Your mission this morning

Read this long essay, An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Or don’t. Some of you might think it’s just a little too believable, and would rather not suffer through the misery.

Here’s the short version to help you decide. A young woman with a troubled history is attacked in her apartment one night. She’s in shock. She reports the crime to the police. The police pick at little discrepancies in her story, pressure her to recant. Full of self-doubt and stress, she does…she wonders if maybe she dreamt it all. The police drop the case, and then decide to prosecute her for wasting their time.

Later, in another state, more diligent police officers track down and ultimately arrest a serial rapist. In his room, they find his “trophies” — he collects underwear and takes photos of his bound and terrorized victims. And there in his collection, they find a photo of a young woman they don’t recognize.

Guess who?

It’s a terrible story of gaslighting and a criminal justice system that would rather sweep crimes against women under a rather large and strangely lumpy rug. This is the story of false rape accusations a lot of people would rather you didn’t hear.

Oh, crap, another YouTube misogynist

I was challenged to watch an anti-feminist video on youtube! My challenger told me he got 16 minutes in before he “couldn’t stomach any more.” I told myself I was made of sterner stuff than that, and the challenge was accepted.

I only got through the first 8 minutes before gagging and having to stop. I am weak. It’s an especially dismal showing because there is almost no content in this video: it’s a guy posturing and sneering through a crudely animated puppet of an armored helmet, and most of it seems to be pointless posing and talking with a funny voice.

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Amazing what you can accomplish with misleading chart design!

That’s a direct quote from Minnesota’s own Powerline Blog, and I don’t think they were aware of the irony. I think they think they were referring to this chart, which demonstrates the correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature change over the last century or so.

120715_chart_120315_co2

Thats actually good chart design: axes are appropriate, a lot of data is packed into it very cleanly, and you can see the relationships clearly. Powerline doesn’t like that.

Looks pretty persuasive, doesn’t it? The casual observer would think that we are looking at record levels of CO2–which is not a pollutant, but rather makes like on Earth possible–and record high temperatures. How can anyone dispute the causal connection?

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Elon Musk is a terrible human being

elon-musk-mars-plan

He’s very concerned about World War III…but not because of the horrific loss of life or the destruction of civilization, but because it might set back plans to colonize Mars. Therefore, we have to hurry up and get humankind into space before we blow ourselves up.

I don’t think we can discount the possibility of a third World War. You know, in 1912 they were proclaiming a new age of peace and prosperity, saying that it was a golden age, war was over. And then you had World War I followed by World War II followed by the Cold War. So I think we need to acknowledge that there’s certainly a possibility of a third World War, and if that does occur it could be far worse than anything that’s happened before. Let’s say nuclear weapons are used. I mean, there could be a very powerful social movement that’s anti-technology.

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What if I don’t know how to fix it?

As a dad, I sympathize with the sentiments in this video, but I don’t know what to do about the problem.

It is a real problem, and here we are on the internet where the problem has been amplified a thousand-fold, and giggling man-children hide behind their anonymity and gleefully, darkly, maliciously vomit up misogyny at will. I can protest, and I do, but it just broadens the target of their hatred to include me.

I don’t think the solution is more paternalism. It has to involve allowing more women the power to use their strength.

But wait…solar energy isn’t consequence-free!

solarfarm

Everyone is talking about that stupid town that voted against solar energy because it would suck up the energy of the sun. So I read the story from the local paper, and hey, it wasn’t as stupid as it was made out to be, and there are actually valid arguments against solar farms.

I’m entirely in favor of more wind and solar power, but let’s not pretend there are no problems with them. The residents of Woodland, NC brought up real concerns.

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Getting ready for the Christmas myth

birth-of-jesus-freethunk

I don’t know about you, but this is the time of year when I get all kinds of amusing messages affirming the literal accuracy of the Christian myth of a virgin birth 2000 years ago. When someone tells me that they have Compelling Historical Evidence for the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, as they so often do, I pay attention, because it is always so enlightening. Not enlightening in the sense that they convince me their beliefs are reasonable, but enlightening because they always show off how weak their evidence is. Here’s the initial puffery I was sent.

Here are some historical evidences for the virgin birth of Jesus Christ:

  • A physician and world-class historian documented it

  • Modern archaeology affirms it

  • An agnostic professor of mythology is convinced

  • Old Testament prophets predicted it centuries in advance

  • The earliest Christians believed it universally

  • Oooh. Well, gosh. An authority and a whole scientific discipline have said it’s so, to the point that it convinced an agnostic? Must be true. Until you read a little further.

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    Winning!

    The Discovery Institute is working hard to prove that the Intelligent Design creationism movement isn’t dead. So, they have a post listing all their great accomplishments since the Dover decision. There have been lawsuits and movies!

    The cause of academic freedom has also seen significant victories. In one case, as we reported here, “[T]he University of Kentucky paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit by astronomer Martin Gaskell who was wrongfully denied employment because he was perceived to be skeptical towards Darwinian evolution.” Two other Darwin skeptics received settlements for discrimination. Applied Mathematics Letters retracted mathematician Granville Sewell’s article critical of neo-Darwinism; a lawsuit followed, leading to a public apology and $10,000 payment to Sewell. After the California Science Center (CSC) cancelled the showing of an intelligent design film, Darwin’s Dilemma, the American Freedom Alliance sued. The CSC paid $110,000 to avoid going to trial over the evidence that they discriminated. And the film Expelled drew over 1.1 million viewers to movie theaters to learn about discrimination against scientific dissenters from Darwinism.

    They have lawyers! And people pay money to settle their nuisance suits! What a triumph for Intelligent Design science creationism.

    They also have people writing books, and can scrape up a few people to give them positive reviews.

    Public outreach on intelligent design is also doing very well post-Dover. In 2009, Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell, which received praise from famed atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who named it “Book of the Year” in the respected Times Literary Supplement of London.

    In 2013, Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt which made the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. That book was endorsed by scientists including Harvard geneticist George Church and Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin. UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall gave Darwin’s Doubt a serious review in the top journal Science and participated in a radio debate with Meyer.

    I’ve read both of Meyer’s books; they are delusional exercises by a long-winded narcissist. It’s lovely for them that Thomas Nagel liked it, but then Nagel’s gone full loopy creationist. McMenamin is a crank. They keep touting the fact that it was reviewed in Science, but they never tell you what the review said. Hint: it’s not a positive review.

    Finally and most importantly, science supporting ID continues to move forward. Several areas of research have seen groundbreaking progress, including work by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (using computer models to test Darwinian evolution) and Biologic Institute (exploring evidence for ID in biology). To date, there are more than eighty peer-reviewed articles supportive of intelligent design, with over fifty of them published post-Dover.

    Virtually none of this “work” is getting published in serious science journals; it’s all going into cheesy dumpsters of bad science like the Journal of Cosmology, or their own house organ, Bio-Complexity. Eighty articles is nothing, especially when you are claiming to be founding a whole new discipline and approach to analysis. Eighty articles, when you’ve got a whole propaganda mill dedicated to pushing your ideas, is an abysmal failure.

    Also, when you look closely at their list of ID creationism science articles, they are exposed as puff pieces, empty musings, and noise published by hacks.

    But the Discovery Institute always looks on the bright side.

    Given how quickly ID scholarship is moving forward in so many areas — science, public policy, and culture — we can only anticipate how much stronger ID will be twenty years after Dover.

    Have you ever read The Wedge Document? In the late 1990s, the Discovery Institute proposed to get 100 academic articles published in the scientific literature. Now, a decade and a half later, they are bragging about 80…and most of them are transparently garbage.

    Nope, sorry guys, “Intelligent Design” is a spent force. The only reason it’s still coasting along is because the evangelical/fundamentalist creationists still like to use it as a pseudo-secular cover when proposing their laws, to get around that pesky separation of church and state thing. But even there, the real blow that the Dover trial dealt to them was in exposing that ID creationism was terrible at providing that excuse. Barbara Forrest smacked ’em hard.

    Creationism is still around and still causing trouble, but the success story there is old school young earth creationism, and that’s not a good thing for anyone. Still, it must hurt the fellows at the Discovery Institute when they look at Answers in Genesis and see that all their sneaky dissembling was for nothing.

    O Glorious Truth

    This is perfect: someone has taken Scott Adams’ own words, as he tends to dump them on his blog, and pasted them onto his money-makin’ comic strip as MRA Dilbert. They sync beautifully. Somehow, the words of a pedantic jackhole with an ego problem fit into a dystopian comic strip about a workplace detached from reality as if they somehow emerged from the very same rather stupid brain. Who would have thought it?

    mradilbert

    Any guesses on how long it will be before Adams commands a winged army of screeching lawyers to descend upon it?