The Freezer of the Damned

Uh-oh. Apparently, I’ve been storing Satan in my freezer.

Conservative cable network Newsmax has sidelined White House correspondent Emerald Robinson after she made the utterly bonkers claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent” tracker linked to the Devil.

In a post that has since been taken down by Twitter for peddling COVID-19 misinformation, Robinson warned “Christians” that the vaccines include “a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” all while suggesting to her followers that the shot was the “Mark of the Beast”—something she’s said before.

What do you know…someone who is just too batty for Newsmax.

A little more information:

  • There is no luciferase in the vaccines. That would be silly and pointless, since no, you can’t use it to track people.

  • Luciferase is an enzyme that reacts with a couple of common substrates to make light. If you want to make cells glow, you inject them with it, or in many cases you insert the luciferase DNA into the genome, and you get a cell that produces light, which is handy…if you are tracking its expression in a microscope.

  • I’ve also got some Lucifer Yellow in my freezer. This is not an enzyme — the compound actually glows bright yellow under fluorescent light. Likewise, I’ve used it for looking at cells, not people.

  • Do you even know how much this stuff costs? Last time I bought it, LY was about $600 for a vial containing 100mg. You’re not going to throw it into a dose of vaccines.

I have several other dyes in my freezer. 1,1′-Dioctadecyl-3,3,3′,3′-Tetramethylindocarbocyanine Perchlorate (DiI, for short) is a favorite, but who knows, it might be the name of some other Lord of Hell.

Wiccan Communists turned my child into a gay transgender revolutionary!

This silly little Halloween commercial for Twix candy has the creationists coughing up all kinds of bizarre ahistorical nonsense. It features a goth nanny with witchy powers who is non-judgementally taking care of a little boy who is wearing a princess dress. The non-judgmental bit is clearly anathema to fundamentalist Christians.

Answers in Genesis discusses it in their weekly “news” show. I learned many things from this segment. You don’t need to watch it, I’ve transcribed the relevant bits, but if you must, the bullshit is flowing at around the 8 minute mark.

Patricia: It’s pretty incredible the messages it is promoting. One of the things I noticed is that actually if you take that narrative that is happening it basically summarizes the key principles behind Marxism. So that whole idea is that you have this minority that is being oppressed so then the solution to that, to make everyone live happily ever after, is to violently overthrow the oppressor, commit some kind of revolution, forcibly remove them, and then everything is good. And that’s actually what you are seeing in this commercial. So that’s an interesting connection to Marxism there.

Tim: And that’s what we see historically with Marxism. Every time there’s a revolution, everything is perfect afterwards and nothing ever goes wrong. It’s utopia.

Patricia: That’s the idea, but it’s not going to work in a sinful world.

Tim: And it never has worked.

It is November, which puts us about four months after the Fourth of July, so I guess we just pinned down a measure of how far back into the past a creationist’s mind can reach. About 4 months. Which explains a lot about the whole young earth notion, I guess.

It’s a bit of a reach to call it Marxism, though. So the key principle of Marxism is for oppressed minorities to have a revolution, period? I’m no expert on Marx or communism, but I’m sure there’s slightly more to it than that. By that definition, the United States is Marxist.

Oh, but she’s not done. It’s also the key principle of Wicca, which is the same as Marxism, a connection I’d never seen made before.

Patricia: She’s teaching him the main principle of Wicca, it’s called the Wiccan rede, it says “an ye harm no one, do what you will”. So throughout this video she’s encouraging him to wear this dress because he wants to. You know, that sounds OK because you’re not harming someone, but actually civilizations have tried that in the past. One civilization that tried it said that “liberty consists of the freedom to do everything that injures no one else.” You might think that sounds pretty good, but what civilization was this? It was revolutionary France, where they tortured and guillotined thousands and thousands of people because, without God, a creator as your source for absolutes in truth and morality, you can define harm however you want, you can define human rights however you want, these were all things that were seen happening in this culture, and the commercial, unfortunately, summarizes that pretty well.

Wait wait wait…the French Revolution was run by Communist witches? I’m a little confused by the contradiction here: the Wiccan rede says “harm no one”, and according to AiG, that was the cause of a bloody revolution with guillotines lopping off heads? It seems to me that if the revolution were actually inspired by Wiccan principles, there would have been no bloodshed.

Remember: the French Revolution was an act by Marxist Wiccans.

The AiG show goes on with more instances of idiocy. They are also upset by another commercial, “Doritos made this ad for the Mexican market where a dead guy’s ghost comes back to tell his family he has a gay lover in heaven”. Yeah, it’s the Gay Agenda again. They’d don’t like it.

Curiously, almost all their sources for these stories is a crappy conservative sort-of-humor site, “Not the Bee”, which is a spinoff of the not-at-all funny Babylon Bee. That tells you something about the depth of their research. One exception is that they comment on an article from Science Daily, “DNA tangles can help predict evolution of mutations”.

In that article, the authors describe how loops or tangles in unfolded bacterial DNA can act as hotspots for mutations. It’s basic research into the mechanisms of evolution and discusses how identifying these hotspots can lead to better predictions about likely new mutations in a line of bacteria.

You can guess how deeply Ken Ham discusses this topic. “They’re still just bacteria.” Done and done.

Damn, those people are stupid. I’m sure they’re sincere in their deeply held beliefs, the problem being that their beliefs are so idiotic and ignorant.

I would never have predicted such a fall

The Church Militant — you know, the fanatical fringe of conservative Catholicism, home to Michael Voris, etc. — has a new product to sell. For a mere $75, you can buy CDs of the Psalms and Proverbs being read aloud by…

Are you sitting down for this?

…Milo Yiannopoulos.

The comments are full of people praising the power of God to rescue such a sinner, but I’m a doubter. I don’t think he’s saved at all. He’s found another grift, is all. I’d be more impressed if he’d found a humble faith to follow, but I’m sorry, the Church Militant is a mob of extremist weirdos.

The Dawkins ennui

Richard Dawkins got a major fluffing from The Times this weekend, and I don’t care enough to try to get around the paywall. Sorry. We all know what kind of conservative BS he’s going to say, and the worst of it (I hope — if there’s worse in the article, I don’t want to know about it) is right there up front in the blurb, and in the title, even.

Richard Dawkins: ‘Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary’

This doesn’t even make sense. Pretty damn binary — so he’s adding vague qualifiers to something he wants to assert is only one thing or another. Everything is black and white, as long as those shades of gray get ignored, I guess. Let’s also ignore the fact that there is a wide spectrum within each sex, with femaleness and maleness having huge individual variation, with overlap. These are forced categories. You’ve decided that, by definition, there are only two possibilities allowed, therefore everyone must be wedged into one or the other, and you look with horror on the boundary conditions that show your classification scheme is inadequate.

What does he think should be done with individuals who are in the pretty part of his damn binary? Shall we just ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, maybe torture them into non-existence so they don’t clutter up your boundaries?

Good grief, he’s an evolutionary biologist. Does he also insist that species are pretty damn binary, you’re either a member of one or not, and there are no individuals who fall into any kind of hybrid state? Embrace the blurriness of the boundary conditions. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.

I am privileged to see the opening paragraphs of the article. I don’t need more.

There’s not much that frightens Richard Dawkins. He shrugs off his regular hate mail from angry evangelicals, occasionally taking to YouTube to read it aloud. He has never backed down from his withering criticisms of Islamic fundamentalism, despite the potential for blowback. He’s happy to pick intellectual fights with eminent fellow scientists and has even been known to find fault (hard to imagine, I realise) with the odd journalist or two.

But Dawkins tells me there are two things he does fear: one is being cancelled by the left. The other is hang-gliding. I think he’s probably in more danger from the former.

There is so much hand-wringing on the right about getting “cancelled”, whatever that means. It seems to be a rather ineffectual state in which some people stop treating you as a demi-god and are more willing to criticize what you say and do, and it’s only a threat to people who consider themselves deserving of uncritical adulation.

By that definition, sorry, Richard. You were cancelled long ago, as were we all. If not by one group, by another (like, say, the American Humanists). Get used to it.

By the way, this photo was embarrassing.

I will charitably assume that it was the newspaper’s idea to put him into a christ-like pose, but really, Richard, you can say no. Tamp down that ego a little bit and just realize that an occasional fit of humility will serve you better nowadays.

Owen Strachan needs to get out more

There are no atheists out there—not even one, he says. He’s pretty insistent about it, too, and seems to think it’s a profound insight.

Guy, the only reason I have clearly perceived the existence of the concept of a god is that you goofballs won’t shut up about it. As a child I went to church and Sunday School every week, and listened as the pastor and my teachers confidently asserted that a god existed, while never offering any good reason I should believe. I never did believe even as I was memorizing Bible verses and singing hymns and learning the catechism, and once I was old enough and confident enough to shed the cant, I did. Never looked back. I’ve had a few close scrapes where I was pretty sure I was going to die, and nope, I didn’t say any prayers, didn’t call out to any god, didn’t imagine the actions of a higher power saving me or damning me. It’s just not in my brain, get used to it.

It’s also the case that, while I find it incredible that anyone is stupid or gullible enough to believe in that cheesy trash called the Christian Bible, I do believe that many people do. If someone says they’re a Bible-believing Christian, well, I accept that they are, and proceed under that assumption. It helps that their claim to sincerity is backed by a statement that is so foolish, since the only way anyone could find that at all credible is if they actually held it as a deeply irrational belief.

So do me a favor, and trust that I also am sincere when I say I’m an atheist. I have no reason to lie about it. It’s not as if it gets me fabulous prizes and admission to a community of people who will fawn over me.

Probably like you, I had never heard of Owen Strachan before, so I had to look him up.

Dr. Owen Strachan is Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. Before coming to GBTS he served as Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Director of the Residency Ph.D Program at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his Ph.D from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, his M.Div from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his AB from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is married and the father of three children. Strachan has authored numerous books, including Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (with Kevin Vanhoozer) and the forthcoming Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel – and the Way to Stop it (Salem Books, July 2021). Strachan is the former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, the former director of The Center for Public Theology at MBTS and is the President of Reformanda Ministries.

Ouch. That’s one insular little biography. A theologian and seminarian who has spent his life in seminary, talking with theologians, sitting in his office inventing theologies, never even imagining godless nature. OK, you really need to get out more, Owen. For your own good.

Also, whining about social justice and wokeness…when you do go out, stay away from me, you smug little tinpot authoritarian. We won’t get along.

I summoned a demon for atheist Hallowe’en. It did not go well.

It’s Hallowe’en, and you know what that means: we atheists (and also witches and ghouls, same difference) are expected to commune with our Dark Lord and Master, Satan. Sadly, he hasn’t been answering my calls in the past decade or so, with no explanation. This year, though, I decided to get to the bottom of it all, so I called and called and called. Persistence paid off, and finally someone picked up: it was the demon Squilliax'<cough>-haaaak’megok, who is the assistant to the vice-undersecretary in the department of spider infestations (I had an in, you see). It was a start!

PZ: “Sir Squilliax'<cough>-haaaak’megok, thank you for taking my call. I was hoping to find out why we atheists, who have been your useful and dedicated servants — or, at least, the religious folk tell us we are — have been abandoned, and how we can get back into your infernal graces. Can you tell us anything? Or connect me to someone with information?”

<sigh> You will have to learn humility. We don’t care.

PZ: But we have been in your service, taking away people’s faith! Isn’t that what you wanted?

Foolish. No. Faith is our greatest ally. Such delicious atrocities happen when people believe. So many of the greatest sins are meaningless without faith: apostasy, heresy, sodomy…

PZ: Hey! A lot of atheists are what you call “sodomites”…

But they are the wrong kind. You always talk about “consent” and “fun” and “using lube” — it’s not our kind of sodomy without squeals of pain and shame and guilt. You know who is the best kind of sodomite? Devout Catholics. You diminish us when you liberate a fanatic. This is why you are no longer in favor.

You also lack immortal souls. When you die, you end — you will never serve in Hell. You are useless to us.

PZ: But…the Christians and Muslims and Hindus and everyone else also lack these souls, and will not serve you in Hell either!

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Yes. We know. But they fear that we will drag them down into Hell on their death, so they serve us in life. Such pain! Such misery! All served so sweetly and voluntarily by priests and mullahs and Republicans and Tories. We whisper the name of a god in their ears, and they stumble eagerly forward to put the machineries of agony to work on their fellow human beings. We don’t need you.

PZ: But…but…Hallowe’en?

Hallowe’en is not ours. We’re not particularly fond of parties and candy and costumed frolics that trivialize the fear of death. Christmas…now that’s a Satanic holiday. Why do you think we’ve coupled it to capitalism? Have you noticed how it is expanding? It has swallowed up your Thanksgiving, is soon to consume Hallowe’en, and then on to Canadian Thanksgiving and Labor Day. When Christmas is year round, we will have achieved Hell on Earth.

PZ: Everyone blames us atheists! They think we’re the Satanists! You have to…

Isn’t that delightful? Do not call us again. If you must, contact us through our Earthly representatives — just find your nearest billionaire. They are Satan’s elect, not you.

Happy Hallowe’en.

My phone burst into flames and melted into a puddle of toxic metallic goo. Well, that wasn’t worth it.

It was unpleasant enough dealing with a demon from Hell, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to stoop to talking to Elon Musk just to find out more. Some things are just too repulsive and disgusting and vile for a mere mortal to do.

Matt Powell gets a promotion

I wonder what Eric Hovind thinks of this?

That’s Kent Hovind on the left, soon to be committed to a jail sentence for spousal abuse. Who will preach to the deluded while he’s away? That’s Matt Powell on the right. Powell is now down in Alabama at Dinosaur Adventure Land, a guest of Mr Hovind, and is appearing in their regular “Wack-An-Atheist videos. He’s also saying that you may call him Professor Powell, despite lacking any degrees or affiliation with an institute of learning, which is kind of par for the course for these frauds.

The video is rather pathetic, with Hovind and Powell reciting the same old creationist nonsense over and over. Dinosaur soft tissue! Bent layers in mountains prove they formed in an instant (quite the opposite, actually)! Coal seams have negligible C-14, therefore they all formed at the same time in a flood! Don’t bother trying to rebut them, because they’ll just deny all the evidence.

I would not, however, say that Hovind is passing the torch. His ego won’t allow that to happen. I also don’t see Powell being very comfortable as an apprentice to Hovind, who has a lot of baggage (the tax-dodging, wife-beating, kiddie-diddler-enabling thing) and I’d love to know what he was promised to get him to move to a decrepit church camp in an Alabama wasteland. He has that deer-in-the-headlights look the whole time. I think Powell is perfectly comfortable with his ignorant line of cant, but doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about being paired with ol’ Kent.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this association will end badly for both of them.

It’s creationism all over again

It wasn’t that long ago (and it’s still ongoing) that creationists followed a relatively successful strategy of packing school boards with loons. School boards are not popular career destinations — it’s relatively easy for a fanatic to run for the board, and often they get strong support from local churches.

Now take a look at this: the same strategy is being followed by anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and anti-CRT kooks.

We need more reasonable, serious people to run for school board positions, so do consider it yourself. When I first moved to Morris, I offered to run…and got nothing but looks of horror from local DFL people. I guess I’m not the kind of guy to be popular with the church crowd that is likely to turn out for a school board election, so they were probably right to look for more congenial candidates.

If you can’t run, the next best thing is to VOTE in those elections. School board elections are far more important than most people assume.

Genetics According to Jesus

I slummed it a bit this morning, watching a video by Dr. (he really is, with a Ph.D. from a credible institution) Robert Carter, who provocatively promised to tell me about Genetics According to Jesus. That got me curious. Jesus didn’t say anything about genetics — he couldn’t. The science wasn’t invented until, really, the 20th century, and the ancient world had only the vaguest notions of how heredity might work. There was only some general, obvious ideas about how there are familial similarities and unpredictable variations — difficult to dissect soup of commonalities and diversity. It took a novel approach to figure it out, exemplified by Mendel, who reduced everything to a simple organism and simple variants, and applied principles of probability and statistics to discern any pattern. Nobody did that before in any systematic way, and a lot of great minds had very crude ideas about how inheritance worked. Aristotle assumed it was all about a dominant male principle that organized the chaotic curdled menstrual blood of the female into an embryo, for instance. So Jesus, a non-scientist, said something about it, huh? OK, give it to me, Bob. I’m curious.

Would you be surprised if I told you that nowhere in this hour-long talk does Carter say anything about genetics from the Gospels? No? Yeah, predictable. Here’s a quick summary of what he does say, so you can skip the whole video.

The first 10 minutes is classic creationist time-wasting. He tells us about his grandparents, where they were from, what they did, all irrelevant to any point he might make. It’s a common trope in creationist talks, though — you start by giving your come-to-jesus biography, because how can anyone trust you if you don’t present your bona fides?

There’s a quickly abandoned moment where he talks about his education in genetics, and he mentions that the tools of genetics have such power that they raise significant ethical questions…which he immediately resolves with a quote from Genesis, the dominion mandate, in which God hands over control of all of creation to Adam. That’s a little bit scary. If fundamentalist Christians were in charge of the institution of science, I guess it would be carte blanche, that you get to do anything you want to non-human organisms, because God said so.

He also takes a moment to condemn Francis Collins, who isn’t Christian enough for him. Collins believes humans evolved 100,000 or more years ago, from a population of tens of thousands of individuals, not just two, therefore he’s not really a True Evangelical Christian™, I guess. True Christians interpret the Bible literally and know that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old (even though the Bible doesn’t say that) and that Adam and Eve were the progenitors of the human race, no one else (even though the Bible has the curious problem of their sons somehow finding wives). Cue the usual “but if Adam didn’t exist, then Jesus couldn’t have saved the world” etc. etc. etc.

Then we finally get the gist of his story. In the first half of the 20th century and before, anthropologists were all horrible stomach-turning racists, but the Bible-believers were egalitarian believers in the unity of mankind. He will not discuss the racist apologetics of American slave-holders, or that many of those anthropologists were themselves Christian, and he only praises the flood of European missionaries who invaded Africa because, after all, they were Christianizing the continent.

After chewing out those evil bigoted scientists, though, he spends most of the rest of his time talking about…race. Not Jesus, or genetics, just race, and he does so in the most trivializing way. Adam and Eve had to be brown, because you can get all the colors of modern humans with nothing but different degrees of melanization. He shows a few human cladograms (science!) and points out that all the branches radiate from a common point, therefore, as predicted by the Bible, that point was Noah and his sons. (After all, I guess evolution wouldn’t predict common ancestry, only the Bible does that.) It’s a half-hour of cherry-picking and bogus interpretations of the evidence — he doesn’t mention that that central point for the radiation of all the races of mankind was not 4000 years ago, but far, far older. He can get away with that because he announces that molecular clocks don’t work, most conveniently. He gets to ignore lots of evidence to fit a few diagrams to his Biblical model.

He can’t even cite the New Testament, let alone the words of Jesus Christ, geneticist, to back up his arguments. THE TITLE IS A LIE. I was so disappointed. I want my money back and my time.

There was absolutely nothing of substance in the talk that I could sink my teeth into, just the usual creationist fallacies and dishonesty. That’s boring, and no fun at all. I tried to find anything that hasn’t been debunked a thousand times before, and perked up at only one claim I hadn’t seen before, at about the 25 minute mark.

In Great Britain, most of the birth defects and developmental abnormalities of children in their health system are from Muslims, because the Muslim tradition is to marry a first cousin.

Wait, wait — you’re telling me the majority of birth defects in Great Britain arise in a small subpopulation of 3 million out of about 65 million? No way. I know a bit about developmental defects, and that sounds ridiculous. I understand that there is a higher degree of consanguinity in marriages within that subpopulation, and that inbreeding does increase the incidence of birth defects, but not that much, and it seems like an unfounded dig. It was a novel claim to me, even if it was totally fucking irrelevant to any putative claim about Jesus genetics, so I thought I’d look it up.

I should have known, though. Google the claim and what you get is a lot of garbage from sources like the Daily Mail, who love to claim that the invading Muslim hordes are just dumping defective babies on the NHS. It’s a racist claim from racists, so why is this nominally anti-racist creationist blithely echoing them? Time to go to the actual scientific literature and figure out what the data actually says.

Here’s one: “A reconsideration of the factors affecting birth outcome in Pakistani Muslim families in Britain”, by SR Proctor and IJ Smith. I guess they were familiar with the misinformation peddled by British tabloids, so they had to go debunk them.

Abstract
Over recent years, Bradford has had a consistently high perinatal mortality rate (PNMR), especially amongst its Asian population, 66% of whom originate from Pakistan. There is a high incidence of consanguineous marriages reported among Pakistani and Muslim couples. Often, this observation is used to explain their higher PNMR and congenital malformation rates. The factors affecting birth outcome in Pakistani women are complex and interrelated. Socioeconomic, genetic, biological and environmental factors all contribute to adverse birth outcome. In addition, these are complicated by discrimination, communication barriers and culture blaming. The aim of this paper is to challenge midwives and other health professionals to reconsider the overwhelming emphasis placed on consanguinity as a factor affecting birth outcome, and to recognise the impact and interplay of other confounding variables.

The point of the paper is to show that you can’t explain away infant mortality and malformations by blaming it on arranged marriages. If you want to try to do that, you have to ignore all the other factors that contribute to that rate, like diet and poverty and unequal access to health care. Anyone who has studied development at all knows all this — it’s multifactorial, and trying to pin problems to a single cause like inbreeding or race or religion is going to blow up in your face. This is a simple diagram of a few of the inputs to birth outcomes.

It is definitely true that consanguineous marriages do increase the rate of birth defects and perinatal mortality, but you’re committing a racism, Robert, when you gloss over the many and more significant factors that contribute to the problem.

Pregnant, Asian women who register with a GP who is not on the local obstetric list have a two-fold increased risk in having a perinatal death compared to a listed GP (Clark & Clayton, 1983). Midwives have also been criticised for being ignorant about the cultural beliefs of their clients and being reluctant to use locally available advisory groups (Kroll, 1990). Hospital service utilisation has also been reduced with low uptake of amniocentesis reported from Sheffield and Birmingham (Little & Nicoll, 1988). This was attributed to late antenatal booking and language difficulties. Antenatal clinical attendance has improved in some districts since the introduction of liaison workers who act more as advocates than literal translators (Raphael-Left, 1991).

As with indigenous white women the factors that affect birth outcome in Pakistani women are complex and interrelated. Major socio-economic and environmental problems have been reported which are not always disentangled from the obvious adverse factors, for example consanguinity and diet. Moreover, they are also complicated by communication barriers, discrimination, culture-blaming and, if consanguinity is present, victim-blaming. If little or no English is understood then there will be a tendency to label the women as deviants who may become stereotyped.

What this is an example of is the tendency of creationists to ignore the bulk of the evidence that defeats their claims to cherry pick the bits and pieces that they can warp to fit their misbegotten nonsense of a “theory”. Sure, we can ignore culture and language and poverty so we can argue that Muslims are inbred, just like we can ignore the breadth of genetic evidence to claim all humans are descended from one family four thousand years ago, or one couple six thousand years ago, and then turn around and claim that it’s true because Jesus said so.

I’m still waiting to see that verse from the Bible where Jesus talks about allele frequencies.


Don’t waste your time.