The groomers are at it again

Never trust a politician who wears a big-ass cowboy hat indoors. That means I’m not a fan of the Wyoming Republican party.

More sensible Wyoming politicians are proposing a bill that disallows marriage to 15 year old and younger children. The Republicans are agin’ it. Their reasoning is that, welp, kids can get pregnant.

The key issue, the analysis states, is that children ages 15 and younger still can get pregnant but could no longer get married legally if the law passes.

This denies the right of the teen’s baby to be raised in a stable home by his or her mother and father, the document says, citing the state Constitution’s promise of equal protection as a basis.

“Parents, by virtue of their right to conceive children, have the pre-political, i.e. God-given, responsibility to raise their own children,” the document continues. “This right and responsibility includes guiding their own maturing children into the estate of Holy Matrimony.”

So “god-given” biology means that they have a right to lock children into a legal and political relationship and commit them to life as a parent. If a 13 year old gets pregnant, do they have the maturity to guide their own maturing children?

Proponents of the law have a clear response.

“You don’t want a 30-year-old who impregnates a 12-year-old to be able to marry them and get around all of our other child protection laws,” he said. “I find that argument disingenuous.”

It apparently isn’t enough for the Republicans that the law still allows them to impregnate and marry 16 year olds.

ChatGPT totally fails my one-question exam on Junk DNA

I was chatting with HJ Hornbeck and Dr Sarah yesterday, and we were tinkering with ChatGPT. We asked it for some simple medical advice, of the sort you might consult WebMD for, and Dr Sarah confirmed that it was close to what she would recommend. Then we asked it a simple question of the sort I might throw out in a college classroom.

We asked, “What is junk DNA?” Uh-oh.

Junk DNA is a term used to describe the non-coding regions of the genome, which do not encode proteins. For many years, it was believed that these regions of the genome had no function and were simply “leftover” DNA that accumulated over evolutionary time. This led to the term “junk DNA” being used to describe these regions, as they were thought to be of no consequence to the organism.

However, more recent research has shown that many of these non-coding regions actually play important roles in regulating gene expression and controlling the activity of specific genes. They can act as molecular “switches” that turn genes on or off in response to different environmental signals, and they can also act as spacers that help to organize the genome into distinct functional regions.

In addition, some non-coding regions of the genome contain functional elements such as transposable elements, ribosomal DNA, and small RNA molecules, which play important roles in regulating gene expression and controlling the activity of specific genes.

In light of these findings, the term “junk DNA” is no longer used in a scientifically accurate context, and has been largely replaced by the more accurate terms “non-coding DNA” or “regulatory DNA.” These non-coding regions of the genome are now recognized as playing important roles in shaping the phenotype and evolution of organisms.

Holy crap, that is a terrible answer, from the very first sentence. It conflates junk DNA with non-coding DNA, and builds its entire argument on that premise. It then claims that the discovery of regulatory sequences undermined the concept…but regulatory sequences have never been regarded as junk, and neither have ribosomal DNA or these unspecified “small RNA molecules” (what? like tRNA or siRNA?) And now transposable elements are just assumed to be functional? Some have acquired functional roles, but most are not, which is kind of significant given that they make up around half the mammalian genome.

Then the grand conclusion is that “junk DNA” is no longer used, and has been replaced by the terms “non-coding DNA” or “regulatory DNA.” No, it has not. Those are not the same thing at all. I note that much of the answer seems to have been cribbed from the kind of thing you get in a random Google search, which is polluted with all kinds of pseudoscience, creationist sources, and general denial that our DNA could be less than perfect. For instance, even Scientific American has a trash article that concludes that evolution is too wise to waste this valuable information. Maybe ChatGPT should have exercised a little discrimination, and looked at qualified sources like Graur, and Palazzo, and Moran? Because I’d give this answer a big fat “F” and comment that apparently the author hadn’t listened in lecture or read the textbook.

Speaking of Moran, his long awaited book, What’s in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk, is off to the printers, with an expected release date of 16 May. Maybe that will help ChatGPT correct its bad science. That’s a book I’m looking forward to.

Magic is not mechanism

Today’s Oglaf is appropriate and entirely work-safe!

It makes a good point, that magic isn’t an explanation for much of anything — you need some chain of causality and evidence, with some mechanism at each step. You don’t just get to say “it’s magic” or “it’s a miracle.”

Bonus, the comic pokes fun at that absurd ad hoc magic system in the Harry Potter books that is nothing but lazy plot gimmicks.

Worst review ever

I would be the worst person in the world to review this new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. I don’t play many video games, and I dislike all the Harry Potter stuff — I got the books to encourage my kids to read, but found them boring and repetitive and full of plot holes myself. And ever since JK Rowling has demonstrated that she’s a revolting bigot. I’m not going to touch this game, let alone play it or review it.

The person you want to review it is someone who loved Harry Potter, who was a deep Rowling fan (at least once upon a time), and an experienced game reviewer. Something like this review in Wired. You can tell it’s driven by the disappointment the author feels.

When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. K. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

The final assessment:

The story is rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. The gameplay feels dated. The graphics feel like they’re a couple generations behind. All the characters are one-dimensional. It doesn’t stay true to the established lore. Every character feels like an off-brand version of the characters we know and love. There’s no sense of place. No magic, no heart.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s any way I’d ever play this game.

The little things that progress with a democratic state government

Every once in a while, good things happen here in Minnesota.

The Minnesota House voted 70-58 along party lines Thursday to spend around $200 million a year making school breakfasts and lunches available to all students at no cost.

That’s right, every school, even the rich suburban ones, will have all school lunches subsidized. I know what some people are thinking — the rich kids can afford it, why pay for their lunch? That’s what the Republicans are saying right now.

“Why are we feeding kids in Edina or rich areas that do not need this extra funding? We are pushing tax dollars where they are not needed,” said Rep. Pam Altendorf, R-Red Wing.

Republican lawmakers tried but failed to amend the bill Thursday by somewhat expanding eligibility for free school meals – to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, up from 185 percent – without making them free for all students.

I can be sympathetic to this argument. The problem is that it’s coming out of the mouths of Republicans who are scrabbling for ways to cause some pain to the citizenry — they don’t want to pay for any lunches at all, but if they can’t do that, they want some control. They want to exercise power, even in petty ways. They’ve always wanted to tighten education’s budget in any way possible.

We need to change our mindset on that. Education is a critical function for the state: we should be providing what students need to be prepared to learn (nutrition, books, supplies), and we should be investing in infrastructure, we should be hiring enough teachers and paying them adequately, and we should be doing that equitably for every school and every student. We already prop up inequities by basing school funding on local property taxes, and I see offering an essential service to every school without regard for the artificial partitioning of schools by class and race that are otherwise endemic everywhere in this country as a virtue.

Lunch is a start. Do books and teacher pay next. Or are you going to be upset at helping upper middle class children?

How did the world’s greatest love story in Jesus become known as a hate group?

There’s a hugely well-funded ad campaign going on right now, that will include one of those ridiculously expensive SuperBowl ads, that aims to clean up Jesus’ image. He’s about love, and tolerance, and all that sweetness and light stuff.

You might be wondering who is paying for this message. Americans United has you covered. They’ve been digging deep into the people funding these ads.

The Servant Foundation, also known as The Signatry, is behind the ad blitz. Over the next three years, the Servant Foundation plans to spend “about a billion dollars” toward this public relations campaign. They’ve hired a PR firm to address, in the firm’s words, the problem of “How did the world’s greatest love story in Jesus become known as a hate group?”

I know, I know! Because modern conservative Christianity is a hate group, and they’ve been relying on buddy Jesus as a front man for hatred and intolerance. Instead of false advertising, maybe they should be using that money to clean up their act.

Once you get past the tolerant veneer, you discover the Servant Foundation is washing dirty money from some of the worst, most horrible Christian cults.

Of course, they’re the cause of their own problem – not only has the Servant Foundation funded hate groups, but the PR firm, Haven, has represented them. Key Shadow Network members Focus on the Family and Alliance Defending Freedom are in their portfolio.

Look who else they’re forking cash over to:

Other recipients of the Servant Foundation’s billion dollars in assets include:

  • Nearly $8 million went to Answers in Genesis, creationist Ken Ham’s fundamentalist ministry behind the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.
  • Over $1 million was designated for the anti-LGBTQ Campus Crusade for Christ (rebranded as “Cru” since 2011).
  • $374,800 went to Al Hayat Ministries, an organization that seeks to “respectfully yet fearlessly unveil the deception of Islam,” and runs an Arabic-language Christian satellite TV station with the goal of converting Muslims to Christianity.

In 2020 alone, we found donations to prominent Shadow Network members American Center for Law and Justice, First Liberty Institute, and Liberty Counsel.

Also helping to fund the Super Bowl ads are the Greens, the billionaire family behind the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and the Hobby Lobby craft store chain that got the Supreme Court to grant corporations a religious exemption to deny workers access to birth control.

Jesus isn’t political, if you don’t think right-wing Xianity is political. Jesus is for all people, except the gay ones or the trans ones. And they’re giving lots of bucks to creationism!

Good thing I won’t be watching the SuperBowl, and in particular won’t be watching the half-time ad glut, or I’d be puking into my nachos when that lying abomination came on.

And if you’re still wondering how Jesus became known as a front for hatred, just look at who is lying in his name.

First, get rid of all the misogynists

OK, it’s not just conservatives. It turns out that progressive movements have a long history of informants blending in and disrupting the efforts of the group, and they’re usually men.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

It’s a long article, but worth a read. It got me thinking back to all the warning signs we should have seen in the Brave Leaders of Atheism, who routinely dismissed those little problems of sexism in the movement as trivial obstacles to advancing the Cause…and who ended up seeing that movement rip itself apart.

Hey, also consider all the spousal abuse among the police. It would probably be a great step forward if they immediately fired everyone ever guilty of wife-beating.

Keep authoritarians away from all children

They look like normal human beings!

I have a confession to make: I’m a heterosexual male. I find women’s bodies attractive. I’ve looked at porn, and even found some of it titillating.

That fact does not overwhelm my interactions with women, and isn’t even a minor factor in how I regard them. I don’t “rate” women, and I don’t collect pornography — it’s not that interesting. Collecting photos of random naked women is more than a little creepy.

So there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this.

A former deacon for Moscow’s Christ Church has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for possessing child pornography.

Alex Lloyd was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Coeur d’Alene this week. Judge Lynn Winmill handed down the sentence and ordered Lloyd to pay $5,000 in restitution and placed him on probation for 20 years.

Lloyd pleaded guilty in federal court in August.

Adult pornography isn’t criminalized, but if it were, I’d be safe, even after confessing that I like women’s bodies. I don’t find the idea of collecting computer images of sexy people at all appealing. Don’t they know that real relationships are much more satisfying? What is going on in the heads of these fools? They’re obsessed with some of the most vile pornography I can imagine!

And then there’s this recent bust.

A Chicago man faces several child pornography charges in Cook County after a federal investigation infiltrated the encrypted media app Telegram and found a cross-country network of people sexually exploiting children, the Sun-Times has learned.

The work of Homeland Security Investigations in Arizona, dubbed Operation Swipe Left, led agents to Norris “Nick” Stauffer, 27, who is charged here with disseminating child pornography, records show.

It also resulted in criminal charges against more than a dozen people elsewhere — including at least two with political ties — amid allegations of livestreamed abuse, kidnapping threats and the production and distribution of child pornography.

A federal judge called some of the allegations “horrific.” When agents raided one suspect’s home, video depicting the sexual abuse of an infant was allegedly playing on a screen. And Cook County Circuit Judge Mary Marubio stressed to Stauffer in February 2022 that “this is not a victimless crime.”

“This is a crime that preys on children and exploits children,” the judge said, according to a court transcript.

At least 17 people have been charged in all, including in Arizona, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., California and South Africa, authorities say. Judges have handed significant prison time to nine of them. Ages of the group’s victims ranged from 6 months to 17 years old, according to a Homeland Security Investigations official.

Yeesh. It’s like trying to understand serial killers — it makes no sense, but somehow the culprits find gratification in it. The investigators can’t find any thread of a connection between all these wicked people.

Eric McLoughlin, deputy special-agent-in-charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Phoenix, Arizona, said most of the defendants charged come from more varied backgrounds than Hageman and Verastigui. They included a youth soccer coach, an amusement park employee and the son of a police officer, McLoughlin said.

Records show Stauffer worked for a grocery chain.

“We often see that the types of individuals involved in these horrific acts, really, they come from all different walks of life,” McLoughlin said.

Except, maybe, one thing they’re overlooking. One of the scumbags worked for the Republican party, another for Turning Point USA. All of them were using Telegram, a service popular among conservatives. They were happily chatting with one another, thinking they were protected by encryption, and reinforcing their sickness with extreme comments.

Separately, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., filed charges in February 2021 against Verastigui, who has been identified as a former Republican National Committee staffer in multiple news reports. Prosecutors alleged Verastigui told a group he “can’t stop thinking about touching, raping and killing a newborn baby.”

All of them conservative. Alex Lloyd was a member of a notoriously conservative church. Also, all of them men. These are the kind of men who protest loudly about “groomers” and think drag queens reading books to children is somehow nefarious. There’s got to be a connection in there, somewhere.

So that’s what it’s like to work with Musk

He’s just a horrible man, and he’ll fire you for telling the truth.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

This is ridiculous, he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.

Uh-oh. He’s got socialmediaitis. The first sign of the problem is when you get obsessed with your numbers, and then you start believing that the number of people who look at you is a measure of your personal worth, and then your head starts to swell and you begin to believe you deserve every bit of attention. Musk is exhibiting ‘influencer’ ego.

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Yes. He’s demonstrated beyond any doubt that he’s a hardcore twit, and has become much less interesting. His critics (like me) are realizing that he’s substanceless, and I suspect many of his fans are becoming uncomfortable at seeing their hero’s frequent gaffes. All the news about Musk is bad news nowadays.

Musk did not take the news well.

You’re fired, you’re fired, Musk told the engineer.

And that’s how an incompetent boss drives his company into a crater.

Liars lying getting hysterical about it

President Biden managed to rile up a contingent of Republicans by pointing out that they wanted to get rid of social security, and also medicare and medicaid. They were indignant. Not so, they screeched.

Sen. Mike Lee reacts with disbelief and shock that President Biden said some Republicans propose sunsetting Social Security and Medicare. Pure disbelief. Where could Biden get this obviously false crazy idea? Note that he did this while sitting next to Sen. Rick Scott, the guy who actually formally wrote the proposal as the Senate GOP platform position.

Huh. Funny how Lee used the promise of destroying social security while campaigning for the senate, and Rick Scott published a brochure explaining that he would do it. They’re on the record and are now lying about it.

After Lee was shown on TV expressing outrage over Biden saying that some Republicans wanted to cut those entitlements, critics online shared a video of an event from Lee’s Senate campaign. In the video originally posted to YouTube, Lee told a group of voters in Cache Valley, Utah, on Feb. 23, 2010, that he was about to “tell you one thing you probably have never heard from a politician.”

“It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said at the time. “People who advise me politically always tell me it’s dangerous and I tell them, ‘In that case it’s not worth my running.’ That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

Ron Desantis and Nikki Hailey have also endorsed cutting social security and raising the retirement age. I’m rather horrified at that, being 65 years old, and considering a delayed retirement already, at 67 or 68. Also, I registered for social security when I was 13 years old, and noticed then that a significant chunk of my $1.65/hour pay was snatched away by the gubmint. I figured it was OK, since it would contribute to my unimaginably distant retirement (now pretty easily imagined), but it means I’ve been paying in for 52 years. You don’t get to cut MY money, guys.

I hope the Democrats can get fired up and campaign hard on this issue.

Also, could everyone shut up about the stupid balloon? Yeah, China spies on us, we spy on them, everyone is spying on everyone.