About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

The Status Quo Is Not Natural

Posted on 03 Feb 2020 by Frank Moraes

Civilians with Hitler salute when Germans marched in - Occupation of the Sudeten area

It doesn’t matter where you go in the world there will always be people complaining about this or that endeavor being political. I recently saw a video by Jose on ComicsGate.

In that case, people were upset at the increase in diversity that was taking place in comic books. Many saw this as politicizing comics. They did not, however, see the facts the comics had always been overwhelmingly white and male as being a political statement.

Colin Kaepernick’s Crime Against the Status Quo

Another example of this is Colin Kaepernick. Now let’s be honest here. People hated him because he was protesting the status quo. The fact that he was black just made it worse. (Note how conservatives love people of color as long as they are telling other people of color they should sit down, shut up, and be happy they aren’t currently on fire.)

It was not because he was somehow disrespecting the American flag. But let’s assume that really was the issue for a moment.

If it were the case that his kneeling during the national anthem was politicizing the event then what was the national anthem itself? Clearly these people think there is nothing political about everyone standing and putting their hands on their chest and listening to the national anthem and watching the military flyovers.

Equating Status Quo With Natural

For these people, the constant jingoistic patriotism and the fetishization of the military is given. But it’s not. As Matt Soniak has explained, it wasn’t until World War I that the national anthem became part of professional baseball. And it didn’t become standard for sporting events until World War II.

It was all supposedly part of the war effort. But just nationalistic nonsense only accretes. When the wars end, these things stayed on. But that doesn’t make them natural.

In fact, I consider the whole thing disreputable. Why do professional sports wrap themselves in the flag? That’s especially true as sports become more international. What is the point of all this? It makes no sense to me. It goes against the things that I always thought America stood for like, for example, individualism.

Status Quo Destroys Freedom

Another thing conservatives love to go on about is freedom of speech and the supposed virtue signaling of SJWs. But ask yourself what would happen if you were an able-bodied person and you refuse to rise during the national anthem at a football game? You would certainly get a lot of angry comments. You might well be beaten up and even killed. Where’s the freedom of speech there? That’s fascist-level intolerance if you ask me.

But apparently as long as it is in the service of something that people think of as normal, it’s fine. But none of these things are normal. These things are the result of history. There is nothing fundamental about them. And you don’t have to be against the national anthem at sporting events to realize that.

I’d think proud patriots would rather that standing for the national anthem be voluntary. After all, what better way to signal that they are chauvinists than to stand proudly while people like me sit and chat with friends?

But it’s like with the War on Christmas: it isn’t enough to believe; everyone around them must also believe. If you ask me, this just means they don’t have a strong belief.

Social Convention

Everyone should admit that this is a social convention. It’s the way we do things. But it’s not the way we always did them. And it will not always be the way that we do them. So it’s open to discussion. And those who claim that it shouldn’t be open to discussion are villains.

Jose’s #ComicsGate Video

“Civilians With Hitler Salute When Germans Marched In — Occupation of the Sudeten Area” by German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv). It is in the public domain.

The Problem With Fact Checkers

Posted on 27 Jan 2020 by Frank Moraes

If the fact-checking industry were honest, there would be roughly two kinds of conclusions.

Republican said X, but X is not true.
Democrat said Y, but the issue is more complicated than that.

We see this all the time but fact-checkers try to hide it. They complain endlessly that liberals have distorted the truth while giving conservatives the benefit of the doubt because they are so much more likely to spout complete nonsense.

Reporting to Fact-Checking: False Equivalence Always

What ends up happening is that a false equivalence is created. A liberal over-generalization is equivalent to a conservative lie.

Note: this wasn’t always the case. There is a long tradition of conservative intellectuals.[1] Fact-checkers in 1970 probably would have caught equal lies. But American conservatism has been off the rails for a long time.

Eric Alterman has noticed that the same tendency of regular reporters to equate liberals and conservatives applies to fact-checkers. He provided a great example. During the 2008 DNC, The Washington Post fact-checker, Glenn Kessler complained that Obama’s statement about John McCain’s voting record didn’t have enough nuance. Four years later, it was very different when it came to the Republican Party:

During the 2012 Republican National Convention, for example, Kessler defended the falsehoods told in a speech by Representative Paul Ryan, then the party’s vice-presidential nominee. Why? According to the headline above Kessler’s column, “The truth? C’mon, this is a political convention.”

Balance always, truth not so much.

Two Fundamental Problems With Fact-Checkers

I remember when these outlets and sub-outlets first appeared, there were two criticisms of them:

Fact-checking should be a regular part of reporting. To make it a special journalistic endeavor was going to make reporting worse.
Fact-checking would have the same problems of regular reporting with claims of bias and so on.

The first criticism didn’t really matter because mainstream “objective” journalism had long before given up on doing anything as contentious as fact-checking what politicians did — especially conservative politicians!

The Same Old Problems

The second criticism played out as expected in a number of ways. The first is that conservatives don’t even pay attention to fact-checkers. Even “reasonable” outlets like RealClearPolitics dismiss them as nothing more than opinion journalism.

Although I don’t think that’s true when it comes to their analysis of conservative claims, it’s hard not to see that when it comes to liberal claims. A great example of this happened after Bernie Sanders said that millions of people work two or three jobs. It turns out that 8 million people do this.

But our good friend uber-fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave the claim 3 Pinocchios (out of a possible 4) because, well, I really don’t know. Apparently, Kessler thought Sanders meant 100 million? Who can say?

What we can say is that Kessler never would have nit-picked a conservative in this way for two reasons. First, he wouldn’t need to because they lie so much more. Second, he wouldn’t need to because he doesn’t need to invent conservative falsehoods to even things out.

It was always understood that if it turned out that the fact-checkers found a lot more conservative lies than liberal lies, the conservatives would just dismiss it as bias. And despite the efforts of fact-checkers to avoid this, they still find that conservatives lie a lot more.

Of course, it doesn’t matter. If fact-checkers found exactly the same number of falsehoods from Democrats and Republicans, conservatives would call foul. And this is understandable because there is a lot to complain about.

Skewed Samples

One of the things that skew results is also used to create false equivalence: the facts that are checked. Why do fact-checkers pick a particular claim to look at? Many of them are silly.

PolitiFact, for example, fact-checked the Facebook claim that all Fox News women are blond. That’s pretty amazing given that everyone understood that the claim was hyperbolic. What’s more, given that the vast majority of people have dark hair, the fact that most Fox News women have blond hair goes along with the point being made.

Fact-checkers go out of their way to seem balanced. That trumps any effort they have to find the truth. For example, Trump lies constantly. PolitiFact looked at 102 of his claims in 2019. It could have been a thousand. Or one.

I now refuse to reference fact-checkers. There is a tendency among people to disregard fact-checkers when we disagree with them but to hold them up as authoritative when we don’t. What’s the point of that?

They are useless. And they should be treated as such — especially by those of us on the left who are most abused by them.

[1] Note that these intellectuals were still wrong and mostly just as bigotted as modern Trump supporters. But they did care about the same intellectual niceties that I do. And they could be shamed. In other words, they were like Max Boot.

Placebos Work: Why Do Idiots Claim Otherwise?

Posted on 20 Jan 2020 by Frank Moraes

Recently, I watched a video about chiropractic care that did an excellent job showing that it was at least of limited value. But several times it dismissed placebos as useless. This was done in passing. And that’s typical: people don’t think about placebos. They just have it in their minds that they don’t “work” and that is the end of it.

This was one of many such examples. And each one of them annoys the hell out of me. I’ve mentioned this before, but I figured it was time to write an article about it that I can link to.

Why Do Placebos Exist?

The word “placebo” dates back to 1785, but its exact meaning has been different. It has generally had a negative connotation, but the assumption that a placebo was useless really started after World War II and the rise of double-blind drug tests.

But it is strange that people should equate a placebo with a useless drug. After all, if placebos were worthless, why would it be necessary to use them in drug tests? If there was no effect, scientists could just test the drugs and see if they did more than nothing.

This is not how drug tests work, however. Instead, drugs are tested to see if they work better than a placebo. Clearly, we don’t want to introduce a new expensive drug that doesn’t work any better than a pill filled with sawdust.

How Do Placebos Work?

If placebos were worthless, why would it be necessary to use them in drug tests?

The human body is an amazing and complex machine. And we have only barely begun to understand it. One thing we do understand is that we are not the rational beings we think we are. (This understanding was critical to my break with New Atheism and all its idiots who thought themselves rational while allowing the basest irrational instincts to run free with post hoc rationalizations.)

This irrationality works with many of the body’s systems to at least feel better. Take, for example, endorphins. They exist in the body for the management of pain. Someone thinking they are being given morphine (which works on the same receptors) could see their endorphin levels rise and thus get part of the effect that actual morphine would produce.

This is a real effect! Your mood is not some spiritual concept. It is based on the soup of chemicals in your body and the receptors that they are attached to. To claim otherwise is to claim that you aren’t really happy when you feel happy.

Based on this, you should understand, at least conceptually, how placebos work. And with that understanding, you should know why drug tests need placebos.

Are All Placebos the Same?

Scott Millard at Premier Research wrote an insightful article, The Placebo Problem, Part 10: The Devil’s in the Details. He writes:

A number of pill characteristics influence the magnitude of the placebo response: bigger pills are more effective than smaller ones, capsules are more effective than tablets, and having a name printed on the pill also boosts its perceived efficacy. The dosing schedule, too, plays a role: placebos given more often elicit a bigger response than ones with a single administration.

But here’s the killer: “Of all the pill characteristics, however, color seems to be the most important.” This shouldn’t be a shock. I first learned about this in the 1990s. That’s how long I’ve been ranting about this.

This is important because it shows that the placebo effect depends upon the placebo. Millard also notes:

The exact type of placebo seems to matter a lot, too. In general, sham surgery seems to be the most effective, followed by sham injection, and then an oral placebo… One study also demonstrated that a placebo laser treatment generated greater somatic sensations among participants than a placebo irritant solution.

The point here is that the effects are real based upon how the patent perceives the treatment. These have real effects on the body.

Summary

By this thinking, “Placebos just work in people’s minds.” That’s wrong. They work in people’s brains.

Now I know what all the “skeptics” out there will say: “I already knew this! Everyone knows that placebos have effects!”

Really?! Because that’s not how people talk about them. And I’m not referring to my relatives here. I’m referring to people who write articles and produce videos that are otherwise reasonably literate, scientifically.

I understand that people know placebos have effects. But I also know that people disregard these effects. They dismiss them the way they do hypochondria. What’s more, the “rationalist” crowd seem to think placebos only work on weak minds — not their kind of steel-trap appliances.

By this thinking, “Placebos just work in people’s minds.” That’s wrong. They work in people’s brains. And they work concretely — something I shouldn’t have to explain to “rationalists” given that humans are nothing more than big chemistry experiments.

But feel free to claim you already knew all this. Just don’t piss me off by continuing to imply (If not claim!) that placebos don’t work!

Pills by stevepb. Used under the Simplified Pixabay License.

Bernie Sanders Won’t Unify the Democratic Party

Posted on 13 Jan 2020 by Frank Moraes

Matt Yglesias wrote a surprisingly good article over at Vox, Bernie Sanders Can Unify Democrats and Beat Trump in 2020. It glides over how easy it would be for Sanders to be a unity candidate, however. I’ll come back to that.

First, I want to discuss something it points out about Sanders that is very good: despite what people on both sides of the Sanders War claim: he’s shown himself to be highly pragmatic. I really like this, but this fact has made listening to Sanders supporters on Twitter very annoying.

Almost all of the complaints about the other candidates from Sanders supporters are that he is Good and Pure and they are all Compromised. But the record shows this isn’t the case. It’s all motivated reasoning: when Sanders was not pure, it was justified because he was getting something important.

Great! I agree. But why does this only applied to Sanders? Why is he always given the benefit of the doubt and otherwise held up as impeccable? This kind of thinking is at least a bit cultish.

Nathan J Robinson

Similarly, I saw that Nathan J Robinson produced an hour-long video, Why Warren Supporters Should SWITCH to Bernie.

However, Robinson evidences a lack of understanding about how presidential primaries work. He thinks Warren should drop out if she doesn’t do well in Iowa and New Hampshire. Let’s leave aside the fact that Robinson will suddenly abandon this argument should Warren do well and Sanders poorly. Presidential primaries just don’t work this way.

Major candidates normally run through the vast majority of the race as long as their funding doesn’t collapse. (Contra Robinson, $21.2 million in the 4th quarter is not a sign Warren is having trouble fundraising.) And it now looks like the 4 top candidates will do this. Thinking that one candidate will drop out for the good of some vague notion of “the movement” is just not reasonable.

He also seems to think that if Warren weren’t in the race, Sanders would get most of her votes. But in fact, he would get maybe half her votes. It’s become clear to me if this race were between Sanders and Biden, Sanders would lose with about the same percentage of the vote he got in 2016.

There seems to be the idea that Sanders is destined to be the nominee and it is just these pesky candidates standing in the way. And this is, again, a little cultish.

I don’t want to rag on Robinson because he is at least trying very hard to make a positive case for Sanders rather than complaining about Warren — which has been the default for as long as Warren has been a threat in this race (something Robinson himself has done).

However, the argument he makes is not that compelling. But I’ll admit: I’m biased in terms of my orientation. I like concrete arguments. I want to hear that the candidate is doing well with black voters and so they will do well in South Carolina and so on. I don’t find it compelling to make gauzy appeals to what a politician actually believes and so forth.

What’s more, these arguments are too finessed. You can see that they are designed post hoc to place Sanders inside the set of Candidates Who Are Good and Warren outside.

Where Presidents Can Make a Difference

Where Sanders most shines — and where I support him more than Warren — is on foreign policy. However, this is an area that is most easy to demagogue. And the Republicans will do so.

Additionally, because this is an area that a President Sanders would have the most power, it is also an area where the next Republican president would have the most power. Is 4 or 8 years of better foreign policy worth the cost of the next Republican demagogue cheered on by over half the nation insisting that America be “strong” once again?

It’s also worth noting that Warren’s ability to better manage the regulatory state is something that is simply ignored by her detractors. I’m not sure why this is so. People spend a lot of time making the (correct) case that Sanders is best on foreign policy and would have great power in enacting it. Why not conceded the same thing about Warren?

I believe a focus on domestic affairs will allow for better long-term foreign policy. Sanders seems too focused on Medicare for All, and I have a hard time seeing it pass.

Is Sanders a Unity Candidate?

My main concern about Sanders is that I believe it will do the opposite of what Yglesias says: it will divide the party. Many of the people we need working to elect him will be standing around: nominally supportive but not very helpful.

And this is not going to be made up for by the enthusiasm of young people. I don’t have hard data for this. It’s just that I’ve heard this for decades — including about Sanders himself — and it has never panned out.

The Case Against Elizabeth Warren

None of this is to say that Elizabeth Warren is a great candidate. There are a number of things that I worry about with regard to her. The first is a personal reason: I don’t like her foreign policy positions. That isn’t a deal-breaker for me because I don’t see the American empire torn down under Sanders either. But there’s no doubt that things would be marginally better under Sanders.

I also worry about the politics of a Warren vs Trump fight. Warren is great. She’s positive and authentic. But I have a very low opinion of the American general election voter. Sanders and Biden look the part. There are doubtless a lot of people who would vote for either of these men but wouldn’t vote for Warren.

In fact, data from FiveThirtyEight shows that almost as many Sanders supporters have Biden as their second-choice as Warren. I tend to think that is sexism — if not that of the voter themselves than of how they perceive other voters.

(It’s also possible that this is the case because for a lot of Sanders supporters, defeating Warren is the most important thing. Reading YouTube comments and Twitter threads, you don’t see nearly the bile directed at Biden or Buttigieg as you do Warren. There’s a real People’s Front of Judea aspect of it. “The only person we hate more than Donald Trump is Elizabeth Warren!”)

One good thing about Warren is that, without the hysteria coming from Sanders supporters, she is a unity candidate. She bridges the divide between the left and the right of the Democratic Party. But the Sanders supporters have been very all-or-nothing and I suspect that means they are going to get nothing. And that takes away one of her main advantages. Good job people!

I Don’t Know

But the truth is that I can argue against any of the candidates. I just don’t know. I do know that Sanders isn’t going to bring the Democratic Party together. Just the same, anyone but Sanders may make a notable section of his supporters turn away — even from Warren, a candidate they would have loved 4 years ago. Now she’s just an impediment to Sanders taking his rightful place. Cultish? You decide.

Any Democrat will be good. There really is no comparison between them and Donald Trump. Trump is a negative force in the world. The Democrats will all be a mixed bag but generally positive. That’s even true of Joe Biden, who will almost certainly be the nominee.

Bernie Sanders by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Elizabeth Warren by ElizabethForMA licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Global Warming and Extreme Events

Posted on 06 Jan 2020 by Frank Moraes

Australia is suffering from extreme fires and all good scientists are supposed to say, “Well, we can’t say these are the result of global warming.” And that is true to some extent. But these fires are demonstrating my greatest fear about global warming and it ain’t the average global temperature.

The science of global warming is more complex than most people realize. The most basic of theory shows, for example, that as radiative forcing increases, the poles warm the most and the equator the least. And the stratosphere cools while the troposphere warms. But mostly, the climate system is really complicated.

Double CO2

For example, there is much made of double-CO2 experiments. But they are not meant to be realistic. They are just a shorthand way to compare how different models respond to changes in radiative forcing. So the models run under current circumstances and double CO2 levels. The differences can be large. When I worked in the field, one model I used saw a 2C increase from double CO2 while another saw a 5C increase.

At the time, I figured the lower estimate was right. But since that time, it looks like the higher number is. The Earth’s climate is surprisingly sensitive to radiative forcing.

Beyond Averages

None of this matters, however. No one lives through climate; they live through weather. Think about it like a car traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles at an average speed of 30 mph. That speed is meaningless if it runs you over. The only thing that matters is exactly what speed it was traveling when you were hit.

There clearly are problems with the temperature always being a few degrees warmer than usual. But the bigger problem is that having a higher baseline means more and harsher extreme events. Plants and animals have evolved to deal with temperature changes. But they aren’t evolved to deal with temperatures outside their normal range.

I realize most people — conservatives most of all — don’t think this matters to us because we can adapt. But we do sit at the top of the food chain. And while we air condition our way through a heatwave, not all the animals we depend upon can.

Extreme Consequences

In addition to more extreme heat, we will also see more extreme drought. If anything, that’s even worse. And it combines synergistically with the heat.

All of this is to say that the Australian fires are the result of global warming.[1] And this is how it will be.

I used to look forward to a time when even the global warming denialists would have to admit that they’d been wrong. But that won’t happen. For one thing, there are people who claim the Earth is flat. But more importantly, the worst effects of global warming will come in extreme events. And that means sudden mass extinctions. And sudden pain for us. Fun times!

But at least coal is cheap!

[1] These extreme events seem like they are coming on the order of once in the decade. But given the climate we had in 1850, these kinds of events would only occur every 10,000 years or more. I think we can thus use the shorthand that such events are due to global warming.

Image by Cameron Strandberg. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sam Harris Was Right About Neanderthals

Posted on 30 Dec 2019 by Frank Moraes

Europeans have, on average, more neanderthal DNA than Africans. In an interview with Ezra Klein, Sam Harris said, “Had it gone another way, all of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.”

His point is that if Africans had more DNA, liberals like myself wouldn’t want to talk about it because it would be a concrete sign that Africans were more brutish. It’s a hilariously stupid thought to support his contention that Charles Murray is a perfectly fine person to platform on his show.

But Sam Harris is probably right. But not for the reasons he thinks.

What Would Happen If Africans Were More Neanderthal

The truth is that if Africans did have more neanderthal DNA than Europeans, it would cause a reaction. White supremacists would use the information along with the ignorant belief that Neanderthals were stupid brutes to argue that white people are superior to black people.

And thus, the discussion of neanderthals would become complicated. Because for each person who was discussing neanderthals seriously, there would be ten who were just using it to push racist bullshit.

Neanderthal DNA, IQ, Whatever

“All of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.” –Sam Harris

It’s like IQ. There are plenty of people who talk about it seriously and there is never a problem. No one demonstrates against James Flynn speaking on a college campus. They have a problem with Charles Murray because he isn’t actually a scientist. Instead, he’s a racist quack who uses the respectability of the pretense of science to push his own political agenda.

Sam Harris has shown himself to be open to racist IQ pseudoscience. He has also shown that he accepts the same tired stereotypes of neanderthals. So if it had turned out that Africans had more neanderthal DNA than Europeans, I have little doubt that Harris would allow racist quacks on his show to use this information to push their agenda.

And he would do this because, he’d claim, college students were trying to silence the brave neanderthal quacks. It certainly wouldn’t be because Sam Harris has some latent racism that he refuses to grapple with.

No, it would be because he’s just a brave truth-teller. It’s interesting that brave truth-tellers are almost always people pushing really old, regressive ideas. Leftist ideas somehow have a much higher activation energy when it comes to brave truth-telling.

Sam Harris Gonna Platform Bigots

The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what neanderthal DNA says about human evolution. White supremacists would use it to make racist arguments if it helped them and ignore it if it didn’t. If it did help them make their case, liberals would rightly see the issue as a delicate one.

And Sam Harris would platform racists wanting to use it.

Image via PublicDomainPictures.net.

Christmas 2019: The Empire Strikes Back But Fades Into Irrelevance

Posted on 24 Dec 2019 by Frank Moraes

Merry Christmas, everyone! In the following article, I’m going to pull together some old stuff from previous posts with mostly new stuff to make a Christmas post. If you want more, go back to Christmas: Everything I Have to Say. It has so much in it that I couldn’t even manage to read it all. And I’m very fond of my own writing (this is helped by having a terrible memory).

Setting the Mood

Let’s set the mood with some Christmas music. This gets harder every year.

It used to be that it was just the explicitly Christian songs that bugged me. And they still do. There are few things that annoy me more than Christians who run around reminding people of the “reason for the season!”

There is basically nothing theologically interesting about Christmas from a Christian standpoint. The virgin birth is just something tacked on for the prols. Christians should make a big deal out of Easter and the related holidays. But they don’t. Because American Christians neither know nor care about their religion’s theology. Instead they care about cultural signaling and in- and out-group politics.

But this year I found it impossible to enjoy songs that I’ve liked in the past like “I Saw Momma Kissing Santa Claus.” So I included a few songs that you really need to stretch to include. Here’s the list:

“Blue Christmas” — Elvis Preseley
“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” — Jackson 5
“Christmas Wrapping” — The Waitresses
“This Christmas” — Donny Hathaway
“Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)” — The Ramones
“Santa Baby” — Eartha Kitt
“Merry Christmas Baby” — Otis Redding
“There Ain’t No Sanity Clause” — The Damned
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” — Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski
“Back Door Santa” — Clarence Carter
“If We Make It Through December” — Merle Haggard
“Run Rudolph Run” — Chuck Berry
“The Weight” — The Band
“Der Hölle Rache” — Diana Damrau
“Fairytale Of New York” — The Pogues
“2000 Miles” — The Pretenders
“Santa Stole My Girlfriend” — The Maine
“We’ll Meet Again” — Vera Lynn
“Must Be Santa” — Bob Dylan
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — Judy Garland

I’m particularly bothered by The Ramones cut because of the stupid video stuff at the beginning and end of the song. But I so love the song that I included it.

Last Year’s Christmas

Last year, I published A Very Alpha Christmas. It’s interesting because I thought I had written it in 2016 or 2017. My feelings have only gotten worse. In fact, I tried to back out of all my familial obligations. It’s not that I mind doing all the holiday stuff. But I do mind the feeling that there are those who only take.

Next year, I may well do my own horror-themed Christmas. If my family wants to come, great. I’ll serve the food I like and show the horror films that I want to watch.

But that’s not what I would hope for a family gathering. I do, however, think that Christmas shouldn’t be me cooking while the television in the other room screams sports. But note: my problem is not the sports but the fact that it isn’t the choice of the group. It’s the choice of one man. And it is the choice he makes all the time. You see, it is no more a choice for him than it is for me.

Last year I also recommend that you watch Christmas Evil. It is the film I’m featuring on Psychotronic Review, so click over there and watch it. Things have been taking off over there. It is getting a lot more love than Frankly Curious. And I’m starting to see the traffic to justify it.

Still, it’d be nice to do more on Frankly Curious. It’s hard to find the time — especially while I’m trying to save money. But I’ll do my best.

School Is In!

It’s always fun to learn stuff. If you don’t agree, you aren’t the target audience of this site. Go away!

In the past, I’ve featured lectures and interviews that were Christmas-focused. Here are a few that I find interesting.

Don’t Celebrate Christmas!

Tom Flynn believes that people shouldn’t celebrate Christmas or any similar holidays. I don’t find the argument compelling. As I’ve already noted, there isn’t much that’s religious about Christmas.

Still he makes an argument that is worth hearing. He’s interviewed by authoritarian atheist Robert M Price. These were the days before Price felt comfortable flying his authoritarian flag high. Now he takes the derision of people like me as proof that he’s right. He’s hopeless.

The Trouble with Christmas

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca Watson is one of the small number of major atheist celebrities who didn’t go on to be an authoritarian asshole. She continues to make excellent skeptic-oriented videos.

In this video, she jokes about PZ Myers. I’m not sure what that’s about. The two of them have long been allies. Both of them are good examples of how the New Atheists largely pushed away anyone who didn’t go along with its increasing political conservatism (or worse).

About a year after I turned against New Atheism, PZ Meyers wrote:

The number of people identifying as “nones” will grow in this country in coming years, because we’re on the right side of history, and because organized religion is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on other-worldly issues that don’t help people. The number of people identifying as atheists will stagnate or even shrink, because organized atheism is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on irrelevant metaphysical differences that don’t help people.

Here is Rebecca Watson’s funny Christmas lecture:

If you want to hear a more radical view of New Atheism (which I mostly agree with), read Sam Kriss’ Village Atheists, Village Idiots.

A Brief History of Christmas

I highly recommend watching Klaus for a Christmas story that is epic and filled with wonderful folkloric elements. It’s on Netflix but I’m sure eventually will be on DVD.

In the meantime, CGP Grey has this excellent video made in the style of, well, CGP Grey.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Renegade Cut creates great videos of film analysis from a leftist perspective. This one tries to answer why Christmas makes some of us miserable.

Saving Christmas

In comparison with the above, here is another leftist YouTuber Maggie Mae Fish on Kirk Cameron’s ode to materialism Saving Christmas. The film is basically a debate between a sincere Christian who believes Christmas is too materialistic and Cameron who thinks materialism rocks.

According to the movie, Cameron is right. And why not? He does speak for the vast majority of Christians, even if they don’t like it put forward in such a coarse way. Fish tears the film and Cameron apart.

Christmas Comedy

Here is a playlist that I’ve put together with mostly comedy related to Christmas, religion, and that kind of stuff.

Merry Christmas

That’s all for me today. I’ve written an article about the “skeptic” community’s embrace of racial IQ “science” that will come out here early next week. And I’ll be doing a few things over at Psychotronic Review.

I hope you have a good Christmas. It’s hard to be too keen given that it looks like America is taking a big step toward authoritarianism. And if Trump is re-elected, I suspect it is over. The Republicans will be in a position to have minority control over the government for the foreseeable future and there won’t be much we can do about it.

I fear for the world. Ho ho ho!

Who Is Virtue Signaling For?

Posted on 16 Dec 2019 by Frank Moraes

When people virtue signal, who are they signaling to? At least when it comes to liberals and leftists, the people they’re signaling to are themselves. They are trying to be the kind of people they think are good.

They absolutely are not signaling to others. In fact, that would be embarrassing. And that’s part of the problem with conservatives who point out supposed virtue signaling; it accuses them of something they absolutely are not doing at the same time it does what they don’t want to be done. If a liberal is signaling to others, they aren’t being the good person they want to be.

How to Be a Good Person

The conservative view goes along with Aristotle’s notion of how to be a good person. The idea is that you should pretend to be good. You should act the way that good people act and eventually, you too will be a good person.

But people have images of themselves. And they will give up a lot to live up to that image. For example, most people become vegetarians despite the taste of meat, not because of it. We see this very clearly with conservatives too.

There is a common liberal complaint that conservatives “vote against their interests.” But that is rarely true. They often vote against their economic interests. But white people voting for policies that oppress brown people? That’s an interest. They are voting for an idea that white people are better than brown people. And need I remind everyone that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly white.

Conservative Signaling

And conservatives signal too. What do you think all that ostentatious patriotism is about? And I think that’s genuine. Just as with liberals signaling that they are tolerant and so on, conservatives are signaling to themselves that they are good people — the kind of people who love the flag and all that.

Conservatives signal other things too. One I notice a lot is signaling that they are skeptics: nobody’s fools. Unlike liberals, who supposedly let emotions get in the way of their view of the world, conservatives see things the way they are. (Not that I agree.)

Allow People to Be Who They Are

I wish conservatives would allow us on the left to have our beliefs without pathologizing them. But I know they won’t because if leftists’ acceptance of others is a sincere belief, what’s wrong with them?

So it is doubtful things will change. But the charge of “virtue signaling” is hollow. It’s just a way of claiming they don’t accept our view of the world. And we know that. So it really means they have no argument.

Image cropped from Pledge of Allegiance by TheeErin. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

John Kerry Wants Democrats to Lose a Second Time

Posted on 06 Dec 2019 by Frank Moraes

John Kerry has endorsed Joe Biden. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to him. But I’m equally sure that we shouldn’t follow John Kerry to catastrophe a second time.

Let’s look at this in detail. Back in 2004, Democrats nominated John Kerry as their presidential candidate. He picked John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate. And they lost — by over 3 million votes — more than Trump lost by in 2016. Based on what we know about political science, this was not surprising.

Political Science 2004

In 2009, political scientist Lynn Vavreck published a book that looked at presidential elections, The Message Matters. In it, she argued that the country’s economic trend largely controlled the outcomes in presidential races. If the economy is improving, the political party in the White House wins; if the economy is going into recession, the party loses. This is standard political science.

What Vavreck added was that there were elections when this didn’t hold. She argued that a candidate could win the presidency against a strong economy if they could make the election about something other than the economy.

The classic example of this is Jimmy Carter in 1976. He should have lost. But he made the election about corruption and that allowed him to eke out a win by less than 2 million votes.

The Democrats had a great opportunity in 2004. People had turned against the Iraq War. If the Democrats had made the election about the war, they could have won. But they nominated two men who had voted for the war. And Kerry was especially bad when it came to justifying that vote.

The right choice was Howard Dean. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like Howard Dean. He’s the kind of Democrat I’ve always had problems with. He’s one of the Democrats who rose in the wake of Watergate. He’s very much in favor of “good government” over ideology, which means that economically, he’s pretty conservative.

But his 2004 campaign was all about the Iraq War. And regardless of what he may have thought at the time, he wasn’t on record as being for it. Had the Democrats nominated him, it would have been Bush looking uncomfortable at the lectern, not Kerry. And Dean might have won. He certainly would have done better than Kerry did.

Political Science 2020

So here we are on the cusp of 2020 and Kerry has announced that he is supporting Joe Biden for the nomination. It’s not surprising. The two of them worked together at the top of the Obama White House. What’s more, I think the decline of Warren in the polls has caused a lot of establishment types to decide that Biden is their only choice.

But I think Biden is as electable today as Kerry was in 2004. I know: everyone claims he is the most electable candidate. But Trump is going to hammer him on his Iraq War vote, just like he did Clinton in 2016. And if you don’t think Hunter Biden is going to be the “But her emails!” of 2020, you haven’t been paying attention.

If Kerry is wrong this time too, don’t worry: the Democrats will listen to him again.

You know the Democratic saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you; fool me three times, wow, you really aren’t a very nice person, you’d better not fool me a fourth time!

Kerry and Edwards by Richard Block, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Kerry and Biden by US Department of State and in the public domain.

Campaign Website 404 Pages: Democratic 2020 Primary

Posted on 17 Nov 2019 by Frank Moraes

It’s that time of year to look at the Democratic primary candidates’ 404 pages on their campaign websites.

As you probably know, in HTTP-speak, a 404 page is what displays when a page is not found. In the old days, you usually got a standard The page cannot be found page. Today, you are more likely to get a page that goes along with the look of the site but is otherwise nothing special, like our 404 page. But a lot of sites do more. And that has been the case with campaign websites.

So I thought we would go through each of the candidates in their order in national polling — more or less.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden’s page is designed to appeal to people like me. It has him with an ice cream cone looking very much like his character at The Onion. He says, “Looks like that page isn’t here. Keep cool – I’ll get us back on the rails.” This is shockingly good coming from a campaign that is anything but cool.

Rating: 5

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has a fairly standard page but with a 2017 SNL skit with Kate McKinnon as Warren. It’s interesting that the character can be so exaggerated and yet pretty much dead-on. And clearly, I am not the only one who likes that feisty character.

Rating: 4

Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders says, “We’ve run into a yuuuuuuge problem.” It then uses this to talk about the problems of the country. There is also an animated GIF of Sanders that does kind of sum up his campaign and his appeal. A little knowing, self-deprecating humor goes a long way.

Rating: 4

Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg says, “Oops! Something has gone wrong.” There’s also an image of him looking playfully troubled. For a young guy, Buttigieg is surprisingly good at banality. Extra point taken off for being money-grubbing.

Rating: 3

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris asks, “Are you lost?” It includes an animated GIF of Harris looking pretty cute as she tries to suppress a laugh. There is a goofy side of her that has been sadly missing in this campaign. It’s nice to see here.

Rating: 4

Andrew Yang

Andrew Yang features a boring caricature of himself along with, “Oops! Page not found.” Surprisingly, it makes Buttigieg’s page seem a lot better. But at least he doesn’t use a quarter of the page begging for money.

Rating: 3

Amy Klobuchar

Amy Klobuchar has a page that announces it is a 404. Then, in big letters, it says, “Uff Da!” I looked it up but it meant what I thought. It’s pretty boring but if you scroll down, there’s a video of her throwing a binder at a staffer. (I’m Kidding!)

Rating: 3

Cory Booker

Cory Booker looks like he’s teasing a fussy baby. It’s cute. And the page says, “Cory believes we can all get where we’re going together. Just not on this page.” I like it.

None of these pages are embarrassing. And a number of them are pretty good. But there is no doubt that Joe Biden’s page does the best job of pushing his narrative. And overall, I think he has an excellent site.

Here are my rankings, but I reserve the right to change my mind (which I will undoubtedly do).

Joe Biden (5)
Elizabeth Warren (4)
Kirsten Gillibrand (4)
Bernie Sanders (4)
Kamala Harris (4)
Cory Booker (4)
Pete Buttigieg (3)
Amy Klobuchar (3)
Marianne Williamso (3)
Tulsi Gabbard (3)
Andrew Yang (3)
Wayne Messam (3)
John Delaney (3)
Tom Styer (2)
Julian Casto (2)
Steve Bullock (2)
Michael Bennet (2)

Let me know what you all think. Am I missing something? Is John Delaney’s page cool in a way I can’t see? Am I being too hard on Bullock and Bennet for ripping off past candidates? Am I being too soft on Elizabeth Warren because I have a crush on Kate McKinnon and, well, Elizabeth Warren? Let me know in the comments. Or not. Regardless what you say I know that I am absolutely right about everything.

Disingenuous Headlines From Fox News

Posted on 02 Nov 2019 by Frank Moraes

I check Google News a few times a day just to keep up with what’s going on. And so I see a lot of headlines from Fox News. In fact, it is interesting to see what things they don’t publish about. For example, when Trump pulled out of northern Syria and abandoned the Kurds, it was notable that there was almost no coverage from Fox News. If they can’t spin a story in a way that makes the Republicans look good, they don’t publish stories about it.

The Formula

But I want to highlight a different aspect of Fox News’ deceptions. A shocking number of their headlines are just right-wing talking points pitched as actual news. The biggest way they do this is to offer headlines of the following form:

[Someone]: [Right-wing talking point]

In general, the “someone” is simply a Fox News contributor. Sometimes, this is someone you’ve heard of — at least if you follow Fox News. For example, “Hannity: Dems want to impeach Trump because they’re ‘hell-bent on taking revenge’ for 2016 defeat.”

Other news outlets use this formula, but it is almost always someone of note who is being quoted. For example, CNN recently published the headline, “Pelosi: I don’t know why GOP is afraid of the truth.” Everyone knows who Nancy Pelosi is. She is a major political figure. The story was about a speech she gave on the House floor.

Fox News Examples

But when Fox News uses this formula, their intent is to deceive not to inform. Let me offer you just a few headlines that I’ve collected over the past couple of weeks.

Liz Peek: Democrats toss Biden aside in zeal to impeach – ensuring Trump’s reelection
Tom Del Beccaro: Decoding Democrats’ rush to impeachment
Gregg Jarrett: Trump did NOT commit an impeachable offense on call with Ukraine’s president – Here’s why
Kayleigh McEnany dismisses ‘quid-pro-Joe’ Biden’s call for Trump’s impeachment
David Bossie: Impeachment inquiry? No, Americans are witnessing an impeachment conclusion
Justin Haskins: Elizabeth Warren is pretending to be something she’s not — let’s not fall for her masquerade
Liz Peek: Sorry, Democrats, impeachment doesn’t mean you’ll carry the White House in 2020
David Bossie: Trump impeachment vote is Democratic declaration of war – Republicans must declare war on Dems
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders want to wreck the ‘great American experiment,’ Jesse Watters says
Stirewalt: Warren’s $52T ‘Medicare-for-all’ plan is a ‘disaster’ just like her DNA test release.

Pretending to Be Objective

Notice what’s really going on here. Fox News wants to publish a story saying, “Trump impeachment vote is Democratic declaration of war.” But that’s not what a news organization does.

So they publish, “David Bossie: Trump impeachment vote is Democratic declaration of war – Republicans must declare war on Dems.” That why they are publishing news. You see, they aren’t saying this. They are just offering “expert” opinion.

One could say that this is just how Fox News presents its opinion coverage. And that’s true. But why is it that the big news outlets that constantly find their way at the top of Google News are overwhelmingly, you know, news?

Opinion All the Time

For example, here are the headlines from three days ago when the House was about to hold a vote on the impeachment inquiry:

What can we expect from televised impeachment hearing? (The New Yorker)
Why John Bolton and his ex-colleagues are crucial witnesses (The Washington Post)
Rep Andy Biggs: Trump-hating Democrats do whatever it takes to impeach, ignoring precedents (Fox News)

Obviously, Fox News is pushing what sells. The first headline would bore their viewers. The second would make them feel bad. But the third? That tells them exactly what they want to hear.

More Examples

Another good example is the treatment of Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-All plan. Fox News cannot discuss it without highlighting it’s cost, as if they were adding “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” to the end of their headlines.

I highlighted one above. Here is the headline of their first article, “Cavuto breaks down Warren’s $52 trillion Medicare for All plan.” At the same time, not one of the half-dozen headlines from actual news outlets mentioned its cost. But then, those outlets produce information, not propaganda.

On those few occasions where Fox News must publish something that will upset their viewers, they do it in a way as to minimize the discomfort. Here’s an example, ” Graham urges Trump to act on Syria, rips Pelosi’s impeachment push.” One Republican has a minor disagreement with another but it’s okay because he “rips” the enemy.

Fox News Is Not a News Organization

What’s maddening about this is that Fox News is treated like a regular news organization. In as much as they produce regular news, it is only so that they can claim the same stature as The New York Times and Newsweek. What they really are is the television equivalent of a tabloid.

Fox News by Johnny Silvercloud. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

A World Series Worth Noting

Posted on 30 Oct 2019 by Frank Moraes

The World Series is over and for once I cared. Really! Admittedly, it had nothing to do with baseball. It was all about my love of symmetry. Let me explain.

Early Sunday morning, I was forced to evacuate my home because of the Kincade Fire. And it was a bit scary. When I first left, the fire was 16 miles away. Within 24 hours, it made a bee-line toward me — ending up only 5 miles away.

Having nowhere else to go, I went to stay at my sister’s place down in Millbrae. That meant spending quite a lot of time with her husband, Harold. And that led me to watch game 6 of the World Series.

A Pattern in the Making

At one point, I realized something. I asked Harold, “So if the Nationals win tonight, does that mean that the home team has lost every game in this series?” He seemed vaguely impressed that I noticed that and told me it was so and that it had never happened before.

And sure enough, the Washington National won. So the first two games were at Houston and Washington won them. There was even some speculation that they might sweep the series. But during the next three games in Washington, Houston won each time. In fact, the Nationals looked pathetic. They managed to score only one run each game, while the Astros won with 4, 8, and 7.

The obvious outcome of the next game back at Houston was for Washington to lose badly. But instead, Washington won easily, 7-2. In fact, Houston didn’t score a run after the first inning.

So even though I made it back home today and so did not have to watch the last game of the World Series, I did. You see: life is constantly disappointing. It is unpleasant and chaotic. But here was an opportunity for a little clarity — perfection, in fact. This was seven isolated games during which the team with the home-field advantage lost each time. Six out of seven was no good. It had to be seven.

And it was.

Some Pointless Math

If the outcome of these games were random, then this seven-game streak would happen less than one time out of a hundred. But the home team in MLB wins 54 percent of the time. If we assume that this distribution is random, the number falls to 0.4 percent.

But I don’t think this is simply a statistical fluke. I suspect it is some form of mass psychology. I don’t have any proof, course; but I’ve seen this thing too many times.

Or maybe it is just the normal human tendency to find patterns where none exist. That combined with my own idiosyncratic love of odd patterns. Regardless, this was a very good World Series.

After the fire, it’s nice to have a little clarity in the universe.

Trea Turner by Lorie Shaull. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped.