Looks so cute

We’re planning to visit in early December. I just have this song in my head now.

Baby, baby, please let me hold her
I want to make her stay up all night
Sister, sister, she’s just a plaything
We want to make her stay up all night
Yeah we do

We’ll only be staying for a little while, so we gotta do what grandparents gotta do: spoil her and overstimulate her and make her stay up all night.

And the suspected mail bomber has been arrested — it’s…FLORIDA MAN

That wacky dope has done one stupid thing too many, and it’s about time he was off the streets.

His name is Cesar Sayoc, and surprisingly, he is not a dedicated liberal.

Sayoc, a registered Republican voter who lives in Aventura, Florida, will face federal criminal charges for the mailed devices, according to NBC News.

They’ve also seized his van. More clues!

Investigators were examining a white van plastered with stickers carrying Trump’s name and the presidential seal, according to MSNBC. The network said authorities were looking at “right-wing paraphernalia” found at the scene.

Clearly a very thorough false flag operation. No word on whether they’ve found check stubs from George Soros.

Kids need to learn to love

Paul Dorr is a cheap coward who has roused the righteous anger of librarians everywhere. He checked out books he personally disapproved of, and recorded himself burning them. Look, guy, you don’t like a book and want to express your disapproval? Buy a copy of your own and burn it. That’s fine. Robbing a library is not cool, and I hope you are tracked down, arrested, fined, and forced to repay the library the cost of the books. And then you should be permanently banned from the library. All libraries, if that were possible.

Dorr is one of those smug Christian fundamentalists who is greatly offended by the existence of gay/lesbian/transgender people, and wants the power to dictate who they are allowed to love, and most perniciously, wants to indoctrinate children in his bigotry. He’s a rotten little man. There is only one good thing about his actions: he has helped spread the word about good children’s books. These are books I knew nothing about, until now! Thanks for that, Mr Dorr, you asshole.

Here are some of the titles he burned.

Now this doting grandparent knows about these books, and Christmas is coming up. This Day in June and Families, Families, Families! both look roughly age appropriate for my little ones, so maybe they’ll get a book or two as presents (don’t tell them! You’ll ruin the surprise.)

I don’t care if those kids grow up gay or straight, I’m never going to tell them who they’re allowed to fall in love with. But by golly, I will work to make sure they don’t grow up full of hate!

They also need to grow up to respect libraries and librarians. What kind of savage raised Paul Dorr?

Seizing the aesthetic high ground

This is an amazing, heroic photo.

Mustafa Hassouna

Not only is it a beautiful image, but the slinger is Palestinian, and the Goliath he’s winging a rock at is Israel. That’s got to sting.

The man in the photo is Abu Amro, and he’s fighting for a just cause.

“I don’t go to protests to get pictures of me taken, but this has encouraged me to continue demonstrating,” he said.

“The flag I was carrying is the same one I always hold in all the other protests I’ve attended. My friends make fun of me, saying it is easier to throw rocks without holding a flag in the other hand, but I got used to it.

“If I get killed, I want to be wrapped in the same flag. We are demanding our right of return, and protesting for our dignity and the dignity of our future generation.”

It’s a sad truth that he does have a good chance of being killed, especially now that Israeli soldiers will be trying to make a martyr of him.

Do not ever read Steve Pinker’s Twitter feed

I made the mistake. His latest 3:

  • Stop worrying about the opioid crisis! It’ll get better! Heath Ledger and Prince will rise from the grave!

  • You should probably vote for some Democrats, even though they have problems. Maybe there are a few problems on the Republican side, but I don’t see them, because my rose-colored glasses make red parties invisible.

  • It’s only a few bombs! We don’t need to worry until at least 0.05% of the public are sending bombs through the mail to elected officials.

So, really, just don’t bother reading Pollyanna Pinker. It’ll make you angrier, and we’ve got a surplus of rage right now. Just read this and laugh.

At least he’s the favorite scientist of cockroaches everywhere.

Geneticists have the right answer. Now they just need to work harder to disseminate it.

In the past, I’ve been the recipient of floods of angry messages from racists who claim that their beliefs are “scientific”, that by rejecting their defense of “white genocide” I am denying Darwin, that evolution says that white people are distinct and special. I’ve had Jim Watson personally try to convince me that his racism was rational.

They’re all full of shit.

Now, as reported by the NY Times, the American Society of Human Genetics has denounced their ideas. Of course, being the NY Times means that the sensible text is surrounded by alt-right racist memes — lots of them, all blinking and flashing, loaded with false claims about genetics. I almost closed the window to the article because at a glance it looks like it’s promoting pseudo-scientific racism.

Here’s ASHG’s official position:

  • Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories. Although there are clear observable correlations between variation in the human genome and how individuals identify by race, the study of human genetics challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research, including recent examples.
  • Most human genetic variation is distributed as a gradient, so distinct boundaries between population groups cannot be accurately assigned. There is considerable genetic overlap among members of different populations. Such patterns of genome variation are explained by patterns of migration and mixing of different populations throughout human history. In this way, genetics exposes the concept of ‘‘racial purity’’ as scientifically meaningless.
  • It follows that there can be no genetics-based support for claiming one group as superior to another. Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance, race itself is a social construct. Any attempt to use genetics to rank populations demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics.
  • The past decade has seen the emergence of strategies for assessing an individual’s genetic ancestry. Such analyses are providing increasingly accurate ways of helping to define individuals’ ancestral origins and enabling new ways to explore and discuss ancestries that move us beyond blunt definitions of self-identified race.

Or you can read this summary at BigThink.

The society, which is the largest professional organization of scientists who work in human genetics, has about 8,000 members. Its statement calls the ideas of white supremacists about genetics “bogus,” “discredited” and “distorted”. The ASHG also makes a clear point that as far as the scientists are concerned, the age-old concept of race is wrong and humans cannot be split into subcategories that would be biologically different from each other.
The reason there is no race purity is due to the genetic intermixing of populations that results from constant migrations which have taken place all throughout human history. The constant movement of people resulted in very blurry genetic lines between groups.

And if you’re wondering whether this is something controversial in the scientific community, the statement goes on to say that the fact that there are no completely separate races is supported by decades of research, including six recent studies like the 2017 paper from the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health, directly titled “Human ancestry correlates with language and reveals that race is not an objective genomic classifier”.

It’s a good statement, but ASHG has more work to do — you can’t just plop out a position statement in a journal only geneticists read, and then expect the general public to regard it as authoritative. You need to work at it. Just ask <a href=http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com/”>Melissa Wilson Sayres, who had a few criticisms for ASHG.

Read the whole thread. This is a common phenomenon: scientists who work in these fields know the racists are full of crap, see no point in discussing the crappiness with other scientists who also know they’re full of crap, and think that publishing a statement that “They’re full of crap, full stop” in a journal is sufficient. It isn’t. Evolutionary biologists also don’t talk about creationists at evolution meetings, and geologists don’t talk about flat earthers at geology meetings, except maybe to laugh at them over a beer at the bar after the daily sessions. And the people who do try hard to bring these issues to public attention are sneered at as popularizers who aren’t doing the real work. Meanwhile, racists and creationists and climate change deniers are climbing the civil service ladder and getting elected to high office, and making decisions about science funding.

But at least the meetings remain pure and unsullied by nonsense.

Which means that the scientists are cheerfully unaware of how their sloppy public speaking on the issues gets appropriated by ideologues. The shorthand of science is easily abused, technical terms get colloquialized in invalid ways (see the word “theory” for an example), and sometimes scientists let their biases lead them down unsavory paths (see James Watson) and get treated as respected fonts of wisdom rather than cranky outliers. We also see that the media cannot address what scientists take for granted without giving lots of press to the ignorant, anti-scientific ideas of bigots and fools in the name of ‘balance’ or ‘teaching the controversy’ — it doesn’t matter that there is no controversy, they’ll invent one.

Geneticists are walking through a minefield. They ought to learn about the dangers rather than just taking a blithe, heedless stroll.

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowgirls

Waylon & Willie had something to say about this.

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don’t let ’em pick guitars or drive them old trucks
Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
‘Cause they’ll never stay home and they’re always alone
Even with someone they love

Well, also, doctors and lawyers have a strong economic advantage over cowboys, who don’t get paid much. It’s not a wise career decision.

But it does have one advantage, the image. Cowboys are the personification of American manliness.

And the girls are going to take that away, too. Felice House is repainting iconic cowboy images with women in them. Shocking, I know. But they look amazing.

Quick! Someone inform them that if there is one job that would pay worse than women’s work, it’s gotta be cowgirl.