I hope you all had a pleasant Juneteenth

Except for these guys.

I hope they were miserable and frustrated and seething with racist anger all day long.

Franklin Police said one of the groups consisted of people carrying signs that read “White Lives Matter” and “Stop White Replacement.” They added that another group, who said they were a buffer between festival-goers and the other group, included people who were armed and wearing ballistic vests.

Members of each group were also reportedly handling out pamphlets saying they are protesting because “the anti-white system is committed to our physical genocide” to festival attendees before police arrived.

Juneteenth is supposed to be a community celebration; you get together and have picnics and talk with each other. Why would you need AR-15s or bullet proof vests for that? The signs also help explain their intent — these were simply dumbass racists.

Also, I’m curious. These were probably the same people who were outraged at mask mandates, yet here they are, willingly wearing masks. Do you think they’ve had a change of heart, seen the rising infection numbers, and decided to protect themselves from COVID?

The Texas GOP party platform — the madness continues

How deep into madness is the conservative agenda?

The new platform would call for:

  • Requiring Texas students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
  • Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
  • Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
  • Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
  • Changing the U.S. Constitution to cement the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
  • Ensuring “freedom to travel” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
  • Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities that required customers to wear masks and limited business hours.
  • Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Don’t forget this!

My idiosyncratic criterion for how bad is getting that years ago, I was focused on the creationist perspective they were always pushing. They still are! The traditional (for creationists) “strengths and weaknesses” language is still being promoted in the official Texas GOP platform.

Scientific Theories: We support objective teaching of scientific theories, such as life origins and climate change. These shall be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students shall discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly, without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

The thing is, now they’ve got so much more and so much worse evil advocacy in their platform that no one is bothering to mention the old stupidities. I’m actually kind of impressed at their restraint. They’re happy to come right out and say homosexuality is bad and they want to end gay marriage, the income tax, and that they oppose transgender normalizing curriculum and pronoun use, but they can’t quite summon the courage to openly push for a seven day, young earth creation…even though that’s what they want.

How to spot a bad journal

I get solicitations to publish papers all the time, and I just roundfile ’em. There are journals that are desperate for suckers to pay them to publish their work, and they’ll accept anything. We call them predatory journals, but I have a reservation about that: the whole establishment scientific publishing system is predatory, taking the federally funded output of scientists and billing them so that they can publish. But some are more lacking in discrimination and prestige than others, and have lower standards to the point of absurdity.

Dan Phelps got invited to publish in the International Journal of Paleobiology & Paleontology, which sure sounds like Serious Science, but he took one look at their table of contents and could tell this was a garbage dump. Do you notice anything funny about it?

When accused of being a predatory journal, they have a curious response.

Thank you for your reply, We would like to inform you that ours is not a predatory journal. We have received the ISSN which is provided in our previous email. For your convenience, we are providing the link of our journal where you can find complete information of our journal and Editorial Board members. Link: https://medwinpublishers.com/IJPBP/index.php Kindly revert back if you have any queries. Look forward hear from you soon. Kind Regards, Jackie Crystal Assistant Managing Editor

They can’t be a predatory journal, they have an ISSN! The International Standard Serial Number just means they registered with an organization that issues unique ID numbers to periodicals, magazines, newspapers, even blogs (kinda expensive with no big advantages, so we don’t have one here), and the organization itself says, “it does not guarantee the quality or validity of the contents”.

Some of those titles are dead giveaways, though, and I felt like digging into them a bit. Here’s a fun one, Proving that Dinosaurs are Distant Ancestors of Humans – The East Asian Locus of Evolution that disproves definitively the “Out of Africa” Theory. The title alone tells you that this is nonsense, and that there was no peer review, and that the journal will publish anything.

It was written by Florent Pirot, who is an independent researcher — that means he isn’t a professional employed by any relevant institution. That’s fine, amateur scientists are welcome, but all you have to do is read the abstract to see there’s no substance here.

The study of evolution is clad with vivid debates and each new fossil brought back from ground studies can start a debate, with the ever-existing risk of creative artists looking for celebrity and building dangerously resembling creatures out of thin air. There nevertheless is a very significant, and simple, way, to demonstrate that the parentry of humans is not to be found in the mice of the Jurassic that are presented to be the founding mammals in the mainstream theory but that big dinosaurs that escaped the -65 MY disasters slowly evolved into standing mammals and that our genes are more related to these mammals. Existing literature from PNAS and Science is brought together with the analysis of the author to prove the point.

That doesn’t say anything. He is saying in clumsy English that humans descended from dinosaurs that escaped the KT extinction, but he doesn’t say what he’s going to do in this paper. It’s just as well; this is going to be an exercise in pareidolia and random leaps of logic. For instance:

In Central Asia and Mongolia, the findings of the Nemegtosaurus in the Nemegt Basin show parentry with aurochs, based on the skull, and suggest a farther relation with oreodonts. The skull’s eyes (in the model presented in the Polish Academy of Sciences Evolution Museum) are below two circular areas that obviously were fitted with horns that were perhaps renewed each year, as in deers today. The prominence of the jaws suggests a link with Theropithecus gelada.

Here’s Nemegtosaurus:

Here’s an aurochs:

Anyone care to tell me where they show “parentry”? Because Mr Pirot doesn’t.

This, by the way, is Theropithecus gelada, the gelada baboon. I don’t see anything about the jaws of baboon, aurochs, and dinosaur that suggest a link, other than the general one, that they all have jaws.

Then he gets to his “data”. This, for instance, is a Parasaurolophus beak remain incrusted in the crystallized magmatic rock. Picture taken in Valbonne, from local supply of rocks.

No it’s not.

Another “fossil,” Theropitecus Gelada skull also molded in magma, from the same rock supply as above, estimated to be 10 to 12 MY old:

No, that’s not a baboon skull.

Read further and you find that Florent Pirot is a silly man who putters about in his yard in Valbonne, France looking at random rocks and imagining similarities with various species that he has read about, linking them in imaginary patterns of descent that he can’t justify.

He’s a French Ed Conrad or Roger Spurr! He’s one up on them because he managed to publish a couple of papers on his bizarre ideas in a garbage journal.

Yes, more than one. Here’s another you’ll find entertaining: The Saint Loup of the Col Du Fam, A Smilodon Caught in a Lava Bubble. He’s got lots of pictures of rocks that he fancies to be dramatic fossils, like this one of a teeth.

Ha ha, you may laugh, but keep in mind that this is delusional kook who is being preyed upon by a journal that charges substantial page fees (I don’t know what this one charges, but typically it’s on the order of hundreds of dollars) to put his mad ideas in print. If you can be outraged that televangelists bilk donations out of the poor to build their media empires, you should recognize that this is exactly the same thing, simply substituting Science for Jesus.

The other thing that should annoy you is some creationist wanker like Matt Powell will seize on this and wander about telling people that those stupid evilutionists believe dinosaurs evolved into a baboon evolved into humans when no, we don’t. Some bête imbécile in the South of France thinks that, and a criminally fraudulent journal is parasitizing him.

The ICR Guide to Dinosaurs

Dan Phelps sent me a few scans from a ‘treasure’ he discovered — a “99 cent Goodwill find that was 98 cents too expensive”. I thought it was interesting to see how creationist dogma has solidified, since this would be a comfortable fit with Answers in Genesis’s silly beliefs…except that it’s from a rival organization, the Institute for Creation Research, and they’d rather peddle their own garbage, thank you very much. Here’s the cover:

Looks good! If you didn’t notice the ICR logo, you might think it’s a real children’s book about science and dinosaurs. Any thought along those lines would quickly evaporate as soon as you opened it, though.

[Read more…]

The bubbles have fizzled out of my champagne

I’m feeling beaten down by everything — chronic pain wears one out, and also wreaks havoc on sleep — so I’m just sort of withdrawing from everything for a day or two.

Last night while I was dragging around the edges of sleep my brain kept going around and around in obsessive circles over my fall term teaching (No! Not now! It’s only mid-June! The end of summer is rushing at me.) So this morning, to be somewhat productive, I started mapping out and scheduling my intro biology course, dividing up the readings and figuring out what I’ll do each week. Maybe I can at least get my syllabus done while I’m malingering about, whining.

You don’t need to tell me, I’m godawfully boring. It’s a good thing that nothing really matters right now.

See? All I have to do is fill in little boxes, a step at a time. I can do that.

Friday Cephalopod: so that’s what capes are for

It’s the hot new parenting fad: glue all your babies to your cape and carry them with you everywhere.

Stylish and practical!

Men never change

I suppose a woman could have carved this stone found along Hadrian’s wall, and from the 2nd century CE, but somehow I doubt it.

The stone is fairly small, measuring 40 cm wide by 15 cm tall (15 inches by 6 inches). Experts in Roman epigraphy recognized the lettering as a mangled version of Secundinus cacator, which translates into (ahem) “Secundinus, the shitter.” The penis image merely added insult to injury—a clever subversion of the traditional interpretation of a phallus as a positive symbol of fertility. The Vindolanda site now has 13 phallic carvings, more than have been discovered at any other dig site along Hadrian’s Wall.

The last laugh is on whoever carved it, because we remember Secundinus’s name and not his.

He is so angry!

Boy, Jordan Peterson sure is upset that other people don’t share his Objective™ and True™ evaluation of beauty.

How dare Sports Illustrated insist that a non-athletic body could be beautiful? I’m going to take that personally.

Then he’s offended that SI was exploiting Yumi Nu…as if no other woman asked to pose in a skimpy bathing suit was exploited. He pretends that he’s defending her by insulting her.

It’s weird how he exposes his rage over such subjective issues, as if he is the final arbiter, and he and he alone gets to decide who is beautiful and who is not for everyone else. His authoritarianism is exposed.

I don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine

This is symbolic of the conflict: Citizens of the Russian Federation from the Free Russia Legion fighting for Ukraine captured Ukrainian citizens from the LDNR formations fighting for Russia.

In other words, the guys with the guns are Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side, and the two prisoners looking hangdog are Ukrainians fighting on the Russian side. It’s all very confusing.

I read the newspapers, and the impression I get is that Ukraine is getting desperate with serious ammunition shortages, while Russians are getting desperate over increasingly heavy casualties, as are the Ukrainians. Ukraine wants to join the EU, but France and Germany are dragging it out, saying it might take decades to negotiate. I don’t think they have decades. No one is going to win this war, are they?