biotk

I love how many people on the left think that people like the Koch brothers are crapping in their pants about how well Sanders is doing, instead of celebrating that their efforts to undermine Hilary Clinton at every turn, and split the left into factions warring with each other, have greatly increased the chances the Republicans winning it all this fall. It is not like they have even been trying to hide their efforts. "I hate Hilary. She is a terrible person. Fox news and Koch brothers financed PACs tell me so." "I sure am feeling the Bern. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie." "Sanders could actually win this. Look at his matchups against Republican candidates. They are around as good as Clinton's, and often better." "Look, Sanders tied in Iowa and will win NH." "We have the momentum!! It is going to be a socialist revolution!!" "Wow!! This is historic. Sanders won the Democratic Presidential nomination!" "Hey???? What the hell???? Why is it that the Republican attack machine which has non-stop attacked Clinton for 25 years is now attacking Sanders after being completely silent about him for over a year?? It is almost like they were trying to fool us. People will surely not believe the lies they spread about Sanders (even though I believed and spread the lies they spread about Clinton)." "Oh no, Sanders popularity keeps on falling." "Feeling a different kind of Burn. 'My eyes! The goggles do nothing!'" "Surely President Cruz/Trump/Rubio will not replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a far-right pro-life justice??"

Why would a police officer stop to consider whether someone - who had just fled the police, and had said that he would not be taken alive, and who no longer had his hands up, but they were instead in the coat pocket area - was right handed or left handed? I am not saying that he was or was not reaching for his gun. I am saying that it was a very reasonable assumption for those officers to make. Yes, Victoria Sharp said that they were shot at “at least 120 shots altogether” I don't believe her for multiple reasons. 1) Anyone can watch the video and see that is clearly not true 2) they are not all dead many times over 3) this is just more evidence that these people are unhinged from reality and simply playing the hero role in their own deluded fantasies. The only media that is making that claim is oregonlive.com. Any other source links back to them. Oregonlive said: "Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound in the confrontation about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395. He was treated and released from a local hospital and was in FBI custody, authorities said." This does not appear to be a direct quote from a released statement. It could be from any "authority" and the "authorities said" could be just referring to the second sentence and not the first. It is not impossible that he suffered a gun shot wound, but it is certainly not established, and I am extremely doubtful. Beats me.

I consider it most likely that there was no hole in the driver side windshield and instead it is just you seeing what ever you want to see as you have consistently done in this thread. But if there was a hole in the driver side windshield, yes, it is most likely from a non-lethal device fired after the driver left. Your belief that they fired a bullet at driver while he was stopped for several minutes is so far beyond absurd no one should take anything you say seriously.

The claim was that he was on his knees with his hands up when he was shot the first time. He clearly wasn't. Instead he was resisting arrest and had his hands near a loaded 9mm. Several people between the two vehicles were not charged with anything. McConnell explains why in his video - they had nothing on him because he was not an idiot like the Bundy's and several others. I would expect them to continue to have guns pointed at him until the scene was secure and they checked him for weapons. Possibly. There is no statement from the FBI on this, and the only source for the minor injury being a gun shot is oregonlive.com.

If there is a hole on the drivers side windshield when the helicopter starts circling (I have not seen one) then the most likely explanation was the subsequent use of non-lethal devices - sponge projectiles with oc to disorientate the passengers in a vehicle that had both fled the LEOs and had several loaded weapons. Aiming at the empty driver seat is the most logical choice to reduce the chances of injuries.

No, McConnell stated that neither he nor Ammon could see what happened because while they were being detained on the ground, LeVoy took off fleeing the LEOs. He stated that 2 people in Levoy's vehicle stated that he charged out the vehicle towards the cops as soon as his vehicle was stuck. He was wrong about the charging at the cops, but that is what the passengers thought happened. Levoy was certainly not on his knees with his hands up. His hands were not up from 9:27/9:28 onward. He didn't fall to the ground until 9:33. No, Ryan Bundy did not receive a gun shot wound from a nonlethal device. But there has been no confirmation that the superficial injury that Bundy received was from a gun shot.

McConnell's claim was almost completely correct. The story by Bundy and others was almost completely incorrect. His hands were not up when he was shot. He hands were around the inside coat pocket area where his loaded 9mm was. How many injuries would normally be expected from the unloading of cs sponges, flash bangs and pepper spray rounds?

Well of course it is, except that the report comes from Ammon Bundy who was physically no closer to what happened then Bundy's driver Mark McConnell was. McConnell has a very different story that is in part from watching the other vehicle flee the police, and in part from the story coming the surviving members of that other vehicle: Both vehicles were pulled over. The members of the vehicle driven by McConnell (which includes A. Bundy) were removed from their vehicle one at a time and arrested. In the other vehicle, after the first person was removed from the vehicle, the driver (now deceased) sped off reaching the road block about a km down the road. Trying to further evade them, he ending up getting the vehicle stuck in a snowbank, and with the tries still spinning, bolted from the vehicle charging at the officers. Keep in mind that the deceased was someone who had said to the media that he would never be taken alive by the police. It looks like suicide by cop.

Your claims are at least as absurd as those I have heard from the worst creationists and climate change deniers. First of all your claim that this event was not formal, or driven by media coverage etc are nonsense. This event was well covered by the media, even by the Sun Media chain. The symposium was live-streamed. And even if none of that happened to be the case, it is beyond sad to see someone defending a man who blatantly lied to an audience of 720 people. A status report by an anti-nuclear activist group. Not a paper. Not peer-reviewed. Not published in a scientific journal. Repeating a claim that was in a power-point presentation. Not in a paper. Not peer-reviewed. Not published in a scientific journal. Furthermore, what he says has nothing to with what the status report said. It doesn't mention an earthquake - Suzuki said " if there's another earthquake of a seven or above that, that building will go and then all hell breaks loose. And the probability of a seven or above earthquake in the next three years is over 95 per cent" The status report said nothing about that at all. The probability of an earthquake of 7 or more was actually considered to be 70%, and there had actually by that time already been four earthquakes of 7 or more since the tsunami, with the most inland one being the Fukushima-epicentre earthquake. Hell did not break loose. Nothing happened, which was no surprise to the experts. Suzuki simply lies. That is what he does. And so much for your claim that Suzuki's lies were restricted to a single sentence. In an interview found in Farley Mowat's book: "Rescue the Earth: Conversations with the Green Crusaders" Suzuki makes clear that he has walked from science and the scientific method. The book came out in 1990, so the interview was likely conducted in 1989. He claimed his impetus for his change away from science as a way to understand the world occurred around 1980 during the shooting of an episode on logging. I personally don't believe his story about his conversion away from science, because I think it was always there. Ecology, like all fields, started out accepting a lot of assumptions (there is simply no other way to even start) that were later challenged by scientific investigation and evidence. Suzuki like most hippie-types formed a world-view around those views and assumptions. For instance the idea of the balance of nature was something that almost all ecologists accepted as self-evident 40 or 50 years ago, but when ecologists gathered evidence they had to accept that their belief was simply unsupportable (See Kricher below)....that is unless you are David Suzuki, or someone else who can make money writing books telling the general public that their myths are still true. The idea that primal peoples enjoyed perfect environmental and social harmony was also prevalent among scientists at the time, but evidence shows that to not be the case either. When your sacred cows are challenged by evidence you can either accept the evidence or reject science as a way of knowing. When Suzuki's sacred cows were challenged he showed just how anti-science he is. From Kricher's "The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth" (pages 16 and 17) "Historically, the notion of a balance fo nature is part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way. It is an example of an ancient belief system called teleology, the notion that what we call nature has a predetermined destiny associated with its component parts, and that these parts all fit together into an integrated, well-ordered system ." "In the more modern sense, the continued perception that nature is structured in some sort of balance results from what ecologists call "scale effect." Ecologists, as we shall see, were slow to come to this realization, and thus the balance of nature idea was permitted to move unscathed from its teleological roots to become assimilated into materialistically based science." After a couple paragraphs explaining how nature on a smaller scale is not in balance, he talks about the last card to fall: "You can also observe nature on a larger scale and erroneously conclude that there is real balance operating. For many years ecologists have believed that ecosystems such as forests pass through a series of successional "stages" eventually to attain what is called a "climax" condition, where the biodiversity of the forest is in a kind of stable, long-lasting equilibrium. This notion is largely discredited today." The whole swath of the anti-science, ideological-based positions that people like Suzuki hold are outlined in Martin Lewis's (Both of these books are written by environmentalists, professors, and published by academic presses) book: Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism as he worried in the late 80s/early 90s that one of the segments of the environmental movement - the ideological, anti-science, eco-radicals - were taking over the movement, and that, as their policies and desires were based on myths, fantasies, ideologies, and devoid of scientific reality, they were self-defeating, would completely polarize environmentalism along political lines, and would delay real action exactly at a time when it was most needed. I think that his fears have completely come to pass and now because of their overwhelming position most people assume that the eco-radical version represents what environmentalism is. Because of that shift, environmental action which had previously had victory after victory, now brings failure after failure. The lack of action on climate change over the last 25 years should be placed at the feet of eco-radicals, and not conservative climate change deniers. The latter encouraged conservative politicians to oppose action. The former discouraged liberal and left-wing politicians from taking sensible actions. As I have said before - the proportion of carbon-free sources world wide increased from 6% to 12% between 1973 and 1990. While during the significantly longer period from 1990 to present they have only budged from 12% to 13%. This complete failure was not due to right-wing deniers. Instead it was due to politicians, who wanted to do something about climate change, facing a completely deluded, but extremely loud, set of ideological and counter productive demands from eco-radicals. Several countries, and provinces like Ontario, have been duped by eco-radicals leaving them with needlessly expensive electricity for a generation for the sake of a small amount of mostly useless wind energy. And of course for Suzuki and the rest of the eco-radicals it is not just with energy, but with everything, from pseudo-science views of food to the repeated scares from environmental NGOs in their constant parade of junk science. I spent most of my life deeply entrenched in the environmental movement. I knew that we were science-based and they were not. It was the reason why I became a scientist. And through becoming a scientist I evolved from someone who believed the things environmental NGOs said, to someone who was skeptical of some of their claims, to someone who now holds the position that claims by environmental NGOs are to be considered lies until I can evaluate the science behind the claim (and in almost all cases the claims are scare-mongering using poor evidence). That makes me sad (and angry) because there are serious environmental issues that need to be addressed. Nor is this rise of small, rural, local, holistic, vitalist, organic, pastoral fantasy thinking generally of left wing origin (it is not progressive, enlightened or revolutionary, but more often then not conservative and reactionary in origin) as Phillips Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts and Degregori's Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate show. However, there is no more sense in trying to change the mind of people like you then there is in trying to change the minds of creationists or climate change deniers. While there is the odd person here and there who will actually look at the evidence to challenge their own positions, those odd cases will not stop the march of unreason. Eventually the anti-science take over of both the environmental movement and the left in general will fall apart due to their self-defeating political strategies - but it won't be any time soon, and it won't be before they cause enormous harm.

As I expected instead of doing the intellectually honest thing and actually looking up what happened here, you, just like Suzuki does, simply made up a narrative that suits your own ideology. While, as I said, Suzuki finally has to worry about "Suzukibashers" exposing the lies he spouts (and that is a good thing), this was not one of those cases. First of all, despite your lie that the claim would have only been heard by a few individuals, Suzuki's statement was made in the non-formal venue/capacity of the sold out Myer Horowitz theatre (capacity 720) at the U of Alberta for the "Letting in the Light" symposium on water ecology. A fan of Suzuki, Aaron Paquette, uploaded to youtube that specific part of Suzuki's talk because he absolutely believed Suzuki. Over the next couple days it was watched 38000 times on his obscure channel before it was picked up by places like the Huffpo and RT - all believing the claims. Because of the popularity of the claims, Vice reported on it 9 days after Suzuki made the remarks. They had the good sense to ask a couple experts what they thought about his remarks and that was the first time any science or evidence-based remarks accompanied Suzuki's nonsense. We are such a scientifically illiterate country duped by the lies of people like Suzuki, that he can make claims so off the mark that a prominent anti-nuclear activist referred to them as "totally insane" and it took three months for (a couple) major media outlets to pick up on Suzuki's lies and for Suzuki to "regret" getting caught. So the whole incident was the complete opposite from start to finish from what you claim it was.

This is actually the biggest problem with Suzuki - for years he has been globe trotting, talking to audiences of fervent admirers who think that he is imparting objective scientific knowledge to them instead of sensationalist anti-science comments to promote his own agenda. Every once in a while when he faces an audience which have real scientists they show that he really doesn't know what he is talking about, and now that recordings from general audiences are common Suzuki is starting to realize that when he lies he might actually get called on it for once. Well he shouldn't have made the comment because it was a complete lie, and has zero corollary with the worst case scenario put forward by the chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission made at the time of the crisis when there was the most unknowns and hysteria was at its height; and agreed to as the world case scenario by the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report....a report put out by an anti-nuclear organization whose anti-nuclear lead author, Mycle Schneider, was at least honest enough despite his anti-nuclear position to say this about Suzuki's comments: "I'm really, really shocked about the way it's being discussed in Canada. It's just totally insane." When the head of an anti-nuclear organization, who has earned his living for decades from opposing nuclear energy to the extent that he won the "alternative nobel prize" in 1997 (the right livelihood award) for it, says that Suzuki's comments promoting fear of nuclear energy are insane it is probably time to stop defending him. There is no excuse for his comments. As to the rest of your nonsensical fear-mongering about long-term exposure and ocean current radiation, this kind of fear-mongering kills people. It kills people because the lies spread about radiation leave governments feeling that they have to act in extreme ways like the government did in Japan with their evacuation - an evacuation which itself is believed to be responsible for 1600 deaths in order to protect people from long-term cancer risks that were so small they were considered undetectable. And leaves evacuated Japanese victims in the absurd situation where they could move to many, many places throughout the world where the natural background radiation would be higher then they would face if they were allowed to move back home. And it kills people because it leads to opposition to nuclear energy - which both makes nuclear plants unnecessarily expensive, leaves older model nuclear plants online longer when in a rational world they would be replaced by more modern ones, leaves nuclear plants offline due to the politics of fear, instead resulting in increased fossils fuels being burned - which really does kill people. A rational environmental movement would be disgusted by Suzuki and the harm he causes to society and the environment.

His academic career most likely sounds much more impressive then it actually was. He only published a handful of papers (4 or 5, about half as first author), and nothing since about 1971. They say academics is publish or perish, and he wasn't publishing. I have never been able to find any evidence of him taking on any research graduate students (and no papers where he is the corresponding author confirms this). I don't know of any class that he taught since the 70s - although it wouldn't surprise me if his uni set up a system where he remained a professor in the 80s and 90s if he showed up for 20 minutes each semester to "teach" for a couple minutes during a first year genetics lecture.

That link is two years old. However, the critic who said "When he's in his own field, he's usually reasonable" was a nuclear physicist and I guess that is why the critic was unaware that Suzuki is not reasonable in his own field, and hasn't been for decades.

People who are there seem to think that racism is an ongoing problem. People who are not there seem to think that it is not a problem. I guess that is a tie.

The spoiled brats there have problems with racism. They are so indoctrinated they don't even know that racism doesn't exist anymore.

I can do you one better. I have taught classes at a university.

I agree that there is no discussion as to whether universities are riddled with indoctrination. Right-wing sources tell you that is the case and you believe the indoctrination you receive from those sources without question.

It may be clear to you, but oddly it is not to the people with actual experience in university lately.

As Larry Moran (professor of biochemistry at U of T, and author of a popular biochemistry textbook) noted 3 years ago: "Kirsty Duncan does not understand how science works". I don't expect a minister of science to be perfect. But I think that it shouldn't be too much to ask for the minister of science to understand how science works. When combined with the noble prize lie, this looks like an extremely terrible choice.

OK. You were responding to a claim about antibiotics and artificial growth hormones in milk - neither of which will be present in milk from New Zealand. But the latter may be given to dairy cows in the US.

New Zealand is not drinking milk form the US. Under TPP New Zealand will be exporting more milk and dairy products to the US. However, you are correct that there are no health problems related to drinking milk from cows treated with rBST/rBGH. There is no difference in the milk. Health Canada said that there is no biologically plausible reason for concern about human safety and there isn't. Opposition based on human health claims are purely anti-science. Opposition based on animal health have some validity, but really not much as the reasons for increased health problems are all related increased milk production - but no one gives a damn about the many, many other things that also increase milk production (and therefore also increase health problems). Antibiotics are illegal in milk both in the US and Canada.

While many of our progressives are already embracing the things mentioned in the article, very few academics on either side of the border are. The article also lists a lot of factors that have cause this change, and while university administration does appear to be one factor, the professors themselves do not appear to be. Other factors that were talked about include the change of parenting style (more fear based, helicopter, coddling, not letting them solve their own problems), social media etc. I grew up before those changes, but I believe that I see many of these same changes in my own friends on facebook despite few of them having gone to university (and none currently). As people self-restrict the groups/media/news etc that they receive many appear to be becoming increasingly unable to handle or accept, when they leave their bubbles, that others have different views. Campbell and Manning have referred to it as a transition from a culture of dignity (which itself arose from a culture of honour) to a culture of victimhood ("in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized." As for the professors - from the article you posted: The American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” From the Canadian Association of University Teachers: "Trigger warnings are inimical to the academic enterprise"

Bonam posted a link to a list of degrees in the US. I compared the percentage of students who received degrees in cultural/gender studies, communication/journalism, liberal arts, sociology (included philosophy, theology, psych etc as well) in 1970 (as a percentage of total degrees) to the percentage of those who received degrees in the same areas in 2012 (as a percentage of total degrees again). The percentage of students taking what many consider soft degrees in 2012 is about the same (I found it to be a little lower) as it was in 1970. As to changes that now require "non-fringe topic" programs to have "fringe" classes - I haven't witnessed that through my experiences. When Carl Sagan did his undergrad there were several non-science required courses (philosophy, english etc). When I did my biochem and molecular biology undergrad every required course was either in bio, chem, physics or math. I consider this incident to have much more to do with how social media works, and how businesses, including universities respond to this new phenomenon. Similar non-university examples are discussed in Jon Ronson's book "So, You've Been Publicly Shamed." The uproar was based in general social media, not among students and faculty (who as far as I can tell generally supported him).

Better detection (in the past far more children within the ASD would have gone undetected). Classification creep (the definition of autism has expanded immensely and what in the past would have been classified as autism now only makes up a small percentage of ASD). Classification substitution (I have an uncle who if he was born today would undoubtedly be classified within the ASD and remain in the home. 60 years ago he was classified as having mental retardation and institutionalized). People are older when they have children. Due to educational opportunities expanding for both men and women, people who have ASD-like tendencies are more likely to go to university together, get married and have children. In the past you were more likely to marry the girl/boy down the street, so the likelihood of two people who have ASD-like tendencies finding each other was decreased compared to today. There has been a lot of research into environmental causes (including vaccines) mainly because people/the general public like to pin things on environmental causes. So far, I agree with the experts that evidence supporting environmental causes is almost non-existent.

It seems it would be simpler for you to just not rank the Liberals at all.