pharyngula

This is old news. The NY Times has an article on the expanding agenda of creationists to include denial of lots of other phenomena that make them uncomfortable. We've known this for years! It isn't just creationism; those beliefs have a surprisingly high correlation with denial of climate change,…

Allow me to purge a few interesting stories from my mailbag: Keshia Canter was working the drive-up window at a burger joint when a sanctimonious customer handed her a pamphlet. Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If…

Weep with me. You know, the rotten little crunchy, jointed thing wouldn't have stood a chance if he'd been fighting within his own weight-class. I found this video on a blog called Arthropoda — a clearly biased advocacy site for violence on molluscs by the world's dominant, bullying metazoans.…

Gosh, when I put it that way, it doesn't sound like much. But at least Dr Rachel Dunlop has won the Shorty Award in the Health category, beating out some quack. Congratulations!

This one is in North Carolina, and I think it deserves some special attention. This ain't just a Creation “Museum” — it's a Christian bookstore, an antique tool collection, and a taxidermy hall of fame! Ken Ham should be squirming with envy. Note the…

Answers in Genesis explains how you can use a "Biblical framework" to figure something out. In this case, they use the Bible to… derive the existence of Atlantis and peg the time of its sinking to somewhere between 1818BC and 600BC. The phrase that comes to mind is "Garbage in, garbage out."

OK, how many takes did it take to get that exactly right?

Hydnora africana

The last open thread had some discussion of what other people don't want you to say on the internet — George Carlin had a few things to say about that censorious attitude (NSFW; you know what he's going to say.) With special bonus rudeness below the fold!

Texans can do things right, I tell you: they just booted Don McLeroy off the state board of education in the primary election. Yay! It's a step forward, although the rest of the board is still a muddled mix of creationist loons and cautious conservatives.

Or you will be exterminated! You know, Texas has a reputation of being a nasty place full of particularly ignorant rednecks, which I don't blindly agree with — I know too many smart Texans, and it does have many good organizations, like the Texas Freedom Network — but this is a blight that smirches…

…is that too often newspapers think you don't need a science journalist to write it. Any ol' hack will do. Take this article on evolution in the Vancouver Sun, which distills modern evolutionary biology into 12 theories, which happens to include Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy as well as Intelligent…

Chopra has another mindless post on the HuffPo, titled Only Spirituality Can Solve The Problems Of The World. I read the whole thing. He's got some fuzzy definitions, praises god-consciousness, gushes about love, joy, kindness, peace, etc., but overall, it's the usual vacuous fluff. I am left with…

I've long held a gripe about science-fiction aliens: they're always far too unimaginative. I know it's because SF is rarely about real aliens but is always about ourselves (and is also usually but keeping the budget manageable, in the case of SF movies), but still…the model is always our species,…

Have you heard about this strange new web service, Chatroulette? It makes webcam connections between random pairs of people with the idea that it'll spark interesting conversations. I like the idea, but I haven't tried it yet myself because a) I've heard that mainly what you get is pathetic…

I thought she'd just want to know, since she talks about it as one of her hideous personal deformities without knowing what it is called. Nice video. It takes quite a bit of confidence to be able to do that. I'd make a similar one recounting my flaws, but youtube has a 10 minute limit on their…

Springfield, that is. And you'll have to wait until November, but it will be worth it. It's Skepticon 3! Read about the meeting. Peruse the list of speakers. Register now. If you're rich, help by sponsoring. I hear there will be a drinking contest between Richard Carrier and Rebecca Watson, which…

This is reassuring: I'm not the only 'militant' atheist who is softspoken in person. Welcome AC Grayling to the club! (via Atheist Media)

Stanley Fish is at it again. He's found an author, Steven D. Smith, who has written a book that appeals to his inner cenobite and has written another dismissal of secular reason. And once again, his problem is that his view of the universe is a millimeter deep and most marked by dumb…

It's good to know that in the ecosystem of inanity, we have village idiots, like Ken Ham, and itinerant idiots, like Sean Meek. Meek has created something called The Traveling Creation Museum as part of his life's work of making people stupider. The Traveling Creation Museum is available to come to…

It's pointless for these loons to try and make their case with a goofy online poll, since we'll just smack it down. Here's another one. Do you believe homeopathy is an effective form of treatment? 51%Yes 49%No The evidence is all against it, and reason suggests there is no mechanism. Perhaps they…

Richard Dawkins has posted a clarification and apology. The key points are that he stands by Josh Timonen (and really, the vituperation against him that I saw was just absurdly excessive), the old forums will definitely be retained as a read-only archive, and the new forums are going to still…

Sacrilege can get people killed. It can cause riots and economic mayhem. People die over a sense of offended propriety. And whose fault is that? You know what I'm talking about. Almost all religions have odd proscriptions that are taken with extraordinary seriousness by their followers — they are…

When we last left the never-ending thread, the subject was cooking. Eat this! One thing that annoys me in these shows is the completely uncritical acceptance of a culture's primitive beliefs in sympathetic magic. It's meat, people. It's got no powers other than the basic, material ones of…

There was a natural disaster somewhere, so I opened my mailbox to find lots of links to Pat Robertson saying stupid things about the Chilean earthquake, like this one and this one and this one and this one. Sorry, gang, I don't believe it. Not only do I expect that nowadays, when his staff at the…

It's the sport that ought to replace pro wrestling, and boxing.

The denialists are at it again in the comments, parroting the latest lie. UEA CRU's Dr Phil Jones agrees there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. Wow. You'd think they'd realize that twisting the words of a scientist around 180° from what they actually said is a very…

I've been going insane this morning, thinking I might have mysteriously lost my ability to type, or even recognize valid HTML…and I've been seeing really weird stuff everywhere I type on the web. It looks like the problem is Webkit, the browser I usually use. I updated it this morning, and it seems…