Welcome to the apostolic cult

I’ve been watching the smart people at the top of the university hierarchy slowly realize that there’s still a pandemic going on, and that they should have sane policies in place to protect the students and staff — you know, the people who do the actual work of the university and interact with students, which they, fortunately for them, don’t have to do. So we have restored mask requirements in university buildings and will be imposing a vaccination requirement, all sensible, practical actions that I’m surprised took them so long to do. I’d applaud, except that it could only be interpreted as mockery because it would be a bit like giving the rich kid in the class an “A” because he drove to class in his Maserati one day. You don’t get prizes for doing the bare minimum.

Well, maybe I should praise them a little bit more because jesus fucking christ, look at Morris Area Schools, our public school district, has established as the rules for the coming school year. The school board thinks the pandemic is over!

So, no face masks, social distancing is treated with ambiguity (there isn’t going to be any social distancing), there will be no distance learning option, and oh hell no they aren’t going to require vaccinations for anyone. You may notice that there is a jarring difference in one aspect of the public school experience: the kids have to wear masks on the bus, and they have to be fairly thorough in cleaning them. That’s because the buses are regulated by state and federal laws, while once the kids are released into the schools, local control is imposed.

Here’s what you need to know to understand the basis for this lack of sense: Morris public schools are under the control of an apostolic religious cult. They pack the school board — they can do that, because they all vote as a bloc under the influence of their religious leaders — and they have undue influence because they threaten to pull all their kids out of the Morris high school and send them to another small town district, and enrollment affects state funding. It goes without saying that of course they are profoundly conservative wankers who voted for Donald Trump. They’ve also been expanding their business holdings in Morris, which is worrisome. Stevens County is darned close to becoming a theocracy, where the women are all required to wear dresses and grow their hair long and pin it up into a bun. It’s just weird and rather disturbing.

I guess we can hope they all die off thanks to COVID-19, except…why did they have to start with infecting the kids? The children don’t deserve this.

Here’s one strong response from a mother responding to the similar ineffectuality of the Chattanooga school district:

Although it won’t help to be able to opt out of an irrational pandemic response, because the threat requires communal cooperation.

There’s a headline to freak out the white supremacists

I expect this will terrify the right-wingers — will Tucker Carlson be giving everyone his confused look over it? (No shock there — stupefaction is his only expression).

I’ll just say meh. It’s no big deal, this is a demographic shift that everyone has seen coming for a long time.

The first race and ethnicity breakdowns from the 2020 Census, released Thursday, show a more diverse nation than ever in the nation’s history.

The report marks the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790. The White population fell from 223.6 million in 2010 to 204.3 million in 2020, a decrease of 8.6 percent.

The country also passed another milestone on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in the coming decades: For the first time, the portion of White people dipped below 60 percent, slipping from 63.7 percent in 2010 to 57.8 percent in 2020.

That first paragraph is nothing but good news. If anything will erode the endemic bias in this country, it’s more diversity.

The decline is not a consequence of persecution or deaths. It’s a combination of a more rapidly increasing non-white population, more interracial children, and wealthier people (a lot of white people in that category) electing to have fewer children. Big whoop — my white children and grandchildren are not harmed by a shift caused by more brown people thriving. This is not ‘replacement’. The gene pool still contains many white gametes (it feels weird to write that, since gametes do not have a color), they’re just intermingling more. This is a good thing.

We can hope for a more egalitarian future, in which the color of your skin does not make a major difference in your success in life. Keep in mind, though, that history is going to reverberate for many generations to come.

They found a way to end atheism!

Today is the day of the Global Prayer to End Atheism, so I checked their website this morning to prepare. You know, I wanted some warning before I wink out of existence, or my brain is erased, or whatever.

I discovered that their prayer page has ceased to exist and is no longer available.

There is the possibility that their prayer had the reverse effect, and God reached out and smote them all for their temerity, which would be nice, and if true, would actually persuade me that some kind of deity existed (or, possibly, Mark Zuckerberg, who is more of a malignant evil).

The most likely explanation, though, is that their strategy to end atheism is to firmly close their eyes and stop up their ears and sing “la la la la la” until we go away, which has always been their go-to method.

Skepticon this weekend!

My favorite con is happening, starting tomorrow, so you’d better get on over to the Skepticon page to find out what’s happening. It’s entirely online again this year, it’s entirely free as always, so you have no excuse to not attend, or pop in for an event or two, or at least see my panel with Erin Maxson, Larry Mendoza, and Shanon Nebo on Saturday at 1:30 CST.

Somehow I have to come up with a favorite creepy-crawly in two days. I don’t know of any, maybe you can suggest some.

Monologuing at the microscope: you can wake up to me trying to say nice things for a change

Don’t laugh too hard. I’ve been wallowing in despair and stress for a year, and it’s not good for me, so I thought I’d try to force myself to say good things about my self. Think Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” except I don’t go so far as to claim people like me — I’ve got to be realistic in my affirmations.

Anyway, I had to spend some time in some tedious light microscope work, so I just started babbling at the camera while poking at baby spiders with a paintbrush and forceps.

A happy picture

They’re bringing back the chinook salmon in Washington state rivers, where the populations have been destroyed by hydroelectric dams, among other things.

Conor Giorgi, Anadromous Program Manager at the Spokane Tribe of Indians, coaxes one of 51 Chinook salmon into the Little Spokane River, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. Spokane Tribe of Indians, Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, Inland Northwest Land Conservancy released the adult Chinook salmon from the Wells Salmon Hatchery into the river. Salmon have not been in the Little Spokane in 111 years. This is part of a larger effort to reintroduce sustainable salmon populations above Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams.

Although, I have to ask, did they really have to bring up the Program Manager’s sexuality in the text? I say that as someone entirely sympathetic with the anadromous lifestyle, and who would be swimming back to the sea myself if I weren’t so darned timid and straight-laced (I’d probably call myself diadromous, actually, I’m open-minded about which way you swing).

Bumps and lumps and crannies, oh my

I’ve been informed by Spirobranchus that a preprint of Rhawn Joseph’s latest ravings is available. How could you? I have baby spiders that require tending, and you serve up this colossal distraction?

At least it’s exactly what I predicted: page after page of color glossy photos with circles and arrows. Unfortunately, he missed the mark on making a homage to Alice’s Restaurant, though, because it’s not 28 photos…it’s FORTY ONE PAGES OF NASA PHOTOS. 41. He really thinks mind-numbing repetition will make his point.

Here’s an example from page 15. Can you find the tube worms?

I know I can’t. Even the red circles don’t help. So let’s look at page 20, where the red rectangle will help us focus on the really important features in the photograph.

Hey, man, have you ever like really looked at dirt? It’ll like blow your mind, man.

You know what else is really annoying? None of these images have legends or captions, they don’t even have figure numbers. The body text mentions that the results are summarized in Table 3, but there are no tables in the preprint. The text also references figures 5, 7, and XX, and that’s it — how do you justify 41 pages of figures without even mentioning their existence? This is particularly galling because I tell my students, who have to write simple little lab reports, that every figure must have an explanatory caption, they must all be numbered, and each figure has to be referenced in the body text. If it isn’t cited or explained, I get to just rip it out and ignore it. I have failed student work that commits even a fraction of the sins in this work that the author thinks is ready for peer review. This paper is a very, very bad rough draft by an exceptionally lazy and undisciplined author, with essentially no thought about the data, and no real analysis.

Further, the paper has 40 references listed; 22 of them are by Rhawn Joseph. Let’s add that the author is lazy, undisciplined, and exceptionally vain.

Are you ready for the conclusion?

If the specimens identified in this report are alive, fossilized, mineralized, or dormant is unknown. That they are biological is obvious. Thus, the specimens presented in this report serve as further evidence that there is and was life on Mars.

Jesus. None of the photos show anything that is biological, obvious or otherwise. This thing is an unprofessional mess that wouldn’t even pass muster in an introductory high school biology class.

Joe Rogan and Tim Pool: Seriously? How can anyone listen to these people?

Joe Rogan is probably the most popular “news” source on the internet right now, but goddamn, it would be nice if the popular sources actually knew anything. Thanks, YouTube, your algorithm is one of the primary enablers of evil in America.

His latest inanity, the latest among many, is that he is spreading COVID misinformation.

Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. You can watch the video below [Nah, I’m not including a Rogan video here–pzm]. But before you do, the lead scientist and author of the study who spent 10 years conducting this research has something to say. Because he’s horrified.

“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” says Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State. “He’s taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.”

Right. Rogan claimed that vaccinated people were a reservoir of variation in the human population. This is not true, as the author of the scientific paper plainly says.

“Evolution, at the moment, is all happening in the unvaccinated. That’s where the majority of cases are. That’s the majority of transmission. Every time a virus replicates, it can mutate. So the evolution is, right now, occurring in the body of people who are not vaccinated. Rogan is completely wrong trying to deduce anything else.”

If you were to listen to Rogan’s video, you’d see it’s one meathead having a conversation with another nobody, misrepresenting the work but claiming that he has a scientific paper proving his point (it doesn’t) while complaining that you have to get vaccinated to hang out in a bar, followed by a lot of conspiracy theory bullshit. That’s the discourse. This is where we’re at, the state of public science communication of significant information is now in the hands of assholes.

Speaking of assholes and misinformation, have you ever heard of Tim Pool? He’s big. He’s making millions of dollars off YouTube programming and biased lying to the public. The Daily Beast just posted a lengthy exposé on Pool.

…Pool has discovered a style of commentary and audience where a lack of knowledge or journalistic skills might not prove an impediment to success. In some ways, incuriosity and incapacity serve as valuable attributes in this medium. Not solely because of the political valence but thanks in part to how YouTube itself functions: rewarding the kind of high-volume, sensationalized, and sloppy churn Pool specializes in.

And it has made Pool both exceedingly rich and one of the most-watched independent YouTube political pundits in the country—over 3.3 million subscribers, 1.5 billion views, and, by all estimates, hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month. He earned $600,000 just in August 2020 and “most of it” came from YouTube, Pool claimed in the recorded conversation.

It’s stunning that that much money is cheerfully forked over to an incompetent grifter by YouTube and Google. You’d think somebody at those companies would look up and notice that they’re enabling some of the worst journalism on the planet, and that maybe they ought to adjust their algorithm to disable its bias in favor of screeching sensationalist jerks. We’ve long been plagued with tabloid-style yellow journalism, but somehow YouTube has figured out a recipe for turning it into even more money.

At the same time, though, some people manage to produce excellent content on YouTube, which will never be rewarded as profligately as the garbage Tim Pool or Joe Rogan churns out. For example, here’s a beautifully detailed dissection of Tim Pool — it’s worth listening to the whole thing, if you have the patience. I was a bit worried at the beginning, because the creator starts by praising Pool’s goals and claims, and I started thinking that this might be a puff piece by a fan…but never fear, as he continues, he carefully shows how everything Pool says is a self-aggrandizing lie by a lazy pseudojournalist. It’s a thoroughly damning analysis.

Give all of Tim Pool’s money to that guy. It’s too bad they won’t, because sensationalist lying and crazy conspiracy theories bring more views and advertising dollars.