Kooks
pharyngula | October 9, 2012I've got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they've just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven…
pharyngula | September 27, 2012Oh, boy. Jonathan Wells explains why some of us reject the outrageous interpretations made from the ENCODE work claiming 80%+ functionality of the genome. It was really an effort to get past this sentence.
Some historical context might help.
Bwahahahahaha! First sentence, he makes a joke. Wells is a creationist clown notorious for his tortured abuse of the history of science. He doesn't have a merely whiggish view of history — it's more of a Burke&Hareish perspective, where if History isn't conveniently dead to permit him to commit ghoulish atrocities on it, he's willing to take a cosh…
pharyngula | July 17, 2012Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called "Negotiation is Over". NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.
Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you're thinking? That does cause one's knee to jerk.
But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She's…
pharyngula | July 14, 2012Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that's always on display. Here's all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:
The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.
If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation
It won't. It can't.
I read the paper he recommended: it's by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is…
pharyngula | March 7, 2012Those Australians…they recently ran a segment on their Dateline program featuring their fellow Australian Ken Ham and the Creation "Museum", which includes portions of an interview with me. Actually, I seem to be the only critic to get any airtime in the show, which is flattering, but I could have used a little more support!
Anyway, the show was recently aired, my name is played up as an atheist opponent of creationist nonsense, and now I'm suddenly receiving lots of email from Australian creationists because they want to persuade me to their foolish cause. And some of them are just weird. I'…
pharyngula | January 27, 2012Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it's bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn't you immediately sense crankery?
It's also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery…
pharyngula | January 23, 2012Every time I mention the fact of global climate change, the denialists start sending me furious emails. (By the way, I know that AGW is "anthropogenic global warming"; what is CAGW?)
I think we can safely say that AGW believers are clinically psychotic
The psychosis of the CAGW cult is total. Rational thought is not possible. It's like watching a freak show from the asylum.
Not ONLY must you never be near the reins of government, you should never come out of your padded room.
Right. So all the scientists who are citing the evidence and presenting the logic of greenhouse gases are the…
pharyngula | January 13, 2012In a previous "I get email" post, I mocked this bizarre list of 50 "proofs" that god exists: they were all nonsense and non sequiturs and bizarre falsehoods. The author actually dragged out the Lady Hope story as evidence for a god! Take a look and you'll see how genuinely stupid the list was.
But there's a stalkerish element to all this, too. Ever since, the author periodically writes me these weird pleading/sneering emails. She was very upset that I called her out on her raving foolishness, and has to remind me of that every once in a while. It's rather stupid, since I'd basically forgotten…
pharyngula | November 25, 2011Do these claims make you at all suspicious? A few people on Twitter told me I should look into this panacea.
Cures heart disease!
Eases anxiety and depression!
Removes unsightly moles!
Arthritis! Snoring! Diarrhea! Acne! Diabetes! Removes warts! Mighraines! Lose weight! Alcoholism! Glaucoma!
IT CURES CANCER! All forms of cancer!
And all without any detrimental effects whatsoever!
Add to the extravagant medical claims, the additional accusation that you can't get this treatment because of a conspiracy by BigPharma and greedy, grasping doctors who want people to suffer so they…
pharyngula | November 8, 2011Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol' Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn't god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?
William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don't really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the…
pharyngula | October 17, 2011Creationists have this idea that history can be nothing but an unremitting decline — their version of the second law of thermodynamics is a weird thing that has everything ratcheting down into chaos equally, with no possibility of local decreases in entropy at the expense of an overall greater increase. They have almost convinced me. I once would have said no one could be dumber than Kent Hovind, but I have seen the works of his son Eric, and it's a forthright demonstration of creationist thermodynamics.
Eric Hovind has disproven the K-T meteor theory of dinosaur extinction.
It's impossible…
pharyngula | October 11, 2011Shorter Deepak: "Richard Dawkins didn't endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!"
Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It's largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn't share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:
What is obnoxious about Dawkins'…
pharyngula | October 4, 2011It's hard to believe, but yes, there are Christians who are even worse than Ken Ham, and even more ignorant. Here's one: Pastor Don Elmore of Union, Kentucky. He's written a revealing screed against Answers in Genesis.
It starts gently enough, chatting about their rapid growth and praising AiG for their work against those wicked evolutionists. And then it goes off the rails.
I am aware of the forces supporting "Answers in Genesis", these being the same powers that are supporting similar multi-cultural anti-Christian organizations such as Alpha, Promise Keepers, The Full Gospel Businessmen's…
pharyngula | September 26, 2011We've got another chittering weasel of a creationist raving in the comments, a fellow going by the name YesYouNeedJesus. He's also sending me email.
PZ, I first heard about you on Bob Enyart's radio show about the fact that you turned down an offer to debate Bob. I must say that my first impression of you is that you are smarter than most evolutionists. Smarter because the evolutionists that debate Bob get absolutely destroyed every time. Every evolutionist that I spoke to who was at the debate between Bob Enyart and Reasons to Believe willfully admitted that their side (evolution) lost. Bob'…
pharyngula | September 22, 2011The court-required month-long psychiatric evaluation of Dennis Markuze is complete, and the diagnosis is "Bi-polar, compounded by alcohol and substance abuse". He is now in a substance abuse rehab center, with another court date scheduled for 2 December.
It sounds like he was a bigger mess than I expected. It's a good thing he's getting treated now.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | September 21, 2011I'm not going to post this email I received, simply because it is insanely long, 15,000 words of random caps and peculiar color changes. Just to give you a taste, this is the subject line:
Subject: SCIENCE, AND THEOLOGY {{ Cogent Word for the 100's of new ears in Science and theology we contacted/called last week around earth }} CHIMERISM, deaths/Wolbachias/satans attack upon Adams Society, ULtra Microbic Life Force/death Force --- How does the Harlot called death ride Adams children and cause death and aging??? Listing below --- {{ A Brief Word on obamas Buffet taxes, and Word that all most…
pharyngula | September 19, 2011There is a severe and disturbing disconnect in the minds of the fanatics behind the animal rights groups. First there's NIO, harassing and threatening students. Now look at what PETA is up to: they plan to launch a porn site to benefit their cause.
The nonprofit organization, whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women's rights groups, said it hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.
"We're hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn't…
pharyngula | September 14, 2011She's an up and coming scientist, a young biology student at the University of Florida, and she has been targeted by the animal rights radicals and human-hating monsters at NIO for harassment as a "career animal mutilator". They've posted links to her email address and facebook on a page that conveniently also provides a diagram on how to make a molotov cocktail. They also declare that "She has now forfeited all of the rights that she denies her victims". Her crime seems to be that she actually listened to NIO, thought about their position and hers, and disagreed with them:
Your website…
pharyngula | September 3, 2011Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It's boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.
We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record - for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)
Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote…
pharyngula | August 26, 2011Ann Coulter is a horrible, ignorant person who once wrote a whole book accusing liberals of being Godless, as if that were an insult, and advancing arguments against evolution that made the standard noisy creationist look like a veritable scholar. I looked at her arguments, and I made a public challenge back in 2006 for any defenders to pick one paragraph from the book and we'd discuss it in detail — there have been no takers, not one person willing to stand up and support in detail any claim she had made. She also made some amazingly inane arguments: did you know that one strike against…