Camp Quest: Now with TWO Camp Quest Wests

Camp Quest is the secular summer camp, and having volunteered as a counselor in 2006 I can attest that it was a blast. It's been massively successful and grown crazy fast since then - look at all those.




Of course Camp Quest West in California is the coolest one. In fact it's so cool that to prevent a coolness singularity they had to make two. So now there are SoCal and NorCal camps, on two different weeks, July 8-14 and July 22-28.

It's great that there's an alternative to religious camps. So you want to volunteer and have fun? Have a friend who you think would be interested? Spread the word, and go here and help Camp Quest continue to grow.

Traditional Asian Medicine is Killing Off Endangered Species

I doubt you know a single person who would be against adding a new medicine to our arsenal against disease that literally grew on trees (or some other living thing) and was therefore cheap, and was also safe and effective. But what if those trees were rare, and disappearing? And what if (even worse) that medicine had never been shown to work? Shouldn't this be a core cause for skeptics?

You're no doubt already familiar with the many hang-ups about nutritional and medical practices so we don't have to recapitulate them here. the point is that acting irrationally and without evidence becomes a moral issue when people spread baseless misinformation that may harm another person's health (or just demand public money and special protection). And it's really bad when it destroys members of near-extinct species. There's a piece in the journal Nature that gives statistics about the toll that traditional Asian medicine has taken on rhinos and tigers, among others.



[Click here to embiggen the figure.] 500 black rhino horns per year are entering the market, out of a remaining population of less than 10,000. Even assuming this is the only reason that these animals are still being hunted, and of course it isn't, then in 20 years black rhinos will be extinct in the wild. The vast majority of the rhino horn and tiger bone powder is going to one country: China.

To be clear, most traditional Asian medicine does not involve endangered animal potions; most of it is woo that can only harm by inaction. But if we care about conservation, then the time is past for pretending that tolerating these kinds of cultural practices won't shortly result in extinction for many of these animals. It doesn't matter if it's
"traditional", or if someone is offended that science is trying to evaluate its claims, or we wouldn't understand because we're not the right religion/ethnic group/social class etc. (By the way, that siren you're hearing is your "shielding claim from rational inquiry" alarm.)

I sincerely hope skeptics start paying more attention to this issue, because in the case of this particular flavor of medical woo, more harm is being done aside from just not getting real medicine to sick patients. The truth will win out, but it's slow - probably too slow for the black rhino. I'd like to think there's something that can be done immediately, like wildlife authorities flooding the market with fake rhino horn and tiger bone.

Graham-Rowe D. Biodiversity: Endangered and in demand. Nature. 2011 Dec 21;480(7378):S101-3.

Where in the Brain Does Religion Happen?

Image from religionlink.com.

Hint for dualists: it's not the pineal gland. From a 2009 PNAS paper: "The findings support the view that religiosity is integrated in cognitive processes and brain networks used in social cognition,
rather than being sui generis...Regardless of whether God exists or not, religious beliefs do exist and can be experimentally studied, as shown in this study." There's more to it than that but that was the money quote.

Kapogiannis D, Barbey AK, Su M, Zamboni G, Krueger F, Grafman J. Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Mar 24;106(12):4876-81.

Your Tax Money Is Paying for Homeopathy Research

It's always worth asking - of the bad thinking that really sticks in your rationalist craw, which beliefs cause the most damage? Alternative medicine has to be one of the worst.

There is, and has been, funded government agency called the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. (It's part of the NIH for crying out loud.) It's not just homeopathy, but lots of other absolutely unfounded ideas. As Randi alludes below, the Chicago Tribune reported on this recently - and it's not just tax dollars, but human life, that's in the balance. Tom Harkin (D-IA) created the NCCAM; here's a piece by David Gorski on him.

From the Tribune article: "The researchers failed to inform the subjects that one risk of the treatment was death. In consent form documents, they made a confusing statement about the study drug, implying it was safer than it was." If there's a cardinal sin in medical research, it's deceiving patients like this.

Also interesting from the article: "The researchers overseeing the study stepped up background checks on the doctors involved after some physicians ran into disciplinary problems unrelated to the chelation trial. Two doctors consulting on the trial have been convicted of crimes." And: "In its 12 years of existence, NCCAM has found itself funding clinical trials of therapies with weak scientific foundations, from distant prayer as a treatment for AIDS to a risky regimen for pancreatic cancer involving coffee enemas." Here's James Randi:



Remember, what do you call alternative medicine that's proven to work? Medicine.

Success of Societies and Religion

In a post over at the good professor Coyne's, he puts up this plot:

Graphics linking religion to political and economic indicators are extremely useful. Another way of looking at the political success vs religiosity question is failed state index vs religiosity, which I wrote about before. Y axis is % saying God is important or very important in their lives, X is failed state index:

Controlling people's behavior right here in this world is what the religion game is really about; and it's rhetorically useful that many social conservatives in the U.S. who reject any mention of evolution are suddenly hesitant when they envision East Asian high-tech economies overtaking our own, because the kids on the other side of the Pacific aren't crippled by dogma. Of course some people might think their faith is more important than economic success, but I bet voters respectfully disagree.

A great source on the success of non-religious societies Zuckerman's Society without God. Coyne's original post is here; he also has one showing the world map of skepticism.

Do You Smoke?

Periodically it's worth pointing out that there are self-described rationalists and skeptics who smoke. Need I point out that Hitchens was one of them?

If you don't smoke, then look for the rationalists who do, and think about this, even for purely selfish reasons: they're subtracting rationalist person-years out of civilization. It's in your and my interest to get them to quit.

If you do smoke, you don't need me to tell you it's bad for you. So go to friends and family, and tell them you're quitting, and give them tools to seriously hold you accountable. As in, money in escrow - seriously - lots of it, so it hurts bad if you slip. It helps to have a reward too.

Here's more information on how to quit. And here's some more motivation.



A smoker's lungs. Okay, no I can't tell you whether it really is, but the smokers' lungs I've seen with my own eyes were just about that bad.

A Nice Venn Diagram for the Holidays

From Junk Charts.

A Nice Christmas Sign

This is along Ortega Highway/Route 74 in the Trabuco Unit of Cleveland National Forest, Orange County. I get excited sometimes:

A Christian Eulogy for Hitchens

That's All He Wrote

It will happen to all of us that at some point, you get tapped on the shoulder and told not just that the party's over, but slightly worse: The party's going on, but you have to leave.


Thank you, Mr. Hitchens. I will be having a drink tonight. With you no longer around, I'll be needing it.

The Camp Pendleton Cross

Duncan Hunter is now involved and has sent a letter to the base commander. This is the son of the previous Rep. Hunter, who Federalized the land around the Soledad cross in La Jolla to avoid taking it down by changing jurisdictions (the case had already been decided). So much for keeping big government out of local affairs!

In a sign of the apoliticalness of San Diego publications (especially the Union-Tribune), so far I've only seen the story in the Marine Corps Times and the Bellingham Herald, but not in a San Diego publication. Bellingham, Washington? Seriously? That's at exactly the other end of the American Pacific Coast!

AP Story About Christmas Displays in Santa Monica

A holiday display conflict in Los Angeles has made the news (AP link here, has been run many other places). There's a good outcome in this one and the coverage was pretty even-handed.

Help the Atheists On Reddit Reach Their Goal

Atheists on reddit are raising money for Doctors Without Borders, and they're almost there. Do you really need that "gourmet" hamburger tonight? Go here to help. The religious still give more than atheists. Help us fix that.

Proven No-Effect Medical Treatments Still Covered By Health Plans

The skeptical community gets justifiably irritated when woo like homeopathy gets paid for by insurance or by tax dollars (even worse, because it's not voluntary). The same extends to "regular" medicine - because there are plenty of procedures that meta-analyses show equal to no treatment. And here's a great example from Health Affairs: "Can Coverage Be Rescinded When Negative Trial Results Threaten A Popular Procedure? The Ongoing Saga Of Vertebroplasty".

Differences in End-of-Life Care Decisions

Do you think doctors make better, or worse, decisions about dying and end-of-life-procedures than most people?

Whatever your position there, it turns out it's a fact that doctors take less aggressive end-of-life measures than most people.

What's also interesting is that non-religious people also take less aggressive end-of-life measures than religious people.

Thank you for good conversation at San Diego Skeptics in the Pub, for making this connection.

Favorite TV Shows of Liberals and Conservatives

Interesting, among the top 25 favorite shows of conservatives is - MythBusters. This is excellent!

Join Obama's "War on Religion"

Rick Perry's pain meds are really leading to some fun ads:



Obama has a war on religion? Wow, can I send in an absentee vote for 2012 now?

New Survey: 18% of Americans Have No Religion At All

From the Ipsos Global Advisor survey. Lots of other interesting (but not necessarily surprising) things in there, like higher religiosity in Muslim countries, and religious admixture.

This Is Why We Have Zoning Laws

Video Game for Killing Jews and Atheists

This is a parody right?

If it's for real, then this is without doubt the greatest game ever made.

I don't play video games. I will play this one. I will play until I die laughing, which might not take long. I'm also a stickler about not downloading stuff for free but this, I'm going to steal the hell out of.

An Automatic Truth-Claim Evaluator Plug-In for Your Browser?

Not ready for prime-time yet, but someone at MIT is working on it for their thesis. What would be even better is if something like this appeared on the screen during political debates.

Camp Pendleton Cross Still in the News

If you're in San Diego or Orange County, you may have noticed the Camp Pendleton Cross issue is getting a lot of local press. Not surprisingly, most of it takes the "PC thugs are destroying Christianity" line.

This is a local issue that could benefit from the enthusiasm of SoCal atheists. So support our military atheists! There are lots of opportunities here to call in to radio shows or write letters to the editor. You might even want to set a Google Alert for it. Here's an article that dismantles the usual Christian persecution myths, share it!

Alternative Theology: How to Simulate God

Find it here. Interesting for programmers, math nerds, and philosophy types.

Exercises in alternative theology are neat-o. They get people to think of absolute givens as counterfactuals, even if their defenses kick in a second later. Sometimes I worry that by promulgating things like this, which justify religious belief in general by showing how what we observe could be consistently explained by such, that I'm reinforcing smarmy theists' thinking. But most of the time it seems getting people to think about their beliefs in the abstract, as actual propositions that can be true or false, gets them moving down the road away from religious beliefs as contentless tribal-loyalty signals and thus, toward skepticism.

Naziism and Creationism

Interesting article on Nazi ideology's shared points with creationism and Christianity. Good for next time you hear somebody repeat "Hitler was atheist" - and is it my imagination, or are people finally saying that less?

Muslim Medical Students in U.K. Boycotting Evolution Lectures

From the article in the Daily Mail: "Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain's leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran."

American creationists: is this good? Would you rather go to these students once they become doctors than a doctor who actually paid attention in class? If you have a problem with what they're doing, why?

All I know is they better not be defaming the words of Origin of Species, or we'll have to find a halal deli in my neighborhood and break the windows. I'm sure everyone would understand, because after all their behavior is offensive and inflammatory.

Another San Diego Cross on Public Land

Up at Camp Pendleton - one of many articles here. Christian group trying to protect it.

When The Scientific Method Is Important

[Added later: There's an article on LessWrong about Value of Information.]

Just yesterday I visited frequent reader and old friend Dan at his office. I was about to go out running, and I mentioned to him that I was doing a little experiment. I had a vial of chia seeds which supposedly help the Tarahumara (the infamous long-distance running people in Chihuaha) when they start getting tired. Dan pointed out that if I really wanted to know for reals if it was working, I would have to do a control. He helpfully suggested chocolate sprinkles. (By the way, if you're a skeptic-minded runner, an excellent blog is Science of Running.)

Magic beans! Actually just chia seeds. Yes, like that would grow chia pet hair.

I'm not planning to do a control, but not because I don't believe in the scientific method. It's because increased certainty on this question just isn't worth the effort to me. It's all about allocation of time and attention: we encounter many more truth claims in a day than we have time to evaluate, and we have to quench the flood to something manageable by limiting to those that seem relevant, plausible, and come from someone not obviously motivated by promoting self-interested falsehoods, all based on our prior beliefs. We therefore eliminate the vast majority without considering them. Of those that remain, there are still only so many hours in the day, so we have to decide how much certainty it's worth getting from our evaluation.

Having a control is one of the best ways to dramatically increase certainty, but it's not an absolute - good Bayesians will tell you, it's not you-know-everything or you-know-nothing based on whether you have a control or based on any new data - and certainty is expensive. Replication is another way, but with profound results, your certainty justifiably skyrockets before you replicate: V.S. Ramachandran has said that if someone shows you a talking dog, you'd be kind of a moron to refuse to believe it at all until you see a second one. So with claims that are not necessarily that believable and/or that are only worth following up if they give dramatic results, we do quick-and-dirty studies. The pharmaceutical industry does this all the time and calls these "proof-of-concept" studies, to see if there's anything there worth spending more money on. Same in medicine in general: we talk about various levels of evidence based on what's behind the claim, and sometimes it's just expert opinion with no studies to back it up (Level C).

In this case, my prior beliefs about probable outcomes for the "experiment" lead me to believe that it's likely there's either nothing to this, or if there is, the effect (if it's as dramatic as people have claimed for the Tarahumara) should be fairly clear, as compared against my prior experience. Granted, my prior experience is a poor control if it can even be called that, but it's still better than nothing, and a little better than nothing is all the time I'm willing to invest here. Of course if someone did a controlled study that conflicted with my own "results", I would gladly to defer to their results.* (Note that the "white-collar athletics" world is ripe for skeptics. It's one of Steve Novella's favorite targets.

So why am I spending extra time and attention on this point? It's good to strive to improve our rationality, but it's good to keep in mind both for being both an effective rationalist and an effective rhetorician that there are constraints on these operations that prevent us from granting equal effort to all propositions:

- We care whether beliefs are accurate because they help us predict experience and affect our behavior.
- There are various ways to increase certainty in the accuracy of beliefs. Controls are one of the best.
- However, certainty costs time and attention, which are the constraints on the evaluation process.
- Therefore for questions where prior beliefs make us doubt their accuracy or big "pay-offs" to begin with, we make executive decisions and either throw them out before we think too hard about them, or do a "quick-and-dirty" evaluation like this one.

An economist might say the value of the marginal unit of certainty of a belief test is some function of the initial evaluation of the belief's plausibility and the expected utility benefit of the updated belief. Thinking this way can help not only to narrow down what it's worth worrying about on your own part, but also to decide the kinds of claims it's worth making to others, based on their prior beliefs and the effect you'd like to have. As with evaluating beliefs, in rhetoric you have to determine goals and prioritize.


*So you want results? At this writing a quick search for "chia seed running" turns up a single paper on Pubmed that finds no statistically significant effect on long-period running performance relative to Gatorade. Having consumed chia several times on runs, I've experienced nothing that would lead me to a different conclusion.

You Are Not Immune to Irrational Tribal Loyalties

...and neither am I, as it turns out. I'm a Penn State alum. In fact, just as I'm a second-generation atheist, I'm a second-generation Penn Stater. I frankly don't even care about football and don't know (for example) if Penn State was in a bowl last year. But that doesn't matter. Know why? Growing up, my room was blue and white. My family had blue and white cars. I arranged my father's funeral to take place in a Penn State conference room, and scattered his ashes over Mt. Nittany. No criticism of Joe Paterno was tolerated in my house, and my mother still has the autograph he signed for her in 1970, in a venerated place in a family photo album.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

It's hard to explain to somebody not familiar with the world of college football, or with Pennsylvania culture and politics, what this scandal means. The closest I can come is that this is Pennsylvania's and college football's private 9/11. At one point Penn State named a new building after a former university president, and people grumbled it should have been the Paterno building; never mind, I would say, because we already have the Paterno Library, and besides when Joe retires, they'll rename the state Paternovania. You probably think I'm kidding about that second part, and I'm not. There would have been a serious campaign.

Besides the obvious lessons from this tragedy, which you can get from any sports media outlet, there's a more subtle one for us would-be rationalists. All those tribal loyalties we get programmed with before we're old enough to question them, supernatural or not, are dug in very, very deep. And now I have first-hand experience. I have a deep-in-my-gut reaction to all this (which I know is wrong) that goes something like this: "Penn State football can do no wrong! The press is exaggerating! The kids are making it up!" Yes, it's really that paleolithic. And of course I know it's not true. But I want it to be. Desperately. As a further example, if you're following the details of the story, you know there's a grand jury report out there that you can read, with graphic nauseating details about what Jerry Sandusky did. I won't read it. I have no doubt that it's true, that it's a necessary part of getting justice. But it would hurt too much.

So now, the next time there's a Catholic sex-abuse scandal and not-even-that-serious Catholics make excuses and get upset, or there's an attack by a Muslim terrorist and we're reassured that Islam is a Religion of Peace and you're an Islamophobe for daring to criticize it...I'll understand a little better. I won't think it's right - in fact my experience is making me realize how insidious this tendency is. In its most severe form it allows and perpetuates tragedies like what happened - and maybe having experienced this, when I naively thought I was free of any such in-group savagery, will help me talk some sense into a few more of these folks. (The alarming parallels are explored further here.)

In the meantime, it bears pointing out that when this same thing happened in the Catholic Church, once, twice, a hundred times - have we ever seen an outcry and an investigation of this magnitude? Have we ever seen such decisive action from the Church's governance mechanisms as was taken by the Penn State Board of Trustees and the Pennsylvania state government, once the information got outside the inner circle where it was protected for far too long? No, we have not. That doesn't un-do the damage done to the victims, but this response, to a horrible crime by a transparent authority that recognizes no one is above the law, is better than anything the Church has mounted so far. Let's hope that anywhere else in the world there's a code of silence allowing the vulnerable to be exploited, that criminals see that these painful moral lessons are gradually waking us up.

It's hard to imagine what, if anything, is appropriate to do at this point. But it seems that hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with the crimes hanging their heads in shame and hiding will have less positive effect than those same hundreds of thousands doing what they can to increase awareness. If anything positive comes out of this, it'll be to remind us in general that the buck stops with each of us, and specifically that sexual abuse remains a widespread problem. So whether you're a Penn Stater, or a football fan, or whatever, think about wearing blue on Saturday, because the Blue Ribbon campaign is for child abuse prevention.

Secular Solstice Soiree, Wed Nov 16th 7-9 pm UCSD

At the Food Co-op at the old student center on UCSD campus; RSVP at the event's Facebook page here. The musical performances include Professor Stephen Baird of the Galapagos Mountain Boys, and Kris and Mark of Platypus Egg. Here's Platypus Egg playing Pool Party, although Sons of Mr. Spanky is another good one.

Secular Student Picnic Wrap-up

Thanks for everyone who was able to make it out, and to folks who brought food and took pictures. Special thanks to the folks who came in from far away (UC Riverside and CSU San Bernardino, and not forgetting UCI!) Hopefully we can make this a regular tradition and rotate the location.

See you at the Secular Student Picnic Saturday!

Hey everyone, if you're coming to the secular student picnic tomorrow in San Diego, the weather's supposed to clear up by then although the ground might still be a little wet. See you there!

It Turns Out the Devil May Control Teh Gays

Or at least that's what the Boston Pilot told us (a Catholic newspaper) until a few days ago when they removed the article from their website. The take-home quote (for me anyway): "scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil."

Many (most?) American Catholics are actually pretty progressive in their attitudes about sexuality. It's worth mentioning things like this to them and asking why they're still buying messages from an ancient corporation that promotes messages like this, even if they end up sweeping them under the rug once they figure out they're not popular.

Who Voted No to Renew "In God We Trust"?

It was 396 for, 9 against, 2 abstaining. Govtrack.us has the full vote here.

Of course with 407 present who presumably have glanced at our constitution at some point, it should have been 407 against, but we should still give credit where credit is due. Who were those 9? Pay special attention to the first one:

Justin Amash R-MI
Henry Johnson D-GA
Pete Stark D-CA
Michael Honda D-CA
Judy Chu D-CA
Emmanuel Cleaver D-MO
Gary Ackerman D-NY
Jerrold Nadler D-NY
Robert Scott D-VA (

Yes, a Republican voted against this! Congrats to Rep. Amash and the rest of his colleagues who did the right thing. You can see where Amash's voting record puts him in the context of the overall Congress on Govtrack's nifty plot (leadership on Y axis, left-right orientation on the X).

The voting plot for everyone in Congress is here. This kind of graphical representation is very useful.

Also worth pointing out: Robert Scott has participated in the hearings on the Constitutionality of faith-based initiatives, and Pete Stark is the only openly non-religious person currently in Congress. Of course not only are nonreligious Americans badly underrepresented in Congress, but our issues are often ignored or villified. But here's a direct question. Without looking it up, right now, do you know your state and Federal Reps.' names? If you don't even know who they are, why would they care what we think?

Secular Student Picnic in San Diego This Saturday!

If you're a non-religious student around SoCal - in a group or not - come down to San Diego on Saturday, to Morley Field at 1-3pm. It's the League of Extraordinary Freethinkers! The Facebook page is here. Hope to see you there!


(Event co-organized by Rational Thought@UCSD and the SDSU Secular Student Alliance (both SSA affiliates).

Main Character on Earth's Top Show is an Atheist

Per Conan and his guest Hugh Laurie (who plays House M.D.), the main character in the most watched show on Earth is an atheist. (Laurie is also an atheist himself.)

Focus on the good. Things are improving!

Art: A New Way to Justify Harmful Bullsh*t

Human beings often seek power over each other. Often this has taken the form of direct violence. But as history has moved on and violence become unacceptable or impractical, power-seekers have turned to bullsh*tting. Sometimes the bullsh*t takes the form of base appeals to emotion with no pretense to being an elaborated system of thinking; these are usually expressed in single sentences (or even less), i.e. my opponent in the election is unpatriotic, hey why aren't you buying this used car off my lot I thought we had a relationship here. You've heard a dozen of these already today.

But there are other schemes that do claim to be fully elaborated worldviews, and since people aren't stupid, the schemers have to at least pretend the schemes are substantive. You can spot those bigger schemes by looking for the tricks they use to hide the emperor's lack of clothing. (If we invent a bullsh*t story taxonomy, then the used car salesman lines up there were bacteria, and now we're moving into metazoans with specialized tissues.) And of course, regardless of how they're justified, these schemes often end up producing amazing similar patterns of suffering-creation - oppression of sexuality, especially women and gays, punishment of dissent, and formation of an economic and sexual kleptocracy that concentrates all the wealth and sex (usually hypocritically) to the benefit of the bullsh*t thought leaders.



To rationalists, this is probably the most interesting things about these bullsh*t schemes - the particular tricks devised to protect each one from scrutiny while the overall outcomes still track the larger patterns of the more elaborate B.S. stories. These defenses all boil down to 1) asking questions undermines the cause or hurts you (or maybe I'll hurt you), so don't do it and 2) you couldn't understand anyway, although I (the purveyor of B.S.) and some small class of people can understand it for you. Plugging in concretes for #2, you'll hear things like of course you don't understand, you're the wrong race, or maybe you're bourgeois and a counterrevolutionary, or you're stuck in the post-modern reantidetextualizationist paradigm.

But even better for #2 ("you can't understand"), why not invent a whole new class of concepts - the supernatural - that are in principle unknowable, and claim that this is an actual virtue? Brilliant! Easily the single best innovation in bullsh*t history. "You can't understand, because it's not understandable." If the category of fully elaborated bullsh*t systems corresponds to metazoans, then religion is vertebrates. (While we're at it, I further submit that Christianity is the reptiles, the Enlightenment was Chicxulub, and Islam is the mammals. Sam Harris and Eddie Griffin, help us out with that. Last link not work safe.)

Rationalists tend to be connoisseurs of all forms of bullsh*t, and reluctant admirers of its insidiousness in human affairs, much like bacteria amaze us with their nasty cleverness. All this is to say that in the age of infotainment, we may be witnessing an as-yet obscure brand of metazoan power-seeking bullsh*t stories emerging: performance art-based meta-bullsh*t. The justification is not that you can't understand it, it's that it's okay because it's art, so treatment of performers is somehow inside a moral vacuum chamber separate from the rest of the world. The best example so far: there's a film project shooting in the Ukraine right now, Dau, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky. It's almost an Orwellian Truman Show, seeking to re-create the Stalin era at a level of historical detail that makes Mad Men look like a middle school production - except the actors and staff live on set, under those conditions, and it's gone beyond Mad Men into Stanford prison experiment territory. (The interviewer admits "By my third day on the set, the dress-up no longer feels like dress-up.") The thing has been "shooting" for five years - scare quotes because apparently there are months where the cameras aren't rolling at all. GQ has a great piece about it.

What can possibly be the motivation for Khrzhanovsky running this? When you notice the director's insistence on control of contact with the outside world, and the insistence on micromanaging the behavior of the cast even when the cameras are off, and in particular see how the director behaves toward female cast members, a very familiar pattern has emerged. But it's okay, because it's for a film, right? It seems at first like a new story - but again we've found the justification that claims the behavior is beyond criticism, and we've found the effects that appear time and time again.

South Park on the Problem with Pascal's Wager

Who knew they'd already dealt with this topic:



Rowan Atkinson had a very good take on this as well (even funnier than South Park IMHO). Razib Khan addressed it more seriously with regard Harold Camping's third apocalypse-prediction failure (we just passed his fourth a few days ago.)

Want to Change Someone's Mind? Do it One-on-One

...or at least in a small group. According to this study, the more people are trying to change someone's mind, the more stubborn and dug-in they become.

Great Article About Atheists in the U.S. Military

I've met a lot of atheist service people since I've moved to San Diego, so if you haven't already seen it, this article in the Atlantic is about you. And as always, a sincere thank you for your service.

Good News on Mt. Soledad Cross

Mt. Soledad as it should be, with just an awesome flag, and nothing else to distract us from honoring veterans, like my late father, who were not Christian. Image from lajollaparks.com.

Background: The Mount Soledad Memorial Association didn't like it when the 9th Circuit said that a giant cross on public land is unconstitutional. (Duh.) The Memorial Association argued that it wasn't, and they court said (paraphrasing) "Yes it is." So the Memorial Association asked the court to hear their case again.

Today the court said (paraphrasing), "No! We said it's unconstitutional, and we meant it!" Full text from the AP:

9th Circuit won't rehear Calif. park cross case

By JULIE WATSON, Associated Press – 4 hours ago

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A full panel of federal judges has declined to rehear the case of a war memorial cross in a public park in San Diego that has been deemed unconstitutional by the court.

A group fighting to preserve the monument announced Monday that the 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied its request. Five of the judges dissented, stating the cross should stay.

A three-judge panel in January ruled that the cross conveys a message of religion and is unconstitutional.

Kelly Shackelford says his organization will appeal to the Supreme Court. Shackelford is an attorney for the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, which oversees the monument.

The 29-foot (9-meter) cross in the San Diego suburb of La Jolla was dedicated in 1954 in honor of Korean War veterans.

The cross has been at the center of a struggle for years now, spear-headed by Del Mar civil rights attorney James McElroy, and its protectors have used a number of poor-faith legal moves to avoid the inevitable (there were a lot - if you're a legal buff, Google it). What's more, the cross was erected at a time when there were active and very well-documented anti-Semitic attitudes in La Jolla. Maybe the cross is not a signal of those attitudes today - I hope - but it's hard to argue that wasn't part of why people put it up in the first place, and I can't imagine the Christian members of our community would want to perpetuate that legacy any more than the rest of us.

Steve Jobs and a Lesson for Erstwhile Rationalists

Steve Jobs initially sought an alternative treatment for pancreatic cancer, as reported at Skeptoid. David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine posted a clarification that, given the specific diagnosis for Jobs and the profound treatment response, this was not as crazy as alternative medicine often is. [Added later: Harvard Med School's Ramzi Amri comes down more on Skeptoid's side. I hope this discussion will give enough alternative medicine enthusiasts pause, because it can have consequences.]

The take-home for the rest of us: to put it mildly, Steve Jobs was not a stupid guy, yet he initially avoided the most evidence-based treatment. What's more, someone with his wealth and personality was surely not coerced into such decision. The lesson is that if Steve Jobs is prone to this, then so am I, and you, and all of us - based on bad beliefs and habits of thought - bad beliefs that we all surely harbor, right now as I'm writing and you're reading.

Which is to say that none of us will ever be 100% sane, but we can and should constantly improve ourselves toward this goal.

"The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the free exercise of the Christian religion." -Bryan Fischer, Director, American Family Association

To clarify matters, fortunately we have America's best ChristianTM, Betty Bowers. Money quote: "Trust me - you can't be both capitalist AND Christian if you don't have the stones to outsmart commie Christ." Better delivered in her saccharine tones of course:

San Diego Secular Student Picnic Nov. 5

It's official! Saturday, November 5th, Rational Thought @ UCSD and the SDSU Secular Student Alliance are holding a joint picnic for ALL secular/skeptical/atheist/freethinking etc. students in Southern California. It's at Morley Field, the northeast corner of Balboa Park in San Diego (Google Map it to Jacaranda Drive at Jacaranda Place). Come as part of your college or high school group, or just come on your own or with friends! Bring a snack to share and a ball or frisbee to throw around.

3 ways to RSVP: on Facebook, email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com, or call me at 619-786-3524. Also email or call with any questions at all - we're looking forward to meeting everyone.

Here's the flyer - feel free to copy and distribute. (Please note: under-21s will be present and no alcohol is allowed in the park anyway. Those of us over 21 may visit another establishment after the event.)

SSApicnic Flyer

Reminder: Blood Drive Tomorrow at SDSU

12:30-1:30pm near the Trolley Station and KPBS, Green field, SDSU. Give your heathen blood to save a life. Here it is on Facebook. See you there!

Single White Female Seeks Atheist

Seeks atheist single spooner, that is (ah yes, OKCupid...) Single atheist gentlemen of San Diego, beware: this UCSD Guardian reporter Laira Martin is on the prowl. Here is her first installment so you can spot her. Her, I'm just looking out for everyone.

More Local Coverage of SDSU Atheism Course with Campus Groups

Article here. Usually these kinds of posts conflate the atheist course with the campus groups, although Jacob (the writer) stops short of claiming that explicitly. This might be a valid point if Professor Whitaker was telling students to pass the course they'd need to sign up for SDSU Secular Student Alliance, then they'd have a point. Are classes on Norse mythology converting people to Odinism? Unless there's an Odinist club on campus and you have to be a member to pass the class, I wouldn't worry about it.

On a side note, do you, fair reader, know of any other San Diego-focused atheist/rationalist blogs? I looked but the first few pages of "san diego" atheist blog turned up only yours truly. Now that can't be, especially since there seems to be no shortage of San Diego online prose that don't like atheists very much. If you could leave blogs (and other online resources) in the comments or just email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com I would greatly appreciate it.

Happy Blasphemy Day

A quick definition for blasphemy is "making fun of people with beliefs that are both indefensible and for which they demand special protection". That's why we need blasphemy. Here's the cartoon that started it all:


Learn more at this article about the Center for Inquiry. I got a lot of blasphemy out of my system on Draw Muhammad Day but for balance, here are some good Jesus with T. rex pictures. I have a real soft spot for those.

Welcome, San Diego New Atheists

If you're here because you followed the link from the San Diego New Atheists Meetup page, welcome!

If you live around San Diego and you haven't already come out to an SDNA event, why not? Next big one is coming up Sunday, Picnic and Volleyball this Sunday November 2nd at Morley Field. Event information here (you can find SDNA on Facebook as well). I'm also going to try to make it to Oktoberfest on Saturday in La Mesa with the East County New Atheists.

I should also take this opportunity to prompt visitors: do you know of any other San Diego atheist blogs? I took a quick gander today and in the first 3-4 pages of results for "San Diego" atheist blog, the only one I could find was yours truly. Come on, there have to be more out there! (Leave comments so we can network.)

The atheist community in San Diego continues to amaze. It's enormous, it's growing, and most of all it's just a lot of fun with a lot of great people.

Bad Journalism or Intentional Lying?

There were more than a dozen of us at the Creation Museum Saturday, unlike what this article says. Whether or not this is an honest mistake, it certainly does nothing to dispel the impression that many Christians believe it's okay to lie, in print, for their religion.

And these are the people who worry what happens to the moral sense of people who recognize evolution?

Blood Drive at SDSU, October 6 12:30-1:30pm

Think that a non-superstition-based morality leads humans to behave better? Me too! Now prove it. The San Diego State Secular Student Alliance is doing a blood drive Thursday, October 6 12;30pm to 1:30pm. If you're worried about parking on campus, then take the trolley - they'll be conveniently located right by the Trolley Station and the KPBS Building, Green field. Here's more info on the event at Meetup, or you can check out the SDSU SSA's Facebook page.

Christian Media on Science Protest at the Creation Museum

Link here.

[Added later: the Christian Post article above was surprisingly civil and free of the red herrings that creationists dishonestly repeat over and over again. But this blog post unfortunately reinforces expectations.]

Jefferson+Vaccine=Win; Dr. Oz Does Not

1) The best take-down of Dr. Oz yet comes, not surprisingly, from the future Doctor ERV. You always know it's going to be good when she files the article under her category of "douchebaggery".

2) "Among his many achievements, which included writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson was a pioneer of smallpox prevention. He was a proponent of smallpox inoculation. As a young lawyer he acted on behalf of doctors who were persecuted for performing inoculations, including one physician whose house was burned to the ground by a mob during an anti-inoculation riot." Article at The Nation. Also discusses Washington's decision to inoculate troops during the revolution, fighting British regulars who'd probably already been exposed in Britain or elsewhere in the Empire.

Seems Like a Pleasant Enough Place

"Right behind Mary's Well is a restaurant/bar called Al Bayat 'The House'. You can find pretty much any kind of alcoholic drink you like there and an extensive menu of international fusion cuisine. Locals like the outdoor patio for a local Palestinian beer called Taybeh, 'Tasty' with complimentary pretzels and peanuts. Local musicians also play some nights."

-The entry for Nazareth at Wikitravel



[Added later in this un-self-consciously ironic entry for Jericho: "It [sic] worth a visit to Qurantal mountain where Jesus fasted 40 days and 40 nights after the devil's temptation to him, where you will find a very nice restaurant at the bottom of the mountain..."]

Upvote This To Get It On the UCSD Subreddit

Thread about Rational Thought @ UCSD. Go there and upvote it.

Do it! Do it now! Come on!

Excellent Turnout for Science-Positive Protest

The protest had a great turnout and not surprisingly, was a lot of fun. I keep thinking that by now I must know everyone in the freethought community here in San Diego but there were a ton of new faces (to me anyway). Good sign! I'm sure pictures will be up soon at the San Diego Coalition of Reason website or elsewhere. Of note: the people who run the museum were quite nice to us, as were most of the attendees who came to talk to us. (Yes, really! Actual engagement!)

Bummed that missed it but want to come out and meet people? SDCoR's calendar is always there at the right, and San Diego New Atheists always has events coming up.

Gullibility and Arbitrage

XKCD takes the bets-as-false-belief-to-wealth-redistribution-transducer angle. Unfortunately how enthustiastically someone propounds a claim does not correlate with how much (or whether) s/he is willing to bet. And if your beliefs don't effect decisions, it's almost as if you...

San Diego PraiseFest - Praising With Our Dollars

San Diego Praise Fest was last weekend. Fine; we live in a free country where people are free to worship or not as they please. Except these folks did it with free money. Your free money and my free money, to be exact.

This year San Diego City Council President Tony Young gave $10,000 in city money to Praise Fest. City Beat was on the story last year as well and the ACLU has already sent a letter to Young, so it's on their radar. This is a perfect example of a concrete, local issue, and a great opportunity to get involved - contact the ACLU San Diego afiliate here. Big ups to SD City Beat's Dave Maass for covering this story:

"I told them not to [use the event for evanglism] in the first place," Young says. "I tried to explain to them, 'Listen, you don't even want to give the impression of that to what we're doing...By the time [the promoted materials] came out, it was a little disappointing, but that's right: We shouldn't have any crosses."

To date, Young's office has steered $28,000 to Praise Fest, including $10,000 in 2011. The money comes from the transient-occupancy tax, a levy on hotel rooms; each council office receives $25,000 to spend at its discretion. This year, Praise Fest scrubbed most religious references from its website (sandiegopraisefest.com), including the cross from the logo.

Nevertheless, God was almost omnipresent at the festival. There were hundreds of T-shirts with congregational catchphrases and slogans like "Jesus is My Boss" and "Bikers for Jesus." Young women passed out cards with "GOD is greater than...ANY problem I may have" printed on one side, with a bail bondsman's phone number on the other. At least eight ministries led musical worship on the "Church House" stage, one of three at the event. Young asked people not to proselytize but says it's not his place to police what's said on stage.

All that said,, Young is saying the right things and the event seems to be moving in the right direction. People should absolutely be allowed to assemble for whatever religious reason they want to. Just not with our money.

House, M.D.

Christina170 from Athens, Greece was kind enough to cut together all of House's religion quotes. And to think they always tell us not to copy his bedside manner. He seems perfectly appropriate to me. (H/T Scott Rhoads at Penn State Atheists and Agnostics.)

Pro-Science Positive Protest at San Diego Creationism Museum

Pro-Science Positive Protest at the Creationism Museum this Saturday, September 24th! The San Diego New Atheists and Agnostics are hosting a Positive, Pro-Science Protest at 1:00 PM at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee on Saturday, September 24th. Bring your signs, or make one at the protest.

This sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun. The emphasis on positive is great. (We're more likely to get someone to consider what we're saying if they like us.) You can find the event on the San Diego Coalition of Reason calendar (always over there on the right here on this blog) or at the San Diego New Atheists Meetup page.

L.A. Times Article About Poway Teacher

Bradley Johnson was the math teacher in Poway who hung a clearly religious banner in his classroom. Among other things this Op-Ed piece states, "The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had to settle several questions, including whether references to God taken out of context from historical documents can constitute a religious message (they can) and whether the classroom is a public forum (it isn't)."

Autistics More Likely to Be Atheists

"Persons with autistic spectrum disorder were much more likely than those in our neurotypical comparison group to identify as atheist or agnostic, and, if religious, were more likely to construct their own religious belief system. Nonbelief was also higher in those who were attracted to systemizing activities..." Caldwell-Harris et al. Interesting, if one aspect of religion is over-ascribing agentivity to non-agent elements in the world. (Note:

Doctors Without Borders Charity Event Now

Learn more at Dr. Jones's website here, or just be a good gal/guy and donate right away here. They need you.

Michele Bachmann Has An Important Announcement

It's here. Probably NSFW.

Sept. 24, San Diego New Atheists at Creation Museum

On Saturday the 24th, the San Diego New Atheists and Agnostics (SDNAA) are meeting at noon at the Creation Museum in Santee. The thing that jumped out at me from the San Diego Reader article about it? John Viggiano, the organizer, is employed by the people who own the museum! This is a guy who puts his money where his mouth is, and now my personal hero. I hope we're all courageous enough like John to take a stand when the opportunity comes.

Here's the event listing on the SDNAA Meetup site. A lot of the events just end up being fun people-meeting events and I'm sure this one will be no different. You'll just be able to, in addition to hanging out, ask silly creationists questions if you want to.


Apparently velociraptors and cave-children coexisted during the Cinderblockene (so named for the dominant mineral found in the same stratum). Oh, you don't like my geological epoch joke? Then why don't you go to the F-U boundary, ZING

Michele Bachmann Becomes Jenny McCarthy

It's official. She says to Matt Lauer: "I had a mother come up to me last night here in Tampa, Fla., after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection. And she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. The mother was crying when she came up to me last night. I didn’t know who she was before the debate. This is the very real concern and people have to draw their own conclusions." Not Jenny McCarthy. Not Andrew Wakefield. Michele Bachmann, a Republican candidate for president.

I'm sad to say that as an atheist conservative, I am thrilled at this development. Why? Because maybe it will finally split wide open this stupid alliance that big business has made with uneducated medieval theocrats, that's why. Pay attention, American business: the superstitious nonsense you've tolerated from the sidelines because it put your people in office has now come full circle, and it's going to bite you in the ass and cut into your bottom line. Maybe this is what it will finally take to wake people up in boardrooms and realize that when you constantly stoke these meaningless hot-button social issues get the Christians to the polls, eventually even the party leadership will start believing that's what actually matters, and the front office takes over from the back office.

Meanwhile: congratulations to the Religious Right. Your candidate is now saying the same things as Hollywood liberals! You've come a long way, baby! And can you imagine that next meeting between pharmaceutical lobbyists and Bachmann's people? Awk-ward....

Excellent takedowns of Bachmann's "claims" from Orac here, and described fantastically as "the anti-vaccine candidate" here.

Unintelligent Design #2: Help Me Invent This Protein

Previous entry in this series: Unintelligent Design #1, Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms.

I'm going to invent a protein. One half of it will bind to a receptor on the surface of intestinal cells; the other half will stick a carbohydrate onto a G-protein inside that cell, which will turn on adenylate cyclase. Why does that matter? Because then it means chloride is pumped OUT, and sodium stops coming IN. That means a huge amount of water moves into the intestine - and then it all comes out. But it's not just gross. As long as that keeps happening, whoever has this protein in them will be losing a huge amount of water. Eventually they'll die of dehydration.

Especially if they're children or elderly.

And I'm going to clone the gene for this protein into some bacteria.

And those bacteria will be able to survive passage through the intestine, so the sick will spread it.

Then I'm going to release those bacteria into the water supply.


Are you ready to invest in that idea so I can invent this protein?

Or are you ready to report me to Homeland Security?


Of course I don't have to invent this vicious nanomachine, because it already exists - it's the exotoxin of Vibrio cholerae, which produces the symptoms of cholera ("rice water stools" chiefly among them. You're welcome.) When you study the microorganisms that make us sick, you often find yourself reluctantly admiring how clever they really are at causing suffering.


A Ghana National Health Service cholera treatment facility.
From Ghana News Link.

The microscopic world is an encyclopedia of brilliant biochemical tricks to invade and hurt and kill us, and to put it mildly, this is a big problem for those who would tell us that living things were created by a benevolent deity. If I were a creationist, I would be racking my brains trying to explain these things if there were just one kind of these, but there are thousands. Yes, some of the more inquisitive creationists do sort of investigate these questions, although they focus on things like the existence of predators and venom; and it's worth asking any scientific creationist you ever talk to what they would have to find to make them abandon creationism. The bottom line is that cholera and its other microbial brethren, are far worse in terms of the suffering they cause to human beings than great white sharks and rattlesnakes.

(I should add here the frequent creationist claim is that nasty predators appeared only after original sin. Lions apparently only grew teeth and claws after Adam and Eve ate some fruit. I seriously want someone to tell me to my face that ADP ribosylation is a result of original sin. Mostly I want to see the biochemical pathway they draw to explain that. Does sin require the Krebs cycle?)

Of course I have to credit the good Samuel Clemens for originally devising this particular thought experiment, although he asked it in terms of inventing and releasing flies, and demanded to know how anyone could possibly be considered benevolent if he did so. So returning to cholera: imagine a parallel universe where Somalia (or Sudan, or Burundi, or Peru, or Haiti) had no cholera - if I were to invent cholera in some evil lab somewhere and add it to their water and their already copious misery, would I be benevolent? Would I even be arguably close to morally breaking even? Now let's come back to this world, where a) all those countries do have endemic cholera and b) creationists literally believe Someone "benevolent" created it and put it there - does that add up? It bears emphasizing that there is nothing theoretical about the problem of cholera - people will die from it today, maybe while you're reading this sentence - and here's one organization fighting it.

In a final question - where are the creationist antibiotics and medical treatments and breakthrough theories to help us in this fight? I think we'll probably be waiting for a while. If these kinds of organisms that hurt us and kill us really are creations of the Lord that He wishes to inflict on us, I don't care. I and many other people around the world have chosen to spend our lives fighting it, and to hell with the consequences.

Toward a Reasonable World Conference - This Weekend, San Diego

Toward a Reasonable World - The Heritage of Western Humanism, Skepticism, and Freethought. Website here. Discount for SDSU students.

Seven Famous "Mysteries" That Science Solved Years Ago

At the inimitable Cracked. Features both the Shroud of Turin and crystal skulls.

Do You Have Contacts At San Diego Colleges Besides UCSD and SDSU?

People from SDSU and UCSD are putting together an atheist student organization event. Nothing fancy, just a chance to socialize and network. Official date and place announcements to come, but it will be in November in San Diego.

So far we've unofficially announced at UCSD's and SDSU's atheist student groups, but what I need are contacts for students and groups at these schools:

University of San Diego
Mesa
Cal State San Marcos
Palomar College
California College SD
SD City College
Miramar College
National
Point Loma Nazarene
John Paul the Great
San Diego Christian

Are you at those schools? Did you transfer from one of them? Or know somebody who's attending now? Please go ahead and forward this link right now (seriously, right now, the post will still be here when you get back.) Or, you can email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com. You certainly don't have to be in a group to come to this student event, but of course if there is a group at your school, we'd like to get contact info. Thanks in advance.

Cool Old Site

It's been around for a while but I've seen it from several different sources in just the last week, a treasure trove of optical illusions, weird natural phenomena, and obvious frauds: Forgeto Mori.

Prepare for Transition to Build on Your Group's Success

Darrel Ray wrote an article for American Atheist that's reproduced here (the PDF wasn't working so that's a Quick-View). Ray is an organizational psychologist so I was eager to see what he had to say.

The gist of it is this: right now we're in the middle of a super-successful expansion for secular groups around the country. I continue to be impressed by the energy and positivity of the post-1985 generation of atheists. So to make sure we keep this momentum, we have to talk about leadership transitions. That's the focus of Ray's article. He identifies both the stable, democratic form of secular organization as well as the family business, single-leader form. Both work, but transitions can be very hard for the second type. Over the next few years a lot of those very successful single-leader groups will face necessary transitions, and Ray offers some pointers to avoid pitfalls. A very useful read.

(H/T Debbie Skomer with the San Diego Coalition of Reason.)

Camp Quest: TWO Locations in California!

If you don't already know about Camp Quest, where have you been? It's a summer camp for secular-minded families and having been a counselor there one year, I can attest that it's a blast.

In 2012 Camp Quest will have two locations in California, one near Grass Valley in the Northern Sierra foothills, and the other near Wrightwood in the ever-awesome Angeles National Forest. Dates below; details here. There are even informational events for those who are considering getting involved but aren't sure just yet.

NorCal: Jul 8, 2012 - July 14, 2012
(near Grass Valley, CA)

SoCal: Jul 22, 2012 - July 28, 2012
(outside Wrightwood, CA)


There are other Camp Quest locations elsewhere in the country. Interested in getting involved, as a donor and/or counselor and/or parent of a camper? Go here.


From the Texas Camp Quest. But of course they're not as awesome as the ones in California. That's a totally un-biased statement.

The Creationists at Discovery Institute Lie Even About Court Cases

Press release from California Science Center Foundation here.

It's interesting that even when they're not talking about evolution, the Discovery Institute lies.

Comforting Noises and Status Contests

An interesting observation on some of unexpected underpinnings of the atheist movement by Robin Hanson. Emphases mine, and I don't agree with his conclusion, but it's worth thinking about in these terms.

Atheists want to apply relatively uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across wide ranges of intellectual claims. Such uniform standards should allow intellectuals to draw more reliable inferences combining insights from many diverse topic areas....Religious folks understand that treating their religious claims as crazy would detract from the many complex functions that these claims serve within the complex religious experience. So they would rather apply different intellectual standards to these claims. They’d rather say "Don't take this so literally, don’t be so reductionist; this kind of talk is just different."

Of course defenders of religion also don’t want to say that they are just making comforting noises that have no intellectual meaning; a sense that their words are somewhat like intellectual claims is part of what lets those noises be comforting. And they don’t want to clarify in much detail just what exactly they are saying, in the usual intellectual terms.

It seems to me that religion will handily win this contest for a long time to come. The social support that can be mustered by a few intellectuals hoping for more uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across diverse topics seems quite weak compared to strong interests others have in the usual complex religious processes. Even if many broad-thinking intellectuals decide to pick a noisy fight over this, most of society will just shrug their shoulders and ignore it. Surely this fact is known to most atheists, so this can’t really be about inducing a social change to a new less objectionable religion substitute. So it is probably mostly about other things, such as status contests within the smaller world of intellectuals.

If There's One More Damn "Animals Can Sense Earthquakes" Article

Really. Thinking about it evolutionarily, it makes no sense. Ten thousand years ago why would any animal have cared about an earthquake? Including us. "Oooh! Some leaves fell on me from a tree that was shaking!" By far the strongest feedback from an earthquake to the fitness of any animal is to us, and recently at that. Yes, there are tsunamis. They are rare. What's the highest fraction of the total population of any mammal species (for example) that died in a tsunami? Seriously guys.

A few years ago a guy in San Francisco said he could predict earthquakes based on dogs running away. Then a bunch of dogs ran away and he said, "It's coming!" and it didn't come, and now we don't hear from him anymore. If only the same were true for all the nutbars after the East Coast quake last week.

New Awesome Blog: Evidence-Based Mommy (Skeptical Family Medicine)

Just ran across this cool "applying critical thinking to parenting" blog called Evidence-Based Mommy. Actually it was less running across, and more that the Mommy posted a comment on this blog. Great blog and great resource for parenting, especially since Evidence-Based Mommy is actually Doctor Evidence-Based Mommy, M.D. Highly recommended for parents.

Comment on Evolution and Ideology

Denver Polymath Wash Park Prophet comments on the recently blogged study about acceptance of evolution in terms of ideological fit. All humans are subject to confirmation bias and other heuristics. As Feynman said: rule #1 is never to fool anyone...and you're the easiest one to fool.

Where Does Religion Come From

Here's an Atlantic interview with the author of the above-mentioned book, which examines the emergence of religion from the standpoint of human evolution. I don't see much accommodationism going on here. It comes across as a softer cultural-anthropological version of some of Pascal Boyer's work.

How Hot Is It In The Desert?

"It's so dry and hot that the Baptists are starting to baptize by sprinkling, the Methodists are using wet-wipes, the Presbyterians are giving out rain-checks, and the Catholics are praying for the wine to turn back into water...now THAT's dry!"

Sometimes those emails you get in blinking purple 185-point font from your mother are actually funny.

Penn Jillette's Celebrity Hijinx

From Authors@Google:

Sam Harris is Finding Out About the Atheist Political Divide

It's often noticed that atheists tend to be strongly left-progressive, or strongly libertarian. With his recent articles on taxing the rich, Sam Harris has uncovered this in a way I've not seen before.

Speaking as someone more on the libertarian side of things, and as someone who thinks Ayn Rand made some important contributions, I find it embarrassing that my fiscal-conservative comrades are so intolerant of someone they otherwise admire expressing opinions that differ from theirs. Ronald Reagan said that someone you agree with 80% of the time is an ally.

Even for those who vehemently disagree, by refusing further contact with him, you're acting exactly like an affronted theist who can't believe someone would disagree. Harris has absolutely been and continues to be a hero of reason, so to all the pouting atheist-libertarians throwing temper tantrums about this article, I suggest you go sign on with someone like Michele Bachmann, who has learned to make some quacking noises like "Friedman" and "Hayek" occasionally. I'm sure her level of skepticism and critical thinking will satisfy you.

Blog Recommendation: Sober Atheist

It's often stated that AA is religion in disguise. Based on anecdotal experience, lots of people who've been through recovery programs are non-religious. Here's one great example.

Book Recommendation: A Trial Attorney Looks at the Bible

By Willard Bakeman, full title Unimpeachable Verdict: A Trial Attorney Looks at the Bible. An excellent entry in the genre of applying what most people (including Christians) good methods of truth-seeking to the Bible, and seeing what happens.

New Resource For Kids

The Kids Should See This, an online compendium of family-friend media of really cool nature and science stuff.

Of COURSE the Virginia Quake Was Sent By God

After you heard the news you probably counted down "3...2...1..." for nuts to say God did it. And sure enough, here's one of them: Joseph Farah. No equivocating here about "this is a fringe element within religion that says stuff like this". Joseph Farah is a writer for a major Christian online publication, and not only does he say this, there's no outrage, no embarrassment even. This is what mainstream Christians believe. (No comment on why Gold hates Richmond more than D.C.

Are they sure it wasn't Allah punishing Obama for his involvement in the ouster of Gaddafi? Seriously. Genuine question.


From Advice God.

Rick Perry and the HPV Vaccine, Irony of Ironies

[Added later: the ironies never cease. Perry just got an injection of his own stem cells, apparently to help his back. Not only is this procedure unproven, it carries substantial risks - infection, thrombosis, etc. I'm starting to think he's a reverse-Bayesian or something.]

Irony #1: One actual good thing that Rick Perry did as governor was requiring immunization with Gardasil in public school girls (against HPV) to prevent later cervical cancer. Ironic, because it's a source of friction with Tea Partiers, who see lack of cancer as an invasion of personal freedoms, and with social conservatives, who apparently see lack of cancer as a way to excuse promiscuous girls from the vengeance a wrathful God will visit on them (not to mention providing a back door for socialized medicine).

My libertarian buddies will never forgive me for saying required immunization is a good thing, but who cares. It saves lives, suffering, and child-bearing ability. I'm a-okay with making an exception for that, every single time.


Michelle Malkin, normally a staunch GOP defender, is so incensed about Perry daring to include the HPV vaccine in the required school vaccinations that she wrote "Perry defenders...are willfully blind to the Gardasil disgrace’s multiple layers of rottenness." Beware, because she rarely displays her teeth like this without immediately spitting her deadly venom. It can blind at 4 meters.

Irony #2: Turns out Rick Perry's campaign team has the equivalent of political quants working for him. Just imagine the doublethink necessary to have heavily empirical critical thinkers creating his campagin strategy, then turning around and saying evolution is "just a theory".


The descendants of Rockefeller Republicans in the Northeast, finally unable to hide from the fact that the GOP has turned into a Southern religious party, are not in love with Perry and are scared of how he'll lose a general election. Many of the GOP rank-and-file digerati are going through gyrations to justify a Perry candidacy, the funniest of which has been that politicians are inexpert in science, so it's okay that he doesn't believe in evolution. (Really.) This set off a bit of a firestorm in the blogosphere, and so far Jim Manzi's response is the most sensible one:

The role of rational politicians, then, is to have an understanding of the boundaries of actual scientific expertise, and accept consensus scientific findings within these fields as practical "givens" in determining policy – but not to be snowed by everybody with a bunch of equations into accepting their personal politics as indisputable by any rational human.

How Do Your Beliefs Change Your Actions?

Stanley Fish has had two op-ed pieces in the New York Times about the real-world impact of philosophy. He argues that philosophy has little impact outside academia because people's philosophical positions do not translate into different decisions and actions. (First piece here, follow-up here.) A key passage:

What exactly will have changed when one set of philosophical views has been swapped for another? Almost nothing. To be sure you will now give different answers than you once would have when you are asked about moral facts, objective truths, irrefutable evidence and so on; but when you are engaged in trying to decide what is the right thing to do in a particular situation, none of the answers you might give to these deep questions will have any bearing on your decision. You won't say, "Because I believe in moral absolutes, I'll take this new job or divorce my husband or vote for the Democrat." Nor will you say, "Because I deny moral absolutes I have no basis for deciding since any decision I make is as good or bad as any other." What you will say, if only to yourself, is "Given what is at stake, and the likely outcomes of taking this or that action, I think I'll do this."

Of course, you could say that this isn't a problem with philosophy per se but rather people's doublethink in our current cultural milieu; fine, but the fact is, Fish is correct, and the more mundane consideration above is how most of us solve problems most of the time, rationalists included.

A recent recurring theme on this blog is an emphasis on outcomes as the real metric of a belief. That's what beliefs are for. As a thought experiment: imagine two computers with identical hardware, running different software. You feed the same string of numbers into each computer. Both produce the same output. You repeat many times, and with the same input, the computer produces the same output. Based on a limited sample size, you can't say for sure that there won't be some cases in the future where the output does differ, but up until now, as far as you're concerned, the two programs are equivalent. Compare this to religious and non-religious Americans who much more often than not, give the same answers to moral philosophy problems (e.g. trolley problems). In my case, I scored 90% identical to liberal Protestants in terms of my own moral sense.


Thomas Aquinas, who sat around categorizing the properties of angels, such as whether more than one could be in the same place. One wonders how a different answer than the one he gave would have affected anybody's actions ever; also, whether he ever thought it actually would.

Liberal Protestants might read this and say, "Then what are you so worried about? Why spend your time telling me to dump my religion when we're substantially the same in our moral behavior?" And in one sense I agree; politically, I'm much less worried about the impact of those liberal Protestants than about Al Qaeda members and Dominionists.

But there's a deeper point here, which is this: if people having two mutually exclusive beliefs on some question does not change their behavior substantially, it does not mean that both beliefs are equally valid. It most probably means that the belief concerns a pointless or meaningless idea that none of us should be wasting our time on. How, it's worth asking theists, would you behave differently today if you suddenly stopped believing in God? For most of them, not at all. So just jettison the supernatural language, and be good people. People do it every day.

Why We All Should Talk About Religion

There's a convention that we should never talk about religion. This is bad. I give adults, and in particular my fellow Americans, more credit than that. We're a diverse country, and somehow we've made it work pretty well.

There are many people who consider themselves theists who find any criticism of religion, even if it's not their own, to be distasteful. What's really interesting is that the reasons why it's distasteful are merely implied, because if they were stated out loud, they would be obviously ridiculous and not worth our respect either. And what's more, the faithful whose religions are being defended by these uber-PC statements would be right to be insulted, if others think they need these kinds of special protection for their beliefs to survive.

In no particular order, these are the implied reasons commonly encountered:

1) People need something to believe in. It would be de-stabilizing to society if we all went around questioning each other's beliefs, and never mind if they're true. (This argument would be right at home with the harmony-at-all-costs Chinese Communist Party, or Hobbes, who argued that atheism should never be allowed, not because it was false, but because it showed refusal to abide by the same moral authority.)

2) Just let people be. It's mean to to cast doubts on someone else's beliefs. If people fell to the ground weeping after a de-piphany every time an atheist asked them genuine questions about what they believe and why, there might be a point here. But that's not what happens. People are grown-ups.

3) Everyone can have their own truth right? There isn't such a thing as totally true and totally false, or we can't know it, or we don't know it right now so we never will. The poor man's Derrida.

The Christians that I know would be horrified at these misguided attempts to defuse debates. If you think people believe things that are true, or at least because they think they're literally true, then what's the problem?

Unintelligent Design #1: Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms

This is the first in a series of medically relevant and quite practical examples of biology which is stupidly designed, or on the contrary is well-designed to make us suffer. For this first one, you might want to skip it if you can't handle gory pictures. The next installment in the series is here.

Your aorta is the main artery coming out of the top of your heart. It does a 180 degree turn and, giving off branches, continues down through the rear part of your abdominal cavity, finally bifurcating.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency, at the part of the aorta just below the arteries that go to your kidneys, for it to balloon out if something happens to drive the pressure up. This ballooned section (an aneurysm) can then rupture, and you can guess what happens when the main pipe out of your heart gets torn open. This is called an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), and it's very, very bad. Why do they happen there at that spot, below the kidney arteries? Because as the blood is pumping downward, suddenly in that section there are no vasa vasorum anymore - "meta" blood vessels that supply the muscles in the walls of big, thick blood vessels - and suddenly the aorta's walls get thinner and weaker. Bad design! Interestingly, this is not the case in dogs, whose vasa vasorum continue past that spot. Dogs therefore don't get AAA's with nearly the same frequency. This is not academic. Starting in October, I will see these in person.

To visualize:



A real example:




It would seem that either evolution has produced something that is good, but not perfect in every respect, and there are features which happen to be better built in some other models of the self-replicating machines on this planet; or, we have a creator that wants us to have aortic aneurysms more often than dogs (or at least was careless). Therefore we humans are left having to scramble to fix these otherwise fatal events when they happen, all the while flying in the face of His plan.

I don't know about you but I would want to live in a universe where the first option is true. Fortunately we do.

Unintelligent Design #2 is here.