Catching up with old news

Some people are in the news that I've covered before. Let's do a quick update.

• We've encountered that very silly man, Barney Zwartz, a few times before. He's an Australian columnist who whined incompetently about the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and thinks "militant atheist" literally means they are coming in jackboots to crush believers (he also comments in that thread). He's kind of a clueless dingleberry.

  He's also getting dumber. He's now credulously reporting that a fundagelical kook is going about raising the dead. It's not just any kook, either, it's Danny Nalliah, an odious little creep who points to natural disasters and claims they're God's vengeance on people who don't support the conservative party line on abortion and such. He's a cut-rate Australian Pat Robertson in that regard, only with less clout…except that people like Zwartz will gullibly hand him more authority.

  Now Nalliah is acting as if Zwartz is his personal publicity agent. That should be a sign to The Age that it's time to let him go.

• Gavriel Avital was the chief scientist in the Israeli education ministry, emphasis on was. I called him the Don McLeroy of Israel, a bumbling denialist who who rejected both the idea that humans evolved from other apes and that carbon dioxide contributed to global warming. Good news: Avital was fired, and even better news, he was fired for his stupid anti-science comments, rather than the usual route of getting fired for incompetence in other aspects of his life.

• Mike Hallett is a totally powerless crackpot who believes he has found fossil dragons, lots of fossil dragons. In fact, just about every rock he sees on the sere hillsides of Utah he imagines to be a bone from giant pre-Cambrian Seazorian monster from the Halletestoneion Era (←not a recognized geological division, as you might guess). The pathetic little man is totally delusional.

  Now he's vainly railing to have the Utah State Paleontologist fired for inadequately protecting his rocks. I've seen his photos; they're random boulders, and Hallett sees Seazoria (another made-up category) dragons in their patterns like others might see squid in the clouds…but rational people know it takes more than imagination to document reality.