Policy and Politics
tfk | July 18, 2012Slacktivist observes that Bryan Fischer is an AIDS denier:
Tweet from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association:
“New pill stops HIV virus. But won’t stop AIDS since caused by extensive inhalant drug use, not HIV.”
So there it is. Bryan Fischer is an AIDS denier. The chief spokesman of the American Family Association is an AIDS denier.
Do you need to know anything, anything at all, else about Bryan Fischer?
No.
Is there anything, anything at all, else that you could possibly learn about Bryan Fischer that would balance this out and make him a credible and/or decent human being?
No.
So…
tfk | July 17, 2012Sometimes someone tricks me into reading Jerry Coyne's blog. He tends to trot out the same bad arguments, sometimes it's worth pushing back. For instance, he recently set out to demonstrate that science and religion are incompatible, in part because of:
the well known data on the greater prevalence of nonbelief among scientists than among the general public. In the elite U.S. National Academy of Sciences, for example, only 7% of members accept a personal God, with 93% being agnostics and atheists. In the U.S. general population, these figures are almost exactly reversed. And, of course, in…
tfk | July 10, 2012Shorter Disco. 'tute's David Klinghoffer: Paul McBride, Darwinist Hero of the Hour:
Why don't real scientists take our book seeking to throw out all of paleoanthropology – self-published by a lawyer, an insect geneticist, and a bacterium geneticist – seriously? That paleoanthropologist who tore it to shreds doesn't count: he hasn't got good enough credentials.
Honestly, here's David Klinghoffer's actual opening:
The debate about evolution is conducted in large part on blogs… Defending Darwinism from critics and advocates of alternative scientific theories like intelligent design should be a…
tfk | July 10, 2012Disco. 'tute blogger Ann Gauger wants to make something clear:
There seems to be an idea on the part of some critics that my analysis in Science and Human Origins means that humans arose four million years ago. That is not the case.
The very idea that anyone would think Gauger agrees with the scientific evidence on any matter is clearly offensive, and her umbrage is duly noted.
Gauger doesn't ever specify who these critics are that maligned her so, or what they actually said. She certainly doesn't link to the critics' work so that her readers can evaluate those criticisms themselves. Links…
tfk | July 2, 2012At his blog Still Monkeys, Paul McBride has done yeoman work examining the shoddy claims of the latest book from the Disco. 'tute Press. This book, barely more than a pamphlet, really, purports to show that the last century of research on the roots of the human race are wrong, that evolution can't explain where humans came from, that there was no common ancestry between humans and other primates, and to "debunk claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple."
Typically for the book's authors – Disco. 'tute staffers Casey Luskin, Douglas Axe, and Ann Gauger – the…
tfk | June 29, 2012Justice Antonin Scalia is known for forcefully advocating his view that Constitutional questions before the Supreme Court should be decided on the basis of the original intent of the Constitution's authors, or by considering the way society in 1789 would have viewed the language at issue.
Scalia is also known for honoring this originalism as much in its breach as in practice. He tends to shift the scope of his historical analysis as needed to reach the modern conservative outcomes he hopes to achieve.
And so we come to his dissent in the Healthcare cases, a dissent which appears to have…
tfk | June 28, 2012At the time of YHWH, God's making of earth and heaven, no bush of the field was yet on earth,no plant of the field had yet sprung up,for YHWH, God, had not made it rain upon the earth,and there was no human/adam to till the soil/adama–but a surge would well up from the ground and water all the face of the soul;and YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soilhe blew into his nostrils the breath of lifeand the human became a living being.
YHWH, God, planted a garden in Eden/Land-of-Pleasure, in the east,and there he placed the human whom he had formed.
…
Now YHWH, God, said:It is not good…
tfk | April 29, 2012I didn't write about the attacks in Oslo last year because…what is there to say. The bombing and shootings are tragic, the Norwegian people have shown an admirable resilience in the face of terrorism, and wingnuts who initially tried to pin the attack on Muslims have egg on their faces.
I was especially struck recently by the charming protest directed at the confessed author of that tragedy, Anders Breivik. In testimony during his trial for murdering 77 fellow Norwegians last summer, Breivik singled out for criticism the song "Children of the Rainbow," a translation of Pete Seeger's "My…
tfk | April 25, 2012A couple weeks ago, the second creationist bill of the "academic freedom" generation became law. You'd think Casey Luskin, who seems to be the ringleader of the clowns pushing these bills, would be thrilled. But all he can seem to do is find reasons to be upset.
First he was angry that Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam let the bill become law, but did so without signing it. Haslam's statement refusing to sign the bill observed that, by the defenders' own argument, the bill was essentially powerless, while there are ways in which it could make things worse. Noting that laws ought to "bring…
tfk | April 22, 2012[Attention Conservation Notice: About 3,500 words on the factual, scientific, and philosophical problems of a paper which was surely not intended to be taken seriously as science or philosophy. Nick Matzke comes at it from a different angle at The Panda's Thumb, and more briefly.]
Evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne has an article coming out in the journal Evolution, in which he demonstrates yet again why excellence in one field does not guarantee competence in any other field. The paper aims to do several things: to advance an argument about why evolution is so controversial in US political…
tfk | April 12, 2012Todd Wood is a professor at Bryan College, in Dayton, TN. Dayton, you'll recall, was the home of the Scopes trial, and Bryan College was named after Scopes's prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, and was founded in part to carry on Bryan's anti-evolution crusade. Wood himself is a prominent young earth creationist, a leader in the creationist answer to phylogenetics (baraminology), and director of Bryan's Center for Origins Research. Which is to say, he's a creationist's creationist.
And he's against the Tennessee monkey bill.
Last month, he wrote to Governor Haslam, asking him to oppose the…
tfk | April 12, 2012On Tuesday, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the second of this new generation of creationist laws, along with a similar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stating that it brought confusion, not clarity. He also noted that the bill had overwhelming legislative support (passing by roughly 3-1 margins in both houses), so a veto was unlikely to have any effect.
That morning, as Haslam weighed his options, balancing the concerns expressed by thousands of parents across Tennessee, and the concerns expressed by the state's leading scientists and…
tfk | March 21, 2012The Florida Atlantic University newspaper reports:
Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: âHow does evolution kill black people?â she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesnât kill anyone.
And then, Carr became violent.
Another member of the class taped the outburst, though it's hard to follow much of what's going on.
A student told the paper that Kajiura "was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question⦠She asked it four…
tfk | March 21, 2012If you wonder why I haven't been blogging lately, it's because I've been trying to keep science safe in the Volunteer State; for instance, here's a great piece Huffington Post science editor Cara Santa Maria put together, including an interview with yours truly.
If you watch the NCSE front page (and you should), you'll see that it's almost all-Tennessee, all the time. Tennessee is getting ready to repeat an unfortunate part of its state's history, the Butler Act and Scopes trial of the 1920s.
Of course, creationism evolves, so the 21st century version won't take the same tack. In 1925,…
tfk | March 7, 2012The Denver Post reports on a talk by hyperconservative Justice Antonin Scalia at a religious conference:
The 75-year-old Scalia said that today one can believe in a creator and the teachings of Jesus without being the brunt of too much ridicule, but that to hold traditional Christian beliefs that Jesus is God and He physically rose from the grave is to be derided as simple-minded by those considered leading intellectuals....
In Washington, Scalia said, the pundits and media couldn't believe in a miracle performed under their noses. "My point is not that reason and intellect need to be laid…
tfk | March 2, 2012For reasons not worth getting into, I was struck by the urge to find the history of the most common example of a loaded question: "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
It's a question that demands a yes or no answer, but either response requires the respondent to affirm a) having a wife and b) having beaten her in the past, and then to either confirm or deny an intent to keep doing so. Someone unmarried or who doesn't beat his or her wife has to reject the question outright.
And, of course, simply by asking the question, the questioner has poisoned the well for any audience, leaving them…
tfk | March 1, 2012From The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, Book Three of The Baroque Cycle. The Duchess of Oyonnax, in the court of Louis XIV, explains why good people do bad things:
In this world there are few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly. There used to be, at court, many practitioners of the Black Mass. Do you really think that all these people woke up one morning and said, "Today I shall worship and offer sacrifices to the Prince of Evil?" Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, desperate to find a husband, so that she would…
tfk | March 1, 2012This is a press release they just sent out about the effort to undo the absurd idea that "corporations are people, my friend":
TOPEKA â Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, House Democratic Leader Paul Davis, of Lawrence, and Ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee Tom Holland, of Baldwin City, announced today that they plan to introduce a resolution formally urging Congress to end corporate personhood.
In January 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations have the same first amendment rights as…
tfk | February 29, 2012David Klinghoffer is surprised that his Disco. 'tute colleagues managed to get an article published at the Huffington Post. Klinghoffer's colleague must've known this was coming, and HuffPo isn't notorious for refusing essays, so I can't fathom why it was any sort of surprise. Nor is "pleasant" the word that came to mind on reading the essay, or anything coming from Disco. Anyway, Klinghoffer asks us to "Try to Imagine Our Country's Founding if the Founders Had Not Been Advocates of Intelligent Design:
The Huffington Post pleasantly surprised us today with an excellent piece on the…
tfk | February 21, 2012Shorter David Klinghoffer: National Center for Science Education, Darwin/Climate Enforcers, Humiliated by Forged Document Scandal:
Ethical questions about someone with no formal ties to NCSE clearly demonstrates the scientific, pedagogical, and moral failings of NCSE.
So Peter Gleick outed himself as the source of the Heartland board documents released last week, and now lots of people are chasing the shiny toy of how and why Gleick did it, rather than the important story of what the documents say.
But how and why Gleick did it, and even that Gleick did it, is irrelevant to most people, while…