The elections: We’re screwed

November 5, 2014 • 5:16 am

As my CNN bulletins kept coming in over email last night (I had no heart to watch the election results on television), my heart sank lower and lower. One by one, Republicans took Senate seats, House seats, and governorships. Democratic victories were rare. The only bright spot is that Oregon and Washington D.C. legalized marijuana, which will provide a palliative for sensible people who must endure the next two years (or even more) of gridlock and heartless conservatism.

Here’s today’s headline from the New York Times, and the depressing statistics below it. Republicans have not only gained control of the Senate, but expanded their hold on the House. Click on each to go to the story:

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Read and weep:

Senate election results:
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House election results:

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The Democrats lost 13 seats in the House, which remains Republican, but also 7 seats in the Senate, which is now in Republican hands. With both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans, what we’ll see is gridlock until the 2016 elections. Republicans will be committed to overturning Obama’s health care bill and expanding tax advantages for the rich, and will do everything they can to derail Obama’s initiatives. They are a party not of progress—not even conservative progress (whatever that is)—but of obstruction. Their only platform is to make things harder for immigrants, women, and the poor.

Here’s what we have to look forward to:

  • Increasing restriction of abortion rights
  • No reform on immigration, or the kind of reform that restricts immigration, particularly of brown people
  • Repeated attempts to dismantle “Obamacare”
  • Expansion of financial advantages for the wealthy and increasing income inequality
  • The end of efforts to curb carbon emissions and global warming

And even if Hillary Clinton wins the Presidency in 2016, which I expect, many of these gains will remain. What that means is very little important legislation will be enacted for six years au minimum. 

This represented a vote against Obama by an electorate who votes on their own pocketbooks and not on principle.  I truly don’t understand the demonization of Obama. He’s gotten healthcare through, largely pulled our troops out of the Middle East (though he tends to waffle on foreign policy), and had sensible policies on immigration.  I can’t help but think that those Republicans disaffected by his victories, and the fact that he’s black, are striking back in a big way when they have the opportunity (if you think Obama’s race makes no difference, you’re living in Cloud Cuckooland). Obama, whatever you may think of him, had decent policies but was blocked by a truculent Republican faction in Congress.

I really do despise the Republic Party and all that it stands for. There’s nothing to look forward to in the next two, six, or even ten years—except for the people of Oregon and the District of Columbia, who now have the means to become impervious to politics.

Texas Tech students parade their knowledge

November 4, 2014 • 2:57 pm

Here a group of Texas Tech students (a decent school in Lubbock, Texas, birthplace of Buddy Holly) are asked five sets of questions:

1. Who won the Civil War?
2. Who is the Vice-President of the United States?
3. Who did we (the U.S.) gain our independence from? And in what year?
4. What (television) show is Snooki on?
5. Who is Brad Pitt married to? And who was he married to before that?

They got two of these groups of questions uniformly right and largely tanked on the rest. Guess which ones.  See the video below:

Now, instead of feeling superior, let’s wonder at an educational system in which students can’t answer the easiest questions about history and politics but know a lot about celebrities.

h/t: Merilee

My interview for Skeptical Briefs

November 4, 2014 • 2:07 pm

Skeptical Briefs is a newsletter that goes, four times yearly, to the Associate Members of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which also publishes the well known periodical Skeptical Inquirer. In the latest issue I have a two-page interview conducted by Brazilian writer Felipe Nogueira, who was clearly well read about my stuff before me interviewed me.  Anyway, you can’t read the whole thing online, so I’ve put a screenshot below and will mail anyone a pdf of the full interview if asked.

But the full interview is also on Felipe’s website, Skepticism & Science, and you can also see it as a video on YouTube (it was conducted on Skype).  I’d recommend the written version, since I hate seeing myself on video.

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More creationist shenanigans at Georgia Southern University

November 4, 2014 • 12:19 pm

The case of Emerson T. McMullen—an associate professor of history at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia—just gets weirder and weirder. He’s a diehard creationist and apparently has been foisting his creationism on his history-of-science and science-related classes for years. (Georgia Southern is a state institution, not a private school.) And the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) has just found out that McMullen, canceling something called a “D-Day talk,” offered students instead extra credit for commenting on a creationist essay that he (McMullen) wrote! This happened just a few days ago

Here’s the offer of extra credit sent to his class:

10-16-2014 email to students to summarize %27No Evidence for Evolution%27 REDACTED

You can find the essay here; it’s called “No evidence for evolution” and it’s full of the worst creationist pap you can imagine. Here are just two paragraphs from its opening:

These examples show just how poorly science handles history. The beginning of life and the origin of living things are historical events. They are not happening now and scientists cannot observe them. We have no time machine to ascertain what really occurred. Yet we find evolutionists claiming to have the correct insights into these important historical events. Many assert that we came from chemicals and evolved from a common ancestor. Are these assertions based on science, or a naturalistic worldview?

For a list of well-known scientists who dissent from Darwinism, click here: 100 dissenting scientists. Scientists on this list include Russell W. Carlson, Prof. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, U. of Georgia; Jonathan Wells, PhD Molecular & Cell Biology-U.C. Berkeley; Dean Kenyon, Prof. Emeritus of Biology, San Francisco State; Marko Horb, Researcher, Dept. of Biology & Biochemistry, U. of Bath; Tony Jelsma, Prof. of Biology, Dordt College; Siegfried Scherer, Prof. of Microbial Ecology, Technische Universität München; Marvin Fritzler, Prof. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, U. of Calgary, Medical School; Lennart Moller, Prof. of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Inst., U. of Stockholm; Matti Leisola, Prof., Laboratory of Bioprocess Engineering, Helsinki U. of Technology; Richard Sternberg, Invertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute (2002).

Imagine those poor students who want or need extra credit. They don’t have to even discuss or analyze this piece of garbage written by McMullen; all they have to do is summarize it.  That is, he’s making students raise their grades by regurgitating his creationist ideas. I’d say that’s a pretty clear case of religious indoctrination.

McMullen’s espousal of blatant creationism has to be curtailed; he’s conducting his career by lying to his students, and making them repeat his lies.  This is unconscionable, and a clear violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The man is a fool, and a danger to science education in Georgia. I have of course called the attention of Georgia Southern’s biology department to McMullen’s foolishness, which, I’m sure, the department would firmly decry.

At any rate, Andrew Seidel, an attorney for the FFRF, sent the following letter to Marcia Copeland, the General Counsel in the Office of Legal Affairs at Georgia Southern. I reproduce it with permission.

Dear Ms. Copeland,
Please find attached additional evidence for the investigation into Prof. McMullen’s preaching/teaching.  Attached is a screenshot of an email Prof. McMullen sent to his students on October 16, 2014 granting them extra credit for summarizing an essay he wrote entitled, “NO EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION: Scientists’ Research and Darwinism.”  That paper can be found here: https://sites.google.com/a/georgiasouthern.edu/etmcmull/no-evidence-for-evolution-scientists-research-and-darwinism  I’ve also attached a screenshot of this link, which clearly shows the GSU masthead above the anti-evolution essay.
I trust you will forward this information to the investigators.  We look forward to hearing how the investigation is progressing (as confidentiality concerns permit).

Warmest,

Andrew L. Seidel
Attorney
Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc.
PO Box 750
Madison, WI 53701

Even male moths do it…

November 4, 2014 • 10:46 am

by Matthew Cobb

Female moths are well known to produce pheromones that attract potential mates, sometimes from miles away. Male moths generally have much larger or more feather-like antennae than females, in order to catch a whiff of their partner on the air. But some males also produce pheromones, using structures called coremata or ‘hair-pencils’. Imagine have a rubber glove in your mouth, then blowing out so it suddenly appeared. Sexy, eh? Well here’s a male moth being helped to do exactly that. Wake up and smell the pheromones, ladies!

moth

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry on hair-pencils has done a pretty good job, and there’s some nice references there, although none of the key ones are open access, sadly. As you’ll see, the compounds released by these structures can also be used to warn off competing males.

A question for compatibilists

November 4, 2014 • 10:07 am

If you’re not a “Free Willy,” you can skip this, for I have at least one more post this week on the topic. But for crying out loud, let’s hear no protestations that I should stop posting on things that intrigue me. You’re always free to skip posts.

I’m now used to the fact that most readers on this site don’t agree with me that compatibilism (the idea that physical determinism is still compatible with the idea of “free will”) is a largely useless philosophical exercise: an exercise in semantics that accomplishes nothing of substance. That’s fine with me; I’m comfortable in my opinion.  But that leaves me with a question for those readers who do endorse compatibilism. The question is this:

What do you think that the efforts of compatibilist philosophers have accomplished? And by “accomplished,” I mean accomplished for both academic scholarship and the welfare of humanity? And how do any social advantages of compatibilism differ from those that inhere in incompatibilism?

Now I can see what incompatibilism has to offer: the explicit dispelling of dualism (something that some compatibilists do, but not often enough), which kicks the props from beneath religion. More important, incompatibilism, by arguing that our decisions are the products of the laws of physics, and are “decisions” over which we have no control, has explicit lessons for how we deal with reward and, especially, punishment. By emphasizing determinism over semantics, I think, incompatibilism leads us naturally to a reconsideration of how we treat social offenders.

Now compatibilists could make the same arguments—for punishment as deterrence, sequestration, and rehabilitation but not retribution, and for a more empathic treatment of offenders—but most of these arguments have come from incompatibilists, who simply dismiss the semantic bafflegab and get on to the determinism. I believe that’s because even though most compatibilists are determinists, their efforts still leave the average person with the idea that we have some kind of real choice about our actions; and this obstructs reform in, say, the criminal justice system.

At any rate, there are many compatibilist readers, and I’d like to hear what advantages, both practical and intellectual, that view has over incompatibilism. Needless to say, I see none, but that is my own opinion.

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