I get spam

I got an email today claiming that the Bible contains the cure for diabetes.

It’s a detailed look at one of one of the most controversial passages in the entire Bible.

Its meaning has been studied and examined for thousands of years, but recently, scientists have linked this passage with something no one could have imagined.

In a shocking twist, researchers may be looking to the Bible to cure one of our deadliest diseases.

Thanks to a misunderstood phrase buried on Page 1,117 of the King James Bible… people from across the country are miraculously curing themselves of diabetes…

Sometimes in as little as 3 days!

Atheists hate this… but they can’t refute it.

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I ♥ Elizabeth Warren

Ted Cruz was whining about how rough his life is, with all the sacrifices he’s had to make to campaign for president of the United States. So Warren replied.

Exactly right.

She is going to be a fantastic president in 2020.

Atheist “spirituality” and “mindfulness”

Wonderful-things-happen-when-your-brain-is-empty.-380x213

I despise it. But it’s the new thing, and there’s a lot of promotion of this “mindfulness” nonsense. Yeah, it makes you feel better, which is a good thing, but so does prayer, and acupuncture, and petting a puppy, and taking long walks on the beach. That something might have subjective effects is useful — we all do things that are enjoyable, and we should — but that’s different from claiming it causes material improvements in your physical state.

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Larry Alex Taunton, Ghoul

taunton

Another Christian has written a book to lie about Christopher Hitchens. This one is claiming that he and Hitchens were great good buddies, that Hitchens was sympathetic to Christianity, and that he may have converted on his deathbed (he doesn’t know for sure — he wasn’t there — but he’s going to sell a book with that claim).

He appeared with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday night.

He read the book and he loved it, Taunton said of Matthews. He knew Hitchens, and he liked Hitchens. He thought it was a compassionate take on friendship. I don’t know if I can write anything ever again that gets universal praise from both the left and the right. This book is getting quite a reaction. The reception has been so kind, no nice. The atheist Michael Schermer loved the book.

Oh, now that’s a great recommendation.

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It’s only plutonium. It’s only near the Columbia River.

hanford

Hanford, in Washington state, has been processing plutonium for decades. The radioactive waste is pumped into gigantic, double-walled tanks with a capacity of a million gallons each, which, we are told, prevents the deadly stuff from leaking into the Columbia River drainage basin. It’ll just get caught by the outer wall of the tank! No worries!

That is, until the inner tank starts leaking heavily, and they procrastinate for years over doing anything about it.

“This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors (to hold waste safely from people and the environment),” said former Hanford worker Mike Geffre.

Geffre is the worker who first discovered that the tank, known as AY-102, was failing in 2011. In a 2013 series, “Hanford’s Dirty Secrets,” the KING 5 Investigators exposed that the government contractor in charge of the tanks, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), ignored Geffre’s findings for nearly a year. The company finally admitted the problem in 2012.

What with the mega-earthquake waiting to destroy the region, and the volcanoes primed to bury Seattle in ash and lava, and the giant pools of deadly plutonium on the Eastern side of the state, it’s a wonder that I managed to survive growing up there.

Washington state is on my short list of places to someday retire to (if I should live that long), but maybe I ought to consider changing it up to places that are safer. Like Australia. They’re always bragging about their lethal wildlife, but back home, we are threatened with the grand forces of geology and nuclear physics.

The Dork Endorkenment

moldbug

I probably shouldn’t make fun of what they call themselves — these people are dangerously wrong. An in-depth article on Vox dissects the Alt-Right, the Dark Enlightenment, the Neo-Reactionaries, or whatever the heck they call themselves today. There’s Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land, and HBD Chick, and 4-chan, and anti-semitism, and Milo Yiannopoulous, and Donald Trump, and Gamergate — all different flavors of shit mixed into the ugliest ice cream cone ever.

There isn’t much glue holding this conglomeration together, other than elitism and hatred of others and a mass of privilege that allows them to afford being insufferable douchebuckets.

Amazon supporting scammers

I subscribe to Kindle Unlimited — I’ve found it useful, and I’ve found several books that have been helpful. I downloaded a couple of camera tutorials, for instance, that were straightforward and direct and coupled practice and concept very nicely (for example, this one by Al Judge) that explained apertures and f/stops well (I already understood the concepts) by showing me how they were implemented in my camera.

Unfortunately, Kindle Unlimited turns out to be extremely exploitable, and there are scammers taking advantage of it. Follow that link for all the details, but the short summary is that a) all authors divvy up a pot of money from KU subscribers, b) the author’s share of the pot is determined by how many of their pages are “read”, c) Amazon has an awesomely stupid algorithm for measuring pages read, so that if someone downloads the book and just zips to the last page, the author is credited for the whole book read, d) so people are creating garbage books and getting co-conspirators to download it for free and jump to the end.

Would you believe people can earn $60,000/month with this game? I am not endorsing this. Do not leap into the action thinking you can make some quick bucks fast. It’s unethical, and at some point, I hope, Amazon will wake up and crack down on these thieves, at which point it will hurt the perpetrators.

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Teachers, we want you to come to Morris

We’re doing it again: we’re offering our workshop, Changes in Nature, to interested teachers this summer, 11-15 July. It was fun and we learned a lot last year, so it’s going to be even better this year. This is a workshop that focuses on helping teachers develop strategies to teach “controversial” topics, evolution and climate change, so there’s a bit of us lecturing at them, and a lot of discussion and listening to teachers, so we all win.

I’ve been keeping my eyes open for papers on teaching evolution for this purpose, and one that caught my attention is a recent article by Price and Perez, Beyond the Adaptationist Legacy: Updating Our Teaching to Include a Diversity of Evolutionary Mechanisms. This has been a hobby horse of mine for a while, that so many people turn to selection and only selection to explain biological phenomena, and it impoverishes the field. So I was happy, sort of, to see an attempt to describe the errors a lack of diversity of explanations leads students to. I’m not happy to see these errors — and I see them in my students, too — but identifying the problem is a first step to correcting it.

Here, for instance, is a table of recognized misconceptions. You don’t have any of these, of course…right?

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Trust Skepticon to turn April Fool’s Day into April Fool’s Month

Skepticon is pranking a couple of losers — every dollar donated is a vote for your choice of recipient of a goofy gift. You can vote for Heina Dadabhoy, Matt Dillahunty, Keith Lowell Jensen, or…what, ME? This must be a mistake. Hang on.

 
 
 
 

I had to run off and make a bunch of votes for those other people. I don’t need Mormon underpants, or my face on a potato, or a cardboard penis. Especially not the last one. As everyone knows, the penis I was born with is already _____________*. So go vote for everyone else, immediately.

*Choose one:
a) flat.
b) corrugated.
c) floppy.
d) made of 100% recycled wetsuits.

Mercola gets a $5 million slap

Joseph Mercola, the popular quack, has been selling tanning beds with a twist. He’s been claiming that exposing yourself to fairly high intensity ultraviolet light will prevent cancer. That’s right. An exposure that causes a low level of direct DNA damage prevents skin cancer, according to a quack.

The courts weren’t going to buy that nonsense, so Mercola settled a false advertising suit, promised to refund up to $5.3 million in tanning bed sales, and to never do it again. Of course he already has an explanation.

But speaking Thursday, Mercola said he only settled the case as “a business decision,” and stands by his claims that his tanning beds had cancer-fighting benefits and that Americans were suffering from what he called an “epidemic” of under-exposure to ultraviolet light, which he said could be treated by “moderate” sun bed use.

The duck says what?

He also swears he’s not selling these things for the money, but solely to help people.

While he acknowledged Thursday that he’d sold thousands of tanning beds between 2012 and last year, he said his business is not “a tool … to get me a bigger house and car” but rather a means of funding his mission to “inform consumers” about “natural health.”

He said he moved from the Chicago area to Florida, where he owns a waterfront mansion, four years ago because of his belief in the health benefits of the sun.

He’s not in it for the money, but he’s able to shrug off a $5 million judgment and has a waterfront mansion in Florida.

I have suddenly thought of one good consequence of global warming. One.