Those silly conservatives

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Michael

With all the patently silly conservatives running around, I may make this into a series.

Today’s silly conservative is none other than John Lott. I recently wrote about how Lott deleted my comments concerning some stupid things he said. This happened on Facebook. To reiterate, I criticized Lott for, essentially, claiming that Ashley Judd represented all Democrats (among some other dumb things he said). He promptly defriended me. Cute.

Up until now I haven’t been entirely sure what he did with my comments. I presumed he deleted them, but had no proof. Well, because of my super-slick spy skills*, I infiltrated Lott’s friends list and confirmed that, yes, he did indeed delete the comments.

Let’s just recap: I made a couple comments about an article he posted. He responded to these comments. They apparently were not offensive enough to delete. I then put the final nail in his coffin and called him out for making a clearly dumb statement. Despite what one may conclude from reading this here blog, I actually was quite appropriate with my comments. I then found myself defriended. After this, Lott went so far as to delete everything I said – that includes the comments he did not previously deem offensive enough to delete. Apparently this 50 year old man has the temperament of a child.

*I had a friend send him a friend request.

Update: This must be the fastest update ever.

I left a comment on John Lott’s blog. He made a post about plagiarism where he is essentially insinuating that PubMed is a bad source for information. I presume this is because I have cited PubMed several times on his blog, but maybe he grew to hate that particular science outlet from somewhere else. At any rate, his post was specifically about plagiarism, but it isn’t a far cry to say unethical behavior is highly related. So naturally, I pointed out to Lott that it is well documented that his behavior is unethical. What did he do? He changed my post to say “This post has been removed by a blog administrator.”

Let’s take a moment to review Lott’s behavior over the years (and to avoid any insinuation from the 50 year old child, the following comes from the previous link).

  • he almost certainly fabricated a mysterious survey and certainly behaved unethically in making claims for which he had no supporting data
  • he presented results purporting to show that “more guns” led to “less crime” when those results were the product of coding errors
  • he pretended to be a woman called “Mary Rosh” on the internet in order to praise his own research and accuse his critics of fraud.
  • he probably was the person who anonymously accused Steve Levitt of being “rabidly antigun”

    All those claims are backed up quite well, too.

    Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

    George Will is a mook

    Posted on March 10, 2009 by Michael

    Really, it’s as simple as that.

    Q: You have felt the righteous wrath of those who believe in man-made global warming. Are you still all there?

    A: Oh, heavens. Yeah. The odd thing about these people is, normally when I write something that people disagree with they write letters to the editor or they write a responding op-ed piece. These people simply set out to try and get my editors to not publish my columns. Now I don’t blame them, because I think if my arguments were as shaky as theirs are, I wouldn’t want to engage in argument either.

    That is George Will getting a proverbial blowjob from some hack journalist. It is in response to an article he wrote about global warming where he just flat out made stuff up. Carl Zimmer wrote about the errors Will made in his piece, exposing the fraud for what he is. The rest of the blogging community did roughly the same (though certaintly not with the same talent level of Zimmer). Here’s the jist.

    To recap: George Will wrote a column in which he tried to downplay the evidence that global warming has already affected the Earth, and that it will have bigger impacts in the future. Various bloggers have pointed out examples where Will misrepresented scientific studies in this column. The most glaring one was this: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    The Research Center put a statement on their site explaining that Will was wrong. On February 15, the day Will wrote his column, there was substantially less ice than on February 15, 1979: the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    Zimmer goes on to explain that comparing one specific day to another specific day is erroneous. It is not how climate is measured – that’s how weather is done. Anyone who isn’t functionally retarded knows there’s a significant difference. Will did not recognize the difference. We’re left to connect the dots.

    Of course, now some journalist with a hard-on for Will is giving him an opportunity to reply to his critics. We’ve seen his dumb rhetoric above. How about a little meat?

    Q: The big issue was about how much global sea ice there is now compared to 1979.

    •A: And that of course was a tiny portion of the column. The critics completely ignored — as again, understandably — the evidence I gave of the global cooling hysteria of 30 years ago.

    Looks like the proverbial blowjob isn’t going so well. We just have some flaccid words.

    Zimmer already addressed this in his earlier response.

    George Will wrote a column in which he tried to downplay the evidence that global warming has already affected the Earth, and that it will have bigger impacts in the future.

    Of course, I’m not a fundamentally dishonest conservative, so I’ll be fair. Will’s initial point is that there was concern for global cooling in the 1970s and now there is not. Okay, fair enough. He can make that claim. However, this is not his primary point. His primary point is that because there was some science (which he exaggerates) that sided with global cooling 30-40 years ago, that science which supports global warming today cannot be trusted. This reminds me a recent post about 50 reasons one should not believe in evolution.

    12.) Because the fact that science is self-correcting annoys me. Most of my other beliefs are rigidly fixed and uncorrectable.

    That is essentially to what this comes down. Will is a conservative who does not want to do things which will cost large corporations significant amounts of money. That is his motivation for being anti-global warming. The same goes for the vast majority of conservatives who are widely known figures. They’re blatant liars. They have no concern for truth or science. It’s all about their economic, religious, or ideological dogma they’ve come to adopt. All else must fall before it.

    But let’s return to the core of Will’s flaccid words. He’s saying that his primary point was about global cooling hysteria. In truth, that was not his primary point: as I pointed out, he is saying that science’s self-correcting nature makes it currently wrong. That is, his primary point is that some science was wrong in the past, so global warming is wrong today. Okay, so now that some actual truth has been told, let’s continue.

    As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

    If Will’s primary point was that he was addressing “global cooling hysteria”, wouldn’t this be entirely unrelated? Oh, hold the phone. That’s right. His primary point is actually that today’s science must be flawed because of yesterday’s science. One wonders why he would even bother citing today’s science, but if I’ve connected the dots from earlier correctly, he may very well be functionally retarded.

    But regardless, Will is using this to try and support his point that today’s trend in science must be wrong about global warming. Do you see the issue, Will? You made a statement and then tried supporting it with evidence. That evidence does not, in fact, support your statement. By attacking that evidence, bloggers like Zimmer are, in effect, attacking your primary point (obscured as you tried to make it, you liar).

    Imagine a high school kid in a wood workshop. He makes a chair. The seat and back are well done. But he royally screwed up on the legs. They’re of inferior material, too thin, shaky, poorly attached: in short, he made a bad chair. The teacher comes by and tells him that the chair is bad. But no, the student objects, “The legs are just a tiny portion of my chair! You can’t ignore the seat. That’s the primary piece of the chair!” The teacher then proceeds to fail the student for being a stupid jackass.

    Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

    Discovery Institute is shut out; whines

    Posted on March 6, 2009 by Michael

    The Vatican held another meeting trying to squeeze its tiny God into the ever shrinking gaps of reality as brought to us by science. (Apologies for the FOX Noise link, but it is an AP article.) Even though they have most things fully 1/2 wrong, them there Catholics do have some things entirely correct.

    The Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, says it was shut out from presenting its views because the meeting was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, a major U.S. nonprofit that has criticized the intelligent design movement.

    Good. The Discovery Institute is filled with hacks who are purely motivated by religion, not science. They are, by definition, liars.

    Organizers of the five-day conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University said Thursday that they barred intelligent design proponents because they wanted an intellectually rigorous conference on science, theology and philosophy to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

    The implication being – though not as eloquently as I am about to put it – is that people who actually think intelligent design is science are fucking mooks who have no idea what science actually is. Honestly. Can any IDist actually give one prediction made by intelligent design ‘theory‘? Does any IDist understand why his failure to do this is one of the major reasons intelligent design is not science?

    Muslim creationists also complained about the conference.

    Oktar Babuna, a representative of a prominent Turkish creationist, Harun Yahya, was denied the right to speak at the opening session Tuesday.

    Notice this says “right to speak”. I assume this is in the same sense that I have a right to swing my fists. That right ends once it impedes someone else’s liberty. At that point, we no longer refer to my fist-swinging as a right: harassing, dangerous, disturbing, etc, perhaps we call it one of these, but certainly not a right. So surely Babuna couldn’t have been figuratively swinging his fists with his gaping mouth of creationist inanity, correct? After all, he was denied a right, not the ability to harass people or spew dumb, disturbing ideas of stupidity.

    Participants took the microphone away from Babuna when, during a question-and-answer session, he challenged them to give proof of transitional forms of animals in Darwinian evolution.

    Organizers said he hadn’t formulated a question and was just stating his point of view.

    Babuna said afterward that the conference was clearly undemocratic. A statement from Yahya said, “Although there are discussion parts, they want this discussion to be one-sided.”

    Surprise. It looks like Babuna took his verbal fists and started throwing them around the conference. It’s fortunate there’s no muscle to back them up.

    Scientists can keep pointing to these fossils, but creationists just keep asking the same question over and over. They’re like little kids who keep asking their parents “why?” no matter what the answer. They aren’t actually seeking any information, truth, or answers; they just want attention because no one takes their childish ideas seriously.

    Filed under: Creationism, Evolution, News | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

    Troopergate resolved

    Posted on March 6, 2009 by Michael

    Asshole trooper Michael Galluccio‘s ticket to a man trying to get his pregnant wife to the hospital has been tossed out. Of course, someone had to keep internalizing the rules.

    Even after John Davis appealed the $100 ticket and a Cambridge clerk magistrate tossed it out, the department refused to give up. A lawyer for the State Police challenged the clerk magistrate’s decision and appealed late last month to restore the ticket. A hearing was scheduled before a Cambridge District Court judge March 18.

    Davis’s attorney, David Lucas, said that in a dozen years, he’d never seen the State Police appeal a traffic ticket. He couldn’t quite believe the department’s prosecutor was going to pursue one against a woman in labor.

    “When I asked, ‘Are you sure the State Police want to be on record as appealing this?’ what he said was, “I just wouldn’t have any credibility if I did not appeal this,’ ” Lucas said.

    Right, well, the law is black and white. Just like reality. There are no shades of gray in life. If the State Police want any credibility they need to internalize rules. It makes sense. It’s basically their job to forgo reasoning for the sake of snap judgements based upon internalization. It works a lot of the time because that internalization happens to coincide with actual reasoning, but it’s still a huge fallacy. So it comes as no surprise that the police didn’t drop the appeal based upon any worthwhile reason.

    But within an hour and a half of being contacted by the Globe, the State Police dropped the case. State Police Colonel Mark F. Delaney “immediately ordered it to be rescinded,” Procopio said.

    The media was ready to pounce on this. That’s the only ‘reason’ the appeal was dropped. It was PR, pure and simple. The police don’t care that none of asshole trooper Michael Galluccio’s actions made any sense. It’s that they didn’t want a big PR flap over a $100 ticket.

    He also said state troopers are expected to make judgment calls all the time. “We understand that there may be a backlash to that,” said Procopio. “That goes with the territory, and we understand that. That said, we make the calls based on public safety and the interest of justice – and not public opinion.”

    And now the department spokesman is lying. He’s a fucking liar. There’s really no sugar-coating this one. The department makes a move that is blatantly motivated by public opinion and then goes on to say that the police simply do not do that. Rescinding the appeal after discovering the Globe is doing a follow-up? Nah, they just filled out the wrong form, said the wrong words, and slipped up with the wrong intentions. All an honest mistake.

    Fuck these people.

    Filed under: News | Tagged: , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

    Short Hiatus

    Posted on March 6, 2009 by Michael

    Science has temporarily halted while it waits for my computer to get fixed. Or it just piles up so I have a lot to blog about when I finally regain regular Internet access. One or the other.

    In other news, this website gets roughly 25 views a day without me sneaking in (always relevant, never spammy) links at other blogs to generate traffic. I guess I’m sort of proud of that.

    Filed under: Administrative | Leave a comment »

    Jerry Coyne

    Posted on March 2, 2009 by Michael

    I’ve recently been reading Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True. The amount of direct information this man delivers is phenomenal. In many cases, creationism-evolution arguments need to rely on a lot of rhetoric – the evolutionary rhetoric being based on reality and the creationism rhetoric being based on what some ignorant pastor or website said (yeah, rhetoric like that). Coyne, however, does this for his opening (as is the nature of openings), but then basically refutes every ignorant creationist qualm with specific examples. My favorite section thus far is on biogeography. It isn’t news to anyone, but Coyne elucidates the concept beyond any single work I’ve encountered to date.

    This is one of the better books on evolution out there. It is needed reading for any individual who is driven by religion and emotion to deny the beautiful facts of life as revealed through science.

    Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

    Why do creationists lie?

    Posted on February 25, 2009 by Michael

    Here’s an old example of lying creationists:

    Basically, some creationists lied to get an interview with Dawkins. They later edited together some footage to make it appear like Dawkins couldn’t answer a simple question: “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?” After a long pause (which was unrelated to the overdubbed question), the dishonest creationists paste in some footage of Dawkins answering an unrelated question. It’s patently silly.

    So what’s the answer? Dawkins explains the situation and answers the question here. But I’m going to simplify the answer.

    An example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information is Down’s Syndrome. Here’s a karyotype for the genetic defect. Look at chromosome 21. It should have two copies but it actually has three. Bam. That’s more information. That is precisely the question creationists want answered: how can information increase in the genome? Mutation.

    Of course, the way the question is worded is stupid. Evolution is all about increasing (and sometimes decreasing) information. Duplications do this: one gene is copied twice, one copy diverges to participate in some other function, and bam, we not only have more information, but we have more useful, advantageous information. We see this all the time, all the way down to minute differences in snails.

    Let me put in another way. DNA is composed of 4 letters: A, C, T, G. These are in triplet form. That means it takes three letters to make an amino acid. For example, GGC is the amino acid glycine (so is GGA and GGG). A change in one of these letters is a mutation. In most instances, a mutation will change an amino acid. Let’s say the first G in GGC is changed to a C. That makes CGC, which codes for arginine. The gene in which this mutation occurred will now have one amino acid replaced. It is possible that it was have the same basic function as the previous amino acid, but often enough it has a different function. It may make a more ideal protein or an entirely new one. This is a change in information. In order for this information to be maintained, natural selection must act on the organism (or gene, depending on your view). That is the evolutionary process which maintains, increases, and decreases information in the genome. It happens every single day.

    I should apologize to my non-creationist readers who didn’t need me to be so basic, but these creationists keep asking questions that are answered in the first weeks of every spring and fall in any intro to bio course.

    Anyway, here’s a video of Dawkins talking about dishonest creationists.

    Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , , , , | 15 Comments »

    Drink of my blood

    Posted on February 22, 2009 by Michael

    Just a notice people living in the Augusta area that there will be a blood drive on March 9. Here is the information. A few more results for the area (and other parts of the country as well) can be found here.

    Penney Memorial Church 1038 Perkins Hall
    35 Grove St
    Augusta, ME 04330

    Because giving blood is far more effective than pretending to drink it. UPDATE: Here’s a thought. PZ Myers had a whole big deal where he desecrated a Catholic wafer. It was to prove a point that nothing is sacred (basically). But instead of a wafer, how about dumping out some blessed ‘blood of Christ’ outside a donation location? It’d be especially poignant to do it outside a church. But this time the point wouldn’t be that nothing is sacred but rather that deep belief, prayer, and silly rituals* are far less effective than simply being a good person and doing good things (for example, like actually helping people by giving them real blood).

    *To be fair, PZ surely mocked these things as well throughout wafer-gate.

    Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

    Making stuff up about global warming

    Posted on February 20, 2009 by Michael

    Most conservatives who have a public voice are outright liars. It’s really that simple, so let’s not parse words. It isn’t that they are fundamentally misdirected in their ideas and thus genuinely believe what they say in public. No. They are simply liars. They know better, but they say things which are untrue. George Will is just another case.

    To recap: George Will wrote a column in which he tried to downplay the evidence that global warming has already affected the Earth, and that it will have bigger impacts in the future. Various bloggers have pointed out examples where Will misrepresented scientific studies in this column. The most glaring one was this: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    The Research Center put a statement on their site explaining that Will was wrong. On February 15, the day Will wrote his column, there was substantially less ice than on February 15, 1979: the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    I’m waiting for John Lott to pick up on Will’s piece, citing it as good science.

    Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

    Massive explosion in space

    Posted on February 20, 2009 by Michael

    When an explosion stronger than 9,000 supernovae takes place in deep space, it may be time to reconsider if Earth is really such a focal point of the Cosmos (provided you think such a patently silly thing).

    The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

    “Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts,” astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.

    “If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don’t stop for anything — they just bore through and that’s why we can see them from enormous distances,” Reddy said.

    A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.

    I want to just make an extra point of the next graf in the article.

    The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away.

    In other words, while the Sun may have exploded 7 minutes ago and we won’t know for another 90 seconds or so (it’s slightly more than 8 light minutes away), we only know about these explosions now because we happen to be 12 billion lightyears from them (and they happened 12 billion years ago). There’s no way to know what’s happening in this area now – it’s going to take another 12 billion years until this region of space has any indication.

    Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics | Tagged: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

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