jlynch | March 29, 2008
Seed has been running an interview with the British author Will Self whom I first encountered by reading his wonderful Great Apes, the cover of which - a mash-up of a human and ape - is above. Every time I see this picture, I can only think of one person ...
And ironically, Duane Gish says there is no evidence for human evolution.
jlynch | March 29, 2008If it wasn’t enough that PZ is wondering why Ben Stein doesn’t have it in for Newton (what with his clear connection to Nazism), Orac now wonders:
The above principles for eliminating the Jew from Nazi territory are clearly those of Pasteur and Koch, not Charles Darwin, and Hitler repeated this rationale on many occasions, as did his underlings! Oh, the perfidy! Where is Ben Stein on this one? How is it that he can’t recognize the true sources of Hitler’s evil. Not Charles Darwin. Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur!
All goes to show how simplistic the cdesign proponentsist view of history is.
jlynch | March 29, 2008Troy Britain has done some poking around regarding the RSVP system that Expelled is using:
I go through this to show that they apparently have a system (at least now) to distinguish between truly private screenings with, I would imagine, an actual predetermine guest list, and other screenings that are perhaps demographically targeted (churchs and religious community leaders etc.) but not really private in the exclusive guest list sense.
There has been no evidence presented that Myers signed up for one of the "invitation-only" events. So it seems that his "crime" here was taking advantage of a…
jlynch | March 28, 2008PZ linked to this earlier, but it’s just too good not to be posted here. Enjoy!
One of PZ’s minions has transcribed the lyrics here.
jlynch | March 28, 2008Christianity Today has published a review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution. The reviewer is Stephen Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, and Jason Rosenhouse wonders:
Why would a serious magazine like Christianity Today ask someone so obviously unqualified to review so technical a book? Could it be that they had no serious interest in assessing the book’s arguments, but instead just wanted an opportunity to stick a thumb in the eye of establishment science?
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Christianity Today has had a book reviewed by someone who knows…
jlynch | March 28, 2008Well it makes as much sense at the Darwin/Hitler claptrap the cdesign proponentsists over at the Discovery Institute spout:
How many have died due to the tyranny of the gravity Newton put into the hands of conscienceless materialist scientists? Examine Hitler’s record, for instance. He was an ardent Newtonist who put his Wehrmacht to evil purpose, building machines that used the wicked geometries of Newton to shatter Europe. Nazi artillery and tanks used Newton’s tools to strike at his righteous opponents. Who can forget the V2 rockets lofting into the air on tongues of F=ma (another…
jlynch | March 28, 2008Hilariously, Myers does it again and invades an Expelled event only to get expelled again. This time it was a conference call.
There was some mad rustling and flustering about on the other side of the phone some complaints, etc., and then one of them asked me to do the honorable thing and hang up...so I said yes, I would do the honorable thing and hang up while they continued the dishonorable thing and continued to lie.
No doubt Nisbet will have an attack of the vapors any moment now.
Update: Predictably the DI-hack spin has begun already. Denyse O'Leary claims "Myers apparently somehow got…
jlynch | March 28, 2008Never one who is afraid to paint with a very broad brush, Ben Stein gives us this gem (from a Christianity Today interview):
I believe God created the heavens and the earth, and it doesn’t scare me when scientists say that can’t be proved. I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. Science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists told Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists told Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to…
jlynch | March 28, 2008
A report released today by the National Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization shows that while the globe warmed by an average of one degree between 2003 and 2007, eleven western states warmed by 1.7 degrees and Arizona by 2.2 degrees for the last five years (2003 through 2007), the global climate has averaged 1.0 degree Fahrenheit warmer than its 20th century average while temperatures in the southwest averaged 1.7 degrees warmer (and those in Arizona were 2.2 degrees warmer). The full report is available here.
jlynch | March 28, 2008
Finding the Tracks
Along the river, under trees - jumbled tracks! Thick fragrant woods, is this the way? Though the ox wanders far in the hills, His nose touches the sky. He cannot hide.
K’uo-an (trans. Stanley Lombardo)
[image source]
jlynch | March 28, 2008Caroline Crocker is one of the ID martyrs for the faith featured in Expelled (and in now Executive Director of IDEA). The bogus nature of her case has been well known for a while, but over at Tiny Frog there is a useful "mash-up" of the available information about Crocker.
jlynch | March 27, 2008
"Researcher in Astronomy:" ... "When you stand on the beach and look into the distance, everything you see is in the visible distance. In the blurred distance, you cannot see a thing. Later on as the ship gets closer to the shore or the harbor, you see the upper part. How do you see it? The eye, as I have said, no doctor has succeeded in understanding how the eye works." *sound of Lynch’s head exploding*
[ht to Boing Boing]
jlynch | March 27, 2008
Jim Lippard has a good post on Expelled and the fact that its distributor (Rocky Mountain Pictures) is know for pushing movies such as Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 and Carman: The Champion (above; for more on Carman see here). As Jim notes:
The two partners in Rocky Mountain Pictures are Ronald C. Rodgers and Randy Slaughter. Rodgers got his start in film with Sunn Classic Pictures in 1968, which made and distributed movies in the seventies and eighties like bad documentaries about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, The Bermuda Triangle, psychics, space aliens, conspiracy theories, and Noah’s…
jlynch | March 27, 2008"Once, for a class called Creative Nonfiction, I swam down to Scammon’s Lagoon during winter mating season and transcribed the simultaneous chatter of every gray whale, all in one continuous stream of unpunctuated prose: "Oh my God oh my click-click-click oh my (inaudibly low drone) God I love you so much I just want to (squeak) stare into your (hum, drone) big beautiful eyes forever click-click-click-click ..." What happened to that writer?"
(source)
jlynch | March 26, 2008
The nation’s first case of West Nile Virus of 2008 has been reported here in the Southeast valley, starting the WNV season four to six weeks early. Everybody PANIC!
jlynch | March 25, 2008At 2:00pm today someone (in Alabama, no less) came here via a Google search for "sex with a sea cucumber". I'm speechless.
jlynch | March 25, 2008It seems the producers of Expelled have gone back to the drawing board regarding their screenings. Last week I signed up for the April 3rd screening in Tempe. It now turns out that it has been canceled:
Due to unavoidable changes in the travel plans of the producers of "Expelled", several of our screenings have been canceled or are being rescheduled to a new date or time. If you'd like to be notified once a new screening in your area is confirmed, please sign-up on one of the waitlists below.
Waitlists, eh? A handy way to screen attendees so that no tough questions are asked.
jlynch | March 24, 2008Julia Sweeney on Ben Stein:
Ben Stein once did a Groundling show, an improv show, that I was a part of. I found him to be spectacularly ill-informed and narcissistic and weirdly devoted to his schtick and worst of all, hacky. He didn’t listen to his fellow performers and played everything outward to his friends in the audience who laughed (fake, forced) at every single thing he did. When he became known as a "thinker" - when his public persona became the "smart guy" I was astounded. So this type of film does not come as any surprise.
(HT to Jim Lippard)
jlynch | March 23, 2008
Speckle-throated otter, Hydrictis (Lutra) maculicollis Lichtenstein 1835
[photo source]
jlynch | March 23, 2008Dawkins on Ben Stein:
The narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have been chosen to front the film. He certainly can’t have been chosen for his knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl, innocent of charm and of consonants. I suppose that makes it a good voice for conveying the whingeing paranoia that I referred to, so maybe that was qualification enough.
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