Mary Lou Bruner might even get elected

Now that’s a terrifying thought. Bruner is a retired teacher (!) running for the Texas School Board (!!) with a set of beliefs about science that ought to have gotten her fired long, long ago. Instead, she’ll probably find herself in that nest of loons with influence over textbooks all around the country.

Bruner, in fact, has written about the extinction of dinosaurs. When the flood waters subsided and rushed into the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. . . . The dinosaurs on [Noah’s ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce. . . . After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age.

Meanwhile, Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate, it’s all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea. It took time to ‘condition’ the people so they would believe such a HOAX!

We haven’t even gotten to her political beliefs, which are just about as nutty.

bruner

That a few kooks exist and think they’re qualified for high office is never surprising. What’s troubling is that there are a significant number of people who will vote for her.

Why can’t we prosecute people for gun incompetence?

It’s another of those stories.

Det. Sgt. Troy Gilleylen of the Battle Creek Police Department said Babick and her 25-year-old boyfriend, whose name was not released, were in their upstairs bedroom at the time of the shooting, lying on their bed watching television. The boyfriend’s .45-caliber handgun was on the bed, after it had just been cleaned and loaded.

Babick got up from the bed to answer the telephone, the boyfriend told police, and when she got back in bed, the gun discharged, sending a bullet through her left rib cage.

She staggered downstairs and collapsed in the living room, where she died.

That’s tragic and terrible. But this is what also makes me furious.

The man told police she may have lain on top of the gun, or somehow hit it with her hand when she got back on the bed, causing it to discharge. Gilleylen said the distraught man has been “100 percent cooperative” with police and he has not been charged in the incident.

Wait. He’s lounging about with a loaded handgun in bed, and it goes off and kills a woman, and the police do nothing? Isn’t there a charge like negligent homicide that would be appropriate here?

This man is an idiot who killed another human being with stupidity. At the very least, he ought to have his privilege to carry guns around taken away, especially since there are two children living there. Do we have to wait until an ‘accident’ kills one of them?

Nah. As we all know, a gun-fondlers right to be a danger to others may not be infringed.

Poor Cliven

You should read all of the charges in Cliven Bundy’s indictment: assault, extortion, conspiracy, and more, and it’s all based on the 2014 standoff at his ranch. The FBI has been waiting patiently all this time to sweep him up and lock him away with an overwhelming list of crimes.

The other rather amusing thing about it all: Bundy, the guy with the great ranch and who has been grazing herds of cattle on federal land, who owes at least a million dollars to the federal government, has asked the federal government to provide him with a public defender. The freeloading never ends.

No Roosh

Do I need to mention Roosh, he of the books full of rape stories, he of the cunning plan to end rape by legalizing it on private property, he who announced a world-wide set of meetings of his fellow pick-up artists, he who cancelled all of those meetings as people around the world learned of them and laughed at him? Yes, I do, but I’ll be brief. He had a “press conference”, that started like so:

All right, so the world has gone insane in the past week. Why? Number one, I had organized meet ups around the world for men to enjoy a social happy hour to meet in private and talk about anything. Work, politics, girls, just to meet. Okay? Number two, a year ago I wrote an article How to Stop Rape. This article, to a 10-year-old, was obvious that I didn’t intend to legalize rape or cause harm against women. But starting on Sunday, a lot of you have lied by saying that I am a pro-rape advocate. He wants women to get hurt! And then the third thing, you said the meet ups are about rapists. They want to gather to learn how to rape. They are going to exchange tips. Some of you have called it a rape rally! What the hell is that? A rape rally? So because of that I’ve been all over the world in terms of the news. Over 100 articles have been written.

I think Dave Futrelle has Roosh’s history covered. Social meetups are not the problem. The problem is that Roosh brags about traveling around the world “banging” women who are drunk, unconscious, or otherwise unable to consent, he publishes recipes for tricking women into sex, he regularly disparages women, and yes, he published a bizarre article in which he suggested that rape would go away if the law disallowed charging men with rapes that occurred on their own private property — after all, the woman consented to entering his rape cave, therefore she consented to anything he might do to her there. So basically his “press conference” was all about lying about what he does.

But the operative sentence is that last one: Over 100 articles have been written. That’s exactly what he wanted. His plan was a success.

Therefore, I now declare Pharyngula to be a Roosh-Free Zone. I won’t be mentioning him in the future. I’m entering his name into the blacklist, so don’t even bother trying to mention him in the comments. Defending him will be grounds for an automatic ban.

You might be surprised at what is computable nowadays

Meet Oliver.

I’m a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher and programmer living slightly north of Castle Black. I study online communities, focusing on how people consume content, how user behaviour varies between desktop and mobile platforms, and how we can best understand systemic bias in peer-production communities.

He writes C++ and R code. His perspective sounds like the kind of contribution a lot of programming communities need, so I would think it valuable to keep him around. Unfortunately, he has resigned from the R community. He found something simple, obvious, and wrong, so he fixed it and submitted a report. Exactly as you’re supposed to do, right? Only this was the problem:

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I’m going to have to renegotiate my contract

I’m a full time professor of biology, with a Ph.D. I put in long hours teaching 2 or 3 courses a semester for a middle class income.

Marco Rubio dabbled in teaching college, too. He’s got a law degree. He had a part-time teaching appointment — one course — and worked less than 10 hours a week. He got paid more than I do, $69,000. Any adjuncts out there getting by on a few thousand dollars per course? You might want to be pissed off.

There’s more. As is typical for Rubio, he shirked. He missed 30% of the classes. I teach a course 3 days a week — that would be like skipping one of those classes every week. I teach two of those courses this term.

And get this: he wasn’t the sole instructor. It was co-taught with another guy, who did all the prep work.

“We had to prepare 28 new lectures for this new prep,” he said, noting that it usually takes him “3 to 4 hours to prepare a completely new lecture,” and that he’s actually taking time off of teaching next semester to prepare a few new courses for the year.

That’s about right — maybe even a bit on the low side. It’s a lot of work to put together a new course. Rubio didn’t have to do any of that.

And hey, look at this:

And though Rubio helped prepare the tests for the class, Moreno said during the deposition, “I didn’t let him do any of the grading,” joking that, “he’s still a politician, and I was afraid he was going to give everyone A’s!”

He. Didn’t. Have. To. Do. Any. Of. The. Grading. I would be so happy if I didn’t have to do any grading. That’s what I’m going to be booked up doing this weekend.

“How do we justify paying him as much as we do to teach one course?” asked Amy Paul-Ward, an associate professor in the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences, according to the FIU student paper. “I know there are qualified adjuncts in our school who we have trouble paying $3,000 to teach a course.”

And those adjuncts would be expected to prepare the content of the course, show up for every lecture, teach it by themselves, and do all the grading.

Hey, if I became a Republican would I get a raise and a reduction in work load? Maybe not as much as Rubio got — I wouldn’t want to be greedy — but it seems only fair.

Those troublesome, shaky X chromosomes!

It’s easy to find lists of dumb things creationists say, and I’m familiar with that lot, but here’s a fun new time-waster: Things Anti-Vaxxers Say. Here’s a beautiful example of something I’ve rarely seen so clearly stated: they get the facts totally wrong, actually the reverse of the actual situation, but nope, that doesn’t stop them from inventing a bogus rationalization around them.

You can do your own research but it comes down to chromosomes -- the X chromosome is shaky, and boys have two of them. So they are quite literally twice as likely as girls to be adversely affected by genetic and environmental factors that can lead to the development of autism -- they are at twice the risk, purely because of their gender alone.

You can do your own research but it comes down to chromosomes — the X chromosome is shaky, and boys have two of them. So they are quite literally twice as likely as girls to be adversely affected by genetic and environmental factors that can lead to the development of autism — they are at twice the risk, purely because of their gender alone.

Uh-oh. I have 22 other chromosomes besides my sex chromosomes (I’ve actually seen them!), and…they’re all in pairs. I’m doomed.

But wait! I only have one X chromosome! I’m saved by the reduction in its pernicious influence!

Stop pooping! You’re killing sentient beings!

bacteria

In a recent quack conference, Deepak Chopra did his usual thing: taking new science that he understands poorly and stuffing it full of magic bogosity.

According to Chopra, that pesky inflamed microbiome is sentient. The genome, microbiome and epigenome, which the author collectively calls the “super gene,” are referenced throughout the interview. His book, Super Genes: The Key to Health and Well-Being, was published last year.

Oh, no! Every time I use the bathroom, I am slaughtering billions of sentient beings? I’m going to have to stop pooping.

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