Someone is wrong in the movie theater!

Did you know that For over 150 years, one convincing lie has prevented billions from knowing the truth? The trailer for this awful movie makes a heck of a lot of bogus assertions and doesn’t present one speck of evidence.

I’ve noticed that Eric Hovind’s one-night stand, Genesis: The Movie is going to be playing at a theater two hours away from me, in St Cloud. It’s on a Monday evening, on 13 November, when I can get away from work early enough to make it, and I’m tempted to go and document how bad it will be.

Your mission: talk me out of it. I get enough from the trailer to see it’s going to be one long irrational Gish gallop built on flimsy premises and bad arguments, so the movie will be a waste of time, but it might be interesting to talk to some of the people in attendance (or even the organizers) to diagnose what’s going on in their heads.

So tell me why that would be a bad idea so I can just stay home and read a good book instead.

I’m already aware of the possibility that I’d show up and get thrown out of the theater. That’s happened before.

It is moved that we replace the Electoral College with a Rap Battle

It’s on. Eminem trounced Trump with his words (which also had some casual racism and sexism, unfortunately), so I’m afraid this means he is the new King of America until someone else comes along and schools him.

Anger. It’s a good thing. There’s something wrong with you if you aren’t angry right now.

Is there a virus out there causing oblivious selfishness?

Let’s hear his side of the story first, shall we? A bicyclist in Spokane was cruising down a community trail when he spots some pedestrians up ahead. He yells “Hot pizza!” (what?) and smashes into them. Then he gets up, yells at them, and later writes a facebook post about how stupid they were.

So first ride without the brace and some pedestrian wouldn’t move!! Centennial trial is not yours alone pedestrians!! When someone yells on your left or hot pizza maybe turn around instead of walking 3 wife with your strollers and dogs blocking the whole trail! !! F#&@!!!!!! I wish I had my go pro to document the stupidity.

He broke a 67 year old woman’s arm. There are witnesses who state that he had room on the path to go around them. He didn’t even slow down, and he publicly admits it.

“I hate to slow down,” Haller said when asked why he didn’t. “Most of the time people move. These people wouldn’t move,” he added, noting that the moms with strollers were part of the problem, too.

Ah. So I guess next time he’ll feel justified running over babies. The little bastards are just too damn slow.

This is a guy who is absolutely in the wrong on all counts. Pedestrians have the right of way, he is expected to bike responsibly on a shared path, he came up too fast and collided with people from behind, and he was biking with an injury (from a previous accident!) that made him less effective at braking. There’s no excuse.

Yet somehow, he blames it all on the woman he injured.

It’s egregious stupidity, and I wonder where this is coming from. There seems to be an epidemic of diminished empathy sweeping across the country, and it’s having consequences that range from accidents on park trails to the Occupant of the White House.

Biology is going to put a crimp in the space program

Scott Kelly served on the International Space Station for 340 days, partly as an experiment to see how the human body held up in long term weightlessness. Not well, it turns out. Kelly writes about his experience on finally returning to Earth.

I struggle to get up. Find the edge of the bed. Feet down. Sit up. Stand up. At every stage I feel like I’m fighting through quicksand. When I’m finally vertical, the pain in my legs is awful, and on top of that pain I feel a sensation that’s even more alarming: it feels as though all the blood in my body is rushing to my legs, like the sensation of the blood rushing to your head when you do a handstand, but in reverse.

I can feel the tissue in my legs swelling. I shuffle my way to the bath room, moving my weight from one foot to the other with deliberate effort. Left. Right. Left. Right. I make it to the bathroom, flip on the light, and look down at my legs. They are swollen and alien stumps, not legs at all. “Oh shit,” I say. “Amiko, come look at this.” She kneels down and squeezes one ankle, and it squishes like a water balloon. She looks up at me with worried eyes. “I can’t even feel your ankle bones,” she says.

“My skin is burning, too,” I tell her. Amiko frantically examines me. I have a strange rash all over my back, the backs of my legs, the back of my head and neck – everywhere I was in contact with the bed. I can feel her cool hands moving over my inflamed skin. “It looks like an allergic rash,” she says. “Like hives.”

I’m rather appalled that this experiment was done at all — we’ve known about the deleterious effects of shorter periods of weightlessness for a long time, so it’s bizarre that they pushed for longer and longer exposures. Were they hoping everything would just get better, that the human body would adjust to living in space? Because if they did, they’d have made returning home even more traumatic.

Face it, if we’re going to have people working in space for months or years, the hardware is going to have to provide some kind of substitute for gravity — great big spinning wheels, ala 2001, or built-in central centrifuges. I would hope that our space agencies would stop wrecking human bodies in pointless exercises in endurance.

I can think of more productive experiments. How much gravity is enough? Do we need a full 1G to be healthy, or would, for instance, .38G, as found on Mars, be enough? Of course, to do that kind of experiment they would need to build one of those rotating space stations, so we’re talking big money and a reset of the ISS.

We’re also ignoring the effects of prolonged radiation exposure. It’s not just the weightlessness. I have the feeling that there are a lot of ghoulish doctors working for NASA who are going to be ticking off symptoms and writing papers on the deterioration of human bodies in space,
which will be ignored by the administrators and politicians who will make speeches about the heroic sacrifices our brave astronauts are making.

An alternative strategy: let’s train tardigrades to crew space ships, if we must have biological entities aboard.

Who else?

The New Yorker has detailed coverage of Harvey Weinstein’s criminal behavior. And by detailed, I mean fairly explicit, names named, horrifying encounters recounted, and a history of extortion and rape spelled out repellently.

Most awful is how Weinstein used his influence to silence any revelations until there were so many they could no longer be contained. He’s been taking advantage of his power for decades, and yet his lawyer has released a statement saying, “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.” If you read the story, you’ll realize that is a lie. They even have a case where one of his victims wore a wire to get open admissions of his tactics, which was taken by the police, and then…a series of stories were ‘coincidentally’ leaked to the media to portray her as a slut, and the charges evaporated.

But now I’m wondering…who else? Matt Damon, Russell Crowe, and Ben Affleck have been called out as enablers of Weinstein’s behavior — how many cowards covered for abuse by powerful men in the entertainment industry (or any industry, for that matter), and how many powerful men have similar histories? They’re out there. I guarantee you that Weinstein is not a solitary case.

I know from personal experience that calling out the Big Men with reprehensible behavior has high personal costs (I still get accusatory email every day saying I’m a terrible person for exposing Michael Shermer, for instance), but it has to be done. It has to be done now. If anyone is hiding abuse now out of fear of the repercussions to your career, we have to make clear that the repercussions will be even more severe if you wait and wait and wait until the revelations are inescapable.

“Both sides! Both sides!”

There’s a new movie out, The Pathological Optimist, about Andrew Wakefield. I agree with the adjective, at least.

The blurb for the movie includes a notorious phrase.

THE PATHOLOGICAL OPTIMIST takes no sides, instead letting Wakefield and the battles he fought speak for themselves.

There are questions on which it is fair to give equal attention to both sides. “Is football a better game than baseball?” “Which is better on a pizza, pineapple or jalapenos, or both?” There are some things where the evidence hasn’t settled one way or another, and we should pursue alternatives, but there are others where there is no controversy. “Is the Earth flat?” “Is the earth about 6000 years old?” “Are black people and women as deserving of rights as white men?” If you’re going to address those questions honestly, taking no sides is dishonest and biases the argument in favor of the untenable side.

Orac is having none of that nonsense, and reviews The Pathological Optimist.

The “take no sides” claim sends up huge red flags for me. My retort to this is that, when it comes to pseudoscience, “not taking a side” is taking a side, the side of giving that pseudoscience far more believability and stature than it deserves. It’s also utter nonsense to claim that “letting Wakefield and the battles he fought speak for themselves.” If there’s one misconception about documentaries, it’s that they are (or should be) objective. They’re not. A documentary filmmaker has a story to tell, and that story is very much colored by how she chooses to frame it, what she decides to show (and, equally importantly, not to show), what order scenes are shown in, who is interviewed and who isn’t, and even the music and narration used. Bailey’s film no more “lets Wakefield and the battles he fought” speak for themselves than Wakefield’s VAXXED is an objective portrait of a CDC “conspiracy.” It is how Miranda Bailey chose to tell Wakefield’s story. Indeed, it’s hard not to note that the only people directly interviewed for the film are Andrew Wakefield, his family, and his supporters. All criticism of Wakefield comes in the form of grainy archival footage from TV news interviews, which Wakefield or one of his supporters gets to answer.

Taking no sides is intellectually vacuous and dishonest. The one thing they could to make it worse is to have somewhere in it the odious phrase, “agree to disagree”.

That time of year again

Today is another holiday celebrating a truly evil, awful man. I don’t feel like writing about him — at best, I might have the energy to piss on a monument to him, if I ran across one — but I just saw this image that summarizes my feelings nicely, so I’ll just post that.

While we’re tearing down monuments lately, can we also get this horror off of our calendar? Replace it with Oscar Wilde Day, or Jonas Salk Day, anything but this.

Newsweek, peddling tabloid bunk

I can’t believe they went down this road…LAS VEGAS SHOOTING: WHAT CONTROVERSIAL GENETICS THEORIES SUGGEST ABOUT THE MOTIVE. What controversial “theory” do they have? That his genes made him do it.

The suspect behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday might have been at higher risk for criminal behavior because his father was apparently once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, according to controversial theories about links between crime and genetics.

That’s it. That’s all of their “evidence”: his father was a criminal, therefore he might have inherited genes that caused criminality. There’s no consideration of the likelihood that growing up in a family where the father was on the lam from the FBI, was robbing banks, and who was never around the kids. So you’ve got kids from a broken family, and one of them commits a criminal act in life, therefore it’s genes? Weak. They bring in an Authority to help back up their claim.

“I was really blown away by the fact that his father had this history, and it’s really hard to argue that this would have nothing to do with Stephen Paddock’s behavior,” says Deborah Denno, a professor and the founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center at the Fordham University School of Law in New York City. “He may have inherited certain attributes from his father that would lead to greater impulsivity.”

Deborah Denno is a lawyer, not a neuroscientist, and definitely not a geneticist. Despite that handicap, I wonder what her legal training would say about trying a suspect, not on the evidence of his behavior, but on the criminal history of his father?

The article does bring in a few voices of reason, like J.C. Barnes and Art Caplan, trying to argue that you can’t defend this argument, but too late, the damage is done. Newsweek published a garbage article promoting an indefensible, fact free claim of the genetic determination of behavior. Shame.