Hey, look! Evolution in action!

Following a link from CathiefromCanada, we have real, live evidence for evolution. See? This is what happens when you don't have to waste massive amounts of time arguing with wingnuts. You get to do research and discover things. What a concept.

Iraq: "Mission accomplished", indeed.

Yup, everything going swimmingly, democracy on the march, and life is good. Well, OK, maybe not for these guys.

More GOP family values.

Via Eschaton, we learn that sodomy is a bad thing only if gays or Democrats do it. Oh, and extra-marital affairs. Apparently, they're all right, too, GOP-wise.

UPDATE: And, hey, while we're at it, let's throw Bush's U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton into the mix. This is so easy, I almost feel guilty.

EVEN MORE: And the incomparable James Wolcott does to Bolton what only James Wolcott can.

OK, this is amusing.

In honour of fellow Canuck Steve Nash's recent NBA MVP award, look what happens when you Google on the combination of "Steve Nash" and "Canadian". Heh.

"Queen" does Gomery ... sort of.

Freddie Mercury must be spinning in his grave.

The Students for Academic Freedom: giving "morons" a bad name.

Every so often, I like to pop by the web site of the Right-Wing Nutbars for College Fascism, just to see what intellectual atrocity they've come up with lately. And I was not disappointed, given a May 6 article by none other than David Limbaugh (he being the Limbaugh brother who is not the hillbilly heroin addict and "sanctity of marriage" proponent now working on his fourth wife).

Being that this piece is published at the SAF site, Limbaugh opens predictably, whining and snivelling about more academic left-wing bias:

If you want to get a real glimpse of the thought-tyranny of the academic Left, you should look at the case of Scott McConnell, who was recently expelled from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., because his personal beliefs didn't fit within the school's indoctrination grid.

Oh, yawn. OK, what's this all about? Let's keep reading.

The Left, through an extraordinary process of self-deception, routinely congratulates itself for its enlightenment and open-mindedness, but the slightest scrutiny of its behavior in academia alone puts the lie to its claims. Sadly, the Left has even sunk its tentacles into Jesuit colleges like Le Moyne.

Um ... excuse me? So Limbaugh and the SAF have now taken to accusing Jesuit colleges of liberal bias? Jesus Christ (pun oh so intended), is there anyone these folks won't accuse of holding a grudge against conservatives? I just can't wait until they start to attack the Catholic Church. You know that's coming. But ... onward. This promises to get just plain weird.

So, given that McConnell was pursuing a masters in education at the college, what precisely was his crime? Praising Bush in an essay? Supporting the invasion of Iraq? Oh, here it is ...

Among McConnell's unforgivable sins were his audacious dissent from the university's dogma extolling multicultural education and his gross insubordination in asserting in a paper that "corporal punishment has a place in the classroom."

Oh ... so he's an aspiring teacher who just wants to beat kids when he thinks it's appropriate. Is that all? Well, for the life of me, I just don't see the problem. You have to think those Jesuits are kind of uptight if they can't see the value of a good beating every so often.

Seriously, this is a case that the SAF wants to hold up as an example of anti-conservative bias? An education grad student who thinks it's just ducky to slap kids around if he thinks they have it coming? What the fuck? Is this what the SAF has sunk to these days? I mean, was it just that they couldn't find any pedophile gym teachers to rally around or what?

The article is, of course, just one long piece of dishonest swill. At one point, Limbaugh quotes one David French, describing the college's action as: "This is one of the most brazen examples of censorship and summary expulsion for the expression of dissenting views I have ever seen."

What utter rubbish. As I read it, the college made no effort whatsoever to censor McConnell -- they just told him to take his child-beating attitude elsewhere. And one would think they have every right to not want their education program associated with someone who could conceivably be a legal liability. I mean, imagine the shitstorm that would erupt if McConnell, somewhere down the road, assaulted and injured one of his students and it came out that the college knew of his proclivities, didn't warn anyone and gave him his degree. Can you say "culpable"? Oh, yeah.

But here's the best part. You have to read all the way to the second-last paragraph to learn that Le Moyne College is, in fact, a private college. That's right: private, which means they can do whatever the fuck they want, which makes all of this conservative outrage so deliciously hypocritical because, as we all know, the right-wing wankers who are all up in arms about McConnell getting his ass booted out of a private college for whatever reason are exactly the same two-faced assholes who will defend the Boy Scouts' position on discriminating against anyone they want because the Scouts are (and you saw this coming, didn't you?) a "private" organization. If the hypocrisy was any deeper, you could dog paddle in it.

Of course, I didn't need to drag out the story this long. I could have just wailed on these idiots in a paragraph or two, like Steve Gilliard did over here. And as for the SAF, it's hard to know just how much lower they can sink. But I'll keep my eye on them, and let you know.

And about that missile defense system idea of yours ...

Well, let's face it ... it sucks.

PZ needs to mellow out just a little.

Over at Pharyngula, PZ gets a little angst going over a recent New York state Assembly Bill:

Assembly Bill 8036, introduced on May 3, 2005 and referred to the Committee on Education, would require that "all pupils in grades kindergarten through twelve in all public schools in the state ... receive instruction in both theories of intelligent design and evolution." It also charges New York's commissioner of education to assist in developing curricula and local boards of education to provide "appropriate training and curriculum materials ... to ensure that all aspects of the theories, along with any supportive data, are fully examined through such course of study."

To be honest, I don't find this all that disturbing. First of all, the bill has only a single sponsor who is clearly mad:

The bill's sole sponsor, Daniel L. Hooker (R), represents Assembly District 127, encompassing parts of Greene, Otsego, Delaware, Schoharie, Ulster, Columbia, and Chenango counties. Hooker also recently introduced bills that would, if enacted, permit the display of the Ten Commandments on public buildings and grounds (A08073), declassify sexual orientation from civil right status (A07916), and prohibit the solemnization of same-sex marriages (A07723).

So I really don't think this bill is going anywhere in a hurry. But there's a definite upside to this.

Look at the requirement to develop appropriate, ID-oriented curriculum. Does this have entertainment value or what? Does anyone remember the last time creationists were asked to come up with some official curriculum? Here, let me refresh your memory with this legal decision regarding the 1982 Arkansas creationism trial, particularly this delightful excerpt:

The testimony of Marianne Wilson was persuasive evidence that creation science is not science. Ms. Wilson is in charge of the science curriculum for Pulaski County Special School District, the largest school district in the State of Arkansas. Prior to the passage of Act 590, Larry Fisher, a science teacher in the District, using materials from the ICR, convinced the School Board that it should voluntarily adopt creation science as part of its science curriculum. The District Superintendent assigned Ms. Wilson the job of producing a creation science curriculum guide. Ms. Wilson's testimony about the project was particularly convincing because she obviously approached the assignment with an open mind and no preconceived notions about the subject. She had not heard of creation science until about a year ago and did not know its meaning before she began her research.

Ms. Wilson worked with a committee of science teachers appointed from the District. They reviewed practically all of the creationist literature. Ms. Wilson and the committee members reached the unanimous conclusion that creationism is not science; it is religion. They so reported to the Board. The Board ignored the recommendation and insisted that a curriculum guide be prepared.

In researching the subject, Ms. Wilson sought the assistance of Mr. Fisher who initiated the Board action and asked professors in the science departments of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Central Arkansas (30) for reference material and assistance, and attended a workshop conducted at Central Baptist College by Dr. Richard Bliss of the ICR staff. Act 590 became law during the course of her work so she used Section 4(a) as a format for her curriculum guide.

Ms. Wilson found all available creationists' materials unacceptable because they were permeated with religious references and reliance upon religious beliefs.

Sure, this was over 20 years ago but it's clear that these folks haven't learned anything as they implode spectacularly in Kansas as we speak.

So chill out, PZ. Don't fight this bill. Rather, let's encourage these folks enthusiastically to develop curriculum. I, for one, would love to see some ID-based lesson plans. Come on ... where's your sense of adventure?

(Thanks to Glenn Branch over at NCSE for the pointer to the legal judgment.)

North Carolina, lowering the bar again.

Oh, Christ. First, it's the dingbat minister who kicked out all the Democrats in his congregation, and now this:

WASHINGTON -- When Sheriff Carson Smith of Pender County, North Carolina, found out that Deborah Hobbs, a recently hired emergency dispatcher, was unmarried and "living in sin," he gave her a choice.

"She was given an ultimatum," said Jennifer Rudinger, executive-director of the North Carolina branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. "She could marry her boyfriend, move out of the house they were living in together or quit her job."

The sheriff was backed by the state's 200-year-old anti-cohabitation law, which declares starkly that "if any man and woman, not being married to each other, shall lewdly and lasciviously associate, bed and cohabit together, they shall be guilty of a class-two misdemeanour."

Unwilling to have her boss decide on her living arrangements, Ms. Hobbs, who's 40, quit and went to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has helped her launch a constitutional challenge of the North Carolina law, where violators are subject to a fine of up to $1,000 (U.S.) and a sentence of up to 60 days in jail...

And you have to read some of the rationalization for this:

Lynn Wardle, a professor of family law at Brigham Young University, a Mormon institution in Utah, concedes that there is a good chance the courts will find the North Carolina statute unconstitutional, but he said that decision would be unfortunate for U.S. society.

"If people can get together for a night of sodomy, they might be able to live together without a criminal statute making it illegal. That's the logic."

He contends that unmarried cohabitation has been proven to lead to much higher rates of child and spousal abuse. "It's exhibit A for the kinds of relationships that have been proven to be socially detrimental, destructive and very problematic."

With that kind of stunning intellect, I expect to see Wardle analyzing Social Security and tax cuts on "Brainster" any day now.

Dear wankers: Please don't analyze Social Security any more. It hurts to watch.

And isn't this just adorable? Apparently, wankers get all up in your grill when you point out that, no, they have no clothes. Where to even start? Well, make sure you read the lead-up to this from my earlier article (including my tediously lengthy comments), then we'll get to work.

In his rebuttal to my earlier work, Pat starts out badly:

I'll avoid returning the nasty names he calls Tim Worstall and me, and get right to the point:

Ah, so name-calling is a bad thing, is it? Apparently, this is a new development -- more recent than when Pat wrote in an earlier piece:

This is what passes for deep thinking on the left: ... Atrios finds this incredibily smart and witty (and it probably is compared to most of what Atrios posts).

So, apparently, the rule is that snotty, personal put-downs are all right when ... um ... actually, I have no idea what the rule is here so I'll just suggest that Pat is being a hypocritical dick and carry on.

Now, as I took great pains to point out in my comments section way back when, the prime strategy from the right-wing wankersphere is to dwell -- nay, veritably obsess -- on the idea that Mr. $60K is getting, in their minds, a pretty good deal, while totally ignoring the fact that Mr. $1M is getting a way, way, way better deal. But as I pointed out in excruciating detail, you're not supposed to notice this.

"You're getting a good deal, that's right, a reeeeeeeally good deal ... Hey! Don't look over there, and pay no attention to the guy with the wheelbarrow full of cash, just look into my eyes and repeat after me ... goooood deeeeeal ..."

So how does Pat rationalize this? Let's see, shall we? Why, begosh and begorrah, he doesn't even try. Not a word, not a hint of the disparity in those two "deals". Shocked, shocked I am, that Pat weasels his way around the obvious. Not a word about the massive windfall going into Mr. $1M's pocket. Quelle surprise.

In a weird attempt at what appears to be a defense, Pat writes:

Look, Mr Cynic, here's a deal I'll offer you, since $6,500 is a larger value than $1,000. If you give me $1000 a year for the next 40 years, I'll give you $6,500 per year for the next three years after that. What's that? You'd be giving me $40,000 and I'd only be giving you $19,500? But I thought $6,500 was a larger value? Or is there another variable in this equation, like the number of years? Very few people have a longer retirement than their working life. And that "ignore entirely the possible returns on investing," is a classic dodge. Yes, if you assume that the person puts the money under the mattress, you can disprove that just about anything that takes into account the time value of money.

So Pat is offering me a "deal", is he? Let me think about this in terms of the deal that's being offered to Mr. $60K, in which he would get X dollars worth of tax cut every year, but would have to pay it back at six and a half times that rate upon retirement.

Hmmmm ... let me think ... no, no, you know what I'd prefer? I'd prefer the deal Mr. $1M got -- where I'd get X dollars worth of tax cut every year, and would have to pay that back at less than one-fifth that rate after I retire. That's the kind of deal I'd want.

But, amazingly, Pat doesn't put that deal on the table. Apparently, that kind of deal is only available to the really, really rich. Bummer.

You want a deal, Pat? I'll make you a deal. You stop analyzing Social Security and tax cuts, and I'll stop pointing out what a moron you are.

Deal?

BY THE WAY: I have absolutely no idea how to interpret this statement from Pat from that same posting:

I'd just like to see where [Canadian Cynic] gets the impression that the tax cut is being used as a defense of the reductions in SS benefits. Anybody? Bueller? There's no link from this remarkable statement, it's just stated as settled fact.

Nobody is using the tax cut to defend the Social Security benefit cuts, because they're completely unrelated.

What can this possibly mean? The entire defense of whacking a big chunk out of Mr. $60K's eventual SS benefits is that, with that $1000 per year tax cut, with careful investing, those people should be able to more than compensate for the SS cuts. This is, in fact, Pat's very own defense of the SS cuts. He defends this as a pretty good deal, precisely because of his analysis of the interrelationship between the tax cuts and the SS cuts. How much plainer can this be?

And yet, checking in brlefly from Planet Bizarro, Pat is adamant -- adamant, I tell you -- that these things have nothing in common. Nothing whatsoever. OK, if that's the case, then let's take Pat at his word and analyze the cuts in SS with no reference to tax cuts at all, shall we? Which means that, compared to the current situation, Mr. 60K will have his SS benefits just flat-out cut by $6,500 a year. It's that simple. If you, as Pat suggests, ignore the whole issue of the tax cuts, this is the effect of the Bush plan on Mr. 60K -- a whopping big decrease in his benefits.

So, does Pat still think this is a "good deal" for Mr. $60K? Probably not, but how is he going to defend it? By claiming that that SS cut is offset by the "tax cut"? The very tax cut that he just finished claiming has nothing to do with any of this?

Oh, please, Pat, try to explain this. Please, please, please. I can't wait.

Life, the universe and everything.

Via Pharyngula, answers to deep questions.

Busted!

No reason, I just think this is amusing.

Steve Nash: Local boy makes good.

Yes, I'm sure you're already heard how Canada's own Steve Nash is the NBA's MVP. Declan mentions it here but don't forget -- there's more to this story than basketball.

New directions in puzzles.

Man, I gotta get me one of these. (And are we ready for another puzzle yet?)

When right-wing wankers do math, it's not a pretty sight.

It's hard to believe that members of the right-wing wankersphere could take exception to Paul Krugman's latest article that explained (with really simple numbers and arithmetic and everything) how Commander Chimpy's proposed Social Security cuts are skewed mightily towards the uber-wealthy but, there it is.

What is it with wankers and math? What is so difficult about this? I mean, I like some good intellectual discourse as much as the next person but, really, there's only so much you can take of,"No! No! Two plus two doesn't equal four! Stop saying that, you big meanie!" I mean, Jesus, what does it take for these people to understand things like addition and fractions and percentages, fer Chrissake? As examples, let's follow a couple links and document the atrocities so you can see what I'm talking about.

First, let's review the (apparently) contentious part of Krugman's article:

Let's consider the Bush tax cuts and the Bush benefit cuts as a package. Who gains? Who loses?

Suppose you're a full-time Wal-Mart employee, earning $17,000 a year. You probably didn't get any tax cut. But Mr. Bush says, generously, that he won't cut your Social Security benefits.

Suppose you're earning $60,000 a year. On average, Mr. Bush cut taxes for workers like you by about $1,000 per year. But by 2045 the Bush Social Security plan would cut benefits for workers like you by about $6,500 per year. Not a very good deal.

Suppose, finally, that you're making $1 million a year. You received a tax cut worth about $50,000 per year. By 2045 the Bush plan would reduce benefits for people like you by about $9,400 per year. We have a winner!

So, regarding the last two folks -- Mr, $60K and Mr. $1M -- let's remember those values, shall we, in preparation for the mathematical idiocy we're about to encounter.

First, we have a commenter to this site, Tim Worstall, who writes:

Well, I dunno Paul. Assume a couple of things (hey, this is a blog post, not a position paper), like you collect SS for 15 years (Age 65-80...not absurd). So $6,500 a year is $97,500 in total. Looking at this calculator, how much do you need to save over 40 years in order to have that $97,500? At a 5% return (I don’t think that Krugman’s numbers are correcting for inflation, so the investment figures don’t need to. 5% including inflation is well within the numbers for likely returns that Krugman himself has given us before.) it looks like you have to save $63.41 a month, or $760 a year.

Why, yes, let's make some thoroughly unworldly assumptions, shall we? Let's first assume that, if Mr. $60K were to get a windfall of $1,000 per year, why, he'd be able to invest the whole thing -- every penny of it. It's not as if $60K is such a stunning salary that he wouldn't, perhaps, use that money to pay off credit card debts, maybe do a little home renovation, conceivably use it as a down payment on a larger family vehicle now that he has three kids and needs a second car or anything, or even for that unforeseen medical emergency for which he's almost certainly underinsured, medical insurance in the U.S. being outrageously expensive and all.

Heck, no, suggests Mr. Worstall, Mr. $60K would naturally immediately be able to invest it and get a 5% return on his investment. Apparently, Worstall knows something the rest of us don't -- where to get a guaranteed, risk-free 5% return on investments as small as $1,000. Good for Mr. Worstall -- perhaps he'd like to share that information with the rest of us in the reality-based community.

(And, as I've written on previous occasions, if the right-wing wankersphere knows where to get this kind of guaranteed 5% return, a simple solution would be shift all of Social Security into that fund, wouldn't it? But when you suggest this, the somewhat-stunned response you get is typically something like, "Well, you can't ... uh, I mean ... you see, it doesn't ... Hey! Look at the bright shiny thing!" Indeed. Onward.)

But let's simplify things to where even Mr. Worstall might be able to understand it. Ignore entirely the possible returns on investing. Look simply at the numbers. In the case of Mr. $60K, his $1,000 per year tax advantage is, on a yearly basis, more than offset by his reduction of $6,500 per year in Social Security benefits. Please tell me you understand that -- that $6,500 is a larger value than $1,000. This is not a deep observation, really. It requires you only to see that, whatever slow, careful gains Mr. $60K makes because of his tax cut is rapidly clawed back at six and a half times that rate once he retires and starts to collect SS. Can we all agree on this? Please, dear God, don't make me explain how 6,500 is larger than 1,000, OK?

And what about Mr. $1M? Well, according to the indisputable figures provided by Krugman, Mr. $1M nets an extra $50,000 per year due to tax cuts but, upon retirement, he takes only a $9,400 annual hit in his benefits. See how that works? Mr. 1M's annual benefits loss is less than one-fifth of his annual tax cut windfall. Proportionally, if you combine these two observations, Mr. 1M's advantage over Mr. 60K is over thirty-fold, comparing ratios. Now, is it any wonder that Krugman can say that this scheme benefits the rich?

But, wait. We're not done here.

If Mr. Worstall is simply dense, one of the commenters on his site is really, truly, unspeakably stupid. I refer to "Pat", who writes:

Krugman Mangles The Numbers Again--Updated!

This is what passes for deep thinking on the left:...

Sigh. As I've written before, the only way you can get away with snark is if you're right. If you do snark and you're wrong, you just end up looking like an asshole. Kind of like Pat, who continues with one of the most breathtakingly inane justifications for Bush's plan. Try to believe that someone actually wrote the following regarding Krugman's piece:

Atrios finds this incredibily smart and witty (and it probably is compared to most of what Atrios posts). But there is a simple and obvious fallacy to Krugman's analysis, and that is that there is no reason to consider the tax cuts and social security benefit cuts as a package other than to use one as a club to beat the other.

The tax cuts have been passed. The social security benefit cuts have not.

That's right -- Pat suggests that it's not fair to compare the reduction in SS benefits in light of the tax cuts since, well, the tax cuts already happened and the SS stuff is still pending, therefore they can have no relation to one another.

Ignore, of course, that that very same tax cut is being used as a defense of reductions in SS benefits. Ignore that Pat, in his very next paragraph, writes glowingly of Tim's analysis which used those very same tax cuts to show how Mr. $60K was getting a "pretty good" deal. And ignore the fact that Pat himself, over here, at the hideously-misnamed "Brainster" blog, produces his own table incorporating the very same tax cuts he just described as being irrelevant to the discussion. No, I am not making any of this up. Follow the links, and gaze in awe on mathematical stupidity and/or duplicity taken to a whole new level.

It really is something, isn't it?

Snarky afterthought: By the way, just in case you want to make an issue of these tax cuts and their relation to SS benefits, we can in fact take them entirely off the table and do one last analysis.

Ignoring tax cuts entirely, let's just compare the proportion of annual salary to proposed SS benefit cutbacks, shall we? In the case of Mr. $60K, his annual loss in benefits of $6,500 would represent a ratio of 10.83% of his $60,000 annual salary where (do I really have to explain this?) a larger percentage means a proportionally larger hit you take in your benefits.

And Mr. $1M? A million-dollar annual salary and a loss of $9,400 per year comes out to a paltry 0.94% loss. That's right -- less than one per cent. How many different ways does one have to analyze this to see that Mr. $1M comes out on top every time?

So, I'm begging you -- before you comment taking exception to any of the above, learn some freaking arithmetic. It's not hard. Really. Lots of children have done it.

What the f...?

OK, now we know why conservatives aren't worried about easy access to abortion or contraceptives.

The talented Mr. Krugman.

Naturally, you should read the whole piece, if only to properly establish the context for this priceless gem:

But Mr. Bush isn't calling for small sacrifices now. Instead, he's calling for zero sacrifice now, but big benefit cuts decades from now - which is exactly what he says will happen if we do nothing. Let me repeat that: to avert the danger of future cuts in benefits, Mr. Bush wants us to commit now to, um, future cuts in benefits.

Indeed.

Pet humour.

Dear pets:

Apparently, it's past time to lay down some ground rules regarding our co-existence so, without further ado, here's how it's going to work from now on.

The dishes with the paw print are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Placing a paw print in the middle of my plate and food does not stake a claim for it becoming yours.

I'm sorry, but I cannot buy anything larger than a king-sized bed. Do not think I will continue sleeping on the couch to ensure your comfort. Both dogs and cats can actually curl up in a ball when they sleep. Trust me -- I've seen it happen.

Strictly speaking, it is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out the other end to maximize the usage of space is nothing but sarcasm.

For the last time, there is no secret exit from the bathroom. If, by some miracle, I beat you there and manage to get the door closed, it is not necessary to claw, whine, meow, try to turn the knob or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. I must exit through the same door I entered. Also, I have been using the bathroom for years -- canine or feline attendance is not mandatory.

The proper order is to kiss me, then go smell the other dog or cat's butt. How hard can it be to remember this?

Finally, for your sake, I have posted the following list of rules on our front door.

"Rules for Non-Pet Owners Who Visit and Like to Complain About Our Pets."

• They live here. You don't.
• If you don't want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture. (That's why they call it "fur"niture.)
• I like my pets a lot better than I like most people.
• To you, it's an animal. To me, he/she is an adopted son/daughter who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and doesn't speak clearly. (Sort of like an animal kingdom version of Jonah Goldberg.)

Remember:

Dogs and cats are better than children because they: eat less, don't ask for money all the time, are easier to train, usually come when called, never drive your car, don't hang out with drug-using friends, don't smoke or drink, don't worry about having to buy the latest fashions, don't wear your clothes, don't need a gazillion dollars for college and, if they get pregnant, you can give away their children.

Intelligent life at the Corner?

And from the Corner of Banality and Mediocrity, we have an astonishingly-relevant observation:

MAKING MONKEYS OUT OF KANSAS [Andrew Stuttaford]

Further comment would be superfluous:

"TOPEKA, Kan. - (KRT) - None of the eight intelligent design proponents who testified at the Kansas State Board of Education's evolution hearings Friday have read the science standards they want changed. Under cross-examination, all eight admitted they simply read the 28-page minority report and not the full 107-page draft of proposed science standards, most of which is not controversial."

Why, yes, further comment would be superfluous, wouldn't it? So who are you? And what have you done with the real Andrew Stuttaford?

Followup: Sadly, the intellectual content of Stuttaford's post is more than nullified by the inimitable K. Lo: "I'M JUST FASCINATED that James Wolcott cares so much about what we do and say."

What's the mystery? We all enjoy laughing at idiots. This is not a deep observation.

Canadian pharmacists and "conscience clauses": Here we go again. Part 1.

I'll apologize up-front for harping once again on the topic of sanctimonious pharmacists whose idea of service is to impose their draconian, religious views on their customers but I'll justify the next article or three on this subject in two ways:

• I'll try to concentrate on recent developments, and
• I'll concentrate on the Canadian connection.

Happy now? Good. Let's get started.

It so happens that, recently, there were a few letters/op-eds published in our national newspaper, the Mope and Wail. A number of them involved, in some way, one Garth McCutcheon, president of the Canadian Pharmacists' Association, so it behooves us to trundle on over to the Globe's web site and search on a combination of "McCutcheon" and "pharmacist", at which point we find these results.

The first thing you'll notice is that you have to pay money to access any of them, and I'll be damned if I'm going to pony up $4.95 so I can read someone's letter to the editor. This means that we're going to suck whatever information we can out of those opening teasers before moving on and, amazingly, those previews can be surprisingly informative.

Assuming you see the same results that I do, let's take them in chronological order. Starting on April 1 of this year, we have the aforementioned Mr. McCutcheon, with what appears to be a letter to the editor regarding something called "Plan B", in which he opens:

Re Make Plan B Easy (March 30): The long-awaited decision by Health Canada to move Plan B off prescription status is an excellent example of increasing access for Canadian women to emergency contraception while maintaining an appropriate level of intervention by a pharmacist to ensure proper use of the drug and deal with related issues.

If you need an intro to Plan B, well, I suggest here:

OTTAWA. April 20, 2005 –Emergency contraception (ECP) is now available without a doctor’s prescription across Canada. Plan B, Canada’s only approved emergency contraceptive, will now be available behind pharmacy counters.

“This is great news for women,” says Linda Capperauld, Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada. “Now we face the challenge of making sure that Canadian women know how to access ECP, and that they can get it before they need it.”

ECP, sometimes referred to as the morning-after pill, has a long-standing history of being a simple, safe, and effective option for women to prevent pregnancy. Now women all across Canada will be able to get Plan B at their local pharmacy. Since ECP is more effective the earlier it is used, timely access is vital. Making ECP available without a prescription is a significant step in making it more accessible to women.

That's reasonably clear, so one wonders just what McCutcheon can add to it. Well, just from his opening snippet, we can see that, while he seems to be in favour of increased access to emergency contraception for Canadian women, he's also clearly worried about "maintaining an appropriate level of intervention by a pharmacist to ensure proper use of the drug and deal with related issues."

Um ... excuse me? And just what "intervention" role would the pharmacist have to play in all of this, beyond taking payment and handing over the pills? Sadly, because of my miserly nature, we'll never know here but, no matter -- we're far from done.

More than a month later (as you can see), we have the same Mr. McCutcheon, with yet another contribution to the comments page:

Today's Paper: Wednesday, May 4, 2005 12:00 AM Page A24

Re Heather Mallick's rant on pharmacists (Why Do We Have To See A Pharmacist The Morning After? -- April 30): We believe the long-awaited decision by Health Canada to move Plan B off prescription status is an excellent example of increasing access for Canadian women to emergency contraception while maintaining an appropriate level of intervention (by a pharmacist, rather than a physician) to ensure it is used appropriately and deal with related issues.

Ignoring his snarky and childish reference to someone else's "rant," notice anything odd about McCutcheon's piece? And, boy oh boy, does it look familiar or what? McCutcheon really does have his talking points down, don't he, almost word for word.

In fact, just for the entertainment value, let's give Google something to do and ask it to find anything related to all of the following phrases: "increasing access", "Canadian women", "emergency contraception" and "intervention". Man, that's pretty specific so you'd be forgiven in thinking we're not going to get a lot of hits.

Oooooh ... lookee here. While some of these hits are obviously not related to what we're after, it's just as obvious that our Mr. McCutcheon is one busy guy. He's here, describing Plan B as:

"... an excellent example of increasing access for Canadian women to emergency contraception (EC) while maintaining an appropriate level of intervention by a pharmacist to ensure proper use of the drug and deal with related issues."

And here:

"... an excellent example of increasing access for Canadian women to emergency contraception (EC) while maintaining an appropriate level of intervention by a pharmacist to ensure proper use of the drug and deal with related issues."

And here, this time in a letter for the Ottawa Citizen, describing Plan B as (you guessed it):

"... an excellent example of increasing access for Canadian women to emergency contraception while maintaining an appropriate level of intervention by pharmacists, rather than physicians, to ensure it is used appropriately and related issues are dealt with."

But wait! What's this? This letter isn't by McCutcheon. Rather, it's from Jeff Poston, the executive director of (how thoroughly predictable) the Canadian Pharmacists Association. Obviously, all of these folks read from the same playbook.

And here, we have what appears to be a letter in the National Post, with no listed author but, hey, let's see if we can guess who wrote it:

The long-awaited decision by Health Canada to move Plan B — an emergency contraceptive that, if taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, can reduce the risk of pregnancy by up to 90% — off prescription status is an example of increasing access for Canadian women to emergency contraception while maintaining an appropriate level of intervention by a pharmacist to ensure proper use of the drug.

McCutcheon? Poston? Does it matter? The same tedious, repetitive rubbish, with the same paternalistic, condescending attitute that women who want to get their hands on some emergency contraception would really benefit from a good, misogynstic talking-to, yessiree.

Anyway, in terms of being Part 1, that should be sufficient to set the stage for what I intend to be a savage beating, CC-style, of McCutcheon, Poston and perhaps a few more of the Neanderthals at the Canadian Pharmacists' Association.

And I write this without having actually done the additional research yet so I better damned well be right about this, or it's gonna be some kind of embarrassing, isn't it?

David Horowitz, making up shit again??

My morning just wouldn't be complete without possibly catching everyone's favourite right-wing academic conspiracy theorist, David Horowitz, in perhaps another one of his urban myths.

From this piece over at the web site of Lying, Right-Wing Slime for Academic Fascism, we have Dave making the following claim:

"At Columbia (University)," he said, "science professors showed 'Fahrenheit 9/11' the day before the election."

Wow, that's a pretty serious accusation -- serious enough to think maybe Dave's mentioned it before. And sure enough, this claim has some history to it. Or does it? From Dave's own Front Page Rag site, we have this piece and the salient excerpt:

On March 30, I spoke at Bowling Green State University, a state school in a blue-collar area about thirty miles outside Toledo, whose 20,000 students each pay $15,000-a-year tuition to attend. On election eve 2004, the university through its official activities program put on a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s hate film against George Bush and the American liberation of Iraq.

Hmmmm ... those two stories certainly match in terms of showing the film the night before the election. But that's at Bowling Green, not Columbia. And it makes it clear that the movie was shown by the college, not by a specific science professor. Could it be that Dave is just making up crap again? Well, if we read further, we find another claim related to that film:

At another school in Pennsylvania that I visited the week before, a biology professor showed Fahrenheit 9/11 to his biology class in the midst of the presidential campaign. In taking an entire class to show this propaganda film, the professor was obviously not teaching his students biology, or imparting any knowledge he was credentialed to share with them.

OK, this sounds closer but notice that this heinous academic crime allegedly occurred somewhere in Pennsylvania. Last I looked, Columbia wasn't in Pennsylvania so that's clearly not what Dave is talking about, althought you have every right to start feeling a mite suspicious that Dave simply tailors his stories for his audience.

Well, there's one way to settle this, isn't there? Let's just let Google run wild all over Dave's site and see what it comes up with when handed "Columbia" and "Fahrenheit 9/11". Surely, that's going to settle this. And what do we find? Hmmmmm ... nothing even remotely resembling Dave's claim.

So, let's open it up to the readership. Can anyone provide more detail on the Columbia story? Or is this just another Horowitz fairy tale? The lines are open.

Afterthoughts: Anyone who's followed the ongoing saga of serial liar David Horowitz has to be depressingly familiar with the pattern behind Dave's claims; specifically, they're maddeningly vague and never quite seem to agree in those critical little details.

For example, did this happen at Columbia? Or at Bowling Green? Or somewhere in Pennsylvania? Was it "a biology professor" (singular) or was it some "science professors" (plural)? Did it happen "the day before the election", or just " in the midst of the presidential campaign"? Details, details. And since I'm feeling particularly snarky today, I'm going to throw out an open invitation to the SAF's own National Campus Director, Sara Dogan.

Since the SAF published that piece on its website, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the SAF to stand behind its veracity. So, to Ms. Dogan, I have the following questions regarding the alleged showing of Michael Moore's film at some imprecise college or university by some unnamed faculty member (or members) on some unspecified date during the 2004 presidential campaign:

• At which college did this happen?
• When exactly did it happen? (That is, the precise date and time.)
• Where did it happen? (That is, the exact venue.)
  
• Who was responsible for the showing?
• Finally, if you can't substantiate this claim, will you pull that story from your site and issue a retraction?
  

You'd think that, being the story that it is and having happened several months ago, the SAF would have definitely covered it somewhere on their site. And you'd be wrong. So, one more questions for Ms. Dogan: Why is there absolutely no mention of this incident anywhere on your web site? Enquiring minds definitely want to know.

P.S. Just in case Ms. Dogan doesn't read this blog, feel free to drop her an email at sara@studentsforacademicfreedom.org, and give her a nudge. Fair and balanced -- that's our motto here at CC HQ.

UPDATE: The first commenter below refers interested readers to a write-up on Dave's visit to Bowling Green. Sadly, it's just Dave being Dave.

Dear America: 9/11? Get over it already.

Yeah, that 9/11 thing? Will you please just stop your fucking whining already? Jesus Christ, you'd think it was big goddamned deal or something. "In the wake of 9/11 ..." Man, I wish I had a buck for every time some snivelling wanker said that.

Excuse me? Oh, you thought that was me saying that? Silly person. No, no, that was your spiritual and moral leader (and certifiable moonbat) the Rev. Pat Robertson who, in discussing the impending threat of activist judges in America, claimed that they were far more of a threat than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."

So, as the Billy Joel song goes, don't come bitchin' to me. You think 9/11 was such a big deal, why don't you take it up with Pat? I'm sure he's terribly, terribly interested in your opinion.

Most. Incompetent. Journalist. Ever.

And from that last White House press gaggle, can someone explain why anybody is paying this buffoon to be a reporter? I mean, when it comes to being a journalist, how dumb is too dumb?

Q Scott, did Putin make comments today where he denounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which is not something you get to weave into a question at the White House very often. There were remarks he apparently made today where he denounced the pact as, I think, the administration wanted him to do.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me double check that. I haven't seen any updated news reports on the flight. You heard that --

Q It would be that he said -- he was referring to the 1989 denunciation by then Soviet Union parliament. And I think he said it was done then, and as the successor state, we --that applies to us, as well. So it was kind of a back-door way of saying --

MR. McCLELLAN: This morning?

Q I don't know the exact timing of when he said it, but I saw the news reports this morning.

It almost makes you nostalgic for the old days of:

Q Scott, can you explain how the President uses his faith to help him make important day-to-day decisions in this time of grave crisis?

MCCLELLAN: Why, yes, Jeff, I'd be glad to ...

"The president is looking forward ..."

Regarding that last post and the statement from the ambiguously gay Ken Mehlman, I swear, if I hear one more claim that the President is "looking forward" to something, I'm gonna start to kill puppies with my bare hands.

Apparently, the president spends so much time "looking forward" to things, it's a wonder he has any time left for important stuff, like clearing brush.

On the other hand, is there ever a time when the president is not looking forward to something? Apparently not. What a happy guy.

UPDATE: All right, where's that puppy? From yesterday's press gaggle with White House Press Reptile Scott McClellan, I give you the first paragraph. The very first:

MR. McCLELLAN: Good morning, everybody. I hope everybody had a good breakfast, maybe a little bit of a nap. This is the first gaggle of our lengthy flight. I want to update you on a couple of things. First of all, the President's morning. The President, early in the flight, spoke with Prime Minister Blair. This was a congratulatory call. The President looks forward to continuing to work with Prime Minister Blair. And the President congratulated him on an historic third victory.

And, of course, it doesn't stop there:

"... But the President looks forward to going to Latvia ... But the President looks forward to going to Russia ... And he also looks forward to going to Latvia ... I think the President's response is that he looks forward to the trip ..."

Please. Just shoot me now.

BREAKING STORY!! Fox News leans slightly to the right!

Is this Freudian or what? Over at Media Matters, we have Fox News "reporter" John Gibson putting it to RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, raking him over the coals, ripping him a new one, laying on a savage journalistic beatdown:

MEHLMAN: These are important issues. The American people want to see us solve problems. The president is looking forward and hopes to work with Democrats to solve these important problems.

GIBSON: Okay, but Ken, look, you're forcing me into the position of being a Democrat here -- which is an uncomfortable shoe for me to wear, but I'll do it for the moment.

Yeah, but it can't be quite as uncomfortable a shoe as, say, that of a real journalist, eh, John? I'll bet that would really hurt.

Calling Dave's bluff.

Having, over the course of the last few months, documented the sleazy, pathological dishonesty of David Horowitz and his little leprechauns, the laughably-misnamed Students for Academic Freedom, it just occurred to me that there's one incredibly easy way to shut Dave up once and for all -- just give him what he wants.

Since Dave is constantly bitching, whining and moaning about the overwhelming (in his own mind, anyway) pro-liberal, anti-conservative bias in academia, what better way to test his claims than to give him his own college class to teach?

Seriously, I propose that some college or university in the U.S. -- ideally, one that Dave has viciously slagged in the last little while -- invite Dave to teach a single, one-term course. Since Dave is perpetually slobbering about the under-representation of right-wing moonbats on the faculty, what better way to address this than to give Dave his very own course to try to set things right? So, let's hammer out the details, shall we?

First, would Dave agree to do it? It's hard to see how he could refuse and not become the laughing-stock of the entire galactic quadrant. How could he possibly justify being such a total pain-in-the-ass for years regarding alleged liberal bias on campus, only to refuse the opportunity that's handed to him on a platter? Really, there's no way he could turn down such an offer and have anyone (well, anyone sane, that is) take him seriously any more. So I think we're safe in assuming that Dave really couldn't weasel his way out of this.

Next, who'd pay Dave's salary? The obvious answer would be the college department itself, who could offer Dave their standard rate for a non-faculty, part-time instructor. It's hard to see how Dave could complain about whatever that rate was. After all, it was Dave himself who wrote:

“Eighty percent of the school budget is salaries,” [Horowitz] said. “You make between $60,000 and $100,000 a year. You teach on average two courses and spend six hours a week in class. You work eight months out of the year and have four months paid vacation. And every seven years you get ten months paid vacation.

Well, gee, Dave, if academics are so spectacularly overpaid, then you shouldn't have any problem accepting the same salary as any other part-time instructor, should you? I mean, grousing about the meagre pay you'd be getting would be, dare I say, just a wee bit hypocritical. But I have a better idea.

Let's let Dave pay for it himself -- that is, do it for free. After all, it does appear that Dave is already pretty-well paid, doesn't it? And given the bitching he's done regarding discrimination over the years, one would think he'd be more than happy to put in those hours for the sheer enjoyment of finally bringing some ideological balance back to academia. I mean, since Dave makes on the order of $5,000 per speech, surely that kind of income is going to cover any possible shortfall in his annual income. But wait. It could get even better.

Dave doesn't even have to donate his time. Why not have one of his wealthy, right-wing foundation backers put up the pittance of the several thousand dollars for his salary? As this article describes, Dave has some pretty rich friends:

In addition to the 35,000 individuals that contribute to Mr. Horowitz's center, several conservative foundations regularly send large checks. The most well known among them include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which the conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife runs, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which, according to its Web site, is "devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism" and supports "limited, competent government."

According to the most recent tax forms available, the two foundations gave a total of $620,000 to the center in 2003. Since 1998, the two groups have contributed about $3.5-million. The center received about $3.26-million in donations in 2003, and Michael Finch, the center's executive director, says about 40 percent of that comes from foundations.

In short, I don't think teaching a course is going to represent any kind of financial hardship for Davey Boy and, as I've already explained, with all the whining he's done over the years, how could he turn down the chance to finally prove his point? Ah, but you know there's a catch to all this, don't you?

If Dave wants to take anyone up on this offer, then he has to be prepared to follow the same rules that everyone else in that department does. First, he has to submit, and have approved, the course outline he's proposing. He has to prepare a detailed list of topics; he has to have real, live lesson plans; he has to create, hand out and grade assignments; he has to write and grade midterms and the final exam; he has to schedule regular office hours where he's available for student consultation; he has to attend the regular departmental meetings -- oh, yes, the whole nine yards as they say. None of this lounging around at home bullshit:

"I love my work space," he says. "I sit at my desk with my laptop. I listen to music. I take the dogs for a walk. Like most writers, I live in my head."

And the best part? The absolutely very best part? Yeah, you knew this was coming -- Dave has to do all this while abiding by the guidelines of his very own Academic Bill of Rights. No right-wing indoctrination, no anti-liberal bias, no ideological harassment. Because we'll make sure that there's at least one liberal watchdog in that course, taking notes, taping Dave every minute, to make sure he behaves. And the instant he slips -- boom! Official complaint to the college ombudsman.

So, who's willing to try to make this happen? Who thinks they have a course Dave can teach for a term? Paging Prof. Singham over there at Case Western Reserve. Your country needs you.

The rude pundit takes on creationism.

Geez, even as a kid, he had an attitude.

Jesus, Mary, Mother of God!!

I guess that's what Republicans mean by "trophy whore".

Your modern media: Did someone mention "incest"?

Over here, Declan has a wickedly amusing take on how the modern media feeds on itself in a totally shameless way.

Dear American freethinking Christians: You are SO fucked.

Baptist Church excommunicates Democrats. And the American jihad begins ...

Afterthought: I hope this puts to rest, once and for all, the notion that you can talk to these people, that you can negotiate, that there is common ground for an amicable dialogue and all the rest of that conciliatory bullshit. Now you know.

Double afterthought: And read TImmy the G's take on it as well.

Triple afterthought: It's moderately amusing to think of the church conservatives demanding that anyone who didn't vote for Commander Chimpy had to "repent their sins". You could almost understand it if, against all expectations, Bush had surprised everyone with his competence, his diplomacy, his economic strategies and the like, so that Democrats really did have a moral obligation to say something like, "Well, OK, we were wrong, you were right. He really is one sharp cookie and he's been good for the country."

Instead, as we all know, the Bush presidency has been one long horror show of military imperialism, lost jobs, a tanking economy, massive deficits and so on, which suggests that it's the conservatives who should be crawling humbly on their hands and knees to those same Democrats, pleading for absolution, "Oh, Jesus forgive me, you Dems were right, he really is a complete moron, what in God's name were we thinking!?!?"

So it's not so much that those Baptists are closed minded and intolerant; it's that they're so unbelievably fucking stupid as to think that anyone who voted against Bush has any need to apologize for it. Idiots.

Friday morning weasel blogging.

Your basic long-tailed weasel, wondering just what Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe are whispering about over there ...

Um ... wait a minute ... how's that again?

Moses, over at Yowling from the Fencepost, asks an interesting question regarding Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was shot and wounded by U.S. troops (her bodyguard was killed) when those troops opened fire on her car in Iraq.

On the other hand, there's something about Moses' cat that kind of just creeps me out ...

Academic "bias", north of the border.

And over here, Timmy the G takes it to Canadian right-wing moonbat Barbara Kay (among others), getting a couple days jump on yours truly as I was about to deal with Kay this weekend. But no problem, Tim. I don't mind some healthy competition. The fact that I know where you live should in no way affect your choice of blog topics.

And for true entertainment value, make sure you read the comments on that piece. Yes, we have our national embarrassments up here as well.

Your next coin-flipping puzzle.

Yes, this one's actually pretty easy. Or is it? Imagine you have a fair coin, and need to choose randomly between two people. Well, duh, that's not hard and, no, it's not the puzzle. Imagine, then, that you had four people and again had to choose one of them equally at random. Once again, not too difficult and it's easy to see how this generalizes to any power-of-two number of people.

But what if you had some other number of people, like three, and you still had to choose one of them at random with equal probability across all participants. What do you do? There are a couple reasonably obvious strategies.

First, each person can choose a different length-two sequence from the possibilities of {H,T}, you flip the coin twice and whoever selected that sequence wins. If it's the one sequence no one chose, you just start over and keep flipping twice until you have a winner. This is, of course, guaranteed to be fair but, on the downside, if luck is working against you, you could be flipping for some time before someone wins. Theoretically, if your luck is unspeakably bad, there is no limit to the number of flips you might have to make.

Another algorithm is to have each person flip the coin exactly once. When one person is the odd man out in terms of what shows, that person is the winner and, once again, it's clear that this is fair, just as it's clear that really bad luck means you might be flipping forever if everyone's flips keep matching.

So, the obvious question is, is there a way, with three people and a single honest coin, to fairly select one of those people at random, and be able to put an upper bound on the number of flips you have to make?

Note well that, when I'm asking for an upper bound, this doesn't mean that you must flip that many times before you can declare a winner; perhaps it will take less flips than that maximum depending on your strategy. But, in any case, you need to be able to guarantee that you'll have a winner after at most a finite number of coin flips.

Thoughts?

Open for solutions, Friday, noon, Eastern time.

Yeah, yeah, your Daily Dave ...

And the good Prof. Singham is just one of an increasing number of folks losing patience with raving, tinfoil-hat lunatic David Horowitz.

Just check out the "Recent Entries" there -- he's got a few pieces.

Gosh darn those pesky Republican family values.

Sometimes, a back rub is just a back rub. Other times, well ...

Three days after it was reported he was involved in a domestic dispute that triggered a 911 call from a 29-year-old woman in his Washington apartment, U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood (R - Strictly Platonic) apologized for causing his family and supporters “pain and embarrassment.”...

Sherwood, 64, did not explain his relationship with the woman or say why she was in his apartment. He has called her a “casual acquaintance.”

Which, as we all know, explains everything, since Republicans make a point of never choking much younger women they're actually having extramarital affairs with. Strangely, the woman, Cynthia Ore, didn't quite see it in the same platonic way:

“When I met him he told me he was getting a divorce,” Ore has said.

Yes, and I'm sure you believed it when he told you he wouldn't cum in your mouth, either. But just how does Sherwood rate when it comes to those infamous conservative family values? Pretty darned well, it seems.

As a congressman, Sherwood has been a loyal supporter of conservative family values since he was first elected to the 10th Congressional District seat in 1998.

While the Tunkhannock Republican has hardly led the conservative charge on social issues, GOP leaders in the House have come to rely upon his vote when bills pertaining to “traditional family values” come to the floor.

The Christian Coalition of America, which touts itself as “the largest and most active conservative grassroots political organization in America,” gives Sherwood an 84 percent rating for voting with the coalition’s positions on legislative issues. The American Conservative Union rates him at 88 percent.

The American Family Association gives Sherwood a perfect 100-percent rating. The organization’s Web site claims to be “America’s largest pro-family action site” with nearly 2.2 million members...

Among the votes that helped earn Sherwood his 100 percent rating with the family association was his support of the Marriage Protection Act of 2004, which would limit the federal courts’ jurisdiction over the issue of whether a ban on same-sex marriage is constitutional. Sherwood also voted in favor of a failed proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as an institution between a man and a woman.

Regardless of whether or not that woman is his actual, you know, wife. Sort of like this.

Yeah ... finding them ... there's a good place to start.

Following this amusing link from over at ThinkProgress, we have at-the-time Under Secretary of Defense and stupidest guy on the planet Douglas Feith, with the following excerpt from his prepared statement, Feb 11, 2003:

Detailed planning is underway for the task of securing, assessing and dismantling Iraqi WMD capabilities, facilities and stockpiles. This will be a huge undertaking. The Defense Department is building the necessary capabilities.

This will be a new mission for the Department and for our nation. It is complex and will take place as part of military operations, continuing into the post-conflict period.

We must first locate Iraq's widespread WMD sites...

Insert appropriate eye rolling, forehead slapping-style punchline here.

Does absolute power really corrupt absolutely?

Why, yes, yes it does.

Suddenly, I feel so inadequate, bikewise.

Trying to psyche up for getting into bicycling seriously? Here's a role model for you.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the David Horowitz ...

The Chronicle of Higher Education does Dave here. And Michael Berube does the Chronicle here. Enjoy.

AFTERTHOUGHT: And don't forget to follow those links. Like to here.

BONUS: More bogus claims of liberal academic bias. Man, this is an epidemic.

The new U.S. ambassador to Canada: a real piece of work.

Timmy the G has the goods on David Wilkins, the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, and a real specimen this guy turns out to be. I'm guessing that the only reason it wasn't John Bolton is that John's a bit busy at the moment.

Documenting the creationist atrocities -- the followup.

Remember back here, when I promised to subject myself to the unknown horrors involving one Dr. John Bilello and his two Saturday presentations? Sadly, after toughing it out through the first one, I simply didn't have the intestinal fortitude to come back for the second. Trust me -- one was enough.

I'll summarize the bad craziness shortly, but over here, you can read fellow Waterlooite(?) Jeffrey Shallit's report on Bilello: part deux.

I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything.

Oh ... crap.

As the saying goes, this is not going to have a happy ending.

NOTE: If you look closely, you'll notice the "Next Photo" link, so you can follow the carnage in real time.

Sports news you can use.

Oh, look. Another coverup in the U.S. military. What a shocking development. Remember this?

Pat Tillman, who gave up the glamorous life of a professional football star to join the Army Rangers, was remembered as a role model of courage and patriotism Friday after military officials said he had been killed in action in Afghanistan...

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers said Saturday that Tillman was killed Thursday night in a firefight at about 7 p.m. on a road near Sperah, about 25 miles southwest of a U.S. base at Khost.

Sooner or later, though, the truth does come out, sometimes in embarrassing ways:

Army officials knew within days of Pat Tillman's death that the former NFL player had been killed by fellow Rangers during a patrol in Afghanistan but did not inform his family and the public for weeks, The Washington Post reported...

The [Washington] Post reported on its online edition Tuesday night that troops on the scene said they were immediately sure Tillman was killed by a barrage of American bullets.

The documents show that officers erroneously reported that Tillman was killed by enemy fire, destroyed critical evidence and initially concealed the truth from his brother, also an Army Ranger, who was near the attack, the Post reported.

Yeah. Semper fi. Or whatever.

Jonah Goldberg, redefining "stupidity".

And stealing shamelessly from First Draft, we have the NRO's own Doughy Pantload, apparently unaware that simply not posting something stupid is actually an option:

Zarqawi (allegedly) complains that morale is low. Better news would be if he complained that his leg shackles were too tight. But we'll take what we can get. Whoops! The letter is (allegedly) to Zarqawi not from him. Sorry. Perils of fast reading when on deadline.

The perils of deadline? Given that that was posted at 12:37 PM, what was his deadline? 12:39? 12:42?

This is what happens when you leave these people with a keyboard, access to the internets and no adult supervision.

Saddam's a bad man!

A very bad man! A horrific tyrant who invaded Kuwait ... and gassed his own people ... and all sorts of really bad things, and we're going to lock him up and throw away the key and there's no corner of hell too hot for that sonofabitch, that evil monster, that ... that ...

Oh, wait.

Never mind. Everything's fine here. Carry on.

New puzzle -- for you electronics weenies.

Open for solutions. Whaddya got?

Yes, it's an oldie but still a goodie. Given a wire cube whose edges consists of 1-ohm resistance wires,

what's the total resistance between diametrically-opposed corners A and B?

More of those delightful conservative family values.

Sorry ... what was all that "sanctity of marriage" stuff about again?

Why the hell does anyone listen to Pat Robertson anymore?

Over here at Media Matters, we have a thoroughly predictable piece about how, on the Sunday morning talk show This Week with George Stephasnuffelufagus, Pat Robertson (God forbid!) contradicted himself, saying that God couldn't have prevented last year's tsunami because He doesn't reverse the laws of nature, and yet Robertson likes to claim that some natural disasters are the result of The Big Kahuna being majorly pissed about ... well, who goddamned knows anymore?

To which one can only respond ... who the fuck cares what Pat Robertson thinks?!?! Why is this raving lunatic given any airtime at all? He is completely certifiable and yet, one can just imagine the table talk when the Sabbath Gasbags are planning their guest lists: "Well, we need the religious perspective on this one. I know; let's get Pat Robertson!".

And what the hell for? Because you haven't filled your barking moonbat quota? Because it's in your contract that you need at least one clinically insane guest per week? What is it? It's like having a discussion on gay marriage and inviting Jerry Falwell. Why? You already know the mindless, hate-filled gibberish he's going to spew all over the airwaves. What's the point?

We don't need to know what lunatics like Robertson think. We know what they think. What we need to know is why they keep getting invited back when having heard them once tells us everything we'll ever need to know.

The greatest invention in the history of the universe, hyperbolically speaking.

Apparently, these folks are familiar with Canadian politics. And David Horowitz.

Yes, you need a living will.

And as a starting point, how about this one? Tweak as necessary.

Holding your nose, and the least of several evils.

I agree wholeheartedly with mahigan over here -- is it really worth voting when the best you can do is agonize over which candidate is the least repulsive? What to do? Well, how about this?

How to win friends and influence people.

Yeah, this is sure to win hearts and minds. Dear Americans: No, they don't hate you because of your freedoms and your democracy. They hate you because so many of you are assholes. There's a difference.

Epicycles and creationism: Some people never learn.

Whoa! And a big north-of-the-border howdy to the visitors from Buridan's Ass. And, yes, in between the David Horowitz beatings, we slap creationists around on a regular basis here. So you'll feel right at home.

(In which many people forget the lessons of history and I steal shamelessly from a couple of web sites, particularly this one.)

Once upon a time, most folks thought the Earth was the centre of the universe, kind of like this:

It was a theologically-satisfying bit of vanity except for the fact that, to the curious and careful observer, it didn't explain the behaviour of the heavens, in which astral bodies had the nasty habit of changing in brightness and occcasionally demonstrating retrograde motion. For this problem, there were two possible solutions: 1) abandon the general model (Heavens to Betsy, no!) or 2) try to patch the current one.

Pulling out their cosmological equivalent of duct tape, the ancients jury-rigged the idea of "epicycles", in which planets orbited around a point, which itself orbited around the Earth:

With this quick and dirty fix in place, the Old Ones at least now had a passable explanation for the behaviour of some heveanly bodies:

Sadly, this still didn't fix all the problems so it was back to the duct tape, introducing even more complicated cycles -- that is epicycles on epicycles (yeesh!):

and, even more drastically, having the primary epicycles not even orbit uniformly around the original deferent but around some point displaced from that. Duct tape on duct tape on duct tape and, in the end, utter failure.

The lesson here should be obvious. If you start with a bad foundation for your theory, all the patching, jury-rigging and desperate taping won't salvage it. Put another way, regardless of how much lipstick you put on that pig, it's still going to oink.

Which brings us to the "scientific" creationists and the fact that these people seem absolutely determined not to learn anything from history. It was back in 1961 when Henry Morris, the godfather of modern creationism (a title I can only hope haunts him throughout eternity) proposed that the entire geological and fossil record was produced by a single, massive, worldwide flood (think Earth-centered universe here). The problem? Those same geological and fossil records clearly showed a distinct and progressive structure so, what to do? No problem, suggests Morris. And out comes the duct tape.

First, Morris proposes that the apparent patterns in the fossil record can be explained by "ecological zonation" -- that the layers correspond to which animals lived at which elevations (epicycles version number one). As you can read at that link, no, that doesn't work, but nice try.

OK, then, time for more duct tape, as Morris proposes additionally that the obvious layers can be explained by "hydrologic sorting" (there's your epicycles on epicycles). And, again, no, sorry, but thanks for playing. But Morris is nothing if not determined. Unspeakably ignorant but determined.

So, it's back into the toolbox for that last bit of tape, and the idea that the order of fossils in the fossil record can be explained by "mobility" -- the ability of some animals to flee the rising floodwaters faster than others, ignoring of course even the remote possibility that some of the animals might be ... uh, dead, and wouldn't be able to keep up with their colleagues (which completes the analogy with your epicycles orbiting mythical, off-center points on their respective deferents.)

Tape slapped on tape slapped on more tape. And none of it able to salvage the underlying creationist viewpoint whose fundamental flaw was that, like the Earth-centered universe before it, it was unsalvageable rubbish.

It's not that the creationists can propose such dreck that's so depressing. It's that they're not even capable of recognizing how, in the midst of all this scientific progress, they're still pushing the biological equivalent of the Earth-centered universe.

One wonders how long it's going to take to drag some of them, kicking and screaming, finally, into the 16th century. And, quite frankly, one is not optimistic.

And just how frighteningly amoral are you?

Apparently, I'm 1% Republican. I've already made the appointment to have it removed.

You can NEVER get too much David Horowitz-bashing.

No, seriously. Because over at HorowitzWatch, there's a great, short piece about how Dave was involved in a frivolous lawsuit against UC Berkeley because it wouldn't hire, as its new dean of journalism, his good buddy and conservative, racist radio talk show host Michael Savage.

And why, you might be wondering, am I so Horowitz-obsessed these days? Well, truth be told, I'm warming up to eviscerate one of our own Canadian right-wing loons, one Barbara Kay. And given that she speaks in glowing terms of the clinically insane Horowitz, my plan is to destroy Horowitz's credibility once and for all, then trash Kay using guilt by association.

And, no, I don't feel even remotely guilty about it. Stay tuned.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Wow. Right-wing wankers could only dream that they were as intelligent and articulate as this 13-year-old girl.

AFTERTHOUGHT: There's a certain irony in the fact that the very people (that is, the wingnut right) who want to prevent this girl from getting an abortion because she's too young and immature to fully appreciate the consequences of her actions are the same people who, historically, have never had any problem executing the mentally retarded since, hey, even someone with the intellectual development of a 12-year-old understands the difference between right and wrong, know whut i'm sayin'?

Sometimes, these yahoos are so chock-full of hypocrisy, it's a miracle they don't explode.

"Defending civilization." From who, exactly?

To truly disembowel the pathetically-dishonest, right-wing "academic liberal bias" movement, it would be necessary to go after one of the best-known and most prolific purveyors of all of that sleaze -- the innocuously-named "American Council of Trustees and Alumni", or "NAMBLA".

Luckily, Paul Street over at Zmag has already saved me the trouble, so I can get back to playing whack-a-creationist.

BY THE WAY: At some point, I really do plan on focusing on what's happening back here in Soviet Canuckistan in terms of academic ... uh, fascism. So feel free to submit stories.

What can you possibly say about this?

Seriously, how can you begin to react to this?

Iraq failed to name an oil minister for its new government on Thursday and controversial politician Ahmad Chalabi was appointed acting minister of an industry plagued by sabotage attacks and uncertainty.

Chalabi ... Chalabi ... damn, that name sounds familiar. Oh! That Ahmad Chalabi. No problem -- I'm sure that, with his years of experience in the industry, he'll do just fine.

Chalabi's aides said the former financier could head the ministry indefinitely in the absence of consensus over a permanent replacement.

"Dr. Ahmad may remain oil minister for weeks or months. It depends on reaching a political agreement," Nabil al-Moussawi, a senior Chalabi aide told Reuters.

That would leave Chalabi, who has no expertise in oil, steering the oil industry of the country with the third largest reserves through a turbulent period of suicide bombings and frequent attacks on pipelines.

Oh ... shit.

BONUS TRACK: And Maureen Dowd (at least when she's not being full of herself) has a good perspective on this as well.

Lies, damned lies and the myth of academic "liberal" bias.

I have no idea how I missed this but a delightful "American Prospect" article from back in December of 2002 puts the lie to the standard right-wing wanker party line of massively disproportionate (for you wankers, "really, like, large") liberal representation on academic faculties.

As we all know (and by "know" I mean that the right-wing wankerverse has lied about it for years), the ideological composition of your average academic faculty is ridiculously skewed to the left. And we "know" this because, of course, the right have carefully and methodically documented this, via meticulous and scrupulously fair surveys and sampling.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I still crack me up.

Apparently, as with almost everything else emanating from the right these days (and, yes, I'm looking at you, Prof. Reisman), this claim is pure myth and bullshit, as author Martin Plissner explains:

As often happens in Washington, the matter began at a think tank. The right-of-center American Enterprise Institute (AEI), in the August cover story of its American Enterprise magazine, claimed documentation beyond dispute of the left-wing hammerlock on American faculties. AE's editor-in-chief, William Zinsmeister, in league with David Horowitz (best known for his ads in college newspapers calling on black Americans to show "gratitude" for all that white Americans have done for them) of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, sent student volunteers to boards of election to search out the party registrations of 1,843 college teachers at 21 institutions. For the cover story, Democrats, Greens and "Working Family" registrants were lumped under "L" for "parties of the left"; Republicans and Libertarians, meanwhile, were filed under "R" for "parties of the right." (Independents, who would seem under Zinsmeister's labeling scheme to merit a "C" for "centrist," were ignored.) The overall ratio of L's to R's reflected in the story's bar graphs was dramatic: 11-to-1...

At none of the campuses -- which ran the gamut from Harvard, Brown, Stanford and Cornell universities to 10 state schools and a smattering of smaller colleges -- did the parties of the left prevail by a ratio of less than 6-to-1. At 86 percent liberal on the Zinsmeister scale, the University of Texas at Austin (on whose board appointees of George W. Bush still reign) trailed by only a tad the University of California, Berkeley (91 percent liberal).

Wow! Proof positive of overwhelming ideological bias in academia! Yes, that certainly is the smoking gun, isn't it? But wait! What's this?

The findings look pretty compelling -- but not when you look at them closely. In the University of Texas sample, for example, 28 of the 94 teachers came from women's studies -- not exactly a highlight of any school's core curriculum or a likely cross section of its faculty. At the same time, none of the 94 was from the university's huge schools of engineering, business, law or medicine -- or from any of the sciences. At Cornell University, it's the same story: 166 L's by the AE bar graphs, and only 6 R's. But not one faculty member in the entire sample taught in the engineering, business, medicine or law schools, or in any of the sciences. Thirty-three, on the other hand, were in women's studies -- more than any subject, save for English.

Oh. But surely that was an anomaly. Perhaps (as Republicans love to suggest these days) the result of an "over-zealous" assistant? Sadly, no.

The methodology employed is similarly slapdash at the other chosen campuses. Harvard's faculty of more than 2,000 is represented by 52 members from just three academic disciplines, all in the social sciences. More than half of the University of California, Los Angeles sample comes from just two disciplines: history and, once again, women's studies.

So, ridiculously-biased sampling. How thoroughly ... Horowitzian. But it does give one pause for a simple thought: If conservatives are this fucking stupid or dishonest in relation to simple statistics, would you want one as a professor?

(By the way, props to this online article, which pointed me to the Plissner article in the first place. Definitely worth the read.)