Culture Wars
tfk | March 7, 2007Denyse "Buy My Book" O'Leary explain How the Darwinists help the ID guys, citing the example of Paul Mirecki (as described by Johnny Wells):
Anti-Christian zealots are often in the forefront of attacks on intelligent design. In 2005, the chairman of the University of Kansas Religious Studies Department, atheist Paul Mirecki, proposed to teach a course titled “Intelligent Design Creationism and Other Mythologies.” Mirecki boasted on a web site that “fundies” would see the course as a “slap in their big fat face.” He also endorsed a description of Pope John Paul II as “a corpse in a funny hat…
omnibrain | March 7, 2007
This guys brain is sorta having an out of body experience...
In any case, The March 6 issue of the journal Neurology has an article in it entitled, Out-of-body experience and arousal. where they found
that some people's brains already may be predisposed to these sorts of experiences. They found that an out-of-body experience is statistically as likely to occur during a near death experience as it is to occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Nelson suggests that phenomena in the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness including REM sleep…
tfk | March 4, 2007IDolator Denyse O'Leary quotes Frank Pastore. Can you figure out who the target is, and why it wouldn't be equally applicable to the ID movement?:
He wanted some of that Da Vinci Code action so badly that he jumped on a 27 year old story line .... He ignored so many early warning signs, too. When he was having trouble early on finding A, B, or even C list "scientific experts" who were willing to throw their careers away if they would only validate his silly theories - and they all continued saying no - he didn't let that slow him down one bit. He pressed on and signed the minor league guys.…
tfk | March 1, 2007There are any number of things wrong with Steve's complaints about an art show at the College of William and Mary. We could complain, for instance, that his criticism of the show on the basis of who the performers are (people who have been sex workers at some point) rather than on the basis of what the show is. We could even point out that students who attend the show and have their preconceptions challenged might even learn something valuable.
But for the moment, I want to focus on Steve's claim that:
Thomas Jefferson … seemed to do okay for himself without a curriculum or extracurricular…
tfk | February 26, 2007The New Scientist reviews Conservapedia. Along with our own Dr. Myers and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the article quotes one:
Joshua Rosenau, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and contributor to Science Blogs claims the site has a darker side. "On some level it's also reflective of a harmful attitude that some people – especially those on the far right – tend to have about science and truth," he told me. "They are re-defining their own truth and seem to think facts are malleable."
If the article didn't also quote Andrew Schlafly, Concerned Son of…
tfk | February 26, 2007Chris Mooney is intrigued that the the Discovery Institute is "outing" him, and wonders:
most importantly, doesn't Discovery have anything better to do?
No.
This has been a simple answer to a simple question.
tfk | February 23, 2007While John McCain serenades the creationists at the Discovery Institute, Rep. Duncan Hunter is putting them on his campaign team. Dr. Henry Jordan, newly named co-chairman to the Presidential committee, told the Associated Press "I mean you’ve got to be stupid to believe in evolution, I mean really."
tfk | February 23, 2007Ohio ID Network boss Roddy Bullock claims:
Kansas (of all places) became the first state to officially impose on public school students an atheistic definition of science
This is either false or meaningless. The Kansas standards do not promote atheism, and if that is the sense of the term, then this is false.
If, on the other hand, the claim is that the Kansas standards do not include references to any gods, then the same criticism could be applied to the definition of any topic taught in public schools. The reading standards explain that "'Reads' is broadly defined and includes receptive…
omnibrain | February 22, 2007
"and protect us from Atkins and his disciples. Ramen."
From the user Salad Is Slaughter.
He has won a copy of the Book God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.
Thanks for all the great entries! And Thanks to the marketing team at Prometheus Books for picking the winner!
Go out and buy the book today!
tfk | February 22, 2007Following an idea that occurred to me while being interviewed for an article on the Conservapedia, I tried replacing the inadequate page on the ACLU with the comprehensive Wikipedia entry. Before I had a chance to create an entry for Christianity by the same means, my account was blocked. Alas, the Conservapedia does not yet have an entry for Christianity at all. Perhaps someone could help out.
So much for my plan to replace the illustration of the Jesus entry with this one.
The experiment, of course, would have been to see how long the information from a supposedly liberal Wikipedia entry…
tfk | February 22, 2007The gang has been examining Conservapedia, "the conservative encyclopedia you can trust" (unlike Wikipedia). There's much fun to be had, like the debate over: "Crusades … Good or Bad?," featuring Conservapedia creator Andrew Schlafly (son of Phyllis Schlafly) arguing:
I don't see anything wrong with having a Christian holy war. Making Jerusalaem [sic] safe for defenseless pilgrims was a worthy goal. The Crusades were good.
You can also examine the revert war over HIV, in which Schlafly removed the statement that "Its main effect is to destroy T-cells, which causes a decreased resistance to…
tfk | February 21, 2007Ed Humes, author of the acclaimed Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul, will be speaking twice in Kansas next month.
He'll be speaking at KU's Dole center on the 28th, and then at the JCCC at 7 PM on the 29th.
Both promise to be interesting events.
tfk | February 21, 2007Witches and scientists is (rightly) upset. Observing the conservative commentariat at Human Events mangling Carl Sagan's legacy, Genexs writes:
I can't help noticing how much the Global warming deniers, Intelligent Design advocates, and other Dominionsts keep claiming the growing mountains of evidence of evolution, and increasing record breaking temperatures, is not proof of anything--but just some sort of New Age religion. I'm pretty sure everyone who follows such stories (and believe me, you have my sympathies for the patience to wade through such muck) has seen an up-tick in this…
omnibrain | February 19, 2007A study from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Center in Australia has shown that nearly a third of people under the age of 30 think marijuana is totally uncool. Drug abuse is clearly a problem that has to be dealt with through education and treatment programs (don't get me started on the war on drugs though). The only problem with this statistic is that people might think marijuana is uncool for totally inaccurate reasons that they pick up either through a lack of education (or even more bothersome - mis-education).
It seems that a possible reason that people believe pot is so…
omnibrain | February 18, 2007Here are a couple of my favorites starting with the original really really stupid text.
Check out the original site for many more, as well as some good commentary.
Via BoingBoing & Digg.
omnibrain | February 15, 2007In the ongoing battle between the DEA, farmers, patients, and scientists there has been nothing but contradictory information. It looks like with a couple new pieces of news that the pro-marijuana (the medical kind) people might be coming out ahead.
For researchers studying marijuana, it's been a very good week. In one of the most careful studies to date, marijuana was found to relieve pain. And a judge ruled in favor of an agronomist who has has been trying for six years to overcome one of the problems of marijuana research: the lack of an adequate supply of the drug for experiments.
The…
tfk | February 14, 2007Billy "Isaac Newton of Information" Dembski complains about the new Kansas Science Standards. The new standards making this change "scientific knowledge describes and explains the natural world physical world in terms of matter, energy, and forces." Dembski complains:
Indeed, try to justify the "inalienable rights" ascribed in the Declaration of Independence not in terms of a creator but in terms of "material forces." It doesn’t work.
Yet another reason that the Declaration of Independence is not, and was never intended to be, science.
tfk | February 13, 2007Kansas Science standards were officially revised. There was little doubt this would happen, but it's nice to see the democratic system at work.
The revision removes amendments written by the Intelligent Design Network's John Calvert and Bill Harris. Instead, the science standards will be those written by the science standards committee as a whole, and further revised since the previous version was butchered by the old Board.