Home at last

Well, that was unpleasant. I caught a red-eye from SeaTac at about 1am last night — cranky already. I had a seat mate who had to keep getting up, so I didn’t get much sleep on the plane — crankier. Then I had my usual 3 hour drive from the airport to home, in this unpleasantly humid Minnesota weather — crankiest.

When I finally got home, I went to the office to pick up my mail backlog. I was sent a new book to review, one of those atheist books about morality and purpose which I would have thought has been done to death, but OK, I’ll take a look and see, maybe it’s new and inspiring. But then, blazoned on the cover, I saw…”Foreword by Michael Shermer”. Jesus fuck. People still go to that rapey guy for recommendations on morality? It’s like seeing a cookbook on cooking with subtlety and finesse, “Foreword by Guy Fieri”. Nope nope nope nope. I tossed that book straight in the trash.

Maximus crankiestiest.

Another science conference, another old white man getting honored

Unpleasant stuff is trickling out of the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

Just because you study scaleys and slimies doesn’t mean you have to be slimy yourself.

The story has already made the news.

Adam Summers, an ichthyologist in attendance, wrote on Twitter: “Herp League decided the most distinguished herpetologist they could find was Dick Vogt. His talk included scantily clad female students. Blue box cover ups were added without Vogt’s knowledge.”

Showing scandalous slides, she said, “is something he’s been doing for 20 years. … There’s a big difference between what he does and just (pictures of) students in normal field garb.”

So the guy is notorious for doing this, he’s been doing it for decades, and women have been avoiding him…and yet the society still goes ahead and gives him an award.

Latest word: the award has been rescinded.

They dream of becoming the thought police

I watched scattered bits of the Strzok grilling yesterday (if you weren’t paying attention, Wonkette has the most interesting interpretation/”transcript” of the day). The one thing that struck me was how all the Republicans were hammering on one point: Strzok had his own opinions of Trump, and that his presence in any investigation means they were biased and unfair. It reminded of how the media goes flocking to “undecided voters” in every election, as if ignorance and vacillation and equivocation are some kind of ideal state of mind. As Strzok pointed out over and over, what matters is how he acts; does he act objectively, does he work with others who have different biases to reach a consensus? You are not going to find any intelligent person whose mind is devoid of opinions.

But there the Republicans sat, insisting that everyone who participates in any difficult analysis is not allowed to have any kind of independent perspective. There seems to be a total lack of understanding that everyone has biases, including goddamned Republicans, and that we have mechanisms to try and overcome them. But no, they want mindless lackeys doing all the work for them (which does, I admit, tend to give Republicans an edge in working for the government).

What we really have to worry about, though, is more mind-reading dentists running for congress.

I had no idea dental schools were a predecessor to the Psi Corps.

Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya has been arrested

But he’s such a holy man!

The guy who authored that genuinely bizarre creationist text, The Atlas of Creation, and who ran a weird television program featuring heavily made-up “kittens” robotically endorsing young earth creationism, seems to have fallen spectacularly in a bust by the Turkish government. Singing the praises of the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, doesn’t seem to have helped him.

Notorious Muslim televangelist Adnan Oktar, known for leading a cultish group, was arrested by Turkish police in Istanbul on Friday over a number of serious charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.

Police said they are conducting a widescale operation led by the financial services department spanning five Turkish provinces. Authorities are looking to detain 235 of Oktar’s followers, and police said they had detained around 150 so far.

It’s clearly not just the arrest of a single man, but a huge crackdown on the entire cult. I have no sympathy for Oktar and his perversity and foolish ideas, but I also don’t much care for tyrannies and totalitarian police states. He’s a crook and a fraud — fine, arrest him for financial improprieties. He’s running a sex cult — pick him up for human trafficking and assault. I’m not too keen on arresting him for violating religious purity.

Following the court ruling, the head of Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs, Ali Erbas, criticised his TV show.

“There are certain religious references [on his TV show] and he makes belly dancers dance. Is such a thing possible? He has most likely lost his mental balance. He now says he is a freemason but he was punished previously for his remarks about freemasonry,” Erbas said.

“He was also jailed for insulting [founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kamal] Ataturk in the 1980s and 1990s, But now he speaks of himself as the greatest Kemalist. He’s a corrupted person.

“It is not right to watch a TV channel like his,” Erbas added.

You know, it’s not as if they lacked sufficient grounds to charge him on serious crimes without arresting him for featuring belly dancers.

Other charges Oktar faces are sexual intercourse with minors, kidnapping children, sexual harassment, blackmailing, holding people captive, menace, political and military espionage, fraud by exploiting religious feelings and beliefs, money laundering, violation of privacy, forgery of official documents, opposition to anti-terror law, coercion, slander, alienating citizens from mandatory military service, insulting, false incrimination, perjury, aggravated fraud, opposition to law against smuggling, opposition to tax regulation law, bribery, preventing one’s right to education and civil rights, torture, illegal recording of personal data, and violating the law on the protection of family and women.

Wow. Wouldn’t want to be him. I think we can now say that the biggest organization in Islamic creationism has been thoroughly crushed.

Facebook lies

Facebook claims to be cracking down on “fake news”, but in a press conference with journalists to announce their great progress, the Facebook flak was asked one simple, penetrating question. What about Alex Jones’ InfoWars site? Is that going to be blocked?

Guess what…no. They aren’t touching this one extraordinarily prominent source of patent bullshit. Nope. This one is an obvious no-brainer, yet somehow they make excuses to avoid an easy target that would demonstrate a real commitment to cleaning up their service.

During yesterday’s session, Su argued that Infowars operates in a gray area — often toeing the line of provably false but not always crossing it — and, according to CNN, suggested that the company was focusing its takedown efforts on outlets that “can be proven beyond a doubt to be demonstrably false.”

Huh. Which one of these InfoWars claims can’t be demonstrated to be false? How stupid are the people at Facebook?

I would like to know which of these Mark Zuckerberg thinks might be true. I want to see his personal testimonial for each and every one of them, or I’m calling shenanigans on the frauds at Facebook.

The word you’re looking for is “officious”

assertive of authority in an annoyingly domineering way, especially with regard to petty or trivial matters: a policeman came to move them on, an officious, spiteful man.

• intrusively enthusiastic in offering help or advice; interfering: an officious bystander.

Isn’t that perfect? I’m just getting tired of these stories coming up every day about white people reporting black people for mowing a lawn, or selling candy, or picnicing, or walking in a neighborhood. Use it more often.

Use it in a sentence: White people, why are you being so fucking officious?

I don’t think Elon Musk reads Pharyngula

But he did suddenly announce that he was going to fix Flint, Michigan’s water problem right after I suggested it here. It is kind of an obvious ploy for a glory hound, and it seems other people suggested it at the same time I did.

Of course, he also declared that the problem was mostly solved already, so that he’s leaping into a problem he thinks is already fixed, just to get some of the credit — especially since he’s only announced this on Twitter and hasn’t bothered to contact anyone in Flint.

“Most houses in Flint have safe water, but they’ve lost faith in govt test results,” he said in another tweet. “Some houses are still outliers. Will organize a weekend in Flint to add filters to those houses with issues & hopefully fix perception of those that are actually good.”

Candice Mushatt, Flint’s public information officer, said in an email that neither Musk nor anyone representing him had contacted the city. Flint is replacing pipes and covering the costs involved with that process, she said.

The article also points out that shareholders are getting a little peevish about his grandstanding.

Jesus, Piers Morgan is a terrible person

Watch this embarrassing spectacle: he berates Ash Sarkar for protesting Trump’s visit to London because he claims she didn’t protest Obama’s immigration policies enough. This is a regular “Dear Muslima”: let’s rank offenses so we can tell people to shut up if they haven’t protested everything. Sarkar, at least, hammers back, which was satisfying.

As a teacher, the worst bit for me was when he asks her how many people were deported under Obama, she says she doesn’t know the number but she was aware of the expansion of repressive immigration policies under Obama, and Morgan just badgers her incessantly to name a number when she’s plainly said she doesn’t know. That’s the worst kind of gotcha game. And then he uses the fact that she doesn’t have this one number at her fingertips to claim that Obama is her “hero” — which leads her to point out that she’s a communist and doesn’t support the American Democratic party.

He is just a terrible person. We Americans drove him out of the US by not watching his obnoxious, awful program — maybe the UK needs to catch up with us in this one regard.

Can you have him deported?