Don’t give Matt Powell any sympathy

Schisms are so confusing. There is this thing called the Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement, which I always thought was on the dangerously loony side of Christianity, but it turns out it wasn’t mad enough for some people, so they founded something called the New Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement, which is even worse. It’s led by Steven Anderson, known hate-monger, and is characterized by extreme anti-LGBT sentiment and anti-Semitism. These are the worst of the worst, the rotting dregs of Christianity. Greg Locke, who recently made news with his announcements about witches in his congregation, doesn’t seem to be NIFB, but he did break away from the Southern Baptist Convention to form his own schismatic group, and I don’t see much difference between Anderson and Locke.

But you know who is NIFB? Matt Powell.

He seems such a nice, baby-faced boy, you say. He’s definitely not very bright, but he couldn’t possible be one of them. Yeah, he is. It’s easy to forget that he has been calling for the execution of LGBT people. I just stumbled across this video of Powell haranguing a member of his congregation a few years ago, shouting, screaming, saying he is “acting like a woman”, gaslighting him, accusing him of betrayal, telling him he’s going to Hell. It’s extremely unpleasant, but mercifully a very short clip.

That has me wondering. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that Powell is throwing his life away by tying himself to Kent Hovind, that Hovind is exploiting his young acolyte. But Hovind is theologically extremely naive, not at all a deep thinker, somebody who is cartoonishly shallow. What if we’ve got it backwards? What if Powell is the serpent, the devious Sith who plans to drag Hovind further towards the Dark Side, inoculating him with even more extremist seeds of hate?

Sure, you can joke about Matt Powell keeping a giant inflatable banana in his backyard, but don’t let it distract you from the fact that he’s a pathetic hate-filled rage beast, and isn’t funny at all.

Nick Lane is a cruel master

He’s trying to destroy me, I think. Look what showed up today, the day after Spring Break, just when I’m getting geared up for my classes: Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.

That’s my most eagerly anticipated book of the summer — it’s release date is in July. But see, it’s an “Advance Reading Copy”. I had it in my head that I’d finish finals week, then check my mailbox daily for it, and get it at sometime when I could sit out on the deck and read it in a leisurely fashion. But no! It’s already here! Beckoning, luring, tempting me constantly. I know I’m going to succumb and at some point I’m going to set grading and lecture prep aside and read it instead, greedily, surreptitiously, lustfully, sinfully indulging in biochemistry and evolution.

Maybe I can put on a down jacket and clear off a spot on the snow-covered deck and read it there anyway.

Don’t any of you dare order an advanced copy, or the publishers will take that as permission to disrupt my professional responsibilities with the temptations of their houses of wicked knowledge!

Worst school mascot ever

My god, even their Indian mascot looks awfully white. My high school’s mascot was the Kent-Meridian Royals, and even he (a European-looking guy in a crown*) didn’t look as stereotypically white as that guy.

It’s been 50 years, and no one noticed? That this Texas high school called their drill team the “Indianettes” should have been a big flag on that.

The Indianettes have been a PN-G tradition for more than 50 years. This year, the drill team is made of 54 members and will march with the band during half time. Members participate in many activities all year long, including summer camp, pep rallies, and half time performances during football season, and basketball performances, competitions, and spring show in the second semester. Tryouts are held in the spring of each year for sophomores and juniors.

They had to go to Florida, of all places, before anyone perked up and said, “HEY! That’s hella racist!”

The company’s Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, apologized Friday after a performance from a Texas high school’s drill team was laden with Native American stereotypes, including repeated chants of “scalp them!” It came just days after the company faced intense backlash over its silence to Florida’s controversial sex education bill, labeled by many critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

How could this possibly be the first time anyone called this flamingly racist act out?

Now follows the usual pro forma disclaimer.

The company [Disney] told the Associated Press the performance, done by Port Neches-Grove High School’s “Indianettes” drill team on Tuesday, “did not reflect our core values, and we regret it took place.” It claimed the performance did not match the audition tape sent by the school to the park’s organizers.

Every time one of these kinds of bigoted displays are put on, someone has to come out all wide-eyed and tell us that gosh, that didn’t reflect our values. Except that it did.

That’s Disney, expressing surprise that someone said something racist in their park. What about the school district itself? Platitudes.

“We are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our school district,” it said in a statement. “Our district is nearing 100 years old, and our Board of Trustees is committed to always making the best decisions for our students, staff, and the communities of Port Neches and Groves.”

They’re old, y’all. If we can expect old people to have bigoted attitudes, that of course means we should allow old institutions to do likewise. Don’t you know they’re committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion? If they say it enough, that makes it so.

I thought that surely there must have been some prior push-back for such a blatantly racist chant, so I checked. There is an Association of Indian Athletes at the school! I wonder what they think of it. Except…

AIA, the ASSOCIATION of INDIAN ATHLETES, is a community service organization for female athletes. This group allows freshman-senior female athletes to join as a united front and give back to the community that gives them so much support during their individual seasons.

Oh. It’s not a group made up of Native American students at all. It’s a collection of mostly white female students who call themselves “Indians”, because that’s the school mascot. Yikes. It just gets ickier and ickier the deeper you dig.

*Huh. I went looking, and it seems even that goofy looking king was too much for the school. The old mascot was retired, and now it’s a lion. Has Port Neches & Groves school considered changing theirs, too?

Conspiratorial concepts coalesce in creationism

I’ve mentioned kook magnetism before — the idea that people prone to accept one loony idea are likely to adopt other loony ideas. When we promote one brand of absurd nonsense, we’re opening the door to a whole asylum worth of batshit stupidity to follow. Here’s another example: creationism and QAnon, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

And all of this leads to the fact that – as PRRI polling reveals – 23% of white evangelical Protestants are QAnon believers (other polls have the numbers higher) and 20% of QAnon believers identify themselves as white evangelicals.

Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) sit quite comfortably within the QAnon-loving camp. Not only have they established that to hold a “secular worldview” is to be a pedophile, but they opened Ark Encounter to right-wing conspiratorialist Trey Smith for the filming of The Coming Storm: A Donald J. Trump Documentary. The title of this nearly unwatchable video – the production values are non-existent, and the unwatchability is exacerbated by Smith’s determination to stick his face as close to the camera as possible – gives away the QAnon connection. So does Smith’s assertion that the Antichrist is present in contemporary culture, as evinced by Hollywood culture and the omnipresent ”witchy people” in the background. So does the fact that Smith – speaking just before the 2020 election – echoes QAnon predictions that God commanded that Trump would have two terms as president.

It is not surprising that young Earth creationists would find the QAnon conspiracy persuasive. The folks at AiG are the same folks who find the notion of climate change to be a hoax, as is the idea of the COVID pandemic (and thus, vaccination mandates are oppressive).

It’s conspiracy theories all the way down. Creationism itself is a conspiracy theory: it’s built on the bizarre idea that hundreds of thousands of scientists are all lying and trying to cover up the fact that a few paragraphs in a holy book are in fact the true and accurate and compleat history of the entire universe.

But let’s be fair. AiG unambiguously rejects the flat-earth BS, maybe QAnon is another bit of silly fluff they disavow. Let’s ask them!

AiG’s Bodie Hodge responded to Braterman’s argument in an AiG article, “Fact Checked: No Conspiracy Here (But a Lot of Fallacies There)”, in the process inventing some, well, nonstandard fallacies (e.g., “emotive language fallacy,” “insufficient evidence fallacy”). What is particularly interesting in Hodge’s lengthy and often tedious narrative is that he fails to make the obvious defense that young Earth creationism is nothing like the QAnon conspiracy. In fact, he has not one negative word to say about QAnon . . . just like his boss and father-in-law, Ken Ham. Pretty telling.

No negative word…in fact, no word at all. Ken Ham also commented on the accusation, and like his son-in-law, only brought up the “Q” word in citing the original article by Braterman, Why creationism bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory, and rather than rebutting anything Braterman wrote, instead accuses scientists of being conspiracy theorists, going on and on about Haeckel’s embryos. But coming out and saying QAnon is wrong? Nope. No can do.

That might alienate those white evangelical Protestants who are their bread and butter.

They love their alliteration, with their Seven Cs of History. Go ahead, throw “conspiracy” in there. It fits perfectly. If they like that magic number of 7, I recommend replacing “Consummation,” which ain’t never gonna happen, with “Conspiracy,” which they embrace enthusiastically.

While the mask mandates are going down…

It’s worth looking at the actual evidence that we’re in the midst of an airborne pandemic that targets the respiratory system. Here’s an article in The Lancet on ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. It’s short, but I’ll make it even shorter.

1. superspreading events account for substantial SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
2. long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between people in adjacent rooms but never in each other’s presence has been documented in quarantine hotels.
3. asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from people who are not coughing or sneezing is likely to account for at least a third, and perhaps up to 59%, of all transmission globally.
4. transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is higher indoors than outdoors.
5. nosocomial infections have been documented in health-care organisations, where there have been strict contact-and-droplet precautions and use of personal protective equipment (PPE) designed to protect against droplet but not aerosol exposure.
6. viable SARS-CoV-2 has been detected in the air.
7. SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in air filters and building ducts in hospitals with COVID-19 patients.
8. studies involving infected caged animals that were connected to separately caged uninfected animals via an air duct have shown transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that can be adequately explained only by aerosols.
9. no study to our knowledge has provided strong or consistent evidence to refute the hypothesis of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
10. there is limited evidence to support other dominant routes of transmission—ie, respiratory droplet or fomite.

Vaccines are great and a solid long-term solution to the pandemic, but why are we talking about removing mask mandates again? Shouldn’t we instead be promoting improved ventilation in public schools, for instance? Are our scientifically illiterate leaders only listening to the scientifically illiterate permanently whiny chickenshit contingent instead of scientists now? We seem to be promoting do-nothing approaches that minimize inconvenience to the most selfish, inconsiderate members of society.

They’re indoctrinating school children? How horrible!

It is most peculiar to read an article deploring the use of propaganda in Russian schools. I agree that this practice is sad and dishonest and intended to mislead and miseducate a whole generation…but this is the United States of America.

Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov, openly described schools as central to Moscow’s fight to “win the information and psychological war” against the West. At the same time, Russia has imposed laws against spreading “fake” news or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces — prompting many journalists and activists to leave Russia.

The country’s Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, also ordered media outlets to delete reports using the words “invasion” or “war” and only rely on official government sources, which call the Ukraine war a “special operation.” Russian state TV removed all entertainment shows from its programming, filling the broadcasts with propaganda-filled talk shows and state-vetted news.

On March 3, Kravtsov said more than 5 million children across Russia watched a lesson called “Defenders of Peace.” It’s part of a government-produced series broadcast online in schools or given to teachers in the form of a slide show for mandatory lessons. The series includes other episodes, including “Adult Conversation About the World,” all pushing Putin’s historical revisionist speeches justifying the Ukraine invasion.

I grew up having to recite a pledge of allegiance every morning. There are flags everywhere. Go to a baseball game, and someone is going to sing our awful national anthem, and you better stand up for it. Put your hand over your heart and look reverent, damn it. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Remember the blacklist, when you could lose your livelihood for even once attending a communist party meeting? Remember when a television show featured the Tulsa Massacre, and everyone was saying, “What? That was a real historical event?” We had a few generations grow up with the mythologizing of the westward expansion, cowboys & Indians, and the cowboys were always the good guys who shot ‘redskins’ without remorse. Hey, we’ve still got athletic teams that promote ethnic slurs.

In the 1940s, Bugs Bunny was a propaganda tool, a cartoon rabbit who humiliated little yellow bucktoothed ‘Japs’, while in the real world we herded people of Japanese descent into concentration camps.

Our schools dutifully taught that Columbus was a brave explorer who sailed the oceans blue in 1492, glossing over the fact that he enslaved the people he met, murdered them, chopped off their hands, etc. The American Revolution was a noble effort to bring liberty to the people…except for the ones who had the wrong color of skin. Any effort to counter the white-washed version of history taught in the schools is met with near-hysterical opposition — Google the 1619 Project to see what I mean.

I agree that it is disgraceful that Putin is erasing history and lying to schoolkids, but before you get high and mighty about it, look to your classrooms at home.

Are some people becoming desensitized to the threat of millions dead?

I think so. It’s certainly the case in the US, where people protest the imposition of mask-wearing over the corpses of a million dead Americans, but this is something else. It’s a post from Adam Something, whose work I normally appreciate, but this is insane.

Let’s talk a bit about nuclear war.

As the invasion falters, Putin will be making more and more nuclear threats – the only thing he has left. These will most likely be just that: threats. I doubt him, or the Russian elite is suicidal.

If it came to nuclear war, Russia would essentially be deleted from the face of the planet, while the West would generally survive in some form or another.

A nuclear war right now would not be the end of humanity. Sure, it would suck, and by that I mean a LOT of people dying, at least a billion plus. However, it wouldn’t erase life from the planet.

Our goal must never be the ‘deletion’ of Russia. There are 140+ million Russian people who deserve as much right to survival, and peace and happiness, as everyone else in the world. Incinerating them in a nuclear war is not a desirable result, ever, under any circumstances. That the West would “survive” does not excuse the act, and “survival” has a wide range of meanings. How many of these Western people would die? If one hundred survive, is that a victory?

Humanity not going extinct is an awfully low standard to meet. A “mere” billion dead is not a trivial number, and I think he’s lowballing it. A limited tactical strike on some battlefields, sure, casualties could be limited, but if we trigger a world-wide spasm of major powers targeting the civilian populations of their opponents, that billion is only what dies immediately…then the collapse of civilian infrastructure follows, killing more, and the riots and wars that break out kill even more, and then the world famine destroys yet more.

Consider how most of our media (movies, games, etc) dealing with nuclear war takes place during the cold war, or its fictional continuation. At that point we did have enough nukes to format the planet. However, since then we have decommissioned 80% of our total nuclear arsenal, meaning a nuclear war would be fought with only a fifth of the firepower.

Also, not all our (as in: humanity’s) nukes are ICBMs. Many of them can’ t even be deployed unless you haul it above a city with a plane. Many are “just” warheads sitting in warehouses, and couldn’t immediately be launched. This is especially true to Russia, as they would be deleted long before any of those warheads could be used.

Another thing to consider is how those strikes would be distributed. Russia has to blanket the whole of Europe and US, possibly more, while the West only has to strike Russian strategic targets. This is a guaranteed death sentence for the Russian elite, including Putin. Hence I don’t think he’ll press the button, or even if he tried, he’d end up with a hole in his head.

Yes, we have gradually reduced the size of nuclear arsenals. But one-fifth of overkill is still mass murder.

Also, assassinating Putin and his cronies sounds like the most desirable outcome of such a war…but this is the crudest, clumsiest, ugliest way of achieving that end. It requires killing tens of millions (at the least) ordinary, innocent Russians to stop a handful of criminals.

Then the following is pollyannaish nonsense:

Otherwise radiation from nuclear bombs dissipates very quickly. You know how in Fallout games everything is still radioactive after 200 years? As far as I know that’s bullshit.
48 hours after the strike, the radiation will have already gone down by 99%, and at 72 hours it should be safe to come out. The tricky part is to not be in the blast radius, or at least be in a basement when a strike happens near you. That, or a sturdy enough building, in which case you should stay in the middle, on the lowest floor. Don’t go to upper floors, as fallout will accumulate on the roof.
Food and drink in closed containers that were inside during the strike should be generally safe to consume, so chances are you won’t die of hunger or dehydration.

To sum up, Putin will threaten with nukes, but it’s unlikely he will actually use them. Even if he does though, the world won’t end, plus your chances of survival aren’t bad if the bomb wasn’t dropped directly on you, and you can stick it out in a basement for 3 days.

Pure madness. Just avoid being in the blast radius! You’re safe as long as you stay in the basement! Fallout will only accumulate on the roof! Also on all the acreage dedicated to growing your food, and on all the reservoirs that supply your drinking water. You won’t die of hunger or dehydration right away, that’s true, but how long will the canned food and bottled water in your house last? Haven’t we learned already about how supply chains can be disrupted? This is a survivalist fantasy, and I hate it.

It is true that biology is remarkably resilient, and we won’t get that video game/syfy movie nonsense of monstrous mutants roaming a radioactive wasteland. Even in the best of circumstances, where the victims are an isolated population that can be supported by the remainder of society, you’re going to see a surge in cancer incidence over many years, and even longer term effects on mental health and social interactions. People have studied these things in great detail. You can look up the long-term consequences of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, for instance, and it wasn’t over after 3 days.

This paper examines long-term consequences of one of the most serious catastrophes ever inflicted on humankind: the atomic bombing that occurred in Hiroshima in 1945. While many victims died immediately or within a few years of the bombing, there were many negative effects on survivors in terms of both health and social/economic aspects that could last many years. Of these two life factors, health and social/economic aspects, the latter has largely been ignored by researchers. We investigate possible long-lasting effects using a new dataset covering the middle and older generations in Hiroshima some 60 years after the tragedy. Our empirical results show that Atomic Bomb Survivors did not necessarily suffer unfavorable life experiences in terms of the average marriage status or educational attainment but did experience significant disadvantages some aspects including the husband/wife combination of married couples, work status, mental health, and expectations for the future. Thus, survivors have suffered for many years after the catastrophe itself.

That’s an analysis of the survivors, and doesn’t include the 200,000 dead, obviously. We’re talking decades of suffering from a single relatively small and primitive nuclear bomb.

Don’t downplay the threat and dangers of nuclear war. Keep it up and you’ll find Jim Bakker running advertisements for his food buckets on your YouTube channel.

One other thing I have to mention: my views on this subject are a product of the 1960s-1980s. In particular, a big influence was George Streisinger, who most of you might have heard of for his essential work as a pioneer of zebrafish research. But also, at the same time, he was a major activist working against nuclear war and for disarmament. There was a whole cadre of biologists at that time who started out as physicists during WWII who then switched to genetics and molecular biology; George was a Hungarian Jew who fled that country to escape the Nazis, and studied viral genetics. He would be shocked to learn that some people now regard nuclear war as a minor setback in their goal of exterminating their enemies.

He was one of the good guys. I’ll always be on his side.