Category: Uncategorized

Merkur bids us adieu:

Like all bullies – physical or intellectual – you can dish it out, but you can’t take it. On your blog, of course, you make all kinds of noises about how sticks and stones won’t break your bones – but they hurt anyway, don’t they? Oh, of course you’ll protest – you don’t debate, merkur, you don’t contribute anything substantial. If that was the case, you’d just ignore me – but no, you need to remove anything that might make people realise how small your playhouse really is.

I’ll always remember you fondly, “Vox”.

That’s nice. I didn’t even remember Merkur had been banned before, so I’ll likely forget she ever existed before the end of June.

The Baseball Savant’s experience flies in the face of what we’ve all learned from television:

I’ve been meaning to write you this story since you mentioned the whole Mia Hamm and her knowing the US Men’s Soccer team could destroy the women’s. Back when I was in college, like you, I was an athlete at a D-1 school. Obviously I played baseball, but our women’s basketball team was also D-1 and the women coaches would go to intramural players and other athletes from different sports to find guys for the women’s team to practice against. The interesting part was that the coaches would specifically tell us to take it easy on the girls and not to play that hard. We would be instructed to let them play and make their cuts and let them make their passes and to never block shots. Also, we couldn’t play man-to-man defense but rather would fall back in the zone.

However, every once in awhile the coaches would tell us to just go play. Keep in mind that we were either intramural players or athletes from other teams and it would get ridiculously ugly. At one point we ran like 68-0 in about 10 minutes of play. It was ridiculous. These were girls playing D-1 basketball and it was absurd how bad we were beating them. Not only that, but they were getting pounded physically. At that time I was 5’10” and around 200lbs with 7% bodyfat and I almost felt abusive towards the girl I was guarding. To be honest, all of us had played high school basketball so it wasn’t like we didn’t have any skill, but we beat the women’s team so badly the coaches called it off about 15 minutes earlier than the time they had down for us to scrimmage against the girls.

The other part of the story is that during intramural season, we played a team that had one of the men’s players. Obviously the men’s team was D-1 and it had been the NCAA Tournament a few times while I was in school. Our intramural team was primarily made up of the guys who played against the girls. When we played that one team with just one of the players who played on our men’s team, he single handedly gave us a severe beating the likes we didn’t see from any other team. He had to score 50 almost effortless. The really sorry part of the story is the guy was like the 4th guy off the bench and didn’t get all that much playing time. I could not even imagine what the men’s team would have done to the women’s team if they were to play. My guess would be the men would have put up at least 100 points in a half and I don’t think the girls would score at all.

One summer at the gym, I met a 6-4 guard who played for the Gophers and later managed part of one season with the Detroit Pistons. The first time we played, I got stuck guarding him and I’ve never felt so helpless in my life, as on the rare occasions when I managed to get in the right position, he would just spin up and around me and dunk the ball. It didn’t matter what I did, there was absolutely no way I could slow him down, let alone stop him. It would have made no difference if I’d walked off the court, I would have done as much good sitting on the sidelines as I did trying to guard him.

We ended up getting along pretty well, as he was a huge NBA Live fan and knew me from my video game column in the Pioneer Press, so we played together a few times after that first humiliating experience. And I never once saw anyone, no matter how good they were, present him with the slightest difficulty if he decided to go all out. He seldom did, and usually contented himself with passing the ball and taking long-range threes. But his athletic ability was unreal.

This isn’t to say that girls can’t be effective in playing team sports if they know their relative disadvantages and compensate for them. In last weekend’s pickup game, the one girl there was playing right mid for us and she did very well. The other team tended to leave her open since they weren’t worried about her, so whenever I got the ball as the right defender, I quickly pushed it up to her and told her to cross it when the defense finally moved up to attack the ball. She wasn’t going to beat anyone one-on-one and she didn’t have much of a shot, but she was perfectly capable of making a pass to create a shot for someone else.

When the left defender finally began to mark her, I started running up the sideline so that she could simply push the ball outside when she got in trouble. That let me blow past the defender and draw the central defenders, which created opportunities for crosses to the far post and pull-back passes in front of goal.

Of course, none of that would have worked so easily if the idiot playing left mid for the other team wasn’t dumb enough to continue leaving her alone because she was just a girl.

I have long argued that calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. And I have no doubt that in 100 years, feminists and abortionettes will be regarded with the same disgust that we currently harbor for Nazis, slave-traders and slave-holders:

After years of wondering whether we’ll ever change society’s permissive attitude towards abortion, I’m convinced that we will some day come to view it in the way we now view slavery, a moral abomination that generations simply became inured to by usage and practice.

The big difference, of course, is that abortion is worse than slavery. Not just in the obvious sense that it involves the taking of life rather than liberty. But because our current debate suggests that deep down most of us really know there’s something quite wrong with abortion.

Say what you will about the slaveowners, I doubt many of them sat around agonising about their decision to keep Uncle Tom and his family chained to the shack at the end of the drive. I doubt they justified it, after much soul-searching, by saying they were only painfully exercising their “choice” to own slaves so they wouldn’t have to sacrifice their standard of living.

Abortionettes should be no more tolerated than Nazis, Fascists or Communists. They are a blight on the planet, an example of the very worst sort of failed humans that humanity has yet produced.

Fortunately, now that a judicial precedent has not only been created, but endorsed by feminists, we can significantly reduce abortion by prohibiting women who have had abortions from ever dating again. We need merely take the names and pictures of those women who murder their unborn children and place them on a national Do-Not-Date registry which can be readily accessed via the Internet, email and SMS.

This would not only prevent any recurrences, but would arguably have a significant deterrent effect.

Americans are rightly unimpressed by the neocons’ pleas to attack Iran in defense of Israel. After all, what’s the use of Israel’s nuclear deterrent if it does not, in fact, deter anyone from anything? But I don’t think Americans will so lightly ignore a serious threat to their porn:

Iran’s parliament on Wednesday voted in favor of a bill that could lead to the death penalty for persons convicted of working in the production of pornographic movies. With a 148-5 vote in favor and four abstentions, lawmakers present at the Wednesday session of the 290-seat parliament approved that “producers of pornographic works and main elements in their production are considered corrupter of the world and could be sentenced to punishment as corrupter of the world.”

The mind reels at the myriad of possibilities for recruiting posters and television campaigns. I can just see Jenna Jameson and Brianna Banks wearing stars and stripes bikinis in the Oval Office before stripping down and tag-teaming Dick Cheney on the desk, while a somber-faced George Bush warns Americans that if our military forces do not act quickly, we risk losing our adult entertainment industry.

“My fellow Americans. Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend some of our most cherished citizens. Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking: Who doesn’t like to see an attractive, silicone-enhanced blonde being plowed like the rich farmlands of Iowa? Who doesn’t enjoy watching flexible young ladies getting freakier than the proverbial fruited plains?

You know who? Hitler… er, that is, Iran.

Iran’s people have been brutalized — many are sexually deprived and many are reduced to self-pleasure without the benefit of quality visual stimulation. Women are not allowed to copulate on camera with unsuspecting pizza delivery boys and well-endowed men dressed as the police. You can be jailed for owning a collection of Vivid DVDs. A man can be jailed in Iran for the crime of merely filming two curious young cheerleaders exploring the boundaries of their sexual orientations.

The civilized world is rallying to America’s side. They understand that if this violent prudery goes unpunished, their own red light districts, their own lovely and uninhibited actresses may be next. No more hot Hungarian honeys, how do you like the sound of that? I know I don’t. Sexual repression, unanswered, can not only be a real drag, it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what — we’re not going to allow it.

I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for peace, prosperity and pornography for the American people. Because remember, no war, no porn for you!

Thank you. (Applause.)”

After that speech, I figure he could turn the place into a glass parking lot and see his approval ratings go from 26 percent to 76 percent overnight.

Not that I mind, it’s not as if the highly intelligent are notoriously stable either:

Jolie told Paramount Pictures publicists to ban Fox News Channel and all Fox News affiliates from covering the “Mighty Heart” premiere on the red carpet. It was only with the intervention of mortified Paramount staff that a Fox camera crew was allowed to be present.

It’s not the fact that lefties are invariably fascistic in some way, shape or form that amazes me, it’s the fact that they believe they’re passionately anti-fascist even while behaving in an overtly totalitarian manner.

I don’t like Fox News much either. But trying to ban part of the press at an event designed to support Reporters Without Borders demonstrates an impressive degree of cluelessness. Hey, she’s hot enough that you can’t reasonably expect intelligence too.

In a group paper published in the June 14 issue of Nature and in 28 companion papers published in the June issue of Genome Research, the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) consortium, which is organized by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), reported results of its exhaustive, four-year effort to build a parts list of all biologically functional elements in 1 percent of the human genome. Carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world, the research served as a pilot to test the feasibility of a full-scale initiative to produce a comprehensive catalog of all components of the human genome crucial for biological function.

“This impressive effort has uncovered many exciting surprises and blazed the way for future efforts to explore the functional landscape of the entire human genome,” said NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “Because of the hard work and keen insights of the ENCODE consortium, the scientific community will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do, as well as how the genome’s functional elements have evolved. This could have significant implications for efforts to identify the DNA sequences involved in many human diseases.”

One of the ironic things about the attacks of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris on Francis Collins and his religious faith is that unlike Dawkins and Harris, Collins is still actually doing science. Dawkins doesn’t do science anymore, he’s merely a third-rate propagandist now, and Harris never has.

I just find it amusing, especially since even the humble applied science which I do on a regular basis involves more use of the scientific method than anything Dawkins or Harris are doing. I suspect that Dawkins has a fundamentally unscientific mind; not only does he make no effort to provide any empirical evidence for his arguments in “Unweaving the Rainbow” and “The God Delusion”, but his most famous invention, the meme, is more literary device than science, it’s a metaphor that too many people have made the mistake of taking literally.

I haven’t been paying enough attention to the ENCODE consortium to have any idea what’s going on there, but in the event that Collins and his associates should discover something that renders untenable the selfish gene theory which Dawkins has made popular, I will laugh myself sick.

By the way, no one answered my question yesterday. If genes are the active component of evolution, how do morals evolve?

I note that the concept of ongoing moral evolution beyond historic theistic moralities directly contradicts the concept of natural selection, as theists subscribing to those moralities are replicating at rates far beyond those of an atheistic persuasion who subscribe to a purportedly more highly evolved morality.

Oopsy! We’re just so careless, don’t you know:

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

I’m just wondering how long it takes before Americans wake up and finally realize they are living in a police state and that their God-given liberties are nonexistent. None of this surprises me, of course, I saw where it was going more than a decade ago. And if you think it’s going to stop anytime soon, well, you’re simply not paying attention.

But at least you can be secure in the knowledge that you’re safe from Emmanuel Goldstein. And tigers.

They generally don’t prefer to, anyhow. And when they do, it seldom seems to work out well:

In my circle, there are legions of them: clever, confident, capable women who – given half the chance – could run the entire FTSE 100 companies single-handedly, but whose troubles start the moment they leave the office desk.

Their men, they moan, are useless. Their men, they sigh, can’t handle a woman’s success. Their men, they grumble, are to blame for being so pathetic that you daren’t risk a future and a family with them. But blame their men as they might, the Alpha women should know this: In the end, they really only have themselves to blame.

They, after all, picked them. I have lost count of the times I have seen this syndrome play out: an attractive, achieving, successful woman who appears almost to go out of her way to choose a disastrous mate.

First of all, there’s no such thing as an alpha female. I have known female CEOs, I have known the female leaders of national organizations, and not even the head of one of the more important national feminist groups – who I quite liked, surprisingly enough – was the least bit dominant. Women just aren’t capable of radiating that strange combination of physical and mental power that gives people the urge to metaphorically go belly-up in their presence.

This isn’t to say they can’t take leadership positions or wield genuine power, they’re just not capable of commanding the same kind of instantaneous respect and mindless obedience. There are just some men around whom other men simply fall in line and to whom women automatically respond based on this social dominance.

The problem is that not only are there very few alphas – I’m not one and you’re almost surely not either – but that there aren’t even many beta males around these days. That means that these beta females end up settling for a gamma male and then trying to challenge him as if he’s dominant, or worse, trying to forcibly remake him into the relationship alpha. In either case, it is mystifying and confusing for the gamma male and frustrating for the female. Whether it’s evolution, centuries of socialization or the Curse of Eve, women will always challenge their men and they won’t be happy if they are allowed to do so successfully. There is nothing a woman despises as much as a humble “yes, dear”.

So this is the continuing conundrum of the successful modern woman. It’s a pity more parents don’t explain this all to their daughters before the girls make the decision to commit their lives to their career ambitions. It’s one thing if career over family is a woman’s informed choice, but too many women have been deceived into making a choice without realizing it.

Orac reliably demonstrates a unique ability to wander through the trees, never realizing that he’s in a forest:

Yesterday, I discussed how pseudoscience–nay, antiscience–may well triumph over science in the Autism Omnibus trial presently going on.

What science? The medical-pharmaceutical complex doesn’t permit any proper double-blind scientific studies to be performed in order to determine the safety of shooting up children with 24 or more loads of chemicals before they turn two. Until they inject 1,000 kids with a heavy vaccine schedule and compare them to a group of 1,000 unvaccinated kids, I’m not going to be inclined to pay any attention to the metastudies of metastudies that are constantly cited. Especially since if vaccines were as harmless as it is claimed, there wouldn’t be any need for VAERS or special Federal laws protecting vaccine makers and shooters from lawsuits.

I’ve spoken to a few European pediatricians over the years. They’re all very pro-vaccine in general, but they also think the heavy US vaccine schedule is dangerous, bordering on insane, given that it requires between two and three times the number of shots required in any of their countries.

This time around, Vox seems to be providing what has to be the dumbest rationale for not liking evolution. Banish the thought of pesky evidence and science! Vox knows there must be something wrong with the theory of evolution because he doesn’t like the way that “adherents” of evolution behave when evolution is attacked.

Fine. Take two sunfish and evolve me a lizard in the lab and I’ll be convinced. Or a fish-squirrel, you know, whatever. I’ve read Dawkins, Gould and few lesser would-be evolutionary popularizers, they’ve all got massive gaping holes in their arguments. I particularly enjoyed Dawkins primordial replicators from “The Selfish Gene” for which he admits there is no evidence whatsoever, but logically MUST have existed. Because without them, you know, the whole thing falls apart. Therefore they must have existed, QED. Here’s a pair of questions which arose from my reading of Marc Hauser’s latest yesterday: just how do morals evolve if it’s genes, not species or individuals, that are the evolutionary component? And why has the speed of the evolutionary process apparently increased so greatly of late? Sounds to me like someone might be confusing the metaphor with the reality there.

Orac, as usual, is missing the point. When I ask for specific evolutionary evidence, I always receive evasions, epistemological explanations and attacks. Always. That is not behavior that lends itself to instilling confidence, especially when a lauded evolutionist like Dawkins steps foot into one of my areas of knowledge and reveals himself to be an utterly clueless ignoramus incapable of handling the most basic logic. Moreover, the psychological argument is not my only reason for being skeptical of evolution; while I understand others may have good reason to be dubious of it, it has proven to be a trustworthy guide for me. Physicists have very little evidence for string theory, other scientific fields have enough to satisfy nearly anyone, and yet no scientists in any field are as reliably frothing-at-the-mouth crazy when faced with skepticism than the evolutionary biologists.

More amusing still is Vox’s “nyah-nyah” attempt to “refute” the contention that the tendency of Republicans to reject evolution is not evidence of their ignorance and scientific illiteracy:

As those who visit here more often knew, I was making fun of Dawkins and Harris, but whatever.

Vox also claims that Duchesne wasn’t a scientist, but rather a military doctor. The problem is, you don’t have to be a formal “scientist” to do science. Science is a method, a way of knowing and discovering, a manner of thinking about the world. Formal training in science certainly helps one to do science, but it is not strictly necessary. If the methodology is sound and designed to test a hypothesis based on prior observations and if the observations were carefully made, that’s doing science.

Dance, little atheist, dance! It’s always amusing how the science-worshippers will claim the same thing is, or is not science, depending on which axe they’re grinding at the moment. For all my supposed dislike of science, I take a more scientific approach to nearly everything than individuals like Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens, who rely on purely epistemological and ontological arguments without ever bothering to cite any evidence of anything. (Except, occasionally, Harris, who shouldn’t bother because he can’t even do simple division without making a mistake.) I just finished writing the chapter on Dawkins and I was practically embarrassed for the man when I finished it. I mean, what sort of “scientist” hypothesizes that X is worse than Y, then attempts to prove it by relating a series of five anecdotes about X without ever providing evidence or even assigning any value whatsoever to Y?

So, how can I be said to dislike science when I am, by Orac’s own measure, doing it? The truth is that for people like Orac, if an activity produces a beneficial result, then it must be science. If it is harmful, then it must not be. Because science is good, or at least it means well, and therefore should never be questioned except by other scientists who have been published in the proper peer-reviewed publications. Do not question the Priesthood!

Ah, the old argument from consequences fallacy. First off, no one claims that science is universally good. It’s a tool, a way of thinking, and as such can be used for good or evil. To turn one of Vox’s arguments against him, religion can be used for evil too. Does Vox thus think that religion is harmful, as he seems to think that science is?

Yes, exactly, it’s just a tool, and one can therefore make the case that it is a tool that has outlived its usefulness to Mankind. I’m not actually making that case, though, just as I haven’t made any argument from consequences. Actually, I agree with Daniel Dennett, let’s put all the cards on the table and scientifically examine the benefits of religion versus the costs of religion as well as the benefits of science versus the costs of science. Is Orac up for that? Surely science has nothing to fear from such an inquiry. Although… it’s not religion that has created the imminent, humanity-imperiling threats of nuclear destruction, of genetic and chemical warfare, of pollution and global warming, of overpopulation and resource depletion.

In answer to the question, Vox thinks that both religion and science can be harmful and that both can also can be beneficial; I am not attacking either scientage or scientody, only scientistry, sciencistry and the common, unfounded atheist assumption that religion is net harmful and science is net beneficial.

It appears the Four Horsemen have saddled up and are about to begin their ride. From the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

Homeschooling is a viable alternative to public schools

Despite promises of reform and improvement from politicians, public school boards, school administrators and unions, the results have either been maintenance of the status quo or an actual worsening of an already substandard public education system. Barely on most people’s radar screens, homeschooling is a viable — albeit niche — alternative.

The number of students reported to be homeschooled in 1978 was only 12,500 (many say the number was actually higher due to underreporting), the National Center for Education Statistics reported 1.1 million children were being homeschooled in 2003 — an estimated increase of nearly 20 percent per year over this 25-year period.

Along with vouchers and charter schools, homeschooling is now considered a true alternative to what the public school system has to offer. In 2000, 3 percent of elementary and secondary schoolchildren were homeschooled; only 1 percent were in charter schools, and a mere one-tenth of 1 percent had vouchers to attend private schools. Based on the numbers alone, it is clear that homeschooling is not limited to the anti-establishment or to fundamentalist religious groups or to those in the most rural of communities, as was once the claim. It is now the largest school reform alternative.

I’m not easily shocked, but this is simply stunning. I can’t even imagine the gnashing of teeth taking place in the California teachers’ unions and department of education offices.

Reform the schools: remove your kids.