Answering Kirk Hastings: Third Question for Darwinists

This post is part of the ongoing saga to answer the questions asked by Kirk Hastings of the defunct Evidence 4 Faith podcast. This post addresses the third question of Kirk's "Top Ten Questions for Darwinists."

3) Why does science demonstrate that all animal species have strict limits as to how much they (or their DNA) can change into something else, yet Darwinists continue to insist that animals can in fact change over time into almost anything?

Here, Kirk misunderstands DNA at a fairly fundamental level, apparently thinking it’s immutable. The first part of this question, ”Why does science demonstrate that all animal species have strict limits as to how much they (or their DNA) can change into something else” is flat out wrong. Science demonstrates no such limits. All life on Earth is based upon DNA, and there’s not that much difference between the various species. Kirk’s question claims a limit that is not there. Chromosomal fusion, for example, is a major change that can occur in a species that can have a profound impact upon the resulting organism. Genetic mutations, driven by copying errors, radiation or chemical interference, can have a major impact upon an organism.

Kirk’s question has to be discarded, because it assumes a limitation upon DNA’s flexibility that simply is not there. The base assumption in the question is so divorced from reality it’s not even wrong.

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Continue to the Fourth Question for Darwinists

Publishing my writing at long last

I've finally gotten some of my writing up on Kindle. The first book, the bar guide, is published under the name Halleys Comet, because that's the name I use on the Distorted View Podcast's voice-mail line, so it's the name the podcast's fans know me by. The other two are under the pan name Matthew Wunderlich. I'm not trying to hide my identity with the pen name. There are already multiple people in print named "Matthew Miller" so a pen name makes sense so as to avoid confusion.

Unofficial Distorted View Bar Guide by Halleys Comet

What is Truth?: Second Edition by Matthew Wunderlich

My Favorite Fire Alarm: The Flaming Spotted Dick was inevitable Book 0 in the Living the Wiretap series by Matthew Wunderlich.

"Living the Wiretap" is a short story series I'm working on, based upon the Wiretap Practical joke archive which was a source of endless amusement and inspiration to my friends and I in college. I'm going for a vibe somewhere between "The Dog Who Wouldn't Be" and "Animal House." The first published short story has some profanity, but I think I'll clean that up in an updated version.

"What is Truth?" is an effort at a skeptical philosophy book. I plan to evolve it over time. It started as an effort at a parody of self-help and new age advice books, but my actual views kept creeping through.

The bar guide will be updated in time for the "Official" release date of Feb 14. The updates will consist largely of some spit and polish, a few new photos and incorporating a handful of recipes submitted by the band Le SexoFlex.

Finally, I was working on a series to respond to the abysmal apologetic writing of Kirk Hastings, famous largely for being theologically vivisected by Irreligiosophy. I decided that trying to publish it on Kindle was silly, so I'm posting the articles on this blog under the tag "Kirk Hastings."

A lot of this has consisted of tidying up writing projects I'd been plucking at for ages. The bar guide is largely a new creation in just the last few months. My new year's resolution was to average an hour or more of writing a day, and so far I've been sticking to it relatively well, even if I have to count editing and promoting as "writing."

Did Kirk Hastings Perjure Himself?

Kirk Hastings has a book on Amazon.com called "The Infinity Man." It's debated if it's a shoddy Superman / Astroboy mash-up, or a straight-up ripoff of the robot incarnation of the "New Gods" character "Infinity Man" owned by DC Comics. Regardless of the book's merits, or lack thereof, it inspired a parody titled "The Infinity Strain." It languished for months on amazon.com, published through Createspace, doing even worse than Kirk's original book in sales.

Suddenly, Createspace pulled the book due to a copyright claim fro Kirk Hastings. Kirk then contacted the book's author to gloat about it. Check out "The Infinity Saga" blog for the full details and continuing updates on the legal battle, but the short version is Kirk Hastings apparently had to lie on the form he submitted to Createspace to get what he wanted. When the author of the parody tried to reach out to Kirk to settle, Hastings defended himself by asserting the you can only perjure yourself in a court of law. Apparently Kirk Hastings doesn't think lying "counts" unless it's in a court.

I've gotten the impression that Kirk Hastings is used to bullying others to get his way, and based upon the e-mail exchanges on the Infinity Saga Blog, having people stand up to him is something he simply cannot handle. Legal proceedings are underway, and the parody's author is resisting the book on other venues.

Good Luck Noah Miller. Be sure to contact Popehat if you need legal help or to raise public awareness of how Kirk Hastings is abusing the system to take down what appears to be a legitimate and legal parody.

Read more about Kirk Hastings at these links:

Answering Kirk Hastings: An ongoing series to answer the questions posed by Kirk's apologetic writing.

Kirk Hastings threatening people who left negative reviews of his book

Kirk Hastings, Sock Puppet

Answering Kirk Hastings: Second Question for Darwinists

This post is part of the ongoing saga to answer the questions asked by Kirk Hastings of the defunct Evidence 4 Faith podcast. This post addresses the second question of Kirk's "Top Ten Questions for Darwinists."

2) According to Darwinism, why do living things become more orderly and complex over time, but everything else in the universe eventually descends into disorder and chaos?

This question has several problems with it. First, it makes a false claim about evolutionary theory. “Darwinism” does not assert that “living things become more orderly and complex over time.” Kirk is exhibiting a common misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, that evolution is always an upward progression, a march towards some sort of genetic perfection. In reality, evolution is merely the chronicle of how creatures have changed over time.

The evolution of whales is very well documented in the fossil record. They are spectacular creatures exceedingly well adapted to their environment. Thier ancestors however had functional legs. The loss of those legs is a loss of complexity. Whales lost the ability to walk on land. This is hardly the only example. It’s currently theorized that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs. It’s hard to argue that the modern chicken is somehow “more complex” than a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Creationists such as Kirk Hastings confuse being better adapted to an environment with being “more” evolved by some standard.

Of course, Kirk could argue that I’m focusing on semantics, because the misnomer that a better adapted creature is necessarily more complicated is not the REAL issue behind his question. What Kirk is really getting at with this question is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law that’s probably misrepresented by Creationists more often than any other. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a fascinating topic on its own, but for the purposes of discussing evolution the first line of the Wikipedia article on the law is a good starting point:

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy - Wikipedia

The influential Creationist site Answers in Genesis (AiG) discusses Thermodynamics in the article The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Curse. Despite the tradition of Creationist writing using the Second Law of Thermodynamics as “proof” that evolution is impossible, the AiG article gives a fairly even handed summary of the law. It starts with a summary of the kinds of “Systems” involved.

Physicists define three types of thermodynamic systems: isolated, closed, and open. An isolated system exchanges neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. A truly isolated system does not exist as a subset of the universe, but we can approximate an isolated system very closely. A closed system can exchange energy but not matter with its surroundings. An open system may exchange both matter and energy with its surroundings.  - Answers in Genesis

The key argument used by Creationists is that the increase in entropy in an isolated system means that the increase in an organism's complexity necessitated by, for example, evolving a compound eye from eye spots, would be impossible, because everything is supposedly in a constant state of decay. This argument hinges upon the idea that the Earth is an isolated system, receiving no new energy from outside. In order for this fundamental principal of the universe to hold, and for evolution to occur, Earth would need to be receiving a steady stream of energy from an outside source, something massive, something that’s been chugging along producing energy for Earth for as long as life has been developing. What could possibly fit the bill?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

Oh, right, the Sun.

“why do living things become more orderly and complex over time..?”

The core misunderstanding for Creationists is the fact that the Earth is, by and large, a “closed” system. People who use the Second Law of Thermodynamics to argue that Evolution is impossible are doing so in part because they misunderstand what a “closed” system means. It means the Earth can exchange energy with the universe around it, but not matter, at least not in any meaningful way most of the time. The occasional extinction-level asteroid impact makes us something of an open system, but by and large we get a steady stream of energy from the sun. Life on Earth is able to evolve because of the energy pouring in from the sun. That energy allows for heat disparities which in turn allows for processes to thrive that generate information.

“but everything else in the universe eventually descends into disorder and chaos?”

The universe itself is, so far as we know, is an isolated system. Nothing is reaching in to pump energy or matter into the universe. Everything within it is moving towards energy equilibrium, maximum entropy. 

AiG represents, in many ways, the Creationism mainstream. As a major source of information, other Creationists get their reference points from it. Unfortunately for Kirk, even AiG is moving away from using the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an argument against Evolution. They even list the argument on their Arguments Creationists Should Avoid page. Kirk is out of step with his Creationist betters and peers in relying on the, frankly embarrassing, argument of Thermodynamics.

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Continue to the Third Question for Darwinsists

Answering Kirk Hastings: Introduction

While I originally intended to publish the following series of short essays as an ebook, I realized the market for apologetic writing pointing out the flaws of Religion 4 Faith's Kirk Hastings is very, very small. No one is going to pay $0.99 for an book addressing the host of a defunct podcast. As a result of this realization I will post the essays to this blog as I finish them. This has the advantage of giving  Kirk's defenders, should he have any, an opportunity to respond.

First Question for Darwinists
Second Question for Darwinists
Third Question for Darwinists
Fourth Question for Darwinists
Fifth Question for Darwinists
Sixth Question for Darwinists
Seventh Question for Darwinists
Eighth Question for Darwinists
Ninth Question for Darwinists
Tenth Question for Darwinists
Now avaialbe as an Ebook on Amazon.com
Kirk Hastings Sorta Responds

Introduction

I first became aware of Kirk Hastings when he taunted the hosts of the Irreligiosophy podcast with a copy of his self-published Christian apologetic "What Is Truth?: A Handbook for Separating Fact from Fiction in a Propaganda-Filled World" The hosts replied with a multi-episode review of the book, picking apart it’s scientific errors, logical fallacies and overall poor construction.

111: Kirk Hastings’ "What Is Truth?"

112: What Is Truth? II

113: "WIT" III: The Reliability of the Bible

114: "WIT" IV: The Case for Christ

One of the hosts then posted a review of the book to Amazon.com titled There are intelligent defenses of Christianity. This is not one of them.

Kirk’s response was embarrassing. He ranted and raved about atheist conspiracies and replied to his critics not with a rational debate, but with insults. Eventually he devolved into posting the same reply to multiple reviewers. A few months later, he went back and posted a Biblically themed word soup of divine revenge fantasy to all his critics in the Amazon reviews.

My garden

Gourd or pumpkin seedlings have invaded my coffee trees. Yes, this is my garden. 

Answering Kirk Hastings: First Question for Darwinists

I have a handful of writing and editing projects in the works. What is Truth? is a philosophy book I've been editing that is already available in the Kindle store. A major update is coming out on February 7, 2014. The "Unofficial Distorted View Bar Guide" will be published as a Kindle exclusive on February 14. Both books will be getting a handful of updates over the next few months before print editions become available.

One project that does not yet have a scheduled release date is "Answering Kirk Hastings." Kirk is an interesting fellow who may very well be the single worst English speaking Apologetic writer today. He has a series of Facebook pages where he posts assorted rants and then bans anyone who asks him difficult questions. I've decided it would be fun, in an MST3K sort of way, to publish replies to some of his questions. The full book will eventually be published as a Kindle Exclusive, with print and other eBook formats becoming available after I've responded to Kirk's more coherent posts. Below is a selection from the chapter "Top Ten Questions for Darwinists," where I respond to ten questions Kirk seems to think are slam-dunk "You can't answer it!" challenges.

Florida man allegedly attacked pregnant sister during fight over chicken nuggets

“I will punch you down,” Gordon barked at the woman before grabbing her neck and tossing her into a nightstand, the report said.

Kareem Gordon, 28, allegedly pounced his 25-year-old sister, who was four months pregnant, after he saw her eating the fast food treat inside their mother's Orlando home, according to a report. Gordon was booked on charges that include aggravated battery.

Apparently chicken Nuggets are tastier on Florida, if they're worth beating up your pregnant sister.

On the topic of men who should not be allowed anywhere near women, take the following steps to improve your Internet experience:

Use Notepad to open the following file on your computer:
c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add the following lines to the bottom:

127.0.0.1 www.returnofkings.com
127.0.0.1 returnofkings.com

Save the changes

Florida man smuggles 13 bottles of liquor in sweat pants

On Thursday, November 14 around 8 a.m., security cameras captured the man (above, left; also, below left) wearing a gray t-shirt and sneakers as he walked out with possibly the chunkiest pair of black sweatpants in all of Fort Myers that hour

I don't think I've ever owned a pair of sweatpants that had the structural integrity for a heist, especially one of that magnitude. Whoever made those sweatpants might want to use this news item as part of their advertising to brag about how durable the clothing it.

Then again, such advertising might be seen as encouraging the use of the clothing as a aid to larceny, so it might not be such a great idea to use it in marketing materials.

Woman sues officer who repeatedly applied mace to her genitals

Woman sues officer who repeatedly applied mace to her genitals

I'm at a loss to understand the "logic" that lead a police office to repeatedly spray a caustic chemical onto a person's most sensitive parts. If his goal was to retrieve the plastic bag, then his course of action was downright idiotic. If you spray someone's genitals with mace, they're going to clamp their legs together and clench up, possibly drawing the alleged contraband further into their body.

Moroni Pasta

I recently stumbled across an old recipe for home made pasta that appealed to my sensibilities. It's called Moroni Pasta. You have to make it from scratch, because commercial sources are scarce to nonexistent. There are three variations on Moroni Pasta. The first is the simplest, boiling pasta in coffee. The next uses brewed coffee, and the third is made with instant coffee.


Bitter Moroni Pasta

This is the only version I've tried. I boiled three cheese tortellini in coffee, and served it with an Alfredo sauce. Unfortunately, boiling that much coffee results in a bitter and astringent meal. The Alfredo sauce could have been a bit sweeter to balance the bitterness of the coffee boiled tortellini.

1. Purchase commercial pasta.
2. Read the preparation directions and replace the recommended water with strong coffee, preferably made in a French Press.
3. Cook the pasta according to the manufacture's directions.

The leftover coffee will be bitter and starchy. I'd be hard pressed to find a good use for it, but if you cooked the pasta without added oil, you could use it to make a coffee beer. The starch will settle out when the yeast flocculates and the bitterness can be balanced by reducing the bittering hops.

Brewed Moroni Pasta

A major advantage of adding the coffee to the pasta is the end result won't be as bitter as pasta cooked in coffee. The result is far more versatile and can pair with any number of sauces.

1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg
2 tablespoons brewed Espresso or Turkish coffee

1. Sift the salt and flour into a medium sized bowl.
2. In a second bowl, beat the egg and coffee
3. Make a well in the flour/salt mixture and add the egg/coffee mixture.
4. Mix together to form a stiff, smooth dough.
5. Knead the dough for 5 minutes on a lightly floured surface. Add flour until the dough is no longer sticky.
6. Use a pasta machine to roll the dough to the desired thickness.
7. Cut to desired width.

The last two steps can be done by hand, but a pasta machine makes it easier.

Quick Moroni Pasta

It's critical that the instant espresso be completely dissolved in the egg before you combine it with the flour, or the resulting pasta will have bits of incompletely dissolved espresso powder. This will cause the pasta to break apart when cooked.

1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg
1 tablespoon instant espresso.
2 tablespoons of water.

1. Sift the salt and flour into a medium sized bowl.
2. In a second bowl, beat the egg and instant espresso.
3. Make a well in the flour/salt mixture and add the egg/coffee mixture.
4. Mix together to form a stiff, smooth dough. Add water as necessary.
5. Knead the dough for 5 minutes on a lightly floured surface. Add flour until the dough is no longer sticky.
6. Use a pasta machine to roll the dough to the desired thickness.
7. Cut to desired width.

Server vs Server

Years ago I was the head tech at a small company. I was in charge of pretty much all of IT, except the things I talked the owner into hiring additional staff to take over. Legislation like CAN-SPAM and technology like ubiquitous server side spam filtering were off in the distant future, so dealing with SPAM had more of a wild west aspect than it does today.

One day I was looking into the performance issues we were having with the mail server. It was taking staff members ages to download and sort though their email over the assorted dial up connections used at the time. Naturally the bulk of the issues were spam and mailing list related. Server side mail filters that fell within the company owner's budget (free or stolen, not Open Source, that's Communist!) lacked the sophistication to address the problem effectively. I ended up configuring a complex web of routing rules to remove most the detritus. I sent unsubscribe requests to the non-work related mailing lists that seemed vaguely respectable. My goal was to stop as much of the incoming garbage as I could so I had less post-hock deletion and filtering to deal with.

One mailing list in particular was problematic. The content was overtly racist, but avoided the racial slurs that would have been caught by my manually configured rules. It also used a series of different domains to differentiate the content. Jew bashing jokes, for example, came from a different bank of URLs than the ones mocking Asians.  Since this set of related sites were responsible for most the garbage still bogging down the mail server I tracked down the originating site and found a phone number for "Joe." I quickly realized Joe was a one man operation. My request was simple and delivered politely, don't send any more mail to our domain. 

"I only send mail to a domain if someone subscribes and the form gives me permission to send a subscribe offer to anyone else on the domain."

I found this to be perplexing logic and replied, "Whoever is subscribing lacks the authority to give you that kind of permission."

"Not my problem," Joe said," Take it up with them."

"Who was the original subscriber?"

"Privacy laws. Get a warrant if you want to know."

"Then just remove my domain from-"

"Stop right there kid. It would take me WEEKS to scrub your domain from my mailing lists."

"Sounds like your mailing list management software was written by an idiot."

"I wrote it, and I don't need to scrub whole domains. Why does it bug you anyway? Are you one of THEM?"

I thought for a moment and said, "I'll just configure the mail server to send an "unsubscribe" request to anything from one of your domains."

"Good luck finding them all b****h."

I read off a list of domain names and ended with, "Did I miss any?"

There was silence for a few seconds. 

"Still there?" I asked. 

"You fu**ing hacked me."

"Nope. Just a little research. It took about an hour."

Joe hung up. 

I set up a rule to move any e-mail from the flagged domains to a dummy address I set up, then delete the message in the original mailbox. I then wrote a PERL script to check the mailbox, extract the "unsubscribe" address and send an "unsubscribe" request for the address the message was originally sent to.

Since it was now about 5:30 on a Friday I went home for the weekend and left my new system running.

When I got back on Monday the sales guys, some of who came in early to get started on correspondence, complimented me on how quickly they could get their e-mail. A few hours later the company owner, I'll call him "Dan," came in and said "I just got a call from a guy saying you hacked his server."

It took about two hours to sort out what was going on. The racist mailing list sent an email asking for confirmation in response to every unsubscribe request. My script responded to this with another unsubscribe request. This meant a single e-mail generated an endless series of back and fourth messages.

"Unsubscribe"

"You Sure?"

"Unsubscribe"

"You Sure?"

"Unsubscribe"

"You Sure?"

"Unsubscribe"

"You Sure?"

Since the racist mailing list sent us hundreds of individual e-mails a day this resulted in a LOT of e-mail. The large glut of traffic was not noticed at our end because the individual staff members were able to download their largely SPAM free e-mail quickly and easily, with the dial-up bottleneck masking any server side issues. The only connection that was bogged down was the one used by the spare computer I'd set up to send the unsubscribe requests. The mailing list server however was not faring as well. My script didn't rout e-mail through our server, but instead connected directly to the mail server processing the "unsubscribe" requests. I'd done this to reduce the load on our own mail server.

It took another hour to convey all of this to Dan in a way he could understand. He then asked what was so horrible about the mailing lists anyway.

"Well, the messages are huge. Between downloading and having to delete them they waste a lot of staff time. Then there's the content."

Dan was an Irish American. He proudly donated to the IRA to 'Defend Ireland.'" The racist mailing list included four different domains used to send jokes bashing the Irish. A lot of Polish and Scottish jokes were re-purposed for the mailing list. Then there were the images included in the mailing list, many of which depicted Irish men as flaming homosexuals with a keen interest in sheep. Dan was VERY homophobic.

"He's kinder to the Irish than he is to African Americans. This is nothing compared to how he treats the Jews though."

We got Joe on the speakerphone. Joe and Dan spent about ten minutes yelling at each other. Joe accused Dan of being a Jew shill, and Dan accused Joe of racism. Dan conveyed a muddled, but essentially accurate, explanation of what was happening at a technical level and ended with, "So go ahead and call the feds and say we're hacking you, but you and I both know you'd be lying, and the feds will figure that out."

"Stop sending me mail!" Joe screamed.

"You first," I said. "Stop ignoring our unsubscribe requests and this will stop on its own."

I heard furious typing and Joe said, "I'm blacklisting your entire f**ing domain now."

"But you said that would take weeks."

The typing was now punctuated with a string of repeated obscenities and mangled "you mamma" insults. After a few seconds he hung up.

I walked over to the PC running my PERL script. I stopped the script and emptied the dummy account's message backlog. Messages were still coming in, but after about an hour they started tapering off, finally stopping by 2:00 pm.

At 4:30, the Comptroller stormed in and demanded to know why her joke mailing lists weren't coming in anymore.

"You should discuss this with Dan," I told her, "He was part of the decision."

"Oh, I WILL," she said, her voice dripping with venom. She then stormed off in a huff. Normally when the comptroller threatened me, there was a subsequent meeting with Dan, or even an all hands meeting where I had to do things like justify the use of passwords on network logins against accusations of it being a "paranoid" practice. Strangely enough, I never heard of this particular issue again.

Scandalous!

Yesterday I took my five year old son school shopping. One errand had us at Whole Foods. He wanted to ride on my shoulders and I obliged him for a few minutes. He started humming a tune. I asked him what it was and he called out, "Guess!"

I listened for a few moments and said "Barrett's Privateers?"

He replied by singing, very loudly, "I'm a broken man on a hall-e-fax pier! The last of Barrett's privateers!"

A woman walking towards us in the ice cream aisle stopped and stared, her face frozen in horror. She said, "Oh my God." I felt her reaction was a bit over the top.

My son continued, "Fire no shots, shed no tears, last of Barrett's Privateers!" He drew out the last "e" for a few seconds.

We passed the woman who was frozen in horror. I smiled and nodded. She gasped and scurried away. I joined my son in singing the chorus a couple of times.

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

My son puts a surprising amount of emotion into "God damn them all!" for someone who does not yet understand what the phrase means.

As we turned the corner I noticed a man behind us who was glaring at me. He mouthed something he clearly meant me to understand but I didn't parse it. Feeling a bit mischievous I cocked my ear towards him and said "Que?"

He snorted and walked past us, casting me one last disgusted look as he did so.

A few minutes later the impromptu concert ended as we began the negotiations for selecting a new lunch box.

Miley Cyrus

Having seen the Miley Cyrus video, I would like to explain why I found it offensive.

She was dancing like she was drunk. Her "thrusts" were ragged and all over the place. That's fine and dandy for a party at a friend's house, but if you're going to bump and grind on TV, rehearse the act a bit first for crying out loud. The lolling tongue made her look like the image of the badly stuffed lion that surfaces every now and then. It wasn't playful, goofy, sexy or seductive. It was just awkward.

The overall performance made her look like a delinquent 11 year old trying to parody a mentally challenged stripper. Given how Hollywood mucks up the physiological development of child stars, this may be closer to reality than any of us would prefer.

If I were in a position to advise Miley Cyrus, I'd say this, "Honey, PLEASE, do the vamp thing with a bit more commitment. Lil Kim , Madonna and Lady GaGa are good examples. Even though you borrowed Gwen Stefani's hair, I think she may have gone more "sultry" than is appropriate for your new act.

But please, when you go on stage to amp up the sex appeal, have some self respect while doing it. Put some art into the craft. Don't phone in a teenage booty bounce and call it a day.

To Thicke and his song "Blurred Lines," please, no more musical love letters to date rape, OK? Partnering with Cyrus was a wise move on your part, because her dancing distracted people from the rape endorsing nature of your song, but while her act just needs some rehearsal and polish, yours needs to be drug out into the street and shot.

Rotolight Utter Shite

I have no personal experience with Rotolight's products, but their recent behavior has convinced me, and this is just my opinion, that the company is run by feckless fools suffering from terminal cranial-rectal inversion. Popehat covers the details in the article Rotolight Tries To Unring The Censorious Bell. In short, Rotolight filed a fraudulent DMCA complaint, falsely asserting copyright over content that wasn't theirs, in order to silence an obscure negative review of one of their products. By filing a DMCA compliant that asserted copyright they did not have, they committed perjury to illegally silence a critic. They have gone on to compound their error with an evasive non-apoplogy that is little more than a steaming pile of marketing with a side of blame deflection.


The great tragedy of the exchange is that Rotolight turned what could have become a customer service success story into a PR disaster. The rank incompetence of how Rotolight handled this incident is breathtaking. A competitor engaging in industrial sabotage would have been hard pressed to do a better job of destroying their reputation than Rotolight has done themselves.

The key issue is that the flaw being discussed in the negative review was one that Rotolight CLAIMS to have corrected in future versions of the product. They cared enough about the negative review to commit perjury to silence it. Why didn't they care enough to, for example, exchange the older, flawed product for an upgraded one, so the reviewer could repeat the test with the new kit? They could have used the negative review, even engaged with the reviewer, to turn this into a marketing opportunity to highlight advances in their hardware.

Unless, of course, the claim that newer versions of the hardware lack this flaw is another lie. They showed they're willing to lie on a legal document, a DMCA complaint, to commit perjury. Why should their marketing claims be trusted about the flaws allegedly corrected in their products? We know they used legal thuggery to censor one bad review. How many other bad reviews were scuttled by the abuse of the legal system? For all we know half the people who've used the products could consider them utter shite, and we don't know about it because of an active, and abusive, legal strategy by censorship happy scumbags.

This also brings into doubt the positive reviews that can be found online. A company that lies to silence their critics is, in general, not going to be above lying to make their products look better than they really are.

Unless you already have personal experience with Rotolight and like their products, it would be wise to avoid them in the future. There's no way of knowing how good their products really are. Just don't talk about what you think of their hardware. Thanks to Rotolight, your sincerity and objectivity will be in question if you say anything nice about their products.

Rotolight

Cinegear

The 'Too Stupid for my Job' Defense

The Derp is strong with this one. 

East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux has spend two years running an illegal sting operation based on a state law that had been declared unconstitutional in 2003. Now he's claiming he had no idea a law he was trying to enforce was invalid despite the DA refusing to press charges on any of the cases for the entire two years of the sting's run.

It would appear Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux is too stupid to have his current job.

"Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux told the newspaper that it didn't matter the Supreme Court ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional a decade ago, it's still on the books in Louisiana, so they were still arresting men for it."

I'd suggest he be demoted to a janitorial role, but frankly, I don't think he's intelligent enough to be trusted with chemicals as dangerous as those used by the average custodial engineer. Has "Dirty Jobs" covered anything that can be done by someone as stupid as Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux? I can't think of any, but I've only seen a couple seasons of the program. Hard work tends to require competence, a character trait clearly lacking in Sheriff Gautreaux.

I'm going to take Special Needs Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux at his word on this, and assume he's telling the truth, that his comprehension of the legal system is too shoddy for him to work in law enforcement. The alternative to him being a mind numbingly ignorant embarrassment to the human race, would be that he was intentionally running an illegal sting to harass homosexual men in the area. He claims he's just stupid, and not deliberately abusing his power to harass people who make him "feel funny down there."

Caleb Learns About Homeopathy

The following makes more sense if you know what Homeopathy is. The excellent article Darryl Cunningham Investigates: Homeopathy covers the basics in a succinct, comic book format.

This past weekend I had a conversation with my son about quackery. He's 5 and we were buying him more allergy medication. He wanted the package with the colorful cartoon characters on it. They were homeopathic preparations. I started talking to him about what that meant, and at one point he said, "Oh! Fake medicine, like my cheetah is fake!" He was referring to one of his stuffed animals.

I replied with "Kinda, only no one is trying to trick people into thinking your cheetah is real."

I ended up explaining what the "8x" on one package and the "20c" meant on another, and just how dilute that made the original ingredient. It was easy for him to grasp as one of his science kits has a water dropper which he uses to move around small quantities of things. We ended up miming taking one drop of red food coloring and moving it through 8 levels of dilution. When we got to the end he said "But Daddy, there won't be any red LEFT!"


"I think you understand," I said.

In the end he picked the cherry flavored Benadryl. Unfortunately this has reminded him that he does not like the cherry flavor. We've agreed that when this bottle is empty we'll go back to bubble-gum flavor.

My Son vs the Jerk

A couple weekends ago, my son Caleb and I were in the grocery store, waiting our turn at the deli counter. I had put my five year old son in one of the carts with a built-in infant seat. I'd done this because he was sound asleep, having exhausted himself at a park before our shopping trip. He continued to nap peacefully throughout the wait. I was checking things off the shopping list on my cell phone. While the counter was decently staffed, things were moving slowly because one woman in her 60's was giving one deli employee a VERY hard time, having him slice and re-slice everything multiple items.

Finally it was out turn. While my order was being sliced a woman in her 40's came up to the woman in her 60's.

"How is it you're STILL at the deli counter?" the woman in her 40's asked.

"They're incompetent," the older woman said, "Here's your meat." She tossed a few packages of meat and cheese into the younger woman's cart.

The younger woman picked up the packages, looked at them and said, "This isn't what I wanted. I need-"

"That's what you're getting. Your taste is crap. This is better."

The younger woman lowered her head and said nothing. It was pretty clear from her body language that she was used to deferring to the older woman. they looked alike enough that I suspected they were mother and daughter.

By this point, my salami and pastrami were done. I tried to leave the deli counter, but the two women and their carts were blocking me in. I politely said, "Excuse me," as I tried to maneuver between them.

The older woman shot me and angry look and nearly screamed, "WHAT is your rush? IT," she poked my son hard in the chest, "is still asleep."

Before I could respond Caleb looked sleepily up at the woman and said, "If you're mean, you won't have any friends." He then closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

The older woman was apoplectic. She raised her arm as if to hit Caleb. I thrust out my arm, shielding my son and growled at her, "If you touch my son again I'm having you arrested for assault." I showed her my cell phone, on which I had already dialed "9-1-1." I had not yet hit the "Call" button.

She glared at me for a moment, her arm jerking as if she were fighting the urge to hit me. She then lowered her arm and, still shooting me a look fit to kill, backed up her cart to make way for us to leave. As she did so I noticed the younger woman was beaming with delight, but she turned away the moment the older woman looked at her.

As we left I heard the older woman muttering, insulting my manhood for "threatening to arrest an old lady." I found myself wondering if she'd have thought better of my manhood if I'd responded to her the way she'd tried to respond to my son.

Rainbows are Gay Now

A recent online exchange reminded me of a former coworker from a job long ago. She was in her 60's. She was the single most anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic person I'd met since college. She ran an "investment" newsletter for some of her equally atrocious friends. One day she asked me for a clipart CD so she could "pretty up" the newsletter. She was, of course, doing this on company time. She ended up sending out a newsletter full of rainbows and unicorns. A few hours later she started getting angry calls from her friends about the "faggy" newsletter. She confronted me and accused me of sabotaging her by not warning her that "rainbows were gay now." (Did I mention she was paranoid too?)

"Rainbows have been a gay pride symbol for ages."

"Since WHEN?"

"Since you were in high school."

"How was I supposed to know?"

"Watching the news?"

She laughed and said, "I'd rather be drinking."

I considered that statement a nice summary of her life, personality and understanding of the world around her.

After that she declared me the "f*g sh** expert" for knowing that rainbows were used as a gay pride symbol. On the rare occasions when a news story involving homosexuals came to her attention, she would go around the office telling people to ask me about it as I "probably knew the degenerates involved."

I sometimes forget just how many truly horrible people I've worked with over the last 20 years.

This is why punching parking officers is a bad idea

Last week I saw something that amused me.

An officer in Harvard Square was writing a parking ticket for a badly parked SUV. A man ran up and started screaming at the officer. The officer calmly looked up and went to put the ticket on the SUV. The man took a swing at the officer. The officer dodged it easily, and the man punched the side of his own SUV. The man crumpled to the ground, clutching his hand and yelling some more.

The officer calmly walked around the prone man, put the ticket on the car and walked away as if nothing noteworthy had happened. If I'd had a camera and taken  a picture I'd be torn on if the better caption was "Like a Boss" or "I Ain't Even Mad."