I love it when creationists decide to attack evolution by way of developmental biology. Yes, come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Our home is our terrible weakness, Im sure youll be able to frolic and thrive in our little domainheh heh heh <twirls mustache>

This fellow, David W. Swift, whose knowledge of development is maybe an inch deep and obtained entirely from information taken from basic textbooks, followed up by a conscious misreading of a few scientific papers with an eye to extracting only bits and pieces that support his conclusion, has decided that embryology is evidence against evolution.

It is quite well known that at a relatively early stage the embryos of a wide range of vertebrates look similar a so-called phylotypic stage and this is generally regarded as evidence of common ancestry.

What is not well known is that before this stage the early embryonic development of vertebrates is very diverse right from the earliest stages which clearly refutes their common ancestry.

Hes partly right. It is well known that there are embryonic similarites between vertebrates, and of course thats evidence for common ancestry. There is a lot of evidence for common ancestry, and that is one small piece of it.

Hes wrong when he says that it is not well known that early development is more diverse. Any developmental biology textbook that discusses comparative embryology is going to tell you that. We developmental biologists ALL know that. Its been a hot button topic of discussion for at least 50 years, probably longer. Mr Swift perused a select bunch of papers and just skipped over any that brought the topic up, so he could pretend he was the perceptive creationist who noticed, for the first time, a weakness in evolutionary theory? Such arrogance. Its especially annoying because he says nothing novel that he couldnt have found prominently discussed in the scientific literature.

Also, the known evidence that early development is a complex process with diverse patterns of execution in different organism does not refute common ancestry. The creationists seem unable to get into their heads that a short-sighted process driven by chance as a core mechanism, running over millions and billions of years, is going to generate complexity and diversity by its very nature. Observing that something is complex and diverse is evidence that an evolutionary process created it, rather than an engineer.

That doesnt stop him from expanding that claim into a whole tedious paper, published in the Discovery Institutes fake journal, Bio-Complexity...

A Fire in the Shadows: A Bolingbrook Babbler Story

A Fire in the Shadows is out today. If you placed a preorder, you should have it today, and thank you for your support. Great American Satan has a review up. Anthony Avina reviewed it as well. It has a 4.29 star average on Goodreads. I will enjoy it while I can before the Goodreads trolls attack.

It is a complete story, but its also an introduction to Lydia, a vampire who regained her ability to feel love and compassion. Shell play an important role in the future Bolingbrook Babbler Stories.

Heres the description:

Vampire, intelligence scout, paranormal protector, and emotional liability

Bolingbrook has long been rumored to be a hub of paranormal and alien activity and Lydia should knowshes a vampire. But that doesnt mean she fits in. Not when shes a target for other vampires and reliant on her blood familys protection because of her inconvenient inclination to experience feelings.

Except right now, Lydia has bigger things to worry about than her recent rejection by a human or her blood sister Auroras relentless teasing. An army of weredeer are gathering near town and they need to gather intelligence fast.

When enforcers from one of Chicagos vampire kingdoms threaten the Bolingbrook Babblers stunning chief editor, Aurora accuses Lydia of having feelings again. But even if Lydia does have a crush on the unsuspecting Sara, she deserves their protection.

Only Lydia hadnt counted on how powerful their enemies are. Or the sort of unexpected revelations that will come to light if Lydia dares to risk rejection again

Get a Fire in the Shadows to find out what Lydia will risk.

If you want to support a local independent bookstore, you can order a copy through Bookshop.org. You can also ask your local library to ord...

FreethoughtBlogss own William Brinkman is at it again!  He has a new story set in his Bolingbrook Babbler Literary Universe, and I got an advance reader copy of it.  The rest of you rabble can order it tomorrow, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.  This is my review.

Like Williams The Rift, A Fire in the Shadows is action-packed genre fiction, set in the Weekly World News -inspired setting of his Bolingbrook Babbler articles.  At around 12k words, its long for a short story, but only covers a few short events.

Theres a lot of information around those events, and the author wants the story to stand on its own, so the exposition can land like bricks upside the head.  The references to events in The Rift feel particularly unnecessary, beyond the important fact of the weredeer incursion.  I do like being able to include a sentence like that in a review.

Still, as I said before, its fun to see SFF genre fiction that isnt beholden to the conventions laid down by the titans of Intellectual Property.  Theres stuff here to enjoy.  The vampire battle strategizing reminded me of a bit in From Russia with Love where James Bond was thinking about how he could totally judo chop through his opponents chest if he wanted to, but now wasnt the time for it.

One thing that struck me odd.  The vampire characters seem to regard their own human ethnicities as a thing to be disdained, and Im not convinced theyd have any reason to feel that way.  This element seemed like a ploy to spell out the characters backgrounds without breaking from the plot and dialogue to do so.  In general, the bitchy attitudes of the vampires were unappealing, and while that may have been intentional, its not interesting to me as a reader.  I know some other readers like it, so YMMV.  I did like the main character Lydia being a lovefool like The Cardigans.

Williams writing style spells out a lot.  Show, dont tell is one of the central dogmas of 20th century literature, but there are situations where even back then it was ignored....

Since I write stories set in Bolingbrook, Illinois, I should mention there was a triple murder last night. The suspect broke into a house and killed three people, two of them teenagers. The police arrested the suspect, who, according to the Daily Herald, was dating one of the victims.

While I have no personal connection to the family, it still strikes me as a tragic loss. Even sadder is that its one of many gun deaths occurring in the United States. My thoughts are with the family tonight.

A little while back, I shared the good news that the so-called clathrate gun was apparently no longer a serious cause for concern. I remain happy about that, but unfortunately there are other big sources of methane all tied to fossil fuel extraction that are contributing to climate change in a major way.

More than 1,000 super-emitter sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

This is why the focus on individual lifestyle choices has always been a massive red herring, and why I focus more on systemic/societal change. I havent owned a car since late 2009, and any decrease in humanitys emissions from that choice was more than wiped out by the methane coming from any one of those facilities. Do what you can on the individual level, but if we dont chance society, that wont end up mattering. Thats doubly true, because fossil fuel corporations fully intend to extract every drop they can, no matter the harm done to everyone else:

Separate data also reveals 55 methane bombs around the world fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

I guarantee you that there are more than 55 places around the world where new extraction is planned, and from which a horrifying amount of methane will leak. These 55 are just the really exceptional ones. Regardless, these findings support the long-standing view that we need to act a lot faster than we have been. The upside is that eliminating or dramatically reducing these emissions should, technically, be pretty easy:

Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a scary surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.

The two new datasets identify the sites most critical to preventing methane-driven disaster, as tackling leaks from fossil fuel sites is the fastest and cheapest way to slash methane emissions. Some leaks are deliberate, venting the unwanted...

State Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-OK) has penned several bills loosening gun restrictions, including the nations first anti-red flag law. He thinks these bills protect the Second Amendment and that they make us safer. We think it's probably one or the other. Watch it on @AppleTVPlus. pic.twitter.com/T7fLFLjTQ5

The Problem With Jon Stewart (@TheProblem) March 3, 2023

Joe Biden sometimes surprises me. I never had a high opinion of him, seeing him as epitomizing the neoliberal centrism of the political establishment, a caretaker of the status quo and an appeaser of the right wing. My support of him during the last election was driven by my horror at the thought of the lying, grifting, narcissist Donald Trump getting to be president for another four years. But I must admit that Biden has done better than I expected. True, he is no Bernie Sanders when it comes to advancing progressive policies but he has managed to push through some important pieces of legislation in his first two years that have made real improvements in the lives of ordinary people.

A big test is the one that will occur this June or so when failure to raise the debt ceiling will reach a crisis point. Republicans were clearly planning to use that issue as a hostage to obtain cuts in spending. What cuts? They refuse to specify but their target has always been programs that benefit those who are in need. (For a list of the programs that they are likely targeting, see here.) But their main target has always been the Big Three: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs are expensive but extremely popular and cutting them will cause a backlash. Republicans know this and thus they seek to create a crisis so that cuts to them will be seen as inevitable and have Democrats share at least part of the blame.

But in the opening maneuvers, Biden seems to have gained an advantage. In his State of the Union speech, he needled the Republicans in Congress into loudly opposing cuts in those programs and even after that he continued to pummel them on this issue in speeches, forcing Republican senator Rick Scott, who had proposed sunsetting all programs after five years and requiring them to be reauthorized, to grudgingly backtrack, saying that when he meant all programs he had actually meant to exclude Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans benefits, and other essential services.

The White House wasted no time in gloating over the reversal.

We congratulate Senator Scott on joining the post-State of the Union red wave of Republicans acknowledging that they have, in fact, been attempting to put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block. For the past year he has explained the absence of an exception by saying, If its worth keeping, were going to keep it. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement.

But make no mista...

Spider webs, especially cobwebs, are so complex that it can get annoying. Theyre also hard to photograph so many thin threads going every which-way in 3 dimensions, its easy to get lost. Ive been gratified lately to find that I can confine spiders to make mostly two-dimensional sheets using a wooden frame in a plastic container (they prefer natural substrates), but I have no illusion that this reflects the sophistication of their natural behavior. Its mainly a good way to get them to pose nicely for me, and to simplify moving them from one place to another.

But some people manage to capture those 3-D webs.

Forget about spider man and his meek two-dimensional webs! Even though spider webs have been around for at least 140 million years, we have never managed to preserve, measure and display their webs in a three dimensional form. Toms Saraceno has opened our eyes to the intricate geometry of spider webs with his newly invented scanning instrument that digitized for the first time a three-dimensional web. In fact, there is no single museum in the world with a collection of this kind. His spider web sculptures are a breakthrough in both science and art, and thanks to his methods and technique he has enabled much needed comparative studies in mathematics, engineering and arachnology, opening new fields of studies.

(Peter Jger, Head of Arachnology, Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt am Main, and co-author of the World Spider Catalog, 2015)

There are lots of pretty pictures at that link. Everybody loves orb webs, but cobwebs are much more intricate and confusing.

I was living in Philadelphia during the OJ Simpson trial, and every day on my commute Id pick up a copy of the Daily News, the citys tabloid paper, and it was pretty much non-stop OJ coverage. It was weirdly fascinating, since OJ was that terrible combination of rich, famous, and obviously guilty. The trial was a prolonged spectacle of justice twisted to support a joyful media that knew a cash cow when they saw it, and a team of showboating lawyers who were more about putting on a show than practicing law. And then OJ was acquitted! The rich guy got off (although that was complicated by the fact that it was the rich black guy who escaped justice there were a lot of people cheering for him, too.)

The latest law event comparable was the Alex Murdaugh trial. It was inescapable! It was unbelievable! It was a string of crimes where the culprit was clearly the corrupt Southern lawyer who seemed to think he could distract the law as it came crashing down on him by committing yet another clumsily executed murder, butchering his own family members. He was so obviously guilty that every death of everyone with any connection to the family began to look like another victim of a Murdaugh conspiracy.

I am so cynical that as the evidence piled up, I was convinced that Murdaugh was also going to be acquitted. The more damning the evidence became, the more certain I was that he was going to walk, because justice in America is synonymous with money. I was surprised when the jury adjurned and came back with a guilty verdict in only 45 minutes!

Amanda Marcotte has been reading my mind all this time.

Ah yes, why would cable news fixate on this truly bonkerballs string of crimes corruption, fraud, drug abuse, and of course, murder that would put any Southern gothic novel to shame? It hardly seems a mystery, especially when it seems that time spent not on this murder is instead dedicated to endless speculation about presidential primaries that are a year away and already have painfully predictable outcomes. (Its Donald Trump and Joe Biden again, folks. Sorry to spoil the surprise.) And its not like theyre going to suddenly start having fruitful discussions on policy that will no doubt invite viewers to turn the channel.

Accusations of frivolity are something true crime fans have had to deal with for roughly forever. Its a charge that has more than an air of sexism to it, as most such enthusiasts are women. But the Murdaugh case thoroughly exposes how wrong t...

Floridas Republican politicians seem determined to send the country into outrage overload. Theres a proposed bill to require any one who blogs about a state official to register with the state if the post. Another bill sets out to cancel the Democratic Party. PZ posted about an effort to ban the COVID vaccine in Florida. And were just getting started.

Its almost as if they read Troll Nation by Amanda Marcotte and thought it was a how to manual for running a government. Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have no policy except to inflict harm, punish their enemies, and reward their friends.

Im going to disagree slightly with PZ. Florida isnt joke. Its a test run for implementing Christian Nationalism on the rest of us.

Its hard to decide what aspect of climate change is the most frightening, amplifying feedbacks effects of warming that themselves cause more warming have to be near the top of the list. A few days ago, I wrote about research indicating that they may be worse than we know, and todays research is about the progression of one of those feedback  mechanisms. Wildfires have been increasing with higher global temperatures, increasing output of CO₂. Unfortunately, it turns out that 2021 saw a huge spike in wildfire emissions:

Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO₂) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021, 150 percent higher than annual mean CO₂ emissions between 2000 and 2020, the scientists reported in a paper in Science.

According to our measurements, boreal fires in 2021 shattered previous records, said senior co-author Steven Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science. These fires are two decades of rapid warming and extreme drought in Northern Canada and Siberia coming to roost, and unfortunately even this new record may not stand for long.

The researchers said that the worsening fires are part of a climate-fire feedback in which carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, creating conditions that lead to more fires and more emissions.

The escalation of wildfires in the boreal region is anticipated to accelerate the release of the large carbon storage in the permafrost soil layer, as well as contribute to the northward expansion of shrubs, said co-author Yang Chen, a UCI research scientist in Earth system science. These factors could potentially lead to further warming and create a more favorable climate for the occurrence of wildfires.

Davis added, Boreal fires released nearly twice as much CO₂ as global aviation in 2021. If this scale of emissions from unmanaged lands becomes a new normal, stabilizing Earths climate will be even more challenging than we thought.

This is why I focus not just on ending fossil fuel use, but also on making changes now, to help us deal with the warming that we know we will be unable to avoid. The climate shift that were currently experiencing has a great deal of momentum enough that it could conceivably keep warming for centuries, even if we do get our emissions under control in the next 20 years. It would be much slower, and potentially easier to ad...

The US government gives religious institutions all manner of tax breaks and also tends to not scrutinize their workings too closely. Crooked people have been exploiting the extra freedoms given to ostensibly religious institutions, such as so-called pastors living the high life on their tax free incomes and perks.

ProPublica exposes the workings of yet another religion-based fraud that left a lot of people, who trusted the institution would do right by them because they were Christian, in the lurch. They describe the case of Bonnie Marin who purchased insurance through a Christian health insurance company. When she developed a cancerous tumor, she thought that she would be spared the huge cost of treatment. To her shock, after a while, they stopped paying out.

Luckily, or so Martin thought, she had placed her trust and her money in Liberty HealthShare. Liberty is whats known as a health care sharing ministry, a nonprofit alternative to medical insurance rooted in Christian principles. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on such organizations for basic health coverage. They promise no red tape, lower costs and compassion for the sick. Although Martin wasnt religious, she found comfort in Libertys pledge to carry one anothers burdens.

Liberty covered her bills at first, but then, without warning or explanation, the payments stopped. Suddenly, she faced $10,000 in unpaid charges. Her whole life, shed had pristine credit. Now creditors called constantly and sent harassing letters.

Martin died in July 2022 at age 63. Liberty never settled the bills that she had begged them to pay.

What Martin didnt know when she joined Liberty was that she was sending her money to members of a family with a long and well-documented history of fraud.

For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences.

Patriarch Daniel J. Beers, 60, lies at the center of the family network. He was a leading figure in a scheme in the 1990s involving a health care sharing ministry that fraudulently siphoned tens of millions of dollars from members, court records show. Two decades later, he played a key role in building Liberty into one of the nations largest sharing ministries, several of the nonprofits current and former employees told ProPublica.

Four years after its launch in 2014, the ministry enrolled members in almost every state and collected $300 mi...

Too much ick this morning. Even grading is suddenly looking pleasant.

Heres a palate cleanser: our granddaughter Iliana gets to take care of a couple of cats for a few weeks, and she seems happy about it.

Not our cat, obviously. Iliana has met our cat, it did not go well, but our cat seems to be a feral outlier.

Another vile human being has been dragged into the light. This woman has been promoting terrorism and encouraging mass murderers for decades, while hiding behind online anonymity. Left Coast Right Watch has done an amazingly thorough job of tracking her down online anonymity isnt as safe as she thought.

Over the past few years, she was simply known as the narratorthe disembodied voice that reads mass murderer manifestos, how-to guides on attacking critical infrastructure and collections of short essays written by an anonymous collective of white supremacists and accelerationiststhe people hell-bent on causing the collapse of society.

Her name is Dallas Erin Humber, and shes deeply involved with the online network of violent, militant bigots known as Terrorgram.

Here she is with her Nazi pedophile (why do those two words go together so often?) boyfriend, Jason Gant.

This is a doxxing I fully support. Shes the voice behind this thing called the Terrorgram Collective, an online group for the cheering fans of terrorism, murder, and mass destruction which has inspired at least one mass killing. Humber is a cheerleader for the worst, most contemptible people on the planet. I wont quote her screeds they make me sick, and probably would nauseate you, too but if you must, the link above includes many excerpts from her sordid history, and theres more here.

Its not clear what more can be done about her, though. Shes a 33 year old woman living a normal public life in Sacramento, California, while inciting international violence under a cowardly pseudonym. Will exposing her have any discouraging effect at all? Its not at all clear what it will do, other than give CPAC an opportunity to invite her to next years conference, and it looks like the law isnt rushing forward to shut her down.

Its also unclear whether Humber now that her role in Terrorgram has been exposed could or would be prosecuted. In the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brandenberg vs. Ohio, the court ruled that advocacy of violence could be punished only where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

Arusha Gordon associate director of the James Byrd Jr. Center to Stop Hate at the Lawyers Committee...

One pleasant bit of non-news is that CPAC is dying. For a couple of decades now, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a yearly spectacle of far right conservative speechifying, when the radical Republicans could let their hair down and let their freak flag fly, and the media would dutifully report on their gibbering mania, and wed point and laugh, and then some of the kooks would get elected to high office. Remember when David Silverman tried to get American Atheists represented at CPAC? That was an omen.

This year, I hadnt even realized it was going on until several days into the conference, it was that much of a yawner. Attendance is way down, and the ratfuckers are giving speeches to nearly empty seats. Prospective presidential candidates are skipping the whole show. Its a who cares? event now.

However, as its relevance declines, the participants are reaching for the big bottle of crazy evil to spark excitement, and as we all know, the Republican party has become unhealthily obsessed with whats in other peoples pants. Theyre trying to pass laws to restrict peoples civil rights, theyve developed a weird hatred of Mrs Doubtfire, they want to burn books that even mention the existence of non-traditional non-heterosexuals. Whats next? How can they top the insanity theyre perpetrating right now?

How about genocide?

The Rights war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles openly called for the public eradication of transgender individuals. During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, For the good of society transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.

In his speech, Knowles used a convoluted line of thinking and false logic while trying to prove his horrifying point that trans people should not exist. There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It can be all or nothing, he said. If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then its true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false as it is if men really cant become women as they cannot then its false for everybody too. And if its false, then we should not indulge it, especially when that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of many people. It if is false, then for the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion then transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirel...

Im fairly well off these days. Between having a frugal upbringing, and being a tech worker married to another tech worker with no kids or debt, I think life has obviously been unfair in my favor. I want to give some of it away. For these reasons, I think a lot about the effective altruism (EA) movement, albeit as an outsider.

Most of the stuff I say about EA is fairly critical (and theres more to come!), but I try to be measured in my criticism, because I dont think its all bad. Compared to a lot of stuff PZ Myers says, Im practically a supporter. In this article, I offer a begrudging and measured defense.

EA corrects traditional charity

Recently I watched a (very long) video by We Live in Hell about the problems with the WE charity, and voluntourism more broadly. The WE charity appears to prey on the naivety of young teens by exaggerating the impact they can have, and overworking them. A lot of resources are wasted sending volunteers to impoverished locations, setting them up in fancy houses (presumably built through the expenditure of local resources), so they can pretend to contribute to construction projects and pretend to immerse themselves in the culture. This exemplifies the problems with traditional charity.

Traditionally, many people select charities based on some sort of sentimental value, or personal connection. This has numerous issues, such as favoring charities that feel good on the surface, and have strong marketing. Often the real impact may be much smaller than it appears.

Besides, if you think that its better to choose charities based on some sort of personal connection, ask yourself: of the techies and billionaires that are said to form the base of effective altruism, what do you believe they have a personal connection to? Probably nothing good! Theyd probably donate to horrible things like robots and crypto-exchanges (I mean, they still do, more on that later). Relying on critical thinking isnt perfect, but it is an improvement over relying on the sentimental value of the people with the money.

And if your objection is that charity only serves to alleviate the harms of the present, without fighting for systemic change, I think thats something that EA recognizes. There are actually a lot of cause areas within EA that fight for systemic change, for the future. Only problem is, the most visible and popular cause areas oriented towards the future are ones that we tend to disagree with.

Longtermism isnt inherently wrong

On a high-level, EA tends t...

If bats are known for anything, its for being the only mammals to evolve flight. Some eat fruit, nectar from flowers, or even fish, but a great many make a living snatching bugs out of the air. It turns out, however, that even with the ability to fly, sometimes its easier to just walk. Met the pekapeka the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. Its the only bat Im aware of that hunts on the ground, scuttling around on the forest floor looking for insects and other things to eat. The males also apparently sing to attract mates.

Theyve had a rough time of it, but apparently conservation efforts are ongoing, and there may be cause for cautious optimism. This video is a couple years old, but they little critters seem to be holding on:

During his week guest hosting The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj discussed how social media enable even not-so-smart grifters to scam people.

This was in a new recurring segment on the show called Long Story Short where the host tackles one issue in depth. Seth Meyers has long been doing that on his show in a segment that is called A Closer Look. Both of them seem to be inspired by John Olivers success with Last Week Tonight where almost the entire show is devoted to a single topic.

It looks like many viewers are like me in wanting to see more in-depth examinations of important topics laced with humor.

Returning from my recent trip to Issaquah, WA, I wanted a taxi from the hotel to the Amtrak station in Seattle.  The hotel clerk told me that taxis werent vary reliable in Issaquah and called me an Uber instead.  The driver showed up within five minutes or so, and it was less expensive than a taxi would have been; so I guess this old dude needs to get with the program.

I checked out the websites for both Uber and Lyft, and it looks like you cant use either one except through a cell phone which I find annoying, principally because of the difficulty of typing readable text on the phones make-believe keyboard.  Im also guessing that you cant pay with a credit card but need to set up some kind of PayPal account or something.

Can anybody suggest any alternatives to Uber and Lyft? Or maybe explain to this old fart why its not as difficult as he thinks it is?

Thanks.