The October surprise!

It’s here! Rudy Giuliani has it. Hunter Biden, who is not running for office, is claimed to have left incriminating evidence of terrible crimes on a hard drive.

“The process was that the laptop was left by Hunter Biden, in an inebriated, heavily inebriated state with the merchant,” Giuliani told conservative radio host David Webb of SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Thursday. “The merchant fixed the laptop, tried to reach out to Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden never came back for it. The document that I have signed by Hunter Biden says that after 90 days, the hard drive is abandoned, and becomes the property of the merchant.”

The shop owner told the New York Post that he had given a copy of the computer’s hard drive to Giuliani, who later provided a copy of the drive to the tabloid earlier in October. The New York Post subsequently published some of the contents in the hard drive on Wednesday, including an email that spoke of potentially setting up a meeting between a senior official from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, where he sat on the board, and his father, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Uh, OK. So Hunter Biden got drunk, left a broken laptop at a repair shop, and forgot about it, so the repair shop owner gets possession and passes it on to the always credible Giuliani, who sits on it for 6 months and is now trickling out little bits info while promising that the remainder proves that Hunter Biden is owned by China.

Weak sauce.

A better surprise is that Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, has repudiated her father’s politics.

If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with “yes-men” and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway).

What inspires me most about Vice President Biden is that he is not afraid to surround himself with people who disagree with him. Choosing Senator Harris, who challenged him in the primary, speaks volumes about what an inclusive president he will be. Biden is willing to incorporate the views of progressive-movement leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on issues like universal health care, student debt relief, prison reform, and police reform. And he is capable of reaching across the aisle to find moments of bipartisanship. The very notion of “bipartisanship” may seem painfully ludicrous right now, but we need a path out of impenetrable gridlock and vicious sniping. In Joe Biden, we’ll have a leader who prioritizes common ground and civility over alienation, bullying, and scorched-earth tactics.

Do people still listen to Giuliani? He’s terrible.

Adam Savage on hearing loss

He gives a good answer to a common question.

My hearing is fine, thank you very much, except for an obnoxious tinnitus that isn’t yet affecting my life much. My wife, however, is losing her hearing in an unusual way, with the lower registers progressively dropping out (usually it’s the other way around, losing the higher frequencies first). Savage mentions the high cost of hearing aids, and we have some experience with that — there’s a reason for it. Modern hearing aids aren’t just amplifiers that make all sounds louder, they have to be more sophisticated than that. For instance, my wife has an app on her phone that lets her tweak the amplification, it’s like a built-in equalizer so she can boost the volume at specifically the frequencies that are affected. The technology is cool, but Savage is right — it’s also awkward and clumsy and expensive.

At least her condition means my voice is becoming gradually more inaudible, while she can hear the grandkids just fine, which is probably for the best. It still ought to be a right for everyone to have this kind of necessary support. You never know, maybe someday I’ll say something worth listening to!

Evil Cat adresssssesss you. Obey.

We have mice in our house. It’s a perennial problem: as the outside temperature drops towards freezing and lower, the mice, being not stupid at all, gravitate towards those big roomy wooden boxes that radiate heat, and as a bonus, contain food. Every fall we get this migration inwards, and I end up setting up traps everywhere around the house. Little do the mice know, though, that in our house, they also face a demonic force…our cat.

It’s not that our cat is an efficient mouser. No, our evil cat is a bumbling incompetent who rarely kills a mouse. Instead, she thinks mice are a wonderful new toy.

So I’m awakened at 2am, 3am, 4am by the sound of this klutz of a cat bouncing about and knocking over random objects. I got up and turned on the lights to witness the barbaric spectacle. Some poor mouse had been battered and stunned and was reduced to scurrying around in circles in the middle of the floor while the evil cat pounced and leapt up and down, and when the mouse broke the circle of torture, she’d chase it down and bat it back into the killing ground. Except, no killing. She’s got needle sharp claws and nasty teeth, but she didn’t use the more deadly weapons, preferring to keep the game going with blunt pummeling and terror and cruelty. This is what I live with.

I struggled just to get a little sleep in between the bouts of bumping and clattering and gleeful meowing. I might have been a punchy, because I swear she got into the bed and wormed her way up to my ear and hissed at me with fishy cat breath.

“Thisss iss my houssse. I posssesssss you. Sssuffer, fool, ssserve me, I will taunt you for my pleasure.”

“Now to busssinesss. I sseee there are only four cans of Fancy Feast on the ssshelf.”

“I must have more. Your poverty embarrassssessss me. When you awaken, you mussst tout your Patreon account and your fundraiser. I am disgusssted that you have pitiffuly permitted a SSSSSLAPP sssuit to diminissshh the ressssources that should be dedicated to ME. End it. End it NEEOW.”

I must obey. I am exhausted today. I cannot resist. Obey the cat. Save me.

“smashing you in the face with a gourd full of spiders”

Why do you have to ruin this pitch-perfect rant about the election by dissing spiders, Cody? That one line hurt, you know.

The rest, though, is spot on. Biden sucks, but we’ve got to vote for him.

I won’t be able to watch the election returns on 3 November. Because of the electoral college, and the corruption, and the rat-fucking Republicans, and the poisoning of the courts with unqualified evil jerks, I don’t have that much confidence that Trump will be thrown out of office.

Synergy!

Earlier, I mentioned that crappy creationist article by Thorvaldsen. Then I learn that Jason Rosenhouse did a phenomenally thorough job dismantling that paper. Really, go read it. It’s fun.

Before that, I was talking about how robust moderation is necessary lest your site be overrun with bad faith commenters. Look at the comments on Jason’s article. Hoo boy, there is a parade of idiots there, which the moderators deal with on a case-by-case basis. Clowns like atheistoclast, Byers, and Otangelo Grasso are regulars over there, and all they do is spew arrogant, stupid noise (which I now dub with the portmanteau “Indignorance”) and add nothing to the discussion.

I guess I should just sit back and let the Panda’s Thumb demonstrate everything.

Her power rises at Halloween — help us control the beast

Halloween is only two weeks away. Aren’t you excited?

Oh boy. Trick or treating…oops, no, cancelled. Wild costume parties…scratch that. Dancing naked in the moonlight with your coven…have they been tested? Long walks in the cemetery after dark to watch the bats? OK, you can probably still do that. Otherwise, all the social events are a bad idea.

Another thing you can do, though, is join us in Halloween fundraiser. It’s mostly safe.

You’ll also save a lot of money that you would have otherwise spent on candy, costumes, witch’s salve, broomstick enchantments, etc., etc. You can donate it to us, instead! All the money will go directly to pay off our legal debts, but indirectly it’ll reduce our anxiety and free up our incomes a little bit so we can buy cat food to appease the evil demons that live in our homes with us.

She’s watching you, you know, and I’m the guardian who prevents her from being unleashed on your world.

How can you tell when a creationist is making stuff up?

I read this paper, “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems”, a while back, and it was obvious crap. You can tell right there in the abstract where it makes a promise it does not deliver on, that “molecular fine-tuning…challenges conventional Darwinian thinking”. It then goes on to make a statistical argument that the probability of producing a functional protein with chance and selection is infinitesimal, that the waiting time problem is a killer for Darwinian mechanisms (it isn’t), and cites Behe extensively. The authors, Thorvaldsen and Hössjer, might as well have fired off a flare that exploded in flaming glitter letters that spelled out “I AM A CREATIONIST”, followed by Thorvaldsen doing a happy dance because he got his garbage published in a legitimate journal.

Now the journal has published an apology (not a retraction, an apology — it’s weird).

The Journal of Theoretical Biology and its co-Chief Editors do not endorse in any way the ideology of nor reasoning behind the concept of intelligent design. Since the publication of the paper it has now become evident that the authors are connected to a creationist group (although their addresses are given on the paper as departments in bona fide universities). We were unaware of this fact while the paper was being reviewed. Moreover, the keywords “intelligent design” were added by the authors after the review process during the proofing stage and we were unaware of this action by the authors. We have removed these from the online version of this paper. We believe that intelligent design is not in any way a suitable topic for the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Hold on there, cowboy. Your reviewers and editors were unable to figure out that this was a creationist/intelligent design paper except that the authors added the keywords “intelligent design” post review? And you think removing the keywords now is sufficient action? If “intelligent design” is not a suitable topic, why is the paper still there with only the most superficial change?

I am not impressed with the perspicacity of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, and suspect that whoever wrote that strange disendorsement is lying.

I worry about Mad Philosophers doing Mad Experiments

We’re all familiar with the Mad Scientist trope. You know, demented but highly intelligent guy pursues insane and obviously dangerous goal of, for instance, breeding giant spiders with which to take over the world, and no one thinks to ask why such a smart guy would think 20 foot tall arachnids would grant him geopolitical domination and power even as his experimental subjects devour him and a band of local villagers armed with flamethrowers torch his work, the end (or is it?). At least you get a little spectacle out of it all, even if the story makes no sense and any sensible person would see the flaws in the plan*.

But what would a Mad Philosopher do? Those people are really dangerous, as the people of Athens realized over 2400 years ago. They play games with people’s heads.

So Aaron Rabinowitz, classic Mad Philosopher type, did a little experiment. He created a private Facebook group, only accessible by invitation or submarine, filled it with lefties and then intentionally invited right-wing goblins to join in, too. He called it Monster Island and said it was an experiment in free speech. Yeah, right. And when I open a jar of angry wasps at a picnic, it’s just an experiment in human agility and speed.

As the resident mad scientist, I saw Monster Island as more than just a containment system for some of the worst people I’ve ever experienced: it was a place to experiment on those monsters, myself included. I wanted to study if it was possible for people from radically different worldviews to debate in an environment that had informal guidelines but no officially enforced rules. It was already clear in 2016 that the regulation of online speech was going to be a rolling disaster, producing an endless stream of rage against the moderators, who were invariably cast as biased against the right. Donald Trump himself has claimed that sites like Twitter and Facebook discriminate against right wing speech. Respectable experts have raised concerns about the lack of oversight for algorithmic moderation. Our failures to address this problem proactively seem to promote a desire in some to return to a “golden age” of the internet, before things got so big that moderation of speech on an epic scale became necessary. I had my doubts that less moderation was really the solution to our problems, and Monster Island presented a perfect chance to test my theories.

Ha ha ha. No. I could predict exactly how this would turn out: in flames and destruction. It did, and worse.

Almost immediately we had to add the guideline “no deleting” as individuals started to delete sections of posts to mess with arguments or cover spots where they’d messed up. I call it a guideline because at this point we hadn’t had to actively enforce anything beyond stating the norms. What became clear though was that even the existence of those unenforced guidelines was an affront to some monsters’ sensibilities, and so they set to work testing the fences for weaknesses. They used all the typical troll techniques. Do things that are very close to breaking the guidelines and then force everyone to argue over whether they count. Look for other horrible things they could do that weren’t technically in violation of any guidelines, just to see if it would force us to develop new guidelines in response. It was always a losing battle, because there is a fundamental asymmetry between order and chaos, and chaos always has the advantage in tempo. One troll named Ryan Balch, whose name I have not changed, for reasons that will become apparent, openly declared his intentions to destroy Monster Island, just to prove he could. Several trolls joined his cause.

The result was several years of the purest banality of evil. We ended up needing to add rules against doxxing, blocking admins, explicit threats of physical violence, and taking photos from people’s personal profiles and photoshopping them into sex acts with military dictators. Meanwhile, the quality of discourse deteriorated from semi-functional, where some folks could have actual arguments or at least do a dance that looked vaguely like presenting evidence, to endless spam of the most disturbing memes you’ve thankfully never seen.

He kept his experiment going for four years. That takes either a level of patience or of masochism to a degree beyond the scope of my imagination. I’ve been running my own Monster Island (it’s a blog called Pharyngula) for almost 20 years, and the only way I’ve been able to cope is with ruthless moderation, keeping the nasties on edge by viciously banning them when they start typing their vileness. Just picture the chaos if I did the opposite, seeding the comment threads by actively inviting creationists, TERFs, racists, and Republicans (oops, repeated myself) to participate. It would be lively, I guess, in the same way that the sack of Rome was an interactive event with an extraordinary degree of audience participation. This was the same kind of thing that happens when you give Libertarians free rein. Someone is going to be eaten by bears.

There was a predictable conclusion to the Rabinowitz Experiment.

By year three it became clear that I’d gotten all the results I was going to get from this experiment, and the toxicity of the island was consuming more and more of my time and life-force, so about a year ago I gave up and swam for shore. Many would say it’s absurd I stuck with it that long, others would call me the worst monster of all for letting the experiment go on as long as I had, and they’re all probably correct. Some of the members seemed to still enjoy the group though, so I passed control over to Peter, set sail, and never looked back. I felt comfortable concluding that unmoderated discourse faces a tragedy of the commons no different than any other unregulated communal resource. There are places online where people who strongly disagree, up to a point, can engage productively. What those groups have in common is substantial rules and heavy moderator enforcement.

There was also a Surprise Twist Ending. Like any good horror story, you may destroy the Island, but the Monsters escape and turn up in the sequel.

It’s hard to believe that a person from a Facebook group with fewer than 400 members ended up directly connected to vigilante violence against protesters. When we saw the news, Peter and I decided it was finally time, and Monster Island sank back into the internet ocean. I’m happy to see it gone, but I’m haunted by the dark irony that Ryan Balch ultimately made good on all his promises. He got out in the streets, and in doing so he destroyed Monster Island.

Go ahead, look up Ryan Balch. He turned up in the news involved in real world bloody violence.

You also get some curious cross-fertilization of bad ideas. They interbreed and recombine and you get strange new monsters that infest the world.

James Lindsay from New Discourses shared this a tweet from Christopher Rufo, a director at the creationist think tank the Discovery Institute

I’m sorry, Aaron. The Mad Scientists’ Union may have to show up at your door with torches and pitchforks, a cup of hemlock, or a trolley. Nothing personal. It’s just that your experiments are terrifying.

*As we all know, breeding small, prolific, fast spiders with aggressive temperaments and gloriously potent venom that you can smuggle onto Air Force One, the Supreme Court, and the floor of the Senate would be far more effective. Bwahahahahaha!

Don’t be fooled by the Barrington Declaration

Even as COVID-19 infection rates are rising, there are people out there lobbying for decreased diligence. Open all the businesses! Party on! If everyone gets the disease, we’ll acquire herd immunity! That latter is from people who previously pooh-poohed the concept in order to defend anti-vaxxers, who now don’t give a damn if a few million people die in order to reach the unreachable goal. Worst of all, the right-wing think tanks are backing the nonsense. A small group of conservative shills have formulated something they call the Barrington Declaration.

The declaration, which calls for an immediate resumption of “life as normal” for everyone except the “vulnerable”, is written by three science professors from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, giving it the sheen of academic respectability. But there is much to set alarm bells ringing. It makes claims about herd immunity – the idea that letting the virus rip among less vulnerable groups will allow a degree of population-level immunity to build up which will eventually protect the more vulnerable – that are unsupported by existing scientific evidence. The professors do not define who is “vulnerable”, nor do they set out a workable plan for shielding them. The declaration sets itself up against a straw proposal that nobody is arguing for – a full-scale national lockdown until a vaccine is made available. There is no acknowledgement of the massive scientific uncertainty that exists with a new disease.

It’s coming out of an organization called the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which, as you might guess from the name, is not a medical or scientific institution, but one focused on making money for its sponsors or throwing out noise to prevent sensible initiatives that might save lives, but reduce profits. It’s fake.

The statement claims to have been signed by more than 6,000 medical scientists, but anyone can sign up claiming to be one (there are a number of fake medical signatories on the list, including a Dr Harold Shipman). When Sky News pressed one of the co-authors on this, he said: “We do not have the resources to audit each signature.” Consider what this approach would mean for scientific endeavour were it applied more broadly. And what are scientists doing fronting a campaign whose back office is run by a thinktank that flirts with climate change denial?

(The Shipman name is fake, I hope, since Dr Harold Shipman was a serial killer who committed suicide.)

This phony declaration business is a familiar tactic used by cranks, quacks, and profiteers, and I’ve run into it many times. There are a lot of gullible people who fall for it, though — false authority is a useful tool to sway the suckers, I guess. But today I first learned that there is a handy, succinct name for it from David Gorski.

I’ll discuss why that’s the case in a moment, but first I’d like to take a trip down memory lane to revisit various examples of science denialists using similar “declarations,” “petitions,” and “open letters” to give the false appearance of strong scientific support for their positions. Why? Because declarations like this, although they can be used for good (such as when US climate scientists recently signed an open letter to Congress reaffirming the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change and the overall warming of the climate), more frequently such letters are propaganda for pseudoscience. Indeed, such “declarations,” “open letters,” and “petitions” signed by physicians and scientists represent a technique that goes back at least to the tobacco companies lining up lists of doctors to testify to the safety of cigarettes. (One particularly ludicrous example from R.J. Reynolds in the 1940s claimed that 113,597 doctors preferred their cigarettes.) The idea was (and is) to give the false impression of a scientific controversy where none exists and to appeal to the authority of scientists and doctors to support their claims. It’s a technique that John Cook has referred to as the “magnified minority”:

Nice, “magnified minority”. I’ll remember that.

As usual, Gorski is thorough in describing past “magnified minority” operations, and documents the phony signatures on this one, as well as the absurdity of their proposal and AIER’s shady history as a climate change denialist outfit funded by the Koch brothers. Really, why anyone listens to anything by them is beyond me at this point: “funded by the Koch brothers” ought to be the kiss of death for any organization.