All you theists better fret
PZ Myers is not dead yet

I guess Ann Coulter is a genius if you take into account the fact that she continues to fleece the Right of millions of dollars every year with her absolutely juvenile and inane drivel. On an objective basis, of course, she is a complete fucking moron with not an ounce of logic, rationale or sound judgment.

Take for example her recent essay entitled LET THEM EAT TOFU!. (Note, the previous link goes to her home page so won’t point to the correct article after a while. Apparently she is not smart enough to figure out permalinks.)

What is clear from this article is that she has not a single piece of evidence, fact or rational basis for anything she says. One can paraphrase her article quite easily: Liberals hate America, hate human beings and want us all to live like cave men eating bugs.

Here is an example:

But global warming is the most insane, psychotic idea liberals have ever concocted to kill off “useless eaters.” If we have to live in a pure “natural” environment like the Indians, then our entire transcontinental nation can only support about 1 million human beings. Sorry, fellas — 299 million of you are going to have to go.

Hmmm. Her logic seems to be, global climate change can’t be true because we don’t want it to be true. That is the entirety of her argument. We depend on industry therefore there is absolutely no risk of human causes to global climate change.

Do any of you buy that rationale? Anyone? Compare and contrast with experts who have intensely rigorous data, methods and models whose results are verified by other researchers around the globe. You are going to believe this bitter, retarded cunt from hell over thousands of climate scientists?

No, we all know, if Ann Coulter believes it then it is certainly not true.

OK, micadelic has been at it again. Because I don’t blog all that much, I’m taking it out to the main page.

First, the soft ball:

And Michael, you should know that science is not based on “consensus, it’s based on facts. Politics are based on consensus and that’s exactly what this global warming scam is, politics. Socialists looking for another reason to tax the rich and give to the government.

This is, of course, completely wrong. As I’ve written about elsewhere, theories don’t become facts, facts become theories. A fact in science is something like “We measured the temperature at time t and it was 64.3 degrees”. That is a fact. Theories, even fantastically successful ones, like the universal theory of gravitation, are never considered facts by scientists. Science is absolutely about consensus, peer review, repeatability of results and all sorts of messy social constructs. Still, it is unbelievably successful, which is why your cell phone works and a billion other little miracles you now take for granted.

As to your point, yes, there will always be disagreements. No theory is accepted by everyone. There are people, some kooks and some not, who still argue with the universal theory of gravitation. The number of scientist who don’t accept gravity is tiny and the number of scientists who don’t accept human causes of global climate change is tiny. If you want to “listen to the science”, on the issue of global climate change, the only rational uneducated opinion is that human beings are influencing Earth’s climate, in a way that may be dangerous.

I just don’t fucking understand what is so hard to understand about that. We have billions of people, billions of cars, millions of smokestacks belching forth crap, what the fuck is so mysterious about human causes of global climate change? It is fucking obvious.

Now the harder one:

So, let’s sum this up: Here we have a major American politician who is calling for policies that would impose huge costs on society but appears to be profiting handsomely himself; who is leading an extravagant lifestyle while demanding sacrifices from ordinary people; and who is calling on the media to suppress the views of those with whom he disagrees, while at the same time urging more government regulation in the name of “fairness” to his partisan and ideological allies.

First of all, I can’t take all of this as fact without researching it and I haven’t had time. My point on Al Gore was simple: he is rich. Rich people use more resources than not-rich people. To compare the energy used by Al Gore’s mansion with the average home in Tennessee is dumb. Compare him to other millionaires and I bet he is not above average. Go run the math on Rupert Murdoch and get back to me.

On the issue of carbon credits, I think being conscious of and paying money to offset carbon release is better than not being conscious of and not making payments to offset it. That’s obvious. Again, go report on what Rupert Murdoch or Rush Limbaugh do to offset their carbon. I’ll tell you what they do: nothing. So Al Gore is already doing more than your average rich Rightie.

Is Gore profiting off of his movie and book? I suspect he is. Is the global climate change issue “good” for Al Gore? It probably is. Is he some tool who is making up a fake crisis to line his pockets? Of course not. That is the mistake the Right always makes on this issue: they attribute to the Left the same shallow, money-grubbing motivations that they are used to on the Right.

The notion that the Left is manufacturing this global climate change business for monetary reasons is completely, fucking insane.

I’m not a huge fan of Al Gore and I can believe that he is imperfect. But this whole story started because a the Right reported an absolute baseless hatchet job, comparing him to the average Tennessean, an area which does suffer from poverty, and that is obvious political bullshit designed to discredit global climate change, which has growing acceptance by the experts who study it, in spite of the fact that we all wish it wasn’t true.

The Right is completely politically motivated on this issue, they don’t even try to understand the science (go to the GCDIS for example, and read up a bit) and their newest tactic is also their oldest: character assassination, and it should be obvious to everyone.

Read this: Private prisons make money from locking up immigrant families — including young children — indefinitely.

Written by my hero, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

(who, by the way, is a nun!)

I think this is comically retarded: Think Tank Blasts Gore for Hypocrisy

First of all, I suspect that if you compared Gore’s resource usage with people in his tax bracket, he is not above average. Second, he claims that he offsets his usage through various means (as the article above describes). Third, neither Gore nor the rest of the “hey, let’s be smart about global climate change” movement are saying that we should live off the grid. They are saying we, as a society, should embrace things which reduce our impact on global climate change and reject those things which do not. For example, the pussy, lobbyist-written energy policies of George W. Bush, which are soft on mercury emissions, provide incentives to not modernize coal-fired plants and subsidize big oil, with our dollars and our military, are wrong-headed and leading us in the wrong direction. The only time Bush does anything remotely “green” is during his state of the union address, in between a bunch of pie-in-the-sky bullshit. You wanna talk about walking the walk?

The fact is, if you compare Gore with any rich Right Winger, there is no question who stands for “green” policies more, in words and in deeds. This is a hatchet job designed to undermine someone who has been very successful in educating people on the data and risks of global climate change.

And I’m not necessarily a huge Gore fan.

A friend of mine told me a scary story. He is a marriage and family therapist. This is a first-hand account that he witnessed personally.

A couple went out for the night and left their three children in the care of a baby sitter. The baby sitter snooped through their dresser drawers and found some marijuana. She called her parents who called the police. When the couple came home their children were gone, under the protection of the county child protection agency. The cops had completely searched their house and the couple were arrested. The children were held for 3 days by the county and then released to a relative. The parents were allowed 9 hours of visitation per week. They had to undergo drug testing and be clean for 6 months (or something like that) before the state would release their children back to their custody. If they failed any of those drug tests they were at risk of losing custody of their children FOREVER.

Had the parents been complete alcoholics, or hooked on prescription drugs, child protection would never had been involved. But, because marijuana is illegal, even a small amount of marijuana in the home can result in the placement of the children under a state child protection agency.

This is insane. My friend did an assessment on the parents and concluded they were great parents, great role models and had done a fine job of raising the kids, one of which was 10 years old. So for 10 years they had been outstanding parents.

Now obviously there are situations where children need protection from their own parents. Marijuana use is not one of those situations. Marijuana is considered less harmful in virtually every way compared to alcohol. To be clear, children should not be exposed to drugs. Nor should they be exposed to severe alcoholism or prescription pill poppers.

This is a result of the insane laws prohibiting the use of marijuana, driven largely by the fundamentalist Christian bastards that I constantly bitch about on this blog. The criminalization of marijuana is a huge failure of public policy and it has to be changed. The reason it isn’t changed is because of god damn Jesus freaks, half of whom are complete fucking alcoholics and pill poppers and who seriously harm their children by indoctrinating them into their radical, intolerant and hateful religion.

Good thing I don’t smoke marijuana. Or believe in God.

I don’t understand why newspapers and TV people can’t use the word “nigger” when discussing the word “nigger”. We all know it is a hateful word that shouldn’t be used as an insult or to refer to people. But when you are talking about the word itself, you are not insulting anybody by saying nigger as opposed to saying “the n-word“.

It also pisses me off that newspapers and TV shows can’t use profanity even when it is news. Like when Cheney told that guy to go fuck himself. They all had to report it as “the f-word”. What the fuck. We all know what the fucking ‘f’ means in that phrase. We all fill it in in our minds. Are we such children that we can’t even report the news word for word anymore?

If the Star Tribune or some other newspaper reported that Cheney said the word “fuck” and some Mommy gets mad about it, the person Mommy should be mad at is Dick fucking Cheney and not the newspaper.

The Second Carnival Of Mathematics: The Math Geeks are Coming to Town!

Check out the link above to read some fun math blogging, including an entry by yours truly!

I’ll start by saying I’m a big fan of smoking bans. The reason is simple: a minority of people smoke and yet their actions dramatically effect every one in the room. Besides the obvious health impacts, it is annoying and unpleasant.

The notion that smoking bans hurt bars is false and it has been proven all over. Yes, there is a short-term impact while whiny smokers try to have an impact, but it is temporary. People do not stop going to bars because they can’t smoke inside. In fact, a happy side effect of smoking bans is that more and more bars are adding pleasant outdoor seating areas.

So I’m displeased that the pussies in the Minnesota Senate neutered the state-wide smoking ban bill. A state-wide ban is the best way to level the playing field for all bars. It is also the obvious thing to do in terms of public safety.

What pisses me off is these senators are bowing to pressure from a whiny, addicted but vocal minority. Why would they give in to 20% of the people when 80% of us have made it clear that we want our fucking air back.

I’ll add that the bleating of smokers who say “If you don’t like it stay home” can easily be turned back on them — you fucking stay home if you can’t get through one beer without a cigarette.

I’ll also add that I don’t care if people smoke, I have no moral objection to people smoking and it is not my intent to try to get people to stop smoking. I don’t give a rats ass. But the notion that 1 out of 5 people can ruin it for the other 4 is insane.

What really cracks me up is a lot of smokers don’t smoke at home because they don’t want to stink their house up. So they go out and stink all the rest of us up.

It makes no sense. It is just not that hard to step outside for a smoke.

This time courtesy of the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic Church:

Our political leaders fail to protect the moral tone of our community when they encourage inappropriate sexual activity by blanketing our neighborhoods with condoms,” Edward Cardinal Egan of the New York Archdiocese and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of the Brooklyn Diocese said in a joint statement released late yesterday. “Although in their statements they give nod to the truth that only abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage are failsafe, by their actions they ignore that truth and degrade societal standards.”

Giving people access to birth control does not make them have sex. Telling people to wait until marriage does not stop them from having sex. These people are naive and they do not have their priorities straight. If you have love and compassion for your fellow human beings you should be more concerned with keeping them alive and less concerned about whether you agree with every choice they make.

Oh, and PS, shove your moral tone up your ass. I don’t worship your God or believe in your silly little book and I am sick to death of you trying to ram your ridiculous “morality” down the throats of our civic institutions.