Debate schmebate

Great. We’re having a another presidential debate tomorrow. I predict it will be a debacle.

I won’t predict who will win, because that is going to be shaped by people’s subjective impressions and the way impressions will be shaped by the media. And one thing I can definitely predict is that the media will fuck it up.

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

This debate shouldn’t be happening, because in a functional democracy the senile narcissist running for the Republican party should have been repudiated long ago.

Finally, a cause to unite the Right and Left

Who knew we could find unity in the cause of killing children? Right-wing loonies and left-wing moonbats have been working together to erode food safety and loosening milk pasteurization laws and allowing ideological weirdness to be poured down the throats of innocent children. But at least it’s bipartisan!

The contentious belief that raw milk may be healthier than pasteurized is a bipartisan one, however, it has captured the imagination of, as the Atlantic put it in a 2014 story, “urbanite foodies (read: progressives).” That same year, Joel Salatin, which the publication referred to as a “food and farm freedom celebrity,” told Politico that it was nice to have some liberals join the fight for the mainstreaming of raw milk.

“When I give speeches now,” he said. “The room is half full of libertarians and half full of very liberal Democrats. The bridge is food.”

You know, we actually have data. We know that childhood mortality was greatly reduced when we required that milk be pasteurized. It’s a simple and relatively easy parameter to measure: when you require pasteurization vs. allow raw milk to be sold, how many dead kids do you stack up in each category? We know the numbers.

The CDC would want us to remind you here that, yes, you are allowed to take risks in private, but raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized milk.

When we were raising kids, we made the decision to exclude Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria from their diet as much as possible. It wasn’t just the cost and trouble of paying for funerals, but the nuisance of infants with diarrhea. Trust me, it’s no fun for anyone.

If you’d like to see an entertaining discussion of the thrills of raw milk, Talia Lavin has you covered.

Pasteurization changed the dairy game. By 1911, Chicago and New York had mandated milk pasteurization in commercial operations, with other major cities quickly following suit; by 1936, 98% of milk in the United States was pasteurized. This coincided with lots of other medical discoveries and improvements in public hygiene, but the milk-pasteurization push had particularly drastic effects: between 1890 and 1915, infant mortality dropped by more than half. By midcentury, babies drinking swill milk and dying of diarrhea was largely a thing of the past. Most people would agree that this is, generally, a good thing. I personally drink milk daily with my coffee; I am glad it doesn’t come with a side of typhoid.

I said that this movement was bipartisan, but now it’s fueled by a lot of right-wing “own the libs” influencers and nutcases.

It’s just that the contemporary opponents of pasteurization—the “raw milk” movement, as they call themselves—are so fucking dumb, and so knee-jerk about it. The movement is endorsed by such disparate grifters as Gwyneth Paltrow; RFK Jr.’s erstwhile running mate, Nicole Shanahan; Christian TikTokers; the existentially stifled Mormon tradwife that is the wanly smiling face of Ballerina Farm. The overwhelming number of recent raw-milk converts—and its loudest current evangelists—are on the far right: over in the raw milk aisle you’ll find an assortment of right-wing Fitness Guys with steroidal vasculation filming themselves chugging raw milk, alongside Alex Jones, QAnon influencers, the CEO of racist Twitter clone Gab, and a motley assortment of also-ran far-right Congressional candidates, plus organizations like the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance.

Now normally I might be willing to shrug off this suicidal insanity — let the kooks voluntarily weed themselves out of the population by swilling contaminated food — except that the primary victims of this lunatic movement are kids who have no idea of the risks, and who are simply expressing a natural trust in what Mommy and Daddy tell them. The problems arise when Mommy and Daddy are named Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones. That’s who the food safety laws are aimed at.

Retro gamers ahoy!

Back in the olden days, you know, the 20th century, I had a favorite computer game: Hellcats Over the Pacific. It was a flight simulator that ran on 68020 Macs; it was a simple, fairly crude game that was smooth and fun for it’s time. Most importantly, you could fire it up and do a mission in 20 minutes or so.

It took up 59K of disk space. How many games can you say that about nowadays?

To my short-lived joy, there is a Mac simulator that allows anyone to play the game on their browser. Check it out. See what glorious computer graphics enthralled us in the 1990s.

Oh gosh. Such flat terrain, 8-bit color, blocky objects made up of what, 10 or 20 polygons?

I can’t do it. Not after playing No Man’s Sky. It was still a great game in 1991, though.

I’m getting flashbacks to the internet atheism of yore

Russian deep state operatives

In the aftermath of the disclosure of Russian disinformation agents sponsoring right-wing YouTube, I kept seeing this name, Lauren Chen, that sounded vaguely familiar. She’s the person behind Tenet Media, and was also attached to Blaze TV, and then I remembered…oh yeah, she was also a player behind the right-wing takeover of a big chunk of internet atheism. Yuck. I detested her before it was popular to dislike her!

She was associated with MythCon and that horrible collection of regressive assholes, and spoke at various right-wing atheist conventions, despite the fact that she is openly a Christian nationalist. She was sorta big on YouTube, although now her channel has been taken down. She spoke at a MythCon adjacent event in 2019. Look at this lineup of dreadful people:

The Great Migration: A discussion on digital and physical immigration
Moderated by: Stephen Knight

Panelists include:
Lauren Chen, aka Roaming Millennial
Claire Lehmann
Daisy Cousens
Tara Devlin

12:25 PM – 1:25 PM
NSFW: How Prohibition Amplifies Problems
Moderated by: Melissa Chen

Panelists include:
Aydin Paladin
Karen Straughan
Brittany Simon
Meghan Murphy

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Demonetized: What Role Should Corporate America Play in Activism?
Moderated by: Bill Ottman

Panelists include:
Rucka Rucka Ali
Josephine Mathias
Jeff Waldorf
Graham Elwood

3:20 PM – 4:20 PM
Nuance, Context and the Future of Comedy Online
Moderated by: Stephen Knight

Panelists include:
Gregory Fluhrer, aka Armoured Skeptic
Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula
Blaire White
Hunter Avallone

4:25 PM – 5:25 PM
Changing Minds: How to Admit When You’re Wrong
Moderated by: Lauren Chen, aka Roaming Millennial

Panelists include:
Tim Pool
Melissa Chen
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad
June aka Shoe0nHead

5:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Ending Racism, Violence and Authoritarianism
Moderated by: Bill Ottman

Panelists include:
David Pakman (via Minds Gatherings)
Tim Pool

Stephen Knight, aka Godless Spellchecker; Claire Lehmann, chief Nazi at Quillette; Karen Straughan, denizen of the Manosphere; Armoured Skeptic, major asshole; Count Dankula, training dogs to give Nazi salutes; Blaire White, evidence that being trans does not make one smart and pleasant; Carl Benjamin, dear-god-who-gave-that-jerk-a-platform; and of course Tim Pool. There also all those other lesser jerks and bigots I struggle to remember, and don’t want to remember. Internet atheism was (and still is) infested with these nasties back in 2019.

Since the Justice Department has started striking down a few of the big grifters, may I suggest that that list is a pretty good hint at who else needs to be investigated? So many useless, horrible people with surprising popularity and an overblown income stream…

I wish I had more prairie progressives around here

I’m conflicted about this cartoon.

It’s true that I’ve met some ferociously progressive people living in this rural red part of the state — but it’s still red. The majority of voters in these parts voted for Trump in the last election, for instance. They put up anti-abortion signs and sign up for the NRA and drive megamonster trucks.

So don’t go too far in either direction. The rural midwest is complicated.

Rocket science is in the Bible?

An engineer named Rob Webb has been inspired by Ken Ham to write a book about space and the Bible. It doesn’t seem to have been written yet — he keeps posting articles on AiG to tease the book, and he uses the future tense, that the book ‘will include’ stuff that he doesn’t actually explain yet.

He promises that his book will be unique.

No doubt, there have been many books written on rocket science—with just about all of them from a secular view. But how many of them are written from a biblical view? As of writing this, there likely aren’t many (in fact, none that I know of) that address the field of rocket science through a truly biblical worldview (i.e., through the “lens” of Scripture).

The Bible says nothing about rockets. The authors did not have any concept of space, or of vacuums, or of Newton’s laws. To them, the stars and planets were small bright lights in the sky. Webb has literally nothing to spin a story from, but that doesn’t stop him from dumping multiple long articles telling us what he’s going to say in this astounding book on the AiG website.

The faint glimmerings of an argument that emerge in his ongoing promissory notes are not encouraging.

And yet, one of the leading pioneers of rocket technology, Werner von Braun, was a creationist! But I pray that trend changes soon . . . starting with this book! That said, the purpose of this book is to give you a starting point in understanding rocket science from a biblical perspective and how to defend your faith in a currently secular space industry—standing on the authority of God’s Word.

I don’t give a hypergolic-fueled flying fuck what Werner von Braun thought of evolution — he was not a biologist. He was an old Nazi who used slave labor to build flying bombs to rain down on civilian populations — is that Biblically OK?

I would hope the rocket industry was secular. They’re supposed to be building machines using reliable engineering principles, not some imaginary nonsense that some guy dreams are in the Bible.

His latest chapter is a lengthy discussion of how he came to Christ. It does not tell us where rocketry is discussed in the Bible, but it does tell us how he came to resign from engineering and embark on a new career as a Christian apologist. You won’t be shocked at his motivations, unless you think you have to be smart to be a rocket scientist.

But then, in 2020, everything changed. Not only was the world hit hard by the COVID pandemic, but also by the popular rise of social-justice (Marxist) ideologies, such as critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality, especially in the US. In particular, the space industry, in general, had gone completely “woke” by embracing—and even promoting—Marxist-led organizations and aggressively pushing the latest LGBT agenda.

I had no idea Marxism was synonymous with social justice! But then again, I should trust that a guy who can pull rocketry out of the Bible would be able to extract any old bug-a-boo he doesn’t like out of Karl Marx’s corpse. It’s a skill.

Many agencies were pushing these religious viewpoints—regardless of an individual’s convictions. There was a widespread concerted effort to make sure everyone had the same religious beliefs that were being promoted by the government and the culture at large.

Obviously, this was an attack against my Christian faith! Inevitably, this turn of events led me to start looking for other employment. At one point, someone even said, “You don’t have to actually agree with it, but at least pretend that you do.”

His Christian faith is being attacked by the idea that one should treat your neighbor as yourself! I guess his faith imagines Jesus as a white capitalist overlord. That’s no weirder than thinking that it prophesies satellites and escape velocities and moon landings, I guess.

He was also pissed off about NASA being unbiblical.

The main challenge I faced was NASA’s unbiblical motivation for each of its missions. Once you get past all the “fluff” from the media, the primary goals of every mission that I’ve worked on are based on evolutionary beliefs, which normally included the constant search for “evidence” of life in outer space and the attempt to explain the origin/evolution of our universe (without God). Of course, the reason is that the people I worked with, in general, follow a view of origins based on naturalism (meaning “nature is all that exists,” governed by natural laws, and thus no need for God).

Evolution, like wokeness, has taken over all the sciences. I think he confuses materialism and naturalism with being antithetical to Christianity…or does he? Maybe his version of Christianity is anti-science, but I don’t think that’s true of all versions of Christianity.

If ever he gets around to writing the damned thing, Rob Webb’s book will be a blast.

I missed out on the action

Surprise! Russian propaganda outlets have been funneling lots of cash into some sympathetic YouTubers…amazing amounts of money. They had a fake figurehead named “Grigoriann” who recruited these commentators to churn out videos that expressed the views that Russia likes.

Prosecutors said one of the Tenet founders began soliciting two commentators for work on behalf of “Grigoriann” around February 2023. One of the personalities, described as “Commentator-1,” said he would need $5 million annually “for him to be interested” in creating videos for the fake persona, Grigoriann. The other, identified as “Commentator-2,” needed $100,000 per weekly episode “to make it worth his while,” according to the indictment.

The two commentators eventually entered into contracts, prosecutors said. The contract for Commentator-1 required four weekly videos that he would host and would be livestreamed by Tenet Media in exchange for $400,000 per month and a $100,000 signing bonus. Commentator-2 agreed to provide weekly videos for $100,000 apiece, the indictment states.

OK, I’ll make videos for a mere $10K per week. No problem. I could commit to making that my full-time job for only half a million per year, although I’d also willingly accept $5 million, like those bozos did.

Maybe the problem is that I don’t express views that are favorable to Moscow. Or have 1 or 2 million followers on YouTube.

The well-paid commentators have been identified as Tim Pool and either Dave Rubin or Benny Johnson (doesn’t matter which is which, they’re all kind of indistinguishable right-wing turds). If you don’t recognize those names, good for you — they are the schlockiest, dumbest, most dishonest people on YouTube.

There’s something wrong at the core of YouTube, because have you noticed that it’s always the worst people who float to the top of that medium?

The more you know

You probably assume you can recognize black widows by the red hourglass on the underside, like this:

But the juveniles and other variant forms can look like this:

And you might as well give up, because in their natural environment they may not pose obligingly for you.

Those are all young’uns, the spawn of the few adults I got this summer. They’re thriving!

I expect better of retired professors, Jerry Hopkins

I guess this is what retired professors are reduced to, flogging their ideas over whatever little venue will accept them for publication (I’m not retired yet, but feel free to poke fun at the irony in a few years), but you know, you’d expect a little more sophistication and logic. You ought to learn something from those years of professing, after all. But not Jerry Hopkins! He’s a retired history professor who writes these amazing little ditties for the opinion pages of the Marshall, Texas newspaper. He’s got a recognizable style as a creationist: he makes a stupid assertion, and then plows ahead repeating the assertion until, apparently, the reader is supposed to believe it.

Evolution is not an empirical science. It is a matter of absolute faith. In fact, it cannot be proven by any exercise of science. It cannot be demonstrated by observation, tested or otherwise verified. It is unproved and has no way of being proved. The transmutation of one species into another has never been observed and will not, because no man can live the millions of years necessary to verify the process. Evolution should not be classified as a theory, because by definition a theory must be testable so as to justify that designation.

All it takes is one observation or test to shoot this claim down. Fortunately for Jerry, though, he’s so ignorant of the field he’s critiquing that he isn’t aware of any counterexamples. But it’s easy to find them: I just opened the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and here’s one interesting example: “Breeding phenology drives variation in reproductive output, reproductive costs, and offspring fitness in a viviparous ectotherm”. They’re looking at the effects of climate change on all these parameters of reproduction in a lizard, Zootoca vivipara. It’s got observations, measurements, experiments, and is most definitely an empirical study of how organisms change in response to a changing environment. It takes less than a minute to look this stuff up, but apparently Jerry is extraordinarily busy in his retirement.

Oh, but there’s the problem: he thinks a researcher has to live for millions of years to directly and personally observe a phenomenon, or it didn’t happen. This is a very peculiar attitude for a professor of history to take. He must be very old to have lived through all of the history he taught in his classes.

Evolution is a speculative philosophy, a religious construct devised by man to exclude God. Evolution exists outside the realm of science and experimentation. It is not questioned or doubted in the scientific or academic worlds. Evolution reigns supreme in universities, even those who claim to be Christian and supposedly believe the Bible. It has become “a sacred cow” that no one challenges or opposes. If you question evolution, you are immediately condemned as an ignoramus, a religious fanatic and uneducated. Brilliant scientists and well-educated academics have lost their positions, tenure and respect when they have merely used the forbidden term “intelligent design.”

But Darwin, to name one prominent example, was agnostic, not at all anti-religious, and he suffered years of anguish because he feared his ideas would be used to attack the religious people he loved. There are lots of scientists who believe in God and yet also accept evolution — Jerry dodges that one by calling them those who claim to be Christian. I guess I’ll have to break the news to Ken Miller that sorry, guy, you’re actually an atheist, according to Jerry Hopkins of Marshall, Texas. Welcome to the club!

Jerry’s argument could be stronger if he named a few of those Brilliant scientists and well-educated academics who have been fired for using the words intelligent design. I don’t know of any; if one of my colleagues at my university proposed it, I’d probably give them an epic eye-roll, and that’s about it. Maybe I’d challenge them to a public argument, if I thought they were doing a disservice to the students. They probably would lose my respect, but you don’t get to enforce respect.

The philosophy of evolution is not scientific. It is a religious belief. Evolution is a worldview, a belief system, built on atheistic presuppositions without proof intellectually or materially. This religious philosophy is based on religious presuppositions held to by faith. This philosophy is an assault on the biblical doctrine of creation and the reality of God as Creator. Romans 1:18-32 clearly holds that unregenerate man rejects God as Creator, defying God as sovereign, seeking to “hold down” this special revelation. Verse 25 clearly shows man substituting willfully his “new reality” in vain reasoning, accepting a God-defying worldview that worships and serves the creature and creation rather than the Creator God. This is how Paul stated it — “who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 1:25). The use of the prepositional phrase “more than the Creator” (πаρá τòγ κτίσαντα) uses the preposition πаρá denoting a position “alongside of” or “parallel to” or “adjacent to” as its basic sense (based on S. E. Porter’s Idioms of the Greek New Testament). Such an expression indicates that man deliberately and hostilely rejects God as Creator-Designer. Man has “exchanged” truth of God for “the lie of godlessness.”

I’m going to take a wild guess here and figure that Jerry Hopkins was a professor at a Bible college, just from that glurge of Bible vomit.

While there is a philosophy of evolution, it’s more diverse than he realized, and it’s definitely not built on atheistic presuppositions. There’s no such thing as proof in science, except in the sense of disproving claims. Nowhere in the long list of things I was expected to know to earn a degree in my field is there a statement that “there is no god”. There is a pragmatic assumption that one will provide evidence in support of a claim…and “there is a god” is one of those claims that is hard to support. Provide that evidence, and we’ll incorporate it into our theories. Them’s the rules.

This explains why many academics and modern thinkers object to the use of “intelligent design” and reject any discussion of God or special creation. As I prepare this, I’m thinking of how some of you will respond because of my experiences in the past when I’ve raised this issue in classes, academic settings or in columns such as this. I anticipate that I will be charged with unscientific thinking, anti-intellectualism and foolishness. My plea is that we civilly discuss the alternatives and come to a reasonable and sensible conclusion to explain what exists and what we can observe. Consider all the marvels in our bodies — our brains, eyes, ears, hands, feet, sex organs, lungs, digestive system, nerves, cells and many other things. There is no way these marvels could have come into being by chance or thoughtless actions. The “Big Bang” could not have created anything. Evolution is not a reasonable explanation and has no scientific proof supporting it. I cannot accept it. I confess that I accept God’s creative design of all things and believe this is a more acceptable explanation than an irrational and unprovable “theory” like evolution.

No, we object to “intelligent design” because you have to provide good evidence for the existence of your hypothesized intelligence. Got any? Listing “marvels” isn’t it, because we know how hands, for instance, evolved. We’ve mapped out the genes that generate the pattern, we have extant organisms that demonstrate the range of morphological variation, we have the fossils. The evidence contradicts your claim that there is no way they could have evolved, because…yes, way.

Evolution opens the door for all kinds of irrational and illogical ideas regarding human beings and the natural realm. This is why the first eleven chapters of Genesis are so important for us to understand who we are and what really exists and how it came to be. There are critically important elements that God’s creative acts establish and confirm. In our foolish and irrational day we need to return to God’s creative order and plan or we will persist in idiocy and idolatry as described in Romans chapter 1.

Right. You believe a few short chapters in a religious text accurately and completely describe the origin of all the biological diversity on planet Earth, but we’re the irrational and illogical ones.

Uh-oh, here it comes: Jerry Hopkins’ ultimate message is that everyone must live their lives how he tells them to, and anything else is icky.

The assault and denial of human sexuality as defined by God must be clearly understood. Homosexuality is a sin issue, not a civil rights issue. It demonstrates the insidious, immoral efforts the Devil has triggered to discredit God and His Word. A primary impetuous in this regard is the philosophy of evolution that opens the door to any emerging sexuality or perversion. Genesis 1:27-28 states simply that God created man in His own image, male and female. God blessed them and said they were to be fruitful, to multiply and replenish the earth, subduing it and having dominion over all — fish, birds and every living thing. Genesis 2:24 clearly stresses that “a person shall leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh. Homosexuality has never been and will never be something God intended for the human race. It maybe falsely advanced under evolutionary thinking, but it cannot be affirmed by God or His Word. This is merely one example of the flawed assumptions that evolutionary thinking brings people to embrace.

Jerry Hopkins just doesn’t like what other people do with their genitals, and thinks his Holy Book justifies his opinion. I don’t believe in any gods, but if they existed, I’d trust what they wrote in the big book of nature to what some blue-nosed prig claims is written in archaic language on a few pieces of paper. And Nature seems to celebrate sex in endless variety.