Positive evidence for Hillary Clinton

She seems to have been a successful advocate for science and mathematics, and for education in general with a great track record since her days in Arkansas.

I was a child in Arkansas while Hillary was empowered to make a focused effort on improving outcomes for children. From fourth through ninth grade, I attended a “gifted and talented education” (GATE) class, a program built as part of Hillary Clinton’s reforms by the Standards Committee. The classes were loosely structured, with no rigid testing schedules or rote memorization, but they encouraged critical discourse and embraced creative divergence. GATE opened my eyes to a world of opportunity.

Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms were year-round. From seventh through 12th grade, I was able to attend multi-week, residential summer learning programs at small universities across Arkansas that offered middle- and high-schoolers immersive camps in fields like mathematics, theater, geology and more. Charismatic professors taught all of the programs. Most importantly for my family, they were provided by the state of Arkansas at no cost to students. The programs, known as “Academic Enrichment for the Gifted in the Summer” (AEGIS) started in 1984, a year after Hillary Clinton assumed the chair position of the Standards Committee. By the 1990s, AEGIS had ballooned to more than 25 programs serving thousands of students every summer. The program would not have existed without Hillary Clinton’s leadership.

Mathematics and sciences (or what we call “STEM” today) were of particular importance to Clinton. In a 1983 interview with the Associated Press, she remarked, while suggesting that Arkansas had overemphasized athletics, “I think it’s time for getting a little fanatic about math and sciences.” STEM is the foundation of today’s technology industry, and only a handful of pioneers in the public education space had the foresight to appreciate its value for future members of the workforce. By far the most significant impact Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms had in my life was through her work to create a free public boarding school for math and science nerds like me: The Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences (ASMS).

That also explains why the Republicans hate her so much. She fought ignorance, which is the core of the Republican party platform.

ORANGE BLOVIATOR GO HOME

So, Donald Trump paid a visit to Minnesota today, which was odd and pointless. This state is pretty much a lock for Clinton, but he flew in, claiming that there’s going to be a surprising upset in the state. He drew a few thousand deplorables to cheer him on, like this fellow:

trumpminnesota

I don’t think that’s the kind of appeal that will work here, and it’s kind of delusional of him to think so.

He also spent a lot of his time raging about those horrible immigrants in Minnesota.

Trump charged that too many Somali immigrants were admitted with faulty vetting and later recruited by radical elements. “A Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local communities where they are being placed,” he said. “It’s the least they could do for you. You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.”

We’ve suffered? Hang on there — we have a lot of Hmong and Somali immigrants here, and they don’t make us suffer. They’re good people. I’ve got a fair number of them in my classes, and they do as well as the third and fourth generation immigrants (like almost all of us) and as well as the native population. I don’t resent them at all, I’m glad to have them here…so what is this bullshit with a loud-mouthed New York millionaire tax-dodger flying in to tell us who belongs here and who doesn’t?

The person I’d like to kick out is a certain ranting orange thug. You know, the kind who encourages his fans to murder people.

The power of self-delusion

the-exorcist

William Friedkin, the guy who directed the Exorcist movie, has written a rather unreliable account of the activities of an official Catholic exorcist, Gabriele Amorth. I say unreliable because, I’m afraid, he sounds rather confused.

I am an agnostic. I believe the power of God and the human soul are unknowable. I don’t associate the teachings of Jesus with the politics of the Roman Catholic Church. The authors of the New Testament—none of whom, it is now generally believed by historians, actually knew Jesus—were creating a religion, not writing history.

I had no particular interest in the spiritual or the supernatural when the writer Bill Blatty asked me to direct the film of his novel, The Exorcist.

…

More than any film I’ve directed, The Exorcist inspired me to the point of obsession each day as I made it. I rejected all constraints, creative and financial. The studio, Warner Bros., thought I had taken leave of my senses. I may have. I made the film believing in the reality of exorcism and never, to this day, thought of it as a horror film.

There is a video of a woman undergoing exorcism. She thrashes around violently, she growls and howls, she curses in Italian. There is absolutely nothing supernatural on display, although it is also illustrated with a still from The Exorcist of a possessed girl levitating. This woman does not levitate. Her head doesn’t spin around on her neck. It’s all sadly mundane and shows a person suffering from some kind of mental illness, nothing more.

So Friedkin takes the video to some real doctors. They are non-committal; this is a problem they wouldn’t know how to treat, they come right out and say “this isn’t demon possession”, they suggest that there isn’t necessarily anything they could do, they agree that religion may be a useful palliative, and they explain that they have a patient with similar symptoms, and “we’re treating her with medication, giving her psychotherapy, creating a safe environment. She gets better.” How does Friedkin interpret this? As an affirmation of the supernatural.

I went to these doctors to try to get a rational, scientific explanation for what I had experienced. I thought they’d say, “This is some sort of psychosomatic disorder having nothing to do with possession.” That’s not what I came away with. Forty-five years after I directed The Exorcist, there’s more acceptance of the possibility of possession than there was when I made the film.

No there isn’t. It’s astonishing how he imposes his own beliefs on a natural phenomenon. And then he has the confidence to say of Amorth that He has performed thousands of exorcisms successfully. That makes no sense. Even the specific person he describes in this account he has to admit has been “exorcised” nine times, and at the end of the story is still having these seizure-like episodes. Is he going to call these nine successes?

I don’t believe in demons, but this account sure convinces me of the power of people to lie to themselves. There’s nothing heroic or noble in that, and in particular, there is nothing admirable about a man who uses religion to perpetuate damaging dishonesty about human behavior.

You might want to tune into Atheists Talk radio this morning

It’s at 9am Central time (you remembered to adjust your clocks, right?), and this week Atheists Talk radio features Geeks Without God to mock Ray Comfort and his new ‘movie’, The Atheist Delusion. They’re going to have to work hard to top the hilarity of Matt Barber’s serious review of the movie, though.

I mean it when I say “The Atheist Delusion” is the most persuasive and captivating answer to atheist questions I’ve ever seen on film. Without giving too much away, let me just say that non-believers and believers alike will be moved emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I have no doubt that many who claim atheism at the beginning of the film, will be left well on their way to admitting His existence and infinite glory toward film’s end.

Geeks Without God can meet that challenge, I’m sure. Unless Minnesota’s atheist comedian/podcasting group was converted to Christianity by the movie.

I am deeply offended

This is a story about sex dolls — specifically, male sex dolls. By the way, totally NSFW.

I was horrified and offended. Not by the sex dolls, though, or the fact that some people really want these things — that’s fine, whatever floats your boat — but by a comment the owner makes. She’s asked by the reporter where these dolls are most popular, and she says “Texas, Minnesota, and Michigan…Republican states“.

I will have you know that Minnesota is not a Republican state.

I may have to sue for the damage to our reputation.

Who are the grown ups here?

Wow. You’ve probably heard about the Harvard men’s soccer team scandal — they’ve been compiling a yearly “scouting report” of the women’s soccer team, rating each team member’s appearance and speculating about their sexual preferences and other such juvenile shit. They ought to be deeply embarrassed. Their team has been suspended, which is an appropriate step, although if it keeps up it ought to be just completely shut down, but I doubt that the boys who thought such nonsense was funny are at all ashamed.

But then you need to read the response by Kelsey Clayman, Brooke Dickens, Alika Keene, Emily Mosbacher, Lauren Varela, and Haley Washburn, members of the women’s soccer team. The boys write like a puerile gang of inflamed testicles, the women write like thoughtful and intelligent human beings.

The sad reality is that we have come to expect this kind of behavior from so many men, that it is so “normal” to us we often decide it is not worth our time or effort to dwell on. Yet as the media has taken advantage of the Harvard name once more, it has become increasingly difficult to evade the pervasiveness of this story, harder still to elude the abhorrent judgment of our peers and the outrageous Internet commentary of the public, and hardest to subdue the embarrassment, disgust, and pain we feel as a result.

In all, we do not pity ourselves, nor do we ache most because of the personal nature of this attack. More than anything, we are frustrated that this is a reality that all women have faced in the past and will continue to face throughout their lives. We feel hopeless because men who are supposed to be our brothers degrade us like this. We are appalled that female athletes who are told to feel empowered and proud of their abilities are so regularly reduced to a physical appearance. We are distraught that mothers having daughters almost a half century after getting equal rights have to worry about men’s entitlement to bodies that aren’t theirs. We are concerned for the future, because we know that the only way we can truly move past this culture is for the very men who perpetrate it to stop it in its tracks.

Having considered members of this team our close friends for the past four years, we are beyond hurt to realize these individuals could encourage, silently observe, or participate in this kind of behavior, and for more than four years have neglected to apologize until this week.

I know who impresses me and who disappoints me, and it’s a shame the difference falls along such strong gender lines.

What also worries me is that I read this satirical (?) article on McSweeney’s right after that, and you know, it sounded less like satire and more like a really good idea.

The Constitution? Yeah, we’re done with that. We’ve enlisted a group of multi-racial women, The Founding Mothers, to draft a new document, The Socialist Mixtape, which will become the law of the land. We’re only going to let non-white, low-income women vote for the first 150 years or so — just until things settle down enough to let white men have a say.

Right now, if it were announced that the US was going to disenfranchise all white men (which includes me) until they learn a little intellectual maturity as a group, I wouldn’t be too horrified. I’d at least regard it as an idea that might have some merit. I’d worry more that it was a proposal that was going to anger the largest bloc of armed assholes in America.

Behe is still comfortably ensconced in a niche of ignorance

Back in the 1990s, when Behe first came out with his idea of irreducible complexity, I recall that there was some consternation in our little community of anti-creationist activists. Behe had done something novel: instead of denying all of the accumulated evidence, he instead turned the focus on the gaps in our knowledge. It’s something of a cunning plan, if you think about it; the scientific literature is full of papers where scientists say that now we understand Step X, but we still need to figure out Steps Y and Z, so let’s work (and get funded) for Y. In a sense, it’s brilliant, because instead of relying on creationist ignorance to advance his argument, he would use honest scientific ignorance instead.

So, have we worked out every single step in the evolution of the blood clotting pathway? No? Then all the gaps are filled in with God Design. Flagellum? Nope. Must have been design then. Resistance to anti-malarials by plasmodium? Clearly, if you haven’t isolated every genotype in the progression of the resistance, there is room for an invisible magic man done did it.

His other clever shuffle was to admit that there are natural processes at work, so every evolutionary change is the consequence of both the understood mechanisms and what he claims are necessary miraculous events, but that you can’t always tell which steps are caused by mutation/selection, and which are Designed. Which means that the scientists have to do all the work of documenting every step, while Behe sits back, does nothing, and gives credit to his unnamed Designer for all the parts that aren’t done. As Matt Herron points out:

Dr. Behe admits (in The Edge of Evolution) that there is “…great evidence that random mutation paired with natural selection can modify life in important ways,” so his view is that life’s diversity and complexity are best explained by a combination of natural and supernatural processes. In fact, I think that’s a fair summary of intelligent design in general. So to falsify intelligent design for a particular example, it’s not enough to show that natural processes are mainly responsible for its origin. No, you’d have to show that supernatural causes played no role at all, no matter how minor.

That’s the funny business that has kept him going for a quarter century now. He doesn’t have to do the work of showing that any of his hypothetical supernatural mechanisms actually operate anywhere, he does not have to test for Design, and in fact he has zero positive evidence for any of the processes that he claims must have been ticking away for millions of years. Meanwhile, real scientists have been measuring and demonstrating the phenomena described by modern evolutionary theory — drift, selection, recombination, etc. — and identifying specific instances of these mechanisms in action. Behe shrugs them off. He’s built a rationalization that allows for the existence of natural processes while demanding that all of the gaps be filled in with his Designer…who seems to be a reflection of his Catholic faith.

It’s infuriatingly dishonest, but he’s found a thriving niche. All the scientists think he’s a kook, while all the creationists who are so gullible that they believe in a great flood and 6000 year old earth look upon him as some kind of super-scientific genius.