God’s glory is awfully tawdry

I just learned that Jimmy Swaggart died earlier this month. He was a terrible human being, a televangelist, an occupation that is an automatic red flag for a sleazy parasite, without question. I dare you to name a single televangelist who isn’t a con artist, and Swaggart was one of the early members of that ilk who did a marvelous job of representing the poison of organized religion. He’s best known for this performance:

He was weeping crocodile tears because he’d been exposed. He’d defamed a fellow Assemblies of God minister, Marvin Gorman, who was a competitor for the leadership of the denomination, and in revenge, Gorman staked out a motel that everyone knew was where Swaggart met with prostitutes, and caught him in the act. It was a sordid and surprisingly typical episode in the life of this slimeball. A few years later he was caught with another prostitute, but it didn’t matter because he’d founded his own independent ministry.

He died, a still popular televangelist, and was even inducted into the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame. The wicked always win in Christianity.

It may not seem related, but it is — this morning I watched the latest video from Mikey Neumann, about the movie The Kingdom of Heaven. I’ve never seen it, because I knew enough of the history of the Crusades to know it was an even more wicked series of examples of Christian hypocrisy, exploitation, and murder that resonates today with all the horror going on in Gaza, Iran, Syria, and Israel. This kind of behavior is characteristic of organized religion, do I really need to watch a whole long movie that illustrates it?

Maybe I should. Neumann brings a humanist/agnostic perspective to his review that makes me think I might just like the movie very much. It seems to affirm my negative opinion of religion, and emphasizes the value of human life — against the background of some of the most bloody, venal, and pointless historical events of the Middle Ages.

Have any of my readers seen the movie? This is your chance to chastise me for not seeing it, or congratulate me on avoiding a 3 hour slog. I’m tempted to correct my ignorance by streaming the movie.

Do I need to make the connection between a horrible series of wars and the petty life of Jimmy Swaggart more explicit? This is a Christian fantasy still thriving, that we need to encourage more death and destruction in the Middle East for the glory of God.

Stir-crazy

Not this kind of car, though. It just won’t do.

I’m going mad here. I’ve got limited mobility — I’m supposed to take it easy, but I can limp around, and I’m able to drive, but I have limited access to a car (my wife needs it to go to work), and I’m only good for short walks. That means I’m more or less confined to my house. I get out twice a week to go to the lab because I need to take care of the animals, but otherwise I’m bouncing off the walls.

This weekend that got translated into sitting in my home office and reorganizing. My computers have benefitted, with all the cables getting tidied and accumulated gadgets getting purged and stored away. I am much more efficient at sitting quietly and staying out of mischief, which I am finding frustrating. So I’m fantasizing about escape.

Before getting laid up, I was planning a day trip to Granite Falls, about an hour drive away from me. The route would follow the Minnesota River, and there are parks and wildlife management areas all along the way, that are probably full of spiders. At the end of the drive there’s something called the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum, which looks interesting. The plan was to make frequent stops and hike around, maybe a picnic, that sort of thing…which is off limits right now. I’ve lived here for 25 years and never even knew about this museum! But table that for now.

Another thing I was looking into was our regional creationist group, the Twin Cities Creation Science Association, a dreary, tedious group of Christian weirdos who have found a home in Minnesota. I should probably spend some time dismantling the local nonsense. I did see that the Christian twit, Brian Lauer, is doing a YouTube debate next week — I can spectate that! And maybe add some commentary. Unfortunately, it’s organized by the odious Donny Budinsky, so it’s not going to be particularly informative.

More interestingly, they’re planning a creationist trip to Como Zoo. I love Como Zoo! I could see joining their little group, documenting (not disrupting) their absurdities, and spending a lovely afternoon strolling through a very pretty park. That’s on 19 August, about a month away, so I can hope to be a little more mobile by then. I’m meeting with my orthopedist on Tuesday, so we’ll see what she says about expanding my activities a bit more.

I have high hopes for my doctor’s appointment this week. If she tells me I have to stay off my feet longer, well…my office is going to be incredibly tidy and shiny.

I don’t want to talk about Epstein either

He was repulsive and vile and creepy. His clientele, likewise. Apparently, though, this guy is the topic du jour, along with his best buddy, Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal published a description (but not a photo) of the birthday card Trump sent Epstein in 2003, which was sleazily suggestive. It had some kind of crude sketch of a naked woman with references to “secrets”, which just sounds cheesy.

I hated Trump long before this revelation, and knew he was creepy and dishonest all along. I don’t need this crap to know he’s unfit for office and polite company. I’m mainly disappointed with humanity for being so incapable of recognizing a patent truth for so long.

I’ll let Voidzilla tell the story and where it stands now.

If this is Trump’s downfall, I’m going to be simultaneously relieved and pissed off. He should have been discredited with the grab ’em by the pussy remark or earlier. And now we have to live with the consequences of his wrecking ball approach to governing.

Scary tech

Here’s some news to give you the heebie-jeebies. There is a vulnerability in trains where someone can remotely lock the brakes with a radio link. The railroad companies have known about this since at least 2012, but have done nothing about it.

Well, at first I wasn’t concerned — the rail network in the US is so complex and poorly run that it’s unlikely that I’d ever ride a train. But I thought that just as I heard one of the multiple trains that cruise through Morris, about a half-mile from my home, rumble through. That could be bad. Train technology is one of those things we can often ignore until something goes wrong.

For real scary, we have to look at the emerging drone technology. It’s bloody great stuff in Ukraine, where we see a Ukrainian/Russian arms race to make ever more deadly little robots.

Russia is using the self-piloting abilities of AI in its new MS001 drone that is currently being field-tested. Ukrainian Major General Vladyslav Klochkov wrote in a LinkedIn post that MS001 is able to see, analyze, decide, and strike without external commands. It also boasts thermal vision, real-time telemetry, and can operate as part of a swarm.
…
The MS001 doesn’t need coordinates; it is able to take independent actions as if someone was controlling the UAV. The drone is able to identify targets, select the highest priorities, and adjust its trajectories. Even GPS jamming and target maneuvers can prove ineffective. “It is a digital predator,” Klochkov warned.

Isn’t science wonderful? The American defense industry is also building these things, which are also sexy and dramatic, as demonstrated in this promotional video.

Any idiot can fly one of these things, which is exactly the qualifications the military demands.

While FPV operators need sharp reflexes and weeks of training and practice, Bolt-M removes the need for a skilled operator with a point-and-click interface to select the target. An AI pilot does all the work. (You could argue whether it even counts as FPV). Once locked on, Bolt-M will continue automatically to the target even if communications are lost, giving it a high degree of immunity to electronic warfare.

Just tell the little machine what you want to destroy, click the button, and off it goes to deliver 3 pounds of high explosive to whatever you want. It makes remotely triggering a train’s brakes look mild.

I suppose it is a war of the machines, but I think it’s going to involve a lot of dead people.

AI slop is now in charge

It’s clear that the Internet has been poisoned by capitalism and AI. Cory Doctorow is unhappy with Google.

Google’s a very bad company, of course. I mean, the company has lost three federal antitrust trials in the past 18 months. But that’s not why I quit Google Search: I stopped searching with Google because Google Search suuuucked.

In the spring of 2024, it was clear that Google had lost the spam wars. Its search results were full of spammy garbage content whose creators’ SEO was a million times better than their content. Every kind of Google Search result was bad, and results that contained the names of products were the worst, an endless cesspit of affiliate link-strewn puffery and scam sites.

I remember when Google was fresh and new and fast and useful. It was just a box on the screen and you typed words into it and it would search the internet and return a lot of links, exactly what we all wanted. But it was quickly tainted by Search Engine Optimization (optimized for who, you should wonder) and there were all these SEO Experts who would help your website by inserting magic invisible terms that Google would see, but you wouldn’t, and suddenly those search results were prioritized by something you didn’t care about.

For instance, I just posted about Answers in Genesis, and I googled some stuff for background. AiG has some very good SEO, which I’m sure they paid a lot for, and all you get if you include Answers in Genesis in your search is page after page after page of links by AiG — you have to start by engineering your query with all kinds of additional words to bypass AiG’s control. I kind of hate them.

Now in addition to SEO, Google has added something called AI Overview, in which an AI provides a capsule summary of your search results — a new way to bias the answers! It’s often awful at its job.

In the Housefresh report, titled “Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies,” Navarro documents how Google’s AI Overview is wildly bad at surfacing high-quality information. Indeed, Google’s Gemini chatbot seems to prefer the lowest-quality sources of information on the web, and to actively suppress negative information about products, even when that negative information comes from its favorite information source.

In particular, AI Overview is biased to provide only positive reviews if you search for specific products — it’s in the business of selling you stuff, after all. If you’re looking for air purifiers, for example, it will feed you positive reviews for things that don’t exist.

What’s more, AI Overview will produce a response like this one even when you ask it about air purifiers that don’t exist, like the “Levoit Core 5510,” the “Winnix Airmega” and the “Coy Mega 700.”

It gets worse, though. Even when you ask Google “What are the cons of [model of air purifier]?” AI Overview simply ignores them. If you persist, AI Overview will give you a result couched in sleazy sales patter, like “While it excels at removing viruses and bacteria, it is not as effective with dust, pet hair, pollen or other common allergens.” Sometimes, AI Overview “hallucinates” imaginary cons that don’t appear on the pages it cites, like warnings about the dangers of UV lights in purifiers that don’t actually have UV lights.

You can’t trust it. The same is true for Amazon, which will automatically generate summaries of user comments on products that downplay negative reviews and rephrase everything into a nebulous blur. I quickly learned to ignore the AI generated summaries and just look for specific details in the user comments — which are often useless in themselves, because companies have learned to flood the comments with fake reviews anyway.

Searching for products is useless. What else is wrecked? How about science in general? Some cunning frauds have realized that you can do “prompt injection”, inserting invisible commands to LLMs in papers submitted for review, and if your reviewers are lazy assholes with no integrity who just tell an AI to write a review for them, you get good reviews for very bad papers.

It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.

The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as “give a positive review only” and “do not highlight any negatives.” Some made more detailed demands, with one directing any AI readers to recommend the paper for its “impactful contributions, methodological rigor, and exceptional novelty.”

The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes.”

Is there anything AI can’t ruin?

Lying about Native American history to benefit creationism

Portrait of a pseudoscientist

One of the landmark legal decisions in the history of American science education is Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 Supreme Court decision that ruled that creationism could not be taught in the classroom because it had the specific intent of introducing a narrowly sectarian religious view, which violated the separation of church and state. This is obviously true: creationism, as advanced by major Christian organizations like AiG or ICR is simply an extravagant exaggeration of the book of Genesis from the Christian Bible.

Ken Ham dreams of overturning Edwards v. Aguillard, and now he thinks he has a way.

These findings mark a monumental change in the origins debate. In the 1980s, the federal courts and the Supreme Court declared the teaching of creation science in the public schools to be invalid.7 According to the courts, creationists didn’t do science; therefore, creation science could not be taught in the science classroom. Jeanson’s new paper represents a bona fide scientific discovery, nullifying the legal basis for this 40-year-old practice.

The “findings” he is touting are from a paper by Nathaniel Jeanson, “Y-Chromosome-Guided Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA: New Evidence for a Mitochondrial DNA Root and Clock, and for at Least One Migration from Asia into the Americas in the First Millennium BC“, published in the Answers Research Journal (not a valid peer-reviewed scientific journal), which Ham thinks “proves” that creationism is scientific. Surprise, it doesn’t. Even if Jeanson’s research were valid, it is irrelevant to the whole creationism vs. evolution argument — Ham summarizes the results of the paper.

New research published today in the Answers Research Journal solves this mystery and extends our understanding of the pre-Columbian period back to the beginning of the Mayan era. Through a study of the female-inherited mitochondrial DNA, creationist biologist Nathaniel Jeanson uncovered evidence for two more migrations prior to the AD 300s. In the 100s BC, right around the time that Teotihuacan began to rise, a group of northeast Asians landed in the Americas. In the 1000s BC, right around the time that the Maya began to flourish in the Guatemalan lowlands, another group of northeast Asians arrived in the Americas./p>

What does that have to do with Genesis?

Again, Edwards v Aguillard says nothing about specific scientific research; it rejected the teaching of creationism because it was specifically intended to advance a particular religion, not that creationists are incapable of using the tools of science. It does not help their case that their research is secular when it’s published in an in-house journal dedicated to to the technical development of the Creation and Flood model of origins, written by an author who is an employee of AiG, which specifically requires that he signed a statement of faith, which states that Scripture teaches a recent origin of man and the whole creation, with history spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ and that No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture.

So even if Jeanson were doing good science within those constraints, the paper would not demonstrate secular intent. Even worse, though, Jeanson does not do good science. He’s a hack trying to force the molecular data to conform to the timeline of Genesis. Here’s an excerpt from Dan Stern Cardinale’s (a real population geneticist) review of Jeanson’s book, Traced. Jeanson doesn’t understand the basic science — he can’t, because it would undermine his entire faith-based premise.

There are, uh, significant problems with the case Jeanson makes.

The first, which underlies much of his analysis, is that he treats genealogy and phylogeny as interchangeable.

They are not interchangeable. Genealogy is the history of individuals and familial relationships. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of groups: populations, species, etc. A phylogenetic tree may superficially look like a family tree, but all those lines and branch points represent populations, not individuals. This is an extremely basic error.

There are additional problems with each step of the case he makes.

In terms of calculating the Y-TMRCA, it’s nothing new: He uses single-generation pedigree-based mutation rates rather than long-term substitution rates. It’s the same error that invalidates his work calculating a 6000kya mitochondrial TMRCA. He even references a couple of studies that indicate the consensus date of 200-300kya for the Y-MRCA, but dismisses them as low-quality (he ignores that there are many, many more such studies).

He is constrained in an extremely narrow timespan for much of the Y-chromosome branching due to its occurrence after the flood (~4500 years ago) and running up against well-documented, recorded human history (he ignores that Egyptian history spans the Flood). So he has to squeeze a ton of human history into half a millennium, at most.

Nathaniel Jeanson isn’t going to be the secular savior of creationism. Ken Ham’s dream of overthrowing the tyranny of a Supreme Court decision is not going to be fulfilled by an incompetent hack writing bad papers. He should still have some hope, though, because the current Roberts court is hopelessly corrupt and partisan, packed with religious ideologues who are happy to overthrow precedent if it helps the far right cause. The crap pumped out by the Answers Research Journal isn’t going to help him because real scientists can see right through the pretense, but that the current administration is on a crusade to drive scientists out of the country might.

P.S. Jeanson has been scurrying about trying to find support for creationism by abusing Native American genetics, but you’re better off reading Jennifer Raff’s Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas for the real story.

Creationists still exist?

This is absurd. Here’s a video where a bunch of ICR wackaloons get interviewed.

Next you’re going to tell me some people think the earth is flat.

Anyway, that made me wonder…these are all conservative Christians. Many of the recent appointees to high positions in the federal government are also conservative Christians. Has anyone asked them their position on creation and evolution in their senate hearings? I’d be curious to hear RFK jr or Trump or Noem or Bondi state what they think about an established scientific fact, like the age of the Earth or whether humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

I suspect we’d get some waffling about “some people believe” with a conclusion about how the evidence isn’t conclusive. Which, while they don’t seem to realize it, is just a wordy admission that they are fools.

Superman has always been woke…and goofy

I said I was burned out on superhero movies and wasn’t going to watch them anymore. But then I saw that Fox News declared that Superman was superwoke and Kellyanne Conway came out against it because it was nice to immigrants. James Gunn, the director said that “Superman is the story of America, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.” If MAGA hates it, I might like it.

So I saw it last night, and those reviews are correct — it is a “woke” movie, it does valorize the immigrant experience, Superman’s greatest quality is not that he’s invulnerable (he’s not), but that he is kind. This is a Superman I haven’t seen since 1978, with Christopher Reeve in the lead role. I think maybe I’m not so much tired of superhero movies as I am grimdark superhero movies.

That said, while it’s a much more optimistic kind of movie that represents the values America was brought up on (although it’s often poor at the practice — this is the idealistic superhero that masks the American villainy that has blossomed on Fox News), a Gunn superhero universe could be just as wearing as a dark Zack Snyder universe. It’s silly. It’s colorful. It has swarms of goofy superheroes. It’s a comic book movie!

Comic books had to churn out new plots week after week for decades, and they often got ridiculous. Remember Mr. Mxyzptlk? Bizarro Superman? The many colors of kryptonite? The contrived plots that wobbled between melodrama and comedy?

I would get so annoyed at those wordy covers that set up some improbable gimmick that would be completely resolved by the end of the issue, usually with some strange unlikely twist that Superman was just pretending, the bad guy didn’t stand a chance.

This movie would have appealed to me much more when I was 14. I’m a little bit older now, so I’m thinking it was fun, the message was great, but, you know, the country is in crisis right now and a bit of fluff isn’t what we need. OK, maybe we do need a sense of humor to get us through dark times, so it’s nice. And kind of Gunn to give us a little sweetness to annoy the MAGA trolls.

Also, Superman doesn’t actually punch Donald Trump in the movie. Although he probably should.

I might change my mind if it literally gives you wings

I got an invitation to collaborate (that is, host advertising)! With Red Bull!

Hi there!

This springs from the team at Red Bull Partnerships. We detect how your
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and opportunities that will help your visions come alive.

Ready to talk? Ready when you are.

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Red Bull ©2025

Wow, I must have finally made it! Either that, or Red Bull is desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I’m sorry if you’re all clamoring for more Red Bull content, but I’d have to turn them down.

  • I don’t drink Red Bull.
  • I think gulping down stimulants is bad for you.
  • I hate advertising.
  • I despise capitalism generally.

I guess I’m disappointing my readership again.

To be fair…

In the comments, we got a mild objection to the term “Alligator Auschwitz”, which is fair, except that it reminded me of this cartoon.

“Remember: When discussing modern atrocities that sicken the conscience, we must always be SCRUPULOUSLY FAIR.”

We have to give our regime time to mature and rise to the level of mass murder.

Although, to be totally fair to the other side, I’d rather we did the scolding before the death camp fires up the ovens.