“Defend” does not mean “kill”

We had another terrible person armed with a gun swagger into a peaceable place here in the Pacific Northwest, and he callously killed one person and wounded three others at Seattle Pacific University before he was stopped. The student who stopped him used a can of mace to do so. That was brilliant: why don’t we endorse the use of non-lethal weaponry by our citizens? There’s no need for guns. The whole NRA/gun-fondler argument for the necessity of self-defense is taken care of by weapons that don’t kill people.

Dear Mr Atheist allow me to destroy evolution in 3 minutes!

That’s the title of a video I was sent that is supposed to utterly crush my faith in evolution. By the way, why is it that people who worship faith as a perfectly valid way of knowing so insistently insist that evolution is wrong because it takes too much faith to believe in it? Shouldn’t that be a sign to them that it’s even better than God?

I don’t know why anyone is impressed. It’s an ignoramus ranting at his cell phone camera, reciting tired, familiar creationist tropes.

evolution is not a science…because it was never observed…which is why it is called a theory.

But people have observed and documented evolution, and done experiments to test its predictions, gone out in the field and the lab to do science guided by the theory. Of course it’s a science! And it’s called a theory because it’s predictions have been successfully tested, and the mechanism has a lot of useful properties to inform the science. I don’t think he knows what “theory” actually means, but if you stuck it out to the end, you know his grasp of language is rather weak.

Then he blathers on with creationist misconceptions about evolution. We developed different characteristics because we willed it? “Will” doesn’t play any role in evolutionary theory. And of course he has to trot out Creationist Thermodynamics, which he defines as chaos can never produce order…because it defies the logic and laws of science, which is not something the laws of thermodynamics claim, and naturally he has to babble about tornado in a junkyard. Thanks, Fred Hoyle, your legacy lives on!

Then he wraps it all up with made-up etymology. You know what universe means, right? Uni, one; verse, like in a poem. Therefore Uni-verse means one single spoken statement, just like the book of Genesis says. Too bad the dictionary says otherwise:

late Middle English: from Old French univers or Latin universum, neuter of universus ‘combined into one, whole,’ from uni- ‘one’ + versus ‘turned’ (past participle of vertere ).

As long as we’re making up word origins, I think it’s clear that it’s like “united” + “versus”, meaning “everyone against”, reflecting the inimical, conflict-driven nature of existence, and therefore we have to all gather and laugh at the dumb-ass obnoxious mouth-breather who made that video.

No cure for insomnia here

I’m not adjusted to Pacific time yet, so I woke up this morning at 3am, and figured the thing to do is watch some boring debate…and you may have heard that Sye Ten Bruggencate debated Matt Dillahunty last weekend. Just the thing! Bruggencate is a tedious kook, and it’s just the thing to put me to sleep.

But then it turns out that Bruggencate’s position is so far out there it jarred me constantly. He’s arguing that belief in god is reasonable, and here’s his reasoning:

Why is it reasonable to believe god exists? Because it is true that god exists.

I say it’s true that god exists, therefore it is true that god exists.

You can’t know what’s ultimately real without revelation from god.

This is called begging the question. His entire opening argument is snippets of video of Matt Dillahunty, quotemined bits that he falsely boils down to claim Dillahunty is a solipsist who can’t tell whether he’s a brain in a vat.

And then, darn it, Matt is a really good debater and drills right down to Bruggencate’s fallacious approach. I keep saying this, that debating is a very specific skill, scientists don’t do debate, and you need someone who knows both sides inside and out. It was very entertaining to watch Bruggencate publicly dissected. Too entertaining. How am I going to get back to sleep?

So I kept going, and Bruggencate is infuriatingly obtuse. Also not conducive to sleep.

So here you go, better than a quart of coffee.

Evidences presupposes truth, truth presupposes god.

Grrr. Idiocy. And ultimately he admits that he regards Scripture as Absolute Truth.

I’ve debated Jerry Bergman, and I thought that was a futile exercise with a fool. I would not be able to calmly argue with Bruggencate, so kudos to Matt.

Oh, and a suggestion for Matt. One of the questions in the Q&A was from a neuroscientist who questioned the value of philosophy, and asked for a specific example of a genuine contribution of philosophy to our understanding. Matt fumbled it a bit, though, but there’s a really easy answer to give to a scientist who asks that kind of dismissive question about philosophy.

Philosophy gave us science.

There’s more, obviously, but that one ought to silence any anti-philosophical scientism.

Dumbasses on parade

Watch a gang of heavily armed lunatics draped with big guns march into a restaurant, proudly. What the heck is wrong with these people? Do they think these stunts make them look rational?

Texas dumbasses seem to get away with this nonsense, but imagine if they were a different group of people. Imagine if they were black.

You don’t have to imagine very hard. California once had the most restrictive gun control laws in the country — in particular, the Mulford Act made it illegal for people to play the stupid games Open Carry Texas does. And it was prompted by the fact that black people were advocating carrying guns around to protect themselves from an abusive police. That was enough for St. Ronald.

Then Gov. Ronald Reagan, now lauded as the patron saint of modern conservatism, told reporters in California that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." Reagan claimed that the Mulford Act, as it became known, "would work no hardship on the honest citizen." The NRA actually helped craft similar legislation in states across the country.

We could probably reverse these stupidly permissive gun laws if our black and Latino citizens started flaunting more legally carried guns, but I wouldn’t recommend it — it’s not worth getting shot over, and you know there are white people — and white police officers — who would feel threatened, and there would be blood spilled.

A better strategy: if an idiot with a gun shows up at a place of business you are frequenting, go up to the management and say, “There’s an idiot with a gun over there: throw him out or you’ve lost my business.” Those bozos are dangerous.

Is Ken Ham literate?

It’s an open question. He’s quite irate with me for stating the truth, which he says is a lie, while confirming that I was accurate.

One atheist blogger is claiming that I was wrong to write on Wednesday that Rachel Maddow of MSNBC TV declared that our Ark Encounter would be built using taxpayer money (through tax incentives). The blogger (PZ Myers) stated:

"He [Ken Ham] declares that no Kentucky taxpayer money is being used to construct the Ark Encounter, but that is a claim no one made. Maddow says quite clearly several times that the Ark Park has been given $43 million in tax incentives — that is, Answers in Genesis has been exempted from a requirement to pay taxes on their for-profit enterprise, and will also receive rebates on sales taxes. So all Ham has done is rebut a claim that Rachel Maddow did not make."

Well, judge for yourself. At the beginning of her mocking rant against us Maddow stated:

"And when the creationist group Answers in Genesis announced their plans to build their Noah’s Ark theme park, the state of Kentucky offered them $43 million dollars in tax incentives for them to build that theme park …".

You can hear Maddow say it for yourself at around the 1:55 mark of the video captured at https://answersingenesis.org/ministry-news/creation-museum/media-coverage/rachels-rant-msnbc/ . The atheist blogger has once again, as such secularists often do, did not tell the truth—and of course Rachel Maddow didn’t tell the truth, either.

I said, and Rachel Maddow said, that Ham received $43 million in tax incentives. We know exactly what that means: he got tax exemptions and rebates that would total $43 million as an incentive to construct his monument to idiocy. So when Ken Ham says we’re lying because no armored cars rolled up to his front door and unloaded big canvas bags with dollar signs printed on them, he is replying to a claim we did not make. Which I also clearly said in that bit of mine that he quoted.

You know, on the cop shows when a suspect is accused of X, and he immediately starts blustering “I did not do Y!”, you kind of suspect that he’s guilty of something. What is Ken Ham hiding?

Mega-facepalm

I am disappointed. Jaclyn Glenn makes an incoherent rant.

Her point: it’s terrible for feminists to take an issue like this [the Elliot Rodger murders] and try to twist it around, and tells everyone to look at the problems for what they are. It’s not misogyny, she says, it’s because Rodger was mentally ill. And then she reads a paragraph from is manifesto that is melodramatic, self-aggrandizing, and totally over-the-top, and announces that it proves that he is mentally ill.

The standards for psychiatric diagnoses have really gone to the dogs, haven’t they?

So a guy writes a 140-page raving rant about how women owe him sex, how he hates them, and how he wants to lock them up in a concentration camp and starve them to death, and it’s not misogyny — it’s just random insanity, completely unconnected to the culture around him. OK. So much for looking at problems for what they are.

She should have stopped there — it would have been just stupid and wrong, but she had to get in one more bit of self-defense of her views that completely contradicted what she just said.

There’s an obvious counter-example: what about people who commit acts of terrorism in the name of god, or mutilate themselves or their children, or immerse themselves in absurd life-styles because their holy book says they must? Are they insane, too?

No, no, says Ms Glenn. People do evil things because of religion, not because they’re insane. Rodger killed people because he was insane, not because of the influence of a misogynistic culture that he joined and that flooded him with constant messages of contempt for women. But when religion floods people with constant messages of extreme lunacy, it must be held accountable. Ideological indoctrination only influences you when it’s something Jaclyn Glenn doesn’t like.

I think she noticed the conflict in her position, though, because she quickly starts making excuses, saying there are big differences between religion and patriarchy: there’s not a rule code-book for men that says they are superior to women, she says. No, there’s not a single specific book — it’s just the whole default attitude. It’s an atmosphere of media bias. It’s a world that says, from the minute they are born, children must conform to gender stereotypes.

But we can now safely ignore everything Jaclyn Glenn says, because she also flings in a bizarre anecdote about how she was raised with a mother who freaked out over bugs, and she blames her upbringing on her phobia about insects. She shouldn’t be blaming her mad fears on her upbringing or her culture — she’s just taking this issue and twisting it around to avoid the unavoidable conclusion: fear of insects is a mental illness. How dare she blame her mother when the answer is so much simpler: there’s something wrong with her brain.

The one good thing about this attitude is that we now get to diagnose everyone with wild, stupid ideas as “mentally ill”. Is there enough room in American asylums to lock up Donald Trump, Cliven Bundy, the Wall Street Journal editorial staff, the entire Catholic hierarchy, those screaming pro-lifers lined up outside Planned Parenthood, and all the Tea Party membership? ‘Cause them folks is obviously crazy.

I’m a little worried, though, that it’s also beginning to look like we’re going to have to lock up a lot of the voices of the atheism movement on the same grounds.

Sacrificing children on the altar of the Constitution

We have a new low — and there have been so many lows — in the gun fondler canon. Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, the dumb right-winger adopted as a pal by the McCain presidential campaign, has weighed in on the Isla Vista murders.

I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now, wrote Wurzelbacher, who became something of a mascot for John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. But: As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.

His precious Constitutional rights…how come they never pay attention to the second and third words of that amendment?

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

It’s a bad amendment that has been no end of trouble throughout our history, particularly because of its sloppy wording and lazy interpretation, but also because it is no longer true — technology has progressed to the point where a militia is pretty much useless in providing security. What we need is another amendment to bring the Constitution into the 21st century, rather than the 18th, and then of course, because it will be in the Most Holy and Inviolable Constitution, every right-winger will respect it and get their guns checked and registered, as well as accepting limitations on access to particularly deadly weaponry. Right?

I have another question, though. Wurzelbacher also complains about gun-grab extremists who want to capitalize on these horrific events for their own political ends. I’d love to know, though…what are those political ends? How does he think we gain, and who profits, from enacting laws that limit the flood of weapons of mass destruction within our own country?

Other than not seeing our children murdered, that is.

Which he’s already said he doesn’t think is as important a goal as allowing him to stroke his rifle.

Dammit. I spoke too soon. Right after I say, “Look at this amazing new low,” someone has to go and dig a deeper hole. In this case, Todd Kincannon of South Carolina, who gets all macho and blame-the-victim.

No idea how my son will die, but I know it won’t be cowering like a bitch at UC Santa Barbara. Any son of mine would have been shooting back.

Drink some water, while you can

Last night, as promised, I watched Gasland. It’s an excellent documentary presented in a jarringly low-key style — jarring because every place visited that had extensive fracking was a horror. There were landscapes where farmers and ranchers were trying to make a living, and everywhere you looked, there were drilling rigs and condensate tanks, clouds of toxic vapor, and the water from local wells was coming up yellow to brown to black, fizzing off flammable gasses and saturated with chemical sludge. In some cases, water wells would actually explode.

Josh Fox, the documentarian, had to struggle to get any interviews with the corporate slugs who were greedily promoting this abuse of the environment. The most honest of them said, essentially, that there were always going to be compromises and a tiny bit of pollution was the price we have to pay for our energy; the worst would flat out deny that fracking could be causing any contamination of the water. Right. They snake pipes a mile or two under the ground, and then pump many thousands of liters of water loaded with organic solvents, a witch’s brew of carcinogens and teratogens and greasy poisonous crap, into the rock under such intense pressure that it cracks the confining geology, all to tap into trapped oil and gas, and there’s no way it could possibly leech into aquifers. And they pay desperate affected individuals some small sum, tens of thousands of dollars, to shut up and accept the damage.

This map was shown several times in the movie. All the red areas are deep shale beds, natural gas reservoirs, that are likely candidates for drilling.

Gaslandmap

Do you live in any of those places? You should worry. If they aren’t drilling now, they want to soon.

We also got to meet the greatest villain of this century, Dick Cheney. He’s the architect of the legal exemption of fracking companies from the restrictions of the Clean Water Act (among all the other things Ol’ Dick has done to advance the United States of Halliburton). Our government has washed its hands of any responsibilities, and an employee of the Environmental Protection Agency came right out and said the EPA was consciously avoiding getting into dealing with the consequences of fracking.

It’s one of the most depressing movies I’ve seen in years. We’re doomed, aren’t we?

At least there were a few nods to the gallant heroes are actually doing something to try and stem the flood of oil money: the movie has an interview with Theo Colborn, who really deserves wider recognition. It also features the real hero, the planet, with lots of lovely shots of Fox’s home in a secluded bit of the Delaware River basin — a place I remember well, having taken my kids camping and on scouting trips in the lush deep woods of Pennsylvania. That’s what prompted the movie, that that area is threatened with fracking development. All it would take is one neighbor to sell out to a natural gas company, and because the government is dragging its feet on protecting the environment, everyone could enjoy a river filled with benzene and 500 other killer chemicals.

By the way, today Google is celebrating Rachel Carson’s birthday.

rachelcarson

We haven’t learned a thing.

What are we going to do about Amazon?

I was reading a summary of Amazon’s bullying of Hachette — basically, Amazon used it’s near-monopoly power to shut out an independent publisher — and that, on top of it’s labor practices, tells me I need to find a way out of the Amazon trap before they become a full monopoly.

But here’s the catch: I live out in the boondocks. The nearest bookstore is a 50 minute drive away. I am addicted to the Kindle app — I can use my iPad to click on a title and get it zapped into my hands in 30 seconds, like magic. So I went searching to see if any other bookseller has similar functionality. Barnes & Noble has an app that will let you search their inventory and find a nearby store (I looked. Two hours away.) Powell’s is even worse: it assumes you will show up at their door in Portland, Oregon, and their app provides an interactive map to help you find your way around their store.

These are not useful for me.

Does Amazon already have an effective monopoly on e-books? To rebuke Amazon, am I going to get off my e-book addiction and start reading those old-fashioned things with ink and paper again?