First, get rid of all the misogynists

OK, it’s not just conservatives. It turns out that progressive movements have a long history of informants blending in and disrupting the efforts of the group, and they’re usually men.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

It’s a long article, but worth a read. It got me thinking back to all the warning signs we should have seen in the Brave Leaders of Atheism, who routinely dismissed those little problems of sexism in the movement as trivial obstacles to advancing the Cause…and who ended up seeing that movement rip itself apart.

Hey, also consider all the spousal abuse among the police. It would probably be a great step forward if they immediately fired everyone ever guilty of wife-beating.

Keep authoritarians away from all children

They look like normal human beings!

I have a confession to make: I’m a heterosexual male. I find women’s bodies attractive. I’ve looked at porn, and even found some of it titillating.

That fact does not overwhelm my interactions with women, and isn’t even a minor factor in how I regard them. I don’t “rate” women, and I don’t collect pornography — it’s not that interesting. Collecting photos of random naked women is more than a little creepy.

So there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this.

A former deacon for Moscow’s Christ Church has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for possessing child pornography.

Alex Lloyd was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Coeur d’Alene this week. Judge Lynn Winmill handed down the sentence and ordered Lloyd to pay $5,000 in restitution and placed him on probation for 20 years.

Lloyd pleaded guilty in federal court in August.

Adult pornography isn’t criminalized, but if it were, I’d be safe, even after confessing that I like women’s bodies. I don’t find the idea of collecting computer images of sexy people at all appealing. Don’t they know that real relationships are much more satisfying? What is going on in the heads of these fools? They’re obsessed with some of the most vile pornography I can imagine!

And then there’s this recent bust.

A Chicago man faces several child pornography charges in Cook County after a federal investigation infiltrated the encrypted media app Telegram and found a cross-country network of people sexually exploiting children, the Sun-Times has learned.

The work of Homeland Security Investigations in Arizona, dubbed Operation Swipe Left, led agents to Norris “Nick” Stauffer, 27, who is charged here with disseminating child pornography, records show.

It also resulted in criminal charges against more than a dozen people elsewhere — including at least two with political ties — amid allegations of livestreamed abuse, kidnapping threats and the production and distribution of child pornography.

A federal judge called some of the allegations “horrific.” When agents raided one suspect’s home, video depicting the sexual abuse of an infant was allegedly playing on a screen. And Cook County Circuit Judge Mary Marubio stressed to Stauffer in February 2022 that “this is not a victimless crime.”

“This is a crime that preys on children and exploits children,” the judge said, according to a court transcript.

At least 17 people have been charged in all, including in Arizona, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., California and South Africa, authorities say. Judges have handed significant prison time to nine of them. Ages of the group’s victims ranged from 6 months to 17 years old, according to a Homeland Security Investigations official.

Yeesh. It’s like trying to understand serial killers — it makes no sense, but somehow the culprits find gratification in it. The investigators can’t find any thread of a connection between all these wicked people.

Eric McLoughlin, deputy special-agent-in-charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Phoenix, Arizona, said most of the defendants charged come from more varied backgrounds than Hageman and Verastigui. They included a youth soccer coach, an amusement park employee and the son of a police officer, McLoughlin said.

Records show Stauffer worked for a grocery chain.

“We often see that the types of individuals involved in these horrific acts, really, they come from all different walks of life,” McLoughlin said.

Except, maybe, one thing they’re overlooking. One of the scumbags worked for the Republican party, another for Turning Point USA. All of them were using Telegram, a service popular among conservatives. They were happily chatting with one another, thinking they were protected by encryption, and reinforcing their sickness with extreme comments.

Separately, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., filed charges in February 2021 against Verastigui, who has been identified as a former Republican National Committee staffer in multiple news reports. Prosecutors alleged Verastigui told a group he “can’t stop thinking about touching, raping and killing a newborn baby.”

All of them conservative. Alex Lloyd was a member of a notoriously conservative church. Also, all of them men. These are the kind of men who protest loudly about “groomers” and think drag queens reading books to children is somehow nefarious. There’s got to be a connection in there, somewhere.

So that’s what it’s like to work with Musk

He’s just a horrible man, and he’ll fire you for telling the truth.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

This is ridiculous, he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.

Uh-oh. He’s got socialmediaitis. The first sign of the problem is when you get obsessed with your numbers, and then you start believing that the number of people who look at you is a measure of your personal worth, and then your head starts to swell and you begin to believe you deserve every bit of attention. Musk is exhibiting ‘influencer’ ego.

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Yes. He’s demonstrated beyond any doubt that he’s a hardcore twit, and has become much less interesting. His critics (like me) are realizing that he’s substanceless, and I suspect many of his fans are becoming uncomfortable at seeing their hero’s frequent gaffes. All the news about Musk is bad news nowadays.

Musk did not take the news well.

You’re fired, you’re fired, Musk told the engineer.

And that’s how an incompetent boss drives his company into a crater.

Liars lying getting hysterical about it

President Biden managed to rile up a contingent of Republicans by pointing out that they wanted to get rid of social security, and also medicare and medicaid. They were indignant. Not so, they screeched.

Sen. Mike Lee reacts with disbelief and shock that President Biden said some Republicans propose sunsetting Social Security and Medicare. Pure disbelief. Where could Biden get this obviously false crazy idea? Note that he did this while sitting next to Sen. Rick Scott, the guy who actually formally wrote the proposal as the Senate GOP platform position.

Huh. Funny how Lee used the promise of destroying social security while campaigning for the senate, and Rick Scott published a brochure explaining that he would do it. They’re on the record and are now lying about it.

After Lee was shown on TV expressing outrage over Biden saying that some Republicans wanted to cut those entitlements, critics online shared a video of an event from Lee’s Senate campaign. In the video originally posted to YouTube, Lee told a group of voters in Cache Valley, Utah, on Feb. 23, 2010, that he was about to “tell you one thing you probably have never heard from a politician.”

“It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said at the time. “People who advise me politically always tell me it’s dangerous and I tell them, ‘In that case it’s not worth my running.’ That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

Ron Desantis and Nikki Hailey have also endorsed cutting social security and raising the retirement age. I’m rather horrified at that, being 65 years old, and considering a delayed retirement already, at 67 or 68. Also, I registered for social security when I was 13 years old, and noticed then that a significant chunk of my $1.65/hour pay was snatched away by the gubmint. I figured it was OK, since it would contribute to my unimaginably distant retirement (now pretty easily imagined), but it means I’ve been paying in for 52 years. You don’t get to cut MY money, guys.

I hope the Democrats can get fired up and campaign hard on this issue.

Also, could everyone shut up about the stupid balloon? Yeah, China spies on us, we spy on them, everyone is spying on everyone.

Jesus Haploid Christ

Do I need to cover this in my genetics course? Years ago, Ron Wyatt, the infamous pseudoarchaeologist, claimed to have made a remarkable discovery: he found the site of Jesus’ crucifixion! There was a hole, where the cross had been erected, and beneath that was a small chamber, and in that chamber was the Ark of the Covenant! Furthermore, Jesus’ blood had dripped down through the hole, and had splattered on the Ark, allowing him to collect a dried blood sample.

You don’t believe it? It’s on video, sort of. There’s a hole in the ground, and Wyatt squats in it and says there’s a chamber 60 feet down, and a door, and the Ark had been stuffed in there and packed in animal hides and boards and rocks. He doesn’t actually show that, but would he lie to you?

Ron Wyatt found this site by a combination of reading the Bible really hard, and by having visions, so it must be true.

One day in Jerusalem, after the swelling in Ron’s legs and feet went down a bit, he decided to go sightseeing in the immediate area around his hotel near the Damascus Gate. Walking along an ancient stone quarry, known to some as “the Calvary Escarpment,” he began conversing with a local authority about Roman antiquities. At one point, they stopped walking, and Ron’s left hand pointed to a site being used as a trash dump and he stated, “That’s Jeremiah’s Grotto and the Ark of the Covenant is in there.” Even though these words had come from his own mouth and his own hand had pointed, he had not consciously done or said these things. In fact, it was the first time he had ever thought about excavating for the Ark.

It was a very special trash heap.

Then he spent years digging down into the trash heap, and finally found something deep in a crack.

With adrenalin flowing through his veins and great anticipation, he looked around to see what else he could see, which wasn’t much. He shined his flashlight around the open area and then up to the ceiling. There, he saw something that caught his eye – it was a crack in the ceiling with a black substance within the crack.

Crawling slowly and painfully over the rocks to the rear of the chamber, he saw a stone case extending through the rocks. It had a flat stone top which was cracked completely in two and the smaller section was moved aside, creating an opening into the stone case. But the top was too near the ceiling for him to look inside. Yet he knew what was inside – the crack in the ceiling was directly above the cracked part of the lid, where it was open, and the black substance had fallen from the crack into the case because some of it had splashed onto the lid.

It was at this time, as Ron recalls, as the instant realization of what had happened here dawned on him, that he passed out. When he realized that the crack in the ceiling was the end of the crack he had found in the elevated cross-hole many feet above him, and the black substance was blood which had fallen through the crack and into the stone case, he KNEW the Ark was in the stone case. But the most overwhelming realization was that Christ’s Blood had actually fallen onto the Mercy Seat.

If he says it was Christ’s blood, I guess that must be what it is. Who can argue with such meticulous logic?

Now comes the fun part for a biologist. He collected a sample of the black goop, and rehydrated it. It was blood! Red blood cells, white blood cells, the works, and it was still alive. He says he was able to culture the cells, squash some white blood cells, and examine their chromosomes.

Suddenly, I have qualms. If Jesus’ blood was immortal, and could survive 2000 years of dessication and bacterial invasion, how could he squash a cell? And if he did, did the chromosomes and cellular debris on the slide continue to live? Are these tissues still living and growing in a slide box somewhere?

That’s a prompt for a horror story somewhere, but right now we’re talking about SCiEnCE, so let’s get back to that karyotype. We have discovered how many chromosomes Jesus had.

Under normal circumstances all human beings have 46 chromosomes…. 23 from their mother and 23 from their father. There are 22 pairs of autosomes which determine things such as our height, hair and eye color, etc. The 23rd pair is the sex determinant pair. They consist of either “X” or “Y” chromosomes. The mother only has “X” chromosomes. The father has both “X” and “Y” chromosomes.

If the sex-determinant pair is matched “X-X”, the child is a female. If “X-Y”, the child is a male. Thus we see that the single chromosome provided by the father in this chromosome pair determines the gender of the child. When the blood sample Ron Wyatt took from the crack in the rock ceiling above the Mercy Seat was tested, it contained 24 chromosomes…. 23 from the mother and one “Y” chromosome from the father, 24 chromosomes.

As Dr. Eugene Dunkley states in his article on the genetics of the blood of Christ, 24 chromosomes is exactly what would be expected if a man was born of a virgin. There are 23 chromosomes from the mother and a “Y” chromosome from a father. But that father cannot be a human father because the other 22 chromosomes on the father’s side are missing. Therefore the existence of a “Y” chromosome is at the very least a mystery, if not a miracle.

Not only was Jesus haploid, he was aneuploid! I’m glad that mystery has been cleared up.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any photographs of the karyogram, no samples available, and you can’t get a piece of Jesus’ immortalized haploid cell line, which would be interesting for biological research, and would probably be worse than HeLa at taking over cell cultures. All we have is “Ron Wyatt said so.”

Oh, also, possibly relevant to my genetics course: that last link talks about somatids, which are immortal blobs found in everyone’s cells, which can only be seen using a special microscope called a somatoscope, invented by a guy named Gaston Naessens. I tried following an explanation of what they are, how they work, and how they disprove the germ theory of disease, but the dense layers of bullshit and bogosity proved too much for me. Cut me a break, I’d just read a bunch of Ron Wyatt nonsense, I was already saturated.

Maybe I’ll dig deeper into that trash heap, but at least I’ve concluded it’s not suitable for any science class.

For this day of social media glitches, we thank you, O Lord

Twitter is back up, which gives me mixed feelings. At least I am grateful that Elon Musk is once again exposed as an incompetent manager. How many more times must that happen before his legion of worshipful fans realize it?

Another blessed event: YouTube has banned Kent Hovind! His KentHovindOfficial channel has been shut down, all of his videos erased. Hallelujah! To add insult to injury, he briefly appeared to complain about his deletion, and then urged everyone to go to his second channel, Dinosaur Adventure Land…then that was wiped out and deleted! Ah, such sweet schadenfreude.

There is still work to be done. Matt Powell, his mini-me, still has his MattPowellOfficial channel, which he can use to trumpet hate. Amusingly, Powell just recently left Dinosaur Adventure Land to return to his ‘ministry’ in Michigan. Hovind had a little farewell party in which he suggested Powell could return in a few years to take over DAL, clearly offering to make him his heir…and in the video, Powell flatly said no. Poor Kent. Abandoned. Denied. In public.

I guess it was Whack-a-Creationist Day.

I think Twitter might be done

Today, Twitter rolled out a new feature for subscribed users: they can post 4,000 character long tweets now.

But what if I don’t want to read long blog posts on a micro-blogging site? What if I’d rather not deal with long-winded assholes clogging up the feed? I guess I don’t have a choice, except, of course, that I’ll instantly block anyone who posts a treatise.

Worse still, though, I just got this message:

Oh no! I must have been chattering up a storm today. Got carried away. I just couldn’t shut up. Supposedly, the limit is 2400 tweets/day. But I’ve been tied up in lab and classes all day! How could I have done that?

So I looked to see how much ol’ blabbermouth PZ had babbled today.

6.

It was 6 tweets, and that broke Twitter’s capacity.

OK, that’s fine, I can switch to my Mastodon account and go crazy. Maybe I’ll post 8 times today. 10 times if I feel like flooring the accelerator.

It takes multiple mechanisms to drive evolution

I went through high school thinking that evolution was pretty neat. I read all the popular treatments — those Time/Life books, National Geographic, science magazines, etc. — and they made it sound like Darwin had got everything right in 1859. I could go along with that.

But then, in 1975, I went off to college and had access to a university library and started reading the real hardcore stuff. I was just mainlining PNAS & Science & Nature & Evolution & the Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology and soaking in all this exciting stuff, and that’s when I discovered the concept of genetic drift (specifically, thanks to Lewontin). My mind was blown. Suddenly, questions I had never even thought to ask were answered with clarity. Certainly nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, but likewise nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of neutral genetic drift.

I guess Holly Dunsworth had the same revelation, and also noticed the sad gap in public education.

In the USA, K-12 evolution education standards are missing GENETIC DRIFT as well as the word NEUTRAL.

(see here: https://www.nextgenscience.org/topic-arrangement/hsnatural-selection-and-evolution)

I don’t know how to understand life’s perpetual change without those fundamentals.

If students know about meiosis (which *is* in the standards), then they know about genetic drift. It’s just a matter of linking meiosis to evolution.

Genetic drift is a very simple concept and makes natural selection make a whole lot more sense!

I shout about this on Twitter and I get “just be happy anyone teaches evolution in K-12 at all” and “teachers don’t know about drift” in response. But evolution without genetic drift is not evolution, and if teachers knew about drift, then they’d be more comfortable teaching evolution. I guarantee it!

Without drift, it’s too easy to just replace God with natural selection. And that habit of narrating evolution by giving agency to natural selection is super-duper weird for non-believers let alone for believers! (This a no hatred of religion, faith, or creationism zone.)

Genetic drift paves the way for thinking about and then narrating evolution as the constant change that life/nature/biology is. Everyone gets that time is just constant change and they will get that nature/biology/life is too. They embody it themselves, being different from their parents.

Plus, continuing to teach evolution as only being natural selection (which is what the standards are doing), is also dangerous. That selection-obsessed mindset is tied to racism, sexism, essentialism… all the stuff that we have to remove from our species’ shared origin story. Darwin only had selection (not drift, etc) to work with and look what his imagination did with evolution: racism, sexism, essentialism

Oh wow, yes. I’ve got to stand up and cheer at that. Also specifically the bit about meiosis, because I’m teaching genetics right now and am constantly emphasizing the role of chance in inheritance. We’re built on a platform of coin flips and die rolls and long shots in heredity, yet somehow in our public education, that all vanishes and is replaced with something close to fixed destiny (in higher ed, that isn’t true, fortunately. Usually.)

Also, drift nicely bridges all those gaps in comprehension the creationists love to inflict on us.

I listened to an “evil” song and survived

I heard a little buzz about the Grammy awards last weekend — there was one song performed that infuriated the culture war conservatives. It got Ted Cruz mad.

“This… is… evil,” Cruz wrote on Twitter, the ellipses perhaps representing the breaks he took to consume more pornography. His post was a re-tweet from conservative commenter and former OANN presenter Liz Wheeler, famed for having the kind of brain you normally find in an aquarium. “Demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan,” she wrote. “I could throw up.”

Well, then. As an atheist in good standing, I had to look this performance up. Here you go, everyone can watch the Sam Smith and Kim Petras song, “Unholy.”

They lied to me. Oh, sure, Sam Smith wears a top hat with devil horns, but the song isn’t about Satan worship, it’s all about people of ambiguous and not-so-ambiguous gender gyrating on the dance floor at a hot club, with lots of lascivious behavior. Anyone interrupting the proceedings with a sermon about Satanism would be a killjoy, and would probably be thrown out. It wasn’t about God or Satan at all, it was about sex.

That’s what make the conservatives uncomfortable — it’s simply their current obsession with changing mores about sex, and the fact that a singer wears a hat with horns allows them to claim it’s all about their religion. It’s not. Christians have sex, too. Some of them are gay or trans even. All that’s going on is that they’ve got an excuse to exercise their authoritarian purity culture.

Let’s see what notorious libertine and Catholic League president Bill Donohue has to say about it all.

Kim Petras is a man who thinks he’s a woman, or what is today called a “transgender person” (they really don’t exist, but that’s for another day). He said he “personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but then slowly realizing it doesn’t want me to be a part of it.”

He did not say who told him he could not be a part of whatever religion he was talking about, or why. But he did admit that “as a trans person, I’m kind of already not wanted in religion.” He did not explain why that might be.

Wow. Donohue has always been an ugly little man, but he really embraces the hatefulness. Also obliviousness.

Petras says she (a person who really exists) was sympathetic to and curious about religion, but was rejected by religion. Donohue then stupidly complains that she didn’t say who or why she was told this religion would not accept her, or why she might not be wanted by that religion. I mean, read what you wrote, Bill. You are a shining example of the problem.

Man, I haven’t read anything by Bill since those long ago days when he was happily hating me. I think he’s gotten worse.

By the way, about the song: I didn’t much care for it, and it won’t be getting much play around my house, and that’s OK! It’s not evil, it just wasn’t to my taste. If you liked it, that’s OK, too! This shouldn’t be about the song, but about authoritarians who want to dictate your personal preferences.