Steven Schafersman is the president of Texas Citizens for Science, and he sent along a status report for Texas — it’s not all bad news, and of course it’s always good to see a strong, active organization defending science in the state. I’ve put the full report below.
Ben Stein must be on a campaign to make himself look stupid. Everyone here knows about his association with creationism, but it turns out this former student of economics at Yale is clueless about everything…but he still gets published in The New York Times.
First, let me begin with a first. I have never warned readers away from any one columnist or journalist, but after reading his column this weekend in The New York Times , I feel obligated to tell readers to never read Ben Stein again.
In indicting traders and lackeys in the press for the subprime selloff, Stein offers not one shred of evidence. Moreover, his implication that traders would purposefully tank the subprime market because they are short stock belies the reality that almost every Wall Street firm is getting creamed because they were not short. And traders are getting laid off left and right. Again: because they were not short.
He speaks about a wise brother-in-law who apparently once explained the legal system to him. He mentions a trader he once spoke to about a movement in the price of IBM. And that’s it.
He goes on to raise an eyebrow about the spread between the size of the write-offs and size of the market losses, without mentioning that part of the market losses have to do with the fact that no one knows where these securities should be priced (unknown is the greatest market fear) and, uh, there has been a concern or six about the economy besides subprime taking down prices.
I have seen a lot of bad business journalism in my day, but nothing as irresponsible and so wholly unsupported by facts. Actually, by even a single fact. This is his last line:
“And one thing’s for sure: With the traders running things, it won’t be a good time for amateurs until the traders cry “Switch!” and the market starts to rise.”
Read it (if you promise me it’ll be the last of his work you read) and tell me if this effort is any better than the braying on conspiracy Web sites. It was a shameful effort.
I’ve remarked before how difficult it is to satirize creationists — they’re already so absurd that any mockery is often overtaken by the reality. There is a corollary: creationists shouldn’t try to do satire. They really, really suck at it. This fellow from Sebring, Florida, William Dailey, Jr., has created a web site called the First Church of Evolution, for instance. There’s not much to it; he seems to have simply vented his spleen in a few text pages, but while he may think he was cleverly making fun of evolutionists, but all he really accomplished was to parade his own misconceptions. Here’s a sample:
Statement Of Faith
NATURAL SELECTION
We believe Natural Selection is a God to many, with the power of chance to form all things. This unseen, unknown force is the power for those who truly believe they have ascended from lower animals.
CHARLES DARWIN
We believe Charles Darwin is the prophet of Natural Selection. Having been chosen by Natural Selection, he has evolved to the most high prophet, having visualized through imagination the formation of all living things.
DECENT
The belief in positive mutation of living things which have descended from a common ancester, through millions of years in time and gazillions of transitions is a matter of faith.
THE SACRED WRITINGS
We believe that each of the written words of the Prophet Charles Darwin are as holy scripture among those who by faith believe they have evolved from lower animals.
CHANGE OF SPECIES
We believe change above or below species such as frog to dog, pig or monkey to man is a matter of unquestionable faith.
WE BELIEVE IT TAKES FAITH TO BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION
Not even close. Look, a good satire needs a germ of truth to it. You need to take an actual attitude prevalent in the group you are making and just give it a little twist, enough that your target can recognize themselves and be made a bit uncomfortable. This is at best a satire of creationists, because it reflects their attitudes about faith more than ours.
Sorry, Bill. Go back to the drawing board, and aim for a little subtlety. This effort reminds me of a second-grader’s attempt at mockery, the kind of thing where a kid tries to make fun of someone else by making a funny face and announcing, “Durrr, I’m Suzy. I’m a poopy-head. Durrr.” I cringe when I see it, not because it’s struck anywhere near the mark, but because the poor dope doing it looks so foolish.
I’ve got to wash my underwear.
It’s a strange, weird world out there. I get hate mail all the time, but you know me — I’m mean and cruel and I don’t hesitate to pull out the sharp, sharp knives of unkind rhetoric. Other people get hate mail, too, and here’s one that made me laugh and laugh (which is also really mean, since I’m not the recipient.)
You people are going to ruin your little daughter and make her burn in hell like the two of you. You think you are clever and so does the devil. Only God has the answer for you. God or G. Bush.
That last line is a real laugh-getter — some people have problems distinguishing god from Bush, and I’m not talking about Moses — but there’s more. What did this horrible person and his child do to deserve such damnation? Is he a militant atheist? A commie pinko Kucinich supporter? I don’t know; maybe, but it’s not apparent from the blog. The blog has a theme.
It’s about vegan parenting.
Oh, man, when George W. Bush discovers that people actually post vegetarian recipes on a blog, he is probably going to send Chuck Norris over to kick their asses and slap ’em around with a side of beef. I’m just relieved that I’ve never posted my old recipe for miso soup here, or I’d really be in trouble — I’d be posting from Gitmo in between waterboarding sessions, or dodging lightning bolts from heaven.
We have another point of correspondence. Remember how Kent Hovind’s organization was bellowing and bucking about to block criticism on youtube? Now the Discovery Institute is up to the same shenanigans, trying to silence criticism by shutting down their youtube critics.
It’s a good video that also nicely explains Dembski’s Harvard/XVIVO fiasco as an ironic counterpoint.
The Discovery Institute’s attempts to launder their internet presence have reached ridiculous levels — they’ve even asked Les Lane to remove a photo of Casey Luskin — “copyright infringement,” don’t you know — which is simply bizarre, unless you figure that they’re smarter than we think, and eradicating embarrassments like Luskin is one of their new tactics.
This is an unbelievable statement from one of our top medical advisors. Heroin overdoses kill many people; there is a cheap rescue option, though, kits called Narcan that cost a mere $9.50 and allow people to save lives. The Bush administration opposes their distribution.
Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, opposes the use of Narcan in overdose-rescue programs.
“First of all, I don’t agree with giving an opioid antidote to non-medical professionals. That’s No. 1,” she says. “I just don’t think that’s good public health policy.”
Madras says drug users aren’t likely to be competent to deal with an overdose emergency. More importantly, she says, Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isn’t as likely.
Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug user’s motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.
Hang on there…Bertha doesn’t like non-medical professionals having access to an antidote? Does she also tut-tut the availability of defibrillators in places where someone without a medical degree might use them to save a life?
And it just gets worse. She opposes saving lives because watching a friend go into delirium, spasm, turn blue, and die in front of you is a pretty good deterrent to drug use. Even better, if you turn blue and die you won’t be repeating your filthy drug habits ever again — the War on Drugs chalks up a win! We have a public health official advocating more deaths among victims of drug abuse as part of their compassionate approach to improving the health of our citizens.
Hey, here’s another suggestion: let’s stop teaching people the Heimlich maneuver. Not only does it put a medical procedure in the hands of mere non-medical professionals, watching a few fat people in your local McDonalds choke and die, turning purple, thrashing on the floor, and clawing their throats, would be an excellent salutary lesson in the dangers of gluttony and poor dietary habits.
(hat tip to Abel)
We’re about to witness a monstrous event here on Scienceblogs.
Omnibrain: weird neuroscience from an inveterate smart-ass.
Retrospectacle: Parrots and hair cells with Shelley passing out the cookies.
Both are young graduate students in neuroscience, and both have decided to shut down their blogs…and
restart them as one freaky hybrid. They aren’t going away, they’re anastomosing.
There is one obstacle. They don’t know what to call this brand new twisted experiment in blogging, so they’re running a contest to name the new blog (they don’t mention it, but they’re also going to need a redesigned banner), and they’re giving away prizes for the best name: a free subscription to Seed, books, and a hodge-podge of other random science stuff.
I’m no good at the blog-naming biz — look at what I came up with for this one! — but all this talk of Shelley and Frankenstein brought to mind some obvious epithets: “abhorred monster”, “hideous progeny”, etc. I think they like their proposed merger, so those won’t do. So I searched on a full text version of Frankenstein and found the only place where the brain is mentioned in the whole book:*
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should he impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.
Maybe I’m just morbid, but I think “Food for the worm” is an excellent name for a blog.
Somehow, I don’t think I’ll win any prizes. You people better take over.
*By the way, the next chapter contains the account of the revivification of the monster. It’s not very dramatic — no lightning bolts, no creaking chains in an old castle, no grisly stitchery of corpses. Frankenstein just does it, leaving the method unexplained.
Has anyone else noticed that you often only need to read the first sentence of anything written at Uncommon Descent to see them screw up royally? Especially, lately, if the author is Denyse O’Leary. Take this, for example.
Textbooks often don’t discuss extinction — the death of all members of a species — in any detail.
That’s news to me. I opened up my intro biology text, which is more a philosophy and history of biology book, and found 23 pages dedicated to discussing extinctions. It’s been my experience that most textbooks will mention at least the Permian and K/T extinctions; they’ll include quite a bit of material on modern extinctions; and they’ll always discuss mechanisms of extinctions. It’s as if these people have never even cracked a biology book, yet feel perfectly comfortable in declaring precisely what’s inside.
Even weirder, O’Leary goes on to quote a section from David Raup’s excellent book, Extinction (damn those evilutionists: they’re always trying to hide the facts by writing books with titles that say exactly what they’re about. Douglas Erwin also has a book titled Extinction — we’re trying so hard to avoid discussing in any detail these subjects, you see.) Raup wrote a book in which he documented the importance of chance events in evolutionary history, arguing that some major events, such as extinction in the face of overwhelming environmental trauma, are not something that any lineage can adapt itself to — some events really are just unpreventable accidents. He also carefully explained that because many major processes are driven entirely by chance, that does not mean that selection is false or doesn’t occur. Evolution has a plurality of mechanisms. O’Leary quoted a paragraph of that, and here’s her take.
In his day, Raup was taking a big risk by even suggesting that Darwinism might not be true, so he wisely merely provides facts that dispute it — and then covers his tracks with a resounding promotion of Darwinism in areas of study that he does not actually address in his book in any detail.
Wha…? That’s simply insane. David Raup was most definitely not suggesting that evolution by natural selection (which is what I presume she means by “Darwinism”) was not true, nor did any of the facts he describe in the book in any way dispute the role of selection. Raup is not in any way on O’Leary’s side. He is not a cunning stealth creationist writing a book to rebut evolution, and hiding his motives in a few false testimonials — he’s an evolutionary biologist, his book supports evolution, and the reason he’s explaining that extinctions don’t refute natural selection is because they don’t, as anyone with a sliver of reading comprehension would be able to tell you after reading his book.
Here’s the other amazing thing about the creationists’ output. The first sentence is stupid and patently wrong, but they always manage to get even stupider as you read deeper.
