Tsk, tsk, tsk, Mr Richards

In a previous post, I quoted John Richards, who said of Lawrence Krauss:

He was a personal friend of Christopher Hitchens, who sadly died nine years and three days ago (there’s been talk about designating December 15th “Hitchmas”) and he was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design*.

I pointed out the “Hitchmas” nonsense, but I should have also mentioned that no, Krauss was not an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design. In fact, he had nothing to do with the Kitzmiller trial.

What a curious little claim. Why would Richards just make that up?

Who doesn’t love the Heidelberg Screen?

Despite ongoing concerns about power outages from this blizzard, I raced through to get another episode of my Evo Devo Diary up. And here it is!

Of course there is a script below the fold. Also recommended, this paper:
The Heidelberg Screen for Pattern Mutants of Drosophila: A Personal Account
Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology
Vol. 32:1-46 (Volume publication date October 2016)
First published online as a Review in Advance on August 3, 2016
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-cellbio-113015-023138
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-cellbio-113015-023138

Also recommended:
The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design

[Read more…]

I am powerless!

We’re experiencing a blizzard right now — I know I was complaining about the lack of snow this year, but that doesn’t mean I wanted it all at once, and I could do without the savage winds — and now it has knocked out all the power to our house. No internet. No lights. No Netflix. No refrigeration (not worried about that one, we just put everything in a cardboard box and put it out on the deck). At least I’ve got some old fashioned books to tide me over, until darkness falls.

You didn’t think Atheist Alliance International was a respectable organization, did you?

Don’t be shocked or surprised: sex pests always bounce back and climb back into positions of prominence. The rehabilitation of Lawrence Krauss has begun.

I am very pleased to announce that eminent Cosmologist/Physicist Dr Lawrence Krauss has accepted our invitation to join the Advisory Council of Atheist Alliance International.

Lawrence has been an active atheist for decades. He was a personal friend of Christopher Hitchens, who sadly died nine years and three days ago (there’s been talk about designating December 15th “Hitchmas”) and he was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design*.

“Hitchmas”? What? Where has this talk been going on, and by whom? Anyone can talk about designating any day as anything — the question is, by what authority and who will care? There has been talk around my household (there, I’m already more specific than John Richards) of designating the 15th as Squidmas, so get in line.

But, you might ask, doesn’t AAI know about the decades of credible accusations of harassment, that ASU acted on the accusations to deny him his leadership of the Origins project, haven’t they read the articles describing his behavior in Buzzfeed and the Arizona State Press, haven’t they read Krauss’s own words defending Jeffrey Epstein?

Yes, they have. They just don’t care.

Our Executive Director, Michael Sherlock, has personally welcomed Lawrence onto our Council of worthy Advisors in the knowledge that he was an early victim of the woke movement (see Wednesday’s blog). Please note that no charges have ever been brought against Dr Krauss.

When asked about the potential blowback from those who have propagated and uncritically believed the unsubstantiated allegations made against Dr Krauss in the past, Sherlock stated,

“After examining the claims made against Dr Krauss, and finding no merit therein, I made a decision to position AAI firmly against the cancel culture that has infected the atheist and secular movement, particularly in the USA. As skeptics, it is important that we lead the way in practicing evidence-based thinking and behaviors and not give in to the fatuous and harmful aspects of a relatively new social and political phenomenon that holds allegations as conclusions by mere virtue of the existence of the allegations themselves.” Sherlock added: “I am extremely enthusiastic about working with Dr Krauss and believe that he will add immense value to AAI’s efforts around the globe”.

As “skeptics”, they will lead the way in practicing evidence-based thinking…by ignoring the evidence they don’t like. For instance, I know the conference organizer he assaulted in a hotel room, waving around a condom; she’s a good person who was in a committed relationship who wouldn’t do that sort of thing, and Krauss admitted that it all happened — he just claimed it was “consensual”. I was one of the people Krauss tried to dissuade from criticizing Epstein. As a guy, I was oblivious to all of his creepy behavior at conferences, but when all these women stepped forward to tell me all about his obnoxiousness, I believed them. AAI does not believe any of that, I guess.

By the way, that “Wednesday’s blog” he references reads like an MRA screed that belongs on one of their horrid sites, like A Voice for Men. It rails against the “new religion of wokeism” and literally calls any accusation of harassment against men a “witch hunt”.

Anyway, it set me thinking – let’s compare some of the properties of religions and wokeism…

The ‘Congregations’ are predominantly female. They are about purity and judgmentalism. They exhibit disapproval of whatever they deem to be unacceptable and they show intolerance of those who have different standards. This is the typically ‘polarising’ mentality that I wrote about a few days ago. https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/secularworldbyaai/wp-admin/post.php?

In summary, it’s a ‘Holier than thou’ attitude.

In wokeism, all the greys are gone. A person is guilty from the moment they are accused. It’s, “We have no time for the cumbersome processes of jurisprudence.” And the accused are immediately sentenced by being cancelled! Their associates are punished too!

What does this remind you of? Oh, yes! Witch Hunts! Jim Crow Laws!

And who are, by far, the most common victims?

Men!

Won’t someone think of us poor men, says the male-led organization that just appointed a known sex pest to their mostly male advisory board, which also includes Michael Shermer, Gad Saad, and Thomas Sheedy. They’re such victims!

How dare women show intolerance of those who have different standards (such as tolerating molestation and crude come-ons), or exhibit disapproval of whatever they deem to be unacceptable, like rape and groping. They need to appreciate the value of men who hold different opinions on those matters.

They also make the common defense that “well, they weren’t convicted of an actual crime, therefore they couldn’t have done anything wrong”, which is just stupid. There are lots of things that someone can do that don’t justify throwing them in jail, yet do warrant considering them unsavory and unpleasant and not someone you want to invite to a party, or a business meeting. They complain about black and white thinking while insisting that there exists a perfect dichotomy between being in prison vs. being a commendable citizen.

They also commit gross leaps of irrationality.

Allow me to point out that if accusations were an indication of guilt, we would have had no President Obama, since he was accused of not being born in the USA. Also, Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton would have been locked up because she was accused of leading a pedophile ring located in the basement of a restaurant that turned out not to have a basement!

We’re only talking about credible accusations backed up by evidence, which was lacking in the cases of Obama and Clinton, and which was present in the case of Krauss.

For instance, I can accuse the leadership of Atheist Alliance International of being a bunch of aggressively idiotic bigots and misogynists, using the evidence of those two posts, and suggest that no one should join that odious group or donate to them. Note that I’m not accusing them of an outright crime for which they should be arrested; I’m saying they are unworthy of support by any responsible citizen. John Richards and Michael Sherlock are simply truly awful people.

Foraging run completed

Today was grocery shopping day, which involves getting up early in the morning and driving 45 miles to the northeast and filling up the car with two weeks of food. The early is required to get there before there are any crowds; the drive to Alexandria is necessary because too many people in Morris don’t give a damn about masking up or social distancing. I suspect many of the people in Alexandria are just as bad, but at least we’ve found a couple of stores that actually enforce the policy to some degree.

Going early wasn’t as useful this time, I think because it’s so close to Xmas and everyone is stocking up. We hadn’t quite paced ourselves appropriately, though, and not only had we gone two weeks without fresh groceries, but our long-term supply of staples was getting low. The dried beans canisters were partially depleted, and we were completely out of rice. So we got it done today, and now the next time we have to go grocery shopping it will be the year 2021, when the hellscape of this year will finally be behind us.

Everything will be better, magically, in 2021, right? It’s not like we’re going to get into a new year and start fondly reminiscing over how much better off we were in 2020, are we?

Moscow Mitch is lying again

The Republicans are trying to spin everything. Now they’re trying to claim the tepid relief bill that made it out the door recently is all their doing, and the Democrats only agreed to prop up the incoming Democratic president-elect.

As Congress passed a new $900 billion economic rescue package on Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered a choice bit of spin on how we got to this moment:

“A few days ago, with a new president-elect of their own party, everything changed,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday. “Democrats suddenly came around to our position that we should find consensus, make law where we agree, and get urgent help out the door.”

Getting the story right here is highly consequential. It will shape the arguments that determine the outcome of the Georgia runoffs — and control of the Senate — and should leave little doubt that continued GOP control means McConnell will strive to sabotage the recovery to cripple Joe Biden’s presidency.

This is what McConnell wants to obscure. Because as he has privately admitted, the failure of Congress to deliver a robust aid package to people is putting his Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R) and David Perdue (R) at risk.

So McConnell wants voters — especially those in Georgia — to believe Republicans supported generous aid all along, particularly the stimulus checks in the new deal, and that Democrats refused to act, to harm President Trump’s reelection campaign.

It’s an astonishing bit of political theater. He opposed any relief bill, fought against any proposals for months and months, and only now when when he’s trying to provide good news for Republicans in Georgia does he come around.

McConnell even acknowledged that a vote would disrupt plans to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and refused to commit to a vote before Election Day. That wrecks the story McConnell is telling: He opposed a vote before the election, despite his revisionism that Pelosi did not want compromise to hurt Trump.

It’s projection all around. He accuses Democrats of obstructing relief efforts; it was the Republicans all along. He accuses Democrats of only coming around when they saw political gain for their party; the truth is he’s only supporting it because Loeffler (who opposed all relief!) and Perdue need the help.

How can we hide the fact that Republican conservatives are first in line for the vaccine?

Ross Douthat does it again. He’s spewed out a pointless screed in which he tediously tells us that science isn’t pure, that somehow you have to engage with social values and not just simply calculable formulas of utility, and I can agree with all that. I think I’ve been saying it myself for years, that what we do with science and how we implement is shaped by culture, and there’s no denying it. But Douthat has an agenda lurking under the glurge, and being Douthat he can’t just come out and say what it is. So I read his whole essay, painful as it was, and emerged out the other side wondering what he’s advocating.

And to the extent that trust the science just means that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a better guide to epidemiological trends than someone the president liked on cable news, then it’s a sound and unobjectionable idea.

But for many crucial decisions of the last year, that unobjectionable version of trust the science didn’t get you very far. And when it had more sweeping implications, what the slogan implied was often much more dubious: a deference to the science bureaucracy during a crisis when bureaucratic norms needed to give way; an attempt by para-scientific enterprises to trade on (or trade away) science’s credibility for the sake of political agendas; and an abdication by elected officials of responsibility for decisions that are fundamentally political in nature.

We’re only in the second or third paragraph, and the murk is already growing. What “science bureaucracy” are you objecting to, Ross? There is one, of course — in a society dependent on science, but where the public is generally ignorant and misinformed, it’s inevitable that institutions have to form to provide good information to politicians. I’d love to see greater democratization of science, but the existence of a “science bureaucracy” is a product of the American environment.

But what “political agenda” are you complaining about? What credibility is being traded away? And of course elected officials, politicians, are making political decisions. Isn’t that obvious?

Then, finally, we get the issue that’s got him wound up: it’s the question of who gets the coronavirus first.

But the further you get from the laboratory work, the more complicated and less clearly scientific the key issues become. The timeline on which vaccines have become available, for instance, reflects an attempt to balance the rules of bureaucratic science, their priority on safety and certainty of knowledge, with the urgency of trying something to halt a disease that’s killing thousands of Americans every day. Many scientific factors weigh in that balance, but so do all kinds of extra-scientific variables: moral assumptions about what kinds of vaccine testing we should pursue (one reason we didn’t get the “challenge trials” that might have delivered a vaccine much earlier); legal assumptions about who should be allowed to experiment with unproven treatments; political assumptions about how much bureaucratic hoop-jumping it takes to persuade Americans that a vaccine is safe.

Yes? We know. There are all kinds of regulatory hoops to jump through before you toss a new medication out to the public. The ethics of science are complicated and interact messily with with social values. We didn’t do those “challenge trials” because we have a long established policy of testing with randomized controlled trials before general release, and challenge trials require intentionally exposing subjects to the virus and your relatively untested vaccine simultaneously. Yeah, it’s a political and ethical decision. What do you propose to do instead? I’m still at a loss about what Douthat is complaining about.

Then it turns out that what’s really chafing poor Ross is that the liberals had a hand in making decisions.

Then there’s the now-pressing question of who actually gets the vaccine first, which has been taken up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a way that throws the limits of science-trusting into even sharper relief. Last month their Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices produced a working document that’s a masterpiece of para-scientific effort, in which questions that are legitimately medical and scientific (who will the vaccine help the most), questions that are more logistical and sociological (which pattern of distribution will be easier to put in place) and moral questions about who deserves a vaccine are all jumbled up, assessed with a form of pseudo-rigor that resembles someone bluffing the way through a McKinsey job interview and then used to justify the conclusion that we should vaccinate essential workers before seniors … because seniors are more likely to be privileged and white.

That “working document”? It’s a set of powerpoint slides that explains how the CDC made decisions about how to prioritize who gets vaccinated. It explicitly points out all the things Douthat has said: that there are issues of science, ethics, and implementation that need to be balanced, and it goes through their process in an abbreviated, powerpointy way. It’s not the clearest way to explain their reasoning, but the whole point of the document is to point out that there are all these non-scientific concerns that must be considered. Again, what is he complaining about? Isn’t that what he was talking about in the first half of the essay?

But then we get to the real issue for Douthat: “the conclusion that we should vaccinate essential workers before seniors … because seniors are more likely to be privileged and white.” It’s all identity politics! They’re discriminating against white people!

Except…the document doesn’t say that.

On one page it lists three ethical principles of concern: “maximize benefits and minimize harms,” “promote justice,” and “mitigate health inequities.” Then, in a table, it assesses each of those principles for essential workers, high-risk adults, and the elderly. And then under “health inequities” and the elderly, it says “Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65”. That’s it. It states a simple fact about demographics of the disease. It was clearly not the major reason for the priorities that were set. It’s just one factor that ought to be considered.

But Douthat (and Matthew Yglesias, but fuck Yglesias) basically wants to claim that this is evidence that it’s the liberals are being racist.

As Matthew Yglesias noted, this (provisional, it should be stressed) recommendation is a remarkable example of how a certain kind of progressive moral thinking ignores the actual needs of racial minorities. Because if you vaccinate working-age people before you vaccinate older people, you will actually end up not vaccinating the most vulnerable minority population, African-American seniors — so more minorities might die for the sake of a racial balance in overall vaccination rates.

No, it’s clear from the table that a major factor in the final decision was the multiplier effect — that benefits to health care workers spread rapidly to assist all the other groups. Sure, we could decide to “mitigate health inequities” by insisting that old black people are first in line, but who is going to give them their vaccine? Who’s going to make sure they follow the protocol? That’s why the CDC puts health care workers in front, because maintaining that group helps all groups. And it’s all the fault of those liberals!

But for liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital-S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make.

This conclusion does not make any sense. Douthat starts this essay by explaining that there isn’t a simple scientific answer for social problems; then he cites a CDC document that shows they are well aware of this problem, and that they are weighing ethical and logistical concerns in addition to the scientific matters; and then he says damn those liberals who want to run roughshod over morality with capital-S Science!

My head hurts. He just wrote a lot of words that didn’t make a coherent point, and he doesn’t say what action is needed to correct for the problem, whatever it is. It’s a lot of finger-wagging at scientists and liberals, with vague intimations that they’re doing a racism against white people, and the implication that their rules for prioritizing the order of vaccinations aren’t good. I don’t get it…wait. There is an explanation for that essay. He’s a conservative, trying to muddy the waters about who should get vaccinated, and claiming the decision-making process is tainted with liberal bias. Why would he do that?

There sure has been a lot of obvious line-jumping by conservative science-denialists lately. Somebody is thinking it would be useful to sow doubt about how the line is ordered.

In that entire CDC working document, they failed to consider the plight of white dumbass pig castrators. LIBERAL BIAS! If they weren’t so infatuated with capital-S Science they would have been able to justify treating these parasites first.

Scratch a rich person, find a crook

Somehow, all the money has ended up in the hands of lunatics. Or maybe getting rich causes the derangement?

The nonprofit group, the Liberty Center for God and Country…

Wait wait wait wait, stop right there. Doesn’t the name alone tell you that this has got to be an evil organization? Just find every group with an over-the-top title touting how good and godly they are, and arrest them on suspicion. You know a little investigation is going to discover all kinds of scumbuggery carried out under the sanctimonious pretext of their name.

But do continue.

The nonprofit group, the Liberty Center for God and Country, paid 20 private investigators close to $300,000 to conduct a six-week probe of alleged illegal ballot retrievals in Houston leading up to the election, the group has said. None of its allegations of fraud have been substantiated.

What did I tell you? There have been so many cockroaches crawling out to feast on the garbage trail left by Republican election lies. As expected, they found nothing, because there is nothing to find, but that just motivates them to make shit up, and carry out extraordinary illegalities to support it.

David Lopez-Zuniga, an air-conditioner installer, had just left his mobile home for his typical predawn commute when he noticed an SUV’s headlights closely trailing his small cargo truck.

Within seconds, the SUV swerved alongside the passenger’s side, striking the truck and forcing Lopez-Zuniga to the side of a highway. There, he said, the SUV’s driver feigned an injury before ordering Lopez-Zuniga to the ground at gunpoint.

“I was very scared,” Lopez-Zuniga, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I didn’t know who this person was.”

As it turned out, the incident was the extraordinary culmination of a misguided undercover surveillance operation — financed by a conservative nonprofit group and carried out by private investigators — that sought to uncover a massive election fraud scheme before the November election.

Police said that Lopez-Zuniga, 39, was the victim of a bogus conspiracy theory alleging he was involved in transporting 750,000 mail-in ballots fraudulently signed by Hispanic children whose fingerprints could not be traced.

You’ll never guess what they found in the truck. Air conditioning repair equipment! Who woulda guessed it?

The guy who assaulted an air conditioner repairman is an ex-cop who was fired for his abuses, but he’s pleading not guilty. He’s guilty. Of course, the real criminal is the conservative twit who founded the Liberty Center for God and Country, Steven F. Hotze.

The nonprofit was created by Hotze, a natural health doctor and megadonor to Texas conservatives, who has taken a leading role in election litigation in the state. Hotze filed a series of lawsuits before November’s presidential election seeking to limit mail-in voting and dismiss ballots submitted via drive-through voting sites.

Most of Hotze’s recent election lawsuits were unsuccessful. However, the Texas Supreme Court in one case prohibited Harris County from sending out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters.

Hotze also has spearheaded anti-gay rights campaigns, claiming in 2015 that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead schools to teaching kindergartners to “practice sodomy.”

Hotze’s nonprofit group was created “for the purpose of ensuring election integrity primarily,” said Jared Woodfill, Hotze’s personal lawyer and the former executive director of the Harris County Republican Party, the county that includes Houston. Woodfill is listed on state incorporation records as a director of the nonprofit group, along with Jeffrey Yates, the former longtime chairman of the county’s Republican Party. Yates did not respond to phone messages.

“The socialist Democrat leadership in Harris County has developed a massive ballot by mail vote harvesting scheme to steal the general election,” a now-deleted fundraising page for the group alleged. “We are working with a group of private investigators who have uncovered this massive election fraud scheme.”

The group raised nearly $70,000 through a GoFundMe page from Oct. 10 through last week. Hotze has said publicly that he donated $75,000 to the probe and that an unnamed individual had donated another $125,000.

Hotze is a filthy rich quack who seems to have made a fortune with a drug store that peddles “supplements”. He’s a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — not a credible organization — and QAnon — also not a credible organization. And now he pours his ill-gotten cash into ludicrous schemes to undermine democratic elections. I guess that makes him a True American Patriot™.

Are you feeling rescued yet?

Moscow Mitch has finally corralled his Republican parasites enough to allow a little money to trickle out to the public.

“More help is on the way. Moments ago, in consultation with our committees, the four leaders of the Senate and House finalized an agreement. It would be another major rescue package for the American people,” McConnell said. “As our citizens continue battling this coronavirus pandemic this holiday season, they will not be fighting alone.”

Wow. A Major Rescue Package. $900 billion dollars! How much is that for each of us?

The legislation includes stimulus checks for millions of Americans of up to $600 per person. The size of that benefit would be reduced for people who earned more than $75,000 in 2019 and disappear altogether for those who earned more than $99,000. The stimulus checks would provide $600 per adult and child, meaning a family of four would receive $2,400 up to a certain income.

Woo hoo! I qualify for the full $600, which will immediately disappear into a single mortgage payment, which is nice, I guess. I’m sure Bank of America will appreciate getting the money that I got to briefly hold in my hand. Oh, well. It’s nice to get a cookie.

If they were serious about rescue, though, I’d rather see some major structural changes to how the country is run. Like, how are there billionaires? And how did they get richer during the pandemic? Maybe, instead of a one shot sop, we could permanently siphon more of that American wealth out of the pockets of rich jerks and into the wages of the general public?