Now they want to poison knowledge

We all know that the creationists have been busily trying to redefine science so that they can call Bible-based faith that the earth is 6000 years old “science”, while empirical research and validated theories are relabeled “dogma”. But now they’re going to reach deeper into the educational process and redefine “knowledge”.

While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky’s new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting … knowledge.

Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.

"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."

That’s right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.

The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.

Knowledge is now the rote memorization of “facts”, and educators who try to get students to understand concepts are now enemies of knowledge. I’m sure the taskmasters who run madrassas are now nodding their heads in complete agreement.

Brad Matthews’ statement is entirely reasonable, and does not warrant one iota of the hyperbole Cothran applies to it. The worst classes in the world are the ones where we sit students down and force them to memorize strings of data and then regurgitate them onto an exam. That does not imply that kids shouldn’t have to master some basic rote skills; sorry, gang, knowing your times tables is still important as a basic life skill.

But you still have to understand how to apply that knowledge. For instance, in cell biology, I expect my students to memorize the structure of a peptide bond (that’s not hard) and the basic properties of the classes of amino acids (only slightly harder), and we talk about some basic chemical reactions, like hydrolysis. They should be able to figure out how you break a peptide bond, without memorizing all the pairwise combinations of amino acids and how they’re split chemically. Once you know the general principle you can apply it everywhere!

Also, if you’re learning science, you have to learn how to fit new facts into an existing body of knowledge, and memorization won’t cut it.

What these guys are really afraid of is that deep ideas like evolution are natural inferences from all the data and facts floating around in science — if you learn how to think, you’ll inevitably figure out that creationism is bullshit, evolution actually works and makes sense, and that all those religious cranks have been lying to us. So in defense they want to truncate education: memorize what we already know (and even that they will tightly circumscribe), but don’t you dare teach kids how to think.

How can you call him a racist? He says he isn’t!

For some strange reason, this tirade by a guy laying out his criteria for a girlfriend reminds me of Pat Condell and his friends.

I am NOT racist. Just because I don’t like the appearnce of black people does not make me racist. Just because I don’t like a particular painting, does not mean I dislike the medium of Art as a whole!

But I will say this, Blacks do make up the majority of the inmates in the prisons in the country.

And I think it’s White people that make up the majority of white collar executive types of positions in America. Probably more Whites are 1 percenters than there are blacks.

When I think of all of the classical composers like Mozart etc that were pure genius, I don’t recall many of them being Black.

This is the 1st black president we’ve had so far and look what a horrible job he has done.

So in the grand scheme of things, it appears the scales are tilted in favor of Whites being the superior race, after all we weren’t the ones that were enslaved workinf cotton fields for 40o years..

Just pointing out that history seems to show whites as always rising to the top and dominating all other countries and cultures and taking what they want and doing as they please, being the dominant, most powerful, most intelligent race….

I’m not saying I personally believe whites are superior to blacks, I am not a scientist, and I have not studied it to any great depth…

Just pointing out some observations.

But, again, for the millionth time, I may be a jerk, but I’m not a racist, there’s a big difference.

My best friends are black and I have no hatred for them.

If you follow the link, you’ll also discover that he is not a sexist pig, nosir, not him.

It’s going to be a fun day!

Good morning! Expect a few rounds of fuming racist comments today — I have been discovered by Pat Condell, and he’s sending his pals over to set us all straight.

Pat Condell @patcondell
Many thanks to @pzmyers and everyone at the North Korea of free thought for a most amusing start to the day. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/09/23/feminism-is-not-an-excuse-for-your-racism-pat-condell/

Ha ha, yes, because a blog network is just like a totalitarian state. I was just telling my kids they need to grow a beard and put on some weight if they ever expect to succeed me.

Pat Condell @patcondell
Ha ha. Honoured to be slandered as racist by @pzmyers and his fellow carpet-chewing PC fanatics at the ludicrously named Freethought Blogs.

“PC” is one of those dogwhistles blown by racists, Republicans, and small-minded thugs who don’t want to recognize the rights of all people…only their own privileged subset. It’s a pretty good marker for regressive idiots.

This is FreethoughtBlogs, which means we don’t kowtow to self-appointed leaders of the freethought movement. To the Condells of the world, it’s only freethought if it properly abases itself before the Loud White Men On Pedestals.

But here come the Condell followers…

The Equaliser P.A.I @Abloorable
@patcondell what an idiot @pzmyers is missing the point feminists are against the ‘list’ of crimes Pat states=acceptance of ISLAM fucks it

We begin with a proper bit of incoherence, which puts us in the right frame of mind for the flood that follows. These people make no sense at all. I don’t know what this guy is trying to say; feminists accept Islam? What?

ShorehamBoys1889 @ShorehamBoy1889
@pzmyers Pat has never been racist he just says what the majority are thinking and isn’t scared to upset the pc lefty liberal scum.

“He’s not just racist, he just says things that get anti-racists upset!” Great defense, guy. Also, what did I say about “pc”?

Veelkantie @Veelkantie
@patcondell Thank god we didn’t have much @pzmyers 70 years ago blaming the ‘small groep of nazi fundamentalist’ for al wrongs at the time.

Godwin!

Yisroel Shalom @YisroelShalom
@patcondell @pzmyers good on you you racist, lol, I wish all racists were like you!! #respect to you Sir!

Yisroel, you’re not helping to make the case against Condell being a racist.

demoivre @dugfuser
@patcondell @pzmyers If an ultra-liberal PC feminist shithead like Myers calls you a racist you know you’re doing something right.

“PC,” check. Liberal and feminist used as a pejorative, check. Embracing “racist” as a compliment, check. I think we’re done here.

1Pat @1Braque
@pzmyers Facts “feminists” remain silent while +100Sharia courts in UK subjugate women’s rights, no convictions of 1000sFGM etc @patcondell

You know, if you get on Google and search for this topic, the top results are all from far right-wing sites raging against both feminism and Sharia law; they never offer any support for their claim that feminists are in bed with Islamists. Instead they just repetitively insist that they’re the same thing, and both must be opposed. It’s a really easy lie: express outrage over some abuse of Islam against women, then say that Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf haven’t condemned it. And it’s true! Every feminist does not stand by their fax machine, watching CNN and waiting for every atrocity so they can send out a disavowal. Instead, they fight for broader principles and the liberation of women everywhere, and condemn Islamic policies as a whole.

I was amused to stumble across this story: Iranian women are translating feminist works to undermine Sharia law, an interview with Azar Nafisi.

WOWOWOW: Who would you describe as role models for Iranian women?

AZAR NAFISI: The writers of the feminist movement — Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Mary Wollstonecraft — are active voices in the Iranian movement today. Their works have been translated. Women very courageously translated all of them. Those women were at the forefront of the movement.

There is something deeply wrong with you if you believe that feminism and Islam are friendly allies. It requires a deeply twisted perspective; it seems to be a story that the right wing press has been pushing hard, though, so if you only read the Daily Mail and Stormfront and Sarah Palin fan sites and the Blaze and Tea Party organs, you’ll get nothing but this breathless assertion that feminists don’t protest against Islam vehemently enough. But note one commonality: these kinds of sites hate both feminism and Islam.

You’d think they’d notice that abortion is outlawed under Sharia, and feminists tend to be pro-choice, just to name one issue. Yet somehow they think they’re allies? Bizarre.

Michael Stephenson @mcsadapted
@patcondell @pzmyers Those folks are fully indoctrinated… to deny that feminists ignore Muslim depredations is absurdly dishonest.

I know these guys ignore what I write, for sure. I rattled off a list of feminists I read —
Taslima, Maryam, Ophelia, Sikivu, Heina — to claim that any of them ignore Islamist oppression of women is simply willfully ridiculous and ignorant.

Alex Rose @SRevision
@pzmyers @patcondell What is wrong with this pz clown?Richard Dawkins, Pat Condell, Michael Shermer..He really thinks he is above them all?

I get this a lot, and it’s hilarious. Do these people really think their heroes are above all criticism? Because that’s the issue here, not that I think I’m “above” all these people, but that I think I can disagree with them on many points.

What is wrong with you that you dare not differ from your heroes, and get offended when anyone points out their human failings?

Oh, I forgot one.

Not Rose Tinted @gpolitica
shut your gob .@pzmyers

Simple, clear, lucid. There’s someone who plainly says what he thinks.

Feminism is not an excuse for your racism, Pat Condell

I confess, I liked his early anti-religious rants, but as he became steadily more irate about the brown hordes invading Britain, I tuned him out…until now, when I happened to run across his latest video. Holy crap, what a racist cretin.

He’s chewing out those

…”progressive” feminists who confidently challenge everyday sexism but who are struck deaf and dumb by Islamic misogyny…they turn a blind eye to religiously endorsed wife-beating, forced marriage, honour killing, genital mutilation, organised rape gangs, sharia courts that treat women as less than fully human, and little girls forced to dress like nuns.

Turn a blind eye to Islamic misogyny, or you’ll be a racist, you racist.

Way to go, Pat! Teach those strawfeminists a thing or two!

I really don’t know of any feminists who think anything on that list is at all acceptable. Who are these mysterious feminists who have no problem with honor killing or rape gangs?

I’m looking around at my circle of progressive feminists — is it Taslima? Maryam? Ophelia? Sikivu? Heina? He seems to be flinging about wild accusations with no basis in fact here; it’s hard to even imagine a woman not deeply indoctrinated into Islam who would excuse murdering other women for infidelity, for instance.

I don’t see anyone turning a blind eye to Islamic misogyny. I do see plenty of conservative racist dorks turning a blind eye to the fact that the majority of the victims of Islamic misogyny are Muslim women, and using the abhorrent tactics of Islamic fundamentalists as an excuse to blame all Muslims for their pain.

Really. Pointing out that many Islamic cultures formally endorse hateful policies is not racism; looking at every immigrant and assuming they’re there to rape ‘your’ women is.

This kind of backward, ugly attitude towards women prevails throughout much of the Islamic world and it’s being deliberately imported wholesale into western society unchallenged and uncorrected thanks to the insane “progressive” view that all cultures are equal, except, of course, for western culture, which is inferior, and this is making life more dangerous for women.

You know that backward, ugly attitude? Islam didn’t invent it. We’ve got plenty of it to go around in the western world as well. To assume that it’s being imported by brown people into a white civilization that is innocent of sexism and misogyny is, well, racist.

It’s also a reflection of an attitude Pat seems to miss. Saying that Western culture is not necessarily superior to other cultures is not implying that we’re inferior. The attitude I see among progressive feminists is that fundamentalist Islam is well and thoroughly fucked up, as is fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Judaism, and maybe we should reject all of that garbage.

The progressive part, of course, is that we also recognize that Muslims are human beings and they deserve equal rights. That’s the equality I endorse. Maybe Condell is confused because he thinks they don’t deserve that?

And now this is flaming racism.

Norway and Sweden used to be among the safest for women. Now they’re best known for their high levels of Islamic immigrant rape that nobody in power wants to acknowledge or do anything about that because that would be racist.

Consequently, Norwegian and Swedish women are no longer safe in their own countries, for cultural reasons. Indeed, Sweden has been so “enriched” by Islamic immigration that its women statistically have a 25% chance of being raped in their lifetime.

Oh, god. That is so dishonest; this is the kind of lies fed to a racist public by right wing tabloids. Sweden does have a remarkably high rate of reported rapes. But that’s because, as a progressive culture, they’ve taken great care to document all cases of sexual abuse. Nothing gets swept under the rug.

But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries’ records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.

"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.

"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record – one victim, one type of crime, one record."

Condell is holding the conscientious record keeping of Swedes against them. This misleading statistic has been widely reported, so there’s no excuse for this lie…unless he gets all of his news from the Daily Mail.

And to imply that this surge of Swedish rapes is a consequence of raping hordes of Muslim immigrants is simply unconscionable. Given that between one in five and one in six women in America (and one in three if you’re Indian!) will be raped in their lifetime, with the more stringent requirements for counting an act as rape here, a figure of one in four for Sweden does not sound remarkable in comparison. Remarkable that it’s so damn high, but not remarkable in that it’s so high everywhere, even in the US, where we can’t blame it on an invasion of Muslim rapists.

Wait, you do need a cherry on top of all this racism, don’t you?

So forgive me for being blunt about this, girls, but there are more important things to get angry about than offensive language on twitter or sexist comments about your appearance.

Fuck you, too, Pat. We can be angry about genital mutilation and honor killings at the same time we’re angry about cranky old racists who are still fussed about every new wave of immigration since the Normans, and about sexist dudes who think they should be given a free pass on calling women “bitches” and “cunts” because they can find someone else who did something worse. We’re also quite capable of evaluating the relative harm of each of those without you falsely telling us that some of them do zero harm and must be ignored. You don’t get to tell me what I’m allowed to be enraged over, and let me assure you, I’ve got enough anger at all of these cultural toxins to go around. My fury encompasses whole worlds, and you’re right there in the list with mullahs and popes and KKK members and Republicans and assholes on youtube and members of UKIP and the English Defence League.

Boy.


Rebecca Watson seems to be somewhat sarcastic, but wow there are some similarities here.

Why are all your speakers older white men?

We asked several women and people of color to participate but unfortunately none were able to make it. We’re not sure why, but it’s a shame because we were planning a workshop with Richard Dawkins titled, “Things Marginalized People Should and Should Not Be Angry About: Everyday Bigotry (No) and Religion (Yes).”

I’m not the troll, but I think they caught one in their sample

I got a strange email the other day.

Dear Troller

Dear Dr Myers, I note that you are trolling our work Please find attached a copy of our SPIE paper which we gave in San Diego. I would welcome the opportunity to give a talk at you Institution so that you, with all your infinite wisdom, could shoot me down in flames and make a fool of me. However, I doubt that you have the balls ! Professor Milton Wainwright

“Trolling” their work? And who the heck is Milton Wainwright? And then I looked at the paper and realized…

Earlier this week, someone had told me that there was another loony “organisms from space” paper touted as proof that British scientists had discovered alien life published in that joke journal, the Journal of Cosmology by this guy Wainwright, and I admit it, I took a quick look at his goofy blog. But that’s it! All I did was read it! I didn’t comment or write about it here!

For a moment I had this terrible thought that maybe the crackpots have finally figured out how to read our minds.

But then I realized that these guys get so little attention paid to them that they probably carefully scrutinize their tiny little referer logs, and they noticed that someone from Morris, Minnesota stopped by, and obviously, since I’m the sole inhabitant of this eerily empty ghost town on the prairie, it must have been me.

So now merely reading their work is trolling.

Well, now I guess I’m obligated to follow through. I had read their paper and decided it was more of the same ol’, same ol’ and hadn’t said anything then, but I’m willing to summarize it.

It’s crap.

The data collection is fine. They’re lofting balloons into the stratosphere, and at a designated altitude, are opening a trap that allows dust, debris, small organisms, and so forth to settle and adhere to EM stubs. Then the trap is closed, the balloon descends, and they put the stubs on the electron microscope and see what is floating around in the atmosphere.

So far, so good. The problem lies in the interpretation. They’re then sorting the material observed into known vs. unknown, where “known” is clearly material from earth, and “unknown” is immediately categorized as Possible Signs of Extraterrestrial Life. The logic doesn’t work. It makes no sense. You’re looking at low density airborne particles in the atmosphere of a planet; it’s not as if we’ve come even close to categorizing all the particles of terrestrial origin, so you can’t play this game of assigning subsets to some other source outside our world.

The authors also have a bad case of apophenia. Almost every bit of unrecognizable garbage they spot is called “life”. Here is one of their examples.

A, Sheet-like inorganic material recovered from the stratosphere which is clearly not biological; and B, a  clump of stratospheric cosmic dust which includes coccoid and rod shaped particles which may, or may not, be  bacteria.

A, Sheet-like inorganic material recovered from the stratosphere which is clearly not biological; and B, a clump of stratospheric cosmic dust which includes coccoid and rod shaped particles which may, or may not, be bacteria.

So the sheet-like stuff to the left is not biological (how they know that, I don’t know and they don’t tell us — I think it’s “it doesn’t look like it to my untrained eye”), while the amorphous blob to the right may or may not be biological. In other words, the information content in this image is precisely zero. (By the way, that mess on the right doesn’t look at all bacterial to me.)

In other cases they flat out claim that the blob they see is biological.

An unknown biological entity isolated from the stratosphere

An unknown biological entity isolated from the stratosphere

Unequivocally biological, no less. How they know, I again don’t know. It seems to be that when they stare at it and do a little subjective pattern matching, they call something a “neck” and something else a “body” — that is, they slap labels on things that conform to their beliefs about the morphology of organisms.

The structure shown in Fig.3 however is unequivocally biological. Here we see a complex organism which has a segmented neck attached to a flask-shaped body which is ridged and has collapsed under the vacuum of the stratosphere or produced during E/M analysis. The top of the neck is fringed with what could be cilia or a fringe which formed the point of attachment of the neck to another biological entity. The complexity of this particle excludes the possibility that is of non-biological in origin.

Complexity does not exclude a non-biological source. Also, just saying that things have names similar to the names we’d give a life form does not support the claim that it is anything other than a subjective interpretation of some debris.

They have another example that demonstrates my point.

A collapsed balloon-like biological entity sampled from the stratosphere. Note the “proboscis” to the left,  with nose-like openings and the “sphincter” present at the top of the organism

A collapsed balloon-like biological entity sampled from the stratosphere. Note the “proboscis” to the left, with nose-like openings and the “sphincter” present at the top of the organism

The structure shown in Fig.4 is also clearly biological in nature; here we see a somewhat phallic balloon-like structure which has presumably collapsed under low pressure. A “proboscis” is seen emerging from the left of the main cell which has two, nostril-like openings. At the top of the collapsed “balloon” is a sphincter-like opening. Again, this entity is clearly biological in nature, and is not an inorganic artefact. Although it is clearly not a bacterium it could well be an alga or a protozoan of some kind. The organisms shown in Figs. 3 and 4 are presumably clear enough for experts in the relevant branches of taxonomy to provide some kind of identification.

Why would an alga or a protist have a proboscis with nostrils? Do they have multiple samples that exhibit a similar shape? Isn’t it more likely to be a random scrap of material, rather than the patterned shape of an organism?

gnomish

Oh, wait. They missed something: look at that wrinkle at the bottom right of the object. It looks like…a pointy ear. And then there’s the nose, alright, and a robust jaw beneath it. By golly, it’s the tiny decapitated head of a gnome that was less than a tenth of a millimeter tall in life! And its forehead has been bashed in, no doubt in a great battle between microcosmic fairy tribes waged by thrip-mounted cavalry in the skies!

I think that’s a more plausible explanation than the authors’ similarly evidence-free guess that unidentified particles are signs of extraplanetary life.

Also, I thought Journal of Cosmology was defunct — it was up for sale, complete with crude slymepit-style parting shots at me. I guess it’s still dribbling on, providing a forum for the worst and dumbest kinds of pseudoscience.


By the way, Rawn Joseph, former(?) owner of the JoC, appears to have had a rather nasty falling out with Chandra Wickramasinghe, who he accuses of theft and plagiarism.

The media have become Jesus-stupid

OK, this is just stupid. A lawyer is trying to get the conviction of Jesus overturned. The state involved no longer exists, the man has no living kin or friends to carry the case forward, and it’s not even certain the individual actually existed…not to mention that the case is 2000 years old and is only one of many thousands of similar executions carried out by Rome. Dumb, a total waste of time, something to laugh at briefly and then dismiss.

But the article goes on and on, at overtly theological length. I had just clicked through when someone sent me the link, and as I was reading this, I was wondering…what is the source here? Is this one of those wacky religious newspapers or something? No serious secular source would give a good god damn for this nonsense.

So I looked. This was from Time magazine.

As oddball as the case may be, Indidis’ effort does raise a larger theological question that Christians have long debated: Why did Jesus have to die? Theologians have argued that his death was required for salvation to actually happen and that it was important for Jesus, who claimed to be the Messiah, the God-man, to experience human suffering and death.

TIME devoted a cover story to that question in 2004, when Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ premiered. Theories of atonement, the theological term for the meaning of Jesus’ death, have varied throughout Christian history, and the story is a deep dive into how the doctrine of atonement changed over time:

What was the cosmic reason for his agony? What is its purpose, its divine calculus? How precisely does his death, usually referred to in this context as the atonement, lead to the salvation of humanity?

The atonement “is the centerpiece of Christianity, and it’s what distinguishes it from all other religions,” says Giles Gasper, a religious historian who has written a book about one of the topic’s great medieval interpreters. Without at least an intuitive comprehension of atonement, a believer stands little chance of making sense of the faith’s promises of redemption and eternal life.

It is a question believers will continue to ponder. But as the Apostle Paul explained, in the New Testament’s Book of Romans, the atonement comes with rewards: “If we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

How does the execution of some guy lead to our salvation, and what cosmic purpose did his agony have? It doesn’t, and none. Case closed. Bye.

I knew there was a reason I haven’t read Time in years.

CGI = Truth

Ed Brayton dug up this amusing preview by backslapping creationists of a movie that’s in the works. It’s a 3-D animated retelling of the book of Genesis — the whole thing is generated in the bowels of a computer, therefore it must have happened for realio, I guess.

It’s an interesting argument. If this is how the universe works, I’m gonna look up Tony Stark next time I’m in New York. I hope they’ve repaired all the damage Superman did earlier this summer. I’m going to have to steer clear of my family on the West coast, though: I really don’t want to get stomped by a kaiju.

One of the many benefits of living in Minnesota is that we don’t have many horrible monsters or superheroes manifested by the magic of pixels around here.

Bug off, Ramachandran Lyer

Every day this idiot sends me examples of his “science”: I just created a filter entry specifically for Ramachandran Lyer to automatically trash his spam. It was entertainingly stupid for a while, but it’s gotten to be a bit much. For instance, just now:

Behind the ear there are eight veins, these veins has direct connections with uterus. When these veins are tuned with tip of the finger, will generate a vibration in the uterus that produce more eggs.(MW p-765) this in Sanskrit is called matri. Since it is attracting the vibrations from eight sides viz1) East, 2)South East,3)South, 4)South west, 5)West , 6)North West, 7)North and 8) North East, the vibrations are notified as ashta dik Bhujas. In Sanskrit these are mentioned as 16 Amino Acids, scribed on a copper plate. It is worshipped as the wife of universe (Aryaman) A diagram is drawn on a plate
There are 3 types of toxins that is responsible for miscarriages.
1) long Nero toxins, 2) Short Nero toxins and 3) Cardio toxins. In Vedas it is identified as head of a cattle like, Horse, Goat and camel. These toxins will affect the ion in protein, and eat away the electron the centre of the seed, thereby preventing that from taking minerals from the mother’s blood, so that the seed dissolve automatically, without life.

Dear god. I’ve got work to do, and I’ve got zombie-brained twits pounding on my door and babbling word salad.