Now I have to worry about the Netherlands as well as Australia?

Actually, I can’t blame other countries for the fact that the USA is a magnet for far-right religious loonies. Of course their evangelists are going to come there — they know they’ll get some success here!

So I suspect this evangelical outreach organization from the Netherland — their statement of purpose is Convinced of God’s love for everyone, we tell stories about God and following Jesus. Stories that change lives, touch people and move them to live in love with each other — figured that not only would they go to the USA, but that they’d go to Texas, where they’d be welcomed with open arms, and get some great video footage they could use for fundraising back home. They optimistically marched a film crew into Central High School in Keller, Texas to interview students for god knows what purpose and started recording. They picked a day when the principal was not around, but they had been encouraged by a couple of school board members. We all know how little knowledge of education that politically and religiously active school boards have.

They did not get the response they expected.

Sandi Walker, a school board trustee brought an Evangelical-based film crew into the high school to conduct interviews with her. Multiple students and parents told WFAA children were filmed and interviewed by the production crew without their consent. Trustee Micah Young was also involved in the filming.

Evangelische Omroep (EO), a Netherlands-based Evangelical broadcast television network previously produced the documentary: ‘God, Jesus, Trump.’

“We don’t want politics in our kids schools,” Hawes said. “If kids wanna bring God into schools, beautiful, but it cannot be the administration. There is a separation of church and state.”

Elliot Mullaney, a freshman at Central High School said he witnessed the filming take place during his lunch hour.

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” said Mullaney. “I think that it’ll be used to spread hate and spread untrue opinions.”

Parents were pissed. These Dutch evangelists didn’t realize that while many Texans are receptive to Christianity, they are also ferociously independent and don’t take kindly to foreigners. Sandi Walker has already resigned, people are calling for the head of Micah Young, and evangelical interference in the schools has taken a small setback. That’s good — this is a school that recently voted to allow unlicensed religious chaplains free reign in public schools after a Christian Conservative PAC had spent half a million dollars to elect horrible people, like Walker and Young, to the school board.

Let’s not blame all the Dutch, though. The Netherlands has its own Bible Belt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Evangelische Omroep was based in that.

Martyn Iles clarifies a few things

Answers in Genesis is evolving: the Ken Ham era is coming to an end, and it’s becoming the age of Martyn Iles (although I bet Ham has kept some hooks in place to yank Iles off the stage if he does anything contrary). Their new front man is another Australian with a checkered history — he became a lightning rod in Australia with a rapid rise in popularity, but was not so successful at getting anything done. “Martyn was a fine preacher, but a poor lobbyist,” said a fellow Christian conservative, and then he was kicked out of the Australian Christian Lobby.

Now he’s back!

The fundamentalist Christian organisation Answers in Genesis (AiG), which got its start in Queensland, is closely associated with the new Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Led by the former Queensland schoolteacher Ken Ham, AiG is part of a movement called “young Earth creationism” that preaches a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Iles’ ascent to “executive CEO” of AiG was a swift one. He spoke at an AiG event in late 2022. Then in May 2023 he was announced as chief ministry officer of the organisation, as well as leader of its Australian office.

By November he had been promoted to executive CEO – with Ham in an “oversight role” as “founder CEO” – and was being groomed to take over one of the world’s largest creationist organisations. In 2022 AiG brought in about US$62m and held US$112m in assets, according to US tax documents. The ACL, by comparison, had revenue of about A$10m in 2022.

Let us all hope he repeats his Australian performance here in America, and flames out quickly. For now, though, he has nailed his colors to the mast with an article on the Answers in Genesis website. He is loudly anti-woke. He shares this position with some prominent conservative scientists, you know.

The person who understands and believes Genesis 1–11 is woke-proof.

Such is the enduring relevance of Genesis. It has the blueprints every generation needs.

Consider the focal points of woke ideologies—race, LGBTQ, identity, environmentalism, marriage, gender, abortion, truth, power—time and time again, the answers are in Genesis.

This is because “woke” culture is an attack on the way God ordered and designed creation.

It’s nice that he’s so clear. “Wokeness” is for racial equality, LGBTQ rights, respect for an individual’s identity, pro-environment, thinks marriage is a choice, regards gender is a continuum, favors abortion rights to protect the rights of women, wants to promote truth through education, and thinks power should be shared. Anti-woke Christians are against all those things. Being in favor of LGBTQ rights and science education and the environment, to name just a few examples, is an attack on the way God ordered and designed creation..

Great. We know where we stand. God is against everything the “woke” stand for. I guess I’ll just have to be against God.

The opposite of inspire

Oh no. That hideous AI-generated scientific illustration is churning out hordes of copy cats. I do not like this.

I teach cell biology, I am familiar with illustrations of cells, and this abomination is just garbage, through and through. It’s an educational experience, though — now I’m appreciating how bad AI art is. It all lacks that thing called “content”. It makes a mockery of the work of professional medical and scientific illustrators, who work for years to acquire the artistic skill and the biological knowledge to create useful diagrams. There’s no intelligence in these stupid pictures.

No wonder I didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year

I thought maybe it had gotten lost in the mail, but no, that wasn’t it: the organizers of this science-fiction award had apparently gone nuts, disqualifying authors for stupid reasons. Also it probably helped that I didn’t write a science fiction novel last year, but that seems to have been a lesser problem than being at all critical of the Chinese government, or being supportive of gay people. The organizers were a combination of being incompetent, being bigoted, and trying to pander to an oppressive regime.

When the Hugos took place in Chengdu last October, it wasn’t immediately clear that the something was amiss. Shit hit the fan months later, when the awards committee finally released its long-awaited nominating statistics. The volunteer body typically releases the numbers the same evening as the ceremony, or within days of the event, but for this year, the stats didn’t arrive until 91 days after the event, per Esquire. Finally released on January 20, 2024, the reports showed that Kuang’s Babel, an episode of Gaiman’s The Sandman, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer all received more than enough preliminary votes to be finalists for awards, yet an asterisk denoted each of their works as “ineligible” for award consideration.

McCarty antagonized critics in multiple Facebook comments that day amid a fan uproar over the artists’ apparent disqualification. He first shared last year’s nominating statistics to the public and derisively attempted to shield the Hugos from criticism. “Are you slow?” he responded to a comment asking him why certain works were deemed ineligible based on the World Science Fiction Society’s constitution. “Clearly you can’t understand plain English in our constitution,” he wrote to another, per Esquire.

Speculation that the Chinese government played a role in censoring the votes grew. Comic-book writer Gaiman has previously voiced criticisms of the government for incarcerating writers. Both Kuang and Zhao were born in China and now live in the West, and their books tackle social issues in allegorical fantasy worlds. However, McCarty denied the notion in a Facebook post in the days following the release of the nominating-statistics release. “Nobody has ordered me to do anything …” he wrote per the Guardian on January 24. “There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.”

After reading much of this stuff, I don’t think anybody should believe anything this Dave McCarty says — he’s a liar and all-around nasty person.

There are lots of specific examples and quotes from the organizers’ internal emails on BlueSky. The arrogance of these guys was appalling.

These Hugo dossiers are disgusting.
“Author openly describes themselves as queer, nonbibary, trans… I don’t know how that will play in China (I suspect less than well)”
They wrote that in writing.
…
The gaslighting the Hugos organizers did, telling everyone they were stupid for not getting that the works were i eligible due to “the rules” and it turns out the authors criticized a human right violation once, or ate Tibetan food, or said a Taiwanese Batman hotel looked cool.

Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford wrote a detailed dissection of the whole mess. Not recommended unless you enjoy lengthy discussions of bad behavior.

So what will they do to untangle this clusterfuck? I’d recommend firing everyone involved and burning their precious constitution to the ground, and rewrite the whole thing. I have no connection to any of it, so ignore me, let’s see what they’re actually doing.

Worldcon Intellectual Property, the nonprofit that runs the World Science Fiction Society, announced resignations in the immediate aftermath to the scandal on January 30, Publishers Weekly reported. Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee resigned from their respective positions, with the former censured for his public Facebook comments. Chengdu Worldcon administration member Ben Yalow, who co-chaired the 2023 event and was set to work on this year’s event in Glasgow, is no longer listed on the 2024 Glasgow staff page. He and his fellow co-chair Chen Shi were censured for their actions.

“I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress,” the current chair of Glasgow 2024, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, said in a statement on February 14. She added that the committee would be taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the awards.” While the upcoming Worldcon has apologized for the failings of the previous year’s convention, the 2023 iteration of the event has not directly apologized for its handling of the awards. Vulture reached out to the Hugos for comment.

Maybe also never hold the event in a country with an ugly repressive government, too? (Never again in the US if Trump gets elected…maybe not even if he isn’t.) I hope this is all fixed by the time my science fiction novel is done, which presumes that I ever start writing one.

Let’s all get disappointed in humanity

I thought everyone knew by now that the whole “bumfight” concept was repugnant and deplorable, but it seems to have gotten some new life from technology. A few sick people are harassing unhoused people with drones. See, bullying in total safety! There’s an amazing amount of cowardice behind this behavior.

The TikTok account was called “BumsnDrones,” and its previous name was “Bad2TheDrone.” Similar accounts are active on YouTube and Instagram under the same name, and a new account with the “BumsnDrones” name was active on TikTok as of Friday evening.

…

In two separate videos, the drone hovers above individuals for an unspecified period of time and distance and appears to provoke them by flying up and down. Other videos show individuals throwing projectiles at the unmanned aircraft system, such as rocks, water bottles and sticks.

“It’s really disappointing to see the way this individual is harassing and bullying people experiencing homelessness,” said Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “It was difficult to watch people put in humiliating and exposed positions.”

In nearly all of the videos posted on each channel, music plays in the background, seemingly for comedic effect. Many of the individuals filmed in the videos attempt to flee the vicinity of the drone or seem agitated by its presence.

Multiple videos appear to show the operator of the drone mocking or taunting the individuals by flying close to them before bolting in another direction either vertically or horizontally when the individuals reach for it.

The drone bullies are calling these “pranks”. I’m getting tired of that word — “prank” seems to be a synonym for cruelty.

Some of these accounts have been taken down, but as the quote above mentions, they just pop up again with a new synonym. It was easy to find lots that are still active — here’s one called “abnormal humans”. I don’t think the creators realize how self-referential that name is.

One such video had 59,000 views and 226 comments, and the comments were as vile as the video. No, I’m not linking to it. Go google your own bullies!

Fight!

Please god, SHAVE

Matt Taibbi has learned that you can’t be friends with Elon Musk. He has posted some of the exchanges that he and Musk had after the failure of the #TwitterFiles nonsense. They are pretty much totally alienated from each other now.

“Elon, am I being shadowbanned?” the exchange begins. “We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off,” Musk replied.

“Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow.” Musk added: “Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following.’”

Taibbi shot back with an exasperated response. “Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” he wrote. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy.”

“You are dead to me,” Musk answered. “Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.”

Those two deserve each other.

What happens when you farm out your scientific illustrations to an AI?

Things get psychedelic. These are actual illustrations from a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway. They had Midjourney do the illustrations, and they are spectacular! And confusing and uninformative.

Regulation of biological properties of spermatogonial stem cells by JAK/STAT signaling pathway. (A) The relationship between the JAK/STAT pathway and spermatogonial stem cell proliferation; (B) Relationship between the JAK/STAT signaling pathway and the microenvironment of spermatogonial stem cells; (C) Relationship between the JAK/STAT pathway and spermatogonial stem cell tissue differentiation; (D) Relationship between JAK/STAT pathway and homing migration of spermatogonial stem cells; (E) The JAK/STAT pathway and immune regulation in spermatogonial stem cells.

Look at the labels! AIs are terrible at reproducing text in images, and these make no sense…and most of the diagrams are random piles of throbbing circles. What do they mean? I don’t know.

But here’s my very favorite image. What have they done to that poor rat?

Spermatogonial stem cells, isolated, purified and cultured from rat testes.

The labels…they do nothing! The text of the paper makes sense and is a reasonable discussion of the role of the JAK/STAT pathway in spermatogonial differentiation, but then your eyes wander over to those bizarre illustrations and you get totally discombobulated.

I should print that last picture out in color, and place copies at floor level around my house as a rodent repellent. Except my cat already has a problem with frequent puking.

New depths in pseudoscience

Creationists have been playing a game for about 60 years. Their claims can’t get published in legitimate scientific journals, so they have created their very own boutique journals that mimic the real things: Answers in Genesis has the Answers Research Journal, which, surprisingly, always comes up with the same answer. The Discovery Institute has Bio-Complexity. The oldest of the bunch is Creation Research Society Quarterly, which proudly announces that it is Peer-reviewed by degreed scientists…with the caveat that in order to be involved in the journal at all, you must be a Christian who subscribes to their statement of belief.

It doesn’t need to be pointed out that real scientists don’t publish in any of those ‘journals’, only kooks who are in the business of rationalizing their superstitions.

But there’s one thing that they haven’t done, as far as I know, and that is creating their own Institutional Review Board to legitimize experiments. One good reason is that they don’t do experiments, especially not experiments on animals or people, so they don’t have to bother. You know who does have to pretend to do experiments? Anti-vaxxers.

They’ve gone and done it. They already have their own fake journals, but now they’ve gone and created a fake IRB so they can rubber-stamp horrible experiments with ridiculous reagents on living people. Orac has the low-down.

Recently, a longtime reader made me aware of a recent podcast episode in which an antivaxxer about whom I’ve written a number of posts over the years, James Lyons-Weiler, revealed a “surprise” announcement a little over halfway through the podcast that his antivax “research” organization, the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), is planning on forming his own institutional review board (IRB).

Lyons-Weiler has a fake organization and a fake journal, so why not go all the way and create a fake IRB to approve fake experiments?

IRBs are important for maintaining ethical standards and getting expert review of experimental protocols — setting up a fake IRB is a declaration that you want to work around those requirements. Orac has a specific idea of what Lyons-Weiler wants to do — not actual research of his own, but an opportunity to data mine other studies.

In the interview, Lyons-Weiler inadvertently reveals what is likely to be the true impetus and purpose for his IRB when he points out that states are refusing to release public health data, particularly record-level data, to researchers because they don’t have an IRB-approved protocol. My first thought was: How much do you want to bet that the “researchers” to which Lyons-Weiler refers are antivax “researchers” who want to data mine state public health databases in order to seek “findings” that attribute horrific harms to vaccines, particularly COVID-19 vaccines? In other words, how much do you want to bet that Lyons-Weiler’s IRB will exist to rubber-stamp antivax human subjects research protocols, so that antivax researchers can get their hands on that sweet, sweet state record-level public health data on vaccines?

I should confess that for many years I avoided having to get IRB approval, despite working on vertebrate animals, because there was a loophole that allowed experimentation on anamniote embryos — when you’ve got an animal that spews out hundreds of eggs per day, most of which will be cannibalized if they aren’t harvested, it’s hard to justify detailed animal care protocols for embryos (for adult animals, that’s a different story…but I didn’t do experiments on adult animals.) Now, of course, I’m working with spiders and flies, and no one cares what horrible crimes against God and nature I commit on them. I wouldn’t worry if the IRB decided that spiders need protection, because I’m doing entirely ethical work on them…I would just hate all the additional paperwork.

But it’s frightening to think this guy believes he can get approval to do whatever he wants to humans by recruiting a compliant board. Or that he can somehow escape data privacy requirements.

The ideal cop: paranoid and trigger-happy

Here’s some body cam footage from a Florida cop who was assaulted by an acorn. He hears a noise, drops and rolls and unloads a clip into his own police car, asks if he’s been hit, and gets his buddies to advance menacingly on the wounded vehicle.

It was all triggered by an acorn falling from a tree (who knows, it could have been thrown by an armed assault squirrel.) It would be comical, except for the sounds of the neighborhood citizens screaming in fear, and that they had a guy handcuffed and trapped in the backseat of the car. He’s fine, just traumatized, and the crazed cop has been fired.

Has anybody considered that maybe the cops have way too many guns? I’m not even talking about defunding the police, but just taking most of their weapons away.