Creepy ol’ Ben Stein

Remember Ben Stein? Lazy character actor best known for his mind-numbing drone, reactionary conservative who writes dull screeds on bogus economics, the creationist voice of Expelled? He’s in the news again, when we’d all rather he just goes away.

He wrote a bizarre rambling bit of nonsense for the American Spectator about how he travels the country, helping breathakingly beautiful women, taking them out to dinner, giving them writing advice, and boy, does airline food suck or what, and Obama is a failure. And he spent a fair amount of the essay just writing about this stunningly beautiful, absolute knockout young Eurasian woman who just happened to be in the airport.

As I walked through SFO in search of my driver, I came across a stunningly beautiful, absolute knockout young Eurasian woman. She was lying on a bench right next to where my driver was supposed to be, so I sat down next to her and chatted her up.

This story has evolved somewhat. Now she’s ambushing him and harassing him for money..

About five months ago, as I was walking through SFO to get into my car, I met a young woman who was extremely excited to meet me. She was literally jumping up and down with excitement. She told me she was a “performance artist” but hinted at some scary parts of her life. She said she would like to be a writer and asked if I could help. We exchanged texting addresses and off I went in my car. I spent fewer than five minutes talking to her in a busy airport terminal.

See? Ben Stein thinks Ben Stein is the kindest, sweetest person around. He deserves a medal for helping a young, beautiful woman out, giving her money and advice.

“I should get a medal for helping this woman. This is a person who appealed to me for money. She said she would send me some examples of her performance art. Some of those examples were racy, and some were not. I just don’t get what I have done wrong. She is mad at me because she wanted more money. … I didn’t expect anything from her.”

This “I am not a crook” moment was prompted by the fact that the young woman, Tanya Ma, released screen shots of their phone messages. And it’s true, he didn’t touch her, he didn’t do anything criminal — he just exposed the fact that the private Ben Stein is a deeply creepy person.

Sext messages below the fold. Wash your hands afterwards.

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The squirreliest thing I’ve seen all day

The NRA is just plain nuts.

This guy starts out by telling us how the government sets education policy, access to public parks, labor policies to protect minorities, and then springs his case on us: we should treat guns the same way. We need guns. We ought to treat them like food, shelter, education, and voting — wonderful things that the government ought to subsidize. So later he even suggests that the government ought to provide free shooting ranges, and a yearly allotment of free ammunition.

Further, progress through the school system ought to require gun training. Why? Because we need guns.

No, we don’t. We need jobs, we need shelter, we need education, we need food, we need clean water, but hell no, we don’t need guns. He says that our gun policy is designed around the assumption that we need to protect people from guns, that guns are bad or dangerous…exactly right. I want to be protected from guns. I’d rather not have to worry about some freak with an automatic rifle when I walk to the grocery store; guns are bad, since they’re tools for killing people; and oh man, guns are dangerous.

But this fool says, What if instead of gun-free zones, we had gun-required zones. No thank you.

He also says,

Sound crazy? Think about it.

OK. I thought about it. It’s utterly insane. The NRA is a festering cesspool of batshit lunacy.

Well, I am on a diet and trying to lose weight

So it’s very kind of John C. Wright to assemble a post that completely kills my appetite — in fact, it makes me feel like an inhabitant of the planet Miranda, only I can’t make up my mind whether to just lie down and die or go full Reaver. It’s titled The Secret to the Most Mind-Blowing Sex Ever. Very click-baity. I can only the imagine the disappointment of people searching for “mindblowing sex” and landing on Wright’s article, and feeling their generative organs shrivel.

It’s premise is that there’s more to sex than just the physical — and I’d agree with that. It’s emotional, it’s social, it strengthens the pair bond, it’s fun. But Wright isn’t thinking along those lines, and he also has a peculiar idea of what’s appropriate about the physical side of it.

If the union were physical only, nothing but the physical sensation of the orgasm would matter, and rubbing your penis in an anus, mouth, armpit, elbow, or an elephant’s ear, not to mention the crevasses of mothers and sisters and underage children, convenient animals, and fresh corpses or whatever floats your boat would be called sex just the same as sex is sex. The word sex would refer only to the hunger for the sensation, and not to the sex act.

I’m fine with people who get off on armpits. As long as the two people doing it (and I’m pretty sure that one requires at least two people; if you can do it solo, you must be built like a barnacle) are willing participants who both are enjoying it, why not? And of course I’d be among many agreeing that there’s a difference between sexual interactions and sexual gratification, and that regarding your mother as a collection of crevasses is more than a little icky. It is rather important in long-term sexual relationships that you consider your partner as a human being.

But no, that’s not what Wright is getting at. He has his own definition of the function and purpose of sex.

In order to understand the perfect sexual experience, we first must say what sex is: it is copulation, the process by which two halves of a sexual whole find complement and completion, and reproduce. The sex act is the act of sexual union in sexual reproduction. The sexes, however, are spiritual rather than physical: men are masculine in psychology and mind and soul, masculine in speech and deportment and nuance in all they do just as women are feminine. The sexual union is spiritual, ordered toward the end of reproduction.

That’s it. The whole purpose of sex is making babies. For someone who just lectured on interminably in flowery language about how sex is not physical only, he sure seems focused on the physical process of getting the lady preggers.

Since sex is ordered toward reproduction, anything that hinders it is an imperfection. Prudence, if nothing else, would warn potential mother and potential fathers not to do the act which makes you a mother or a father until you have a household and loving union ready to rear children.

If you are artificially sterile, or using contraception, you are holding back, you are not passionate about the sex, you are trying to use the sex rather than surrender to the sex.

Gosh, is he an evolutionist? Because we’d be the types to say that the only ‘goal’ of evolution, the only measure of success, is sustained maintenance of the species. Of course, we’d also note that it’s a much more complicated process in humans than blindly inseminating random females (that’s more appropriate to sea urchins), and that sex also plays a role in strengthening bonds between people to help with survival, and we’d also note that lots of phenomena in biology have interesting side-effects that can be important in life histories, too. Sex is not exclusively ordered towards reproduction, so his premise is false.

We get to his real deal, at least: he’s against contraception. He doesn’t see any point to any kind of sexual interaction that doesn’t have the possibility of conception. Well, gosh, I’ll have to break the news to my wife that there were only three brief periods in my life when our sex life mattered, and that was when we were trying to have kids. All the rest was frivolity and illusion, and now that we’re all done with the kid stuff, we can stop. Because sex would be pointless.

It just gets worse from here. If you’re just trying to lose a bit of appetite, you can stop just a couple of paragraphs in — proceeding further takes you deeper into bulimia territory, as you discover that sex is also supposed to reinforce very traditional roles for men and women: master and servant.

Since sex is ordered toward reproduction, you have to love the woman first, and want her to be the mother of your children, and want it more than you want life itself. Since sex is spiritual, you have to protect your children and your wife and make them safe. Your wife cannot be made safe if you are allowed to abandon her. Hence, since sex is ordered toward reproduction, you must swear, swear by Holy God and your hope of heaven, never to leave her, but to love and cherish her, in sickness and health, for better or worse, until nothing less than horrid death itself you do part.

For her part, she must vow to love and honor and obey.

And if you do not understand about that obey part, you do not understand women. She wants a leader, an alpha male, a chief, a Christ, and you must be willing to die for her as Christ was willing to die for you, or she will not feel secure in your love. If she does not swear to obey, you are not a couple, not a dyad, not a unit, but are still two sovereigns dealing with each other at arm’s length, not intimate, and she cannot trust you fully, cannot love you fully, not with a divine and self-sacrificing love. And she knows you don’t love her fully, not with a love that is more than madness, more than sense, more than the universe.

So much nonsense. Here’s the real secret to mindblowing sex: each treats the other as a sovereign, intimately. My interactions with my wife are not subservient to praising tropes in a dusty old holy book, nor are they dedicated to creating some third party (yeesh, especially not at our age).

Of course, this is John C. Wright babbling: Catholic, conservative, fan of Vox Day, science fiction writer. And if the puffed-up goofy prose in that column is any example, not a very good writer. Judging by the content, also a dogmatic idiot.

I think it would do him a world of good to go fuck an elbow, actually.

Big News: God was not a Klingon

Poor Ken Ham: the media has been distorting his words. They claim that he said all the space aliens are damned to hell. He did not! He plainly said:

And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel.

See? They aren’t going to hell, because they don’t exist. He continues with a beautiful example of fundagelical creologic:

You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation. One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire, and there will be a new heavens and earth. God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the “Godman,” to be our relative, and to be the perfect sacrifice for sin—the Savior of mankind.

Jesus did not become the “GodKlingon” or the “GodMartian”!  Only descendants of Adam can be saved.  God’s Son remains the “Godman” as our Savior.  In fact, the Bible makes it clear that we see the Father through the Son (and we see the Son through His Word).  To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.

An understanding of the gospel makes it clear that salvation through Christ is only for the Adamic race—human beings who are all descendants of Adam.

Now that’s impressive arrogance and delusions of grandeur. So there are 1011 galaxies and almost 1023 stars in the universe, and they’re all entirely empty of intelligent life, and they’re all going to be burned away and discarded when a Magic Jew comes reappears on Planet Earth. We know this because of an ancient book written by people who thought the earth was flat and the sky was held up on pillars.

Ooooookay.

Caricature, corrected

MRA’s have been sending me this video they’re very excited about — it’s done by a pretty young woman who comically repeats every stupid stereotype of feminists by anti-feminists everywhere. Did you know feminists don’t want you to be young and slender and pretty, and you shouldn’t wear makeup or pretty clothes, and most of them hate men, and it’s all about competing to see who is most oppressed? We don’t need feminism any more, because men and women are already equal in all things, and besides, she has never experienced any discrimination, so nobody else can have. It is funny. Funnily bad.

I thought about writing a rebuttal, but shortly I have to go to work, and it would take hours to dismantle it nonsensical misconception by outright flaming stupidity, sentence by sentence. There’s so much of it.

Fortunately, I don’t have to. One of the sensible people who sends me things (They exist! Really, my in-box isn’t just a shitstorm of derp. Usually.) sent me this most excellent common sense general defense of feminism by the Bloggess, so I’ll just tell you all to go read that instead.

Feminism is inherently good.  It’s not even close to perfect and still needs lots of work and sometimes it gets all fucked up and backward and awful but that doesn’t mean it’s not still worth fighting for.  Now go back and replace “Feminism” with “The human race”.  It works, right?.  That’s because feminists are made of human.  Men and women.  In fact, one of my favorite feminists is Sir Patrick Stewart.

Patrick Stewart, feminist. His mother made 3 pounds 10 shillings for working a forty hour week in a weaving shed. She was also an abuse victim and he’s an anti-domestic violence advocate.

Patrick Stewart, feminist. His mother made 3 pounds 10 shillings for working a forty hour week in a weaving shed. She was also an abuse victim and he’s an anti-domestic violence advocate.

I’m not saying you can’t choose to not be a feminist but know what you’re choosing.  Don’t make a decision about a group based on the most radical beliefs of a group.  Don’t get defensive if you get deeper and are exposed to difficult ideas about intersectionality and race and gender and colonialism and patriarchy and male liberation.  Just listen.  Some of it will make sense.  Some of it won’t.  Some of it will later when you’re a different person.  Some of it you’ll change your mind about throughout your life and the world will change too.  Some of it is bullshit.  Some of it is truth.  All of it is worth listening to.

And now you get to decide.  Are you a feminist?  Yes?  No?  Well, don’t worry because tomorrow you get to choose again.  And that keeps happening every day for the rest of your life.

As for me, I am a feminist (among so, so many other things).  I believe in equality and I think we still have work to do.  I’m thankful to the men and women who worked to give me the freedom and rights I have today and I am proud to be a part of a movement that I hope will make the world better and safer for my daughter (and for the men and women she’ll share that world with).  I’m happy we’ve come so far and I’m glad that we’re becoming more aware of feminist issues that don’t just focus on straight, white women, even though confronting those issues is sometimes painful. And I’m happy that the womenagainstfeminism tumblr exists.  Because even though I disagree with most of them I’m glad that those women have a platform on which to speak, and also because if we know what the arguments or misperceptions are against feminism then we can better address them.  Or agree with them.  Or ignore them.  Or discuss them with our sons and daughters so they can make informed decisions for themselves.  It’s up to you.

That pretty young woman’s video? The most important part of the description is that she’s young. I hope she grows up to be just like the Bloggess.

The dose makes the poison

Princeton physicist William Happer is still getting invited on television to say stupid things.

I keep hearing about the "pollutant CO2," or about "poisoning the atmosphere" with CO2, or about minimizing our "carbon footprint." This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving "pollutant" and "poison" of their original meaning….CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth.

Did you know oxygen, while not a poison at standard concentrations, is highly reactive and will kill you at high concentration? Or that CO2 is vital for plants and is measured to regulate your breathing, but too much and you’ll suffocate?

What makes a substance poisonous is how much of it there is. Paracelsus figured this out in the 16th century. So Princeton physicists are unaware of developments and explanations that predate even Newton? That’s kind of amazing.

Maybe CNBC and other networks ought to take a lesson from the BBC on ginned up controversies and false dichotomies, and cut this bozo Happer from their invitation list.

It’s not just creationists who mangle science, some atheists do, too

I was sent this terrible statement reputed to be from the guy who calls himself “The Amazing Atheist”. There is, however, no evidence that he actually said these specific words, so the attribution was inappropriate. However, somebody still wrote this idiotic statement:

Nature already has an age of consent. That age is approximately 12-13, otherwise known as the onset of puberty. We don’t need Christian morals to set an arbitrary age on when a sexually mature human female can mate legally. We already have clear parameters on sexually maturity as established by the law of evolution, and acting within those parameters does not under any reasonable definition constitute “rape”. Moreover, because this irrational moral imperialism is almostly solely applied against males who pursue relationships with younger females, I do believe the change of age-of-consent laws should be a critical area of focus for Men’s Rights Activists.

So much wrong.

Nature does not set an age of consent. Nature doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t stop you from raping babies, and it doesn’t tell you it’s OK to rape 21 year olds, either. The age of consent is a social construct, made by people, intended to protect our children from exploitation during those difficult years when they are transitioning from childhood to adulthood.

The law of evolution (tell me, which one?) does not set clear parameters for sexual maturity. Humans have complex, prolonged development — we’re an altricial species, helpless at birth and requiring a long period of nurturing before fully independent. Ovulation is not a magic signpost that says you’re ready to be impregnated. It says your ovaries have developed, but humans live by complex social interactions and sex can be a difficult phenomenon, with obligations and responsibilities and privileges. We expect people to be able to be able to interact with each other in non-damaging social ways before they leap to bumping genitals.

The only way evolution comes into play here is in a pragmatic, rather than a moral sense. For instance, if the author were to promote the idea that since babies are plump, tender, and helpless, Nature’s Law says that we’re free, even encouraged, to eat them, it would be easy to see that any population that thought that would be quickly on their way to self-enabled extinction. Similarly, evolution doesn’t say that you can’t rape young children…it will simply and objectively pass a kind of operational judgment on your population, as the next generation grows up with fucked up, likely unstable and untenable, social structures.

The legal age of consent is arbitrary. Some people might be able to enjoy sex in a mature fashion at an earlier age, others might be best off avoiding it for a few extra years. But we don’t have a way to measure sexual maturity, so as social and legal animals, we abide by one arbitrary dividing line. But picking the moment of first menstruation is also arbitrary — it says nothing about human behavior, or the ability to be responsible for one’s actions, or readiness to cope with the burdens of a possible pregnancy.

Somehow, even worse, the author seems to think that the ability to get pregnant nullifies the concept of rape. That doesn’t follow. If a person has poor judgment because they are too immature to consider all of the consequences, that does not mean you’re allowed to freely have sex with them, as long as they say “yes” to a bowl of candy. We do not use the legal age of consent to dismiss the idea of rape — we don’t say, “she’s over 21, we can rape her now” (well, some people do, but they’re wrong.)

I’ll also condemn with equal severity older women who take advantage of boys. I know, the attitudes in our culture do trivialize sexual assault on boys and men, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them. Maybe that would be a good goal for MRAs, to work to defend the sexual autonomy of young men and boys.

But that would be a rational and responsible approach. That last line is revealing: rather than a responsible goal, go for personal sexual gratification. Yeah, sure, encourage MRAs to embrace pedophilia. We’ll see how effectively cultural evolution can work.

I get email

I’m getting a swarm of these, all sounding nearly exactly alike. And what do you know, an idiot youtube atheist just issued a fatwah. Guys, I’d be more impressed with your claim to be unique individuals if you didn’t simply parrot some youtuber’s talking points.

Hello PZ myers. I just want to email you to ask you a few questions and to plead for sanity. I am fairly sure that I am just wasting my time and you will not respond but here I go anyways. What is the deal with your “free thought blog”? You censor comment and ban people for not agreeing with you, from what I have heard.

Oh, please, get down off the fucking cross already. It’s a really boring trope: I’ve got comments all over the place that start, “I know you will delete this comment because I disagree with you…” and strangely, they don’t get deleted. Look at any article with a lot of comments, and you won’t find it’s all a bunch of people agreeing with me — even regulars here routinely criticize me. What you always find in those long threads is one or more jackasses braying repeatedly and inciting prolonged rebuttals.

“From what I have heard”…right. Sleazy little wanker, you are. Where did you hear it? I bet I can guess.

You seem to start arguments in the atheist community, which largely serve to divide the community and make it harder for us to get in a position to actually do something about the harm that religion causes humanity. You have people on other websites talking bad about other atheists and scientists in your name.

In MY name? That doesn’t even make sense. I’m a guy with a blog and a teaching position, with zero power and authority. I write what I think, and many people agree, and many disagree.

And what atheist community? You act as if there is some monolithic institution with a few rebels causing trouble. Atheism is a chaotic mess, with many communities within it. It seems to annoy some people that I don’t join with the libertarian, anti-feminist herd, but they never seem to consider that it takes two sides to make a rift.

I am trying to be polite in this email but you seem to be starting a cult in your fan base. We all need to work together to make the world a better place. We won’t always agree 100% with everyone even in our little niche groups, if we do then that is a sign of something worse at work. I am not asking you to just go out and say “sorry I was a jerk” but you NEED to stop doing things to divide the community.

Oh, no, I’m dividing the community! I dare to point out that some members of this community are assholes, and you get to call me a jerk and tell me what to do. If you really want to do something to help humanity, then I’m afraid what you need to do is separate yourself from the anti-feminist ranters and join a group that sincerely cares about social justice, rather than using the term as an insult.

I grew up in the 1960s, and I remember a real divide — there were all these young people demanding an end to the draft and opposing war, and then there were all the people with the “America, love it or leave it” bumper stickers. And even when I was 9 years old I could see the deep logical flaw in the bumper sticker people. If you really loved the country, and you saw serious problems (like Nixon, or creationism, or misogyny), wouldn’t the appropriate response be to work to fix them, rather than denying their existence?

Yet here we have atheists who insist on the equivalent of “atheism, love it or leave it,” seeing no flaws at all, and demanding that anyone who disagrees should shut up in the name of holy unity.

Fuck that noise. I do not aim to conform.

When you let assholes be the public face of atheism, it’s no wonder we have a bad reputation

I am no fan of Bill Maher. I was extremely uncomfortable with his selection as the recipient for the Richard Dawkins Foundation award in 2009, and I could only accommodate it by telling myself it was solely for his movie, Religulous, and not a general appreciation of his asshattery. And I didn’t even like Religulous! Orac was spot on in his criticisms, and while I’d hoped to talk to Maher at some time — we were even seated at the same table — he showed up late, complained about the brand of water served at the table, did his acceptance speech, and blitzed out of the room immediately afterwards. While happy to get an award, you could tell he was completely uninterested in associating with the riff-raff of atheism.

He also showed up with an extremely attractive young woman who could have been his daughter, or even granddaughter, but was actually his date. She was pleasant to talk to, quite unlike her sugar daddy, and actually bothered to engage the table briefly in light conversation. But you could tell that Maher’s ideal woman was candy to decorate his arm in public. It also illuminates his behavior — the man has a history of sexist remarks. Is it any surprise that he has done it again?

Bill Maher benefits from the hive mind mentality of so many atheists. You cannot disagree with Bill Maher without simultaneously delivering a slap to atheism — you must not foster divisiveness. You must accept all prominent celebrities who openly embrace atheism as pure paragons of human goodness — it is simply too complicated to think that a person might have a mix of views that are sometimes appealing, sometimes repugnant. So we constantly loft up “heroes” as exemplars, failing to recognize that the essence of atheism has to be a recognition of the flawed humanity of its people, and then we end up with primitive atheists getting defensive and angry at all those critics who point at the awkward reality of those heroes, whether they’re Feynman or Maher or Sanger or whoever.

The problem is compounded by the fact that these same boosters of the Brave Hero Leader of Atheism simultaneously insist that atheism has no guiding principles or morality or goals — it’s a complete moral cipher that simply says there is no god. So sure, as long as you clearly state that there is no god, you can be sexist or racist or endorse bombing the Middle East or love Ayn Rand with all your heart or believe that the poor deserve their lot since Darwin said “survival of the fittest” (he didn’t), and still be the paradigmatic Good Atheist. In the absence of any moral principle, we can promote even moral monsters, or ascientific promoters of bunkum and quackery, to be our representatives — and if you dare to disagree, you are ‘divisive’ and ‘bickering’ and doing harm to the movement.

I am tired of it. Atheist organizations, step it up, clean up your act, and put together a clear statement of what you stand for. If it’s just that you agree that you believe there is no god, fine; if you think the only cause worth fighting for is separation of church and state, that’s a good cause and it’s reasonable to limit your goals; if you want to promote science education, I’m all for it. But I think you need to go further. You need to recognize the implications of godlessness, that there is no Chosen People, that there is no godly support for patriarchy, that everyone is equal under Nature’s law, and that that means there is a whole raft of social and political causes under your purview…and that you should have a broader statement of the meaning of atheism. I want to know what you stand for. This current vacuum of any attempt at an understanding of what atheism ought to mean is exactly what allows assholes to flourish.

I apologise for the “sugar daddy” comment, which implies that the woman had no say in the relationship. That was not my intent; Bill Maher came off as a sexist pig, but she was actually quite an interesting person. She seemed more intelligent than Maher, that’s for sure.

Shermer rides again!

Jesus. He’s written a climatological ‘Dear Muslima’ for Scientific American, defending Bjorn Lomborg. It feeds directly into a common Republican trope: ‘sure, climate change occurs, and maybe humans contribute to it, but it’s just too costly do what is necessary’. He lists a bunch of problems, and then does a “cost-benefit analysis”.

The ranking is based on a cost-benefit analysis. For example, an investment of $300 million “would prevent the deaths of 300,000 children, if it were used to strengthen the Global Fund’s malaria-financing mechanism.” Another $300 million would deworm 300 million children, and $122 million would lead to total hepatitis B vaccine coverage and thereby prevent another 150,000 annual deaths. Low-cost drugs to treat acute heart disease would cost just $200 million and save 300,000 people.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more about climate change. But what? Both books posit technological solutions: Lomborg’s Copenhagen experts recommend spending $1 billion for research on planet-cooling geoengineering technologies; Oreskes and Conway have humanity saved by the creation in 2090 of a lichenized fungus that consumes atmospheric carbon dioxide. Whatever we do about climate, we should recognize that the world has many problems. If you are malnourished and diseased, what the climate will be like at the end of the century is not a high priority. Given limited resources, we should not let ourselves be swept away by the apocalyptic fear generated by any one threat.

I fucking hate “cost-benefit analysis” — it’s always accomplished by sweeping a lot of costs under the carpet to reach the desired conclusion. It’s such an easy way to create imaginary books that you can fudge without consequences. Do they factor in the cost of losing New Orleans and Miami? Wanna bet everything is lowballed?

The argument about other problems is bogus, too: if we could wrest government out of the control of goddamned Libertarians and Republicans, we could talk about rational policy making and trying to fund all of those projects. Does anyone really believe progressive politicians are arguing we can’t save those children because we’ve only got money for ONE project, and we can’t prioritize to support humanitarian goals? Does anyone seriously believe for one second that if we follow the Libertarian dream and spend less on carbon reduction (as if we spend enough now), that suddenly the wretched conservatives in congress will decide they can invest a few hundred million dollars to prevent the deaths of foreign children?

NO ONE is claiming that we need to stop everything else and deal only with climate change right now. But they are arguing that we need to carry out an appropriate, necessary, and immediate change in our carbon consumption habits — which we are not doing, thanks to obstructionists and pseudo-scientific rationalizers for the status quo, like Shermer. Pretending that climate scientists want everyone to be “swept away” to deal with “one threat” is simply dishonest. Reprehensibly dishonest. What they’re doing instead is explaining how the long term costs of climate change represent a far greater concern than phony ‘cost-benefit analyses’ allow.

And citing Oreskes and Conway…they wrote The Merchants of Doubt, which is all about how industry assholes have connived to lie to us about the scientific consensus on tobacco, ozone, acid rain, and climate change — Oreskes does not agree with Lomborg. Yet here Shermer lumps Conway and Oreskes into the same camp with Lomborg. And what is this nonsense about ‘lichenized fungus’ in 2090? Nobody can make that absurd claim now, nor give it a date of arrival, let alone a couple of historians of science. What are they going to do, switch to molecular biology and develop it themselves? Why should we trust magic bullet solutions to complex problems?

Simply citing the discredited conservative hack Lomborg is grounds for suspecting Shermer’s ability to judge the quality of the arguments. He might have been well off reading Scientific American’s 12 year old demolition of Lomborg’s credibility. I don’t know what has happened at SciAm that they continue to encourage a Libertarian crank to publish in their once respectable journal…and this after his bogus article on a liberal war on science, and his more recent lying with statistics to dismiss concerns about wealth inequity. Do they simply not care any more?