Virginia is for lovers…of similar skin tone and opposite sex who don’t touch each other’s genitals with anything other than their own

The worst attorney general in the world has to be Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli, who has been on a crusade to promote a far right conservative social agenda.

The Washington Post wrote that Cuccinelli has been ”the most overtly partisan Attorney General in Virginia history” and ”has waged war on Obamacare, harassed climate-change scientists, sanctioned discrimination against homosexuals and embraced Arizona’s (now mostly gutted) immigration law.” Cuccinelli waged an all-out assault on academic freedom by using state resources to sue a University of Virginia Professor who was researching global warming, and bullied members on the State Board of Health into shutting down abortion clinics by threatening to sue them.

But I’m hoping now that he has finally crossed the line with an effort to control people’s sex lives.

Although most people think sodomy laws have been unconstitutional since the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli would like to explain why — in his view — that’s not so.

What’s more, he wants the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to agree with him and uphold the constitutionality of Virginia’s sodomy law — which makes anal and oral sex between people of any sex a crime — in the process.

Yes. Ken Cuccinelli has a platform of outlawing blow jobs. Anyone campaigning against him in the future needs to remind the Virginia electorate of that.

The ark builders

Apoplexy is such an antique disease. I’d hate to die of it, just because is so unfashionable, but every time I read one of these stories about Answers In Genesis, I feel an attack coming on.

Yeah, they’re working on building a replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s all part of their plan for defrauding the public. The author talked to people at the existing creation “museum”, and hit one of those points that spike my blood pressure.

When I was at the Creation Museum I got talking to Greg Duck, an industrial courier who was visiting from Texas. He said his favourite part was a video where a creationist paleontologist who is digging alongside one of his peers says: “I start with the Bible. My colleague does not. We come to different conclusions because of our different starting points.” Duck said: “That is tremendous perspective.” I asked him if he believed in creationism. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “You’ve got to follow the facts.”

It’s the first lie the Creation “Museum” hammers at you: ‘we’re all using exactly the same evidence, it’s just that we’re using that same evidence plus the bible.’ Yet the reverse is true.

What AiG doesn’t tell you is that there is a vast and consilient array of facts that demonstrate that a dinosaur fossil, for instance, is over 65 million years old. We’ve accumulated all these methods that lock together to agree on the age; and these are the same methods that lock together to support modern technology. They provide for a gigantic library of facts tested and reinforced by reality that testify to the age of the earth.

The Bible has one brief poetic passage on its first page that gives a cursory, non-specific, unverifiable assertion by authority that the creation was brief and teleological, with no date specified. Some Christians, not all, have interpreted those passages to mean the earth is less than 10,000 years old. In fact, historically fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have accepted the old age of the earth; this demand that it must be 6000 years old is a fringe belief that was made mainstream by fanatics in the 1960s. It requires actively rejecting the majority of the data, the testimony of the rocks and stars, in order to make a completely nonsensical claim.

The gullible courier is not following the facts. AiG has to hide the facts and lie about their determination in order to make this utterly outrageous claim that they are taking the totality of the information into account.

Besides being built on lies, their intent is simply vile. They are true believers in Old Testament morality.

Marsh, the ark designer, has similar concerns. He said he had watched humans “become more sensual, more dangerous, more self-centred” – just as they did in the licentious society punished by the biblical flood. As a reminder, before park visitors reach the ark they will walk through a stucco-walled sin city filled with the evils of pre-flood society, which he has decided will include prostitution, torture and cage fighting. On the other side will be a Tower of Babel and a ride themed on the plagues unleashed on Egypt, among them a river of blood and swarms of locusts. “We basically have retribution through this whole thing,” Marsh said.

Shouldn’t it bother us all that the basis for their arguments about morality are built on fear of a retributive event that didn’t happen? That we’re supposed to quiver in fear of a godly wrath that is nothing but a falsified myth?

Relax, everyone. It’s only a metaphor.

The Telegraph’s environment denier James Delingpole wants us to know he really doesn’t think environmental scientists and journalists should be executed:

Should Michael Mann be given the electric chair for having concocted arguably the most risibly inept, misleading, cherry-picking, worthless and mendacious graph – the Hockey Stick – in the history of junk science?

Should George Monbiot be hanged by the neck for his decade or so’s hysterical promulgation of the great climate change scam and other idiocies too numerous to mention?

Should Tim Flannery be fed to the crocodiles for the role he has played in the fleecing of the Australian taxpayer and the diversion of scarce resources into pointless projects like all the eyewateringly expensive desalination plants built as a result of his doomy prognostications about water shortages caused by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?

It ought to go without saying that my answer to all these questions is – *regretful sigh* – no. First, as anyone remotely familiar with the zillion words I write every year on this blog and elsewhere, extreme authoritarianism and capital penalties just aren’t my bag. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it would be counterproductive, ugly, excessive and deeply unsatisfying.

So why does he bring it up?

Indeed, it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg. But please note, all you slower trolls beneath the bridge, that when I say Climate Nuremberg I use the phrase metaphorically.

A metaphor, let me explain – I can because I read English at Oxford, dontcha know – is like a simile but stronger.

There’s something that tickles the back of my brain about him using a simile to explain a metaphor by comparison to a simile. Why not go the whole way, and say something like “a metaphor is like a simile because each is analogous to an allegory”?

Anyway, Delingpole was engaging in hyperbole in response to criticism of a paywalled piece of his in The Australian, in which he said:

The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer: preferably in the defendant’s dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap.

For those of you not well familiar with the intersection of fashion and British jurisprudence, the black cap is a black square of fabric worn by a judge when ordering an execution. (Which hasn’t happened since 1973.)

I almost certainly need not explain what’s completely criminal about Delingpole’s disingenuous hate speech, whether or not he appends the condescending Oxford grad equivalent of a winking emoticon at the end. Technically speaking, Hutu “journalists” referring to Tutsi people as “cockroaches” was also just a metaphor.

It’s hate speech, plain and simple, uttered with the express intent of riling those who agree with Delingpole to suppress science.

Delingpole should be careful what he pretends he isn’t really wishing for. Life on this planet is likely to get very nasty for a large number of people in the next decades. At some point, as Britain suffers the third or fourth or fifth triple digit summer in as many years, and crops fail and people go hungry and the urban aged drop dead when the power goes out, there may well be calls for a “Climate Nuremberg” — and it’s doubtful that prominent denialist writers who call metaphorically for executing scientists and climate change activists will go unsummoned.

Happy 9th Paul Nelson Day!

It’s a dying holiday, I’m sorry to say — I completely forgot it last year. But I was reminded this year, so I’ll mention it again. I think the proper way to celebrate it is simply to laugh at a creationist today.

The source of the holiday is a remarkable exhibition from Paul Nelson, who like several other creationists, loves to register and present at legitimate science conferences. The barriers are low, and many conferences are intended to give students an opportunity to present, so you’ll often find that all you have to do is send in a fee and an abstract and you’ll be allowed to put up a poster in an allotted space for a few hours of time. So Nelson showed up at the Developmental Biology meetings in 2004 with a poster titled “Understanding the Cambrian Explosion by Estimating Ontogenetic Depth” in which he and Marcus Ross claimed to have been collecting data measuring some parameter called “ontogenetic depth” in various organisms.

I was at that meeting. I asked him about that in person, and also in blog posts afterwards. How do you measure ontogenetic depth? Share your procedure so I can assess and replicate it, which is what scientists are supposed to do. He hemmed and hawed and hmmphed and in typical Nelsonian fashion babbled and burbled on, and the upshot was that he couldn’t tell me just then, but he had something he was writing and he’d polish it up and get it to me the next day, 7 April. He didn’t. We’ve been watching the 7th of April pass by for nine years now.

I think he’s felt the sting of mockery. In 2010 he announced that my criticisms were invalid, but he was inventing Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, which still isn’t defined and still doesn’t have a procedure.

In 2011 he posted some more essays on his fictitious method, in the first of which he announced that ontogenetic depth is A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure. Yeah? So why was he presenting a poster at a serious scientific meeting in which he and his colleague claimed to have been measuring it? Sounds like scientific fraud to me.

But then, Intelligent Design creationism has been scientific fraud all along, so I guess he was just following hallowed tradition.

Good ideas and bad ideas

Hey, gang, sorry I’ve been neglecting the blog this weekend, but I’ve been off at Skeptech, and this has been a very busy conference…maybe a little too busy. The roster of talks and panels started at 9am, and Friday and Saturday they went on until 10pm, and it was maybe a little too densely packed for my taste…especially since there were all these interesting people to talk to. And then they’ve all been such interesting subjects as well…

One particularly interesting technological development was that there were two screens at the front of the room: one big one for the presenter to use, and a smaller one on which a twitter wall was displayed — all the silent conversations using the “#skeptech” hashtag were continuously displayed, which meant there was a constant flow of commentary from the audience sharing the stage with the speaker. It was rather cool — I’d like to see more of it at more conferences. It certainly made that hashtag explode with content.

It could also be abused, unfortunately. We seem to have a dedicated corps of fringe jerks who like to poison conversations they aren’t participating in. The same idiot anti-feminist/pro-harassment nonsense was going on with trolls on the #AACon13 hashtag, and we got some of that here, too. Two factors prevented it from being a big problem, though: one was the sheer volume of twitter comments from legitimate, involved attendees swamped out the trolls. Another (and it’s too bad no one used it as an example in the panel on anonymity and censorship) was that the displayed twitter wall used the Tweetdeck application, which includes a global filter option. Ha ha: all the slime trying to whine about harassment policies and throwing shit at various attendees didn’t appear on screen.

I just think all the “brave heroes” of the troglodyte faction ought to know that. Their activities are doing a fabulous job of further alienating themselves from the people who are actually active in atheism and skepticism.

By the way, I also have to tell JT Eberhard something. One of the points he made in his Hacktivism talk was that there is no such thing as a bad idea, and contrarian that I am, I immediately thought of lots of counter-examples. Burning churches, for instance, would be a bad idea if your goal is promoting secularism. But another bad idea is spamming conference hashtags with bile and noise, just because you can. Especially since, no matter what your cause, you’ll be perceived as damage and the tech will route itself around you.

SkepTech Reminder!

Today, tomorrow, and Sunday…SkepTech, at the University of Minnesota campus. I’m leaving for the big city this afternoon after I finish dispensing justice teaching/advising today, so I plan to be there the whole session, and maybe hang about into the evening.

Look at all the lovely speakers at this free conference:


Oh, and if you’re wondering what I’m talking about, my title is “Hacking Evolution: Transhumanist Fantasies, Biological Realities”: it’s a strangely sympathetic and simultaneously scathing critique of transhumanism.

Which reminds me…the talk isn’t quite done. I should get to work.