The crazy anti-science people

The rejection of science by the Republican party and its rabid base is quite extraordinary. To reject evolution is to reveal oneself to be a pre-Enlightenment person living in post-Enlightenment world.

The correlation of pre-Enlightenment thinking with religion is clear. Religious people fear (correctly) that science undermines religious faith and so they can be easily manipulated by big business to reject science and devalue evidence and data because of their belief in the value of ‘faith’, which is merely a synonym for prejudice and gut feelings.

In this clip from The Daily Show, Republican strategist Noelle Nikpour seems to be even dumber than Lord Monckton, in that she never seems to catch on that she is being primed to say crazy things that will make her look like a fool. How can such a stupid person ever acquire the label of ‘strategist’?

What use is half a wing?

Creationists like to challenge the theory of evolution by asking how it can be that things can evolve incrementally since in its early stages the new feature seems to lack its final functionality. They pose questions like “What is the use of half an eye or half a wing?” Of course, scientists have long explained this. They have shown how the eye could have evolved by tiny changes and in fact even right now almost the full spectrum of differential eye development can be seen in existing species.

They have also pointed out that it is a mistake to assume that the final functionality of a feature was the only functionality all along, and that features may have had other functions in the early stages and only later became adapted to its final use.

Carl Zimmer had a nice article earlier this year in National Geographic about the evidence that feathers might have evolved for a different purpose long before flight occurred. More recently, he reports on new research results that add to our knowledge of what purpose those non-flying feathers in primitive wing forms might have served.

Drone killings

Nat Hentoff cites Morris Davis, a professor of law at Howard University, who says that the continuous killing by the US of people around the world (Americans and non-Americans alike) in the CIA-run drone program is, apart from being a moral abomination, a clear violation of law because the CIA is a civilian organization and thus does not even have the fig leaf of ‘combatant immunity’ that the military can use to justify its killings.

Boycott Bank of America

Matt Taibbi makes the case that removing our money from Bank of America is one concrete action that we can take to show our disgust with the banking industry. Targeting one of the worst culprits is a better strategy because we cannot boycott the entire industry. If we can shake one of the main institutions, it will cause other banks to fear if they will be the next to have a bull’s-eye painted on them

I used to feel the same way about earlier boycotts of gas companies to protest gouging practices. General boycotts will fail because people eventually need gas. It would be better to pick a particular gas company and boycott only them because such an action can be continued indefinitely. After the BP oil spill, if people stopped buying only BP gas, that would have forced them to take the public outcry more seriously.

Signs of strong support for Elizabeth Warren

Since I contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for US senator from Massachusetts, I get email updates of the campaign. I must admit that I was impressed by the size of this turnout in Framingham when she went to a volunteer meeting. Such a huge crowd in a relatively small town for such a meeting more than a year before the election is extraordinary and augurs well for her campaign.

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I suspect that such enthusiasm is a spin-off from the energy generated by the Occupy Wall Street movement, since she has been such a sharp critic of Wall Street practices.

Rising income inequality

The Congressional Budget Office released a report yesterday looking at the changes in the distribution of household income from 1979 to 2007. The graph on the very first page tells the whole story: The top 20% has increased its share of the national income at the expense of the other 80%, whose shares have all gone down.

Jared Bernstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities digs deeper into the report:

Between 1979 and 2007, incomes grew by 275 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent of households, 37 percent for the middle 60 percent of households, and 18 percent for the poorest 20 percent of households. These figures adjust for inflation and account for the impact of taxes and government transfer payments such as Social Security and unemployment benefits.

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In media coverage of this report, I have heard phrases like incomes of the top 1% have ‘doubled’ or ‘almost tripled’. This is wrong. A 275% increase means that they increased by a factor of 3.75, i.e., almost quadrupled!

Kevin Drum comments that what has happened is that “For all practical purposes, every year about $700 billion in income is being sucked directly out of the hands of the poor and the middle class and shoveled into the hands of the rich.”

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Losing the capacity for shame

Glenn Greenwald has the details of the drone killing that killed the 16-year old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, the son’s 17-year old cousin, and seven others while they were reportedly having a meal. The US government will no doubt spin some story to justify their action. The standard operation is to immediately put out some self-serving lies and not worry about them unraveling later, since few people worry about corrections once the initial impression has been made. Nowadays they don’t even have to bother doing that since the killing by a US drone of a US teenager by the US government aroused hardly any interest. Just another ho-hum event.
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What the Oakland assault tells us

As I feared, the authorities are starting to use force on the Occupy protestors, starting in Oakland. Charles Pierce says that the assault symbolizes the militarization of the police:

Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic
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It’s time for the country to realize that something is dangerously out of control here, and that it’s not a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the public parks. There is a tradition of public protest in this country. Hell, this country is itself an act of public protest. Preserve that, or preserve nothing else, because there’s nothing else worth preserving. Police officers are public servants. They are not soldiers, facing down enemies. This is not a war. This is America.

It may not be a war as yet, but the oligarchy sees this as an uprising that must be quelled in its infancy.

Relativity-9: The importance of corroborating evidence in science

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In my series on the logic of science, I recounted how philosopher of science Pierre Duhem had pointed out as far back as 1906 that the theories of science are all connected to each other and changes in one area will have unavoidable effects on others that should be discernible. In this case, if neutrinos in the OPERA experiment did in fact travel faster than the speed of light, then we should be able to look at some other effects that should occur and see if they are observed.
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