More answers to creationists

A couple of my anti-creationist pals, James Downard and Jackson Wheat, have released a new book, The Rocks Were There: Straight Science Answers to bent Creationist Questions, Volume 1. I expect it will be good, but I just ordered my copy 5 minutes ago, so I haven’t read it yet, and can’t actually review it.

That doesn’t stop the creationists, though: it has a single one-star review from a long-winded pseudoscientist named James V. Kohl. I’ve dealt with him before, he’s a crank. Don’t let his review stop you — we need more honest reviews to counter the nonsense kooks like Kohl throw around.

When did you last wash your hands?

John Oliver has some sensible advice.

As for my handwashing…all day long. I work with students every day all day (who I avoid touching, obviously), so I tend to wash my hands thoroughly about once an hour, or before and after I go to class. Not just for coronavirus, but because they’re filthy animals and disease vectors for all kinds of crap…and I have the potential to transfer diseases to a diverse lot of people who wouldn’t normally hang out together but are forced into my classrooms for those sweet, sweet credits.

Spiders are far less infectious than other humans, you know.

The only political punditry you need

I vote in the Minnesota primary tomorrow, along with lots of people in states all across the country. There is a stultifying mass of punditry hovering over the country: ‘experts’ are all telling you who to vote for based on this mysterious thing called “electability”, on prognostications about matchups next November, on how many other people are voting for candidate X vs candidate Y. Your goal is to get on the winning bandwagon early, because as we all know, whoever guesses which candidate will win tomorrow gets fabulous prizes.

Oh, wait, no they don’t. You win nothing for picking the same candidate the most people pick.

So I have some advice for you. Ignore your friends and families. Never mind the statistics and the odds. Drop-kick FiveThirtyEight into an open sewer manhole. Fuck the commentators on CNN and Fox and MSNBC. Don’t trust me to tell you who to vote for.

Instead, be totally selfish, and think exclusively about which candidate you like best, who supports the policies you favor. The calculus of figuring out who your neighbors and the people of California and Texas will vote for is totally irrelevant. Go into that booth and vote your conscience. That’s all.

Wasn’t that easy?

Then go kick Chris Cilizza and whatever other goofball has been calling the horserace. That’s the fun part.

News from the tech world

No drama here. We all know that science and technology is the domain of cool heads, objective thought, and rational personalities, so this post is going to be a bit boring.

First up: the owner and founder of 8chan are locked in a bitter battle. The founder, Frederick Brennan, called the owner, Jim Watkins, some mean names, and he then replied in the manner of a true defender of Free Speech by siccing the government of the Philippines on him with an arrest warrant, threatening to put Brennan in prison for 10 years.

Watkins is pursuing Brennan under the Philippines Cybercrime Prevention Act. The law was enacted in 2012 despite outcry from rights groups and the United Nations, which warned that it was not in line with international norms. Amnesty International said that it “rolls back protection for free speech” and would have a “chilling effect” on speech in the country. It has most notably been used against journalist Maria Ressa in what the Committee to Protect Journalists labeled a “campaign of harassment.”

Yay Free Speech!

In other news…Twitter. That bastion of reasonable debate and discussion has gradually evolved to become an important arm of the government. Like Alexander Hamilton had the Federalist Papers, our current president has been calmly making arguments for a new way of communicating with the people via Twitter, and rich people have noticed. A billionaire, Paul Singer, is buying a sizable stake in the Twitter corporation, so that he can use his wealth to push Jack Dorsey around. The fact that he is a billionaire clearly informs us that he is competent and wise, so this can only improve the site. Money gives you the right to rule any aspect of the world you want to change.

Singer has even taken on whole countries: in 2016, after a relentless campaign, he secured a partial repayment of debts by Argentina, arising from its financial collapse in the early 2000s.

Maybe he’s going to give Twitter to The Donald as a Christmas present?

Speaking of Twitter, you know it has a policy of supporting anonymity, for good or ill, and banks away a lot of confidential information which you’re only supposed to see if you’re a wealthy capitalist who wants to advertise on the site. It turns out there’s another way: worm spies into the organization who will compromise security and sell information directly to their clients, like Saudi Arabia.

A week after returning to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, Abouammo logged into the system he used to verify users, according to the complaint. That system, sources who’ve accessed it told BuzzFeed News, stores information including email addresses, telephone numbers, and last log-in time — sufficient personal data to track down a user in real life.

Accessing two Saudi dissidents’ information — one a prominent critic with more than 1 million followers, the other an impersonator of a Saudi Royal family member — Abouammo allegedly passed the information to al-Asaker. Twitter had long been a godsend to dissidents: Unlike Facebook, it had no policy requiring people to use their real names, allowing critics of repressive government to speak more freely. The allegations threw its value as a tool of anonymous dissent into question.

Hey! No fair! You’re supposed to pay Twitter for those privacy breeches, not some random employee! You know I think Saudi Arabia could afford to pay through appropriate corporate channels and grease the right palms here.

There. I’ve had enough of the great minds behind our technological enterprises, I think I’ll sit here and just drink coffee for a while.

Is Denver in the Danger Zone?

The American Physical Society has abruptly cancelled their March meeting…the day before it was to begin.

Many attendees are already in Denver, making this a rather ineffectual way to limit travel. It’s also the case that the World Health Organization is not recommending travel restrictions, so I’d be curious to know who argued for this cancellation, and why.

WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COIVD-19 outbreaks.

In general, evidence shows that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions. Furthermore, restrictions may interrupt needed aid and technical support, may disrupt businesses, and may have negative social and economic effects on the affected countries. However, in certain circumstances, measures that restrict the movement of people may prove temporarily useful, such as in settings with few international connections and limited response capacities.

Maybe it has something to do with that last phrase — is the US now regarded as a country with limited response capacities? I hope not.

My wife is near Denver right now, and was traveling through the Denver airport yesterday. I hope this cancellation was an unnecessary over-reaction. I’m planning some meeting travel for the end of June myself, and I could imagine cancelling if the epidemic got much worse, but I wouldn’t wait until the day before!

Why does Chris Matthews still have a job?

He’s always been this way: unpleasant, obnoxious, poorly informed, and just generally been a grating presence on the news. I don’t know what segment of the population he’s supposed to appeal to — I don’t think he’s liked by either the right or the left — and Matthews has a serious misogyny issue.

This tendency to objectify women in his orbit has bled into his treatment of female politicians and candidates. He has repeatedly lusted over women in politics on air, including remarking in 2011 that there’s “something electric” and “very attractive” about the way former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin walks and moves, and noting in 2017 that acting attorney general Sally Yates is “attractive, obviously.” But he has reserved a particular contempt for the woman who made it closest to ascending the heights of American political power, Hillary Clinton, calling her “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “She-Devil.” The Cut obtained footage of him joking in early 2016, just before a live interview with then candidate Clinton, “where’s that Bill Cosby pill,” referring to the date-rape drug. In 2005, he openly wondered whether the troops would “take the orders” from a female president; after another interview, he pinched Clinton’s cheek; and in another, he suggested that she had only had so much political success because her husband had “messed around.” This evening anchor, in addition to everything else, has repeatedly challenged whether women are legitimate politicians or could be president at all. “I was thinking how hard it is for a woman to take on a job that’s always been held by men,” he said of Clinton in 2006.

When MSNBC was constantly being labeled as a left-leaning news channel, I just had to look at Chris Matthews to wonder what they were smoking.

I guess he’s been yanked from all of MSNBC’s election coverage, at last. Now they just need to fire him.

Seems fair

A Bristol newspaper is outing the jerks who plagued media announcements about Greta Thunberg with threats of violence. They pulled names and faces off their profiles and publicly posted them, with examples of their threats.

Strangely, I notice that all of them are men — who’d have thought it? — and half of them pose in their profiles with alcoholic beverages. I am particularly impressed with the hypocrisy of the guy in the top left who has festooned his profile with the words, “Be kind”.

I’d say media sources should do more of this, except that there are so many of them I’m afraid every paper in the world would be reduced to page after page of photos declaring “these are the assholes who read this paper.”

The media have lost the plot

Last week, Donald Trump gave a couple of press conferences that were the apotheosis of Trumpian incoherence and inanity — he rambled on in his usual stream-of-consciousness style, exposing the fact that he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and announced that the person who was in charge of the COVID-19 response was Mike Pence, who is the opposite of a responsible, informed choice (put him in charge of the Prayer Team, OK?), and later took direct action by announcing a crackdown on Mexican border crossings (our cases of COVID-19 are not coming from Mexico). Yet at the same time, our media blandly treats this as routine.

Wednesday’s briefing was arguably the most abnormal moment yet in a profoundly abnormal presidency.

But top news organizations, rather than accurately representing Trump’s alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all.

They made it sound like some real news was made: That Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus; that the president urged calm.

But even the Pence “news” appears to be a sham, and a clusterfuck: In addition to being basically a fuck-you to the medical community — given Pence’s proud defiance of scientific truths — it was apparently a last-minute decision based on political optics that blindsided Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who at the same time insisted that he was still in charge.

This one really wasn’t hard. It was obvious to anyone listening to Trump’s rambling, often incoherent, self-centered, stream-of-consciousness ad-libbing – much of it straight out of his political rallies — that:

  • Trump had no real understanding of what he was talking about.
  • He had no sense of what was required of him as president.
  • He sees this as being all about him.
  • There are only so many things that can come out of his head.

    • No, the New York Times is not pointing out the idiocy of this president.

    But at the New York Times, Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland and Katie Rogers engaged in something even worse than stenography: The cherrypicking of quotes that weren’t incoherent, that in no way whatsoever indicated the true nature of the briefing. They led off:

    President Trump named Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday to coordinate the government’s response to the coronavirus, even as he repeatedly played down the danger to the United States of a widespread domestic outbreak.

    Nothing in that story told readers what they most needed to know.

    Even in a sidebar on Trump’s credibility, Annie Karni, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman simply called Trump’s briefing “casual”. Then they punted:

    Mr. Trump could face a moment of reckoning. Maintaining a calm and orderly response during an epidemic, in which countless lives could be at stake, requires that the president be a reliable public messenger.

    There was also a cutesy sidebar by Katie Rogers about Trump’s self-declared germophobia.

    Inexcusable.

    It’s maddening. The more serious the media outlet, the more likely they are to pretend the drooling clown at the top of the country as a serious thinker, because the Newspaper of Record would find it beneath their dignity to expose a madman.

    Although I will say that I watched a little bit of CNN on Friday night, and they were discussing the reasons we should be concerned about a COVID-19 pandemic, and they did come right out and say that one of the exacerbating factors for this disease is “incompetent leadership”. That ought to be the lead story in every newspaper every day. “THE PRESIDENT IS INCOMPETENT”, 72 point bold font, all the time until he’s run out of town on a rail.

    P.S. The president also put Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s new wife, in charge of all coronavirus communications. He’s not only incompetent, he’s corrupt and handing out jobs to cronies. No one will care.