There is good skepticism, and bad skepticism

I’m down on the organized skeptical community, because I think they practice skepticism selectively. But here’s a good example of healthy skepticism on nutrition science, prompted by this ‘documentary’, What the Health. I like that the position is put right up front.

As a vegan health professional, I am sometimes mortified to be associated with the junk science that permeates our community. And as an animal rights activist, I’m disheartened by advocacy efforts that can make us look scientifically illiterate, dishonest, and occasionally like a cult of conspiracy theorists.

I’m not a vegan, but I sympathize with the movement; I’m not an animal rights activist, because I agree that there is way too much scientific illiteracy in that movement…but I do support improving care and minimizing suffering in animals. I can never support the kind of dishonesty rampant in these quack nutrition stories, like those credulously promoted in What the Health.

The exaggerated and misleading statements about animal foods and health are meant to build the case that you must be vegan if you want to be healthy. We hear, for example, that there is no evidence that consuming animal foods in moderation can turn heart disease around. Yes, there is. There is at least as much evidence that plant-based (but not vegan) diets can reverse heart disease as there is evidence indicating vegan diets can reverse heart disease.

And finally, there are the miraculous healings. The film tells us that a plant-based diet can treat lupus, multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis. (I’d love to see actual evidence for any of this.) Then we’re shown real-life examples of astonishing recoveries from illness. One woman has been diagnosed with bilateral osteoarthritis and is scheduled for two hip replacements because, as she describes it, bone is rubbing on bone. This means that the cartilage that cushions the hip joints has worn away. You can’t just grow back a bunch of cartilage in two weeks by changing your diet. Nor is there evidence that a healthy vegan diet will reverse thyroid cancer as is claimed in the film. And I hope that the woman who stopped taking antidepressants in just two weeks did so under strict medical supervision. That is not enough time to taper off of these drugs (which kind of makes me doubt her story). And to imply that people can abruptly stop taking their antidepressants when they go vegan is irresponsible and dangerous.

Kip himself says that after he changed his diet, “within a few days I could feel my blood running through my veins with a new vitality.” It immediately brought to mind Lierre Keith, ex-vegan and author of The Vegetarian Myth. She says this when she eats a bite of tuna fish after many years of veganism: “I could feel every cell in my body—literally every cell—pulsing. And finally, finally being fed.”

I’ve personally made changes in my diet to reduce animal protein, because the arguments make sense: it’s generally good to exercise moderation in your diet. I’ve been exercising more. But I don’t believe in magical rejuvenations or that I can feel my veins or cells or that eating more carrots will prevent cancer.

I think I’ll skip the movie. But I’m willing to listen to what Virginia Messina has to say about vegan diets.

Ken Ham buckles beneath the hob-nailed boot of Caesar!

Yep, Answers in Genesis has folded, but not without whining.

The Ark Encounter has agreed to pay the 50-cent per ticket Williamstown safety assessment fee after a lengthy debate with the city council that has spanned weeks.

Answers in Genesis Co-Founder Ken Ham offered a statement to the Grant County News, in which he explained that Ark Encounter officials never said they would not pay into the fee. He added that the Ark Encounter has been paying into the fee since the city began collecting from businesses on July 1, and offered to pay the city a capped amount of $350,000, later increasing the offer to $500,000.

“Now, we do believe there were, and still are, some issues with the way the ordinance is worded, and we do have concerns about the fairness of such a tax,” Ham said. “The city ordinance makes the Ark Encounter bear almost the entire load for the increased funding for Williamstown’s police, fire and EMS budget.”

Ham said that the organization is still concerned over the fact that there is no cap, and what that might mean for the Ark Encounter’s future.

Ham also notes that despite the large numbers of guests the Ark Encounter serves on a regular basis, calls for emergency services have been relatively small. On average for the year, it’s been about two calls per week, with the majority being in the busiest six months of operation, according to Ham.

Aww, they never said they wouldn’t pay it, they just wanted to control how much they paid. I’m going to try this with the IRS: sure, you guys can tax me at the same rate as anyone else in my bracket, but I’m unilaterally putting a cap of $500 on how much I’ll pay. See, I’m not saying I won’t pay my taxes. I’m also worried that if I make a few million dollars this year, you might demand that I pay more than I do with my middling 5 figure income.

As for his argument than there haven’t been very many calls on emergency services yet, does he even understand what “emergency” means? Why should I pay for homeowner’s insurance, for example? It costs me more than I get back each year! Usually. Except for that time the water main broke and turned my basement into a nicely carpeted lake with floating furniture. But that’ll never happen again!

I AM OUT OF CONTROL

Ken Ham says so.

MEDIA AND BLOGGERS OUT OF CONTROL RE: ARK

You may have read media reports and blogs that have misrepresented and/or lied about AiG’s dealings with local officials who have imposed a new city tax that places almost the entire tax burden on our ministry. Here is what we are sharing with the media when they ask us about the matter:

“Because the new ordinance passed by the City of Williamstown essentially singled out the Ark Encounter to shoulder nearly all the burden for additional safety services that will benefit the entire community and not just the Ark, and because of the ordinance’s wording concerning exemptions to the safety fee, we needed to keep our options open to protect the organization for the future. We have always said we want to pay our fair share for safety services, and believed we had made a highly reasonable counter proposal to the city council.

“It has always been our desire to be a partner in helping to grow the economy of a community that welcomed us so kindly. We are saddened that the city council did not extend the courtesy of discussing this ordinance with us before passing it and taking it public, and was not willing to negotiate further.
“We are thankful that even with over a million Ark guests who have come to Williamstown in just over a year, the number of calls from the Ark Encounter for emergency services has been quite small.”–Mark Looy, CCO

Wait. We liars have been saying that AiG didn’t want to pay the taxes imposed by Williamstown, and that they shuffled ownership of the Big Gay Wooden Box to a religious non-profit to avoid those taxes. Nothing in that comment rebuts those claims. They’re calling “tax shenanigans” keep our options open, and they’re basically admitting that they got exasperated with the Williamstown requirements and acted to protect their own interests without regard for the tax laws. So we were right! We weren’t lying!

I’m also not impressed with the objection that darn it, this safety fee will benefit the whole community rather than just AiG. I would also like to point out that the fee is to pay for safety infrastructure rather than paying out on a case by case basis, so it’s irrelevant that they’ve only needed it a few times in the past. It’s like how Republicans don’t understand what insurance is.

The future kinda sucks

We’re all going to be cyborgs who live on protein pills! Unfortunately, reality makes that less glamorous than it sounds. It turns out that Soylent is rather unpleasant, and all those happy ambitious post-humanists who got gadgets implanted under their skin are discovering some downsides. When I met a guy who’d done some biohacking and implanted magnets under his fingertips (he can feel electric fields!), I thought it was nifty — but it turns out those magnets wear out after a few years, and you end up dredging corroded bits of wire out of your flesh.

OK, maybe it’s the near future that sucks, but it’ll all be great in the 22nd century.

Organizations have the right to not invite Richard Dawkins — or me — to speak

A talk by Richard Dawkins on his newest book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, was canceled by the radio station that was hosting it, KPFA, a public broadcasting station in Berkeley. Their reason:

We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier.

Richard Dawkins complains with, unfortunately, the kind of argument often used by the alt-right:

I am known as a frequent critic of Christianity and have never been de-platformed for that. Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?

Somehow, a minority community in America that is threatened with deportation by the government, is routinely condemned by talk radio and the likes of Breitbart, and that lives in fear of good Christian citizens who vandalize mosques and threaten violence (and sometimes, carry out violence) gets accused of having a “free pass”. That’s precisely the kind of blinkered nonsense that I can understand KPFA objecting to, so Dawkins is not helping his case at all. It’s also denying the fact that the New Atheists have been particularly specific in denunciations of Islam; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the newest member of the “four horsemen”, has recommended converting Muslims to Christianity, so there clearly is a hierarchy of religions with Islam at the bottom, deserving special contempt. And Sam Harris, of course, is all about anti-Islamic sentiment, going so far as to suggest that using torture and nuclear weapons against them might be justifiable. Let’s not play the wide-eyed innocent, “what, me abuse Muslims?” game. Let’s not pretend that Dawkins has never made any hurtful, regressive comments on his twitter feed, or on my blog.

CFI handles it a little better, pointing out that Dawkins has, for instance, opposed Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and that this particular talk was to be about science, so his other views were irrelevant. I suspect that it would have been a good talk that I would enjoy, since it wouldn’t contain the regressive views I’ve found so exasperating in Dawkins. So, sure, you can make the argument that Dawkins is a speaker of considerable virtue, and that he wouldn’t be flaunting his vices in this talk.

But then they go too far.

“We understand the difference between a people and the beliefs they may hold,” said Blumner, “All of us must be free to debate and criticize Ideas, and harmful ideas must be exposed. It is incredibly disappointing that KPFA does not understand this.”

I am disappointed that CFI does not understand that this is not a free speech issue. Dawkins is free to debate and criticize ideas. He’s the best-selling atheist author in the world! He isn’t oppressed or censored in any way; his books are popular, they get translated into dozens of languages, he gets to appear on television, he doesn’t have to fear that he’ll be ejected out of the country or murdered for his views (people like Maryam Namazi or Taslima Nasrin do). KPFA, as the host of this talk, has the right to decide that they’d rather not.

I’m going to agree completely with Siggy on this matter. That Richard Dawkins has some controversial, even objectionable, views does not, in some weird reversal of free speech concerns, obligate every entity on the planet to host him on demand.

People are always thinking of these issues in terms of the speaker’s free speech, but if anything, it’s about the inviters’ free speech. If speakers have a right to platforms, where are all my speaker invitations, and why isn’t anyone standing up for my free speech?

It wouldn’t even matter if KPFA’s reasons for rejecting Dawkins were totally bogus, so all the spluttering about how he isn’t really anti-Islam is irrelevant. Making it a free speech issue is just using a bullhorn to yell about how you don’t understand free speech.

Dawkins (and I) might not particularly like the idea that this rejection was made so late that it was obvious, but it is within KPFA’s rights, and it does no major harm to Dawkins. This is a case where the appropriate response is to shrug and move on.

There have been two cases in just the past year where conference organizers have contacted me, asked if I’d be willing to speak at their event, and then later written to me and retracted the offer without explanation. I’m sure it was because there are vocal members of those groups who objected vehemently to my appearance, but it was done before the final list of speakers was announced, so the change was not publicized. And that was fine, I didn’t complain, I didn’t announce that my free speech was being violated, I didn’t try to argue that their reasons for cutting me were invalid. Conferences have that right.

Why doesn’t CFI understand this?

Is this what the kids call “trash talk”?

That creationist with the chromosome argument put out another video raging about me today. It mainly consist of him declaring that I’m stupid, that he’d destroy me in a debate, but he’s not going to debate me, and that I ran away from debating him (I’d never even considered a debate with this bozo). Although if you advance to 17:10 in the video, he does do an imitation of me which is amusing.

His reply to my earlier comments is that he didn’t have the human chromosome number memorized, which is fine. I wasn’t testing him on rote memorization. More significant is that his guesses were that we had an odd number of chromosomes, which would be unusual for a diploid organism (yeah, you’re raising your hand and saying “male bees!”, but that’s a detail G Man is not ready for.)

What’s more important is that he takes a step back and tries to clarify the concept he was trying to explain. That’s good. That’s more important than the specific number, and I’m glad he could deliver a brief, crystal-clear summary of what he thinks. Of course, what he then has to do is demonstrate that he can get the concept right. So here goes G Man’s short summary of The Chromosome Argument that all of us atheists are using all the time.

What is the meat and potatoes of what I was trying to say there? I was trying to say that since tobacco had more chromosomes than human beings, then that means the next step in our evolution was to become, you know, tobacco. You know what I mean, because they have more chromosomes. That was the whole point I wanted to talk about.

Uh, no. No biologist makes that argument, as I said.

You can now ignore the video. Unless you really want to listen to him rant about destroying me. Oh, yes, and also Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra.

It’s Christmas in July!

First it’s the gay-themed redecoration of the Ark Park.

Then, in light of the dodgy resale of the Big Gay Wooden Box to themselves to avoid taxes, the FFRF is coming down on them.

FFRF is requesting that the Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority take immediate action to suspend the availability of tax rebates to the operators of the Ark and to terminate any applicable agreements it has with the Ark Encounter.

Kentucky has already responded!

The Kentucky Tourism, Arts, and Heritage Cabinet notified the operators of the Ark Encounter that it is in breach of its Tourism Development Agreement with the state. That agreement provides up to $18 million in state subsidies for the Ark project in the form of annual sales tax rebates. FFRF obtained records from the Cabinet today that include a July 18 notice sent to the operators of the Ark saying that Ark Encounter, LLC has breached the agreement following the sale of the property. The letter says that no further tax rebates may accrue as of June 28.

And with that, a whole flock of happy lawyers and accountants have got their wings. See? This is what happens when you play shenanigans with the tax system: headaches, and the sucking sound of money swirling down the drain.

Oh, and Sean Spicer has resigned.

Today was a good day.

G Man puts the smack down on me!

I got into a conversation with a creationist in a hangout late one night, and now, wouldn’t you know it, he has announced that he “humbled” me. Funny, that’s not how I remember it. He cut up a few bits from our discussion and created a video in which he thinks he has rebutted me, with much bluster and arrogance.


PZ Myer just got owned! all the down votes are from butt hurt atheists who worship PZ Myers and want to protect their religion called evolution!

In case you don’t want to sit through 13 minutes of ranting, I’ll summarize it for you.

He says I allow these atheists to puff my head up because I broke the world record in math. I have no idea what he means; what is the world record in math, anyway? So I’ll let that slide, just as I’ll skip over the fact that he spells my name two different ways in his description and consistently mispronounces it.

He claims I said two stupid things.

The first is that he said something bizarre — that humans have 43 chromosomes, while tobacco has 48, and that this is a fact that evolutionists use to argue for evolution, calling it the chromosome argument which, he says, 40 or 50 atheists use.

My reply was that chromosome number is irrelevant. After all, it varies in a rather arbitrary fashion across species, and it seems to be a highly variable character. While it may be useable as a comparision across closely related species, just tallying up chromosome numbers gives you no clue to relatedness. Here’s a table of some representative numbers, for instance:

If you just thought those numbers were sufficient to indicate ancestry, you’d have to conclude that humans are more closely related to zebrafish than they are to horses. So, no, we don’t use the chromosome argument, or the argument from chromosome numbers.

I asked him if he knew how many chromosomes he had. His answer: 43 or 45. Both wrong. Not just wrong in detail, but in concept — we’re diploid, so we’re going to have an even number of chromosomes.

In his rebuttal, he mangles the statement that chromosome numbers are not a good metric for relatedness into a claim that no evolutionist uses chromosomes as evidence for evolution. Then he shows a clip of Ken Miller dismantling a common creationist claim, that because the other apes have 48 chromosomes and we only have 46, we can’t be that closely related. Miller shows from the content of chromosome 2 in humans that it is a product of a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes. He is explaining how chromosome numbers can vary.

Then he cuts to Kent Hovind. It’s Hovind who thinks these numbers are significant. He shows slides of chromosome numbers like the one I posted above, and makes strange arguments. Chimps have the same number of chromosomes as tobacco, which for some reason the audience finds hilarious and guffaws loudly.

Chickens and dogs both have 78 chromosomes, so they’re identical twins. Ferns have the largest number of chromosomes, so evolutionists think that’s the ultimate goal of all evolution. Opposums, redwoods, and kidney beans have the same number of chromosomes, and then in a non sequitur, he argues that the similarities are indications of a common designer.

It’s creationists like Kent Hovind who use this bogus chromosome argument, not biologists. Our creationist then summarizes by saying he was not demonstrating his ignorance, he knows what he’s talking about. Sorry, guy, you’ve only demonstrated that you’re as ignorant as Kent Hovind. Do better.

He says the second stupid thing I said was to cite the fossil record.

Actually, what I did say was that there were multiple lines of evidence and that I thought the molecular evidence was most persuasive, but he had a canned rant about how he doesn’t believe in fossils, so he latched onto that.

Here in this rebuttal he then cuts to an ancient clip from Dick Weisenberg (I knew him; he was a colleague at Temple University) from the 1990s (ancient history — look, he’s using an overhead projector!). What this has to do with me, I don’t know, especially since I disagree with a few of the things he says. But what seems to have caught his attention was that Dick was caught in a contradiction: he first tells the audience of creationists to look at the fossil evidence, that the bones “prove” evolution, and then later he dials it down and says that the fossils are consistent with evolution. I agree with the latter, not the former. It’s one of the difficult things about doing debates when you’re not a trained debater — it’s easy to get tripped up by the colloquialisms and casual conversational use of words.

But the thing is, pointing out someone else’s error does not address anything I said. It also doesn’t rebut the fact that the fossil record is consistent with the theory of evolution, but not with creationism.

He lectures me at the end about my arrogance and how I should have more humility when dealing with Christians.

My time is very important to me, and I don’t like wasting it on people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

OK, Mr 43-or-45-chromosomes, I agree.

Two weasels wrestling in a tub of jello made with toxic waste

I actually listened to Sam Harris’s interview with Scott Adams — with only half an ear, admittedly, while I was doing other things. I will say something I find uncomfortable: I mostly agreed with Harris in the discussion. He was reluctantly (there’s a part near the beginning where he declares he’s a “centrist” and wants nothing to do with the left or right) dragged into conceding that he was strongly anti-Trump, and he was compelled to spend most of his time arguing vigorously against Adams. So that’s good at least (although they did seem to have a few moments of consonance on the topic of immigration).

You also get to listen to the Harris Evasion Tactic played over and over again against Harris — “that’s not what I was saying”, “it’s out of context”, and of course, “I’m seeing things much more deeply than you are”. Harris is clearly frustrated at points.

Unfortunately, you also have to listen to Adams, who is hopelessly obtuse and arrogant. Trump meant to do everything he’s done, he’s cleverer than you think, he’s really doing good for the country. He’s also constantly interrupting Harris, to an annoying degree. It’s also one of those events where you wonder why the hell anyone is having a conversation with this lunatic, kind of like how I feel every time yet another Trump proxy is brought on to a television news show. Aren’t we done with this crap yet?

Adams, of course, thinks he won the argument and is preemptively announcing that everyone is getting him wrong.

The Haters of Imaginary Events are out in force already. They imagine I said objectionable things during my conversation with Sam and they tweet about their hallucinations in anger. So far, no one has accurately stated my opinion before criticizing it. That’s a tell for cognitive dissonance. I’ll be making those monkeys dance today on my Twitter feed

Not recommended. They just kind of weasel around for over two hours, with Adams winning the weasely contest, but losing the reason contest. So…a tie?