Vox Popoli

is paved by science:

Let’s face it, we really trust science. In fact, studies suggest that the vast majority of people will murder another human being, if a guy in a lab coat tells them it’s OK. But surely in their insatiable curiosity and desire to put knowledge above all things, science would never, say, inadvertently set off a chain of events that lead to some sort of disaster that ended the world. Right?

This, of course, says nothing of the insistence of keeping the 1917 flu virus on ice, the continued research on new and better ways to kill people, and the scientific contribution to anthropogenic global warming. Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d take a stab at the five greatest dangers presented to the planet by religion.

1. Islamic fanatics sweeping across the Atlantic on camelback. Evolved amphibious camels!
2. Neo-aztecs sacrificing six billion people with stone knives atop a rebuilt Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlan.
3. Jews successfully converting the rest of the planet to Judaism, then being holocausted en masse by the twelve remaining Christians holding them collectively and retroactively responsible for killing Jesus two thousand some years ago.
4. This is the perfect time for the revival of the Spanish Inquisition, since no one is expecting it.
5. Evangelical Bhowanee-thugeeism.

Gary North sounds as if he was taken a little off guard by recent naval movements:

The most important news for the month of August was the fact that President Bush has quietly sent the largest armada into the Persian Gulf since the Iraq war began in 2003, when there were six carrier groups. This is a huge number of ships to be concentrated in one location in peacetime.

This story has been completely ignored by the news media all over the West. The only coverage is from special-interest websites.

I’ve been paying attention to this myself, although I haven’t wanted to cry wolf having been wrong about this last summer. I’ve been expecting some sort of Iran strike before Bush leaves office. I know there’s been a large number of false alarms with regards to Iran, but then, such a remarkable assembling of forces seldom takes place without there being a purpose for it.

It could be mere sabre-rattling, but I doubt it. Surely one or two carrier groups would suffice for that. As Stratfor noted last week, preparations for an Iran strike help explain the near-complete non-response to Russia’s activity in Georgia.

It’s hard to decide which is the more ridiculous idea: (a) That the governor of Alaska successfully faked a pregnancy and is passing off her grandson as her son, or (b) that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy somehow demonstrates the inefficacy of abstinence-based education.

Both notions require brain damage, an IQ at least 35 points below the norm, or willful ideological blinders for anyone who spends more than five seconds thinking about the matter to adhere to them. Palin’s pregnancy has been sufficiently attested to that it needs no further explication here. As for the abstinence argument, consider the following facts:

1. In 2001, the federal and state governments together spent $4,403,000 in Alaska on contraceptive services and supplies for 141,000 women of childbearing age.

2. Almost all U.S. schoolchildren receive sex education by eighth grade, most begin receiving sex education in fifth grade. This sex education may include abstinence programs, but it is almost never limited to them.

3. Bristol Palin was not homeschooled for most of her education and her fiance is a hockey player at a public school.

Therefore, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is much more reasonably viewed as a failure of comprehensive sex education because that is the form of sex education she and her fiance almost certainly received, rather than a failure of the abstinence-only program that her mother favors and which she did not receive. One would have to be extraordinarily logically handicapped to indict a program that cannot possibly be held responsible for a situation while trying to claim that the program actually involved would have somehow magically prevented the situation even though it manifestly did not.

Furthermore, abstinence programs are superior to other forms of sex education, at least when measured in terms of reduced STD contraction. This is what I noted in analyzing Sam Harris’s statistically tortured attempt to attack abstinence programs: “What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” – TIA p. 127

In which both the inherently unreliable nature of science and the declining probability of anthropogenic global warming are demonstrated:

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted. The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth….

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

Scientists like to consider themselves more educated and more intelligent than the great unwashed who know nothing about science. This is, for the most part, true. But they save their real dislike for those non-scientists who are not only more intelligent than most scientists, but are sufficiently educated about science to point out the inconvenient fact that the inherently unstable – or “dynamic”, if you prefer – nature of science renders it frequently unreliable and therefore useless as a tool in matters outside science.

For example, there are still many scientists who say that the Earth is warming despite the fact that it has been getting colder over the last decade and there is a valid theory based on empirical observation which suggests it will continue to do so for some time. All decisions made on the unsound basis of the former consensus would have probably been incorrect, and the absence of a current consensus renders all of the related science of zero value at this particular point in time.

As with many things, the human variable renders science far less useful than it might otherwise be, and it’s profoundly dishonest for scientists to pretend that the human variable is not there. Scientists like to brag that science is self-correcting, which is largely true over time but is also a confession that it can be completely unreliable at any single point in time. This doesn’t make the entire endeavor worthless, but it does mean that science always has to be examined with a much more skeptical eye than most scientists are usually willing to endure.

UPDATE – A Slashdot commenter sums it up reasonably well: “The reality is that scientific “proof” consists of general agreement among communities of people about the interpretation of observed phenomena, and that agreement can be driven by MANY factors, not just how well the data fits. One CANNOT get to the level of mathematical proof. So there will always be a role for skeptics, and those that just won’t accept that, if you have a square peg and a round hole, you just pretend the peg’s squareness doesn’t exist, because it MUST fit into the round hole.“

Although I’d be most amused to see him sworn in as president, I’ve been almost completely underwhelmed by Obama’s increasingly bizarre performance since the early part of the Democratic primary when he was driving Team Clinton nuts. That being said, Obama handled the dangerous curve ball of the pregnancy in the Palin family much, much better than many of his supporters:

Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, was asked at a brief press conference in Monroe, Mich., about the suggestion by some Republicans that Democrats – particularly liberal bloggers – were trying to advance rumors about the Palin family.

“Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be,” Mr. Obama snapped, his voice raised. “And if I ever thought there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired, O.K.?”

And that ends that. Well done. All may be fair in love, war, and politics, but there are some attacks that are more dangerous for the attacker than the target. When one considers the fact that the Palin family quite obviously love children, attacking the VP candidate’s daughter for having a baby would be crazy. Throw in Obama’s position on abortion and it would be a recipe for self-inflicted disaster. The Christian family values crowd has no inherent problem with 17-year old mothers; remember, they’re not the ones who believe all women should go to college, obtain graduate degrees, and work in an office for at least ten years before contacting their doctors about their IVF regime before giving up and settling down with six cats and/or an overweight lesbian partner.

The Right Wing News isn’t welcome at the Republican convention:

This week, the Republican National Convention is kicking off and there are going to be almost 200 bloggers attending. However, I’m not going to be one of them. That’s not because I didn’t put in an application, it’s because they didn’t want me there. My application for media credentials was not approved.

That’s despite the fact that…

* Right Wing News is one of the 15 biggest conservative blogs.
* I was actually invited to attend in 2004.
* I founded Rightroots in 2006 and, along with the help of a crew of other bloggers AND the RNC, I helped raise almost $300k for Republicans candidates in 2006.
* Right Wing News is one of the websites permalinked on the Republican National Committee’s Blog….

My best guess as to why I’m not being allowed to go to the RNC is a post I wrote back in March called, “Why I Will No Longer Support John McCain For President.” The piece savagely denounced McCain for his breathtakingly dishonest flip-flop over illegal immigration, was widely linked, and a source of mine inside the campaign told me they were very aware of it.

This is just insane and an apparent confirmation of McCain’s notoriously thin skin. Hawkins isn’t just a Republican, he’s a serious Republican loyalist and if there isn’t room for the likes of him in the Republican tent, a small kitchen cabinet should suffice.

I wasn’t invited to the convention either, but then, I’m not a Republican and I’m not supporting John McCain for president.

In case you needed further proof:

ELEANOR CLIFT: This is not a serious choice. It makes it look like a made for TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it’s been literally laughter in many places across news-

JOHN McLAUGHLIN, TALKING OVER CLIFT: Where is that? See that?

CLIFT: In very, very many newsrooms.

They didn’t see the Palin selection coming. I did. They think it’s a joke and will turn out poorly for McCain. I think it’s an excellent choice that will help him trounce Obama. We’ll see who is correct….

One has to wonder if the effete media types dissing Palin would be quite so keen to get nasty about her and her youngest child if they knew what sort of man her husband is. They’d probably do very well to keep their criticism substantive and polite, although it would be absolutely hysterical to see someone like Colmes or Olberman get punched out by a hard-bitten snowmobile racer.

UPDATE – As I pointed out, it wasn’t exactly hard for Republicans to find recent pictures of Palin that show her pregnancy. It seems the beauty of being a Democrat is that one never has to let even the most momentary thought get in the way of opening one’s mouth.

No wonder Obama is sinking in the polls:

Obama’s offer: an end to US stupidity
This is the hope that Obama offers the world, of an end to stupidity. His name, his ethnicity and his message of conciliation and negotiation promise a new chapter.

So, Obama not only going to roll back the waves, but end human stupidity as well? That’s just, well, stupid! But perhaps, at last, an Obama victory would mean that the USA would finally be a nation of which British socialists could be proud. I’m sure we all know how much that would mean to the average American voter.

I can’t tell you how much I hope the Magic Negro wins. I really can’t, although I want him to win more than the average starry-eyed true believer in HopeChange does. But I can say that should Obama do for the USA what Kwame Kilpatrick has done for Detroit, what Marion Barry did for DC, what Thabo Mbeki has done for South Africa, etc, I really won’t be able to restrain my cruel and mocking laughter.

The commenters at John Scalzi’s place are hardly the first science fetishists to fantasize about a scientific government. That such a thing would be a violently authoritarian nightmare never seems to occur to them, however, which is interesting given the track record of the last government to claim its foundation in science, namely, scientific socialism.

A few of these would-be technocrats assert that Sarah Palin’s belief in creationism should somehow disqualify her from holding office. But this is a wildly stupid position. Everyone is ignorant of something – as the Congress and the executive branch demonstrate almost every day – and the USA is not a technocratic oligarchy, it is a quasi-democratic republic. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority of Americans don’t give a damn about science and would rather kill every single scientist in the country than hand their government over to them. And they would be absolutely right to do so; it seems that the inheritors of natural philosophy are still dreaming of totalitarian philosopher-kings two millenia after The Republic.

To claim that a man or a woman should be disqualified from political participation for failing to genuflect before the current state of science – an intrinsically moving target – is anti-democratic, fascistic, and historically ignorant. One can make a much better case for limiting government by sex, height, or even hair color, things that are far less subjective and less given to abuse by an authoritarian oligarchy. And given the fact that scientage is a dynamic entity, the abjuring of the admittedly bad science of yesterday is no guarantee that today’s scientific consensus is not tomorrow’s bad science.

Science has been a two-edged sword throughout its history. It has undeniably made many people’s lives better and it has just as undeniably caused many people’s deaths. Vaccines and antibiotics are no more created “in the name of science” than are atomic bombs and biological weapons; both are created by scientists through scientody. Science is simply not a legitimate arbiter for political leadership and it would be interesting to know who would agree that everyone who still believes in Anthropogenic Global Warming is similarly unsuited for political office now that actual science has demonstrated that the AGW theory is little more than bad data combined with poor computer modeling?

Moreover, the New York Times reported in 2004 that 65 percent of all Americans favor teaching creationism and evolution in schools. While I will not vote for the McCain-Palin ticket, Palin’s perspective is far more democratically legitimate than than that of those who think her views on the origins of Man should somehow disqualify her. If Americans are going to disqualify politicians for their ignorance, it would be much more effective to disqualify those who demonstrably fail to understand the supply-demand curve or the concept of marginal utility.

I still haven’t heard from TheMadItalia (Silver Spooners) or p-dawg (Black Mouth Curs) yet so I’ve gone ahead and created their teams and selected their keepers. I won’t be at the draft, unfortunately, since I’ve got a party to attend. Also, don’t get bent out of shape about the draft order’s failure to switch between rounds three and four as it’s an artifact of Yahoo’s keeper system. The real draft begins at round four; the first three rounds are merely placing everyone’s keepers on their teams. The order is worst to first among the old school, then worst to first among the new school, the entirety snaking from round to round. It’s worked quite well in the past; it’s not as if Nate picking first every year has helped him at all.

If p-dawg and The MadItalia will email me, I’ll install them as co-managers and then remove myself as a manager from the Curs and the Spooners. If they don’t do so within a week, we’ll add two new managers.