A double-wide in Pahrump, Nevada is haunted now

The grandfather of all the mass-media conspiracy stories and paranormal nonsense has died — Art Bell has become a ghost and floated up in the sky to be with the aliens. Some of us will recall Coast to Coast AM from the 1990s, when Art presided over a collection of the freakiest dingleberries on Earth, gullibly broadcasting every improbable story any yahoo with a phone wanted to call in.

One could literally trace every woo claim, urban myth, and conspiracy theory of the 21st century to its appearance on Coast to Coast AM. The notion that comet Hale Bopp was being shadowed by a UFO (which inspired the Heaven’s Gate cult suicides in 1997) was given no small amount of credibility on the show, as was Remote viewing, EVP, Mel’s Hole, and End Times predictions too numerous to count. Bell created an art form out of giving the craziest of the crazy their individual 15 minutes of fame. According to The Washington Post in its February 23, 1997 edition, Bell was at the time America’s highest-rated late-night radio talk show host, broadcast on 328 stations. In 1999, Bell co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm, upon which the movie The Day After Tomorrow was based.

He was last century’s less mean-spirited Alex Jones. Now dead.

Us Soy Boys should be relieved

It’s an odd thing how some people are scrabbling to invent markers for maleness, as if it is the sole defining feature of their existence, and yet must be constantly validated with sciencey affirmations of invisible phenomena. So we get statements about the utter certainty of the Y chromosome being the definitive factor in being male, from hordes of people who’ve never seen their own karyotype, some small fraction of whom might well have curious chromosomal abnormalities. Will it change who they are if a variation is found? No, not at all. We live in a fairly modest culture, too, and yet we want to declare possession of a penis to be the one great truth behind masculinity…yet I’ve never seen any of your penises, nor have you seen mine. We make demeaning jokes about small penises, but we don’t actually inspect them.

There’s another invisible attribute I’m seeing touted as important to your masculinity: testosterone levels. I’ve seen the silly commercials that try to sell supplements to correct that bane of men’s lives, Low T.

Well, that’s blatant. I better buy me a case of them there pills, lest I suffer the pity of a woman.

The thing is, most of us don’t know what our testosterone levels are. I get twice yearly checkups and get tapped for buckets of blood, and I’ve got reports on levels of triglycerides, HDLs, LDLs, CPK, all that important stuff that matters if you’re concerned about heart disease, but darn, they never bother to check my T levels, and I always forget to ask. Except for certain serious extremes, T levels don’t matter that much, and they certainly aren’t a major factor in that indefinable thing called “manliness”. I also note that half the population seems to function just fine with incredibly low T levels.

But now you’ve got shady companies trying to sell you supplements, and to them it’s really important that you consider T levels vital. The latest round of silliness from the alt-right has them accusing SJWs of being “soy boys”, that consuming products containing soy reduces their T levels. They don’t know! Testosterone levels vary within populations, to no obvious discernible effect, so it amounts to one group of people sneering at another group of people over their blood chemistry in complete ignorance of what it actually is. I feel like the only rational response in such an argument is to whip out a rubber strap and a syringe with a wicked sharp 21-gauge needle and offer to take a sample.

Or, I suppose, we could just have some medical professionals do a clinical assessment of the effects of testosterone. Oh? It’s been done?

So researchers set about designing the Testosterone Trials: double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials—the gold standard in medicine. They went looking for thousands of men over 65 with low T and at least one of its supposed symptoms. When the first findings came out in February 2016, one thing stood out from the start: Of the more than 51,000 men who had been screened, fewer than 15 percent had testosterone levels low enough to be enrolled, even after the researchers relaxed their testosterone threshold. The widely held idea that low T is rife among older men seemed to be a myth.

All told, the studies found that T did not improve men’s physical function or vitality. Nor did it help with age-related memory impairment. It did help with anemia and bone mineral density. It increased sexual desire and activity, but the effect was modest; men were better off using Cialis or Viagra. The most worrisome findings came from a study on cardiovascular risk: In men with certain risk factors, T accelerated coronary atherosclerosis, possibly increasing their chance of heart attack.

If you want to argue with this, I’m going to accuse you of having low aldosterone levels. Or was it cholecystokinin? One of those things neither of us ever bother to actually measure, anyway.

Remember when…?

The month before the 2016 election, when Trump said this?

On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict.

Those were the days, when people would seriously argue that we couldn’t vote for Hillary because she was a warmonger.

Today, of course…U.S. launches missile strikes in Syria.

Someone is psychic, I don’t know who.

The operation capped nearly a week of debate in which Pentagon leaders voiced concerns that an attack could pull the United States into Syria’s civil war and trigger a dangerous conflict with Assad ally Russia — without necessarily halting chemical attacks.

David Silverman fired from American Atheists

I told you this was coming down. Buzzfeed just published the news that Silverman has been fired for financial malfeasance and sexual assault. The personal accounts from several women are sordid, to say the least — you can go read the article for the terrible details, but it sounds like this was a case where there was no doubt about what needed to be done.

It’s terrible news for organized atheism. David was a friend, and was an aggressive, effective promoter of fierce atheism. He was also imperfect — he antagonized some people, and American Atheists made some bad decisions under his leadership, trying to court conservatives at CPAC, and supported some questionable billboards.

None of it matters. The documented behavior is intolerable. I heard some of the stories from the whisper network, but nothing I heard was as horrible as the truth.

Uh-oh. This might just turn everyone gay.

It’s the Straight Pride pin. I am horrified by how boring it is.

This is supposed to represent my sexual orientation? It just makes me look back on my life with regret. Put it away. Honestly, I have no problem with being a straight married man, I just think the symbol for my lifestyle ought to communicate at least a little joy and happiness and enthusiasm, rather than this tepid blandness.

It doesn’t even have any squid on it. What is the point?

Banned by Answers in Genesis!

There is a home-schooling conference — ugh — going on in Calgary right now, which had invited Ken Ham as a speaker — ughugh. Paulogia, a very Canadian (that is, polite to a fault) critic of creationism, bought a ticket to the event and was planning to attend and listen, nothing more.

He had his ticket revoked. He was personally contacted by both the head of AiG Canada and the president of the homeschooling association to inform him he wasn’t welcome. What an amazing honor!

The whole story is here:

Someone has finally figured out Jordan Peterson

Elizabeth Sanderson’s explanation makes perfect sense.

Never before have I encountered such a complex, intelligent, and daring work of satire. This “Jordan Peterson” character is the most cutting-edge performance art I have ever encountered. No sincere leftist commentary has ever exposed the link between seemingly banal conservativism and borderline-fascism in such an easily understandable way. This one-man-show is the bumbling Canadian answer to Laibach. As an expert in pseudo-academic nonsense, I have to salute my superior on this one.

“Jordan Peterson” is a work of parody known as stiob: “an overidentification with the person or idea at which it is directed and that it is often impossible to tell if stiob is sincere support, ridicule, or a mixture of the two.” Stiob arose from the late Soviet years, during the Brezhnev era. There are many eerie similarities between that time and our own – the government was largely ran by a cadre of septuagenarians, wages had stagnated, yet all official narratives insisted that there was no alternative. The horizon of possible futures was closed. Into this fray, a new form of parody emerged, one that was often indistinguishable from the thing it was criticizing.

Take, for example, the Slovenian industrial band Laibach. Their artwork and performances are rife with totalitarian imagery, which leads many to wonder whether or not the band themselves are fascist. Laibach can be seen as an example of “stiob”, employing a strategy of subversive affirmation or over-identification in order to tease out truths that cynical distance could not. It is not “satire” as we would usually understand the word.

I’d never heard of “stiob” before, but it seems to be a real and useful term. So I’ve also picked up a new addition to my vocabulary!

Despite his recent notoriety, the most towering accomplishment Peterson leaves behind is his earlier book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. This is the greatest academic practical joke ever conceived. Despite its name and intimidating 500+ page length, the book manages to pull off the impossible, and leave the reader with no meaning whatsoever.

It reads like a cross between Joseph Campbell and Timecube, interspersed with diagrams of the auto-fellating dragon of chaos. Peterson seems hellbent on finding every hokey pseudo-science and subsuming it into his personal worldview. Jungian psychology, evolutionary psychology, social Darwinism… the man has spent decades on what is fundamentally unprovable quackery. It’s sprawling, pedantic, repetitive – a commentary on the demand for quantity over quality that has become so common in academia today.

Move over, Boghossian. Maps of Meaning is the satire you wish “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” could have been. You missed the mark by failing to notice that the social movement ripe for parody is the centrist/alt-right/pseudo-skeptical gang you belong to.

For years I’d been hearing leftists claim that conservative thought is always mobilized in defense of the ruling classes. In response, many right-wingers have taken to insisting they are, in fact, “classical liberals”, and that their politics flows from a respect for freedom and markets rather than defending the powers that be. Enter Jordan Peterson. On the surface he seems like a milquetoast conservative. But when it comes time to defend inequality, Peterson points to animal hierarchies as a justification. His individualism does not arise from a place of ethical consideration, but out of biological essentialism and social darwinism.

The bumbling professor, despite all of his appeals to the contrary, keeps accidentally rediscovering fascist ideas.

There are moments where he almost breaks character – take his story about lobsters, in his more recent book. Peterson knows nothing about biology, but he plunges forward with complete confidence, shamelessly preaching an understanding of evolutionary psychology that sounds like it was ripped straight from a Pick Up Artist forum.

If taken seriously, he is moronic and dangerous. But taken as a work of intellectual Outsider Art? Goddam brilliant.

Dang. Am I going to have to rethink my opinion of Peterson?

At least I’m not going to have to rethink my opinion of his followers — all dupes.

Californians, do the rest of us a favor

The California legislature is considering a comprehensive net neutrality bill, which the big corporations like AT&T really hate. I’d like to see it become law for you all, because that would mean us little people in flyover country who don’t have any significance at all could then point to you as a shining example.

We need you to contact your representatives and tell them to get off their butts and do the right thing, and ignore those well-heeled lobbyists who are waving money at them.

Contact:

Ben Hueso (Chair) | 916–651–4040 | @BenHueso
Robert Hertzberg | 916–651–4018 | @SenateHertzberg
Steve Bradford | 916–651–4035 | @SteveBradford
Henry Stern | 916–651–4027 | @HenrySternCA
Jerry Hill | 916–651–4013

Tell them to support SB 822 to restore net neutrality.