Never again? It rings a bit hollow nowadays

Once again, Israel’s boot is stomping down hard on the Palestinians, and the Israelis are positively giddy about it.

I’m trying hard to see both sides in this conflict, and this article, for instance, is doing it’s best to present a balanced story. All I see, though, is a chronicle of a grossly asymmetric battle.

A day of upheaval at the holy sites of this contested city quickly widened into a night of warlike violence in communities across the country early Tuesday, with hundreds of rockets from the Gaza Strip causing injuries in Israeli neighborhoods and retaliatory airstrikes killing at least 22 Gazans, according to officials there.

Something is not adding up. Hundreds of rockets are launched, but the end result is only a few injured civilians?

Air-raid sirens sounded every few minutes in towns where many Israelis had already passed the night in bomb shelters. On Tuesday afternoon, more than 200 rockets struck southern Israel within the span of an hour, including in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon just north of Gaza, according to media reports. At least four members of a family were reported injured when one rocket hit an eight-story apartment building.

These things seem to be remarkably ineffective. Are they little more than glorified fireworks? I had to look them up on Wikipedia to get the basics, and yes, they are nasty little things I wouldn’t want fired in my general direction, but they aren’t useful weapons of war.

The Qassam rocket is the best-known type of rocket deployed by Palestinian militants, mainly against Israeli civilians, but also some military targets during the Second Intifada of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to Human Rights Watch, Qassam rockets are too inaccurate and prone to malfunction to be used against specific military targets in or near civilian areas, and are mainly launched for the purpose of “harming civilians.”

They have a range of 3 or 4 kilometers, are grossly inaccurate, and most of them seem to fail, one way or another. In the recent escalation,

Military officials said more than 500 rockets had been launched from Gaza since the start of the flare-up, although a large percentage of them failed to cross into Israel and exploded, landing inside the enclave itself. The army’s expansive antimissile defense network, known as Iron Dome, destroyed more than 90 percent of the rockets that reached Israeli airspace, the army said.

These are tools of impotent rage that mainly seem intended to harass civilians. Israel knows this, too.

In 2006, the Israeli Ministry of Defense viewed the Qassams as “more a psychological than physical threat.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli response is somewhat more deadly and distructive.

In response to the launches, the Israel Defense Forces carried out sustained retaliatory strikes inside the Gaza Strip overnight and into the morning, with warplanes conducting more than 140 attacks. The IDF said it killed 15 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in strikes that targeted rocket manufacturing and storage sites, training and military complexes, two underground tunnels and the home of a battalion commander.

Images from the Shati refugee camp near Gaza City on Tuesday morning showed scenes of destruction following at least one Israeli airstrike that appeared to target the top floor of a nearby residential building. The building’s concrete rooftop collapsed onto the apartment below, where residents were shown picking through the rubble.

So Palestinians are churning out a lot of these in metal shops across their territory…

…and Israel retaliates with this.

That’s stupid. If that’s how the war is being fought, F-15s vs homemade rockets, Palestinians are doomed and flailing futilely. But Palestinians aren’t stupid, so maybe we shouldn’t assume that’s how the war is fought, and just maybe the stupid ones are the Israelis. This is a political campaign fought on a global stage, and all I see is a heavily armed bully murdering people armed with popguns, and then the bully dances in the street while innocents burn.

Who is going to win that war? I know for sure that the loser is any high-minded principles or history of courage by the people of Israel.

“tastes like the casual cruelty of the universe”

I have been working with lab alcohol for decades. I’ve got liters of the stuff. When we’re using it in the teaching labs I might sometimes make a feeble joke about how I don’t want to catch any of the students taking a snort, but I can tell that no one is ever tempted. It’s a fierce-smelling chemical that you’re not going to want to try.

It’s 95% alcohol, which is the same concentration as a product you can buy at the liquor store, called Everclear.

Sad to say, I have tried Everclear. My seriously, tragically, horribly alcoholic grandfather would drink the stuff, and he once gave me a sip. Just a sip! That was enough. I guess I have no taste for an industrial solvent.

Not even my grandfather would drink it straight, though. He’d add a spoonful of brown sugar to his glass.

Eww, I just shuddered involuntarily at the memory.

Are you OK, Arizona?

You’re acting strangely. You’re carrying out a partisan, biased “recount” of an already settled election, and your deep investigation involves searching for bamboo fibers in the ballot, because that would mean they were printed in China? Why would you think they’d pre-print them in China, and go to all the trouble of shipping them across the Pacific, when — I don’t know if you’re aware of this — we have plenty of paper and printers and all that sort of thing right here in the US? This is a conspiracy theory, and it is stupid.

In which case, this makes more sense: to guarantee the future supply of stupid people who will fall for stupid conspiracy theories, the Republicans want to compel schools to teach stupid ideas.

Republican lawmakers voted Wednesday to punish teachers who don’t present both sides of controversial science or events, a move some lawmakers say could force them to seek out and present contrary views on everything from climate change and slavery to the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the Holocaust — and even whether Joe Biden really won the election.

The measure approved along party lines requires any “controversial issues” discussed in the classroom must be done “from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”

Well, that’s familiar: that’s the creationist “Teach the Controversy” strategy that they deployed to enable them to introduce garbage into the classroom. Now it’s just being broadened by Arizona Republicans.

I don’t know why they’re doing this. Were they jealous of Florida’s reputation? Are they hoping to get everyone else to laugh at “Arizona Man”? Because it’s not going to happen as long as Matt Gaetz lives.

Although, I do confess, this was a pretty good effort.

Plumbing the depths of psychic research

Does anyone else roll their eyes when they see that Dean Radin has come out with another paper about psychic powers? His latest is Genetics of psychic ability – A pilot case-control exome sequencing study, so you can see he’s now going to pretend he’s got genetic and molecular evidence. Let’s take a look at the abstract!

Introduction
It is commonly believed that psychic ability, like many mental and physical traits, runs in families. This suggests the presence of a genetic component. If such a component were found, it would constitute a biological marker of psychic ability and inform environmental or pharmacologic means of enhancing or suppressing this ability.

“Commonly believed” is not evidence, so claiming that a “common belief” justifies “suggesting” there is a genetic component is a huge reach. If this paper wasn’t rejected at the first sentence of the abstract, it should have been thrown out at the second.

Then to say they’d have a marker of psychic ability if they found a genetic component is absurd. This is like saying, “If I had some bread, I could make a ham sandwich, if I had some ham” (literally on the nose, I have neither ham nor bread in my house right now.)

Methods
A case-control study design was used to evaluate differences between psychic cases and non-psychic controls. Over 3,000 candidates globally were screened through two online surveys to locate people who claimed they and other family members were psychic. Measures of relevance to the claimed abilities (e.g., absorption, empathy, schizotypy) were collected and based on those responses, individuals with indications of psychotic or delusional tendencies were excluded from further consideration. Eligible candidates were then interviewed and completed additional screening tests. Thirteen individuals were selected as the final “psychic cases,” and ten age-, sex-, and ethnicity-matched individuals with no claims of psychic ability were selected as controls. DNA from the saliva of these 23 participants was subjected to whole-exome sequencing. Two independent bioinformatics analyses were blindly applied to the sequenced data, one focusing exclusively on protein-coding sequences and another that also included some adjacent noncoding sequences.

They found their “psychics” with an online questionnaire. They invited people to basically write in and claim they had paranormal abilities, and got lots of submissions. I guess I’ll have to look at their results beyond the abstract to see what’s going on. Boy, was the population full of super-powered people…at least, on self report. They got 3,162 people writing in saying they had all kinds of powers!

The psychic cases reported various ages when their abilities began, with “0-10 years old” being the most commonly reported answer (n = 9). The psychic cases endorsed the following abilities in descending order (number of psychic cases in parentheses after each ability): claircognizance (psychic “knowing,” n = 13), clairempathy (psychic “feeling,” 13), emotional healing (13), precognition, premonition and precognitive dreams (12), animal communication (11), clairvoyance (11), mediumship (11), telepathy (11), astral projection (10), aura reading (10), clairaudience (10), clairsentience (10), lucid dreaming (10), channeling (8), clairalience (8), nature empath (8), remote viewing (8), physical healing (7), retrocognition (7), psychometry (6), geomancy (5), psychokinesis (4), automatic writing (3), levitation (1), and psychic surgery (1). Clairgustance and pyrokinesis were not endorsed. On average, cases endorsed 9.5 +/- 8.9 abilities.

Of course, they’re not so stupid that they’d simply accept them on their say-so. They winnowed out the real crazies with an online psychiatric test, and then subjected them to one of those online psychic power tests. They were very rigorous. They got the number of subjects down to 13. Before you get too excited, though, they actually failed most of the tests, but got accepted anyway.

The cases’ performance was better than controls on most tasks, although this difference only reached statistical significance on the Remote Viewing test.

The “Remote Viewing test” was basically, “What does my table look like?”. That’s it.

So, using a sloppy lazy test, they picked a tiny random group of 13 people to spit in a test tube, and they shipped the saliva off to a company to sequence the exons — that is, the part of the genome that was transcribed and translated to produce proteins. I’m going to have to criticize their methodology again. Not only is their sample so tiny that they have no statistical power, but also what they’re looking for is vague and unspecified. They’re fishing for any kind of silly correlation.

What’s really surprising is that they didn’t find any!

Results
Sequencing data were obtained for all samples, except for one in the control group that did not pass the quality controls and was not included in further analyses. After unblinding the datasets, none of the protein-coding sequences (i.e., exons) showed any variation that discriminated between cases and controls. However, a difference was observed in the intron (i.e., non-protein-coding region) adjacent to an exon in the TNRC18 gene (Trinucleotide Repeat-Containing Gene 18 Protein) on chromosome 7. This variation, an alteration of GG to GA, was found in 7 of 9 controls and was absent from all psychic cases.

That’s right. They got diddly-squat.

No significant results were found when comparing psychic samples with general population samples obtained from a large-scale public sequencing database. This analysis followed standard practice
and excluded consideration of intronic regions.

They make a big deal of how they’re only looking at exon sequences in the methods, but then, when they found nothing, they decided, well, hey, let’s look at some introns. Again, this is bad design. They’re desperately looking for anything that might correlate with their “psychic” population. They found one thing.

However, probing intronic DNA adjacent to coding regions in exomes did find one non-coding region with a variation from the wild-type DNA sequence in 7 of the 9 control samples that was identical in all case samples and matched the sequence most commonly found in humans (i.e., wild-type). The variant was a modification from GG to GA in the intron region of the TNRC18 gene (Trinucleotide Repeat-Containing Gene 18 Protein) on chromosome 7 (rs117910193 position 5,401,412).

This is unimpressive. This is bad. They went trawling through billions of nucleotides to find a variant that might show up preferentially in their ridiculously defined “psychic” population, and they found one in an intron, a class of the genome that they initially excluded from their analysis. They demonstrate a truly pathetic incomprehension of probability and statistics.

But then, incomprehension of probability and statistics is a prerequisite for being a psychic power researcher.

And then…

Discussion
The most conservative interpretation of these results is that they result from random population sampling. However, when the results are considered in relation to other lines of evidence, the results are more provocative. Further research is justified to replicate and extend these findings.

Wow. The only reasonable interpretation is that their result is the product of random population sampling. Their statistical power is feeble, they got no statistically significant results, except when they ignore their experimental protocol and reach for any variation that they can weakly correlate with their test population — which also showed no significant psychic ability, except that they were able to guess the color of a table.

You might be wondering what these “other lines of evidence” might be. So am I. I read the discussion, and they don’t give any. Not one bit. Instead, they offer a lot of excuses for why their results were so pathetic. For example:

For example, one cross-cultural sociogenetic hypothesis that potentially explains the observed variation is that the rise, spread, and prevalence of Christianity in the Early to Middle Ages may have contributed to the reduction of the wild-type variant across populations. Christianity has been historically associated with an extraordinary degree of cross-cultural success, both in terms of the extent of its spread and temporal persistence across populations, relative to other religious creeds. The historical spread of “Western Church” Christianity, or Roman Catholicism, measured using an indicator of historical Church exposure, was found to be responsible for psychocultural variation among contemporary Western populations, including low rates of consanguineous mating, high rates of monogamous marriage, and individualism. This would be consistent with the action of culture-gene co-evolutionary selection pressures stemming from the historical (and contemporary) tendency for Christianity to favor these sorts of behavioral and reproductive patterns. Christianity also strongly proscribes mystical and psychic experiences, such as mediumship, outside of a limited range of contexts (e.g., monasticism in some cases). Thus, as part of this broader psycho-cultural “syndrome,” Christian cultural values, once established, may have historically attenuated the fitness of those prone to these and other sorts of psychic experiences (i.e., wild-type carriers). Conversely, the alternate allele carriers’ fitness (controls) may have been enhanced

Now I’m no fan of Christianity, to say the least, but to claim without evidence that Christianity is at fault for extinguishing the genes responsible for granting psychic powers because they couldn’t find anyone with psychic powers with a molecular correlate to their non-existent powers is a bit loony.

The paper is embarrassingly bad. But then, it’s typical of the journal, Explore, that had the lack of standards to allow it to publish it.

EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing addresses the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine. It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.

Yeah, right.

Fundraising, stories, and a new video

It’s true, we’re still digging out from under our legal debt and begging for donations. Check out our Fundraising page! There’s new stuff there!

Also, very importantly, Kris Wager is matching donations, up to a thousand dollars total. This is the perfect time to kick in a little bit to our our paypal account.

My contribution this time is a video about a science paper — a case study of an XY woman who gave birth to a child.

You can read the original paper right here, or a transcript of my remarks below the fold.

[Read more…]

Less a day’s work and $350, plus one pissed off cat…

She’s fine. The Evil Cat’s bloodwork all came back totally normal, and the vet has survived unscarred. The cat’s kind of mad at me right now, but she got doped up with a painkiller and is stumbling around drunk, so I’m safe, for now.

I have to keep an eye on her for a few days and see that she doesn’t get worse, and if she does I have to walk across town, pick up the sedative, come back, dope her up again, and then bring her back to the vet, because they don’t want to deal with the shrieking clawing hell-beast again. I don’t blame them.

That was a long spanking for King Crocoduck

I mentioned before that I got into a conversation with Kevin Logan and Kristi Winters about this painfully narrow video on philosophy of science by another YouTuber, King Crocoduck. It’s patently obvious that KC knows next to nothing on the subject, and is really just desperately rationalizing his hatred of social justice.

The video of our conversation was recently posted. It starts at about 8:20, and goes on for THREE (3) HOURS. I’m sorry. Here, you watch it, I’ve got to trundle a cat down to the vet (ooh, she’s going to hate me, she does not like to go to strange places), and maybe I’ll be back by the time you’re done.

(Note: none of us are philosophers. We should have recruited one to join us.)

Answers in Genesis’s Statement of Faith Becomes More Strident

(Guest post by Dan Phelps)

Many of you are aware that Answers in Genesis (AiG) has a very strict Statement of Faith (SOF). Until early this year the SOF was in this form. This original version was retrieved via an internet “Wayback Machine” search. On March 5, 2021 this updated and expanded version of the SOF was posted to the AiG website without fanfare. This newer SOF is even more strident than the old one and actually adds several requirements that previously were not mentioned. One has to wonder if there was some internal conflict in AiG’s ranks that led to the additional dogmatic statements.

The original version of the SOF was problematic to most thinking people for a number of reasons. Scientifically, it required signers to believe in a young earth and universe as well as ascribe most of earth’s geologic record to Noah’s Flood. Even more damming is the statement:

“By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.”

This statement is a very clear science stopper. How could science be done when the results are already known dogmatically? Furthermore, the SOF has specific statements concerning non-scientific subjects that exclude non-Fundamentalist Christians and anyone who is pro-choice or partakes in sexual activity that AiG finds offensive or belongs to groups AiG finds offensive. Here is a sample:

“The only legitimate marriage sanctioned by God is the joining of one naturally born man and one naturally born woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God.“

Making questions of sexual orientation equivalent to bestiality and incest is particularly hateful. However odd and bigoted as these tenants are, AiG has every right to require the above tenets of their SOF when hiring staff for the AiG ministry itself or the Creation Museum (which is officially part of AiG’s ministry). However, these strict faith-based requirements almost lost the for-profit Ark Encounter $18.25 million in Kentucky Tourism tax incentives in 2014. The Ark Encounter’s for-profit corporation (officially called Crosswater Canyon) repeatedly and publicly told the state of Kentucky that they would not discriminate in hiring or require workers to sign the SOF when the project was announced in late 2010. The entire project was promoted to government entities as a way to bring “JOB JOBS JOBS!!!” to a financially troubled area. Simultaneously, Ken Ham and AiG’s spokespeople would slyly tell religious audiences that the project was about religious proselytizing. Rick Skinner, Mayor of Williamstown, Kentucky, home of the Ark Encounter, posted this statement to Facebook in March 2014 (since removed) when defending the creation of $62 million in junk bonds for Ark Encounter:

In July 2014, in the midst of the controversy over the Ark Encounter receiving the $18.25 million in tax incentives from Kentucky Tourism, AiG posted a help wanted advertisement for the Ark Encounter requiring that potential employees sign the SOF (and adhere to numerous other religious based requirements). This was a major mistake on their part. I discovered this and wrote an op-ed for the Lexington Herald-Leader. This op-ed led to closer scrutiny and Kentucky revoked the incentives. In late 2014, AiG sued in Federal Court for the right to simultaneously receive the incentives and discriminate against anyone who would not sign the SOF. Surprisingly, a Federal Judge agreed with AiG in an early 2015 decision. By this time, Kentucky had a new, religiously conservative Governor, Matt Bevin, who would not appeal the decision. Governor Bevin also appointed new members of the Tourism Cabinet. These appointees were all supportive of the Ark project. Thus, the Ark Encounter was legally allowed to discriminate in hiring and only hire workers that will sign the SOF. Ark Encounter continues to receive $1.825 million dollars every year in tax incentives from the state and will continue to do so until 2026.

On March 5, 2021, AiG posted a new version of their SOF. This is somewhat more lengthy, detailed, and (remarkably!) strident than the original version. The new SOF is also more detailed on various sundry theological requirements. Especially disturbing are new tenets that attack social justice, transsexuals, and other non-gender conforming individuals. The SOF states:

“The concepts of “social justice,” “intersectionality,” and “critical race theory” are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing (Ezekiel 18:1–20; James 2:8–9).”

And also:

“Gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated. A person’s gender is determined at conception (fertilization), coded in the DNA, and cannot be changed by drugs, hormones, or surgery. Rejection of one’s biological sex (gender) or identifying oneself by the opposite sex is a sinful rejection of the way God made that person. These truths must be communicated with compassion, love, kindness, and respect, pointing everyone to the truth that God offers redemption and restoration to all who confess and forsake their sin, seeking his mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ (Genesis 1:26–28, 5:1–2; Psalm 51:5, 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5; Matthew 1:20–21, 19:4–6; Mark 10:6; Luke 1:31; Acts 3:19–21; Romans 10:9–10; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11; Galatians 3:28).”

Another bizarre addition is that one must believe that hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are caused by human sin:

“Human death (both physical and spiritual) as well as all animal death, disease, bloodshed, suffering, extinction, thorns and thistles, and all other natural evils (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.) entered this world subsequent to, and as a direct consequence of, man’s sin (Genesis 2:16–17, 3:8, 3:19, 4:4–8; Romans 5:12, 8:20–22; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22).”

I recently learned that Answers in Genesis (AiG) has rented Northern Kentucky University’s (NKU) Grant County facility to use for job fairs to interview perspective employees for positions at the Ark Encounter. These job fairs are scheduled for April 22, May 6 and 20, June 2 and 17, July 15 and 29, and August 12. I am not a lawyer and cannot comment on the legality of NKU allowing AiG/Ark Encounter to use the Grant County property. In fact Northern Kentucky University could actually be legally obligated to provide the site to AiG. I informed NKU of the contents of the SOF and made them aware that they have a reputation to protect and should be aware that AiG and the Ark Encounter have a history of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination against numerous protected groups. I also mentioned that the Creation Museum had accepted the donation of a dinosaur skeleton valued at $1 million from a white supremacist and former board member of the neo-Confederate League of the South. The reply I received only indicated that NKU’s attorneys had already reviewed their rules for room rental, but I was not provided the actual policy.

It remains to be seen if AiG will continue to use government entities for their benefit. AiG has been particularly talented at using Kentucky, Grant County, and Williamstown to their advantage with relation to the Ark Encounter. One suspects that this behavior will continue in spite of their discrimination and bigotry.

Gneiss news for UMM

Thanks to generous donors, we are about to launch a new named professorship.

The University of Minnesota Morris announced a new privately funded named professorship to assist in recruitment and retention of faculty at the University. The Morton Gneiss Professorship for Environmental Sciences will provide funding support for U of M Morris in recruiting, supporting, and retaining outstanding faculty members in the area of environmental sciences. With the help of private donors, this is the first named professorship at the U of M Morris.

I love the title. Morton Gneiss is not the name of the donor.

Morton Gneiss, the name selected for the professorship by the donors, refers to the 4 billion-year-old [more like 3.5 billion, I think] bedrock below western Minnesota — a symbol of permanence. The Morton Gneiss Professorship starts in the fall of 2023.

You’ve got a little time to tune up your CV if you want to apply. That timing means we’ll probably start advertising the position in the fall of 2022.