Religion in Disasters - Haiti and more

That bunch of muppets, the Scientologists, turned up in Haiti and while some of them were doctors and stuff, fine, others were offering some wakko spiritual healing;

I knew we were traveling with doctors and EMTs, but I didn't expect to see 50 scientologists, in their yellow shirts with Volunteer Minister on them. They were completely unprepared for going to a third world country, let alone a disaster zone. One girl was in designer cowboy boots. I asked her if she'd brought any sturdier footwear.

"Oh no, these'll be fine."

I asked another guy what he'd packed and he said he hadn't bothered to bring soap or toilet paper or food, but that he'd just "buy whatever I need at Port-au-Prince airport." I couldn't break it to him.

They had no place to stay, and no supplies — their idea was to use the ton of money they had to buy food to distribute when they got there. But there was no food and no water. That was the point.

By the time we arrived in Haiti, after a stopover in Miami, we had missed three landing slots at the airport. Aid agencies — genuine aid agencies — from other countries were being turned away, refused permission to land. But we still got a slot straight away. The guy who ran our charter seemed to think that the Scientologists had some real influence with the US Government, who were assigning the slots.

The doctors and EMTs in our party headed straight downtown to start working. The Scientologists had nowhere to go, and nowhere to put up the big yellow tent they'd brought for touch healing people in. They went to the UN, and managed to get on to their list of approved NGOs somehow. That meant they could set up in the UN grounds.

But they had no-one who spoke Creole, and they brought the weirdness of touch healing into a very superstitious society. They'd leave the tent and come into the general hospital downtown, and try healing people. One of the doctors and one of the nurses told me that the wounded started coming to them to tell them they didn't want to be treated by the people in the yellow shirts.

One nurse told me that the Scientologists actually caused harm — they gave food to people who were scheduled to go into surgery. That then led to complications in the operating theater.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sound like Haiti would be better of if they didn't bother sending the Volunteer Ministers. Fuck-heds. What is staggering is that they got UN accreditation!!!

We also need to spend a moment considering the comments of fellow wakko-fuck-hed, Pat Robertson, who told the world that the quake was Haiti's own fault because they'd entered into a 'pact with the devil'...

"They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it’s a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another,"

So to get free of slavery Haiti turned to the devil for freedom but God would get revenge by killing their descendants? What. The Fuck. Idiot x 2.

Why do people end up thinking that their god supports such a warped view? Because in their head, God's view coincidently coincidences with theirs...which is why God can simultaneously be supporting Bin Laden and America, telling mass murders to kill and doctors to save etc.

If not this, then the question I have for the religious is why does God call so many paedophiles to the priesthood?

Move Over X-Factor: It's KLF Time

We're all com'in through now 'cos the KLF manual - How to Have a No.1 Pop Song is now online!

KLF - The Manual is the famous book by the KLF which describes how to get a number one hit. Written by Bill Drummund and Jimmy Cauty, who have become famous as The KLF, The Manual teaches you everything you'll need to know to be successful in the music business. The printed edition is no longer available, but you can read The Manual right here, right now, so enjoy it and learn from it.

Am currently enjoying the amazing Kutiman's Thru You...

'Climate Flaws' Are a Normal Part of the Process

The Guardian has an article about the fact the once of the climate scientists at the centre of the swifthack was trying to avoid too much scrutiny 'Leaked climate change emails scientist 'hid' data flaws' - this is important news and yes given how much the data and science (rightly) will be scrutinised, he was in a difficult position which he responded to badly. However the denialist are also part of the problem; right-wing oil money mixed with conspiracy theories has corrupted their critical faculties to the point where their shrill bleatings of the same old same old - they have cried wolf so often that they are are simply unable to respond when a real issue around the science arises. We also need to keep this issue in perspective and this is the key point of the article:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings.

And relating that back to 'Science for Non-Scientists' bit I've been writing, it is clear that the overall theory of global warming is having it component parts being modified as the science advanced - exactly what you'd expect too see - and expect to see more of it - yet all this is against a backdrop of continued strengthening of the theory, for even is new science modifies it, it also adds to it - which strengthens it.

Ignore any drip-shit who knows so little science that they confuse the ongoing (and normal) evolution of a theory with it's fall - not the same thing and not what is happening here.

Science for Non-Scientists: Part 2 - Theories and Stuff

From Hypothesis to Law

Following on from part 1, a basic discussion of the Scientific Method, I'm now going to move to looking at theories. In science ideas move thought a series of stages which signify their acceptance. This is an important concept because as the idea moves though the stages, it also signifies the amount of facts and data they backup that idea. Broadly these are;

- 1. Hypothesis: This is an idea that you wish to test out, a premiss or a concept. It is an idea waiting for evidence. However, confusingly this is what in normal language we would call a 'Theory'. A hypothesis can be anything: 'I think the moon is made of cheese', 'I think the planet is warming', 'I think milk comes from cows' - anything. There is also the null-hypothesis, which is where your stated premiss is a negative, so for example 'I don't think the moon is made of cheese', 'I don't think the earth is warming' etc. The null-hypothesis works by taking your hypothesis, then you then try to disprove it - this is considered a better method because you avoid the problem of confirmation bias (where you search for information that confirms of your prejudices, rather than what might be true). Hypothesis (and their nulls) are weak ideas that can (and are) easily overturned by contrary data and experiments.

- 2. Theory: This is a framework that explains lots of facts. It is what a hypothesis can become if you've gathered lots and lots of data and/or done lots and lots experiments and other people doing other experiments and data gathering that all arrive at the same point. Theories are not easy to get to in science and once something is considered a theory it is a mark of huge importance. It means that lots of divergent paths have come together to all underline the same point over and over. It is the opposite to what the word means in everyday speech. So when Darwin first published 'On the Origin of Species' it was a hypothesis - now, with it's added parts and divergent lines of evidence from biology, ecology, palaeontology, genetics and more it is considered a theory. Theories are strong ideas that are hard to overturn because not only would you need to produce data that the current cannot account for, but you would need to explain what happens to all the other lines of evidence that back up the theory.

Theories also tend to consist of inter-locking parts that work together. While a theory is hard to overturn, the interlocking parts can and are often modified, downgraded, upgraded etc. So when Darwin proposed evolution he only had one and a half parts of what the theory is today; he got natural selection and he sort of understood that there where other bits that had to exist for the theory to work, but didn't have the mechanisms to prove it. Later research filled the gaps and added the transmission of genes and random mutation of genes into the mix to complete the theory. Since then the relative importance of each of the bits has been/is debated and moved around - but the core idea of evolution only gets stronger as the evidence piles up.

- 3. Laws: A constant that is universal. This is the top stage for an idea in science. They are so strong that it is considered almost nothing can break them. They tend to be used for stuff where there are measurable and definable aspects to them - where mathematical predictions are at their core. An example would be Newton's Laws of Motion - for which there are definite measurements you can take that always end up being predicted by the laws. Laws can be overturned, but not very often. It would be a major, major event for this to happen.

So I hope you can see how ideas in science move though stages, if the idea is robust - it gathers more and more evidence and passes up the hierarchy of terms from hypothesis to theory to law. Like a martial arts student going from white belt to red belt to block belt as they accumulate skills and experience.

The Abuse of Theories

Put even more simply, a hypothesis is an opinion whereas a theory and a law is a fact. This is where you see people failing to grasp the concepts; they confuse opinion with fact. So a common pseudo-attack on evolution is to say something like, "If it is a fact, why do they call it a theory?" - this is a huge fail because that person does not understand what a theory in science is.

The second common mistake is to not understand that a theory is a robust and complex body of facts and ideas. Take the example of global warming denial; when a new bit of evidence comes out that suggests one aspect of the theory does not operate quite as it was thought, they assume the whole theory is broken and thus disproved. Not so, it means the theory may well get modified to account for the new data. This might sound a bit sneaky, but again remember that theories of large interlocking ideas with lots of evidence behind them; one part of the idea can easily be modified without breaking how they work together - indeed you expect modifications of the whole as the data piles up. Theories almost never stay the same - as new data arrives, it needs to be accounted for and so the theory advances - evolves, if you will. Here's an example; Some recent NASA research showed a cooling of the upper atmosphere. Denialists jumped on this as proof that the earth was not cooling. However, if they had bothered to read the whole thing, they'd see that one of the interlocking parts that the theory of global warming predicts is that this warming has no implications for climate change in the troposphere, a fundamental prediction of climate change theory is that the upper atmosphere will cool in response to increasing carbon dioxide.

File Under 'Denial of Reality'

Further evidence, if any were needed, that those who claim to be in-denial sceptical of global warming. Here's what one fuck-all bejonas says about 'evolution', the age of the earth being millions of years old and global warming in one huge bundle of horse-shit...

In a nutshell, this is what I believe:

1. Origin studies, (whether Creation or evolution) and the idea of "millions of years" does not belong in the science classroom because these are not testable, repeatable or observable; they are philosophical and accepted by faith.

2. If evolution is taught in school, students should be taught the truth about it and the scientific data surrounding it. Ideas that were once championed by evolutionists are no longer valid, much like the false science behind man-made global warming. Students deserve the truth.

What he is saying is that: Students deserve the truth provided the truth is a myopic Christian-fundamentalist fantasy that has been disproved time after time be the evidence. That sort of truth.