Shakin’ the nuts

Stay tuned for frolicsome hijinks and high hilarity. We have stirred up some kooks. Here are 3 in ascending order of lunacy.

That climate fraud, Anthony Watts, has noticed Pepsigate. He's got a unique spin on it: the reason some Sciencebloggers were very upset at the inclusion of an unlabeled infomercial as a blog had nothing to do with the ethics of keeping advertising separate from content — it's because we don't like Pepsi. Then he goes off on a riff about how we're hypocrites because we probably eat Doritos and drink Mountain Dew.

Wait. That's not funny. That's just stupid.

This one is a little better. Crackpot right-wing physics goon Lubos Motl has also noticed Pepsigate, and of course he has his own distinct explanation. It's because we're all left wing socialist pinko commie stooges producing "stinky communist garbage".

These "thinkers" make Leonid Brezhnev look like Milton Friedman in comparison. The list includes the self-described "Godless ejaculating liberal" Paul Z. Myers, the top climatic Wikipedia censor and U.K. Green Party apparatchik William M. Connolley whose Stoat is "taking science by the throat" (his words!), Tim Lambert with his Deltoid, and many others whose names remain actively unknown to us - thank God. (I follow dozens of blogs but none of the SB blogs is anywhere in my bookmarks.)

Got that? Stoat and Deltoid are my comrades. Don't ever visit them. I repeat: Stoat and Deltoid. Together, we are the troika of evil.

One last tidbit, and this is really funny.

Your humble correspondent was offered to join the scienceblogs.com platform in 2006 and I had nothing substantial against it. The purely technical considerations such as the stability of the URLs and traffic and the control over the design - and independence in general - decided I would say no.

I remember that! Motl was considered, and his name was floated to the blogger community here, and after we all got done laughing, the consensus was that no, we'd rather not have Crazy Lubos in our company. And the fact that he wanted full control over his design…Lubos Motl is infamous for his tasteless and eyeball-busting scrambled layouts.

Last example of conservative conniptions, and this one is my favorite. I have been targeted by Conservapædia for their Article of the Week. Yay me!

My crimes are numerous and severe: cracker abuse, gate-crashing movie premieres, mocking creationists, riding a triceratops, and being "intellectually slothful". The most grievous crime, though, the one that deserved to be pulled out and highlighted with a figure, was this one.

I've been very naughty.

By the way, years ago there were several Conservapædia fanatics who did spam the site rather fiercely, trying to jam up conversations and presumably direct more traffic to their silly site. I had to add "conservapedia" to the list of filtered words here. If you want to comment on this, you can't link to Conservapædia, and you can't mention them by their preferred spelling either. You can use that effete European ligature, though: just write it out Conservapædia. Drives 'em nuts.

All of this is very annoying. I'm an atheist; how can Voltaire's prayer be working out so well for me? ("I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.")