A Libertarian on the Wall Street protests

From the Market Ticker:

You know what the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is?

It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

The Tea Party is a contradiction. They want a balanced budget, but they also want the US military to intervene everywhere. Obamacare is a dirty word, but don’t dare touch social security or medicare. Individual rights are important too, but don't push it too far. After all, republicans came up with today's policies.

The most intriguing thing about these protests is the instinctive reaction of horror from the conservative media who still confuse corrupt big government corporatism for free market capitalism. If the Tea Party hadn't already revealed itself to be little more than a joke, they'd be protesting side by side with the left-wing hipsters.

Both Republicans and Democrats are the problem. And that's understandably something few Republicans or Democrats want to admit.

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Herman Cain: banker's whore or bankster?

It has been interesting to see how feeble a defense those who support Magic Negro Part II: The Republican have been able to make on his behalf. When faced with the fact that he was not only a corrupt Federal Reserve executive, but is still defending the Federal Reserve, the giant zombie banks, and Wall Street despite the economic depression they caused, their only - and I do mean ONLY - response is to cry raciss.

This demonstrates that Herman Cain has little more to offer as a presidential candidate but his race. But, in the immortal words of the French castle guard, the American people already got one, you see. The grand Republican dream of finally being able to accuse Democrats of racism is based on an erroneous assumption that Democrats care about such things; it would appear that Republicans have learned nothing from Clinton presidential scandal when it was learned that feminists didn't mind being legitimately accused of supporting sexism.

Democrats are the modern equivalent of the medieval religious heretics who demonstrated their moral ascension beyond good and evil by their ability to indulge in the latter without harming their immortal soul. Thus, while others are tainted by the mere accusation of sexiss or raciss, actual acts of what would otherwise be considered sexism or racism on the part of a Democrat only proves his ideological saintliness.

As we've seen already with regards to Rick Perry, Cain is more than willing to cry raciss himself. But that's almost irrelevant. The real question is whether Cain is a banker's whore or a bankster proper. While his Federal Reserve history suggests the latter, his astonishing remarks about the central bank and apparent ignorance about the U.S. financial system strongly indicate that his role at the Federal Reserve was little more than affirmative action PR. So, I conclude that Cain is merely a banker's whore like McCain and Obama rather than a genuine bankster like Bernanke.

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Dancing around the D-word

1. "The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage has fallen below 4 percent for the first time in history. For the lucky few with good jobs and stable finances, it's a rare opportunity to save potentially thousands of dollars each year. For most people, it's a tease and a reminder of how weak their own financial situation is."

2. "The American dream of homeownership has felt its biggest drop since the Great Depression, according to new 2010 census figures released Thursday. The analysis by the Census Bureau found the homeownership rate fell to 65.1 percent last year. While that level remains the second highest decennial rate, analysts say the U.S. may never return to its mid-decade housing boom peak in which nearly 70 percent of occupied households were owned by their residents."

3. "Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession. Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead. Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster. “This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”"

Of course, more quantitative easing isn't the right thing to do if the desire is to see the global economy return to real economic growth in the shortest possible period of time. Expanding the money supply, however one wants to label it, is the precisely wrong thing thing to do and is an action driven by the banking industry's allegiance to a false economic model because the correct action will significantly increase the likelihood of widespread bank failure. But if one simply goes back to basic economic theory 101, it's not hard to see why neither Bank of England's current action nor the Federal Reserve's previous actions can possibly work. Since it is the price of money, the Law of Supply and Demand dictates that historically low interest rates mean there is either (a) insufficient demand for money or (b) an excess supply of money.

How, one wonders, can increasing the supply of money be expected to either (a) increase the insufficient demand for money or (b) reduce the excess supply of it?

Both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England would do much better to reduce the money supply, raise interest rates to 20 percent, and make it profitable to save and loan money again. The reason they don't is that thanks to the Wall Street Casino, many banks are now net borrowers rather than creditors; remember that the financial institutions owe 27 percent of all U.S. debt. That is why there is simply no way out of the financial crisis without shutting down the banks.

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Ever more 1984

The USA is moving closer to Soviet-style ritual denunciations. I don't know about you, but I am rather looking forward to the emotional catharsis of a good Two-Minute Hate.

The House voted to set aside a privileged resolution aimed at condemning the stone on Perry's ranch offered earlier in the day by an impassioned Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL).

Earlier in the day, Jackson read his resolution on the floor. It called on the House to:

“Condemn Texas Governor Rick Perry for using a secluded West Texas hunting camp as a place to host lawmakers, friends and supporters on hunting trips at a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance called 'N*****head.'"

So, Congress has no problem with pharmaceutical corruption, handing two of every three Texas jobs to immigrants, and blowing millions, if not billions, on educating illegal aliens, but using land on which sits a politically incorrect rock, that's legitimate national business demanding Congressional attention.

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Wall Street's house negro

I warned you from that start that Herman Cain was as stupid as he is corrupt:

"I don't have the facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama Administration," Cain told the Wall Street Journal. "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed."

It's true, Herman Cain doesn't have any facts. He also doesn't have much of a brain. Remember, this is the guy who claimed the Federal Reserve doesn't need to be audited because it performs so many internal audits on itself. The cluelessness, the sheer effrontery, of defending Wall Street and the big banks by pointing to the lack of success of the very people who are being robbed of TRILLIONS in order to prevent Wall Street and the big banks from experiencing the consequences of their egregious failures is simply staggering.

Herman Cain is a corrupt and stupid man who is wholly owned by the banksters. Republicans who support him are either delusional or foolish; the only reason they are enthusiastic about this Wall Street banker's whore is because they desperately want to prove how post-racial they are. If Cain somehow manages to win the nomination and the election, he will be a bigger and more spectacular disaster than Obama. Although it would certainly be amusing to guess the Vegas line on the over/under of ex-Goldmanites in a Cain cabinet. I'd say three.

What Cain has completely omitted to mention is that the primary failed policy of the Obama administration is its policy of doing whatever Wall Street and the big banks demand of it. And that slavish submission to Wall Street is exactly the policy that would be the guiding policy of any future Cain administration.

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50 Ann Coulter quotes

The Right Wing News compiles them. My personal favorites:

44) The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

35) This is liberalism’s real strength. It is no longer susceptible to reductio ad absurdium arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea.

24) Liberals use the word science exactly as they use the word constitutional. Both words are nothing more or less than a general statement of liberal approval, having nothing to do with either science or the Constitution.

3) Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.

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Steve Jobs is dead

It seems appropriate somehow, that he should die as his creation stands towering over the cratered ashes of the tech boom. It feels like a metaphor of sorts, but what precisely, I cannot say. As for me, I loved my Apple II and I loathed his lovely technofascistic vision.

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"Such as it is"

Bernanke circles around the truth:

Europe has a debt crisis. America has a jobs crisis. Corporate profits could be in trouble. World financial markets are in turmoil. And no one seems prepared to ride to the rescue. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke bluntly warned Congress on Tuesday of what most of America has sensed for some time: The economic recovery, such as it is, "is close to faltering."

"Such as it is." For those of you who aren't fluent in Fedspeak, allow me to translate:

There is no recovery. There never was any recovery and all of my talk of green shoots and economic growth was a failed attempt to raise those all-important animals spirits while I flooded the banks with money. But the happy talk isn't working and is actually becoming counter-productive as the gulf between it and observable reality continues to widen, so I'm going to dial it back a bit in order to retain some semblance of credibility. God help us all, because I am totally out of ammo.

And this was an interesting admission: "I think people are quite unhappy with the state of the economy and what's happening. They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess. And they're dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can't blame them."

Yes, the massive borrowing that took the financial sector from 0.85% of the total U.S. debt to 32.66% in 2008 might just have a little to do with the current problem. But no, Helicopter, people aren't protesting Wall Street because of 9% unemployment and slow growth, they're protesting because they know Wall Street gambled big, lost heavily, and then robbed them and went back into the casino.

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A mistaken assumption

I've noticed that some people are operating under the mistaken impression that I have to answer anyone's questions. Let me make it perfectly clear for everyone. I don't have to do anything. And, as I have already made clear in Rule 14, even if I do choose to answer a question or two, I'm not inclined to devote inordinate effort in explaining anything to the egregiously slow, the willfully or terminally stupid, or to permit any visitor here to assume a prosecutorial role. In fact, the more one attempts the latter, the less likely it is that I will even read one's comments. Substantive criticism is not only fine, it is welcome. Acting officious or posturing as if you have any authority whatsoever is not.

Rule 14: It is my intention to give individual commenters up to three opportunities per post to criticize what I have posted there. Since I do not have any interest whatsoever in wasting time on futile attempts to explain things to the willfully obtuse, the intellectually underpowered, or the disingenuous, I will cease to engage with a commenter after he has committed three demonstrable errors of fact or logic in that comment thread. While I will identify those errors, I am not inclined to be drawn into tangential discussions of them. Attempts to claim that my refusal to further engage with a commenter whose arguments have repeatedly been demonstrated to be flawed are the result of cowardice or an inability to respond are false and will be deleted.

What some tend to forget is that thousands of people come here to learn what I have to think. They don't come here to learn what random critic A or emotionally deranged person B have to say. So, I get a lot of questions directed at me, both in the comments and in my email. I ignore the majority of them because I simply can't answer them all and when I do answer them, I answer most of them in a terse manner. For example, I presently have 27 emails saved because I would like to answer them but haven't found the time to do so yet.

On the other hand, the commenter to whom I direct a question has usually already asked me several questions that were answered. He doesn't have hundreds of people asking him questions and he has no one holding him to account. Furthermore, he does not have an eight-year history of reliably backing up his claims with evidence. And finally, as we have learned, there is a type of critic that is the shoot-and-run variety that is totally unwilling to stand by his own words.

Notice, for example, that whereas I answered R.S. Bakker's ridiculous question that I initially believed to be rhetorical, the moment I started asking him questions central to his assertions, he dropped the subject and fell silent despite having implied that my failure to immediately answer his questions was meaningful. I shall leave it to the readers to decide what his failure to answer my direct questions means by his own metric.

So, that is why the unbalanced treatment of a) requiring commenters to answer direct challenges to their claims and b) ignoring questions directed at me is not only justified, but necessary. The fact that people can ask me questions about my posts is a privilege, not a right, as is commenting here at all. And the fact that I have answered a question, or two, or three neither means that I have agreed to a debate nor accepted a commenter's status as some sort of special prosecutor.

And once you've shown that you're clueless, I'm simply not going to pay much attention to what you write. There are too many other people who actually have something intelligent or interesting to say. This isn't a public school, where the teacher has to devote all her attention to the retards and behaviorally challenged to the detriment of the rest of the classroom.

And on a tangential note, many of you need to stop using the term "logical fallacy" until you learn your logical fallacies. It is readily apparent that many of you do not know what is and what is not a logical fallacy. So, unless you can identify the specific logical fallacy that has been committed, I recommend avoiding use of the term. A logical error is not synonymous with a logical fallacy. Wikipedia has a list of logical fallacies here.

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Breaking the law

In related news, bank robbers also reported they were worried about state plans to enforce the laws against bank robberies:

Effective Saturday, many of South Florida's "No guns allowed" signs are gone. That's thanks to a new state law imposing fines of up to $5,000 on county and municipal officials, and even threatening them with removal from office, if they enforce firearms and ammunition restrictions other than those spelled out by state statute.

The state legislation has been on the books since 1987. But because it did not contain any penalties until now, many local governments passed their own, more restrictive laws.

Now, do you suppose that the Federal Reserve and various federal agencies might be just a little more disposed to enforcing the various laws and regulations they are supposed to enforce if said laws and regulations came with penalties attached for not enforcing them?

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PZ Myers Memorial Debate Round 3 - the judges

Alex: I’m still adding to my detailed notes, but I’ll make them available to anyone upon request.

1. The first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong. I find the hypothesis, as it relates to the question at hand, specious and unconvincing. Vox’s rebuttal was very slightly more convincing. Very small edge to Vox.

2. Proposition B, aka Vox’s Argument from Objective Morality. Vox carries the day.

3. Proposition A, aka the Ancient Aliens. Vox again.

Vox’s arguments are tighter, sharper, and more concrete. Round to Vox.


Markku: What I attempted to do in order to judge the debate format was to identify the specific attacks from Dominic, and the corresponding counter-arguments from Vox. Since Vox was on the defense, he merely had to counter the attacks in order to fulfill his responsibilities. The shortened forms displayed here should not be understood as capturing the argument but merely showing which part of the text I am talking about.

Dominic: no one does [have a complete model of what constitutes conciousness]

Vox: [I mentioned it] to demonstrate b) the materialist internal model cannot be assumed to be correct.

Vox from round 2: but their opinion is irrelevant at this point

Verdict: Successfully countered. Claim of irrelevancy is not a claim of your own explanation's superiority.

Dominic: admitting that our moral sense is another part of our conciousness while having no idea what conciousness is composed of amounts to admitting B3 ["that the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind"] is false

Vox from previous round: we must decide if it is more likely that the signal is internally or externally generated. (?) And because this definitive moral law is constant and arbitrary, there must be a lawgiver capable of both defining and transmitting it.

Verdict: Vox defined the "signal" (the only part he claimed external) as where the moral sense's information comes from, calling it moral law and merely calling its externality more likely. Not certain. Dominic just took what Vox had explicitly admitted and pronounced the claim, not unsatisfactorily proven, but false. Had it been the former, there could be sensible further debate about the evidence.

Dominic: [Freud vs. external moral law] is a false dichotomy.

Vox from round 2: Freud's theory and its variants is the most established of the various internal models

Verdict: Models, plural, means admitting several options. No dichotomy.


Dominic: heterosexual attraction to the opposite sex [is internally generated] (...) It is just another desire, a consequence of biology

Vox: If this were true, Freud and his successors would not have had to construct their tripartite model in the first place

Verdict: Vox's answer doesn't hold water. Sexual attraction comes from id, as opposed to ego, according to Freud's model. These are already two separate processes of mind, both seemingly pure biology. If we can have two, we could have three.

Dominic: Without further context, [aliens, plasma beings and time travellers] are equally plausible explanations

Vox: It is merely an object lesson in the importance of not leaping to conclusions or placing inordinate confidence in a tool that is inadequate for the task at hand.

Verdict: The agnostic option is in the middle, and doesn't do the atheist any more good than it does the theist. What Dominic needs in order to do anything useful is to look at the options that don't involve gods and argue why they are more plausible than the others. Nor does the mere existence of those options do any good to Vox, but he is not listing them to that end.


Dominic: The concept of gods are what we first postulated to explain the inexplicable. Consequently, the concept itself, is wrong.

Vox: But theists readily admit our understanding of the nature of the divine is far from perfect.

Verdict: Successfully countered. It was particular gods with particular features, responsibilities and names, which were arguably postulated to explain such things. Any of those things not only can be wrong, but must be in the overwhelming majority of cases. It is enough to satisfy Dominic's principle.

Round goes to Vox


Scott: Dominic continues his argument that the first explanation is usually wrong. Nothing he says, however, is new, and I continue to disagree with it.

He does address me at one point, and while I don't want to intrude on the role of the debaters, I feel that at least addressing why I don't think his counter addresses my point will illustrate why I don't find his argument convincing at large. (Moreover, Day makes similar points in his rebuttal.) I said: "[S]ure, people will color their experiences with the divine with trappings taken from their culture. But that's just them trying to understand something far beyond their ken. People who first saw the sun imagined it was a guy in a chariot. Nevertheless, that they put it in terms of the familiar doesn't show the sun doesn't exist."

To which Dominic responded: "For some reason, Scott was under the impression he was disagreeing with me here, but he made my point quite well. Yes, there is a Sun out there, but it sure as hell isn't a guy in a chariot. It is something else besides a god."

But that wasn't my point. My point was the mere fact that we explain things in term of the known doesn't prove that there isn't something out there to be explained. Dominic said:
"Show me someone recounting an experience of being sexually molested by little grey aliens with big heads and huge hypnotic eyes who'd never heard of or been exposed to Hollywood films or other popular culture sources that tell us what aliens do and what they look like."

In saying this, he was denying, so far as I can tell, the existence of aliens because people who "encounter" aliens explain those "encounters" in terms familiar to them. But, say I, this would be the same as denying the existence of the sun based on the fact that people used familiar terms to describe it. But the sun clearly exists. Ergo, this argument would prove entirely too much.

Note the fact that the sun is not a chariot in the sky is completely irrelevant. Of course it isn't. But the operative fact is that the sun exists, despite our folk explanations of it. Gods, gods, or aliens, what have you, may exist in the same fashion, though we early on explained Him as astride Merkabah.

Dominic continues to harp on gods being the first explanation implies they're wrong. What he doesn't seem to grasp is that "God" is not some unique answer that was made for all time in Bronze Age Israel. The Christian God has greatly evolved since the gods of the Ancient Greeks, as has *Dyēus phter himself. Aquinas's God is not Zeus. So I'm perfectly willing to except that the first answer is nearly always incorrect--but I don't think that has any weight on the argument. Just because our first stab at what a God is is wrong doesn't mean that God doesn't exist--which is what Dominic wants to infer. God just isn't what was described by our first hypothesis. In the same way, our first stab at science was wrong--that doesn't mean since as a whole is a failed hypothesis. Better hypotheses will be presented with time, just as more plausible gods are presented with time.

So while we can heartily accept Dominic's observation that the first explanation is usually wrong--and it seems Day does as well--I don't think that takes us where Dominic wants it to.

So, respectfully, I think the argument fails. In fact, I think Dominic at least twice now has attacked arguments out of context. He attacks Day's Aztec argument, but not for the purpose for which Day advanced it. In the same fashion, he appreciates my sun-chariot argument as supporting his claim that the first explanation is wrong. But my argument was not addressed at that particular argument of his, so whether or not it supports it is besides the point--it is aimed elsewhere.

Dominic makes other points. He says the failure to explain consciousness does not mean that morality is external to humankind. I agree entirely. And Day seems to as well. But, and here I agree with Day, this certainly does not show it to be internal to humankind either. Day cites the failure to explain our moral sense through traditional models as pointing to something external. And well he should, because this is quite suggestive, and will be until: 1. a model of our morality produced through naturalistic processes is convincingly demonstrated; or 2. we find ourselves willing to accept that evolution produces some counterintuitive things that we, through lack of evidence and repeatability, may never be able to fully explain.

Does this show that God is the rule-giver? No. But it, coupled with evidence that God exists and has given rules, is not nothing.

Day repeats much of my own response to Dominic's argument. His attack is far-ranging, and, though there are parts of it I disagree with--that science may have unexplored frontiers does not suggest to me it doesn't have substantial authority in saying what does and does not exist--I think on the whole his response the stronger. Day seems to back off of previous statements that evil implies God, now content to say it implies external morality, whatever its provenance may be. But even if morality can exist without a creator--nonetheless, that it does exist gives one some pause in denying a creator entirely.

Round to Day.


As the judges scored the third round 3-0 in my favor, I will elect to present the argument for Round 4 and Dominic will rebut. This is the second-to-last round.

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The age of debt and deceit

There is Paper Money, there is Fool's Gold, and then there are macroeconomic statistics, which make the previous two look reliable:

The nation's economy is managing to grow modestly, reports Monday showed, despite high U.S. unemployment and growing alarm about Europe's debt crisis.

The nation's economy is not growing. There is now a near-complete disconnect between the map and the territory. The debt-deflation monster has barely begun to tear apart the economy and already the BEA has devolved into a bizarre Orwellian MinEcon. This was inevitable, given the way Keynesians turned "animal spirits", or as they are now known, "consumer confidence" into a fetish that articulated a concept of lying one's way into prosperity.

No doubt future generations will look on the period from 1950 to 2010 as an age lost to deception, where growth was believed to be the result of debt and deceit, national prosperity the result of outsourcing jobs, and industrial growth through free trade. The observable fact is that there is another word for a "service economy" and that is "an unproductive economy with high unemployment".

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Occupy Wall Street

As police arrested hundreds of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, more demonstrations began to spring up across the U.S.

The anger against Wall Street isn't likely to burn out anytime soon. Not all, but most, of the US economic problems can be traced to the Wall Street casino and the refusal of the Wall Street bankers to accept their losses instead of forcing them on an unwilling public. The fact that the federal government connived with the bankers to do so doesn't make the action legal or legitimate.

Every bank that received a bailout, direct or indirect, should be shut down, its executives arrested, and their bonuses seized. Remember, in 1946, the financial institutions accounted for 0.85% of all U.S. debt. Sixty years later, that percentage had risen to 32.7 percent, nearly three times more than the 11.6% owed by the federal government.

The government is far from innocent, but for the most part, it has exacerbated the debt-deflation problem that the bankers created. Occupying Wall Street should only be the beginning of the debt cleansing process. However, what neither the Occupy Wall Street activists on the left nor the Tea Party activists on the center-right appear to understand is that BOTH Wall Street and the federal government are responsible for the present situation.

Washington can't fix Wall Street because it is wholly owned by the bankers. And Wall Street can't fix Washington because Washington is already doing what Wall Street wants. As long as the left supports Washington and the right supports Wall Street, absolutely nothing with long-term positive economic effect can be accomplished.

Which, of course, is why I have been saying for years that there will be no solution until the eventual and inevitable system failure takes place.

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Sam Harris is a psychopath?

It is science:

A study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology found that people who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism—the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences—tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits.... Bartels and Pizarro found a strong link between utilitarian responses to these dilemmas (e.g., approving the killing of an innocent person to save the others) and personality styles that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless.

And there is your scientific connection between the man who advocates a happiness/suffering moral metric and the one who also advocates killing people for the mere possession of dangerous beliefs. They tend to be one and the same, and in the case of Mr. Harris, they are.

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Week 4

Someone has to win in this week's epic remake of Super Bowl IV, right? The question is which is the more immovable force, the Kansas City offense or the Minnesota passing offense.

With both Foster and Colston back from injury, I've elected to start the former and sit the latter. We'll see how that goes.

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Review: The Desert of Souls by Howard A. Jones

One of the legitimate complaints about SF/F literature these days is that in the authors’ fervent, self-conscious attempts to Make A Point, Preach To The Choir, or Demonstrate Literary Talent, basic story-telling elements such as plot, characters, and sheer enjoyment tend to be swept out the window. Long gone are the days of the little novel of 65k words, which didn’t attempt to Lecture, Educate, Browbeat, or even Impress us, but was content to merely provide the reader with a pleasurable few hours visiting faraway places and magical lands. The magic of Howard A. Jones’s The Desert of Souls is its admirable lack of literary ambition and its unfashionable focus on simply telling an entertaining tale of two remarkable and very different heroes who refuse to shirk their duty in the face of either evil or danger.

Read the rest of the review at The Black Gate

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Science that isn't science

The materialist argument against testimonial evidence is that it relies heavily on the truthfulness of the witness. The great irony is that this is also true of science as it is actually practiced, as opposed to that imaginary ideal science in which every experimental result is duly replicated multiple times. The Economist describes an episode of scientific misconduct that reveals how most of what passes for science today holds no claim to even being called science, let alone possesses any scientific authority.

ANIL POTTI, Joseph Nevins and their colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, garnered widespread attention in 2006. They reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that they could predict the course of a patient’s lung cancer using devices called expression arrays, which log the activity patterns of thousands of genes in a sample of tissue as a colourful picture (see above). A few months later, they wrote in Nature Medicine that they had developed a similar technique which used gene expression in laboratory cultures of cancer cells, known as cell lines, to predict which chemotherapy would be most effective for an individual patient suffering from lung, breast or ovarian cancer.

At the time, this work looked like a tremendous advance for personalised medicine—the idea that understanding the molecular specifics of an individual’s illness will lead to a tailored treatment. The papers drew adulation from other workers in the field, and many newspapers, including this one (see article), wrote about them. The team then started to organise a set of clinical trials of personalised treatments for lung and breast cancer. Unbeknown to most people in the field, however, within a few weeks of the publication of the Nature Medicine paper a group of biostatisticians at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, led by Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes, had begun to find serious flaws in the work....

Finally, in July 2010, matters unravelled when the Cancer Letter reported that Dr Potti had lied in numerous documents and grant applications. He falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes Scholar in Australia (a curious claim in any case, since Rhodes scholars only attend Oxford University). Dr Baggerly’s observation at the time was, “I find it ironic that we have been yelling for three years about the science, which has the potential to be very damaging to patients, but that was not what has started things rolling.”...

The process of peer review relies (as it always has done) on the goodwill of workers in the field, who have jobs of their own and frequently cannot spend the time needed to check other people’s papers in a suitably thorough manner.

Now, there are two significant points here. First, the reason the hypothesis was eventually falsified wasn't due to the scientific method, but because of historical documentary evidence, namely, the false claim of Dr. Potti to have been a Rhodes Scholar in Australia. Second, most "science" is not only never experimentally replicated, but the unscientific editing process known as peer review isn't even performed properly in most cases.

When comparing science and other forms of knowledge, it is not logically consistent to compare ideal science versus the practical real world application of those alternatives. Either ideal science can be compared to ideal alternatives or actual science can be compared to actual alternatives. It is as nonsensical to claim that all reported science is reliable as it would be to claim that all historical documents are accurate and all eyewitness testimony is true.

Just as some eyewitness testimony is false and some historical documents are inaccurate, most scientific reports are neither properly peer-reviewed nor replicated in any manner. Therefore, no scientific paper can credibly claim the authority of science until it has been demonstrated that it has been both properly peer-reviewed and duly replicated.

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Mailvox: the hypocrisy of the anti-scientist

One can't truly appreciate how effectively Dominic has argued the atheist case without comparing it to the conventional talking points usually presented by the average atheist:

Yeah, heaven forbid that we actually learn from our mistakes! Tell me vox, if you have such distrust of our present snapshot, how about you jump off your roof to test it?

But you won't. And I'll tell you why. While you know it can be wrong, and certainly is at some points, the chance that it's wrong regarding your fall is abysmally low. So low that you won't stake your life on it.

You similarly will not trust historical evidence that says humans flew , for you know well that the chance of them lying as opposed to science being wrong on the subject is really, really huge.

When someone testifies to you that he has seen a dragon in your backyard, you will, like a true hypocrite, impose upon the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons despite the fact that you know full well it can be wrong.

And I'll tell you why. You know it can be wrong, but you're pretty sure it isn't. When we bet, we bet on good odds, not bad ones. There's the difference between probable and plausible that you're unable to grasp. There's a chance that your car will crash, your aeroplane will be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, you'll be mugged while walking, etc. Does that prevent you from going out ?

You just happen to forget this game of odds when it suits you. It's called hypocrisy, and you play this game well.

The amusing thing about the average atheist is the way they illogically attempt to simultaneously deny the relevance of historical and testimonial evidence while appealing to it under the misapprehension that it is science. I don't refrain from jumping off my roof because science has confirmed that the effect of Earth gravity will draw me to the ground at 9.8 m/s and I have performed a rapid calculation involving my mass, the distance of the fall from the roof, and reached a conclusion that I will not jump. Instead, I rely upon the testimonial evidence of others, which simply states "don't jump off the roof or you will hurt yourself."

The amusing thing about this atheist's example of flight is that scientists of the early 20th century refused to believe the historical evidence that the Wright Brothers had, in fact, flown, in part due to their reliance upon the scientific consensus of the time which insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In fact, Lord Kelvin, the leading scientist and President of the Royal Society of England, in 1895 stated unequivocally that "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible".

If someone testifies that he has seen a dragon in my backyard, I may or may not believe him depending upon his historical record of truthfulness. Science won't enter into it at all. I have already seen far too many things take place that I previously thought to be impossible to place more confidence in "the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons" than in the truthfulness of an individual known to have been reliably truthful in the past.

The problem with atheists who make a fetish of science is that they simply don't understand that science is not a universal tool ideal for all purposes, but is rather more akin to a hammer. A hammer works very well for driving nails and rather less well for cutting down trees. But preferring the use of a saw when the task at hand involves cutting down a tree does not make one intrinsically anti-hammer, nor does it make one hesitate before picking up a hammer to drive a nail.

Scientific evidence and historical evidence are complimentary, not intrinsically adversarial. They may overlap at times, they may conflict at others, but in no case are they the same thing and both types of evidence are capable of being wholly unreliable if applied in an inappropriate manner. It is far from hypocrisy to recognize the limits to a type of knowledge and restrict one's use of it to the situations when it is relevant, especially since doing otherwise is misguided at best and quite possibly delusional.

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