Grifters gotta grift

That Catholic reactionary, Michael O’Fallon, is running another “Sovereign Nations” conference. It’s very important you know.

The funny thing is that their #2 speaker, after O’Fallon himself, is James Lindsay, the regressive atheist buddy of Boghossian, who is so desperate for attention that he sells himself off to endorse a religious organization with religious goals.

Double irony: if you look at that twitter thread, it’s got angry Christians complaining that the conference includes a liberal atheist, with O’Fallon insisting that no, it’s entirely secular, when all the other speakers are Christian ministers, and the blurb describing the con is this:

The Christian Church finds itself societally in interesting times; times of rapid change, uncertainty, and division, where all that was our sure objective standards seem to be melting into air.

Also indicative is that there are no women speakers, although there are an awful lot of truly secular events that also forget the womz.

Another entry in the Carnival of Curiosity: Dr Myers’ Menagerie of Itty-Bitty Monsters

Next Sunday, our Carnival continues with a tour of the imaging side of my lab. I’ll just aim a camera at my microscopes and cameras and talk about how I put together a macrophotography and microscopy lab on a budget, and maybe put a few critters on the screen.

I might also remind you that this is a fundraiser, and you can optionally leave a tip at

Take a look at our fundraiser next Saturday

I finally got the schedule for our Carnival of Curiosity fundraiser completed. Well, for all the Saturday events anyway (I’ll work on the Sunday events tomorrow). So now you know what you’re going to do a week from today! You’re going to be trapped at home, as usual, and you’ll be glued to a computer screen, doomscrolling through Facebook…no, wait, not that. We’ll have something better for you. We have events scheduled all day long! Look at the schedule! It really is all day Saturday! Instead you’ll be enlightened and entertained by the various freethoughtbloggers, and be intermittently inspired to click a link and send us money!

Remember, this is a fundraiser.

Of course, it’s also a voluntary fundraiser. You don’t have to donate a penny if you don’t have one.

Anyway, the new stuff I added this morning for our Saturday schedule:

  • At 3pm PT-6pm ET, 11pm BST, William Brinkman will do a reading from his novel, The Rift.
  • At 6pm PT-9pm ET, 2 am BST, a selection of bloggers will participate in The Quiz, where their knowledge and wit will be tested. The winner will be crowned King/Queen of Freethoughtblogs! Very exciting.
  • At 8pm PT-11pm PT, 4am BST, we will have a Sophisticated Literature Reading, dramatic renditions of some stuff people wrote down. There is a reason it is scheduled for a relatively late hour.

See? You’ll almost be happy to be quarantined/on lockdown/bored to tears, because you’ll have us to turn to. And us to donate some of your shrinking funds to, if you can.

P.S. You managed to donate over a thousand dollars to us in the last week, which we appreciate very much, and which will significantly help reduce our legal debt. Thank you!

Confirming that the Nazis have taken over

You should have already figured that out, but Trump had another rally in Minnesota yesterday and hammered the point home.

People are not racehorses that have been bred for a single defining suite of traits, and he wouldn’t understand the genetics if we had. That’s just a racist klaxon he’s sounding to call all the white nationalists to his yard.

He must go.

Friends don’t let friends fall for the Lincoln Project’s lying tricks

I’ve been seeing this excerpt of a video interview with Republican Steve Schmidt in which he thoroughly tears into Trump’s incompetence and failures — and don’t get me wrong, that’s good to see, but it’s the omissions that grate. Schmidt is one of the architects of the modern Republican party, just like Rick Wilson and the other Lincoln Project hypocrites, and when he howls about how bad Trump is, he’s concealing the fact that he wants an autocratic conservative government, just one with not that figurehead. He’s not looking for a more moderate leader, he wants someone who is far right, but good at it, so don’t listen to these guys thinking they want to improve our country, they want to make it worse.

Driftglass explains the dishonesty of the Lincoln Project with a telling example.

Once again, good ol’ Steve’s feigning ignorance of basic American political history is almost comical.

See, we had an eight year experiment in compromise with Republicans. It was called the Clinton Administration: Clinton actually delivered on lots of things Republicans had screeching about for years and they reacted by shutting down the government, launching a four year witch hunt and impeaching him over trivia.

Then we had another eight year experiment in trying to work with Republicans when Democrats elected an intelligent, humane, scandal-free constitutional law professor to fix the multiple, crippling catastrophes Steve Schmidt’s Republican Party had left in their wake after eight years of George W. Bush. Barack Obama was exactly the sort of incrementalist/accommodationist leader that Steve Schmidt now dreams of and Steve Schmidt’s Republican Party reacted to his election with eight relentless years of sabotage, sedition, unhinged racism, Birtherism and, finally, Trump.

Exactly. Obama was a moderate centrist (or in many ways, a conservative Democrat), and Schmidt and Wilson and all their fellow travelers hated him and fought him every step of the way. They don’t want a good leader, they want a Trump without the baggage.

Or, I suppose, the most charitable (not really) interpretation is that maybe they want a white Obama who they can push around. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.

What? Grandma & grandpa were…impure?

I’m reading this recent article on Population genomics of the Viking world, the one with a bazillion authors, and it’s nice and well done, but the popular press seems to find it surprising, when it’s pretty much what I would have expected.

The maritime expansion of Scandinavian populations during the Viking Age (about AD 750-1050) was a far-flung transformation in world history1,2. Here we sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland (to a median depth of about 1×) to understand the global influence of this expansion. We find the Viking period involved gene flow into Scandinavia from the south and east. We observe genetic structure within Scandinavia, with diversity hotspots in the south and restricted gene flow within Scandinavia. We find evidence for a major influx of Danish ancestry into England; a Swedish influx into the Baltic; and Norwegian influx into Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. Additionally, we see substantial ancestry from elsewhere in Europe entering Scandinavia during the Viking Age. Our ancient DNA analysis also revealed that a Viking expedition included close family members. By comparing with modern populations, we find that pigmentation-associated loci have undergone strong population differentiation during the past millennium, and trace positively selected loci-including the lactase-persistence allele of LCT and alleles of ANKA that are associated with the immune response-in detail. We conclude that the Viking diaspora was characterized by substantial transregional engagement: distinct populations influenced the genomic makeup of different regions of Europe, and Scandinavia experienced increased contact with the rest of the continent.

Well, yes. If my Scandinavian ancestors were all tall, blue-eyed, blonde- and red-haired giants out of a Frazetta painting, how did I end up with this [sweeps hand dramatically over frumpy body] particular genetic complement? Why are my relatives so…variegated? I’ve been to Norway, and the people there are wonderfully diverse. This result should be what we all expected — and the scientists who did it were certainly unsurprised, just appreciative of the data — but somehow, the stories in the popular press all about how this upsets stereotypes. Like this one, “Vikings may not be who we thought they were, DNA study finds”.

History books typically depict Vikings as blue-eyed, blonde-haired, burly men sailing the North Atlantic coast to pillage wherever they set foot on land. While some of that may be true, a new genetic study of Viking DNA is flipping much of this history on its head.

In the largest genetic study of Viking DNA ever, scientists have found that Vikings — and their diaspora — are actually much more genetically diverse than we may have thought and were not necessarily all part of a homogenous background.

Notice what the title and the opening paragraph do: they center the story on public misconceptions about a group of humans. I guess “Humans had children with other humans” isn’t quite as exciting as “Cartoon version of ancient people isn’t quite accurate”. The real interesting question, other than the science of the study, is about how pervasive racist myths are.

It’s all about gene flow, which is important and interesting and pretty much universal, and not at all scary, all you white supremacists out there with your phony Asatru tattoos.

Finally, our findings show that Vikings were not simply a direct continuation of Scandinavian Iron Age groups. Instead, we observe gene flow from the south and east into Scandinavia, starting in the Iron Age and continuing throughout the duration of the Viking Age, from an increasing number of sources. Many Viking Age individuals—both within and outside Scandinavia—have high levels of non-Scandinavian ancestry, which suggests ongoing gene flow across Europe.

I wish I could hang around for a thousand years to see the results of anthropological studies of American graveyards. “History books typically depict Americans as obese, orange-skinned, and profoundly stupid, lying and cheating their way to exploit other people’s wealth. While some of that may be true, a new genetic study is revealing that they were much more diverse and complex than that.”

Oh no, there’s a chink in my armor!

I have been very good about avoiding all human beings. All my classes are taught over Zoom (although my first in-person lab is scheduled for next week), I don’t go anywhere, when we do have to go public, like our biweekly grocery shopping, we shun stores that fail to practice basic viral hygiene and we go early in the morning when there are few shoppers, and I always wear my mask outside the house.

So how did I wake up in the middle of the night with a fiery sore throat and inflammation bad enough that I can barely swallow? I am assuming I caught some bug somewhere somehow, and if one bug can find its way past my defenses, so can coronavirus. May have to dig a moat around the house. May have to install a laser point defense system. May have to seal all the doors and windows with sheets of plastic. May have to wear a biohazard suit at all times. May have to re-read The Masque of the Red Death.

It really sucks to have your vulnerabilities exposed during a pandemic.