Michelle, now *I’m* shocked

Hat tip to Janine in the Thunderdome for the heads up on this: Alt-folk singer songwriter Michelle Shocked has gone all the way  over to the Dark Side.

Those of us who’ve followed her over the years — myself, I’ve long been a  particular fan of Short Sharp Shocked and Arkansas Traveler — were disheartened over the last couple years as she became a so-called born again Xtian and, perhaps not coincidentally, went more or less to shit musically. But according to Queerty, she’s since completely lost the plot:

Michelle Shocked, an alt-folk singer who had success in the 1980s and ’90s, shocked audience members at Yoshi’s in San Francisco Sunday night with a homophobic rant that wound up clearing out the club.

The crowd had come, presumably, to hear songs like “Come a Long Way” and “On the Greener Side,” which got airplay on MTV back in the day. (“Greener Side” was even up for a VMA against Madonna’s “Vogue.”)

Instead they were treated to a tirade that allegedly included Shocked announcing “God hates fags.”

Matt Penfield, who was live-tweeting the show from onstage called her rant, delivered during her second set, “totally sincere [and] super anti-gay and hateful.”

We’re still trying to get the full text of her speech, but apparently she told fans “you can go on twitter and say Michelle Shocked said ‘God hates fags.’”

Another Twitter user posted that Shocked “said she lives in fear that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry.”

My disappointment in Shocked is only marginally leavened by fleeting amusement at a few commenters at Queerty who proudly say they’d never heard of her, as though their ignorance says anything about her importance to the Americana genre. Her descent into hate is a tragedy for the genre, and more importantly for the young people who might take her hate seriously.

One commenter over there does offer the perfect quote from a song on Arkansas Traveler, though: “The secret to a long life’s knowing when it’s time to go.”

Adam Merberg on grazing and Allan Savory and TED

I wish I’d seen Adam Merberg’s excellent takedown of Allan Savory’s TED talk on “greening the deserts” before I wrote my own. Merberg provides a history of Savory’s career that’s remarkably detailed for its relative brevity, with a couple of damning quotes by Savory, including this one:

You’ll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me.

Merberg offers perhaps the best summation of both Savory’s attitude and the pseudoscientific impulse I’ve seen:

Savory argued at TED that Holistic Management “offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity.” What Savory does not tell us is that there is the distinct possibility that if we try to implement those ideas, we will fail. In this case, he will tell us that we misunderstood his ideas. How comforting it will be to know that his ideas were correct, as they always have been!

Also of interest, Merberg offers a sampling of credulous responses from people who pride themselves on being skeptical, including this one:

In Shermer’s defense, it may be that suspension of credulity isn’t really a guy thing.

One of the more interesting parts of Merberg’s piece is his conclusion, where he directs certain uncomfortable questions at TED:

In December, TED responded to concerns that independent TEDx authorized events were “dragging the TED name through the mud” by sending a letter to “the TEDx community” warning that bad science could lead to revocation of the TEDx license. The letter also included some advice for identifying bad science. I can’t help but think that Savory’s work should have raised concerns for anybody familiar with that list. At the least, Savory’s work “has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth,” much of it “is not based on experiments that can be reproduced by others,” it comes from an “overconfident fringe expert,” and it uses imprecise vocabulary to form untested theories.

Of course, TED has no contractual incentive to apply the standards it sets for TEDx organizers to its own talks. However, the letter emphasizes that “your audience’s trust is your top priority,” and I think it’s fair to ask what TED did to respect that trust in this case. Did they research the science behind Allan Savory’s ideas? Are they satisfied that his talk amounts to “good science”? If Savory’s talk had run at a TEDx event, would that event’s license have been revoked? Now that TED has reined in TEDx, perhaps its next move should be to look in the mirror.

Go check it out.

TED Talk: spreading bullshit about the desert

What? TED vectoring pseudoscience? Unpossible! In one recent particular instance, though, a TED talk firmly grounded in bullshit — literal and figurative — is gaining a mortifying amount of traction with people who really should know better.

The lecturer is Allan Savory, who for the last couple decades has been pushing his own brand of Maverick Science despite hidebound opposition from “scientists” with their “peer review” and their “evidence” and their “reproducible results.”

Savory’s thesis: every desert in the world is caused by insufficient grazing. We know this because of reasons. All those desertified former grasslands in Africa and the Middle East that have been turned to dusty parking lots by cattle and sheep and goats just didn’t have enough livestock on them to churn up the soil, shit everywhere, and then move on to the next patch of land in a rotational grazing approach.

Savory’s approach can work in theory, on marginal grassland with very close monitoring and if your management goals do not include protecting species that are intolerant of cattle. Can work.  Doesn’t necessarily. And that’s irrelevant to actual deserts, yet Savory wants to push his approach onto ancient desert landscapes anyway.

The biggest problem for me, as I point out this morning at KCET, is that Savory doesn’t distinguish between actual deserts — stable, diverse yet fragile habitats — and ruined grasslands. He conflates “desertification” — a term that needs to be abandoned — with actual deserts, then misrepresents the basic science  of desert ecology, for instance calling cryptobiotic crusts a “cancer.”

None of this is a surprise to anyone who has followed Savory over the last few decades. Same shit, different day. But TED has helped him go viral, and there are people who are taking him at his word to an embarrassing degree. Even though he says stuff in the talk like “There is no other option” but to follow his program, a phrase that should cause any sane person to back away slowly with her hand firmly protecting her wallet.

But environmentally concerned people, even here in California, show a disturbing willingness to believe any negative shit they hear about the desert. The TED audience laps Savory’s crap up to a disheartening degree.

Anyway, I debunk what I can of Savory’s crap here at KCET. What I can given time and space, that is. It’s only a 13-minute video and one could write a book about the wrongness.

 

A quote from Ed Abbey, who died 24 years ago today

The geologic approach is certainly primary and fundamental, underlying the attitude and outlook that best support all others, including the insights of poetry and the wisdom of religion. Just as the earth itself forms the indispensable ground for the only kind of life we know, providing the sole sustenance of our minds and bodies, so does empirical truth constitute the foundation of higher truths. (If there is such a thing as higher truth.)

It seems to me that Keats was wrong when he asked, rhetorically, “Do not all charms fly … at the mere touch of cold philosophy?” The word “philosophy” standing, in his day, for what we now call “physical science.” But Keats was wrong, I say, because there is more charm in one “mere” fact, confirmed by test and observation, linked to other facts through coherent theory into a rational system, than in a whole brainful of fancy and fantasy. I see more poetry in a chunk of quartzite than in a make-believe wood nymph, more beauty in the revelations of a verifiable intellectual construction than in whole misty empires of obsolete mythology.

The moral I labor toward is that a landscape as splendid as that of the Colorado Plateau can best be understood and given human significance by poets who have their feet planted in concrete — concrete data — and by scientists whose heads and hearts have not lost the capacity for wonder. Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.

PZ was wrong wrong wrong

My esteemed co-blogger lists the usual pope field marks — old, male, conservative, homophobic, godbag — and says “that’s all you need to know” about New Pope. But it turns out, as pointed out by a few commenters downthread, that Francis I is worse than that. A lot worse.

Says commenter sc_e94313c775e472e2749a200883fdec2e (can I call you “sc_e”?)

As an Argentinian I can confirm your “rumours” and add that this guy was a collaborator with the military during the last coup d’etat during the 70′s : Among many things, he informed to the military that two monks that were working in a low income neighbourhood were no longer protected by the catholic church, facilitating their detention and posterior disappearance.
Mind you, to “dissapear” at that time meant to be detained by the military, held without rights or trial, possibly (and often) tortured under suspicions of being a Marxist/ “terrorist”, being completely incomunicated with your family and finally be killed and buried on an unmarked grave, or thrown form a plane into the river.
Thrown.
From a fucking plane.
Into the river. (Known as “deathflights”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights )

I’ve seen some “progressive” Catholics in the English-speaking world already lauding this guy for his apparent concern for the poor. I seem not to be able to embed Storify curations here, so here’s a link instead: Check out this Storify being collected by Asteris Masouras. And if you’re an English speaking progressive of whatever religious orientation who doesn’t know what the Dirty War was, you need to learn. This Al Jazeera documentary is a start. (Serious trigger warning for, well, everything.)

Good report on Federal wildlife torture from a surprising source

Sometimes, even Fox News gets one right [trigger warnings, as you might expect from the post title]:

The brutal approach by Wildlife Services is part of a culture of animal cruelty that has long persisted within an agency that uses taxpayer money to wage an unnecessary war on wildlife, according to two U.S. congressmen who have repeatedly called for a thorough investigation.

“This agency has become an outlet for people to abuse animals for no particular reason,” Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., told FoxNews.com.

“It is completely out of control,” he said. “They need to be brought into the 21st century.”

The story covers an investigation that was spurred, in part, by revelations that USDA “Wildlife Services” employee Jamie P. Olson had posted photos of his dogs tearing trapped coyotes to pieces on Facebook. (Previously, on Pharyngula.) The issue’s been kept on the front burner by my colleague Camilla Fox at Project Coyote; she and her organization deserve your attention and support.

Bring back the Shasta ground sloth

Bringing extinct animals back to life is big news this week. Not because there’ve been any particular recent breakthroughs, but because the upcoming issue of National Geographic features the topic as a cover story, and is hosting a related TEDx meeting this Friday in Washington D.C. that’s also sponsored by Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation. There’s a Twitter hashtag for the meetup, National Geographic has set up a portal page for the topic (credit Brian Switek for that labor), and the event is driving a lot of traffic to the Long Now site — which is worth checking out, especially its FAQ and its list of criteria for choosing extinct animals to bring back.

But I see no mention of bringing back the extinct animal we actually really need.

[Read more…]

Well crap, I missed out on the cake

This is what happens when you stay off the internet all day: you miss your co-blogger’s birthday celebration.

I didn’t even get a card together or anything. Guess I’ll have to dust off this old thing again. Just add 7 to all the ages mentioned.

Actually, from the looks of that cake plate, I think it’s just as well I missed the party. How did those sucker marks get all over the tablecloth?

Bora 1, Climate Denialist Kooks 0

This is really a thing of beauty: climate pseudoscientist Willis Eschenbach whines at the inadvertent comedy blog Watt’s Up With That that Bora Zivkovic has been moderating comments on his SciAm blog.

Eschenbach, who’s also a Mass Extinction denialist, objects to Bora’s having instituted some basic anti-troll measures at A Blog Around The Clock that relegate comments with certain field marks of the climate denialist loon to the spam bin. Says Bora, in a passage that apparently made Eschenbach’s cranial temperature spike like a Warmist hockey-stick graph:

If I write about a wonderful weekend mountain trek, and note I saw some flowers blooming earlier than they used to bloom years ago, then a comment denying climate change is trolling. I am a biologist, so I don’t write specifically about climate science as I do not feel I am expert enough for that. So, I am gradually teaching my spam filter to automatically send to spam any and every comment that contains the words “warmist”, “alarmist”, “Al Gore” or a link to Watts. A comment that contains any of those is, by definition, not posted in good faith. By definition, it does not provide additional information relevant to the post. By definition, it is off-topic. By definition, it contains erroneous information. By definition, it is ideologically motivated, thus not scientific. By definition, it is polarizing to the silent audience. It will go to spam as fast I can make it happen.

What Eschenbach doesn’t mention, and a basic point of Bora’s post on how trolls derail substantive conversation, is that climate denialism is just the most pernicious and prevalent of a number of kinds of pseudoscience that have afflicted some of the sites on SciAm of late:

I know that I used the example of Global Warming Denialism here the most – mainly because it is currently the most acute problem on our site – but the same goes for people harboring other anti-scientific ideas: creationists, anti-vaxxers, knee-jerk anti-GMO activists, and others.

This post is not about climate denial, it is about commenting and comment moderation. It is about the fact that eliminating trolls opens the commenting threads to more reasonable people who can actually provide constructive comments, thus starting the build-up of your own vigorous commenting community.

There are seven billion people on the planet, many of them potentially useful commenters on your site. Don’t scare them away by keeping a dozen trolls around – you can live without those, they are replaceable.

Eschenbach’s month-late response to Bora’s post is as pure and canonical a paean to the hallowed practice of JAQing off as I have seen. A sample:

I can only bow my head in awe. I mean, what better way is there to keep you from answering people from WUWT and other sites who might want answers to actual scientific questions, than not allowing them to speak at all?… See, Bora, the beauty of your plan is, you don’t even have to think about censorship once you do that. The computer does the hard work for you, rooting out and destroying evil thoughtcrimes coming from … from … well, from anyone associated with Watts Up With That, or with Steven McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit, or anyone that you might disagree with, or who is concerned about “alarmists”, you just put them on the list and Presto!

No more inconvenient questions!

I probably ought to feel sorry for Eschenbach: anyone who would proudly link to a piece like this alleged debunking of extinctions — as opposed to deleting it, salting the earth of the server on which it once resided, and denying under oath that you’d ever heard of the thing — is definitely more properly pitied than mocked. “No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause,” Eschenbach says. That’s some Time-Cube-level obliviousness.

But I can’t help snickering, and feeling slyly jealous that Bora was able to elicit a response like that just by mentioning idly that he’s keeping his own comment threads on topic despite a massive campaign by a few fanciers of metallic haberdashery to disrupt them. Well done, my friend. Well done.