But what about capitalism, Rush?

Rush Limbaugh’s network has lost millions of dollars this past quarter, and he may be on the way out. Apparently, the problem is that advertisers have fled his show in droves, especially after his rages against Sandra Fluke. But you knew he’d have an excuse: it’s all the women’s fault.

Despite sources close to Limbaugh that accuse Dickey of scapegoating the radio host for a bad quarter, Limbaugh himself has addressed his advertiser woes in the past. But Limbaugh doesn’t see his offensive bloviating as the problem driving mainstream advertisers away; instead, he accuses media buyers who are ”young women fresh out of college” and “liberal feminists who hate conservatism” of “trying to harm” him.

I had no idea that women now controlled all the media; did you women reading this know you had such immense power?

Now I have a few requests. Right after you’re done flushing Limbaugh’s career down the toilet, could you shut down Fox News and Glenn Beck (well, you’ve been doing a good job on him so far), and perhaps redirect some small fraction of those advertising dollars to Freethoughtblogs.com? Thanks, much appreciated.

“Intolerant Atheists Viciously Attack Christian School”

That’s right: a mob of snarling, vicious atheists on PCP descended on an innocent, pious group of reverent Christians, on their knees and heads bowed in prayer, and brutally clubbed and stabbed them. Just ask Ken Ham.

Oh, wait, no…what actually happened is that the Answers-in-Genesis inspired exam given at this one school came to light, and thousands of people expressed their dismay at the miseducation being delivered in the name of Jesus Christ. You’ve probably seen it. It’s so, so dumb.

creationsciencequiz

It’s got everything: the earth is only thousands of years old, dinosaurs and people coexisted, “Were you there?” Ken Ham is shocked that people all around the country saw that abominable collection of lies and were appalled, and immediately curled up into the traditional persecuted Christian ball of martyrdom.

Now, this Christian academy is not a large school. Yet the atheists went after it with incredible fervor. The school administrator informed us she knew that the school would be involved in a spiritual battle after the quiz went public, but she was not expecting such ferocity. She told us she was shocked at the level of hate that the atheists poured down upon her, the teacher, and the school in general.

This is clearly a sign that the atheists are taking over the world and opposing good Christian morality. Ham even has a list of all the evil things atheists are doing.

How Are Atheists Becoming More Aggressive in America?

  1. Billboards promoting atheism and attacking Christianity have popped up across the country.

  2. The American Humanist Association has launched a special website for children to indoctrinate them in atheism.

  3. An atheist rally in Washington DC last year had a special promotion to encourage kids to attend their atheist camps.

  4. Atheists have been increasingly using terms like “child abuse” to describe the efforts of Christians who seek to teach their children about creation, heaven, and hell.

  5. Many atheists claim that children belong to the community, not to their parents.

  6. Atheists have actively opposed any effort in public schools to even question a belief of evolution or suggest there are any problems with it.

My reply consists of simply referencing the material on the Answers in Genesis site.

  1. dragonbillboard

  2. The Answers in Genesis Creation Education Center.

  3. The Answers in Genesis Vacation Bible School.

  4. “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:4–5)

  5. Citation needed.

  6. Does the quiz cited above give even the slightest acknowledgment of any education in the evidence backing up evolution?

Hypocrites and liars. Typical Christians.

Fortunately for Matt Yglesias, Lindsay Beyerstein only leaves him in a metaphorical smoking crater.

A couple of commenters here have persisted in defending Matthew Yglesias’ odious bleat that life is cheaper in Bangladesh because it ought to be because reasons, and that any anger we Westerners might feel about the horrendous loss of life in the recent factory collapse ought more helpfully be directed to buying clothes made in those collapsing sweatshops so that eventually the people making a few hundred dollars a year will have flat screen televisions just like us.

Yglesias is doubling down. In a followup post, he stands by his conclusion that poor countries need to have less stringent workplace safety standards, and adds, as a prelude to accusing his critics of “poisoning the atmosphere,” [see update at end of post]

I’m not really sure what Americans can constructively do to get better enforcement of building codes in Bangladesh

As it turns out, Lindsay Beyerstein has a possible answer:

A group of Bangladeshi and international trade unionists put forward a bold plan to make the garment industry in Bangladesh safer. A surcharge of 10 cents per garment over 5 years would raise $600 million a year, enough to radically transform the infrastructure of the garment industry in Bangladesh. Walmart and the Gap rejected the proposal in 2011.

So that’s pretty handy: All America has to do to make sweatshops in Bangladesh safer is to stop fucking obstructing their being made safer. It’s win-win!

Oh, and a protip to Yglesias: If you persist in discussing the worker safety aspects of US investment in South Asia, you might want to consider not using “poisoning the atmosphere” as a way to tone-troll your critics. We have a 30th Anniversary coming up late next year that will turn that phrase a bit unfortunate.

Updated: in comments, nialscorva correctly points out that I misread Yglesias’ reference to “poisoning the atmosphere.”  My bad. Leaving the post as it was for transparency’s sake.

Musings from the mind of a mouse

Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn’t the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It’s hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance.

I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman for Intelligent Design creationism. He just makes me so happy.

His latest tirade is inspired by the New York Times, which ran an article on highlights from the coelacanth genome. Luskin doesn’t think very deeply, so he keeps making these arguments that he thinks are terribly damaging to evolution because he doesn’t comprehend the significance of what he’s saying. For instance, he sneers at the fact that we keep finding conserved elements in the genome, because as we all know, there are lots of conserved elements.

Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was found between Hox-gene-associated DNA across these organisms isn’t very surprising.

[Read more…]

Yankee brainlessness

The craven tools in congress can’t get up the nerve to increase gun control so our kids won’t be as likely to be shot in school, but that just creates opportunity for capitalists. You can now buy bulletproof backpacks.

Lined with ballistic material that can stop a 9mm bullet travelling at 400 metres per second, the backpack is only one of a clutch of new products making their way into US schools in the wake of Newtown school massacre. As gun control legislation grinds to halt in Washington, a growing number of parents and teachers are taking matters into their own hands.

The Denver company that supplied Jaliyah’s rucksack, Elite Sterling Security, has sold over 300 in the last two months and received inquiries from some 2,000 families across the US. It is also in discussion with more than a dozen schools in Colorado about equipping them with ballistic safety vests, a scaled-down version of military uniforms designed to hang in classroom cupboards for children to wear in an emergency.

Parents “taking matters into their own hands” in the most selfish and stupid way imaginable. If only that effort could be focused on getting assault rifles out of the hands of self-righteous assholes…but there is no money for Elite Sterling Security in improving actual security, but there’s a lot in increasing fear.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree

There’s another Hovind! And he’s an idiot, too! I’m no fan of genetic determinism, but man, when every person I know saddled with the name Hovind is a bible-thumping twit, I begin to have doubts.

The new Hovind is Chad. He’s a preacher, of course, and he likes to turn complex subjects into simple-minded Bible verses, of course, and he’s making videos to promote his nonsense, of course. His thing is Godonomics. You guessed it, the Bible tells you everything you need to know about economics. And his god is a free market capitalist, of course.

I watched a couple of his introductory videos. It’s the usual schtick: selective use of Bible verses with his own interpretations that allow him to twist it into his desired conclusion. We’re apparently supposed to recognize that “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” is a deep insight into modern economics, if only we’d see it.

I was also amused…hey, is he using a felt board to make his arguments? I haven’t seen one of those since Sunday school. Imagine Glenn Beck (who praises “Godonomics”, as does Mike Huckabee) using a felt board to put up his frantic diagrammatic scenarios. That’s this Hovind.

I looked, but I couldn’t see if Chad is fond of the kind of economic advice that put Kent in jail.

Creationism certainly does undermine education!

Tina Dupuy had a good op-ed published in the Sedalia, Missouri newspaper, titled “Teaching creationism hurts kids, undermines educational system“. Yeah, it does: it prompted some rebuttals that made her case even more strongly. John Nail has some complaints:

Writer had it dead wrong on debate over teaching creationism

In response to Tina Dupuy column in the April 15 paper entitled “Teaching creationism hurts kids, undermines education system,” I’d like to say, “Phooey!”

From the article it sounds like she has some real issues with her mother. [Cheap shot. Dupuy’s article had issues with her mother’s fundamentalist dogmatism…just like Nail’s] It may be good therapy for her to vent in the column, however she submits NO scientific evidence of the evolution theory [The piece is about how creationism kept her ignorant of science; it’s not a scientific treatise]. The only item she mentioned was when she wrote, “There’s plenty of self-evident evidence (see: the flu virus). …”. A virus is not even a living organism. [And yet…they evolve!]

From the Answers in Genesis website (answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v1/n1/has-it-evolved) [Uh-oh. Not a trustworthy source at all]: “So what should one say if asked, “Is the ‘bird flu’ evolving”? It could be said that the avian influenza genome is evolving only in the sense that it’s continually changing and modifying [Uh, yes? That’s evolution!], and not in the sense that it will someday be something other than an influenza virus [It will become a different kind of virus, with different properties. It will not become a chicken, nor does evolution predict that it will]. Yes, influenza viruses do possess a certain degree of variability; however, the amount of genetic information which a virus can carry is vastly limited[So? So’s the amount of information in your genome, John Nail — that we don’t have infinite genomes is not an argument against evolution], and so are the changes which can be made to its genome before it can no longer function[Again, limits are what we expect in the real world; show me a system with an absence of limitations on its behavior and maybe I’ll start believing in your god].”

“Scientists”[The only “scientists” who deserve scare quotes are the shabby charlatans that Nail cites] tell us the moon is 4.6 billion years old. If it were then the Apollo 11 astronauts should have stepped off into several feet of space dust instead of the inches they did. Based on the accumulation of dust (which is measured by “scientists”) the moon would be 7-10,000 year old [Oh, please. Seriously? The Moon Dust argument? Even Answers in Genesis, Nail’s favorite source, rejects that claim!].

The word dinosaur means “large lizard”[No, actually, it means “terrible lizard”] — Ms. Dupuy, we still have large lizards [So? “Dinosaur” is a specific name referring to a specific clade with specific features in their anatomy that are distinct from those of extant lizards—the argument from word roots is irrelevant to the biological reality. I could call John Nail an ass, but that doesn’t mean he’ll sprout long ears and a tail and start braying (oops, well, he is doing that last bit already)]. In fact, large lizards were small when they were young. Noah could have easily had immature “dinosaurs” on the Ark [He could have also packed in every species in the planet as gametes stored in liquid nitrogen, with the temperature maintained by giant refrigerators driven by a nuclear power plant. Your fantasy about what ‘coulda’ happened isn’t evidence of reality]. Natural Science museums do not show the rabbits, squirrels and other currently known animals whose bones were found with the dinosaur bones[Say what? Rabbits found in the Cretaceous would be amazing. Too bad they aren’t — John is just making shit up]. It would be to hard to explain why they were living together in the same times[Yes it would. But they haven’t.].

When I was in school in the 60s we learned about the cavemen: The Peking man, the Java man and others. When they were exposed as hoaxes, they were not removed from the textbooks [Because those are all examples of Homo erectus. They were not exposed as hoaxes, by any means — rather, many more fossil examples have been found].

I could list many scientific reasons that macro-evolution makes no sense but we believe what we want to believe[If they’re of the same quality as the reasons given so far, no need to bother]. As an ancient text says, “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.”[I think it was in the best interests of the authors of the Bible to claim that wisdom is foolishness, to make their foolishness look wise.]

I have taught[Fuck, no!] in a Christian school (St. Paul’s Lutheran)[Unsurprising] for the past fifteen years. We look at both sides of the argument[Liar. We can see already that he knows nothing of the science]. The government schools only look at one side so who is getting a “better” science education? [The kids in schools that actually teach the evidence, and how it was determined, and who are not getting prepackaged superstition in the guise of science] We are not afraid of the scientific discoveries[Because you will readily distort them to fit your agenda]. They prove the Bible true! [Seven day creation, zombies invading Jerusalem, genetics determined by striped sticks, self-serving ahistorical bullshit, all of that? Nope.] The Bible is not a bunch of “stories.”[Actually, it is largely the mythology of a tribe of pastoral, patriarchal jerks who successfully murdered and enslaved their way to a small niche in the Middle East, and then frantically invented a legendary triumphal history to prop up their egos when they were serially crushed by stronger tribes] It is a record of God moving in the history of mankind [Yeah, right, and Star Trek: The Next Generation is about an all-powerful psychopath named Q…but that doesn’t make it true]. We cannot prove that God created the earth and everything in it in 6 days, no one we know was there to see it[But we can look at the scientific evidence and disprove your myth]. Neither can we prove that a spark started life billions of years ago. No one was there either[A true acolyte of the frauds at AiG: “Were you there?” Nope, but there’s more to evidence than just eyewitness testimony…which is actually a miserably poor form of evidence]. And we certainly cannot replicate either in a lab[Actually, yes, we can replicate pieces of the chemistry in the lab. We can’t replicate magical beings poofing things into existence]. So, Ms. Dupuy, it all comes down to what we want to believe[I want to believe I’m a billionaire who can fly by flapping my arms. Is it true?]. I understand that if you do not believe that God created the world in six days[Because it is contradicted by the evidence] then you probably have a difficult time in believing the account of God’s amazing work in the lives of people then and now [Which is unsupported by any credible evidence]. My prayer is that God would touch your life in a mighty way so that you will know with certainty that God is real [What an evil wish: the one thing we learn from the Bible is that their imaginary deity is a vicious amoral thug. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, not even John Nail].

Just to put the icing on the cake, John Nail actually is a teacher (kindergarten through 5th grade) and principal at St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Sedalia. I feel so much pity for the kids being sent to that undoubtedly awful school.

It’s Matthew Yglesias’ world: we just get blown up in it.

I haven’t had much use for The Lizard of K Street since he posted this sociopathic little gem in 2004:

Did the president really gut the Endangered Species Act yesterday while no one was paying attention? So I’ve heard, at any rate. If so, good riddance. You’ll all yell at me, I suppose, but really: Who cares? Species die, shit happens, get over it.

It is not exactly news that Matthew Yglesias is a tepid thinker. Poking holes in Yglesias’ vacuous, self-absorbed puffery has long been a popular pastime among bloggers from the progressive left to the hard right. He’s got himself a cushy gig these days, squirting out incontinent posts with no detectable logical or factual value, and as long as people give his outlets page views it’s all good. Eyeballs are eyeballs, and it doesn’t matter much if those eyeballs are rolling upward hard enough to burst blood vessels.

But this shit? This shit is inexcusable.

Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum.…

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you’ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody.

There are three main problems with Yglesias’ argument.

  1. Yglesias’ argument is profoundly immoral. People are willing to take bigger risks to feed their families when they’re burdened by poverty, yes. But arguing that we should use that unfortunate fact as a basic design feature of global workplace safety regulations is vile.
  2. Yglesias’ argument is profoundly ahistorical as well. Workplace safety regulations — and environmental laws, and education for women, and all of the thousands of other social goods we fight for — don’t magically appear when societies’ wealth passes a certain threshold as a result of the airy  fapping of the invisible hand. Those regulations come into being because people fight for them, often dying in the process, against the opposition of the entrenched powers that make the regulations necessary in the first place.  And here Yglesias is on the side of the entrenched powers, willing to wave away yet another workplace disaster so that he can continue to enjoy the cheap cotton shorts, running shoes, and tablet computers he sees as his birthright.
  3. Yglesias’ argument is essentially plagiarized from a 1991 memo by Laurence Summers written when the latter was the chief economist at the World Bank. A salient sampling from that memo:

I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. … The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand.

An individual human life is worth fewer U.S. dollars in Bangladesh, and so betting that lower-value life against the possibility that you might actually survive your $432 per annum minimum wage job just makes better sense there than it does here, eh Matt? Hell, if the typical Bengali minimum wage worker survives his or her job for three or four years before they get crushed to death by an unsafe building, they may actually have come out well ahead of the game!

It’s a repugnant argument.

Matthew Yglesias should be ashamed of himself.

Happy Eliminating All References To Him Day!

earthday

It’s Earth Day today, and I had no idea this was an atheist holiday. Ken Ham sets me straight, though, explaining that Earth Day is actually an anti-christian plot.

You see, God made humans stewards of the earth, which basically means that we’re supposed to turn it into farms and gardens. There are also bad things that were brought about by the Curse of the Fall, and icky things that don’t help people be fruitful and multiply are supposed to be removed.

Meanwhile, Earth Day is just a bunch of pagans elevating the universe over the imaginary being he claims created the universe, so it’s bad. Furthermore, it’s…evolutionary.

But we must be cautious of putting the creation over the Creator. Romans 1 warns against worshiping the creation rather than the Creator—and many Earth Day celebrations are founded on evolutionary ideas, where man’s opinions are lifted above God’s Word. And we must remember that “nature” is not perfect. In fact, we read that God cursed the ground in Genesis 3:17. That will dramatically affect how we understand farming and gardening. Also, in Genesis 3:18, thorns and thistles came into existence as part of the Curse. Thus, man can help improve things by working against the Curse.

So, see, the tallgrass prairie that once dominated where I live, and was home to bison and prairie dogs and prairie chickens and passenger pigeons and numerous small lizards etc. etc. etc. better serves God’s purpose when we plow it down and replace all that diversity with endless fields of corn and soybeans. That’s Earth Day to an evangelical Christian: chop down that copse of trees, rip out that inhuman habitat, replace it all with a fecal lake for the nearby pig farm. That lake glorifies God!

There’s also the inevitable denial of scientific facts. Global warming is a myth, his “Christian perspective” says so.

As a biblical creationist, let me illustrate how I would deal with a specific issue like climate change, which can serve as a useful example of how we should use biblical principles when we approach any issues associated with Earth Day.

I argue that the earth’s climate has gone through a few major periods of change, but in every case, humans did not produce the change. Ever since the Flood of Noah’s time, about 4,400 years ago, people have seen an unsettled earth in its sin-cursed state. Many smaller climate changes have occurred and continue to occur (perhaps in cycles). Whether humans have contributed significantly in a detrimental way is just not suggested by the evidence we have at hand.

What a nice, succinct explanation for why we shouldn’t want Christian dogmatists in charge of anything to do with maintaining the planet’s life support system. They’re all just slacking, simultaneously declaring that nothing can go wrong because of God’s will and everything is screwed up anyway because God cursed it. Christians and Libertarians: a hellish combination of oblivious destructiveness.

By the way, I promised yesterday that I’d try another Google+ Hangout tonight, at 9pm Central time. I’m hoping I’ve got the bugs worked out this time, so we’ll give it another shot. This time around, though, in keeping with the day, let’s focus on a theme — “Earth Day: Atheism+Environmentalism”. Be prepared to explain why you think the environment is an appropriate topic to have on atheism’s agenda, and why you think the godless (or at least, the non-libertarian atheists) ought to be better than anyone else at being stewards of the planet. Keep in mind, though, that not all religious people are as batty as Ken Ham and his ilk. Maybe it would work if all the bureacrats in the US Department of the Interior were required to be druids? Let’s discuss the intersection of religion and the environment!