Trust Skepticon to turn April Fool’s Day into April Fool’s Month

Skepticon is pranking a couple of losers — every dollar donated is a vote for your choice of recipient of a goofy gift. You can vote for Heina Dadabhoy, Matt Dillahunty, Keith Lowell Jensen, or…what, ME? This must be a mistake. Hang on.

 
 
 
 

I had to run off and make a bunch of votes for those other people. I don’t need Mormon underpants, or my face on a potato, or a cardboard penis. Especially not the last one. As everyone knows, the penis I was born with is already _____________*. So go vote for everyone else, immediately.

*Choose one:
a) flat.
b) corrugated.
c) floppy.
d) made of 100% recycled wetsuits.

Mercola gets a $5 million slap

Joseph Mercola, the popular quack, has been selling tanning beds with a twist. He’s been claiming that exposing yourself to fairly high intensity ultraviolet light will prevent cancer. That’s right. An exposure that causes a low level of direct DNA damage prevents skin cancer, according to a quack.

The courts weren’t going to buy that nonsense, so Mercola settled a false advertising suit, promised to refund up to $5.3 million in tanning bed sales, and to never do it again. Of course he already has an explanation.

But speaking Thursday, Mercola said he only settled the case as “a business decision,” and stands by his claims that his tanning beds had cancer-fighting benefits and that Americans were suffering from what he called an “epidemic” of under-exposure to ultraviolet light, which he said could be treated by “moderate” sun bed use.

The duck says what?

He also swears he’s not selling these things for the money, but solely to help people.

While he acknowledged Thursday that he’d sold thousands of tanning beds between 2012 and last year, he said his business is not “a tool … to get me a bigger house and car” but rather a means of funding his mission to “inform consumers” about “natural health.”

He said he moved from the Chicago area to Florida, where he owns a waterfront mansion, four years ago because of his belief in the health benefits of the sun.

He’s not in it for the money, but he’s able to shrug off a $5 million judgment and has a waterfront mansion in Florida.

I have suddenly thought of one good consequence of global warming. One.

It’s Confederate History Month?

KansasKKKpainting

It really is! The governor of Mississippi says so, and a Republican in that fine state would never lie to you.

Fortunately, David Neiwert has been honoring the Confederacy appropriately. You should go read the whole series, it’s very enlightening.

Day 1: Strange Fruit
It Was About Slavery
That Peculiar Institution
How Poor Whites Got Suckered
The First American War Criminals
‘The River Was Dyed’
War By Other Means
Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them

It was very kind of Mississippi to invite this kind of inspection of their history.

The very best academic proposal ever?

It’s brilliant, and solves a host of problems at American universities. Why Not Adjunct Administrators Instead of Adjunct Instructors? It Makes Far More Sense. I agree. With the proliferation of administrators and increasing teaching loads on us faculty, it makes far more sense to make all those administrator positions into temp jobs.

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

There’s only one catch. The idea comes from Glenn Reynolds, Republican toady and right-wing shill, so it makes me suspect that I’ve missed something. It makes me pretty certain, actually.

Toxic gallantry

supermansaves

This afternoon I’m giving a talk on how evolution, and fundamentally, the naturalistic fallacy, is abused all over the place, and then I find this open letter to the various heroines of recent movies, and I just want gak all over it. Not only does this guy call on bad biology to defend his traditionally misogynistic position, but he’s a fundie Christian who believes humans were created by a deity, so he doesn’t even accept the biology he’s misusing.

I know the whole world is ladling on the adoration for your brave contributions to modern womanhood. However, you are behaving, all of you, in ways that do not befit your sex or glorify God. Frankly, and I’m sorry to have to say this, I really am, many of you look ridiculous. Your friends and family and fans may not laugh at you. But the angels do and history will. What you’re doing might be good politics (of a sort), but it’s bad biology, bad theology, and bad storytelling. It lies about who you are as a woman and how God made you. And it makes for lousy movies and TV.

Okay, that’s the nastiest part. Now let me explain.

Let’s talk about biology first, who you are as a woman.

The most obvious things are the hardest to defend. You can write whole textbooks proving something unseen and unexpected like gravity or photosynthesis. But how do you prove the existence of Mt. Everest besides saying “Look, there it is?”

That’s why I feel dumb saying this, but:

Women are the weaker sex. They may be the smarter sex, they are often the wiser sex, they’re probably the more industrious sex, they’re definitely the prettier sex. But they’re also the weaker sex.

[Read more…]

Looks A-rab, has an A-rab name, speaks A-rab…must be a TERRRRIST!

This is what this profiling nonsense comes down to. Khairuldeen Makhzoomi boarded a Southwest Airlines flight, and had a conversation on his cell phone with a relative.

On his way back to Berkeley, Makhzoomi, a loyal Southwest premier rewards member, boarded his flight to Oakland and called his uncle in Baghdad to tell him about Ki-moon’s event. At the end of the phone call, conducted in Arabic, Makhzoomi said goodbye to his uncle with the phrase “inshallah,” which translates to “if God is willing.”

When Makhzoomi hung up, he noticed a female passenger looking at him. Once he made eye contact with her, she got up and left her seat.

“She kept staring at me and I didn’t know what was wrong,” he said. “Then I realized what was happening and I just was thinking ‘I hope she’s not reporting me.’”

Minutes later, an airport employee arrived to remove Makhzoomi from the airplane. Makhzoomi was escorted onto the passenger boarding bridge where he was met by three security officers.

Yep. He was kicked off the flight and interrogated by the FBI. This is rank madness. If anyone should have been kicked off, it’s that paranoid woman who reported him for speaking a foreign language.

Southwest Airlines released a statement about the event.

A statement from Southwest Airlines says that prior to departure, the flight crew decided to investigate potentially threatening comments made by Makhzoomi aboard the aircraft.

We wouldn’t remove passengers from flights without a collaborative decision rooted in established procedures, the statement reads. We regret any less than positive experience onboard our aircraft. … Southwest neither condones nor tolerates discrimination of any kind.

Yeah, right. Then perhaps they could tell us all what the potentially threatening comments that informed their decision to refuse service to a customer might have been?

A little long-form reading for your weekend

I’m going to be doing a little traveling this weekend, for some R&R in the Twin Cities and also to do a public lecture on Sunday, so you need some good stuff to read. I recommend:

  • The Wetsuitman. A couple of bodies in wetsuits wash ashore in the Netherlands and Norway. Who are they? And the pursuit of that information leads to a tragic story about desperate immigrants, so desperate that they tried to swim across the English channel.

  • The Sugar Conspiracy. How an agricultural system that is really good at making immense amounts of sugar persuaded the world to ignore what it does to our bodies. Also includes bonus examples of scientists behaving badly.

  • We don’t know why it came to this. Did you know there is an epidemic of white women between 25 and 55 dying prematurely? The cause: economic disparity, poverty, and despair.

    White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

  • “Free, white, and 21”. There’s a phrase that has happily faded away into obscurity…until you start watching old movies and discover all these people in Hollywood proudly announcing their skin color as a triumph.

There. You should probably be able to find something to talk about in all that.

Guys who make me embarrassed to be a guy

Stop it. Just stop it. I’m usually quite happy to be male — it’s an incredibly lucky sex to be, and I’m chockful of hormones that joyfully confirm all of my biases — but then there are these other guys that are so stupid about it that I become uncomfortable. We should all be happy with who we are, and it’s not women who make me squirm, it’s the members of my own sex who do everything so badly. And there have been some terrible examples lately.

  • Men who think women owe them sex. Like this terrible story of a man who didn’t get the sex he wanted on a date. Don’t you know, he spent $30 on tolls?

    rejection

    It’s her decision, full stop. Don’t argue. And when you go on that kind of entitled rant, it just confirms how right her decision was.

  • Here’s another brand of obliviousness: a man wants his mother to be in the delivery room when his wife gives birth. His mother is apparently very critical and demanding, and his wife put her foot down and said no, so he went…running to Reddit to get advice on how to overrule her?

    You know you’ve got problems when you think Reddit is a good source for relationship advice. You ought to know you’re really screwed up when even the Reddit community is nearly unanimous in declaring that you’re a clueless doofus and you need to respect your wife’s wishes.

  • MRAs. Enough said.

Hasn’t neoliberalism done enough damage?

ronald-reagan

Time for it to die, and for the corpses of von Mises and Hayek to be dug up, paraded through the streets, and thrown into the Tiber. Every once in a while, I get some ass who snootily tells me that his (strangely, it’s always been a man) brand of liberalism is superior to mine, and then proceeds to announce that he is a true “classical liberal” (translation: he’s a flaming Libertarian) or more rarely, that he is a “neoliberal”, although that species of conservative prefers to hide the term under a fog of economic buzzwords. I detest them all.

Now George Monbiot has written a wonderful summary of the crimes of neoliberalism, that poisonous doctrine of St Reagan and St Thatcher. It’s one of those essays where I do a disservice to it by quoting only a small portion of it — but I’ll do it anyway, just so I can tell you to go read the whole thing.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

It is the most pernicious and pervasive ideology of our time. I’ve been hearing a lot of it in complaints about tenure and teachers’ unions lately — “these are just efforts to give teachers job security“, as if that were some horrible abomination. Shouldn’t we aspire to give everyone job security? Isn’t it a good thing when people can rely on stable employment and income? But no, much of the public has absorbed this notion that chaos and fragility are virtues, that we need to be able to, for instance, fire people as punishment for inefficiency.

They never seem to care that the beneficiaries of that ruthlessness all seem to be the most useless parasites, the profiteers and rent-seekers and exploiters of the market. The punishment is the thing. We’re all getting screwed over, but hey, at least we get the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else screwed over even more.