Go go go, Boeing workers!

Well, my mother’s house has been stripped bare. We hired a local contractor to sweep through and sort and dispose of everything she left behind, which leaves me feeling sad and depressed. She lived there for almost 50 years, and had gathered all these memories, neatly boxed and on display, of the family she loved, and I’ve ordered them all distributed to second-hand stores, Habitat for Humanity, and landfills. Sorry, Mom.

The house will be going on the market in a week or two. The asking price will be $435,000, which leaves me slightly stunned. Housing prices in the Pacific Northwest are out of sight, although it could be worse — the house could have been located in the Bay area.

Now I have to be concerned with selling it off to benefit all the heirs, all 9 of them. Complicating that is the fact that Boeing is on strike. This is a house that was owned by a Boeing family, with multiple Boeing siblings, and is located not far from a Boeing plant, so I feel like that’s the market it fits in. Unfortunately, Boeing machinists have rejected the latest offer.

Machinists on Wednesday rejected Boeing’s latest contract proposal, dashing hopes for an end to the nearly six-week walkout and further complicating the aerospace giant’s path to a more stable future.

The vote by members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers districts 751 and W24 came on the same day the company reported a loss of more than $6 billion for the quarter that ended in September.

Boeing had hoped the sweetened deal, which included a 35 percent pay increase, enhanced health and retirement benefits and a $7,000 signing bonus, would be enough to end the walkout by 33,000 machinists, but some observers say they may have underestimated the mistrust and lingering resentment that remains among rank-and-file workers, particularly those who have been through previous rounds of contract negotiations.

My interests in this matter are all aligned. I want the union members to win a glorious victory and triumph with an excellent increase in pay and benefits because they deserve it, and I know Mom and Dad would be cheering them on (heck, Dad would probably be bringing coffee and donuts to the picket line), and darn it, I have a house to sell.

I’m in trouble with AiG and its lawyers

I have been informed that I must take down a blog post, this one. Apparently, Answers in Genesis does not own a whole jet, they lease 25% of one, and how dare I quote an investor site that says “The Cayman Islands are considered a tax haven” or that AiG has been grasping at tax breaks.

RE: False and Defamatory Statements

Dear Dr. Myers:

We represent Answers in Genesis, Inc. (“AiG”). We are writing to demand you and your blog, FreeThoughtBlogs, cease and desist further publication of your article Why are creationists so pasty pale at Answers in Genesis? posted at https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ 2024/10/17/why-are-creationists-so-pasty-pale-at-answers-in-genesis/ with a October 17, 2024 publication date (the “Article”). The Article contains several false statements and distortions of fact intended to defame our client.

The Article begins with the following statement: “AiG owns a private jet,” which is false. AiG has a lease for the fractional use of a private jet. In other words, AiG does not own a jet. It owns a percentage of an aircraft’s flight hours each year, approximately 25% of the allocated usage. The ministry has no oversight or involvement regarding the other 75% of use. The reasoning for the fractional use of a private plane is not about luxury but practicality, allowing the ministry to reach more people over a shorter period of time.

With that being said, it could very well be true that this jet “frequently darts down to the Cayman Islands for one-day visits.” However, that does not mean that those trips are taken by AiG. In fact, they are not. No AiG personnel have used the jet (or any other aircraft) for trips to the Cayman Islands.

Of particular concern are the following false statements on your blog:

“What are they doing down there? Why do they frequently fly there and then come straight back?” followed by “Wild guess: The Cayman Islands are considered a tax haven
… making it an ideal place for multinational corporations to base subsidiary entities to shield some or all of their incomes from taxation.”
“AiG has been working so hard to get all kinds of tax breaks here in America, why would they need to evade taxes even more than that?”
These veiled claims have no basis in fact.As you know and intended, when such allegations are directed towards a nonprofit ministry, they discredit and impeach the ministry. The intended implication in your false statements is not only that AiG aims to profit from its mission and that it violates laws for purposes of enriching itself, but it also partakes in additional illicit activity. Since there is no basis in fact, your blog’s publication of the Article (and your authorship of it) constitutes the tort of defamation. Under the laws of Kentucky, where the damage of your misconduct was directed and felt, your malicious defamation exposes you personally to liability, to include for punitive damages.

To our knowledge, you made no effort to contact AiG to verify or corroborate the story’s allegations. It further appears that no effort was made to independently verify the allegations via publicly available sources. Even a minimal effort in that regard would have revealed the falsity of these allegations. Indeed, had you bothered to look at the aircraft registration of the plane, which can conveniently be found on the same website your Article links to, you would have discovered that AiG does not in fact own the plane.

You and your blog acted with actual malice in that you knew your statements were false or, at best, you acted in reckless disregard to the veracity of the statements. This is not the first time you have been reckless in your allegations regarding the ministry. The insinuations your “expose” propagates are presented as truths, when in fact they are lies. Your statements have been circulated to the public, to include the media, which increases the scope and corresponding liability for your misconduct.

Implications that AiG has engaged in illegal or criminal activity is unacceptable, as are the enumerated claims above. Your statements damage AiG’s reputation and were done with intent to cause harm, i.e. maliciously. Your followers have circulated your false claims, including to the media.

We demand that you immediately and permanently remove the Article and release a statement retracting the article and enumerated claims above. Please confirm that you have done so within five days of the date of this letter.

In the meanwhile, since you are on notice of legal claims made against you, you have a duty to preserve all communications and documents concerning the Article, to include all communications and investigations relevant to the same. All electronic records, to include all forms of electronic communications, should be preserved. This demand is not a waiver of any other claims my clients may have against you. Do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions or desire to discuss this matter.

OK, I’ll admit that they have a solid alibi, and I am removing the post.

I am not at all surprised that Ken Ham is extremely touchy about their money, but have never sicced a lawyer on me for all my posts refuting their creationist bullshit.

The happy couple, getting ready for the wedding

This is one of the black widow females I just moved into roomier quarters.

It does not have a red back. Our North American widows are a solid black, with a red hourglass on the underside of the abdomen.

This is one of the males, currently separated.

Seriously dimorphic, which is why he won’t be introduced until the female is fed again, and I can keep on eye on her shenanigans.

Antici…pation

An Australian reader sent me this photo of a redback, the Aussie version of Latrodectus. So pretty! And with an egg sac!

That reminds me…this is a big week in the lab, I hope. My second generation black widows are looking ready for breeding, so that means I have to prepare the nuptials. I’m moving the females to a larger, cleaner container and giving them time to make a cozy web today. Tomorrow I’m giving them a feast — gotta fill ’em up so they aren’t hungry when a visitor comes calling. Then on Friday I’m introducing them to second generation males.

I’m a little nervous about that. As usual, males are less common than females — more of them die during development. But the big concern is sexual dimorphism. Latrodectus males are so much daintier and distinctly tinier than the females, so it could be a bloodbath in two days. I’ll record video of the event, and maybe if it isn’t too disappointing I’ll post it then.

Walz has a way with words

First, it was recognizing that conservative Republicans are “weird,” out of touch with common values. Now he has absolutely perfectly pegged Elon Musk: he’s a dipshit.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on Tuesday joked that Elon Musk is Trump’s real “running mate,” and mocked him for jumping “like a dipshit” on stage with Donald Trump earlier this month.

“I’m going to talk about his running mate,” Walz said during a campaign rally in Wisconsin. “His running mate Elon Musk.”

“Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things,” the Minnesota governor said. “You know it.”

Oh man, that brought back memories of my father, a bedrock union man and staunch Democrat, because that was one of his favorite words to describe clowns lacking in dignity and publicly making an ass of themselves. That’s Musk in a single word, a dipshit.

The administrators have my paycheck, but the students have my respect

University of Minnesota took over the administration building yesterday.

The protest didn’t last long. The police charged in and have arrested 11 students and alumni. It’s the principle, though: they were protesting the university’s investment in Israel and our country’s bomb-making industries. It’s not as if the Democrats are working for peace, and you know the Republicans love them some civilian casualties, so it’s good that someone is raising a ruckus and declaring that genocide is not a good business decision.

One of the organizers, Juliet Murphy, had a few words for the administration.

“And I think we’re kind of calling it out at this point and saying, ‘You have always taught us that we should stand up for what we believe in, we should be the motivators for change, but yet, when it no longer benefits you, it doesn’t seem like you really want to continue having those conversations. It doesn’t seem like you really care about listening to your diverse student body,’” Murphy said.

The administration had a counter: you will be silent, you will be orderly, or you shall be ejected from the campus.

The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents voted in August to reject student calls for divestment from Israel — and to block most future student divestment campaigns.

The university also rolled out guidelines this summer stating demonstrations must be limited to 100 people and end by 10 p.m., and that they cannot use tents nor remain in buildings after scheduled closing hours, among other rules. Violation can result in immediate interim suspension, arrest and being barred from campus.

The smug, comfortable assholes on the Board of Regents really don’t get it: the whole point of a protest is to make the other side uncomfortable. Rejecting disagreement from a position of power does not resolve the point of contention, but only makes the opposition angrier and more determined.

Free Palestine. End the genocide. Divest now. Those are simple, clear ideas that won’t be answered by arresting people.

Living the dream, I think he should do it full time

I never worked in a fast food joint, but I had lots of friends who did; it’s a common, mundane job experience for a lot of people. It’s not an extraordinary claim at all for someone to say they worked at a McDonald’s in their youth, but to Donald Trump it is some kind of unlikely experience, like claiming to be a UFO abductee. He’s been raging about Kamala Harris claiming to have worked in fast food 40 years ago, and thinks it is a winning argument to deny her experience.

To make his strange point, Trump volunteered to work at a McDonald’s over the weekend.

As Trump put it reporters when he got off his plane: “I’m going for a job right now at McDonald’s,” before adding, “I really wanted to do this all my life.”

I wish he had, although it would be unfair to the customers — he’d suck as an employee. But OK, he charged off to pretend to experience the life of a fast food worker.

One catch: he didn’t. The McDonald’s was closed and the streets cordoned off, while he walked in, spent a few minutes shuffling fries, and then handed out a few containers. That was it. It was a photo-op, nothing more.

Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s he was visiting and cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.

It was a notable event to celebrate, the fact that Donald Trump did ten minutes of actual work.

You just know that in his future rambling babbles, he’s going to claim that Kamala Harris never worked in fast food, but he, the lazy phony, did.

Fluff and nonsense

I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.

As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.

She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.

Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.

Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.

Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!

He gives us four things that religion does.

But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.

Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.

Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.

Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”

Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.

I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.

But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?

That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.

You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!

But what about that claim of neuronal reserves that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.

Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.

They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!

That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.

I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.

What it was like to be a baby grad student in 1979

I’m back! Yesterday was a long day of travel — I got up a 5am to go to the airport, and what with the flight, then waiting to take a shuttle to the western part of the state, sitting on the shuttle, waiting for Mary to get off work and pick me up, and then the drive to Morris, it was 1am when I finally got home. I slept in until 9:30 this morning.

I think it’s going to be my last trip back to the homeland. My mother’s house is going on the market in a few weeks, after it’s stripped down to bare walls, and there won’t be anything to come home to anymore. That’s sad.

I’ve brought home a few mementoes, but it’s mainly a few pictures and selections from the vast collection of stuff Mom had filed away. She was a doting mother, so she kept everything related to her kids, most of which is going to be trashed this week. It all has to go! I plucked a few small things out of the pile to bring home.

I brought home a letter I wrote in 1979, because it immediately took me back to my first year of graduate school. It was a different world then. Remember: no internet, no computers, no cell phones, long distance phone calls would cost you a few dollars a minute, so you only used it for emergencies. That meant we had to write letters to keep in touch — and literally write by hand, because typewriters were the only alternative. I was writing a letter every week to my parents, writing to my grandparents every few weeks, and several times a week to my girlfriend. That was common in my generation.

Here it is. Do not mock my handwriting, treat it as a glimpse of the distant past.

OK, I’ll translate and give a little context.

3 August (1979)
Dear Mom + Dad + Tomi + Mike + Lisa + everybody,

That’s everyone who was still at home. My brother Jim and sister Caryn had moved out, too.

I had just completed my BS in Zoology at the University of Washington, was accepted into the University of Oregon, and had even been offered a research assistantship for the summer. No gap year for me! I went through commencement and immediately moved into a summer research program. I was living in a bare, nearly empty dorm dorm for the summer, which was not great — days spent in the lab were great, but then I’d go home to this empty, unfurnished room and stare at the walls until I fell asleep. I was writing because I was finally moving out to my own place.

I’ve got my new apartment today. It’s a small studio with a private bathroom, and I share the kitchen with the apartment next door, so it’s not very impressive physically, but it has a good price and I figure room+board won’t cost me much more than it would in the dorm. August rent is $120, + fall rent is $170 a month, with all utilities paid for. It’s very close to campus — it’s located right behind the 7-11, near about 3 bookstores (wrong–5 bookstores), 2 markets, + a couple of cafes. The manager is also a grad student who is involved with the biology dept., + arranged to get me the keys tonight, so I can start moving in tomorrow. I still have a week to go in the dorms, so I get one more week of food service, which will give me an easy transition into life on my own–I can just eat in the dorms until I figure out how to cook, + get set up to do it.
My new address:
735 E. 14th St., Apt 6A
Eugene, OR 97403

Look at that rent! Things have changed a bit.

Living in a reasonably sized college town was paradise. All those bookstores in walking distance! I spent so much money in the Smith Family Bookstore.

Work is coming along fairly well — for about a week now, I’ve been tangled up in about 3 projects, + I had to give a presentation of my research to a lab meeting today, so I’ve been pretty busy, what with finding an apartment on top of that. My little fish haven’t been behaving very well, either. They’ve been giving me cock-eyed results so this next week will be spent refining my set-up to get rid of some extraneous noise that has been fouling up my data. I’m also learning a little photography, since Dr. Kimmel wants me to start making a complete record of my experiments. It’s not high art, but I can take magnificent portraits of oscilloscope screens.

My first project was trying to reliably record extracellular action potentials from the zebrafish hindbrain. Electrophysiologists will know the feeling — carefully grounding everything, housing everything in a faraday cage, starting off every day making fresh sharp electrodes, etc. This is also the moment that Chuck Kimmel sent me spiralling down the photography game.

Because this was a poor student writing home, of course I had to talk about money.

Since I won’t have to be out on the 31st now, I’ll probably be staying down here a little longer, so don’t expect me home until 7 September at least.

P.S. Thanks a lot for the loan. I’ll pay it back as soon as I can, but it will be a few months until my bank account will be full enough to make me confident. If you need it, though, I can pay back one hundred any time, + maybe two or three hundred next month, + still get by.

It’s still true that moving into a new place required first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, so even when the rent was that low it was a difficult financial decision to make the move. Fortunately, I had parents who could loan me a few hundred dollars to get set up. Yes, I paid them back over the next 6 months or so.

I salvaged a few letters like that, just because it was mind-blowing to remember what it was like to be 22 years old again.

I got stuff done

We have committed to a real estate agent. He thinks my mother’s house will be on the market within a few weeks.

I signed up a cleaning service who will sweep in on Wednesday, and reduce all the rooms to bare walls.

All bank accounts closed.

Hey, remember, I’m a college professor teaching a couple of courses? I got a lot of grading done today, too.

Now I get to go home. My flight leaves at 8am, so I’ve got to be out of here at 5. My flight is nonstop, but once I get to MSP I’ll have to wait a few hours for a shuttle, then sit in a van for longer than I was on the flight. I won’t be home until midnight.

I might just sleep all day on Sunday.