I get email

Ahh, evangelical Christians…so persistent, so illogical, so arrogant. There’s a guy who has been pestering me for years, and he wrote again today. I’ll include most of it here, because one notable thing about him against the background of the usual mob of people who write is that he actually has decent command of spelling and grammar. He couldn’t argue his way out of a wet paper bag, though.

Isn’t that nice? He’s read some books about science. It’s an open question whether he understands them, though, since he never talks about the contents, nor will he in this letter. It’s a kind of meaningless nod, to say he has some books on his shelf I might have read, too, but nah, he’s going to talk about a sermon he heard, instead.

Also, it’s very nice to hear that Harry Kroto had recommended me to the evangelicals that pestered me. Harry and I had quite a few conversations before his death — he was deeply passionate about science education, and used his Nobel as a tool to fund all kinds of outreach programs. He was a genuinely good guy, and ferociously godless as well.

See what I mean? All he writes about is the stupid goddamn sermon he heard recently, and he seems to think that sprinkling Bible verses everywhere will be persuasive. I believe there was a Paul who lived in the first century AD. I believe that he traveled about, preaching. I can believe he visited Athens, and that philosophers were curious about him (I don’t believe that all Athenians did nothing but listen and think about the latest ideas, though). Nothing in this account contradicts a reasonable understanding of people and the natural world. So, so what?

Of course many people are searching. I’m searching. That doesn’t mean I’m searching for a god — I’m searching for a better understanding of reality. I even accept that last line, People will NEVER find soul satisfaction in false gods. True. That’s why I reject Jesus and Jehovah and all that nonsense, along with other false gods. Is my correspondent actually so incapable of understanding that other people won’t necessarily find his assertions about god at all true?

He just resorts to puking up more Bible quotes.

Some guy insisted, 2000 years ago, that his god was real and true, and some people believed him, and others disbelieved him. There are prophets everywhere who have been saying similar things — Mohammed, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard. Why should I believe? Because you thump your holy book harder?

Here are his conclusions.

No evidence given. We’re just supposed to accept this because it’s in the Bible. You know, this is not an approach that’s ever going to work with people who deny the authority of scripture.

But wait! He has a little evidence to throw at us at the end!

So they found that the Bible names 53 people who have been confirmed to have really existed.

I can do that, too. Here’s a story.

Robert Downey Jr and I used to get together to drink beer and build robots in Wakanda several years ago — Harry Kroto was there, too, as well as Harry Potter, and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms. Downey later used the skills I taught him to build an armored suit and become famous as Iron Man. Unfortunately, we had a falling out because his girlfriend, Pepper Potts AKA Gwyneth Paltrow, found me irresistible and kept throwing herself at me, and Iron Man refused to believe me when I said I found her ditziness unattractive. So I moved to Iceland and married a far more attractive woman named Mary and we went on to found the city of Little Rock, Arkansas. You’ve probably heard of it.

There are 6 names in there, maybe more if you aren’t particularly rigorous in your fact-checking, that you can easily confirm belong to people or places that verifiably exist.

Therefore, the whole story is true.

The mole people are taking over

Late last night, I mentioned that terrible little man who defended torture by claiming it worked on McCain. Again, I think McCain was a posturing, hypocritical Republican, but it turns out that one thing he was not is a “songbird”: when asked to name the members of his squadron under torture, he gave up the names of the Green Bay Packers football team. The cheeseheads of Wisconsin might resent that bitter treachery, but he didn’t betray his military colleagues.

The guy who made the accusation, Thomas McInerney, is a kook of the first order who was formerly on a birther crusade, claiming that Obama was a secret Muslim who was not born in this country, and he also filed an affidavit to support a military officer who refused to obey orders, since the Commander-in-Chief, he claimed, had no authority. I think that makes him more of a traitor than McCain.

McInerny still got booked for his valuable opinions on Fox Business, despite being a gullible conspiracy theorist and racist (face it, if you gave credibility to the claim that a black president was not eligible for the office, you’re a goddamned racist.)

Gina Haspel was the commandant of a secret prison in Thailand, where prisoners were tortured. She was responsible for destroying all recordings of the torture. She got nominated for head of the CIA.

Scott Pruitt was bragging about blocking environmental regulations before he was made head of the EPA. Now it’s revealed that he was also having expensive dinners with a certain Catholic defender of kiddie diddling. Isn’t associating with Cardinal Pell a moral failing?

I could name the entire cabal of crooks in the Trump administration, including the chief con artist himself. None of these people belong in any position of power and influence, yet there they are. I could name the rotating cast of regulars appearing on talk shows and “news” programs every day, milking every scrap of notoriety for more notoriety. They’ve tunneled through rich loamy filth to suddenly pop up with an eruption of dirt and sludge at the top of our country.

This is America.

It is 2 am and I am wide awake. I’ve had a nightmare.

It’s my own damn fault. I’ve been watching this video a couple of times a day for the last several days, and I think it’s doing things to my brain.

That transition…it hurts so good. It starts sounding a bit like Simon & Garfunkel, light and happy, and Glover is mugging like an old time minstrel, and then wham, we get a rumbly throb, an act of unspeakable violence, and “This is America”. Oh, sure, pop music has to have a catchy hook so it sticks in your brain, but this is more like a 2×4 upside your cranium. As the song goes on, it keeps on alternating between shuckin’ and jivin’ in the foreground and casual crime in the background.

That’s the dichotomy that jars me out of my sleep. I dream about this video, it’s in the forefront of my mind, but I’m thinking about all these other events going on recently.

I see Lauren Southern, her conventionally pretty white face blown up to ten times the height of a man on a video screen, her amplified voice indignantly declaiming to a crowd about how her free speech has been taken from her.

This is America.

Gina Haspel, the woman who helped cover up the CIA’s record of torture, is asked in her senate confirmation hearings if she would obey a direct order from the president to torture someone.

“I do not believe the President would ask me to do that.”

Oh my god. She really said that.

This is America.

The New York Times runs a really long piece on a collection of apologists for the status quo, people who represent nothing but the shabby id of white people, and puts on the pretense that these are radical intellectuals. No one on the NYT staff notes the irony.

This is America.

The NRA, a criminal terrorist organization, announces that their new president is Oliver North, a convicted criminal who sponsored terrorism in Central America. His first major speech representing that organization denounces the survivors of the Parkland shooting, a group of high school kids lobbying for gun control, as “civil terrorists”.

This is America.

Bitter old white guy on Fox News sneers at John McCain to defend torture.

“…it worked on John [McCain]That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’ The fact is those methods can work, and they are effective, as former Vice President Cheney said. And if we have to use them to save a million American lives, we will do whatever we have to.”

I don’t even like McCain. I detest McCain. And oh my god, Cheney is back?

This is America.

That video by Donald Glover is great art, it’s shaking me up. But I shouldn’t blame it for my loss of sleep — it’s only the musical accompaniment to the real nightmare. This is America.

This is where I live.

Can’t sleep. This is America.

If you have a chronic runny nose, maybe your brain is leaking out of your skull

That sounds like an unkind joke, but sometimes it happens.

Jackson was diagnosed with cerebrospinal fluid leak, as in, brain fluid had been leaking through a hole in her skull into her nose. All day, every day. For three years.

She was losing approximately half a pint per day of the fluid that is supposed to surround the brain and spinal cord, doctors told her. If left untreated, the leak could have led to serious infections, including meningitis, vision changes and hearing loss.

I don’t have a runny nose, so I guess I have no excuse.

I still think the Intellectual Dark Web moniker is going to increase the ridicule

Henry Farrell has an interesting take on the Intellectual Dark Web. He argues that their sense of resentment is in some ways justified, because they actually have been displaced from the respect and appreciation their views might once have had. In other words, their shitty opinions no longer get the old beard-stroking regard they would have 10 or 20 years ago.

The traditional safe spaces for pseudoscientific speculation have been taken over, almost literally. The New Republic — which Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted had perhaps two black staff writers or editors in its heyday and was certainly overwhelmingly white — is now being edited by the leftist multicultural barbarians. Slate has moved away from reflex contrarianism toward a more robust liberalism. And William Saletan, to his genuine credit, has written a serious mea culpa for his previous flirtations with race-IQ theorizing.

Today, contrarianism on race and gender is liable to get fierce pushback in the publications of mainstream liberalism. Intellectual ties to the right can win you toleration if you are David Frum, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks. You may be recognized as a member of a minority that needs to be acknowledged, and as a possibly unreliable ally against Donald Trump Republicanism. However, you are unlikely to enjoy real love or deep acceptance.

In absolute terms, dark web intellectuals enjoy far more access to the mainstream than genuine leftists. But in relative terms, they have far lower status than their intellectual forebears of 20 or even 10 years ago. They are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it. This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies. It’s hard for erstwhile hegemons to feel happy about their fall.

There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too. But where dark web intellectuals veer from analysis of that phenomenon into self-pity is in their consistent tendency to treat all skeptical criticism of their purported commitment to truth-seeking as further symptoms of political correctness gone mad.

In that sense, it’s kind of a promising development that they now have to get their photos taken while lurking in the bushes at dusk. The flip side, though, is that while the intelligent, educated people have had enough of their bullshit and are willing to rip into them when they open their ignorant mouths, that gives them an additional cachet with the ignorant…and there’s more of them than there are of us. Hence, all the buckets of money being poured over them.

Do they also ban diet Coke?

The organization run by our coke-guzzling president has just banned Irn-Bru from their golf courses in Scotland, because, they say, it stains the carpets. It’s a lie. I’m pretty sure that it’s because its iron content — I understand it’s made by dissolving an entire medieval claymore into each bottle — makes the Scots unstoppable in any athletic competition, and we all know how much Trump hates to lose.

(I have drunk the stuff, and it’s OK — it’s got a distinctive and vaguely medicinal flavor. I recommend sticking to the whisky. It’s the top selling soft drink in Scotland, though, so this is kind of a rude order.)

I haven’t ever fantasized about this

Good morning! I know you all love to wake up to stories about exotic sexual fetishes, so here you go.

The idea is to replicate the act of being impregnated with eggs. Usually from an alien or insect. If you’ve seen the Aliens movies, you’ll get the picture. Many people find this sort of thing very arousing. The toys are simply phallic-shaped hollow tubes that can be used to insert gelatin eggs into oneself. There is a funnel-shaped hole in the bottom to receive the eggs, which are inserted one by one, forcing them up the tube and out the top.

There’s a video so you can see how it works.

OK, being injected with parasites isn’t one of my turn-ons, but hey, if that’s your thing, now you know where to go.

However, I’m concerned by the maker’s cavalier attitude towards infection.

We are not doctors, and we’re not about to comment on what is safe or unsafe to do to one’s body as it varies from person to person. I can say that I have used them many times without hurting myself, but frankly it is up to the person using it to know their own limits. For instance, if you are allergic to gelatin. If made properly, the eggs are firm, but rubbery, similar to the consistency of gummy bears. They dissolve with body heat rather quickly.

I have made gelatin plates many, many times, and while they’re nice and cushiony for embryos, they are also pure protein and a delicious medium for growing bacteria and fungi. Mmmm, carbon and nitrogen in an easily digestible form. Talk to a microbiologist — there ought to be serious concerns about the sterility of that lovely growth medium you’re stuffing up your whereevers.

The Intellectual Dark Web is an object of ridicule, again

I guess I’m not the only one who noticed the blatant ironies of The Intellectual Dark Web. So did Nathan Robinson.

Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)

Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great philosopher once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.

First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.

I guess we can put all of them soundly in the conservative camp, since they meet the two main diagnostic criteria: they make money off their persecution complex, and they’re all flailingly hypocritical.

The martyrdom of the most privileged people in America

The contradictions have become obvious. The people who howl most about “identity politics” are the ones most dedicated to propping up the privileges of white male identity. The ones screaming about “free speech” get all the press and are determined to silence those awful SJWs. And the ones who sneer at thin-skinned lefties are the most delicate little flowers.

Required reading for our graduating students who plan on pursuing a career in science

We tend not to talk about this stuff: when we tell our undergraduates about graduate school, it’s all about getting to hang out with smart people all the time and doing science in a lab and constantly learning new things. We avoid talking about the grind, the fluctuating amounts of pressure, the unsupportive pricks who run some labs, and the fact that the whole enterprise is an engine for depression. You’re working on tiny, tightly focused problems in ways that no one has tried before; you’re going to fail and fail and fail, and only occasionally see a flicker of cheerful sunlight. It can be tough.

One scientist writes about the black dog of depression that haunted him throughout grad school.

The days merged into weeks; the failures continued. My supervisor called me to his office. He was unimpressed. I needed to do better, work harder, get it right. Walking back to my bench that day, a black dog walked with me. When exactly it had arrived I can’t say. I was 21. My ramshackle mental defences had been crumbling for a while. I’ll never know what tore the breach. It may have been an admonishment from a lab technician or just one more cloudy culture bottle. Whatever had splintered the final defence, depression was my new master.

It is amazing how we can maintain a facade of normality while behind it a maelstrom of disintegrating sanity roars. By Christmas, I was thinner and quieter, but still me. Time with family and fiancée kept the black dog subdued. It waited.

Instead of seeking help, I counted down the remaining days of holiday like a condemned man. Sometimes you can see deep depression coming for you, slamming doors of escape, tightening the orbits of desperation. Deciding I would kill myself was a relief. I wrongly felt that it was the only door left open. One place the black dog could not follow.

He didn’t kill himself, obviously. And he later found support from other people and clawed himself out of the pit.

But still, when I think back…I am not prone to depression, myself. This is not to say that I don’t experience stress or self-doubt, but that somehow I’m emotionally rather unperturbable (which isn’t always a good thing), and I don’t spiral into that bleakness I see in others experiencing depression. I’m lucky that way.

I can see how the circumstances of grad school can do terrible harm, though. I spent a lot of time alone, slicing away at a microtome or sitting in a dark room feeding copper grids into an electron microscope. There was one faculty member who literally hated me, who would hiss at me in the hallways and once hauled me into his office on a whim so he could tell me to get out of science, that it was his personal goal to destroy any career I might have and prevent my graduation. Less coarse-souled people than I might have been wrecked by that.

Fortunately, I was in one of the good labs — you know, the ones with a helpful advisor and a team of supportive grad students and post-docs, which also helped immensely. Still, I worried when my daughter went off to grad school. It felt a little bit like watching her leap into the maw of a wood chipper, although it’s one where some survive unscathed, others gather scars, and others get ground down to a pulp.

Not to discourage anyone, but you should be aware of this problem.