Bryan Johnson has been lying to himself

You know that millionaire who has been posting regular updates for the press, claiming that his physical age is going backwards thanks to his bizarre health regime? He’s had a little setback.

This is a guy that tweets about every other health gain he says he is making. Most recently he has boasted he reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42.

Last summer he said he had reduced his epigenetic age by 5 years and that he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old (which doesn’t appear to square with a 15% capacity reduction).

All those claims he makes? Self-serving lies. Their purpose is to get attention from the press, nothing more.

The sad thing is that he’s putting himself through all this:

“He rises at 4.30am, eats all his meals before 11am, and goes to bed – alone – at 8.30pm, without exception. He ingests more than 100 supplement pills daily and bathes his body in LED light. Two of the three meals he eats every day are exactly the same: boiled broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and garlic, nuts and seeds. He takes 54 pills in the morning, and the rest in between skin treatments and red-light therapy. He doesn’t drink alcohol, and doesn’t go out in the evening. He experimented with injecting himself with blood plasma from his 18-year-old son Talmage.”

And for what? Ego. He’s draining the blood of his own son to feed his delusion.

You are not allowed to follow the evidence

I have no patience anymore. I was sent this video titled Evolutionists Have Been WRONG About Dinosaurs for Years from Answers in Genesis, and I was only able to watch the first 3 minutes.

It opens on two people, one claiming to be a paleoartist, the other a Ph.D. paleontologist. They have to be failures at those occupations because they also announce that they are employed by Answers in Genesis. At least, though, they are quick to state their objection. Is it reasonable to believe in feathered dinosaurs in a Biblical worldview? Their answer is no.

They’re easily refuted, of course, just by showing a dinosaur fossil with feathers. That’s pretty stupid, you’d think, to frame up a target so easily shot down. But they have cleverly created an excuse in advance!

They show some clips from one of the Jurassic Park movies, and telling us that those are fake. Did you know that? That Hollywood magnified the size of dinosaurs and made them look flashier? And that the Pyroraptor holotype was fragmentary and lacked any feather impressions. If only the scientists would stop relying on movies for their data. Of course, they were instead relying on data from other specimens of dromaeosaurids that do have feathers. Those don’t count, though, because then they said the thing that made me close the video.

Evolutionists have been changing the meaning of words…to better fit their evolutionary worldview.

They’re making a definitional argument. Birds have feathers, and dinosaurs don’t, therefore any fossil found with feathers is a bird, not a dinosaur. See? Those dastardly scientists changed the meaning of the word “dinosaur!” That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. The universe is fixed and unchanging, just like the Bible says, and whenever a scientist finds evidence of species in flux, they’re wrong. Because the Bible tells them so.

Joel Osteen, devastated

An attempted mass shooting in a megachurch failed.

A woman in a trenchcoat opened fire with a long gun inside celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Texas before being gunned down by two off-duty officers who confronted her and sending worshippers rushing out of the building between busy Sunday services, authorities said.

The woman, who entered the Houston church shortly before 2 p.m. local time, was accompanied by a five-year-old boy, who was shot and taken to hospital in critical condition.

The woman is dead. A bystander was wounded. The kid is in critical condition. Joel Osteen is devastated.

Osteen joined police at a news conference and said the church is “devastated.” But he added that the shooting could have been much worse if it had happened during the larger 11 a.m. service.

In case you’ve ever been curious about what a devastated, grieving Osteen would look like, here he is.

I think he has this reflex where whenever a camera points his way, he’s got to flash those choppers. It’s creepy and weird. The grim old guys surrounding him clearly lack the Osteen face.

Here he goes, again:

We’re going to stay strong and we’re going to continue to, to move forward. There are forces of evil, but the forces that are for us — the forces of God — are stronger than that. So we’re going to keep going strong and just, you know, doing what God’s called us to do: lift people up and give hope to the world.

Nice words…but then I noticed the truck behind him. He’s just reading slogans off the signs around his megachurch!

I only realized after he got away…Joel Osteen is Keyser Söze! It all makes sense now.

God favors the team with the racist name over the godless sodomites

Admittedly, playing the game in Las Vegas did give Satan an edge, so the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, 25-22, and obviously God just threw up His hands at the galaxy of sin and pride beneath Him in overtime. See you all in Hell, He figured.

I could care less. However, I admit to favoring the 49ers a little bit, but only because my late Uncle Ed was a dedicated partisan of that team. He was always complaining about how they let him down, so nothing has changed.

I didn’t watch the game, so I don’t know…did Taylor Swift rise up in all her glory at the end and usher in a new millennium of Democratic tyranny by endorsing Joe Biden? Did CIA snipers take out a few San Francisco players to rig the game? I might have missed some epochal events.

Christ, capitalism, and crime go hand in hand

When you’re watching the Super Bowl, do try to avoid the commercials. Not only is it rampant capitalism, but they’re propaganda for odious organizations. Take those “Jesus gets it” commercials:

The Servant Foundation has plunged millions of dollars into its ‘He Gets Us’ ads, which paint Jesus as an “influencer” who was “cancelled” for standing up for his beliefs. The controversial adverts were shown at this year’s Super Bowl and have been plastered across billboards in the United States over the last year.

But analysis of financial accounts by openDemocracy shows over the last five years the Servant Foundation has also grown to become the main identifiable source of funding for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), described as an anti-LGBTIQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) – an allegation it denies.

You already know that if they can afford a Super Bowl ad, they’re a poisonous organization. They’re pushing Jesus, which is about as awful as pushing heroin. Here’s a local Minnesota example, you’ve probably got these creeps in your neighborhood, too.

A former minister at a large Owatonna church has been charged with multiple felonies after a woman reported he sexually assaulted her while she was a student at the school associated with the church – and again as an adult.A second woman reported he had attempted sexual contact with her, also when she was a student.

Luverne Zacharias, 46, of Medford, faces one count each of first- and second-degree criminal sexual conduct, as well as two counts each of third- and fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, as reported by the Steele County Times.

Zacharias was a teacher and principal at the school; the victim was about 14 years of age when the inappropriate touching began, the complaint says.

The woman told police that Zacharias would meet her in the basement of the school when she was sent to get milk for her classmates at lunchtime and during breaks. He allegedly touched her breasts and genitals over her clothing at first, doing it at least once every day, the woman said.

Zacharias would give her notes, tell her she was beautiful and that she reminded him of his daughter. He also reportedly told her he couldn’t control himself around her, and that she was “like my kryptonite.”

She reminded him of his daughter…so what’s he doing molesting her? It just got worse and worse from there.

The girl also reported Zacharias…to other church authorities. Doesn’t she know that their first thought would be to protect their own?

Court documents state the victim reported the alleged assault to pastors Tim and Cherrie Peterson. They told her they would hold Zacharias accountable for his actions, but told the victim to “think about Zacharias’s family and kids and what they might go through if she went to law enforcement,” the complaint says.

Keep that in mind when the lying Christian ads appear on your screen. Jesus chose the rapists and child molesters.

Poor Things, a most peculiar movie

I’ve been deprived for so long. Our local movie theater has been showing the usual profit-making superhero movies and kids’ shows, so when I saw the announcement that they were showing something outside the norm — a norm I’ve become tired of — I had to go. I had a great time.

Cool. What a surprise! It’s a weirdly beautiful movie. The premise is that a hideously scarred Willem Dafoe fishes up a pregnant suicide (Emma Stone), and he transplants the fetus’s brain into the skull of the woman using fantasy 19th century Frankenstein technology. It’s then about this baby/child growing up in an adult body, and encountering a dream-world version of Europe. She has a super-power, though: as an innocent in an adult body, she discovers she has a button she can press to make herself very, very happy. There’s a lot of sex in the movie. But mainly it’s about discombobulating perspectives and a mind changing and becoming more aware over time against an exotic background. Stone took a lot of risks with this movie, but she pulled it off.

As I was leaving the theater, I was asked what I thought of it. My answer was “Peculiar!” That was high praise.

It was a relief to see a challenging movie in town. Morris residents better see it fast, though: it looks like next week we’re getting Madame Web, a confusing superhero movie tangentially spider-related, and Ordinary Angels, some uplifting dreck made by a Christian production company. I’ll be staying home next weekend.

A conversation about orthodontia today

It’s Friday, and that means that today I make all the students in my eco-devo class do all the work, while I sit back and observe. It’s too bad I can’t do this every day of the week, but I guess I have to do something now and then to earn my gigantic paycheck. Anyway, on Fridays I pick a paper relevant to the subject of the course, throw it to two student volunteers, and tell them to lead a discussion.

This week the paper is The Jaw Epidemic: Recognition, Origins, Cures, and Prevention by Sandra Kahn, Paul Ehrlich, Marcus Feldman, Robert Sapolsky, and Simon Wong. It’s about the fact that our jaws have been shrinking rapidly in some cultures, and speculating about why. The answer the paper gives is that it’s an epigenetic response to environmental factors, specifically diet but also respiratory phenomena. You might be able to see why this is of interest in an eco-devo class.

Some scholars, although they accept all or some of our narrative, still assert that part of the problem must be genetic or hereditary. They apparently do not realize that, because every attribute of all living organisms must to some degree be traceable to their DNA (or RNA), the statement is nonsensical. Nonetheless, some scientists continue to push partial blame for the epidemic toward genetic evolution while ignoring the etiology of jaw shrinkage and distortion. The success of some clinical techniques to normalize jaw growth in young children and abundant evidence that jaw shrinkage is a factor in both obstructive sleep apnea and the advancement of maxilla and mandible are key treatments, in addition to other surgical techniques. This further makes clear the largely environmental cause of the epidemic.

This confusion over etiology is a possible result of the genetic determinism that is characteristic of much of popular science. For instance, recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) studies aimed at orofacial issues have been focused on possible genetic factors involved in the variation in the eruption of third molars (wisdom teeth). But they in no way suggest that selection and widespread genomic evolution explain the rarity of impacted third molars in hunter-gatherers compared with their common occurrence in settled or industrialized human populations). Similar problems occur when “racial” differences in the occurrence of jaw-related disease are discussed. For instance, Weinstock and colleagues (2014) found that African-American children were about 20% more susceptible to pediatric obstructive sleep apnea than children of other ethnic groups. But, unhappily, possible key environmental variables such as allergen concentrations at home or the length of nursing were ignored, as were different head shapes in different human groups that could make some more susceptible to the impacts of environmental change. In short, despite the great attention paid to a possible genetic evolutionary cause of the jaw epidemic, precious little evidence of genomic change being a significant factor has been uncovered.

I hope this sparks some good conversation. It’s a bit over-the-top to call it an “epidemic” of jaw shrinkage, but the hyperbole might trigger some arguments.

P.S. Their instructor is no gigachad. I grew up with a horribly crowded mouth with crooked teeth every which way that was treated crudely, by just yanking out a half dozen teeth to make room — we couldn’t afford braces or any finesse. Also, I had painfully impacted wisdom teeth that required an oral surgeon to take a hammer and chisel to my face.

Empirical data that shows people finding happiness is good news

We can make all kinds of arguments about what defines or doesn’t define a sex, but it really doesn’t matter — especially when it’s from a stock vanilla cishet person like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or me. What we should be discussing is the lived experience of trans people who are better acquainted with the actual life in a trans body.

So they did.

The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.

Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.

The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.

I don’t think the report will convince the opposition to shut the fuck up, unfortunately. I predict two responses. One, they’ll focus on the 6% (although it’s actually less than 1% who were unhappy after hormone treatments or surgery) and shriek about their ruined lives while ignoring the majority of successful outcomes, and not bothering to ask what went wrong in that minority. Two, they’ll point to the study as proof that they were right all along, see how seductive the trans lifestyle is? I remember how the anti-gay people moaned about how appealing the self-indulgent, self-gratifying, sybaritic gay life was, and how we must ban all gay references to keep our children from falling into the trap. This is the same thing. They’re going to call this study trans propaganda and ignore the actual data.

The one thing I can say as a stock vanilla cishet person is that no, I’m not going to suddenly shed all my sexual preferences and change my interests because I see somebody else having a good time. I’m going to be happy for them. What’s the matter with those people who’d rather others were unhappy?