That’s not how the brain works!

I’m watching this video of Ben Carson’s recent speech, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I know everyone is aghast at his trivializing of the slave trade, and that’s the more important example of negligent ignorance to focus on, but good grief, I was trained as a neuroscientist, and his remarks about the brain are appalling.

It remembers everything you’ve ever seen. Everything you’ve ever heard. I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there; it doesn’t go away. You just have to learn how to recall it. But that’s what your brain is capable of. It can process more than 2 million bits of information per second. You can’t overload it. Have you ever heard people say, “Don’t do all that, you’ll overload your brain.” You can’t overload the human brain. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to challenge the capacity of your brain.

None of that is true! Not one bit of it! I can’t imagine anyone who learned the slightest bit of neurobiology in the 20th century believing any of that. The brain throws away most of its sensory input. We don’t know what the “storage capacity” (and it’s fundamentally wrong to think of it that way, as if it’s a flash drive) of the brain is, and we don’t know the storage requirement of a “fact”, so that’s just a bullshit estimation.

Do you even need to know anything to be a brain surgeon? Somebody wack him upside the head with a copy of Kandel and tell him to start reading this stuff he pretends to know.

Apparently, he’s been reciting this pseudoscientific claptrap for years, in his books and speeches before religious groups, but we all know that anybody who read or listened to that stuff wasn’t competent to criticize his bad science.

“Let them eat cake” translated perfectly into modern English idiom

Thank God for Jason Chaffetz. He’s perfect. He’s such an excellent representative of the Republican party. About the fact that the Republican replacement plan for ACA is more expensive and enriches the wealthy, he says,

You know what, Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own health care.

There are facts that illustrate how clueless his argument is.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average premium for an individual health care plan in the United States is just over $235 per month. Buying an iPhone 7 through a wireless carrier and paying for it in installments over a two-year period costs $27 per month.

But for now, just set aside the facts — Republicans don’t care about them anyway — and savor the flawless Marie Antoinette-ness of the moment. And remember what happened to Marie.

Logan

logan

That description is exactly right: Logan is not a movie for kids. It’s grim, gory, and extremely violent, and much of that violence involves a child (who does give better than she gets, but still — that’s not a lesson you want your child to learn).

It’s also played as an “end” to the X-Men franchise, but it really isn’t. Everyone is dead, except for Wolverine (Logan) and Professor X, and a few rare, scattered individuals who are being hunted down. The ending (which I won’t reveal) puts close to the saga, and Hugh Jackman has said he won’t be reprising the role, but that’s no real termination — it leaves a heck of a lot of questions wide open that could, in a sufficiently venal film industry, justify a few more prequels to this story to explain how it ended up in such a deplorable state.

But still, I enjoyed it. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an engaging one, and it focused on the human side of the story. What happens when demi-gods grow old and have to face their own mortality? What do you do when old dreams die, you’ve lost hope, and the vitality you relied on begins to fade? That’s far more interesting than trying to see how many city blocks an overpowered superhero can demolish in an afternoon.

Recommended. It makes you think a little bit in addition to keeping the action flying.

It is disturbing that the news is all Russia all the time

I agree that the administration’s Russian connection ought to be pursued, but I am not happy that that is being treated as the primary reason to delegitimize Donald Trump. The man is a destructive incompetent with a fist full of bad policies, and the most effective way to bring him down is to expose the fact that his campaign staff talked to the Russian ambassador? What? Have you looked at what he is doing to the country right now? Because there is a whole lot of crap going down while we’re busy looking for Russians under the bed.

For instance, look at his proposed budget for the EPA.

  • Puget Sound. Funding for restoration work in the country’s second-largest estuary would be cut from $28 million to $2 million.
  • The Great Lakes. Funding to combat algae blooms, invasive species and other water pollution problems in the world’s largest group of freshwater lakes would be cut from $300 million to $10 million.
  • The Chesapeake Bay. Funding for restoration in the country’s largest estuary would be cut from $73 million to $5 million.
  • Research on endocrine disruptors. The EPA’s work studying chemicals that can interfere with the body’s reproductive and developmental systems would nearly be eliminated, dropping from $7.5 million to $445,000.
  • Diesel emissions. Since 2008, the EPA has issued grants to accelerate the country’s transition from old, dirty diesel engines to cleaner burning trucks and equipment. They’ve been responsible for most of Oregon’s progress in addressing cancer-causing diesel soot, a major air pollution source.
  • Beach water quality testing. The EPA spends about $9.5 million to fund state testing of bacteria levels at beaches around the country. In Oregon, it funds state testing during the summer. That would be eliminated.
  • The U.S.-Mexico border. Sewage and garbage from Mexico frequently sweeps into San Diego during winter rainstorms. The EPA has funded work there to slow the flood of garbage into the Pacific Ocean. Its program to address problems like that would be cut from $3 million to $275,000.
  • Environmental education. The EPA spends $8.7 million annually on programs to educate children. Spending on them would be cut to $555,000.

Meanwhile, he’s increasing the bloated defense budget by 10%, and covering that by cutting other programs, like education.

These are standard Republican policies. Are we planning to rely on finding Russian connections in order to get rid of bad stewards of our country’s resources forevermore? Because you know that most of the Republican congress is going to be untainted by Russians, but is still going to be promoting these same bad ideas.

There is no single reason to rise up and throw these assholes out — they’ve provided an embarrassment of causes that make them terrible leaders, which is part of the problem, that the reasons for taking action have been diffused so widely. It seems to me that our targeting is off when conversations with Russian diplomats become the strongest reason for investigating the president, rather than his habit of appointing incompetents and looters like DeVos and Pruitt to run major government agencies.

Humans are stupid

Kathy Watson is stupid. She has diabetes, high blood pressure, and two cancers. Her husband lost his job, she lost her health insurance, and because of her pre-existing condition, no one was going to insure her at a reasonable rate…until the Affordable Care Act came along.

She voted for Trump.

Yeah, you know that was going to be the kicker. She voted for Trump.

Watson also voted for Donald Trump, believing the businessman would bring change. She dismissed his campaign pledges to scrap the Affordable Care Act as bluster.

Jesus Christ, Ms Watson, but you are a dumbass. Not only did you make a choice that is probably going to kill you, you made a choice that is going to wreck our country.

Also, LA Times and every other goddamn newspaper on Earth, I’m getting more than a little tired of these inane stories written to squeeze out a little sympathy for Trump voters. They’re not working. I have no sympathy for the Kathy Watsons of the USA, and all you’re doing is convincing me that humanity doesn’t deserve any more chances.

Sorry, guys, your penis is not a claw machine

claw-machine

I’m used to Redpillers/MGTOWs/MRAs/Incels saying stuff that reveals that they don’t understand how vaginas work, but Futrelle has found something unique: a guy who doesn’t understand how penises work. He has a fantasy of extracting ova during sex somehow and implanting them in other women…all with his penis.

Imagine advances in nano machines enable a delivery system of minuscule scale transferring an embryo through the vagina, cervix and into the womb. You are Chad Thundercock. You want to maximize your reproduction with high quality genetics. Problem is it’s too slow to go around looking for the top 20% of women. You have found one however, bred her, and you’ve gotten a lot of her eggs. Now you go around implanting unwitting low quality sluts with your preferred sperm & egg combo. Imagine the implantation process can be easily done during sex so there’s good reason to suspect, for the woman, that biologically it’s her child.

gumballmachine

I don’t think he understands female reproductive biology, either. So after you’ve “bred” a woman, you get a lot of eggs, like she’s some kind of gumball machine?

I begin to understand. I wonder if he learned about sex by wandering around his local Chuck E. Cheese? If so, he learned from the wrong toys. Everyone knows that sex is just like Skee-Ball.

skeeball

“Red Pill Libertarian”

Nathan Larson is a delusional fool. He’s running for congress in Virginia on a platform that can only be called raw misogyny, and it’s all under the banner of the “Red Pill”.

A red piller is someone who recognizes and is aware of (1) the way that feminism, feminists and their white knight enablers affect society; (2) the dark truths surrounding human sexuality; and (3) hypergamy, women’s AF/BB strategies, society’s feminine imperative, sexual differences in emotional attachment, and women’s attraction to DT traits and sexual dominance/violence. The red pill is extremely politically incorrect, and one may expect reflexive social ostracism for even mentioning the Red Pill in polite society.

You remember the Red Pill — it’s the choice Neo is given in that very silly movie, The Matrix. He can either take the blue pill and go back to living in a dream, or the red pill and wake up to a difficult reality. They’ve got it wrong, of course. “Red Pillers” immerse themselves in a fantasy world of evil women that explains why they are lonely and regarded as creepy, and they also get to learn a lot of bizarre jargon (look at that quote!) that makes them incomprehensible to people outside their little clubhouse. And look at that rationalization at the end — if people find their views repellent, then, well, that’s proof that they’re correct!

This sounds so much like an ugly mix of Scientology and radical Islam: the same isolating cult talk, the same elevation of their narrow group as True Heroes because their ideas are rejected as hateful by people who haven’t been soaking in their Kool-Aid.

It’s clear that it’s not just religion that rots people’s minds, though: a fair number, maybe a majority, of “Red Pillers” are atheists, and they are just as susceptible to cult-like thinking.

It may be permanently damaging, too. Here’s an account of people who left the Red Pill subreddit, and by their own words, most of them still sound like awful, horrible, repulsive people. They left because they found some other get-laid-quick scheme that helps them sleep with women, or because their racist views awakened them to the need to get women pregnant, beyond just having sex with them.

Every man on the Red Pill has a different story. However, each of them do have striking similarities. The main one is anger. Like the name of the subreddit itself, it is blazing red. We must understand the psychology behind the philosophy not to condone it, but to better tackle the poisonous spider slowly infecting those across the web.

It’s actually rather impressive how thoroughly a wrong and hateful ideology can take over a generation of young men and warp their minds so effectively — the author is right. These are phenomena that demand a better understanding of human psychology.

Unless we want to see more Nathan Larsons running for congress.

Jeez, I know where that happened

Yet another hate crime, something becoming increasingly common it seems, but it’s strange to see a racist shooting near where I grew up.

Kent police are searching for a gunman they say opened fire in the East Hill neighborhood.
Officers say the victim, a Sikh man, was in his driveway working on his car Friday around 8 p.m. when another man approached him and began yelling, “Go back to your own country.”

They give the address, which gave me a start — it was a familiar neighborhood. It was actually near where my girlfriend lived, up past the top of James Hill (I made so many rubber-legged treks up that monstrous hill). I can’t even imagine this sort of crime happening 30 years ago.

It takes a firm hand

We just got back from the Indivisible meeting in Glenwood, and it was…interesting. There was a good crowd of 40 or 50 people, I think, and there were a few protesters with their big blue “Trump/Pence” signs, and they did something clever. There were a handful of them easily spotted because of their signs, but there were a bunch more that blended in with the attendees, so that when we went around the room introducing ourselves and explaining our interests, we’d have 3 or 4 people who’d talk about the environment, or hostile immigration policies, or health care, or LGBTQ rights, and then we’d hit some gomer salted into the audience who’d whine at us. I think they had 3 primary arguments, and they were: 3) I hate big government and taxes, 2) the authoritarian “he’s our president, so we have to support him no matter what”, and 1) JESUS and the decline of our morality. It was aggravating. The organizers, Jeannette and Glen, handled it just right, though. Here they are:

IMG_1705

They let them speak! They got a minute or two, just like everyone else, and then they’d firmly insist on moving on to give the next person a chance. You can tell that chapped their hides, because at the end a couple of them demanded an opportunity to go on at greater length, and they just shut them down politely and insisted that we stick to the agenda. Good work. I was impressed. That’s how to get it done efficiently and get it done on time.

Then the meeting ended and, well, you know me. I’m a kook magnet. In the introduction I’d mentioned that I was a biologist, so a kook homed in on me afterwards. He thinks global warming is nothing to worry about.

So he told me he had a friend who was a submariner, and he said they sometimes got CO2 concentrations as high as 5,000ppm, (current CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is about 400ppm), and they were fine. The scientists don’t want you to know about that. To which I told him I’ve taught physiology, we go all over the partial pressure calculations, and we know that partial pressure of CO2 in the tissues easily gets around 40mm Hg, or about 60,000 ppm, so as long as you’re below that, you can offload metabolically produced CO2, although with decreasing efficiency, so yes we certainly do know all that basic stuff. Do you think the scientists and engineers who put people in submarines are unaware of the limits of tolerance to atmospheric gasses?

Besides, this isn’t about how much CO2 you can safely breath, it’s about the accumulation of greenhouse gasses causing global warming.

So he changed the topic. Of course. If you show the slightest sign that you know what you’re talking about, they flee.

Next, he asks me if I know what is in a can of Coke. I’m not sure where this is going, but I tell him flavorings, colorings, and carbonic/phosphoric acid. Yes, he announces triumphantly, and do you know what happens when you open a can of Coke? “It…fizzes?”, was my reply. Do you think the acid sinks to the bottom and forms a layer? NO! It escapes into the air! Ocean acidification is a lie! It can’t happen!

“Have you ever heard of the concept of equilibrium…”

Scientists are all liars! They’re idiots!

I’d had about enough of this raving nutcase. So I told him we were done with this conversation, good bye, move along. I was trying to follow the example of our organizers, but no, it wasn’t enough.

The Coke can makes it obvious! Scientists are all lying to us!

“Done. Stop. Go away, you’re a kook.”

LIARS! IDIOTS!

So I just told him, firmly to fuck off. It took a couple of tries before he did, finally, wander away.

These goons really have no idea of what boundaries are, let alone science.