Weird fact of the day: humans can see about an octave

That observation and this table I learned from Milton Mermikede's most recent Gresham lecture "Music of Light & Colour"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxgbgoBBTE

#colour #light #music #lolscience

the most fucked up thing you’ve ever seen SO FAR

Blue Cross/Blue Shield want to stop covering anesthesiology drugs beyond a fixed amount of time

during

surgeries?

So if a surgery goes longer than their time allotment, coverage stops on

anaesthesia?!

I mean

I mean

I mean

there’s also the whole “nothing says quality medicine like rushing a surgery team” but

HOLY SHIT YOU MONSTERS

#HomeEc #lolscience #medicine #science

kennedy as trump’s shadow running mate

The last couple of days – basically since Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Kennedy dropped out of the race and endorsed the Cheeto – the idea that he’s going to be Trump’s shadow running mate, sort of a second and unofficial vice president and/or vice presidential candidate.

I mean, the two obviously work better together, they’re both old white Boomers and similarly detached from any interest in actual reality.

(CCPK was out there saying their administration would ban “chemtrails?” Which aren’t actually things, it’s just seriously antique conspiracy theory? If you want to say you’re gonna break physics to stop water vapour from forming that’s one deeply weird flex.)

If he thinks the Kennedy family name is going to stop people from thinking their whole fascist parade is any less weird, holy shit, have you met the dead bear in Central Park or the chainsawed whale head on top of his car? This doesn’t even get into his disease-promoting vaccine denialism, though I guess that does fit with the whole GOP “Party of Plague” thing they’ve had going for the last few years.

Anyway, I’m no longer the only person thinking that Kennedy will be kind of de facto running as Trump’s VP candidate. Some people are even speculating that he’ll even get swapped out on the ticket, though that seems very unlikely to me – since it’s post-nomination, it does create actual legal issues if Vance stays healthy and doesn’t just quit.

So get out there and make sure your lowest-info white voter family and friends know that just because he’s got Kennedy as a surname does not mean that he is, in any way, actually okay.

Because on so very, very, very many levels – wow, he is not okay.

69 days remain.

(no, I’m not saying it)

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #lolscience #politics #uspolitics

Turns out we can prove Dr. Cass had ill intent

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article on how the fundamentalist movement, in the past, committed acts of fraud disguised as science. I talked about how they’d done so for decades, I talked about their intent and their methodologies, and how they have been adopted over time by the right in general.

I then applied this to the Cass Report, the “report” used by the Tory government in Britain to ban most forms of trans medical care and by American rightists to both deny health care and pass laws against trans people. I showed how exactly the same recategorisation and data selection methods were used to de-rate almost every study on youth gender transition, so that they could create a report which claimed there were “few to no high quality” studies on the matter.

I said I didn’t know for sure this was the same sort of ill intent, or that they happened to be doing the same thing as fundamentalists and rightist have been doing for the last many decades. I couldn’t prove that’s what they were doing, I could just demonstrate that it looked awfully, awfully similar, as in, exactly the same.

Whelp, looks like we can prove that ill intent now.

The Cass Report describes Dr. Cass as “a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.”

This is a lie.

Not only had she met with American politician Ron DeSantis to aid his efforts to ban gender transition, turns out she was recommending the so-called “gender critical” hate screed, Irreversible Damage, which compares gender transition to the Holocaust.

She also, turns out, included studies to argue against trans health care that are not only outdated and fail to meet her own theoretical standards, but which have been out-and-out discredited.

Again: it all comes down to picking the data you want to get the result you want, and that’s exactly what she and her team did.

Talking of the team, some of the other people appointed to work with her on the report were also active in anti-trans/anti-queer politics, including lobbying against ending “conversion therapy” and helping Republicans with bans on trans health care, serving as “expert witnesses” in favour. Tories have now admitted the group was salted with “gender critical” activists specifically to “expedite” the work, while trans people were explicitly excluded.

Erin in the Morning has the details, as do Drs. Max Davie and Lorna Hobbs in a report they have kindly also placed in Google Docs for better public accessibility.

The Cass Report is a rightist political document disguised as a scientific work, with better cover than, say, the work of Dr. Paul Cameron, but with no better scientific validity or intent. If you don’t know who Cameron is, count yourself lucky. Or read my M&Ms post, the same one I linked above. Either will do.

This was a hatchet job and a work of hatred used to both condemn and deny medical care to people who desperately need it, and it is yet another lie that must be exposed, and another fraud about which people should know.

It is, once again, yet another goddamn lie of the right.

87 days remain.

[link] #medicine #politics #USPol #fascism #lolscience #politics #uspolitics

Today’s a really heavy work day

…so I don’t really have anything new for you today, but if you missed them, I strongly suggest that you give these two posts over the weekend a look. I think they’re valuable, and also under-read.

• “In four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not gonna have to vote.” – Donald Trump meant exactly what he said, but not in the way most people are reporting it. Did you know North Korea has three legal political parties? And that they have elections too? And all three parties have seats in the people’s assembly?

  I’d be like that. Or more likely, like Russia, where Putin allows pet opposition parties. They’re just not allowed to win.

  There would still be elections and multiple political parties in MAGA America; they’d just be ones only Republicans could win.

• For Elon so hated his daughter that he moved to destroy the world – On mask-off fascism and on the reasons for it, including sheer, unmitigated, unlimited hatred of women.

If those aren’t enough, I’d really also suggest you give a look at on M&Ms and sample selection, or really, on something more, which is about how Christofascists have created fake science for decades, and how they and their rightist allies continue doing so right now. It will help you explain to others why fascist cardboard science is cardboard, not real, and might help you spot it when it’s hard to tell the difference.

Back tomorrow with new material. Enjoy the Olympics, it’s gonna be a loooooong autumn.

98 days remain.

[link] #politics #science #USPol #fascism #lolscience #politics #science #uspolitics

tucker carlson is “open to” the earth being flat

No. Really. This isn’t the Turning Point conference where he flirted with it several months ago but was very clearly working in a joking way, this is very recent and he’s not obviously joking at all. He’s using it to push the idea that the truth is unknowable, an idea that fascist movements use to cement belief in the great leader, however.

That, and that he believes in guns, that guns are real.

Here’s the clip. You can play it for yourself.

You got any relatives who were into Tucker Carlson? Let ’em know. This is who he is, and so maybe this isn’t the only thing he’s a complete nutbag clown about.

#lolscience #news #science #uspol #uspolitics

this was also always a lie

Elon Musk’s oft-quoted declarations about Tesla “autopilot” being safer than human drivers was always a lie:

Tesla keeps these paying liability sponges behind the wheel largely through the strength of a statistical lie: that Autopilot is safer than human drivers. … When road safety researcher Noah Goodall adjusted the best publicly available data for factors like road type and driver age in a peer-reviewed paper, Tesla’s claim of a 43% reduction in crashes turned into an 11% increase in crashes.

Ed Niedermeyer for Rolling Stone, “Elon Musk’s Big Lie About Tesla Is Finally Exposed,” December 17, 2023

Lots more deets at the link.

I’ve had Musk’s and Tesla’s autopilot numbers thrown at me for years. They’re bullshit. Please stop fanboying this fascist marketeer fuckhead. He’s not Tony FUCKING Stark and he never was.

#liesAndDeceit #lolscience #news

Fascism Watch for April 26, 2023: Expel the Opposition Again edition

State Rep. Zooey Zephyr said – correctly – during the Republican Montana Legislature’s debates over their anti-trans-healthcare bill that people voting for it would have “blood on your hands.” This is, again, the truth, and she was saying this in context of youth suicide. They’re now moving to censure or expel her. We don’t know which yet. You might know by the time you see this post. They’re probably using the peaceful (if loud) protest against the Speaker of the House refusing to let her speak on the floor as an excuse (story also at the AP wire feed) since they’ve been trying for days to gin up some way to pretend there’s been violence. (There hasn’t.)

(Wednesday afternoon eta: They’ve moved to semi-expel her. She’s not allowed be on the floor or speak. She can vote remotely but that’s it. This is no doubt to avoid the Tennessee re-appointment issue.)

Republicans do not share or cede power, or care about their own hypocrisy. They can call LGBT people existential threats to civilisation and call for our eradication and it’s just fine; we say the truth about what they’re doing, and they move to expunge us further.

Russian propagandists continue to be pissed off that their best friend in American media, Tucker Carlson, got fired. He’s being offered jobs in Russia, to be a sort of Lord Haw-Haw of the Ukrainian conflict and global fascist movement.

Vice has a rather substantive article on how the American conspiracy-theory movement (QAnon et al) are all converging on trans people being the root of all evil. This is predictable enough but will be no less virulent, violent, and dangerous for that. It’s what you get when you have the American fundamentalist movement – now pretty much entirely Christian Nationalists – gaining power, in part via their support from and alliance with Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Talking of conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaccination movement leader in charge of DeSantis’s Republican Florida Department of Health has been caught editing studies to remove evidence against his batshit theories and add material that supports them. This is how they work and what they do – again, decades of fundamentalists doing this – and they can do it with a clear conscience because they truly believe that the definition of truth isn’t empirical observed reality but is instead received knowledge, a.k.a. What God Said, a.k.a. what they want to be true.

Republicans in the Indiana Senate are looking for a way to get their book back back into legislation – the one that creates felony charges for librarians. The latest update I have is from a few days ago, but as far as I know, it’s current.

LawDork has the details: Missouri’s appointed attorney general sued over anti-trans “emergency” rule. Hearing Wednesday, rule goes into effect Thursday unless enjoindered.

The anti-fascist research organization Task Force Butler is engaged in a major effort against an explicitly Nazi organisation working to terrorise ethnic/racial minorities and LGBT people, all with the goal of establishing a white ethno-state. Rolling Stone has coverage.

Bud Light has bowed to fascist pressure and suspended two executives involved in sponsoring two posts by a trans influencer on Instagram. Yes, that’s bad, and you shouldn’t drink it any more. Sure, because it’s shit, but also, because of this. Meanwhile in corporate news, Gizmodo asks its readers “keep your memories, kill your nostalgia“ regarding HBO Max’s new TV series involving noted anti-trans activist and multi-millionaire J.K. Rowling.

Jay Rosen talks about how rightist media engages in “verification in reverse,” a process he describes with Rachael Maddow. It’s basically about taking things not well established (vaccination, and so on) and instil doubt into it. The doubts you’re installing don’t have to have any relationship to reality; it’s just that the doubt gets introduced, and that lets you fuel a movement which is immune to reality. It’s an extremely fascist – and fundamentalist – way of working against reality.

Thomas isn’t the only bribe-taking Supreme Court Justice; looks like Gorsuch has been on the take as well, also via unreported property sales to people who have cases before the court, just as with Thomas.

Assume no Republican will give a single solitary fuck, because really, they won’t. Making women with a non-viable pregnancy riddled with cancer out in a parking lot until she actually starts dying before they’ll help her? That’s who they are, and it’s a sickness.

Strangely – even bizarrely – I don’t have anything on Twitter today! But I do have something on BlueSky, which says that it’s not going to ban hate groups, it’s just going to label them. Supposedly to make them “easier to block.” So once again, BlueSky’s founders will be making a social network safe for Nazi terrorism.

Don’t be on Twitter, but don’t go to BlueSky either.

#fascismWatch #lolscience #news #politics #t0000000000bs_

Career anti-gay “researcher” and generator of hate propaganda Paul Cameron: Gay Sex is Better

Paul Cameron was the fundamentalist all-star “researcher” in the 1980s and 1990s, well known for fabricating studies, faking and intentionally distorting data, and publishing such scholarly works as The Death Penalty for Homosexuality, which will hopefully appear in these backdated posts soon. They’d trot his lies out in courtrooms, state legislatures, […]

[link] #politics #science