“It’s on her left foot!”

The health minister in Queensland, Australia was interrupted when a huntsman was found crawling on her.

Wait, wait, she’s talking about the impact of COVID-19 on her community — the spider is cute and adorable (although we don’t even get a photo of it), but isn’t that a relatively unimportant part of the event to be making the news? If I were there, I’d volunteer to cuddle the spider so she can get on with the important message.

One thing I don’t miss from Salt Lake City

Yikes, there’s something off about the whole story

Really, it’s a lovely place to live, and it’s usually easy to overlook the Mormons. The Salt Lake Tribune is also a good newspaper, except…they have a tendency to soft-pedal Mormon absurdity. Case in point: their coverage of Mormon archaeology. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Mormon religion was founded by a 19th century con artist who wrote this pretentious, long-winded piece of fan fiction about the lost tribes of Israel colonizing North America and creating, out of whole cloth, a pseudo-history of pale-skinned people building cities and fighting wars all across the continent. There’s no evidence for any of this nonsense. But the Salt Lake Tribune reports it as if this is legitimate history and archaeology, and the religious kooks digging around for support for their myths are heroic.

Forget Indiana Jones. Try Iowa John.

Yes, John Lefgren and other supporters of the Heartland Research Group aren’t hunting for the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, but they are searching high and low — in this case, really low — for archaeological evidence supporting the church’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon.

Right now, they’re on a quest to find Zarahemla … in southeastern Iowa.

They’re using light detection and ranging sensors — along with carbon dating, magnetometry and other technological tools — to pinpoint the ancient Nephite capital, which they believe is waiting to be discovered underground just outside of Montrose.

Nope. There were no Nephites. There was no Nephite nation. There was no Zarahemla. Montrose, Iowa happens to be just across the Mississippi from Nauvoo, Illinois, where Joseph Smith and his followers fled to after they were chased out of Missouri — Smith just incorporated anywhere he found himself into his fantasy fictional history. So they’re digging in a random spot and claiming any evidence of human habitation supports the Book of Mormon.

The Heartland Research Group thinks it may have found the site of Zarahemla—a notable city in the Book of Mormon—outside of Montrose, a small southeast Iowa town located on the banks of the Mississippi River.

John Lefgren of the Heartland Research Group said in his faith, Zarahemla would be comparable to Jerusalem for Christians. The exact location of Zarahemla has not been verified, so being able to pinpoint it would be a milestone.

“Iowa is an important place,” Lefgren said. “In the fourth century, Montrose, Iowa, had the largest city in North America.”

According to Lefgren, in its heyday of AD 320, Zarahemla had a population of about 100,000 and it was the largest city in the Americas.

Nope. Nauvoo/Montrose are on the Mississippi, about 200 miles from Cahokia. This was the heartland of the Mound Builders culture, which actually existed, and was thriving at the time the Mormons claim there was an entire Hebrew civilization living in the same place, riding horses and wielding iron swords, somehow replacing the real human beings who lived there. They’re going to misinterpret everything they find.

One method they hope can help verify Zarahemla’s location is by finding fire pits. The group theorizes that with a population of about 100,000, there would be one fire pit for every 10 residents within a mile or so of the city center.

“We’ve gone down into the ground with core sampling to get charcoal/carbon from fires that are 1,700 years old,” Lefgren said. “It’s all serious stuff; all serious stuff right here in Iowa.”

The samples will be sent to the Vilnius Radiocarbon Laboratory in Lithuania for carbon-14 dating to determine the age of the recovered charcoal.

Let’s just pretend there wasn’t a thriving American Indian culture right there 1700 years ago, and that those people cooked their food in their villages along the banks of the Mississippi. They’re going to find ashes and declare victory, they found proof that Joseph Smith’s grand con was true.

And the Mormon newspapers will go along with it.

Hovind gets banned! Hovind rises from the dead! Hovind is still a mindless zombie.

I noticed that Kent Hovind wasn’t posting any videos on YouTube lately — apparently, he’s been banned, for how long I don’t know, but it’s about time. If you’re going to police misinformation on your social media site, Hovind is one of the worst offenders.

Unfortunately, these bannings are just for show and have no teeth to them. For a while, he was getting his videos hosted by Matt Powell (if you don’t know who he is, consider yourself lucky — he’s a young Hovind wanna-be), but now Hovind has created a whole new channel and resumed his cartoonish, ignorant ways. The good news: he has plummeted from having a channel with 190 thousand subscribers and each video getting tens of thousands of views to one where he has fewer than 200 subscribers and his videos get a few hundred views. He’s down in my territory now! Although I suspect he will grow fast as he is rediscovered, at least until he gets banned again.

Sorry, I’m not linking to him, if you must you’ll have to search a bit to find his new, pathetic channel, same as his old, pathetic channel.

He’s still doing his whack-an-atheist schtick, to a much smaller audience, though. His latest target is Emma Thorne, and you will notice…I do link to her. Notice also that he’s still condescendingly stupid, he’s still reciting the same tired cliches (“you believe you came from an amoeba!”), and he’s still totally wrong (no, we didn’t descend from a complex, specialized protist like an amoeba). You don’t need to watch any new Hovind, or Powell, videos — he’s still parroting the same tired lies and jokes he was doing thirty years ago, and he hasn’t learned a thing.

Mark Meadows is an oozing pus-bag of poison

Jesus wept.

Mark Meadows may go down in history as the corrupt political sleazemaster who assisted Trump in his coup attempt (which is still ongoing, unbelievably!), but I remember him as that loon who bought a dinosaur dig site, facilitated the transfer of a valuable Allosaurus skeleton (naming it Ebenezer) to Ken Ham and the Creation “Museum”, and put together a “documentary” about the discovery of the fossil in which he had his own daughter lie on camera and pretend to be the discoverer. It’s pretty damned vile, and just highlights how dishonest and creepy creationists are.

But here’s the icing on the cake: Ken Ham appropriated that fossil and mounted it in his carnival show “museum”, where it’s not even used for scientific research. It’s a prop.

But for all of this, the weirdest part of the story may be that – for all the desperate efforts on the part of creationists to secure this dinosaur skeleton, for all the brouhaha and AiG-hype surrounding “Ebenezer the Allosaurus” – the Creation Museum makes absolutely no use of the skeleton itself to advance the case for a young Earth and a global Flood. Referring to arguably the most relevant placard that accompanies the dinosaur fossil, we note in Righting America that

Given that this placard appears in the room wherein a truly impressive skeleton of a real dinosaur is on display, and given that this placard tells a story that seeks to link that skeleton to the Flood, it is surprising that the placard makes no mention of the skeleton itself. Not one piece of physical evidence from the skeleton is mobilized in any way by this placard. No inferences whatsoever are drawn from the skeleton about Ebenezer on this placard . . . In the end, Ebenezer-the-skeleton appears to make no contribution to an understanding either of his demise or any other creature’s (Righting America 93).

The only evidence provided by the Creation Museum in behalf of the claim that Ebenezer died in a global Flood is the story recounted in Genesis 7:21-23. That’s it.

When it comes to creation science, there is no there, there.

Now Meadows has something else to be infamous for.

The House voted Tuesday night to hold former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack to appear for a deposition.

The vote was 222-208, with GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming voting with all Democrats.

Meadows is now the first former lawmaker ever held in criminal contempt by Congress — and the first held in contempt since 1832 — when former Rep. Sam Houston was held in contempt for beating a colleague with a cane.

What a legacy. These are the charlatans the American people elect to high office.

We weathered that weather just fine

We had a night of howling window-rattling, but that was the worst of it. We dropped from 4°C to -12°C overnight and acquired a thin layer of snow — hard to tell how much because the wind scoured it off of exposed surfaces. We are on the northern edge of the big storm that ripped through the midwest, so we still have power and all that good stuff — Iowa, SE Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan suffered far worse.

So, I selfishly wonder, will my flies arrive safely at the lab today? That’s the real test.

Oh, no…this might be all my fault

I’m sitting here all innocent-like when suddenly all these alerts come streaming across my desktop.

Uh-oh, that’s not good. We’ve got students planning to go home today and tomorrow.

Volatile weather? Never seen here before?

Plummeting temperatures and slippery roads…what could be causing this?

POTENTIALLY HISTORIC HIGH WIND EVENT! Wait, I might be responsible. You see, I ordered a whole bunch of mutant flies earlier, thinking the weather was going to be mild during the middle of the week — I check the weather before ordering these things, because it’s a bit dicey in December, and I’ve received shipments of biological specimens frozen rock solid before. I honestly thought this would be good timing to sidle past the Weather Gods and the Fly Gods. They are expected to arrive…

TOMORROW. <duh-duh-DUUUHHH>

I taunted fate, and this is what I get.

I guess we better batten down the hatches and make sure everything movable is secure — I remember a year when our garbage cans took flight. Everyone be safe. I hope my flies make it.

I’m eager to try out my new toy!

I got a new Christmas present for myself.

If you don’t know what it is, I explain it fully over on Patreon, for the benefit of the supporters who donated money to enable this purchase. I also explain some of my research plans there.

I’m sure some readers here will be able to instantly recognize it — it’s not that exotic — and the rest of you can entertain us all with wrong answers.

At least they made him cry

Look at that smiling white man and his bag of killing tools!

That’s Cleveland Meredith, a right-wing asshole who drove to Washington DC in January to participate in treason and maybe, if he was lucky, get to murder a few Democratic politicians.

In other messages sent the following day – while Pelosi and Bowser were making public remarks about the riot – Meredith texted, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG c***.” Meredith then sent a similar text about Pelosi, saying he was, “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi C****’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”

His defense was to claim he didn’t really mean it.

Meredith addressed the judge near the end of the hearing, saying he’d had “no intention” to act on his messages. He described them as “political hyperbole that was too hyper.” He apologized to Pelosi and to his family and was audibly tearful as he asked to be able to go home.

Right. He just packed up a pistol, a rifle and 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his truck, and drove more than halfway across the country, from Colorado to Washington DC, to commit an act of hyperbole. The judge sentence him to 28 months in prison. I don’t know if that was sufficient, but at least it may have slapped him into a brief awareness of his own madness. Brief. Because then he made the usual excuse:

That’s not who I am, boo hoo. It was exactly who you are. He’s a grown man, 53 years old, and he was blustering misogynistic bullying abuse about murdering people, and he drove off giggling about the prospect.

Matt Ridley’s steady descent into dangerous British loonhood

Matt Ridley is definitely a smart guy, and he also writes well. I enjoyed some of his earlier books, like The Red Queen and Genome, but I became less appreciative as he became more openly libertarian, and espoused a Whiggish view of the world that was only a rationalization for why he was so wealthy and privileged (he’s kind of the British version of Pinker, only worse). He’s the 5th Viscount Ridley, don’t you know, he is to the manor born (Blagdon Hall, Northumberland, specifically), he’s a member of the House of Lords, he endorsed Brexit, he owns coal mines, he used to own a bank, but he ran it into the ground and it was taken away from him and nationalized. On climate change, he’s argued that global warming is going to be a net benefit, increasing rainfall and the growing season, and that human ingenuity will overcome any minor disruptions. He even coauthored a book with Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg and a host of the usual denialist suspects, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, which ought to alarm anyone who wants to think he’s just being objective. I guess that comes of owning coal mines and being an enthusiastic endorser of fracking — when your prosperity is a product of spewing as much fossil carbon into the atmosphere as you can, your very smart brain will work very hard to find excuses.

That doesn’t explain why he’s become such a dedicated proponent of the lab leak “theory” for the origin of COVID-19, though. He’s not an epidemiologist, and it shows, but now he’s authored a book, with a post-doc, Alina Chen, titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Unfortunately for him, it has been dissected by the formidable Lindsay Beyerstein.

The lab leak theory, for the uninitiated, is the notion that the Covid-19 virus that has now devastated the globe is not of purely natural origin but rather escaped from a lab after it was harvested from the wild or engineered by Chinese scientists. It’s not actually a single theory but, rather, a grab bag of possible scenarios by which the virus might have been unleashed on the world—all of them implying some level of shady or incompetent behavior by Chinese scientists. And in trying to take each of these scenarios seriously, Viral’s authors have unintentionally exposed the entire farce of the lab leak discourse—showing both the exceptional flimsiness of the lab leakers’ narrative and also why this very flimsiness makes the lab leak conspiracy theory so hard to eradicate. By relying on an ever-growing arsenal of seemingly suspicious facts, each pointing in a slightly different direction, lab leaker discourse renders itself completely unfalsifiable.

Like I said, Matt Ridley is a smart guy, and he knows he can’t take a strong stance on any idea, whether it’s climate change (he calls himself a “lukewarmer”) or this lab leak nonsense, where he practices a performative neutrality. It’s his evasiveness that reveals his biases — he tries so hard to dodge around his beliefs that the shape of them is recognizable.

The book is structured around a set of themes, which I hesitate to call arguments because the authors decline to argue for anything in particular. (In this sense, the book aligns perfectly with what academics have been saying about conspiracy theories for years: that the theories rely on people poking holes in the official narrative without committing to a single plausible alternative.) First, the authors attach great importance to a mysterious pneumonia outbreak linked to the abandoned Tongguan mineshaft in Mojiang, China, in April 2012, which lab leak theory adherents see as a critical episode in the history of Covid-19, because researchers with the Wuhan Institute of Virology later found the bat virus RaTG13 in that same cave, and RaTG13 was briefly the closest-known wild relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. Second, the authors focus on the purported evidence of “preadaptation” of Covid-19 to human hosts. Finally, they examine gaps in the epidemiological record that purportedly call into question the current scientific consensus that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, following a “spillover” event in which the virus passed from a live animal to a human.

That’s a good tell for recognizing that you’re dealing with a conspiracy theorist — they spend all their time trying to find errors or inconsistencies in good theories, which they can use to claim their unsupported, extremely wobbly, speculative alternative must be the correct answer, an illogic that they never quite grasp. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s exactly what creationists have been doing for decades. Intelligent design creationism, in particular, relies on Ridley’s strategy. They’re not about to give you positive evidence for what they’re claiming, they trust that finding gaps or even errors in modern biology will give their supporters sufficient excuse to lapse into what they’re biases predispose them to believe.

Ridley’s mistake here is that he gave away enough of his own beliefs that holes are being poked in them in turn. There is a heck of a lot of work being done on bat viruses now, which Ridley has no competence to address.

A series of recent discoveries, however, has undermined Viral’s central themes: Newly discovered wild bat viruses from Laos have proven not only more genetically similar to the Covid-19 virus than any previously known to science, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s RaTG13 sequence, but also directly infectious to humans via the same mechanisms that the Covid-19 virus uses to infect human cells. These findings make Viral’s breathless speculation about the Mojiang mine and the origins of RaTG13 completely obsolete. This discovery also suggests that whatever “preadaptation” was needed to make Covid-19 infectious to humans could have happened in the wild over many years of natural selection. The Laos bat preprint was published in mid-September, by which time it may have been too late to address it in the book.

Meanwhile, a reanalysis of early Covid cases published in November in the journal Science has confirmed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the likely site of a zoonotic spillover event. Another paper, which gets a brief discussion in the book, established beyond a reasonable doubt that, contrary to Chinese government denials, live wild-caught animals that could be prime viral vectors were illegally sold at the Huanan market through November 2019—including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and Siberian weasels, all members of the carnivorous mustelid family, which is known to be susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses.

Every time Ridley opens his mouth on the pandemic he exposes his own ignorance. Back in the fall of 2020, Ridley was arguing against basic health measures.

It is counterintuitive but the current spread of Covid may on balance be the least worst thing that could happen now. In the absence of a vaccine, and with no real prospect of eradicating the disease, the virus spreading among younger people, mostly without hitting the vulnerable, is creating immunity that will eventually slow the epidemic. The second wave is real, but it is not like the first. It would be a mistake to tackle it with compulsory lockdowns (even if called ‘circuit breakers’), whether national or local. The cure would be worse than the disease.

If you cannot extinguish an epidemic at the start, the best strategy is for the healthy to get infected first. Lockdowns ensure that the vulnerable and the healthy both get infected with similar probability.

Yeah, similar reduced probability. Ridley endorsed that lump of Libertarian poppycock, the Great Barrington Declaration, a massive bit of misguided stupidity that killed people.

The alternative to lockdown is not ‘letting the virus rip’, as Boris Johnson puts it. The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by over 20,000 doctors and medical scientists (but disgracefully censored by Google’s search engine), calls for focused protection: help the elderly and vulnerable stay at home, but let the young and invulnerable go out and achieve immunity for us all, while earning a living. The extraordinary truth is that a student catching Covid might be saving Granny’s life rather than threatening it.

In support of that claim, he cites the example of Sweden, which refused to enforce any lockdowns. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see what a mistake that was: Sweden has had more cases and deaths than neighboring Scandinavian countries.

Ridley doesn’t have to worry, though. He still has plenty of high profile supporters.

That man just keeps embarrassing himself. I wish he’d stop.