Smack my atheist up

In which Stickwick and I tag-team a pair of godless self-appointed wonderboys. First up, DookerT:

On people like Sam Harris. I don’t know how anyone can really debunk anything he says, you can just make your own subjective moral arguments of why you think he’s wrong and you’re right. As far as the final word goes, it’s in the eye of the beholder. The Christian will generally see people like Vox as being correct and an atheist might generally agree with Harris . There simply are no certainties in this realm of debate, at least in my opinion.

It’s quite easy to debunk much of what he says, as it happens. Sam Harris makes many arguments that are based on objective assertions. They can be, and have been, conclusively debunked by the simple mechanic of showing those assertions to be factually false. There is nothing subjective about it. A very good example can be found in the appendix of On the Existence of Gods.

The ironically named Mr Rational picked the wrong blog to try to dazzle with pseudo-intellectual posturing when he responded to a statement about the Big Bang theory:

You do realize that the current model of cosmology is a creationist theory, do you not?

That statement utterly discredits you.  Creationists may have tried to claim Big Bang/Inflation theory as their own, but it is utterly without theistic implications.  If you are listening to people who claim it does, you are listening to liars.  The left has its own liars telling lies which support its dogmas; if you commit the same errors you are no better than the left.

I am moderately familiar with the theory of inflation (far more than most readers here, I’m certain).  The fluctuations in the temperature of the Cosmic Background Radiation associated with quantum density variations frozen in the cosmic fireball as space expanded too fast for them to reach equilibrium again is predicted by WHAT holy book in WHAT passage, precisely?  If it is fair for Vox to demand a specific list of mutations to turn organism X into organism Y, it is eminently fair for me to demand this specificity in theological claims and pronounce the theology worthless if it fails.

I responded to this myself, by pointing out that a) the Big Bang Theory and expansion were conceived by a Belgian priest, and b) the Big Bang Theory is a necessary, though not sufficient requirement for the Bible to be true, but Stickwick’s response is better. She is, by the way, a very well-regarded astrophysicist with a bibliography of published scientific papers on esoteric cosmological matters that is much longer than my list of publications:

I can’t decide if this is the stupidest thing ever said here or the funniest. Others have done a sufficient job explaining to you why this is wrong, but I’ll add one thing. A few years ago, I was present as a Nobel laureate and one of the greatest living physicists explained to a group of non-scientists that the multiverse hypothesis was developed at least in part because of the theistic implications of the big bang.

You’re doing something very annoying, which is attempting to dazzle people with the details of science instead of addressing the heart of the matter. Unless you’re an expert, this is a bad idea, because not everyone is going to be bowled over by your ability to parrot this information. I’m certainly not, because you’ve failed to realize that inflation is not yet a theory with any predictive power. The recent BICEP2 results that supposedly confirmed it were disproven. Inflation is a nice idea, and one that I think is probably correct, but let’s be honest — so far there is no conclusive evidence supporting it.

In any case, it’s absurd to say that the theistic implications of a theory hinge on whether a holy book mentions one particular unproven detail of the theory. It’s like the idiot biologist I talked to who said Genesis was bogus, because out of the dozens of scientifically-testable statements made by Genesis 1, she could find no mention of bacteria. The theological implications of a theory do not hinge on whether it contains every possible detail of the theories of the natural development of the universe, but on whether it says anything that confirms or denies a central tenet of a religion.

As Vox already explained to you, the big bang confirms the first three words of the Bible. The Bible begins with Genesis 1, because, among other things, it establishes God as the sovereign creator of all things. Without this, the Abrahamic religions are meaningless. If the universe is eternal, that’s obviously a big problem for Christianity. Scientists in the 1950s and 1960s understood this very well, which is (partly) why there was so much initial resistance to the big bang and why physicists continue to try to find loopholes in the theory that imply the universe is de facto eternal.

Now, before any atheist gets his panties in a bunch, I hasten to add that I know perfectly well that neither DookerT nor Mr Rational speak for all atheists nor are representative of the best that they have to offer. There are atheists I like, respect, and even admire.

But I think it would be wise for the average Internet atheist to understand that not only are there Christians who are better-educated and more intelligent than they are, but that there are actually more highly intelligent Christians than there are highly intelligent atheists. According to the GSS, in the United States, there are 11.4x more +2SD theists who either know God exists or believe God exists despite having the occasional doubt than there are +2SD atheists who don’t believe God exists.

And if you don’t understand why that is, you’re really not equipped to even enter the lists here.


The crisis in science

Although the fetishists are loath to admit it, the scientists themselves are well aware that something is rotten in the profession of scientistry:

Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine.

A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90 percent of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science.

While this rightly tarnishes the public belief in science, it also has serious consequences for governments and philanthropic agencies that fund research, as well as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. It means they could be wasting billions of dollars on research each year.

One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made.

This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are often small.

Further, dubious scientific practices boost the chance of finding a statistically significant result, usually at a probability of less than one in 20. In fact, our probability threshold for acceptance of a discovery should be more stringent, just as it is for discoveries of new particles in physics.

The English mathematician and the father of computing Charles Babbage noted the problem in his 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes. He formally split these practices into “hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking.”

As with all institutions in this latter day, social justice convergence is having its deleterious effects in science. This is why a strict division between scientistry and scientody is absolutely vital; science-SJWs profit from the nebulous nature of the term “science” and use it to cloak their convergent activities.


Wounded Gamma loses again

One significant characteristic of the Gamma male is that he cannot deal with being publicly shown to be wrong. Such an event punctures the delusion bubble in which he, the Secret King, always triumphs, so it creates a wound that never heals, and festers much longer than any higher-rank man can imagine. Even if he manages to control himself and not let it show immediately, it eats away at him and preys on his mind.

The way the Gamma usually deals with a festering wound is to attempt to negate it by subsequently demonstrating his superiority to the party who dealt it to him. This means that he will lie in wait, for years if need be, for what he sees as an opportunity to prove the offending party wrong. This, he believes, will disqualify and discredit the party, which somehow means that the Gamma was not wrong the first time, even though he was. But no matter, the Secret King triumphs in the end!

This behavior is so predictable that I not infrequently find myself able to correctly anticipate when a previously wounded Gamma is going to think he sees an opening and launch what I am coming to think of as a restorative rebuttal. However, I did not see this one coming; I did not think that Camestros Felapton was dumb enough to launch what is either his third or his fourth attempt to repair his delusion bubble since being so publicly humiliated about his lack of knowledge concerning rhetoric in Of Enthymemes and False Erudition. Apparently the sting of his repeated defeats at my hands has become more than he can bear, because he is really grasping at straws now.

The other day Vox was disparaging about the value of scientific evidence. I’m not entirely sure if he is clear himself about what he means but when it comes to IQ he is happy to post anything that he feels supports his case. This time, it is a pair of studies that point to a 4 point decline in IQ in France in a 9-10 year period. Vox quotes a second study that was an analysis of the first. This second study was an attempt to discern the cause of the decline by looking at the magnitude of the changes at a subtest level. This second paper concluded that the decline ‘likely has a primarily biological cause’. Vox declares it was due to immigration.

Did I now? What did I actually write? Let’s review:

My estimate of a post-1965 four-point IQ loss in the USA was a minimum estimate based solely on replacement migration, but considering that dysgenic fertility is also a factor in the USA, the actual decline is almost certainly worse.


If replacement migration is also the lesser factor in the US case, then the post-1965 IQ decline in the USA could be as much as 10 points. However, US immigration has been higher and US native birth rates have remained higher than in France, so something on the order of 7-8 points is more likely. This is not insignificant; it is the difference between the current USA and Sierra Leone.


So, Camestros is obviously wrong. I did not say the decline was due solely to immigration, I merely repeated what the study said, which is that the reported IQ decline in France was primarily due to dysgenic fertility and secondarily due to immigration.

Moreover, this shows that Camestros was not merely wrong, he was lying, because I even pointed out that while dysgenic fertility appears to have been the primary factor responsible in France, in the US it is more likely that immigration is nearly as important a factor for two reasons: US immigration rates are higher and US native birth rates are higher. There is a third reason as well; higher abortion rates among the lowest-IQ population tend to partially counterbalance the lower fertility rate of the highest-IQ population.

We had damn well better hope I am right, because we know the immigration-related decline of IQ in the USA is at least 4 points based on population averages. If the dysgenic fertility decline in the USA is, like France, even worse than the immigration-related decline, then we will have already seen a catastrophic decline in average US IQ of 9 points or more! In his desperation to declare me wrong about immigration and IQ, (and therefore retroactively wrong about Aristotle and rhetoric) Camestros fails to even notice the horrific implications of his argument. Who cares about that, what is important is to patch up that punctured delusion bubble stat!

Finally, after again trying to cast doubt on IQ as a reasonable metric for intelligence as well as upon the possibility of comparing average national intelligence levels, Camestros ends by saying, “neither paper ends up agreeing with Vox’s conclusion.”

Considering that neither paper addresses the USA at all, it would be absolutely remarkable if either of them had.

Once more, Camestros provides us with sufficient evidence to safely conclude that if IQ is a reasonable measure of innate intelligence, his is considerably lower than mine. It’s funny that despite being such a questionable metric, a similar percentile just seems to keep showing up no matter how it’s measured.

Of course, my actual vocabulary is probably more than twice that, but then, we’re not counting Italian, German, French, or Japanese vocabularies.

UPDATE: Gammas never learn. And they never stop lying.

Camestros Felapton ‏@CamestrosF
@voxday declares me beneath his consideration, again

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
You’re lying, again. I take on all comers. Even hapless, midwitted gamma males like you. 


Scientific skepticism

And scientists wonder why we’re every bit as skeptical as everything they report as “the current scientific consensus”. This is a fairly typical “scientific” rebuttal to a science news report that happens to be outside of the current mainstream of accepted thought:

Let’s start with a quick talk about aliens. In an infinite universe, it seems foolhardy— even arrogant— to completely dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial life. There are so many galaxies, so many planets, so many suns; across the neverending expanse of space, one suspects that there must be another group of intelligent beings somewhere.

But suspect is the key word there. We have no credible evidence for the existence of alien civilizations. As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And claiming that the Paracas skulls are possibly alien is certainly extraordinary. So let’s look at the evidence— does it measure up?

Well, the short answer is no. First, consider the source: the preliminary results of genetic testing were announced by Brien Foerster, who is the assistant director of the Paracas History Museum.

That’s a pretty impressive title, and I’ll admit that it threw me. That title implies formal archaeological, curatorial, or history credentials, maybe a body of peer-reviewed research projects. That title implies that he has serious academic credibility, and that we should listen to his announcements about his areas of expertise.

None of this is true. Some pretty basic Google research turns up some facts about Foerster that cast his announcement in an entirely different light.

First, his academic credentials: by cobbling information together from the webpage of his company Hidden Inca Tours and his official Facebook page, it appears that he has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. Foerster doesn’t offer any further information about his educational background, including his exact field of undergraduate study. I was unable to find any evidence of an advanced degree.

Foerster’s company, Hidden Inca Tours, is a travel agency that specializes in taking travelers on paranormal tours around the world, but focuses on Peru and the surrounding region. Foerster has also written a number of books on archaeology, including one called “The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients,” which he wrote with David Hatcher Childress. Vanderbilt University archaeologist Charles E. Orser once called Childress “one of the most flagrant violators of basic archaeological reasoning.”

So what about his role as assistant director at the Paracas History Museum? How did a paranormal tour operator get that job?

Well, first, the Paracas History Museum is a private museum. It’s owned by one Juan Navarro, who is also its director. Navarro is also listed on the Hidden Inca Tours webpage as a member of “Our Team of Experts.” I was unable to find any mention of academic credentials earned by Navarro, either.

My preoccupation with academic credentials is not meant to downplay the immense wisdom and experience possessed by many people who do not have undergraduate or post-grad degrees. Being smart does not require a college degree. Heck, it doesn’t require any kind of education at all; it’s an innate quality.

However, scientific expertise is not an innate quality. It is something that is gained through years of study and research, both of which are usually completed in an institution that awards successful students degrees upon graduation.

To be fair, I don’t have any special academic credentials that make me an expert in archaeology or genetics. But I’m not arguing that the data is flawed— we haven’t seen the full data, and I’m not qualified to speak on that— but I am arguing that a number of features of the announcement should warn us not to take Foerster’s announcement at face value.

That brings us to the strange nature of the announcement. Foerster announced the results personally, via internet, rather than through a scientifically reputable source.

There are a number of problems with the way he announced the preliminary results. Speaking to Discovery.com, science promoter and skeptic Sharon Hill said “This is an unconventional way of making ‘groundbreaking’ claims.”

Hill added “It’s not supported by a university, but by private funding. The initial findings were released in this unprofessional way (via Facebook, websites and an Internet radio interview) obviously because Foerster and the other researchers think this is very exciting news.”

Exciting news is one thing, but scientific credibility is another. “[S]cience doesn’t work by social media,” said Hill. “Peer review is a critical part of science and the Paracas skulls proponents have taken a shortcut that completely undermines their credibility. Appealing to the public’s interest in this cultural practice we see as bizarre — skull deformation —instead of publishing the data for peer-review examination is not going to be acceptable to the scientific community.”

There’s also the matter of the testing itself. According to Foerster, the geneticist who discovered the allegedly never-before-seen DNA, wants to remain anonymous. If that’s not a red flag for the credibility of your research, I don’t know what is.

The final nail in this story’s coffin, for me, was the revelation that Foerster had appeared on the popular History Channel program “Ancient Aliens” multiple times. In yesterday’s article, I said that the scientific and archaeological communities generally regard “Ancient Aliens” as inaccurate.

Now let’s consider the various bases for why we are supposed to dismiss the announced findings of genetic anomalies in the highly unusual Paracas skulls, which reportedly do not fit within the parameters of human skull variations.

  1. We have no credible evidence for the existence of alien civilizations? That’s a stupid statement, considering these skulls may be such evidence. There is no credible evidence for anything the first time it is discovered.
  2. The Carl Sagan quote is stupid and incorrect, for reasons that a) should be obvious and b) have been covered previously. It’s cheap sciencistic rhetoric.
  3. The title doesn’t imply anything. As for the lack of credentials, well, given the amount of known fraud and statistical error being committed by impeccably credentialed scientists, that is hardly a disqualifier.
  4. Guilt-by-association. I wrote a book with Bruce Bethke, but that doesn’t make me one of the world’s experts on supercomputers.
  5. (laughs) The writer has no credentials either. By her own logic, should we not dismiss everything she is saying? In any event, her preoccupation with academic credentials is not exactly hard to explain; she is a woman. That’s why women now so outnumber men in the university enrollments.
  6. The fact that Foerster elected to bypass the gatekeepers says literally nothing about whether the reported news is accurate or not.
  7. The geneticist’s preference to remain anonymous is not a red flag but rather an indication of the corrupt nature of science and science journalism. He knew his credibility would be attacked and adroitly avoided it by permitting the evidence to stand on its own.
  8. An appearance on a television show that is generally regarded as inaccurate by the very communities whose consensus and competence is being challenged by these reports says absolutely nothing about whether they are true or not.

Now, none of this means that Foerster is not a con artist and the reports of the genetic anomalies in the skulls are not fiction. But the correct response is for other geneticists to test the samples and either confirm or contradict the report; that is scientody. This sort of blanket assertion isn’t founded in science, it’s not even based on good logic.


The bonfire of science

In which it is once more demonstrated that scientific evidence is VASTLY less reliable than other types of evidence, because, in most cases, no one ever bothers to actually check the results:

A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” MRI-based science has been invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data.

The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters.

When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software.

Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives.

In this paper at PNAS, they write: “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.”

For example, a bug that’s been sitting in a package called 3dClustSim for 15 years, fixed in May 2015, produced bad results (3dClustSim is part of the AFNI suite; the others are SPM and FSL).

That’s not a gentle nudge that some results might be overstated: it’s more like making a bonfire of thousands of scientific papers.

It is not even remotely reasonable to take scientific evidence at face value anymore, much less the pseudoscience so often being substituted for the results produced by genuine, if often flawed, scientody.

It is not even remotely surprising that the flaw the scientists failed to pick up in this situation was statistical, for as I’ve previously observed, most scientists have very little training in math or statistics, and despite their habit of regularly citing statistics, most of them are more or less statistically illiterate.

Never forget that while there are certainly some brilliant scientists, most of them are literal midwits as there are relatively few credentialed scientists with IQs over 132. A study of all the U.S. PhD recipients in 1958 reported an average IQ of 123; the Flynn effect notwithstanding, it is highly unlikely that the average IQ of today’s increasingly diverse and vibrant PhD recipients has risen since then.


The problem of peer review

Peer review simply isn’t what it is advertised to be; it is not only little more than editing, most of the time it is not even competent editing:

As a scientist with a 15 year career behind me so far, I am afraid that my experiences reflect this. Peer review is excellent in theory but not in practice. Much of the time, the only vetting the papers get are two relatively junior people in a field (often grad students or postdocs) giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. That is absolutely it. In theory, the editors should make the decisions with the recommendations of the reviewers, but the editors rarely have the time or the expertise to judge the papers and often automatically defer to reviewers. Also, the papers should be reviewed by luminaries of the field, but these folks rarely have the time, and either decline invitations or bounce the work to a student or another trainee. It’s not just bad papers that get through, but also good, rigorous, papers that are bounced by this system.

Many if not most of the people in academic science today, at least in biology (my field), are overwhelmed with the need to publish in such high volumes, few people with the needed expertise can afford the time to go over the results in detail. All this while, at the same time and for the same reason, the volume of papers that needs to be reviewed goes up. I’ve heard of (and had myself) papers havve lingered for 4+ months before they even went out for review.

And, in our rush to publish, we often don’t read this literature carefully ourselves but start citing papers anyway, which weaves these potentially weak or erroneous papers even more tightly into the fabric of their field.

It’s difficult to care a lot about the quality of your work when you know the extra effort often doesn’t help something go through this fickle review process, and when you know people will cite it without really reading it closely. There is little incentive to spend longer on a paper to make sure everything is right and the results are reproducible because there is very little accountability for errors and huge rewards for being prolific.

The ironic thing is that True Believers and the I Fucking Love Science crowd genuinely believe that “peer reviewed science” is the gold standard for evidence. But there is a reason scientific evidence is not automatically allowed in a court of law, let alone considered conclusive, and the more we learn about the defects of peer review, the better we understand that science’s credibility is limited.

We have a word for science that is trustworthy, and that word is engineering. Until science can be applied, it cannot be fully trusted to be correct.

All peer review is really designed to do is to reassure the reader that the information presented fits safely within the confines of the consensus status quo.


Was Charles Darwin a science fraud?

A buster of supermyths claims that Darwin was, in fact, a plagiarist:

Sutton has himself embarked on another journey to the depths, this one far more treacherous than the ones he’s made before. The stakes were low when he was hunting something trivial, the supermyth of Popeye’s spinach; now Sutton has been digging in more sacred ground: the legacy of the great scientific hero and champion of the skeptics, Charles Darwin. In 2014, after spending a year working 18-hour days, seven days a week, Sutton published his most extensive work to date, a 600-page broadside on a cherished story of discovery. He called it “Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret.”

Sutton’s allegations are explosive. He claims to have found irrefutable proof that neither Darwin nor Alfred Russel Wallace deserves the credit for the theory of natural selection, but rather that they stole the idea — consciously or not — from a wealthy Scotsman and forest-management expert named Patrick Matthew. “I think both Darwin and Wallace were at the very least sloppy,” he told me. Elsewhere he’s been somewhat less diplomatic: “In my opinion Charles Darwin committed the greatest known science fraud in history by plagiarizing Matthew’s” hypothesis, he told the Telegraph. “Let’s face the painful facts,” Sutton also wrote. “Darwin was a liar. Plain and simple.”

Some context: The Patrick Matthew story isn’t new. Matthew produced a volume in the early 1830s, “On Naval Timber and Arboriculture,” that indeed contained an outline of the famous theory in a slim appendix. In a contemporary review, the noted naturalist John Loudon seemed ill-prepared to accept the forward-thinking theory. He called it a “puzzling” account of the “origin of species and varieties” that may or may not be original. In 1860, several months after publication of “On the Origin of Species,” Matthew would surface to complain that Darwin — now quite famous for what was described as a discovery born of “20 years’ investigation and reflection” — had stolen his ideas.

Darwin, in reply, conceded that “Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection.” But then he added, “I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, had heard of Mr. Matthew’s views.”

That statement, suggesting that Matthew’s theory was ignored — and hinting that its importance may not even have been quite understood by Matthew himself — has gone unchallenged, Sutton says. It has, in fact, become a supermyth, cited to explain that even big ideas amount to nothing when they aren’t framed by proper genius.

Sutton thinks that story has it wrong, that natural selection wasn’t an idea in need of a “great man” to propagate it. After all his months of research, Sutton says he found clear evidence that Matthew’s work did not go unread. No fewer than seven naturalists cited the book, including three in what Sutton calls Darwin’s “inner circle.” He also claims to have discovered particular turns of phrase — “Matthewisms” — that recur suspiciously in Darwin’s writing.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Sutton is correct. Although non-writers don’t have much confidence in it, to the expert, or even the experienced amateur, literary style is very nearly as distinguishable as a fingerprint. This is particularly true in cases where the two works are supposed to be entirely unrelated.


Cargo Cult debate

One thing science fetishists can’t bear is to have their obvious ignorance of science pointed out:

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
I love being able to back up what I say with hard evidence, peer reviewed scientific consensus.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
50 percent of which is proven to be wrong when replication is attempted. You’re out of date.

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
replication of what? You got a peer reviewed piece or really any article that backs up your claim? Waiting.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Mindlessly repeating the words “peer review” and citing “articles” shows you’re a low-IQ ignoramus.

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
you apologize for that or you’re blocked

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Block away, moron. It won’t fix peer review or change the fact that you’re both stupid and ignorant.

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
You are blocked from following @bgolshahi1 and viewing @bgolshahi1’s Tweets.

I wish more of these morons would use Randi Harper’s anti-GG autoblocker, so I wouldn’t be subjected to their repetitive idiocy.

It is important to understand that if you’re prone to demanding “peer reviewed pieces” or shouting “logical fallacy” at people with whom you are arguing, you’re probably a midwit who doesn’t really understand what you’re talking about. In both these, and other similar cases, what we have is a person who has seen someone else win an argument successfully refuting another individual’s argument by comparing scientific evidence or identifying a specific logical fallacy being committed, and trying to imitate them without understanding what the other person was actually doing.

But if there is no genuine substance behind the demand or the identification, if you don’t have your own competing scientific evidence or you can’t point out the actual logical fallacy – and there is a massive difference between the set of flawed syllogisms and the subset of logical fallacies – then you have no business talking about such things.

The failure to cite a peer-reviewed study means nothing in the absence of competing citations. The claim of logical fallacy means nothing when the precise fallacy is not identified. If you don’t understand those things, stop embarrassing yourself by arguing with people and start reading.

Otherwise, you’re no different than the ignorant South Pacific islander building runways in the hopes that the magic sky machines will descend bearing gifts.


Diversity kills community

The same negative effect of diversity on community discovered – and initially buried – by Robert Putnam in the United States is replicated in the United Kingdom by a study entitled Does Ethnic Diversity Have a Negative Effect on Attitudes towards the Community? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Causal Claims within the Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate:

We observe that as a community becomes more diverse around an individual, they are likely to become less attached to their community. This is a strict test of the causal impact of diversity, minimizing unobserved heterogeneity and eliminating selection bias. Importantly, neither indicator of disadvantage is significantly associated with attachment.

Model 2 shows the same analysis among movers. Diversity is again significant and negative, suggesting that individuals who move from more diverse to less diverse communities are likely to become more attached (and vice versa).

Like calls to like. Most people prefer to live among their own. Segregation is not only the right of free association in action, it is a community imperative. This is further evidence that the increasingly diverse United States will not survive because it cannot survive. It is not a nation.


All ur hashtag are belong to us

The Global Warming charlatans are planning a propaganda push. This is from a science activist mailing list.

Climate Feedback works like this: Using the new web-annotation platform Hypothesis, scientists verify facts and annotate online climate articles, layering their insights and comments on top of the original story. They then issue a “5-star” rating so readers can quickly judge stories’ scientific credibility. Recognized by NASA, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and California Gov. Jerry Brown among others, Climate Feedback is already improving journalistic standards by flagging misreported climate science in mainstream outlets; earlier this month, for example, scientists took apart Bjorn Lomborg’s misleading op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. This is only a hint of what Climate Feedback has in store as it begins to aggregate those credibility scores into a wider index, rating major news sources on their reporting of climate change as part of a new Scientific Trust Tracker.

To that end, Climate Feedback is launching a crowd funding campaign on April 27 around the hashtag #StandWithScience, supported by leading climate minds like Profs. Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes and others. I invite you to take a look at this sneak preview of our campaign (NOTE: please do not share publicly before April 27). The Exxon climate scandal has already made its way into the 2016 election season, but few have discussed the role the media has played enabling corporate interests to sow doubt about the science of climate change, which has long confused the public and undermined political support for dealing with the issue. As 350.org founder Bill McKibben said of Climate Feedback: Scientists are just about ready to come out of the lab and get more active and when they do, it will make a remarkable difference.

Let’s disrupt it. VFM, you know what to do. Political activism is not science. #StandWithScience.