Steven Novella warns us about confirmation bias!

Dr. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist who takes a singularly materialist view of the mind-brain problem, warns us of the dangers of confirmation bias in science:

It is my contention that scientific skepticism is an intellectual discipline and a cognitive skill set more than anything else. It is also a philosophy, a value system, and an approach to knowledge – but these are hollow without the knowledge and skills to apply that philosophy.

This is especially true in our complex world, with sophisticated pseudoscience alongside mature and highly technical real science, ideologies of every stripe pushing their agenda...

It is therefore not enough to have a generally skeptical outlook, or even to call oneself a skeptic. Skepticism is a journey of self-knowledge, exploration, and mastering the various skills that comprise so-called metacognition – the ability to think about thinking... 

As an example of the need for metacognitive skills in navigating this complex world there is confirmation bias. This is definitely on my top 5 list of core skeptical concepts, and is a major contributor to faulty thinking. Confirmation bias is the tendency to perceive and accept information that seems to confirm our existing beliefs, while ignoring, forgetting, or explaining away information that contradicts our existing beliefs. It is a systematic bias that works relentlessly and often subtly to push us in the direction of a desired or preexisting conclusion or bias. Worse – it gives us a false sense of confidence in that conclusion. We think we are following the evidence, when in fact we are leading the evidence.  

[emphasis mine] 

Oh, where to find confirmation bias in this big world of ours...

Scientism-- the atheist viewpoint that science proves atheism and represents the only reliable source of knowledge-- is confirmation bias on steroids. Scientism is a crude logical error in which one adopts a particular method of inquiry congenial to a preconceived notion of truth and then mistakes the answer it provides for truth itself.

Here's another jaw-dropping example of confirmation bias:

"The materialist hypothesis - that the brain causes consciousness - has made a number of predictions, and every single prediction has been validated. Every single question that can be answered scientifically - with observation and evidence - that takes the form: "If the brain causes the mind then..." has been resolved in favor of that hypothesis."

Wow. This guy actually believes that his own metaphysics-- materialism-- has been validated by every relevant scientific experiment ever performed. It's like a terminal case of confirmation bias.

Too bad he's not a "skeptic", on a journey of self-knowledge.

: ) 

Bob Costas is...

... a blow-dried sanctimonious hypocrite who makes a personal fortune hawking profitable organized violence and who looks down his nose at ordinary people who earn less in a year than he spends on botox who want to protect themselves from a less glamorous form of profitable violence.

Goodness gracious I can't stand liberals.

Greg Gutfeld calls Costas out:

Experts cite microphone in Bob Costas' gun control controversy

(Dissociated Press) T.V. football viewers were shocked Sunday night when sportscaster Bob Costas  unexpectedly made a 90 second statement endorsing gun control in the wake of the murder-suicide committed by Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher.

Experts attributed the highly controversial jeremiad to the easy availability of microphones.

Microphone-control advocate Gerry Kerzowicz explains:

"It's a scandal that in our nation any blow-dried-botoxed-jock-wanna-be sportscaster can get get a hold of a microphone and subject millions of innocent victims to tedious illogical arguments. The First Amendment isn't a murder-suicide pact. How many tragedies like this do we need until we get serious about microphone control. Only responsible people should have microphones. "

In related news, weight loss advocates attribute the the obesity epidemic in America to the widespread availability of unlicensed refrigerators...

The "Hollywood Holocaust"

From J.P. Freire:

Howard Kurtz calls our attention to the Hollywood Reporter where the current publisher issued an apology for what he termed the “Hollywood Holocaust,” in which the industry magazine, “Hollywood Reporter,” led by his father, Billy Wilkerson, led a “crusade” against the Communist Party in Hollywood. Kurtz describes the effort as “odious” and an “appalling chapter of the publication’s history.” Kirk Douglas said that the period was “the most sinful period in Hollywood’s history.”The five page apology rounds up those who felt wronged, but treats the Soviet Union as if it were never a threat. Strange. 

This way of looking at anti-Communist efforts in tinseltown flatly denies the nature of the American Communist Party, which sought to overtake American institutions and subjugate them to the Kremlin. No big deal, I guess, but worth clarifying: A holocaust is a slaughter on a mass scale. The blacklist made it hard for Kremlin-connected Hollywood actors (sympathetic to Soviet victory in the Cold War) to find work. Not similar.

We know from the Soviet archives and reams of testimony that Communism wasn’t a mere set of opinions or some marginalized activist political third party. It was a calculated underground effort, organized in cells, to expand the power of the Kremlin to America. It wasn’t a group of silly idealists who weren’t taken seriously, but a collection of elites who had become quite taken with Stalin and his ilk. All those secret meetings weren’t secret because they were living in fear of the Red Scare and mean ol’ Amuricans who wouldn’t tolerate dissent.Those secret meetings were secret because they were figuring out how to fight for International Communism in America, just as the Baader Meinhoff gang would later attempt in West Germany.

One of the more striking delusions of the 20th century is the bizarre 'victimhood' status conferred on Communists and fellow-travelers in the United States, especially during the McCarthy era (an era of sanity and justice) and during the Hollywood boycott of screenwriters with ties to the CPUSA.

Communism is the full moral equivalent of Nazism. They are both claques of blood-soaked socialist gangsters. The CPUSA was owned, funded and controlled by Moscow. From the late 1920's to the early 1950's that meant that that commies in the U.S. were taking Stalin's orders and doing Stalin's bidding. They knew it and did it eagerly.

I believe in second chances, so Americans who publicly repudiated their earlier participation in totalitarian sedition and worked to fight Communism should be given a pass. We forgave Whittaker Chambers, as we should have. But the bastards who denied the truth of their complicity in this evil, or who continued to work for International Socialism, deserve the worst our society can throw at them. They deserved to be rigorously criminally prosecuted --knowingly working for an organization secretly funded by a foreign government without registering as an agent of that government was illegal, as was espionage, as was advocating violent overthrow of the government. Of course Communists should be privately shunned, as Nazis should be shunned, and the blacklist should be airtight and rigorously enforced.

Again: Communism is the full moral equivalent of Nazism. Nothing that was done to the commies and fellow-travelers in the U.S. was unjust, except our excessive leniency, and nothing that was done to these totalitarian bastards was anywhere near as cruel as what they would have done to us, if they could have. 

Population control: "Destroying the Village"

Another installment from Robert Zubrin's must-read essay in The New Atlantis on the population control holocaust:

Destroying the Village

Upon coming into office in January 1969, the new Nixon administration sought to further advance the population control agenda. Responding to lobbying by General William H. Draper, Jr., the former under secretary of the Army and a leading overpopulation fear monger, Nixon approved U.S. government support for the establishment of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). With this organization as a vehicle, vast additional American funds would be poured into the global population control effort, with their source disguised so as to ease acceptance by governments whose leaders needed to maintain a populist pose in opposition to “Yankee Imperialism.” While the United States was its primary backer, the UNFPA also served as a channel for significant additional population control funds from European nations, Canada, and Japan, collectively equal to about half the American effort.

Going still further, President Nixon in 1970 set up a special blue-ribbon Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, with longtime population control booster John D. Rockefeller III as its chairman. Reporting back in 1972, Rockefeller predictably cited the menace of U.S. population growth with alarm, and called for a large variety of population control measures to avert the putative threat of welfare-dependent, criminalistic, or other financially burdensome populations multiplying out of control. Just as predictably, the report generated scores of newspaper headlines and feature magazine articles serving to cement the population control consensus. Nixon’s politically-driven rejection of one of the commission’s recommendations — government-funded abortion on demand — only served to make Rockefeller’s Malthusian committee seem all the more “progressive.”

But Nixon’s chief interest in population control was its supposed value as a Cold War weapon. The president charged Henry Kissinger, his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, with conducting a secret study on the role of population control measures in the fight against global communism. Kissinger pulled together a group of experts drawn from the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, USAID, and other agencies to study the question. The result was issued on December 10, 1974 in the form of the classified NSC document titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The document — known as National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), or simply as the Kissinger Report — represented the encoding of Malthusian dogma as the strategic doctrine of the United States.

NSSM 200 was declassified in 1989 and so is now available for scrutiny. Examining the document, what is apparent is the Nietzschean mindset on the part of its authors, who (implicitly embracing the communist line) clearly regarded the newborn masses of the world as America’s likely enemies, rather than her friends, and as potential obstacles to the exploitation of the world’s wealth, rather than as customers, workers, and business partners participating together with America in a grand team effort to grow and advance the world economy. The memo made the case for a population control effort that is global in scope but not traceable back to its wealthy supporters.

On November 26, 1975, NSSM 200 was formally adopted by the Ford administration. A follow-up memo issued in 1976 by the NSC called for the United States to use control of food supplies to impose population control on a global scale. It further noted the value of using dictatorial power and military force as means to coerce Third World peoples into submission to population control measures, adding: “In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program.”

Without a shred of justification, but with impeccable organization, generous funding, aggressive leadership, and backing by a phalanx of established respectable opinion, the population control movement was now doctrinally enshrined as representing the core strategic interest of the world’s leading superpower. It was now positioned to wreak havoc on a global scale.

The 'overpopulation' hoax has legs, and during the late 20th century this crude junk science was not merely the desiderata of deluded third-rate scientists with totalitarian urges but was a predicate for American national defense policy.

It is hard to come to grips with the fact that American policy was to use control of food supplies as well as control of housing and education to force compliance with population control. Simply put, we told desperately poor people in the Third World that if they wanted to eat and have housing and education, they had to accept sterilization and contraception and abortion. And we did it for strategic as well as ideological reasons-- we saw nations with growing numbers of young people as vulnerable to communist ideology, and we imposed measures-- blackmail really-- to reduce the population of the young.

To fight totalitarians, we emulated totalitarians. The American policy of geopolitically-motivated suppression of births in the Third World was simply genocide.

The people who did this-- that includes our own government officials as well as a host of private advocacy groups-- committed crimes against humanity.

Will we have the courage and the integrity to face this, and to hold these people to ideological account, even if we regrettably can't hold them to legal account? 

Clumps of tissue fight in womb

Two expendable non-human parts of a womyn's body engage in a little shoving match in the uterus during an MRI scan.



These tissue clumps should be better behaved. Millions of their fellow little clumps have been exterminated for less reason than bad behavior. 

Sadistic ghost prank

This is apparently a clip from a Brazilian prank show. It's damn creepy, and if it's for real, it's in very poor taste and even sadistic. Scaring people like this is dangerous.

Nonetheless, I post the video...