Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
April 13, 2011
I hope no one is expecting any mercy from the other primates.
April 13, 2011
This is the Geek Zodiac, a spoof of the Chinese zodiac (the image at the link is larger and easier to read). It's horrible and wrong.
I skimmed over that diagram and thought that all the choices were cool and geeky, except…well, this is just me, and you can feel differently…I thought the one I…
April 13, 2011
I have learned that today is Christopher Hitchens' birthday. I hope he gets many more.
What is it with all these New Atheist birthdays in the springtime, though?
April 13, 2011
This is a real mystery. Donohue is an angry guy with a fax machine who gets donations from affronted Catholics, which is nothing the church can do about, obviously…but he also pretends to be a defender of Catholicism while having no standing with the church and while making the most outrageous…
April 12, 2011
This one is from Bad Pitt. Read it while keeping in mind that we atheists are the ones called militant extremists…while good Judeo-Christian lunatics have these sick, psychopathic, violent fantasies of murder and execution.
GLORIOUS BASTERDS
Inglorious Basterds is a Jewish psycho-fantasy based on…
April 12, 2011
[I am totally confused. I have not seen the movie Source Code, although it will be playing in Morris next week, yet I have now seen an explanation of the time-travel paradox in the movie by the physicist James Kakalios, and now here is an explanation by an English professor. You guys sort it out. I…
April 12, 2011
So why do they have to foist chaplains upon helpless public school children? It's like going to school to be intentionally infested with parasites. If you think supporting chaplains is a bad idea for a secular state, follow the linky and click the little buttons to honk for godlessness.
April 12, 2011
OK, I'm used to the idea of batrachian horrors and creatures tentacled and squamous, and part of the appeal of HP Lovecraft is that he is so quaint. But I was unprepared for the chilling simplicity of Chicks With Steve Buscemeyes.
April 12, 2011
The apocalypse is near. Americans must gird their loins and prepare to defend themselves against a terrible evil. Rick Santorum has a warning for us.
"Think about how they view you," he told the crowd of Republicans. "They view you no different than the drug dealer views the little kid in the…
April 12, 2011
The NCSE has a list of recent creationist legislation, and you've all been up to no good. I hope you are all chastened now and will strive to throw the inane rascals out of your legislatures at the earliest possible opportunity.
April 12, 2011
Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he's not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he's a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as…
April 11, 2011
I'm very tired and it's been an extremely long day, and you just had to go and fill up the endless thread. OK, here you go, you cruel taskmasters, fill this one up now. I'm going to bed.
(Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,191 entries with 1,337,781 comments.)
April 11, 2011
Oh, it's a tough one.
How much will you miss Glenn Beck on Fox News?
Not at all 30%
A little bit 18%
Tremendously 45%
Life is not worth living 7%
Do me a favor and make Billo whine about how we hijacked his poll.
April 11, 2011
Uh-oh. I was just reading this very silly fundy Christian piece, in which the pious author is bemoaning all those terrible, awful, un-Christian things on the television and radio, and saw this explanation.
While listening to a preaching by Pastor David Wilkerson, he said something that stuck with…
April 11, 2011
Here's another one: Lynn Margulis. HIV denial, weird ideas about spirochaetes making sperm tails, dismissing the whole field of population genetics, failing to understand evolution in general…it's embarrassingly bad. Dr Margulis had a weird idea once about endosymbiosis, and she was right — and now…
April 11, 2011
The crackpot wing of the astrobiology community (and I do know, there are rational and scientific members of that group!) has now flowered into full-blown paranoia. N. Chandra Wickramasinghe has published a remarkable paper on arXiv titled Extraterrestrial Life and Censorship, which isn't as much a…
April 10, 2011
Poor Phantom. He looks like he just took a skull ring to the jaw, himself.
Via Roger Ebert, who as a salve to his ego, suggests that the Phantom is the only sexually active superhero, which is not true! I vividly recall a scene in a Spiderman comic with a blissed out Mary Jane, who definitely…
April 10, 2011
This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn't believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said "goodbye!", and scurried away. It's…
April 10, 2011
Darn, I'm going to have to find some time to re-read Sam Harris's Moral Landscape. It bugged me the first time; I kept trying to make, I think, a judgment based on whether we can declare an absolute morality based on rational, objective criteria. I was basically making the same sort of internal…
April 10, 2011
Paul Nelson has deigned to write a two-part essay on "Ontogenetic Depth", his sciencey made-up term for a metric that he claims makes evolution essentially impossible. We've been wrangling over this for a long time — he and Marcus Ross introduced this in a poster at the Developmental Biology…
April 9, 2011
Brace yourselves for a new onslaught of ridiculous Republican anti-woman bills. Alabama is working on bills to declare fetuses 'persons' by fiat — they'll just legally redefine humanity to be a fertilized ovum and all derivatives thereof. They'll probably get it passed, too.
I suppose if we could…
April 9, 2011
As some of you already know, the universe was revolted by the recent spectacle of Rebecca Black's hideously insipid autotuned song, Friday. I felt a bit of sympathy for her, however — she's very young, and her name is always going to be attached that monstrosity. And then there was the fact that…
April 9, 2011
Bryan Fischer (if you know the name, you know lunacy will soon follow) has a plan.
Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur'an, and sharia law, is to…
April 9, 2011
Hey! Martin Rundkvist is in Minnesota, and Greg Laden will be interviewing him for Atheist Talk radio tomorrow morning at 9am Central time.
Now I'm tempted to drive in to Minneapolis tomorrow for the brunch at Q Cumbers. Must finish projects first…must finish prep for Monday class, too…aargh, don't…
April 8, 2011
As a member of the professoriate, I like to think that we are egalitarian and do our very best to correct the social inequities that are so prevalent outside of our relatively benevolent, enlightened institutions. Only…not. It looks like women get screwed over in academia, too.
The gender gap in…
April 8, 2011
On the Venn diagram of politics, the intersection of Mississippi and Republican is a very ugly place.
April 8, 2011
You are required to watch Tim Minchin's excellent short animated movie.
Enough said.
April 7, 2011
I must be very old. I remember a friend getting recordings of the Goons sent by mail, and we'd sit around listening to an old reel-to-reel tape machine and we'd laugh and laugh. I suspect that Eccles and Bluebottle will not resonate with the whippersnappers here, but I shall inflict them on you…