Blast off!

To the moon, Alice, to the moon!

Look at that. No COVID-19 cases in my county in the summer, and then we all got cocky and slacked off. The Minnesota governor lifted the mask mandate, we had the Stevens County fair (I skipped it), the college students started trickling back, the schools opened, and whooo-eee, look at that spike! 28 cases on Thursday, 48 on Friday, and we’ll have to wait and see the thrilling progression on Monday. Will it continue to rise? Or will the roller coaster start going down? Nobody knows! We don’t even know where the locus of infection is, although rumor has it that in this case it’s due to spread in a local church congregation.

You may recall the conservative church domination of our school board means the public schools here aren’t allowed to insist on masking or vaccinations. How’s that going for you, Stevens County?

I’m pretty sure our local hospital couldn’t cope with 48 serious cases — I hope the majority of the current surge do not require hospitalization — so, to everyone else…do not get sick right now. Be safe. Don’t take any risks. Because if you do, you might find yourself at the bottom of any priorities.

Anti-vaxxers are murdering children

Who kills, again? Fuck every one of these assholes.

They are all aiding and abetting murder by taking up ICU space with diseases that were easily preventable. Look at this example.

What first struck Nathaniel Osborn when he and his wife took their son, Seth, to the emergency room this summer was how packed the waiting room was for a Wednesday at 1 p.m.

The Florida hospital’s emergency room was so crowded there weren’t enough chairs for the family to all sit as they waited. And waited.

Hours passed and 12-year-old Seth’s condition worsened, his body quivering from the pain shooting across his lower belly. Osborn said his wife asked why it was taking so long to be seen. A nurse rolled her eyes and muttered, “COVID.”

Seth was finally diagnosed with appendicitis more than six hours after arriving at Cleveland Clinic Martin Health North Hospital in late July. Around midnight, he was taken by ambulance to a sister hospital about a half-hour away that was better equipped to perform pediatric emergency surgery, his father said.

But by the time the doctor operated in the early morning hours, Seth’s appendix had burst — a potentially fatal complication.

I take that personally. When I was a child, I almost died of appendicitis — the memory of the agony of that event still burns in my memory. I only had to wait 5 minutes after my dad carried me at a run into the hospital (my projectile vomiting probably motivated the staff), but if that thing had ruptured, if modern medicine hadn’t made appendectomies safe and routine, I wouldn’t be here today. I still remember the pain and drifting in and out of consciousness on that short and probably too fast drive to the hospital, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to wait 6 hours for treatment.

Fortunately, in this case there was a relatively happy outcome.

Seth Osborn, the 12-year-old whose appendix burst after a long wait, spent five days and four nights in the hospital as doctors pumped his body full of antibiotics to stave off infection from the rupture. The typical hospitalization for a routine appendectomy is about 24 hours.

The initial hospital bill for the stay came to more than $48,000, Nathaniel Osborn said. Although insurance paid for most of it, he said the family still borrowed against its house to cover the more than $5,000 in out-of-pocket costs so far.

You know, there’s this process called triage, in which you rank the needs of the patients. I would not object if hospitals made a patient’s refusal to obtain a cheap, safe, easily obtainable vaccination part of the triage process. When Seth Osborn shows up in the emergency room, they should have looked at the list of people taking up ICU beds with COVID-19 who had not been vaccinated, and bumped one of them out to make room for the kid. It’s a hard decision, but medical personnel sometimes have to make those painful choices.

Imagine if Seth had died because some selfish asshole had neglected to do the minimally responsible thing, all because some Republican had told him not to.

I quite enjoy a good Sullivan-bashing, but…

Please do tear into Andrew Sullivan. This review of one of his books in The Baffler does a fine job of highlighting his shallow and contradictory thinking. Everything Sullivan does is a mess, and I have no idea how he continues to be published.

Three decades and four hundred pages later he’s still at it. “Transgenderist ideology,” he writes in “The Nature of Sex,” “is indeed a threat to homosexuality, because it is a threat to biological sex as a concept.” “Native Americans had been the first to discover this continent, and, with it, their own sort of American dream—thousands of years before Europeans imagined theirs,” he declares in an essay about the coronavirus pandemic, as if he actually believes the interpolation of a not particularly clever anachronism creates an equivalence between Stone Age nomads wandering into an unpopulated land and the gun-toting, disease-carrying invaders who stole that land from them ten thousand years later. Writing about Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Dominican-born professor of classics who “came to see the white supremacists’ cooptation of the classics as inextricable from the classics themselves,” Sullivan tells readers that Padilla “refuses to ‘praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.’”

This was one of a dozen times my margin note read “Physician, heal thyself.” But there can be no healing when there’s no ability to recognize one’s plight in others, and Sullivan remains resolutely uninterested in any losses but his own. In his mea culpa on the Iraq War, the final note isn’t “the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed.” That was “bad enough,” sure, “but what was done to America—and the meaning of America—was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself.” That’s right, folks: as many as a million people were killed in a pointless war that Andrew Sullivan hawked like a fishwife for no other reason than his need to punish as many Muslims as possible for 9/11, but what’s important to remember is that he feels really bad about it. When I read this, I was reminded of Edmund Wilson’s reaction to Brideshead Revisited: “The last scenes are extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not—painful to say—meant quite seriously.”

But, the author of the review, a gay man, also constantly undercuts himself by sexualizing Sullivan, and the review keeps bring me up short.

The subsequent twenty-five years have proven Sullivan a dependable shill for reactionary causes célèbres, whether it’s defending racism and sexism in the name of “science” (“It may be no accident that testosterone-soaked ghettos foster both high levels of crime and high levels of illegitimacy”), opposing hate-crime laws on the grounds that calling someone a “gook” or “n*gg*r” “allows natural tensions to express themselves incrementally,” or undercutting radical LGBTQ activism by insisting that only a $35 marriage license provides “a sense of normality, of human potential, of self-worth—something that my generation never had and that previous generations would have found unimaginable.”

But that was still a few years off. At the time I was less interested in a bangers-and-mash Roy Cohn than in whether or not Maer and Andrew had fucked. I hope they did. No, really, I do. At least then there’d be something about Sullivan I could take pleasure in, if only vicariously.

If a book reviewer were a heterosexual man who kept bringing up his fantasies about the sex life of the female author of the book, would we be fine with that? Sullivan’s sexuality is an OK topic to discuss since Sullivan brings it up all the time, but please, don’t make it about your sexual interests, reviewer. Do discuss Sullivan’s hypocrisy on the subject. I do like that he quotes Sullivan’s own words at length, which is the best way to expose a fool.

I suspect that the way Sullivan continues to be published is by being such an obnoxious contrarian that his fellow obnoxious contrarians think they’re being clever by putting his ideas out there — not because they’re good, but because they are so wildly wrong. That’s why Maher continues to bring him on as a guest, because he’s not favoring ideas, he just wants noise.

I’m convinced: death to Facebook

One of Facebook’s very own internal reports on the state of Facebook has seen the light of day, and it is revolting.

Its revelations include:

  • As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election.
  • Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.
  • The troll farm pages also combined to form:
    • the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
    • the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
    • the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
    • the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
  • Troll farms primarily affect the US but also target the UK, Australia, India, and Central and South American countries.
  • Facebook has conducted multiple studies confirming that content more likely to receive user engagement (likes, comments, and shares) is more likely of a type known to be bad. Still, the company has continued to rank content in user’s newsfeeds according to what will receive the highest engagement.
  • Facebook forbids pages from posting content merely copied and pasted from other parts of the platform but does not enforce the policy against known bad actors. This makes it easy for foreign actors who do not speak the local language to post entirely copied content and still reach a massive audience. At one point, as many as 40% of page views on US pages went to those featuring primarily unoriginal content or material of limited originality.
  • Troll farms previously made their way into Facebook’s Instant Articles and Ad Breaks partnership programs, which are designed to help news organizations and other publishers monetize their articles and videos. At one point, thanks to a lack of basic quality checks, as many as 60% of Instant Article reads were going to content that had been plagiarized from elsewhere. This made it easy for troll farms to mix in unnoticed, and even receive payments from Facebook.

Troll farms. It’s all troll farms, as far as you can see. This service I signed up for to keep in touch with family has instead become a service for Eastern European assholes to keep in touch with me.

Although, I guess things do change. If Facebook had stayed true to its original purpose, we’d be using it to track hot girls on campus. The legitimate social functions were just a passing phase in Facebook’s process of becoming whatever the hell it is now.

I’ll be posting my announcement that I’m leaving Facebook right now, and let it sit there for a few days…and then I’ll nuke my account during my Sunday livestream. That’ll be fun.

What are the grifters doing today?

It’s enlightening and amusing to see what the kooks are up to. They live in a world where every stupid idea that tumbles in the arid desert between their ears will find an audience.

  • The Qux. Some ex-Info-Wars reporter has figured out how to get rich: she has “invented” a mysterious electronic gadget called a Qux that she has crowdfunded to the tune of $170,000, and which she’ll sell for $150 a pop. Supposedly, it’s going to filter out the bad left-wing propaganda or vibrations or something from your TV set.

    Except that what it seems to be is some kind of cheap knock-off of a Roku box, and the port layout looks exactly like a generic Linux TV box that sells for $15-$30. It’s going to take you to the future, though!
    They do know their audience, though. They’ll buy it.

  • Purebloods. The super-geniuses of anti-vax are rebranding. They don’t want to be called “unvaccinated” anymore: instead, they are Purebloods. Yeah, they consciously stole it from the Harry Potter books, which, apparently, they didn’t read very closely because the Purebloods were the Nazi-like bad guys.
    Now, of course, they’re coming out with “Pureblood” merch, because it isn’t right-wing stupidity if you don’t make money off of it.

    Makes you wonder what JK Rowling would think of it. She might actually approve.

I do enjoy a good evolutionary psychology take-down in the morning

I read a brilliant review of what may be a brilliant book (I’ll have to read it to find out), Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature” by David Buller. He dismantles a ubiquitous myth among evolutionary psychologists: the idea that women crave wealthy, high-status men, that they’re using a peculiar kind of capitalist economic reasoning when they make significant life-choices about marriage and pregnancy. This appeals to certain kinds of people — incels and “alpha” males and MRAs — who love the idea of the “sexual marketplace” and the notion that with great profit comes great desirability, and the corollary that hey, if you’ve got a girlfriend, you must be a superior Chad.

The evidence, say the evolutionary psychologists like David Buss, is that if you look at polygamous societies where women’s mate choice is freed from at least one artificial constraint, that men can marry as many women as want them, they all come flocking to the highest status males, and high status males have the most offspring. The existence of harems is proof that status is what women are all seeking, and that men with harems are sexually desirable.

(I’ll give you a moment to see the obvious flaw in the reasoning before you read the book’s explanation.)

He criticizes the methodology of David Buss and confirms what I suspected but hadn’t yet researched – that David Buss ignores cultural restrictions on female choice of mates. As Buller says:

…in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that “high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women,” and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 “Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind”).

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males “traded” in women. This isn’t evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn’t evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

The fact that Buss can’t be bothered to account for virtual female slavery when proclaiming female choice is typical of the Evolutionary Psychologist approach. Their belief in the power of biology to control human behavior is so reflexive that they can’t be bothered to consider even the most glaringly obvious cultural factors impacting their claims.

It’s so typical of evolutionary psychologists that they would overlook trivial details like sexual slavery that might interfere with their thesis.

My true and honest feelings about the death of Bob Enyart

A decade ago I briefly tangled with Bob Enyart and his pal Fred Williams. They had a show called Real Science Radio where they preached nonsense about creationism — there’s no real science anywhere in it — where they constantly claimed to have disproven evolution and threw debate challenges at every nobody (like me) that they stumbled across. Even then, I was disgusted with creationist debates and wasn’t going to get into it with a kook like Enyart. He sent me a challenge anyway, to explain how a little connective tissue loop in the eye socket called the trochlea evolved. I answered honestly.

I don’t know.

I don’t see any obvious obstacle to an arrangement of muscles evolving, but I don’t know the details of this particular set.

I explained why. We don’t have any intermediate forms for this tendon, so any thing I might suggest would be pure speculation, although I really don’t see anything unevolvable about the feature. I should have added that an interesting approach to answer it would involve tracking its development in some model vertebrate, such as a zebrafish, but I knew that would be a difficult job, given that it had to develop at something like 10-16 hours post-fertilization, not a task I would want to jump into. This is a solvable problem, even if it hasn’t been solved yet, and we won’t get an answer by prayin’ on it.

As you might have predicted, slimy ol’ Enyart declared victory, because of course he did. To a creationist, saying “I don’t know” is the same as saying “God done did it”.

Well, now Fred Williams has announced that Enyart is dead.

It comes with an extremely heavy heart that my close friend and co-host of Real Science Radio has lost his battle with Covid. Bob Enyart was one of the smartest, and without question the wisest person I’ve known. All the while being exceedingly kind and humble, and always, always willing to listen and discuss anything you wanted. It was an honor beyond measure to have been alongside him for 15 years and over 750 science shows. I always marveled how Bob put up with me all those years together. 🙂 When we pre-recorded a show and he asked me to do a retake, I’m convinced that many times he would on purpose follow it with one of his own retakes just to make me feel better. The number of lives he touched is immeasurable and I’m sure Jesus has an extra special place for him in heaven. ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’.
I was with Bob at his last public appearance in mid August in San Antonio Texas for an ex-JW conference. What an incredible honor and great time we had! I fondly reflect on my journey with Bob, from watching his eye-opening TV show in the 90s, to meeting Bob at St John’s church for an Age of the Earth debate (RSR sells that debate and the old earth group doesn’t, in case you are wondering who won), to Bob asking me to join him in doing Real Science Radio, then 15 years of weekly radio shows, culminating in the conference in San Antonio. In between we had many lunches and dinners together, some Nuggets games tossed in, and so many other good times and fond memories. I also really loved Bob’s sense of humor! As an example, the theme of our presentation at the ex-JW conference was “dinosaur blood”, perhaps the greatest discovery of the century that destroys millions of years. During Q&A, Bob responded to a question and asked “what two words do you say when someone says the Earth is billions of years old?”. No one answered, including myself, so Bob turned to me and said “Fred, you’re fired!” (you can see this at 1:12:50 here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=4518764224820454&ref=watch_permalink).
Heaven’s gain has left an enormous hole here on earth. Bob’s enduring legacy will live on with the treasure trove he leaves behind, including an amazing website which many have recognized as the best online resource of science confirming the Genesis record, his captivating Bible study MP3s, science DVDs, YouTube videos, etc.
I miss my best friend and mentor. Please especially pray for Bob’s family.

It’s good that he admits that it was COVID-19 that killed him, but he doesn’t mention that part of their real science show, and a view held by the wisest person Williams knew, was actively, fanatically anti-vaccination and COVID-denialism from a guy who also taunted AIDS victims.

So Bob Enyart is dead. Fuck that guy.