Maybe they’ll run for president in the next election

The Republicans are giving me some hope. They have quite the pair running for governor in Virginia: Cuccinelli and Jackson.

Here are some of the comments from Republican women in Virginia:

Waddell called “the worst ticket ever”, adding that she was “completely embarrassed and mortified by the Republican ticket of Cuccinelli and Jackson.”

Jan Schar told Blue Virginia that although she’s been a Republican for years, “I simply cannot support them,” as they would “end a woman’s right to make her own health care choices, including access to birth control.”

Schar was disturbed by the Republican ticket’s attack on Planned Parenthood, “which does so much good for women in Virginia…. to call them a racist group is simply beyond the pale and hopefully will frighten Virginians from voting for them. This team of three would take us back to their ideology.” Schar concluded, “I know so many Republicans who just can’t support [this ticket].”

Waddell (I/R) called Cuccinelli “extreme”, according to Blue Virigina, due in part to his “dangerous… anti-woman health agenda.” Reacting to the ticket’s charges against Planned Parenthood, she pointed out that it made “absolutely no sense to accuse Planned Parenthood of being a racist organization; it’s an organization which brings much needed health care to many.”

But that’s nothing. You should listen to Phyllis Schlafly’s latest remarks.

…in an interview this week with conservative radio program Focus Today, Schlafly just came right out and said it. Calling the GOP’s need to reach out to Latinos a “great myth,” Schlafly said that “the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election.” Schlafly accused the Republican “establishment” of nominating “a series of losers…who don’t connect with the grassroots.”

“The propagandists are leading us down the wrong path,” she said. “There’s not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican.”

Yay! Please please please, Republican party, quit pretending and just admit that you are the Wealthy White Man Party! Come right out with it in the next election, court the KKK, announce that you want to amend the Constitution to prohibit women from voting, sneer at all our citizens who are of Central and South American descent, campaign on a platform of banning contraception and evolution, and just be yourselves! I’ll enjoy it.

Unless they get elected, that is.

Super colossal jumbo-sized douchebag

It is the douchebag against which all other douchebags must be measured, Roman Polanski.

Polanski told the press that he is not pleased with how the sexes act with one another today. “I think that now offering flowers to a lady becomes indecent, that’s how I feel about it. I think to level the genders—it’s purely idiotic,” he said. “I think it’s a result of progress in medicine. I think that the Pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, ‘masculinizing’ her. I think that it chases away the romance from our lives and that’s a great pity.”

Right, because letting a woman control her own sex life and reproduction is a dismal outcome and totally unromantic. And medicine for women? What a pity. Remember what Polanski is famous for…

He was arrested for having sex with a 13-year-old girl after allegedly drugging her and plying her with alcohol.

He was originally indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs, child molestation, and sodomy. He accepted a deal by which he plead guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for the other charges being dropped and a sentence that was most likely going to be probation. Before final sentencing, however, he fled the country and returned to his native France out of fear that the judge would send him to prison.

Oh, yes — autonomy is such an unattractive and unstimulating feature in a woman.

What do the Boy Scouts, Catholicism, and Nazis have in common?

They were all seething, orgiastic hot-beds of prancing nancy-boys, according to Scott Lively. Alternatively, all three are lied about by Scott Lively.

It’s breakfast time here, so you might want to skip reading that whole essay: it’s stomach-churning homophobia and dishonesty. You won’t be able to read it without realizing that Lively really does hate gay people.

(via Joe. My. God.)

Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, you’ve got some explaining to do.

23 years ago yesterday, as my friends Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving through Oakland, California on their way to appear at a Santa Cruz rally against clearcutting California’s remaining old-growth redwoods, a bomb exploded beneath the driver’s seat. Judi was in that drivers’ seat and nearly died of her wounds. She lived in constant pain until cancer took her life seven years later. (Thankfully, Darryl’s injuries were not as severe.)

The bomb was a home-made nail-filled pipe bomb with a motion-sensitive trigger. (The explosion happened as Judi and Darryl were driving past a middle school’s bus stop at Park and Macarthur boulevards in Central Oakland: it’s a wonder no one else was injured in the blast.)

Judi and her daughters after her release from the hospital. David J. Cross photo

At the time of the bombing, Judi, Darryl, and their fellow Earth First! activists in Northern California had been the targets of a campaign of sustained harassment, including death threats. Mailed leaflets featuring Judi’s face with superimposed crosshairs, for instance. A few weeks before the explosion, Judi had been run off a rural Northern California road Silkwood-style by a logging truck. The local cops told her “if you get killed, then we’ll investigate.”

The context for this was that some time earlier, a local timber company — Pacific Lumber — had been bought out leveraged-style by junk bond trader Charles Hurwitz. Hurwitz  and his shell company Maxxam then started to liquidate PL’s holdings to generate cash. Among those holdings were some of the 5 or so percent of remaining old-growth redwood forests in California, which PL had previously been logging slowly enough that some people actually called the company a sustainable timber firm. Those trees started getting cut really quickly, endangering wildlife, the safety of timber workers , and the lives of people who lived downhill from the clearcuts.

Activists countered with a campaign modeled on the Civil Rights movement’s sit-ins, originally called Mississippi Summer In The Redwoods. Before long Judi and Earth First! had become central to the campaign, whose name was quickly shortened to Redwood Summer.

It was a really tense time in Northern California. Maxxam/PL managed to persuade some workers that the hippies were threatening their jobs, and the consequent conflict was ugly. That ugliness made the press fairly often. What didn’t make the press was the fact that Judi was an old-school union organizer: she identified more with the loggers than did most enviros, and she built some serious bridges between the two camps. Among other things, she got Earth First! in Northern California to renounce tree-spiking. She helped unionize a timber firm. Above all, she worked with timber workers to point out that sustainable logging meant sustainable employment, and that Maxxam’s cut and run practices meant mills would be closing as soon as the last tree was cut.

Still, those threats were out there and continuing. As horrified as we were when the bomb went off, it wasn’t particularly a surprise. What was a surprise was that the FBI arrived at the crime scene within minutes, and that the Oakland Police Department arrested Judi and Darryl before they’d been extracted from the ruins of Judi’s Subaru, charging them with transporting an explosive device.

The interior of Judi’s Subaru, the blast damage showing that the bomb was directly beneath the driver’s seat and not in the back footwell. Oakland Police photo.

The architect of this legal strategy? Mythbusters’ bomb expert Frank Doyle, then a special agent with the FBI.

Four weeks before the explosion, Doyle had run what was called a Bomb Investigator’s Training Course in Eureka in which law enforcement agents blew up cars with pipe bombs and then examined the wrecks for forensic evidence. There are two things that are especially spooky about this confluence of events. First was that Doyle, on arriving at the corner of Park and Macarthur, told his fellow first responders — four of whom had attended that course — “this is your final exam.” His statement was caught on tape.

The second spooky coincidence was that the bomb’s construction closely paralleled that of the practice bombs used at Doyle’s “bomb school.”

Doyle told the press that the damage to the car showed that it had been carried behind the driver’s seat, therefore was visible to the passengers, therefore they knew it was there and were deliberately transporting it. That lie was thoroughly shredded in a later court case, but at the time the press ran with it. Within two months all charges against Judi and Darryl were dropped for lack of evidence. You still hear people refer to them as the “people who were carrying that bomb.” The act of character assassination worked — a sentiment with which a Federal court judge and jury agreed.

Judi died of metastatic breast cancer in March 1997, leaving behind two young daughters. In 2002, that federal judge ordered Oakland cops and FBI agents to pay $4.4 million to Darryl and to Judi’s estate for violating their civil rights. During the trial agents admitted tracking Judi and Darryl for weeks before the bombing. The forensic evidence was clear. It was pretty much an open and shut case.

I am not saying that Frank Doyle had  other than an after-the-fact a role in the attempted murder of my friends, though it wouldn’t shock me if I found out that he did. But Doyle absolutely did thwart an effective investigation of that attempted murder. That’s a matter of established record. He ignored obvious leads, misrepresented evidence, and worked to frame activists for a horrible act of violence against them.

And nonetheless, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman decided to use Doyle as their go-to guy for explosives on Mythbusters. Despite the fact that Doyle tried to destroy two lives with a myth of his own concoction.

Let me be clear about one thing. Judi was not just targeted for being an environmental activist. The worst harassment, the worst threats that Redwood Summer activists received were directed at women. My friend Karen Pickett got some of those threatening letters too, and they were rife with misogyny to the point of being nearly laughable, before the bomb went off. (The accusation that women Earth First! activists were “box lunch eating lesbians” got used a lot.) One of the prime uninvestigated suspects in the bombing, a blithering godbag calling themself the “Lord’s Avenger,” claimed responsibility for the bombing and said it was in retaliation for Judi doing clinic defense at the Ukiah office of Planned Parenthood. That may or may not be true, though the Lord’s Avenger did apparently possess some interesting knowledge about the bomb’s construction.

Either way, Judi’s feminist activism definitely played a more than significant role in her being targeted. Male Earth First! activists got threats, and some of them were scary indeed. But it was the women who bore the brunt of the threats and harassment, and Judi paid the biggest price.

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The film “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” screened on the outside of the Mythbusters building in San Francisco, May 24 2013

Which raises a question. For all the criticism it has received for being sensationalist and superficial, Mythbusters essentially serves as a public face of Skepticism to viewers who have never heard of Skepticism. Yet apparently it’s no big deal for Adam and Jamie to support, employ, and publicize a man who may have helped target a feminist environmental activist for unbelievably painful harassment, and who certainly provided effective cover for the people who tried to kill her.

Darryl Cherney, who has plowed some of the proceeds from the court settlement into making a film about Judi, is trying to get Jamie and Adam to explain why they employ Frank Doyle. They’ve been reluctant to answer, even though Darryl went so far as to offer a free screening of the film on the wall of Mythbusters’ building this weekend.

Anyone concerned with the role of women in the Skeptics’ movement ought to ask them for an answer.

What have you done that atheists can’t?

Ah, Glenn Beck: bizarre as always. He’s now claiming that Wolf Blitzer Was Set Up, that “forces of spiritual darkness” maneuvered him into asking an atheist on air about whether she wanted to thank the Lord, just so she could denounce God publicly. Now everything is a conspiracy theory to these guys.

But what I also found interesting in his long ramble is his challenge to Christians to prove themselves worthy by getting out there and doing something that atheists can’t. This sounds like the inverse of Christopher Hitchens’ challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.” There is an assumption that somehow, Beck’s Christian followers have some mysterious capability that atheists don’t, although he never specifies what it is. I’d love to hear it, though.

Perhaps…standing by and doing nothing in the face of tragedy other than praying, and somehow feeling self-righteous about it? They do seem to have an almost magical lock on sanctimony.

Don’t tell the anti-choicers!

Or we could be in big trouble. The antis of Ireland have a whole arsenal of secret weapons in the battle to keep women pregnant that I haven’t seen deployed here — they have access to Catholic magic. I don’t think we’d be able to resist if they started cruising our country with magic paintings, magic garments (guaranteeing immunity from hellfire!), and magic faces.

No word yet on whether they have any magic briar patches.

After they defeat Darwin, the creationists will be coming after psychiatry next

I think David Dobbs is going to be amused to learn that the Discovery Institute thinks he has just demolished Darwinism by way of psychiatry. But in an article that is delusional even by the standards of that bastion of lunacy, the DI argues that the collapse of evolution is just around the corner. Again. Like always.

Here’s how David Dobbs decided the demise of Darwinism: he wrote a positive review of a book critical of the impending release of DSM-5, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. Such a small thing, the tiniest pebble that will lead to an avalanche of destruction and the total demolition of the edifice of modern science.

Or not. The book is critical of one component of the understanding of the mind, and it’s no surprise…hasn’t every edition of the DSM led to the gnashing of garments and the wailing of teeth, or something? As Dobbs points out, there really are fundamental flaws in how psychiatry handles mental illness.

The DSM, Greenberg concludes, “dresses up symptoms as diseases that are not real and then claims to have named and described the true varieties of our suffering”. Technically, the APA concurs, admitting sotto voce (for instance, in planning documents and public discussions for earlier versions of the DSM) that many psychiatric diagnoses are constructs of convenience rather than descriptions of biological ailments. This originates in an explicit decision the APA made, during the creation of DSM-III, to base diagnoses not on aetiology but on recognizable clusters of symptoms that seem problematic. The APA did so recognizing that this would mean stressing consistency among clinicians in recognizing symptom clusters rather than any other marker of a condition’s origins.

A slippery deal, but essential. For by formalizing this scheme, psychiatry can claim medical legitimacy and accompanying insurance coverage and pay rates so that it can help people. Unfortunately, writes Greenberg, this scheme has led everyone, psychiatrists included, to talk about and treat DSM’s conceptual constructs as if they are biological illnesses — a habit that has bred troubles ranging from overconfidence to incestuous liaisons with Big Pharma.

Yet neither Greenberg or Dobbs are predicting the annihilation of psychiatry. Rather, they seem to be discussing serious problems that need to be corrected so the discipline can advance.

As Greenberg writes, the DSM, and psychiatry with it, increasingly “casts its subjects into dry, data-driven stories, freed from the vagaries of hope and desire, of prejudice and ignorance and fear, and anchored instead in the laws of nature”. Yet when psychiatry works, it often works less at a biological than at a humanistic, narrative level, by helping the sufferer to reframe the story of his life and of his place in the world into one that includes a sense of agency, strength and social connection. This is doubtless why a combination of drugs and talk therapy generally works better than just drugs. It also helps to explain why schizophrenia, as described in Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010) and in work by Tanya Luhrmann, is much less disabling in cultures — or even treatment regimes — that cast its eccentricities more as variations in human nature than as biological dysfunction.

For more than 100 years, psychiatry has been getting by on pseudo-scientific explanations and confident nods while it waited for the day, always just around the corner, in which it could be a strictly biological undertaking. Part of the DSM-5’s long delay occurred because, a decade ago, APA leaders actually thought that advances in neuroscience would allow them write a brain-based DSM. Yet, as former APA front liner Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, confirms on Greenberg’s last page, the discipline remains in its infancy.

So…it works, but our understanding of how it works is in its infancy. That’s not the act of carving its tombstone, but merely issuing its first grade report card (“little Psych is very creative, but needs focus and discipline.”)

That doesn’t fit into the creationist trope, though, so they had to…reinterpret what was said (“little Psych is about to die, deservedly!”) This is a really old line: the Discovery Institute has a hard-on for psychiatry that rivals Scientology’s. Some years ago they were fond of citing the troika of 19th century failed philosophers: Marx, Freud, and Darwin. They predicted that because Communism was already dead and Freud was an old discredited pervert, Darwin was next. It was highly irrational ‘logic’, and smacked more of superstition than reason, but it was a big deal for them. They’ve also been arguing for years for dualism — there is a supernatural soul or spirit in the brain — and anything that tries to find natural causes for the mind is anathema to them.

So Dobbs, published in Nature, and Greenberg, author of a very serious book, are dragooned into the service of intelligent design, their conclusions twisted to support the dogma of the day, and are now cited as not just pointing out the problems with past assertions or the politics that distort the publication of a major reference work, but as a science in crisis, on its deathbed, about to be pushing up daisies.

I agree with Greenberg, Dobbs, and the Discovery Institute (Erk! My heart!) that psychiatry is rife with conceptual problems and a serious absence of sound natural causes for the phenomena they describe. But I’m not about to write it off completely, and I certainly do not understand this massive bounding leap of illogic.

The things being said about psychiatry now, though, on the eve of publication of its latest upgrade, the DSM-5, are revealing it to be a science in crisis — if it ever was a science at all. As we list the problems, ponder whether many of the same criticisms could be leveled against Darwinism.

That makes no sense. The 18th century assertion by spermists that the spermatozoon contained a tiny homunculus has been disproven, therefore I’m pondering whether the same criticism could be leveled against stem cell therapies. The archaic economic structure of the Ottoman Empire contributed to its collapse, therefore I’m pondering whether the same criticism could be leveled against the apocalyptic popularity of Fifty Shades of Gray. The designated hitter rule ruined American league baseball, therefore I’m pondering whether the same criticism could be leveled against the use of polysiloxanes in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.

A = B, therefore X = Y is not sound reasoning.

But reason won’t get in the Discovery Institute’s way, now or ever! So they compile a list of psychiatry’s shortcomings, as they gleaned from a number of criticisms they found on the internet, calling it a “failed science”, even though that’s not the impression I got from the sources they cite.

  1. Long history of failure.

  2. No theoretical basis grounded in biological reality.

  3. Reliance on a book.

  4. Conflicts of interest.

  5. Lack of quality control.

  6. Ignoring critics.

  7. Focus on symptoms instead of causes.

  8. Category errors: confusing arbitrary classification with reality.

  9. Attempting to pigeonhole complex entities into simple categories.

  10. Concern for consistency and consensus over empiricism.

  11. Tortured attempts to fashion theories.

  12. Formalizing schemes to gain legitimacy.

  13. Promissory notes to do better in the future.

  14. Hopes that other sciences will legitimize it.

And now the fun begins. They have cobbled up 14 reasons why psychiatry is totally wrong, so let’s make up 14 complementary reasons why evolution is totally wrong!

  1. Failure to explain the Cambrian Explosion since Darwin.

  2. Extrapolating natural selection far beyond the evidence.

  3. Continuing to exalt Darwin and his Origin.

  4. Scheming to keep criticisms of Darwin out of journals and classrooms.

  5. Flimsy assertions that “it evolved,” with little rigor.

  6. Refusing to hear or publish scientific critiques of Darwinism.

  7. Use of homology as evidence and explanation for adaptation.

  8. Inventing terms like “kin selection” and “evo-devo.”

  9. Attributing the whole biosphere to undirected causes.

  10. Claiming the consensus accepts evolution in every meaning of the word.

  11. Applying natural selection recklessly to everything, even the universe.

  12. Scheming to prevent intelligent design from gaining a hearing.

  13. Always saying “more research is needed.”

  14. Misappropriating genetics, computer science, and development to support it.

Uh, wait. Despite having the same number of items, the lists don’t really line up at all well — there’s virtually no correspondence between the two. Furthermore, many of those items are just plain wrong or repetitive.

  1. We do have explanations for the Cambrian explosion, and good ones at that. That one is just a plug for Stephen Meyer’s hack book that’s supposed to come out next month (and I’ll write more about the reasons when it’s out.)

  2. That some people overuse a powerful explanation does not imply that the phenomenon does not exist. This is the same as #5 and #11.

  3. We do not exalt Darwin. We respect him as a great scientist who still got many things wrong. Also, you do not need to read the Origin to learn about evolution.

  4. “Scheming”? No. Demanding rigor. Half-assed assertions of a “designer” with no evidence are not adequate. This is the same as #6 and #12.

  5. This is the same as #2 and #11.

  6. This is the same as #4 and #12.

  7. No, I’ve never heard homology or common descent used as an explanation of adaption. Retention of non-adaptive features, sure.

  8. Both kin selection and evo-devo are terms for real phenomena, one for a gene-centric explanation for altruism (for instance) and the other for a discipline that relates evolution and development.

  9. This is not false. There is no evidence for teleology in evolutionary history.

  10. The scientific consensus accepts the scientific meaning of the word. What else would we do? Anything else, it wouldn’t be a consensus!

  11. This is the same as #2 and #5.

  12. This is the same as #4 and #6.

  13. But we always need more research! If we had all the answers, we’d be done with science.

  14. It’s not misappropriation. Genetics does support evolution; have you ever heard of the neo-Darwinian synthesis? Computer science provides an essential contribution to modern biology; have you ever heard of bioinformatics? Development and evolution work together beautifully; have you ever heard of evo-devo? Oh, right, you have, you just believe we made it all up.

The creationists are just getting more desperate and pathetic. They didn’t even try to come up with a reasonable set of correspondences — apparently they trust their readers to be so stupid that they won’t actually read or think about the comparisons, they’ll just see 14 reasons evolution is just as wrong as psychiatry — it’s about as reasonable as saying that the 14 stations of the cross mean Catholicism is as doomed as Freudian psychoanalysis.

But then, non sequiturs are what I’ve come to expect from those awful writers at the DI.

Dobbs D (2013) Psychiatry: A very sad story. Nature 497:36–37 doi:10.1038/497036a

And we’re the intolerant ones?

Al Bedrosian is the Republican (of course) candidate for the Roanoke County supervisor, and he certainly makes his position clear in a 2007 op-ed to the local paper.

As a Christian, I think it’s time to rid ourselves of this notion of freedom of religion in America.

Now that I have your attention, let me take a moment to make my case. Freedom of religion has become the biggest hoax placed upon the Christian people and on our Christian nation.

When reading the writings of our Founding Founders, there was never any reference to freedom of religion referring to a choice between Islam, Hindu, Satanism, Wicca and whatever other religions or cults you would like to dream up. It was very clear that freedom to worship meant the freedom to worship the God of the Bible in the way you wanted, and not to have a government church denomination dictate how you would worship.

Christianity, by its own definition, does not allow freedom of religion. A Christian is defined as a follower of Jesus Christ.

He is forthright, I’ll give him that — he comes right out and says exactly what a lot of American fundagelicals think: they are intolerant radicals. They’re also guilty of magical thinking.

Beware, Christians, we are being fed lies that a Christian nation needs to be open to other religions. America is a great nation — not because of its freedom, great economic system, or even its military power. It is a great nation because the God of the Bible has blessed us in our freedom, our wealth and our military power.

Once we remove ourselves from worshiping the one true God, all the wonderful qualities of America will vanish.

If Al Bedrosian is an example of the wonderful qualities of America, please do vanish.

Justicar/Integralmath: Wretched skeevy piece of internet offal

Good god. I was just sent a link to this disingenuous youtube video by the above named scumbag in which he lectures Jen McCreight on “security”, claiming that she has revealed clues to her location on twitter, and that she’s either put herself in great danger, or she’s been lying about her concerns for her safety, given all the abuse she gets from wretched skeevy pieces of internet offal. And in the process, he displays all the clues he has!

You know, if he were sincere about sending her a message about security, he wouldn’t have essentially been pointing to her location and announcing to the world how to find her. To add to the hypocrisy, here are his final words to Jen:

Congratulations, you fucking nitwit. If it is the case, that there is a legitimate concern for your safety from the internet, good job posting to more than 9,000 people on the internet exactly how to find out where you commonly are.

Jebus, you hypocrite. You just broadcast the same information in the guise of “helping” someone with their security. This is the act of a coward intentionally taunting others to go do the harm to Jen that he would like to have occur.

I’m also fed up with the binary thinking these vermin propagate. You know, there are more possibilities than that you live like Salman Rushdie, hiding from a fatwah urging religious fanatics to murder you, and living in complete anonymity, unknown to wackjobs. One can also be moderately well known and take simple precautions like not posting your home address, without serious concerns that a determined hit squad is trying to track you down. That someone doesn’t have armed guards around their house does not imply that they haven’t been threatened. But apparently, even a grad student who blogs now and then is considered fair game for veiled threats by the slymers.

Isn’t it amazing that the anti-social justice atheists are now coming full circle to be almost as threatening to those they oppose as the Islamists? Same silencing tactics, same cowardly threats.