I agree with this guy

I don’t agree with the two guys on the other side of this debate, but Nasser Dashti, arguing that the Islamic world must become more secular, is spot on.

I believe that the time has come for us to adopt the secular, rational, scientific approach, and to remove religion from public life and confine it to the private sphere. Every person is free to understand his religion as he sees fit, and he is free to change his religion, to adopt any school of thought or religion, and to spread his ideas in keeping with the modern rules of human rights.

—Nasser Dashti

Maybe once the Middle East becomes secular, we can start working on fixing the USA in the same way.

Important questions, I hope someone tries to answer them

Every four years, Shawn Otto and his ScienceDebate organization politely suggest that science, engineering, tech, health, and environmental issues deserve a presidential debate, and every four years they’re ignored — largely because our presidential candidates are never really competent to discuss science in any detail at all (can you imagine Trump trying to bluster his way through a discussion of science and education policy?). But one thing that does get a regular response is the list of 20 science policy questions. Now there are a lot of questions I’d like to see both campaigns address.

It’s a rather quixotic effort, but it’s important to keep the pressure on. Go sign the petition at Sciencedebate.org.

We are so screwed

It would be so nice to imagine that Donald Trump was a lone anomaly, and once he’s defeated in an election, the problem will go away. Unfortunately, the real problem is the dumbasses who are supporting him now — they’re just going to find more cocky fascists to prop up. Watch this and weep:

A little skepticism about an extrasolar planet is required

Okay. It would be really cool if there were an earth-like planet orbiting the star nearest us. Now there’s news dribbling out about a putative discovery of a rocky planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri. Except, unfortunately, the story is grossly premature and unreliable. A few warning signs:

  • It’s a rumor published in Der Spiegel, a news magazine, not a scientific publication.

  • The discoverers are unnamed. What science publication uses unidentified sources?

  • The general source is the La Silla observatory, which previously claimed to have found an earthlike planet around Alpha Centauri B…a claim that was later retracted.

  • The story gets stuff wrong.

    Knowing that there is a habitable planet that a mission from Earth could reach within our own lifetimes is nothing short of amazing!

    Whose lifetime?

    The fastest spacecraft we’ve ever fired off, Voyager, is traveling at about 17 km/sec, which is fast alright — but it would still take tens of thousands of years to get there.

Fraser Cain, usually a reliable source, has already made a video about the ‘discovery’.

Nope, I still don’t buy it. There’s no evidence there. You could make the same video with generic science-fictiony images declaring that scientists have discovered little green men on Mars, and it would be just as convincing, that is, not.

The video also mentions Project Starshot, which would be one way of getting man-made objects to velocities somewhat closer to the speed of light. This scheme involves building 100-billion-watt laser arrays and firing them at laser sails hauling teeny-tiny chips with built-in micro-gadgets to do everything our regular space probes do and transmit the data back to Earth. Project Starshot is the baby of a Silicon Valley billionaire, so of course it must be a good idea.

You know, we’re kind of in a golden age of space exploration, with all kinds of information coming in from robots on Mars or flying around Jupiter. The real data is exciting, but these impractical fantasies are not.

God’s stealing the credit again

godfail

Prayer doesn’t work. Miracles don’t happen. Faith and spirituality are nothing but magic words for nothing at all. So what is a church to do?

Easy. Buy something that does work, and slap a religious label on it. So the Catholic hospitals are busy growing again.

Catholic health care services are buying up an increasing number of hospitals in the United States — 1 in 6 hospitals now answer to the Catholic authorities — and in many towns, the only hospital in the area is Catholic. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, except that these hospitals usually have to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which expressly forbid any care seen as fiddling with the “natural” course of reproduction. Interpreted faithfully, means no abortion, no contraception, no sterilization, and a ban on many fertility treatments.

It’s win:win for ignorance! Not only does Catholicism get to claim credit for scientific successes, but they get to spread harmful doctrines at the same time!

Here’s another case of a ‘higher power’ inflating it’s potency: 12 step programs. They don’t work.

There is a large body of evidence now looking at AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent. Most people don’t seem to know that because it’s not widely publicized. … There are some studies that have claimed to show scientifically that AA is useful. These studies are riddled with scientific errors and they say no more than what we knew to begin with, which is that AA has probably the worst success rate in all of medicine.

It’s not only that AA has a 5 to 10 percent success rate; if it was successful and was neutral the rest of the time, we’d say OK. But it’s harmful to the 90 percent who don’t do well. And it’s harmful for several important reasons. One of them is that everyone believes that AA is the right treatment. AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.

It’s always the victim’s fault when it comes to faith-based treatments. The very first comment there is a perfect example of religious apologetics.

I’m a recovering addict/alcoholic with over 5 years of continuous sobriety. I attend AA meetings regularly, and I take exception to Dr. Dodes statement, “AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.” I have never attended a meeting where this sentiment was expressed. The AA Big Book says, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”

Exactly. It doesn’t work, the stats show it doesn’t work, but according to AA, it always works, except when it’s the subject’s fault, which is 95% of the time.

What are the assnuggets up to now?

invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-1978-donald-sutherland

There are horrible, awful, no-good people everywhere who are doing wretched things and making the world a worse place. Let’s catch up with a few of them.

  • James O’Keefe, still lying for a living. The fraud was caught trying to make another video in which he pretends he’s someone he is not, in this case, he tried to commit election fraud to ‘prove’ it is a serious problem. It isn’t. Unsurprisingly, he was immediately caught trying to fake his identity in Michigan. This is a succinct summary of O’Keefe’s entire career.

    “James O’Keefe is a professional liar,” Dickerson said. “He just isn’t very good at it.”

  • Do you know of the all-time horrible person, Mike Cernovich? He’s an MRA and general Twitter troll, a conspiracy theorist and racist, and an advocate for rape. Not a nice guy at all. But he got invited to appear on a Fox News show called Red Eye, which prompted howls of outrage, not from lefty liberals, but from far right wingnuts who have their own reputation for looniness.

    “You’ve got to be kidding me. He’s a nutcase,” said right-wing author and radio host Ben Shapiro. “Granting any legitimacy to a fringe kook like Mike Cernovich, and all of the attendant nastiness and problems, is close to insane by any cable network.”

    “Are you serious?” asked Ben Howe, a writer and editor of the conservative blog RedState, when informed of Cernovich’s Fox News appearance. “He was a guest on fucking Red Eye? They’re giving this motherfucker legitimacy? Oh my god!”

    Shapiro is a former editor at Breitbart, and fan of the Tea Party. When you’re so extreme that you’re getting repudiated by the likes of Shapiro and Howe, just say goodbye.

  • And finally, of course, Donald Trump. Digby writes about the time he pointed his finger at a woman reporter, opened his mouth, and screamed…I mean, told a crowd of fans that she was a liar, and the Secret Service had to act to protect her from the mob.

    He knows very well what he’s doing. He’s intimidating people, especially women, into going easy on him by threatening to sic his violent cretins on them. There was no other reason to publicly name her.

    Pure, vicious demagoguery. Now he’s also primed his thugs in Pennsylvania by declaring that the only way he can lose that state is if there is cheating. This is unadulterated bullshit, of course; he’s currently substantially behind Clinton in the Pennsylvania polls. But you all know what fun we’re going to have the day after the election when Trump makes excuses for his defeat by telling his lackeys to riot.

    Also, why is CNN calling Trump’s lie a “bombshell”? It’s not. It is just an open fabrication.

Cause and effect

Why do universities dislike Republicans so much?

Writing at Salon last year, Sean McElwee and Robbie Hiltonsmith analyzed a Grapevine study from Illinois State University and found “when Republicans take over governor’s mansions they reduce spending on higher education by $0.23 per $1,000 in personal income (a measure of the state’s total tax base). Each 1 percent increase in the number of Republicans in the legislature leads to a $0.05 decrease.” As Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia told U.S. News & World Report, “Most GOP elected officials believe that universities are hotbeds of Democratic support—and the voting patterns in most college precincts support this.”

You know, a lot of faculty are pragmatic, moderate, mainstream Americans who would not be averse to a cautiously conservative government — but the Republicans have evolved into education-hating radicals. The voting patterns in college precincts reflect the contempt of the Republican party right back at them.

But just the overall statistics aren’t quite as strong a punch in the gut as the personal attacks on education and science and investment in the future exhibited in these two states:

During the Great Recession, virtually all states cut their higher education funding. But since the low point in 2009-10, states have raised their higher ed funding by an average of 10 percent. Wisconsin, on the other hand, has cut its spending by 4 percent. The day before Governor Scott Walker announced his candidacy for president, he signed a budget cut of $250 million for Wisconsin public universities. (He wanted to cut $300 million, but the legislature wouldn’t go that far.) He also wanted to gut the La Follette-era “Wisconsin Idea,” such that the university system’s mission was no longer “the search for truth” but “to meet the state’s workforce needs”—proposed changes that Walker unbelievably blamed on a “drafting error.”

Something similar occurred in Louisiana under another Republican governor who made a failed bid for the White House in 2016. “The scope of Louisiana’s disinvestment is both startling and unique,” mourned The Advocate of Baton Rouge. “Louisiana … according to national surveys, has cut higher education funding more than any other state since the slowdown began. State aid to universities here has been slashed by 55 percent.” At the start of the recession, Louisiana covered 60 percent of university expenses; under Jindal, it fell to 25 percent, with tuition rising accordingly.

Why do Republicans hate America? Why do Republicans want to destroy science?