Junk food does not cause obesity

The NY Times reports:

In the fight against childhood obesity, communities all over the country are banning the sale of sweets and salty snacks in public schools. But a new study suggests that the strategy may be ineffective.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University ... compared children’s weight in schools where junk food was sold and in schools where it was banned. The scientists also evaluated eighth graders who moved into schools that sold junk food with those who did not, and children who never attended a school that sold snacks with those who did. And they compared children who always attended schools with snacks with those who moved out of such schools.

No matter how the researchers looked at the data, they could find no correlation at all between obesity and attending a school where sweets and salty snacks were available.

Nearly everyone has an opinion about what foods are healthy, and nearly all of them are contrary to scientific research. Do-gooders pass laws and policies favoring what they think are common-sense ideas about beneficial diets, but they are almost certainly doing more harm than good.

Denying sex differences

Anthropologist Agustín Fuente attacks the study in SciAm:

Recent publication in PLoS ONE by psychologist Del Giudici and colleagues [i] has reignited the debate about just how “naturally” different men and women are. Del Giudici et al. state that their findings of a “pattern of global sex differences…may help elucidate the meaning and generality of the broad dimension of individual differences known as “masculinity-femininity”.”

The study doesn't actually say anything about the sexes being “naturally” different. It merely reports personality differences.

There are three major problems with the conclusions being drawn from study: a) “gender” and “sex” are used interchangeably, b) evolved differences in men and women are not being measured, and c) relevant biological and anthropological datasets are ignored. ...

“Sex” and “Gender” are not the same thing. Sex is a biological state that is measure via chromosomal content and a variety of physiological and developmental measures. Gender is the roles, expectations and perceptions that a given society has for the sexes. Most societies have two genders on a masculinity-femininity continuum, some have more. The two are interconnected, but not the same thing. We are born with a sex, but acquire gender and there is great inter-individual diversity within societies and sexes in regards to how sex and gender play out in behavior and personality.

Gender is a grammar term that is sometimes used as a polite term for sex. The above comment might be applicable to a study of transsexuals, but this study concerned those who are unambiguously male or female.

There are no consistent brain differences between the sexes [iii], there is incredible overlap in our physiological function [iv], we engage in sexual activity in more or less the same patterns [v], and we overlap extensively in most other behavior as well. There are some interesting re-occurring differences, particularly in patterns of aggression and certain physiological correlates of reproduction, muscle density, and body size.

This is nonsense. Another denier says:

They argue that males and females are as different in personality as the distance between the planets Mars and Venus. Instead, the overwhelming evidence, across multiple psychological domains, is that men and women are more similar than different; the distance between them is more like the distance between North Dakota and South Dakota.

More gibberish. The same reasoning says that humans and monkeys are more similar than different. I don't even get the point of the Dakota analogy -- North Dakota and South Dakota have no overlap at all. Here is a recent example of parents trying to be sex-neutral, and a funny video of the Norway gender equality paradox. Yes, there are plenty of academics who deny the obvious.

Why Jews Vote Democrat

Ilya Somin tries to explain why Jews vote Democrat. He disagrees with other Jewish explanations, such as Norman Podhoretz's and Irving Kristol's.

These opinions confirm that American Jews have been voting overwhelmingly Democrat for a century, but their theories are filled with contradictions. Jews hate the Religious Right, but that could only explain the last 30 years or so, at most. The cause does not seem to be any religious teaching, because the Orthodox Jews are not so Democrat. Jews are not necessarily opposed to conservatism, as they heavily supported Margaret Thatcher. Explanations based on income, education, urban living, etc. are unconvincing. Nor is it based on support for Israel, as Republicans usually support Israel more than Democrats. Other theories involve Jews foolishly voting against their self-interest. Kristol calls it "cognitive dissonance".

Explanations by non-Jews are always denounced as anti-semitic.

Jews are only about 2% of the USA, but the Democrat Party would be dead without them. Marxist and other more radical leftist movements would not exist without Jews.

Whatever the reason, it seems clear that Jews will vote for Barack Obama in 2012. So will the blacks, single moms, and food stamp recipients.

Grads defend liberal bias

Princeton University has a token conservative on the faculty (Robert P. George), drawing this alumnus praise:

Especially in light of the heavy liberal bias that exists on the current Princeton administration and faculty, it is refreshing to learn that “it’s not unusual to find Professor Robert George engaged in a dialogue about constitutional issues,” and that “it’s a major focus of his classes.”

But a brainwashed recent alumna complained about it:

The basic premise of science is that change is inevitable and in many ways, if understood, beneficial and revolutionary. We may consider “liberal bias” to be revolutionary in terms of the citizenship rights and alumni donations that allowed me to attend the University. ...

The liberal perspective toward change is intrinsic to higher education in the United States and for this, thank goodness. What are education, science, and governance if not the acceptance of the basic premise that change will happen and that we can have an impact on its direction? I rue the day when my alma mater or any other loses this bias. In its absence is the reproduction of the status quo, which while admirable as an ideal, requires us to ignore the watches on our wrists.

So she thinks that conservatives are folks who refuse to accept the time on their own wristwatches? She probably did not have a conservative professor. Who even wears a wristwatch anymore?

She probably did take a class at Princeton that taught her that science was all about revolutionary change, in a leftist Marxist sense. I did when I was a student there.

Another alumnus wants that professor to be re-educated:

he might benefit greatly from sitting in on an introductory economics course, and perhaps one on the history of the 1930s.

This is another incoherent letter. Is he blaming conservatives for the Great Depression?

You would think that if a liberal Princeton graduate is showing off how stupid George is, then he or she could actually address some opinion of his.

Into the mind of a Neanderthal

Now that Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced, scientists are getting bolder with their analysis. NewScientist reports:

But while Neanderthals would have had a variety of personality types, just as we do, their way of life would have selected for an average profile quite different from ours. Jo or Joe Neanderthal would have been pragmatic, capable of leaving group members behind if necessary, and stoical, to deal with frequent injuries and lengthy convalescence. He or she had to be risk tolerant for hunting large beasts close up; they needed sympathy and empathy in their care of the injured and dead; and yet were neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic.

So we could have recognised and interacted with Neanderthals, but we would have noticed these significant cognitive differences. They would have been better at well-learned, expert cognition than modern humans, but not as good at the development of novel solutions. They were adept at intimate, small-scale social cognition, but lacked the cognitive tools to interact with acquaintances and strangers, including the extensive use of symbols.

In other words, the European Neanderthals were conservatives, while the out-of-Africa hominids were liberals. Plus Neanderthals were ugly. Or so they imagine.

Update: The NY Times reports that the out-of-Africa theory has been superseded:

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Not dark today

Wikipedia and a lot of other web sites have gone dark today to protest SOPA, a proposal to limit lookups to pirate web sites.

Google uses a rare ad on its home page to recruit people to its political cause. What Google does not say is that it makes billions of dollars from indexing pirate web sites, and that limiting piracy is a threat to its business model.

SOPA may have been a bad idea, but it was already dead, and it was not going to destroy the internet or anything like that. The internet has a long history of chicken littles claiming that some law or technology will end the internet, and they have all been wrong. SOPA might make it a little harder to find pirate web sites, and slightly harder for Google to facilitate piracy, but that is about all. If Google wanted to be constructive, it could suggest other ways of dealing with pirate web sites.

So this blog is not going dark today.

Update: After the blackout, the feds seized the overseas file sharing site megaupload.com. I thought that the they needed SOPA to have this power. It appears that the feds wanted to make a statement that they will bust pirate sites regardless of the web protests or congressional action. And I didn't see Google sticking up for the free speech rights of megaupload users.

Romney attacked for being white

Lee Siegel writes for the NY Times blog:

There has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly driven Mitt Romney’s candidacy: his race. ...

Contrast that with Mr. Romney’s meticulously cultivated whiteness. He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie. He has mastered Benjamin Franklin’s honesty as the “best policy”: a practiced insincerity, an instant sunniness that, though evidently inauthentic, provides a bland bass note that keeps everyone calm. This is the bygone world of Babbitt, of small-town Rotarians. ...

Mitt Romney ... knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate. For these sudden outsiders, Mitt Romney is the conventional man with the outsider faith — an apocalyptic pragmatist — who will wrest the country back from the unconventional man with the intolerable outsider color.

Siegel is Jewish, which allowed him to once criticize Joe Lieberman for matching the "anti-Semitic caricature" by being "greedy, arrogant, venal, and vindictive."

This election is not about race or religion. Barack Obama's race turned out to be a big advantage in the last election. He only became unpopular with people like David Brooks after his policies failed. And it is funny to see Romney accused of representing Christians when he is a Mormon.

To liberals at the NY Times, race and religion are proxies for the American Dream. They hate American culture and values, and they promote racial animosity whenever they can, in the hopes of undermining Americanism. The NY Times had its harshest attack on Romney for wanting limits on immigration. They want to flood America with Third World immigrants, and scream racism at anyone who wants to preserve American greatness.

Autistic boy aces college

Last night CBS TV 60 Minutes reported:

Jake Barnett is one in 10 million. The Indianapolis 13-year-old has been acing college math and science courses since he was eight years old. Now Jake is a college sophomore taking honors classes in math and physics, while also doing scientific research and tutoring fellow students. No one could have predicted that Jake would even make it to college. At age two, Jake began to regress - he stopped speaking and making eye contact. The diagnosis: autism. Jake is proud of his autism. "That, I believe, is the reason why I am in college and I am so successful," he tells Morley Safer. ...

No one could have predicted that Jake would even make it to college. Just before his second birthday he began to regress, stopped speaking and making eye contact. After consulting with several doctors the diagnosis was autism.

Michael Barnett: We went through speech therapy, physical therapy, developmental therapy, occupational therapy. Therapists came to the home.

Kristine Barnett: He was going further and further from our world into a world of his own. And I really was just baffled at how we were going to get him back out of that world.

Safer: And how did you get him, back out of that world?

Kristine Barnett: We realized that Jacob was not happy unless he was doing something he loved.

Which even as a three-year-old was math and science. His parents say the more he focused on the subjects he loved the more he began to communicate.

The psychiatrists are redefining autism as autism spectrum, and broadening the concept so that it can be diagnosed based on stereotyped behaviors, as well as mental retardation. Many states have now passed laws requiring insurance coverage, even tho there is no known effective treatment.

On TV, Jake seems like just an unusually smart boy with no obvious disorders. He just has what the shrinks derisively call stereotyped behaviors.

The psychiatrists are doing something sinister here by pathologizing harmless behaviors, particularly male behaviors. Millions of dollars are being drained from our medical system to fund useless therapies. They conflate smart kids with retarded kids. I think that their pseudo-scientific opinions about autism will ultimately be considered more offensive and wrong than their previous stances on homosexuals.

Cannot consider musician for his accomplishments

Criminal defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz writes

Gilad Atzmon was invited to attend a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Friends Meeting House happening late this week...

I cannot overemphasize how serious this matter is. ...

I cannot imagine an overtly homophobic, sexist or racist musician being invited “solely for his musical accomplishments.”

Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, is author of “The Trials of Zion.”

Really? Musicians cannot be considered for their musical accomplishments anymore, and must also be judged for the political correctness of their views? And the serious of those judgments cannot be overemphasized?

Many famous musicians have endorsed Che Guevara in various ways. Companies sometimes get blamed for it, such as the recent Mercedes-Benz Apologizes for Using Che Guevara Image. I think Mercedes-Benz was only trying to make a harmless joke. But musicians seem to get a free pass. Surely endorsing Che is more offensive than any opinions that Atzmon has expressed. Dershowitz is the bigot here.

Google wants copyright opt-out

Google copyright lawyer Bill Patry claims to tell how to fix copyright, part 3 and part 2. I would respond in the comments on that blog, but my comments were deleted.

He does not explain it, but a large part of Google's empire is based on the difference between opt-in and opt-out. Copyright law protects an author's exclusive right, and no other system can use his works unless he opts-in to the system. Google wants the law to be opt-out, so that Google can copy whatever it pleases until the author opts-out by formally objecting. Google finds that few authors opt-out, becaues of Google's market power and other reasons.

For example, the rapid success of YouTube was almost entirely because it was the biggest and most reliable source of pirated videos on the web. Now Google responds to takedown notices from those who want to opt-out, but the market power of YouTube is so great that most copyright owners settle for some ad royalties instead.

The Google Book lawsuit was supposedly a class action representing authors who did not want their books copied unless they decided to opt-in. But Google's proposed settlement was an opt-out system.

Patry's only proposal is to shorten copyrights, but he says, “None of those suggestions would weaken copyright, whatever that means. None of the proposals have anything to do with my employer.”

Yes, they do weaken copyright, and they are designed to help Google, his employer. A weakened copyright would be a good thing, but Google ought to be honest about its interests here.

Red wine health is bogus

NPR reports:

The already shaky case for the anti-aging powers of resveratrol, a substance in red wine, is looking a little shakier.

After a three-year investigation, the University of Connecticut Health Center has told 11 scientific journals that studies they published by resveratrol researcher Dipak K. Das may not be trustworthy.

In 2008, the university got a tip about irregularities in Das' work. The subsequent investigation identified "145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data," according to a UConn statement.

Of course, these studies being bogus does not say anything about whether red wine is healthy or unhealthy, just as a vaccine study being bogus does not say anything about whether the vaccine is safe. But this does show that a lot of people are easily duped by research claims that reinforce what they would like to believe.

Meanwhile, it is claimed that a soda tax will save thousands of lives.

Marxist retirement is tragic and unnecessary

I will know that California is low on funds when I stop reading about 6-figure pensions. The Santa Cruz newspaper reports:

SANTA CRUZ - Mike Rotkin, who has spent nearly two-thirds of his life at the City on a Hill, has finally and officially retired.

The five-time former mayor, who holds the record for City Council service, retired from UC Santa Cruz at the end of December, nearly 43 years after arriving as a graduate student in 1969.

After working as a teacher's assistant for several years, Rotkin served a combined 38 years as a lecturer and field study coordinator for Community Studies, a program being phased out by UCSC amid ongoing state funding cuts.

"I do feel that I'm not harmed by this as much as the students and the university by closing the program," Rotkin, 66, said. "It's tragic and unnecessary." ...

And even now, he's not really leaving. He will teach "Introduction to Marxism" as a summer session course and continue as member of the University Council of American Federation of Teachers' negotiating team.

"I didn't retire because I was tired of teaching," he said. "I retired because they threw me out."

There was a financial calculation, too.

Rotkin, who earned $88,461 from UCSC in the 2009-2010 academic year, figured out he would take home more each year if he started drawing on his pension. As a 26-year veteran of the City Council, he also gets a small pension from the city.

So he was being paid $90k to teach Marxism, and even more not to teach Marxism? The governor is planning on a tax increase to be approved by a ballot measure. There should be a ballot measure to abolish unfunded pensions and stop teaching Marxism.

Disqualifying the chess champion

Computer chess has gotten too good. In 1996, a computer beat the human world chess champ. In 2005, a state-of-the-art chess program was released as GPL open source, and the field got a lot more competitive. Now the good computers are far better than the best humans.

One program wins every year:

On December 4, 2005 a free, downloadable chess program named Rybka 1.0 Beta was initially released and took a sizable lead on all then-existing chess program strength ranking lists, surpassing all commercial programs. Rybka then proceeded to rapidly widen its lead with subsequent versions. Rybka went on to become a commercial engine in 2006. Working with Grandmaster Larry Kaufman, one of the world’s leading position evaluation specialists, Rajlich issued the seminal Rybka 3 in 2008. Rybka 3 was over 100 Elo points stronger than Rybka 2, an enormous improvement in what was already the leading commercial program. The latest public edition of Rybka (Rybka 4.1) is more than 300 Elo points stronger than the top competitors that existed in late 2005 on comparable hardware.

But in A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess, Rybka has been banned from tournament play.

It is a little hard to see how Rybka could have been plagiarized when it is some much better than it has won every tourneyment it has entered. The Wash. Times wrote:

Yet another world champion has been brought low for suspected use of a banned performance-enhancing substance.

Rybka, the chess-playing computer program that won the past four World Computer Chess Championship titles, was summarily stripped of its silicon crown this week amid charges its programmer plagiarized the software of two rival programs. ...

As for Rybka, it will now be remembered as just another champion that didn’t respect the rules of the game.

No, Rybka may be remembered for advancing the state-of-the-art more than any other chess program. Here is the rule that it is accused of violating:

Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details. Programs which are discovered to be close derivatives of others (e.g., by playing nearly all moves the same), may be declared invalid by the Tournament Director after seeking expert advice. For this purpose a listing of all game-related code running on the system must be available on demand to the Tournament Director.

There is some evidence that early versions of Rybka had components similar to what is in the open-source programs. Rajlich admits that he studied them. But I don't see how Rybka could be called a close derivative when it plays so much better. There don't seem to be any standards for how much one program can use the ideas of another.

It appears to me that the real problem is that Rybka got so good that no one else had any chance of winning the tournaments. The losers had to gang up to disqualify the champ so that the others would have a chance at winning.

I think that the real problem with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Lance Armstrong, etc. is that they were so good at what they did. Others are jealous, and will do anything to bring down the champ.

The Distance Between Mars and Venus

A new psychology paper says:

The idea that the sexes are quite similar in personality – as well as most other psychological attributes – has been expressed most forcefully in Hyde's “gender similarities hypothesis” [9]. The gender similarities hypothesis holds that “males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. That is, men and women, as well as boys and girls, are more alike than they are different.” Hyde's paper has been remarkably influential; between 2005 and 2010, it has accumulated 247 citations in the Web of Knowledge database and 498 citations in Google Scholar (retrieved May 19th, 2011).

While the gender similarities hypothesis does not make specific predictions about personality, sex differences in personality were found to be “small” in Hyde's meta-analytic review.

The paper goes on to argue that while the 16 Personality Factors do not individually show much difference between men and women, the factors can be combined so that the distributions of men and women only overlap by 10%.

As explained here, the situation is somewhat analogous to race and genes. People used to say that human races were all the same because they have essentially the same genes. They also said that we have 99% the same genes as chimps. It turns out that you have to look at many genes at once to see dramatic differences.

The paper says:

The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology. ...

In conclusion, we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated.

It is surprising that this paper is so controversial. I thought that it was obvious that men and women have different personalities, and I had assumed that psychometric testing had established this decades ago. The original Turing test involved fooling someone about a male or female personality.

In other psychology news, SciAm Mind reports:

Two Big Myths about Grief
People are not always devastated by a death and should be allowed to recover in their own ways

It says that grief counseling usually does no good at all.

Psychology research is in a sorry state. They have trouble with the obvious.

UN attacks freedom of religion

Harvard law prof and Jewish identity political activist Alan M. Dershowitz writes:

The Brian Leiters of the world are an important part of the reason why anti-Semitic tropes are creeping back to legitimacy in academia. His knee-jerk defense of an admitted Jew hater — who, according to Leiter is not a despicable anti-Semite but an acceptable "cosmopolitan" — contributes to the legitimization of anti-Semitism.

The same can be said of Ron Paul, who everyone has heard of. Paul has, according to The New York Times, refused to "disavow" the "support" of "white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy." ...

It has been said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Leiter and Paul may or may not be good men, but they are guilty of more than merely doing nothing. They are, by their actions, helping to legitimate the oldest of bigotries. Shame on them!

This is apparently a large part of what Jewish identity politics is all about -- going around calling people anti-Semites and bigots and invoking silly Nazi analogies. He even calls Jews and other Semites anti-Semites if they do not support Israel.

Leiter and Paul have all sorts of goofy views. It is reasonable to assume that 2% of their goofy views involve Jews, since Jews are about 2% of the USA population.

Deshowitz is the worst sort of bigot. He doesn't even believe in the religious aspects of Judaism. He just promotes Jewish identity politics and Zionism, and recklessly calls people Nazis if they do not share his political views. He claims to support free speech, but he wants organized ostracism of anyone who even associates with people he dislikes.

A different view comes from leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne. He is of Jewish descent but he says that all religion is poisonous. He says:

We need the right to freely and publicly criticize politicians, religious people and their beliefs, and historians — indeed, even those historians who affirm the Holocaust. I’ve learned a lot listening to Holocaust deniers, including ways that they resemble other conspiracy theorists, the methods that Nazis used to suppress information about the gas chambers, and the paucity of direct written links between Hitler himself and the extirpation of the Jews. It should not be a crime to promulgate such denialism, odious though those viewpoints may seem.

That is a crime in much of Europe, and Holocaust historical work is unreliable as a result. Another religion wants the UN to give it special protection from criticism:

It’s Islam, and at issue is Resolution 16/18 of the United Nations Human Rights Council (have a look at it.) It ostensibly protects all religions, but the people pushing it are, of course, Muslims. ... But now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (a consortium of Islamic Nations) has tweaked the language to make it palatable to America, and they’ve succeded: Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are supporting the resolution, and the U.S. may sign on.

This is what the resolution says ...

3. Condemns any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, whether it involves the use of print, audio-visual or electronic media or any other means; ...

What’s happening here is that Islam is seeking special protections not afforded to other faiths. We should not let ourselves be bullied by this stance, or by this resolution. Resolution 16/18 is an offense to the American tradition of free speech, and it’s odious that both Obama and Hillary Clinton are supporting it.

Yes, it is odious. Some religions really are better than others. Nearly everyone agrees to that, altho they differ about what the better religions are. Speaking in support of one religion implicitly devalues the competing religions, and incites discrimination against those other religious views. That is a good thing, not a bad thing, even if it is upsetting to Dershowitz and the Islamic nations. They are textbook examples of bigoted religious intolerance. There is no true freedom of religion in any Islamic nation.

Human appendix not useless

I pointed out here that evolutionists like to cite the human appendix as bad design, even tho there is a good theory that it is useful. Now there is clinical evidence as well. Those with an appendix recover from certain intestinal infections better.

Jumping to a guilty conclusion

I am making a list of things that I learned in 2011. One is that no one believes in innocence until proven guilty. Between people I know, people on TV, etc, I have yet to meet a single person who believes it. Every single one of them jumps to conclusions that people are guilty based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Herman Cain. I had an otherwise sensible woman tell me that Cain must be guilty of sexual harassment because she was once sexually harassed. She insisted that I listen to her story, even tho it had nothing to do with Cain's story. I have heard other women make a similar argument many times. If sexual harassment stories are common, then it is easy for a woman to make a false accusation.

Jerry Sandusky. Many people said that they decided that he was guilty based on the weakness of his denial in a TV interview. But criminal defendants have a 5A right not to testify at trial, and one of the reasons for that right is people think that they can judge guilt or innocence by watching a denial, but they cannot.

Penn State officials. They have been fired and ostracized, and yet the case against them rest entirely on one accuser who has told an implausible story and who has changed his story a couple of times. Of course there will soon be lawyers filing million dollar lawsuits, and you can be sure that new witnesses come forward with mysteriously recovered memories.

Rod Blagojevich. He was convicted of selling Barack Obama's senate seat, but no one ever showed that he ever took a bribe, asked for a bribe, or had any suspicious money squirreled away.

Barry Bonds. People argue that he is guilty of something based on the size of his head and other strange notions. He was convicted and sentenced, but hardly anyone knows what he was convicted of. And the prosecutor sure did not present evidence of his head size.

Michael Jackson. The accusations were implausible, and from people suing for millions. He was acquitted.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The accusations were extremely implausible, and the charges were eventually dropped.

Of course there are many people in the criminal justice system who are unfairly prosecuted, but that is not my point. My concern is about how people jump to conclusions of guilt even tho the accusation is bizarre and improbable, the evidence is flimsy, and sometimes even the crime itself is undefined.

I should have learned this lesson during the 1974 Watergate hearings. Yes, some crimes were committed, but hardly anyone can tell you what Richard Nixon did that was criminal. Somehow they all decided that he was guilty without even knowing the charge or how the evidence relates to that charge. I think that this is a common brain defect that people come to such conclusions.

Obvious studies of the year

After posting some retracted science stories, here are some true ones. SciAm reports:

Nonetheless, some studies really take the cake in the "duh" department, discovering things that were already obvious. Here are findings from this year that should come as little surprise.

1. Unsafe sex is more likely after drinking
2. Men appear confident by suppressing fear, pain and empathy
3. Smoking pot and driving isn't safe
4. Pigs love mud
5. Fashion magazines glorify youth
6. People with generous partners have happy marriages
7. Parents don't think their kids are doing drugs
8. People aren't doing anything in particular on the Internet
9. Restricting driver's licenses decreases teen fatalities
10. Most shoppers ignore nutrition labels

A reader adds:

You missed the article that said, The first humans out of Africa engaged in interbreeding for tens of thousands of years. That article was just plain stupid.

Maybe obvious, but it is still a minority view. The mainstream idea has been that humans came out of Africa, and have not evolved since then.

Retracted science stories

2011 had several big stories of previous science stories being wrong. Lists are at NPR and MSNBC. For more, see Retraction Watch. Some fields are more vulnerable than others. Most big medical studies are not replicated. Many psychology studies are bogus. Even physics may soon be retracting the story about neutrinos going faster than light.

Disparities in school discipline

The Wash. Post reports:

Across the Washington area, black students are suspended and expelled two to five times as often as white students, creating disparities in discipline that experts say reflect a growing national problem. ...

Experts say disparities appear to have complex causes. A disproportionate number of black students live below the poverty line or with a single parent, factors that affect disciplinary patterns. But experts say those factors do not fully explain racial differences in suspensions. Other contributing factors could include unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles.

Are those really the only explanations that the experts can imagine? They ought to at least consider IQ, future time orientation, ADD, and drug use. And whether the students are discipline problems in other settings.

Why psychoanalysis never existed

NewScientist reports:

THE name Sigmund Freud is inextricable from psychoanalysis. And vice versa. But why? And how did the two wind up in the same cultural basket as Copernicus and Darwin?

In The Freud Files, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani have a tangled tale to tell but their mission is clear: "We should hurry to study psychoanalysis whilst we can," they write, "for we will soon no longer be able to discern its features - and for good reason: because it never was." The pair argue that without the Freud legend the "identity and radical difference [of psychoanalysis] from other forms of psychotherapy collapse".

Attempts to debunk the legend in the 1970s and 80s failed. But a current assault, helped by a wealth of "declassified" material, correspondence and critical studies, looks more likely to dismantle the monomyth. The Freud Archives, a collection of letters and papers, were deposited at the US Library of Congress by Freud's daughter, Anna, to put them out of reach of unofficial biographers. This move also locked away Freud's patients' versions of their own problems.

But now, as primary material is made public, parts of the archive are declassified and his letters re-edited without censorship, the legend is "fraying from all sides".

The book costs $95. I will pass. If the field had any integrity, Freud would have been disavowed as a kook a century ago.

Govt-funded evolution site gives religious opinions

I criticized a Cal Berkeley evolution web site in 2004:

I guess these evolutionists think that it is okay to use religion to promote evolution, but unconstitutional to allow religious criticism of evolution.

Now leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne attacks the same web site:

Now I’m sure that when the NSF gave money to the Cal Museum of Paleontology, it had no idea that taxpayers’ money would go to fund theology — for that’s exactly what this kind of accommodationism is — but we need to be aware of what message taxpayer–funded institutions are putting out to the public. (Berkeley is a state university) My position has always been that scientific organizations, particularly ones funded by the taxpayers, should say nothing about the compatibility of science and faith.

He personally believes that evolution disproves religion, but I guess that he does not advocate forcing that view on others.

The evolutionists seem to be split into two camps -- the new atheists who believe that evolution disproves religion and that religion is evil anyway, and the accommodationists who insist on telling us which religions are acceptable and which are not.

Either way, evolutionists are on the warpath against religion in a way that other scientists are not. It is no wonder that religious folks are offended. Their tax money is used to put down their religious views. I think that we would all be better off if the evolutionary scientists would stick to the science. But they do not. Almost all of them try to use their evolutionary views to justify unscientific opinions about religion and politics.

Genes Play Major Role in Behavior

Liberals like to deny that people have any innate differences, but the NY Times reports:

Social behavior among primates — including humans — has a substantial genetic basis, a team of scientists has concluded from a new survey of social structure across the primate family tree.

The scientists, at the University of Oxford in England, looked at the evolutionary family tree of 217 primate species whose social organization is known. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, challenge some of the leading theories of social behavior,

This might be exaggerated, because they did not find any actual genes. It has been known for millennia that behavior is a complex combination of nature and nurture, and modern research has not changed that. But they do apply it to human nature:

The Oxford survey confirms that the structure of human society, too, is likely to have a genetic basis, since humans are in the primate family, said Bernard Chapais, an expert on human social evolution at the University of Montreal. ...

Human multifamily groups may have arisen from the gorilla-type harem structure, with many harems merging together, or from stable breeding bonds replacing sexual promiscuity in a chimpanzee-type society, Dr. Chapais said.

I am waiting for the follow-up editorial on why this shows that we should not expect Mexican, Arab, and Chinese immigrants to assimilate into American culture.

Free will and the unconscious

Here is research claiming that we have an unconscious mind, and no free will.
Scientific American Mind says:

Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious — described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness — is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis.

A Berkeley leftist cognitive scientist explains in this video:

Prof. George Lakoff - Reason is 98% Subconscious

The London Telegraph reports:

For a man who thinks he's a robot, Professor Patrick Haggard is remarkably cheerful about it. "We certainly don't have free will," says the leading British neuroscientist. "Not in the sense we think." It's quite a way to start an interview.

We're in the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Queen Square in London, the nerve centre – if you will – of British brain research. Prof Haggard is demonstrating "transcranial magnetic stimulation", a technique that uses magnetic coils to affect one's brain, and then to control the body. One of his research assistants, Christina Fuentes, is holding a loop-shaped paddle next to his head, moving it fractionally. "If we get it right, it might cause something." She presses a switch, and the coil activates with a click. Prof Haggard's hand twitches. "It's not me doing that," he assures me, "it's her."

This stuff is interesting, but I don't think that it is persuasive about free will or the unconscious.

Freakonomics: What went wrong?

Statistician Andrew Gelman documents what's wrong with Freakonomics:

The nonfiction publishing phenomenon known as Freakonomics has passed its sixth anniversary. The original book, which used ideas from statistics and economics to explore real-world problems, was an instant bestseller. By 2011, it had sold more than four million copies worldwide, and it has sprouted a franchise, which includes a bestselling sequel, SuperFreakonomics; an occasional column in the New York Times Magazine; a popular blog; and a documentary film. The word “freakonomics” has come to stand for a light-hearted and contrarian, yet rigorous and quantitative, way of looking at the world.

Steve Levitt was a big hero to the Left when he was giving bogus arguments in favor of abortion. He fell out of favor when he gave arguments against global warming. Now he has been shown to be completely wrong on many subjects.

Steve Sailer says:

It’s unfair to denigrate Levitt and Dubner without comparing the reliability of the Freakonomics brand to that of their chief rival, the Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker Brand. My view is that Levitt and Dubner are more trustworthy than Gladwell by a comfortable margin.

Yes, Levitt has the virtue of being sometimes correct. The New Yorker is read for its literary style, and not for the correctness of its essays. It is famous for fact-checking the details, and getting the big picture wrong.

It is funny how someone can get away with being a public intellectual and giving bogus arguments, as long as he stays politically correct. As soon as he steps on the wrong political toes, then he gets criticized.

Statute of limitations for sex crimes

A CNN columnist writes:

There are various reasons why we have statutes of limitations for crimes, other than the worst felonies, and for torts. Memories fade. Witnesses die. Evidence goes bad. We want to encourage plaintiffs to bring suit as quickly after the alleged injury as possible. Potential defendants should be able to get on with their lives without worrying about getting charged or sued for acts alleged from long ago. If anyone could sue anyone at anytime it would further clog an already congested legal system. In most cases, this all makes sense.

Not so for child sexual abuse. The very nature of the crime is predicated on secrecy and shame and manipulation. It often takes years, decades even, for victims to grasp what has happened: that an adult, often a trusted authority figure or a family member, did horribly wrong by them. ...

Over the objections of numerous groups -- insurance lobbies, teachers unions, Roman Catholic clergymen -- some states have decided to suspend the statute of limitations for these crimes, a tacit recognition of the unique dynamics of child sex crimes. Delaware recently suspended the statute of limitations for two years, creating a window for those previously time-barred to come forward. More than 100 alleged victims emerged.

In California, a similar suspension spurred more than 300 lawsuits, some dating back to episodes from the 1950s. "It's clear that it can take a long, long time before victims are ready to confront abuse and everything that can come with it," says Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Cardozo Law School and a lawyer for one of the accusers in the Sandusky case. "It's just wrong to have [policy] that favors the predator."

This is backwards. The more horrible and harmful the crime, the more we need the statute of limitations.

Yes, of course suspending the statute of limitations will encourage lawsuits. When people find out that the Catholic Church had hundreds of millions of dollars to pay out against claims, then they have a recovered memory about some allegation from decades ago.

When I hear a sex crime allegation, I ask myself: Is the charge plausible? Was there a contemporaneous complaint? Is there physical evidence? Does the accuser have an ulterior motive to make a false accusation?

I never believed the accusations in the McMartin preschool trial or Duke lacrosse case or Michael Jackson trial or DSK case for just those reasons. Implausible stories. No hard evidence. Non-credible accusers. And I am dubious about the Penn State sex abuse scandal for just those same reasons.

Yes, sex abuse is bad. If it happens, report it to the police and get the physical evidence. Sex abuse is universally considered abominable, and no police cover up these crimes. The perps are always prosecuted and convicted. But when someone says that it is so bad that the usual rules of justice have to be suspended, I get worried.

The Pann State accusers all have this in common: They did not make a prompt complaint. They have no witnesses. They have no physical evidence. The allegations are about events many years ago. And they are suing for millions of dollars. The only exception is McQueary, but he is not credible for other reasons. He has changed his story. His grand jury story is implausible. He traded his testimony for immunity. And he is a morally damaged man himself.

It is possible that jurors will ultimately find McQueary persuasive, but his story hinges on details of conversations from 2002. Most people are unable to remember a 9-year-old conversation, and our justice system has no way of resolving a discrepancy between two different accounts of a 9-year-old conversation.

We laugh at medieval prosecutors who convicted witches, but we have our own witch-hunts.

Barry Bonds sentenced

Baseball hero Barry Bonds was sentenced today:

The Barry Bonds case is over. Bonds, as we speak, is being sentenced. The penalty: 30 days of house arrest, two years of probation and 250 hours of community service. This, by the way, is what the probation office recommended. Prosecutors were seeking a 15 month jail term.

In handing out her sentence, the judge observed that she agreed with the jury that Bonds tried to obstruct justice. Just that he failed. She noted that he did not threaten witnesses, for example. When I first read his grand jury testimony three and a half years ago I observed the same thing. You can tell Barry wanted to perjure himself. He just was pretty damn bad at it.

The judge also noted that the sentence took into account that Bonds has a strong record of philanthropy, much of which is unpublicized. Weighing against that, I presume, is that he is a lousy stinkin’ cheater who robbed some sportswriters of their childhood memories.

Prosecutors spent 10 years and millions of dollars on this base. Bonds was not convicted of perjury or of using steroids. I defy anyone to explain to me what he did wrong. He did not obstruct anyone being prosecuted. At worst, he gave an incomplete answer to a question. If anyone was at fault, it was the prosecutor for not asking a followup question at the grand jury hearing.

A lot of people hate Bonds, and today they will be cheering that Bonds is disgraced. I am glad that he "robbed some sportswriters of their childhood memories." He was a great baseball player. I hope that he convinces the appeals court that it was not a crime for him to have given an incomplete answer to the grand jury.

Moderate Islam is not moderate

The leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:

I keep looking for the “moderate” form of Islam in the Middle East, but have trouble finding it. I guess its main home is elsewhere. But I’ve recently come across four items that bear witness to the hatred of Muslims for Jews (I’m not claiming it’s not reciprocal), and to the fact that religion poisons everything. ...

Here’s a twelfth-grade textbook from Saudi Arabia: ... The struggle with the Jews is not political but religious. ... The Jews spread corruption and fitna [chaos and internecine rancor]. ... The Qur’an describes the corruption of the Jews. ... Jihad will force the Jews out of Palestine. ...

If this stuff is drilled into you at age twelve, what are you going to believe? And it further shows, as I’ve argued before, that a huge element of radical Islam is based not on politics, disaffection, or dispossesion, but simple religion-based emnity. Do we deny that these people believe what they say? ...

Finally, to round things out, and show that Islamic viciousness is not limited to the Middle East, ...

Is there anyone who doubts that, considering all major religions, Islam is the most pernicious. Of course Catholicism gives it a run for its money.

I was with him until that last sentence. Catholicism does not teach anything like those things. Coyne is mainly on the warpath against evangelical Christians who do not accept the macro-evolution of men descending from lower animals, but Catholics accept evolution. Coyne does argue that the Pope doesn’t understand evolution and that the Adam and Eve story cannot be reconciled with modern genetics. Okay, fine, I am sure Coyne understands evolutionary science better than the Pope. Coyne's main complaint is the Pope said evolution being a product of random mutation without mentioning natural selection. But the Catholic Church does not encourage or condone suicide bombers.

A recent study said:

80% of U.S. mosques provide their worshippers with jihad-style literature promoting the use of violence against non-believers and that the imams in those mosques expressly promote that literature.

No Catholic churches promote violence against non-believers.

Since Coyne is of Jewish descent, I will round this out with a couple of things I recently learned about Judaism. The Bible (Old Testament) says:

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you may nations...then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy." Deuteronomy 7:1-2, NIV.

"...do not leave alive anything that breaths. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you..." Deuteronomy 20:16, NIV.

One of the weirder anti-Jewish stories is that Jews cannot be trusted because once a year, they all get together and say a prayer that all their promises to non-Jews will be broken. That is not quite right. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Day of Atonement prayer, known as Kol Nidre:

"All personal vows we are likely to make, all personal oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our personal vows, pledges and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths."

The leader and the congregation then say together three times "May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are in fault." The Torah scrolls are then replaced, and the customary evening service begins.

I do not wish to imply some sort of equivalence between Islam and Judaism. The overwhelming majority of the Jews do want to peacefully coexist with the Arabs, and Jewish textbooks do not teach violence and hatred like the Mohammedan textbooks. The book of Deuteronomy is in the Christian Bible also, but Christians (and Jews) are not taught to destroy their enemies.

Some religions are better than others. Everybody believes that, even if they think that it is rude to point out the differences.

Bogus atheist distrust study

A study on distrust of atheists was widely reported in many newspapers, including USA Today:

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers.

"It's pretty remarkable," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?

The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.

Andrew Gelman points out that the researchers were fooled by the base rate fallacy. The study does not imply that atheists are distrusted at all, and only shows the low standards of one of the leading social science journals, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The current Amazon no. 11 top seller is currently Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I just mentioned that Pinker's book is selling well, but Kahneman's book is selling much better, and tops all the science-related books.

Kahneman is known for prospect theory, which is about the psychology of how people understand risk. If you read his book, you would probably understand what is wrong with the above atheist study. According to an Amazon review:

Here is one final example from Kahneman's work of some of the concepts the reader will encounter in this book. Suppose that Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. In college, she majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issues of discrimination and social justice, and she also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

According to Kahneman, about 85% - 90% of undergraduates at several major universities chose the second option, that Linda was a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. However, this is an example of the "conjunction fallacy," since the probability of two events occurring together (in conjunction) must necessarily be less than the probability of either event occurring alone. Put simpler, the probability that Linda is a bank teller must be greater than the probability that she is a bank teller and active in feminist causes.

So the fictional driver is more likely to be a teacher than an atheist teacher, and more likely to be an atheist teacher than a rapist teacher.

These are really just trick questions that are especially contrived to trip people up. I only mention them because some major social science conclusions are manipulated from the ambiguity of the questions.

Better angel analysis is weak

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is one of the better-selling science-related books of the year. As noted below, it claims that violence has declined over history in spite of Christianity.

Pinker's quantitative analysis seems to based on the assumption that violence should be expected to scale linearly with population size. So he compares the Mongol invasion to recent wars by counting deaths, as a proportion of the population at the time. His trick has the effect of making the Mongol invasion seem much more deadly than it was.

This assumption seems dubious. If we have a population of N people, and we assume that each pair of people has a 1% chance of being enemies, then we expect about 0.01N² pairs of enemies. If violence occurs between enemies, then we might expect violence to grow quadratically in N.

However civilization would be impossible if violence grew that rapidly. Maybe it makes more sense to assume that potential friendships grow quadratically in N. Then maybe societies can use those friendships to self-organize into peaceful communities, and violence would grow sublinearly in N. Maybe violence only grows like the square root of N, or even the logarithm of N.

Pop psychologist John Gray reviews Pinker:

While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence — the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics — his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.”

This is an odd list of thinkers to credit. Baruch Spinoza was big hero to Jewish atheists. Hardly anyone else has even heard of him. He was a Dutch Jew who believed that God was the universe, and that intuition was the highest kind of knowledge. Immanuel Kant was an unreadable German philosopher whose biggest achievement was to find a non-Christian rationale for the Golden Rule. Thomas Hobbes and David Hume were religious skeptics who were accused of being atheists. Cesare Beccaria wrote a book arguing that crimes should only be punished to the extent necessary, and that people should have access to guns to prevent crime. Thomas Jefferson is revered by Americans for writing the declaration that justified armed revolution against the British. So why does Pinker make him non-violence leader? My guess is that Pinker likes the Jefferson Bible, which was an attempt to remove the religion from the Gospels. (It removed God and miracles, and left the moral teachings.)

What do these have in common? It seems to me that Pinker has cherry-picked some intellectuals in a vain attempt to support his anti-Christian thesis. The Age of Enlightenment was very important, but it happened entirely within Christian Europe. The political leaders, peasants, and intellectuals were nearly all Christians. Christianity taught a message of peace. There were Jews and other groups, but their numbers and influence were far too small to have a significant effect on the violent crime rate or the war-making policy. If violent wars and crimes were declining, it seems crazy to argue that Christianity was not the major reason for the decline.

There are many Christian historians who know this subject much better than Pinker or me. I would like to see a serious rebuttal, as Pinker's book seems like anti-Christian propaganda to me.

Convicted man has alibi

The Houston Texas newspaper reports:

Sentenced to life in prison in November for armed robbery, LaDondrell Montgomery insisted he was not the shadowy figure on surveillance video. He swore the eyewitness identifying him were flat wrong.

If only the 36-year-old habitual offender had an alibi. If only he could remember exactly where he was that day of the robbery.

A week after jurors sentenced Montgomery, his attorney was researching the felon's lengthy rap sheet.

In that file was a report that had details about a 2009 arrest and an iron-clad alibi: He was in jail.

Released from custody about nine hours after the December 13, 2009 crime, Montgomery was actually innocent.

The judge's excuse is, "Both sides in this case were spectacularly incompetent." Maybe so, but the judge failed to give the man a fair trial.

Teaching evolution in medical school

Steve Jones complains about Moslems walking out on evolution lectures in medical school, and explains the value of such lectures:

A few years ago I had an operation to repair a hernia. In that I shared the experience of about one in four British men of my age, in whom a section of intestine breaks through the body wall to form an unpleasant, and potentially dangerous, bulge in the groin. The job was done quickly and efficiently by a surgeon who had, no doubt, done it hundreds of times before.

But why is that procedure needed so often? The story began long ago, when our ancestors were fish. In those happy days ...

Hernias, then, are the result of the imperfect process of evolution, of the slow accumulation of successful mistakes and of the inevitable pressure of compromise. A surgeon may not need to know that and the first hernia operations were carried out well before The Origin of Species by people who had no idea why the problem arose; and (although I doubt it) perhaps my own doctor was equally ignorant.

Now, though, we have evolution, the grammar of biology. More and more, students do not like it.

This is unconvincing. He seems to be saying that we have hernias because we are descended from fish. But unless there is some argument that we would not have hernias if we had not been descended from fish, then what does evolution has to do with it?

Furthermore, students attend medical school to learn medicine. Do stories of fish evolution somehow make it easier to do hernia surgeries?

Of course when evolutionists give these lectures, they cannot resist offending people by saying that Adam and Eve never existed and other such anti-religion messages.

Blago sentenced to 14 years

AP reports:

Rod Blagojevich, the ousted Illinois governor whose three-year battle against criminal charges became a national spectacle, was sentenced to 14 years in prison Wednesday, one of the stiffest penalties imposed for corruption in a state with a history of crooked politics.

Blagojevich's 18 convictions included allegations of trying to leverage his power to appoint someone to President Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat to raise campaign cash or land a high-paying job....

But the judge made it clear early in the hearing that he believed that Blagojevich had lied on the witness stand when he tried to explain his scheming for the Senate seat, ...

It took two trials for prosecutors to snare Blagojevich on sweeping corruption charges. His first ended deadlocked with jurors agreeing on just one of 24 counts that Blagojevich lied to the FBI. Jurors at his retrial convicted him on 17 of 20 counts, including bribery and attempted extortion.

FBI wiretap evidence proved decisive. In the most notorious recording, Blagojevich is heard crowing that his chance to name someone to Obama's seat was "f---ing golden" and he wouldn't let it go "for f---ing nothing."

I defended Blago here and here. It took two juries to convict him, and he is being punished, in part, for testifying in his defense.

The prosecution was political. His fellow Democrats hated him for refusing to raise taxes. There was no objective evidence of corruption, such as a suitcase full of cash. If he were really corrupt, then they could have just offered him the money for the senate seat, and see if he accepts it. But they never caught him actually taking any bribes, or having unexplained bank accounts. Those quotes above are very weak evidence.

Here is a video of the Blago story.

Passwords and baby names

Here are the 25 most common passwords:

password 123456 12345678 qwerty abc123 monkey 1234567 letmein trustno1 dragon baseball 111111 iloveyou master sunshine ashley bailey passw0rd shadow 123123 654321 superman qazwsx michael football

And the popular baby names:

The top 10 girl's names of 2011: Sophia Emma Isabella Olivia Ava Lily Chloe Madison Emily Abigail

The top 10 boy's names of 2011: Aiden Jackson Mason Liam Jacob Jayden Ethan Noah Lucas Logan

Nothing made both lists.

Medicine’s dirty secrets

The WSJ reports:

This is one of medicine’s dirty secrets: Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can’t be reproduced.

“It’s a very serious and disturbing issue because it obviously misleads people” who implicitly trust findings published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, says Bruce Alberts, editor of Science. On Friday, the U.S. journal is devoting a large chunk of its Dec. 2 issue to the problem of scientific replication.

Medicine is much worse than the hard sciences. Remember that when you read the health headlines or hear a pitch for some hot new medical procedure or drug.

Jewish identity politics

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz attacked The Wandering Who? by Gilad Atzmon on Fox Business TV. His main purpose was to shame and intimidate anyone associated to the book. He is particularly upset about this endorsement by John Mearsheimer:

“Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it increasingly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their ‘Jewishness.’ Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon’s own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.”

Dershowitz also hates Mearsheimer for co-writing an academic article and book on The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Atzmon is a famous jazz saxophonist who describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew, and responds to Deshowitz on his blog.

The book is not so much about Jews or Judaism, but about Jewish identity politics. That is, it concerns the views of people like Dershowitz, who don't necessarily have any Jewish religious beliefs, but are concerned with Jewish politics above all else. The most outrageous argument I found is that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany. That is absurd, but hardly anything to get excited about. I tend to be pro-Israel, but a lot of people disagree with things Israel does, and political arguments that make comparisons to Nazis are commonplace. The Left was frequently comparing George W. Bush to Hitler.

It seems to me that Dershowitz is just proving some of what Atzmon says. Dershowitz is preoccupied with Jewish identity politics and Zionism, and with launching vitriolic personal attacks against those who disagree. He supports preemptive war and torture to advance his causes. He also supports animal rights because he thinks humans are no better than animals. And he is very quick to call anyone an "anti-Semite" if they do not support his Jewish identity politics.

Pinker defines science

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne praises Pinker's new book:

I’ll include just one excerpt that I liked, for it bears on recent discussions we’ve had on this website. I particularly like his characterization of “science” in the second sentence, which is how I construe oue discipline broadly:

(p. 181) Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it.  The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science.  The progress of science with its dazzling success at explaining and manipulating the world, shows that knowledge of the universe is possible, albeit always probabilistic and subject to revision. Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge — not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.

The definition of science was the essence of the Kansas evolution dispute, according to the NY Times and leading science organizations, and evolutionists convinced Kansas of a new definition. The leftist view denies that science is about truth, and relies on paradigms instead of evidence. I think that Aristotle had a better understanding of what science is.

In around 2005, Kansas decided:

The new definition adopted: "Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building, to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."

The evolutionists hated this definition.

Daniel B. Botkin writes a WSJ op-ed that absolute certainty is not scientific:

One of the changes among scientists in this century is the increasing number who believe that one can have complete and certain knowledge. For example, Michael J. Mumma, a NASA senior scientist who has led teams searching for evidence of life on Mars, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "Based on evidence, what we do have is, unequivocally, the conditions for the emergence of life were present on Mars—period, end of story." ...

Some scientists make "period, end of story" claims that human-induced global warming definitely, absolutely either is or isn't happening. For me, the extreme limit of this attitude was expressed by economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, who wrote in his New York Times column in June, "Betraying the Planet" that "as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet." ...

Not only is it poor science to claim absolute truth, but it also leads to the kind of destructive and distrustful debate we've had in last decade about global warming.

The Pinker definition is lousy. He says that science is just a paradigm that cannot prove anything. He says that scientists are entitled to be confident as long as they realize that they may be wrong. He makes some specific claims about Christianity and violence. For these to be scientific, there should be some way for others to test and verify them. It sounds as if he just has some dubious hypotheses about the causes of violence.

Science can prove certain things. In connection with global warming, it has been proved that burning fossil fuels has substantially increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, and that CO2 absorbs infrared light. We can also measure these things quantitatively and reliably. Whether this has caused the observed warming of the last 50 years is a useful hypothesis, but not yet proved. Whether Krugman is seeing treason against the planet is just an opinion. This subject is greatly confused by those who claim the confidence of the dominant paradigm, but who do not have proof for what they claim.

Decline of violence, no credit to Christians

The Jewish Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has a big new highly-promoted book on violence that has many anti-Christian claims:

First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. ...

Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. ... religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. ...

Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. Shortly afterwards, the Cathars of southern France were exterminated in another Crusader genocide because they had embraced the Albigensian heresy.

But things started going downhill in 312 when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the historical facts are not consistent with the claim that Christianity since then has been a force for nonviolence: The Crusaders perpetrated a century of genocides that murdered a million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the time to the Nazi holocaust. ...

Christians killed 60,000-100,000 accused witches in the European witchhunts.

Several years ago, Pinker attacked a scholarly work on Jews:

Of course I have not plowed through MacDonald's trilogy ... outside the bounds of normal scientific discourse ... MacDonald's various theses, even if worthy of scientifically debate individually, collectively add up to a consistently invidious portrayal of Jews

It seems to me that Pinker is going out of his way to give an invidious portrayal of Christians.

The Crusades were not genocides. They were wars to prevent the Mohammedans from invading Europe. It is a little strange to blame the Pope for being neutral during WWII. He had no army and could not do anything. Pinker ought to be blaming the aggressors in these wars.

If I had Pinker's attitude, I would declare his book offensive to Christians, and refuse to read it. I will be interested to see what historians and other experts say. Eg, Quodlibeta argues that the his death toll for the Albigensian Crusade is way too high.

Steve Sailer's review says:

Unfortunately, the opening chapters of Better Angels — a history of violence — display Pinker’s main weakness. His historical sense isn’t that strong. And a major reason for that is his deep-rooted aversion to engaging intellectually with the effects of Christianity. His distaste for the culture of Christendom before the Enlightenment is palpable. For instance, he responds to historian Barbara Tuchman’s summary of medieval economic theory with, “As my grandfather would have put it, ‘Goyische kopp!’ — gentile head.” This old family attitude seems to make this otherwise very bright scholar’s interpretations of the last 2,000 years rather obtuse.

For example, the single most obvious bit of evidence in support of Pinker’s theory that there has been a long trend away from violence is the change in morality from the Old Testament to the New. Pinker recounts at length some hair-raising anecdotes passed on without criticism — indeed, often with approbation — in the Hebrew Bible, such as the tale of what the 12 sons of Jacob did to Hamor the Hivite. Yet when the author’s attention turns to the New Testament, with its radically different moral climate, he’s barely able to begrudge an acknowledgment of this epochal change. He quickly quotes Jesus saying, “I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

The Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon famously argued in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that early Christians were too nonviolent, that their pacifistic tendencies undermined the Roman army’s ability to keep out the German barbarians. But that goes unmentioned in Pinker’s history of violence.

Pinker seems to argue the opposite -- that Roman coversion to Christianity caused more violence, not less. Weird. I think that Pinker's biases are showing.

Freud declared totally dead

A WSJ op-ed says:

How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. ...

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen. ...

Freud ought to be totally dead, but he is not. NPR just reviewed a book on Freud and cocaine. There was no mention of what a quack Freud was, except that he wrote an essay on the medical uses of cocaine without even noticing that it is an effective local anaesthetic. Freud was a cocaine addict.

Not freed by DNA

There have been lots of examples of men convicted of horrible crimes, and later proved innocent by DNA evidence. Legally, some appellate court grants the convict a new trial because of evidence not considered in the original trial, and the district attorney decides not to prosecute. But here is such a story where the man was prosecuted again, and convicted again! The jury decided to believe the cops instead of the DNA.

Update: The NY Times reports on Dec. 12:

The conviction of a man in the 1992 rape and murder of an 11-year-old baby sitter, a case that his supporters have long believed was the result of a false confession, was reversed Friday night by an Illinois appellate court. ...

Mr. Rivera’s case was profiled in a Nov. 27 article in The New York Times Magazine.

Earlier this week, the prosecutor, Michael Mermel, who had convicted Mr. Rivera in his third trial, retired because of inappropriate comments he made about the reliability of DNA evidence and about alleged sexual activity by the victim.

I guess that is what it takes to free an improperly convicted man. DNA proof of innocence, and a long NY Times article that humiliates the pig-headed prosecutor into retirement.

Non-Christians can freely mock Christianity

Ever wonder what happens when atheists try to form a community? If so, just google atheist elevator and you will find thousands of messages arguing about some silly incident at an atheist convention a few months ago. You will wonder how they ever cope with ordinary human interactions.

Now there has been another convention and another silly incident. Just google atheist gelato, and read about how the atheists are trying to punish an ice cream shop because the owner was offended by their anti-Christian tirades. Leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers writes:

Others may accept his apology. I don't. Until he accepts that non-Christians can freely mock Christianity, it's a not-pology.

They accuse the Christian of being a bigot, but he was really just expressing offense at a convention speech.

Myers explains himself. He acts as if he is the victim, because he is an atheist. But nobody cares about his atheist beliefs. He read his explanation, and it will convince you that he is a creep that you would not want to be near.

50 years for decapitating a pig

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (CBS Washington) – A Portsmouth woman faces up to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to beheading her boyfriend’s piglet.

According to court documents, Ashley Fowler, 22, was breaking up with the piglet’s owner Zach Sawyer and wanted to play a prank first.

Sawyer’s mother told the Virginian-Pilot last year that the piglet’s head freaked her out when she let her puppy outside early one morning last February and saw it staring back at her.

“For somebody to come and do something like this was unbelievably sick,” Janie Sawyer told the paper.

Okay, it is sick, but 50 years in prison? Your local grocery store is stocked with meat from slaughtered pigs.

Conrad Murray killed Michael Jackson, and he faces a maximum sentence of only 4 years. Our society is unbelievably sick when it values a piglet more than the King of Pop.