Kooks
pharyngula | May 22, 2008Abby has a classic battle of the kooks. In one corner, Leonard Horowitz, a raving looney who begins the debate with an official denunciation of Duesberg, speaking as the mouthpiece of god, arguing that HIV/AIDS is the designed product of evil militarists. In the other corner, the calmer, but still goofy, Peter Duesberg, who claims that the HIV virus cannot possibly cause AIDS. They don't like each other, and Horowitz is particularly shrill.
And just to make it even more hilarious, the venue: this is from a recording of some New Age health nut radio program, and the commercials that intrude…
pharyngula | May 18, 2008Shorter Bryan Fischer: Because the Nazis really hated homosexuals, they are nothing like the Religious Right. Or maybe it's that because the Nazis were gay, they didn't hate homosexuality enough, as the Bible clearly says you should.
I don't know. It's a confused mess of butchered history, so who knows what this guy is trying to say. He sure seems fascinated with butch Nazis abusing effeminate beautiful boys, though.
pharyngula | May 16, 2008Is your lunch hour safely over? If not, wait a while before watching another interview with Ben Stein. I can't believe what an idiot this man is; it's not just that he's ignorant, but that he has these bizarrely inappropriate notions about biology. He complains about "Darwinism" because it doesn't explain why are there laws of gravity and thermodynamics, or where physics and gravity come from (Bonus lunacy! He claims Darwin said gravity was intelligently designed!). He keeps making these insane assertions in interview after interview, too; does he ever think, or notice that gravity is not a…
pharyngula | May 14, 2008That guy, Mike Norman, with the t-shirts implying Obama is a monkey is selling them for $15 apiece. Doron Braunshtein is also selling an anti-Obama t-shirt…for $250. This one isn't as overtly racist — it just says "JEWS AGAINST OBAMA" — but it's also not worth the money, and Braunshtein's attitudes, revealed in the story, are rather bigoted themselves. Proud Jews shouldn't vote for someone with the middle name "Hussein"?
pharyngula | May 8, 2008I've tuned into KKMS, although to be honest, I lost all respect for these evangelical radio cretins when they had that Simmons "debate" and left me out. We'll have to see if their guest's attempts to criticize atheists in their absence will be as effective.
I'm trying to grade exams while simultaneously listening — it's like listening with half my brain tied behind my back.
The host claims that it is important to understand the perspective of the "New" Atheists…so why are they inviting this Aikman clown on, instead of an actual atheist?
Aikman claims the atheists are bringing "pestilence",…
pharyngula | May 6, 2008Omnipotent, omnipresent supernatural being (left) deigns to be arrested for raping children.
It's a rough era for deities. This one seems to be subject to ordinary mortal ills, like wrinkles and graying hair, ordinary mortal temptations, like having sex with young girls, and also, surprisingly, is powerless before minor material obstacles, like handcuffs. Odd, isn't it? He should stamp his foot, and the earth cracks wide and his foes tumble into the depths. He ought to wave his hands raise a whirlwind that sweeps away his enemies, scatters their guns, and hurls their squad cars into the sky.…
pharyngula | May 5, 2008OK, Florida, this has gone far enough. You've been dallying with creationism, and I've read enough Hiaasen novels (who knew those were non-fiction?) to see that there are many screws loose down there, but this is getting ridiculous. Look at this reason for firing a teacher.
Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.
But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land 'O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.
"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute…
pharyngula | May 2, 2008I see you've all met our little troll, David Mabus. "Mabus" (his real name is Dennis Markuze, and he used to sell used computers in Montreal, Canada) has been flooding my mailbox for about the last month — he has a list of about 70 skeptics and atheists, and just about every day he fires off his little angry rant about how James Randi owes him a million dollars right now, based on prophecies from Nostradamus or some such nonsense. You can get a feel for his insanity from this series of posts he made to the Center for Inquiry forum. It's hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that he really is…
pharyngula | May 1, 2008That crazy mayor of Birmingham who dressed up in sackcloth and ashes is in a little trouble right now.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday said it has charged the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, and two of his friends in connection with an undisclosed payment scheme in municipal bond deals.
The SEC said the chairman of Alabama investment bank Blount Parrish & Co made more than $156,000 in undisclosed payments to Mayor Larry Langford related to municipal bond offerings and swap agreements Langford directed on behalf of Jefferson County, Alabama.
It seems to be a general…
pharyngula | April 28, 2008I thought Jebons were supposed to be a joke … so what is this lunatic ranting about?
Warning: this is from GodTube, so unless you've got a fair amount of tolerance for crazy, deluded talk, you might not want to click on it.
Just in case you didn't want to puke up your dinner by actually watching this kook, it's an evangelical apologist teaching his version of molecular biology to his audience — he is immensely and undeservedly impressed by the fact that the cell adhesion molecule laminin is cruciform in diagrams. Forget the fact that it is a floppy glycoprotein, and the arms can fold around…
pharyngula | April 27, 2008This is some email I suspect a lot of you have already received; look at it through new eyes, though.
It's from Premise Media (I'm on their mailing list, and have been for a long time…how else could I have gotten an invitation to their premiere?), and I present it here as I received it, except that I stripped out most of the links. Notice anything familiar?
Ben Stein's movie is now in danger of being “Expelled” from theaters
Despite:A “Top 10” box office opening…
Standing ovations in theaters…
Scathing critics and raving fans…
Expelled is being sued by YOKO ONO – and she's demanding that…
pharyngula | April 26, 2008Birmingham, Alabama apparently has a serious crime problem. That's bad news, but to compound it all, they've got a mayor who is a fecking idjit. Mayor Larry Langford has a plan to deal with crime.
At Tuesday’s Birmingham City Council meeting, Mayor Larry Langford proclaimed Friday, April 25, a “day of prayer in sackcloth and ashes” in Birmingham.
Birmingham Weekly reported two weeks ago that the mayor purchased 2,000 burlap sacks for ministers and other community leaders to wear at a Plan 10/30 summit.
To many Christians, sackcloth and ashes symbolize humility and repentance, but the mayor’s…
pharyngula | April 25, 2008Mars seems to bring out the kooks. I was pointed to the bizarre Xenotech "research" site, which consists entirely of the delusional fantasies of Sir Charles W. Shults III, Scientist (yes, that's what he calls himself). His research program? He gleans photographs from Mars probes for random shapes that look biological to him. Here, for instance, is the "clearest and most perfect trilobite" he has found in these pictures.
It's a good thing he marked up that one photo with his imaginary lines—I've seen a lot of trilobites, and I wouldn't have seen one in his rock if he hadn't pulled out the…
pharyngula | April 25, 2008KBSU is the campus television station for Bemidji State University, and apparently they've been broadcasting crap lately — several hours a day have been dedicated to episodes of this feeble series of videos called "Does God Exist?". It's awful. It's basically some self-proclaimed Christian standing in front of a camera and preaching.
For an example of the quality of the thinking going into this video series, take a look at his proof for the existence of god. He literally says that there are only two possibilities: 1) the universe is eternal and uncreated, the atheist position (which is…
pharyngula | April 24, 2008Mark Mathis does not come off as a nice man in interviews. You may have listened to the SciAm interview, a truly painful experience in which he made claims about evolution and then backtracked when confronted with his mistakes…and admitted that he knew nothing about the subject. He's done it again in an interview with a Detroit weekly (scroll down to the "Unevolved" article on that page).
I confront Mathis with this point, and he counters that evolutionary theory is also untestable. This is patently untrue—to give just one example, scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new…
pharyngula | April 24, 2008I mentioned this new religious license plate in Florida before, and now it looks like it's closer to reality. I don't object strongly to it — it's optional, and people who want it have to pay an extra $25 — but some of the arguments against it are embarrassing, and the arguments for it are even worse. There are a lot of variations of the slippery slope being thrown around.
Rep. Kelly Skidmore said she is a Roman Catholic and goes to Mass on Sundays, but she believes the "I Believe" plate is inappropriate for the government to produce.
"It's not a road I want to go down. I don't want to see…
pharyngula | April 23, 2008The things you learn from crazy clerics…
A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim "qibla" - the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.
Oh, well — if a prominent cleric said such a thing, who am I to argue? I'm sure there must be an utterly dazzling, deep theological argument to explain how one specific point on the surface of a spinning sphere, a point which doesn't seem to have any special relationship to the pattern of…
pharyngula | April 22, 2008What am I supposed to do when all three candidates for the presidency turn out to be credulous, anti-science ignoramuses? Obama thinks there's a link between vaccines and autism, and now Hillary has jumped off the cliff with him. They're both nuts, or at least suck-ups to the kooks.
Orac, of course, weighs in.
pharyngula | April 17, 2008The email below the fold is a fairly typical rant from a creationist who has a teeny tiny bit of information, and therefore thinks he has uncovered an irrefutable disproof of evolution. In this case, he has noted that different species have differing numbers of chromosomes, and therefore, because he believes variation in chromosome number is an absolute barrier to fertilization, evolution could not have occurred.
He's missing a few key pieces of information. One is that, contrary to his belief, variation in chromosome number is not a barrier to reproduction, although it can reduce fertility.…
pharyngula | April 15, 2008I'm late to the party again; only because Hilzoy mentioned it did I see this hilariously inane article by Michael Medved. I don't know what Medved's qualifications are; he seems to be the Clever Hans of the Right Wing chattering classes, the guy who doesn't actually have a functioning mind but is good at stringing random words together. So now he has written an article claiming that it is perfectly reasonable for Americans to discriminate against atheists in politics, specifically that they should resist the possibility of an atheist as president.
This is not a choice I thought we had. I had…