Gabler gone, but it makes no difference

A few years ago, Mel Gabler died, and I put up my response below. Now his wife, Norma Gabler, has also died. Good riddance at last. Those two did an awful amount of harm to American science education by inflicting their ignorant opinions on textbook selection in Texas.


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I read this which led to this, where I learned a few months late that Mel Gabler was dead. This Mel Gabler. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Gabler had a good 89 year run in which he spread poison and ignorance and lies, and made his wretched mark on the textbook industry. He was a dishonest old man who reviewed biology textbooks through the lens of his own stupidity and religious prejudice, and he was darned good at it.

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Yikes!

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I was nowhere near this disaster—I’m on the other side of the state—but I’ve been over this bridge lots of times when I travel from Morris to the Twin Cities campus; now it has suddenly collapsed during rush hour, killing at least half a dozen and injuring many more. I’m shocked. There wasn’t any obvious cause, just boom, it fell apart.


An in-person account by someone living right by the bridge, with photos, is available.

I’m mostly normal!

People might read this definition of Asperger’s Syndrome and think, “Gee, that Miyyears fellow meets two of the three criteria, maybe that’s his problem”.

Asperger’s, like too many other mental illnesses, is in effect an almost whimsical diagnosis of exclusion: If someone is really smart, arrogant beyond measure, and tends to be an asshole or otherwise impossible to converse with in a normal way, then he must have a form of autism.

I’ll have you know, though, that I took the test and scored a 24, an “average math contest winner.” You need a 32 to suggest Asperger’s, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don’t have Asperger’s, I’m just cruel and insensitive.

Hey gang! Want to see something depressing?

Here’s a representative slice of average Americana: Parade magazine. I don’t read it, and I suspect most of you don’t either, but we aren’t average—we’re freaky flaky outliers. If you want to see what ordinary Americans are thinking, though, it’s a useful place to look. Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, “Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?”

About a third of the respondents currently answer “yes,” which is actually quite a bit better than I feared. The real scary part is the comments, though, and there are a lot of them. Here’s a quick sampling of the creationist point of view:

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America’s alcohol problem

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the ethanol boondoggle.

Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.

And that’s just the beginning … it starts getting savage after this point.

How do we get HPV infections, anyway?

One of the weirdest issues to drive the religious right into frothing madness was the discovery of a vaccine against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which would effectively reduce rates of cervical cancer … and it was opposed because it blocked infection with a sexually transmitted disease, and thus would encourage licentiousness. Weird, I know. Their brains don’t work right.

Anyway, here’s a new twist: investigators have found other non-genital reservoirs of the virus: HPV strains that could cause severe forms of cancer have been found under people’s fingernails. Ooooh, yuck, you filthy humans, crawling with viruses and microorganisms and various creepy crawlies … it gives one a little sympathy for obsessive germophobes.

It has to be emphasized, though, that finding the virus in one place does not mean it is transmitted via that place — this may be a completely negligible finding. If transmission is documented, then this could be an important discovery for public health policy, since we could at least tell them we’re inoculating their kids against a virus they might get from their priest patting them on the head, rather than just in case their child grows up to be a nasty dirty slut who actually has sex. It’s too early to do that, though, and right now this is mainly an opportunity to justify more research into mechanisms of infection with HPV.

Different strokes

OK, I don’t know quite what to make of this: it’s a site called The Atheist Conservative. I know there’s no obstacle to being both godless and conservative, but this one is ’round-the-bend freaky far-right Bush-lovin’ conservative. I don’t know how an atheist could write a review of Ann Coulter’s Godless that contains gooey dollops of praise for Coulter — that book was one flaming bonfire of stupid. But hey, if there are conservative atheists out there with tears running down your cheeks because you’re reading this pro-atheist site by a crazed liberal, maybe you’ll be happier over there.

Oh, and they’ve got their own symbol for atheism: it’s the square root of 2. Oy. Everyone’s gotta be different.

(via The Friendly Atheist)

The next question is, how many of them moonlight as ministers?

Larry Moran sneers at the creationist habit of stoking their numbers by claiming that M.D.s are “science professionals”, and therefore bolster their generic claim that ‘growing numbers of scientists are defecting from the Darwinist camp’.

I’ll make Larry’s sneer even fiercer by pointing out that many of them are dentists.

(I have nothing against doctors and dentists, of course, and have nothing but respect for their important skills. Most are not scientists, however, and don’t think like scientists, and don’t even pay much attention to the basic scientific literature. Claiming scientific legitimacy by tallying up your fan base among dental hygenists is like claiming Al Gore should have been the president because Canadians liked him better than Bush. Worse, because scientific conclusions are not determined by popular vote.)