I tried to stay away from Conservapedia, but I just can’t. Despite what I said in my previous post, nobody on the web does stupid like Conservapedia. And I’m not talking about your everday, vanilla kind of stupid. No, this is spicy, arrogant stupid. It’s the stupid that comes from people who are too stupid to know they’re stupid, and my latest Conservapedia discovery serves as a perfect example of this arrogant ignorance. Stumbling around the site earlier, I eventually came across a link to the Conservapedia article on Richard Lenski, so I decided to take a peek and see if they’d found any new bullshit to throw at the man or his work. Well, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had.

The bullshit in question has been hurled at the statistical analysis used in Lenski’s inaugural PNAS paper, and it’s particularly ripe.  It opens with a heaping pile of fail:

Blount, Borland, and Lenski^[1] claimed that a key evolutionary innovation was observed during a laboratory experiment. That claim is false. The claim was based on incorrect measurements of statistical significance.

The person who wrote those words understands approximately shit about Lenski’s paper.  The claim of an “evolutionary innovation”, specifically the evolution of aerobic citrate utilization in a population of E. coli, was not based on any statistical argument.  It was based on the direct observation of the Cit+ phenotype.  Statistical methods were used in the paper to evaluate the hypothesis of evolutionary contingency, not to support the observation of aerobic citrate metabolism.  So right off the bat it’s clearer than Crystal Pepsi that the dildo who wrote this exercise in creationist self-delusion doesn’t know the first thing about the paper he/she claims to be critiquing.

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I’ve recently discovered RenewAmerica.us, which just might be crazier and dumber than Conservapedia.  Of all the RenewAmerica columnists, I think you’d be hard pressed to find another who can bring the stupid like Cynthia Janak.  Cynthia doesn’t like vaccines, especially the Gardasil HPV vaccine.  Cynthia also has the scientific literacy of an eighth-grader, a fact she basically admits with alarming frequency.  But she doesn’t let this limitation stop her from wading into the scientific literature to find evidence that vaccines cause all sorts of nastiness, often resulting in hilarity.  Anyway, I just couldn’t make it past the third paragraph of her latest juicy turd:

Since September of 2008 a mystery illness has struck the UK after the HPV jab Cervarix was implemented in a school vaccine program.

It has been reported in the UK Mail Online that 1,340 reports have been filed coincidentally after the HPV vaccine Cervarix was implemented in September. This mystery illness causes Paralysis, Convulsions, Sight problems, Nausea, Muscle Weakness, Fever, Dizziness and Numbness, Bell’s palsy, Hypoesthesia (loss of sense of touch) and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

With the knowledge that I have from an insider as to how the young girls and women are being treated by the medical establishment in the UK, I feel it is safe to say that approximately only 1% are reporting. So if 1% are reporting that means that the real number of girls affected by this mystery epidemic is more like 134,000. That means that 19% of the girls getting the jab have acquired a new medical condition. I came at this percentage because it states in the article at 700,000 girls aged 12–13 have been vaccinated. This vaccine is also being given to 17 and 18 year old girls.

Wow.  Cynthia finds a couple of girls who thought they were treated badly by their doctor and concludes that 99% of patients aren’t reporting paralysis, convulsions, Bell’s Palsy, and the loss of one of their five senses.

Wingnut blogger Ed Morrissey makes the case that Obama is just as dumb as Bush because Obama thinks Austrian is a language.  After quoting Obama saying, “I don’t know what the term is in Austrian”, Morrissey snipes:

Austrians speak German primarily — and I’m sure some Austrians speak languages ranging from Albanian to Swahili, being an intelligent and cultured people. However, none of the speak Austrian, because it doesn’t exist.

Technically, he’s right.  And the tomato is technically a fruit, but I have yet to find a can of fruit cocktail with tomato in it.  See,  the thing is, there are numerous German dialects that differ drastically from another.  For example, and I know this from personal experience, Germans who speak the Berlin dialect often cannot understand Germans from Bavaria.  So contrary to what Morrissey seems to think, a Berliner would likely struggle to communicate with someone speaking Austrian German.  Sorry, Ed.  I know it upset you greatly when people pointed out how dumb Bush sounded, but you’re gonna have to try harder if you want to pass that torch on to Obama.