Have to wash my brain out with soap

Because everyone else is doing it:

Yet more incompetence on FOX News

A couple of weeks ago, Bill O'Reilly did a segment on a "Lesbian Gang Epidemic." I don't usually watch FOX News (my cable company doesn't carry it), but whenever I do, I'm just stunned by the fearmongering and their, shall we say, loose association with facts. This "OMFG the lesbians are coming, run, run, run" segment was no exception.

O'Reilly invited "FOX News crime analyst" Rod Wheeler on to lay it on thick. Here's some of the crap Wheeler was spewing:

Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country... We've actually counted, just in the Washington D.C. area alone, that's Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, well over 150 of these crews...

O'REILLY: Now, when they recruit the kids, are they indoctrinating them into homosexuality?

Yes," Wheeler answered. "As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were forced into, you know, performing sex acts...

It's all over the country. I mean, you go from New York to California to wherever you want to name, you can see these organizations. Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry—some of these groups carry pink pistols," Wheeler said. "They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols...

Shadowy homosexual conspiracy? Check. Nationwide crisis? Check. Gays molesting children? Check. Lesbians with weapons? Check. OMFG!!1!

The Southern Poverty Law Center did an excellent fisking of this report, and it turns out that every single thing this guy reported was complete bullshit. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a so-called study that was being unquestionably reported by the press, even though its conclusion were clearly ridiculous. This is no different.

The 150 lesbian gangs roaming the DC area as we speak? It turns out there are only about 160 gangs of any sort in the DC area. Only nine are mostly female and there's no indication that any of those are a lesbian gang. There hasn't been a single media report about a crime committed by anyone with a "pink pistol," yet this fucking incompetent on FOX claims there are entire groups of people carrying them.

It's not that this guy was wrong or just exaggerated a bit that peeves me. It's that this was such a towering edifice of incompetence. That even if every gang in the DC area actually was a bunch of raging dykes he still managed to inflate their numbers by 1500%. That he managed to get every single fact he reported wrong, yet this still made the air. That's what ticks me off. So it doesn't really surprise me when the SPL pointed out that this idiot was part of an anti-gay church.

Apparently this had drawn some attention because the idiot Wheeler has taken down his entire website, and replaced it with a "disclaimer" that reads in part:

I mentioned that there are "over 150 of these gangs" in the greater Washington DC area. What I actually meant is that there are over 150 gangs in the Washington DC area, some of which are in fact lesbian gangs. Lastly, I mentioned in the segment that there is this "national epidemic" of lesbian gangs. A better choice of words would have been to say that there is a growing concern nationally, and especially in major urban areas, of increased gang activity, which includes some lesbian gang activity.

So if this segment was just about increasing gang activity in this country, then why the focus on lesbian gangs? Could it have something to do with a political axe to grind? Hmm... Not surprisingly, this story has been picked up by the right-wing nutjob press. Just here in Illinois, both Porno Pete and Stacy Harp have mentioned it. Facts are just so inconvenient when you have bigotry to spread.

(Via Pam's House Blend and Replace the Lies With Truth.)

UPDATE: Orcinus has also picked this up.

UPDATE II: Also picked up by Feministing and Pandagon

I guess I'm just naive

So Bush pardoned Scooter Libby the same day the judgment came down that he would not be able to stay out of jail while his appeal was in the works. I was honestly surprised. Not that he would pardoned, really, but that it seems so political -- blatantly political -- without any regard to whether this is for the benefit of the country or not.

I guess perjury and obstruction of justice aren't all that serious when it comes to the rule of law, after all.

UPDATE: Both David and prarie biker mention in the comments that this commutation is significantly different from an actual pardon. I disagree. There were three components to Libby's punishment: probation, a $250,000 fine, and 30 months of jail time. The jail time has now been reduced to zero.

The fine is also meaningless. Libby's defense fund was as high as $4 million a little while ago. Even if the lawyers devour all of that, raising another $0.25 million should be all that difficult for him. I doubt he will actually pay a penny of the fine. That leaves just the probation as his punishment. Big deal. As long as he doesn't drive with a suspended license, he's being punished less than Paris Hilton.

prarie biker's comparison to Sandy Berger isn't particularly apt, either. Berger did not "steal and destroy classified information" from the National Archives. He took copies of classified documents in preparation of his testimony before Congress. At worst, what he did was a security risk, there was no crime against the public interest.

A letter writer at the NY Times I think put it quite eloquently:

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he presided over more than 150 executions. In more than one-third of the cases — 57 in all — lawyers representing condemned inmates asked then-Governor Bush for a commutation of sentence, so that the inmates would serve life in prison rather than face execution.

Some of these inmates had been represented by lawyers who slept during trials. Some were mentally retarded. Some were juveniles at the time they committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.

In all these cases, Governor Bush refused to commute their sentences, saying that the inmates had had full access to the judicial system.

I. Lewis Libby Jr. had the best lawyers money can buy. His crime cannot be attributed to youth or retardation. He has expressed no remorse whatsoever for lying to a grand jury or participating in the administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq. President Bush’s commutation of Mr. Libby’s sentence is certainly legal, but it just as surely offends the fundamental constitutional value of equality.

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them.

Bush wouldn't pardon inmates who's lawyers slept through their trials, yet Libby gets off. There's just something fundamentally wrong about that.

Our "liberal" media: science edition

There's an interesting editorial in the Dallas News about science reporting and how stories get spun in the media. Even though we're told non-stop about how the media is "liberal," it turns out that scientific studies that support conservative views get huge attention in the press (and can be distorted to say things they don't actually say), studies that support traditionally liberal views get virtually no traction at all.

[A parenting study] tracked the effects of good fathering on 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001 and found that by age 3 a child would have more emotional and behavioral problems if the father had not taken time off after the birth.

Don't recall reading about it? You don't remember seeing experts lined up on the morning news shows to explain how crucial the findings were, or advocacy groups noting how this proves it's important to support paternity leave?

That's probably because, although such a study was indeed published, it got virtually no media attention...

Over and over again, studies that appeal to anti-feminists and social conservatives gain media traction, while the ones that come to opposite conclusions languish in obscurity.

For instance, the traditionalists always like studies with results showing large gender differences that support the old-fashioned sex roles. A great example is the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which in 2005 found that women and men differ in their use of the Internet:

More men (30 percent) than women (25) said the Web helped them a lot to learn more about what was going on, while more women (56 percent) than men (50) said it helped them connect with people they needed to reach. These differences are statistically significant.

But when filtered through the media, these findings are interpreted as: "If there is an overall pattern of differences here, it is that men value the Internet for the breadth of experiences it offers, and women value it for the human connections..."

A difference of at most 6 percentage points became an absolute gulf between the sexes, and the media exclaim, "Women are relational; men are factual!"

I'm starting to notice this more and more, myself. When reading about something about science in the media, I often have to just wince because they get it fairly obviously wrong or draw inaccurate conclusions. I mean, does every article about media storage capacity have to tell us how many Library of Congresses will fit on this new media? Does every report on a new transistor design have to mention artificial intelligence?

I didn't realize this the first time I read through it, but the piece is written by J. Goodrich, who runs the feminist harlot blog Echidne of the Snakes. Score one for the bloggers.

Shiny!

Last night, David and I went to the Champaign Can't Stop the Serenity, a charity screening of Joss Whedon's Serenity to raise money for Whedon's favorite charity, Equality Now.

It was pretty impressive. Of the 29 cities holding such an event, Champaign was only one of five to completely sell out the theater. Pretty much everyone showed up, too. According to the website, this event raised about $2,200 for the charity, which is more than Pittsburgh, London, Charlotte, and Madison. Not bad for a little college town.

This is the second year for the event. Last year, Serenity showings raised $50,000. This year, the Champaign show opened by showing Joss Whedon's acceptance speech for an award he was given by Equality Now. In true Joss fashion, even his speech was pretty entertaining:

Bad porn science

I hate bad science. What I really hate is someone using a thin patina of scienceyness to push some sort of political agenda. That's when people either cherry-pick data to support their position, or produce some ideological-driven "study." John Bambenek did that a few months ago, when he tried (and failed) to produce studies that showed sex caused depression in girls. Two of the studies directly contradicted in their text the very conclusion he was drawing, and the third wasn't even a credible study. I suspect Bambenek has not changed his position on this matter, showing it is ideologically driven and not rational.

Recently, a study is being flogged around by the press about internet porn addiction. Porn addiction is apparently about to destroy society. The study was run by Christianet.com, which claims to be the "most-visited Christian website in the world." The addiction results have been reported by mainstream news sites (here, here, and here) and Christian news sites (e.g. here, here, and here). Gay bloggers have also picked it up; both Pam's House Blend and Wayne Besen have commented on it.

Here's what the study says:

The poll results indicate that 50% of all Christian men and 20% of all Christian women are addicted to pornography," said Clay Jones, founder and President of Second Glance Ministries whose ministry objectives include providing people with information which will enable them to fully understand the impact of today's societal issues. 60% of the women who answered the survey admitted to having significant struggles with lust; 40% admitted to being involved in sexual sin in the past year; and 20% of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

Fifty percent of men are addicted to porn? Not just that they look at it, but they're actually addicted to it? That's an absolutely ridiculous statistic. If I told you that half of all men were addicted to heroin, you'd look at me with a "What you talking about, Willis?" look on your face. It's absurd on the face of it. What pisses me off is that this statistic is being reported without even a shred of skepticism.

So I thought that maybe the press was picking this up and making more of it than it really was or just flat-out misunderstanding it, as reporters often do with anything having to do with science. So I went looking for this study. What did I find? Crickets chirping. Nothing.

First, I went to Christianet.com. This place hardly qualifies as a website at all. It's an Internet portal. How very 1998. It's mostly a collection of links to things like "Christian Home Loans" and "Meet Christian Singles." Their Blogs section is a hoot, too. Each blog entry consists of roughly two lines of text, plus a link to some other section of their site and an offer to send an e-card.

It turns out that this thing everyone is citing is an internet poll, not any sort of study. There's no information about what questions were asked, how people responded, or even what qualifies as internet port "addiction." I have the suspicion that the people running this poll would consider Michelangelo's David to be Renaissance porn.

I tried to find more information about the poll on their website. Not only isn't there any mention of it on the Christianet website that I can find, there's no contact information for anyone at Christianet. Absolutely zero. No email address, no "Contact us" page. I wrote the admin in the WHOIS entry, but no response.

What's almost worse than this thing getting this level of attention is that it's being looked at with complete credulity. Even though it concluded that half of all men have this addiction, no one even batted an eye. In fact, people mostly just seemed to find it amusing that Christian evangelicals were caught in a bit of hypocrisy. The Stuff article called them "porn-again Christians." (OK, I admit I got a laugh out of that.)

This is how things get caught up in our collective consciousness. Someone reads about this poll in a news article on some website, but no one ever looks up the details. It gets generally accepted as true, even though it's just propaganda from one small group with an axe to grind.

Things that make you go, "Who cares?"

I've been working a bit on a Big Important Blog Post in my head for the past couple of days. Tonight I decided to make Indian food, so you get this, instead.

Over On Matt's Planet, a commenter mentioned that he hadn't heard of Paris Hilton for a couple of months. Other commenters asked how recently he arrived on Earth.

So here's my question: is the constant media fixation on Hilton driven by the fact that people watch the news when she is on it, or is it that people watch the news when she is on it because the media is fixated on her? Discuss.

On a related note, the photographer that took the iconic picture of Paris weeping in the car as she was driven off to jail also took another famous picture exactly 35 years ago. You gotta feel for that poor photographer.

A couple of gaming notes

I'm not trying to move in on Billy's turf, but there are a couple of gaming related notes I thought I would share.

First, Blizzard has announced Starcraft II. If you haven't played the original Starcraft and it's expansion Brood War yet, you really are missing out. Starcraft really is one of the juggernauts of gaming history. Not only does it have really great RTS gameplay, but it has an entertaining plot and characters. The multiplayer action is supposed to be real good as well, but I've never used that.

As part of the announcement, Blizzard has released several movies for Starcraft II. There is a cinematic movie and a gameplay movie. The cinematic is just visually very impressive; there were times when I honestly was unable to tell if it was animation or live-action. It doesn't have a lot of content, though. The gameplay movie shows off the new game engine, and some of the units that will be in the game. Again, it just looks stunning (get the 500 MB high-res movie) and they seem to be putting a lot of effort into balancing the units very well.

All the movies are distributed through BitTorrent through a small BT client dedicated to downloading just that file. Blizzard also distributes it's World of Warcraft patches the same way. This, combined with their the Easter eggs they like to include and their new in-game anti-spam feature, has led me to believe that Blizzard Gets It^TM. If there is a better way of distributing multi-hundred-megabyte files to thousands of people across the Internet, I don't know it.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, Blizzard also released patch 2.1.0. They actually made a cinematic movie to advertise a game patch, which I find stunning. (To be fair, the patch included quite a bit of new content along with the usual fixes.) Making these things can't be cheap, and that they will go to that extent shows, I think, just how big a deal WOW is.

Oh, for those that care, Starcraft II and WOW are available for both the PC and the Mac.

Our what media?

Driving across the country, I've learned that listening to the radio is, not surprisingly, a good way to make the time pass. Music is OK, but what really makes the miles go by is listening to news and talk radio. There also seem to be roughly two kinds of radio stations.

It seems that non-music radio can be divided into two types. Listening to the first type of radio station, I learned:

• about the first post-Taliban beauty school in Afghanistan and how it was teaching women a skill they can use to support their families
• how a musician is using his music to teach the current generation about their unique ethnic group, descended from shipwrecked African slaves and local Indians
• about an Army chaplain, how he is working to help re-integrate soldiers and veterans into civilian society, and how combat can damage a soldier's spirit and soul (on Speaking of Faith)

On the other type of radio, I learned:

• how FOX News is mainstream; CNN is "liberal"
• CNN and Law and Order are pro-homosexual; these three guys had a real thing for L&O, mentioning it at least three times in the space of fifteen minutes
• that, when Rosie O'Donnell says the silly things she does, it's because she "hates America" (Bill O'Reilly)
• that the New York Times editors want completely unchecked immigration in order to destroy the white, male, Christian power structure (again, Bill O'Reilly)
• how Catholics are not "real Christians"
• how the ACLJ is running a petition to get Congress not to pass a stem cell bill that would allow the "killing of babies"
• that adult stem cells are far more useful than embryonic stem cells (no mention of the fact that research on adult SCs has been going on for more than three times longer than embryonic SCs).
• that the ACLU plans plan to eliminate and outlaw Christianity in this country

We are constantly told that one of these types of media outlets is "biased." Determining which of these is biased is an activity I will leave up to the reader.

(By the way, I self-censored and didn't even put the real kooks into the second group. These were the mainstream stations. For some of the real right-wing nuts, check out the Republic Broadcasting Network.)

Some weekend snark...

From Living the Scientific Life:

To Be a Good Republican, You Must Believe ...

• Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
• Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
• Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
• Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

Another American jihadist

Another Muslim extremist was arrested today for planning a terrorist attack in the United States. Shockingly, the attack was to take place at a funeral.

OK, it wasn't a Muslim. It was actually a white Christian good-ol'-boy.

A first-year Liberty University student was arrested in what police said was a plot to detonate explosive devices Tuesday, the day of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's funeral.

Liberty University is the college-like institution Falwell founded to proved impressionable young adults what they think is a college education. It teaches creationism, geocentrism, and denies the existence of gravity. I'm just kidding about those last two. That would be nutty.

"Extremist" and "terrorist" are not how the press will describe this guy, I wager.

Fantastic Firefox plugins

Sorry, I just couldn't find a way to make that title alliterative.

Anyway, I just came across two new great Firefox plugins that I'd never heard of before. So I thought I'd make a post about what I use. If anyone else knows of useful plugins, I'd love to know what they are.

• Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater: Make banner ads a thing of the past.
• All-in-one Gestures: This is such a simple idea, yet so incredibly useful. Control Firefox just by using the mouse.
• Copy Plain Text: One of my pet peeves is that cutting-and-pasting from Firefox pastes rich text, with all the text formatting and links retained. This cuts and pastes from Firefox just as plain text.
• Download Statusbar: Creates a status bar for downloads in progress, rather than a pop-up window.
• Yet Another Window Resizer: If you ever create webpages, it's important to know how they will look on screen resolutions other than yours. This makes changing the window size a snap.

The stuff nightmares are made of

You know how, when you're out running errands or something, you're in the middle of the store, and it occurs to you, "Wait. Did I remember to put on pants this morning?" And then you actually have to stop and check? Does that happen to everyone, or just me?

I blame his deathstyle

Warning: There are what may be dangerously high levels of insensitivity in this post.

The Lord struck down Jerry Falwell today. Falwell had a tendency to blame the misfortune in people's lives for either their sin or the sins of those around them. So one wonders what Falwell did to bring about the wrath of the Almighty.

Perhaps I take his words a bit personally. But he accused me being the cause of the terrorist attacks five years ago. He pointed his finger in my face and said I helped 9/11 happen. So yes, I take that personally. As of last week, he was still claiming it, even after his so called "apology".

I take no particular pleasure in his death, but I do not mourn him. I am sorry for what his family is going for and, frankly, hope none of them ever read this.

But he was an odious man with vile beliefs who said repugnant things. The world is better off without him.

What if they gave a terrorist attack and no one came?

Remember a couple of months ago, when an ill-advised marketing campaign left strange electrical devices around Boston, causing local authorities to think they could have been bombs? It made the news for days. This week's arrest of five men accused of planning to attack Fort Dix has similarly garnered a great deal of attention, even though the men had not even started planning any attack.

Would it come as a surprise to you if I'd told you there had been an actual terrorist attack in the US two weeks ago? Doesn't it seem odd that this has barely made a blip on the news? This wasn't an theoretical attack in the pre-planning stages, this was an actual bomb, placed where it would kill many civilians, with shrapnel added to maximize casualties. The bomb squad had to detonate it in place.

I suspect it was because the alleged bomber wasn't a swarthy Muslim immigrant, but a white Christian man. I certainly hope it was not because the target of his wrath was a family planning clinic and thus his near-victims were somehow less "innocent."

This isn't the only case. While the Fort Dix arrests have been plastered all over the news, this case of a group of men allegedly planning a machine gun attack also hasn't been widely publicized. They had fabricated about 200 explosive devices.

David Niewert over at Orcinus writes:

Of course, acknowledging that this is the case would require a major readjustment of the media's constructed narrative about the "war on terror." So it continues to turn a blind eye, and in the process it profoundly misinforms the public.

And yet Ann Coulter still gets to complain about terrorists being "ragheads."

More reading:

• http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/05/other-kind-of-terror.html
• http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10638.html
• http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/04/27/the-terrorism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/

Go peddle crazy somewhere else

I don't understand the level of credulity among the American people. It seems like every ten years or so, some event of national significance always gets credited to a vast, evil conspiracy. The Moon landing was a hoax, the government killed Kennedy, the CIA created HIV to kill black people. These days, it's all about 9/11 and how it wasn't really perpetuated by Al Queso, but rather by the government, or the CIA, or the Jews. Some say the Towers weren't brought down by planes at all, but by by missiles protected with hologram generators.

Yesterday, Washington Journal had Charles Allen, a (the?) Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence on. (The program is here, and you'll have to scroll down to the correct link; sorry, no permalinks. He starts about 2:00 into the full program, the first call is about 4 minutes in.) I just happened to come across this by chance. He seems fairly reasonable on the investigation of terror groups and talked a bit on how and why people become extremists. One caller asked about the search policies of container vessels, which is a legitimate issue and something we should be having a discussion about.

Allen talked briefly, then the show took about a dozen calls. It must have been Crazy Person Day, because the very first caller, a grandmotherly-sounding woman from Virginia, wanted to know why no one follows up the "Zionist connection" to 9/11, how they were "dancing on top of their cars" as the buildings fell, and how they had cased the buildings to plant explosives.

It was also two-for-one Crazy Person Day. A later caller from Las Vegas claimed the 9/11 attacks were a "false flag operation" in order to goad the US into war. This is the bit of what he said that steamed my broccoli:

Why don't you address what a lot of the people of the country think, that this is an inside job and your investigation, the 9/11 investigation, did investigate up to the point that the building was hit, but how did the building come down because physically, a lot of physicists says it's impossible, your pancake theory doesn't work, it was a free fall, that's a demolition job.

First of all, I'd like to meet these physicists that say a building collapsing is "impossible." Secondly, how do these people thing demolition works? You collapse some of the supporting beams and let the building fall down under the force of gravity. The planes hit WTC1 and WTC2 at about the 95th floor and the 80th floor, respectively. That means that once supporting beams gave way, the equivalent of either a 15- or 30-story building was dropped onto the rest of the tower. It would have been miraculous if the buildings didn't collapse after that.

Last week, a California highway collapsed after a tanker truck caught fire under it. The construction of the highway was probably mostly concrete and steel, much like the Towers. A picture is here, pretty impressive stuff. The tanker truck was carrying a lousy 8000 gallons. Each plane that hit the WTC was carrying the equivalent about one and a quarter tanker trucks full of fuel. Is it really such a stretch that that could have catastrophically damaged the building?

About one in six Americans believe the Towers were brought down by explosives, rather than by the planes. More than one in three believes the US was either complicit in the attacks or knew about them and did nothing. All without any evidence or explanation. Those are numbers I find very frightening.

Game designers having fun

I play a lot of computer games (too many?). One thing I like to see in a game is a sign that the game designers enjoyed themselves when making it. Jokes, meta-comments, amusing little subtleties all contribute to the atmosphere of a game. They probably also contribute to the quality. I figure a team that's comfortable enough and creative enough to put little tidbits like that into a game is in a situation where they will design a better product.

For example, Might and Magic VI has a setting typical of fantasy games. Throughout the game, however, the player explores ancient ruins and environments that show highly advanced technology. One temple requires the player to collect words of power from long-dead inhabitants of the temple: the captain, first mate, navigator, communicator, engineer, and doctor. It turns out these are all the names of Star Trek characters spelled backwards. In another part of the game, the player meets a character shunned by the rest of her village because her cat smells very bad.

Right now, I'm playing World of Warcraft (yes, I'm an unimaginably huge geek). A few Sundays ago, on Easter, I kept running across brightly colored objects. What they are should be pretty obvious:

If only a conservative pundit had been at Virginia Tech

Last time, I mentioned how Sean Hannity had been complaining in his radio show about how "liberals" were politicizing the Virgina Tech shooting. His sole example was something Rosie O'Donnell said on The View. Since then, conservative pundits have blamed the shooting on gun control, atheism, secularism, "Paki" Muslims, gays, universities "coddling" students, video games, and even vaccines. Yet, somehow, this is all the liberals fault. I've been wanting to write about what one conservative said about the massacre for a while, but every time I think about it, it just makes me so damn mad, so I've put it off.

The fact is, I haven't really heard much from liberals about the causes of this shooting. A discussion of gun control vs. concealed-carry-type laws might even be reasonable at this point. (Frankly, I think both arguments are flawed, but that's neither here nor there.) The outcry about the underlying causes, usually having to do with some value or another not being sufficiently important in modern America, seems to be coming mainly from the Right.

The worse of these was John Derbyshire, writing this in National Review Online:

Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

The level of insensitivity in this is just stunning. Derbyshire wrote this on April 17th, the very day after the shooting. He wrote it with perfect hindsight, complete knowledge of what had happened that day at the school, and probably a nice hot cup of coffee next to his laptop.

I've been in a lot of university engineering classes. How to disarm an gunman with hand-to-hand combat was not something we covered. Nor did we ever discuss how to tell a Walther P22 from a Glock 19. We didn't even discuss how to tell if the Glock was using the standard 15-round magazine, or if it was using one of the optional 15-, 17-, or 33- round magazines, all while a crazed gunman was shooting at you through a crowd of people. Maybe this explains why I'm not an employee of National Review Online. Hell I'm probably one of those wimps that would actually be upset by the fact that I'd just been shot with one of those lousy .22 caliber bullets.

Oh, but it gets worse. The next day, Mark Steyn blogged in National Review Online, saying this about the victims:

They’re not "children." The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men.

You see, the reason these college students were killed was the fact that they just weren't masculine enough. Had this happened in the 1950s, I suppose, the gunman would have quickly been tackled by muscled, football-playing, corn-fed, Midwestern men. But these students? Pussies, every one of them.

He also makes a cheap shot referencing Monica Lewinsky. For conservatives, everything is about the Clenis.

This Republican fixation on masculinity isn't anything new. It's the standard fare of those that tell us we live in a society with crumbling morals, depraved values, and the wrong kinds of religion. If we just buy their current book, it will tell us all about what's wrong with the country.

Just a few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald wrote about something very similar in "The right-wing cult of contrived masculinity":

[The conservative movement] is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archtypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind -- or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is -- and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.

This really is no different from how Derbyshire wrote about how much more of a hero he would have been in the Virginia Tech situation, had he been there.

Politicizing tragedy

I was driving back from my interview (more on that later) this afternoon, when I came across Sean Hannity's radio show. This show, like most of the news over the past couple of days involved the shootings at Virginia Tech. Hannity was ranting about the about how "liberals," the "pundit class" (presumably liberal pundits), and "reporters" (we all know how liberal they are) are politicizing the tragedy of the shooting to make political hay. The sole basis for his rant was the fact that Rosie O'Donnell spoke about gun control on The View this morning. Hannity gave no other example of the liberals politicizing this issue.

Rosie is indeed a kook. She's said numerous nutty things over the years. She's even a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. But she's one host out of four on a weekday morning gossip show, for crying out loud. She's hardly the spokesdyke for the Liberal Media Conspiracy.

The ironic part is that I originally intended this blog post to be about the fact that both President Bush and John McCain couldn't even comment on the Virginia Tech tragedy without mentioning their support for gun rights. Hannity did the same in his rant.

Shortly before listening to Hannity and having to turn it off in disgust, I had been in Southern IL listening to Scott Doody on The Working Man Show. This gun nut kept saying that even though we give the government 50% of every dollar we earn, "we can't rely on the government to keep us safe." That's a fairly standard conservative, gun-rights talking point. (Hint: if you're paying 50% of your income in taxes, there's probably a deduction or fifty you're not taking advantage of.)

This guy kept ranting about the cops in Virginia and how they were "fat" and "lazy" and "incompetent" and stood outside the building for twenty minutes while the shooter rampaged inside. He went on about how, had he been there, he would have charged in guns blazing. This nut then goes on to suggest this whole incident wouldn't have happened if there had been a concealed carry law to allow students to wear firearms to class.

What a fucking idiot.

I had been listening to The Diane Rehm Show earlier, and she had an hour-long interview with three people who actually knew what they were talking about, including Susan Riseling, the chief of police for the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Riseling says that the police went to an "active shooter protocol," meaning the first four law enforcement officers, regardless of jurisdiction or agency form a diamond and storm the building. She said they came to the exterior doors and found them chained shut, but that stopped them for less than 60 seconds. Law enforcement (I'm not sure if they were campus or city police) were inside Norris Hall while the shooting was going on.

I'd also like to point out that it was only on NPR where I heard any mention of the victims of this shooting. They had several profiles on the students, professors, and resident associates that were killed during this, describing who they were and putting a "face" to this tragedy. I don't think I heard the name from a single victim from any other news outlet all day. SRN News, which seems to be the radio news source used by most conservative radio stations and self-describes as "Christian radio's definitive source for news," didn't mention the victims, except to point out that two were members of Campus Crusade for Christ, and that Virginia Tech has a strong CCC presence.

So, please, don't tell me that it's the liberals that are politicizing this event and how it's the conservatives that just want to grieve and heal.

Crappy scientists, take one

From Replace the Lies with Truth and Kevin's Space, I see that Paul Cameron has a new "study" out proving how the evil homosexual agenda exaggerates the numbers of gays in society and how they tend to die young. This is already being touted by Christian media and has been cited by Porno Pete's Americans for Truthiness Truth about Homsexuality. The study is crap. I'm no sociologist and even I can drive a truck through their methodology.

I want to point out here how Cameron and his son are co-opting the scientific process to give their study a veneer of validity it doesn't really deserve. Let me point out that my background is in the physical sciences, so my observations are based on that. Things may be a bit different in the sociological realm, but I doubt by much.

The noise being made by the Cameron about their study, mostly being made via press release, is in regards to "Federal Distortion of The Homosexual Footprint," a poster they presented at the 2007 convention of the Eastern Psychological Association. Their conclusion was that there are fewer gay men and lesbians over 60 that self-identify as gay, therefore they die young.

At a scientific conference there are generally three tiers of events: invited talks, regular talks, and posters. Invited talks are a fairly big deal. They're given by respected scientists, they're fairly long (usually about an hour), and there are relatively few of them. They're the most prestigious. Regular talks are given by scientists and grad students. They're shorter, perhaps fifteen minutes with five minutes for questions, so there are about five times as many of these as the invited talks. They're the bread-and-butter of scientific conferences. Now, sometimes, the authors of regular talks are asked to write their presentation up into a paper, and these are published in a proceedings. Proceedings can be cited by someone else in a scientific paper, but they're not considered good citations, because they haven't undergone peer review and are not generally as high quality as a real paper.

Posters are the lowest tier at a conference. Basically, you put your poster up in a room of about fifty other posters and stand in front of it. People walk around the room looking at posters, possibly asking questions about them. Often, poster sessions include food subsidized by a company, because otherwise, people wouldn't show up. These are invariably done by graduate students; I've never heard of anyone else presenting a poster. They're not peer-reviewed and, most of all, they're not documented or published anywhere. There's barely any evidence that the Camerons even presented this poster, let alone what it said or if anyone paid attention to it.

Here is how the press release is touting Cameron's credentials:

Paul Cameron, a reviewer for the British Medical Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and the Postgraduate Medical Journal...

The fact that Cameron is a reviewer for these journals means nothing. It's about as prestigious as saying he's a dues-paying member of a psychological organization (which he may not be, since he's been kicked out of two of them).

The way that peer review works is that a scientist submits a paper to a journal. The editor of that journal sends the paper to two or three other people to look it over and critique it. If there are any major flaws, errors, or inconsistencies, the reviewer sends comments back to the editor, who forwards them back to the original scientist. He can then revise the paper, or respond to the commenter. Once the comments have been addressed to the satisfaction of the reviewers, the paper is them published. (I imagine this is very field-specific. Again, this is only in my experience.) Editors are usually fairly indiscriminate about who they ask to review a paper.

So the fact that Cameron's press release lists among his credentials the fact that he is a reviewer for these journals says more about his lack of esteem in the scientific community than anything.

What a great way to start the week

So it turns out that the water company didn't actually do their scheduled repair on Friday. Unfortunately, they didn't tell anyone that. So Monday, just as I'm leaving for work, the water pressure just goes out. Great. They also didn't warn anyone that they would be turning off the water. So not only was I avoiding using my water supply for half the weekend, I got to do it all over again at the beginning of the week, but without having laid in a supply of clean water. Thanks, guys.

Leave me behind, you go on ahead

Billy has started Softcore Gamer, reviewing computer games for the casual gamer. Sort of in that line, I was going to actually pick up and play Left Behind: Eternal Forces, to see if it really and truly was as awful as all the reviews said it was. The game was released about six months ago, and has been almost universally panned, so I figured I'd be able to pick up a copy fairly cheap.

I was wrong. Not only is the game still retailing for around $40, used copies are still going for about $25 on eBay. Much as I wish to keep you well-informed, Gentle Reader, I don't like you that much.

Most of the non-gameplay objections to the title center around the fact that the game, which takes place post-Rapture, involves either converting neutral characters to Evangelical Christianity or killing them. So it's a choice of my way or eternal damnation. Good. Evil. Black. White. There are no shades of gray. Just like in the real world, kids!

Even if I could find a copy of the game cheap, I'd now be reluctant to install it. It turns out that the game comes enabled with spyware. Eeeew. The game displays in-game advertisements for EBGames, GameStop, the Ad Council, and other businesses and organizations. These can be updated by the software online, and it also uploads viewing information and God knows what else.

Just to give you an example of the sort of philosophy that this game espouses, the neutral characters in the game that the player can recruit come in both male and female versions. The male version can be pretty much any character type: doctor, disciple, manly strapping construction worker, etc. Female neutrals can be: musicians and nurses. That's it. Nurses, seriously? One wonders what these women are even doing outside the kitchen. (Note: The game's Wikipedia page says otherwise, but I've found two reviewers, PC Gamer and Ars Technica, that both make a note of it.)

So you'll have to excuse me, but I'm going to leave this game behind.

A great start to the weekend

Some utility or another has been doing quite a bit of work outside my apartment. There were those little flags laid out for a while, as well as some recent spray paint on the ground. Then there were strange holes dug around the yard. Then yesterday, I got a notice saying that the water company had to shut the water off for a few hours to fix a leak. So I'm under a boil order until 9 p.m. tonight. Great, what a lot of fun.

The Darwin robot

Yeah, I know, I haven't been posting much lately. I have a few things rolling around in my head and I'll get around to putting them online when I can. Or when I feel like it. Here's something to keep you entertained in the meantime. It's programmed in LabVIEW, too.

Why do I know more about the Bible than him?

This charming letter appeared in the News-Gazette this Wednesday.

I do not understand why Schmeling thinks that he should be a priest. Apparently, he does not read the Bible. If he did, he would know the following: God said, "Ye shall be holy; for I am holy." The apostle Paul said, "What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid." Because Schmeling lives an unrighteous life, he should not be a priest.

Moreover, God demonstrated in the Bible that he does not like homosexuality. He destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of it. Ironically, the definition of the word sodomy described the same homosexual behaviors that had happened inside of Sodom. Homosexuals had polluted these cities so badly with their homosexuality that God only found three righteous people whom he could save from destruction.

Homosexuals want to use the powers of religious offices to pollute churches. Homosexuality being accepted in today's society is important to homosexuals. If homosexuals can use these powers to get society to accept homosexuality, they certainly will.

No matter how homosexuals interpret the scriptures for the homosexual movement, they cannot change how God feels about homosexuality. In the end, he will demonstrate to them how he feels.

Paul Hayes
Urbana

What is it with self-righteous Christians and the hating of the queers? It seems to be all they focus on these days. From passing Constitutional amendments, to firing journalism teachers that publish a student's letter in the school newspaper calling for an end to gay bullying, it's a wonder these Christians still have time to feed and clothe the poor.

Even I know that the story of Sodom is generally viewed by Biblical scholars to be a condemnation of the inhospitality showed by the city dwellers toward the strangers in their midst. Hospitality was of vital importance to many of these ancient cultures. The Greeks were especially aware of it, since their gods regularly traveled in human form; offending a stranger could get you the wrath of Zeus. The ancient Middle East was no different.

Frankly, Mr. Hayes, I might give your beliefs some credulity when San Francisco is destroyed by a rain of fire and sulfur. Until then, you're full of crap.

Icky, but interesting

Fig has another blog post about life in the ED. Go read Like spitting into the ocean.

U.S. Attorney scandal

A commenter over at It's Matt's World had just doesn't seem to understand why anyone is so upset about the recent firing of all those US Attorneys. Yes, they are political appointees of the President, but they work in the Department of Justice. The DOJ is not the political enforcer of the President's political party.

Digby, quoting Kevin Drum in today's Washington Monthly, puts it well:

the only serious argument that Purgegate is a scandal is related to the reason for the Pearl Harbor Day massacre. If seven U.S. Attorneys were fired that day for poor performance, that would be fine. If they were fired for insufficient commitment to Bush administration policies, that would be fine too. But there's considerable reason to believe that at least some of them were fired because either (a) they were too aggressive about investigating Republican corruption or (b) they weren't aggressive enough about investigating Democrats.

That's it. That's the argument. David Iglesias: Didn't bring indictments against some local Democrats prior to the 2006 election. John McKay: Failed to invent voter fraud cases that might have prevented a Democrat from winning the 2004 governor's race in Washington... And this all comes against a background that suggests the Bush Justice Department has initiated fantastically more investigations of Democrats than Republicans over the past five years.

Although there wasn't any fellatio involved (that we know of) this leads to a suspicion that somebody was obstructing justice, which last I heard was still a crime.

He also links to this article in Washington Monthly, showing that at the local level, the DOJ has instituted seven times more investigations into Democrats than Republicans.

Why the right-wing smear machine works

Sometimes, something happens or I hear something that just jolts me out of my blogponymous narcissism. For example, when I find out that some people don't at least glance at a couple of Internet news sources most days. Or when I realize that there are some people that don't even read blogs (or know what they are), let alone have one of their own. It's moments like that that make me realize just how the right-wing noise machine works.

The hard part is getting a story/smear started. Once it's planted somewhere, other, more "respectable" media outlets can report on the fact that someone else is reporting the smear. Then commentators pick it up and start using it as a talking point. Then it becomes a code word to the base. For example, Al Gore says he "invented the Internet," or that John Kerry is a coward and threw his medals away.

Greg Sargent over at The Horses Mouth shows this with the "Hillary's drawl" story. No CNN anchor reported on Hillary's drawl until the day after Drudge commented on it. Then, they were all condemning it and quoting Clinton out of context. Elsewhere, Sargent even blogs about a Washington Post article about how Drudge is the "launching post" for stories.

So I was listening to C-SPAN the other day, and this caller calls into Washington Journal:

CALLER: Good morning and thank you for taking my call. I have a question about a news article that was on two or three TV stations approximately a month ago. Senator Clinton made a comment that Mr. Obama attended a madrassa as a child and I was just wondering if he ... I haven't heard anybody say if he is a practicing Muslim, or if he isn't affiliated with any particular religion.

The caller is of course referring to the story that was reported by InsightMag.com, without any named sources, that associates of Clinton had discovered that Senator Obama had attended an extremist Muslim madrassa. The story was thoroughly debunked, but persists in the right-wing media, in soundbite and code word form, if nothing else. This poor guy heard probably about it initially, and didn't catch any of the followup stories (probably on other networks, if he heard about it on FOX), so he still thinks it's true. How many other people do?

So we have a completely unsourced story on a right-wing website (not only were there no sources in the article, no reporter or author is listed). The story is immediately picked up by FOX News, where anchors and commentators talk about it for several days. Little followup is done to show the story is a complete falsehood. The story has now entered the zeitgeist, and people accept it as true, even though it's not.

If you go to the FOX News site now, and search for "Obama madrassa," three pages come up in the results. Two are transcripts of John Gibson reporting the InsightMag.com smear. The other is an AP story refuting it, but there's no indication that this made it to air.

Clearly, the story has accomplished its purpose, namely to smear Obama. Whether or not it's true is unimportant; the only thing that matters is to get it out onto the airwaves.

The ultimate Champaign-Urbana blogroll

The local blogging community is fairly small, so I'm making some attempt at a comprehensive list. Below are all the blogs local to Champaign-Urbana I've been able to find. If one is missing or has gone inactive, please let me know.

• Analog Periphery
• Baseball Zealot
• Beth Loves Bollywood
• Burning Oak
• Cat People
• Champaign County Clerk
• The Champaign of Blogs
• Concrete Box
• e pur si muove
• Eric Sink's Weblog
• Exploding Aardvark
• Exploration Through Example
• Frogs and Crowbars
• Gamera Gabs
• Glock21
• Illinipundit
• It's Matt's World
• JavaJunkee
• Jscrilla.com
• little blog on the prairie
• lonetreeontheprarie
• Maladjusted
• mediageek
• My Pet Goat
• Narciblog
• Nerdlusus
• Out of the Forest
• Papa Familias
• Part-Time Pundit
• Pies Men Like But I Prefer Cake
• Racial Pro-File
• Reports from the Edge
• Schreiner's Media Landscape
• Serpent Factory
• Socrates' Academy
• Steam Room Quantum Mechanics
• This Just In
• Urbanagoria
• WILLblog

Update 2007-06-23: Removed a number of blogs that had not been updated in three months.

Told ya so

So it turns out that the FBI has been using its new USA PATRIOT Act powers inappropriately. From the NY Times:

The report found many instances when national security letters, which allow the bureau to obtain records from telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit companies and other businesses without a judge’s approval, were improperly, and sometimes illegally, used.

Moreover, record keeping was so slipshod, the report found, that the actual number of national security letters exercised was often understated when the bureau reported on them to Congress, as required.

Oh, if only someone had forseen the possibility of this abuse! If only there were some way to place some sort of check on the powers of the executive, or at least to balance them with the powers of the other branches of government. There just doesn't seem to be any way of doing that, at least not in the minds of the Bush administration. Woe! Woe is us.

Jill Stanek disproves her own argument

Jill Stanek is the conservative columnist that has been arguing against the HPV vaccine because it will encourage promiscuity in young women. Debbie Halvorson, the Majority Leader in the Illinois State Senate, recently spoke out about her own HPV infection, precancerous cells, and hysterectomy and is speaking out in support of the HPV vaccine. Jill Stanek then likened her to a porn star in a column.

In a recent post on her website, Stanek now is proposing that male circumcision be mandated for boys if the HPV vaccine becomes mandated for girls. Her justification is a recent Lancet study in Africa that shows a significant reduction in HIV infection rates in men due to circumcision. The reduction was so significant that the study had to be terminated prematurely because to continue with it would have been unethical.

I'm not writing this because I want to discuss circumcision and HIV prevention. (Though the fact that a simple procedure could save many lives is nothing but good news.) I want to point out the fact that Stanek has now disproved her own argument.

The whole premise that girls will become promiscuous if the get the HPV vaccine is fairly ludicrous on its face, but it's the standard argument conservatives put forward for anything that helps prevent STD infection (other than celibacy). Now that we have determined that circumcision protects against HIV infection, will we see an explosion in promiscuity in circumcised men? Of course not. Looking at the same Lancet study, the rate at which the men had sex was basically the same for the circumcised and uncircumcised men.

So, what I don't get is, if giving girls a vaccine to protect them against HPV makes girls slutty, why is Stanek calling for the circumcision of boys to protect them from HIV?

UPDATE: Stanek appears in the comments and writes:

You clearly don't understand sarcasm.

Oh, don't be silly. Of course I understand sarcasm. I was trying to point out in this post that if circumcision protects against HIV, then -- by Stanek's very own argument -- circumcised men and boys should be more promiscuous the uncircumcised men and boys. As such, Stanek should be arguing against the circumcision of young boys. After all, if a girl views getting the HPV vaccine as license to have sex, then it is reasonable to conclude that a boy protected against HIV will do the same. Yet there is no anti-circumcision campaign among conservatives.

The conservative argument against the vaccine says the girls who have been vaccinated will be more likely to be promiscuous. One could also make an argument that girls who have had the HPV vaccine are more likely to be aware of the dangers, prevalence, and infectiousness of HPV, and may actually avoid sexual contact. Conservatives have produce no actual evidence that their argument is correct. As far as I know, they haven't even attempted any studies. Data collected by rhetorical argument is not valid data.

For the record, I'm very much pro-vaccine. I think its existence is a great thing and I hope it saves many lives. I'm also mildly anti-mandate.

Forget the Chief and hit the books

After the Daily Illini's recent redesign, readers can now post comments on articles and editorials. Basically, they've enabled blog comments in the online version of the newspaper. This isn't exclusive to the DI; Salon has done the same thing. Frankly, I don't think it's a good idea, for reasons I'm not going to go into here.

Today, the DI had an editorial about the board's decision to get rid of Chief Illiniwek. There were a handful of comments. A commenter named "lyn" left this:

how about we do that and then we do something more than just symbolic. Why not a lasuit agaisnt the NCAA funded by the money from fans, alumsm students and faculty who intend to withhold said money from the U in protest of the CHief decision. There are to start with 12,400 signaturs on the web petition pledging to so scuh.

We can go afterafter the NCAA for capricious implementation of subjective policy that exceeded their (Ncaa"s) authority and resulted in the violation of first amendment rights. The damages to the reputation and image of the UICU as well depriving 10s of thousands of a meaningful tradition could be a beginning. Dan Maloney was deprived of his 1st amendment rights also...

It goes on. She posts two more times. The third time was in ALL CAPS BECAUSE SHE HAS SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY.

Seriously, this is just embarrassing. I hope to God that lyn is not a UIUC student. In the above quote, I was going to point out each misspelling, grammatical mistake, and other error that a moment's proofreading would have caught, but realized that would be every single word. Parts of it are so incoherent I actually can't figure out what she's trying to say.

The ineptness of the writing aside, she seems to be claiming that there's some First Amendment issue with the Chief. I'm sorry, but that's just bunk. The NCAA is a private organization. UIUC was welcome to keep the Chief, but the NCAA didn't want to associate with us if it did. End of story. They were well within their rights to do so.

Getting back to lyn's comments, if this is the quality of writing our undergraduates display, we need to attract a better caliber of student. I don't care if you're studying nuclear physics, political science, or freaking physical education, decent communication skills are imperative. UIUC is ranked as the 25th best university in the world, for crying out loud. Our students should be able to throw together half a dozen coherent sentences, even on the spur of the moment.

Then again, I should probably just look on the bright side. Maybe she was just drunk.

Now death is the only certain thing

I have a feeling most people don't know about this, so I thought I'd bring it up. As of mid-2006, after a series of losses in federal court, the Treasury Department decided to stop collecting a federal excise tax on long distance telephone calls. A tax that was instituted in 1898. To pay for the Spanish-American War. Seriously.

The good news is that all the taxes collected to pay for the Spanish-American War since 2003 will be refunded to you this year. Basically, if you had a long-distance carrier since then, there will be a line on your tax return giving you back $30 (for single people, more for people with more exemptions). The IRS has more information.

I'd just like to point out that this isn't a new deduction or even a credit. This is a refund of tax you have already paid. It sounds like anyone with a long distance phone bill is eligible.

Handing sandwiches to drunks

Fig has put up a post about a day in her life as an ER doctor. Go read Pictures, pinesol, pregnancy, progeny - a night in the ED. It's fascinating. One thing that struck me today is just how much of what goes on isn't just medical but human. The bit about the mother that was antsy until she was made to feel "part of the process," especially.

Other days, I'm ashamed to be a Texan

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this Houston Chronicle article about the state of education in Texas. (The article is in their archives by now; you'll have to register.) It's rather frightening:

...between one-fourth and one-third of Texas students leave school before graduating. Texans must be grateful the rate is not higher.

In urban areas such as Houston, the dropout rate climbs to 50 percent. For black, Hispanic and low-income students of any race or ethnicity, according to Eileen Coppola, a researcher with Rice University's Center for Education, the rate climbs to 60 percent.

I had no idea the problem was that bad. That means that a majority of the poor don't even get a high-school education. It's hard enough getting by with just a HS degree, and these kids won't even have that.

Now, I don't actually know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit that a big factor of whether a kid finishes his education is whether his parents did. That means that this low dropout rate will echo into future generations, possibly creating a semi-permanent underclass.

One of the big things that President Bush did while in office is get the No Child Left Behind Act passed. I believe that is at least partly based on the changes he made in the Texas educational system while he was governor. Just something to think about.

Some days I'm proud to be a Texan

Every year, Texas Monthly publishes their Bum Steer Awards, where they point out all the stupid things politicians, celebrities, and random other people have done. This year was no exception. I think this is my favorite magazine cover ever:

A cute overload

It's Sunday. I don't feel like being particularly insightful.

I'm a sucker for pictures of cute animals doing cute things. I Can Has Cheeseburger? takes it to an almost dangerous level of cute.

This geeky picture is my favorite. Honorable mentions go to this one, this one, this one, and this one.

(Via the Detonating Armadillo. Or something.)

Is it just because she had really big tits?

Anna Nicole Smith died yesterday. I can't say much for the other networks, but this has basically been running on CNN constantly for two days now. It's overshadowed every other piece of news. It's sad, of course, but why does anyone care? She was a two-bit celebrity that really never did anything of substance.

I'm so glad the press is covering this story non-stop rather than bothering with boring stuff like the fact that the Pentagon distorted pre-war intelligence to make the case to go to war in Iraq.

Abstinence education is unsafe

A good engineering design is fault tolerant. A designer must realize that components are not always reliable and design accordingly. A suspension bridge shouldn't fail because a single cable breaks.

A good software design fails gracefully. In other words, when faced with unexpected or intelligible input, the program reacts in a predictable manner. The case of the USS Yorktown going dead in the water when a sailor left an unexpected zero in a database field is a great example of software that was not well-designed.

When it might be possible for a piece of equipment to be put in a state where injury or death could occur to the user, an engineer must take this into account. As a simple example, my coffee grinder can't be run with the lid off. There's an interlock that prevents it from turning on when it is possible for my hands to be near the blades.

Lastly, a good designer must take into the possibility of human error. Any potentially lethal piece of equipment, even any policy which could lead to damaging consequences, that does not take this into account is a poor one. This is why we mandate that truck drivers work at most eight hour shifts -- we acknowledge that a tired human being at the wheel is unreliable.

I guess this is why abstinence-only sex education pisses me off: it fails all these criteria. It is not fault tolerant, nor does it fail gracefully. If a kid screws up and has sex before being really ready for it, then it's more likely that he or she will wind up with an STD or a bun in the oven while still in high school (or earlier).

Abstinence education also doesn't acknowledge the possibility of human error. In my last blog post, I quoted the rather repugnant Jill Stanek where she said in a recent column decrying the HPV vaccine that she can't understand why a "virtuous young woman" would want to marry a man who wasn't a virgin. Really? She honestly can't fathom why? One can't help but wonder what Stanek's reasons for getting married actually are.

Abstinence educators are always quick to quote condom failure rates (they almost always use misleading and inaccurate information, when it's not outright falsehoods, but that's a blog post for a different day). What you never hear them cite is the failure rate for a vow of celibacy. Abstinence-only programs do not protect kids from STDs.

Not only do the religious conservatives that push abstinence-only education completely ignore the existence of gay kids, but they're pushing an unsafe agenda. There is no other activity in our society where we consider deliberate ignorance a safety strategy.

All of this is because these religiously-based programs aren't intended to stop STDs and unwanted pregnancy. They're intended to prevent sex. They're intended to prevent sin.

I her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg tells of a speech given by celibacy advocate Pam Stenzel. Stenzel was appointed by President Bush to an abstinence task force at the Department of Health and Human Services. This is how Goldberg describes Stenzel's speech at the 2003 Reclaiming America for Christ conference:

Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she’d had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education’s success rate—a question she regarded as risible. "What he’s asking," she said, "is does it work. You know what? Doesn’t matter. Cause guess what. My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public schools’ job should not be to keep teens from having sex." Then her voice rose and turned angry as she shouted, "Our job should be to tell kids the truth!"

"People of God," she cried, "can I beg you, to commit yourself to truth, not what works! To truth! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day I’m not answering to you, I'm answering to God!"

Later in the same talk, she explained further why what "works" isn’t what’s important—and gave some insight into what she means by "truth." "Let me tell you something, people of God, that is radical, and I can only say it here," she said. "AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not teach my child that they can sin safely."

These are the sorts of people Republicans want to turn our country over to. People who aren't interested in the actual effects of their policies, so long as they are consistent with their supernatural beliefs.

Do Christians really want women to die?

ArchPundit reads WorldNetDaily so I don't have to. Today, he linked to a column written by nutjob Jill Stanek, who in turn wrote about how horrible the HPV vaccine is. I'm almost starting to think that conservative Christians want there to be horrible consequences for sex, because it makes it dangerous. Stanek says:

Aside from the fact Winokur has no business telling other people's children about "precautions" to avoid pitfalls of promiscuous sex, her advice stinks. Let's not address the real cause. Let's try to avoid the ramifications of the cause.

Winokur or People magazine are fueling the exploitation and health demise of women by refusing to acknowledge the only full-proof [sic] way to avoid HPV or cervical cancer: abstinence.

Let's ignore the fact that she calls any sex before marriage "promiscuous." No, Jill, actually, that's not the only full-proof way to avoid HPV. Twenty percent of women are forced to have sex before they reach their twenties. So I guess you have to add "not getting raped" to that list of "full-proof" (dumbass) ways to avoid HPV.

Fig has pointed out that HPV can live on surfaces for a short while. It's possible to infect yourself by touching an HPV-laden surface, and then touching yourself. So we also have to add "not touching things" to the list of foolproof ways to avoid HPV.

Then Stanek gets into full-self-righteous mode and gets all judgmental on the slutties:

There is only one good reason a virtuous young woman should consider getting the HPV vaccination. That is if the man she plans to marry has had sex with other women, meaning he could be infected with HPV or an array of other STDs. I don't know why a virtuous young woman would want to marry such a man, but there you go.

Seriously, Stanek has absolutely no idea why a woman would want to marry a man who has had sex? "I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you. What, you're not a virgin? Get lost, tramp!" Is this really what goes through the mind of conservative Christians? Fewer than 10% of Americans are virgins when they get married. So when a woman meets a guy, she has a roughly 90% chance of picking one that has had sex at some point in his life. Those really aren't such great odds when we're talking about a disease that's (a) incredibly common, (b) easy to catch, (c) easy to prevent, and (d) can kill you.

UPDATE: Stanek shows up in the comments and largely apologizes for her attitude towards non-virgins at the end. What she doesn't mention is that many thousands of women are exposed to this virus, even though they do everything "right." This is a simple way to protect a woman from a virus that she is very likely to be exposed to during her life, possibly even against her will. Remember, even, that the adultery rate in American marriage is roughly 40%.

Doughnuts and people-watching

(This was originally written while I was away for Christmas. I'm only now getting around to posting it. Yes, I really am that lazy.)

I have a couple of hours here in Chicago's Union Station. So I'm killing time sitting in the food court with a cup of coffee and my first-ever Krispy Kreme doughnut. (Not bad, but over-hyped.)

There's a restaurant right next to my seat with an older Asian man and a younger Asian woman hawking their food in broken English. "Yummy, yummy, right here" is his line and he's been repeating it every thirty seconds for the past hour. "You try sample" is her cry to the passers-by, along with a proffered toothpick topped with some sort of meat.

I just watched a guy walk up and order an egg roll and something else that I don't know what it is because he only pointed to it. The name of the restaurant? Kelly's Cajun Grill. Now that's fusion cuisine.

Aren't you tired of all this HPV talk by now?

(This was written while I was traveling recently. I'm only now posting it.)

Matt brings up the issue of the HPV vaccine. (As always, the good discussions happen while I'm out of town.) There seems to be a sentiment among many of the commenters there that the vaccine should not be required to attend school, and I'm not sure I disagree. I am, however, confused about why any parent would not want their daughter to have this vaccine. So I'm trying to think of likely reasons.

1. Cost. The virus costs approximately $350. As a potentially life-saving measure, it's cheap at the price. I suppose for those genuinely just squeaking by, the cost might be prohibitive. For any middle-class family, the cost shouldn't be a significant issue.
2. Anti-vaccination hysteria. As Orac has long pointed out, there is a small, but very vocal, contingent of people crowing about how dangerous vaccines are. Usually, it is that the MMR vaccine causes autism. First it was mercury, and when that was shown not to be true, the cause is unnamed "toxins" in the vaccine. So there are probably a number of people averse to one of "Big Pharma's" treatments. Unfortunately, it's irrational behavior like this that has caused a recent surge in dangerous, yet preventable, diseases like measles.
3. A desire to avoid a perceived risk. I guess this is the reason I can understand the best. The vaccine is new, and that makes people uncomfortable. As I understand it, the vaccine is extremely safe -- to the point where no serious reactions were reported in the clinical trials for Gardasil.
4. Treating an STD. This is what I think is behind pretty much all the controversy about this vaccine, and it is the reason that distresses me the most. HPV is largely a sexually transmitted disease, and it seems that conservative Christians are opposed to it because it will remove one of the Lord's punishments for slutty women. This was abundantly clear when they were proclaiming how HIV/AIDS was God's punishment for gay men and His cure for homosexuality. As Michelle Goldberg pointed out in her book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, some abstinence-only proponents have made it clear that preventing unwanted pregnancy and STD's are not the goal of their movement, but rather their goal is preventing people from sinning by having premarital sex. I really do think that if this vaccine treated eyeball cancer rather than a cancer of the naughty parts, it wouldn't be even slightly controversial.

So let me point out that HPV:

• causes cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women, worldwide (cervical cancer used to be the leading cause of death for women in the United States)
• causes anal cancer (while that may make you snigger, it is important for gay men to know; a man who has sex with men is five times more likely to get anal cancer than a woman is to get cervical cancer)
• causes penile cancer (fortunately rare)
• causes genital warts
• can be spread by sexual contact (by the time they reach college, one in five women have been forced to have sex)
• can even be spread by casual contact

In a private email to me (and I hope she will forgive me for sharing this here), Fig wrote:

I think Merck made a HUGE marketing error. What they should have said was:

Hey, guys - did you know that this year alone 1500 men will get penis cancer? It looks like this [horrible yucky picture]. And the only cure? Surgery. Penis and testicle off and scraped down to the bone. You will pee sitting down for the rest of your life. You'll never have sex again. People in locker rooms will sneak looks at your deformed body and missing maleness and be horrified.

But there is hope! If this vaccine is administered to all boys and girls, penile cancer rates will be slashed by 90%.

If I ever get off my lazy ass and see a doctor, I may have to get this vaccine myself.

UPDATE: This post was picked up by Buzzfeed, so welcome everyone coming from there. This was one in a series of posts I did on the HPV vaccine. (I don't normally harp on about things like this.) If you were interested in this, you may also wish to read:

1. School Boards and Vaccinations -- the post over at It's Matt's World that started it all
2. Vaccinations, Revisited -- the discussion continues
3. More vaccine talk -- where I jumped on the bandwagon (Long, but worth the read.)
4. Do Christians really want women to die? -- last in the series, about a local conservative who refuses to believe there's any reason a woman should get this vaccine unless she's a slut.

Local troublemakers

This is weird. While I was away for the holidays, John Bambenek's page was resurrected from it's deleted status at Wikipedia, then quickly put through the deletion process again. Weirdly, there were three sockpuppet accounts created during the process: JohnBambenek, ChrisPerardi, and Narciblog. Mr. Bambenek used to edit at Wikipedia under the userid Jbamb, but appears to have left early last year, so he does not appear to be the person behind the JohnBambenek account. The ChrisPerardi account was blocked because it was a sockpuppet of JohnBambenek. The Narciblog account was blocked for being a troll, though I suspect it was a similar sockpuppet.

I just wanted to state for the record that the Narciblog account at Wikipedia was not me.

Why Obama will not win

Obama has recently started to explore a run for the Presidency in 2008. I've always said that he seems like a smart guy and it's good to have him the Senate, but there is not a chance in hell he could ever win the Presidency. Here's an excellent example of why:

This morning, Fox News featured a segment highlighting a right-wing report that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) attended an Islamic "madrassa" school as a 6-year-old child.

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy pointed out that madrassas are "financed by Saudis" and "teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us," then declared, "The big question is: was that on the curriculum back then?" Later, a caller to the show questioned whether Obama’s schooling means that "maybe he doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy." Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade responded, "Well, we’ll see about that."

The Fox hosts failed to correct the false claim that Obama is Muslim. One caller, referring to Obama, said, "I think a Muslim would be fine in the presidency, better than Hillary. At least you know what the Muslims are up to." Anchor Gretchen Carlson responded, "We want to be clear, too, that this isn’t all Muslims, of course, we would only be concerned about the kind that want to blow us up."

Well, that's nice of Carlson. I'm sure she's not "concerned" about all black men, either, just the ones that want to break into her house.

Raise your hand if you're surprised this aired on FOX News.