James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer!

When we bought our house, it came with a disconnected, nonfunctional hot tub. It’s still here, sitting unused in our back yard, because having a mere Ph.D. in biology means that I don’t know how to fix it, and also, I don’t get paid enough to afford to have it fixed by a competent hot tub expert. And thus am I made to realize that I am a failure. I shouldn’t have wasted effort on that lowly science degree; instead, I should have learned how to install hot tubs.

Because hot tub experts are wizards, masters of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time.

I have been reading the works of James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer, who is a real scientist. He said so.

I am a real scientist for over 47 years. I make my living producing functional equipment that always works as designed because I don’t use any pseudo science. I hate pseudo science religious crap in academia.

He says so frequently.

Please check out my science blog. It is based on over 47 years of using the scientific method to solve problems and to seek to find what is really true.

Here is where I do most of my recent research. I have read over 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics.

I don’t know which science blog to check out, though, since he didn’t provide a link. He has several!

  • Hot Tubs And Spas Blog
  • Education Literacy and Science
  • Science, Religion, Politics What’s More Important?
  • Evolution Science Clarity

41,000 papers is a lot. In 47 years, that’s 2 or 3 papers a day, which is about what I read. It’s hard work reading a science paper with comprehension, so his dedication to biology may be why his hot tub business has some bitter complaints, and why his brother thinks he’s a sleazy con artist. Mastery of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time makes demands on one’s life; sacrifices must be made. This is another mark of my failure; I’m not guilty of bad business practices, and I haven’t alienated either of my brothers yet. I don’t think; maybe I’ll have to ask when I see them next month.

So I looked up Arjuna’s latest science article to learn wisdom and discover the deep secrets of the Hot Tub Masters. In this, he asserts that there is not and never has been a beneficial mutation. His chosen example? The lactose tolerance mutation, because while it may be beneficial, it couldn’t possibly have happened.

The most ridiculous of this is the lactose tolerance mutation. First of all making lactase is made in a gene that is 49,335 base pairs for just one of the THREE lactase genes. This is the most common gene found in lactose intolerance.

First rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a big number. Numbers are sciencey, and big ones are hard, and 49,335 sounds scary. How could it be? 49,355 whatevers must be impossible!

According to the article claiming that this was some great event creating this new gene. It turns out that it is only 2 base pares were changed to cause this gene to function. Where did the other totally designed 49332 BP come from that were aligned perfectly and just needed two base pares to change?

Second rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a small number. We must trivialize any accomplishment. Only 2 out of that intimidating 49,355? That can’t possibly matter. The scientists will splutter, “but single nucleotide changes can distort the whole shape of a molecule, or disrupt a biochemically active site; and in this case, the modification is to a cis regulatory element which modifies expression, not the sequence of the enzyme”, but you can ignore them, because of the obvious fact that 2 is a lot less than 49,355.

Third rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You are not bounded by any rules. Even though you’re making a strangely irrelevant argument from arithmetic, you can say that 49355 – 2 = 49332, and no one will care. Also, spelling is an oppressive tool of those pinheads in academia.

Fourth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You can read 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics and still not understand basic biology, and that’s OK. The thousands of bases in a gene must be aligned perfectly in your head, whatever that means, and never mind that that is not a rule in reality.

Hot Tub Masters are free spirits. Truth is whatever they say it is.

It was a pre-existing gene from ancient ancestors prior to this finding and they found a group where it was turned off and then a group where they drank milk where it was functioning. The two base pairs were not mutated from disease in the functioning gene and in the malfunctioning gene it was and is a disease.

Fifth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Consistency be damned. You can simultaneously announce that there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation, and that groups without the mutation are diseased (surprise, lactose intolerant individuals! You are afflicted with a disease!) and that groups that have the mutation are not diseased. And that it wasn’t a mutation anyway.

In the 2.5 million DNA studies there are no cases of any living or recently extinct (6000 yrs on human studies) showing even one verifiable beneficial mutation.

Not one of the PhD’s have been able to produce one. Therefore, there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation. It is fantasy.

But…but James! You’ve only read 41,000 of the 2.5 million studies!

And I am so confused. The Hot Tub Master plainly said that the 2 nucleotide variation was the difference between diseased and not diseased. Even in his own head it’s clearly beneficial to carry that trait.

We know that Evolutionists believe that “duplication” mutations are the “power behind evolution”. But even a base pair duplication causes disease or deformity because it destroys the original proteins construction with extra proteins that cannot be integrated.

Well, a single base pair duplication would be a frame shift mutation, so it certainly would mess up the structure of the protein. But we’re talking about segmental duplications, where a complete copy of the original gene is left intact and a duplicate is made elsewhere.

I don’t even understand what he’s talking about when he says a single base duplication creates extra proteins that cannot be integrated. That makes no sense. It’s almost as if he has no understanding of molecular biology and genetics at all.

But that cannot be! He’s an International Man of Mystery Spa Design Engineer!

They cannot be integrated because the HOX genes have to place them into the correct use and the HOX genes are master programmed for a specific master plan of the organism.

Then they cannot be recognized by the immune system and so the immune system takes the only messed up proteins and attacks them. Every mutation destroys the recognition of both the HOX to use them and the immune system to destroy them as foreign attack cells, that our immune system does not recognize.

I…what? I know a little bit about HOX genes; they don’t control every little thing, every gene in every cell. They set up domains with specific body plan identities in early development. Most genes don’t interact with HOX genes at all, so it’s a little peculiar to claim they limit everything — I’m beginning to think the Hot Tub Master memorized a few buzz words and phrases and is plastering them all over his cartoonish and wrong vision of how gene regulation works.

As for his immune system argument — does he know nothing about how adaptive immunity works? How self/non-self recognition is a product of selection?

James Arjuna is bringing discredit to the noble traditions of the Hot Tub Masters. I suspect that he is not a True Hot Tub Master™, and I’m going to have to look farther for a master of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time. I also think my broken hot tub is going to continue to languish in my back yard, because if his knowledge of hot tubs is as sound as his knowledge of biology, I wouldn’t want him to come near it.

I know I sure can’t do anything about it. I know nothing about hot tubs. Nothing at all.

The Heartland Institute quote-mines George Carlin

Mike the Mad Biologist traces a ‘quote’ from George Carlin that the Heartland Institute has been publicizing. It’s comparable to the worst that creationists do — it takes a Carlinesque rant against “big wealthy business interests that control things” and turns it into a Libertarian complaint about big government by changing a few words and deleting almost all of the text. Knowing Carlin’s angry liberal predilections, it was easy to spot that there was something wrong with Heartland’s quote, but dang if doing the empirical thing and actually laying out the full quote from Carlin wasn’t convincing to a high degree.

That’s another point of the post, too. He cites an article by Ezra Klein making the point that it’s not that liberals are free of bad ideas, but that we have this added value of fact-checking — we have our biases, and we have our loons (anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOs, for instance), but the thing is, we can feel shame if we find out something we’re promoting is empirically incorrect. There is a check on any liberal tendency to drift off into la-la land that is totally absent in Tea Baggers and other far right political nuts. They have no shame, they already know how the world must work, and if you point evidence at them, well, the evidence must be wrong.

It’s also the difference between science and religion. Religion already has their answer, nonsensical as it is, and the evidence must be made to conform. Science has provisional answers, we keep gathering evidence to verify and improve, and we’ll change our theories if the evidence contradicts them.

Stepping in to confirm everything that Mike and Klein said, the very first comment is from someone calling themselves Gubbler who lists four things he considers fact-free liberal fantasies.

  • Racial equality, because black people were selected to be sexy animals, according to Steve Sailer, racist fraud.

  • Global warming might have merit, but any effort to change is hysteria.

  • Gay marriage, because Two guys do fecal penetration and that is the premise for marriage?

  • The liberal belief that OBAMA IS messiah!!!!

Thereby confirming that right-wingers are delusional.

What happens when you accuse racists of being racist?

You get mail. Nicely written, printed letters in the mail. And they confirm everything I said.

So a lot of Fox News viewers have been writing to me lately, expressing their outrage that I would dare to suggest that racist newspapers out to be thrown off campus. And a great many of them have another odd, common thread, something that wasn’t in the Fox News report, but apparently all these rabid tea-baggers have inferred it, and they’re pretty darned insistent that it must be true.

I must be Jewish.

Take it away, Bob in Boca:

bobinboca

“Myers” is not a Jewish name. I wouldn’t be at all put out if I’d had some Jewish ancestry, but I’m afraid that my father’s ancestry has been traced back to the 16th century (mostly Scots/Irish/English ne’er-do-wells living marginal lives along the western American frontier), and my mother’s back to the 14th (Scandinavian peasants who never wandered far from their village), and I’m afraid there’s no evidence of any Jewish family. I’ve never hinted that I might be Jewish. People who know me have never made the assumption that I might be a cultural Jew.

The only people who call me Jewish are right-wingers who write to me to chew me out for some great liberal evil I’ve committed, and a surprising number of them do so. They never speculate that I’m Lithuanian, or tell me that my name sounds suspiciously Belgian, or sneer at my obvious Sinhalese bias — it’s always this bizarre insinuation that I’m a wicked anti-American liberal, therefore…Jew.

It says a lot about them. Not much about me. Why are so many teabaggers implicitly anti-semitic?

The guy’s an evolutionist, and there’s nothing in the whole course description about biblical creation as even a plausible alternative!

Oh, joy. We’re getting another cheesy Christian movie in which the college professor is the evil bad guy. We just had Kevin Sorbo pretending to be an angry atheist philosophy professor in God’s Not Dead, and now we get Harry Anderson playing an angry atheist biology professor in A Matter of Faith.

Rachel Whitaker, a Christian girl, heads off to college for her much-anticipated freshman year. New friends create situations that require important, quick decisions—some about her social life, some about her core beliefs! Rachel begins to embrace the ideas of the university’s immensely popular biology professor (Harry Anderson) who boldly teaches that Darwinian evolution is the only logical explanation for the origin of life, and the Bible therefore cannot be true. When Rachel’s father (Jay Pickett) senses something changing in his daughter while she is home on a weekend visit; he begins to look into the situation and what he discovers catches him completely off guard. Now very concerned about Rachel drifting away from her Christian faith and the clear teachings of the Bible, he accepts an impossible challenge and tries to do something about it!

Can you guess what the impossible challenge is? He’s going to debate the biology professor on evolution.

Gosh, I wonder who will win?

It’s rather clear that people who believe in the Bible don’t have much connection to reality in their entertainment.

We almost elected this mad woman to high office?

Sarah Palin is so stupid, it’s terrifying. Here she is preaching to her fellow lunatics about how liberals are soft on terrorists and are out to help our enemies, when we’re supposed to put the “fear of god” in them.

Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. I think I’m going to be sick. This is why we should never ever vote Republican.

Isn’t public masturbation illegal?

A gun isn’t just a tool, it’s a sex aid for the terminally inadequate. A gun fondler in Georgia wandered about exposing his toy to children.

A Georgia man panicked parents and children at a local park and baseball field by randomly walking around and displaying his gun to anyone he encountered in the parking lot.

According to witnesses who spoke with WSB-TV, the man wandered around the Forsythe County park last Tuesday night showing his gun to strangers, telling them “there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He was right. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The police came, talked to him, he had a permit, so there was absolutely nothing illegal about strutting aimlessly through a park, smugly waving his gun at people.

Maybe there ought to be a law, though. And maybe the NRA should support it, being fans of responsible gun ownership and all that.

Ha ha, I made a funny.

But seriously, people like that will help make a change as more and more voters realized that these gun fanatics are dangerous idiots.

Just when I thought I was out, @BlakeStacey pulls me back in

I’ve been Salon-free for a whole week, and then Blake Stacey has to link to the newest tactic in Salon’s courting of the woo demographic. I’m used to the idiot apologists; I can mock the gooey soft religion of the liberal theists; but what they’d done this time is flaunt an incompetent atheist. Yes, it’s an article by an atheist, but it’s so badly written and so waffly and so reliant on stereotypes that I want to just back away slowly and pretend he’s not there.

The author is W.R. Klemm, a neuroscientist who, every time I’ve heard of him previously, has been terribly incoherent. What does this mean?

“Many polls show that most scientists are atheists,” said Dr. W.R. Klemm, a senior professor of neuroscience at the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, in explaining why he created the course. “I think that is unfortunate to say the least.”

I think it just means he’s a full-of-himself contrarian.

His article in Salon is far worse — for one thing, it meanders along forever, saying next to nothing. His premise seems to be that biologists and physicists are “two cultures” (and he cites C.P. Snow!) that don’t get along and don’t understand each other, because physicists are too mathy.

It’s hard for biologists to argue with physicists. Often physicists listen with detached bemusement because biologists can’t explain life with mathematics. Physics could not exist without math. Sometimes I think physicists get too enamored with math. I get the impression that they think that describing and predicting phenomena with equations is the same as explaining why and how such phenomena occur. Take the most famous equation of all, E = mc2. Just what does that equal sign mean? It implies that the variables on each side are the same. But is mass really identical to energy? True, mass can be converted to energy, as atom bombs prove, and energy can even be turned into mass. Still, they are not the same things. Not only are the units of measurement different, but the equation is only descriptive and predictive. It does not explain how mass converts to energy or vice versa.

I am embarrassed. Physicists, I swear, not all biologists are this stupid. Really, we aren’t.

Then, after telling us that he hates it when physicists write about biology, and muddily explaining that the mind has a material, biological basis, and sorta rejecting the silliness of The Spiritual Brain, he proceeds to explain to us that ‘spirit’ might be lurking in physics.

To me, other possibilities for discovering material attributes of “spirit” seem more likely. Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity, dark matter, and dark energy, has already shown that not even physicists understand what “material” is. I will now summarize the more likely possibilities for hidden realities of mind.

And then the neuroscientist writes about physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, dark matter, dark energy, string theory, parallel universes, etc., each with a little potted summary to explain how maybe there is a source for spirits within them. For example, bugger thermodynamics:

Also, what about the energy generated as electrons whip through protein chains in mitochondria? Only some of the energy is trapped in phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate. We assume that all the other energy is lost as heat. How can we be sure relativity is irrelevant to energy capture? Energy is well established as crucial for consciousness.

Oh, jebus. I am so eagerly anticipating the first creationist to come along and tell me that God is fueled by energy losses in biochemical pathways…because relativity. Or that dark energy is diddling our thoughts.

So what about dark energy? To push galaxies apart, it must impart some of its energy to the cluster of stars and planets to give them a push. What must dark energy be doing to us? Obviously, its push is not greater than the gravity that keeps us fixed to earth. But if that energy is absorbed by the galaxy, surely some of it must be absorbed in us. But what could such absorption do? Would such dark energy interact with the regular energy that we know about—like the energy in our brain? Could it act on consciousness?

Hey, and maybe the gravitational perturbations caused by the motion of the planets affects our brains, too, and astrology is true! Could it act on consciousness? is such a cheap and meaningless question — replace “it” with anything (frying pans, neutrinos, water, fluttering butterflies in the Amazon rain forest, the color orange, cosmic clouds of sentient formaldehyde, whatever) and it’s just as empty and just as thought-provoking as that noise.

I feel like I have to apologize to all the physicists in the world right now. Please, please, please don’t think all neuroscientists are like that. Neuroscience is a field that actually does use a lot of math and biochemistry and physical chemistry and physics, and it doesn’t usually lead to crania full of drivel.

The prophet who couldn’t shoot straight

Read about the real goings-on at the Bundy Ranch. Racism is just one of the lunacies on parade. GOOGLE DOCTORS THAT REMOVE MICROCHIPS. The summary:

Welfare negroes, the United Nations, sexually devious lawyers, satan, a Chinese solar farm, microchips, secret-agent NPS, a Muslim-Kenyan president, hippies, illegals. Take your pick.

Also revealing, and very Mormon: Bundy cast himself as a divinely inspired prophet of god who was delivering instructions to his people, instructing them in the prophecies they were supposed to follow, and chastising them for failing.

He goes on to explain that, although they managed to deter the BLM, they failed to do it “within one hour,” as the revelation had prophesied. So when an hour passes, he decides to get in his bulldozer and march on the BLM himself. The dozer gets stuck in the mud and he receives another revelation.

“It come to my mind real plain — the good Lord said, ‘Bundy, it’s not your job, it’s THEIR job.’ So we come back over here and heard that they had brought some cattle back. So I want you to understand,” addressing the crowd, “This is not my job, it’s YOUR job.

It’s a real comic opera. It’s too bad these kinds of clowns have successfully inserted themselves into American politics.

You can’t possibly be surprised

Cliven Bundy, the ignorant, ahistorical, far right wing, Mormon parasite who has been stealing the use of government land for decades, is also a flaming racist.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

I forgot to say he’s also egotistical. This two-bit peckerwood is giving a daily press conference in which he lets his mind ramble through the cobwebs in his skull, as if what he says is important. Could someone ask him about evolution, or climate change, or religion? Because I’m sure his ensuing monologue would be intensely entertaining.

A swarm of teabaggers on Twitter were complaining that the lamestream media just made up this story, and they weren’t going to believe it until there was video…which they said didn’t exist. Whoops.

Right-wing lies flourish on their propaganda organs

Wheee! I’m featured on OneNewsNow, the Far Right Christian online ‘news’ organization. It’s the same old thing.

University of Minnesota-Morris Professor Paul Z. Myers has encouraged students to gather up and trash all copies of an independent student newspaper [Not true. I said the university ought to prohibit their racist rag in the same way we would refuse the Ku Klux Klan the right to insult our non-white students on campus] with which he disagrees [Not true. I said we do have conservatives on campus; the basis of my disagreement wasn’t their politics, but the racism of this particular small group of extremists. And also their incompetence.]. The politically radical [Sorry, no. I’m pretty much a rock solid liberal/progressive. Not very radical at all.] professor blogged that the Morris NorthStar student newspaper was a disgrace and has "worn out its welcome and must go."[Correct! When your approach is to hide behind Trayvon Martin’s corpse and accuse university administrators of racism because they aren’t nice enough to white people…you’re not really bright enough or responsible enough to appreciate an education, let alone benefit from it.]

"We ask UMM to publicly condemn these instances of theft and destruction [They did!], investigate what happened [They did! Although I haven’t seen any evidence that this ‘theft’ even occurred; it was a free paper, widely distributed across campus, and all of a sudden, we have known far-right media clowns claiming some were “stolen”. Really? How could you tell?], and prosecute those responsible, [Yes, even if it is a stunt by the students who put out the North Star. So why are you harassing me? I had nothing to do with it.]" Theriot says. "The university must take steps to protect the NorthStar [Not necessarily. They could also banish it from campus as a disruptive, dishonest, and scurrilous pile of shit.] and all other student publications from such viewpoint-based [Is that what Republicans are calling their racism now?] censorship [There is no evidence of censorship! Saying it over and over again doesn’t make it true.] in the future."

While copies of the newspaper were being stolen, trashed, and defaced, ADF attorney David Hacker says the university quietly stood by.[Again: no evidence of theft, except the claim by the North Star. It’s a free paper that students were encouraged to take. What was the university supposed to do, put guards around the distribution racks and yell at anyone who takes a copy?]

It is simply bizarre. The university throughout has repudiated any attempt to destroy the paper; the chancellor sent out a campus-wide email saying so way back in December. They’ve got no case against the university. I used my free speech rights to say that the paper is garbage and that we ought to have some standards and reject the distribution of the libelous, poorly written crap, and yet they’re claiming that there must be an absolute right to free speech everywhere and at all times. They are going to have a hard time making a case that a free paper could be or even was stolen, and they’ve made this patently bogus case against me based on the idiot editor’s claim that there was a sciencey smell around one of the racks. That’s it. A contrived and implausible claim by a dope with an agenda, and that’s what these right-wingers are leaping upon.

It’s the same dishonest O’Keefeian tactics again. We’re just waiting for someone to ask if these people have any decency at all.