You know most of Minnesota is totally on your side. We like Canada. So why are you trying to smoke us out?
I’m out on my daily walk, and can see the haze everywhere. We had a short, weird thunderstorm yesterday — about an hour of dark clouds, heavy rainfall, high winds, and thunder & lightning that disappeared as quickly as it appeared — but it didn’t help clear the air. Winnipeg must be even worse off.
I think I’ll just have to hold my breath while I walk home.
As you may have heard, Joni Ernst, the Iowa pig-farmer who has somehow found herself in congress, had a town hall the other day in which she tried to justify the massive cuts to medicaid and medicare her party is endorsing. Someone in the audience shouted out that people were going to die. Ernst dismissed that with the comment, Well, we all are going to die.
They weren’t making an existential comment, they were pointing out that these cuts were going to directly cause the death of thousands or even millions of people in the near future.
Ernst has now posted a truly epic apology video, one that will live on in the annals of disgraceful, clueless apology videos. She could only have made it worse by bringing out a ukulele, but she does win extra points for recording it in a graveyard.
I would like to take this apology to sincerely apologize for a statement that I made yesterday at my town hall. I was in the process of answering a question that had been asked by an audience member when a woman who was extremely distraught screamed out from the back corner of the auditorium, ‘People are going to die,’ and I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes we are all going to perish from this earth. So, I apologize and I’m really, really glad I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior Jesus Christ.
I’m sure everyone in the audience already knew that they were mortal. The concern wasn’t that they were going to die someday in the future, but that they’d rather not die right now, you fucking clueless kook.
And they call atheists “arrogant.”
I do appreciate that she’s the one who juxtaposed belief in Jesus with belief in the tooth fairy.
Ken Ham is spittin’ mad. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear made a statement in support of LGBTQ+ people and the importance of inclusion…but he didn’t plug Ken Ham’s little roadside attraction! How dare he? He’s supposed to advertise the stupid wooden “boat” with every breath!
Can someone help me here? I want to know what Kentucky Gov Beshear means by “more equal and inclusive.” The reason I as is that the Ark Encounter @ArkEncounter is the biggest themed attraction in Kentucky and the biggest Christian themed attraction in the world.
Also the Ark Encounter and @CreationMuseum are the two leading Christian themed attractions in world and they have had billions of dollars of positive impact on the state of Kentucky.
I’ve been to both of Ham’s sideshows, and if those are the leading Christian themed attractions in the world
, then Christianity has a problem. Those are boxes full of lies and nonsense, distortions of scientific facts that promote foolish myths that they can’t support with evidence. You could say that of every religious center for every religion, but most of them, unlike Answers in Genesis, try to promote myths that support their beliefs — AiG is dedicated to lying about science and the nature of the universe outright. That is their sole purpose, to tear down the reality that exposes their folly.
Even if we ignore their lack of a dignified intent, they are a bad attraction. There is nothing inviting about the Ark Park, unless you’re desperate for displays that prop up your ignorance. They’re fucking weird. You’ve got a few animatronic displays of Adam & Eve, or Noah speaking with a heavy Yiddish accent, and unanimated baby dinosaurs in crates, and lots and lots of hectoring signs explaining why the Bible is true and you’re going to hell if you don’t believe it. It’s boring.
If I were to compare it to anything, it’s the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, which trust me, is not appealing to non-Mormons. Lots of empty space, paintings and sculptures and dioramas promoting LDS history, and hugely grandiose buildings. It’s much more elaborate than the Ark Park. The Ark Park is an embarrassingly gauche red-neck version of what some particularly ignorant set of anti-science gomers think a temple should look like, and they failed to even build an impressive facade for the whole thing.
And yet when Gov Beshear is giving talks on Tourism and listing tourist facilities he never mentions the Ark (or Creation Museum). And the Ark is not mentioned in most State promotional materials.
Also Gov Beshear calls his administration “Team Kentucky.” AI sums up “Team Kentucky” as “”Team Kentucky” refers to a broad concept encompassing different initiatives and programs under the leadership of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. It’s used to promote unity, economic, development, and various state-wide efforts.”
Beshear is probably trying to promote Kentucky as a beautiful state with great economic potential, and the citadel of stupidity Ken Ham has built is an embarrassment. Ken Ham had to go to ChatGPT to interpret Beshear’s slogan, and it came back with an accurate explanation that Ham just ignores. Unity is not promoted by a narrow religious sect. Economic development is not going to be built on the back of an egregiously idiotic theme park.
So Gov Beshear uses terms like “inclusive,” “equal,’ and “Team Kentucky” to promote unity, but the Ark and Creation Museum are basically excluded.
Now I understand an LGBTQ group would never employ me as a bible believing Christian who builds his thinking on God’s Word and thus adamantly believes that there’s only one marriage, that of a man and woman (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-7) and only two genders of humans (Genesis 1:27). Now that is not hate speech. It just means we have different worldviews. I wouldn’t expect an LGBTQ group to hire a Christian who believes as I do based on the bible. But they have the freedom to exist as a group. And the Governor has the freedom to promote them if he wants. But how about promoting the Ark and Creation Museum as well to be truly inclusive and a team working for unity?
Impressive. He somehow brags about his regressive views on homosexuality and trans issues (it’s only his “belief”), and then requests that he get more free advertising for his theme park under the banner of inclusivity. If you were truly inclusive, you’d be promoting his exclusionary views. It’s the paradox of intolerance, but there’s no point in explaining it to him because Ken Ham is to narrow and bigoted to comprehend it.
Now the Ark and Creation Museum employ Christians who adhere to our statement of faith. A Federal judge in Kentucky ruled we have a right to do this according to the law and freedom of religion. But everyone is welcome to come to the Ark and Creation Museum and we’ve seen people from all sorts of backgrounds visit, including LGBTQ people. We publicly promote the attractions to everyone as all are welcome.
Now Christians are persecuted around the world and in some places much worse than others. In some countries Christians can’t meet publicly or distribute bibles. How about a Christian month to promote unity and thus be inclusive of Christians to send a message to the world?
It is true that everyone is welcome to visit his grossly overpriced dreary carnival sideshow, and I think a few LGBTQ+ people (also some atheists!) have actually visited it, but they have not been there because they found it inviting. It’s more to witness the freak show. Or to protest it.
And of course he concludes with his martyr myth, that somehow endorsing the existence of LGBTQ+ people is equivalent to persecuting Christians, and Ken Ham in particular. He says this in a country that has allowed him to con hundreds of million dollars to propagandize Christian lies, with a government that is dominated by the Christian right, in a state that gave him millions of dollars in tax breaks to subsidize his Christian cult, and goes further to ask that a month be dedicated to honoring his weird version of Christianity.
There is going to be a protest at the Ark Park next month. That is not hate speech. They just have different worldviews. But the AiG worldview is founded on hatred, ignorance, bigotry, and superstition, and must be opposed. Governor Beshear is being political and avoiding talking about the shameful disgrace located in his state, and Ken Ham ought to shut up and appreciate that that is the best he’s going to get.
Have you ever heard of Aporia? It’s an online magazine. If you want to follow that link, feel free, but it will taint your search history, so let me just describe a little bit of what you’d see on the Aporia main page and spare you the contamination. There are articles about kinship realism
, about men and romantic relationships, about incels and evolutionary psychology, about the feminism backlash, about the Roman Empire, about In Defense of German Colonialism
, and a lot of nonsense about AI. The authors listed include:
All those links in that list are just to this site, where their names have popped up a lot in discussions of racism, but actually there are other sites that have much more in-depth analyses of those individuals — for instance, Hope Not Hate has a substantial investigation of Aporia and its contributors. These are not good people. These are some of the very worst eugenicists, racists, fascists, neo-Nazis, and all-around heinous bigots you can find on the internet. For example…
HDF is led by three men. The CEO and founder of Human Diversity Foundation LLC is Emil Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard is a well-known Danish scientific racist and far-right activist, having spoken at the Traditional Britain Group conference in 2022.
Kierkegaard’s disturbing views extend beyond race. In 2012, he published a blog on his website about paedophilia, suggesting that abusers should be allowed to rape children drugged with sleeping medicine. “If they dont notice it is difficult to see how they cud be harmed, even if it is rape [sic],” he wrote. Kirkegaard later claimed he was merely discussing a hypothetical scenario. He now leads HDF’s research team.
In case you don’t know what HDF is, it is
- The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF)
- Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team
- Andrew Conru, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who created Adult Friend Finder, has given $1.3 million to HDF. After being contacted prior to this report’s publication, he said he would cut ties with the company
- HDF has connections to Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right German party, and hopes to create a white-only ethnostate
- HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS
Really, this is the worst of the worst. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.There was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father
rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench!
All you have to do is glance at their web page, and you will see exactly what they’re all about. They aren’t even trying to hide it, so there has to be something deeply wrong with you to be interested in reading it, and contributing to it? Unthinkable.
But now they have a new contributor.
Oh, hi, Steve.
Steven Pinker is genuinely one of our dumbest “public intellectuals.”
When I encounter a substance dualist, this is how I mock their position.
Consciousness arises from physically undetectable, yet also indestructible, mind-stuff, which wasn’t present until humanity reached its current evolutionary phenotype, and which, despite not interacting with the body, both determines and is affected by its actions and is also perpetually localized to each individual person until they die at which point it goes to a non-localized location that also can’t be detected.
Also, like in the comic that comes from, my interlocutor can’t tell that I’m making fun of their position.
I was sitting at my computer this morning, when a fuzzy, tiny blob slowly lowered itself before my face. I looked closely at it, and it was a single strand of spider silk with a dead mosquito at the end of it. I tried to take a photo with my phone, but it was too small and close. Here it is, anyway.
Now it’s possible that some ceiling spider was fishing for humans, but I prefer to think that it was a spider cult offering a sacrifice to their god. I couldn’t hear what they were chanting, so I don’t know if they were praying for anything, and I prefer to think they were just expressing their gratitude.
I used to see this fake graph all over the place in my New Atheist days. It’s troubling because…well, look at the Y axis. No units? How do you quantify “scientific advancement” to a single dimension, anyway? Also that dashed line extrapolation implies that science naturally rises ‘upwards’. “Christian” Dark Ages implies that there was one single unitary factor to the social, economic, and military changes that occurred after the fall of Rome, and that there was no technological progress between 300CE and 1300CE. It’s a bad graph.
How about this one?
Now that’s a quantitative historical trauma! And we get to live through it (I hope we live through it.)
Trump is going to cut NASA’s budget in half, while making some contradictory plans.
President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors. The plans, released today, call for a “leaner” agency that will land “the first human ever, an American, on Mars.” But they would effectively end NASA’s long-standing role as the world leader in space science, researchers say—if the U.S. Congress follows through on them.
Putting an American on Mars is the dumbest goal ever. It’s not going to happen without a solid foundation in space science, which he is destroying. This sounds like a Musk plan: stupid, ill-founded, and doomed to failure.
Trump is demolishing biomedical research.
The Trump administration and Congress are eliminating billions of dollars of funding for medical research while also gutting the scientific workforce. Specifically, they are:
- Terminating more than $2.4 billion in active grants and obstructing new awards.
- Radically altering budget structures and reducing future funding.
- Eroding expertise and ending training programs.
Our best working estimates calculate that the NIH alone has cancelled more than 1,500 grants so far, representing a loss of more than $2.4 billion (PDF) in previously-committed medical research funding, with more expected. When delays (an additional $2.3 billion) are factored in, the total value of lost research funding approaches $5 billion.
The changes to grants management have been rapid, large-scale, and chaotic. In the past, grant terminations have typically been associated with misconduct and extraordinarily rare: from 2012 to 2024, there were fewer than five such terminations. Since February, however, hundreds of researchers across the country have received termination letters telling them that their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” This specific phrase references an obscure update to the Office of Management and Budget rules from the first Trump administration that allows them to unilaterally sever grants in service of the president’s political agenda. This executive branch maneuver is called “impoundment” and it functionally overrides Congressional authorization and appropriation.
Some of the terminations are blatantly ideological; a result of DOGE-directed screening and searches for flagged keywords like “women,” “trans,” “nonbinary,” “diversity,” or “COVID.” The attack on “woke DEI ideology” targets research focused on HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ health, reproductive health, addiction and mental health, health equity and systemic racial disparities, and more. Other terminations have nothing to do with the subject of the research, and instead must be understood as part of the administration’s attempt to strip universities of their independence.
Here’s a tally of many of the scientific budget cuts.
• National Science Foundation (NSF):
o The budget proposes $3.9 billion for NSF, which is $4.9 billion below (55%
decrease) FY 2025 enacted. The budget request proposes cuts for climate, clean
energy, “woke social, behavioral and economic sciences” and “programs in low
priority areas of science.”
• National Institutes of Health (NIH):
o The budget proposes $29.116 billion for the NIH, a $17.97 billion reduction (38%
decrease) from FY 2025 enacted. It also proposes reforms to the NIH, including
consolidating programs into five new focus areas:
▪ National Institute on Body Systems Research;
▪ National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research;
▪ National Institute of General Medical Sciences;
▪ National Institute of Disability Related Research; and
▪ National Institute on Behavioral Health.
o NIH research would align with the president’s priorities to address chronic
disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating
research on climate change, radical gender ideology and divisive “racialism”.
This new structure retains the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health
(ARPA-H).
o The budget provides $27 billion for NIH research.
• Department of Energy (DOE):
o The budget proposes $7.092 billion for the Office of Science, which is $1.148
billion below (13.9% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $888 million for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
(EERE), which is $2.572 billion below (74% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $200 million for Advanced Research Projects Agency–
Energy (ARPA-E), which is $260 million below (56% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
o The budget proposes a $1.311 billion decrease for the NOAA Operations,
Research and Grants program. Since the final FY 2025 continuing resolution did
not provide the specific funding level, the base level is unknown. The budget
cites a termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant
programs, which are not aligned with the Administration’s policy-ending ‘Green
New Deal’ initiatives.”
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):
o The budget proposes $5.069 billion for NASA Science Mission Directorate, which
is $2.265 billion below (30.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $1.034 billion for Earth Science, which is $1.161 billion
below (52.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $569 million for the Space Technology Directorate, which
is $531 million below (48.2% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
Don’t forget: 47% decrease in the budget of the department of agriculture, and a 30% cut to the department of the interior, and eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science! On the bright side, the defense department gets a 13% increase. Also keep in mind that these are the quantitative changes — we haven’t even started examining the qualitative changes in where the money that is left is going, thanks to agents of chaos like RFK jr and Bhattacharya.
There’s no hiding the fact that these cuts are ideologically driven.
In February, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — began an ideological purge of its grants. Without warning, hundreds of research projects — many of which had been underway for years, representing thousands of hours of work and billions of dollars in investment — were abruptly cancelled without a scientifically valid explanation. The NIH cited only vague connections to “gender identity” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), or other now-forbidden topics such as vaccine hesitancy and COVID, as justification, claiming these projects no longer aligned with “agency priorities.”
These funding cuts raise serious ethical concerns for study participants and risk many life-saving findings going unpublished. The NIH has undermined research on life-threatening diseases that affect us all like cancer, HIV, and Alzheimer’s — and dangerously implies that some patients are more worthy of care than others. These actions stifle scientific progress and put lives at risk.
It’s amazing how electing one man can so profoundly change the course of history…and not in a good way. Here’s the real march of progress:
Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.
Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.
If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.
They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.
Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.
It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.
I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.
These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?
Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly
because the creationist implications are not there.
It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it
.
It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.
Musk is on his way out, but he’s not going quietly. It seems there’s been some resentful scuffling over his activities failures.
A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder’s quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.
The incident was previously reported as a “screaming match” between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.
“‘Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, ‘You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you’re at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?” Bannon recounted. “And that’s when Elon got physical. It’s a sore subject with him. It wasn’t an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him.”
The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.
The Daily Mail is not a reliable source, but we also have physical evidence of the fight.
Cool, hit him some more, and put a little more vinegar in the punch.
You know what? This is not normal.
It’s that time of year when we start spending more time outdoors, and when the mosquitos are on the prowl for your blood. Colin Purrington bought these simple devices that are non-toxic but promise to kill mosquitos around your yard — not that I’m at all interested, I like having spider food living around my home — but I can understand not wanting biting, flying insects disturbing your parties. It also seems ecologically safe, since all it is is a tube containing a yeast solution (to produce CO2, a mosquito attractant) and boric acid, to kill insects that drink from it.
Only problem is that they don’t work. They produce very little CO2, mosquitos don’t take the bait, and if they crawl inside the tube, they don’t drink, they just fly out again. And it’ll cost you $50 for a box of 4 tubes! They really shouldn’t have let these devices fall into the hands of a scientist who can think quantitatively and who can devise easy tests of their efficacy.
Oh, another little problem with Spartan Pro: if you write a negative review of their product, they will sue you. It’s a stupid SLAPP suit that was eventually defeated, at a cost of $90,000 to Purrington. No, he didn’t get his legal costs back.
SLAPP suits are evil, and anyone or any compony that deploys them is evil, too.
I’m amazed at all the people leaving comments on Purrington’s site to claim that they actually do work. I don’t know whether they’re gullible, or Spartan Mosquito is paying puppets to leave phony testimonials, or my most charitable interpretation, they’re seeing the effects of general insect decline and attributing it to the magic cylinder they hung from a tree. I’m seeing fewer insects year by year in my area, so this might be a good time to be selling ineffective insect traps and letting your reputation thrive on ecological decline.
