Badass space dude completely fails at answering dumbass feminist

I guess most folks have heard that the European Space Agency landed a probe spacecraft on a comet the other day. It's a big deal, as no one has done it before. It took a 10-year flight to hook up with the comet. This is a difficult task that took a long time to accomplish. Guess what feminists are worried about?

The shirt worn by one of the scientists responsible for this accomplishment:

Yesterday the European Space Agency landed the Philae spacecraft on a comet, a powerful step forward for humanity and science alike. However, slightly before the big moment, coverage of the event reminded us how much progress remains to be accomplished back on Earth.
A number of the scientists involved on this incredible project were interviewed in the hours leading to contact by Nature Newsteam. One of those Rosetta scientists was Matt Taylor, who chose to dress, for this special occasion, in a bowling shirt covered in scantly clad caricatures of sexy women in provocative poses.
"This is going to be a very long day but a very exciting day," said Taylor. "I think everyone should enjoy it because we're making history."
No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. Taylor apologized on Friday during a live ESA broadcast for wearing the shirt, stating that "the shirt I wore this week... I made a big mistake and I offended many people, and I'm very sorry about this." Still, Taylor's personal apology doesn't make up for the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world's population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn't think about it. It wasn't worth worrying about.
This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don't feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague's office and they know they aren't respected. They hear comments about "bitches" while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they decide to change majors.

Guess what? Science is fucking hard. Yeah, most scientist are men. Is this because most scientists wear "offensive" shirts, or make comments about "bitches," or otherwise make women feel unwelcome? No. There are lots of reasons. But a shirt is not one of them. In science, you put forward an idea -- a hypothesis -- about something you think might be so. The scientific method then requires every other scientist in your field to try and rip your idea to shreds and prove how fucking wrong you are. Usually, they do. Then you come up with another hypothesis, and it all starts again. If you can't handle what kind of shirt the dude ripping your life's work to pieces is wearing, do you seriously think you can handle the same dude ripping your life's work to pieces, regardless of what he's wearing?

People, women or otherwise, do not choose against entering the scientific fields because of fashion choices. It's because they aren't suited for the work. Period. The shirts worn by scientists are the least of the problems facing potential scientists. The sciences are brutal. They are not for the faint of heart, because your work will be attacked. If your main concern is what your intellectual attackers are wearing, you are in the wrong business.

Matt Taylor should not have cried and apologized. He should have said something like this:

I wore a shirt that some people didn't like while I helped achieve something historic. My shirt is not why there were not more women in the room. If you think I'm wrong, fuck you. Go to MIT, get your damn astrophysics or whatever degree and prove me wrong. Oh, wait, you can't handle a shirt, so I know damn well you can't handle what it takes to get an advanced science degree. So I guess we're back to fuck you.

I don't think this is the kind of stuff we should turn to scientists to learn

Scientists say -- and let's face it, we trust these guys, because science, right? -- that this is the catchiest song of all time:



I'm not sure who is asking scientists this shit, because those guys are not exactly noted for their social skills and musical taste, so what the fuck would they know about catchy songs? Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of the "because science" horseshit, because most people are misrepresenting the science when they say that, and they don't understand the science anyway. As for the scientists, could we please quit pretending that many of them are not a bunch of grant-grubbing dickwads who are perfectly willing to link anything to anything if it gets them grants? And most so-called public interest groups that claim to represent "science" are just liberal shills who will sell you a membership for 20 bucks a year even if you can't spell "science." They certainly don't conduct actual research. If you think Science in the Public Interest or Union of Concerned Scientists are groups made up of scientists or that they are interested in science at all, please kill yourself before you reproduce, because science says that would be good for the gene pool, just like chlorine is good for a swimming pool. No, really, research proves it.

But I digress. We were talking about catchy songs. This Spice Girls song is catchy, but I'm not giving it any "of all time" awards. It's actually not a bad song, as pop songs go. To be the catchiest song of all time, a song must command your attention and have an unforgettable hook despite being God-fucking-awful. Like this:

Or maybe this:

Seriously, I could do this all night, but I'm tired. There are a lot of catchy songs out their catchier than the Spice Girls because they are catchy despite the fact that they suck. Further proof that scientists don't know everything. Hat tip to Hot Air for the original link.

This is why we have scientists

After all, without highly trained scientists to study important matters, how would we know that men like to look at boobs? No, really,  there's a study, which I can only find web references to (probably behind a paywall -- my efforts led only to a no-link USA Today story) that finds that "men like looking at women’s large breasts." Shocker.

Serious, you guys. How did you arrive at that?

No, really, I don't understand how they reached this conclusion.

But what the fuck do I know? I'm just a temp. The good news, of course, is that this study was doubtless funded with taxpayer money. Wish they'd given it to me. I could have given them study results much sooner.

Hat tip to VodkaPundit, which is a much cooler name that Raised By Wolves.

Do your homework, kids

One of the big problems with the so-called debate over global warming is a disturbing lack of understanding on the part of the public regarding the basis of the positions of the two sides. The alarmists, the ones who say we're all going to die if we don't stop using fossil fuels yesterday, base their positions on computer models. The so-called skeptics -- or worse, "deniers," invoking that whole Holocaust denier  imagery -- base their skepticism on observed data, among other things. The whole point of the scientific method is to come up with a hypothesis and then try like hell to prove it wrong. The global warming folks -- and by that, I mean the anthropogenic global warming folks, who claim  mankind is causing a warming of the planet byt its production of carbon dioxide that is going to be disastrous -- have never tried to follow this method. Instead, they ignore data they don't like and base their entire theory upon the results of global climate models. In other words, computer simulations, not the real world.

Alas, their models suck. There is so much that still is not understood about what factors affect climate that the warming alarmists don't even know what they're leaving out of their models, or whether the factors they are including work the way they think they do. The models, frankly, stink.

How do we know this? Because we have data, and the models are contradicted by actual data. Reality bites, right? Not a single fucking one of the major climate models out there accurately predicts what has happened in recent years and is happening now. Read that much? Try this:

Seventy-three climate models worldwide, not a single fucking one matches the actual data. Hey! Maybe Americans are better, right? Nah, not so much. Nineteen US-based models also go 0-fer:

Please note that they are not even close to reality.

So what does this mean? It doesn't mean man isn't contributing to any atmospheric warming. It doesn't mean we are. It means we don't fucking know, but we do know that the models that assume mankind is causing, not contributing to, any warming are for shit. For anyone who disagrees, please explain the anthropogenic warming theory in the comments. I'm betting none of you even understand the basics of the theory in which you so fervently believe. (At least the liberals in the audience.) And if you don't understand the theory at its most basic level, I'm a little confused as to why you might defend it while simultaneously calling me "anti-science."