This week in lunacy

On the whole, I'm an optimist.

It seems a happier way to be.  In general, I would rather expect people to behave well and occasionally be disappointed than to start from the assumption that everyone is an asshole and occasionally be pleasantly surprised.  I know a couple of people who are diehard pessimists, who believe that the worst of humanity is the rule and not the exception, and by and large they're chronically unhappy -- even when things turn out well.

On the other hand, the last few years have been a trial to my generally positive mindset.  I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fifteen years, and the anti-science attitudes and loony counterfactual beliefs that impelled me to start this blog seem to be as common as ever.  Take, for example, the four stories I came across on Reddit, one after the other, while I was casting about for a topic for today's post.

First we have an article courtesy of the ever-entertaining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose main function seems to be making sure that Lauren Boebert is never proclaimed the Stupidest Member of the United States Congress.  Greene just introduced a bill to make weather modification a felony, because -- and this is a direct quote -- "we need clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!"

The irony here is that Greene has supported every one of Donald Trump's efforts to weaken environmental protection -- hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, crippling research into climate change, increasing the number of coal-fired power plants, clear-cutting forests on public land, and deregulating mining and oil production.  But sure, Marjorie, let's outlaw "weather modification," which she says was responsible for Hurricane Helene, the California wildfires, and most recently, the devastating flooding in central Texas.

Hell, if the evil liberal-controlled Deep State could modify the weather, they'd have dispatched EF-5 tornadoes to level Mar-a-Lago ages ago.  But I wouldn't expect logic like that to appeal to Greene, who responded to critics by using my least favorite phrase, "I've done my research," and based on that has come to the conclusion that people who say that hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are natural events are big fat liars.

Expect her "research" to that effect to appear in Nature any time now.

Then we had evangelical preacher Troy Brewer, who claimed that the Texas floods weren't weather modification, they were God sending a message to us.  It was significant, he said, that the flooding (well, some of the flooding) happened on July 4.  In a passage that I swear I'm not making up, Brewer said, "It was a divine signal...  Whenever this thing happened on July the 4th… this is not just about Texas.  This is a word for all the United States of America.  It's no coincidence that 1776 divided by two is 888, the numerical value of the name Jesus in Greek.  Did you know that there were 888 people rescued out of that creek?  888 is the number of Jesus...  And remember that the site of the flood, Kerrville, is the home to the 77-foot-high sculpture known as The Empty Cross."

It does strike me as odd that if this is God sending a message about how lawless and evil and wicked we all are, smiting the shit out of central Texas -- one of the most devoutly Christian places in America -- is kind of an odd move.  I mean, Kerrville isn't exactly Sodom and Gomorrah.  But "God drowned hundreds of good Christians to show you all how important it is to be a good Christian" isn't any crazier than a lot of what these people believe, so I guess it's not really all that surprising.

Next, there's Joe Rogan, who if this was a fair world would have zero credibility left, claiming that Lyme disease was a deliberately-leaked biological weapon from the secret labs on Plum Island.  It probably won't take you longer than a couple of nanoseconds to figure out where he got this amazing revelation from:

RFK Jr.

The only person out there with less scientific credibility than Joe Rogan.

"The ticks are an epidemic because of what happened at Plum Island and the other labs," RFK said in the January 2024 episode of the RFK Jr Podcast.  "We also know that they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab, and they were putting them in ticks and then infecting people."

Of course, this is the kind of thing that gives Joe Rogan multiple orgasms, so he was all in on the bioweapon claim. 

"Turns out there's a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was weaponized," Rogan said.  "It came out of a lab called Plum Island, which was close to Lyme, Connecticut.  And RFK Jr. firmly believes that this was a weapons program...  What they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community.  So, you could dump them from a plane, everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they're more vulnerable if you want to attack them...  Can you imagine if those cunts created a fucking disease and now everyone on the East Coast has it?  Because it's mostly out there."

The Rogan/RFK Jr. claim kind of falls prey to the fact that there's ample evidence that Lyme, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, has been around for a very long time.  To take just one example, Ötzi -- the "Ice Man," the five-thousand-year-old frozen human found in the Alps in Switzerland -- was found in 2012 to be Lyme-positive through DNA analysis of his tissues.

What, Joe -- did the evil Plum Island scientists use their time machines to go back and infect Ötzi in order to throw us all off their trail?  Or should we tune in next week to hear you come up with some even more insane explanation?

Finally, we have a loony claim surrounding a viral craze I hadn't even heard of.  To be fair, I'm not exactly the sort who immerses himself in pop culture, but this one is apparently huge and had escaped me entirely.  It's called a "Labubu doll," and is a "plush monster elf toy" created by Hong Kong designer Kaising Lung.  It got picked up by a couple of big names like Dua Lipa and Rihanna, and now everyone wants one.

Well, you can't have a popular toy out there without someone deciding that it's eeeeee-vil.  And especially... look at those teeth.  So now people on X and TikTok are warning that you should burn your Labubu doll because it's possessed by a demon called, I shit you not, Pazuzu.

Notwithstanding the fact that Labubu and Pazuzu sound like names that a rich old lady would give her poodles, people are taking this extremely seriously.  "I’m not superstitious, I’m a little stitious, but I’d never buy a Labubu," said one person on X.  "It comes from Pazuzu, which is a demon, and possessed the girl in The Exorcist."

So this individual is warning us not to buy a doll representing a fictional creature because it might be inhabited by a fictional demon who possessed a fictional girl in a fictional movie.

But do go on about how plausible all this is.

Then there's the person who commented, "Please before falling into the trap of Labubu or any trend nowadays, do your research.  THEY’RE MADE AFTER A DEMON DEITY (Pazuzu as they say)."

Yes, of course!  For fuck's sake!  Do your research!

Other people are blessing their Labubus or anointing them with holy water to "turn them into protector spirits." I guess this is better than burning them, at least from the standpoint of releasing toxins from burning plastic into the air, which would probably make Marjorie Taylor Greene think that the liberals were trying to modify the weather using smoldering demon flesh or something.

So.  Yeah.  Some days it's hard to remain optimistic.  Just yesterday, my wife and I were discussing how the average dog is a better person than the average person, and these stories haven't done anything to diminish that assessment.  So I think I'll spend the rest of the day socializing with my dogs.

I'll try being optimistic about humanity again tomorrow.  We'll see how long it lasts.

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Saving the marriage

You probably saw that Marjorie Taylor Traitor Greene has called for a "national divorce" along red state/blue state lines, splitting the United States into two countries.  Here's her exact quote:

We need a national divorce.  We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.  Everyone I talk to says this.  From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s [sic] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.

There are some, in my opinion overly optimistic, people who believe this is just a publicity stunt, another opportunity to increase polarization and ring the changes once again on the whole "Culture War" trope, and that she doesn't actually believe what she's saying.  Myself, I'm not so sure.  For one thing, in the past the woman has shown every sign of having the IQ of a Hostess Ho-Ho.  For another, her voting record is nothing if not consistent.  As long as a bill has the MAGA imprimatur, she'll vote for it.

Also, it hardly matters if she believes it, because apparently a good chunk of her constituency does.  While I doubt that "everyone she talks to" says this, I'm guessing that there are people on the Far Right would love nothing better than to turn the red states into a right-wing, Christo-nationalist enclave.

There are a number of problems with this, though, the main one being a wee problem of money.

The Far Right loves nothing more than to call the liberals a "bunch of socialists," living off of federal government handouts.  Wanting "something for nothing."  You know the talk; it's all over right-wing media.  The truth is, though, that if you look at federal government dependency -- the ratio of money given per capita to the federal government to money received as benefits from the federal government -- an awkward pattern emerges:

While the correlation isn't perfect, it's a curious thing that the states run by Evil Liberal Socialists tend to be least dependent on the federal government for funding, and a good many of the states run by the Stalwart Independent Conservatives are the ones who happily accept the most in the way of help.  (In fact, the nonpartisan study I linked above found that my staunchly-red home state of Louisiana is near the top, and relies on the federal government for 52.27% of its funding.)

So if MTG's loony proposal was followed, the liberated Confederate States of America (version 2.0) would instantly become the Western Hemisphere's newest Third World country.

The other frustrating thing about this is that whenever issues of secession come up, I hear from pissed-off liberals things like "Hell yeah, let 'em go and serves them right."  The problem is that even the reddest of red states is more diverse than the purveyors of polarization would like you to believe.  In Greene's own bright-red district in Georgia, for example, 34% of voters in the last election voted for her Democratic opponent, Marcus Flowers.  

So suppose we did split along red state/blue state lines.  I have liberal and moderate friends in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and West Virginia (just to name a few off the top of my head).  If MTG's Christofascist MAGA paradise was realized, what happens to them?  What happens to the people of color, the non-Christians, the LGBTQ people?  They're already fighting like hell not to have legislation passed allowing discriminatory practices against them -- how do you honestly think they'd fare under President Greene?

Let me make one thing clear, and hopefully head off at least a few of the hate-comments; yeah, yeah, I know, not all conservatives.  I also have a good many conservative friends, and mostly we get along fine, because they are coming from a position of respecting others and trying to find common ground.  (Otherwise it's hard to imagine we'd stay friends long.)  But that's not where people like Greene (and Ron DeSantis and Lauren Boebert and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham) are coming from.  They play on divisiveness because it gets headlines, and inflame hatred because fear and anger get people to the voting booth, even if that fear and anger is based on lies.  (And if you object to my saying "lies" outright, recall that recent legal disclosures make it clear that the Fox News hosts are well aware that they're lying to their listeners; text messages from people like Carlson and Ingraham not only state explicitly that they knowingly lied on air, they brutally ridiculed Trump and Trump supporters for falling for those lies.  They're not only liars, they are hypocrites who hold their own listeners in the deepest contempt.)

It's time for reasonable people on both sides to stand up and shout down the ugliness trumpeted by folks like MTG -- and demand the truth, not partisan spin (and outright falsehoods) from media.  Americans of all political stripes have more common interests than we have differences, and those differences can be discussed in a civil manner.  For a good example of this, check out the Twitter account of conservative commentator and former congressperson Joe Walsh.  While there's a lot we disagree on, he is a deeply honorable man and open to finding that common ground.  If more of us on both sides of the aisle approached issues like he does, we'd be a far better nation -- and hate-mongers like MTG would never get elected.

It's easy to feel hopeless.  If you read the news, things certainly seem to be sliding into a nightmare.  But when I look around me, I'm struck by the fact that the vast majority of people I see are decent and kind and want the same sorts of things; stability, peace, a safe place to raise their kids, a roof over their heads, enough to eat.  We might differ about how to get there, but that's stuff we can talk about.

Let's give ourselves a chance at that conversation by turning off the lying, hateful, and divisive voices -- and listening to each other for a change.

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Enough already

I'm beginning to think that the aliens who are running the computer simulation we've all been trapped in for the past few years have gotten bored and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us.

I say this because of recent developments in American politics, which was weird enough already.  By now you've undoubtedly heard about Donald Trump spending a couple of weeks hyping up a "big exciting announcement" both on his bizarre site "Truth Social" and on Twitter (now that Elon Musk has seen fit to allow him to reprise his award-winning role as Cheeto von Tweeto).  A lot of folks thought it might be some sort of serious political strategy move, such as revealing who he had chosen as his running mate for the 2024 presidential election.  This, of course, could have been a bizarre spectacle as well; speculation was running rampant that he would choose Kari Lake, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, whose campaign slogan was, "I DID TOO WIN!  YOU'RE A BUNCH OF BIG STUPID LOSERS!  WAAAAAAAH!"

Which makes me wonder how these people don't see the contradiction between their shrieking at the education system as fostering an "everybody gets a gold star" mindset, and at the same time stating that their favorite candidate in an election should be declared winner despite getting way fewer votes.  Cognitive Dissonance "R" Us, these people.

But I digress.

Anyhow, by now you know that Trump's "big exciting announcement" was that he was selling NFT digital trading cards of "art" (I use the term loosely) of himself dressed up like a superhero, a cowboy, a prizefighter, and so on, at $99 a pop.  My first thought was, "Who in their right mind would spend their hard-earned cash on this?  This is the dumbest idea he's come up with yet."

"Ha ha," said the aliens running the simulation.  "A lot you know."  All forty-five thousand cards sold within twelve hours.

This didn't stop the good folk of the internet from lobbing enormous ridicule bombs Trump's way.  One wag called the cards "MAGA the Gathering."  Another labeled them "Brokémon Cards."  Then the digital artists got involved, and created their own, more realistic Trump trading cards, such as the following:

Then we had the fight between one-time allies Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have been sparring over support for Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy.  Boebert suggested that she might have qualms about supporting McCarthy's bid -- evidently she thinks he's too moderate -- and Greene retorted that Boebert had turned her back on not only McCarthy, but Donald Trump and the Republican party.

Boebert fired back with something that I am quoting here verbatim, because otherwise you flat out won't believe me: "Well, you know, I’ve been aligned with Marjorie and accused of believing a lot of the things that she believes in.  I don’t believe in this, just like I don’t believe in Russian space lasers, Jewish space lasers, and all of this."

*brief pause while the aliens running the simulation take another long toke*

Then there was Lavern Spicer, unsuccessful candidate for Representative of Florida's 24th District, who spoke out vehemently against people introducing themselves including the pronouns they wish others to use for them, and made two statements on Twitter -- one, that there are "no pronouns in the Bible," and the other that "Jesus didn't use pronouns."

Is it just me, or do these people honestly have no idea what a pronoun is?

Here's just one example of a passage from Lavern Spicer's pronoun-less version of the Bible, from Luke 6:32:

If Lavern loves people loving Lavern, that is no credit to Lavern. For even sinners love people loving sinners.  And if Lavern does good to people doing good to Lavern, that is no credit to Lavern either.  For even sinners do good to people doing good to sinners.

It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode about the guy who always talks about himself in third person, and George Costanza picking up the habit.  "George is not happy." 

In any case, I'd like to put the aliens on notice that we down here on Earth are getting kind of fed up with all this.  I mean, enough already.  I know it must be fun watching us, especially the marginally rational fraction of humanity skittering about trying to figure out how in the hell to make sense of the insane chaos we're immersed in, but really.  Y'all have had your laughs at our expense.

Time to put the bong away, shut off the simulation, and call it a day.

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The fall of the Guidestones

Ten years ago I wrote a piece here at Skeptophilia about the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, a granite monument that since 1980 has stood on a hill in Elbert County, Georgia.  People have called it "America's Stonehenge," which in my opinion gives it more gravitas than it deserves.  It's got a set of ten inscriptions that seem to fall into two categories: (1) not bad ideas but impossible to achieve (such as "Unite humanity with a living new language") and (2) vague pronouncements that seem to be attempting profundity but don't quite get there (such as "Prize truth -- beauty -- love -- seeking harmony with the infinite"). 

The building of the monument was funded by one "R. C. Christian," almost certainly a pseudonym.  But a pseudonym for whom?  No one knows for sure, but there's some speculation it it's either Ted Turner or a white supremacist doctor from Fort Dodge, Iowa named Herbert Kirsten.  The mystery adds to the site's appeal, and it became quite a tourist attraction, attracting thousands of visitors per year.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Quentin Melson, Georgia Guidestones in Elbert County, GA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, it also attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists and evangelical wingnuts, who promptly proclaimed it as (respectively) an icon of the Evil New World Order and a manifesto from Satan himself.  Both of these impressions were enhanced by one of the inscriptions, which recommends keeping the human population at five hundred million "in perpetual balance with nature," a move that would probably be highly unpopular with the other seven billion humans on the planet. 

This is how it came to the attention of one Kandiss Taylor, unsuccessful candidate for governor of Georgia, whose motto "Jesus Guns Babies" made her the target of hundreds of posts on social media such as the following:

She was also brutally lampooned by the inimitable John Oliver in one of the funniest segments he's ever done.  You should take seventeen minutes right now to watch this, but do not, I repeat, do not attempt to drink anything while doing so.  You have been warned.

Anyhow, Taylor, who apparently gets most of her exercise doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, said that the Guidestones are satanic in origin, and that if she became governor, her first action would be to have them destroyed.  She received immediate support from loony Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of course she did, who said that the Guidestones "revealed a world genocide plot," if you can apply the word "plot" to a message engraved in enormous letters on a giant rock on top of a hill outside of Atlanta.

But all of this is just a lead-up to what happened this week.  On Wednesday, an unknown person blew up one of the Guidestones and did enough damage to the others that they had to be demolished.  A car was captured on surveillance footage leaving the scene right after the bomb went off, but so far, no suspects have been identified.

This, of course, prompted conspiracy types to stop chewing on the straps of their straitjackets long enough to engage in some triumphant, and long-overdue, "I told you so"s.  Kandiss Taylor tweeted, "God is God all by Himself. He can do ANYTHING He wants to do.  That includes striking down Satanic Guidestones."

Apparently, though, sometimes The Almighty needs help from a random wacko with dynamite and some county workers with bulldozers, and "ANYTHING" doesn't include putting Kandiss Taylor in office, given that she lost the Republican gubernatorial primary to Brian Kemp after receiving only 3.4% of the popular vote.  Even with that poor showing, however, Taylor has refused to concede, claiming that she actually won but was cheated out of the election by voter fraud.

Because of course she did.

After reading all this, I've come to the conclusion that one of the two following conclusions has to be true:

1. The aliens who are running the computer simulation we've all been trapped in for the last six years have gotten bored and/or drunk, and now they're just fucking with us.
2. A significant percentage of Americans are absolutely batshit insane.

What's most striking about the Guidestones, though, is that things in this country are crazy enough that a story which can be summarized as "Unknown bomber destroys weird monument that far-right nutcake politician thinks is a message from Satan" hardly creates a blip on the radar.  Are things this bad elsewhere?  Or is my assessment correct, that somehow the United States has cornered the market on whackjobbery?  It's getting to the point that I'm concerned my readers from other countries are judging me just because I'm American.  I'm going to be taking a trip out of the country next month, and I'm wondering what I should tell people.

Maybe I could pass for Canadian.  Although I wonder if I have the capacity for sustaining that level of niceness.  I suspect I'd tolerate stuff for a while, then something would make me say, "Are you fucking kidding me right now?", and the people nearby would slowly turn to stare at me, in the fashion of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but instead of pointing and shrieking, they'd point and yell, "AMERICAN!!!!!"

Anyhow, if option one was correct, I'd like the aliens just to give it a rest for a while.  I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.  Maybe I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, and things have always been this weird, but even so, I'm undergoing lunacy fatigue.  So let's just have some normal news, of the kind Walter Cronkite used to deliver, for the next few weeks.  Thanks ever so.

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Complexity vs. bigotry

By now, most of you have probably heard that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican representative from Georgia who narrowly edged out both Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert as the biggest asshole in Congress, thought it'd be a fun stunt to taunt Representative Marie Newman (D-Ill.) about having a transgender daughter by putting up the following sign:

This sign illustrates a general rule of thumb, to wit: do not append "Trust the Science" to your ignorant, bigoted opinion and expect it to go unchallenged when there's someone in the room who actually understands science.

The whole "anything that's not cis-het-binary sexuality is unnatural" claim starts to fall apart as soon as you look at it carefully.  Beginning with the fact that to date, homosexual behavior has been observed and documented in 450 animal species besides humans.  That's a few too many to explain away, as one Kenyan official did regarding a video of coupling between two male lions, that the animals were "influenced by gays who have gone to the national parks and behaved badly."

Although I have to say that any couple, gay or otherwise, who is brave enough to fuck outdoors while lions are watching has my utmost admiration.

Since "unnatural" means "not found in nature," we're off to a bad start.  Things only get worse when you look not at who's mating with whom, but what the sexes of individuals themselves are.  Over five hundred species of fish have been identified that change sex -- often when a dominant individual of one sex dies, and the strongest remaining individual switches sex to take his/her place.  Some species, such as many types of gobies, can actually change back and forth, actually altering their anatomy to become reproductively mature females or males as needed dependent on the makeup of the rest of the population.

The complications don't end there, because there's the difficulty of specifying what exactly we mean when we say "male" and "female."  There are at least five different ways that you could define "sex:" what genitals you have, which gender(s) you're attracted to, what sex chromosomes you have, the hormones present in your bloodstream, and your brain wiring (i.e., what gender you see yourself as).  And despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene and others of her ilk would have you believe, all too commonly these don't line up.

We dealt with attraction and genitalia; what about chromosomes?  In mammals, maleness is conferred by a gene complex called SRY that's present on the Y chromosome, so generally if an individual has a matched set of sex chromosomes (XX), she's female, while someone with an unmatched set (XY) is male.  It's wryly amusing that the euphemism for explaining sex is "the birds and the bees," because birds and bees both do this a different way; in birds, it's the males that have the matched set (ZZ) while the females have the unmatched set (ZW), which is why sex-linked trait inheritance has the opposite pattern in birds than it does in mammals.  Bees are haplo-diploid, meaning that males have half the number of chromosomes that females do -- fertilized eggs give rise to females, and unfertilized ones to males.  (If you're thinking, "so that means male bees have a mother but no father?", you're exactly right.)

Okay, so let's limit it to humans.  Makes it simple, right?  If that's your guess, you've kind of lost the plot.  Humans follow the XX/XY pattern -- most of the time.  In embryonic development, female anatomy is sort of the default condition; if an embryo lacks a working SRY, it develops into a female.  One of the drivers of the development of male anatomy is a gene in the SRY complex called 5-alpha-reductase, of which males generally have two copies.  One activates embryonically, which is why a prenatal ultrasound can often tell a woman if she's going to have a boy or not; the other activates around age twelve or thirteen and generates the changes in a boy's body that happen at puberty.

But there's a mutation called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, which knocks out the first copy but not the second.  So the baby is born looking like an ordinary female infant.  Then at age twelve, the second gene switches on, and in a few months, the child turns into a male -- the gonads descend, the penis develops, and so on.

Then there are the kids who have X-SRY -- the SRY complex moved during a process called crossing over onto the X chromosome, so the child karyotypes as a female but is anatomically male.  Then there's XY androgen insensitivity, which is sort of the opposite; an alteration in a hormone receptor causes the male hormones to be unable to lock onto the appropriate cells, so even though they have an XY karyotype and the amount of testosterone in the bloodstream usually seen in a normal male, they're anatomically female.

And then there's the most complex thing of all, which is the neural wiring that gives rise to the sense of self.  Most adults have a sense of their gender that goes beyond what their plumbing looks like.  Sometimes that doesn't line up with the genitalia, the chromosome makeup, or both.  A 2019 paper in Nature exhibits beyond any doubt that transgender people are not, as Marjorie Taylor Greene would claim, either "unnatural" or "making it up," they actually have differences in their neurology and hormone/receptor interactions from those that cisgender people do.  We still don't fully understand what causes the transgender condition, but one thing it definitely isn't is some kind of invented pseudo-condition.

Nor is any of this a choice.  I'm reminded of what a trans student of mine said a couple of years ago: "A choice?  Why would I choose this?  To face prejudice on a daily basis?  To have to fight continuously for people simply to acknowledge that I am who I say I am?  Give me a break."  Then there was the gay student who shut up the "it's a choice" bigots by saying that if homosexual attraction is a choice, straight people should be able to choose, at least temporarily, to be attracted to the same sex.  "Try it!" he'd tell them cheerfully.  "Look at the body of someone the same sex as you, and choose to be attracted!"

After the bigot is stunned into silence, he usually adds, "Until you can do that, shut the fuck up."

Unfortunately, a lot of non-cis-hetero-binary people aren't in the position where they can be that determined not to give an inch; they still face ostracism from family and friends, ridicule and violence, and in some countries, imprisonment, torture, or execution.  Just for being who they are, just for loving who they love, just for wanting to have society acknowledge that sexuality and gender are complex -- and therefore as long as it's between consenting adults, every person has the right to be open about expressing those things in whatever way they experience them.

But with so many people being bound and determined to fit the whole world into a neat, tidy, binary box, is it any wonder why LGBTQ+ people want to find a descriptor for every possible combination and gradation?  I sometimes hear snickering over "adding another letter to the acronym;" but society has been so dismissive for so long that it's no wonder people want to find a label to hold up and say "This is who I am."  (If you're wondering, I'm male and bisexual, but "queer" is also fine with me.)  Sexuality, both in humans and in other species, is so complex and multifaceted that there may not be letters in the alphabet to slice it finely enough to find a unique descriptor for each person's experience of it.  But with clods like Marjorie Taylor Greene posting signs on office doors saying that they have the God-given black-and-white truth and all the scientists agree, you can hardly fault them for trying.

So to wrap this up: not only is Greene's sign simple bigotry, it's outright false.  The universe is a complicated place, and either you should take the time to learn what science actually has uncovered about it, or else keep your damn mouth shut.

And if you're too lazy, ignorant, and opinionated to do that, you have no place in our government crafting policy for people smarter than you.

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The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]