Uh-oh, South Korea has gone authoritarian

This is personally worrying — my son is in the midst of interviewing for a new position in the army (he’s a Major in the signal corps), and just this past week he was narrowing his options down to a position in South Korea. We thought this was good news, since he’s currently stationed in Kuwait, and we’d rather he were in a nice, peaceful, calm place. But look! South Korean President Yoon has declared martial law, citing vague threats from North Korean communists while actually targeting the South Korean opposition parties.

“I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free constitutional order,” Yoon said.

Yoon did not immediately specify who constituted the pro-North Korean anti-state forces. But he has cited such forces in the past as hindering his agenda and undermining the country.

He did not say in the address what specific measures will be taken. Yonhap reported that the entrance to the parliament building was blocked.

“Tanks, armored personnel carriers, and soldiers with guns and knives will rule the country,” Lee Jae-myung, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, which has the majority in parliament, said in a livestream online. “The economy of the Republic of Korea will collapse irretrievably. My fellow citizens, please come to the National Assembly.”

Yeah, everyone who opposes my politics is a Communist who supports the terrorists. Sounds familiar.

The news sources are predicting immediate protests, rallies, and even riots in response — South Koreans do not abide autocracies taking over. The American military won’t respond (we hope!), but it’s probably no fun to be hunkered down in Camp Humphreys while the citizenry takes to the streets.

It’s probably too much to expect that someone in the military will always be posted to someplace calm.

Here we go again

Are you ready for another pandemic?

No, you are not. And this one has the potential to be worse than COVID.

Cases of H5N1, the bird flu, are on the rise. Bird flu is bad — the cases are limited right now, because most of the transmission is from birds/cows to humans, and not human to human, and most of us don’t cuddle chickens that often. Please don’t start.

We’re definitely not at the point where we should panic and shut everything down, but we are at the point where we should be preparing, building up stockpiles of vaccines, and developing new vaccines (there is no commercially available RNA vaccine for bird flu yet). If the virus mutates, as viruses are wont to do, a variant could spread with stunning speed.

But don’t count on those vaccines saving us if this virus does what flu viruses sometimes do, and turns into a pandemic form. It won’t oblige humanity by slowly mutating, giving people a chance to ramp up vaccines quickly.

“It is going to happen fast,” says Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health and a veteran of numerous disease outbreaks, from influenza to Ebola.

The world just saw this happen. COVID appeared suddenly and spread globally before alarm bells rang. Even with the new, quick-turn technology of mRNA vaccines, it took just about a year after SARS-CoV-2 started its global spread to get the first doses into arms. By that point, 300,000 people had died in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands more—possibly millions—died around the world before vaccines were fully deployed.

Viruses reproduce at a phenomenal rate, faster than we slow clumsy vertebrates can adapt. You just know, though, that the guy Trump wants to appoint to run the NIH is going to argue for “herd immunity” the instant a pandemic takes off. In fact, this country has been working to undermine even a minimally responsible pandemic response for the last few years.

When COVID broke out, people were largely open to vaccines. Then-president Donald Trump touted his government’s rollout of the vaccine, but he has since helped feed vaccine skepticism. Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, mentions pandemic preparedness in their respective campaign platforms.

Even uptake of routine childhood vaccines is falling. “The lack of trust around vaccines does put us in a very bad place. We do know that people are dying because they are not getting vaccinated against COVID,” Khan says. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only 11 percent of adults and just 7 percent of pregnant women have received the latest COVID vaccine.

Some states have loosened vaccine requirements and recommendations, something that worries Khan and other public health experts. Vaccines cannot help anyone if people don’t get them. Politicians who don’t promote the need for pandemic preparations are gambling that the next one won’t hit during their terms in office. “This is all going to potentially come home to roost with the next pandemic,” Khan says.

I got my COVID vaccine. It won’t help against bird flu, though. Meanwhile, the idiots are pushing the public to take greater risks. Remember all the fools touting raw milk for some absurd reason? That had consequences in California.

The source for all those bird flu cases in California was a few cow herds, herds specifically raised to produce raw milk, from a company called Raw Farm, run by a guy named Mark McAfee. Remember that name; it could go down in history, just like that of Mrs O’Leary. McAfee has some political opportunities in the current climate.

As bird flu has spread among poultry and cattle in the US this year, raw milk has seen a new wave of interest and some high-profile supporters, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Raw milk was on a laundry list of items that faced “aggressive suppression” by the US Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy said in a post on X in October. In a fact sheet shared with CNN on Monday, Raw Farm said its CEO, Mark McAfee, “has been asked by the RFK transition team to apply for the position of ‘FDA advisor on Raw Milk Policy and Standards Development.’ ” CNN has reached out to the Trump transition team for comment.

Imagine a pandemic with RFK jr and Jay Bhattacharya in charge. Or don’t, if you don’t like nightmares. We are so screwed.

Oh, and for those people who look at a table listing a mere 57 cases, who think that’s minor and nothing to worry about, that’s just human cases. The virus is thriving in herds of cattle and flocks of birds, you know, those animals most of us eat.

In updates since November 27, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) confirmed 14 more H5N1 outbreaks in dairy cattle, all involving California herds. The latest additions push the state’s total to 475 and the national total to 689 across 15 states.

Also, APHIS confirmed more H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in six states. All involve commercial farms. In California, the virus struck poultry farms in three counties—a duck breeder and a broiler facility housing more than 266,000 birds in Fresno County, a turkey farm in Merced County, and a commercial hatchery in Tulare County.

In Minnesota, the virus hit two more turkey farms in Meeker County, one of which has nearly 242,000 birds.

Similar outbreaks were confirmed at turkey farms in North Dakota (Ransom County), South Dakota (Beadle and Faulk counties), and Utah (Sanpete County).

In the south, the virus was confirmed at a broiler farm in Tennessee’s Gibson County that houses 37,200 birds. The outbreak is Tennessee’s first since October 2023.

Think of those as vast culture dishes where H5N1 is proliferating and mutating at a furious rate. Give ’em time, we’ll get a deadly variant popping out eventually.

I yam what I yam

I got stuff done today. A quiz written and posted online, and I took this huge pile of my late mother’s savings bonds to the bank. Almost 200 slips of paper, and they’re being processed and interest calculated as a I type. Unfortunately, to get that done I had to personally sign each one there at the bank.

I can’t feel my right arm now. It’s simultaneously numb and sore. That represents one tedious chore done, though.

“White” is not a synonym for “elite”

They’re called “segregation academies,” private schools set up to siphon off state education money to support discriminatory policies. If you live in an area with many black students, somebody will create a school with enrollment that excludes the kinds of people you don’t like, often to make sure only white students get in, or students with particular religious beliefs, and then it’s a double-win: they get to take in state money through voucher programs, and they get to charge their ignorant, bigoted parents excessive fees. It’s an “elite” school, after all. Pay up!

ProPublica examined the effects of these voucher programs on a set of private academies in North Carolina. These schools have a specific purpose, and it’s exactly the purpose that has inflamed the electorate in recent years: isolationism, racism, and ignorance.

Back when segregation academies opened, some white leaders proudly declared their goal of preserving segregation. Others shrouded their racist motivations. Some white parents complained about federal government overreach and what they deemed social agendas and indoctrination in public schools. Even as violent backlash against integration erupted across the region, many white parents framed their decisions as quests for quality education, morality and Christian education, newspaper coverage and school advertisements from the time show.

They’re sucking up a tremendous amount of state education funds. You know that if a local creepy throwback of an academy in a region is getting millions of dollars, that money is coming out of a pool of cash earmarked for general education…and that means the public schools, which are free to the public, get less. And it’s a scam.

Opportunity Scholarships don’t always live up to their name for Black children. Private schools don’t have to admit all comers. Nor do they have to provide busing or free meals. Due to income disparities, Black parents also are less likely to be able to afford the difference between a voucher that pays at most $7,468 a year and an annual tuition bill that can top $10,000 or even $20,000.

So your choices are to send your child to a public school that doesn’t charge tuition, or accept a $5000 voucher to send them to a private school that demands that you pay them an additional $10,000. The private school isn’t necessarily better, but it does provide the helpful service of preventing your child from rubbing elbows with brown children, and may offer the bonus of teaching them more Sunday School-style Jesus.

This is how the Republicans aim to destroy education. They’re going to offer more and more “alternatives” that don’t improve anything, but do pander to the biases of their voters, and that have the advantage of also wrecking public schools. Even if they are building good schools (they probably aren’t), they’re making sure that the non-Republican electorate has fewer opportunities, is less qualified for higher education and upscale work, and are effectively poisoning the minds of the citizenry.

They’ve got at least four more years of running rampant and wrecking institutions. Perhaps some of you figure you can weather a few years and rebuild to come roaring back with progressive values, but you know who can’t handle four more years of ruined education? Kids. Childhood is short, the educational curriculum has year-by-year goals and standards, and if you tear out that foundation, there’s nothing to build on later.

I still recall my 3rd grade year, when I had a couple of weeks of school lost to acute appendicitis, and I came back to discover that I’d missed out on some basic stuff that my peers had already mostly mastered (was it fractions? I recall being bewildered by numerators and denominators for a while). I had to struggle to catch up, and it wasn’t fun — but I was motivated by being already academically inclined, so I had to do the work. Imagine if I missed a year, or two years, though. I probably would have just given up.

An even better example of institutional failure: in general, our current public school system does a poor job of educating students in math, and that has a ripple effect on our colleges. In Europe, most universities offer a complete degree program in three years; here in the USA, it’s usually four years. A lot of that difference is because so many students are ready for calculus when they enroll; some high school programs barely teach algebra. Seriously. I advise so many students who want to get a science degree, and their first year is spent teaching them remedial algebra so that they can do basic stoichiometry in their first chemistry class, or understand elementary concepts in biochemistry for their first biology class.

And Republicans think it more important that no brown people pollute their high school dance, that they don’t get exposed to evilution, or that their history classes don’t mention slavery, or that they learn the highest moral value is to attend church on Sunday? Those are omissions from their education that we will pay for at the college level and beyond.

Hey, I can mangle thermodynamics, where’s my million dollars?

It’s been a weekend. My wife pulled a double-shift last night, and I took advantage of the boring silence in the house to wrap up the preparations for my last week of classes, and was up way too late. For my history of evolutionary thought class, I have the laziest plan ever: the students are doing presentations all week, and are also responsible for evaluating their peers. For my intro class, I’ve got one last lecture all queued up and ready to go, and then on Thursday they get an exam. But right now, I’m really tired and should get some sleep tonight.

Now for some light entertainment. A company called Extropic is getting millions of dollars of funding on the basis of this kind of gobbledygook.

Extropic describes itself as building a computing paradigm which harnesses the power of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to fundamentally merge generative AI with the physics of the world. [Extropic, 2023]

There you go. Translate, please.

I’m no physicist, but even I can see that that’s a lot of noise — they’ve garbled up a few thermodynamics buzzwords and mixed them up with the magic word “AI”. Helpfully, they go further to try and explain.

And the hardware wants to be stochastic, if we want to keep scaling. So why don’t we just cut the Gordian knot and simplify things, and implement AI algorithms in, as the stochastic physics of the world. So what we’re building at Extropic is a full stack, Physics-based computing paradigm focused on AI. And we harness the stochastic physics of electrons directly in order to instantiate probabilistic machine learning, which is the parent concept to generative AI.

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I’m just a lowly biologist. Maybe I’d just like to know how someone can con millions of dollars out of silicon valley venture capitalists with that kind of insipid, pretentious babble. Are VCs just not very bright?

All it needs is some goofy AI-generated ‘art’ to make it look like sci-fi…and look, the gullible tech press provides!

Sexy beast

Argiope are epic spiders — they’re big, spectacularly colorful, voracious, and if you witness them, you’d be impressed at how quickly they can trap and kill their prey. But now we learn they also use sex appeal to capture dinner.

Predators and prey have direct interactions that influence their short-term behaviors, including resource allocation and strategies for moving through habitats. However, the presently observed behaviors are the products of coevolutionary interactions, posited to be a history of measures and countermeasures between the predator and prey. We found that Argiope (orb-weaver) spiders in the continental USA appear to use a pheromone lure that mimics the mating pheromone of the day-flying Hemileuca moth (buck moth) to entice male moths into their webs. We found evidence that different phylogenetic groups of Hemileuca moths respond to the Argiope pheromone lure with a broad range of responses, ranging from indifferent to acutely strongly attracted, suggesting a coevolutionary history of predator–prey countermeasures. One of these countermeasures may be the potential evolution of moth developmental timing (adult emergence) to avoid Argiope predation in areas where the ranges of the moths and spiders overlap.

I’ve seen fields filled with tens of thousands of Argiope, with a web every few steps. Oddly, I didn’t see any moths nearby, even though this should have been a giant invitation to an orgy. No moths, period. I wonder why?

An hour of mathematical genetics homework

We Americans have all had a pleasant Thanksgiving and possibly an indulgent Black Friday, but it’s time to get back to work. Yesterday, Zach Hancock gave a presentation on why the hereditarian fallacy is a fallacy — the math doesn’t work. The video demonstrates an important truth: biology requires math. In this case, it’s a fairly simple level of math, so if you know a little algebra and maybe a little statistics, you should be able to cope.

It’s an important message, too. Racism and hereditarianism are built on a false premise, and anyone who tries to use population genetics to argue against evolution or for racism doesn’t understand some rather basic stuff.

It gets in some good digs against Steven Pinker, too, who clearly doesn’t understand genetics or basic math.

Now get to work. Your break is over.

Have a merrily bigoted Xmas!

Ken Ham is proud to announce that Answers in Genesis will be celebrating a non-Woke Christmas.

It wasn’t that long ago that woke was just a word I used in the context of “waking up” after being asleep. Now the word woke has permeated our culture with various meanings, including believing in what are called “progressive” (actually anti-God) values.

Over the past couple of years, many organizations and companies have been described as becoming “woke,” which usually means they have greatly restricted or abolished freedom for those with a truly Christian worldview. And in recent times, we’ve seen considerable backlash against various companies because of their woke positions (which often result in pushing a transgender ideology, etc.). But really, the woke agenda is driven by a secular/anti-Christian worldview based on man’s word rather than God’s Word!

As I often remind people, believing in a literal Genesis 1–11 is the key to being “woke-proof,” as Genesis 1–11 is the foundation for marriage, gender, and, in fact, everything! I tell people that Answers in Genesis is a “non-woke” organization and our Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are “non-woke” attractions.

As the culture becomes more secular, woke, and permeated by moral relativism, Answers in Genesis and our two attractions exist like a beautiful oasis in a desert environment increasingly devoid of biblical truth.

Well, isn’t that nice. AiG finds comfort in reducing the Bible to one page at the beginning of the book, and discouraging people from exploring further. After all, if they read the New Testament they might be introduced to a radical Woke character who encouraged tolerance and change. Although, if you browse YouTube, you might find a lot of loud evangelical preachers who are trying desperately to tell listeners that Jesus wasn’t actually tolerant, and that his values, and yours, are more properly founded in hate.

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of journalists joining Ham in repudiating “woke”. It’s silly. They don’t understand what “woke” is or that the Democrats were not particularly “woke” in the last campaign, so I’m seeing claims that “woke” fueled dissension, and that the liberal side was focused on arguing identity politics.

And so this narrative of succumbing to “Big Woke”, according to the American journalist Jack Mirkinson, “bears virtually no resemblance to the actual campaign we all just suffered through”. Woke talking points were a key part not of Harris’s campaign but of Trump’s – he said that Harris suddenly “became a Black person” to capitalise on her race, and his campaign spent millions on ads about transgender rights. Welcome to the culture war – where only the right is really fighting, and the other side is helping it out by punching itself in the face.

Except that Harris ran a centrist campaign, and liberals don’t argue about pronouns — if I’m told what pronoun someone prefers, I accept it and we’re done. The only people fighting over pronouns are the far right weirdos who want everyone to conform to their dogma and stereotypes, like Ken Ham.

I’m going to continue to be “woke,” as long as that means aspiring to a just and equitable world. If that means accepting a “secular/anti-Christian worldview,” then so be it — it’s a stance I’m already comfortable with.