Delicious. Stefan Molyneux failed miserably at attempting to be an “attractive young woman” leaving a comment thanking the wonderful Stefan Molyneux. Unless, maybe, there is an attractive young woman who looks to Stefan Molyneux for guidance who just happens to also be named Stefan Molyneux.
There’s a simple way to avoid getting caught inventing imaginary fans. Don’t invent imaginary fans in the first place.
Please, Republicans, welcome this man back into the fold, and make him a mouthpiece for the party. We are happy to see you drive women out of your camp. Todd Akin thinks there’s still a legitimate concern about legitimate rape.
"When a woman claims to have been raped, the police determine if the evidence supports the legal definition of ‘rape,’" Akin writes. "Is it a legitimate claim of rape or an excuse to avoid an unwanted pregnancy? Are the police warranted to take action against a crime or not?"
"In short, the word ‘legitimate’ modifies the claim and not the action. There have been women who have lied about being raped, as Norma McCorvey did before the U.S. Supreme Court. The infamous Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 was based on a lie."
"My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down," Akin adds in the book, "was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and fertilization,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject."
Yes, sometimes women are bad and ignorant and dishonest, just like men. Sometimes people lie about being robbed in order to get the insurance money, too; that doesn’t mean we have such a cynical view of humanity that we dismiss all claims of theft as fraudulent.
I found his last challenge interesting, though. But don’t go to Google — that’s wide open and leads to a lot of garbage. I did his search on PubMed. It returns about 1500 peer reviewed papers on the subject, but the problem is that ‘stress’ has a rather specific meaning in biology, and it’s not about transient terror — it’s about relatively long-term metabolic changes. It’s also a big database, so it covers everything — plants, mice, insects, etc. So I narrowed the search to just humans, which gives me 136 results. That is not very impressive.
I browsed through them all. Some looked interesting:there’s stuff on the role of follicular antioxidants, how serotonergic modulation affects the stress response in zebrafish (they mention modulators developed for human research — they’re giving Prozac to fish larvae), issues in treating Jehovah’s Witnesses with in vitro fertilization, heat stress and DNA repair in sperm production, lots of stuff about oxidative stress, and surprising numbers of papers about the effects of stress on sperm in general. I guess sperm are just easier to work with. Maybe Akin should be arguing that stressed-out rapists are firing blanks? Nah, the research doesn’t support that, either.
I found one relevant paper in my search: Stress and anxiety do not result in pregnancy wastage, by Milad, Klock, Moses, and Chatterton, published in 1998. They were looking at the effects of the psychologically stressful process of IVF on fertility clinic patients. It has a small n of 40, so it’s not entirely conclusive, but the abstract concludes:
In conclusion, there is little association between psychological scores and physiological stress hormone concentrations. Also, it does not appear that high levels of anxiety and stress result in an adverse pregnancy outcome.
Again, these are studies of long term stress — we know there are effects of overwork, worry, lack of sleep, poor diet, and fear that cause metabolic changes in the body that can reduce the likelihood of reproduction. But that’s a far cry from suggesting that a single psychologically traumatic event can instantly shut down ovaries and prevent pregnancy, like a switch.
Also, a search on PubMed on the subject of stress and pregnancy turns up many more papers. It’s easy to conflate the two issues, and it’s certainly the case that metabolic changes occur and can affect pregnancy. But it’s also easy to send people off on a wild goose chase on a complex topic to confuse them.
So far, I haven’t found any peer-reviewed papers that support the Akin Hypothesis. I probably need to dig deeper into fringe journals.
Stephanie Yoder wrote a blog post criticizing WorldVentures, one of those nasty MLM pyramid schemes. She pointed out that 72% of those roped in to the scheme made no money at all, and the median commission was only $40, etc., etc., etc., par for the course for these kinds of phonies, in which only the scum at the top get any money out of it.
So now WorldVentures has sent out one of those blustery vague cease-and-desist letters (oh, I’ve seen a few of those) to Ms Yoder, and the Popehat signal has gone up. I am not a lawyer, I’m not even vaguely knowledgable about legal matters, but I’m posting this because Popehat made a promise:
If you write a blog post questioning WorldVentures, you will very likely draw a crowd of very enthusiastic, very intense, somewhat off-putting WorldVenture supporters.
‘Offputting’ doesn’t worry me at all — my inbox has biohazard warnings splattered all over it, and leaks venom whenever I shake my laptop — but enthusiastic crowds…bring ’em on. I get paid for the visits, and I expect I might make 10, 15 cents with an invasion of MLM wackos, and besides, my commenters need chew toys. They wear them out so fast! Multi-level marketers probably don’t have much endurance — WorldVentures sounds like a pathetic, desperate lot — but if we get enough volume, it might make up for their friability.
After reading this article, I checked our pantry…and sure enough, we’re stocked up on Eden Organics. That’s the last of it, we won’t be buying any more.
Now, like a good left-winger, I’m going to go for a walk to the local farmer’s market and see what fresh produce I can get.
Holly Hobby Lobby explains what she was thinking with that picture of her holding a bible and a rifle in front of a flag.
“I expected less backlash with this than I did the first one because the picture is, like, America’s founding principles,” Fischer opined to Fox News on Wednesday.
Hold it right there. Guns and God are what you get out of the Enlightenment principles that inspired America’s founders? That’s rather missing the point.
“That’s all that’s in the picture. And I really didn’t think it would cause the uproar that it has.”
What uproar? Pointing out, on media like blogs and twitter that parading about with a Bible and a gun isn’t exactly progressive, and exactly mirrors the attitude of the worst of the Abrahamic fundamentalists (heck, it is modern Abrahamic fundamentalism) isn’t exactly a riot. What I saw was a great deal of amusement on the left at the juxtaposition of Christian and Islamic ‘freedom fighter’, and most of the outrage came from the right, where they were howling in denial and insisting that they weren’t the same, because Muslims were gun-toting barbarians with a false god, while Holly was a white human being married to an American soldier. Totes different.
Fisher said that she posted the photo because there was a “growing intolerance among the left, and conservatives are becoming more and more afraid to speak up.”
In my culture, martyrdom is folly and a martyr complex, where no sacrifice is made but one pretends to be oppressed, is contemptible and stupid. Here, let me quell your fears.
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News (hell, Holly was being interviewed on Fox), World Net Daily, Ann Coulter, the Family Research Council, Dinesh D’Souza, Sean Hannity, Sunday morning television punditry, Alex Jones, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Clear Channel, Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly, and the entirety of the Republican Party.
Conservatives aren’t afraid to speak up, because they sure won’t shut up. Everywhere I go, the Far Right Noise Machine is squawking nonstop.
Meanwhile, you probably think President Obama is a far left socialist/communist radical. He’s actually a centrist apparatchik who is less obstructive and destructive than the screaming idiots on the right.
You can complain when President Bernie Sanders is in office. Until then, your fears of socialism running the country are groundless. (And even then, a hypothetical Sanders presidency would be an even greater slog against the right-wing no-bots than the current one.)
Every year, Minnesota Atheists participate in the gay pride event in Minneapolis — they don’t go in to make “conversions”, but to show support for our fellow citizens. There is no flaunting of trophies afterwards, no singling out of gay folk who Suddenly! Turned! Atheist! because of our godless proselytizing, because that’s not what it’s all about. In particular, the purpose isn’t to steal attention from the real goals of the event, which are all about equality and rights for same sex couples.
I expect there are also liberal Christian groups that participate as a show of support, rather than as an attempt to convert. But that’s not the case for Trinity Works, which sent evangelical teams to Twin Cities Pride, and afterwards bragged about bringing 80 people to the Lord (knowing how these groups play fast and loose with the numbers, they probably just got the Christian gawkers to reaffirm their prior beliefs).
Another devious ploy: they set up a free corn feed booth. It was a bait-and-switch, offering corn and serving loathing instead.
Trinity Works held a corn feed at 11th Street and Hennepin Avenue along the Pride parade route. According to OutFront, the support team had to counsel dozens who mistakenly thought it was part of Pride activities. “Pride-goers who went in, assuming it was LGBTQ-friendly, were surrounded by Trinity works people who said they would burn in hell because of their sexual orientation,” OutFront’s Monica Meyer said in a statement. “Our support team counseled more than a dozen people who unknowingly went in and left the corn feed shaken, crying and traumatized.”
I bet a lot also left furious and upset — emotions that aren’t part of the intent of the event.
I don’t get how people who are so into dictating other people’s proper sexual behavior can simultaneously be so into rat-fucking.
Michael Shermer indulges in some shabby Libertarian statistical games to wave away American economic inequality. Sure, there are inequities, he argues, but they’re not so bad — the poor are also getting slightly richer.
The rich are getting richer, as Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless found by analyzing tax data from the Congressional Budget Office for after-tax income trends from 1979 through 2010 (including government assistance). The top-fifth income earners in the U.S. increased their share of the national income from 43 percent in 1979 to 48 percent in 2010, and the top 1 percent increased their share of the pie from 8 percent in 1979 to 13 percent in 2010. But note what has not happened: the rest have not gotten poorer. They’ve gotten richer: the income of the other quintiles increased by 49, 37, 36 and 45 percent, respectively.
I have a few problems with this. First, in an article titled “The Myth of Income Inequality”, he’s doing a bit of bait-and-switch: it doesn’t matter if the baseline is rising, the question is about the disparity. Income disparity is greater now than it was before. His own numbers show that.
This argument is basically a version of the “Well, the poor all have cell phones!” dismissal. They’ve also got refrigerators and TVs, therefore, you should just ignore the fact that the wealthiest are sucking up all our prosperity to fund luxuries and frivolities. We should just pretend that we’re all getting the benefit of a rising tide, and never mind that yacht towering above your dinghy.
But there are other funny things going on in this economy. Look at this chart: the costs of TVs and toys and cell phones (the latter at least is essential now; but it’s a new cost for the poor, even if it is dropping) are plummeting, but the stuff that really matters for upward income mobility, like child care, health care, and education are going up. Especially education. We are saddling new graduates with overwhelming amounts of debt.
Another interesting game Shermer plays is to ignore the difference between income and wealth. It’s good that the poor are getting some increase in income, but if you’re using it to make ends meet or dig out from under a pile of debt, you’re not going to be accumulating any wealth — you can still get poorer. Meanwhile, the rich don’t have to worry about covering essential living expenses, and can invest and get richer. It’s useful to be able to see the distinction, so here’s a handy table of wealth and income in the US.
Income, net worth, and financial worth in the U.S. by percentile,in 2010 dollars
Wealth or income class Mean household income Mean household net worth Mean household financial (non-home) wealth Top 1 percent $1,318,200 $16,439,400 $15,171,600 Top 20 percent $226,200 $2,061,600 $1,719,800 60th-80th percentile $72,000 $216,900 $100,700 40th-60th percentile $41,700 $61,000 $12,200 Bottom 40 percent $17,300 -$10,600 -$14,800 From Wolff (2012); only mean figures are available, not medians. Note that income and wealth are separate measures; so, for example, the top 1% of income-earners is not exactly the same group of people as the top 1% of wealth-holders, although there is considerable overlap.
Here’s another sneaky trick. When the concern is inequality, let’s ignore the most extreme and instead focus on perceptions.
One reason for the controversy is that people overestimate differences between the rich and poor. In a 2013 study published in Psychological Science entitled “Better Off Than We Know,” St. Louis University psychologist John R. Chambers and his colleagues found that most people estimate that the richest 20 percent make 31 times more than the poorest 20 percent (it is 15.5 times), and they believe that the average annual income of the richest 20 percent of Americans is $2 million, whereas in fact it is $169,000, a perceptual difference of nearly 12 times. “Almost all of our study participants,” the authors concluded, “grossly underestimated Americans’ average household incomes and overestimated the level of income inequality.”
That’s beautiful sleight of hand. First, as previously mentioned, talk only about income, not wealth (and most of us already have poor intuition about the difference; notice also that if you look at the table above, the guesses pretty much hit the mark on wealth, rather than income). Then talk only about the top 20%, rather than the top 1%. And then make much of the fact that people’s guesses about rich people’s incomes are wrong. Har har, the proles guessed that managers make 31 times as much money as they do, when it’s really only 12 times.
Really? Try this exercise: imagine that you got paid just 10 times as much as you do now. “Just” 10 times. How much of a difference would that make in your life? I’m in a comfortable position; optimistically, I’m probably somewhere in the bottom of the 20%, so I don’t have to worry much about making ends meet, and give me an order of magnitude more money and I’d just be socking it away in a bank. But if you’re poor, if you’re struggling to cover child care and rent and keep the family fed, that’s an immense difference.
And of course the other factor is that the 20% aren’t actually working any harder than the 80% — their labor may require more training (which we’re trying hard to lock poor people out of with skyrocketing education costs), but they’re not actually working any harder than you are. My father was often working two jobs in order to keep spinning his wheels in poverty, so I’ve seen this inequality at work, and am well aware that I’m on the lucky side of the rich-poor divide.
But set aside all the squinty-eyed statistical games, and simply ask the fundamental question: Who owns the country? Where is the product of 315 million people’s labor going?
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%.
That’s the inequality that we’re concerned about, that a mere 1% own well over a third of the wealth of the country, and it’s increasing — they use that wealth to manipulate media and politics to steal even greater quantities of our work. We are becoming a kleptocracy.
But never mind that. Look! Over there! There’s a poor person with an Xbox!
But wait! Even that claim that the poor have gotten richer may be dodgy: this analysis of reported incomes shows that we’ve been experiencing a decline.
Behold, the latest example of human stupidity and shortsightedness.
In small towns across America, manly men are customizing their jacked-up diesel trucks to intentionally emit giant plumes of toxic smoke every time they rev their engines. They call it “rollin’ coal,” and it’s something they do for fun.
An entire subculture has emerged on the Internet surrounding this soot-spewing pastime—where self-declared rednecks gather on Facebook pages (16,000 collective followers) Tumblers and Instagram (156,714 posts) to share photos and videos of their Dodge Rams and GM Silverados purposefully poisoning the sky. As one of their memes reads: “Roll, roll, rollin’ coal, let the hybrid see. A big black cloud. Exhaust that’s loud. Watch the city boy flee.”
These dumbasses think they’re being tough and rebellious, when they’re simply parroting conservative stupidity.
Aside from being macho, the rollin’ coal culture is also a renegade one. Kids make a point of blowing smoke back at pedestrians, in addition to cop cars and rice burners (Japanese-made sedans), which can make it dangerously difficult to see out of the windshield. Diesel soot can also be a great road rage weapon should some wimpy looking Honda Civic ever piss you off. “If someone makes you mad, you can just roll coal, and it makes you feel better sometimes,” says Ryan, a high school senior who works at the diesel garage with Robbie. “The other day I did it to this kid who was driving a Mustang with his windows down, and it was awesome.”
The ultimate highway enemy, however, are “nature nuffies,” or people who drive hybrid cars, because apparently, pro-earth sentiment is an offense to the diesel-trucking lifestyle. “The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal,” says Ryan. “I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me.”
I despair of humanity sometimes. If we make it that far, future generations will look back aghast at these idiots. I know there is something at least that keeps me going.
According to the Clean Air Taskforce, diesel exhaust is one of the country’s greatest sources of toxic pollutants and leads to 21,000 premature deaths each year, but even that won’t deter the coal rollers. “I’m not a scientist, but it couldn’t be too horrible,” Robbie says. “There are a lot of factories that are doing way worse than my truck.”
I’m not ready to die off yet, because I want to see these motherfuckers die first.
Penn Jillete defends Anthony Cumia. We’re all missing the important detail that exonerates him — sure, he went off for hours in a racist tirade, but don’t you all realize that Cumia is licensed to carry a concealed handgun?
Penn Jillette says that people are
burying the ledein the alleged incident that led to SiriusXM’s decision to fire “Opie and Anthony” host Anthony Cumia. He also argued that he’s never seen any evidence that suggests Cumia is racist as many of his critics have alleged.
We are burying the lede of this story, which is that Anthony, who has a reputation for being a bit of a hot head, is carrying, comes up gets hit in the face and does not hurt the person back,Jillette said during his “Penn’s Sunday School” podcast this weekend.
That is incredible. If I am in the position where I cross somebody who is carrying a gun and who can defend themselves and hurt me, and their choice is to write angry stuff on Twitter instead of fighting me back — wonderful. Gandhi! That’s Gandhi! … That is Martin Luther King,he continued.
Seriously? He just compared a racist ranter to Gandhi and Martin Luther King because he didn’t shoot a black woman in the face?
Sure. This sounds exactly like something King or Gandhi would say.
Savage violent animal fucks prey on white people. Easy targets. This CUNT has no clue how lucky she was. She belted me 10 times. I had a gun
No,an ANIMAL BITCH used it’s instinctual violence on me. I restrained myself from putting it to sleep
It’s a jungle out in our cities after midnight. Violent savages own the streets. They all came 2 defend this pig. I had to yell like at dogs
Gosh. I’ve never shot anyone, and I’ve never even raged at minorities as animals. I guess that means I must be like Jesus!
By the way, the article strangely features a photo of Cumia’s concealed carry license…with a 2012 expiration date. I guess True Skeptics™ don’t give a damn about little details like that.
Charles Pierce gives us another quote from Sarah Palin. I’m glad someone else is extracting these, because I can’t listen to her for more than 3 or 4 seconds.
Any interest in doing a political talk show, either on TV, radio or the Internet?
Maybe. But the politics would have to be interspersed with a whole lot of fun and real life and inspiration showcasing American work ethic, because those topics are all pretty much the antithesis of today’s politics, which I find incorrigibly disastrous! It’d be so much fun to shake it up taking on issues that make audiences objectively consider all sides, and I’d do it with my own real-life groundedness, candor and commonsense that I’m known for. Media needs that today, versus the condescension that oozes from TV and radio. I hear everyone recently got canned from The View, maybe a show like that needs a punch of reality and a voice of reason from America’s heartland to knock some humble sense into their scripts. You know, someone willing to go rogue.
Oh, gob. The arrogance. The incoherence. Urrk, my brain is seizing up!
I hope her speeches are never militarized.
