They’re not sending their best

Joe Rogan needs to do a better job screening guests on his show. Here’s one of his interesting guests.

Sheldon Johnson – a 48-year-old youth counselor for the Queens Defenders who spent 25 years in prison for attempted murder and robbery – was introduced on the Joe Rogan Experience in February by his friend, Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice executive director Josh Dubin, as “a marvelous human being” who was wronged by “the system.”

Johnson was also photographed shaking hands with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

He sounds better than Jordan Peterson or Alex Jones or Elon Musk or Gavin McInnes. Except…

However, less than a year after his release from prison, Johnson was arrested in New York on Thursday after police found a severed head in an apartment freezer and a torso stashed in a bin.

What kind of life puts you on a trajectory that leads to stuffing decapitated heads in a freezer?

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Deja vu — it used to be called “teach the controversy”

Classic foot-in-the-door technique, just picture them wearing ragged dirty clodhoppers

You all remember Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the court case that decided that no, teachers couldn’t smuggle creationism into the classroom by pretending they were teaching reasonable alternatives? This story about a West Virginia law even references it.

In 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution because it advanced a Christian viewpoint and is not legitimate science.

Well, it’s baaaack!

A bill that could permit teachers to discuss and answer questions from students about theories, including intelligent design, will head to the House of Delegates for a vote after a tweak Tuesday morning.

Senators already approved the bill, Senate Bill 280, early in the legislative session, saying it protected teachers who may face legal challenges when discussing theories outside of evolution.

A Democrat member of the House Committee on the Judiciary argued that the bill didn’t explicitly permit intelligent design in classroom teaching — despite what was discussed as a possible intent of the legislation in the Senate.

During debate, Republicans emphasized that the bill wouldn’t be a mandate of what to teach; rather, they said the legislation ensured that students could have wide-ranging discussions on theories.

“This bill doesn’t require a teacher to teach creationism,” said Del. Andy Shamblin, R-Kanawha, who is a public school teacher. “All this bill does is say if the subject is brought up, the teacher can discuss that subject.”

While voicing support of the legislation, Del. Scot Heckert, R-Wood, said that the bill could result in more students being interested in science or “simply [keep] them from getting involved in drugs, playing on the computer all the time or eating Tide Pods.”

Teachers have not been prohibited from having a conversation about a topic not in the curriculum (unless, of course, it’s mentioning that they’re happily gay-married, in which case fundamentalists will storm the school with pitchforks and torches.) They can say, “I believe in the book of Genesis” and then move on — what they can’t do is derail the whole curriculum by spending class time going over the begats or treating the bullshit peddled by the Discovery Institute as science. Public schools are supposed to have science standards, a set of things the teachers are obligated to teach, because they are supposed to be preparing them for college, or for life as an educated citizen. Teach those religious ‘alternatives’ in Sunday School, where you’re not constrained by the shackles of reality or practicality.

Naturally, the Bible thumpers make the same arguments they always have.

Del. Todd Kirby, R-Raleigh, said that he didn’t see how the legislation introduced religion to students in the sciences classes.

“Just because you believe we came from something greater than a mere chance or an instance when everything happened to come together in our universe and solar system … it doesn’t mean you’re pushing religion. It just means you have a different theory than what’s taught in school,” he said.

Another ignorant yahoo who thinks evolution equals chance, and that any old tall tale you can babble about is a “theory”. What he’s talking about is a peculiar religious myth that he wants taught alongside natural selection and the periodic table and Newton’s laws of motion. He just wants the schools to pretend that Adam & Eve have equal explanatory power to common descent.

No one is fooled. I know and he knows that he is pushing religion, he’s just the one lying about it.

Meanwhile, the state of Kentucky is likewise investing large amounts of money into promoting faith-based bologna, as the FFRF points out.

The Northern Kentucky Convention & Visitors Bureau’s new Kentucky Faith Trail program has received a $305,000 grant from the state. The Faith Trail is a self-guided tour through 11 sites of “faith, culture, and history,” as a Bureau press release states. Even though the trail “is designed to be inclusive, welcoming people of all faiths and backgrounds to embark on a shared journey of discovery and reflection,” all 11 sites are Christian. To belabor the obvious, this makes the trail the opposite of “inclusive” and welcoming to people of “all faiths and backgrounds.”

Two of the sites, the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, are well known for spreading misinformation and promoting anti-science worldviews, FFRF points out. The Ark Encounter purports to be an accurate replica of the mythical ark from the biblical story of Noah and claims that the Christian story of a worldwide flood actually happened. Similarly, the Creation Museum promotes scientifically disproven myths of how the universe came to be and promotes inaccurate information, such as teaching guests that humans and dinosaurs once co-existed on Earth. Both the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are owned by Answers in Genesis, an extreme evangelical Christian organization that spreads misinformation and scientifically inaccurate teachings about our world.

The Bureau must cease using taxpayer money to promote a Faith Trail that includes the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, FFRF stresses.

Gullibility, unfortunately, does not disqualify one for running for high office.

Goodbye, OnlySky

I regret to inform you all that an atheist blog network, OnlySky, has announced that they are ceasing publication. We first announced that OnlySky was setting up shop 2 years ago, mentioning that Hemant Mehta had snubbed us casually.

There aren’t any media outlets that cater specifically to atheists,” he said. “All the other atheist specific blogging networks are run by volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject but don’t do business-savvy anything, so they falter and die. This one has digital expertise.

I could cruelly remind them of the irony of that “falter and die” comment, and that despite our lack of business-savvy we yet continue, but I honestly regret that we’re losing such an attractive and well-designed website (and that I’m jealous of their professionalism), and hope that the good writers working there can find new homes. I’ll read them where ever they end up.

Somehow, though, I doubt that Sydney Sweeney has any socialist sympathies

I have no idea who Sydney Sweeney is. She is apparently a hot new Hollywood star who has been working hard, appearing in a bunch of movies I haven’t seen, and good for her — but I think all celebrities get more attention and money than they actually deserve.

In an informative twist, though, I learned from this article that there are tiers of celebrity, and that Sweeney is near the bottom because she isn’t a nepo baby. Despite having a $3 million house and being pursued by paparazzi, she’s on a treadmill where she must work non-stop (at being fabulous and fashionable, which is of course much nicer than having to grind non-stop at factory) or her whole world will come crashing down.

The whole of American society, at this moment, is a layer of various anxieties and resentments without any sincerely shared values pinning it all in place. Some of those resentments are more deserved than others; the millennial generation stands to inherit a whopping $68 trillion from the Boomer generation. What is being coined The Great Wealth Transfer is already beginning. Sweeney’s peers, who are mostly the children of very rich people, are going to become even richer by doing nothing. Millions of millennials are going to become very rich by doing nothing. Among the many benefits of this will be that they can post only when they want to. They will be able to take jobs they care about instead of ones they need.

But Sweeney isn’t one of those people. She comes from a family that could not afford to financially support her at all when she finished school. She will not have the luxury of relaxing as her inheritance pours in. Everyone deserves to be able to take six months off to have a baby. Everyone. The fact that Sydney Sweeney cannot is a reminder that the reason American workers do not have paid family leave is also the reason each generation has more nepotism babies than the last. We do not tax rich people enough and they do not pay their fair share; the fact of that, over decades, has intruded upon and warped every aspect of American life. Sweeney has to work, like everyone else, and has to do so for whatever she can get, and she has to do it knowing that what reaches her was the absolute minimum figure that people who are paid much more than her had determined that she would be willing to take. She’s not alone.

I wouldn’t feel sorry for Sweeney, but she does demonstrate that wealth inequality permeates every level of American society, and that always the ones on top are the people loaded with inherited wealth that they never had to work for. Tax the rich! Tax them a lot!

Thrashing Boeing, deservedly

Portrait of a modern Boeing plane

Everett, Seattle, Renton, Kent, Auburn — growing up in the Seattle area, we knew the chain of Boeing towns, where so many of our family members worked. My father worked in several of those plants as a diesel mechanic, my mother was wiring the planes, my brother works in the windtunnel unit, my sister was in marketing — we had a lot of Boeing pride. Before about 1990, when booking flights, I’d actually preferentially select Boeing planes over Airbus, because it was reassuring to be on a plane where I could imagine my Mom building cable assemblies with loving care.

No more, of course. Boeing, a company of engineers, merged with McDonnell-Douglas, a company run by profit-seeking military contractors, and oh boy, those flightless chickens have come home to roost, where “home” is no longer a series of factories but skyscrapers in Chicago. They got the John Oliver treatment this week.

I wouldn’t fly in a Boeing MAX plane myself. I’m just a timid little biologist, though…it’s a bad sign when your own former engineers refuse to fly in them. Ed Pierson, ex-Boeing engineer, says:

Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-MAX airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off. The flight attendant didn’t want me to get off the plane. And I’m not trying to cause a scene. I just want to get off this plane, and I just don’t think it’s safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX].

Our recommendation from the foundation is that these planes get grounded — period. Get grounded and inspected and then, depending on what they find, get fixed.

The people to blame are the executives at Boeing.

Boeing’s board of directors — they have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that their products are safe, and they’re not in touch. They’re not engaged. They don’t visit the sites. They don’t talk to the employees. They’re not on the ground floor. Look, these individuals are making millions of dollars, right? And there’s others between the C-suite and the people on the factory line. There’s hundreds of executives who are also very well compensated and managers that should be doing a lot more. But their leadership is a mess. The leadership sets the whole tone for any organization. Public pressure needs to continue.

That board of directors, and all those executives, don’t know what they’re doing. They ought to all be fired, and the company put in the hands of good engineers who prioritize safety and quality, but instead you’ve got accountants who just want to make lots of money, doing their “fiduciary duty.” Ironically, all that short term emphasis on profit is destroying the company, trashing their reputation, and killing people. I also wouldn’t invest in Boeing any more.

Hey, why are stock buybacks even legal? The executives seem to be more interested in artificially pumping up their stock prices than in, you know, building airplanes.

Oh well. It’s all great news for Airbus.

AI is hell

Can we just knock it off with the AI nonsense? Somebody is profiting off this colossal sinkhole of useless frippery, but I don’t know who. Look what it’s doing to our environment, all because people like Mark Zuckerberg have decided it’s cool, and the future of profiteering.

The amount of water that A.I. uses is unconscionable, particularly given that so many of its data centers are in desert regions that can ill afford to squander it. A.I. uses this much water because of the computing power it requires, which necessitates chilled water to cool down equipment—some of which then evaporates in the cooling process, meaning that it cannot be reused. The Financial Times recently reported academic projections showing that A.I. demand may use about half the amount of water consumed by the United Kingdom in a year. Around the world, communities are rightly beginning to resist the construction of new data centers for this reason.

Then there’s A.I.’s energy use, which could double by 2026, according to a January report by the International Energy Association. That’s the equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet.

Microsoft’s own environmental reports reveal these immense problems: As the company has built more platforms for generative A.I., its resource consumption has skyrocketed. In 2022, the company’s use of both water and electricity increased by one-third, its largest uptick ever.

We should be asking what we gain from glossy shiny artificial artwork, or from bizarre texts cobbled together by machines that don’t actually understand anything. Search engines are already corrupted by commercialized algorithms, do we really need to add another complex layer that adds nothing to anything? Tell me one thing AI adds to improve the world.

Do we need this?

Dozens of fake, artificial intelligence-generated photos showing Donald Trump with Black people are being spread by his supporters, according to a new investigation.

BBC Panorama reported that the images appear to be created by supporters themselves. There is no evidence tying the photos to Trump’s campaign.

One photo was created by the Florida-based conservative radio show host Mark Kaye.

“I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller,” Kaye told BBC. “I’m not claiming it is accurate. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these African American voters. Look how much they love him.’”

Maybe what we really need is a Butlerian Jihad.

Moms For Liberty gets high profile interview, falls flat on face

I’d rather see less of bigots on TV, but if they have to brought on stage, it should be to expose them. Like this:

Two of the founders of the group, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, sat for an interview with reporter Scott Pelley and had a difficult time answering pretty simple and direct questions.

“We love teachers. My children have had the best teachers. I’ve had the greatest teachers that have influenced and impact me. But there are rogue teachers in America’s classrooms right now,” Descovich told Pelley. Justice added, “Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.”

Pelley asked, “What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?” Whether something short-circuited inside Descovich’s brain is hard to say, but after taking a breath and swallowing, she slowly answered, “Let’s just say … children in America cannot read.” Huh?

Pelley repeatedly pointed out that the two were being “evasive,” and when Justice attempted to pivot to a handful of books with sexual content that may be inappropriate for certain age groups, his report was quick to point out that “Most people wouldn’t want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes: These examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.”

The pair of buffoons also claimed that Moms for Liberty was not anti-gay, which is transparently absurd. Pelley showed them tweets where they are accusing teachers of being “groomers,” which prompted them to quickly shuffle their papers and change topics.

You know, we might be in trouble someday if these right-wingers ever acquired any intelligent spokespersons. I guess intelligent people don’t fall for their lies, though.

By the way, they mad.

Was it actually a super Tuesday?

The chaos that is American politics began to gel a little bit yesterday. It’s still not pretty and it’s never going to be — it’s more like those terrifying Jell-O recipes from the 50s, but at least we’re seeing some progress towards the final boss battle.

You know that Joe Manchin had previously announced that he wouldn’t run in 2024. Well, now Kyrsten Sinema has also bowed out. I’m going to have to recommend this obituary by Albert Burneko.

Blessed by St. Collins. Now you know she’s evil.

What a horrible nightmare of a person Kyrsten Sinema is. That she might end up having been the signal political figure of our time—a period in which the day-to-day work of elected officials has become so hopelessly divorced from the material conditions their work nominally governs that “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns” can function as the full ideological expression and sum total contribution of an actual senator—does nothing to redeem her, personally. At a certain point you could extend her a kind of sour grudging credit, I guess, for having pioneered a new depth of undisguised cynicism in politics, a dark idiocratic abyssal layer where nothing has any value except to the extent that it demonstrably foils one’s own political party and sells out one’s own voters in service to one’s patrons. This is the kind of credit you give when you walk into an apocalyptically ruined public bathroom, freeze, and say, “Whoa, somebody took one crazy friggin’ dump in here.”

This society’s total prostration could hardly find a better—which is to say worse—avatar than Kyrsten Sinema, the mandate that nothing may ever be allowed to disrupt its consumption (or even to facilitate the hope that it could be slowed) congealed into a sneering blonde Karen theatrically performing her own imaginary cuteness while she kills even mild and popular compromise initiatives toward a better future. It’s rare for a single person to hold that kind of power, and unspeakably awful and sad that it fell into the hands of an absolute F-minus of a human being.

In any case, if holding her spiteful, obstructive, nihilistic line turns out not to have benefited any electoral ambitions—there’s no real broad base for a program best described as “the most hateful possible centrism,” to the surprise of no one else—it’s also not clear that Sinema ever authentically had any, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Which fits, since she also lacks any authentic political beliefs, convictions, or sympathy to or solidarity with humanity, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Her constituents as electoral politics defined them hated her guts; on the other hand she all but explicitly did not consider them her real constituents. Her real constituency (assuming Literally Dracula doesn’t count here) is the class of rich freaks for whose benefit she will now even more openly serve. Few could promise to protect them with as little shame, or as much sheer sadistic glee. I wish her all the very worst, forever and ever.

In other news about hypocritical women flopping at politics, Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race. Didn’t she announce last week that she was in it all the way? Unfortunately, even in defeat she didn’t manage the dignity of opposing the corrupt criminal who had stomped on her.

Trumpworld’s frequent insults of Haley—who the former president slammed as “birdbrain”—would indicate that the South Carolina governor is unlikely to be a surrogate or booster of the Trump campaign this election season.

Still, despite it all, Haley has already made the case that Trump is a better choice than Biden—even if she claimed both are dangerous. In an interview with NPR from Feb. 22, Haley said, “I have a lot of concerns about Trump regaining the presidency. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden being president.”

Mediocre.

In local news, Minnesota managed to cock a snook at stooge of the Israelis and Xian fundamentalists, Joe Biden, while still giving him enough votes to carry the state.

President Biden, who faces less prominent challengers, continued to win by larger margins than Trump. But as in Michigan last week, he ceded significant votes to such options as “uncommitted.”

That option was getting nearly 20 percent of the vote in Minnesota with about 85 percent of the vote counted, after pro-Palestinian activists sought to turn it into a protest vote again. The uncommitted share there should wind up being larger than it was in Michigan (13 percent) despite a less-robust effort — and despite Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) taking another 8 percent.

Biden’s current 70 percent overall share of the vote in Minnesota means it could be his lowest share in any state, apart from the 64 percent he took as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire.

Come on, Joe. Grow a spine and stand up against the terrorist state of Israel.

I’m not complaining about some history being erased

Minnesota recently got a snazzy new flag. It’s much nicer than the cluttered (and mildly racist) mess that was the old flag.

The Republicans don’t like the change, so they organized a rally at the capitol to complain.

“I’m wearing a T-shirt today that says, ‘Erasing history never goes well.’ And that’s what we believe is happening here,” Minnesota Republican Party Deputy Chair Donna Bergstrom said. “As a Native American and tribal member, it’s exhausting to see Native Americans once again bearing the brunt of the short-sighted eradication of our shared history.”

That’s the same complaint Republicans made about tearing down Confederate statues. I think that went pretty well, actually.

The bring-back-our-hideous-old-flag rally happened today. Look upon the horde and be awed!

Perpetually growing meat!

This is mildly interesting: scientists have modified muscle cells in culture so that they produce their own growth factors. This is a major cost reduction, because now you won’t need to constantly supplement your vat of muscle cells with a relatively expensive reagent.

Cellular agriculture – the production of meat from cells grown in bioreactors rather than harvested from farm animals – is taking leaps in technology that are making it a more viable option for the food industry. One such leap has now been made at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA), led by David Kaplan, Stern Family Professor of Engineering, in which researchers have created bovine (beef) muscle cells that produce their own growth factors, a step that can significantly cut costs of production.

Growth factors, whether used in laboratory experiments or for cultivated meat, bind to receptors on the cell surface and provide a signal for cells to grow and differentiate into mature cells of different types. In this study published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, researchers modified stem cells to produce their own fibroblast growth factor (FGF) which triggers the growth of skeletal muscle cells – the kind one finds in a steak or hamburger.

Keep in mind that this works for cultured meat cells, which is completely different from the artificial meat made from plants that you can buy in stores right now. I have a few reservations about it.

This is basically a tool to remove a regulatory limit on muscle growth. When this happens in vivo, we call it cancer. I suspect the marketing department will balk at labeling it “tumor meat”.

The technique amplifies one cell type. Edible meat has texture and is made up of a mix of cell types, fat and connective tissue. This is a way to make large quantities of something that is equivalent to ‘pink slime’ or, as the marketers call it, ‘lean finely textured beef.’ We already do this! I guess it’s a good thing to be able to produce large quantities of protein in the form of ‘pink slime’ more cheaply, and without the need to slaughter animals to do it.

Without a regulatory limit on growth, though, don’t be surprised if a news headline later announces that Boston has been eaten by a giant ever-growing blob of immortal meat.