Winning! So hard!

It’s official: Paul Ryan won’t be running for re-election. He’s the 39th Republican to announce a retirement from office this year. It’s almost as if they know something.

He stated his two major accomplishments:

Ryan had long championed overhauling the tax code, a goal accomplished with the passage last year of the sweeping GOP tax bill.

“That’s something I’ve been working on my entire adult life,” Ryan said at his news conference.

He cited tax reform and rebuilding the military as his two biggest achievements and said he wants to accomplish more before stepping down.

What? He’s proud of a tax reform that’s a bonanza for the filthy rich and increases our debt?

Someone tell me when our military was weak and needed strengthening, because right now all I see is expensive overkill. So Ryan helped make that worse?

I think it’s more like he’s done all the damage he can do, and he’s getting out to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.

<gasp> I forgot Paul Nelson Day!

We were supposed to have waffles on 7 April, but instead I was off at the Secular Social Justice conference, and completely forgot about Paul Nelson Day.

It is rather forgettable, so, to recap: in 2004, Paul Nelson presented a poster at the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in which he unveiled his sciencey super-concept, Ontogenetic Depth. This was, supposedly, a method by which you could measure the developmental complexity of organisms, and he claimed to have been working on doing just that, although his poster was nothing but hand-wavey claims of the concept. I asked him to give me details on the method, that it would be interesting to try on my zebrafish. He said he’d send me a manuscript explaining how to measure it, later. I pestered him a bit for the documentation, and it was always “later”. He finally committed and said he’d post something on 7 April, 2004.

He didn’t.

For a while it was because he was prepping a new version, Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, but since we haven’t seen either 1.0 or 2.0, and since “ontogenetic depth” is a phrase which hasn’t even caught on among creationists, I think it’s safe to say it’s dead. It’s yet another bit of rotting detritus in the pointlessly continuous reinvention and relabeling of creationism.

But it’s still useful to poke at them and remind them how useless and bad their version of ‘science’ is. And, apparently, how forgettable.

A fine demonstration of unpredicted consequences

Global climate change has freaky outcomes. I wouldn’t have predicted that warming Minnesota would freeze septic tanks.

Frozen septic systems are emerging as an unexpected consequence of climate change in Minnesota — one that is bedeviling homeowners across the state and could soon cost taxpayers more for the repair and maintenance of fragile rural roads.

The cause is a dramatic long-term decline in insulating snow early in November and December. Combined with still-freezing conditions, that drives the frost line deep underground — well below septic pipes and drain fields.

So climate change → less snow → frost line goes deeper → frozen septic tanks → more septic tank pumping → heavier traffic on rural roads → rising road repair costs.

What other unforeseen effects are going to hit us in the future?

Someone noticed

Paul Waldman, specifically. He outright says that Trump is a crook.

One remarkable thing about the 2016 election is the way Trump’s business career was given such a superficial examination by the media as a whole. Again and again, some crazy story or unusual aspect of his financial life would be the topic of one or two investigative stories, but those stories wouldn’t get picked up by other outlets.

Making this more problematic, Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America. He ran scams like Trump University to con struggling people out of their money. He lent his name to pyramid schemes. He bankrupted casinos and still somehow made millions while others were left holding the bag. He refused to pay vendors. He exploited foreign workers. He used illegal labor. He discriminated against African American renters. He violated Federal Trade Commission rules on stock purchases. He did business with the mob and with Eastern European kleptocrats. His properties became the go-to vehicle for Russian oligarchs and mobsters to launder their money.

So it was no accident that when he ran for president, the people who joined him in his quest were also a collection of grifters, liars, and crooks — people such as Paul Manafort. Those were the kind of operators Trump has attracted all his life. Honest, upright people with a deep respect for the law don’t go to work for Donald Trump.

That is remarkable. All throughout the election campaign, those horrible little stories about Trump’s sleazy business practices would trickle out — we all saw them — and then the press would shrug and move on to something else (Hillary’s emails!). Any one of those things would have scuttled an ordinary candidate: heck, Howard Dean made a loud yell and boom, it was all anyone talked about and it killed his presidential run. Trump wouldn’t even release his tax returns, which should have had everyone deeply suspicious.

We don’t just have a corrupt president, we have a corrupt media.

The bombshell will detonate soon

Uh-oh.

On the evening of Saturday, April 7, 2018, the American Atheists Board of Directors received a complaint regarding David Silverman, the President of American Atheists. The Board takes very seriously the concerns expressed and, in accordance with organization policies, the Board has placed Mr. Silverman on leave while an independent investigation is conducted. Mr. Silverman has pledged his full cooperation with the investigation.

The Board, led by Vice President Kathleen Johnson and myself, will fulfill the duties of the President while Mr. Silverman is on leave. National Program Director Nick Fish will oversee the day-to-day operations of the organization.

While Mr. Silverman is on leave, American Atheists will continue our work protecting the separation of religion and government, elevating the voices of atheists in our nation’s public discourse, and supporting our members and atheist communities across the country.

We are committed to transparency and openness about this process and will release more information as it becomes available.

I know what’s going on, and it’s been building for a while. It’s not just AA that’s investigating some allegations, but another organization as well, and the atheist movement is about to get another well-deserved battering.

Go about your business, citizens. Ignore the chaos.

Two hours of Sam Harris whining

I didn’t listen to the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein conversation, I couldn’t possibly bear it. I read the transcript, and that was more than enough. Harris’s main theme: ‘everyone is picking on me.’ Klein keeps pointing out that he’s promoting bad ideas, that he isn’t engaging with people’s actual concerns, and that his brand is all about defending his identity, white identity, while denying that he engages in identity politics…because his line of attack is a blanket condemnation of all identity politics while labeling everyone else as engaging in it. It’s infuriating.

Here’s a revealing sample from near the end.

Ezra Klein
We all have a lot of different identities we’re part of all times. I do, too. I have all kinds of identities that you can call forward. All of them can bias me simultaneous, and the questions, of course, are which dominate and how am I able to counterbalance them through my process of information gathering and adjudication of that information. I think that your core identity in this is as someone who feels you get treated unfairly by politically correct mobs and —

Sam Harris
That is not identity politics. That is my experience as a public intellectual trying to talk about ideas.

Ezra Klein
That is what folks from the dominant group get to do. They get to say, my thing isn’t identity politics, only yours is. I will tell you, Sam, when people who do not look like you hear you telling them that this is just identity politics, they don’t think, “God he’s right. That is just identity politics.” They think this is my experience and you don’t understand it. You just said it’s your experience and they don’t understand it.

There is also the part where Harris declares that he has black friends, therefore you can’t accuse him of casual racism. The part where he reveals that he knows nothing about Charles Murray’s work outside of The Bell Curve and can’t comprehend how anyone can think he has racist motivations. But mainly, Harris is all about how others have dared to criticize Sam Harris.

I think it’s damning enough that Harris thinks so highly of himself that he would walk unarmed into a duel with Ezra Klein, and get fairly and politely slaughtered on all points.

Of course, Harris probably emerged thinking that Klein never even touched him.

Just a thought…I just now posted about how there are rational Christians and foolish ones, and how, if you must be a Christian, you should do yourself the favor of being the kind who cares about the evidence. You know, a non-atheist could look at our side and say something similar: do yourself the favor of not simply blindly following the self-appointed leaders of your tribe, and think about more than just their ideas on one issue. Harris is right that there is no god, but there’s a whole lot of other shit that he’s flamingly, painfully wrong about.

Creationists once again flustered by evidence

A geologist gives 21 evidence-based reasons why Noah’s Flood never happened. It’s nice, short, succinct, and clear, and is going to be useful in future discussions about creationism. It’s also all really obvious — we have a few hundred years of observations by geologists, who were mostly Christian, that made it irrefutable that, in the most charitable interpretation, the book of Genesis was a metaphorical fable.

You’ll never guess who is very sad about the article, though. Poor Ken Ham and his crew at Answers in Genesis. They can’t address the arguments, so they resort to indignation.

“Now, we’re used to hearing false claims like that. What made me sad was that Collins was specifically writing this article to give Skeptical Inquirer magazine readers counter-arguments to use against Christians. And who are the readers of this magazine? Most are skeptics and atheists!” Ham continued.

“A professing believer (who claims on his website that he has ‘sought to bring people to Christ’) is trying to equip unbelievers to tear down the faith of believers! Ultimately, he is helping atheists attack God’s Word and the Christian faith. I would not want to be in his shoes standing before our holy God — he will give an account one day,” he added.

Yeah, the author of the article is a Christian. I definitely do not think he’s trying to tear down people’s faith. It seems he is a living example that you can simultaneously accept the science (Yay!) and still believe in God and Jesus (unfortunately, from the perspective of this atheist — but I’ll accept the progress). There are Christians like Ham who demand that you accept their every absurd interpretation of the Bible, refusing to recognize just how idiosyncratic their beliefs are, and then there are Christians like Lorence Collins, who recognize that their understanding of their religion is imperfect and incomplete and must be tempered with an accommodation to reality. If you must be a Christian, be like Collins, not Ham.

Oh, and AiG has one other well-worn argument. Andrew Snelling asks, “Were you there?”

“We don’t see a global flood happening today, so we would have never seen one in the past. Well, how do they know? They weren’t there in the past,” the AiG geologist continues.

“We need an eye-witness who was there to tell (the story), and a reliable witness,” Snelling says, noting that Collins’ authority should be God’s Word.

Sheesh. Everyone knows that material evidence trumps eye-witness testimony.

Bad people can abuse good ideas

One of the more distressing things about organized skepticism is how they’ve tainted science and reason — too often it seems that opportunists have grabbed the principles as handy talking points that they can babble about while acting in ways that befoul the good ideas. But sometimes they get caught at it.

Jason Kottke wrote a post crediting Michael Shermer with popularizing Carl Sagan’s rules — his baloney detection kit. Then he was informed about Shermer’s reputation, so he rewrote the post and put in this addendum.

Update: After I posted this, a reader let me know that Michael Shermer has been accused by several women of sexually inappropriate & predatory behavior and rape at professional conferences. I personally believe women, and I further believe that if Shermer was actually serious about rationality and his ten rules for critical thinking listed above, he wouldn’t have pulled this shit in the first place (nor tried to hamfistedly explain it away). I’ve rewritten the post to remove the references to Shermer, which actually made it more succinct and put the focus fully on Sagan, which was my intention in the first place (the title remains unchanged). (via @dmetilli)

It’s dismaying that it takes this long to get the word out, but eventually, we can hope the truth will win. It’s just a shame that someone can profit for so long off Carl Sagan’s reputation when their life is a standing repudiation of Sagan’s ideas.

Shermer still gets invited to skeptic events, by the way.

Naughty!

This is a list of banned words from 1995.

Two things:

  • These lists are just sort of hilarious when the words are just dumped on you out of context.

  • Shockingly, there are several words in there I’ve never even heard of before, and that I have no idea what they mean. I feel so naive.