I need a time machine with a 500 million year range

Because I really need to see this Middle Cambrian chelicerate from Mount Stephen, British Columbia. Look at that face full of widgets, like an array of Swiss Army knives! I want a Sanctacaris uncata for a pet.

If we’ve only got a 420 million year range, I guess I could settle for a new ophiocistioid with soft-tissue preservation from the Silurian Herefordshire Lagerstätte. Sollasina cthulhu is a lovely name.

I’ve decided mammals are boring, and that invertebrates are where it’s at. Sorry, humans, I’m not really interested in associating with you any more. Nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve changed.

Well, I actually haven’t changed that much.

They grow up no matter what you do

This is a good piece on how kids get sucked into the alt-right vortex, although I think there was maybe a bit much of an attempt to blame the kid’s trauma on an overzealous idiot of a school administrator. People join the alt-right without ever being unfairly accused of sexual harassment.

The parents’ approach was just right, in my opinion: dealing with it patiently, giving their side openly, letting the kid wrestle with it himself with only gentle guidance. I remember when my son asked for a book by Thomas Sowell for Christmas — I was anguished, heart-broken, wondering where we went wrong, looking through the yellow pages for deprogrammers, anything to break the chains of libertarian conservative propaganda. But we got him the damn book anyway, and we’d still love him even if he’d asked for Ayn Rand. Fortunately, he seems to have turned out OK now.

“Inside the Atheist Mind” is more revealing of what’s going on in the Fox News mind

This is an opinion published by Fox News, so you already know it’s garbage, but I’ll kick it around for a bit anyway. It’s by a guy named Anthony DeStefano, who claims to have insight into the atheist mind.

There’s no polite way to say it. Atheists today are the most arrogant, ignorant and dangerous people on earth.

Even more arrogant than a Christian who thinks the entire universe was created for their people? More ignorant than a Christian who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old? Even more dangerous than a cult that controls the American government? I’ll have to see the evidence.

We’ve all seen how these pompous prigs get offended by the slightest bit of religious imagery in public and mortified if even a whisper of “Merry Christmas” escapes the lips of some well-meaning but naïve department store clerk during the “holiday season.”

No, that’s not true. Splatter as much religious imagery on your house or your church as you want. But please, the government is here to serve all the people, so the government has no place endorsing a specific sect.

Also, you won’t find many stories of atheists raging at a store clerk saying “Merry Christmas”. That has never been a problem for us. You will, on the other hand, find plenty of stories of some self-righteous Christian raging about a clerk saying “Happy Holidays”.

But really, the War on Christmas? You know this is a totally made-up conflict peddled by the likes of Bill O’Reilly, don’t you?

To cite a few recent examples: Last December, the group American Atheists launched its annual billboard campaign with the slogan: “Just Skip Church — It’s All Fake News.” In February, the American Humanist Association became furious when President Trump had the gall to mention Christianity and Jesus Christ without also mentioning atheists—at the National Prayer Breakfast! (How dare he!) And just this month, the Freedom From Religion Foundation raised holy hell because the Reverend Billy Graham was laid out in state in the Capitol Rotunda before his burial.

Yes? A billboard campaign by an atheist organization is just a publicly expressed opinion. It’s allowed.

If you are so upset that a few citizens expressed a non-binding, secular, unenforceable opinion, why are you so blase about the President using his power and his influence to tell the country that they should pray, and also using the power of the government to honor a Christian mouthpiece?

Yes, these atheists are loud, nasty, unapologetic and in-your-face.

So far, he’s backed that up with an imaginary conflict, the fact that atheists openly say that they don’t believe in church, and that the American government expresses a religious bias. Mediocre!

But while their arrogance is annoying, it’s nothing compared to their ignorance. Atheists believe that the vast majority of human beings from all periods of time and all places on the Earth have been wrong about the thing most important to them. They basically dismiss this vast majority as being either moronic or profoundly naïve. What they don’t seem to know – or won’t admit – is that the greatest contributions to civilization have been made, not by atheists, but by believers.

The vast majority of human beings from all periods of time have always believed that everyone else is wrong about gods, not just atheists. Remember, Christians were once a small minority who believed that everyone else — Jews, Romans, pagans — got the most important fact in the universe wrong, and were going to be punished with eternal damnation for it.

Atheists do know that they are a minority, and that historically they’ve been an even more minuscule minority. When the majority of people believe in a deity, then we can expect that a majority of believers will have contributed to civilization. This is not a surprise.

Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Isaac Newton all believed in God. Nobel-prize winner Wilhelm Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays; Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry; William Keen, the pioneer of brain surgery; rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; and Ernest Walton, the first person to artificially split the atom—all believed in God.

But…but…Aristotle didn’t believe in your religion and specifically not in Jesus. Bacon, Da Vinci, and Newton all lived at times when denying Christianity would get you persecuted and punished (which is not to say that they didn’t also have cultural biases favoring belief…and Newton in particular was fervent but weirdly unorthodox). Heck, I was brought up Lutheran, although I repudiated it in my teens — does that mean a demented 16th century anti-semite gets credit for my interest in science? I think not.

And speaking of pioneers of science, who do you think coined the term “scientist” in the first place? William Whewell, an Anglican priest and theologian! He also came up with words “physicist,” “cathode”, “anode” and many other commonly used scientific terms. Essentially, the very language used by scientists today comes from the brain of a believer.

Even the Big Bang Theory itself – which atheists mistakenly think bolsters their arguments against God – was proposed by Fr. George Lemaitre, a Belgian astronomer and Roman Catholic priest! And the father of genetics—which provides the basis for the whole theory of evolution—was Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk!

Just about every 19th century English scientist was an Anglican! They probably also ate porridge, too, but we don’t go around insisting that porridge made them great scientists. Or maybe you do. It would make as much sense.

I teach genetics. I imagine everyone who does so mentions a bit of the history, and discusses Mendel specifically as a monk working in a monastery garden. We’re comfortable saying it too, and are fine with the idea that people who believed in God can also do science. Most of our American students are religious, mostly Christian but I also teach Muslims, and we don’t use the classroom to lie about history, which makes this next bit particularly ridiculous.

Yes, the new atheists have an ignorance of history bordering on madness.

You haven’t shown that. You haven’t even made an argument touching on that.

But are they really dangerous, too?

I expect more garbage arguments in defense of that claim.

You bet they are. The truth is, the atheist position is incapable of supporting any coherent system of morality other than ruthless social Darwinism. That’s why it has caused more deaths, murders and bloodshed than any other belief system in the history of the world.

I’m an atheist humanist. I reject social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was avidly endorsed by a great many Christians, you know — it’s a position that can be held independent of one’s religious beliefs.

Atheists, of course, are always claiming hysterically that Christianity has been responsible for most of the world’s wars, but that’s just another example of atheistic ignorance. The main reasons for war have always been economic gain, territorial gain, civil and revolutionary conflicts. According to Philip Axelrod’s monumental “Encyclopedia of Wars,” only 6.98 percent or all wars from 8000 BC to present were religious in nature. If you subtract Islamic wars from the equation, only 3.2 percent of wars were due to specifically Christian causes. That means that over 96 percent of all the wars on this planet were due to worldly reasons.

I have never heard an atheist claim that Christianity has been responsible for most the world’s wars. Was the American Civil War caused by Christianity? Both sides were majority Christian. What about WWI and WWII? I’ve never seen it claimed that those were religious wars at all. I’d agree that most wars have been waged for “worldly reasons”. Of course, you still have to concede that, as most Western scientific discoveries are being credited to Christians, than likewise most of those worldly wars must have been waged by religious believers. You don’t get to claim all the good things in history for godly folk and blame all the evils on an insignificant minority of atheists!

What follows is predictable.

Indeed, in the last 100 years alone, upwards of 360 million people were killed by governments—and close to half of those people were killed by atheist governments!

Yes, there is a profound and frightening connection between atheism and death. Atheist leaders like Stalin, Mao Zedong, Hideki To ̄jo ̄, Pol Pot and many others bear the blame for the overwhelming majority of deaths caused by war and mass murder in history. And while many atheists make the preposterous claim that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, his private diaries, first published in 1953 by Farrar, Straus and Young, reveal clearly that the Fuhrer was a rabid atheist: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity,” Hitler stated, “was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew… Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.”

Interesting shift. One minute he’s arguing that almost all wars can be blamed on “worldly reasons”, in the net he leaps to claim that’s synonymous with atheism in the last century. To buttress his argument, he claims that Hitler was not a Christian, citing his private diaries. This is bogus. The “diaries” that were published in the 1980s were entirely fake; he must be referring to the “table talk” transcripts. These were not diaries, and they weren’t even particularly complete or accurate transcripts, and they weren’t good sources for Hitler’s state of mind, let alone the goals of the German leadership or the German people. They’re also plagued with a history of bad translations.

[Hitler] was that classic German type known as Besserwisser, the know-it-all. His mind was cluttered with minor information and misinformation, about everything. I believe that one of the reasons he gathered so many flunkies around him was that his instinct told him that first-rate people couldn’t possibly stomach the outpourings.

Hmmm. Sounds like he’d be a natural as a Fox News pundit nowadays.

But even if Hitler were a flaming satanist, it doesn’t change the fact that the German people were almost universally Lutheran and Catholic, and yet they willingly went to war with the world, and many participated in the Holocaust. His public speeches endorsed religion, Mein Kampf is full of religious claims of righteousness, and he had the support of the German Catholic hierarchy.

He goes on longer, but I’m bored now. To be honest, I was bored after his second paragraph. I’ll just point out that the Fox News staff must have gone looking for the most “arrogant, ignorant and dangerous” illustration they could find, and this is what they came up with.

Oooh. Scary.

Tell me a story, Bernie: Sanders in Sioux City

In my years of science communication, sometimes contentious, there was one thing everyone agreed on: tell a story. Data dumps don’t work. Use a narrative hook, get the audience engaged, lead them through the whys and hows and leave them with some resolution, a conclusion, and maybe something to leave them asking for more. Every successful communicator knows this through and through.

(You can also go too far this way, though: many TED talks are terrible because they’re all narrative fluff and not enough plausible, substantive content.)

So. Yesterday my wife and I drive off to Sioux City, Iowa to a Bernie Sanders rally. We got in with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, we got good seats up front, we got handed our Bernie signs. We listened to the band, we listened to the warm-up speakers (they were all fine), and then the main act, Bernie Sanders, appeared to wild applause.

He was good. I agreed with his position on every danged thing. But…

There was no story here. None at all. We got shotgunned with blipverts. It was a positive, receptive crowd, so it worked: chains of short soundbites evoked lots of applause, and it was clear that this was a well-honed stump speech that said all the right things to Bernie supporters.

“Medicare for all!” <cheers> “Support LGBTQ rights!” <cheers> “…Women’s right to choose!” <cheers> “Civil rights!” <cheers> You get the idea. Good stuff, I’m tempted to cheer and wave my sign, too, but I’m also feeling some dismay. Where’s the hook? Where’s the story? Where’s the focus? What’s the point? If I go home after this and meet some Biden supporter, how do I explain why Medicare for all matters, what’s the case for it as good policy, how do I justify it over some alternative? What are the alternatives? What are their weaknesses?

Worse, what if I’m arguing with a Warren supporter? How do I differentiate the two? He did make the case that a lot of the radical ideas he brought up decades ago, and a few years ago in the last presidential election, are now mostly mainstream in the Democratic field (with exceptions, obviously). What might make the difference is if Sanders had an emotional case that engaged his listeners with an intellectual punch that followed through. That rally was for people who already supported him, which was fine and valuable and part of the campaign, but where’s the part that reaches out and compels non-Bernie backers to pay attention? That’s needed to grow his support.

You might wonder what it will take to rally the Trumpkins to his cause. Nothing. Screw ’em. They’re a lost cause. There were two people who had the gall to show up in Trump hats, and they were politely escorted out, which is an appropriate response, I think. They were only going to disrupt the event and we might as well recognize that they’re unreachable, and talking to racists isn’t a viable strategy.

But talking to moderate conservatives or conservative Democrats is still on the table, as well as drawing together progressives. Bernie has to work on the persuasion game a bit more. And that means introducing a question or problem, building some empathy for people suffering under the current state of affairs, offering a solution, making a case for how it will work, giving us a compelling explanation that we can take home and share with friends and family.

Soundbites are fine, and needed to hammer blurbs home to a dumbass media. But they need to be imbedded in a constructive framework.

He needs to give us a story.

They all do.

Madness in Sioux City!

This morning, I’m driving off to Sioux City, Iowa for a Bernie Sanders rally, because my wife really wants to see him, and it’s unlikely he’ll be visiting Morris. It’s a 4 hour drive, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since we’re used to having to drive 3 hours to get to just about anywhere. It’s still going to rip the heart out of my day, just to listen to an old man rant at the system. I could do that home, alone, with a mirror!

I’d be OK with President Sanders. I’d prefer a President Warren, but I’d be content with anyone taking a progressive step forward. Right now my second worse outcome is President Biden, and that’s the establishment Democrats want to foist off on me.

My worst outcome is that Biden is the nominee, and Sanders decides to run as an independent, and we get President Raunchy Oompa-loompa again, and that is my one major reservation about Sanders.

What? Even in Morris?

This “Beyond Meat” stuff must be booming if it’s showing up on grocery store shelves even in remote, barren backwaters like rural Minnesota.

But OK, I’ll give it a try this evening, despite the fact that marketing something as just like meat isn’t exactly a great way to reach vegetarians.

Hey, kind of like how Joe Biden is a fake progressive who’ll appeal more to neo-liberals and centrists, but not so much to people who want real change in the system.

A litany of bad science

Trumpism is nothing new. Fevered racism has been simmering in the US for a long, long time. What’s embarrassing is how Daniel Okrent explains how much well educated scientists at famous institutions contributed to the toxic stew. It’s not southern rednecks who necessarily are full of ignorance and hate; genteel northern scholars with bad ideas had more power and influence.

Also note how the social sciences have been scorned all along.

Together, they [a gang of prestigious scientists] popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

People with no knowledge of sociology are always eager to shut down sociology departments because they keep on digging up hard data to show that racists are wrong. But wait — when a sociologist says bigoted things, then we can listen to them. Also, I guess people of Slavic descent weren’t considered white enough?

Writing about Slavic immigrants, the sociologist Edward A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin — later the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union — declared, they “are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man.” The president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.”

Racial classifications were so confusing. Italians were Asiatic?

The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians coming to the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.” A Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, his city’s leading supporter of progressive causes, explained to friends why he became the single largest financial backer of the anti-immigrant campaign: His concern, he wrote, was that without a restriction law, Europe would be “drained of Jews — to its benefit no doubt but not to ours.”

Cold Spring Harbor has a deep history of aiding and abetting racism — removing that stain was one of the reasons James Watson got the boot there, although that doesn’t explain why they hired him in the first place.

The “biological” justifications for this nativism were first developed in Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, in laboratories financed by the widow of the railroad baron E.H. Harriman. (One of her goals, Mary Harriman said, was preventing “the decay of the American race.”) The laboratory’s head, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, took the ideas of the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of human breeding. One of the first steps, he believed, was to impose new controls on open immigration.

I read “The Passing of the Great Race” a few decades ago, and recall it as awful pseudoscience of the sort that might fit in at the Daily Stormer nowadays. I should re-read it, I suppose, but the memory is painful and infuriating.

At first, Davenport wished to bar the immigration only of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

Never forget how entrenched anti-semitism was and is.

Grant was not an actual scientist. But Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-famous paleontologist and his closest friend, definitely was. Osborn, who once expressed his opposition to the extension of the Westchester Parkway near his country estate because it would bring thousands of “East Side Jews” to the area, presided over the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, and made that institution the beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement. “I am convinced,” said Osborn, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and intellectual structure” of individuals is “based on racial characteristics.” It wasn’t a matter of ethnic bias, he said — it was “cold-blooded” science.

Good news for me — I’m one of those Nordics. That means I get to sneer at everyone with ancestry from a more southern country. That’s what this is all about, right, ranking people in arbitrary hierarchies so you always have someone lesser to spit on?

“Whether we like to admit it or not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting” to the “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the questionable “Alpines.” Lower than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.” And, he concluded, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

We’ve still got people today babbling about IQ tests. Thanks, scientists!

Other scholars rallied to the cause. Robert M. Yerkes — his name immortalized today at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta — conducted a severely flawed series of tests of American servicemen purporting to establish the intellectual inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans. Charles W. Gould, a lawyer in New York, sponsored “A Study of American Intelligence,” by Carl C. Brigham, a young Princeton psychologist (and later the inventor of the SAT). Brigham’s conclusion: “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”

It’s good to be reminded now and then that all the pseudo-scientific respectability given racist science today was granted by bigoted assholes with science degrees yesterday.