Turkish futility

Some of you may have noticed that we got hit hard by a Turkish spammer last night: several hundred comments, mostly saying the same thing, all linking back to a farm of Turkish spam sites. It’s extremely annoying, and I’m in the process of cleaning it all up. Normally that wouldn’t take long at all, but right now Scienceblogs is seizing and sputtering, like usual, so I delete 10 or 20 at a time, get the stupid timeout message, and have to reload and restart the despammer tools…so it might take a little while.

And it is all so pointless. They get a few hours of their url on my blog, but what I do in addition to deleting their spam is pluck out urls and unusual keywords and tuck them into my automatic spam filter file…which, after a few years of this nonsense, is looking like a goddamned Turkish dictionary. That means that a lot of Turkish words and links get automatically rubbished if you try to use them here — there must be a lot of national pride over there in Asia Minor, where they’re doing a phenomenal job of making Turkish the pariah language of the internet.

The inanity strikes home sometimes

I got a very annoying announcement on our university listserv today. Among the usual community and campus events, it says:

Please mark your calendars: Don Bierle, PhD in Biology, polar explorer, and former skeptic, shares FaithSearch Discovery at Morris Area High School Sunday, September 27, 6:30 pm. This event is sponsored by Stevens County Ministerial and area churches.

This really pisses me off.

Our local high school has problems. It’s underfunded, it’s academically compromised in many ways, and we were immensely relieved to get our kids out of there. It’s a small school, with a total of two science teachers, and one of them is openly creationist and openly dismissive of evolution in the classroom. If you want a good science education, Morris Area High School is not the place to go right now. And this doesn’t help.

Don Bierle is a creationist, a certifiable liar for Jesus, an evangelical, fundamentalist wackjob who is coming to town to lie to the community and to our kids. This FaithSearch program is undiluted Christian apologetics, and it’s going to be presented in our school building.

I called the school, and they gave me a runaround about how it wasn’t during school hours, and the churches were renting the room. I assumed all that; it doesn’t matter. This is a group promoting propaganda antithetical to the educational message of the public school. They are going to be teaching lies to the Morris community, and the school doesn’t care that their facilities are being used for this ghastly purpose. If it were the KKK asking to rent a room, there would be squawks and rapid backpedaling…but because this group is sponsored by a mix of our local churches, it must be OK.

It isn’t OK. It’s just more evidence that our theistically inclined brethren are happy to corrupt education and spread more ignorance through the area.

Any locals who happen to read this: if the school promotes this at all, if it’s mentioned in announcements, newsletters, or flyers; if our dear little creationist teacher, Mrs. Franey, even whispers a word about this dishonest performance in her class, I hope there are a few of you willing to spread the word and pound on the school hard. This is not the way to improve the academic status of our community. I also hope a few biologists and biology students attend, if it goes on, and puts a little public smackdown on this pious phony.

I’m also a bit peeved that my university sees fit to promote this garbage to our faculty and staff.

It’s Loving Day!

It wasn’t that long ago that it was illegal in many states for black people to marry white people — this was the same kind of sentiment promoted by people who are defending marriage from gays nowadays, and I hope it will someday soon look as unbelievable as those old laws. Old laws? They were only overturned on this day in 1967, in the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia!

Roy Zimmerman (with Laura Love, John McCutcheon, and Sandy O) has a song for this day, of course.

You can see the Lovings in this short news piece.

Aaargh! Obama screws up, very, very badly! I could forgive his religious leanings and vote for him, but denying civil rights to our citizens is not the kind of thing I can overlook. He must be hoping that the Republicans will nominate an extremely distasteful thug in the next election, so we’ll vote for him anyway.

Good news and bad news

A doctor in Nebraska, Dr. Leroy Carhart, has stepped forward and said he will train his staff to take over the important role lost when George Tiller was murdered. That’s courage, and I applaud what he is doing. I hope more doctors take on this essential task.

That’s the good news. The bad news? Look at what Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, a fellow who is obligated by his position to support the law, had to say.

I’m disgusted and I’m saddened, and I hate it that he’s here in Nebraska and I hate it that he’s in America. I mean, this guy is one sick individual.

I hate it that the people who enable murder can be found in positions where they are supposed to promote justice.

Another museum in danger

You can tell when the anti-intellectuals are in charge: they start throwing away investments in knowledge that took generations to build, all in the name of short-term economy. The latest instance: the state of Wyoming wants to shut down the University of Wyoming Geological Museum. It’s already been starved down to a minimal (well, more like inadequate) staffing level, and now the state just wants to erase it completely.

This doesn’t make sense. A museum is a repository of accumulated information — if you discard it this year because you don’t want to maintain it, you never get it back. It’s gone. You can’t decide at a later date when you’re more flush that maybe you’ll restore it, because you can’t, you have to start anew, and hope that future legislatures are a little more far-sighted than present ones. It frustrates me immensely to see academic infrastructure demolished because some bean-counter would rather throw away money on some waste of resources like abstinence-only education or locking recreational marijuana smokers in jail.

Read more about this travesty at Dinochick and Science Buzz, and sign the petition to save this resource.

Pikers

Look here: Britain’s National Health Service threw away £12 million on homeopathic treatments. It’s a complete waste; millions were spent on teeny-tiny bottles of ‘special’ water that could have been had for pennies from the local water tap.

But hah! America is #1! We spent $2.5 billion on remedies that don’t work! Doesn’t that make you all feel so good right now? Now one might reasonably argue that paying all that money for clear negative results really isn’t that bad; good science doesn’t begin with your conclusion, and good studies can show that a hypothesis was wrong. Unfortunately, these were studies that a) were begun with no good reason to think they would work (the principles of sympathetic magic are not valid premises for research), and b) despite the fact that the treatments were disproven, quacks will continue to peddle them, and gullible people will continue to use them.

While I’m complaining about altie nonsense, remind me to never get in an auto accident in Maryland. I might get tucked into a helicopter and flown to this:

At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.
They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields.

Thanks, Rogue Medic, you’ve just increased my fear of hospitals.