First they came for the political scientists…

Meet Jeff Flake from Arizona. His number one goal is the destruction of the federal government, one piece at a time. His first target: the National Science Foundation. The NSF funds a big chunk of the country’s basic research to the tune of about $7 billion/year, and Flake proposed cutting it by a billion dollars.

He didn’t get what he wanted, fortunately.

But now he’s fallen back on the tricks of anti-science demagogues everywhere, falling back on using his ignorance to justify gutting programs, one by one. He’s managed to block funding of all political science research through NSF, because, he says, they’re “meritless” and “These studies might satisfy the curiosities of a few academics, but I seriously doubt society will benefit from them”.

What did he single out as worthy of cutting?

A project to “develop a new model for international climate change analysis” — apparently, if you close your eyes to a problem, it goes away.

“Understanding the origins of the gender gap in political ambition,” a project to identify why young people aren’t running for office. Oh, that one we can cut, because the reason is obvious: because the offices are full of assholes like Flake.

Strangely, Flake has an MA in political science. I guess he thinks his degree is worthless, not realizing that it’s not the diploma, it’s the brain behind it.

(Also on Sb)

“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Jebus Teetotalin’ Christ. That’s the best we’ve got from Obama? Seriously? It’s taken him this long to “evolve” to the point where he can take a personal (not even a political) stand on civil rights?

I am not impressed.

Those few words were the bare minimum I’d have expected from a Democratic candidate running for office last century — they are so self-evident, so clear and obvious to any decent human being that I’m appalled that anyone thinks this is a remarkable achievement. Our standards are apparently so low for our politicians that we clap and applaud when they make even a token declaration against bigotry.

Hey, maybe if he’d taken a stand a few years ago, we wouldn’t have had debacles like the recent anti-gay ballot in North Carolina.

He might as well have. In response to that tepid and qualified and ineffectual statement, American hate groups like the American Patriarchy Association, the Patriarchy Research Council, and the Catholic League are already denouncing him furiously. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say — I dare Obama to now stand up and fight for this right. None of this pussy-footing around — he’s going to get screwed by the haters already — so he might as well take a strong stand and earn the goddamned liberal/progressive vote.

He might earn a little respect, too.

Schneier on Harris

I have to commend Sam Harris for featuring a guest post by security expert Bruce Schneier on profiling, especially since he backs up everything I’ve said so far. 1) Profiling people who “look Muslim” will have a high false positive rate, 2) “looking Muslim” is a hopelessly indefinable criterion, 3) terrorists will use profiling to avoid detection, and 4) it’s a strategy to alienate those who could be on our side.

I do recommend his blog, Schneier on Security, for your regular reading (also because he has Friday Squid Blogging — he’s a man of excellent taste).

I’m also going to recommend this paper that Brownian mentioned in the comments here: Strong profiling is not mathematically optimal for discovering rare malfeasors. Profiling doesn’t add up; the numbers don’t work.

Are we done now?

Kentucky must be a real dump

Kentucky just launched a tourism campaign to tout the wonderful landmarks in their state — and Governor Beshear includes Ken Ham’s creationist “museum” as one of them. He has just slapped the whole state with a gross insult.

Really, Governor Beshear? You’re so desperate for tourist attractions that you pad your list with a shameful institution dedicated to lies and miseducation? They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel; next on the list is a garbage dump, or a sewage treatment plant, or a polluted lake.

Of course Ken Ham is laughing happily. Not only did he get the state seal of approval on his madhouse, but the state has committed $2 million to road work to improve access, with $9 million more on the way.

Man, the University of Kentucky must be rolling in cash if the state has so much to spare that they can waste it on roadbuilding to an attraction that doesn’t exist.

Showboating in a hijab

There is a trial going on right now of 5 men who plotted the 9/11 attacks (now? What happened to the idea of a speedy trial?) The lawyer for Walid bin Attash has done something I have mixed feelings about. She’s wearing a hijab.

Attorney Cheryl Bormann, 52, who is from Chicago and is not Muslim, said she wore the modest garment that revealed only her face to show respect for the religious sensitivities of her client, Yemeni terror suspect Walid bin Attash.

These men must get fair representation in the court, and she’s going beyond the call of duty to work with her client…although letting them dictate how the lawyer dresses goes too far. If she were defending a sexist asshole like Tucker Max, would she let him make her do her appearances in a bikini? She’s there as a professional, not as a slave to the suspects.

But alright, let that one slide…let’s assume she’s doing what needs to be done to represent a slimebag. This, though, is not forgivable.

Bormann asked the court to order the other women present at the hearing to dress more modestly so as not to distract the defendants, who would be "committing a sin under their faith" by looking at them.

What an astonishing demand. According to the article, the chief prosecutor “deemed the request not worthy of a response.” Seems about right.

But now I’m wondering…Bormann has to know that this kind of behavior and request in the environment of that courtroom has to be highly prejudicial. Is she trying to subtly sabotage Walid bin Attash’s case? Because I don’t know much about him, and I’ve already decided that he’s an arrogant, contemptible jerk.

My objections to profiling weren’t actually addressed…but OK

The argument goes on. Sam Harris has reacted to my post on profiling.

One line in my article raised a tsunami of contempt for me in liberal and secular circles:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

Once again, I included myself in this profile—but that did almost nothing to stem the accusations of racism.

He keeps saying that. I don’t know why. The objection isn’t that Sam Harris wants to discriminate against people who don’t look like him, it’s that Sam Harris wants to discriminate against people on the basis of their appearance. The fact that his search criteria are so broad that they include him isn’t a point in his favor, either — it means he favors criteria that produce many false positives.

I really don’t understand why he’s finding that so hard to grasp.

Then he offers an example of how his version of profiling would work. I’ve highlighted a few words that I think are important.

Imagine that you work for the TSA and are executing a hand search of a traveler’s bag. He is a young man in his twenties and seems nervous. You notice that he is carrying a hardcover copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You pick up the book and ask him if he likes it. He now appears even more nervous than before. You notice something odd about the book—the dust jacket doesn’t seem to fit. Your remove it and find a different book underneath. How do you feel about this traveler’s demeanor, and the likelihood of his being a terrorist, if the book is:

A. The Qur’an (in Arabic)

B. The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide

C. Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know

D. Dianetics

If you care more about A than B, C, or D, as I think you should, you are guilty of religious profiling (and calling it “behavioral profiling” doesn’t change this fact).

I have no problem at all with that kind of profiling. The matter that raises concerns isn’t that the young man looks Muslim: it’s that he looks nervous, and that he’s hiding something. TSA, please do notice when people’s behavior is peculiar!

But now I’m curious. Change the story a bit. What if the young man were confidently and openly carrying his Qur’an? Should we stop and search everyone with a Muslim holy book?

What if he were nervous, and it was a Christian bible hidden away? Should we then ignore his odd behavior and wave him on to the plane?

What if he were openly carrying that bible? Does proudly carrying a Bible give you a free pass through the screening? He could wear a cross and a flag pin on his lapel, and no longer Look Muslim, I guess.

Harris doesn’t seem to understand that his critics are not saying TSA should be blind and deaf to the people passing through security checkpoints…but that there should be some intelligence behind it, and that the criterion of “looking Muslim” is stupid and useless.

Then he raises a series of strawmen — that we think there is no link between Islam and suicidal terrorism, that we have some pious fantasy of Israeli egalitarianism in their security procedures, and implies that we have no problem with TSA searching toddlers. I said precisely the opposite about Islamic terror tactics; I have no sympathy for Israel’s convergence on fascism; I think most of what TSA does in those security lines is a waste of time and bad security policy.

My fundamental issue with his whole proposal is the shocking innumeracy of it all. Here’s the perfect example: he asks, what percentage of the people who would murder the children boarding a plane, and all who accompany them, are Muslim? And here’s his strange answer.

Some readers might think that this question would be difficult or impossible to answer. Let’s try another, then: What percentage of porn stars are also theoretical physicists? Is this a hard question for which to give a ballpark answer? No. In fact, I would be willing to bet my life that I could get within 10 percentage points of the exact figure without doing any research—and the same holds for the question about using children as bombs on airplanes in the year 2012.

Wow. He gives himself a very broad 10% window for his answer.

So the percentage of porn stars who are also theoretical physicists? I guess 0%. I’m sure I’m within 10% of the correct answer. I won’t go searching porn studios for answers to cosmology questions.

The likelihood of a toddler being used to smuggle a terrorist bomb on board a plane? 0%, again. I’m confident — we aren’t seeing 1 in 5 kids being plucked out of line so the dynamite in their diapers can be thrown away.

But then his peculiar question — what percentage of suicidal terrorists boarding a plane are Muslim — I’d answer with 100% (OK, 90%, so my guess covers a broader range), and I suspect he would, too. But it’s the wrong question. It’s a completely bizarre twisting of what the appropriate question should be. We aren’t screening the guys who look like terrorists at the airport to find out which are Muslim; he wants us to screen the people at the airport who look like Muslims to find the terrorists.

The right question is what percentage of the people who “look Muslim” (whatever that means; Harris hasn’t yet defined it), his screening criterion, are terrorists? And again, the answer is 0%±10%, the same as the percentage of physicist porn stars, or bomb lobbing toddlers. I would agree that just screening Muslims would increase the likelihood of finding a terrorist by some small amount, but it has the problem that I still don’t know what a Muslim looks like, so that pre-selection is going to be awfully leaky, and you’re going to generate such a huge number of false positives that your more rigorous secondary screening is going to get swamped, and you’re going to open the door to even more false negatives as your real terrorists avoid “looking Muslim” in line.

So once again, we sacrifice civil liberties and real effective security for TSA showmanship, as people who “look Muslim” to uniformed low-wage security guards with a GED get thoroughly frisked. I don’t get it. Sam Harris is a scientist; how can he so blithely overlook type I and II errors in a statistical sampling protocol? How can he ignore the ambiguity of his sloppy definition of his primary measure, “looking Muslim”?

Good questions, ____________ answers

You fill in the blank. Greta Christina interviews Edwina Rogers.

Did you know 70% of Republicans are pro-choice? And that there is no Republican party position on abortion? It’s only a few elected officials who are anti-gay, not the majority. You shouldn’t stereotype Republicans! Republicans believe in the separation of church and state, too. But not a majority now (she’s backed down on this one). Republicans at the federal level have not been promoting creationism and intelligent design. It was OK that she donated money to Rick Perry because a) he used to be a Democrat, b) he was head of the Republican Governor’s Association, and c) she was interested in promoting health care. And we all know what a friend to health care Rick Perry has been. She joined the Republican party along with everyone else in the South because she like Ronald Reagan’s message, which was about working hard.

I learned many Surprising Facts™ about America in this interview. I haven’t been thrilled with the Democrats for some time, but apparently the Republicans have an agenda more in tune with my views (!), and I ought to have been voting for them.

We don’t exist?

This is a new argument to me. Representative Emanuel Cleaver (Democrat, Missouri) was discussing the possibility of atheists getting elected to office, and while saying he thinks we’d have a difficult time, he also says we don’t exist.

Actually, I don’t believe that there is such thing as an atheist because no respectable atheist would walk around with something in his pocket that said ‘In God We Trust.’

Oooh, ooh, I can do that, too!

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a Christian, because no respectable follower of Jesus would have any money at all — he or she would have handed it all over to the poor.

Man, it’s going to be really hard to run for office in this country when we’re not allowed to have any money without being accused of hypocrisy. And couldn’t Rep. Cleaver’s argument be turned around to show that the inclusion of the religious motto is a clear violation of the separation of church and state? I presume he’s behind the campaign to have god references removed from our currency, then.