The blog ate my homework edition:

I thought it might be a slow week in bullshit locally until Goldy decided to cover Dino Rossi’s bullshit non profit. Still no word from those guardians of electoral integrity over at (un)Sound Politics. Hmm.

It has been a banner week in prudishness from local people. Lou Guzzo doesn’t like that the federal government took over a legal brothel for a short time almost 2 decades ago after its ownership fell behind on their taxes. And Michael Medved saw a study that the kids are having s-e-x and kinda freaked out.

Some famous people came to town last week. Torture boy going anywhere but his impeachment hearing is bullshit. And when Howard Dean came to town, it inspired a bullshit press release from the state Republicans.

Nationally, Jonah Goldberg changed the name of his bullshit book. That he still has written, so there.

In thank God they aren’t in the majority any more news, Pete Domenici and Norm Coleman are trying to weaken the Violence Against Women Act.

Finally, the big piece of bullshit today is the Scooter Libby pardon not quite a pardon. By a man who once said, “I don’t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.” But those were just for people being killed by the state, not as big a deal as say his friend outing a CIA agent.

The I guess I’m still around edition. As long as there’s bullshit and Goldy lets me keep a set of keys, I guess I’ll do this on a weekly basis.

Locally, Representative Bill Hinkle hates children. Or at least thinks that children of non-citizens don’t deserve education and health care.

Gary Randal gives us a review of a show by the Seattle Men’s Chorus that he hasn’t seen.

Consumers Against Higher Insurance Rates is an Astroturf organization and they are sponsoring a bullshit referendum to repeal recently passed consumer protection.

Nationally, it’s been mentioned here on HA, but the biggest bullshit artist of them all, Dick Cheney, is not a member of the executive any more. Oddly during the energy task force, he had said that he could claim executive privilege.

James Inhofe has a bit of a truth problem. He overheard a conversation the other day that happened 3 years ago. And the people who supposedly took part in the conversation don’t recall it. And shockingly, he’s the less crazy of the two Oklahoma Senators this week.

And internationally, China has surpassed the United States in total carbon emissions. This is mainly because they have 4 times our population and because much of the West has exported manufacturing to them. A normal person would see this as a reason to make sure that our trade agreements have strong environmental components. Crazy people see this as a time to gloat.

For a second week in a row, I report on the bullshit that just won’t report itself. And in fact it’s been a bit of a banner week for bullshit. Locally and nationally.

First, Kemper Freeman thinks that transit is for terrorists.

According to the Discovery Institute conservatives are more generous than liberals. They have one source for this who is a bit suspect and who relies on surveys that are inherently difficult to judge, so that’s good. Then they cite a study showing that foreign born people living in the United States give a lot of money to their relatives in the old country to show that Americans are generous with our foreign aid.

Jim Miller shows his unfamiliarity with the concept of time. See, Al Gore said that Saddam was a bad person in 1992, so that’s totally proof that he’s a hypocrite for opposing a war in 2003.

Nationally, Oh my. Oh. So. Um. Yeah.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wouldn’t like the British press to be censored. But if those wacky Brits are going to do it, well, they brought it on themselves didn’t they?

And as awful as bloggers can be, I keep hearing that you need a background in journalism to know anything about anything blah blah blah. But you know what, if being a columnist for the Seattle Times for a few years can let you think that installing foot sinks in a Midwestern airport leads to Holocaust denial, count me the fuck out.

Also, us wild and crazy lefty bloggers don’t, um, go out of our way to write letters defending outing a CIA agent and obfuscating the investigation.

“Listen, the immigration debate is a tough debate,” Bush said. “I’m under no illusions about how hard it is. There are people in my party that don’t want a comprehensive bill. There are people in the Democrat Party that don’t seem to want a comprehensive bill.

“Now, it’s going to require leadership from the Democrat leaders in the Senate, and it’s going to require me to stay engaged and work with Republicans who want a bill,” he said. “We made two steps forward on immigration, we took a step back, and now I’m going to work with those who are focused on getting an immigration bill done and start taking some steps forward again.

Thanks Mr. President for reminding Democrats why we should be treating you like the lame duck that you are. Why are we bothering to try to work out a compromise that’s too heavily corporate and that still treats people who want to come to this country like shit when we’ll probably have a few more seats in the Senate and a Democratic president in a year and a half? Why bother giving President Bush a victory that’s starting to compromise our values?

I mean, the fact that he can’t even be bothered to not distort the name of the party he’s trying to work with was hardly the first breach of conduct (I’d say stealing the 2000 election) or the most serious (that would probably be disappearing 7 and 9 year olds but really, who knows at this point?). But someone should tell him that maybe the President of the United States should be able to get the name of the majority party in both houses of Congress right on the first try.

The party has been called the Democratic Party in one form or another (Democratic Republican for a while) at least informally since Jefferson’s day, because whatever their faults Jefferson and the people who followed him since then have been the party of the demos. The Federalist party with it’s Alien and Sedition act, and its strong use of force against the people and even more so the Whigs were pretty explicitly the party of the aristocracy. And the Republicans have been since fairly early on a big business and corporate minded party. And in most of the time that we’ve been a party, being the democratic party was considered an insult in many quarters.

Of course, it’s not an insult today, and if Bush says, “the Democratic Party” or, “Democratic Leaders” well people will hear “the democratic party” or “democratic leaders.” At But in the same way, we’re perfectly willing to call the Republicans the Republicans or the Grand Old Party, even if they aren’t grand and they are a younger party.*

There was a time when only crazies intentionally distorted the name of the Democratic Party; John Birchers, and the like who nobody took seriously. But at some point, bloggers with a screw lose (hell with a few missing) and the former House Majority Leader decided to join the act. Eventually the President started saying it. And while it may have been cute when his party ran the show in Washington, D.C., he needs us more than we need him. We can wait him the hell out, get a good deal, and not give some political cover to a madman. He’ll be gone in less than 2 years, the least you’d think that he could do was pretend to try to work with us.

*With some exceptions

When I’m not guest posting for Goldy I enjoy chronicling the bullshit that comes out of this state. From the blogs to organizations to the media to the Republican Party, and the elected officials, we produce quite a bit. The Mars Hill post is kind of what I do. Lee, blogging as thehim, also does an amazing job of it. And there are plenty of bullshit chroniclers on national issues. So here’s my favorite bullshit from the past week:

The (un)Sound Politics crew have been at it this week. Sharkansky seems to think that buying an espresso machine that will pay for itself in less than two years and then will get money to pay for operations and for school lunches is a dastardly big government plot. And that the school district should just have a coffee machine instead. Because getting money to the general fund and paying for school lunches is bad.

Sound Politics second fiddle and even lesser light Jim Miller is convinced on his own blog that the Bush economy is the best economy EVAR! Because George Will said so.

Outside of (u)SP, local crazy people organization, Faith and Freedom Network are celebrating LGBT Pride Month by overreacting. They want a Christian Pride Month (because nothing says “Christian” quite like one of the deadly sins) or at least a Straight Month.

Nationally, the bullshit artists are horrified that Bush attempted to pass an immigration bill that didn’t completely hate Mexicans and other immigrants. This cartoon is the funniest thing I’ve seen on the subject. Digby’s post here makes much the same point, and has an added bonus of pointing out how far the right wing has gone from its supposed ideological roots.

But lest you think that the righties have suddenly developed a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, fear not! They still love the way he fights terrorism. And issues press releases about how he fights terrorism. And get upset at the fact that the New York Times doesn’t like how he issues press releases about how he fights terrorism.

And oh by the way, the surge is working. So there!

Mars Hill Elder Gary Shavey wrote a letter to the Seattle Times. It’s chock full of nuts, so I thought I’d share with the congregation. It’s especially horrible that it’s making me defend Nicole Brodeur!*

To the Seattle Times:
Insinuating Infanticide

Oh my

This letter is in response to the column written by Nicole Brodeur titled, “Having to make this Choice.” Nicole Brodeur’s column was on the recent Supreme Court decision on “partial-birth” abortion. Although I am aware, and she is quite clear, on her stance on abortion this column seemed to sicken me with the logical outworking of what she was promoting through an emotional argument that takes anyone down the slippery slope of abhorrence at the reality that may come. I think that the column is pretty clear that she is not really promoting anything purposely but as a columnist she is leading people, who read her column, through persuasion.

Isn’t the point of writing a column to promote something purposely? And, “seemed to sicken me”? You would think you would know if you were sickened or not.

If anyone were to recall this column, Nicole uses a couple that had a planned pregnancy. This couple, then 22 weeks into the pregnancy, found out about a malformation in the brain of their baby. Then here is the crux of the column, does a couple end the life of an unborn child in the womb rather than agonize over the struggle of life for the child outside the womb? The linkage between a diagnosis of brain malfunction of an unborn child to that of a child born critically ill is clear. Then in this column we see that abortion is the better choice. Why would parents go through the agony of seeing their child struggle through “heroic measures” to attain life then ultimately die?

Look, if the family wants to keep the child that’s their decision. And the state should be doing everything that it can for any children that are born. But ultimately this decision is incredibly difficult for any family to make. And seriously, fuck you for thinking that you can make it for them.

Pause for a minute here. What has just happened? There is a major shift taking place here. We would rather kill the unborn child than give the opportunity of life and letting nature take its course? The link was already made, that the option was, “if death was soon after birth what difference would it make if death happened in the womb?” The couple in the column grieves their child even though they made the decision to extinguish life in the womb. Where do we go next with this type of thinking? Do we start jumping on the bandwagon of Dr. Singer (professor at Princeton) that promotes the option of killing babies after they are born (infanticide) because they will die anyway or they are a major inconvenience to the parents and society? This all seems like a decision of convenience for the parents apart from the thought of sanctity of life. It seems that the slippery slope is that if parents are able to end life of a child in the womb because of the possibility of a critically ill life, then there is nothing stopping parents from killing their child outside the womb anywhere up to 9 months after birth because of a critical illness that may pervade a child.

I know, and the only proper infanticide is biblically approved infanticide. Like when a child who, “curses his father or mother must be put to death. He has cursed his father or mother and deserves to die.” It sounds harsh, but if the B-I-B-L-E The Book for me says it, it must be moral.

Seriously, according to Broderur’s column, the family already has one child. Should we subject that child to poverty as well as the parents so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of a few out of the mainstream Christians?

And what the fuck kind of slippery slope is that? Birth is a much more clear line than the consequentialist notions of Dr. Singer or the life magically becomes worth saving at some point in the womb approach of the Christianist faction. It is the clearest line in the sand. But please, go on and tell us how giving women choices over their own bodies is a step on the road to fascism.

Close friends of mine in California had just delivered their third child in late 2000. Little did they know that their daughter would have a rare skin disorder called Epidermolysis Bullosa, which basically means the skin does not adhere to the body along with other major complications internally. The mortality rate the first year is 87%. Besides the agony of losing their child along with the million dollar medical bill why didn’t they just extinguish life rather than live with the burden and loss of their little one? This is the option being promoted. Fortunately they did not and she is still alive to this day. She will never have a life normal to that of the average American girl but the parents and community are glad to be blessed that she is still around. There is something about the society promoted by Dr. Singer and even suggested by Nicole Brodeur that is very saddening. The ramifications of enabling choices to preserve convenience and the pre-emptive strike of avoiding agony of lost loved ones may be extremely damaging to our society, if not already. The thought that my friend’s little girl along with countless others would not have made it past their first birthdays, is astonishing. May we think past the pragmatics of today to the peaceful world we are suppose to drive towards. Where would we draw the line? When does the topic shift to euthanasia of burdened elderly people or to that of any handicap that puts a burden on society? This sounds all to similar to the paradigm that drove the fascist regimes of World War II.

Brodeur isn’t suggesting anything beyond that people should be able to abort if they chose. Even late term. For whatever reason they chose. She isn’t advocating infanticide, hell she isn’t advocating people make the same choice, and the line she has is clear as day. Christ.

Nobody is saying your friend has to or should have had an abortion. What we are saying is that what was the right decision for them might be the wrong position for other people.

Thanks,
Gary Shavey

Welcome,
Carl Ballard

* Having to defend her isn’t actually so horrible. I may not be her biggest fan but I did meet her once and she was perfectly delightful. And this column was spot on.

Fnarf guest posting over at Slog (yay for guest posters!) has a great post about the Port of Seattle parks. They are a mostly hidden treasure:

For all of the many malfeasances of Mic Dinsmore’s and Pat Davis’s crony operation down on Port 69 (where elected officials and port businesses gather to fellate each other), they did a fantastic and largely unheralded job building a network of waterfront parks. Some of these fulfill the classic parks ideal of picnic tables in a field of grass, but they also don’t shy away from the truth about Seattle’s waterfront. Work goes on there, heavy industrial work, work that is a lot of fun to watch.

These parks are tucked in between working port sites and can be hard to spot. Some of them have sexy, romantic names like “T-105 Park”, but don’t let that put you off. They’re quite pretty, and have lovely river views. The Duwamish lives beneath the radar of most Seattleites, but it is the center of our Indian heritage, our early white settler heritage, and our industrial heritage.

Click over for some great pictures. My only complaint is nary a mention of my favorite Port of Seattle park, Jack Block. The best view of the skyline and some good biking. Near Alki, so well integrated into the Seattle Parks system.

In any event, I’ll have to check out some of the other parks this weekend. If you see someone who seems overdressed, especially given his crazy facial hair, say, “hi” and even if it isn’t me, it’s a nice thing to do.

The election is still a year and a half away, but we should be thinking about it now. And we should be thinking about more than just the presidential election. There are a lot of other offices and only so much time, energy, and money. So I’m curious, what do we want to work on the most?

Obviously, who’s president is hugely important. I’ll support the nominee whoever she happens to be. A Democrat in the White House will start to bring sanity to our foreign policy. Will restore our basic rights. Will be a force for the Constitution.

But a Democratic White House will need all the support it can get from Congress. Just look at the difference between Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994, passing FMLA and restoring sanity to the budget with the rest of his Presidency where he was playing defense. Locally, that means supporting the nominee in the 8th. I’d also like to pick off one of the Eastern Washington Republicans.

Locally, we’re going to win the governor’s mansion by enough that the Republicans don’t try to steal it in court.

All of that is good and necessary, but I think it’s time to start running some primaries. There’s a lot of dead weight in Seattle, and frankly it’s silly. Is there any reason that the state’s best environmental legislator should be from sprawlville? Is there any reason that the impeachment resolution should have come from Kirkland? I mean these legislators are a treasure, but come on Seattle!

Seattle legislators should lead on education. They should lead on the environment. They should lead on making sure there is better public transportation. It’s not like they are voting wrong for the most part, but they are in safe seats and if they don’t start acting like it, maybe we should put some time and money into finding better legislators.

Also, I’d like a better Lt. Governor. I mean playing the guitar is important, but I’d think we can do better. I’d like to see someone who we can put out on the campaign trail (I’ve been to my share of campaign events since Owen was first elected, and I can’t remember him ever showing up, maybe I’m forgetting something). Surely there’s some small town mayor from Eastern Washington who’s loved, but too liberal to advance to the legislature who can take a shot at a statewide race. Surely there’s some D. legislator who wants the job and is willing to make the case that we can do better.

I’m not sure that there is the energy (or the money) for several serious challengers, but I’d like to see a few any way. And with the earlier primary, it probably won’t take as much time away from general election activities.

The Discovery Institute’s own Michael Behe has a new book. I’ll admit I don’t know enough about protein-protein binding to actually understand what the hell he’s talking about. But I do know that scientists are laughing at him.

Behe uses a pitiful number of examples (count’em: four) to attempt to establish a generalization that binding sites can’t evolve, ignores numerous known cases where binding sites are known to evolve, and then concludes that anything involving the evolution of two or more binding sites is impossible without mystical unspecified guidance by a mystical unspecified supernatural force that somehow mysteriously frontloads nonrandom mutations into the beginning of the universe. Or something. Behe even says explicitly that malaria and HIV are intelligently designed in just this fashion. Along the way he repeatedly violates the First Commandment of Competent Argument Against Evolution – Get Thee To A Library and Double-Check Thy Generalizations About Biology Against The Biological Literature Or Thou Willst Look Like A Fool. My biggest problems with Behe are within this last point, but Chu-Carroll shows that the math area is just as bad. And I’m sure the philosophers will jump in at some point. Most amazingly, in The Edge of Evolution, Behe treds onto ground occupied by population geneticists. Behe’s first book talked about stuff like flagellum evolution, which was actually pretty devious because the number of people who know enough about evolution, creationism, and a random obscure biological organelle to give a detailed rebuttal is bound to be pretty small. But vast herds of population geneticists stampede around the evolution meetings, trampling all foolish enough to get between them and another exciting session on Drosophila genetics. So Behe invading that turf is kind of like the “land war in Asia” scenario. Not a good idea.

Or to make it more simple:

Wow, double the irreducible complexity! You can’t build cilia without a functioning IFT, so now you have to explain both the origin of the IFT and the origin of cilia. Except that, as Nick shows, this claim is just plain false. Just as his claim in his earlier book that every single factor in the blood clotting cascade must be present in order to function was easily disproven by pointing to dolphins, which lack Factor XII (Hagemann factor) yet still have blood that clots), this claim is easily disproven by showing that, in the real world, there exist organisms which have cilia but do not have the IFT.

Nick shows a chart and offers a citation showing that there is an existing organism that has a cilium but does not have IFT, an organism in a group called Apicomplexans. Specifically, a parasitic organism in that group. More specifically, a parasite known as Plasmodium falciparum. You might know it by its better known name: malaria. Yes, the very organism that Behe spends much of his book using as evidence of IC actually disproves his claim about the cilia/IFT system being irreducible. Oops.

Hmm. Well maybe a research assistant who deals with infectious diseases can shed some light on the subject.

1. Evolution can be modeled in terms of a static, unchanging fitness landscape.
2. The fitness landscape is a smooth, surface made up of hills and valleys, where a local minimum or maximum in any dimension is a local minimum or maximum in all dimensions.
3. The fitness function mapping from a genome to a point of the fitness landscape is monotonically increasing.
4. The fitness function is smoothly continuous, with infinitessimally small changes (single-point base chanages) mapping to infinitessimally small changes in position on the fitness landscape.

Ouch. I dont talk about my research directly a whole lot here (except for pretty pictures, of course), but like I put in my blurb, I study the evolution of HIV within patients and within populations. Fitness and fitness landscapes are vital to my research. And if Mark has summarized Behes claims properly– Im kinda peeved *fumes*

No one can have a basic, basic, basic understanding of ‘fitness landscapes’ and come out thinking those four points are valid. Just watch, Ill explain fitness landscapes to you all right now in the context of HIV, and you will get it! You, even those of you with zero biological training, will be able to refute Professional Creationist Michael Behe! Yay!

And if you’re like me, you won’t actually get it, but you’ll get closer, so you might as well read go read it.

And this has some obvious real world implications. Namely if you don’t know how malaria works, it becomes very tough to cure malaria. Same with HIV or any other virus. If you’re hoping that God or magic or whatever unseen, unknowable force is acting on these diseases, well, I certainly believe in the power of prayer, but I also believe in knowing how things work. In experimentation. In moving slowly, one piece of data at a time, one experiment at a time, one peer reviewed paper at a time toward the truth.

That’s where the creationists and the intelligent designers bug the fuck out of me. Because even more important than any real world implication, is a basic attack on the truth. We humans believe a lot of crazy things (I certainly believe in the power of prayer). We take shortcuts in our thinking and we all bring in biases and our partial information to whatever we’re trying to discover. So science has taken great pains to figure out ways to minimize these problems so that we can get at the truth. And then these anti-intellectual institutions think they can just yell “nu hu!” and that their argument is just as good as the scientific method. But if evolution isn’t the best explanation, then do what plate tectonics and what quantum physics and every other new discovery in science has done: prove it! Make claims that can be proven wrong with experimentation (as opposed to God might do something, or He might have done something). Then if those claims aren’t proven wrong, you’re on the way. Publish in scientific journals. Repeat like a zillion times so you know it wasn’t a fluke and people will start to believe you. Then, maybe you can write your book.

But if you yell “nu hu!” enough, and let your biases and prejudices interfere with human advancement toward the truth, you create your own world. And that world can be scary to those of us looking at it from outside.

These folks living in their own world give skepticism a bad name. If it’s these creationists or if it’s Exxon scientists. And skepticism is vital to that advancement toward the truth. I’m thrilled that people are questioning even our basic assumptions. I’m disgusted that people think just saying “no” without proving it, or really even trying is the same thing as honest skepticism.

And it is embarrassing that a Seattle institution is getting in the way of finding the truth. It’s horrible to have to read, “Seattle’s Discovery Institute” as if the city had something to do with those freaks.