A periodic reminder

It’s that season.

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”

― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. It’s all getting hard to believe, isn’t it?

Death row inmate Brandon Bernard has been executed in Indiana after last-minute clemency pleas were rejected by the US Supreme Court.

Bernard, 40, was convicted of murder in 1999 when he was a teenager, and is the youngest offender to be executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years.

Bernard told the family of the couple he killed he was sorry, before dying by lethal injection on Thursday.

Four more executions are planned before the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.

This administration is rushing to murder as many people as they can before a new administration, that might be slightly more reluctant to murder people (only slightly!), comes to power. It’s very strange. Who are these people who are so eager to kill before someone can tell them “NO!”?

JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. Interesting fictions.

The return of the probability argument

We should have known. We’ve heard it for so long. Creationists love the Argument from Big Numbers — if we chain together a whole series of improbabilities and multiply them, we can get a really big exponent, therefore God. This approach is so familiar there’s a FAQ by Ian Musgrave on the errors in the calculations of the evolution of proteins.

Problems with the creationists’ “it’s so improbable” calculations

1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a “modern” protein, or even a complete bacterium with all “modern” proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.

2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.

3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.

4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.

5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

We’ve seen it all. People seem to be fundamentally statistically innumerate and, without training, incapable of grasping the basic principles. There are whole books about innumeracy and its consequences.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw that the Texas Attorney General had filed a lawsuit claiming there was a less than one in a quadrillion chance that Biden could have honestly won the Texas election, and that it’s based on a familiarly stupid argument. Also unsurprising: that an old talk.origins compatriot, Wesley Elsberry, would jump on the faulty reasoning. We’ve all been here before.

Texas filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four other states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia). Others have already weighed in on how unserious a lawsuit this apparently is.

But I want to have a look at something that is a bit more approachable, which is the statistics opinion that Texas Attroney General Ken Paxton relied upon in crafting the lawsuit. It makes some remarkable claims:

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the
four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—
independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m.
on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four
States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one
in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004). See Decl.
of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. (“Cicchetti Decl.”) at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31 (App. 4a-7a,
9a).

Read Wesley’s post for a thorough deconstruction (or this thread for a similar take), so I’ll keep it simple. What kills Paxton’s claims are the assumptions: he assumes that voters should have voted exactly as they did in 2016, that people who voted early on election day would have the same statistical preferences as those who voted later, that people who voted in person would vote the same way as those who voted by mail, and that different precincts would show no change in their preferences over time. He doesn’t seem to realize that what he has shown is not that Biden couldn’t have won, but that his assumptions were all wrong.

Now this has gotten me thinking about genetics, and it’s too early — this is my break, people — and the very first cross we’re going to do. It’s a boring cross to get heterozygotes out of two true-breeding strains, just a preliminary to the real experiment, but I have the students do observations to test their assumption that they’ll get half males and half females. They never do, and the statistics all say it’s a significant difference, with more females than males. Further, when you sample the population at different times after eclosion, it changes, with more females eclosing early. You don’t get to say, “it’s supposed to be 50:50!” and pretend your results are wrong — you’re supposed to question your assumption that sex is a random binary choice. There are a lot of factors that bias the outcome!

So, this is what it’s like to live in a gerontocracy

This story about Diane Feinstein makes me sad. She’s exhibiting signs of severe cognitive decline, and is hindering progress by Democrats in the Senate with her inability to function.

In a hearing on November 17th, Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, at eighty-seven, is the oldest member of the Senate, grilled a witness. Reading from a sheath of prepared papers, she asked Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, whether his company was doing enough to stem the spread of disinformation. Elaborating, she read in full a tweet that President Trump had disseminated on November 7th, falsely claiming to have won the Presidential election. She then asked Dorsey if Twitter’s labelling of the tweet as disputed had adequately alerted readers that it was a bald lie.

It was a good question. Feinstein seemed sharp and focussed. For decades, she has been the epitome of a female trailblazer in Washington, always hyper-prepared. But this time, after Dorsey responded, Feinstein asked him the same question again, reading it word for word, along with the Trump tweet. Her inflection was eerily identical. Feinstein looked and sounded just as authoritative, seemingly registering no awareness that she was repeating herself verbatim. Dorsey graciously answered the question all over again.

She’s a symptom. The whole Senate is sclerotic with these ancient, decrepit geezer. It’s how we ended up with a 78 year old Democratic president, and a senate full of old people shaking their canes at each other.

Meanwhile, the Feinstein situation has triggered the latest round in a larger generational fight in the Democratic Senate caucus. Unlike the Republican leadership in the Senate, which rotates committee chairmanships, the Democrats have stuck with the seniority system. Some frustrated younger members argue that this has undermined the Democrats’ effectiveness by giving too much power to elderly and sometimes out-of-touch chairs, resulting in uncoördinated strategy and too little opportunity for members in their prime.

A glimpse of the discontent became visible last month, when Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, who at sixty-five is considered a younger member, challenged the claim of Richard Durbin, the seventy-six-year-old senator from Illinois, a long-serving member of the Party’s leadership, to be next in line to fill Feinstein’s seat as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

That’s depressing. I’m 63 and I’d be a young babe in that place, and that just isn’t right.

I am not suffering any kind of cognitive decline (I think, but then I wouldn’t know, would I?) but I am suddenly thinking that I should be considering retirement. I’ve never seriously thought about it before, just assuming I’d keep going and going until I dropped dead in front of a class (also not something I think is imminent), and retirement was not something that would ever be an option for me. But now, I’m contemplating it, not just because Feinstein is setting a bad example, but because this stupid pandemic has been traumatic, and I wouldn’t want to keep teaching this way. It would probably serve the students better if I were replaced with a younger, more up-to-date person (not much hope of that, either, with university finances being hit hard recently, so if I left, I’d probably be replaced with nobody).

Anyway, I’m putting my retirement on the agenda. At some point. I should start squinting at the calendar. And my finances. All I’m saying is that if I’m still at UMM when I’m 70, you all have the job of yelling at me to stop being selfish.

Oh, and if I do take the option of dropping dead before retiring, yell at my corpse even harder that I was so selfish.

How will we pay for it?

Get ready, you’re going to hear that question a lot from the Republicans in coming years. Just keep this in mind:

The fossil fuel lobby has actively worked in many countries to protect their subsidies and avoid the imposition of carbon taxes. Doing so protects their profits.
US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education

Funny how cutting oil subsidies and defense never end up on the chopping block.

I need an economist to explain this to me

Or maybe a psychologist. OK, I sorta understand the wacky mindset of those people who obsess over gold — they want the heavy shiny stuff, because it seems more solid and real than the abstraction of numbers in a bank account, and if you are a bit paranoid, you might want that apparent reliabilty of an expensive metal under your mattress. It’s the kind of thing that gets advertised on talk radio, with an audience of terrified old people (and your goal is to terrify them even more), so Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck rely on that gold advertising money.

But this mystifies me. Why would these same people then turn around and trust…a credit card? The latest iterations of stupid conservative talk radio, like Dave Rubin, are now promoting something called the Glint card, which is a credit card which claims to be based on gold.

I don’t understand the psychology here. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t trust bank accounts, where your money can be whisked away with a flicker of bits in a computer, why would you then turn your precioussss into another abstraction?

Dreading how this could end

It feels like it’s going to drag on forever.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the official GOP Twitter account is blasting out the idea that good Republicans will die fighting to overthrow the rule of law in their state.

Fine. Die, then. Hold your breath until you turn purple. Kick and scream on the floor. Having a tantrum won’t change the fact that Biden won. I’m also kind of pissed off that it’s Biden, rather than a real progressive Democrat, but I’m prepared to work through the process.

By the way, we’ve run into this @Ali character the Arizona Republican Party is re-tweeting. The last time I heard of him was when he and Jacob Wohl toured downtown Minneapolis trying to smear Ilhan Omar, unsuccessfully, and made a false report of a crime. He has a history that wobbles around silly and ugly.

After one of the first 2020 primary debates, Alexander went viral claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t an “American Black,” because she was of Jamaican and Indian heritage, instead of descending from African-Americans who had been forced into Antebellum-era slavery. Alexander was convicted of two felonies in 2007 and 2008, and has a track record of publicly noting people who are Jewish. He made a sensationalist video with right-wing snafu generator Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer, the Islamaphobic failed Congressional candidate, wherein Wohl seemingly fakes the group receiving death threats during filming.

If you aren’t willing to die, at least continue to entangle yourself with the Rabid Right.

Back of the line, MAGAts!

After months of dragging their heels and opposing pandemic control efforts, our Republican representatives are making a rush for the front of the vaccination line.

Republican leaders of the Minnesota Legislature suggested Friday that state lawmakers and the staff who work for them should be among the early recipients of a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.

“I’m encouraging the vaccines, as one of the priority groups after elderly and some of our front-line workers, that we think about the people that have to be essential at the Capitol,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said at a forum with other legislative leaders.

No. If Republicans all got sick and had to stay home for a month, ending their obstructionism, we’d make better progress. All Republicans should be sent to the end of the queue.

Front of the line: health care workers. Right behind them: public school teachers. Then, if there were any justice in the world, we’d do a rational risk assessment and distribute the vaccine to those communities with the highest mortality from the disease, which would be the black and Latin communities in our cities.

Aww, but get real. This is America. It’s going to go first to the already wealthy people, because it’s going to be sold on capitalist principles, which means the actual beneficiaries will be those with the least need.

Don’t let the Republicans escape the Trump taint!

We’ve been watching the death throes of a banana republic for the last month. We have a president who wasn’t fit for the job in the first place thrashing about in a panic to deny the election results, and we have a couple of embarrassingly stupid “lawyers”, Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, making a spectacle of themselves with a string of barely literate lawsuits, all failing. I am not a lawyer, and even I can see the ineptitude on display. It’s not just incompetence — these wackaloons are demanding that Trump throw out the election results by fiat, cancel Biden’s inauguration, and basically rule as a dictator.

None of that is going to happen. The dangerous part is that there are tens of millions of deluded citizens who think it should happen.

The interesting part is that right now, there are some cunning Republicans who enabled this whole catastrophic mess who are skulking away, trying to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, thinking they can come back in 2024 and pick up the pieces. One of the most delusional is Mike Pence, a rat who is at least aware that he’s on a sinking ship. He’s been trying to crawl out from under the baggage of being Trump’s servant, hoping to avoid being slimed with the garbage the president is throwing around right now.

Vice President Mike Pence has been a go-to fundraising draw for the president’s campaign, and since October, no more than a day passed without his name emblazoning a fundraising email for the Trump reelect.

But that changed late last month. Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.

He’s got to be looking at the example of William Barr, though, who said that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the election, and now has Trump pissed off, considering firing him. Worse, I saw a bit of the Lin-Powell rally in Georgia, and the mob now hates Barr, and was raging about locking him up. Pence doesn’t want that. He’s daydreaming about a comeback, taming that mob to support him in a run for the presidency. So he’s walking a tightrope right now.

There’s no way a man who served as the vice president of a corrupt, treacherous regime could ever resuscitate their political career after this, is there?

Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was an American politician who served as the vice president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, and later as the 50th governor of Georgia from 1882 until his death in 1883. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives before becoming governor.

Goddamnit, America.

Sean Bean did it

Those catastrophic hijinks atop the telescope, and the explosions, couldn’t have been good for the structure.

Seriously, and sadly, the Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed. It’s done.

A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.

The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below.

The US National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100ft gash on the 1,000ft-wide (305m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.

Rather than blaming Sean Bean, though, I should note that this is another example of the decay of our scientific infrastructure on Donald Trump’s watch. You don’t he really cares about a radio telescope, or Puerto Rico, do you?

Wow. Kevin Sorbo is an idiot

I used to watch Hercules with my kids all the time, but then he made God’s Not Dead and demonstrated that he’s a world-class twit. Now you can read this interview with Sorbo and see for yourself. It’s a well-done interview: Marlow Stern just asks him question, and lets Sorbo hang himself with the answers. Normally I detest journalistic stenography, but they are very good questions. He also keeps pointing out where Sorbo is wrong, until Sorbo himself realizes he sounds like an idiot (while not admitting error) and ends it all whining about how it’s going to be a hit piece. Sure thing. Because of what he said, willingly.

It’s all the right-wing’s greatest hits. Venezuela! Bernie is a Stalinist! Hitler was a socialist! That woman who accused him of harassment was just trying to get rich (because accusing someone famous harassment always leads to fame and fortune)! Trump didn’t lose the election! Doctors are faking coronavirus deaths, and masks are no good! Yuck.