I am once again confirmed in my decision to shun organized religion…even Satanist religions

I have long held reservations about the Satanic Temple. I am not at all keen on replacing one Christian superstition with another Christian superstition, even if the satanist are saying they don’t believe in any supernatural entities. It’s just an attention-getting hook, they say. I could see the argument that they are acting as a counterpoise to all those Good News Clubs that are infiltrating the public schools, or as a way to highlight the absurdity of religious teachings.

But are they really?

I have my doubts. Especially after reading this long expose of the Satanic Temple’s history. It begins to look like one guy’s marketing scam. They charter an insignificant few “After School Satan” clubs, they trigger hysterical shrieking from local pastors, they get in the newspapers and on local television news, Tucker Carlson invites Lucien Greaves onto his program, mission accomplished, the clubs are neglected and fall apart.

As late as September 2020, the Temple claimed to have active ASS clubs in nine school districts. A person searching for themselves to double-check could even find multiple national and local headlines about it:

Atlanta (Powder Springs, Ga.);
Los Angeles (Panorama City, Calif.);
Salt Lake City (Taylorsville, Utah);
Pensacola, Fla.;
Washington, D.C. (Capitol Heights, Md.),
Tucson, Ariz.; Springfield, Mo.;
Seattle (Mount Vernon, Wash.); and
Portland, Ore.

What you may notice (but journalists and fact-checkers never seem to) is that those stories don’t include the clubs getting to the point of actually meeting with students.

Ooops.

This is a good summary of the pseudo-religion.

What an awful, pathetic religion Satanism is if it wants to get national headlines, untraceable money, and the right to teach children but is too craven to even manage that.

Do we even need to get into Lucien Greaves’ sordid history of anti-semitism, racism, eugenics, and pandering to the far right?

Neuralink is feeling the heat

Neuralink is pumping out a flurry of PR to counter the reports of animal neglect at the company. Here’s Ryan Tanaka making excuses for them:

Tanaka is an odd one — he claims to have no affiliation with the company, he just loves them so much that he has a YouTube channel dedicated to fluffing Elon Musk and Neuralink. Even here, notice how the justification is I think it’s worthwhile to keep the long-term goals of the team in mind — the end justifies the means. Then he trots out a string of Neuralink employees to say how wonderful the company that pays them is.

That’s worthless.

The goals of Neuralink are sci-fi nonsense and hype about mundane technological developments. They’ve got a chip with more channels than previous efforts…but that’s not where the questions lie. Just throwing more needles into the brain does nothing if you don’t understand the interactions, or the long term consequences of healing, repair, and response to exogenous signals. It’s really a brute force approach to physically interacting with a mammalian brain, and it’s going to be increasingly disastrous as these people fumble about crudely under the directives of an incompetent narcissist.

I don’t want to hear what paid employees say. This is a case where an independent review is necessary by people who don’t get a paycheck from Elon Musk. I’d still like to know why UC Davis no longer supports Neuralink’s animal research. Is it under an NDA? That wouldn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I bet all those employees have a threatening NDA stapled to their backs.

If you want to see something really sad, though, check out Tanaka’s YouTube channel. Read the comments on this video, for example, but they all sound alike. They’re full of desperate people looking for hope. ‘Please sir, cure my seizures/paraplegia/tinnitis/depression/autism/Parkinson’s/multiple sclerosis/schizophrenia. Will it let me talk to animals?’ That’s where the fervor comes from. Musk is the messiah who will heal everything.

Then there are the sci-fi fantasies.

Very ambitious! Nope, not gonna happen.

I want an invasive, dangerous electrical device imbedded in my brain to help with my homework! Sheesh, CS nerds.

That could help with the research. Using an unreliable device and Tesla software to assist you in driving your motorcycle will generate a huge number of test subjects.

Oh, and all the people asking to sign up for the experimental trials! It’s madness. No, don’t do this. Don’t. Just don’t. One of the signs you’re in a cult is the willingness to let the cult leader do experimental neurosurgery on you. It will never end well.

One more thing…

The grocery store was packed with swarms of people (I was the only one wearing a mask, naturally), and I was wondering what was going on until I noticed that their carts were packed full of snack foods. Oh, right, it’s the Super Bowl today. I won’t be watching and know nothing about it except for one thing: I know which team I hope loses.

I know I’m petty. It’s OK to be petty about silly trivial things like this.

I also know my “hope” is going to be just as effective as Kenny-boy’s “prayer” in affecting the outcome of the game.

Pray for me

I just got back from my epic trek through the Arctic wilderness to reach the grocery store. This was an urgent emergency mission. See, here’s a pantry shelf:

You may look at that and tell me, “no, there’s no hurry here, you have plenty of cat food,” but you would be wrong. There is only one can of cat food there. Our cat will only eat Fancy Feast, and then only the seafood varieties, and no, none of that “gravy” crap, she only wants Fancy Feast Seafood Pate. Anything else, and she will walk away with a look of disgust, and will probably vomit all over the floor.

We’ve tried everything else. She is an extremely finicky eater.

I have been going to the grocery store for over a month looking for her brand, with no luck. That shelf is totally bare at the store, and has been for weeks and weeks. We’re down to our last can. When that’s gone…I fear there will be a bloodbath. I figure we’ve got maybe a week, perhaps a little more if I stretch it out.

If the blog goes silent next week, call the cops. Tell them to mobilize that stupid SWAT team and their tank that we’re wasting taxpayer money on, and bring the big guns, and be prepared before they open the door. There will be a berserker cat waiting for them.

Like a machine!

Not creepy at all.

It’s a little after 9am, and I have now completed everything: got this week’s lab set up, got tomorrow’s lecture prepped, finished a really cool book, and now the day yawns open before me, with lovely blue skies and -20°C temperatures. I think that means I can go take a walk. Get some exercise. Pick up some groceries. Breathe a little bit.

Only a little bit, though, because the student homework starts streaming into my computer by midnight.

Maybe I’ll tell you about the book later. Walk first.

What happens when you put an incompetent engineer in charge of brain surgery?

I worked through my last two years of undergraduate college working as an assistant in an experimental animal surgery. Much of what we were doing was training medical students in basic surgical skills, and installing chronic implants for a neurophysiology department. What this involved was shaving animals, anesthetizing them, locking their heads into a stereotaxic device, and then handing them off to the experimenters. They’d cut open the scalp, drill holes into the skull, and then precisely and accurately lower electrodes into specific locations in the brain. Then either they or I would close up, which involved slathering dental acrylic over the apparatus and stitch the scalp closed. Finally, it was my job to take the animal away to a recovery room and take care of it post-op.

I’m just saying that this was over 40 years ago, but I do have some experience in this area. I assisted in these surgeries on hundreds of animals, cats, rabbits, monkeys, dogs, even goats a few times, and I can remember precisely three rabbits that died on the operating table (rabbits are what we called “friable”, fragile and easily killed by stress) and two cats who died of post-op distress and/or infections. Those were memorable to me because, as the post-op animal care guy, when there were problems I’d spend all night in the recovery room trying to nurse them back to health.

So this story about Musk’s Neuralink tells me that there is something seriously wrong. I’ll put it below the fold because it gets ugly. Seriously, my experience working with small animals was disturbing enough that I spent the rest of my career working on fish embryos and invertebrates, and I swore off doing research on mammals.

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Friday Cephalopod: It’s Octo-Easter!

It’s always silly how the Christian Easter holiday is so arbitrary and seemingly random, and engaged so many people in pointless mathematical calendrical exercises to figure out what day it falls on each year. Right now, I have no clue when it will be Easter this year, and you don’t need to tell me, because I don’t care and I don’t celebrate it.

So in the same spirit of random decisions, but with at least a little more simple predictability, I hereby declare that the first Sunday after Darwin’s birthday is Octo-Easter. Here are some Octo-Easter eggs for you all.

I suppose we could claim we’re celebrating the fecundity of the sea, or just the deep dark cold depths, or whatever. Don’t care. You can also celebrate it or don’t. That’s the nice thing about these freethought holidays, you’re free to think whatever you want about them.