I am quite enjoying the chaos on the right

Sometimes I do regret leaving Twitter — I have to get all the gossipy infighting second hand.

For instance, you may recall the depths to which Nick Fuentes sank after the Supreme Court gutted Roe v. Wade:

Your body, my choice. Forever.

What, you may wonder has happened to little Nicky ever since?

I will now have to uproot my life and relocate. While I can handle whatever comes to my front door, it is irresponsible to expect my neighbors with young families to share that burden.
In the mean I will have to contract 24 hour security to protect myself and my property.


If anybody would like to contribute to defray the cost ($13,000/week) of private security and rebuilding my studio, here is a donation link.
I can only accept cryptocurrency because I am banned from banking services and CC processing. Thank you.

His choice, he needs to learn to live with it. It’s a fitting fate for a hateful racist and misogynist.

In addition, that freaky obsessive Laura Loomer is jealously trying to defend her ‘boyfriend,’ Trump, from that wicked interloper, Elon Musk.

The elephant in the room is that @elonmusk, who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total fucking drag on the Trump transition. @realDonaldTrump
He’s a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump’s side piece and be the point man for all his accomplices in big Tech to slither into Mar a Lago.

I will give her this…it takes one to know one.

Elon Musk: Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore.
Laura Loomer: Telling the truth isn’t trolling.
Read the room! @elonmusk
You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago after Trump almost had his head blown off in Butler. Remember when you voted for Biden and propped up @GovRonDeSantis and you said Trump was too old?
We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing.

Delicious. It all reminds me of junior high school. And this is how the American presidency operates?

Have your genes been pacified?

A reader sent me a request to help him debunk an evolutionary psychology paper. It’s easy: it’s evolutionary psychology, which ought to be sufficient, but also it’s by Henry Harpending, notorious white nationalist and spewer of scientific racism nonsense.

To be fair, I’ll give you a chance to read the paper and judge for yourself: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. The premise is that the operation of the death penalty culled out some mysterious genes that gave Western people a propensity for violence, so that nowadays white people are nicer and more civilized. Our violent genes have been “pacified”. I tried looking up this concept of “genetic pacification” in the scientific literature — it seems to be a term of art used only by evolutionary psychologists, without any quantifiable definition. This paper claims to try, though.

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

You will not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no data presented anywhere in the paper. The authors cite a purported correlation between historical endorsement of the death penalty and a decline in the homicide rate, while ignoring all the other complex social changes that were going on over the same period of time, a typical reductionist strategem. The paper fails to provide any evidence that criminality is heritable, but just assumes that it is.

What the authors pretend is evidence is a model they have built, but they don’t report any details about how the model works, and report very few quantitative conclusions from it…which are pointless anyway since they don’t explain how they derived them. What the do tell us about the model makes it laughable, though. Here are the assumptions they’re working from, in addition to their assumption that crime is caused by genes:

1.The death penalty was the only selection pressure acting against personal violence;

2.Without the death penalty, condemned men would have each killed only one person on average over a normal lifetime;
and
3.Condemned men had no offspring at the time of execution.

I think we can dismiss their whole model out of hand, based on the obvious falsity of all three of those assumptions.

At least the authors didn’t feel any need to make the implicit conclusion explicit — that white westerners are genetically more civilized than all those other people in the world.

He really means it

Donald Trump belched out a “christmas” message. It’s not the usual platitudes and well wishes, it’s instead a subconscious whine from the id of a demented tyrant. I’m not going to type this all out, so struggle with reading this mess…or don’t.

He keeps talking about seizing the Panama canal, annexing Canada, and taking over Greenland because “we need it”. I’m beginning to believe he’s really going to try to do it, somehow. Apparently, he’s going to try wheedling Canada into voluntarily ceding their sovereignty for lower taxes and the benefit of our “protection” (he’s openly asking for protection money, very Mafia). I don’t think Canadians are interested in being invaded by health care insurance companies, or being saddled with the kind of uncertainty about the future I have, and the only threat to Canada I know of right now is the USA. He has also deluded himself into thinking the inhabitants of Greenland want to be taken over by Donald Trump.

Panama is a different story. Now he’s falsely claiming that Chinese troops are in control of the canal — they aren’t, they’re investing lots of money in development in Panama — which is priming the MAGA clowns to justify military action.

I’m going to guess what’s going on in his mind. He knows his record as president was bad, and is going to get worse, although he thinks he can hide it with all this bluster. He’s trying to come up with something that will generate a positive legacy for him, and thinks that territorial expansion is just the thing to make him look like a strong leader. It’s what Putin did, after all. I think he’s also trying to pick out ‘easy’ targets (Canada has a history of wrecking American invasions, though, and I think he might find that a lot of American citizens would stand with our friend and ally to the north), because maybe he thinks Ronald Reagan looked tough invading Grenada.

The second half is just the typical whining about how everyone is picking on him.

25 days until this demented, delusional maniac is at the wheel of this country.

Lunch has been served

We all had something tasty for lunch

I spent some time with the spiders this afternoon, who were all extremely appreciative of the plump mealworms I gave them, devouring them immediately. I also learned something: I’ve often noticed that they will back away from their prey and then scurry back to their meal, as if they’d briefly entertained second thoughts. No, that’s not what they are doing. When I looked closely, I saw that they were attaching a thick webbing cable, practically a ribbon, and then attaching it to another strong cable in their existing web. It’s all part of securing a strong prey animal. I have a short video clip of this behavior on Patreon. These mealworms are strong — I saw one getting wrapped and bucking so hard it was lifting up the whole cobweb, which was attached to a wooden frame.

Then I came home for a fabulous Christmas lunch, a peanut butter and honey sandwich, the honey a gift from Karl and Ariela Haro von Mogel, of Biofortified. Thanks, guys!

So this is Christmas

I’ve noticed a trend. My childhood Christmases were raucus events, with my big extended family all cramming into our little houses, and we had two of them, one for each set of grandparents.

My adult Christmases were smaller but just as nice — me, my wife, the kids, and that was it. No grandparents because we’d moved a thousand miles away.

Now in my geezerhood, the parents and grandparents are all dead, my kids are scattered in a broad swathe from Tacoma to Kuwait, and my wife is pulling an early & long shift at work, so I’m home alone, no presents, no Xmas feast, no party of any kind.

I know! I’ll go to the lab and spend Christmas with the spiders!

The numbers are almost magical

I aspire to be a good vegetarian — we simply don’t eat any meat at home, although we do consume some stuff like Impossible Burgers now and then, a plant-based meat alternative. I can believe that plant-based foodstuff have significantly lower environmental impact, but then I read this claim by the Good Food Institute, and my skeptical ganglion started sending alarms.

Plant-based meat has, on average, 89 percent less environmental impact than traditional meat across all impact categories. Furthermore, plant-based meat’s environmental impact is 91 percent lower than beef, 88 percent lower than pork, and 71 percent lower than chicken.

Overall, plant-based meat uses 79 percent less land, 95 percent less water, and produces 93 percent water pollution [I assume that’s an error…93% less maybe?]. Efficient, low-impact meat alternatives also produce 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 89 percent less air pollution.

That’s lovely. Amazing. Let’s quit killing cows, pigs, and chickens and start murdering soybeans. I can believe it’s better for the environment…but that much better? I tried tracking down how they calculated those numbers, and couldn’t find a detailed methodology, or even a peer-reviewed paper — it’s mostly corporate in-house stuff.

Unfortunately, I also found this on Wikipedia.

In 2018, GFI participated in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, receiving funding and strategic support. Y Combinator lists “cellular agriculture and clean meat” as one of its funding priorities, stating that “the world will massively benefit from a more sustainable, cheaper and more healthy production of meat”.

GFI has ties with the effective altruism movement, having received endorsements and financial support from several effective altruism-affiliated organizations. For instance, Open Philanthropy awarded GFI with several major grants in support of its general operations and international expansion, totalling $6.5 million as of August 2021.

Sam Harris’ Waking Up Foundation recommends GFI as one of its top charities.

Yikes. Suddenly, they have even less credibility.

I’m still going to consume plant-based meat, but now I have no idea how beneficial the stuff is, and I don’t trust the techbros touting it.

I do have one nagging question, though: if it uses so few resources, relatively speaking, how come processed soy protein and GMO yeast are so much more expensive than slaughtered cow? So it’s a new technology and is still working up economies of scale, but does silicon valley love it so much because somebody is profiting heavily from it?

The lurid, salacious, sensationalist news we all want to read!

The Gaetz report is trickling out.

From the report: “The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

More: “The record overwhelmingly suggests that Representative Gaetz had sex with multiple women at a 2017 Florida party, including the then-17-year-old, for which they were paid… Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school. Victim A said that she did not inform Representative Gaetz that she was under 18 at the time, nor did he ask her age.”

I can’t compete. I could talk about my experiments in spider sex, but all that’s happened is that the males have been attentive but cautious with the females, and all the black widow couples have settled down into a quiet domesticated co-existence. It’s not exciting at all! None of them are even taking drugs.

At least I can say that black widow spiders have a more conventional sense of morality than Matt Gaetz. Unless this portrait of Gaetz is accurate.

Do not trust this man with your medicine!

Didier Raoult, quack

We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!

The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.

A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.

There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.

The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.

According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.

28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.