Checking the fact-checkers

There was a channel on YouTube called “Cinema Sins” (maybe there still is) which would go through recent movies, nit-picking over every continuity error and anachronism and just stuff they didn’t like. It became a parody of itself, though, because the creators were locked into the paradigm of finding as many errors as possible — their entire schtick was based on tallying up huge numbers of sins to the point that they had to start inventing them. Shaun dissected them thoroughly. That ‘sin counter’ tally on their videos had to keep going up, you know!

The latest sport on Bluesky is doing a Shaun to the newspaper fact-checkers who are struggling so hard to justify their existence by finding something, anything to criticize about speeches at the Democratic National Convention. In particular, I see a lot of piling on of the odious Glenn Kessler. The poor man takes his job very seriously. He’s motivated to make sure he gets column inches by finding something to write about, which would be a worthy occupation, except that he keeps calling into question statements that aren’t literal quotes. “Summarizing” or “condensing” the overall message of a political group is a sin!

For instance, one speech highlights the family policy of the Republican party.

“Page 451 says the only legitimate family is a married mother and father where only the father works.”

— Colorado Gov. Jared Polis

It’s a matter of interpretation. Polis was one of several speakers during the convention who have highlighted passages in a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page catalogue of conservative proposals that is popularly known as Project 2025.

But the report’s Page 451 does not use the words that Polis suggested he was quoting, nor does it say that mothers should not work. On that page is a proposal for the Department of Health and Human Services to promote “stable and flourishing married families.”

But here’s what page 451 says. It’s true, Polis was not accurately quoting the literal words of Project 2025.

Goal #3: Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families. Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families. Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures. In the overwhelming number of cases, fathers insulate children from physical and sexual abuse, financial difficulty or poverty, incarceration, teen pregnancy, poor educational outcomes, high school failure, and a host of behavioral and psychological problems. By contrast, homes with non-related “boyfriends” present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.
In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them. In cases involving biological parents who are found by a court to be unfit because of abuse or neglect, the process of adoption should be speedy, certain, and supported generously by HHS

It’s only hinting at their plans with explicit opposition to LGBT+ equity, the nuclear family, and the importance of working fathers. We also have all the other things Republicans have said about their desire to return to a stereotyped version of 1950. Good work, Glenn.

Most irritating is this complaint about Tim Walz characterizing a well-known Republican policy.

“They’ll repeal the Affordable Care Act. They’ll gut Social Security and Medicare, and they will ban abortion across this country with or without Congress.”

— Vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz

The problem?

This is speculative. Trump has insisted he will not touch Social Security or Medicare — and he largely kept to that pledge during his presidency.

He also said he wouldn’t touch Roe v. Wade, as did several nominees to the Supreme Court. Yet somehow, it got “touched” and touched hard. Does Kessler assume that Republicans never lie? Programs like Social Security and Medicare and abortion are popular, so politicians avoid being direct in their plans, because that would make them lose. Glenn Kessler plays the Republican game of pretending circumlocutions are effective at hiding their intent.

As for abortion, Trump has said the Supreme Court sent the matter to the states and that each state can set its own policies. But many conservative allies are eager to restrict abortion rights even further, perhaps using old laws on the books (such as the Comstock Act of 1873) in new and aggressive ways. Walz hinted at that by saying Trump would act “with or without Congress.”

Go back to that Project 2025 document Kessler just cited as evidence that, oh no, the Republicans aren’t actually interested in restoring the Patriarchy. Search for the word “abortion”.

There are 199 mentions.

You’ll have no problem finding quotes to substantiate Walz’s wild assertion.

That’s enough. Nitpicking the plain sense of Republicans, or the slimy evasions of certain fact-checkers, has already bored me and is an endless sinkhole of evasions and lies.

I was against Walz before I was for him

Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, accepted the VP nomination last night. Here’s his speech from last night.

It was a ‘greatest hits’ kind of speech, where he threw out all the familiar slogans that the Democrats have found to resonate with the public. That’s fine; I agree with the sentiments, and will be voting for Harris/Walz in November.

I figure I’d better come clean and confess that I was not happy with Walz. You can go through the archives here and find all the posts where I commented on him, so I’ll save you the effort and repost some excerpts for you so you can tell me I was wrong.

My number one complaint was his close connection to the National Rifle Association. This was a major political issue in his campaign, as he proudly advertised the fact that he was an NRA supporter.

In the Minnesota caucuses, Democrat Tim Walz came out in first place in the race for governor. He was my last choice. He’s a Democrat who is good at getting the rural — that is, conservative Democrat — vote, and I scratched him off my list for consideration on the basis of one crucial fact: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. Nope. That’s like getting praise from the KKK; it might appeal to a certain demographic, but that’s one demographic I’d like to see ignored.

Another factor was the condescension by the DFL. They figured that NRA hook was sufficient to capture the yokels of rural Minnesota. It probably worked, since he won the 2018 primary.

I took a look at the Minnesota primary election results. There weren’t really any surprises, although there was one disappointment.

The disappointment is that Tim Walz will be the DFL candidate running for governor in November. I despise Tim Walz — he’s a conservative Democrat who has been in the pocket of the NRA for years. What’s particularly galling about it is that I keep seeing people saying that they voted for Walz because he was most appealing to outstate (the obnoxious term people in the Twin Cities use for the region outside the Twin Cities) voters, so they were supporting the DFL candidate most likely to win over those Neandertals who don’t reside in the metropolitan region.

I live in “outstate” Minnesota. Grrrr. Don’t assume we’re all gun-totin’ rednecks out here.

And yes, he was a conservative Democrat. I didn’t vote for him in the primary (although I did in the general election) because there was a good strong liberal Democrat running against him.

The frontrunner is Democrat Tim Walz. I scratched him off my dance card long, long ago: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. That ought to be the kiss of death for any politician any more.

On the other hand, Rebecca Otto has the recommendation of environmentalists and climate scientists like Michael Mann, along with an excellent record as the state auditor. She’s pro-democracy and pro-environment.

An A+ from climate scientists vs. an A+ from the freakin’ NRA. This one’s an easy choice. I want Rebecca Otto for governor of Minnesota.

Walz did get better, fortunately, and he changed, becoming more progressive in the course of his term. I’ll admit that I was proven wrong (although I’ll bet there are a lot of rural voters in these here parts who now rue the day they voted for him), and he turned out to be a very good governor.

Still, the NRA? Jesus. I think I was justified in not trusting him.

Crabby destiny

This diagram from Convergent Adaptation of True Crabs (Decapoda: Brachyura) to a Gradient of Terrestrial Environments is going to reinforce the idea that everything converges on crabs…which is kind of cool anyway.

Summary of phylogeny and divergence time estimates for Brachyura (88 brachyuran families, 263 genera, 333 species, 338 individuals plus 6 outgroups). Posterior ages were estimated in BEAST2 using a fixed topology resulting from the concatenated ML analysis in IQ-TREE, 36 vetted node calibrations, a birth–death tree prior, and relaxed lognormal clock model. Shaded circles at nodes represent ultrafast bootstraps. Pie slices are colored by superfamily, with the outermost ring colored by taxonomic section. Line drawings, one representative per superfamily (numbers corresponding to taxa in Supplementary Table S7), by Javier Luque and Harrison Mancke.

Please note, this diagram illustrates the evolution of a single, large, successful clade, the Brachyura. It does not imply that humans and salamanders and spiders are going to converge on a crablike form, OK? The interesting thing is that all the descendants of this Triassic lineage, despite going through multiple independent transitions from marine to terrestrial and back again, have assumed these very similar (superficially, at least) forms, and that tells us something interesting. The Brachyura have some internal constraints that shape their evolution, and studying them help us understand the balance between inherited patterns and external forces. That’s the conclusion of the paper, that there are constraints on evolution.

Herein, we inferred a large molecular phylogeny of true crabs, estimated divergence times that were older than previously thought, and estimated the number of transitions from marine to non-marine lifestyles. We found up to 17 convergent transitions through direct and indirect pathways, with at least 3 climbing to higher degrees of terrestrial adaptation. The most highly terrestrial clades were some of the oldest non-marine inferences in our data, with their common ancestors having diverged over 66 Ma. At least 9 more recent events throughout the Cenozoic led to crabs living in intertidal and marginal marine environments, a shift that is estimated to be much easier based on lower threshold liability and likely fewer traits required. As instances of convergent evolution provide emerging models in the form of “natural experiments,” the framework we have developed to compare the gradient of adaptations will enable future research that aims to “predict” the constraints leading to repeated trait evolution and better understand the drivers of biodiversity across related groups.

I don’t often follow financial news, but when I do, it’s to giggle at asshats

The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk is a historic flop.

The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The seven banks involved in the deal, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, lent the money to the billionaire’s holding company to take the social-media platform, now named X, private in October 2022. Banks that provide loans for takeovers generally sell the debt quickly to other investors to get it off their balance sheets, making money on fees.

The banks haven’t been able to offload the debt without incurring major losses—largely because of X’s weak financial performance—leaving the loans stuck on their balance sheets, or “hung” in industry jargon. The resulting write-downs have hobbled the banks’ loan books and, in one case, was a factor that crimped compensation for a bank’s merger department, according to people involved with the deal.

The value of the loans to Musk quickly soured after the $44 billion acquisition was completed. But new analysis shows how their persistent underperformance has put the deal in historic territory.

I’m slightly sympathetic. I too was in debt to the Bank of America, but then I paid off my mortgage last month. If I’d been able to take out a $13 billion loan I wouldn’t be paying it off, either.

I wouldn’t be able to take out that loan anyway, because I lack “allure”.

The banks that agreed to underwrite a deal that even Musk said was overvalued did so largely because the allure of banking the world’s richest person was too attractive to pass up, according to people involved in the deal.

You’d think banks would be hard-headed and practical about this sort of thing, but no, they fell for “allure”.

The ghost of Gish

It’s depressing how much the right wing of politics owes to creationists. Madhusudan Katti speaks a well-recognized truth.

Veterans of the evolution wars have been alarmed at how some of the figures driving the antiscience and anti-intellectual agenda of the modern Republican Party emerged from the creationist movement. A prime example is Manhattan Institute’ Christopher Rufo, who rose from Seattle’s Discovery Institute (birthplace of “intelligent design”) to become a leading conservative intellectual; his attacks on universities have taken on dangerous proportions, linked to attacks on academic freedom in states like Florida. Such mastery of the Gish gallop manifests not just on the debate stage these days, but in the op-ed pages of major newspapers falsely demonizing “critical race theory,” decrying DEI and getting prominent university presidents fired. Rufo and like-minded advocates know how to flood the zone with a steady barrage of disinformation until, as the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt noted, “people no longer can believe anything”, losing their “capacity to act” or “to think and to judge”, and “with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

What we once thought of as an obscure reference to weird creationist tactics has become common parlance. Just about everyone knows what a Gish Gallop is, and every time a Republican steps up to a lectern we can trust them to deploy it. We have seen Trump use it; even his rallies are a random, scattershot collection of confusing nonsense. Sharks and electric batteries, anyone? Crowd sizes at his past events? Hannibal Lecter? It’s madness.

Ask one of those veterans of the evolution wars what we should do when confronted with a galloping Gish. The first bit of advice is the simplest.

The best advice for scientists, honed after years of fighting creationist and climate-denial drivel, is to eschew fake debates on stages as simply lending megaphones to liars.

Unfortunately, politicians are trapped by convention and have to do debates. So, specifically, what should someone do when compelled to participate in a debate?

Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, the next debate, scheduled for September 10, will likely feature Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who better be prepared to counter Trump’s Gish gallop more forcefully. She will face a well-practiced con artist and loud dissembler who will flood the zone with enough falsehoods to outshout the former prosecutor and senator. (Speaking as an evolutionary scientist, there are no prizes for guessing which side of the evolution-creation debate these two candidates fall on, either.) When it’s her turn to respond, Harris should turn the tables on Trump by calling him out as a liar without bothering to refute each lie and refocus the audience on her own message. When asked how she might respond if Trump started stalking her on stage, Harris said she would turn around and ask “Why are you being so weird?” Indeed, her campaign has already leaned into this strategy to highlight and mock just how extreme the Republican agenda has become. It just might see her win the next debate as well.

This is good advice for all the youtubers who get sucked into engaging with liars and fools. First, don’t. Second, if you must, focus one one thing instead of a thousand and drill down hard to expose the dumbass. Third, make it clear that your opponent is not a scientist, is not qualified to address the evidence, and is just a weird pretentious clown who is wasting everyone’s time.

Science is not supposed to be partisan

This is how they think science works

But it’s unavoidable when one party is explicitly anti-science. Scientific American scrutinizes Project 2025 from the perspective of science, and you won’t be surprised to learn that a substantial part of that document is explicitly about politicizing science. Let’s start by replacing civil servants with Republican hacks.

Project 2025 presents a long-standing conservative vision of a smaller government and describes specific, detailed steps to achieve this goal. It would shrink some federal departments and agencies while eliminating others—dividing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into two weaker entities, for instance, and abolishing the Department of Education (ED) entirely.

What is even more unusual, and also mapped out in detail, is a plan to exert more presidential control over traditionally nonpartisan governmental workers—those Trump might describe as members of the “deep state,” or regulatory bureaucracy. For example, Project 2025 claims that the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other scientific institutions are “vulnerable to obstructionism” unless appointees at these agencies are “wholly in sync” with presidential policy. To that end, it would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service jobs as political positions that answer to the president.

Obstructionism, in their mind, is when someone competent and qualified tells a MAGA Republican that their ideas are wrong. Project 2025 hits a whole bunch of topics: abortion, agriculture, climate change, education, environment, health care, and technology. Do those sound like areas where science might possibly make an informed contribution? Or would you prefer to have some smug graduate of a backwoods Bible college dictating policy?

Ugh. “Cultural Christian.” That’s an excuse for a lot of stupidity

That photo is nauseating. Elon Musk is not at all pious — he’s blatantly pandering to conservatives who are often religious. Now he’s calling himself a “cultural Christian,” a phrase I’ve heard a few times before, and never fails to make my stomach churn.

Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”

And then applying his First Principles mindset, Musk extrapolated that what follows from that goal is to have “consciousness expand in scale and scope” by increasing population and allowing differing perspectives. Or put differently, more babies and free speech.

Yeah, that’s short for “white nationalist”. He’s also claiming to have been a thoughtful scholar of religion…until he discovered that science fiction was a better fit.

As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.

I don’t believe he ever read those religious texts or those philosophers, making him similar to Donald Trump. But I can believe he read Douglas Adams, although he didn’t understand him.

Elon is a perfect example of a real-life Otto.

What voting block will he piss off next?

I wouldn’t have guess the Irish, but the Irish would notice.

“Has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? ” Vance queried at a press conference held at the Milwaukee Police Association. “That’s what I’m talking about.

“We know that when we have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates,” Vance stated. “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.”

This is what happens when you base your policy on what movie you’ve seen. The facts are a bit different, though.

However, studies have indicated that migrants are no more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The fictional film is set in 19th-century New York and centers around a feud between rival gangs of different backgrounds. The protagonist is an Irish immigrant seeking revenge for his father’s murder, reports the Journal Sentinel.

The Danes better watch out if he ever watches The Salvation.

Or maybe he’ll center immigration policy on a viewing of Alien: Romulus.