Pharyngula is one of my favorite blogs on the interwebs. It merges two of my favorite intellectual hobbies: skepticism and science. Granted, all scientists should by definition be skeptics, but I am simply a humble member of the peanut gallery. PZ Myers is a scientist, however, and a brilliant one at that.

In his post today, he takes on the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing:

It’s the cesspit of the university, where all the pseudoscientific fuzzy-headed crap that fails is excreted, polished, gilded, and held on high as a beacon of New Age light to lead the gullible into a sewer of feel-good futility.

Apparently, a homeopathy event (homeopathy is the preposterous claim that ‘medicine’ works better when diluted with as much water as possible)was sponsored in the health sciences building at the University and Mr. Myers really blew his top. The whole post is worth reading (read it here).

I’m posting this because it’s now a matter of policy: this is a public university pissing money away on NONSENSE. As a fiscal conservative, I would love to see this 100% pure and uncut bullshit eviscerated from budgets as soon as possible.

Ok, so I’m probably the only person who calls him Dick Dawkins and he would probably loathe this contraction of his name. I think it’s wonderfully reminiscent comic book and film noir detective heroes uncovering the truth despite all odds.

Appropriately, Mr. Dawkins’s life has been devoted to uncovering the truth. As an evolutionary biologist, he has contributed greatly to our understanding of human origins and the mechanisms of evolution. He is perhaps most famously the author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. I find his lectures on the origins and probability of life, the massive scale of the universe, and the wonder of nature to be incredibly inspiring. This lecture is probably one of the most conversational and easy to understand (probably because Mr. Dawkins is lecturing to a younger audience). It’s also nice because it includes several demonstrative illustrations. It’s also super 90’s chic! Enjoy:

As Andrew Sullivan points out in a blog post today, things are not looking good for Charlie Crist’s nomination for the Florida senate seat. I drew a cartoon on this subject not long ago about how Crist and other moderate republicans are being forced out of the party. Here’s another cartoon after Lindsay Graham voted to confirm Sotomayor.

It looks like both parties are moving to the right at the moment – the Democrats are incorporating more independents and blue dogs, and the Republicans are beating the drum of conservative credentials, to the point of even considering a mandatory loyalty exam to receive GOP campaign support. Suddenly Michael Steele is the voice of reason.

A commenter on the site, Turino, posted this video in response to a discussion that stemmed from my cartoon “Palin for President” (November 14, 2009). I love Ted talks and this particular presentation is certainly thought-provoking. Jonathan Haidt brings up some intriguing psychological studies that illuminate morality and group behavior.

Mr. Haidt challenges us to escape our own self-righteousness, which he describes as the “natural state” of humans on questions of morality. Easier said than done, but I think it’s something worth reminding oneself on a regular basis.

Thanks again to Turino for the tip!

The esteemed art critic Robert Hughes has covered developments in the art world since the early 1970s. He has been one of the loudest voices protesting the art-for-the-art-market’s-sake that has dominated museums and auction blocks in the last twenty years.

Personally, I find myself in utter agreement with Mr. Hughes:
-What is the message of this generation of artists? I would argue that they are intellectually and aesthetically bankrupt.
-If the ‘artist’ serves only as a conceptual genitor (ordering teams of interns to actually create the art), what is the point of creating it at all? Apparently, so that it can be sold.

The program “The Mona Lisa Curse,” for which I have created a youtube playlist and embedded it below, succinctly outlines the incestuous relationships between ‘artists’ such as Damian Hirst and Jeff Koons and their ignorant, super rich clientele. The real danger, Mr. Hughes shows, is that this fad for art as a collectible is pushing out the meager budgets of museums and leaving them at the whim of rich collectors. These wealthy collectors, now the main buyers of works available at auction, can lend their property to museums to increase its worth, and thus control the narrative of the art world.

Joe Windish, tech editor at The Moderate Voice, posted today about a California program called “ReadyReturn,” which takes the information that banks and your employer already are required to send to the state and plugs it into a tax return for you, eliminating the most onerous part of filing.   It also has cost-saving benefits:

California does it, and it’s a real money saver. They say it costs $2.59 to process a paper return; 34 cents to process a “ReadyReturn.” Funny thing, though. The state only spends $10,000 to promote it.

The New York Times offers an explanation as to why the program is so under-touted:

“Publicity remains one of the most formidable obstacles,” said John Chiang, the state’s controller.

California has budgeted only $10,000 for getting word out. The meagerness of the funds allotted for the ReadyReturn program reflects the strength of its political opponents, Mr. Chiang said. The most vigorous opposition comes from companies that sell tax-preparation software, “principally, Intuit,” he added.

INTUIT, which publishes TurboTax, does not dispute this description.

“We’re a California company and actively participate in the political process,” said Julie Miller, a company spokeswoman. “Our position has consistently been that ReadyReturn duplicates what is already available.”

I, for one, would love to have a simpler tax filing process in place.  This is, unfortunately, a circumstance in which a market inefficiency is present – California is providing a service free of charge, but political opponents are doing everything they can to prevent consumers from accessing full and complete information.  Intuit would rather keep taxpayers ignorant in order to fleece them for another $35, rather than see the market for tax filing be truly free, thus leading to the demise of TurboTax and their other products.

This is a pretty clear example of a market inefficiency promoted by a dominant industry player…

After spending a painful long weekend without internet access, I’m back in the nation’s capital.

The buzz in DC is all about the race for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. No one really knows what the outcome will be this evening, but Ezra Klein and David Weigel took on the issue on bloggingheads today. Their conversation highlights the structural elements of our democracy that make this Senate seat so important (the security of the Democrats’ supermajority), and whether these rules are arcane and backwards:

The NYTimes’s editorial today spoke out against the free hand given to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan:

…the government has not prosecuted a single successful case for killings by armed contractors overseas. An Iraqi lawsuit against American military contractors by Iraqi victims of torture at Abu Ghraib was dismissed by a federal appeals court that said the companies had immunity as government contractors.

Furious that the Nisour Square case was dismissed, the Iraqi government said it might file civil suits in the United States and Iraq against Xe. But its chances of success are not considered great. The families of many of the victims of the rampage accepted a settlement from Xe last week, worried that had they pursued their civil suit they might have gotten nothing.

There are many reasons to oppose the privatization of war. Reliance on contractors allows the government to work under the radar of public scrutiny. And freewheeling contractors can be at cross purposes with the armed forces. Blackwater’s undersupervised guards undermined the effort to win Iraqi support.

Amen to that.  It’s hard to rally support for this issue, as the government can claim some separation of responsibility.  If U.S. troops had perpetrated similar crimes, the military justice system would have dealt with them far more severely.  Though it goes largely unnoticed, many U.S. soldiers have been convicted of illegal killings in the Iraq war and are currently serving long sentences.  It’s unfortunate that these killings take place at all, but there ought to be some form of accountability in place.

As a nation of laws, we cannot continue to work within the margins of established international and domestic justice systems.  Guantanamo Bay was an attempt to find a way to lock people up without any possible legal repercussions, and immunity for Blackwater (Xe) is a way to wage war without worry of embarrassing legal convictions against Americans fighting in Iraq.   It’s clear that the losses from abandoning international law far outweigh any tactical gains in the fight against extremism.

I don’t always agree with Fareed Zakaria, but he’s spot on in his column in the Washington post today, Dont Panic.

Overreacting to terrorist attacks plays into al-Qaeda’s hands. It also provokes responses that are likely to be large-scale, expensive, ineffective and possibly counterproductive. More screening for every passenger makes no sense. When searching for needles in haystacks, adding hay doesn’t help. What’s needed is a larger, more robust watch list that is instantly available to all relevant government agencies. Almost 2 million people travel on planes in the United States every day. We need to isolate the tiny percentage of suspicious characters and search them, not cause needless fear in everyone else.

We often overreacted during The Cold War, and I’d like to furnish a Herblock cartoon that was drawn in 1949 and still resonates today:

Library of Congress Source: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/fire.html

France has announced that it may begin levying a tax on advertisement clicks (yes, a tax on clicks) in order to reallocate resources to industries “hurt” by the digital boom.

To get it out of the way, I’ll take a couple of sentences here to express an indignant rant : Seriously, are you kidding, France?!? This is like taxing printing presses in order to prop up scribes. This is like taxing neuroscientists to prop up phrenologists. This is like taxing the inventor of the wheel to give cash to some asshole who drags his crap on the ground!

Anywho, the main thrust of the proposal is to establish a form of protectionism. The idea here is that France doesn’t receive tax revenue from online advertisers who make money from French people who click on ads. Hellloooooooo, this is the nature of the internet. French companies have just as much of a chance to make revenue off of foreign clients (where they won’t be taxed for their clicks by each respective government). What the French government basically wants to do is tap into the success of international firms and to give a handout to some domestic producers. This kind of tactic is employed by various banana republics and it’s not exactly a recipe for competitive domestic incentive structures. Protectionism, like cheating in school, really only hurts those who practice it.

Furthermore, the Sarkozy administration endorses:

“a proposal to force the music industry to offer their songs across all digital distribution platforms if they didn’t negotiate such deals voluntarily within a year. Such a move is necessary, he said, because of the collapse in sales of CDs and the absence of a corresponding rise in online music sales.”

Honestly, who the hell is the French government to tell the music industry how to run itself? And yes, some sectors of the music indistry are struggling and I’m sure the last thing they need is a mandate that they are obligated to fulfill.

I was at one time under the impression that Mr. Sarkozy had a rudimentary education in economics, but he seems to be doing everything possible to dispel such a myth. Here’s the icing on the cake:

By the middle of this year, Sarkozy also wants to give French teenagers vouchers worth €200 to spend on online music services, with half the cost to be subsidized by the government.

Young people, he said, have been conditioned by the press to expect online content to be free, where previously they had to pay for magazines and newspapers. That expectation is one of the reasons why young people won’t pay for music, he said, and the goal of the music vouchers would be to get them used to paying for online music once again.

Oh, I SEE. So the way to cure kids of their expectations that music is free is to give them a 200 EURO voucher to ‘buy’ music for free, eh? Makes PERFECT sense.

Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6947706/France-plans-Google-tax-on-internet-searches.html

http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=16504&Title=Why_France%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%98Google_tax%E2%80%99_sounds_like_protectionism

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186356/president_sarkozy_adds_his_support_to_french_google_tax_plan.html