I await the angry letters in his defense

Yet another sorry story of a prestigious man with a disgusting habit.

John Kearsley, the director of radiation oncology at St George Hospital and conjoint professor of medicine at the University of NSW, gave depressant drugs known as benzodiazepines to the 32-year-old and touched her inappropriately.

That’s the sanitized, softened-down version of what he did — you’d have to read the whole thing to get the details.

But look (he says, sarcastically), this is a MAN who dedicated his LIFE to FIGHTING CANCER … I’m sure someone somewhere would like to argue that we ought to cut him a little slack, and allow him to occasionally slip a mickey to women half his age and drag them into bed for a nice fondling. Won’t medicine grind to a halt if we don’t?

Less sarcastically, I wonder how one gets to be 63 years old, at the top of their profession, director of a major subdivision of a hospital, and still think one can get away with drugging women for sex. These kinds of behaviors don’t just suddenly manifest in a one time accident — I bet he has a long history of these or lesser transgressions, yet no one had qualms about promoting him ever upwards.

Unproportional! Vicious! Hypocritical! Hysterical!

RIPscience

There’s a letter going around, in support of Geoff Marcy. If you’d rather not read it, just see panels 4 and 5 of this cartoon.

Dear Colleagues,

Due to my outrage concerning the disgusting attack of the (mostly) US1 astronomical community against Geoff Marcy, and the apparent lack of any counter movement against this madness, I would like to draw your attention to the danger of remaining silent in this situation.

What we can gather from the newspapers and web sites discussing the issue, it is clear that the reaction of the community was unproportional, vicious, hypocritical and hysterical2. The unleashed hate3, clearly blowing out of proportion the weight of his behavior and leaving wide open space to any further accusation against anybody showing some level of casual interaction4 and furthermore, endanger normal and friendly contacts in the community and in the society, as a whole. I hope you recognize the great danger of accepting the total destruction of someone’s undeniable contribution to science5 because of the hypocritical attitude the community seems to accept these days.

Considering the pace of events, I think that the clock is ticking very quickly. If the mature and free-thinking part of the community does not act right now, I am sure that the game ends very quickly, and those who initiated this dirty, unethical and disgraceful attack6, will win. Today Geoff, tomorrow you or me.7

Sincerely,

Geza Kovacs, DSc
Konkoly Observatory

p.s.: You are free to circulate this letter to anybody you think might be willing to act. This letter has been sent also to other researchers.

1I’ve seen this same weird displacement activity among atheists, too. It’s just Americans who are too sensitive. I have never heard Americans accused of “sensitivity” in any other context. Either there is no sexism in Europe, or European men are especially oblivious.

2Speaking of unproportional, vicious, hypocritical and hysterical, isn’t the accusation that people who are unhappy with the lack of consequences to Marcy kind of unproportional, vicious, hypocritical and hysterical?

3Ditto. I haven’t seen any expressions of hate at all — mostly regret, dismay, and anger at both the behavior and the timidity of UCB.

4Ahem. Casual interaction? An official investigation at Berkeley found:

After a six-month investigation, Geoff Marcy — a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate — was found to have violated campus sexual harassment policies between 2001 and 2010. Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.

I just got out of lab with my cell biology students. I managed to help them do measurements of enzyme reaction rates with no massages, kisses, or groping. I would not call such activities casual interaction.

5Marcy’s contributions to science have not been destroyed. Neither has Marcy’s career.

If we’re going to talk about destruction, how about the careers of the women who fled astronomy because of the disrespect, or how about their potential contributions to science?

6Again, official, formal investigation by the university in response to a decade of bad behavior by Marcy, with at least four clear victims. If I had to name who was dirty, unethical, and disgraceful, it would be someone whose name begins with “G” and ends with “eoff Marcy”.

7It might be you tomorrow if you are massaging, kissing, or groping your students. It might also be you tomorrow if you’re in the habit of robbing banks; that you might be thrown in prison for that crime if you were to rob a bank is not an argument that bank robbers need to be treated leniently.

At any rate, Kovacs was too late. Marcy has resigned.

I guess all Kovacs can do now is help him land a new position somewhere less concerned about Dr Handsy fondling the undergrads, and more enthused about getting grants and fame. I’m sure there will be no shortage of positions available, and may Cthulhu have mercy on the students8 at his next institution.

8Cthulhu will show no mercy.

Others are coming forward. Would you believe his bad behavior goes back 30 years? Of course you would.

His inappropriate behaviour goes back a good thirty years, when he was teaching at San Francisco State University.

This is where I met him in 1985 when we both worked in the Physics and Astronomy Department while I was a Master’s student and a lecturer. It was well known that he had intimate relationships with several of his female students. But it is not the only aspect where I felt Marcy’s ethics were questionable.

In 1987, Marcy’s colleague in the search for exoplanets realized that he had handed her a revised copy of their joint grant proposal. On the copy Marcy had given her, both their names appeared, his as main investigator and hers, as co-investigator. But Marcy’s official copy, the one he had submitted to the funding agency, bore only his name.

She reported this to the department head, who fired her on the spot. Marcy was the rising star of his department. She then filed a formal complaint for professional misconduct against Marcy. But she was unable to recover her position and she left the field of astronomy. Following these events, a few people tried to draw the University’s attention to Geoff Marcy’s inappropriate behaviour with his female students.

Guess what the university did?

They had t-shirts made!

How odd. The cultists who believe the world will end today had bright yellow t-shirts and hats, and professionally printed signs, and have been waving them around to announce their imminent demise. That seems like strange behavior if you really believe the entire world will be annihilated. It’s almost as if they’re less interested in their assumed facts, and more interested in advertising their dogma.

worldend

Also, the person on the right seems lacking in confidence: The End of the World, question mark? If the world does actually end today, they’re going to be roasting in hell for their lack of faith, which means they lose whether the world ends or not.

His underwear carried dark portents

I just liked that line, from this story about Jim Bakker claiming his choice of underwear color was a sign from his god. Wait, Jim Bakker is still alive, and still working as a televangelist? That’s more a portent than his underwear, I fear.

He was claiming that because his underwear was black, the world was going to end in September. It is now October, of course, so it’s obvious that his underwear is a false prophet, and must die.

There seems to be a lot of end-of-the-world nonsense going around. Last month’s eclipse was also supposed to be a portent of apocalypse. It fizzled. Now some guy is claiming the world is going to end tomorrow.

I’m not worried yet. I’ll tell you tomorrow what color underwear I’m wearing, and then maybe it will be time to panic.

Another day, another shooting

This one is at Umpqua College in Roseburg, Oregon. Ten people are dead.

I feel cynicism and despair. Nothing will be done. We are targets in the sights of the NRA, and there will be the usual excuses from armed lunatics.

More gun control NOW.

I’ve just heard on the evening news that the shooter was “mentally ill” — I’ve heard this repeatedly now. I’m going to demand some consistency.

If this guy was so sick in the head that he should have been institutionalized before he committed this crime, then we need to round up all the sick fucks on 4chan and get them medicated right now. If you’re not willing to do that, if it is too much to label a huge fraction of the privileged male population mentally ill, then stop claiming somebody who is actually representative of a common attitude is diseased.

How nice! An invitation from iERA

So polite, and they even spell my name correctly! And offer me a free weekend in London!

Dear PZ Myers

Hope you are well. As part of our ethos we would like to extend our hand of friendship to leading intellectual figures that hold views contrary to our own. With this spirit we would like to invite you to London for a dialogue on Islam and Atheism. Please let us know if you are available on any 3 weekends between January and March.

We will cover any associated costs of your travel, accommodation etc. We hope you accept our offer for a fruitful dialogue. Here is an example of one our past events:

Regards

Subboor

Now I have a dilemma, and will leave it to my readers to help me decide how to respond.

Is the correct answer “No” or “Hell no!”?

(In case you don’t know what the iERA is, here’s one helpful explanation.)

I’m filing this one away as an example of one of the most dishonest graphs ever

Holy crap. Take a look at this monstrosity that was shown in a congressional committee by Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz to show the need to defund Planned Parenthood. It’s appalling. In my universe, there would be guards with meathooks who would have dragged Chaffetz out of the room, he would be cashiered out of office, and all of his votes would be retroactively nullified.

badgraph

That’s simply evil.

[Read more…]

Rush Limbaugh must be desperate to emulate Alex Jones

Someone is unhappy that scientists have found water on Mars. It’s Rush Limbaugh. As he says, he’s always right, and he has seen the truth.

…this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow going to find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda.

Yep, he caught us. It’s entirely true. Leftists are planning to use facts, science, and evidence to promote a reality-based agenda.

The evolution of the Ahmed Mohamed story

The shifting rationales in the story of the Texas kid who brought a jury-rigged digital clock have been amazing. There’s been a steady progression of new excuses brought up to excuse throwing him in jail.

Early on, it was that it was simply precaution — they had standard procedures for dealing with potential threats. That’s patent nonsense. A standard response to a potential bomb would not involve throwing the “bomb” into the police car with the “bomb maker”. The school and the police knew it wasn’t a bomb from the beginning.

Then the complaint was that he didn’t properly explain what the device was. Simply not true: he said over and over precisely what it was, and all it was: it was a clock. Demanding that he say that it was something more when it wasn’t is absurd.

Then the yahoos all came out of the closet and said it sure doesn’t look like no clock to me. Yep. It was a collection of components strung together with wires, it was ugly and not too practical, but functionally, all it was was a clock. Sorry you don’t know much about electronics.

Then there were the detailed deconstructions of the clock, from the few pictures we have of it. This bit came from here, that bit came from there, here’s a dangling wire that has no purpose, there’s a cable that could be used to tap into the signal output from the clock. A terrorist could use this to set off a bomb! Sure. But they could also buy a $5 travel alarm from Wal-Mart even more easily to do the same thing. Can we arrest Wal-Mart now?

Then there were the nay-sayers: the kid was lying. He didn’t invent anything. This is true: a lot of us tinkered with old electronic components when we were his age, and assembled basic gadgets. I built a crystal radio, and made electric motors (looping those thin copper wires around and around was tedious). There was nothing revolutionary and lot that was clumsy in the clock. He disassembled and reassembled a Radio Shack digital gadget, nothing more. But so what? He’s 14! It’s excellent that he’s curious and is experimenting with technology, and is also enthused about it. That’s how scientists and engineers get started.

And now, at last, that lunatic Sarah Palin weighs in:

Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun, Palin rambled. Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school’s lot later that day. Kids humiliated and intimidated for innocent actions like those real examples are often marked the rest of their lives and made to feel really rotten. Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade “clock” that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told “if you see something, say something!”) gets invited to the White House.

I thought we’d reached Peak Paranoia with Palin, until I read the comments on her post.

Guys, can’t you see between the lines? This was nothing less then a dry run, to test school security, had no one noticed it, next time, it would be the real thing

This little Muzzie was practicing his bomb making skills not “inventing a clock”.

It was a dry run to see how far they could get. They use their kids to bomb all the time in their country. They don’t care if their child dies in the process.

So now the demented right wing is convinced that Ahmed was actually planning to make a suicide attack on the school.

I’d like to believe we’ve reached the limit on this evolving set of excuses, but I’m not going to shortchange the astonishing imaginations of the American people.

Milo Yiannopoulos needs pizza and a wank

bot

Milo’s up to the same old sexist nonsense again — what a hack. His latest is a bit of contrived outrage about sexbots. He’s for ’em. He somehow thinks liberal SJW’s are going to suppress the technology, as if we care. I think he was so upset that he drank until he couldn’t see straight and then started typing.

Who, or what, men have sex with is the basis of our civilisation. It is the driving force behind our greatest accomplishments. Men don’t compete for abstract pleasure: they compete to bag the best mate. The internet, the pyramids and the moon landings would not exist were it not for man’s desire to have sex with woman.

Keep in mind that this was written by an openly gay man. He does not really believe that aspiring to sex with a woman is the basis of our civilisation or the driving force behind our greatest accomplishments (oh, and by the way — I read the hyperbole and the padded prose of first year students, and they aren’t this bad). He’s just pandering to his audience of juvenile MRAs and angry people who are pissed off that there are women in video games.

[Read more…]