Creationists make some crazy claims about fossils — Ken Ham, for instance, is adamant that T. rex was a vegetarian before the Fall. So let’s all laugh together.
Isn’t this charming: Utah has officially declared the Browning model 1911 semi-automatic pistol their official state gun. How lovely! I remember when our kids were growing up in Utah, one of their school assignments was to compile all of the state symbols into an illustrated report, so I knew the Utah state bird was the California gull, and the state insect was the honey bee, and the state fossil was Allosaurus, but they weren’t pasting pictures of firearms into their scrapbooks. That will all change now.
If I were helping a kid through the Utah school system, and I had to help them find pictures for that assignment, I’d point them to this page on the geography of gun deaths. It has some pretty illustrations.
Look! Utah is a lovely orange!
This is also useful, but it might be a little difficult for elementary school kids…although it might be a springboard to teach them about statistics and correlations. Every fourth grader should know about those.
So celebrate your gun culture, Utah! And celebrate poverty and ultra-conservative politics, too — they all go so well together.
How I feel this morning.
Hey, how come there are no LOLcrocs? They’re much cuter than cats.
More authoritarian bills are working their way through congress. They simply have no restraint anymore, and are rushing hell-bent to create a police state.
Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?
In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans’ “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they’d have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.
Why are they doing this? Because they are spoiled children who refuse to think that a few pennies from their pocket might end up helping some horrible woman who got pregnant.
(via Mike the Mad Biologist)
Ooops. Hot off the dramatic fizzle of the bacteria in meteorites story comes word that Chandra Wickramasinghe is losing his job and the University of Cardiff is closing their astrobiology center. Not because they oppose his work, of course, but simply because the weird science isn’t cost-effective.
It turns out it was a pretty rinky-tink operation to begin with. All it was was Wickramasinghe, getting paid a part-time salary of $24,000/year, with a little unpaid assistance from other people working at the university. In other words, the Astrobiology Center of the University of Cardiff was Chandra Wickramasinghe sitting at a desk for a few hours a week, writing effusive editorials and essays about the wonderful things astrobiology was discovering. No loss.
That’s the message the despicable John Edward and Dr Oz tried to give in a recent television program. I knew Edward was beneath contempt, but I’ve never watched Oz and had only heard second-hand that he was a woo-meister…but this show confirms it. Even worse, Oz brought in a critic, Katherine Nordal, to assess Edward’s psychic readings, and she has since complained about what the show did with her commentary.
In a letter to producers of “The Dr. Oz” show Nordal said, “I provided very balanced responses to Dr. Oz’s questions during the show’s taping, however, the editing of my responses did not capture my full comments or give viewers an accurate portrayal of my professional view on John Edward’s methods. Instead, it seems that ‘The Doctor Oz’ show intentionally edited my responses in a way that gave the appearance of my endorsement of Edward’s methods as a legitimate intervention.”
Keep that in mind, skeptics, if you’re ever asked to participate in one of these scammy shows: they want you for window dressing, to give an air of critical evaluation to their games, but they won’t hesitate to mangle your words. We already know that psychics are liars and con artists, why should we expect them to treat anyone honorably?
And then…oh, man, this is evil ghoulishness. Edward did one of his typical fishing expeditions, saying someone who had lost a child was present, and getting a gullible victim to volunteer for a little torture and exploitation.
This was unbelievable.
His next victim (patient?) was a middle-aged man who rose to his feet when Edward suggested someone had lost a son. As the reading continued, Edward informed the grief-stricken parent that the car accident that claimed his son’s life was in fact a suicide.
“I’ve never known that he committed suicide for sure,” said the grieving father, “but I believe it.”
Edward is making this stuff up as he goes along; he is taking the grief of a heart-broken parent and twisting it and making it harder, sharper, more painful. And he’s getting paid for it.
Jebus, but I hate these amoral psychopaths, these molesters of memories, these exploiters of tragedy.
And Oz is an enabler, the monster’s assistant.
The Catholic Church still doesn’t get it
By Adrian Liston
No matter how many revelations of child sex abuse by Catholic Priests come out, the Catholic Church still doesn’t get it. Take, for example, this story told by the Archbishop of New York, in which he recounts a (probably apocryphal) encounter with an angry man at an airport.
According to the Archbishop, the ex-Catholic said that he cannot look at a Catholic Priest without thinking “sexual predator”. The Archbishop’s response is telling, as he thinks only of the “shame and damage of the wound” that had been inflicted on himself with those words, rather than the far worse damage inflicted upon countless children by the Church’s actions.
Archbishop Dolan considered yelling and swearing at the guy, but instead proceeded to excuse the Church from all misconduct — taking the common line that sexual abuse is everywhere, so the Catholic Church should not be singled out. The Church just doesn’t get it, still treating child sexual abuse as just another sin on par with consensual homosexuality, rather than as a crime. They are also ignoring their own records, which suggest that Catholic Priests are more than 100-fold more likely to be a child sex offender than an average member of the public. There is a real genuine problem of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church that just cannot be eradicated until the Church accepts that the problem is within Catholicism itself, rather than just being a society-wide problem that has reached into the Church.
Most revealing of all is the musings by the Archbishop on the reasons why the Catholic Church is attacked over child sexual abuse. The Archbishop gives three reasons:
1. “For one, we priests deserve the more intense scrutiny, because people trust us more as we dare claim to represent God, so, when one of us do it – even if only a tiny minority of us ever have — it is more disgusting.”
I have to say, I think the Archbishop has a point here. Not about “a tiny minority”, the Church’s own figures suggest that ~9% of Catholic Priests ordained in 1970 were child sex offenders. But it is true that the crime is more horrific when the same monster who is abusing children is also telling adults in a loving consensual relationship that their act is a crime against God. The solution is simple, however – until the Church achieves some semblance of morality itself it should cease from condemning others.
2. “Two, I’m afraid there are many out there who have no love for the Church, and are itching to ruin us. This is the issue they love to endlessly scourge us with.”
Ah yes, the Church is the victim of a witch-hunt (a term which originates, incidentally, from the practice of the Catholic Church in persecuting innocent women and executing them without evidence). America does indeed have a history of Protestant discrimination against Catholics, but the child sex abuse scandal is not limited to America. There has been scandal and outcry in staunchly Catholic European countries, such as Belgium and Ireland. The rise of anti-Catholicism in these countries is not due to historic prejudice, but rather is being directly created by the actions of the Church. The Archbishop has cause and effect the wrong way around – child sex abuse is driving anti-Catholic sentiment, not the reverse.
3. “And, three, I hate to say it, there’s a lot of money to be made in suing the Catholic Church, while it’s hardly worth suing any of the other groups I mentioned before.”
This is contemptible, the Archbishop is making the outright accusation that cases of child sex abuse are being invented for profit. Once again, the Church is considering itself to be the victim rather than the culprit. Not only is this a disgusting slap in the face to all those people abused by Catholic Priests, but it is certifiably wrong. The John Jay Study, commissioned by the Catholic Church, detailed that Church investigations of sex abuse allegations found that 80% were “substantiated” and only 1.5% were “false”. So even when the Church investigates itself, using a Canon Law process that is judged by the local Bishop and does not allow for forensic evidence, they agree that only the tiniest minority of cases are made up.
The Church needs to stop assuming that the outrage against child sexual abuse is confected for political or monetary gain. The outrage against child sexual abuse is genuine outrage at the horrific nature of the crime itself.
I have suggested before the five steps that the Church needs to take in response to these crimes:
1) Admit that child rape is a wide-spread crime being perpetrated within the Catholic Church by a substantial proportion of Priests, reaching across continents and as far back as records exists.
2) Admit that this child rape has nothing to do with homosexuality or secularism or any such, and is instead a problem disproportionately within Catholicism.
3) Admit that the Church knew for a long time that this was a problem but chose to cover it up, and that Church doctrine is still preventing cases being reported directly to the secular authorities.
4) Admit that the Church has spent, and still spends, far more time devoted to petty concerns such as preventing contraception than it has to preventing child rape by its own members.
5) Fix the damn problem. Sell a few pieces of art and pay restitution to the victims. Make it official Church policy to report every incident to the police. Investigate Priests with the zeal shown during the Spanish Inquisition. Shut up about other people’s “sins” until the Church is clean. Change those aspects of doctrine or theology that drive child rape. Show some humility.
Unfortunately, decades into the scandal the Church is still failing to grasp step 1.
I made this post a few years ago, and I’m updating it now because my family back home in the Seattle-Tacoma area has a tradition: every year they join the Relay for Life to raise money for cancer research, in honor of my sister-in-law, Karen Myers, who died of melanoma. That’s my family listed there, doing good. If anyone wants to chip in to help out, that would be nice — I’m planning to donate to my mother’s page, since I like her best, but they’re all nice people and it’s a great cause. Or if you’d prefer to donate to the one who’ll probably expend the most energy running around the track, Alex Hahn is the littlest ball of fire.
This is my sister-in-law, Karen Myers — mother to 3, shy but always cheerful, and with a wonderful laugh that you were sure to hear any time you were with her. You would have liked her if you’d known her…unfortunately, she was slowly eaten alive by an implacable melanoma several years ago. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are; lots of good people — and you probably have known some yourself — are killed by cancer every year.
About 20 years ago, I was funded by a cancer training grant which required me to experience a fair amount of clinical training in oncology. It is not one of my happiest memories. What I saw were lots of dying people, in pain, with treatments that caused more pain — or were palliative because the patient was expected to die. Pediatric oncology was the worst, because they were dying children. I’m afraid my training convinced me to run screaming from anything clinical.
So last week, I met Beth Villavicencio, who told me she was a pediatric oncologist. The first words out of my mouth were something like, “That’s funny — you don’t look depressed or suicidal.” And she wasn’t. She looked awfully happy for someone who works with critically ill kids … so she turned me around 180°. She wasn’t miserable, because people bring dying kids to her and she saves them — she has a job where she is literally taking people who would be dying otherwise and she makes them healthy again with excellent success rates, which sounds like something that would make anyone cheerful.
I concur with Ophelia Benson: “interfaith” is a code word for the religious clubhouse. It’s used to exclude secularism and promote a unity of faith, any faith, where it doesn’t matter what BS you believe, as long as you really, really believe. I think we ought to rename the ideology of all those people who cheerfully and indiscriminately embrace every faith without regard for content as “tinkerbellism”.
That our government is embracing all faiths is just as much a violation of the separation of church and state as if they were to declare Episcopalianism as the state religion…its only political virtue is that it doesn’t antagonize any of the other superstitions.
I have to call your attention to this article, Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees, just published in PLoS One. It’s cool in itself; it’s about the analysis of metagenomic data, which may have exposed a fourth major branch in the tree of life, beyond the bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea…or it may have just exposed some very weird, highly derived viruses. This is work spawned from Craig Venter’s wonderfully fascinating work of just doing shotgun sequencing of sea water, processing all of the DNA from the crazy assortment of organisms present there, and sorting them out afterwards.
But something else that’s special about it is that the author, Jonathan Eisen, has bypassed his university’s press office and not written a formal press release at all. Instead, he has provided informal commentary on the paper on his own blog, which isn’t novel, except in its conscious effort to change the game (Eisen has also been important in open publishing, as in PLoS). This is awesome, and scientists ought to get a little nervous. It maintains the formality and structured writing of a standard peer-reviewed paper, which is good — we don’t want new media to violate the discipline of well-tested, successful formats. But it also adds another layer of effort to the work, in which the author breaks out from the conventional structure and talks about the work as he or she would in a seminar or in meeting with other scientists. A paper provides the data and major interpretations, but it’s this kind of conversational interaction that can let you see the bigger picture.
I say scientists might want to be a little bit nervous about this, because I can imagine a day when this kind of presentation becomes de rigueur for everything you publish, just as it’s now understood that you could give a talk on a paper. It’s a different skill set, too, and it’s going to require a different kind of talent to be able to address fellow scientists, the lay public, and science journalists. Those are important skills to have, and this kind of thing could end up making them better appreciated in the science community.
Are any of your grad students and post-docs blogging? You might want to think about getting them trained in this brave new world now, before it’s too late. And you might want to consider getting started yourself, if you aren’t already.
