I get email

Eugene Delgaudio, a fellow calling himself the “Public Advocate of the United States” and from an organization called “Traditional Values”, writes to me a lot. To be fair, I think some kook somewhere signed me up for his newsletter — I get a lot of peculiar email that I only get because random organizations have an open sign-up process that allows them to be used for harassment — but poor Eugene is such a persecuted sad-sack that I thought I’d point and laugh at him a bit. He’s always complaining.

Dear PZ,

In the past, the radical homosexuals have attempted to kill me, even threatening and stalking my family. [Evidence?] However, all that did was make me more determined than ever to fight them. [Oh, come on, Eugene. You’ve been salivating over gay men for ages]

And with Public Advocate supporters’ help, I did.

Together, pro-family Americans have really rocked the Homosexual Lobby. We’ve held off so much of their agenda for so many years. [Like equality? Way to go!]

But now they want to take supporters like you out of the fight.

I’ve received letters from three different government agencies ordering me to stop sending mail to members like you. [Well, you know, I sympathize with the agencies here, since I’m a perfect example of a recipient of email abuse. I didn’t sign up for his deluge of paranoia, but he has such a sloppy opt-in sign-up that anyone can sign anyone else up for his crap.]

One letter from a Post Office bureaucrat actually declared my correspondence with Public Advocate members to be obscene! [This is one of his milder efforts. He actually is obsessed with homosexual practices, and tends to fantasize graphically about them.]

You see, in their sick world radical homosexuals can desecrate churches [Like that would bother me], spread their filth across the internet [I could send him lots more heterosexual porn, if he’d like], and run naked through the very halls of Congress [Has anyone seen that? I haven’t.].

But when I try to tell people about it, my letters are labeled obscene by those who serve the homosexuals’ purposes. [Like the post office? Your mailman might be gay, Eugene!]

And if they can find a judge who agrees with them, the legal consequences could be severe. Even if we win, the legal fees could destroy your Public Advocate. [Tell someone who cares.]

That’s why I’m desperate for you to send a contribution of $50 or even $100 today. I need your help right away, so I ask you to send whatever you can afford today.

Wait, what? This feeble complaint is a fundraising gimmick? I have seen the light! Christians have been poisoning the body politic for centuries, they send me threats, they frolic in the halls of Congress (clothes mostly on, but maybe you should read about the degenerates in The Family), I find their prudery obscene, and look! Wackos are sending me harassing email! Send me money. Paypal accepted. Cash in small bills also accepted. OK, very large bills are also fine, if you insist on forcing them on me.

Suffer, Earthlings!

Creationists have this idea that history can be nothing but an unremitting decline — their version of the second law of thermodynamics is a weird thing that has everything ratcheting down into chaos equally, with no possibility of local decreases in entropy at the expense of an overall greater increase. They have almost convinced me. I once would have said no one could be dumber than Kent Hovind, but I have seen the works of his son Eric, and it’s a forthright demonstration of creationist thermodynamics.

Eric Hovind has disproven the K-T meteor theory of dinosaur extinction.

It’s impossible for a couple of reasons for an asteroid to kill them [dinosaurs], because the asteroid, they say, was millions of years ago. The earth isn’t millions of years old. And second, they’ve lived with man, as is very very evident.

I’m so sorry. I’m looking at that quote, and realizing that as soon as I press the “publish” button, it will sweep out in a wave of electrons all around the world, and trillions and trillions of innocent neurons will die in agony as they try to parse it. And I think, I have the power to do that, but do I have the right? Is it ethical to inflict such cognitive pain on so many people?

Eh. Atheist, scientist, slightly mad.

I press the button. Bwahahaha!

(Also on Sb)

I think all Americans have just been insulted by Andrew Brown

He calls Mormonism a “truly American faith”. I don’t think Brown actually knows anything about the Mormons other than the whitewash they’ve been given in their efforts to become more mainstream.

Mormonism is detested by some American evangelicals because it is “not Christianity” – but perhaps more because it is the first, great, truly American religion. It is founded on claims that no outsider can take seriously, but validated by one of the greatest epics of the settlement of the west, and secured by prosperity and tithing.

[Read more…]

Oh, you cruel gay kids!

David Barton and Sally Kern have a conversation.

Barton: With all of the protection we have for free speech, there’s still a number of areas where you’re not free to speak out on certain things. If you touch homosexuality, be prepared to pay a price, not just attacks, it’s gonna cost you economically, other things as well, may cost your life. This is, the way people respond to what you say about homosexuality if you criticize it and we got Sally Kern today, State Rep from Oklahoma who experienced that first time, what happens if you exercise your right of free speech and happen to say something disparaging about homosexuality.

I know there are a fair number of gay readers here, so ‘fess up: how many heterosexuals have you killed? I had no idea we had gangs of homosexuals casually beating and murdering the poor oppressed heteros.

Kern: I have to be honest with you Rick, when I was sitting there in my car that day and when she told me that those emails were coming from homosexuals, honestly, fear gripped my whole body, because I was very aware of the homosexual lobbyists and the power that they have. And people say, ‘oh you’re so brave, so heroic,’ but I’m not, I’m just a sinner saved by grace and I was gripped with fear that day. I just said, ‘Lord, what have I done?’

She did say one true thing: sitting in a car trembling in fear of the gays is not brave. Actually, it’s rather cowardly to use your fear of a class of people to push legislation that really does cause fear and anxiety.

Precious but icky

This is what religion does: it institutionalizes and rationalizes stupidity, like these signs in New York neighborhoods.

The large signs started popping up in the neighborhood more than a week ago. They had a Yiddish message that translates as: “Precious Jewish daughter, please move to the side when a man approaches.”

Neighborhood residents were annoyed the plastic signs, which were bolted into the wood, were taken away.

“The signs don’t bother anybody,” said Abraham Klein, 18. “Men and ladies don’t go together. It’s just our religion.”

Yeah? Well, your religion sucks. And the signs bother me.

Orthodoxy and misogyny seem to go together like a bad sandwich: shit and slime, two awful flavors that taste worse together and don’t stand alone so well, either.

Somebody watched “Born Free” too many times

Students in California were participating in a big project: they were helping to raise tens of thousands of salmon to be released into San Francisco Bay. The release of the smolts was imminent, and a party was planned to honor the people who had helped, when animal rights activists cut the nets and freed the salmon prematurely.

I really do not understand how these kooks think. Nothing was gained by this action, other than to disappoint some kids who’d been working to help restore salmon stocks. I don’t even know what they want: do they just want the salmon to die out? Are they even aware that they released the salmon from an environment where they were sheltered and fed, into a wild world where food is more scarce and they will be actively preyed upon?

Peter Young, in a “Voice of the Voiceless” journal for the Animal Liberation Movement, weighed in after the first episode of vandalism, calling the perpetrators “anonymous saboteurs.”

“If this was the act of animal liberators, it would be the largest recorded animal liberation ever in the U.S.,” he wrote, noting that the largest previous one was the release of 14,000 mink in an Animal Liberation Front raid on a fur farm in Iowa.

“Those who cut the nets may not have known the fish were slated to be released in the coming weeks,” he went on. “Or, they could have chosen to risk themselves anyway to give the fish a few extra weeks of freedom, sparing them the psychological suffering of being kept in intense confinement with approximately 40,000 others in a small net.”

Oh. They were suffering psychologically. How does Young know? Which is happier, a salmon confined to a net with a steady food supply, or a salmon fleeing from an orca or a seal?

Referencing the mink farm release is also telling. Imagine 14,000 voracious predators released into the local environment: every other animal in the environment is going to experience intense “psychological suffering”, and ultimately most of the released mink are going to starve to death.

These people don’t think.

(Also on Sb)

Somebody watched “Born Free” too many times

Students in California were participating in a big project: they were helping to raise tens of thousands of salmon to be released into San Francisco Bay. The release of the smolts was imminent, and a party was planned to honor the people who had helped, when animal rights activists cut the nets and freed the salmon prematurely.

I really do not understand how these kooks think. Nothing was gained by this action, other than to disappoint some kids who’d been working to help restore salmon stocks. I don’t even know what they want: do they just want the salmon to die out? Are they even aware that they released the salmon from an environment where they were sheltered and fed, into a wild world where food is more scarce and they will be actively preyed upon?

Peter Young, in a “Voice of the Voiceless” journal for the Animal Liberation Movement, weighed in after the first episode of vandalism, calling the perpetrators “anonymous saboteurs.”

“If this was the act of animal liberators, it would be the largest recorded animal liberation ever in the U.S.,” he wrote, noting that the largest previous one was the release of 14,000 mink in an Animal Liberation Front raid on a fur farm in Iowa.

“Those who cut the nets may not have known the fish were slated to be released in the coming weeks,” he went on. “Or, they could have chosen to risk themselves anyway to give the fish a few extra weeks of freedom, sparing them the psychological suffering of being kept in intense confinement with approximately 40,000 others in a small net.”

Oh. They were suffering psychologically. How does Young know? Which is happier, a salmon confined to a net with a steady food supply, or a salmon fleeing from an orca or a seal?

Referencing the mink farm release is also telling. Imagine 14,000 voracious predators released into the local environment: every other animal in the environment is going to experience intense “psychological suffering”, and ultimately most of the released mink are going to starve to death.

These people don’t think.

(Also on FtB)

Atheist cooties cause cancer

It must be true. You better not touch us — the cooties will jump off and give you horrible diseases. Also, everything we handle, including our money, is contaminated. You can trust the American Cancer Society on this one.

You see, Todd Stiefel and the Foundation Beyond Belief offered $250,000 in matching funds to the ACS — a great big pot of godless moolah — and the American Cancer Society dodged and waffled and squirmed and ran away from the money. A charitable foundation turned their nose up at half a million dollars. It’s inexplicable.

Except for the cooties. That’s the only conceivable answer that makes sense.

Deepak Chopra reviews Richard Dawkins

Shorter Deepak: “Richard Dawkins didn’t endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!”

Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It’s largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn’t share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:

What is obnoxious about Dawkins’ version is his tone of absolute authority about matters that he shows complete ignorance of. Respected physicists like John Archibald Wheeler, Sir Arthur Eddington, Freeman Dyson, Hans-Peter Dürr, Henry Stapp, Sir Roger Penrose, Eugene Wigner, Erwin Schrodinger, and Werner Heisenberg suggest a fundamental role for consciousness in quantum theory and a mental component at the level of biological organisms and the universe itself.

I notice that 56% of the people he names are dead, that none of them are biologists or psychologists, and that several of them, while authoritative in their fields, aren’t actually known for their views on consciousness. This is a common pseudo-scientific con, roping a few famous corpses into agreeing with wacky interpretations.

But even the ones who’ve pontificated on consciousness and physics, like Dyson and Penrose, don’t help. Those guys don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Quantum effects matter in that they’re fundamental to how all matter behaves, but cells are big — any counter-intuitive weird quantum effects are going to be negligible in the large-scale bulk activity of a synapse. This is a world where the laws of thermodynamics and electromagnetism rule: the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation doesn’t need any quantum handwaving to accurately describe the potential across a cell membrane.

Bringing these guys into the argument is as silly as if I were to charge into a discussion of how the tides go in, the tides go out by insisting that we have to take into account the effect of the presence of schools of squid. Sure, they’re real and they’re there, but they don’t affect the tides. This simply is not where neuroscience is going: if you want to understand how the nervous system works, learn math and the physics of electrochemistry, and in particular learn about biochemistry, pharmacology, and molecular biology…but studying quantum physics won’t help you at all.

I won’t even get into his absurd ideas that the universe itself is conscious. Dawkins’ book is about reality, not fantasy.

So Deepak then gets off his quantum bandwagon and tries to discuss biology. He fails.

Dawkins bypasses evidence from his own field of genetics that might upset his hobby-horse. He ignores, either willfully or through ignorance, the evidence for directed mutagenesis first put forward by John Cairns of Harvard in 1988. John Cairns showed that if you grow bacteria with the inability to metabolize lactose, they evolve that ability in petri dishes tens of thousands of times faster than would be predicted if mutations simply occurred randomly. Professor Rudolph Tanzi of Harvard Medical School further points out that mutations in the human genome do not occur randomly but cluster in “hot spots” that are hundreds of times more likely to undergo mutation.

Dawkins is not a geneticist: he’s an ethologist and evolutionary biologist. Of course, he knows far more about genetics than does Deepak, so his confusion is understandable. Deepak would have to stand awed before the depth of knowledge known by my undergraduate students in comparison to his.

The Cairns results were interesting, but I don’t know of anyone who still claims that they are the result of directed mutagenesis, other than woo-peddlers. The fact that bacteria produced viable mutations more rapidly than predicted is explained by the observation of hypermutability in bacteria under stress. Basically, if you measure the error rate of replication in normal, healthy bacteria under growth promoting conditions, and then use that same rate to predict the frequency of mutations in a population under stressed conditions, you’ll underestimate the frequency.

The observation of hotspots for mutation in the genome is also well-known. It’s not magic, it’s not because these regions are well-liked by the mutation fairy, it’s because of chemistry. Some areas of a chromosome are more prone to breakage or error because of their structure or sequence.

This does not defy the observation that mutations are random. It merely means that the probability of mutation is not uniform across the entire length of the genome. Deepak’s argument is like claiming that because, when shooting craps, you’re more likely to roll a 7 than snake-eyes, throwing two dice generates a non-random result. Deepak doesn’t understand physics or biology, and he also doesn’t understand elementary probability theory.

Dawkins does. I heard him talk about this book on Sunday, and Deepak’s baseless complaints to the contrary, he did take a moment to explain what he meant by “random”, and it wasn’t the cartoonish nonsense Deepak Chopra babbles about.

I could go on and on about the stupidity of Deepak’s review — every paragraph is like the evacuations of an elephant with diarrhea — massively feculent and slimy, of a quality that will not even appeal to the neighborhood dung beetles. But I do have to mention one more sentence that left me laughing.

One doesn’t ask for advanced genetics in a primer for young adults, but one does ask that the writer know his field before adopting a tone of authority.

That’s rich coming from a quantum quack who is demonstrably deluded about medicine, biology, evolution, physics, chemistry, and the entirety of science, yet manages to pretend to be an authority every day.

(Also on Sb)

Deepak Chopra reviews Richard Dawkins

Shorter Deepak: “Richard Dawkins didn’t endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!”

Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It’s largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn’t share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:

What is obnoxious about Dawkins’ version is his tone of absolute authority about matters that he shows complete ignorance of. Respected physicists like John Archibald Wheeler, Sir Arthur Eddington, Freeman Dyson, Hans-Peter Dürr, Henry Stapp, Sir Roger Penrose, Eugene Wigner, Erwin Schrodinger, and Werner Heisenberg suggest a fundamental role for consciousness in quantum theory and a mental component at the level of biological organisms and the universe itself.

I notice that 56% of the people he names are dead, that none of them are biologists or psychologists, and that several of them, while authoritative in their fields, aren’t actually known for their views on consciousness. This is a common pseudo-scientific con, roping a few famous corpses into agreeing with wacky interpretations.

But even the ones who’ve pontificated on consciousness and physics, like Dyson and Penrose, don’t help. Those guys don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Quantum effects matter in that they’re fundamental to how all matter behaves, but cells are big — any counter-intuitive weird quantum effects are going to be negligible in the large-scale bulk activity of a synapse. This is a world where the laws of thermodynamics and electromagnetism rule: the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation doesn’t need any quantum handwaving to accurately describe the potential across a cell membrane.

Bringing these guys into the argument is as silly as if I were to charge into a discussion of how the tides go in, the tides go out by insisting that we have to take into account the effect of the presence of schools of squid. Sure, they’re real and they’re there, but they don’t affect the tides. This simply is not where neuroscience is going: if you want to understand how the nervous system works, learn math and the physics of electrochemistry, and in particular learn about biochemistry, pharmacology, and molecular biology…but studying quantum physics won’t help you at all.

I won’t even get into his absurd ideas that the universe itself is conscious. Dawkins’ book is about reality, not fantasy.

So Deepak then gets off his quantum bandwagon and tries to discuss biology. He fails.

Dawkins bypasses evidence from his own field of genetics that might upset his hobby-horse. He ignores, either willfully or through ignorance, the evidence for directed mutagenesis first put forward by John Cairns of Harvard in 1988. John Cairns showed that if you grow bacteria with the inability to metabolize lactose, they evolve that ability in petri dishes tens of thousands of times faster than would be predicted if mutations simply occurred randomly. Professor Rudolph Tanzi of Harvard Medical School further points out that mutations in the human genome do not occur randomly but cluster in “hot spots” that are hundreds of times more likely to undergo mutation.

Dawkins is not a geneticist: he’s an ethologist and evolutionary biologist. Of course, he knows far more about genetics than does Deepak, so his confusion is understandable. Deepak would have to stand awed before the depth of knowledge known by my undergraduate students in comparison to his.

The Cairns results were interesting, but I don’t know of anyone who still claims that they are the result of directed mutagenesis, other than woo-peddlers. The fact that bacteria produced viable mutations more rapidly than predicted is explained by the observation of hypermutability in bacteria under stress. Basically, if you measure the error rate of replication in normal, healthy bacteria under growth promoting conditions, and then use that same rate to predict the frequency of mutations in a population under stressed conditions, you’ll underestimate the frequency.

The observation of hotspots for mutation in the genome is also well-known. It’s not magic, it’s not because these regions are well-liked by the mutation fairy, it’s because of chemistry. Some areas of a chromosome are more prone to breakage or error because of their structure or sequence.

This does not defy the observation that mutations are random. It merely means that the probability of mutation is not uniform across the entire length of the genome. Deepak’s argument is like claiming that because, when shooting craps, you’re more likely to roll a 7 than snake-eyes, throwing two dice generates a non-random result. Deepak doesn’t understand physics or biology, and he also doesn’t understand elementary probability theory.

Dawkins does. I heard him talk about this book on Sunday, and Deepak’s baseless complaints to the contrary, he did take a moment to explain what he meant by “random”, and it wasn’t the cartoonish nonsense Deepak Chopra babbles about.

I could go on and on about the stupidity of Deepak’s review — every paragraph is like the evacuations of an elephant with diarrhea — massively feculent and slimy, of a quality that will not even appeal to the neighborhood dung beetles. But I do have to mention one more sentence that left me laughing.

One doesn’t ask for advanced genetics in a primer for young adults, but one does ask that the writer know his field before adopting a tone of authority.

That’s rich coming from a quantum quack who is demonstrably deluded about medicine, biology, evolution, physics, chemistry, and the entirety of science, yet manages to pretend to be an authority every day.

(Also on FtB)