My thoughts on Palin

Fig asks what I thought of the VP debate. I didn't want to bury my thoughts in the comments on a non-top-post, so I'm putting them here. Both she and David seem to have been traumatized by the debate.

Personally, it was about what I expected. I think by now it's pretty clear that Palin follows in Bush's intellectual footsteps: poorly informed, incurious, and ideological rigid. After the famous Couric interview Palin's main objective for this debate must have been not to embarrass her.

On the other hand, her comment that "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also" pretty much shows that she had nothing but contempt for the debate process. The debate wasn't so she could let the American people know about her track record, that's what the Internet is for. And newspapers. Which she should know, since she reads them all.

Palin's job in this interview was to not do anything embarrassing and repeat the campaign's talking points, which she did ad infinitum. Notice that whenever she was talking she never gave any specifics, just aw shucks, gee whiz, gosh darn, say-it-aint-so-joe soundbites intended to appeal to the so called "low information" voters, and I think that succeeded.

Fortunately, it looks like recent polling data shows she has turned off the voters that look for a bit more in their candidates than whether or not they would be a good person to have a beer with.

UPDATE: This piece by Radley Balko basically sums up what really bothers me about Republicans:

This growing anti-intellectualism on the right is alarming. It isn’t that Palin is dumb. I don’t think she is. It’s that she has no interest in learning, no interest in reading or experiencing anything that might challenge what she already knows she believes. She thinks with her gut, as Steven Colbert might put it. She’s a female W. And they seem to love her for it. The GOP has gone populist. Knowledge, worldliness, and learning are to be shunned, swept aside as East Coast elitism. It’s all about insularity, earthy values, and simpleness. Remember the beating John Kerry took in 2004 for daring to use the word “nuance?” There’s no room for complexity on the right anymore. It’s good and evil. Black and white. Us and them.

Drill, baby, drill

Sarah Palin wants energy independence. She wants more offshore drilling and Alaskan drilling. Here's her version on energy independence:

Energy independence simply isn't possible while we're dependent on petroleum. Alaskan production would be approximately the same size as the yellow areas.

Hat tip: Ezra Klein

Should I watch the debate?

I'm torn. It won't change who I vote for. On the other hand, if the Couric interview and the following, now-infamous SNL skit is anything to judge by, there is some possibility that it will be entertaining.

Why won't the press cover this?

In this election season, we've seen expose after expose on Obama's church, Reverend White's teachings, Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy, John Edwards's affair, and so on. But virtually nothing about policy. Ezra Klein has an interesting piece about how John McCain's health care plan will massively raise taxes on everyone, result in 20 million Americans losing their health insurance, and basically end employer-based health insurance.

The individual insurance market is not the same as the employer-based insurance market. It sacrifices the bargaining powers of numbers for the cost-effectiveness of comparison shopping. It is fractured. It has higher administrative costs. Insurers can discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions, geography, age, gender, and even simple whim. The risk pools are smaller. The deductibles are higher, as are the co-pays, and the spending caps are lower. And the individual insurance market is much more expensive: Buchmueller, Glied, Royalty, and Swartz estimate that "for a typical family that moves from group to individual coverage...the move to nongroup insurance will raise premiums for an identical policy by more than $2,000 per year." That increase alone chews up 40% of the family tax credit, and that's simply so the family does not lose ground. In addition, the tax credit is not indexed to health spending, and will sharply decline in value with each passing year. In sum, individuals will be in a costlier market, where insurers have more power to set prices and conditions, and McCain's tax credit will do less to help them with every passing year.

Yet, mark my words, the media narrative for this election will be that Obama is in favor of higher taxes.

Putting things in perspective, the graphical version

I put together this little chart because I think it shows the impact of this bailout better than yesterday's post.

Crap, that's a lot of money.

Just putting things in perspective

I feel like I should write a blog post about the financial bailout that was announced this week. I find it difficult, however, because I barely understand enough economics to balance my checkbook at the end of the month. I sort of get the impression that it's a Big Deal and, therefore, I should care about it, but I'm not entirely clear on what's going on, how we got here, and what's been proposed to do about it.

So I'm not going to talk about that. I just wanted to try to get an idea of the scale of the $700 billion bailout. Seven hundred billion dollars is a LOT of money. It's a bit enough number that I have difficulty wrapping my brain around it.

• This bailout is the size of the cumulative cost of the Iraq war to date, plus 50%. David has a neat little widget that displays the cost of the Iraq War at any given instant, presumabely to show how fast the number is growing. This bailout is even bigger.
• The bailout is four times larger than the cumulative cost of the War in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, source). That's the war that we went into after, you know, a little thing called 9/11.
• This is roughly fifty times larger than the airline bailout after 9/11. That's 5000%, mind you.
• Remember the savings and loan crisis of the late 80s? (I don't, really. I was in high school and wasn't really paying attention.) That was about $125 billion. This is roughly six times larger than that.
• The bailout alone will add an additional 7% to our national debt.

So the cost of this thing is staggering. And it's not limited to American banks, either. It turns out we will be bailing out lots of foreign-owned banks as well, as long as they have "significant operations" in the US. Excuse me, but when was the financial well-being of Swiss banks an American problem? Why isn't the Swiss government doing their part of the bailout?

All the decisions about who will be bailed out and for how much is left up to one, unelected guy. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

So who thinks we should privatize Social Security next?

Something's wrong with these numbers

OK, So I'm kinda confused about something. The hurricane warning I saw for Ike insisted that Galveston residents faced "CERTAIN DEATH."* Somewhere between 20-50% of Galveston residents did not evacuate, or between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Rescuers have searched about 90% of Galveston and evacuated about another 1,500 people. The official death toll varies a bit, but is on the order of a dozen people.

So what happened to the other 8,500 - 28,500 people? Either I'm missing something, or these numbers just don't match up.

[*] Actually, the warning I saw said that residents "MAY FACE CERTAIN DEATH," which leaves open the possibility that they may not, making me wonder about what definition of "certain" was being used. Imminent natural disaster is no excuse for bad grammar.

Things I never thought I'd hear a Senator say

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse at the hearings on the politicization of the Justice Department:

When it comes to politics, this is an administration that has no gag reflex.

(Oops, wrote this a while back but forgot to publish it.)

How the RNC should have ended

This is just great. I really have no other words.

Via Pam's House Blend.

Congratulations to people I've never met!

It appears that moon-grrl and Jonathan have gotten married. I'm assuming to each other. Congratulations!

Remember, shiny side out

IlliniPundit really has descended into tinfoil hat territory. He's now complaining about what is, apparently, a media conspiracy to win Obama the election.

I doubt Palin, or the overblown and transparent media bloviation surrounding her, will seriously impact the dynamics of the race ... But I wonder, as I have for a while, if at some point the public tide will turn on this obvious and over-the-top media worship of Obama ... But I wonder, as I have for a while, if at some point the public tide will turn on this obvious and over-the-top media worship of Obama.

We've had to deal with non-stop allegations that ohmygod Barack Obama is a Muslim, he's not a US citizen, he's a Marxist, he's a socialist, he wasn't born in the United States, his wife hates whitey, his wife hates America, he doesn't say the Pledge, etc. This is apparently "media worship." For Odin's sake, major news outlets are having debates about whether Obama is actually the fucking Anti-christ.

Seriously, what did you expect would happen when McCain nominated, lets face it, a basically-unheard-of state governor for the second most powerful political position in the world, especially considering she's the first woman that Republicans have nominated to this level and that McCain passed over his own preferred candidate for her sake? That everyone would just ignore her?

I'm sorry, but the fact that her unmarried, minor daughter is pregnant is indeed news, particularly in light of her anti-sex-education and anti-teenage-mother policies. The fact that her husband hates America and wants to secede from the United Stats is news. The fact that she abused the power of her office to settle a family vendetta is news. The fact that she has been part of an anti-Semitic church for most of her adult life is news. Does Gordy really expect us to ignore all of these things?

Yeah, I'll grant that she's not a member of Alaska Independence Party and that early reports were mistaken. But her husband was.

That's the great thing about the myth of the "liberal media." It insulates Republicans from any criticism. It allows the faithful, when they are confronted by anything they find unpleasant, to simply avert their eyes and chant "media bias." And the media is so paralyzed with fear of accusations of being "liberal" from the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity that they bend over backwards to accommodate them.

Behold the power of the comma

I was asked to fill out a job application web form the other day. Right below the title of the form was this:

Do not answer questions, which may be contrary to existing laws or regulations.

(I guess it's not just the comma, but the fact that whoever wrote this used "which" when he meant "that.")

By their headlines, shall ye know them

IlliniPundit over at, um, IlliniPundit has on several occasions, claimed that Democrats are being overly-sensitive when it comes to race in this election. (Example.)

That's the advantage of privilege, isn't it? Whether is white privilege, heterosexual privilege, or male privilege, one of the benefits is that you don't even have to realize it's there. A corollary to that is that you don't have to wonder about those borderline cases. Until I'd read a few feminist blogs, I'd never actually noticed that paper towel commercials always show a smiling woman mopping up some mess or another, either made by a child or while some hapless male looks on in bewilderment. I'd never even thought about how our society often makes jokes that imply that rape is a complement.

So maybe it's easy for the (I assume) white IlliniPundit to pooh-pooh the racism that may be inherent in political ads this season. But think about this: Ann Coulter's August 20th column was titled "Constitutional Scholar Obama Questions Legality Of Slavery Ban."

Really. One of the most visible and most syndicated conservative writers in our country just wrote a column suggesting that a black Presidential candidate might approve of slavery.

No, race won't be a factor in this election. Not at all.

The definition of useless

This weekend, I ran by the bank to cash in several jars of change I had accumulated. I think it was five to ten pounds worth. All in all, it wound up being $40 in coins, roughly half in dimes, and the rest split between nickels and pennies. Most of the volume by far, however, was pennies. (I hoard quarters because I need them to do laundry.)

This got me to thinking, I can't even remember the last time I used a penny for any purpose other than making exact change just so I didn't get more pennies. You can't use them in any vending machine. I can't imagine anyone using them to pay for anything even as trivial as a Coke from a 7-11. So what's the point of keeping them in circulation?

Why can't you buy plain yogurt in small containers?

When I was shopping for ingredients to make a recipe the other day, I needed to buy plain yogurt, something I don't often buy. In the yogurt isle of the supermarket there were a wealth of options. Even in plain yogurt there was plain, vanilla (pretty close), whole-milk, low-fat, nonfat, organic, and regular. But that kind of yogurt is only sold by the bucketful.

Sure, the flavored yogurt is sold in smaller containers. If I wanted Banana Berry Rhubarb Delight instead of plain, I could have bought individual 8 oz. containers, four-packs, six-packs, whipped, blended, sugar-free, drinkable smoothies, and even freakin' yogurt-in-a-tube. But, no, I needed plain yogurt, and the smallest container they seem to sell is two pounds.

So I have two-pound-minus-a-cup of plain, whole milk yogurt and no idea what to do with it. I've made yogurt cheese before, and that worked fine, I just don't have a lot of use for it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Just how crappy is Conservapedia?

No, that's not a rhetorical question. Just how crappy is the world's crappiest encyclopedia? Pretty crappy, it turns out. In a solar-flare-sized burst of irony, Conservapedia actually accuses Wikipedia of being "anti-intellectual."

In looking up stuff for my previous post about Conservapedia, I poked around a bit. The John McCain article is reasonably level-headed, if not balanced. There's nothing in there that's particularly kook-worthy.

Oh, but just take a look at the Barack Obama article. It's not just biased, it's spittle-flecked, conspiracy-mongeringly, unhinged. Here are some of the good bits, with the craptastic segments bolded.

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. (allegedly born in Honolulu, August 4, 1961) is the presumptive 2008 nominee of the Democratic Party for president... In 2007, Obama was the most liberal Senator. If elected, Obama would be the first Affirmative Action President.

You have to love the subtle Muslim-baiting in the comment that he is only "allegedly" born in Hawaii. Kind of like commenting that John McCain is only allegedly not a shape-shifting alien come to steal Earth's water. The "most liberal Senator bit?" That's based on a conservative hit piece that cherry-picked votes, I can only suspect, deliberately to portray Obama as the most liberal Senator, just as they did to John Kerry last election. One of the "liberal" bills he voted for was the one to implement the 9/11 committee's suggestions. The "Affirmative Action President" comment is so blatantly racist, I just can't think of any way to respond.

Obama has declared himself to be a Christian, yet never replaced his Muslim name with a Christian one as many do, casting doubt on his politically self-serving claim.

See, he's not really a Christian, he just claims to be one for political reasons. More Muslim-baiting.

Obama wore an American flag lapel pin after 9/11, but later stopped wearing it without adequate explanation. Presumably it would have hurt him with anti-military campaign donors. Recently, he has begun wearing one again, for explained reasons, though it is likely a political pander.

How dare he change his choice in jewelry without getting permission first! Plus, his supporters hate the military. Continuing the Obama-hates-the-military theme:

Obama's campaign has been financed largely by leftist donors opposed to the war and to the American military in general. Obama has encouraged this by refusing to wear the customary flag on his lapel during appearances...

Note how his supporters are no longer "liberals" but "leftists." I'd be a "leftist," too, but my Che Guevara beret is in the wash.

In the context of sex, he quipped about his daughters, "if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby." Obama makes it clear if his daughters had an unplanned pregnancy, he would support terminating the life of his grandchild and it is undeniable that Michelle Obama agrees with that decision.

"Undeniable," you see. The conservatwats are apparently mind readers, to boot.

He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action.

Boggle.

Nonetheless, he asserted that elements of sex education should be taught in kindergarten.

Wow, that sounds terrible! Perverted, even! Or maybe not. Crapapedia gives that statement without explanation or context. The citation it claims it comes from quotes Obama as saying this:

Nobody's suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it ... If they ask a teacher 'where do babies come from,' that providing information that the fact is that it's not a stork is probably not an unhealthy thing.

The fact is that it's not inappropriate to talk to even preschool kids about where babies come from. The key is to do it in an age-appropriate manner. In about five seconds of internet searching, I found a number of family-oriented websites discussing how to do it. Here's the baby-hating DrSpock.com, an excerpt from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Parenting a Preschooler, and something on ehow.com.

I wish I could remember where I read it, but it's been said that when liberals see something that's biased, they want to make it more accurate. When conservatives see something that's biased, they want to make it more conservative. Even if Conservapedia's thesis that Wikipedia is liberally biased were true, just piling on more bias, as they've done, isn't the answer. Conservapedia sells itself as a scholarly website, fit for teaching students. You don't get quality academic material by framing things you don't agree with in the most inflammatory way possible.

The pentayokel

OK, this has gone from amusing to depressing to downright annoying. Yet another letter by a yokel from the Ghetto of Ignorance® was in the News-Gazette. This one by Mark Thompson of Dewey. As before, since these people aren't capable of having an original thought, the standard creationist claims are identified by a link.

Au contraire, evolution as a theory is entirely inconclusive. For all they preach the evolutionists have little evidence for the record.

Let's ignore for the moment the fact that "inconclusive" doesn't make sense in this sentence. I imagine he's trying to say it's not backed up by evidence. The only reason evolution is the dominant theory in biology is that it is consistent with the evidence. It's the only theory that's consistent with all the evidence.

• CA202. Evolution has not been proved.

Universal reproduction could not have evolved randomly; it is beyond scientific probability (insert DNA, any organ, voluntary and involuntary bodily systems, flora and fauna).

• CA100. Argument from incredulity.

I have a hard time fisking this because ... what the hell is "universal reproduction?" Is he talking about sexual reproduction? If so, I guess he has no problem with organisms that reproduce asexually having evolved? Ghetto of Incoherence is more like it.

Creationists, especially the casual, letter-to-the-editor writing kind like to talk about things being beyond some level of probability and therefore impossible. It's a crock, of course. You can't calculate the probability of events like that. (We'll ignore again whatever the hell he means by "scientific" probability.) The head yokels, the ones that write the books for the yokel audience, come up with metaphors like a tornado in a junkyard constructing a 747. But that's a false analogy. Evolution isn't random. It's stochastic. It has an element of randomness, but it's not a random process.

Could one person win the lottery every day of his life, unaided, probability or impossibility? Math science suggests "random evolution" as one chance in trillions.

• CF002.1. Tornadoes in junkyards do not build things.

What the hell is "math science?" Again, you can't calculate the odds for evolution. It's not a probabilistic event. It's like saying, "What's are the odds of gravity?"

On the other hand, evolution theorists can't rule God out of the equation statistically. After all, they believe in "any" chance.

• CA602. Evolution is atheistic.

And here, of course, we have it. Mr. Thompson equates evolution with atheism. Since he knows atheism is teh evil, so evolution must be, too.

"Random" evolution didn't create this marvelous, interwoven, natural world from a crucible of metals and gases; statistically and scientifically impossible, beyond reason.

Scientifically impossible, huh? So I guess all those, you know, scientists just missed that fact. That God we have Mr. Thompson of Dewey, Illinois, to tell us what is scientifically possible.

Math science favors this hypothesis, as does reason, as miraculous design is everywhere. Open your eyes, see?

• CI100.1. Look; is design not obvious?

There's that "math science" thing again. I guess this whole line of argument is the "stamp your foot and shout, 'It is too created!'" method of rhetoric. To paraphrase the Goblin King, if design is apparent and obvious literally everywhere, from every biological species to subatomic particles to even the very laws of physics that make the whole thing possible, what's your basis for comparison? If literally everything is designed, how do you know what a non-designed thing looks like?

Creationism does not refute science; it guides it, quite logically, on an enlightened level that stands the test of reason. No spin, just reasonable logic and math science, a theory that should be taught in school, alongside the random evolution theory, given the lack of conclusive facts. A totally reasonable stalemate.

• CA041. Teach the controversy.

Well, no, actually. Creationism does not guide science. There is nothing in science that requires religious belief. You don't need to be a Christian for an electron microscope to work, nor do you have to be a Hindu to study the human genome.

We're not at a stalemate. Creationism lost the game over a hundred years ago, and now they're just trying to change the rules.

Previous yokels:

• Local yokel disproves evolution?
• Another local yokel
• The third yokel's the charm
• Buy three yokels, get one free

Buy three yokels, get one free

The News-Gazette is trying to kill me. That's the only explanation I can think of for them publishing another creationist letter to the editor. This time it's by Dee Mulligan of Urbana. As usual, I'll give links to the Index to Creationist Claims for each bogus statement she makes.

It has been wonderful to see the debate over the theory of evolution and creationism once again emerging.

Not really, since there isn't any such debate. The debate, such as it was, was settled nearly a century ago. The only "debate" that rages is that ignorant Christians just keep demanding that their theology be treated as science.

I have a graduate degree and aced all the biology classes by feeding back answers the professors wanted. But they never convinced me that evolution makes any sense.

I'm sorry to see that Ms. Mulligan wasted this part of her education. Rather than actually learn anything, she treated her university as a series of hoops that needed to be blindly jumped through.

A friend of mine in college took Physics 101 as a pass/fail course. For him, it was just a mandatory prerequisite, and he didn't really care. His grades were reasonably good, so for the final exam, he just sat down and memorized a bunch of relevant equations without any actual understanding of what they were for. Ms. Mulligan apparently not only did the same this for her biology classes, but has the absolute hubris to demand that her pretend-knowledge be treated on the same level as actual experts in the subject.

My objection is that it is a theory. It is not taught as such in most cases. It is taught as fact.

Evolution is both theory and fact. We also teach atomic theory, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, and the germ theory of disease. Ms. Mulligan doesn't really understand the technical definition of the work "theory." That's what comes of blowing off your biology classes and getting your science lessons from your preacher.

• CA201. Evolution is only a theory.

I remember sitting in high school biology and looking at pictures of Cro-Magnon man.

It was absolutely taught as fact. Of course, we all know now it was just a hoax.

Whaaaaat? Cro-Magnons aren't a hoax. They were the first Homo sapiens to inhabit Europe, alongside the Neanderthals. It's kind of an archaic term, sure, but it's hardly fraudulent.

The saddest part of this is that literally 10 seconds of searching the Internet would have shown here this. There's Wikipedia article and the Britannica article. Hell, even the laughable Conservapedia has a stub article on Cro-Magnon man. But no, Ms. Mulligan couldn't be bothered. She's comfortable wearing her ignorance on her sleeve.

So science can be wrong. As a matter of fact, Karl Popper argues that a hypothesis or theory must be falsifiable if it is does not admit the possibility of being false.

The "science can be wrong" gambit is a classic one. It's basically just a way of saying "since we don't know everything, we know nothing." Can we assume that if Ms. Mulligan is diagnosed with cancer she won't accept treatment for it since we don't know everything about cancer? I suspect we were wrong once or twice there.

If education is to be complete, then all theories on the beginning of the world and we mortals should at least be explored or mentioned. It cannot be proved that we evolved from a single cell.

Uh, no. We don't study rejected theories except to mention that they are incorrect. Unless Ms. Mulligan is suggesting medical schools should have to explore the theory that disease is caused by bad air? Should science classes have to teach alternatives to atomic theory? No, of course not.

And what's with this fascination with "proof," anyway? It's something that's come up in a couple of the previous yokel letters. Science doesn't deal in proof; it deals in evidence. You want proof, go study mathematics.

• CA040. Fairness demands evolution and creation be given equal time.
• CA041. Teach the controversy.

By the way, where did that cell come from? And it cannot be proved that God created the world. They both take faith to believe. The creation story has been around for at least 6,000 years. How long has the theory of evolution been around? As for me, I choose God.

People, please, repeat after me: evolution is not abiogenesis. Or for those of you that don't know words not found in your hymnals, evolution has to do with how life changed on this planet, not where it came from. I guess these people fixate on this point since, in their creation story, everything was created in its current form, and so they don't see any difference between the history of life and the beginning of life.

You know what else has been around for a long time? The four elements. And guess what? It's wrong. It's the product of a time where people were ignorant about the world and how it worked. With the limited information they had at the time, it might not have been a crazy idea, but that doesn't mean it was right.

• CB050. Abiogenesis is speculative without evidence.
• CB090. Evolution is baseless without a theory of abiogenesis.
• CA612. Evolution requires as much faith as creationism.

Yeesh, I'm not even sure why I bother. As the quote goes, you can't argue someone out of a position they didn't argue themselves into.

Previous yokels:

• Local yokel disproves evolution?
• Another local yokel
• The third yokel's the charm

The third yokel's the charm

I had enough fun poking fun at the first two creationist yokels that wrote in to the News-Gazette, I thought I'd wrap up by looking at the letter from the third. This one is by Dan Yagow of Champaign:

Can a Christian accept evolution as fact? Can we believe human existence evolved from lower forms of life? Many say it is possible, but I see conflict. If a Christian accepts evolution, then what purpose or credibility does the Bible serve us?

One thing that's interesting about this line of "argument" is that it focuses entirely on human evolution. But evolution isn't just about how H. sapiens arose, it's about every species on the planet, from the towering dinosaurs to the bacteria that live all around us. They're every bit as evolved as we are. In the creationist mind, humans are special, dammit. We're not one of those dirty monkeys!

Notice the argument implicit in his last statement: if evolution is true, then the Bible is of no use. But that's not really an argument, is it? It's like saying that if the Earth isn't the center of the universe, then we're not special in the eyes of God, therefore the Earth is fixed in space and everything revolves around it.

• CH182. The Bible is influential.

A Christian follows Christ, claiming him to be holy and one with God the Creator... [snip irrelevant Bible quotes] If we embrace evolution, it's impossible to give God the credit he deserves. We would diminish his awesome power and exchange it for a faith in man's accomplishments.

Again, note the same implicit assumption as before. If evolution is true, my faith will be challenged, therefore evolution isn't true.

Why would evolution being true require awesome faith in man's accomplishments? It seems to me that if evolution were true, the credit belongs to all the billions of critters worldwide that crawled around in the muck and slime and dirt, from Tiktaalik to Archaeopteryx.

We would say that man's interpretation of how life originated makes more sense than the infallible intelligence of God. To claim that man evolved from lower forms of life does not fit with God's inerrant words.

In other words, "If it contradicts my interpretation of the Bible, it must not be true." A better excuse for intentional ignorance has never been spoken.

• CH100. The Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it.
• CH101. The Bible is inerrant.
• CH101.1. If part of the Bible is wrong, none of it can be trusted.

Consider this. There has been no scientific experiment that has successfully produced living cells from an arrangement of molecules evolution suggests.

Consider this. You haven't a freaking clue what you're talking about. Evolution doesn't say that a random arrangement of molecules got together to make a cell. Evolution isn't about the dawn of life. Even if God said "poof" and suddenly there was life on a barren Earth, evolution still could have caused that life to grow and develop into what we are now.

• CB010. The odds of life forming are incredibly small.
• CB010.2. First cells could not come together by chance.

The odds of it happening are remote. To believe that it can be done and that it occurred by accident over millions of years without any intelligence behind it would require immense faith.

Now wait a minute. We just went from "it couldn't happen" to "it couldn't happen without any intelligence behind it." So God-driven evolution is possible? Somehow I don't think that's what Mr. Yagow is saying.

• CA612. Evolution requires as much faith as creationism.

Again, we see that there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to creationist claims. Maybe evolution isn't true; otherwise, we'd expect to see their arguments (ahem) evolve to more persuasive forms.

Another local yokel

The editors at the News-Gazette are clearly conspiring to give me a coronary, because they published not one, but two, creationist letters to the editor last Friday. I'm not sure which is worse: that fact, or that these two pathetic examples are the best that the local forces of ignorance could muster. You know their arguments are tedious when they've been rehashed so many times they can be referred to by number. Let's take a look at the first, written by Mr. (Ms?) Kerwin Brown of Champaign:

Zielinski should know that theology is the branch of science that deals with God.

Really? That's really odd, because I just checked, and we don't seem to teach a single class on it in any of our science departments. I only missed a few classes, but if they covered transubstantiation in my Physical Chemistry course, it must have been in one of the few classes I missed. Maybe they covered rivers of blood in Environmental Engineering; I didn't take any of those classes. Funny, for theology being a branch of science, we do seem to have a lot of courses in the Religious Studies department.

Intelligent design is just an answer to how some particular events happen. A plausible answer to an event is called a hypothesis.

• CI001. Intelligent design theory is scientific.

Well, no. Intelligent design is just repackaged creationism. Kitzmiller vs. Dover proved that pretty much conclusively. That monkeys flew out of my butt is an answer to where monkeys came from, but that doesn't make it a reasonable hypothesis.

A person who backed the hypothesis of intelligent design as regards the beginning of life would propose that someone spontaneously changed the non-living matter into living matter.

Uh, yeah, that's what makes it creationism. This next bit may come as a news flash to Kerwin, but there's no difference between "non-living matter" and "living" matter. Life is not a property of matter like mass or color is.

They would back up their hypothesis by pointing to the fact that DNA requires enzymes in order to reproduce, and it is scientifically impossible for enzymes to get together with DNA by random chance.

• CB010.2. First cells could not come together by chance.
• CB015. DNA needs proteins to form; proteins need DNA.

Seeing as how evolution doesn't suggest things happen by "random chance," this really doesn't have anything to do with his argument.

No theory, including the atheistic/agnostic theory of evolution, can be proven even though it can be tested.

• CA202. Evolution has not been proved.

Since the Catholic Church doesn't have a problem with evolution, someone really tell the Pope that he's an atheist. Does this mean we're going to go back to teaching that the Sun goes around the Earth? After all, if that can't be proven, I guess we have to teach all theories. And lest you think I'm exaggerating, there really are fundamentalist Christians that are modern-day geocentrists.

In schools, they do not mention God when teaching the theory of evolution, which means they are teaching the atheistic theory of evolution.

• CA602. Evolution is atheistic.

Folks, I think we have an entry for the 2008 Dumbest Argument of the Year contest. We may even have such a stupid statement here that no one else need bother to enter. It you don't mention God, you're teaching atheism? So if we don't teach that God wanted the United States to exist are we teaching the atheistic Civil War? If we talk about antibiotics without mentioning Jesus, are we practicing atheistic medicine? Secular is not atheist.

Sigh.

The world's crappiest encyclopedia just got crappier

Unless you're an ignorant Luddite who's just learning to "get on the Internet," you're familiar with Conservapedia, a right-wing attempt to create an Internet Ghetto of Ignorance. It is a place where they can go to not be confronted by facts or be disturbed by reality's well-known liberal bias. It is a place where ideology trumps reality. But now they've set their sights on actually interfering with the scientific process.

Let me explain. No there is too much. Let me sum up. Richard Lenski at Michigan State University has been performing an experiment on E. coli for the past twenty years. Recently, they published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the E. coli had evolved an entirely new feature; namely, that the bacteria could eat the citrate present in the cell medium, where it normally just subsists on glucose that's in there. Here is the New York Times article and here is one of the many good blog articles about his research.

Conservapedia can't let this stand. A demonstration of evolution in action is a direct threat to their creationist views. So Andrew Schlafly, head Conservapedia wingnut, started trying to discredit the paper. He first wrote Lenski demanding his data. Lenski responded saying that all the relevant data was in the PNAS paper. Schlafly wrote again, demanding Lenski's data apparently claiming that he has some sort of right to it since Lenski's work was "taxpayer funded." (As if a scientist working on a government grant has a responsibility to copy decades of work for any yahoo that stops by his lab.) He's even threatened legal action. Lenski responded again with a letter that I can only describe as a thing of beauty. RationalWiki has the entire exchange archived, but it's Lenski's second response that has got to be one of the best takedowns of such an ignoramus I've ever seen. Give it a read.

Oh, but it gets better!

Conservapedia now has a Flaws in Richard Lenski Study page, as well as trying to claim they found lots of errors in his paper at their Richard Lenski page. They're also threatening to write a Letter to PNAS for publication (not unusual if someone wishes to respond to a published paper) pointing out all the "flaws." If they do, just them displaying their ignorance to the scientific community and reading what I'm sure would be an entertaining response letter by Lenski would be so entertaining that it might go a long way to convincing me that there really is a God and he wants me to be amused.

But there's a bigger point here. These people are trying to interfere in the very process that makes science work. That there is this big pseudoscience resource on the Internet -- and let me point out that Conservapedia is intended to be a resource for homeschooled children. They're not making these criticisms in an attempt to forward our understanding of the world; they're making them because this is evidence in support of evolution, and they dare not let it go unchallenged because that would put their religious beliefs in danger. So they throw up a smokescreen and they hound the researchers with spurious demands for "data."

Science is hard. It requires years of study, dedication and then it takes more years of doing research, building a reputation and only then might you come across something really new and interesting. Religion is easy. It just requires a suspension of disbelief and obedience to doctrine. The problem is that science is a tool that leads our society and our knowledge into the future. It's what lets us build new technology, develop new drugs, shrink our transistors, all of which develop our economy. These religious nitwits stand in the way of all that. They attack not just the scientific process, but the population's confidence in its trustworthiness. They are a threat to our future and a threat to our superiority in the world. The sad part is that I think we're outnumbered.

Good posts on the subject:

• Beneficial Mutations in Bacteria, Wherein Conservapedia is Pwned
• Beneficial Mutations in Bacteria, Wherein Conservapedia is Pwned, Take II: Andy Schlafly’s Lawyer Gambit Fails
• The Lenski "Debate": Missing Schlafly's Point
• Hubris, gall, arrogance…inanity

What Ezra said

I'm working on a real blog post, but in the meantime, Ezra Klein has a good post:

[McCain's] statement, in other words, made no sense. It was a war against Arabs, and maybe some Persians. not a limited conflict against al Qaeda. As Obama says, one of the clear distinctions between the Left's approach to terrorism and the Right's approach to terrorism is that the Left wants to limit the scope of the conflict, while the Right wants to expand it. So though it was only al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11, Romney and Giuliani and McCain and plenty of their colleagues want to zoom out from al Qaeda to terrorism, and from terrorism to Islamic extremism. Rather than this being an effort to hunt down al Qaeda, it becomes a war to hunt down al Qaeda, destroy Hezbollah, eradicate Hamas, overthrow Saddam Hussein, change the regime in Tehran, crush the Muslim Brotherhood, and confront Syria, and whatever else Bill Kristol thought of while eating his Cheerios that week. It is an incredibly dangerous and incoherent approach. And it marks a genuine difference between Obama and McCain.

Of course, acknowleging that those brown people over there aren't a monolithic block would require having a "nuanced" view of the world, something Republicans aren't too keen on.

Call in FEMA! No, better hold off on that...

Rather than blog about anything, I'm just going to leave you with this video:

And yet it's still better than FOX News.

ANWR: In Perspective

In all the arguments about high gas prices and whether it's the fault of the Republicans or Democrats, one of the solutions being put forth is drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Take a look at this graph and try to decide whether it's going to have a big effect on anything:

Energy independence, it ain't.

UPDATE: I posted this same graphic at Illinipundit, because I figured it's Republicans that seem to be pushing the ANWR drilling, so that crowd might be interested. Instead of interest, all I got was "Liberals are teh suck!" OK, so I'm naive.

Local yokel disproves evolution?

No, just kidding. There was a letter to the editor in the News-Gazette the other day that was just so stunningly arrogant, misled, and flat-out wrong, that I couldn't resist responding here. Mr. Justin Bleich of Gibson City writes:

It has been proven many times that creationists appeal to the facts of science to support their view, while evolutionists appeal to the philosophical assumptions from outside science.

Creationists appeal to the facts of science? Um ... really? Maybe it's been proven in your Bible study group, Mr. Bleich, but among rational people, that's a load of hooey. Take this load of "proofs" for the existence of God. Go take a look through the literature sometime. You'll find lots of experiments, data, photographs, even. You won't find many creationists doing the same because they have no experiments. They have no data. They can only appeal to the ignorance and gullibility in their listeners and their religious beliefs.

When it has been proven that energy cannot be created or destroyed, how in the world would a single-celled organism, by chance, appear from nothing and eventually evolve into a multi-celled organism, like a fish?

What? Unless these single-celled organisms have internal fusion reactors, the creation or destruction of energy has nothing to do with evolution.

How, also, would this fish then evolve into a lion? Humans were not yet here to prove this.

I can't even tell if he's arguing that fish couldn't evolve into tetrapods like Tiktaalik because humans weren't around, or if he's arguing that if humans weren't around, nothing can be "proven." The latter, of course, would mean we can't know anything about astrophysics, geology, or who really built the Pyramids. After all, were you there? Did you know that it wasn't aliens with tractor beams coming out of their flying saucers?

Evolutionary scientists often use their assumptions to formulate the idea that nonliving organisms gave life to living organisms, and humans came from apes.

Um, huh? I'd love to find one of those "nonliving organisms" someday. I guess in his own incoherent way, Mr. Bleich is talking about abiogenesis, which has nothing to do with evolution.

Humans didn't evolve from apes! God, have these people learned nothing since the Scopes Monkey Trials? Mr. Bleich's assignment is to write "Humans and apes diverged from a common ancestor millions of years ago. One did not evolve from the other" one hundred times or until his crayon runs out.

Creation scientists have just as much right to our opinion as do evolutionary scientists.

No one is saying that creation scientists don't have their right to their opinion. Christian Scientists and modern geocentrists have the right to their opinion, too. They don't have the right to demand their weird beliefs taught in science classes as science.

The fact that rank ignorance survives even in this day and age frightens me. People like Mr. Bleich really want to drag us down back into the Dark Ages. And while he and his religious brethren are being so smug and self-righteous about their Godly beliefs, the rest of the world is going to pass us by in scientific knowledge.

My sympathies

I've given News-Gazette blogger Rhonda Robinson some crap over the years, but I'd like to offer my sympathies over the recent accidental death of her son.

Inconvenient ellipses

I was looking at the local Freecycle group, and noticed that this message had been posted, saying that something previously offered was no longer available. I do hope it's incomplete. (Click to embiggen.)

Something to look forward to for the next six months

I'm glad Obama got the nomination. I think he stands a pretty good chance at winning. But for the next six months (and possibly longer after that) don't expect to hear him referred to by a lot of Republicans as anything other than Barack Hussein Obama. They are going to push it relentlessly. You won't hear them refer to John Sidney McCain, however. The reasons are obvious. Racism and xenophobia. It's happening locally and at the national level.

I disagree with him on a number of issues, but Glock21 has a great post about the phenomenon.

... his name is pretty irrelevant beyond "branding" that has become such an important part of American politics. People who try to exploit that are essentially kowtowing to the worst of our society in order to win an election, and that's pretty disgusting no matter how much one wants to claim two wrongs make a right. If you don't want to be associated with the racist and prejudiced nimrods that flock to such childish reasoning when they go the ballot booth... stop using their arguments.

My God, it's full of torture!

Various people have testified in front of Congress that it's OK that we waterboard, because we've only done it to three people, and they were the worst of the worst. Well, it looks like those officials may have been "bending the truth" a bit.

A German-born Turkish citizen ... said that in 2002 in Afghanistan, U.S. interrogators subjected him to beatings, electrical shocks and, on one occasion, a technique he said was referred to as "water treatment." He said his head was held under water in a bucket while he was punched in the stomach, forcing him to inhale. On another occasion, he was hung by his arms for five days, he said.

Republicans have constantly been downplaying the extent of the torture we've been committing by referring to waterboarding as a "swimming lesson" and trivializing the pain that's caused by stress position techniques. Now we find they may have been lying all along as to the extent.

It gets even more Kafkaesque. The guy in the above passage was completely innocent of all terrorism charges. US officials even knew he was innocent, held him anyway, and it still took a personal appeal from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to get them to let him go. Think about that. It took an appeal from a head of state of one of our allies to get the US to free a torture victim from detention.

And to make matters even worse, a UK human rights group has accused the US of using ships to detain and secretly interrogate prisoners.

A British human rights organization claimed Monday that the United States had used military ships to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects. U.S. officials denied using ship as prisons.

I imagine any US Navy vessel holding a prisoner would be subject to US military law. But what about a Halliburton-owned ship, in international waters, crewed by civilian contractors, registered in say, Liberia?

Brokeback Island

First there was Brokeback to the Future. Then there was Star Wars: The Empire Brokeback. Then there were a whole lot of others and the joke got old. But this is pretty good:

I can't decide if I like this one better:

Hat tip: David.

Charity suggestions

Most of us are about to get a fairly hefty check from the government as an "economic stimulus." Personally, I think they money could have been better spent on, say, a major public works project in New Orleans, but hey, you work with the economy you have, not the one you'd have had if Gore had been elected you wish you had.

So my options are pretty much: save it, spend it, or give it away. I could save it, sure. Spending it means basically buying stuff made in China. So I'm thinking about giving a big chunk of it away, but I'm not sure where to. Can anyone suggest any worthy charities?

On the other hand, I'm also thinking about buying a Wii.

UPDATE: I guess I should have said some of the charities I had in mind already. My list now includes: Human Rights Campaign, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, The Wounded Warriors Project, America's Second Harvest, Planned Parenthood, Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU, the Democratic National Committee, and probably one or two others I can't think of right now. I think two or three, at most, is what I need to decide on. Thanks for your suggestions.

Calm down, the queer sky is not falling

Glenn Greenwald has an insightful-as-usual post up about the California gay marriage ruling. He basically points out that the CA Supreme Court's recent ruling basically requiring CA's civil unions to be now made equal marriages is fully in accordance with CA law and the state constitution. His points are:

1. As the court found, this ruling must be based on California law and the California Constitution, not whether or not you think gay marriage in CA should or should not be legal
2. This ruling is not in violation of the "will of the people." He points out that the CA legislature has, not once, but twice approved a gay marriage bill vetoed by the governor, who said that the issue must be settled by the CA Supreme Court.
3. The ruling doesn't legalize gay marriage. It just says that separate-but-equal civil unions are unconstitutional.
4. Lastly, he predicts all sort of ignorant and hystical political overreaction to this ruling from the right-wingnuts.

So, let's look for the hysteria.

World Nut Daily quoting some hate-filled preacher:

Now activist judges are overruling the will of the people...

Of course, to get to the really good stuff, you have to head over to Free Republic:

Queerly beloved in the land of fruit, nuts and cereal.

Sodom, Gomorrah and Kalifornia too!

I’d say the odds of the Next “ Big One “ just shot off the charts..

We need a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution to end this judicial tyranny.

I’m going to marry my gun and take it everywhere I go.

And that's not the bad stuff. These people really have a fascination with bestiality and incest:

And now you can marry the Sheep of your choice, because to prohibit such would of course be a violation of your right to Equal Protection of the Laws.

There is no argument for gay marriage that does not equally support marriage between two people who are already related by blood.

If the legislature now strikes “between a man and a woman” and does not replace it with something like “between one human and another” things will get interesting.

remember their argum,ent is they love each other ... well you can love a sheep

so by that logic marriage could be anything people marrying animals, as what as happened elsewhere in the world namely India [WTF?] we can have more than one wife or husband Kids as young 5 could get married

That's from the first 100 postings on Free Republic. There are over five hundred more. Republicans disgust me. I'm going to go shower now.

Our Brave New World x3

The things that are happening around us, in our names, are just becoming too numerous to even pay attention to. So here are just three things I think are important enough you should pay attention to:

1) On being ashamed of one's country at Balkanization: An innocent Italian man is disappeared into our new immigration obliettes.

2) Attempt at Show Trials--US Military--And Why it Failed also at Balkinization: The (a?) Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military tribunals had to resign in protest at the political maneuvering and manipulation of the process. The judge had to remove one of the Legal Advisors from the case and ordered the DoD not to persecute any of the prosecuters for objecting to his manipulations.

3) Lastly, Glenn Greenwald links to a briefing given to the Pentagon's TV military analysts about abuses witnessed by the FBI at Guantanamo:

In GTMO, that translated into ... strip search[es] for control measures and he was forced to perform dog tricks on a leash.

Christ. What the fuck is this country coming to?

It's only a matter of time

Just how long do you think it will be before some preacher somewhere attributes the Myanmar cyclone and the Chinese earthquake to some sin or another, or the fact that those countries are not primarily Christian? I give it maybe a week.

Weird emails

I occasionally get misdirected emails. My name is a combination of a fairly common first and last one, so people often mistype what they meant and get me. This is one of the weirder ones I've gotten lately.

To: me
Subject: AK-47

This is X, if you dont have my email address. So im starting to think about accesorizing my AK. When you come home before graduation can you help me take it apart and clean everything on it? I havent even done that yet. I know and can see that there are not very many parts to it but I dont know much about it and dont want to screw anything up on it.

I just hope me posting this email doesn't make him angry. After all, I know he's armed.

Interesting TV watching

Via Ex-Gay Watch, I see 20/20 updates a show they did previously by examine how people react to public displays of affection -- by gay people. According to EGW, "The setting is NJ for lesbian wives and Alabama for a gay couple. Guess where the 911 call happens."

That this is happening on the Day of Silence just can't be a coincidence. Appropriate timing.

My five

The mighty Gamera tagged me with this a while ago and I'm just now getting around to it. So here are five facts about myself:

five things:

1. I really hate tomatoes. When raw, anyway. It's something about the texture, I think. Cooked, I have no objection. Which is odd, since I have a friend who hates cooked tomatoes in any form, but has no objection to raw ones. I think I'm learning to like olives (except for those nasty things that come on frozen pizza), but tomatoes are more of a challenge.

2. I don't like California. There's nothing actually wrong with it; something about it just grates on me the wrong way. Maybe it's the fact that the weather is always insufferably perfect, or that they don't always number their highway exits. Or maybe it's that there are just so damn many people everywhere. We always joke that Champaign-Urbana is a city surrounded by a sea of corn, but in Southern California, you're always in a suburb surrounded by an sea of more suburbs.

3. I'm terrified to fly. It used to be that I didn't mind it at all, then became gradually worse. And now I can't really get on a plane at all. It's getting affecting where I look for jobs, even. I probably should do something about it, but not dealing with the problem is always easier than doing something about it.

4. When I was a freshman in college, I dislocated my kneecap while playing racquetball. (The really embarrassing part is that I was playing alone.) Two years later, I slipped on some wet concrete, fell down and either dislocated it again or wrenched it badly. I wound up having surgery on it a year later. It's better; I can go up stairs without it sounding like I have a ratchet in my pants, but getting up from a squatting position can be distinctly uncomfortable.

5. There are only four interesting things about me. Yes, I know this is a total cop-out, but I really cant think of anything else.

Since all the bloggers I know have done this already I'm going to tag PZ Myers, Atrios, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Tobias, and Dr. Fig. People, of which, only one reads this blog. See if you can figure out which. One of these things is not like the other...

Champaign County Computer & Electronics Recycling Event

This is short notice, but there will be an electronics recycling event tomorrow, Saturday, April 19, from 9:00 am to 3:30 pm. It looks like they're taking all sort of electronics, with a small charge for televisions. Here's the flyer.

This is what happens when you put two scientists in a room together

We have a new staff member starting at work soon. He is looking for an apartment. Another colleague recently went through a series of apartments looking for one that he found accessible and I suggested he might be able to share some of what he learned. We got into this discussion and it came up that it seemed the farther you get from campus, the better the apartments became. Somehow, paper and a pencil was involved and this sketch happened:

I think the fact that the "optimum distance to campus" is given in metric units just ices the cake.

I am not your mother!

Alright, people, listen up! When you have finished with a pair of rubber gloves, you take them off and throw them away. What you do not do is leave them lying around on the nearest work surface looking like the shed skin of some dismembered, purple, reptilian hand. I also don't appreciate you leaving them inside out, with your nasty sweat and germs all over the surface I have to touch in order to throw them away.

This has been an announcement from the Eeeewmergency Broadcast System.

Open news, insert frame

The more I pay attention, it seems like the more I notice that media narratives are always forced into a particular frame. Any science story about computers involves artificial intelligence or how many times the Library of Congress would fit in a new storage device. People that go missing are almost always female, white, young, and attractive. Really, when was the last time a media cycle fixated on a missing African-American woman?

Politics is especially bad. Lately we've heard tons about Obama's un-American preacher and Hillary's Bosnian misremberances. Really, could you tell me how John Edwards's health care policy would differ from anyone else's. I bet, however, you could tell me how much he paid for the famous haircut.

And it's still happening. Glenn Greenwald points out:

One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.

By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.

I imagine nothing is going to change about this any time soon. The Republican candidate will always be a cowboy "man of the people" while the Democrat will be a latte-drinking, elitist Frenchman.

Now all I need are the butcher and the candlestick maker

Because moon-grrl asked so nicely, here's an update on my foray into the world of baking with Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day:

It really is every bit as easy as the book suggests. It's a matter of 10-15 minutes to mix the ingredients and you're touching the dough to shape it for 5 minutes, max. I'll photoblog better next time I do this and believe me, there will be a next time.

This whole thing started from a The Splendid Table podcast episode. You can listen to that episode here.

(Weird fact. When you do a Technorati search for "Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day," one of the blogs that pops up on the first page of searches is "My Penile Enlargement Reviews." Seriously.)

How much incompetence is enough?

The "liberal" media is largely ignoring this recent story about McCain saying Iran is training Al Qaeda terrorists. He's wrong, of course, since Iran is largely Shia and Al Qaeda is basically a Sunni movement.

The McCain campaign is trying to pass this off as a "slip of the tongue" sort of thing. Saying "Shia" when you mean "Shiite" now and then is understandable, I suppose. This clearly wasn't just a simple mistake. McCain has said this exact same thing on at least four different occasions. His campaign has even been using this point in its literature.

I just want to point out how, not wrong, but stunningly wrong he is here. Even I knew the moment I heard that, that something wasn't right. That's sort of analogous to getting the Chinese and the Japanese mixed up during WWII, or maybe the Germans and the Russians.

OK, I get that the difference between "Sunni" and "Shiite" is confusing, but the guy is running to be head of the military during a war! It you cant tell Pakistan from the Taliban, it seems to me you lack one of the basic qualifications for the job.

The so-called liberal media is all but ignoring this. There was a smattering of coverage, then the spin began. It seems the party line is that he "misspoke." This wasn't a slip of the tongue. This wasn't him just meaning one word and saying another. As Glenn Greenwald points out, McCain has been making this same error, consistently, for days. The only reasonable explanations to me are that he genuinely doesn't understand that the Iraqi insurgents are not mainly Al Qaeda, or that he is attempting to perpetuate the myth that the Iraq war has something to do with 9/11 by conflating Al Qaeda with native-Iraq hostiles.

Whether it is honest incompetence or genuine malfeasance, it does not bode well for a McCain presidency.

(Update to get my own Shia/Sunni labels correct. Good thing I'm not running for President.)

Behold, for it is risen!

... well, rising, anway.

When I was driving down to visit family over Christmas, I took a few podcasts of The Splendid Table with me to listen to in the car. One of the episodes features a new book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which is all about a new technique for making bread at home. In short, you mix up a lot of a very high-moisture dough and let it sit in the fridge, using it as you need it. That's really the whole of the idea. The book has been getting quite a bit of press, so I thought I'd give it a try. I got the book from the library and mixed up a batch of dough this afternoon. I didn't get a chance to actually cook any up today, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity for this post title on Easter. I'll let you know how it turns out.

And wouldn't you know it, you can see the technique for yourself here, posted on YouTube by one of the authors of the book:

The Information Age has its down side too

There's an interesting post over at Balkinization. Eliot Spitzer's pecadillos were discovered when his bank reported suspicious transactions to the government, as they are required by law to do.

These events offer a window into a much larger phenomenon, the National Surveillance State, in which the state increasingly identifies and solves problems of governance through the collection, collation and analysis of information. Governments have always used information, but today's techniques are made more powerful and more prevalent by lower costs of computing and data storage.

If computing power increases enough, there is no reason why governments might not lower the threshold for reporting of suspicious transactions, or, indeed, require that every transaction over 100 dollars be reported. All this information could later be sifted through by data mining programs, in order to spot patterns of suspicious activity. The only limit is the technology and the manpower that law enforcement is willing to devote to analysis of financial transactions...

On the other hand, these developments carry all of the potential risks of a powerful National Surveillance State: Governments can make mistakes in assessing levels of criminality and dangerousness; and their data mining models may characterize innocent activity as suspicious. Without sufficient oversight and checking functions, government actors may misuse the additional knowledge they gain, for example, by instigating abusive prosecutions, or creating discriminatory systems for access to public and private services (like banks, airports, government entitlements and so on). And the more powerful government becomes in knowing what its citizens are doing, the easier it becomes for government to control people's behavior.

Remember, computing power isn't just increasing, it's increasing exponentially. Yet the government still manages to put our own Senators on terrorist watch lists.

Ryan is a high-class escort

Via Ryan, I find another of those Cosmo Internet quiz things:

Powered By Pleasure Store

I guess that just makes me a cheap slut.

Because everyone else is doing it

Via David, Matt, and Ryan. There's this quiz.

Who is Your Ideal TV Boyfriend?

More on Gossip Girl. Created by BuddyTV

Like everyone else, I have no idea who this is. I believe that makes me old.

A food question

I had some cheese in the fridge that had been there a bit too long. The other day, I took it out and found it had become a bit moldy. But it was blue cheese. So does the mold make it better or worse?

More anti-science from the News-Gazette

Every once in a while, I poke my head in to the News-Gazette blogs. I'm not sure why; they're usually just about sports and weather and are only intermittently updated. (These people aren't actually paid to blog, are they?) One of the more disappointing ones is Rhonda Robinson's. Her history of promoting creationism, anti-vaccination, anti-contraception, and oh-my-god-the-Muslims-are-coming paranoia never fails to make me shake my head and fear for the future of the children she homeschools.

A couple of weeks ago, she came out with a blog entry about how recent school shootings are caused by the use of antidepressants. She has no actual information, but supports her conclusion through innuendo, insinuation, conspiracy-theories, and an appeal to alternative (i.e. ineffective) medicine.

Here is the sum total of her argument:

No doubt there will be calls for more gun control, tighter security, but what I want to know most is will they look in [NIU shooter Steven Kazmierczak's] medicine cabinet.

The overwhelming majority of adolescent and young adult shooters have all been on, or withdrawing from psychotropic medications.

That's the totality of her argument. These shooters were taking psychiatric medications, therefore the medications are at fault for the shootings. The fact that these men were taking antidepressants for a reason doesn't seem to register with her. The fact that they were actually mentally ill is, apparently, irrelevant.

Her appeal to authority is rich, too. She cites Julian Whitaker when he says:

...guns and movies don't cause these tragically frequent episodes of inexplicable violence. The real reason is written out on a prescription pad by psychiatrists and doctors all over the country-these monstrous acts were done not by criminals, but ordinary people high on prescription drugs.

What she doesn't mention is that Whitaker is an alternative medicine quack, who treats people by means of diet and exercise changes, nutritional supplements, and chelation therapies. He actually believes there is a conspiracy among drug companies to over-proscribe psychiatric medications to children.

I'm not suggesting that psychiatric medications can't have serious side effects, or that they're not over-proscribed. I'm just saying that jumping to the conclusion that these shootings were caused by these medications based on no other evidence that the shooters were taking these medications, and ignoring the fact that they had underlying mental illnesses, is an example of poor critical thinking. Using that kind of logic to propose these medications be outlawed, as Whitaker does, is reckless and irresponsible.

Robinson doesn't mention that the two deadliest mass shootings in US history, the 1966 University of Texas Clock Tower shooting and the 1968 California State, Fullerton massacre, were both perpetrated by men who were seriously mentally ill, before the age of antidepressants. One was committed by a man who was depressed and had a brain tumor, the other committed by a paranoid schizophrenic. Undoubtedly, if their cases were discovered today they, too, would be on antidepressants. But that doesn't mean you can blame the violence on Prozac.

UPDATE: Just reacting to some of the stuff that's come up in the comments. I just want to say that we know that starting antidepressants can lead to an increased rate of suicidal behavior, especially in young people. So it's not entirely unreasonable to think that there might be a possibility that we might see an increase in violent behavior as well. Also, I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that abruptly stopping antidepressants could lead to strange changes in behavior. As terrible as mass shootings are, they are fairly rare, so trying to establish a cause is difficult, at best.

My main complaint in this blog post was just to point out that Robinson sees a mentally ill person on antidepressants commit an act of violence and jumps to the conclusion that the antidepressants were to blame. Furthermore, she does so without evidence. She then goes on to quote a alternative medicine quack that thinks these rare events necessitate a complete ban on these drugs in spite of the fact that they have improved the quality of life for millions of people.

Nanny-states are good... for students

I was reading over at IlliniPundit suggestions on how to deal with Unofficial. One commenter suggested that the police deliberately harass bar patrons. Another suggested the bar entry age be raised to 24 or 25. Both are of questionable legality, I suspect. Several other commenters suggested the Mayor use his powers as Minister of Alcohol (or whatever) to force the bars to close for this weekend.

Judging from the smoking ban brouhaha last year, I guess we can conclude:

1. Government interference into the lives of bar patrons who choose to legally drink: Good
2. Government interference into the lives of bar patrons who choose to legally smoke: Not just bad, but a sign the United States is turning into a Communist country

Meat

Did anyone catch Torchwood a few weeks back? You know the episode with the giant space whale in the warehouse? Worst CGI monster since the Sci-Fi Channel's last movie of the week. But there was this little moment I found amusing. It's framed too perfectly in the shot for it to be a coincidence.

The episode was called "Meat" and that's what it was about.

On the normalization of torture

As more timely bloggers than I have pointer out, Supreme Court Justice said the other day:

...it would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face. It would be absurd to say that you couldn’t do that.

I just want to point out the complete moral turpitude of what Scalia is saying. He's not even bothering to participate in the legal sophistry so popular among Republicans these days that waterboarding isn't torture. He's flat-out saying that the US can torture detainees. He's talking about putting splinters under people's fingernails, for crying out loud.

That's where this issue has brought us. It used to be that the United States could claim to be a moral authority in the world. Now a member of the highest court in the land is claiming the US has the legal authority to torture captives and it barely even makes the news.

Too close for comfort

For those not local, it turns out that this week's shooting at Northern Illinois University was done by a UIUC graduate student. I just found out that he lived in the same apartment complex from me, just on the other side of the parking lot. Whoa. Freaky.

I don't really have anything to say on this, but can we wait just a little while before blaming this on Illinois's lack of concealed carry laws, media violence, removing God from the public schools, video games, or the homosexual agenda? Just 72 hours before it starts getting used as ammunition for your choice of political argument. Is that so much to ask?

Love came so softly I didn't even hear it

While I was visiting the parental units over Christmas, we watched Love Comes Softly. It was an odd choice and no one could remember why it had been in the Netflix queue. It probably was one of those "Since you liked X, you'll like Y" things.

It wound up being pretty predictable, made even more so by the fact that the opening credits let us know that the movie was distributed by Faith & Values Media. Oh, boy. Katherine Heigl plays a pioneer woman moving West with her husband, who dies five minutes into the movie, the day they arrive at their homestead. A couple of days later, at the funeral, Dale Midkiff proposes marriage, ostensibly since the preacher is leaving the very next day. Not "real" marriage, mind you, but she needs a place to live and he needs someone to care for his small children. He even says he'll sleep in the lean-to outside the house. The rest of the movie is fairly predictable at that point: she learns to be a good homemaker, bonds with his tomboy daughter, convinces her to wear a dress, discovers she's pregnant by her late husband, is witnessed to by her new husband, and at the movie's climax, discovers she's in love with the new guy. The movie's title comes from a conversation Heigl has with her only female friend, who also, it turns out, entered into a marriage of convenience only to discover she loved her new husband. Love in a marriage, you see, is an optional thing that sometimes "comes softly," rather than being something you start with.

Marriage is therefore sometimes a thing you do because it is useful or practical and not out of sentiment. That's a pretty radical idea for this day and age.

Remember that this is a movie made by a "family values" business and broadcast on the freakin' Hallmark Channel. Normally, I don't believe that making a movie is an endorsement of what happens in a movie -- you can tell a story without advocating its events -- but remember that this production company has made "good values" the very differentiating factor in its business model. I can only conclude they are, on some level, holding up this example as something to be emulated.

It's the sort of thing that makes me want to point out to all the "protect traditional marriage" types that this is what a traditional marriage is. Before about the mid-1700s, you got married for economic, political, and practical reasons, not for love. It was expected that some degree of fondness would develop, but it was never central to the institution. Not only was the kind of soulmate-finding, all-consuming love we idolize in our popular media not expected in a marriage, but it was actually considered improper for much of Western history. This Christian attitude towards marriage reminds me of the creepiest thing I've ever seen on the Web.

Other than this sort of creepy aspect, I didn't hate the movie. I didn't love it, but it wasn't awful, either. Some one else must have agreed, because they didn't just make a sequel, they made five.

Those naughty partisan Democrats

There's a thread over at IlliniPundit about McCain winning Florida. In it, the Pundit himself complains about the unwillingness of Democrats to be bipartisan and compromise with Congressional Republicans:

...many Democrats want to see the end of partisanship by having Republicans adopt Democratic positions. I have not seen any Democrats who lament partisanship urge Democrats to adopt Republican positions, nor have I seen anyone urge Democrats to compromise to move closer to Republican positions.

I almost laughed out loud at the idea that the lack of bipartisanship in Washington is due to the intransigence of Democrats. Glenn Greenwald pointed out this week what "bipartisanship" means in Washington. Here's a few examples:

To support the new Bush-supported FISA law:
GOP - 48-0
Dems - 12-36

To compel redeployment of troops from Iraq:
GOP - 0-49
Dems - 24-21

Declaring English to be the Government's official language:
GOP - 48-1
Dems - 16-33

The Military Commissions Act:
GOP - 53-0
Dems - 12-34

To renew the Patriot Act:
GOP - 54-0
Dems - 34-10

Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:
GOP - 48-1
Dems - 29-22

The moderate position is not the midpoint between the two extremes, as TheSquire pointed out a couple of weeks ago with reference to the Overton Window.

Greenwald concludes with:

On virtually every major controversial issue -- particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism -- the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to "bipartisan" support. That's what "bipartisanship" in Washington means.