The right wing’s new/old strategy for dealing with an uncomfortable reality

Declare that they are smarter than scientists. Simple!

George Will and Charles Krauthammer are right wing hacks who have an air of cultivated superciliousness that passes for intelligence in the smugly self-serving atmosphere of the Sunday morning talk shows…but they have no other talent or ability to justify their existence. The two got together on Fox News to pontificate on the usual conspiracy theories about how scientists are all lying. Here’s Will:

Now, there is, as Charles says, the policy question is how much wealth do we want to spend directly or in lost production in order to have no discernible measurable effect on the climate? People say, well, what about this report? There is a sociology of science. Scientists are not saints in white laboratory smocks. They have got interests like everybody else. If you want a tenure-track position in academia, don’t question the reigning orthodoxy on climate change. If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don’t question its orthodoxy. If you want to get along with your peers, conform to peer pressure. This is what’s happening.

Krauthammer doubles down by claiming that all of science is subjective and simply made up by the eggheads.

99 percent of physicists convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I’m not impressed by numbers. I’m not impressed by consensus. When I was a psychiatrist, I participated in consensus conferences on how to define depression and mania. These are things that people negotiate in the way you would negotiate a bill, because the science is unstable, because in the case of climate, the models are changeable, and because climate is so complicated.

And then he declares that the conclusions of science are equivalent to superstition.

And you always see that no matter what happens, whether it’s a flood or it’s a drought, whether it’s one — it’s warming or cooling, it’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with the pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament. It’s in the rain dance of the Native Americans. If you sin, the skies will not cooperate. This is quite superstitious, and I’m waiting for science which doesn’t declare itself definitive but is otherwise convincing.

Do either of these guys have any knowledge of how science actually works? No. That doesn’t stop pundits from declaring it all invalid when it produces answers different from their ideological presuppositions, though. Isn’t it nice that the news media has become a haven for propagandists? It pays them a cushy salary and bolsters their prestige so they can go on air every week and engage in that exercise in projection in which they declare scientists to be scum-sucking shills who’ll say anything for money.

And now watch Marco Rubio. Oh, he’s pandering to the Tea Bagger vote.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asserted recently that there was nothing that humans could do to stop climate change because it was not caused by humans, and that any new laws would only destroy our economy.

In an interview that aired on Sunday, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked the Florida Republican if he agreed with scientists who said that two of the cities in his state were being threatened by climate change.

I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there — including scientists — that somehow, there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate, Rubio insisted. Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research, and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity.

Don’t try to tell me these frauds aren’t science deniers.

How to drive a Brit crazy

It turns out to be really easy. All it takes is five little words.

“‘Cunt’ is a sexist slur.”

Ophelia is discovering this.

Maki Naro posted this little comment on twitter.

I retweeted it, and then the replies came flooding in. The defenses are hilarious, irrational, and indignant. It’s incredibly common to see people protest that it’s a perfectly acceptable word; everyone says it in England; it doesn’t have any sexual connotations at all, because apparently, people in the UK are so stupid that they don’t remember that it’s a word that refers to the female genitalia. The Argument from Regional Ubiquity simply doesn’t work — would we accept that Southerners get a free pass on calling people “nigger” because everyone down there is rednecked cracker, so it’s OK?

Other common arguments: it can’t be sexist, because we mostly call men “cunts” to insult them. Yeah, there’s nothing misogynist at all about thinking the most degrading thing you can call a man is to refer to him as a woman’s private parts.

Another one: So then is calling someone a “dick” sexist, too? Yes. We shouldn’t do that. And since when does “you said a bad word!” mean you get a free pass to use a different bad word?

Maki has been making his replies to these idiots in cartoon form.

There have been silly attempts to redefine “cunt” to strip it of all sexual connotations. Sorry, it’s still got them.

Another common excuse: “well, I don’t mean to be sexist, so it’s OK.”

I’ve also been amused by the condescending criticisms: we Americans don’t know how to swear properly, or it’s supposed to be insulting, that’s why it’s a bad word.

Right. Because the best way to hurt an individuals feelings is to demean half the population of the planet.

I’ve also been impressed by how damned insistent some people have become over this — they’re practically frothing in their insistence that it’s not sexist at all in their demand that it’s perfectly legitimate to use women’s vulvae as the most disgusting and contemptible thing in the world. They do go on and on. So I won’t. It’s still a prohibited usage here. Swear all you want, but racist/sexist smears are examples of bigotry and will not be tolerated.

I think Rob Ford must be my fault

Because, as we all know, I have so much influence on the Canadian electorate, and I keep making fun of Canada’s reputation for niceness, so they probably elected him just to spite me.

The latest account of Ford’s hijinks occurred right after his notorious softball interview with Jimmy Kimmel.

Ford is behind the wheel and hammered. One constituent he calls that night recalls Ford slurring his words.

The Star has heard audio of Ford and Bellissimo talking and both are slurring. (The Star has interviewed people who say it is nothing for Ford to down a 40-ouncer of vodka. The man who recorded the audio of Ford at Sully Gorman’s bar two weeks ago told the Star Ford’s ability to drink shots of tequila is “incredible.”)

Ford has two ways of communicating as he drives — his cellular phone and his Onstar device, a General Motors product that acts as a cellphone. During one call as he drives that night, Ford is recorded as saying the following about Jews, blacks and Italians:

“Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every f—ing k–e, n—-r, f—ing w-p, d-go, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”

On a roll, Ford continues to spew invective that may be the worst published yet. At one point he makes a rude comment about his mother.

It goes on. It gets worse.

Wait…maybe it’s not my fault. We can blame Jimmy Kimmel!

For my part, if it will help, I’ll try in the future to avoid characterizing Canada as Mr Rogers’ neighborhood in real life, and try to remind everyone that the nation has its share of slimy assholes. For your part, Canada, could you at least get Ford off the road? Coked up drunk jerks shouldn’t be driving.

They can be mayor of Toronto, though.

The font of creationist idiocy continues to gush

I will say this for our latest creationist visitor, medic0506: he’s persistent. His foolishness has bloated up another thread to over 1200 comments, so I’m starting the conversation anew with this post.

One reason it’s going on and on is that he is full of shit and refuses to recognize that his ideas are ridiculous. He’s still babbling about the nature of light; if it’s bright enough, light is instantly teleported to your eye. He has some very curious explanations for how telescopes work. In response to a comment that if light behaved as he says it does, you wouldn’t be able to see more stars with a telescope than with the naked eye, he says:

On the contrary, if you think that through, you have it backwards. A telescope makes no sense under your theory of light travel, and can only work if my ideas or something very similar is true.

Under your theory, starlight has to physically travel and c remains a constant, telescopes should not be able to change any part of the equation. Light photons still have to reach all the way to earth and physically enter your eye. Likewise they also have to physically reach the earth in order to enter the telescope lens. Telescopes cannot in any way change the speed or distance in the equation and thus would become a useless middle-man.

Telescopes magnify, and magnification can only work if vision is the primary active mechanism, and works from the ground up.

It’s rather obvious he doesn’t have the slightest idea how light behaves or how telescopes work. C is not constant — it varies with the medium. We can use this property to refract light with a lens, or reflect it with a mirror, changing the direction. Telescopes are light collectors that gather photons falling on a large surface area and focus them on a smaller point. We design telescopes — light has mathematical properties that are accurately described by theories that are a few hundred years old — and modeling lenses on the assumption that eyes actively emit some kind of mysterious sensory rays, or whatever the hell he’s trying to suggest, doesn’t work and makes no sense at all.

And then, on top of the godawful ignorance, there’s his incredible arrogance.

…I have done my homework over the past couple years, and continue to do so. I have been researching information from both sides. I’d be willing to bet that I’ve read at least as many, if not more, scholarly articles from secular research journals, than many of the people on this site. Most of the information that people here post is old hat to me, and after researching the actual scientific arguments, links like Wikipedia and talkorigins aren’t the least bit helpful in making the case for evolution.

Without having done the amount of research that I have, I could not be as convinced as I am that it is false. It is that research that shows me that this theory should have been deemed falsified, and scrapped long ago. Every basic tenet of the theory has been falsified, or proven not to be sufficient to show what evolutionists claim that it shows. All anti-evolutionists know that to be true, whether they are creationists or not. It’s no longer a matter of trying to falsify the theory, that’s done, it’s a matter of persuading people to accept what the evidence shows. Proof and persuasion are two different things.

My god. This is a guy who still believes that visual perception is a product of extramission, claiming that he is a scholar of science, and that evolutionary theory has been falsified by the scientific literature. The man is astonishingly full of bullshit, and completely divorced from reality.

I’m happy to have him going on and on here, though: what a wonderful demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of creationists.

As has been explained in the comments, C is a constant; it’s the propagation of light through media that is variable.

The NRA version of play time

A reckless dumbass gun-fondling idiot named Chad Olm was entertaining his nephew. To reckless dumbass gun-fondling idiots, “entertainment” means showing off your gun collection and pointing weapons at children.

After letting the boys handle three handguns — a .357 Magnum revolver, a .22 revolver and a 9 mm — he then pulled out a Glock 27 .40-caliber handgun that was equipped with a laser sight.

Olm stated that he did not check to see if there was a round in the chamber, but said that the handgun did not have a magazine in it. Olm said that he pointed the laser at the walls and ceiling. And then he pointed it at his nephew.

“Look, you have a red dot on your forehead,” Olm recalled one of the boys saying.

Olm said that when the nephew reached out for the gun, he pulled the trigger. A single bullet struck the child above the eye, causing him to start bleeding and fall over.

Eleven years old, and he got his brains blown out because his uncle was a gun-fondling fuckhead.

We have received a creationist challenge!

It’s about the physics of light. This is coming from a guy who insists that if light is sufficiently bright, it can ignore the speed of light — so starlight blitzes instantly across multiple light years. He has a whole cacophony of bizarre ideas about how light works, but that doesn’t stop him from challenging evilutionists with this challenging challenge.

If your ideas about light travel are true, you should be able to catch some of these photons from a distant star of your choosing, and ship them to me with a note telling me which star they’re from. Once I open the container, those photons jump into my eyes, and I see your star, I will come on to Pharyngula AND DDO, publicly admit my ignorance on light travel, and issue an apology, as well as reimburse you for any shipping costs.

Isn’t the announcement of that challenge sufficient evidence that he’s ignorant of how light travels?

But don’t worry, he immediately backs up his challenge with a declaration that any statement that notes he has made a very stupid assumption is an attempt to chicken out.

Any takers, or are you guys just going to grumble about how ignorant the challenge is and make excuses for why it’s not possible to meet the challenge?? That seems to be the MO here for many of you, or the few of you and your puppet accounts, whichever the case may be.

Gosh, creationist, how about if you take a box into church and have the congregation pray into it, so that when I open it, Jesus pops out? Isn’t that what your religion preaches?

Or are you going to grumble now about how ignorant I am of religion as an excuse to not meet my challenge?

You want your starlight in a box, I WANT MY JESUS IN A BOX.

South Dakotans are obsessed with anal sex

I always suspected as much — they’re a bit strange over there, 40 miles to my west. Steve Hickey, one of those state legislators in Sioux Falls (and a Republican, of course) was compelled to write a long screed ranting about the public health dangers of gay sex by this event:

Hickey told TPM on Wednesday he was driven to write the letter after Nancy Robrahn and Jennie Rosenkranz, a lesbian couple from Rapid City, S.D., announced their intention to become the first state residents to challenge its gay marriage ban. The couple was married on Saturday in Minnesota in a wedding that was officiated by Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, setting the stage for South Dakota to become the 29th with a marriage equality court case.

Two lesbians getting married drove him to think horrible thoughts about anal sex. That doesn’t even make sense. If he’s going to rant about the public health risks of sex, he ought to know that it is lesbians who have the safest sex lives.

Here’s his wretched letter in full. The comments are full of praise for his brave stance.

A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck

Rep. Steve Hickey, District 9, Sioux Falls

Consider this an open letter to the medical and psychological communities in South Dakota. The subject is homosexuality, which is about to be a front-page topic for the next few years in our state. I’m asking the doctors who practice in our state, is the science really settled on this issue or is it more the case that you feel silenced and intimidated?

Certainly there are board-certified doctors in our state who will attest to what seems self-evident to so many: gay sex is not good for the body or mind. Pardon a crude comparison but regarding men with men, we are talking about a one-way alley meant only for the garbage truck to go down. Frankly, I’d question the judgment of doctor who says it’s all fine.

South Dakota docs, it’s time for you to come out of the closet and give your professional opinion on this matter like you capably and responsibly do on all the others. Somehow the message we are presently getting from the medical community is that eating at McDonalds will kill us but the gay lifestyle has no side effects. Truth be told it seems self-evident the list of side effects would read far longer than anything we hear on a Cialis commercial.

If many are indeed wearying of our religious community leading on these morality issues, and believe also those of us in the legislature should butt out too, it’s time for the medical community in our state to be honest with us. If you don’t speak up, this issue will be decided by five unelected judges on the Supreme Court regardless of what states like ours have decided by public vote.

This indeed is a matter of being on the wrong side of history considering that historically, homosexuality has been a notable marker of the downfall of past civilizations, not their rise. It’s not hate for a physician to speak up about something that is harmful to human health. It is not unloving to tell people you don’t have to have sex with and marry someone to love and be loved by them. As one who performs marriages and counsels couples as part of my professional life, marriage is the last thing I’d recommend to someone who simply wants to be loved and legitimized. What do other health care and mental health professionals in our state really think?

The South Dakota High School Activities Association is presently considering changing the rules to accommodate transgender kids. Forty-one percent of those who struggle with Gender Dysphoria attempt suicide, that’s twenty-five times the rate of the general population– certainly tragic and urgent but not a word from the medical and psychological communities? So really, we are letting our basketball coaches sort it out while ACLU lawyers look carefully over their shoulders!?

Letting boys play girl sports is not the starting place to fix the suicide problem or the very real daily struggle these students face dealing with something they have been handed in life. Society is broken and people have broken identities. Is it really best for us to break down the one remaining thing that has been working in society to try to fix the broken in our midst? And does it really even do that, or does it merely put them in more places exposing them to additional painful ostracization all the while transferring serious anxieties to other innocent and impressionable ones in those locker rooms? We need to have compassion but there are unintended consequences to consider too.

Before we let lawyers and judges decide this for our state and override the will of the people in the 2006 election, I issue a call to the medical and psychological communities and associations to weigh in publicly and timely on the matter of homosexuality and the human body, psyche and family, particular kids.

I thought his ignorance and his fascination with one specific sex act was amusing, until I read the part where this asshole has the gall to use transgender people’s suicide statistics as a blunt instrument to imply there’s something wrong with them, rather than with the poisonous haters like him who make life miserable for them. There is something deeply wrong with society, and it’s represented by the smug Steve Hickeys of the world, not the tortured kids in our schools who are bullied by the bigots.

But otherwise, he’s picking the wrong target. If anal sex repulses him, he shouldn’t do it, but he should also think about who is doing it. Anal sex is the least common sexual activity between gay men — oral sex and mutual masturbation are much more common. Meanwhile, among the majority heterosexual population, about 25% have had anal sex at least once, and 10% do it regularly. If you’re looking for the common link in anal sex, it isn’t homosexuality: it’s the possession of a penis.

I would urge Mr Hickey to rewrite his screed to instead demand that doctors come out of the closet and speak out on the self-evident health risks of having sex with someone who has a penis.

He could also throw in something about how his religion venerates vaginas that are either untainted by the intrusion of a penis, and/or are one way exits for babies. He should specifically mention the Virgin Mary as the perfect example of how god intends that that pathway is best as a one-way street.

Although, do you really believe Mr Hickey is at all motivated by his concerns for the health of his gay constituents? I don’t think so.

James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer!

When we bought our house, it came with a disconnected, nonfunctional hot tub. It’s still here, sitting unused in our back yard, because having a mere Ph.D. in biology means that I don’t know how to fix it, and also, I don’t get paid enough to afford to have it fixed by a competent hot tub expert. And thus am I made to realize that I am a failure. I shouldn’t have wasted effort on that lowly science degree; instead, I should have learned how to install hot tubs.

Because hot tub experts are wizards, masters of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time.

I have been reading the works of James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer, who is a real scientist. He said so.

I am a real scientist for over 47 years. I make my living producing functional equipment that always works as designed because I don’t use any pseudo science. I hate pseudo science religious crap in academia.

He says so frequently.

Please check out my science blog. It is based on over 47 years of using the scientific method to solve problems and to seek to find what is really true.

Here is where I do most of my recent research. I have read over 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics.

I don’t know which science blog to check out, though, since he didn’t provide a link. He has several!

  • Hot Tubs And Spas Blog
  • Education Literacy and Science
  • Science, Religion, Politics What’s More Important?
  • Evolution Science Clarity

41,000 papers is a lot. In 47 years, that’s 2 or 3 papers a day, which is about what I read. It’s hard work reading a science paper with comprehension, so his dedication to biology may be why his hot tub business has some bitter complaints, and why his brother thinks he’s a sleazy con artist. Mastery of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time makes demands on one’s life; sacrifices must be made. This is another mark of my failure; I’m not guilty of bad business practices, and I haven’t alienated either of my brothers yet. I don’t think; maybe I’ll have to ask when I see them next month.

So I looked up Arjuna’s latest science article to learn wisdom and discover the deep secrets of the Hot Tub Masters. In this, he asserts that there is not and never has been a beneficial mutation. His chosen example? The lactose tolerance mutation, because while it may be beneficial, it couldn’t possibly have happened.

The most ridiculous of this is the lactose tolerance mutation. First of all making lactase is made in a gene that is 49,335 base pairs for just one of the THREE lactase genes. This is the most common gene found in lactose intolerance.

First rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a big number. Numbers are sciencey, and big ones are hard, and 49,335 sounds scary. How could it be? 49,355 whatevers must be impossible!

According to the article claiming that this was some great event creating this new gene. It turns out that it is only 2 base pares were changed to cause this gene to function. Where did the other totally designed 49332 BP come from that were aligned perfectly and just needed two base pares to change?

Second rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a small number. We must trivialize any accomplishment. Only 2 out of that intimidating 49,355? That can’t possibly matter. The scientists will splutter, “but single nucleotide changes can distort the whole shape of a molecule, or disrupt a biochemically active site; and in this case, the modification is to a cis regulatory element which modifies expression, not the sequence of the enzyme”, but you can ignore them, because of the obvious fact that 2 is a lot less than 49,355.

Third rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You are not bounded by any rules. Even though you’re making a strangely irrelevant argument from arithmetic, you can say that 49355 – 2 = 49332, and no one will care. Also, spelling is an oppressive tool of those pinheads in academia.

Fourth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You can read 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics and still not understand basic biology, and that’s OK. The thousands of bases in a gene must be aligned perfectly in your head, whatever that means, and never mind that that is not a rule in reality.

Hot Tub Masters are free spirits. Truth is whatever they say it is.

It was a pre-existing gene from ancient ancestors prior to this finding and they found a group where it was turned off and then a group where they drank milk where it was functioning. The two base pairs were not mutated from disease in the functioning gene and in the malfunctioning gene it was and is a disease.

Fifth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Consistency be damned. You can simultaneously announce that there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation, and that groups without the mutation are diseased (surprise, lactose intolerant individuals! You are afflicted with a disease!) and that groups that have the mutation are not diseased. And that it wasn’t a mutation anyway.

In the 2.5 million DNA studies there are no cases of any living or recently extinct (6000 yrs on human studies) showing even one verifiable beneficial mutation.

Not one of the PhD’s have been able to produce one. Therefore, there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation. It is fantasy.

But…but James! You’ve only read 41,000 of the 2.5 million studies!

And I am so confused. The Hot Tub Master plainly said that the 2 nucleotide variation was the difference between diseased and not diseased. Even in his own head it’s clearly beneficial to carry that trait.

We know that Evolutionists believe that “duplication” mutations are the “power behind evolution”. But even a base pair duplication causes disease or deformity because it destroys the original proteins construction with extra proteins that cannot be integrated.

Well, a single base pair duplication would be a frame shift mutation, so it certainly would mess up the structure of the protein. But we’re talking about segmental duplications, where a complete copy of the original gene is left intact and a duplicate is made elsewhere.

I don’t even understand what he’s talking about when he says a single base duplication creates extra proteins that cannot be integrated. That makes no sense. It’s almost as if he has no understanding of molecular biology and genetics at all.

But that cannot be! He’s an International Man of Mystery Spa Design Engineer!

They cannot be integrated because the HOX genes have to place them into the correct use and the HOX genes are master programmed for a specific master plan of the organism.

Then they cannot be recognized by the immune system and so the immune system takes the only messed up proteins and attacks them. Every mutation destroys the recognition of both the HOX to use them and the immune system to destroy them as foreign attack cells, that our immune system does not recognize.

I…what? I know a little bit about HOX genes; they don’t control every little thing, every gene in every cell. They set up domains with specific body plan identities in early development. Most genes don’t interact with HOX genes at all, so it’s a little peculiar to claim they limit everything — I’m beginning to think the Hot Tub Master memorized a few buzz words and phrases and is plastering them all over his cartoonish and wrong vision of how gene regulation works.

As for his immune system argument — does he know nothing about how adaptive immunity works? How self/non-self recognition is a product of selection?

James Arjuna is bringing discredit to the noble traditions of the Hot Tub Masters. I suspect that he is not a True Hot Tub Master™, and I’m going to have to look farther for a master of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time. I also think my broken hot tub is going to continue to languish in my back yard, because if his knowledge of hot tubs is as sound as his knowledge of biology, I wouldn’t want him to come near it.

I know I sure can’t do anything about it. I know nothing about hot tubs. Nothing at all.