Dear 'experts': Don't bother auditioning for 'Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?'

Idea for title borrowed from Jimmie Bise, video swiped from The Blog Prof:

For crying out loud! These idiots were urging us to undo two centuries of economic growth on the basis of bug-riddled computer code? I'm convinced that the whole purpose of this climate-change crap was for a bunch of universities to get taxpayer money. "Give us grants so we can buy super-computers and save the world!"

Exit question: What's your over/under on the number of gigabytes of porn on the hard drives of those CRU computers?

'Trust us -- we're scientists!'

As our teachers used to say in math class, "show your work":

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

(Via Memeorandum.) My Catholic friend Pete at Da Tech Guy knows how to push my Protestant buttons:

Q: What do the "Global Warming" people have in common with some forms of Protestantism?
A: Apparently they also are making the argument that the salvation of Global Warming should be a question of faith and not works.

Right, Pete. While we await your Ph.D. dissertation on the physics of transubstantiation -- zing! -- let's agree that there have always been religious overtones to environmentalism. One reason that abortion is such a sacred right to some Baby Boomers is that they were deceived by the "Population Bomb" hoax of the 1960s and '70s, when neo-Malthusians warned that the alternative to draconian population control was a Soylent Green-style dystopia.

For decades, elitists have sneered at those of us who are skeptical toward the claims of what I describe as the Temple Cult of Scientism:

The High Priests perform their statistical rituals and the cultists genuflect reverently before their idol, Science.

The federally-mandated triumph of secularism in public education -- Engel v. Vitale, Abington School District, Epperson v. Arkansas -- has steadily enlarged the credulous congregation of the Temple Cult.

These landmark Supreme Court decisions stigmatized religion as unconstitutionally subversive of the educational process, ensuring that future generations of American youth would be inculcated with a sort of neo-Manichean worldview, wherein traditional religious belief had nothing relevant to say about science, history, psychology or any other realm of human inquiry.

Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver famously observed, and this legally-certified declaration that there was no overlap between Faith and Reason has not merely marginalized Faith, it has also undermined Reason. When we behold the religious fanaticism of the Temple Cult in regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), we must understand this irrational fruit as a natural product of the poisoned tree of Scientism.

Philip E. Johnson's Reason in the Balance demonstrated how Darwinism -- one of the bedrock tenets of Scientism -- inevitably perverts not only science but also education, law and many other intellectual endeavors. It is but one step from this sort of Scientism to the revolutionary terror of Jacobinism, for when men jettison the anchor of Faith, the selfish conceit of Reason makes them dangerous fools, as Edmund Burke explained:

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who will not look backward to their ancestors. . . .
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government; nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.

This temptation to think that we are morally superior to our ancestors, you see, is the road to hell that Scientism paves. You need not be a Bible-thumping fundamentalist (like me) to notice how the adherents of Darwin tend to smuggle into their arguments a predisposition toward Whig history, wherein humankind is relentlessly struggling upward on the road of Progress. Here it is best to recall the brilliant aphorism of G.K. Chesterton:

"My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."

Exactly. If everything is Progress and Progress is everything, then decline becomes an ontological impossibility and -- by logical extension -- today's Congress is morally superior to the Founders who gathered at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787.

Anyone who doesn't understand how such a worldview undermines the Rule of Law and puts our rights at the mercy of legislators and bureaucrats has forfeited any claim to intellectual superiority that would qualify them to lecture the rest of us about Science.

Christopher Hitchens is both intelligent and an atheist, but intelligent men who suppose themselves smarter than God are ultimately defeated by their own syllogisms. Man dies and God endures, and if man's conceptions of the eternal and infinite -- the Alpha and Omega -- are sufficiently flawed as to be vulnerable to literary criticism or scientific dispute, then this is merely because, as the Apostle Paul said, "now we see through a glass, darkly."

There are no accidents, you see, and those who seek God earnestly and diligently will not forever be frustrated in the search. In checking my citation just now, I was directed to I Corinthians 13, which rather famously addresses the relationship between faith and works:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Truly there are no accidents, and by his seeming joke about Protestantism, my Catholic friend Pete has directed me by the roundabout route toward the passage that justifies a Protestant creed: Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia.

We end, then, with Paul's meditation on love and charity. Considering the season -- especially Mrs. Other McCain's decision to be a one-woman stimulus program on Black Friday -- I am tempted to declare myself a fit object of charity.

However, I am merely a greedy capitalist blogger, and this is a fee-for-service operation, so if you wish to show appreciation for my services in vindicating Faith and Reason, $5 or $10 in the tip jar might do the trick. If your prefer even more shameless capitalism, we'll count this as the latest installment of our second annual Holiday Book Sale. And don't forget: What to Give Your Wife for Christmas.

'Cap and Trade Is Dead'

Well, duh! This is kind of obvious, isn't it? Once the fraudulent "science" behind the global warming scare was exposed, Al Gore became the Piltdown Man of American politics and that whole Kyoto-style agenda was as obsolete as the mullet and parachute pants. Delicious commentary from Eric Raymond:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as "deniers" and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

Unlike crow, schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. And I remind you what I said in June:

The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Kind of like the Obama administration's economic plan, really. It didn't take any prophetic power to declare last December, "It Won't Work." And the emerging obviousness of the failure of Obamanomics is just further confirmation of the fundamental truth that liberalism is always wrong.

Now, if only we can get liberals to agree that Florida will win the SEC championship next Saturday, an Alabama victory is guaranteed.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: G.M. Roper:

The recent exposure of emails, data and software from the pre-eminent global warming organization -- the Climate Research Unit -- shows not only that scientists are human and thus tribal, arrogant and sometimes deceitful, but also the modern process is inadequate and antiquated.
Skeptics have argued that critical data had been "cooked," and scientists had been refusing requests for data. Now we know that not only was the data misused and that the scientists had been engaged in a coverup and suppression of dissent, but also that they are not even able to understand their own data. . . .

Read the whole thing. What we need, I tell you, is a scientific consensus that Florida will win next Saturday. Get the CRU working on it. Roll Tide.

More 'scientific' kookery

Dr. Jones awaits the global-warming gotterdammerung:

If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.

Via Tim Blair, who observes, "Of course, if change doesn’t happen, it won't prove that science was wrong. It'll prove that certain scientists were."

Fanatical certainty among misguided experts is by no means limited to the global-warming cultists. The field of psychology, for example, has been whipsawed by successive eruptions of the "expert consensus." There was the whole Freudian analytical couch-trip trend, pre-frontal lobotomies and eletroshock treatments, deinstitutionalization and so on, until today everything is attributed to neurochemistry. This latest consensus is probably wrong, too.

I'm eagerly awaiting the day when psychiatric practice comes full circle and the expert consensus declares that all mental illness is caused by masturbation, demon possession or both: "Nurse, bring the holy water, it's time for Mr. Sullivan's exorcism."

Lies, damned lies, and 'climate change'

One of the biggest scientific scandals of our age, described in two sentences:

That supposed scientific "consensus" about global warming may actually be a conspiracy. E-mails from a British climate-research organization -- obtained by an Australian magazine, Investigate -- disclose scientists discussing a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" of global temperatures in their data.

More reaction at Memeorandum.

UPDATE I: Before we go any further, let's understand why this is so important. There have always been scientists who have disputed the "consensus" about global warming. Many of the alleged "experts" whose authority has been cited on behalf of this consensus are not, in fact. especially qualified in the field of meteorology, and some of the most prominent spokesmen on the topic of climate change -- e.g., Al Gore -- are no more qualified than you or I to speak as experts.

With the assistance of a pliant media establishment, the global-warming crowd has created the impression that all qualified experts agree with their theory, and that all skeptics are either biased or unqualified. The consensus-mongers have arrogated to themselves the authority to decide who is or is not an expert, and what does and does not qualify as evidence. Once this was Jedi mind-trick was accomplished, it was predictable that any data contradicting the "consensus" would be ignored or suppressed.

Remember this, the next time you hear some media elitist carping about "anti-intellectualism."

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey quotes extensively from the Climate Research Unite e-mails, and comments:

Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? . . . [H]ere we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. That’s not science; it’s religious belief.

Kind of like economists who think the Obama/Pelosi agenda will lead to recovery.

Expect further updates . . .

Safe sex not so safe after all

Ah, you can't fool Mother Nature!

The oral contraceptives Yaz and Yasmin are the top-selling pharmaceutical line for Bayer HealthCare, largely as a result of marketing that presents them as much more than mere pregnancy prevention.
Yaz, in particular, the top-selling birth control pill in the United States, owes much of its popularity to multimillion-dollar ad campaigns that have promoted the drug as a quality-of-life treatment to combat acne and severe premenstrual depression. . . .
But recently, the Yaz line’s image has been clouded by concerns from some researchers, health advocates and plaintiffs’ lawyers. They say that the drugs put women at higher risk for blood clots, strokes and other health problems than some other birth control pills do. . . .

(Hmmm. Pro-choice fanatics vs. the tort bar. Kind of like Freddy vs. Jason there.)

Bayer said that the company had been served with 74 lawsuits brought by women who charge that they developed health problems after taking Yaz or Yasmin. . . .
Birth control pills work by altering a woman’s hormone levels. Researchers have long known that taking a combination hormone birth control pill -- which contains estrogen and a progestin hormone -- can increase the risk of stroke and blood clots in the legs and lungs. . . .

What good is "choice," if you're dead? The very idea that women would voluntarily dose themselves with synthetic hormones, which have the effect of preventing their bodies from doing what nature meant their bodies to do . . .?

Look, when I was in college, I had a buddy who was into weightlifting. He scored some Dynabol (a popular steroid) and asked me to read through the enclosed warning -- an 11-by-14-inch sheet filled with tiny print on both side -- about the side effects. (He was good at weightlifting. Reading scientific literature? Not so much.)

When I got to the part about testicular atrophy -- hey, that was all I needed to read to know that I was never going to use that stuff. (Whatever happened to my weightlifting buddy? I don't know. But if he kept shooting that Dynabol . . . raisins.)

Putting fake hormones into your body is a bad idea, to be avoided except as a medical necessity. If a woman is bound and determined not to have babies -- well, tell your husband to start a blog, which tends to lower your risk of having sex. (To my wife: That was a joke, honey.)

When the Pill was first introduced, a lot of people didn't think about the potential for long-term side effects. It was Science, after all, and Science is never wrong.

Lots of girls in the Baby Boom generation started on the Pill when they were still teenagers and stayed on it year after year until, finally, they got married and said, "OK, I'm ready to have babies now."

Shockah! Science had figured out a cheap and easy way to turn fertility off, but turning it back on? Not so much.

Lots of 50-something women out there with no kids, thanks to Science. Although they didn't expect it when they started taking the Pill, birth control ended up being permanent for them. Turns out "choice" meant not really having a choice.

And then there those other side effects -- well, we don't know for certain that they were actually side effects, because determining direct causation can be difficult when you're talking long term consequences. It's kind of weird, as you get to be in your 40s, you start hearing about these girls you knew from high school dying from weird cancers, or developing strange, lingering ailments that doctors can't really find a way to treat effectively.

My wife and I have six kids, and maybe you don't want to have that many. Fine. But don't think you can fool Mother Nature forever.

Sometimes, Mother Nature is a bitch.

A 9-year-old transsexual?

From the Department of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:

A boy of nine has returned to school as a girl in what is believed to be Britain's youngest gender swap.
Children at the school in southern England were told the child had left and been replaced by a female pupil.
The child came dressed in girls' uniform with long hair tied in a pink ribbon.
The case comes after it was revealed yesterday that a 12-year-old boy had started his first term at secondary school in southern England as a girl.
Some parents at the school have criticised staff for not informing them before telling children about the gender change at a special assembly. . . .

Via Blogmocracy. Exactly how soon this child will begin hormone therapy, castration, etc., is unknown, but the mind boggles at the idea. Next on Oprah: "Shemales in Elementary School"!

Remember earlier this year, it was reported that a German boy, Tim Petras, who had begun hormone treatment at age 12 and, at age 16, underwent sex-change surgery to become the world's youngest post-operative transsexual, Kim Petras. We had been warned by Judith Reisman about this trend toward pre-teen transsexuals (???) in January, at which time I responded:

Mister Huxley! Paging Mister Huxley! Mister Aldous Huxley, please pick up the courtesy phone . . .

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. However, The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged.

Experts get me off the hook

Vindication, at last! Mrs. Other McCain will be pleased to see the latest scientific study proving that most women have never had sex with me.

(Hat-tip: NewsAlert.)

UPDATE: A not entirely unrelated development: Who is Dita Von Teese, and why is she nearly naked?

UPDATE II: More scientific experts:

[W]omen have sex for many reasons but romance and passion come rather low on the list, a new book has revealed.
"Research has shown most men find most women at least somewhat sexually attractive, whereas most women do not find most men sexually attractive at all," Why Women Have Sex authors Cindy Meston and David Buss said.
One said she did it for a spiritual experience, proclaiming: "It's the closest thing to God."

That was my wife's answer . . .

Hat-tip to Allah, who is an atheist. What does an atheist woman scream during the throes of passion?

"Oh, science!"

What's missing from the biography of Fox 'Sexpert' Yvonne K. Fulbright?

Yeah, all the publications, the degrees from hither and yon, blah, blah, blah.

Is she married? If so, how long has she been married? Does she have any children?

I point this out because I was just looking at the sidebar feeds at NTCNews.com -- a good source of fresh blog-fodder -- and happened to notice the headline of her latest column, clicked over, and thought . . . hmmmm.

Adultery has payoffs for a woman. For example, having someone else interested in her means more resources.

So I'm thinking that this sort of morally-neutral anthropological attitude toward adultery doesn't make her a Girl Just Like The Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad, y'know? If the "sexpert" happens to be single, my hunch is she's likely to stay that way.

Maybe some of you bachelors out here can spot me on this. Maybe attitudes have changed, but I'd suspect guys would be more interested in marrying a woman who expressed horror and repugnance at even the slightest suggestion that she would ever cheat on her mate. "Oh, no -- I'm strictly a one-man woman!"

On the other hand, if Fulbright is married, why does my cynical mind leap to the conclusion that her professional insights into the anthropological incentives of adultery for women aren't merely professional insights?

As to my curiosity about whether Fulbright has any children, that was prompted by reading her bio and seeing the title of her most recent book:

Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Sex Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know

Really? Here's where I need some of the lady readers to spot me, because I'm thinking that this isn't really one of the mother-to-be's top priorities.

In general, I have an especial scorn for the How-To-Have-Better-Orgasms genre of women's literature, seeing as how endless variations on this theme appear on the cover of Cosmo every freaking month.

By comparison, no man has ever read a magazine article to find out how to have a better orgasm, because no such article has ever been published in a magazine for men. There may be, somewhere among the 3 billion males on this planet, one who didn't figured out the orgasm thing before his 14th birthday. But they certainly don't seem to be seeking magazine advice on the subject, eh?

What's up with this? Women I've spoken to say that they read women's magazines mainly for fashion, hair and make-up ideas. I've never heard a woman admit to seeking out the How-To-Have-Better-Orgasms articles in these magazines. But maybe they're just embarrassed to admit it.

Right-wing kooks spread 'misinformation' that Newsweek's Sharon Begley is ugly

Newsweek's incredibly attractive science editor, Sharon Begley, says that " some of the loudest opposition" to ObamaCare "is the result of confirmatory bias, cognitive dissonance, and other examples of mental processes that have gone off the rails":

Obama's opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on "confirmation" that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his "spread the wealth around" remark to Joe the Plumber -- finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the "socialist" label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label -- anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

Well, there you have it, folks: It's science, and only crazy people argue with science.

Borderline schizophrenic Jeff Poor of the Media Research Center accuses the stunning Sharon Begley of having an "elitist persona." Obviously, Jeff is suffering from cognitive dissonance, and this derogatory comment is an effort to comfort himself for the feelings of inferiority caused by his recognition that he'll never be worthy of a sexually magnetic woman like Sharon Begley.

Another pathetic example of "mental processes that have gone off the rails"? Ace of Spades, whose pathological obsession with the irresistibly alluring Sharon Begley leads him to "seize on confirmation" that she's hot for him:

• Sharon Begley, May 2007: Bush is mentally ill, suffering from delusions due to deep denial.
• Sharon Begley, June 2007: Democrats lose elections because they target the rational side of the brain, while Republicans target the irrational side.
• Sharon Begley, October 2007: Those who deny global warming are kooks and cranks like those nuts who deny the moon landing.

All of which is clear scientific evidence that Ace of Spades suffers from dangerous erotic compulsions toward Sharon Begley. But then again, don't we all?

Remember, denial is part of the problem. If you think President Obama's modest health-care reform agenda is "socialized medicine" or if -- like Ace -- you refuse to acknowledge your overpowering attraction to Sharon Begley, you have already begun losing touch with reality and should seek professional treatment immediately.

Honkies are too uptight

That seems to be the basic point of a Tufts University research project about how "self-control" -- self-censorship might be a better phrase -- isn't the answer to better race relations. (Via Kathy Shaidle who, of course, is completely out of control. And yes, I do mean that as a compliment.)

Personally, I feel that there are inherent limitations to what "experts" can tell us about race, just as there are limits to what "experts" can tell us about sex. Common sense and careful observation will teach you just as much in the long run.

Richard Spencer, who witnessed the lunacy of the Duke lacrosse "rape" fiasco as a Duke student, has some wry observations.

Sixteen-year-old sex change

Tim Petras began hormone treatment at age 12 and recently became Kim Petras, the world's youngest post-operative transsexual:

The op -- carried out in secret last month -- was authorised after psychologists confirmed that Kim was "without doubt a girl in a boy's body."

(H/T: Right View from the Left Coast.) The appropriate pronoun? Oh, never mind. And what's a sex story without a media-approved "expert"?

Dr Bernd Meyenburg, who treats patients with identity disorders at the University of Frankfurt Hospital, said . . . "I was always against such operations on children so young but after seeing how happy one of my patients was and how well adjusted after returning from having the operation abroad while still a teenager - I realised that in some cases it is the right decision."

Thank you, Dr. Mengele! And I'm sure Steven Kotler is happy that "Tim/Kim" won't be contributing to overpopulation. Teen pregnancy? Not a problem. (Everybody go neuter yourselves in the name of ecology.)

Kim reportedly signed a record deal, and here is a video of the song "Last Forever":

Here is video of Kim answering blog questions:

Who can wait until Disney announces "The Kim Petras Show"? A role model for your children! Next: "Oprah"! "The View"! "Larry King Live"! . . . "Cabaret"? (Isn't there something kind of Weimar going on here?)

TOP TEN SIGNS THE PETRAS FAMILY KNEW YOUNG 'TIM' HAD A PROBLEM

10. Won the lead role when the kindergarten staged its version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

(Commenters can finish the list.)

UPDATE: Linked at AOSHQ headlines.

UPDATE Ii: Kim may not be the youngest for long. "Experts" have approved sex-change treatment for preteens.

The problem with plethysmographs

You know this recently-reported research claiming that, when measured by plethysmograph, women seem to become aroused by watching monkeys having sex?

Maybe the plethysmograph is not measuring what the researchers think it's measuring. That is to say, the reaction that researchers are classifying as "arousal" may actually be embarrassment, or perhaps "awww, what a cute monkey."

This goes back to my skepticism toward Northwestern University psychologist Michael Bailey, who reported somewhat similar results in his notorious federally funded "porn arousal" research. The plethysmographic measurement of female arousal may simply be miscalibrated or misunderstood.

Female sexuality may be sufficiently subtle and complex that what are actually emotional (as opposed to sexual) reactions to visual stimuli are producing somatic changes that are picked up by the plethysmograph and then misinterpreted by researchers. So the real problem is in the interpretation of the data, and the "scientific" misconception of what is actually being measured. Just because a reaction can be detected by changes in the woman's genitalia does not mean the reaction is sexual, per se.

A scientific mystery solved! Can I get my federal research grant now?

'Science' and teen sex

Thursday, I wrote about how liberals were spinning the latest teen pregnancy statistics as an argument against abstinence education. I had missed Bill McGurn's take on how research results have been misrepresented in the media:

A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don't. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.
Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.
"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.
In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."
Here's the rub: It just isn't true.

Liberal reporters, McGurn explains, don't look past the bullet-points on the press release to examine the underlying methodology of the study. The researchers pulled some hocus-pocus by comparing the pledge-taking teens not with the general population of teenagers, but rather with a "control" group who were matched demographically and socio-economically with the pledgers:

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that "virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold."

In interviewing professionals in the science/medical/health fields, I've found they are almost unanimous in loathing the way the MSM report on research. Often, research that merely indicates a possible correlation between two facts -- say, between coffee drinking and cancer rates -- ends up with a headline implying that scientists have proved a cause-and-effect relationship: Coffee prevents cancer!

What is true in reporting on medical and scientific research is even more true in reporting on social science research. As one criminologist has remarked, social scientists can "prove" anything. Trying to isolate cause-and-effect in sociological research (which is what this abstinence-education study purports to do) is a damned difficult task. There is a disturbing tendency among liberal journalists to cherry-pick research -- hyping research that seems to confirm their own biases and downplaying contradictory results.

Given the high correlation between delaying sexual activity and positive socioeconomic outcomes (i.e., completing high school, obtaining full-time employment, avoiding drug abuse, etc.), there is clearly a social good to be obtained by discouraging teen sex. Much of the media, however, think of this as a "Republican" or "conservative" objective, and therefore bring to bear the usual liberal bias. Since when did it become "liberal" to be indifferent to kids messing up their lives?

UPDATE: Laura Gallier of Inspiring Abstinence e-mails:

I see a huge contradiction in the medias' response to the issue of teen sex, two primary contradictions to be exact. For one, the media cries out for answers when teen pregnancy rates are on the rise but then seems to go out of their way to undermine abstinence programs. Two, the same media that reports that we must find answers to the teen sex crises then turns around and includes sexually based images and comments in nearly everything they produce.

Indeed, one of the rich ironies is how TV producers, on the one hand, claim that their sex-saturated programming doesn't influence kids' behavior, but on the other hand, collect billions in advertising revenue by telling clients that a 30-second commercial can influence consumer behavior. Either TV influences behavior or it does not, so which is it?

BTW, Ms. Gallier is the author of a new book about abstinence called Choosing to Wait: A Guide to Inspiring Abstinence.

Did I mention I'm a father of six?

Scientific proof of my genius:

"Women tend to like smart men because they're usually more successful and better providers. But here's another reason: Their sperm is better, a new study says. . . .
"The smarter the men were, the more sperm they produced and the better their wee ones swam . . .
"The researchers instead speculate that intelligence might be passed down as part of a larger package of good attributes."

"Larger package." Heh. And proving the obverse:

"By the way, I have no children. And I’m not in MENSA, either."

-- Alan Colmes

He also voted for Obama.

The Christina Hendricks autism test?

Weird science:

Men who do not find the shape of the curvier woman most attractive could be more likely to father children with autism, according to a study. . . .
The new research from the University of Bath suggests that fathers of autistic children do not share the preference of men across the world for the curvier woman. . . .
Dr Brosnan said he hopes the research will increase understanding of the causes of the condition.
'Autism is widely regarded to have genetic origins which may combine with hormonal influences', he said.
'We wanted to investigate the mechanisms by which these genes come together in a parental pairing, whether it is by chance or if it could be due to different preferences in choosing a mate - so-called assortative mating.
'This study raises some interesting questions about how the person we are attracted to could impact on our offspring.'

My completely unscientific hunch is that they're barking up the wrong tree. But how can we know unless we test the hypothesis? (BTW, none of my children are autistic.)

(Via Hot Air Headlines.)

Real hope

One of the ironies of Obama's invocation of "Hope" is that the soi-dissant "progressive" agenda is actually based on a pessimistic view of humanity: Everything is getting worse, individuals are either greedy exploiters or helpless victims, and therefore massive government intervention is necessary to save mankind from itself.

If you want real hope, you need to look to the optimistic free-market vision of the late Julian Simon. John Tierney has doubled down on real hope:

In 2005, I found a more adventurous prophet willing to bet on resource scarcity. Matthew Simmons, an expert on the oil industry and the author of "Twilight in the Desert," bet $5,000 against me and Rita Simon, Julian’s widow, that the average price of oil, in 2005 dollars, would exceed $200 per barrel in 2010. . . .
Last week, the price of oil hit a four-year low, dropping below $35 per barrel, but Mr. Simmons remained optimistic of winning our bet. He told Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun that 2010 is "an eternity" away and predicted the price of oil would shoot back up. Well, anything’s possible. But I’m glad I followed Julian Simon’s advice to bet low. (Emphasis added.)

(Via Instapundit.) Obama has picked gloom-and-doom prophet John Holdren as his science adviser, yet another omen of the new administration's inevitable failure: It won't work.

Obama's population bomber

Yuval Levin points out that Barack Obama's science advisor John Holdren included in a 2007 speech a respectful reference to Paul Ehrlich's utterly discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb. He might as well have referenced phrenology or necromancy.

The Population Bomb -- named one of the worst books of the 20th century by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute -- began with one of the most infamously mistaken prophecies ever published:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.

Wrong. The mass famines never happened. World population, which was about 3.5 billion when Erhlich wrote that, is now about 6 billion, and humanity has never been more well-fed than it is today. Far from a population "explosion," what the world now faces -- especially in industrialized nations -- is a population implosion. In Europe, birth rates in recent decades have been disastrously below what demographers call the replacement rate (2.1 average lifetime births per woman) needed to maintain a stable population size.

Yet many people (Ted Turner notoriously among them), continue to pretend that Ehrlich's misguided warning that "mankind will breed itself into oblivion" was accurate, and to push programs based on Ehrlich's 1968 ultimatum:

We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer.

To speak of population growth -- i.e., people having babies -- as a "cancer" reflects an almost genocidal misanthropy. That Obama would choose as his science adviser Holdren, a believer in such malevolent hokum, is a disgrace.

UPDATE: Via Memeorandum and Ross Douthat, I learn that I'm arriving a little late to this dance. John Tierney is all over the Holdren appointment, revealing that Obama's advisor was one of the "experts" consulted by Ehrlich in his ill-advised bet with the late Julian Simon. Reason magazine's Ron Bailey has even more on the consistently wrong Dr. Holdren.

One global-warming fanatic recognizes Holdren as a kindred spirit: "Obama is dead serious about the strongest possible action on global warming."

I hate to pick a fight with the Obama administration over science. After all, I'm hoping to get federal funding for my own research.

UPDATE II: Obama makes it official. And in his radio address, he declares:

"Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. . . . It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology."

This eye-rolling is giving me a headache.

Here's video of Obama's speech:

Dear President Obama . . .

. . . I need a federal research grant in order to conduct intensive investigation of findings recently reported by the University of L'Aquila.

Science! (H/T: Tigerhawk.)

Short answer: 'No.'

"Does the work of Sigmund Freud have anything to teach us about the global financial crisis and how to extricate ourselves from its clutches?"

No. A thousand times, no. To the extent that Freud asserted anything original as being scientific, he was 100% wrong. His conceptions of the mind, its natural processes and ailments, were as primitive as those of any tribal shaman or voodoo priestess, and as scientifically useful as astrology, tarot or palmistry.

Mental illness does not result from bad potty training or repressed lust for one's own parents or any "complex" bearing a name from Greek mythology. Freud formed his theories from his practice treating the complaints of Viennese hypochondriacs in the Victorian Age. As such, his work offers some insight into the worries that afflicted 19th-century Austrian neurotics, but not much more than that.

Freud's ignorant theories spawned more nonsense than the theories of any other intellectual in modern history, excepting only Marx and Nietzsche. And in the case of all three of these European humbug merchants, there are still apologists who, having been taught to reverence the Great Man before they had sufficient experience to know any better, cling to the idiotic insistence that the Great Man's theories were true, and that any perception of error is the result of the misinterpretations made by the Great Man's followers.

To defend these eminent authors of error is the same as advocating error, and to perpetuate misconceptions that have long since been proven false. No amount of fact can seem to shake these people who cling to the bogus theories of Great Men. One still encounters educated people who worry that "sexual repression" causes mental illness, even though nothing could be plainer than (a) American society is now less sexually repressed than any major culture since Nero was Emperor, and (b) we've got far more genuine craziness than we had when Coolidge was president and the Comstock Laws were in full force.

Anyone who thinks that anything true or useful can be found in Freudian psychology needs to have his head examined.

P.S.: I should add that the falsehood of Freud's theories does not prove the truth of modern theories of the mind. I am a real physical being, not a perception induced by a neurochemical illusion. Also, if you think I'm sexy, it's not because of a biological deterministic evolutionary urge. Darwin was wrong, too; there is no "gay gene"; and my sexiness is an objective fact.