I’m not panicking over the coronavirus

It has the potential to be a serious pandemic, but with a strong medical infrastructure, robust public health response, and a sensible, informed public, we can minimize…wait. What the heck…PANIC! Not over the virus, but over the ongoing dismantling of those very things vital to keep the citizenry as safe as possible.

Trump is making massive cuts in biomedical research.

Multiple organizations expressed shock and disappointment at Trump’s budget proposal, which adds $54 billion in defense spending but would slash nearly $6 billion from the National Institutes of Health, which funds most basic medical research in the country, as well as eliminate entirely dozens of other agencies and programs.

It would cut the overall Health and Human Services department budget by 18 percent, including the 20 percent budget reduction at NIH, and reassign money from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to states.

In response to concerns that we might not have enough doctors if a crisis arises, he has said that we’d just hire more doctors in that case. Doctors are not fungible. They require years of training, and their expertise requires constant maintenance.

Trump seems to think creating a task force and appointing a “czar” is a smart response. We already have experts in infectious disease at the NIH and CDC…you know, those agencies he is defunding. Appointing an ignoramus like Mike Pence, who has no qualification and has a history of botched public health management does not inspire confidence. Nor does having Ken Cuccinelli, Steven Mnuchin, and Larry Kudlow on the task force.

Also, this:

As for our informed public, Corona, the Mexican beer, has taken a substantial hit to their revenues because people are associating it with the virus.

Please note that the beer and the virus have nothing to do with each other.

We’re gonna die.

Fake science is profitable, in some cases

There are many ways that fake science can be promoted: two factors are the profit motive and lazy media. Or are those the same thing? The media has become obliging to industry in part because they also want to make money.

One day at the conference, while six or seven of us were standing in a circle during a break, the conversation shifted to climate change. Because I didn’t know much about the subject, I kept asking the others questions, trying to understand whether the research was any good. A woman who covered the environment for a newspaper out west began laughing, saying that there were about a dozen scientists who said that climate science was nonsense. She kept contact information around for all 12 of them, she told us, because her editors required her to put one of these doubters in every story to provide journalistic “balance.”

Several reporters in the circle giggled. This was my first hint that what I was reading in the media on climate science might be overemphasizing contrarian opinions. Because what everyone in that circle already knew, and I was learning, was that by 2004 thousands of climate experts around the world had published research showing global warming was real, and mostly caused by carbon dioxide pollution from burning oil, coal, and gas.

I’ve noticed that. There are huge numbers of qualified people working at universities around the world who will give you the same strong answer — climate change is real — yet it’s always the same handful of climate “skeptics” who get all the attention. Understanding and accepting the scientific consensus makes you a mundane member of a huge community of informed agreement, disagreeing makes you one in a million, and therefore newsworthy. I’ve joked before that if I wanted to fund my retirement, all I’d have to do is accept Christ in my heart and reject godless evolution, and I’d get daily invitations and honoraria to make my testimony.

But there I’d just be getting bits of cash from little church groups all over the country. If I really want to clean up, I’d have to tap into the oil and gas and coal industry, or maybe Big Tobacco, industries with bigger pockets.

Industries create these campaigns because they are effective at confusing the public and the press about science, which helps to slow or stop policy changes that would require stronger anti-pollution laws, or taking products off the market. Today disinformation has become its own industry, one that distorts not only climate science, but most areas of research where studies might influence how the government regulates corporations.

There’s the catch: I don’t want to be effective at confusing the public. Clarity doesn’t pay when your salary comes from liars, though.

But I have to add that money isn’t the only motive to fake science. Creationists are driven by their religion; anti-vaxxers don’t personally profit, usually, and are doing themselves harm; flat-earthers are fueling their ego with contrarianism. Money helps, though.

My representative is in Cracked

Cracked identified The 5 Most Garbage Democrats In Congress, and I knew upon reading just the title that my rep, Collin Peterson, would be on the list. He is. He’s #2.

It sure seems like the climate crisis has split American politics straight down party lines, with Democrats with the 99% of scientists who’ve declared it a global crisis and Republicans, as always, with the 1%. But whoever believes that hasn’t met Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who would set the world on fire himself if it would get his farmers a warmer harvest season.

Peterson is one of the last members of the “Blue Dog Coalition,” which sounds like a D.C. garage band made up entirely of dudes in Birkenstocks, but is actually a faction of Dems who are fiscally conservative and socially apathetic — the kind of Democrats whom Republicans vote for when they want their bi daughter to show up for Thanksgiving. And never having a progressive thought in his head is exactly how Collins manages to stay in office as a Democrat while representing one of the thickest parts of Minnesota’s Trump-friendly farm belt. In fact, Collins leans more Republican than some Republicans, being one of only three Democrats who voted against impeachment and one of two who put their names under a letter asking the Supreme Court to pretty please reconsider revoking abortion rights.

But Peterson’s blackest mark is a sooty one, as he’s the only establishment Democrat still firmly in the climate denial camp, the kind of guy who doesn’t believe in global warming because “we’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had.” As the House Agriculture Chairman, Collins is constantly pushing green deals onto the back burner (the coal one he leaves running all day), pretending farmers are being victimized by green activists and running a scorched-earth policy on climate legislation. No really, his solution for solving the wildfire crisis is to destroy every inch of wilderness to protect his precious farms.

And if you’re wondering how many bridges Peterson is willing to flood for his constituents, this is a man who helped pass a bill to cut aid for starving Yemeni children so he could get his hands on farming funds quicker. Real salt of the earth, this guy.

At every election I’m told to do the expedient thing and vote for this jerk to empower the other, real Democrats. I’m not going to fall for that line anymore. If Peterson is a Democrat, then the Democratic party stands for nothing.

There’s another atheist organization in the swamp

Here we go again. We have a new gang of atheists with the same old meaningless buzzwords: Atheists for Liberty. It’s for Americans who care about Enlightenment Values, specifically Atheists • Agnostics • Freethinkers • Non-religious • Skeptics • Independents • Conservatives • Libertarians • Classical Liberals • Centrists. I notice there are a few labels missing from their list, like liberals, progressives, and humanists, and that becomes even more obvious when you look at their “principles”, which are basically dogmatic conservative Americanism. Of course they worship Free Speech! But mainly because they hate social justice. Even much of the atheist community which used to pride itself on steadfast free-thinking principles, has fallen victim to the poisonous, emotional forces of Intersectionality, Social Justice, and “Wokeness”.

They never get around to saying what “Enlightenment values” are, but it sounds good. I expect that what they really liked about the Enlightenment was the eurocentrism, the racism, the slavery, and the colonialism. Bring back the 18th century!

The founder bios say a lot, too.

Thomas Sheedy is President and founder of Atheists for Liberty. Sheedy is an entrepreneur from Long Island, New York. He is an undergraduate in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at the University at Albany, where he serves as an Auxiliary Officer for the University at Albany College Republicans. He has appeared on multiple podcasts, blogs, and YouTube video interviews, and has participated extensively in student atheist activism. Sheedy was an Assistant State Director for American Atheists, President of the Long Island Atheists, Event Organizer for Center for Inquiry Long Island, President and founder of the Ward Melville High School Secular Student Alliance, and a member of the Center for Inquiry Student Advisory Committee from Fall 2015 to Summer 2016. Additionally, he is a member of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State‘s Youth Advisory Council. In 2015 he received the Richard and Beverly Hermsen Student Activist Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and was FFRF’s student of the year. He also holds memberships with Turning Point USA at SUNY Albany, Louder With Crowder Mug Club, the National Rifle Association of America, The Ripon Society, and the American Conservation Coalition.

Yikes. American Atheists, FFRF, and Americans United, you disappoint me, coddling this viper in your midst; CFI, I’m not surprised; TPUSA and the NRA, this is exactly the kind of young asshole I expect from you; Louder With Crowder Mug Club, that must be comic relief, right? Crowder is one of the dumbest conservatives on YouTube, and you just pay him money to join that club.

Guess who the advisors to Atheists for Liberty are.

Go ahead, guess.

They’re the usual suspects in the atheist community.

[Read more…]

Mmmmm, samosas…

I’m sitting in my classroom, proctoring an exam over lunch, and I’m hungry. Then I read that that Donald Trump was in India, and his host prepared a special lunch by an award-winning chef of vegetarian Indian food, and ol’ Tubby McDrumpf spurned it all. Didn’t take a bite. I mean, they made samosas for him…and right now I’d kill for a samosa. They made an effort to provide some American-style foods, like apple pie. Nope. I guess his idea of great cuisine involves mass produced gunk that sits under a heat lamp for a while.

It’s embarrassing. I was brought up to think it was simply good manners that if you were a guest, and you were offered food, you would taste it and you would at least try to appear as if you liked it, that it was an insult to reject your host’s offer. Yet there he goes, turning his nose up at vegetarian food.

Although I’m insulted back by this line from the Telegraph.

Mr Trump is infamous for enjoying a classically American diet, featuring cheeseburgers, Diet Coke, well-done steak and ice cream among his favourite dishes.

Trump does not consume a “classically American diet”, and while you could argue that cheeseburgers are a common item, “well-done steak” is a tasteless abomination that True Americans™ do not eat. Many of us do not object to vegetarian food, and I at least appreciate Indian food. Many of us are true polygluttons.

Hey, could one of you swing by the lecture hall with some curry right now?

The Anti-Greta

The right wing authoritarians recently looked around and noticed that they have a girl gap. While the reality-based community has Greta Thunberg, they had nothing — so they cast about desperately, found Naomi Seibt, and the Heartland Institute elevated her to be their Anti-Greta spokesperson. Only they tried a little too hard, and got someone who is the antithesis of Greta in all things.

Where Greta’s consistent message is, “Listen to the scientists”, the Anti-Greta says the scientists are all wrong.

Where Greta is painfully, passionately honest, the Anti-Greta is a carefully groomed liar. Here’s a perfect example of an obvious lie.

The teenager, from Münster in western Germany, claims she is “without an agenda, without an ideology”. But she was pushed into the limelight by leading figures on the German far right and her mother, a lawyer, has represented politicians from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in court.

Seibt had her first essay published by the “anti-Islamisation” blog Philosophia Perennis and was championed by Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, who has been denied entry to the UK and US because of his political activism.

Anybody who claims to be without an agenda or an ideology is lying. That she also supports right-wing bigotry is more evidence that she lies.

Also, the Heartland Institute is paying her, and they are an evil and ethically bankrupt institution. Good grief, they lobby for the tobacco industry and fracking, as well as against climate change. The Anti-Greta is their puppet.

I think I’d rather be on the side of the genuinely good, like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. That’s my agenda, my ideology, and I’m proud to say it.

Don’t you make me vote for Elizabeth Warren, Ann!

My wife has been edging me into the Bernie Sanders camp over the last few months, and I should be listening to her, but Ann Coulter sings a siren song for Warren.


Sen. Warren has convinced me that Bernie isn’t that worrisome. He’ll never get anything done. SHE’S the freak who will show up with 17 idiotic plans every day and keep everyone up until it gets done.

Now I’m confused again. Is she trying to use reverse psychology to steer us away from the candidate she really fears, Sanders, or is she accidentally revealing that she recognizes who the real powerhouse is, Warren?

At least she isn’t trying to trick us into voting for Bloomberg. Mike must have forgotten to send her a check.

Working data from a museum, all yours

It is good news that the Smithsonian is making its archives of millions of images freely available — this is information ought to be in the public domain. Before you start drooling at the prospect of piles of free scientific art that you can use, the implementation is a bit rough. Sure, you can search for images of “spider” in the Smithsonian collection, but you’ll get back is a hodge-podge of imagery, most of which isn’t exactly polished, and the searches are difficult to refine. I mostly got photos of spider wasps, and black and white snapshots of broken, fixed specimens from the museum archives. General terms like “skull” give you a flood of miscellaneous imagery, some of which is neat or historically interesting; try to narrow it down to, for instance, “Neanderthal skull” and you get…nothing.It’s a work in progress, I guess.

It’s an excellent start, though. Just be warned that there isn’t much in the way of curation behind it and a lot of the images look like quick photos to go into a catalog of things that are buried deep in cabinets in the bowels of the museum.

I was quoted in Charisma magazine!

Oooh, the thrill of recognition. I got a whole paragraph, too, not just a one-liner. Here’s my moment in the spotlight:

To be sure, tentacles have lots of “suckers.” The squid’s suckers are even more effective than the octopus’ in capturing prey. P.Z. Myers spells it out on ScienceBlogs.com: “They contain a piston-like structure inside an interior chamber, coupled so that when something tries to pull away from the sucker, it lifts the piston, further decreasing pressure inside and strengthening its grip—like a Chinese finger-trap, the more you struggle, the harder it is to get away.”

Except…REWIND. What’s Charisma saying to lead into that quote?

What I didn’t know was that a sneaky squid spirit would soon start stalking me.

Right about now, you might be scratching your head and asking, with all sincerity—or with all mockery—”What in the world is a squid spirit?” Essentially, it’s a spirit of mind control but its affects go way behind what you would think.

In his classic book, Demon Hit List, Eckhardt lists mind control and defines it this way: Octopus and squid spirits having tentacles; confusion, mental pressure, mental pain, migraine.” Sounds a lot like witchcraft, and I imagine that’s what it actually is. There are many expressions—and many manifestations—of witchcraft.

And what comes immediately after the quote?

Here’s a lesson: We’re not wrestling against flesh and blood. We can’t overcome a squid attack in our flesh. The more we struggle in our flesh, the greater the hold this spirit seems to get on us. The more we get in our heads trying to figure things out, the more ground the squid takes because the squid is attacking our head (our mind).

Squids also have a chameleon persona. Reference.com reveals, “Squid have the largest nervous system in the animal kingdom. They have the ability to change colors because they have translucent skin. The colors come from chromatophores, which are pigment cells that are on the outside of the skin that expand or contract to show colors.”

Spiritually speaking, this chameleon-like characteristic means it can change its behavior or appearance to stay hidden. It’s sneaky! Squids are fast swimmers and some of them can even fly. Again, that’s why you need discernment in any spiritual battle. Internet checklists and articles can be helpful if the Holy Spirit illuminates the truths within them, but we must ultimately wage prophetic warfare if we are going to win the battle.

The ignominy of it all — I am reduced to sciencey-sounding window dressing to add one little tidbit of true facts to a heaping bowl of bullshit. I shall have my revenge. When I’m dead, my incorporeal spirit will command a legion of squid demons, and they will slake their thirst for vengeance on this author’s head.

Or not. There are no floating souls or cephalopod demons, sorry.

Is this the kind of drivel that gets routinely published in Christian magazines?