Mike Pence, creationist

In 2001, a French anthropologist discovered some very interesting specimens in West Central Africa: the skulls of some 6-7 million year old apes that showed some chimpanzee-like features and some human-like features. He called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

In 2002, Mike Pence used the bully pulpit of the house of representatives to denounce Sahelanthropus and the entire theory of evolution, in a pointless exercise of flouting his ignorance. Why, I don’t know; perhaps he thought he could use a scientific discovery to somehow legislate against science? The performance has been caught on video.

It’s an extended riff on the “just a theory” argument, revealing that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory means. He cites the 1925 Scope trial as the moment where this mere “theory” was legislated into the classroom and taught as fact; wrong. The Scopes trial was the result of a law that tried to prohibit teaching evolution, the side of science lost the case, and the theory has been taught in classrooms ever since because it is the best-supported explanation of the history of life. And evolution is a fact — life has not been static, but species change over time.

Then he claims that we all remember our classrooms illustrated with that linear portrayal of humans evolving from little monkeys to Mel Gibson. Well, I’ve been teaching for 30 years that that linear sequence is wrong, and that evolution is all about branching descent, which is also, as it happens, how Darwin thought about it (that popular Time-Life illustration is a true curse on evolution education).

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But I also challenge Pence on his claim that this portrayal was ubiquitous in classrooms. I had a public school education, in the liberal stronghold of King County, Washington, and never once heard the word “evolution” pass the lips of my teachers. What I learned about evolution before college I got from sneaking into the “Adult” section of the local public library, because this was a subject they didn’t even allow children to read about.

Pence reads about Sahelanthropus and claims to be surprised, that this represents a new theory that human evolution was taking place all across Africa and on the Earth. Uh, what? He also criticizes it because the textbooks will have to be changed, because the old theory of evolution…is suddenly replaced by a new theory.

I really want to play poker with Mike Pence. The astonishment on his face when the second hand dealt to him is different from the first will be something to behold. He will be aghast that the rules of poker get changed with every deal.

And then he gets to his point. Every theory is equivalent. We ought to also teach the theory that the signers of the declaration of independence believed — that humans were created by a creator. The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image, male and female he created them, and I believe that. He also thinks that scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe. Alas, scientists have scrutinized intelligent design explanations for a century or two now, and have generally found them to be useless crap.

It’s clear. Mike Pence is not only a babbling loon, but he’s a generic Biblical creationist who sees Intelligent Design creationism as a loophole to smuggle his religious ideas into the classroom. He’s wrong about virtually everything in that pompous little speech.

He’s lucky in one thing, though: he’s got Donald Trump boldly distracting most of the media from making any noise about Mike Pence’s incompetence and ignorance. Even without Trump, I don’t want this goober anywhere near high office.

A day in the life of a buffoon

This is just 24 hours of political campaigning by Trump. I’m impressed.

  • In a Washington Post interview, Trump declined to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan against his primary challenger
  • He reiterated that he hasn’t endorsed Sen. John McCain and said the onetime prisoner of war "has not done a good job for the vets"
  • He slapped out at Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, saying "she has given me zero support"
  • He suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market
  • He said he’s "always wanted" to receive a Purple Heart but that having one gifted to him by a supporter was "much easier"
  • He said that the handling of sexual harassment has "got to be up to the individual"
  • He accused Khizr Khan of being "bothered" by his plan to keep terrorists out of the country, and said that he had no regrets about his clash with the family
  • He appeared to feud with a crying baby during a rally
  • He reiterated that "if the election is rigged, I would not be surprised"
  • The sitting president of the United States publicly called Trump "unfit to serve" and urged Republicans to withdraw their support for him.
  • Trump spokesman Katrina Pierson suggested that Obama and Clinton are to blame for the death of Humayan Khan, who died in 2004, when neither were in the executive branch at the time
  • An ally of Paul Manafort told our colleague John Harwood at CNBC that the campaign chairman is "mailing it in," leaving the rest of the staff "suicidal."
  • Sitting GOP congressman Richard Hanna, HP head Meg Whitman and former Christie aide Maria Comella all said they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton
  • The Washington Post released a transcript of its full interview with Trump, indicating among other things that he paused five times to watch TV coverage in the middle of the sit-down
  • A GOP source told NBC’s Katy Tur that Reince Priebus is "apoplectic" over Trump’s refusal to endorse Ryan and is making calls to the campaign to express his "extreme displeasure"

This is a whole new level of incompetence. And he’s got three months more to top it!

You could try taking Slate’s challenge, but my challenge is just as impossible

Slate is challenging people to diagram this sentence from Donald Trump:

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

I’m not really interested in dissecting the parts of speech and their relationships to one another as I am in answering a different question about the content: WTF is he talking about? This is going beyond word salad to a garbage salad that has been consumed and excreted and is now swirling around at the sewage treatment plant.

It’s bad to be confined to one choice — but at least there’s no ambiguity about who is the better candidate

I think John Oliver was put off a bit by the blatant American exceptionalism and weird fervor for the military on display at the Democratic national convention — so was I. But as he points out, we don’t have much choice, because Trump is so abysmally horrible.

And Trump is simply incompetent at even the simplest parts of the job that require minimal human decency, or even just the ability to pretend to be a caring person.

Honestly, the main take-away from these two weeks is that, incredibly, we may be on the brink of electing such a damaged, sociopathic narcissist, that the simple presidential duty of comforting the families of fallen soldiers may actually be beyond his capabilities. And I genuinely did not think that was the part of the job that someone could be bad at.

So there’s a lot to dislike about the Democratic party, and the Republicans are in the process of disintegration — we really need a better party and a better choice. No, not Gary Johnson and the Libertarians — they’re openly incompetent and driven by a failed ideology. Not the Greens, either, as long as they’re led by Jill Stein.

I’ve been getting a lot of pushback from people trying to argue that Stein isn’t anti-vax, because she doesn’t come right out and say it, and “ANTI-VAX” isn’t tattooed on her forehead. But I’ve had to deal with a lot of anti-thises and thats — the climate change deniers, the evolution deniers, the vaccine deniers — and this is pretty much their standard operating procedure. Think Bjorn Lomborg, for instance: because he admits to the reality of climate change, I’ve heard people claim he’s actually pro-environment. It’s not true. He’s just taking a more cautious approach to making his denialism sound reasonable, even while he’s fundamentally wrong.

Mike the Mad Biologist makes a similar case for Jill Stein being a vaccine denier who is straining to make her position seem plausible.

One hideous thing she has been doing is making the standard anti-vaccination arguments. If you follow this stuff, it’s obvious what she’s doing, but there are a lot of newbies who just aren’t aware of how the anti-vaccine game is played.

Anti-vaccinations never come out and say ‘we oppose vaccination.’ It is always couched in terms of altering vaccination schedules, urging ‘caution’, and calling for safer products.

This is really no different than when anti-abortionists come up with bullshit medical safety arguments (or bullshit pre-natal neurology and developmental biology), rather than admitting they want to end all abortions. Nor is it any different from Republicans who are supposedly protecting us from voter fraud, while really attempting to disenfranchise Democrats for partisan gain.

What’s awful is that she is mainstreaming garbage that undermines one of the most successful public health interventions of the 20th century.

Exactly right. And why I’d never vote for Stein.

Canada sets another example for us all

A judge handed down a decision in a rape trial. And Marvin Zuker judged the entire damned system.

“The myths of rape should be dispelled once and for all,” Justice Marvin Zuker wrote in his 179-page decision on Thursday. “It doesn’t matter if the victim was drinking, out at night alone, sexually exploited, on a date with the perpetrator, or how the victim was dressed. No one asks to be raped.”

He was just getting started.

The myths of rape needed to be dispelled, once and for all, he said in the decision. “We cannot perpetuate the belief that niceness cannot coexist with violence, evil or deviance and consequently the nice guy must not be guilty of the alleged offence.”

He also took on what he called unrealistic expectations around how a survivor should act. “For much of our history the ‘good’ rape victim, the ‘credible’ rape victim has been a dead one,” he wrote. “There are many misguided conceptions of what constitutes a ‘real’ rape or how a ‘real’ victim of sexual violence should behave (ie scream, struggle to the utmost and report immediately). No matter how sophisticated the law is, any allegation that derogates from the stereotype is likely to be approached with a degree of suspicion.”

He added: “No other crime is looked upon with the degree of blameworthiness, suspicion, and doubt as a rape victim. Victim blaming is unfortunately common and is one of the most significant barriers to justice and offender accountability,” he said.

I’ve seen all of this. Just the other day I saw a comment thread elsewhere where people were railing against an accusation of harassment, using the usual buzzwords: “Victim culture!” “Witch hunt!” “He is such a nice guy!” And of course, those damned SJWs were entirely at fault for daring to criticize a Brave Hero. It’s infuriating that pointing a finger at a man is treated as more of an assault than fondling, groping, or raping a woman.

Despite the good, strong words of the judge, though, we’re still left with a broken system that leaves the victims further wracked.

The verdict did little to blunt the trauma of the past year and a half, she said. “But, I mean, these statements don’t un-rape me, first of all, and nor does it erase the process that I’ve had to go through.”

She pointed to her experience of reporting the incident to police, which left her feeling as though she was to blame for what happened. “This process has been so brutal to me that I just cannot at this moment feel any sort of happiness. I will give you that the judgment is beautiful, and I will appreciate it one day, but not quite yet. I’m still not over the trauma of the system.”

I thought he was supposed to be the stable, normal one?

Mike Pence. Establishment politician. There to add a little gravitas — as much as a wingnut Republican can — to the chaos of the Trump ticket. So what’s the calm one saying?

GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence on Thursday predicted that Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, would be overturned if Donald Trump is elected president.

I’m pro-life and I don’t apologize for it, he said during a town hall meeting here. We’ll see Roe vs. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.

OK, the Republicans were already the lunatic party, do they need to keep re-emphasizing it?

Meanwhile, Jill Stein is making vague anti-vaccination noises.

I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication, Stein said. Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.

You know, vaccines aren’t the big money cash crop for the pharmaceutical companies that the anti-vaxxers think — and Stein ought to know that — and accusing the FDA and CDC of being in the pocket of Big Pharma is a rather strong accusation. But then, she sees an opportunity to get out of the tenth of a percent bracket in the coming election, so she is pandering madly to the ignorant lefty vote right now.

Should I mention Gary Johnson, as long as I’m looking at the competition? Nah, not worth it. Libertarian, <hiss> <makes sign of the cross>

On the positive side, Amanda Marcotte makes a good case that Hillary Clinton has a winning strategy.

Donald Trump gave Clinton a huge gift with his ridiculous “I alone” line from his convention speech last week. It allowed her to portray herself as the opposite: A team player, a listener, a coalition-builder, and humble public servant. She literally said of being a public servant that “the service part has always come easier to me than the public part”.

“None of us can do it alone. That’s why we are stronger together,” Clinton added. It was a masterful stroke. By framing the presidency in terms of service and community, Clinton both contrasted her vision with Trump’s narcissistic one and fought back against stereotypes that hold that ambitious women are heartless shrews who don’t care about anyone else.

It’s also a good look next to Pence’s anti-woman stance.

OK, enough politics. My wife is taking me out to see Ghostbusters shortly, obviously because she wants to indoctrinate me in this silly idea that women can do the same things men can do. Like catching ghosts.