Another reason to dislike JD Vance

A terrifying visage

He’s a naive eugenicist. This review of Hillbilly Elegy (both book & film) notes that he blames all the problems in his family history on “bad genes”, and entirely ignores the issues of mental health and poverty.

The ways in which each version of “Hillbilly Elegy” avoids this crucial topic are different, but both are tragically ill-advised. The book itself is a Frankenstein hybrid of looping, repetitive memoir chapters told almost entirely in a voice-over style summary (the creative writing teacher in me kept screaming give us something to see, smell, feel — any sensory detail at all, please!) sandwiched between slapdash social science commentary on the “lurking” “ethnic component.” Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining. He bases this argument almost entirely on a blog post from Discover magazine by a writer with a history of contributing to racist, far-right publications.

But James Watson himself told me that he’s Scots-Irish, and that that is the best ethnic background to have!

Well, I guess if Vance has a “lurking” “ethnic component,” that ought to disqualify him for the position of vice president.

Intelligent Design 3.0?

What? I’ve been so neglectful of the ID gang that I completely missed an announcement five years ago that they were establishing something called Intelligent Design 3.0. Seriously, you can’t rely on me for news about the Discovery Institute because I fucking don’t care anymore. They shot their wad 20 years ago, and right now they’re a limp, exhausted pseudo-movement that thinks raising a number on their label makes them innovative.

Here’s what they announced in 2019.

After the Discovery Institute staff Christmas lunch last week, Stephen Meyer sat down with me for a quick video discussion of an extensive research project that, until now, has been deliberately kept from public. It’s Intelligent Design 3.0, an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly but, instead, to use design insights to open up avenues for new scientific discoveries. It is being supported by the Center for Science & Culture, thanks to the generosity of our donors:

That’s it. That’s all they had then. They declare that they are making an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly, so that’s the non-news…but the really important news is that they have generous donors. So it was a gimmick to raise money.

In 2024, they are now claiming major advances. The first is that they made their annotated bibliography longer.

It’s a talking point for evolutionists that in the past two decades, intelligent design has stalled. Hardly! On the contrary, I’m delighted today to share with you two very impressive measures of how much ID has advanced in that time. One is the latest update of our “Bibliography of Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design.” Go to the link to download the full bibliography, with annotations, which is the length of a book — 186 pages in total. That’s not bad for such a young field.

It’s pretty bad when you take into account that a lot of the articles are from their in-house fake journal, BIO-Complexity. I also notice that they still have a huge number of articles by the prolific David L. Abel, head of the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.. It’s easy to pad a bibliography if you have no standards and no quality control.

Their second major accomplishment is…they’ve created an Intelligent Design 3.0 website! If you’re wondering what’s on it, they’re bragging about publishing more garbage papers. They don’t have any real revelations, but just list a lot of legitimate fields that they claim to have contributed to.

The third and current phase of ID research extends ID 2.0 to new systems and fields, showing the heuristic value of intelligent design to guide scientific research. This research includes not only testing the origin of new systems, but also using ID to answer questions and make novel contributions in burgeoning fields, such as epigenetics, synthetic biology, systems biology, genomics (e.g., investigating function for junk DNA), systematics and phylogenetics, information theory, population genetics, biological fine-tuning, molecular machines, ontogenetic information, paleontology, quantum cosmology, cosmic fine-tuning, astrobiology, local fine-tuning, and many others.

I looked deeper to see what they claim to have innovated in one topic, junk DNA, and this is it: one paragraph, plus two citations to papers by Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro, published in 2002 and 2005.

Evolutionary scientists have long-claimed that the vast majority of our DNA which does not code for proteins is useless genetic “junk.” Intelligent design theorists, on the other hand, have long-predicted that much of this non-protein-coding DNA likely has important biological functions. This prediction flows naturally out of the fact that intelligent agents typically design things with function and for a purpose. Because of this ID prediction, quite a few ID proponents have been involved in research investigating function for non-protein-coding DNA—what was previously considered “junk.” Many of these scientists are part of our Junk DNA Workgroup, a collaboration of scientists who are seeking function for “junk DNA.” Many of these researchers are in sensitive positions so we do not list their names or publications.

They’re doing this research, but they can’t tell you who’s doing it! Yeah, I am filled with confidence.

I can at least praise their synergy: one goal is to pad their bibliography, and their second goal is to name a bunch of fields and buzzwords that they can use to pad their bibliography. Empty filler for the win!

They do have a long list of contributors to ID3.0, but it’s almost entirely the same old tired faces that have long been associated with the Discovery Institute. There’s a lot of rehashing of the same moribund nonsense.

I was amused to see Paul Nelson’s name listed again. One of his projects is “waiting time” and I will concede that he’s an expert on making people wait, but he’s not doing any research at all.

I want my microbots

I used to have the hots for a micromanipulator — a bulky block of clamps with a joystick that would scale down your movements from millimeter movements to tiny micrometer twitches for working at the single cell level. Now, though, I want these itty bitty microbots that you can suck up in a syringe and inject whereever you want, and command them to capture cells and move them wherever. Watch the video, and look at this little microbot that can grab single cells.

Single-cell collection with optically actuated microstructure.

These are not at all autonomous. An operator manipulates them using laser tweezers (that’s what the ball-shaped blobs on prongs are for — you focus the laser on those like they’re little handles and control the gadget, like it’s on strings). The microbots look like they’re cheap and easy to make, too, using known techniques in microlithography used to make computer chips.

Unfortunately, what isn’t cheap is the laser-equipped microscope and the control electronics. I could probably buy a couple of Tesla Cybertrucks for the price of that gear.

Water, stone, trees

We — myself, Mary, and Alaric — visited Tolmie State Park, just off the Nisqually Reach, with Ji and Knut, and strolled along the rocky beach, relaxing. The water was soothing.

The trees were spectacular.

Knut led the way.

Today it’s back to the grind. My plan is to contact realtors to get an estimate on my mother’s house. I doubt that 50 years of memories will be included in the sale price.

Back to the 1950s

Here’s another blast from the past — my mother was on the junior high “yell squad” when she was 13 or 14 years old (she’s the one on the far left). Once again, as I’m going through these old photos, I am struck by how godawful bad casual photography got to be in the 1970s. Kodak should be ashamed. I have so many photos from my youth that are smeared and grainy, with color blooming over the details, and then I see my mother’s youth, and it’s all these crisp fine black & white images that are fun to look at.

At least I can say that in my home photo collection I switched to taking B&W on my old Pentax in the 1980s, and also to color slide film (that’s a whole ‘nother tangle, converting 35mm color slides to digital images.)

Teaching kids to ‘OBEY’ is not education

This summer, when I haven’t been handed unhappy distractions, I’ve been working on a new course for the fall. I’m looking forward to it; it’s about the history and science of evolution, but it’s shaped by the requirement that courses in its category are equally focused on developing the discipline of writing in our students, so it’s going to be a combination of me lecturing briefly on the history of evolutionary theory, students discussing what they understand, writing exercises, and students explaining back to each other and me with essays. It’s not just a STEM course, it’s a STEAM course where the liberal arts pedagogy is folded into science content, and it’s all built around an epistemological approach to understanding where our ideas come from.

And now Angela Collier puts out a video about STEAM. It’s very good, especially since the last half or so is about how conservatives are openly trying to destroy progressive education and return us to the era of authoritarian instruction, where it’s so much easier to insert propaganda and lies into the curriculum. “Memorize this” is a much more useful tool for authoritarians than “question everything”, and it also would demolish good education.

This is not.a new problem. It’s clearly an issue since Reagan, the creature who corrupted everying about America, or at least, interpreted all the pustules of corruption as fashionable beauty marks for the fash.

They can’t stop lying

I caught a glimpse of the Republican National Convention out of the corner of my eye last night: Sarah Huckabee Sanders praising Trump as the the greatest president ever, while Trump himself smugly grinned and mugged for the camera, and then she went on to talk about how she was the first woman governor of her state, a woman press secretary, a woman this, a woman that, and that the Democrats hated her and were mean to her, implying that she was disliked because she was a woman. No, sorry, we disliked you because you were a dishonest propagandist for a corrupt administration. That was enough for me. I had to leave the room to avoid more exposure to the Trump cultists and liars avoiding mentioning their evil policies to revel in authoritarianism ahd cult of personality bullshit.

I went in to a different room and listened to Rebecca Watson explain Project 2025.

The Supreme Court nominations, of course, led to policies beyond what they previously would have even dreamed of stating publicly, such as Roe v. Wade falling and more recently giving the President the power of a God Emperor. All of that set the stage for Project 2025, where they could finally say the quiet part loud and publicly reveal their end game, which includes but is not limited to outlawing abortion nationwide through the Comstock Act, ending same sex marriage, removing all protections for LGBTQ+ people, criminalizing pornography, neutering Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, eliminating public education and replacing it with private Christian schooling, consolidating control of the government under the President, and replacing tens of thousands of civil service employees with political appointees who will do whatever the President wants, drawn from a vast database that the Heritage Foundation has been building for the past decade or so.

That’s what they want to do. That’s what they say they are going to do. They’re not going to openly brag about it at the convention, because those are wildly unpopular policies, so we’re only going to see Republicans wallowing in victimhood and avoiding talking about how they’re eagerly planning to fuck over the entire country if they get into power once more. The RNC is simply the shiny, glossy, colorful cake made out of poison that they’re enticing the electorate to gobble down. They want what’s worst for everyone. They’re just plain evil.

Really, I’m expected to go through all this now?

Yesterday, I spent hours going through massive piles of photo albums, gathering images to put on display at a memorial service. I learned a couple of things. Cheap mass market cameras from anytime in the 20th century were crap and produced smudgy, blurry images. Polaroids in particular were terrible. More professional cameras that typically shot in black & white and used large format produced very nice results, but throwing them in a pile or in sticky photo albums does them no favors.

Also, my mother was quite lovely, but I already knew that.

Mom at 16

It’s also particularly sad to see a long life reduced to this brief shots of happy moments.

Must be about 1940, looks like it was shot on a Minnesota farm, before they moved west.

I know exactly where that picture was taken, in my grandparents’ house. It must be around 1950.

My parents, early 1970s, I think

Mom & Dad at the wedding of one of their kids, I don’t know which one. They were happy at all of them.

Modern cameras are amazingly good, but when you buy a cheap scanner, it’s going to die in the middle of trying to digitize hundreds of old photos.

We read the will yesterday, too. It was written in 1984 and wasn’t changed since, despite the fact that three of the family members have died since it was written. It’s vaguely written, so it’s still applicable, but it basically just says that her executor should divide her estate equally among her 6 kids. Easy, right? I’m meeting with a lawyer this morning to discuss all the details that will bite me in the butt. She wasn’t rich, so that really simplifies everything.

I’m currently dreading the viewing, a barbaric custom. People don’t look as they did in life after they’ve died, so these things are always shocking, distressing events. You definitely come away knowing your loved one is gone forever.

However, I am looking forward to the memorial event on Friday evening. Mom was well-loved, so I expect to see a lot of familiar old faces, and this may be the last grand gathering of the family. This is where Mom’s financial mediocrity is a virtue, because no on will be coming to harangue me for a piece of the pie. There is no pie, there is a small cupcake that is being split 6 ways, and I intend to be meticulous in making sure the crumbs have their proper distribution.