. We come from a long line, 4 billion years of optimization for life on a planet the size of Earth, with air and water freely available, under certain narrow ranges of temperature and pressure, and we simply lack the biochemical and physiological equipment to cope with a totally alien environment. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible for life to find a way, but if we did artificially modify ourselves to produce descendants who could live on Mars, they wouldn’t be human anymore. We’d probably have to scrap sentience and all the other baggage we’ve accumulated, that we consider so important to the human experience, to generate an ecosystem of creatures that could survive in some way on a mostly airless and waterless frozen ball of rock. There isn’t any point in aspiring to such an artificial state.

Don’t even get me started on Ray Kurzweil. I first read one of his hopelessly delusional books over 20 years ago. Hated it. He was just making shit up about the technological progression he imagined was going to occur, all in service of his pathological fear of death. We’re also not ever going to be immortal.

Kurzweil tries to get around this by saying that you’re not going to be immortal, but you can live as long as you want to. Sure, that gets around some of it. But Kurzweil also thinks that we’re going to find a way around the second law of thermodynamics, which we’re not. I do think that fear of death is at the root of a lot of this, if not all of it. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say that death is what gives life meaning. I would say that the human experience is defined by the limitations that death imposes, the fact that our time is limited. If you remove that constraint, that would fundamentally alter the human condition in ways that very well might not be pleasant.

Silicon Valley isn’t about technology, it’s about selfishness and greed, and weird little gnomes with stupid ideas who have made a niche for themselves by burrowing into junk science. We’re not going to become near-immortal short of turning ourselves into jellyfish. Well, maybe Henrietta Lacks is immortal, but at a price no one would want to pay.

Maybe that explains what’s going on: the worst and richest people in the world are working hard to become mindless, cancerous jellyfish.

None of these people have contributed anything to our understanding of the world, but are experts at accumulating personal wealth by leeching off everyone else.

The Pope has a surprise for us all

Pope Leo XIV is a trans man.

X, of course.

You don’t doubt this conclusion, do you? How can you question a guy who has dedicated his life to superimposing the outlines of skulls on celebrity photos and deciding what sex they are? Also, they’re a Christian.

Bones never Lie, but people do ~ wake up from their Lies ~
Genesis 1:27, 2 Timothy 3:13 ~ Glory to God and praise to Jesus.

Browse his Xitter feed and you will discover that practically no one is the the sex they say they are.

The fundamental fork in the road to destiny!

The DOGE scam is fading, at least in the sense of helping Musk skim off money from the government, so now he’s pivoting to maximizing fear in the uninformed. Forgive me for including this clip from Fox News of that walking smarmy smirk, Jesse Watters, encouraging Musk to expound on his nonsensical imaginary apocalyptic claims of the coming doom of Earth.

He can’t even get the numbers right. He says that the sun is going to expand and swallow up the Earth in a few hundred million years — the end is imminent! It’s more like 5 billion years, but even a hundred million years is an immensity of time for a species that has only existed for maybe 300,000 years, and it’s ridiculous to be trying to terrify stupid people, like Jesse Watters, with the news of an apocalypse sometime. It’s a good way to shake down the rubes, though, just like the opening claim that the Biden administration stole billions of dollars from the gullible geezers watching Fox News.

I’m not being pessimistic to say that Musk will never build a colony on Mars; I doubt he’ll even get a single mission to land there and return. He is not saving humanity. He’s the biggest grifter to ever exist, and Fox News has cultivated an army of goobers who will direct the federal government to shovel their tax money into the gaping maw of this horrible person.