Tag: science

“A spurious doubling”

In which we learn that the global warming scammers are as statistically inept as the biologists:

Using Leroy 2010 methods, the Watts et al 2012 paper, which studies several aspects of USHCN siting issues and data adjustments, concludes that:

These factors, combined with station siting issues, have led to a spurious doubling of U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.

Other findings include, but are not limited to:

· Statistically significant differences between compliant and non-compliant stations exist, as well as urban and rural stations.

· Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.

· Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.

· Urban sites warm more rapidly than semi-urban sites, which in turn warm more rapidly than rural sites.

· The raw data Tmean trend for well sited stations is 0.15°C per decade lower than adjusted Tmean trend for poorly sited stations.

· Airport USHCN stations show a significant differences in trends than other USHCN stations, and due to equipment issues and other problems, may not be representative stations for monitoring climate.

This is the sort of scientific debacle that became inevitable once the definition of “science” is broadened to include editorial and statistical analysis. It is particularly problematic because most of the scientists who are messing around with the statistics and simulations that serve as the entire basis of their “science” have no more statistical training, and considerably less simulation design experience than I do.

I have tremendous respect for the utility of the scientific method as a knowledge tool. The problem is that much, if not most, of what presently passes for science has literally nothing to do with the scientific method. Which, of course, lends itself to the corruption, fraud, and incompetence that is so reliably demonstrated by the climate “scientists”.

Universal suffrage vs democracy

This post by Roissy should help explain why the Founding Fathers limited the vote to about one-fifth of the male population:

If you are apt to align your lifestyle with whatever is the latest fashion, (and ostracize those who don’t), you are probably also apt to blindly obey high status authority figures telling you what is good for you. If true, then we might speculate that women make better cultural foot soldiers for whichever elite authority is most tangible in their lives, owing to women’s greater propensity to accept authority dictums without question.

We may add to this speculation not only personal observation and confirmatory heaps of anecdotes, but in addition scientific evidence that women are, indeed, more obedient to authority than are men. Courtesy of reader uh pointing us to this Milgram experiment replication:

Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram’s subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a “cute, fluffy puppy” who was given real, albeit harmless, electric shocks. They found similar findings to Milgram: half of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed to the end. Many subjects showed high levels of distress during the experiment and some openly wept. In addition, Sheridan and King found that the duration for which the shock button was pressed decreased as the shocks got higher, meaning that for higher shock levels, subjects showed more hesitance towards delivering the shocks.

Always remember: All female participants in the Milgram obedience to authority experiment continued shocking the puppy despite their tears.

Contemplate this: if all women are willing to shock cute little puppies simply because an authority figure told them to do so, what won’t they be willing to do? No doubt the women who participated in the experiment had no desire to harm puppies and would explain their behavior by saying “he made me do it”, but that malleability is the entire point.

Resistance to evil requires the ability to stand up to it and refuse to submit. Jesus was not merely obedient to His Father, he also refused to bow down before the Prince of the World. And note that it’s not only women who lack the ability to resist perceived authority, but half of all men as well. It’s not merely women’s suffrage, but universal suffrage that caused democracies to become dictatorial.

It also underlines the importance of watching women’s actions, not listening to their words. If asked “would you ever subject a puppy to a painful electric shock of no possible benefit to it?”, most of those women would quite vehemently deny the very idea. However, the evidence indicates that if instructed to do so, they would, in fact, do it, even though the action caused them significant personal stress.

Anyhow, I’d be interested to know how many people here, male or female, believe they would shock the puppy at the behest of the men in white coats. I don’t think I would object to giving it a mild shock or three in the interest of science, but if this experiment truly mimicked the Milgram one and I was told that the voltage was high enough to seriously harm or even kill the puppy, there is a non-zero chance I’d punch out the scientist before hooking him up to his device and giving him a shock or two. At the very least, I believe I would deliver a solid “WTF is wrong with you people” rant before kidnapping the puppy.

But then, it is well known that I regard scientists with nearly as much suspicion as male elementary teachers who just love children. So I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a test of authority in my case.

So much for “the science is settled”

Now it is the turn of evolutionary scientists discover that Richard Dawkins is a deeply unpleasant individual:

A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve.

The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson’s theory “as implausible and as unsupported by evidence”.

“I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory,” Dawkins writes.

The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins’s negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.

“In any case,” Wilson writes, “making such lists is futile. If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston [a mythical fire-like element] and navigating with geocentric maps.”

As I noted a few years ago in The Irrational Atheist, Richard Dawkins is not a scientist, he is an ex-scientist. Dawkins has always been inept when it comes to arguing against intelligent and informed interlocutors, so it should come as no surprise that he would blunder badly when trying to take on EO Wilson, even in the event that he happens to be right.

Dawkins’s statement also raises a serious question. If a famous and heavily credentialed biologist like EO Wilson truly does not understand evolutionary theory, what could possibly be the use of attempting to teach it in public schools?

Scientists are still stupid

It is truly remarkable how few supposedly intelligent science majors intending to pursue doctoral degrees and careers in science understand the concept of supply and demand or the significance of price information:

Michelle Amaral wanted to be a brain scientist to help cure diseases. She planned a traditional academic science career: PhD, university professorship and, eventually, her own lab.

But three years after earning a doctorate in neuroscience, she gave up trying to find a permanent job in her field. Dropping her dream, she took an administrative position at her university, experiencing firsthand an economic reality that, at first look, is counterintuitive: There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

That reality runs counter to messages sent by President Obama and the National Science Foundation and other influential groups, who in recent years have called for U.S. universities to churn out more scientists. Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.

The ironic thing is that many scientists and science students simultaneously complain about science pay being too low while calling for more science education. So, not only are they ignoring the information being provided by the price – the low pay signifies that there are too many scientists – but they are actually seeking to make the problem worse by increasing the already glutted supply!

Forget permitting these clueless wonders to run society as per the scientific technocracy of their utopian dreams, I find it astounding that we even let them vote. As for the politicians, we already know they don’t grasp the link between price and supply or they wouldn’t be so intent on immigration amnesty, among other things.

The futures of America

The argument that race and culture do not matter with regards to the construction and maintenance of civilization is not only historically dubious, but is deeply and profoundly anti-scientific:

The stench of sewage permeates the run-down streets, which have the second highest crime rates of anywhere across the country. Of its 70,390 residents, a staggering 40 per cent are out of work, with many having been ‘on the scrapheap’ from the ‘formal economy’ for generations.

The population has plummeted by more than 40 per cent from its 1950 level of 120,000, but there is little hope for those who remain. City budgets are being slashed, nearly half of the police force has been axed in recent years and the public library system is now almost non-existent.

Seventy thousand people and they not only can’t manage to build anything or prosper, they can’t even maintain the basic order and infrastructure they inherited from their grandfathers. What is the difference between a thriving metropolis of 124,000 thousand people and a dying one of little more than half that?

There are a number of factors, of course, but it would dishonest to fail to note that one of the significant ones appears to be the decline in the white percentage of the Camden population to only 17 percent. Stagnation and moderate decline are already apparent in the USA with whites now accounting for 72.4 percent of the population, down from 89.8 percent in 1940; if we hypothesize a link between between race and civilization, we can use that as a basis for predicting a significant decline in the standard of American civilization on the basis of “minority” births now outnumbering the number of births to the white majority.

Now, whites have no monopoly on civilization and there are obviously a number of great non-White civilizations. But they are almost uniformly Asian. So, it is also possible that the recent influx of Asian immigrants, who now outnumber Hispanic immigrants, could eventually permit the maintenance of a functioning civilization, albeit one that is likely to be a blend of Eastern and Western civilizations rather than a Western one. This would tend to indicate a reasonable amount of societal prosperity, but significantly reduced individual rights, an emphasis on bureaucracy, an end to the pretense of democracy, and technological stagnation.

There are worse fates. An Asio-America post-Aztlan secession may, in fact, represent the optimal non-violent outcome, presuming present trends prevail. Civilization is subject to entropy, which must be actively combated by each successive generation; any failure to do so assures that civilization will eventually return to Man’s natural state of barbarism. As Camden shows, a mere two 30-year generations is sufficient to reduce it to that natural state.

The Standard Model survives

I still suspect it will be refined considerably, but it appears that for the present, it remains in play:

Scientists believe they have captured the elusive “God particle” that gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together. The historic announcement came in a progress report from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator.

Professor John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and technology Facilities Council, told reporters at a briefing in London: “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

“Discovery is the important word. That is confirmed. It’s a momentous day for science.”

Scientists say it is a 5 sigma result which means they are 99.999% sure they have found a new particle.

I’ll admit that I was hoping for an outright negative result, not because I have anything against physicists or physics, but because their Standard Model hasn’t permitted them to make any significant material advances in quite some time. Hence the philosophical diversions of string theory, multiverse theory, and so forth. But, one can only work with what is actually there, and as an armchair economist, I somewhat envy a model that actually works reasonably well as a predictive model.

However, given the possibility that the characteristics of the particle are still unknown – and what an astonishing surprise to learn that more study, (translation: money), is needed to determine those characteristics – we can still hope for something unusual in this new “Higgs-like” particle that will upset the consensus apple cart and pave the way for some new scientific breakthroughs.

Mailvox: by George, they’ve got it!

Nick comments: “It is expected that scientists will announce Wednesday that they have wholly relied on circumstantial evidence to “prove”, via inferences, beyond all resonable doubt (or, if you prefer, 5-sigma certainty) the existence of the “God Particle”.”

It will certainly be amusing if it turns out that the scientific media is reading the tea leaves wrong and CERN is summoning famous particle physicists to Switzerland in order to announce the failure of the Standard Model. But that won’t be half so hilarious as if their announcement of the proof of Higgs boson is eventuall followed by a reluctant admission that it doesn’t actually exist in spite of all their sigmas.

It seems scientists don’t pay much attention to finance, as it is remarkable how often the mathematically impossible black swan shows up to crash the party.

Scientists claim vaccine fraud at Merck

It appears there may still be a few legitimate scientists working in the deeply corrupt vaccine industry:

This is the story of the MMR vaccine and two Merck scientists who filed a lawsuit in 2010 over Merck’s efforts to allegedly “defraud the United States through Merck’s ongoing scheme to sell the government a mumps vaccine that is mislabeled, misbranded, adulterated and falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.” Merck allegedly did this from 2000 onwards in order to maintain its exclusive license to sell the MMR vaccine and keep its monopoly of the US market….

In the complaint, the scientists outline in great detail exactly how Merck manipulated the efficacy results in order to be able to say they had a 95% effective vaccine so that they could meet the fairytale goal of vaccine-induced “herd immunity by 2010.” Well, it turns out that the vaccine could not meet the goal that CDC projected to eradicate mumps by 2010, BECAUSE the vaccine, in its current state cannot reliably confer immunity, and is in fact a dilute version of what it once was when Maurice Hilleman invented it using the virus of his five year old daughter. The same viral mumps strain has been in use in every mumps or MMR vaccine Merck has made since 1967. In order to make the live vaccine virus non-infective the virus has to be “passaged” through different cells or animals. In that passaging, mutations take place and have altered the antigenicity, or the antibody-stimulating capacity of the virus. When testing was performed to show the efficacy (neutralizing antibody provoking potential) of the forty-year-old virus strain, for use in the newer combination mumps vaccines, Merck’s scientists could not produce a 95% efficacy rate….

If what these scientists claim is true, the net result of Merck’s questionable activity was epidemics and outbreaks. It is known that the mumps component of all MMR vaccines from the mid 1990’s has had a very low efficacy, estimated at 69% (Harling 05). The outbreaks started in UK and Europe in 1998. USA’s outbreaks began in 2006.

These mumps outbreaks have already been proven NOT to be the result of failure to vaccinate, but vaccination failure … and now it looks to all be a result of Merck’s cooked books, used in order to maintain a commercial monopoly to generate increased revenue from increasing numbers of boosters.

Now isn’t this interesting? As I have long suspected, the science is not on the side of the vaccine manufacturers even though the scientists are well-paid to ensure that they are. Once more we see the utility of observation and pattern recognition versus published professional science, which due to its increasing corruption, is intrinsically unreliable. This is why the constant appeals to various statistical studies and the occasional experiment in defense of vaccine safety are logically invalid; absolutely none of it can be trusted.

And don’t fall for the defensive and deceptive claims of the vaccine apologists that the known corruption in their limited field of science means that all other fields are necessarily corrupted to the same extent. While the potential for the same problem certainly exists in other fields, few of them are as observably and demonstrably as corrupt as vaccine industry science.

Can anyone doubt that if this case is dismissed for some reason, the same people who claimed the Italian court’s finding that an MMR vaccine caused a case of autism were immaterial will loudly proclaim how it proves that Merck’s vaccines are safe? Or that even if the scientists’ case is confirmed, that those who have loudly accused the unvaccinated for causing the various outbreaks since 1998 will fail to admit they were wrong and point their fingers at the faulty vaccine?

MMR caused this case of autism

Ever notice that science fetishists love to point to the courts when it suits them, then quickly reverse course and point out that that the law isn’t science when it doesn’t?

At nine months old, Valentino Bocca was as bright as a button. In a favourite family photo, taken by his father, the baby boy wriggles in his mother’s arms and laughs for the camera. His parents look at the precious picture often these days. It is a reminder of their only son before they took him on a sunny morning to the local public health clinic for a routine childhood vaccination.

Valentino was never the same child after the jab in his arm. He developed autism and, in a landmark judgment, a judge has ruled that his devastating disability was provoked by the inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).
The case of Valentino Bocca age nine from Rimini Italy has reignited the debate over a possible link between the MMR and autism after a judge ruled his disability was provoked by the jab.

The judgment in a provincial Italian court challenges the settled view of the majority of the medical profession — and could have profound implications in Britain and across the world. Valentino’s parents, Antonella, 44, and Maurizio, 43, have been awarded £140,000, to be paid by Italy’s Ministry of Health and they plan a civil action against the Italian government that may get them £800,000 more…. The judge’s view has since been endorsed by Italy’s High Court of Law (the equivalent of our Supreme Court) which ruled that the Italian government must pay compensation to children damaged by any jabs given under the Ministry of Health auspices — even if they are not compulsory ones.

The problem faced by the pro-vaccine camp is twofold. First, what passes for the science on this issue is dreadful and really should not be described as science. The same scientific community that didn’t hesitate to give syphilis to black men and performed experiments on Jewish concentration camp internees is suddenly claiming that it would be terribly unethical to allow children to remain unvaccinated or even push back the vaccine schedule a few months in order to gather meaningful scientific evidence on the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. Statistical surveys of populations are not proper science, and furthermore, have absolutely nothing to do with whether one individual will be negatively affected by a vaccine or not.

The constant bleating that “no scientific evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism” has been found is so irrelevant and misleading as to be dishonest. I doubt there is any scientific evidence between a punch in the nose and death either, but there is no question that people have been killed by a single punch before because people have seen it happen. For some reason, the process of simple observation that everyone believes is perfectly reliable when one person punches another in the face suddenly becomes not only unreliable, but downright anti-scientific when one person injects various foreign substances into a child. I have personally witnessed an infant scream and immediately collapse into unconsciousness when given a shot, and I absolutely defy any moronic scientist to claim it was not the result of the vaccine being administered. Fortunately, there were no ill effects apparent after the infant regained consciousness, but after witnessing that, I would no sooner permit any child of mine to be vaccinated at such a young age than I would permit someone to hit me in the head with a hammer… no matter how many statistical surveys are presented by scientists claiming that there is no scientific evidence showing any link between being hit in the head with a hammer and autism.

Second, the legal standard is “beyond a reasonable degree of doubt”. And it is well beyond a reasonable degree of doubt that certain vaccines have caused autism in some children. Very few vaccine skeptics are saying that no children can be vaccinated against anything or that all vaccines are intrinsically evil – although the whole fetal tissue thing on which some vaccines are based is, quite clearly, evil on its face – but most parents are not complete idiots incapable of recognizing when their normal child suddenly loses speech and motor abilities that it previously possessed, or linking it to probable causes. In fact, the awareness that vaccines are, beyond any reasonable degree of doubt, responsible for autism and other damage is precisely why Congress passed a law removing vaccine makers and administrators from legal liability.

It is far beyond the current state of biological science to claim one particular administration of a vaccine did not cause one specific case of autism and any honest scientist would admit it. Can you imagine if other culpable parties began to try defending themselves using the “no scientific link” defense? Science simply doesn’t work that way, especially “science” that is nothing more than statistical analysis, and those who attempt to appeal to science in such fashion are guilty of dishonesty, empty propaganda, and the abuse of science.

Anyhow, this is a welcome outcome and I hope that the threat of being financially ruined by their victims will force Big Pharma to spend more effort in improving the safety of their products than in lobbying the various governments to mandate more vaccines and providing them with additional protection from liability. Science is not the law, nor should it ever be confused for it. We don’t need scientists to determine if a specific vaccine has harmed a specific individual any more than we need them to determine if a specific individual has robbed a specific bank, in fact, scientists should not be involved in the legal discussion at all given their shoddy faux-science and oft-demonstrated biases on the matter.

Still sniping, still running

It would appear PZ Myers is now too delicate to respond to me directly, so he’s responding to someone else quoting what I wrote, which totally doesn’t count as responding:

I don’t do debates anymore. One reason is that they give the other side far too much credibility; another is that the format rewards rhetoric, not honesty. But the other big reason is sheer disgust at the spectacle these loons can put on.

Imagine this metaphorical situation: you’re at a debate, and your opponent stands up and in the first round, starts punching himself in the face. Punching hard, until the blood spurts in great red rivers out of his nose. You’re aghast, but when your turn comes up, you try to make your points; in rebuttal, he pulls out a knife and starts gouging out one of his eyeballs. You just want to stop the whole debacle, call an ambulance, and have the poor warped goon hauled away. But then afterwards, he crows victory.

That’s a bit of hyperbole, but not by much. Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, has leapt upon my post in which I used the status of women as evidence that religion does harm to humanity, and eagerly tries to rebut me in a spectacular act of self-mutilation. I won’t link directly to poor sick Theodore Beale — he needs psychiatric help — but fortunately Dave Futrelle quotes him extensively, so you can get the gist without feeding Beale’s pathology directly.

Right, that’s why the man whose intellectual courage inspired me to dub him “The Fowl Atheist” doesn’t debate anyone. It’s not because he can’t argue his way out of a paper bag and knows that he’ll get his pudgy ass exposed to the public before it is kicked all over the place, it’s because he’s too much of a humanitarian. You’d think he would know no one is going to buy that excuse, he’s a high-AQ militant atheist after all. He’s a fierce and focused hunter, with hunter’s hands and hunter’s eyes, not Sister Mary Margaret feeding the poor at the homeless shelter! I find it a little ironic that a man who openly admits to being closer to having Asperger’s Syndrome than being neurotypical is attempting to claim I need psychiatric help.

I never cease to find amusing how quickly these inept atheists resort to accusations of mental illness whenever their illogic is publicly illuminated and dissected. Why, one might almost begin to suspect they are projecting!

But there’s enough bile to make you wonder. I was arguing that many features of religion clearly don’t benefit women, so I asked:

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

So Teddy rebuts that in the most appalling way.

[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

Say what? So his answer to how this benefits women is to say it’s bad for society for women to be independent, and that honor killings, stonings, and mutilation of women is a small price?

I think he just made my case for me.

Yes, that is precisely the answer. But this doesn’t make his case for him, instead, his response to my scientific answer only confirms Wilson’s original case against him, in which he claimed that PZ doesn’t act or think in a scientific manner. And while Wilson is correct and PZ truly doesn’t think like a scientist in any way, shape, or form, it’s actually worse than that because it’s clear that he also doesn’t understand what he reads. I not only provided an answer to his question that can be empirically and objectively analyzed, it was a scientific answer that was entirely in keeping with PZ’s own previously expressed statements on the subject. Consider what PZ wrote about the Taliban’s oppression of women only two years ago:

I also think that the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise…it’s a kind of Darwinian criterion, because unsuccessful societies don’t survive. Can we use science to determine whether that is a good strategy for human success? I think we can, but not in the way Harris is trying to do so: we could ask empirically, after the fact, whether the Taliban was successful in expanding, maintaining its population, and responding to its environment in a productive way. We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion. It’s an emotional one; it’s also a rational one, given the premise that we should treat all people equitably…but that premise can’t claim scientific justification.

So while the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise, determining the way in which a society can become successful is. Note that Myers admits that one cannot say throwing acid in a woman’s face when she demands independence is wrong from the scientific perspective. He even acknowledges that science could support, on the basis of the Darwinian criterion, horrific actions in support of societal success and survival. This is not to say he supports such actions, only that his opposition to them is based on entirely non-scientific reasoning. In that previous post, he adds:

I agree with Harris entirely that the oppression of women is an evil, a wrong, a violation of a social contract that all members of a society should share. I just don’t see a scientific reason for that — I see reasons of biological predisposition (we are empathic, social animals), of culture (this is a conclusion of Enlightenment history), and personal values, but not science. Science is an amoral judge: science could find that a slave culture of ant-like servility was a species optimum, or that a strong behavioral sexual dimorphism, where men and women had radically different statuses in society, was an excellent working solution.

So, we see that Wilson was correct. PZ is not thinking as a scientist about these matters, by his own words he is clearly thinking about them according to his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values. Of course, the biological predisposition, the culture, and the personal values of those who throw acid in women’s faces to keep them in their place are not only different than PZ’s, but may actually be superior to them in both scientific and moral terms. PZ hasn’t even begun to attempt to make any case for the superiority of his own biological predisposition, culture, and personal values, in fact, he has devoted considerable effort over the years to demonizing the Christian culture in which he was raised.

But how about this: Beale has not made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I reject his bargain; I say we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings live in mutually loving and respectful relationships. I do not have to hover over my wife with a threatening jar of acid in order for both of us to live together happily; in fact, a life where I had to compel a partnership with terror would be a horror and a nightmare.

One more. I also asked this:

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

Here’s his answer.

Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

A fetus is not a woman. I’m used to hearing those wacky anti-choicers call the fetus a “baby”, with all those emotional connotations, but this is the first time I’ve heard them called “women”.

The racist tirade is just sickening. So now Beale wants us to lump all black people together as “murderers” to justify forced sterilization, as a logical consequence of my values? I’ve heard of that tactic somewhere else before.

Again with the logical fallacies. Here’s a hint: the death of women in back-alley abortions can be directly addressed by legalizing abortion and providing responsible medical treatment; the socioeconomic conditions that create an environment of crime are not addressed by racially-defined forced abortion. If we want to end murders by any population (yes, please), the answer is not the extermination of that population, but the correction of social and economic inequity and providing opportunity for advancement.

Of course I haven’t made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I didn’t need to make that case in order to make my point, which is that the scientific case could be made and that in refusing to consider it, PZ was proving Wilson right about his failure to think like a scientist about it. He can say whatever he likes, but his position would be no weaker if he had instead declared that we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings began the day by pledging their loyalty to Yog-Sothoth and committing seven deadly sins each morning before breakfast.

PZ then reveals that in addition to his demonstrated inability to think like a scientist, he’s not even able to think logically. If “a fetus is not a woman”, then obviously “a black fetus is not a black adult”. It’s simple multiplication by zero. If there is no harm done in aborting one fetus, there can be no harm in aborting all the black fetuses in America, plus there will be a net benefit that will save 17 times more lives every single year than merely permitting abortions to save the lives of pregnant women. The logical consequences of PZ’s position on abortion are inescapable. If it is worthwhile to utilize abortion to save 466 pregnant women every year, then it is clearly worthwhile to utilize it to save 8,012 murder victims, as either way, the cost is trivial, since according to PZ, the fetus is not a baby, a woman, or a black adult meriting protection of the law. The appeal to socioeconomic conditions is irrelevant, as PZ is wrong and murders committed by blacks can be directly addressed by utilizing abortion; nonexistent people cannot murder anyone. That there may or may not be other ways of addressing the same social ill does not change that simple and undeniable fact.

I further note that I am not a supporter of abortion for any reason, including the elimination of crime and the life of the mother. I am merely explicating the logical consequences of PZ’s reasoning. Nor is it racist to cite the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report; one could make precisely the same case, although it would be a less effective and efficient one, for the abortion of white fetuses. If PZ doesn’t like the inescapable logical implications of his reasoning, then I suggest he should consider rethinking his assumptions. And if he doesn’t like scientists and non-scientists alike pointing out the obvious fact that he does not reason or behave like a scientist, perhaps he should start trying to actually think like one rather than like an irrational, emotional, atheist propagandist.

And with that, I’m sufficiently repulsed not to want to continue. Beale/Day has apparently been whiningly demanding to debate me for the last few years; now you know why I won’t even consider it. Getting his words as second-hand text is nauseating enough, I’d rather not have to deal with the poisonous little scumbag directly.

Still sniping and running. After all these years, still sniping and running. The thing is, as anyone who has ever fired a gun knows, it’s a lot easier to hit your target if you stand still and take the time to aim at it. Of course, then you have to take the risk that you’re up against a much better marksman who will blow you away before you can even get a shot off….