David Paszkiewicz speaks out…

…and he’s as much of a fool as you’d expect. Paszkiewicz is theteacher who told his students they deserved to go to hell if they didn’t believe in Jesus, among other things, and he has now written a letter to his regional newspaper.

The letter is about as you’d expect. It’s a long-winded example of quote-mining the founding fathers to support his continued claim that America is a Christian nation, and also that the courts are being used to strip Christians of their freedom. It’s awfully silly stuff.

All I can say is that I don’t care that the Jefferson and Washington held religious views—they also held slaves, and we managed to finally purge our country of that odious institution, so what’s one more? And if you are going to take Jefferson’s opinions and make them the model for our new state religion, I might be willing to go along with it, actually…but can you imagine the howls when we start taxing the Catholics and Baptists and make the Unitarians the official established Church of America? It would be hilarious.

Anyway, for what little it’s worth, I’ve put the letter below the fold.

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Weird Tales of the Sea?

I really don’t know whether to believe this story or not. It’s a diary of a sailing trip that reports an encounter with a fellow sailor who had experienced serious difficulties.

We reported last time that Shigeo’s trip from the Galapagos to the Marquesas had been terrible — after about 1000 miles his autopilot had failed, something had gone wrong with his steering, his engine water intake had clogged temporarily, blowing his impeller, the intake for one of his heads had clogged, and, most important of all, something had slowed his speed down to 2 knots, even with full sails, a lot of wind, and the engine running. He basically drifted with the current for the last 2700 miles, taking about 8 weeks to cover a distance that his 42-foot Beneteau could easily have sailed in a fraction of that time.

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That part doesn’t seem improbable, but the explanation for his boat’s sluggish performance is wild. Divers took a look at the hull, and found hundreds of strange circular scars all over it—they speculate that they are marks of a giant squid’s suckers.

Hmmm. I can’t believe that a giant squid would or could cling to a boat for 2 months, but I can’t think of any simple explanation for the strange marks. Any more nautically experienced people out there with a better alternative explanation? I’d be inclined to call it a hoax, but for the fact that there’s very little bang for the effort that would have had to go into it.

I almost feel sorry for them

Hey, I’m the wild-eyed creationist smasher in this family. So why are all the lame creationists doing their stupid act in my daughter’s blog? She’s actually getting comments like this, intended to refute evolution:

why is it that nothing today is evolving and why is it (if we did come from apes)that they haven’t all turned into humans?

Dogs are not evolving. different kinds of dogs yes but not dogs becoming cats

It’s pathetic and creepy how they think they can get their arguments past the 16 year old girl instead of the curmudgeonly old college professor—and she and her friends are still kicking their butts.

Oh, and this “For the Kids” character is really repellent. Concern trolls are even slimier when they go after your kids…but again, Skatje’s pretty good at handling herself.

Accept the implications

Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I’m sorry, guy, but that’s what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.

At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That’s because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same correlation holds today, only more so.

One other thing that that graph shows is that conservatism is associated with disbelief in evolution, and several people have complained that they dislike the way I phrased it, as “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science”. They’ve complained that it’s only a correlation, not evidence of causation, and that it’s not about science, it’s about evolution. However, I stand by my wording.

The voice of conservatism in America is the Republican party, and the Republican party stands against evolution, against stem cell research, against reproductive rights, against education, against the environment, against alternative energy research, against pollution controls, against good science education, against universal health care, on and on and on. I appreciate that individual conservatives in good conscience may deplore the anti-science agenda and divorce themselves from rather large chunks of the Republican platform, and I understand that the party has not always been such a refuge for know-nothings and may someday reshape itself, but face it: conservatism in this country is tightly coupled to scientific ignorance. If you are a conservative, that is your problem (just as the ineffective, dithering dullards of the Democratic party are my problem, as an openly declared liberal). Buck up, accept the responsibility, and do something about it. Fight for reform of America’s conservative political party.

Or maybe you sensible people who believe in conservative values just need to found a new party and get out from the umbrella of what should be called the Insane Christianist party.

It’s good to piss off the right people

One other important thing about using ridicule to combat your opponents: you have to be on very solid ground yourself for it to be effective. An excellent case in point is Michael Fumento, a rather deranged lawyer by training with negative experience in science (i.e., paying too much attention to him will cause cortical neurons to wither and die) has chosen to flail against competent science, and he makes a complete fool of himself. Fumento’s schtick is to play Chicken Belittle and downplay the importance of public health in favor of privatizing everything, and something that would require coordinated community response, like a potential pandemic, is anathema to him…so he ignores the science and pretends it will never happen. To make his case, I’m amused at his choice of targets: Revere, Mike, and Tim. This is another reason to be pleased to be at Scienceblogs—my peers here raise the ire of the anti-science crazies on both the right and the left. It’s good company!

Worms ‘r’ us

What’s a philosopher doing writing about science? Willikins has a short article on the idea that bioturbation was a major factor in the Cambrian explosion. I can go with that: the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian seem to have been times when the sea floor was covered with algal mats, and the successful animal forms were grazers who scraped the surface and worms that burrowed through them. Along with changes in atmospheric oxygen, the radical remodeling of the marine substrate were the major biologically induced changes in the environment.

Ridicule is a useful tool

And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.

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The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He’s got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it’s a MS Word file that doesn’t help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.

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