Doomwatch 50 year anniversary

I'm rewatching Doomwatch (1970-1972).  It’s Doomwatch’s 50^th anniversary, since it was first broadcast on 9^th February 1970.

As a science fiction fan, I'm used to being an early worrier about man-made apocalypses, and Doomwatch, the ultimate 'My God, man should not meddle with things he cannot comprehend, doctor!' program certainly was the sine qua non of early worrying about the apocalypse. Episodes covered pandemics, incorrectly tested pesticides, antibiotics erroneously used on livestock, nuclear-armed missiles lost from submarines and found by scrap-hunting yokels, the effects of western diseases on island populations, computer-monitored intensive care units where the computer is the sole Death Panel arbiter, the dangers of subliminal advertising, anthrax-contaminated military bases and invasive super lab rats in the sewers... and I'm only half way through. (And half the episodes are lost, so technically I'm only a quarter of the way through.) The one thing we haven't panicked over so far is global warming (but we haven't had global cooling either).

I note that the episode debunking the then commonly held belief that men with two Y chromosomes, XYY Males, are powerful, overgrown violent offenders must have worked, because nobody believes it today.

First broadcast in 1970, it is one of the first TV series I remember watching.  Many Brits my age will remember the episode in which pretty boy Toby Wren (Robert Powell) died while disarming a bomb. Well, that’s a lost episode, so you have to rely on that memory there. (The events leading to the explosion and Wren’s off-screen tragic death are recapped in a still-extant sequel in this DVD set). I certainly remembered the first episode, in which a biological agent (a 'virus', it says here), which was designed to eat plastic waste, gets loose and starts degrading plastic parts of such items as an aircraft, unfortunately while the plane is still in flight. I even have the book (by series writers Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis).

The show is astoundingly, outrageously sexist. I'm not just saying the usual ‘But Then Everyone Was In Those Days’, I'm saying it was off the freaking radar. I thought at first this was confined to Ridge, the porn-hairdoed playboy-scientist whose job was basically to schmooze while code-switching so that he could seduce secretaries (all secretaries are women in miniskirts) with a smooth line in dolly bird-pulling patter in order to pump them for information, and yet at the drop of a hat seduce Ph. D. molecular biologists (yes, even in Doom Watch 1970, women could be Ph. D. molecular biologists) with a smooth line of doctorate-level patter, and pump *them* for information. But it wasn't just Ridge slapping the secretaries on the bottom and ogling pharmaceutical salesgirls. At one point, the head of Doomwatch, Dr. Quist, sets up a Doomwatch job applicant, a lady molecular biologist (or possibly a lady heart surgeon or whatever), to have an argument with a previous extra-marital lover so she can 'get it out of her system', because everyone apparently knows women are incapable of logical thought if male pheromones are in the air. A bit later he reiterates that women are just hurtling balls of emotion. You'd think a man who had shouted "You Bastard!" at Ridge and had Ridge shout "You Bastard!" at him several times, along with half a dozen other shouting matches and incidents of Ridge’s insubordination would have noticed that men can also get a little overheated emotionally at Doomwatch HQ.

The science ranges from thoroughly sketchy – exemplified by the way all the Doomwatch team can perform all experiments necessary to investigate any issue, from psychology to computer science to nuclear physics – to some passable biology, including a couple of Big Pharma plots where the technobabble holds up to this day, fifty years later. I mean, I’m not saying I believe that the way to get a new drug approved is to have Quist and Ridge put a manila file folder on the government minister’s desk, but the technical language used leading up to that scene was pretty solid.

I’m looking forward to the final episode, Sex and Violence, which was never broadcast as the BBC did not want to get up the nose of the anti-porn campaigners of the day (for example, Mary Whitehouse) by showing an episode that questioned their motives and failed to support their premises. Lord Longford and Whitehouse seem like they’re from so long ago, but then again we’re still dealing with the numerous environmental and medical horrors Doomwatch tackled so now’s as good a time as any to find out what we early adopters were afraid of five decades ago.

Edit to add: You can buy this 7 DVD set on Amazon, and presumably elsewhere. Make sure you specify the TV show, as there is a related film out there on DVD.

Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (book, review)

Ian Buruma’s 2004 book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies told me more about my own culture than its enemies.

There was a recent kerfuffle about Ian Buruma, whose name I had not heard for some years prior. Apparently recently made editor of the New York Review of Books, he intended to publish an article by accused sexual assaulter Jian Ghomeshi. The staff warned against it, but Buruma allegedly insisted, and the resulting rather self-pitying article went down like a lead balloon with the public, culminating in Buruma quitting his post after only a year on the job. (The previous editors started in 1963 and served for 43 years (Richard Epstein) and 54 years (Barbara Silvers) so it’s fair to say the magazine’s editors normally have more staying power.)

His book, A Japanese Mirror, was well thought of in the 80’s, during the Japanese economic miracle. This new spat brought his name back to my attention. I remember once vaguely having believed he was Japanese, and indeed he’s published many books on Japan, though he’s not a native. (I think I mixed his name up with “burakumin” anyway.) On reading more about him, I saw that he’d also co-written the book I’m discussing today with co-author Avishai Margalit.

The brief description I read piqued my interest. It was written shortly after 9/11/2001 when “the West” (as in most Americans) first learned that they had somehow managed to make enemies of…someone. “Why do they hate us?” a colleague memorably asked me at work that morning, and from the press the answer came back, “They hate us for our freedoms.” This book is an attempt to look at this question less jingoistically. Indeed, it betrays traces of having been written in a hurry to supply an answer. Its argument that there is a enemy-culture-wide understanding of “Occidentalism” equivalent to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” falls apart on several occasions. It’s still an interesting book.

Ordinarily, the essay would have to establish that the “Orient” sees the “Occident” as a unified culture, and other than Oriental in ways similar to those established in Said’s famous book. It should establish that “Occidentalism” is a collection of stereotypes tending to dehumanize its enemy so that it can be destroyed without pity. It doesn’t. It looks at some of the flowerings of the Occident – like cities and modernity – and tries to make the case that cities and modernity are sufficiently different in the West than in the East to make them abhorrent. It also fails to make the case that people from the “Orient”, with their criticisms of “modern” life can have conflicts with the West in a way that Westerners themselves do not. It continually undermines its own thesis by situating the early criticisms of modernity in the thoughts of Western thinkers. 

In all fairness the book does spend a little time on actual non-Western thoughts about the West. A section on Japan, which adopted modern western methods early on and raised the ire of Japanese traditionalists; a section on Russia and the Eastern Orthodox Church which I was impressed by (though, knowing nothing about it, I may be too easily impressed) and a section on Islamism, which certainly filled me in on a lot I did not know, though it approached it from the aspect of jahiliyya (religious ignorance, nowadays referring to a species of Western idolatry based on love of material things rather than God) but not so much with the attempt to establish a Caliphate, with which I’m more familiar. Even so, the authors manage to site most of this thinking in Western roots – Communism, Nationalism, National Socialism – rather than endemic, non-Western thought.

In the first section, The Occidental City, the fear of Godless and amoral cities is traced back to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It seems somehow relevant but not…relevant to Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. Next up is Juvenal – a Westerner - writing about the iniquity of Rome, the city being a hotbed of lying, robbing and mercantilism. There’s the Goncourt brothers, describing a prostitute in Paris as moving in a mechanical way, literally a soulless whore of the city, of the “machine civilization”. William Blake, who abhorred the Dark Satanic Mills that blighted England’s Green and Pleasant Land. It references T. S. Eliot’s poetry about secularism in city dwellers, comparing the godless to animals.

The book cites Richard Wagner, where Tannhäuser’s Venusberg is “Paris, Europe, the West,” according to the man himself, having more “freedom and alienation” than our “provincial Germany with its comfortable backwardness”.

Another problem with cities is the fluidity of relations that are conducted using money. With money as the medium of exchange, emerging rules about money and the use of money are both godless and conducive to the growth of communities of strangers with no kinship bond or attachment to the soil necessary. Voltaire is cited. Friedrich Engels (also not Oriental) saw something “repulsive” in English cities as there was a mingling of classes without any societal rules, and with indifference leading to “atomization” of individuals pursuing “selfish” interests.

This reduction in the importance of position in the clan and relationship with the feudal lord leads to the newly alienated individuals feeling lost and forgotten when they arrive in the city, and the book talks about movies from India, Thailand and Japan in the 1950s. (It does not name any.) Finding no brothers in the city, the newcomer often turns to violence. The book goes on to say, “It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city.” If it’s universal, where is it between Occident and Orient?

Hitler (also notably a Westerner) in one of his Table Talks said membership in a Volk was “organic” while citizenship in England or the US was open to anybody. In another Table Talk Hitler said, “American civilization is of a purely mechanized nature. Without mechanization America would disintegrate more swiftly than India.” Japan may be foreign, he said, “But my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance.” Arthur Moeller van den Bruck also saw Amerikanertum (Americanness) as the society that was changing our way of thinking of the Earth as something we were dependent upon to something we could exploit for our own purposes. Trotsky is said to have described Capitalism as the “victory of town over country”. Johann Gottfried von Herder was a folklorist who “believed that nations were organic communities, which had evolved like trees, rooted in native soil”. “Nature’s children were better off, purer more authentic”, he thought. Buruma and Margalit say that for Romantics, “organic” is a good word and “mechanical” is a bad one (p 80).

The subsequent section, Heroes and Merchants, is about the love of comfort vs. the love of death.

It begins with German, not Oriental, romanticism with Thomas Abbt and his essay “Dying for the Fatherland”. Germany saw itself as different from the West – i.e. the French – typified by Napoleon. Germans loved their Kultur, their roots and Romanticism, which developed into a military culture based on honor. 

Werner Sombart, during WWI, wrote the book Händler und Helden (Heroes and Merchants) describing a battle between two Weltanschauungen (world views), that of shopkeepers like England and that of heroes like Germans. Sombart refers to “Komfortismus” meaning material possessions and living comfortably, as the enemy’s mode of living. In this worldview the bourgeois have a habit of hanging on to life and not dying heroically in order to achieve grand goals. They are happy to be individuals who will not fight for the greater good of a system of ideals. De Tocqueville thought similarly, though he was less hostile towards it. “If your object is not to create heroic virtues but rather tranquil habits…” Ernst Jünger wrote about the “closeness of death” being the rush that real heroes – Germans – craved. His brother Friedrich Georg Jünger fretted that Germany was “part of the west” now that it had internalized Western values including “civilization, freedom and peace.” German thinkers such as Heidegger made a particular enemy of what they called Amerikanismus, the love of America that they saw as sapping the European soul. The slavophile, says the book, believes the Will is superior to reason – and so did the Nazis (p92).

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck said liberal societies allow “everyone the freedom to be a mediocre man”. Preference is given to the everyday, not the exceptional. Examples given in the book are Dutch paintings and English novels which show ordinary life, not heroic, manful, out of the ordinary events. This desire for a quiet life represents a threat to a utopian society as it encourages people to settle for the ordinary, and not fight for an ideal. 

Another dislike of the West is based on its supposed rationality, its reliance on science and logic as opposed to contemplation and prayer. The section called the Mind of the West starts with a quote from Plotinus who differentiated between discursive thought and nondiscursive thought, nowadays referring to soulful contemplation (nondiscursive) and reasoning (discursive). Occidentalism is said to believe that the west is only capable of the latter and allows the spiritual to languish. The authors quip that Occidentalists believe the West can find the “best” way to do things, but not the “right” way to do them (p 76). Herder, the folklorist, thought that the world was frozen by philosophy, meaning the effect of cold reason (p 37.) One of Dostoyevsky’s characters is mentioned as convinced by Crystal Palace (at the Great Exhibition of 1851) that the West was committed to scientism, trying to engineer society in the same way they could engineer the magnificent glass palace. It was a “common Romantic belief”, the authors write, “that excessive rationalism caused the terminal decay of what was once the vital organism of the West. Rationalistic cleverness was held to be a Western disease: cleverness without wisdom.” (p80). 

To me, this dislike of the “Occident” by its enemies began to sound very much like the (Western) Romantic Left’s and the alt-Right’s dislike of “things nowadays”. And the book, which was written well prior to the recent rise of the modern alt-Right, acknowledges this very briefly: “some of the rhetoric now coming from the United States, specifically in neoconservative circles, comes close to this vision.” 

And that’s most of what I got from the book’s long list of western civilization and its discontents. That the Occident’s “modernity” – city living, appeal to science for the best way forward and rules for society that are limited to rules for the flow of money – has had internal enemies from the early days. The Romantic movement, a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and in many respects against the Enlightenment itself, may not have “dehumanized” the West preparatory to attempting to destroy it, but it did call upon the West to be more human and less mechanical, which by inference shows that they thought it was insufficiently human. If non-Westerners saw this critique and adapted it, it’s unsurprising and not a sign that “they” have characterized “us”. (The book is ringingly silent on whether or not a couple of centuries of regime change and carpet bombing may have had something to do with creating a “them and us” situation with the West, or an association of the West with Israel. Israel has become “a prime target of a more general Arab rage against the West, the symbol of idolatrous, hubristic, amoral, colonialist evil, a cancer in the eyes of its enemies that must be expunged by killing,” says the book. (p139) Note that it “has become” – passive tense. Nothing is proposed to have caused it.)

It seems to me that this strain of self-induced Occidentalism, having survived, would explain such disparate matters as the flight from science as a source of knowledge, the embrace of folk remedies, a desire for things which are “natural” and a preference for foods which are “organic”. A rejection of vaccination fits in well as a feeling that science may have found the best way but not the “right” way to deal with epidemic disease.

Of great interest to me was the-then subcurrent, and now fast flowing river, of far-right thought that agrees with this supposedly enemy Occidentalist dislike of godless, atomized, unheroic city dwellers concerned only for their own comfort and increasingly easy mechanisms of mercantile exchange. The book acknowledges this briefly but back then, in 2004, there was little to show what the alt-Right would become. The Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction and Accelerationism seek to overthrow modern capitalism and undo the Enlightenment, democracy apparently having been a mistake. Happy-go-lucky alt-right fans of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, and Aleksandr Dugin’s dismissal of modernity, such as Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos were just a gleam in the Right Wing’s eye. These modern western “thinkers” seem to fall right in with Buruma’s and Margalit’s statement that “The Romantic always feels that he is at the nadir of the fall, from which he looks up in the hope of redemption. The fall is marked by total fragmentation, estrangement from one’s own true self, alienation from one’s fellow human beings and estrangement from nature (or God).”

I would be interested in an updated look at the issue from Buruma and Margalit, now that they’ve had a little more time to think about who the enemies of the West – and the Enlightenment – may be.

Pictures from the Phoenix trip

More from the Phoenix trip. 

Part I here.

Part II here.

Phoenix's mountains are fossilized Sorting Hats. 

The aquarium has some nice jellyfish, among other things. (I went to the zoo too, but didn't take any photos.)

The Trump billboard went up the day I arrived and generated a lot of buzz. What the articles didn't show is the billboard is in an artist's community, not over a main highway. 

 The back of the billboard.

The billboard has since been vandalized, hey, it's the libs who always cause the property damage, son, the right wing people always respect property. 

A screen in Taliesin West. I assume the decoration is a representation of the property. I forgot to ask.

The legendary Sa Gyu Ro cactus of the S'Morean dessert.

Reduced Power Research

The Washington Post recently changed its motto to "Democracy Dies in Darkness". It's hard to tell whether that's a claim or a prophecy. The government is trying to make it literal, by reducing HHS grants for light.  Statnews reports that HHS Sec Tom Price wishes to reduce support for "indirect expenses" or "overheads" in research.

Price repeatedly suggested reducing the amount the NIH pays universities to cover “overhead” costs, like lab equipment and utilities. That would let the agency direct more of its funds to actual research, even if the overall budget were reduced, he said.
“I was struck by one thing at NIH,” Price said, “and that is that about 30 percent of the grant money that goes out is used for indirect expenses, which as you know means that that money goes for something other than the research that’s being done.”

"Indirect expenses" has a specific meaning to a businessman. They're things that cannot be directly linked to the product being manufactured. For example, they include electricity, rent, and telephone costs. His accountant will treat them differently from direct costs - for example, what accounting period the incurred cost hits the books, which affects spreadsheets and the bottom line. There are tax implications. I think indirect costs (unlike direct) are tax deductible. Usually a business will develop a costs rate. If indirect costs are normally say 30% of overall costs, then a change to 35% may need investigation to see if there is impending trouble.

If a researcher writes a paper, it's trivially true that institutional electricity and telephone costs can't be linked directly to the conclusion of the paper. However, it's also fucking trivially true that without them, the research can't be conducted and the paper can't be written. Every businessman knows this - that's why they keep an eye on the rate, not suddenly decide to defund indirect costs. What the hell are universities going to do if they lose support for rent because it's 'indirect'?

These people are as crazy as junebugs.

Never mind, we can all start using this: 

Gattaca, anyone?

A new bill in town, H.R.1313 - Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act. These 'wellness' programs already let employers do "voluntary" health testing on employees or charge a penalty fee. With the new law, they would be allowed to test for genetic issues.
According to Stat,

“What this bill would do is completely take away the protections of existing laws,” said Jennifer Mathis, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act “would be pretty much eviscerated,” she said.

The Governator speaks about gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering.

In which I watch UK TV to take my mind off things

So this morning, to get away from it all, I watched the BBC (it was 7:30 pm in England) and they'd given up on the news for one of those cute-puppy-can-bark-national-anthem-underwater type shows. We've just had a man I don't recognize talking about catching fish and being asked to recognize celebrities with last names that recall fish -example: Nicola Sturgeon, an autobiographical film on Gilbert O'Sullivan's first piano, an extremely enthusiastic Sikh man with an impenetrable Scottish accent talking about star cooks and what might have been some kind of cooking competition, and suddenly we're listening to DJ Pete Tong, Jules Buckley (?) and the Heritage Orchestra, giant glockenspiel to the fore, accompanied by what appears to be a cast of a thousand ravers, belting out house music versions of Fat Boy Slim's Right Here, Right Now and Whosit's Insomnia.

Trump features not.

The BBC's London has never looked more European, that sort of Romanian ambiance of very white people[1] playing Chicago dance music with wild abandon, and celebrating fishermen and food.

Shame England's decided to leave Europe. One non-fish related politician a couple of days ago came back with assurances that Trump would look favorably on the tiny rudderless kingdom, but Trump's speech today rather emphasized he's not going to give an inch in trade deals - it's America first all the way. I suppose England could file to become a suburb of Chicago, or Detroit, I forget which type of House Music these two are. 

Then I watched Room 101 and it featured a horse playing a recorder with one nostril (fingering supplied by a handy human) which struck me as hilarious. There was also that guy with the floppy hair that's on all these things - David Mitchell(?) managing to sound British and indignant over things like being thought a lesser person because you couldn't remember the names of the people you were talking to. I read the reviews for Room 101 and they all said it was tired, and dire. I guess my laughter threshold is pretty low today. 

Mood wasn't helped by either episode of East Enders (there's two a day? and it's still going? and it still has Dot Cotton?) which was so unrelentingly grim I felt a compunction to put them all out of their misery, but I didn't have any anthrax handy. 

[1] The Sikh guy is the exception that proves the rule.

Wall of meat

Post Modernism and Surkov

This is an interesting article from Jacobin but I'd quibble with the following statement: 

"The effect of the fake-news narrative was the opposite of what was intended: now the president-elect can stand behind the podium and throw the accusation right back at none other than CNN, the international symbol of American cromulence. It was an empty concept, just waiting to be recuperated by the far right."

As far as I can tell, it was invented by the far right, with exactly that outcome in mind. Here's a portion of an Adam Curtis documentary discussing Vladislav Surkov, the Russian who invented - or at least weaponized - this postmodernist confusion. 

Mike Pence, would-be Vice President, and Evolution

I keep seeing this Patheos article come up in my feed, so here’s my thoughts on Vice President nominee Mike Pence’s speech to Congress regarding the origins of man. A video of his speech is at that link.

A transcript of Mike Pence’s speech is here.

First, it’s only fair to Mike Pence to drag you back to 2002 when the news of the Toumai skull hit.  Paleoanthropologists are a singularly noisy bunch and the newspapers act like sugar-overdosed toddlers when it comes to human origins. Discovery after discovery is routinely touted as THE MOST AMAZING THING THAT HAS EVER BEEN DISCOVERED EVER.  The Toumai skull (Sahelanthropus) was one of those finds.  It was dated by looking at the features of the abundance of fossils with which it was found and was pronounced the oldest find on the direct line between ancient apes and humans. The original paper is as dry as a bone (no pun intended) but Nature ran articles with it that described it in the usual excitable terms.

Photo: Oryctes

Part of the scientific paper reads as follows:

“Sahelanthropus is the oldest and most primitive known member of the hominid clade, close to the divergence of hominids and chimpanzees. Further analysis will be necessary to make reliable inferences about the phylogenetic position of Sahelanthropus relative to known hominids. One possibility is that Sahelanthropus is a sister group of more recent hominids, including Ardipithecus. […]The discoveries of Sahelanthropus along with Ardipithecus 6, 7 and Orrorin 8 indicate that early hominids in the late Miocene were geographically more widespread than previously thought.”

Nature’s introductory blurb on the issue that contains the paper was not quite as reserved:

“… the new find will galvanize the field of human origins like no other in living memory — perhaps not since 1925, when Raymond Dart described the first 'ape-man',Australopithecus africanus, transforming our ideas about human origins forever. A lifetime later, Toumaï raises the stakes once again and the consequences cannot yet be guessed.”

Nature’s concurrent article on the find manages to introduce some confusing imagery that suggests Evolutionary Theory used to be ‘linear’ and ups the ante on the hyperbole:

“Toumaï is thought to be the oldest fossil from a member of the human family. It's a dispatch from the time when humans and chimpanzee were going their separate evolutionary ways. A thrilling, but confusing dispatch.
Sahelanthropus tchadensis - Toumaï's scientific name - was probably one of many similar species living in Africa at that time. "There must have been a group of apes knocking around between 5 and 8 million years ago for which there's a very poor fossil record," says anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington DC.
Toumaï is the tip of that iceberg - one that could sink our current ideas about human evolution. "Anybody who thinks this isn't going to get more complex isn't learning from history," says Wood [an anthropologist Nature interviewed, not the finder of the fossil].
"When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder," he says. The ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last.
Now human evolution looks like a bush. We have a menagerie of fossil hominids - the group containing everything thought more closely related to humans than chimps. How they are related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated.””

By the time all of this wawarara got to the newspapers, it was once again bigger than the biggest thing ever. So when Mike Pence, as a newish member of the House of Representatives, picks Toumai up as something worth proselytizing about to his insufficiently Creationist colleagues, it’s not as random an act as it might seem at first.

The rest of the story is less flattering to Mike Pence. First, he’s a Creationist, specifically of the Intelligent Design brand. That in itself is sufficient to make me hope he stays well away from the Executive Branch. I don’t mind creationists in their own houses, or their own churches, but when they get into government and start legislating what my body is and isn’t allowed to do (as Mike Pence already has), they can go pound sand. The Intelligent Design brand is the worst kind, as they have no intention of limiting their belief to the realm of faith, where it belongs, and insist it is a kind of science. It isn’t, unless ‘science’ means believing what you want and trying to find bits of evidence to support it, while discarding the mountains of evidence that refute it. (Hint: it doesn’t.)

Secondly, he’s not a very good creationist. His arguments are weak, misleading and incorrect in the details. Even if I shared his worldview, which I don’t, it would be wrong to support a half-baked thinker as the de facto president. (You know he would be; Trump would get bored with presidenting within a couple of months and leave it to him. He’s already said as much.)

Here’s a few of the problems with his impromptu Sermon on the Hill.

In 1859, a sincere biologist returned from the Galapagos
Islands and wrote a book entitled ``The Origins of Species,'' in which
Charles Darwin offered a theory of the origin of species which we have
come to know as evolution. 

No, Charles Darwin returned from the Galapagos in 1836 and wrote about the voyage shortly afterwards. He did not publish anything on evolution, or origin of species, until Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same theory independently of Darwin, prompting the latter to publish The Origin (singular) Of Species in 1859. Pence is a lawyer and says he studies this sort of thing as his “avocation”. Eliding the facts makes him look sleazy and partisan.

Charles Darwin never thought of evolution as
anything other than a theory. He hoped that someday it would be proven
by the fossil record but did not live to see that, nor have we.

The last clause is just not true; there are mountains of fossils in the record and all of them support evolution. I think he’s confused the fossil record of the human line with the whole fossil record and thinks it’s fairly sparse - I'll touch on that later on. It’s not sparse, but abundant. Or maybe he just wanted to slip a lie into the speech and hope it went down unremarked upon.

In addition to the fossils, since Darwin’s time, thousands of researchers have studied the developmental and molecular biology of tens of thousands of organisms and everything so far supports the theory of evolution and nothing disproves it. There are, of course, always arguments about what something means and whether it’s been correctly characterized, but there is literally nothing where knowledgeable scientists have shaken their heads and thought, “That shouldn’t be here. It can’t be fitted in to Evolutionary Theory.”

At the same time, we have Pence misusing the word ‘theory’. As many other people have noted, ‘theory’ does not mean ‘a just-so story I thought up that seems about right’. Relativity isn’t anything other than a theory either. A theory, as used by scientists, is a statement, or a model, that explains the evidence gathered so far, makes predictions about what may be discovered in future, and has been tested and confirmed.

In 1925 in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, this theory made its way
through litigation into the classrooms of America, and we have all seen
the consequences over the last 77 years: evolution not taught as a
sincere theory of a biologist, but rather, Mr. Speaker, taught as fact.

This is not true. Or rather, it's a classic piece of obfuscation. Teaching evolution was against the law. Scopes taught the theory of evolution in a school. He was prosecuted and LOST. Teaching evolution remained illegal and it was not introduced until the 1960s. (The verdict against Scopes was later overturned on a technicality but the law stayed on the books.)

Also, something can be both a theory and a fact. Do teachers tell kids that Malaria is caused by bad air? Why not? The Germ Theory of Disease is just a sincere theory!

Note how the official record phrases it as, “the sincere theory of a biologist”. Pence actually appears to say “sincere theory of biologists” on the video, but officially it’s been recorded as a little dig at evolution, since it was apparently only sincerely believed by one man.

I’m not sure what the ominous “we have all seen the consequences” means. I assume it’s the noisy kids with the saggy pants and the hippy-hoppity music who should get off our lawns.

Unless anyone listening in would doubt that, we can all see in our
mind's eye that grade school classroom that we all grew up in with the
linear depiction of evolution just above the chalkboard. There is the
monkey crawling on the grass. There is the Neanderthal dragging his
knuckles and then there is Mel Gibson standing in all of his glory.
It is what we have been taught, that man proceeded and evolved along
linear lines. 

This is a clever move, drawing such a vivid picture of simplicity that we all begin to see it in our mind’s eye, and then – bait and switch – tell us that this is what we’ve been taught. For a second we believe it. Then I recall I’ve only ever seen that ape-to-caveman-to-nice-modern-white-man picture in cartoons that lampoon it. And I’m old.

But…it’s the sensationalist write-up in Nature that gave him the ammo to say this. Nature said, 

"When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder," [Wood, an anthropologist Nature talked to] says. “The ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last.” 

Wood doesn’t actually mean the cartoon version, but you can step, uh, through a progression of intermediate simplifications and come up with the drivel Pence does without significantly twisting Wood’s words.

Wood’s next words are, remarkably, “Now human evolution looks like a bush”.

It’s looked like a bush for as long as I’ve been around, and that’s a fair amount of time. How often do you hear “the tree of life has many branches” or similar? Who knows why Wood (or the journalist) stressed this as a change in thinking. It doesn’t help.

Writers have often taken a leaf at the tip of the twig – let’s say a race horse - and traced it backwards down to the main branch - let’s say to Eohippus, the Dawn Horse - and written, ‘Little Eohippus is the ancestor of Seabiscuit’. It makes a good cartoon, and it’s a tidy story. There are plenty of other leaves and twigs, and this isn’t their story. Seabiscuit’s story doesn’t violate the principles of evolution but it does simplify it as linear. That’s because, if you first select the end point of your discussion, that makes each subsequent step after the origin look inevitable and pre-ordained. But Seabiscuit was not the only pinnacle of Eohippus’s journey. You could select a zebra’s twig as the end point and go back down to the Dawn Horse; you could select a quagga; you could select a Przewalski's horse. Eohippus would apparently lead inevitably to each of them. In other words, it looks like a bush, like the hominids.

But now comes a new find by paleontologists. In the
newspapers all across America, a new study in ``Nature'' magazine, 6-
to 7-million-year-old skull has been unearthed, the Toumai skull and it suggests that human evolution was actually, according to a new theory,
human evolution was taking place, and I am quoting now, ``all across
Africa and [on] the Earth,'' and the Earth was once truly, and I quote, ``a
planet of the apes on which nature was experimenting with many human-
like creatures.''

Pence isn't lying. He actually is quoting. But what is Pence quoting? The paleoanthropologist who found the skull? Nope. A prominent scientist? Nope. Well, then, that PR puff article in Nature quoting that guy Wood, surely? Nope. The quote is from the newspaper USA Today, which had pounced on the story in delight and introduced its own set of simplifications. Pence then deleted a word to make it appear that whoever he was quoting had said human evolution was taking place all across the Earth.

USA Today: “Paleontologists are hailing the discovery, reported in today's Nature, as the most significant in 75 years. The "Toumai" skull, found by a team led by Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France is the oldest ever found and the first found outside of eastern or southern Africa. It suggests that human evolution was taking place all across Africa and that Earth once truly was a planet of the apes on which nature was experimenting with many humanlike creatures.”

“[A]ll across Africa” ends one thought. “[A]nd that Earth” begins another. It’s not same as the phrase “all across Africa and the Earth” describing a location.

USA Today’s wording was already simplified from what was said in Nature:

“On the bright side, Toumaï's discovery suggests that, even if they were rarely fossilized, ancient apes and hominids roamed right across Africa. "Finding hominids in the Sahara was a bit of a long shot," says Wood. “So far, most fossil hominids have turned up in the east, with a few further south.”

Back to Pence:

Paleontologists are excited about this, Mr. Speaker. But no one is
pointing out that the textbooks will need to be changed because the old
theory of evolution taught for 77 years in the classrooms of America as
fact is suddenly replaced by a new theory, or I hasten to add, I am
sure we will be told a new fact.

Here’s where we start to get into either massive confusion or perhaps just an attempt to massively confuse. He’s still insisting on this 77 years (1925, Scopes, to 2002, the date of the speech) even though we’ve seen that is not the correct start date. He’s missed out the part of the article that might have helped him suggest that the text books be changed. After his “linear lines” remark, he could have reinforced that he believed it to be “a new theory” with a mention of the bush-shaped thing replacing the Mel Gibson-topped evolutionary line-shaped thing. I don’t know why he didn’t, but it strikes me as poor debating technique.

The Theory of Evolution and the family tree of humanity are related, but not the same thing. One is a tiny story taking place in a giant, ancient world.  A young fossil of 7 million years or so is not going to make much difference to the theory of evolution, and the change in textbooks, if it was ever made, would be the addition of one line to note the older fossil in the record, of unknown significance. Pence’s confusion seems to go back to the introductory remark where he mentions The Origin of Species, which does not discuss mankind. The origins of man are discussed in a later book, The Descent of Man, 1871. It might explain why Pence thinks the fossil record can’t be used to prove evolution; he conflates the descent of man with the whole edifice of evolution. He may even have read this in yet another article in Nature at the same time:

“Ten million years ago, the world was full of apes; five million years ago, the first good records of hominids appear. Between these two benchmarks, the human lineage diverged from that leading to chimpanzees. And yet the entire record of human evolution in this interval is frustratingly sparse - a few fragments remain, all of which can be fitted into a shoebox.”

Fit in a shoebox. The fragments on the human line between ten million years ago and five million years ago. Not the whole human line; and certainly not the whole fossil record.

Adding another bone – which is of course a fact, not a theory; there isn’t much that’s more factual than a skull – to the shoebox doesn’t change the theory. It’s the same theory, with another fact added.

The truth is it always was a theory, Mr. Speaker. And now that we
have recognized evolution as a theory, 

No, Pence has declared it to be a theory, a word he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t get to declare something is something else by fiat and then a sentence later say, “now that we have recognized it as such….” That’s cheating.  It's the definition of the logical fallacy called "begging the question".

I would simply and humbly ask,
can we teach it as such and can we also consider teaching other
theories of the origin of species? Like the theory that was believed in
by every signer of the Declaration of Independence. 

This is the “two sides to every story” gambit. If the “theory” of evolution is taught, then the “theory” the Founding Fathers espoused must be taught. They deserve equal time. But do they? If we teach these two theories, then we should also teach the theory that man was licked out of the ice of nonexistence by the cow, Audhumla, or the theory that the white race was created by an evil scientist called Yakub, or the theory that Lord Vishnu told Brahma to create the world out of a Lotus flower, or….

This has all been through the courts, too. As a lawyer, Pence must know that. You can’t refight this one.

Every signer of the Declaration of Independence believed that men and women were created and were endowed by that same Creator with certain unalienable rights.
The Bible tells us that God created man in his own imagine, male and female. He created them. And I believe that, Mr. Speaker. I believe that God created the known universe, the Earth and everything in it, including man.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Scientologists believe that Xenu brought millions of cold-storage humans to Earth 75 million years ago and stacked them around volcanoes, which were then blown up, releasing Thetans. Does that make it a good “theory”?

And I also believe that someday scientists will come to see

i.e. One day you’ll all find out I was right!

that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rationale explanation for the known universe. 

Scientists aren’t going to suddenly decide Intelligent Design is a scientific theory, either. It doesn’t explain the known facts and doesn’t predict any new ones. It certainly isn’t falsifiable. All its meager arguments have other possible explanations that fit in with Evolutionary Theory.

All the facts are already on the ground. All Intelligent Design would do is postulate an intelligent designer who made every living thing in the whole world look as though it had been bred through descent with modification, i.e. evolution.

Then you’d have to explain both how the Intelligent Designer got here and why he designed everything to look as though it hadn’t been designed. 

Researching this affair taught me two things:
1. Someone who spends his time trying to prove God Did It instead of studying the world as it exists might be a fine monk, but is less likely to be a good lawmaker
2. Anthropologists (and scientists in general) should recognize that every time they pop up with a quote along the lines of “My paper changes everything and everybody who came before me was wrong!”, there are people listening who will use that phrasing as ammunition to bring down both the abject rivals AND the boasting scientists. Stick to the science and we’ll all be better off.

Explaining Caucuses

Today is the day of the Iowa Caucuses. I know what a caucus is, but it's a fair bet you don't, so I got hold of the definition. It's from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which is my favorite book. 

Scene: Alice has been crying. Her tears turned into a flood, which caught up a number of small animals including the Dodo, who are all now cold and bedraggled.

'What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, 'was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'
'What is a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
'Why,' said the Dodo, 'the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, ('the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no 'One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out 'The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, 'But who has won?'
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, 'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'
'But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked.
'Why, she, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, 'Prizes! Prizes!'
Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round.
'But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse.
'Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. 'What else have you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice.
'Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly.
'Hand it over here,' said the Dodo.
Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying 'We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.

Now Scotland's staying, there's a coup afoot in England

No, you daft bugger, this is not how devolution works.

The English question, long buried, has rushed to the centre of British politics as David Cameron announced that devolution of further powers to Scotland will be dependent on a broader agreement that, in future, English MPs alone will vote on English issues.
[...]
The implications of Scottish MPs being excluded from the Commons on an array of issues is not just a constitutional thicket, but also a crude political nightmare for Miliband, the Labour leader, since he is likely to have rely on a phalanx of Scottish MPs to secure an overall majority for much legislation.

From The Guardian.

Devolution for England means that England gets its own parliament, preferably well away from London. Obviously I'd prefer the North, but Exeter is fine by me too. (Assuming Devon doesn't want its own parliament. It's just Cornwall that's pushing for independence, right?)

Cameron's plan, throwing the Scottish MPs out of the UK parliament on "English days" doesn't make an "English" parliament, it's just a form of coup, since almost all Scottish MPs are from the opposition party. I can see why Cameron wants it, but the man's a douche and should be restrained from doing anything involving constitutions.

In future, is someone from the majority English party going to be "English Prime Minister" on English-only days at Westminster and someone else from the majority UK party going to be "UK Prime Minister" on other days, relegating the English Prime Minister to the position of leader of the loyal opposition on those days? What a lot of codswallop.

How can you possibly have the same MPs voting for UK interests on one day and English-only interests the next day while sitting on the same benches in the same building? That's madness. And all of them soaking up exactly the same Murdoch/Square Mile largesse and favor because they are exactly the same people? Nope.

Miliband isn't falling for it, but he's not exactly King Arthur Redux either so I don't hold out much hope.

Devolve powers to an English parliament, and preferably devolve England for tax and policy purposes into Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex, East Anglia, London and Home Counties, and Devon and Cornwall. (I may have missed someone out. Soz.)

If Cameron gets his way, maybe I can get a Scottish passport based on my (presumed) grandfather's domicile when they finally do secede.

Devo Max and the Scottish vote

The referendum is over, and the Scots decided they want to stay with the UK.

I'm glad – I think that Scotland and England (and Wales and Northern Ireland) really are "better together" as the much-maligned campaign slogan says.  The loss of that many smart people and that much land would have crippled the UK. (You can read a million analyses of the loss to NATO for example.)

The good that came out of the campaign is that the Scots have been promised Devo Max. As I've mentioned before, that's great, particularly if the rest of the provinces (read: England outside the Home Counties) are given the same powers. I know Yorkshire and Lancashire would benefit from devolution that allowed them to set income tax rates on a regional basis (among other things) and although I don't know how say, Tyne and Wear or Cornwall think, I'm betting many there feel the same.

The fact is that Westminster  is a sphere unto itself. It governs based on what the City of London (a very small part of Greater London) wants and doesn't  deign to notice what the other 60 million people of the UK want. And the voters in the UK have the choice of the Conservatives, who promise something but I'm not sure what  they speak like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoon) and Labour, who are Conservatives pretending to care about working people in order to get votes.

Yeah, I was a card-carrying Labour supporter in the eighties. Not so much now.

Looking forward to Devo Max for Yorkshire.

President's address on ISIL, 10 September. The Six Sigma analysis

I worked for a big company for more than 20 years.  The company was goal driven, which is to say that every project, and every performance review, included a goal.

Some of the goals were mathematical, and a few were "voice of the customer".  But every project had a numerical goal.

You have 55% of the customer base in this sales territory? Your goal is to have 65%. Next year, we'll try for 70%. 

Your customer approval rating is 87%? It needs to be at or above 91% by next year. 

Your production line has 7 defects per million? Let's get that down to 3 defects per million. 

You met your production schedule 91% of the time? We need that to be 95% of the time, and get even better next year.

It's just weird that Congress – and the president – don't have any goals. They can hand-wave about how they'll improve the economy or – today's topic – "defeat ISIS" but there's rarely any actual metric they can reveal to tell us how they did.

President Obama's speech today was an example of that. 

Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy. 

First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions, so that we’re hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven. 

Second, we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground. In June, I deployed several hundred American service members to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi Security Forces. Now that those teams have completed their work – and Iraq has formed a government – we will send an additional 475 service members to Iraq. As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission – we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. We will also support Iraq’s efforts to stand up National Guard Units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL control. 

Across the border, in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters. In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its people; a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost. Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all. 

Third, we will continue to draw on our substantial counterterrorism capabilities to prevent ISIL attacks. Working with our partners, we will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding; improve our intelligence; strengthen our defenses; counter its warped ideology; and stem the flow of foreign fighters into – and out of – the Middle East. And in two weeks, I will chair a meeting of the UN Security Council to further mobilize the international community around this effort. 

Fourth, we will continue providing humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.

Transcript of the speech is here.

OK. I know it's your strategy, but the only number in there is 475 service members. The rest is waffle.

• What does "degrade" mean? How much capacity do they have, and how much needs to disappear before they are "degraded". 

• What does "destroy ISIL" mean? Wipe out everyone who's fought with them? Stop them using the name? What if some remaining fighters join "New Improved Al Qaeda" in 2016 - are they still ISIL?

• How many terrorists are "threatening our country" and how many do you need to kill to stop them threatening it?

• How strong is the (Syrian) "opposition" and how will we know when it has been strengthened enough?

• How much funding does ISIL get and how much will "redoubling" our efforts cut the funding. How will we know when we've "cut off the funding"? Zero dollars a year? Ten million? They made a buck fifty last year so we should continue to bomb?

• What are defenses, anyway? Is a trooper in Iraq a defender in any real sense of the word? If we're going to strengthen them, how strong do our defenses need to be? C'mon. Is it 50 billion or 50 million? What are we going to spend? How do we know when we've strengthened them enough?

• Are we countering the warp of the ideology, or countering the warped ideology? How much countering its warped ideology is enough countering? Is there a way to tell if the ideology is now straight? Or are we saying that we need to get positive Twitter mentions down from 300,000 a month (guess) to less than 200 a month (equally a guess)? Or do we have to neutralize fiery imams? If so, how many are there? How many need to go?

• How many foreign fighters go to the Middle East in any given time period and how many per year (or month) do we need to reduce it before the "flow is stemmed"?

• How much international mobilization is needed? What is the definition of "mobilized"? What's the goal? What's the stretch goal?

• How do you define a "community" and an "ancient homeland" and how many drivings from ancient homelands are acceptable? If ten people leave the US because of fear of ISIS, is that actionable? Or does every single Yazidi have to be at gunpoint before we can allow military action? 

And so on and so forth for the rest of the speech.

We used to say, in meetings as we planned our goals, "What does victory look like?" and "How will I know if I've succeeded?"

There are, believe it or not, regulations against saying you'll drive an (American) rival out of business, but it's certainly fine to state you'll meet their sales force one-one-one and get 1/3 of their business.

If a medium-sized (we were a few billion dollars) company requires all its managers to state outright what they hope to achieve with their project or their year at work, I think we should insist the POTUS do the same before he starts blowing people to bits on the other side of the world.

Fear and West Lothian in England

I don't suppose anyone needs my opinion on the Scottish independence referendum coming up in just over a week, but the subject came up in my (English but living in the US) household due to the sudden pro-independence surge in the polls this week. Here's my opinion:

Hey, Scottish people! Do what you want! (I know you were doing it already and didn't need my permission, but you can have it anyway.)

A digression:

One thing that's really rattling me is to hear (or see) American opinions on it. It sounds like most of us sleep on pillows embroidered with quotes from the Federalist Papers and spend our time recalling the Good Bits of Braveheart, with a bit of Gerry Adams/Sinn Fein propaganda leaflets from the 70's thrown in. Even that would be okay, if Americans got hold of a map and learned the difference between England, Scotland, Britain (and British), Great Britain and the UK (or UKOGBANI).

Here's a rather lame official video that explains it.





When everyone's watched it, perhaps there be a little bit less of things like this:

"Good for plucky Scotland finally getting rid of the British!" ß Scottish people are British.  

"Scotland is now trying to get rid of colonial rule!" ßThe English have not colonized Scotland and they don't "rule" it.  The government in Westminster (London, England) has representatives from Scotland, voted in by Scottish people. Scotland have their own Parliament, which votes on matters that have been "devolved" to the Scottish alone. The last few Prime Ministers were Scottish, or of Scottish descent. There is no equivalent English Parliament which some English people think is a bit rich. (It's called the West Lothian Question, hence the title.)

The colonizing the British Empire has done was partly done by Scottish people. About a third of the British Army that fought in the American Revolution were Scottish.  Lots of Canada is populated by the descendents of Scottish people. One bit of it is called New Scotland.

Back to independence:

The UK government is completely out of step with Scottish values – the Scots prefer a well-run welfare state over the rampant Neo-liberalism of the current government. Devolution did not come quickly enough nor grant enough powers and the Scottish see their cherished society being sacrificed to "austerity" while the English swallow Scotland's North Sea Oil revenue and give it to the 1%. I'm told that much of Scotland is now impoverished.

I know how that feels. I'm from northern England. Not from near the border, but from Yorkshire. The cities I grew up in are equally ill-served by the British government and equally impoverished. Everyone in the UK knows what happened: In 1979 the Thatcher government was elected and proceeded to dismantle the nationalized industries – British Steel, British Rail, and so on – and went on a furious ideology-driven rampage to close down the heavy industries and the coal mines that the north – and Scotland – depended on. The industries were "uneconomical" and "needed modernizing" but the London government did not put one millisecond of thought into what would replace them, how the workforce would be trained to do any new jobs, or for that matter, how to pay for the inevitable welfare payments that would ensue. Perhaps they thought the Invisible Hand of the Market would snap its invisible fingers and new jobs would appear? Well, it didn't. It would be difficult to exaggerate how angry I remain over this. Whole communities saw their men thrown out of paid work over a very short time frame; no new jobs or significant job training ever materialized. No one ever thought being a coal miner or being a steel worker was *fun* but it was steady, paid work.

The Blair government that followed 18 years of Tory wealth transfer from to the working class to the rich Tories were more Thatcherites in the disguise of the "Labour" party, and followed up with ten years of more of the same, plus some foreign wars. And as soon as the UK turfed Blair out, the banker-caused economic meltdown occurred (in 2008), leading the new government to bail out rich bankers, continue to transfer nationalized industries (such as the Royal Mail) to private hands at great profit to the 1%, all the while shrinking the welfare safety net as much as they dare.

The north of England and Scotland are blighted. Almost all the 1% work and live within the environs of the City of London, London, and the Home Counties. (Though they own palaces and vast swathes of hunting estates in Scotland.) But they are the 1% after all. If all of Scotland and northern England is taken out of the equation, that just makes them the 2% or 3%, meaning the other 97% of southerners are part of the blood-sucked, rather than the blood-suckers. It's just that the ruling class like nice things around them, and pay for local services, so the Home Counties have not been slid into the mire in the way the northern, previously industrial, areas have.

The Scottish are rightfully pissed off with 34 years of unending pilfering from the ordinary person in the street in order to line the pockets of the rich, and as a northerner, so am I.

If the Scots do vote for independence, I hope they'll let Yorkshire join them. (Huddersfield can remain an English enclave.)

Minnesota would-be governor explains AIDS. It's caused by sperm.

The internets are a strange place. On the one hand, you can learn a lot from them. On the other hand,  it's rife with "facts" so erroneous that they make your eyes bleed. And, although I haven't set foot in a children's classroom in years, and I know teachers who will strenuously disagree with me, I get the very strong impression that American education is so fluffy that you can quite easily graduate high school without being able to tell the difference.

In this case, Mr Loudly Incorrect is Bob Frey, a candidate for Governor of Minnesota. At least I assume he finished high school.  His views, according to MinnPost:

"But when questioned about his position on social issues, Frey added that it “does certainly need to be addressed for what it is. It’s not about the gay agenda but about the science and the financial impact of that agenda. It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle.”

Frey then explained his view: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there’s an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it's the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That’s why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”"

His son Mike Frey said the same thing, when testifying before the MN House Civil Law Committee about Gay Marriage.

It's utter bullshit, of course, and anyway fails to explain why gays shouldn't get married, as I imagine if they couldn't get married they'd just go in for premarital sex. In fact, I think premarital gay sex may have been observed in some societies already.  So there aren't many benefits to preventing gay marriage on disease-prevention grounds.

Tracking this statement down a little further, I was directed to this page -Towleroad.  Here, the authors are debunking a group founded by yet another Minnesotan politician, Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen, which put out bizarre videos that make the entirely incorrect claim about anal sex, above, as well as a number of other equally peculiar ones. Weirdly, the video is entitled “Sodomy, Health, Money, and HF-826,” which is to say it was produced to address a school anti-bullying bill that somehow can only be attacked by videos filled with endless descriptions of anal and oral sex.  (Full disclaimer: I have not read HF-826.)

Here's the video which makes the anal sex claim.  If you're short on time, start at 3:21.

It claims that the references are peer reviewed before publication.  There's only one reference in there – Judson et al's COMPARATIVE PREVALENCE RATES OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES IN HETEROSEXUAL AND HOMOSEXUAL MEN Am. J. Epidemiol. (1980) 112 (6): 836-843

Note the date.  It's from 1980. HIV/AIDS was not known at the time. Even the early name for AIDS, Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), was not in use before 1982.  Judson's paper, which according to that site has been cited only once, concerns the higher prevalence of syphilis and gonorrhea in homosexual men attending STD clinics compared with heterosexual men.   Other STDs had a lower incidence in gay men. The speculation on the cause?

"It is speculated that higher rates of gonorrhea and syphilis result from a larger mean number of sexual contacts, more potential sites of infection, and more hidden and asymptomatic disease, while the lower rates of the other STD result from a lesser susceptibility of anal mucosa to the causative agent(s) of NGU, herpes genitalis, and venereal warts or from a lack of pubic apposition (pediculosis pubis)."

Nothing about the sperm "burning" through the mucosa with its enzymes.  This is because that is not a peer reviewed fact. It is more along the lines of hooey.

Larry Burtoft's Setting The Record Straight, also mentioned, is a book. Not a peer-reviewed paper.

Sperm do have enzymes in a vessel at the top of their heads.  Called the acrosome, it contains hyaluronidase (the -ase ending to enzymes means "I eat it") to break through the egg-surrounding cumulus cells it comes into contact with (they are suspended in hyaluronic acid, sometimes known as "goo" as it functions by "gluing" cells together or lubricating things that should slide over each other), and acrosin, which dissolves the clear zone around the egg so that fusion can begin . However, in the vast majority of cases, the acrosome is only activated after the sperm swims in the uterine environment and meets the chemical signals coming from an egg.  Sperm are not born as armed nuclear warheads looking for mucosa to "burn through", or happily burrowing with gimlet-eyed ease through rectal skin that's tough enough to keep billions of fecal bacteria – some armed with hyaluronidase – out of your bloodstream.

Still, that's not the weirdest part about the video.  Anybody can fail to remember what a zona pellucida is (or lack the nous to look it up), but most people can ask "what if?" questions. Such as "In that case, why aren't women getting AIDS in their mouths in vast quantities?" and "What about heterosexual anal intercourse?" and  "Why aren't all female porn stars dying?" and "If it's just due to the membranes being thinner there, why don't we see AIDS cases going back thousands of years? and "What is this HIV thing we've heard about – are you saying it doesn't exist?' and "If sperms have little cell-dissolving bombs on their heads,  why don't all teenage boys have a permanent rash on their hands?

Do politicians have a duty to at least partly understand the world we live in, or is it our duty to kick out the ones that clearly don't have a clue? In this case, he hasn't a clue. Don't vote for him, for heaven's sake. 


9:37 pm edited for clarity.
10:45 edited because Minneapolis is not a state