There is a little girl dying of cancer in Seattle (there are, of course, little girls dying of cancer everywhere). There’s a positive aspect to the story, of a community pulling together and providing support for her family, but there is also a poisonous taint to it all—most of the support isn’t actually for a suffering young girl, but for a communal fantasy.
Did you know…
…that men never get abortions? If you aren’t strong enough to have that baby, you’ve got no grounds to complain about male privilege.
…some of the instruments used in abortions are just like the ones used in transgender surgery?
…that every woman who gets an abortion would rather be taking a long romantic walk on the beach than be lying there with cold steel probing about in her nethers?
Pandagon has a whole collection of great arguments against abortion. Use them, and contribute your own!
And lest you think those are just too silly, here are some slogans from real signs that I see on my drive from Morris to the Twin Cities:
“Fetus” is just another word for “baby”!
A baby’s heart starts to beat at 24 days.
A baby can smile in the womb!
They are all accompanied by photos of adorable happy babies, too.
As Revere points out, Michael Moore gave Sanjay Gupta a whomping. What I missed in the Moore-Gupta match, though, was the big picture. Basically, they argued over details: Gupta put together a “fact check” that claimed Moore fudged various numbers, while Moore showed that his numbers were legitimate. What appalled me, though, was the spin put on it, the spin that Gupta did not acknowledge.
Gee, people seem to have slowed in sending me announcements, or it’s a slow summer week, but I only have two carnivals to report: I and the Bird #53 (it’s their second anniversary!) and Friday Ark #147.
I can also say that next week is time for the Tangled Bank, to be held at The Voltage Gate on 18 July. Send links to me or host@tangledbank.net.
Go below the fold to comment on anything you want, or to see the recent collection of cephalart (it’s also been a while since I ran one of those.)
You can listen in on George Johnson’s and Sean Carroll’s conversation at Bloggingheads right now. I’m doing this next week with John Horgan, so I should have closed my eyes—Sean is so much prettier than I am.
Don’t let that stop you, though. It’s interesting stuff throughout, and one of the better dialogs I’ve seen on bloggingheads.
This is turning up all over the place — at Brad DeLong’s, Crooked Timber, and this pair is from Cosmic Variance — it’s the most sublimely, awesomely, wickedly stupid example of fudging a curve ever. The two graphs below have exactly the same data points, and the only difference is the curve that was ‘fit’ to the distribution. Which one looks plausible to you?
The one on the left looks sensible and simple, and looks like it was actually drawn with some consideration of the data. The one on the right … not so much. I have no idea how anyone could think that particular curve belongs in there.
Now guess which one was actually published?
Hint: it was published in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.
Someday, somebody’s going to write a book about the shenanigans at the WSJ that allows a clown college, the editorial staff, to exist and thrive within the bounds of an otherwise staid and sort of boring, but respectable, newspaper. That they could actually publish something like the ridiculous abomination on the right and no one said “Wait! What about our credibility?” is merely symptomatic of some really interesting pathology going on there.
It’s like a flood of papers on that curious cnidarian worm, Buddenbrockia. Now you can also read about its thoroughly bizarre pattern of development — there are unicellular amoeboids, plasmodial masses, and syncytia involved, so be prepared to be titillated.
Professor Steve Steve, how could you?
He will be going into rehab, and promises never to do it again.
(via Zeno)
Curses — we almost had Sandwalk in our grasp. If only we’d sent the borg queen in a little earlier, we might have overcome his resistance.
Ah, well. There are other blogs to conquer, although I must say the swooning and shrieking and histrionics among the SciBlings as we absorbed yet another godless evilutionist into the hivemind would have been … entertaining. I shall not regard this as a setback, since Larry’s blog will still be promoting a nefarious world-view similar to my own. Bwahahaha!
Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron’s math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show’s statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski’s got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he’s got to make this ridiculous taunt:
Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that they won’t. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that we’ve found the tomb of Jesus? And to think that until just recently the skeptics didn’t even think that Jesus existed.
They won’t be interested because the author is Dembski, a man with no credibility. They also won’t be interested because it’s a dead issue; none of the skeptics I know or read were at all impressed with Cameron’s methods or interpretations, and certainly didn’t make any declarations that Jesus’ tomb had been found. I saw the program, and I thought it was crap from beginning to end. I think the universal consensus was that Cameron was a laughingstock and the whole sorry episode was a joke. But now Dembski thinks he has accomplished something by debunking a claim we rejected months ago?
I have this mental image of Dembski strutting around the dusty roads of Texas and finding a dead horned toad, partially consumed by birds, dessicated and defleshed and clearly long deceased. He gives it a kick, and then pompously declares that he has slain the ferocious dragon that had the godless skeptics cowed. And he writes a paper about it.
