It’ll never happen

The pair of psychic frauds, James van Praagh and Allison DuBois, who were featured on Nightline, have been called out by the JREF:

The JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge Director, Banachek, also featured in the episode, said, “We’re issuing a challenge to these fakers: for once, show that you can get this supposedly supernatural knowledge without cheating. If one of you can demonstrate your ‘psychic’ abilities on randomly chosen strangers—not celebrities—under mutually-agreed conditions, without relying on known cold-reading techniques such as fishing around with vague questions, and without just using Google—we will donate our million dollars to you or to the charity of your choice.”

You know Van Praagh and DuBois will never, ever risk exposure of their profitable scams by subjecting themselves to tests.

(Also on FtB)

TAX THE RICH!

Sam Harris is bemused: he made the simple, obvious statement that the US needs to tax the rich more, and furious readers of his blog stomped off in a huff. He has discovered an easy way to chase away readers!

I fear it won’t work as well here, since my anti-libertarian views are already well known, but I agree entirely with his suggestion “that taxes should be raised on billionaires.” I’d go a bit further — raise them on millionaires, too. Raise them on people making over $100,000 a year, while you’re at it (that comes close to me, too, since we have a two-income family).

But Harris has doubled down. Now he’s pissed off the Randroids.

As someone who has written and spoken at length about how we might develop a truly “objective” morality, I am often told by followers of Rand that their beloved guru accomplished this task long ago. The result was Objectivism—a view that makes a religious fetish of selfishness and disposes of altruism and compassion as character flaws. If nothing else, this approach to ethics was a triumph of marketing, as Objectivism is basically autism rebranded. And Rand’s attempt to make literature out of this awful philosophy produced some commensurately terrible writing. Even in high school, I found that my copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged simply would not open.

This could get interesting, if only Harris allowed comments on his blog — I believe he has just pushed the button on the foreheads of the True Libertarians labeled “Frappé” and we can expect some delicious brain smoothies to be dispensed out of their ears any moment now.

The real question, though, is why Americans are so adamantly opposed to sensible taxation — it’s completely irrational and damaging. I blame the attitude that we see expressed by capitalist extremists and that is so well represented by the Prosperity Gospel. It’s a nicely circular tautology: wealth comes to those who deserve it most. How do we know that? Because the rich are wealthy. It leads to the ideas that warp our country and poison our economies, that the rich deserve their money, and it would therefore be unfair to punish them with taxes for their success, while the poor are clearly lazy parasites (because they aren’t rich!) and therefore deserve to be squeezed and punished further. The idea that a poor person might deserve security and stability and a living wage with reasonable work hours simply because they are humans and fellow citizens is alien to people who think like that — poverty is bad and only comes to bad people.

It’ll never happen

The pair of psychic frauds, James van Praagh and Allison DuBois, who were featured on Nightline, have been called out by the JREF:

The JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge Director, Banachek, also featured in the episode, said, “We’re issuing a challenge to these fakers: for once, show that you can get this supposedly supernatural knowledge without cheating. If one of you can demonstrate your ‘psychic’ abilities on randomly chosen strangers—not celebrities—under mutually-agreed conditions, without relying on known cold-reading techniques such as fishing around with vague questions, and without just using Google—we will donate our million dollars to you or to the charity of your choice.”

You know Van Praagh and DuBois will never, ever risk exposure of their profitable scams by subjecting themselves to tests.

(Also on Sb)

Keeping score in Boston

Ugh. The Archdiocese of Boston keeps a public list of accused and convicted pedophiles for your viewing ‘pleasure’. It’s a l o n g list.

It’s also disturbing that the two most common penalties are “Assigned to a Life of Prayer and Penance” and “Laicized”. If you’re a priest aren’t you expected to do the former anyway, and wouldn’t being kicked out of the priesthood be a reward?

Coulter revisited

Ann Coulter is a horrible, ignorant person who once wrote a whole book accusing liberals of being Godless, as if that were an insult, and advancing arguments against evolution that made the standard noisy creationist look like a veritable scholar. I looked at her arguments, and I made a public challenge back in 2006 for any defenders to pick one paragraph from the book and we’d discuss it in detail — there have been no takers, not one person willing to stand up and support in detail any claim she had made. She also made some amazingly inane arguments: did you know that one strike against evolution is that the people who study it are mere biologists, which is not really a science, and that there are more women working in biology than, say, physics?

I was tearing into her quite regularly for a while there after that book came out. She was such an easy target.

But no matter. I’m acutely envious of Carl Zimmer, who Coulter regards as a giant flatulent raccoon. Man, I would love to have that on my résumé. Alas, Coulter has no idea who I am, so I’m not going to get that recognition.

By the way, the Coulter challenge is still open, and has been for five years. All anyone has to do is pick one paragraph, any paragraph, from her evolution chapters in Godless, and post it with a defense of its accuracy. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? She wrote this whole book, I’m letting you pick the very best, most solid, strongest argument against evolution from it and present it here to stump us all. It’s strange that no one has managed to do that in all this time.

(By the way, as is usual whenever I mention Coulter, there will be petty people who will sneer at her appearance or make ugly remarks about her sexuality. Do not do that. I will cut you.)

(Also on FtB)

Coulter revisited

Ann Coulter is a horrible, ignorant person who once wrote a whole book accusing liberals of being Godless, as if that were an insult, and advancing arguments against evolution that made the standard noisy creationist look like a veritable scholar. I looked at her arguments, and I made a public challenge back in 2006 for any defenders to pick one paragraph from the book and we’d discuss it in detail — there have been no takers, not one person willing to stand up and support in detail any claim she had made. She also made some amazingly inane arguments: did you know that one strike against evolution is that the people who study it are mere biologists, which is not really a science, and that there are more women working in biology than, say, physics?

I was tearing into her quite regularly for a while there after that book came out. She was such an easy target.

But no matter. I’m acutely envious of Carl Zimmer, who Coulter regards as a giant flatulent raccoon. Man, I would love to have that on my résumé. Alas, Coulter has no idea who I am, so I’m not going to get that recognition.

By the way, the Coulter challenge is still open, and has been for five years. All anyone has to do is pick one paragraph, any paragraph, from her evolution chapters in Godless, and post it with a defense of its accuracy. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? She wrote this whole book, I’m letting you pick the very best, most solid, strongest argument against evolution from it and present it here to stump us all. It’s strange that no one has managed to do that in all this time.

(By the way, as is usual whenever I mention Coulter, there will be petty people who will sneer at her appearance or make ugly remarks about her sexuality. Do not do that. I will cut you.)

(Also on Sb)

Triumph in Canada

Remember that silly blood type nonsense from the Canadian Blood Services? It’s gone, replaced with a much simpler page that states that your blood type will be determined when you give blood.

A few people have received email from CBS admitting that they’ve removed the nonsense.

Dr. Sher has asked me to respond to your recent e-mail regarding our What’s Your Type? new donor recruitment program. I understand that you have also sent an e-mail communicating your concerns to www.whatsyourtype@blood.ca and that others from our organization have provided you with specific details in response. I can confirm that the content you object to has been removed from our web site. The marketing materials for this program are being revised.

Thanks again for sharing your views with us.

Ian Mumford
Chief Operating Officer
Canadian Blood Services

Good for them. Science FTW!

(Also on FtB)

Triumph in Canada

Remember that silly blood type nonsense from the Canadian Blood Services? It’s gone, replaced with a much simpler page that states that your blood type will be determined when you give blood.

A few people have received email from CBS admitting that they’ve removed the nonsense.

Dr. Sher has asked me to respond to your recent e-mail regarding our What’s Your Type? new donor recruitment program. I understand that you have also sent an e-mail communicating your concerns to www.whatsyourtype@blood.ca and that others from our organization have provided you with specific details in response. I can confirm that the content you object to has been removed from our web site. The marketing materials for this program are being revised.

Thanks again for sharing your views with us.

Ian Mumford
Chief Operating Officer
Canadian Blood Services

Good for them. Science FTW!

(Also on Sb)

Paula Kirby tells the same story

I don’t know how we can get any plainer than this: evolution really happened and is happening.

Evolution is a simple fact. We can choose to remain ignorant of it, we can stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to think about it, we can even rail against it and shout and scream that it is not allowed to be true. But facts are facts, and will not go away just because we don’t like them. We don’t get to vote for our preferred method of having come into existence as a species, any more than we can choose to have been delivered by stork rather than conceived and born in the usual way.

Candidates who stick their fingers in their ears and reject reality simply don’t deserve to hold office.

(Also on FtB)

Not you too, New Zealand?

Let’s imagine that you, a rational person, are a high muckety-muck in some prestigious scientific institution — like, say, the Royal Society of New Zealand — and you’re asked whether some fringe subject — like, say, Traditional Chinese Medicine — should receive the endorsement of your society. How would you determine your answer?

If you’re anything like me, you’d go to experts and ask, “Is there good evidence that this really works? Is it a subject we should pursue in greater depth?”

Not the Royal Society of New Zealand, though. No, forget all that business of whether TCM actually works, or even does harm: instead, they hired a consultant psychologist who interviewed 30 people and asked them whether they’d used TCM. Their conclusion:

The Society recommends that TCM should become a registered profession and that registered practitioners should be clinically well qualified.

It apparently doesn’t matter whether it works or not, and the fact that it can cause harm was actually used to support endorsing it in a fine piece of topsy-turvy logic.

There is the potential of harm from the practice of TCM. Apart from the risks already outlined in the proposal document, clients consulting TCM practitioners are at risk of delayed diagnosis and treatment of their conditions, which can carry significant consequences. It is possible that an occult fracture is missed in a client consulting a TCM practitioner for foot pain, or early meningococcal disease overlooked in a client with fevers and general malaise.

Regulation of TCM will ensure that all TCM practitioners are aware of the limitation of their service, and to know when to refer clients to another health service if necessary. Improper practice of TCM, such as tuina (massage therapy) and tei-da (practice of bone-setting), has been shown to induce physical damage (e.g. joint dislocation, spindle damage, deep tissue/muscle damage) to the patients and some herbal medicine may also not be suitable for pregnant women. It will therefore be important to ensure that registered TCM practitioners are responsible and clinically well qualified.

I have decided that chewing broken glass is a cure for cancer. It is irrelevant whether it actually does so; it does cause severe bleeding and oral and throat damage, though, so I’m moving to New Zealand, where that will be cause to officially recognize and register my practice, so that the state can better protect my patients from harm.

(Also on FtB)