Category: conservatives acting badly

More unsubstantiated assertions of indigenous “science” in New Zealand

September 17, 2025 • 11:20 am

Predator Free NZ (“PFZ”, and “NZ” is New Zealand)  is apparently a science-oriented trust whose goal—a worthy one—is to keep non-native predators, such as the common brushtail possum, out of New Zealand, as they destroy native wildlife and have other bad effects on the ecosystem. (The possum, for example, destroys native New Zealand birds and carries bovine tuberculosis, and it’s a constant battle to destroy them).  But, like apparently all science in New Zealand, the organization is getting infiltrated with indigenous “ways of knowing” and “lived experience”, which in the case at hand appear, at they so often do, not to be based on real science at all. Real science means you use data to test a hypothesis, not simply adduce “lived experience”.

A Kiwi who apparently gets PFZ’s newsletter sent me a copy that started this way, already showing, by the profusion of Māori words, that there lies danger ahead. (Although there are some translations, they don’t mention that “Aotearoa” is the Māori term for “New Zealand”):

Kia ora NAME REDACTED,

It’s Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. For the 50th year, Aotearoa is coming together to celebrate te Reo Māori. Learn some kupu (words), set your tārore (traps) and keep protecting our manu (birds) and other taonga species.

Keep an eye on our instagram this week; we’re learning some sayings featuring native manu with Hēmi Kelly from Everyday Māori.

And this newsletter links to an article that touts trapping predators using the Māor lunar calendar, a method for which there’s no evidence at all. There are three links given at the end of this article, but they are not scientific references: they’re simply expositions of the Māori lunar calendar, with a few undocumented assertions about when to trap based on the moon. In other words, there’s no “science” as we conceive of “modern science.”

Click on the headline below to read the piece:

The article shows 30 phases of the Māori lunar calendar, and says that the author (Cam Speedy) knows that these phases are associated with hunting and fishing.  But experience is not science.  A quote from Mr. Speedy:

As a hunter, I have always recognised similar distinct patterns when night shooting. Sometimes, there is just nothing doing; other times, there are critters there, but they are very shy or just too fast. Sometimes, it’s simply all on – critters everywhere that hold in the light.

It is the same with fishing – fishing is more productive at ‘bite time’ – when the moon is directly above, especially when that happens at dawn (Tangaroa phase) or dusk (Tamatea phase).

Deer are also more active at ‘bite time’. With over 40 ‘deer roars’ under my belt, I now plan my roar trips to coincide with the end of the third lunar quarter (start of the Tangaroa phase) – when hind cycling and stag activity is much higher – and I make sure I’m looking over hot spots at ‘bite time’.

As I began applying maramataka [JAC: lunar calendar] principles to my predator trapping, my diary notes started to speak for themselves – for example, the serviced traps were fresh for the ‘Tangaroa’ moon phase (seven to 12 days after the full moon) and out-performed other traps.

. . .I have consistently found that traps serviced a day or two before the Tangaroa phase catch more pests.

If you also start to layer in weather influences (most critters stay home during cold, wet stormy periods to re-emerge once the weather fronts clear), take note of and follow wider seasonal patterns in animal behaviour (eg., mating, breeding and dispersal) and understand seasonal diet changes, you will transform your trapping success.

And indeed, Mr. Speedy might be right, but there are no data supporting his assertions. He calls this approach “holistic”—always a red flag in these type of articles.  As my correspondent emailed me:

As far as I can find with search engines, this is an article with no evidence base to it at all – even CHatGPT agress (below).  Given that many of the species we target (mustelids and, regrettably, hedgehogs) have not been in New Zealand for more than 150 years, and have been seen as an existential threat to wildlife for a far shorter time, it’s a bit rich to claim centuries of experiential learning!

And so my correspondent asked ChatGPT the question below, followed by the answer:

Does maramataka improve pest trapping?

The bot’s response (bolding in the last paragraph is mine):

Yes, maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, can play a role in improving pest trapping, especially in agricultural or ecological contexts.

Maramataka is based on the phases of the moon and the positions of other celestial bodies, and it dictates the best times for planting, fishing, hunting, and other activities. Some people believe that certain phases of the moon, as well as specific days in the lunar cycle, can influence pest behavior. For instance:

  1. Feeding and Activity Cycles: Some pests may be more active or easier to trap during certain lunar phases. For example, it is believed that during the waxing moon (when the moon is growing in size), pests such as rats or insects might be more active, making them easier to catch or trap.
  2. Moon Phase and Tides: In some cases, particularly in coastal areas, the moon’s phases can affect the behavior of pests that are tied to tides or certain weather patterns. For example, high tide during a particular lunar phase might affect the movement of certain pests in coastal areas.
  3. Cultural Knowledge: In Māori culture, there’s a deep understanding of how animals and pests behave in relation to the moon’s phases. Traps or hunting methods are sometimes planned around the maramataka to align with times when pests are most vulnerable or more predictable.

In short, while there’s no definitive scientific proof for maramataka’s direct effect on pest trapping, the knowledge embedded in the lunar calendar could help guide better timing and more effective pest management practices based on natural patterns observed over centuries.

“It is believed,” “might”, “no definitive scientific proof”: all these are euphemisms for “this isn’t science but guesswork.” So not only has Kiwi science been infiltrated by the “sacralization of the oppressed,” but apparently so has ChatGPT, which hedges its answer into meaninglessness.

Dire-ish wolf

April 8, 2025 • 11:30 am

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s…

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

The Right uses the Left’s tactics: Nancy Pelosi viciously harassed at a Florida venue

October 20, 2018 • 1:00 pm
Now it’s become common practice to viciously harass in public politicians you don’t like. It’s happened recently with Republicans Ted Cruz, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, while White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia. I haven’t seen much of this kind of public harassment happen to Democrats, but it has now—and it will happen more frequently.  I’ve decried this practice as uncivil, and a disturbance of the privacy that people should have when they’re eating or trying to avoid attention as they go about their business in the street. And some the harassment of Democrats to come is the fault of the Left.
Grania sent me the tweet below, with the excerpt of a longer video that I’ve added below. She added these words:

“Who ever saw this coming? Apart from all of us, I mean. The Right has been taking notes.”

Early reports were that this took place in  a restaurant (see right below), but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, Pelosi was entering a venue to campaign for the congressional seat sought by Democrat Donna Shalala.

The slightly erroneous report from Mediaite (it wasn’t a restaurant):

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is the latest politician to be harassed by angry protesters who insisted he doesn’t f*cking “belong here.”

On Wednesday, video was captured of Pelosi entering a restaurant in Florida for a campaign stop as a swarm of people being described as “Trump supporting Cuban Americans” confronted her.

“Look at Nancy Pelosi right here, look at this piece of sh*t right here. Look at this piece of sh*t Pelosi right here,” a protester is heard yelling. “F***ing communist! You don’t belong here you fucking communist! Get the f**k out of here! Get the f**k out of here! F**k you and your f**king Democrats!”

After she entered the building, the protesters then began pounding on the door. The mob can be seen holding several anti-communism signs.

They then chanted “Socialism sucks!”

Here’s the full video:

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill political protest, but personal harassment. It’s legal, but it’s uncivil and reprehensible. This group, at least, is a small basket of deplorables.  And, I claim, this tactic was adopted by Republicans who took it from the Democratic playbook.  It reflects, of course, the increasingly nasty and apparently irreconcilable gap between the Left and the Right. Journalist Benny Johnson, now on the Right, has it pretty well right:

When I posted this on my Facebook page, with an indictment of the Left for “normalizing” this behavior, one person, eager to defend the Left at all costs, wrote this:

I’m now suspicious that these are paid left wing activists acting as if they are right wingers heckling.

This shows how eager some are to demonize the other side and “angel-ize” their own. Face it, folks, we’re polarized, and Lefties can act as bad as Righties. In fact, this tactic was popularized by the Left: at colleges, by Antifa, and by all those determined to shut down free speech. And the bulk of deplatforming of speakers at U.S. colleges in the past four years has come from the Left.

Well, the Facebook conspiracy theorist was wrong: the Washington Post (click on screenshot below) identifies these people not as disguised Leftists, but as diehard right-wingers, many of them members of an extreme-Right group called The Proud Boys.

An excerpt:

The video shows a small group of protesters cursing at Pelosi (D-Calif.), and calling her a communist in English and Spanish, as she enters an event on Wednesday in Coral Gables, Fla., to campaign for Democrat Donna Shalala, who is running to fill the seat vacated by the retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) in Miami.

“You don’t belong here,” one says. “Afuera!”

After Pelosi calmly walks by them and enters the building, people bang on the door.

“Open up! It’s the Proud Boys in here,” one says, referencing the far-right group that was implicated in a street brawl in New York last weekend.

“Socialism sucks,” others chant.

Photographs taken of the protest around the event, which appears to have been organized by Nelson Diaz, the chairman of the Republican Party in Miami-Dade County, according to emails posted online by radio host Grant Stern, show some protesters with Proud Boys gear.

. . . “I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi’s agenda, but this is absolutely the wrong way to express those disagreements,” Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who was wounded in a shooting at a congressional baseball team practice in 2017, wrote on Twitter. “If you want to stop her policies, don’t threaten her, VOTE! That’s how we settle our differences.”

In a statement Pelosi’s spokesman Drew Hammill said President Trump and Republicans were to blame for stoking the flames of “incivility, intolerance and aggression.”

And, as if to confirm Grania’s correct diagnosis, there’s this (my emphasis):

The video did not appear to have traveled widely on YouTube, but it was seized on by fringe right-wing sites as a sign of the retribution Democrats face in the wake of other high-profile incidents where Republicans have been confronted by protesters in public at places such as restaurants.

“Nancy Pelosi was heckled at a Miami Restaurant by Trump Supporting Cuban Americans,” reported one.

“Nancy Pelosi shouted out of a restaurant — by Cuban Americans in Miami,” wrote another.

“RUN, NANCY, RUN!! PELOSI SHOUTED OUT OF RESTAURANT IN MIAMI!” wrote another.

The protest did not however take place at a restaurant. It occurred at Shalala’s headquarters, where protests during an event were widely reported earlier this week.

Well, this wasn’t at a restaurant, but it well could have been, and expect to see this kind of unruly and reprehensible behavior by both sides in the coming mobs. And yes, Trump and his insane behavior has grossly exacerbated the passions that divide Americans so sharply. But Pelosi’s spokesman doesn’t have it completely right. It’s not just Trump and the Republicans that are to blame here: it’s also the Left, which made it okay to confront political figures in public and scream abuse at them.

In my post on other incidents like this, with Republicans confronted in restaurants by angry and abusive Democrats, some readers said this kind of behavior was okay. “They deserve it”, said some, while others saw nothing wrong with disrupting people’s behavior in public by screaming abuse at them.  Well, what’s sauce for the GOP goose is sauce for the Democratic gander. If you think this is okay, you’ll also have to also approve of shouting at people like Pelosi, or Barack Obama, or Joe Biden when they go out to eat. (It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re in office, of course.)

Do you want to live in a country like that? I don’t. The civility I expect on this website is the kind of civility we should exercise when politicians are in public. Listen: protest the actions of Republicans if you want, but don’t disrupt their lives or call them names. They are people and deserve some consideration; remember, many of them hold their views honestly, even if we think those views are wrong. Better yet, do what Representative Scalise said: VOTE!

When I put the video on Facebook, another person commented:

 I agree we should call out awful behavior where we see it. But I’m very skeptical of claims that actions by one side or the other “make it okay” for the other side to respond in kind. Bad behavior always finds an excuse. You can probably imagine how many Trump supporters think he’s justified in calling for protesters to be beaten or say disgusting things about his opponents or one-night-stands because of some imagined offense by the left. Maybe all we can do is continue to stand for what’s right, regardless of party, and do all we can to maintain decent norms.

And I responded that the only point I really wanted to make was in his last sentence (I’ve put it in bold). I’m not so sure that “bad behavior always finds an excuse,” though. Sometimes it’s lubricated when you see others do it and those others aren’t criticized.

An antagonistic interview with Steve Bannon

September 19, 2018 • 9:30 am

In my futile effort to show that people need not fear public presentations of Steve Bannon, I present one interview from the Showtime program “The Circus”. It was sent by reader Paul, who said this:

This show is one of my favs as it combines behind the scenes looks at US politics and good food and drink.
Well, I wasn’t that impressed by the food and drink, but the 8-minute Bannon interview, from 12:30 to 20:25 in the clip below, is quite enlightening. In contrast to the last video I showed (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s interview with Bannon and Sarah Ferguson), the interviewer, John Heilemann, just takes out from the beginning after Bannon. And Bannon doesn’t look very good. Not only does he paint a completely ridiculous picture of Trump as a very smart man, but Bannon also spouts rather unintelligible politicospeak. Here’s the YouTube summary.
The Gathering Storm. With the looming midterm elections, the Trump presidency under siege, and Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Carolina coast, Washington has a lot on its collective plate. Executive Producer and Host John Heilemann interviews Steve Bannon. Season 3 Episode 7 premiere. Watch The Circus Sundays at 8pm ET/PT.
The entire video covers a variety of topics, but all are centered on the frightening Trump presidency. Although I wasn’t as impressed as Paul with the show’s format, I was engrossed by the hard-hitting interview. My point is that it shows how unfounded is people’s fear that a public talk by Bannon—or interview, as proposed by both my University and David “Invertebrate” Remnick at the New Yorker Festival—will hurt feelings and, indeed, constitute a form of violence. Bannon is a fairly eloquent right-wing ideologue, but when pressed by somebody that knows something, his facade collapses. There’s nothing to be scared about having Bannon speak in public, or in a debate format.

Liz Cheney criticizes lawyers for defending accused al-Qaeda detainees

March 16, 2018 • 8:15 am

Grania called this tweet to my attention; it’s from Ken White who writes on the site Popehat, and he’s a civil rights and free speech attorney:

If you adhere to anything close to the ideals of American democracy, you recognize that everybody deserves a defense attorney, no matter how horrible the crime of which they’re accused. (And we now recognize that those arrested and sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp were often innocent or, at least, minor figures in al-Qaeda rather than big-name terrorists.) Nevertheless, we haven’t closed the Guantanamo camp (Congress wouldn’t let Obama do it), and many detainees linger there still, supposedly awaiting trial. It has now been open for 16 years, and Donald “Make American Reviled Again” Trump signed an executive order keeping it open indefinitely.

This is shameful. Prisoners were originally held there for one reason—so they wound’t be subject to American criminal law but to American military law, which doesn’t afford the accused so much protection. Things have changed now, but the prisoners’ right to a speedy trial has been violated horribly.

Now it’s not only the detainees who are demonized, but also the lawyers whose job it is, rightfully, to give them the best defense they can get. So it’s even more shameful that Liz Cheney (Dick’s daughter) runs an advocacy group that, according to ABC News, is accusing the lawyers themselves, whom they call “The Al-Quaeda 7”, of being terrorist sympathizers:

The conservative group led by Liz Cheney is having to defend itself against criticism from fellow conservatives who say that an ad attacking Attorney General Eric Holder is unfair.

The ad, launched by Keep America Safe, an advocacy group led by Cheney, criticizes Holder for not disclosing details about Justice Department lawyers who have previously defended alleged terrorists.

The video, which surfaced last week, brands the lawyers as the “Al Qaeda 7” and ridicules the Justice Department as the “Department of Jihad.” The narrator questions, “Who are these government officials?…Whose values do they share?”

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller has called it “offensive” that the patriotism of agency lawyers is questioned by Cheney’s group.

Here’s that video:

It’s no secret that I was on O.J. Simpson’s defense team, serving as an “expert witness” without pay, because I thought that even he deserved a good defense, and I was plenty irked by the government’s slipshod use of DNA evidence (especially the population-genetic analysis and the refusal to consider lab error rates) to want to go after the prosecution’s wonky analysis. While we “won”, I wasn’t happy, and gave up my side career as defense witness expert in DNA cases (almost always defending the poor along with their public defenders).

Those accused of terrorism deserve an equally avid defense. The purpose of this, as I saw in the O.J. case, is not to protect the guilty, but to keep the principle strong that the government has to be able to prove its case “beyond a resonable doubt.”  If we stop holding the prosecution’s feet to the fire on this principle, our whole system of law will be destroyed.

Accused terrorists deserve good lawyers who will make the government prove their case, and those lawyers should not be demonized by being equated with terrorists. Defending the accused, whether guilty or not, is an honorable thing to do.