Kooks
pharyngula | November 8, 2007Hi, Stan. You're new here, like a whole lot of people. You've just shown up, and here's your very first comment.
I noticed that this blog is in the running for a Best Science Blog award.
I've looked over the site. Cna someone point out where the science is on it. I have looked but I can't find any.
Let me introduce myself. My name is PZ Myers. I'm an associate professor of biology at a small liberal arts university in the upper midwest. I make no grand claims for myself, but I have been exceptionally busy lately, with lots of travel and lectures, and it's all on top of teaching two courses,…
pharyngula | November 5, 2007Iconoclasts- Enlightenment
Posted 47 Minutes Ago
Comedian/actor Mike Myers talks about how enlightenment actually means "lightening up" when he sits down for a one-on-one conversation with philosopher Deepak Chopra in this clip from the next episode of Iconoclasts. Airs Thursday, November 8th @10PM on The Sundance Channel! For More info, visit: http://www.sundancechannel.com/iconoclasts/
Sucking up to Deepak Chopra? Blechh. Pretending that his nonsense has anything to do with enlightenment? Double blechh.
The only part that's valid is the claim that humor is part of enlightenment values—so…
pharyngula | October 30, 2007This is a troubling story if you just read the right-wing perspective: a student at Hamline University (an excellent liberal arts college in the Twin Cities) was suspended for writing a letter to the university administration. That shouldn't happen, I'd say — we want to encourage free speech. Even if the student seems to be a bit of a far-right nut, and if the letter was supporting that lunatic idea that school massacres wouldn't happen if everyone were carrying a concealed weapon, people should have the privilege of expressing their opinions.
So I read John Leo's opinion piece on the issue…
pharyngula | October 28, 2007A-ha! It's not just the United States that's stocked with religious creepazoids and hypocrites!
A candidate for the conservative Family First party has dropped out of his race. He was caught flaunting his junk on the internet, and admits to viewing porn…neither of which are particularly wicked, but when your party is against internet porn, well, there's a little problem with consistency. There's also a problem with making pathetic excuses, like these:
I might have been drunk off my face or my political enemies might have drugged me.
But that's not my penis.
Look, maybe somebody…
pharyngula | October 28, 2007People keep telling me I ought to read Freakonomics, but something about it keeps tripping my bogosity detector, and I've never gotten around to it. Now I've got another reason to avoid it: the Freakonomics blog is hosting a particular silly Q&A with someone who has absolutely no credibility on anything: Scott Adams. It reinforces my bias that the authors don't exercise much judgment.
Scott Adams is about the last person of whom I'd be interested in asking any questions: he wouldn't answer anything except to say how much smarter he is than any so-called expert, and any hint of actual…
pharyngula | October 26, 2007Lots of people have been sending me this bad article from the Daily Mail, "Human race will 'split into two different species'". I don't quite get it. This is the very same utter nonsense from Oliver Curry that came out at this same time last year.
Is this to be a yearly occurrence now? Every Halloween some newspaper will dredge up this bilge from the London School of Economics and try to horrify us with abominable pseudoscience masquerading as evolutionary biology?
pharyngula | October 24, 2007D'Souza is crowing over his debate with Hitchens — he's got a YouTube clip on his site that he seems to think exemplifies his triumph. His arguments there are 1) the fine-tuning argument for God, which is pathetic, as Douglas Adams scotched that one long ago, and 2) the usual claim that atheists are the major murderers of the 20th century, which is again silly — blame totalitarian ideologies for that, not philosophical positions on the existence of deities.
But then, D'Souza is running a poll to judge the winner. I think you can all go over there, view the clip, and judge for yourself how to…
pharyngula | October 24, 2007I would have guessed because it's very dry and windy, but James Hartline has a less obvious answer.
They shook their fists at God and said, "We don't care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!" And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of "mom" and "dad" in the text books and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California.
And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-christian California rebels.
Doesn't God…
pharyngula | October 23, 2007Do we have to wait until he's elected to impeach him? 'Cause right now I'd like to see Huckabee kicked off the campaign trail and sent back to repeat grades 6-12.
Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do. In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don't think there's a conflict between the two. But if there's going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn't. So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict.
So when he's faced with two claims, he'll follow the one that ignores all the evidence and sticks to its guns in the face of…
pharyngula | October 23, 2007Let's get this out of the way: I really, honestly, truly do not give a good goddamn if Dumbledore is gay. He's a fictional character, the author is getting a little too freakily obsessive over her characters, and it doesn't affect me one way or the other how the character swings. So Rowling says he's gay. Eh. Move on.
It only gets interesting when a certain ID proponent who has weebled on about how delightfully Christian the Harry Potter books are hears that her imaginary character imaginarily experiences arousal over another imaginary character who is, imaginarily, of the same sex as he is.…
pharyngula | October 23, 2007Here's an article that deserves a prize. It's wall-to-wall praise-Jebus babble, giving the Lord of the Universe credit for getting the Colorado Rockies baseball team into the World Series—have a puke bucket handy if you actually try to read the whole thing.
"You look at some of the moves we made and didn't make," general manager Dan O'Dowd said in the only interview he has given on the subject, long before the Rockies' remarkable ascension over the past few weeks. "You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this."
And that's…
pharyngula | October 22, 2007Prepare to have your opinion of Jerry Seinfeld diminished. He's a scientologist, for the dumbest of reasons.
"They have a lot of very good technology. That's what really appealed to me about it. It's not faith-based. It's all technology. And I'm obsessed with technology."
Scientology and technology? You've got to be kidding. The "e-meter" they use is a cheap galvanometer, and their explanation for how it works is biophysical nonsense. If that's his idea of technology to obsess over, he's going to really be dazzled when someone shows him a transistor radio.
pharyngula | October 22, 2007It's Monday. You're tired after your weekend, you aren't too enthused about getting back to work, and it's just so dispiriting to have to get back into the grind. What do you need with your coffee? An unsurprising tale of a very stupid person, so that your boss and your coworkers will look like shining beacons of reason by comparision, and you'll realize your job isn't so bad after all. You need to hear about Dinesh D'Souza, because you'll realize that even in the state of sluggish stupor on a Monday morning, you are a thousand times wiser and more perceptive than that crank.
You will…
pharyngula | October 22, 2007Richard Mellon Scaife, that horrible little man with an immense fortune who has been propping up institutes loudly supporting right-wing family values, creationism, and gutter-scraping attacks on Democrats, is getting a divorce. Not just any divorce — a train wreck of a divorce, prompted by Scaife's gallivanting about with a prostitute, and with scads of amusingly petty behavior. And the money involved is impressive.
Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued…
pharyngula | October 20, 2007They don't like it. But they love Jesus. At least, that's the message I get from this interview with Dahmer and Chuck Colson's fear of Richard "Maddog" Dawkins.
Are these the best celebrity endorsements of Christianity around?
pharyngula | October 18, 2007Physicists, do you feel left out? Some nobody biologist from the Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota gets featured in a crackpot movie, but all you get is incoherent dumpster-diving schizophrenics making tirades about your work, and never anybody who has heard of venture capital? Rejoice! Your loons are getting more professional, too!
Feature Length Doc "Einstein Wrong" Looking for Executive Producer
Two Oscar Winning Distributors Wanting a Rough Cut
LONG BEACH, Calif, October 16, 2007 - Bootstrap Productions is currently
looking for an executive producer for it's feature-length documentary
"…
pharyngula | October 17, 2007I've read a lot of wacky reviews of Dawkins' book, but this is so absurd I nearly choked on my coke. How about a Freudian psychoanalysis of Dawkins?
The analysis? Dawkins' atheism is grounded in a psychological murder of the God/Father...For Dawkins, the Oedipal counter-current manifests itself not in hearing divine voices but in an unquestioning commitment to a new paternal figure/institution, namely modern science (note the element of trust in science that is necessary to make this commitment, since science alone does not disprove God/murder the Father, only makes God's existence/Father's…
pharyngula | October 15, 2007The godless seem to be making some people desperate and angry and worried — the stupid arguments have just been flooding in, and I've had to exercise some restraint, or every day would be a day for yet another long "religiots are nuts" post. So I've saved them up and will throw them out with fairly short commentary here. You'll see what I mean: bad arguments and pious indignation seem to be the only fuel they're running on right now.
First up, let's pick on a University of Chicago student. He's very upset that scholars (oh, excuse me: "scholars") dare to point out the follies of religion.
The…
pharyngula | October 12, 2007When they say "Judeo-Christian", they actually mean "Judeo-Christian," and they actually hope it means "Jews-for-Jesus-Christian" someday.
It's all good as long as it translates into more book sales to bigots.
pharyngula | October 10, 2007Prison doesn't seem to be helping Kent Hovind face the facts. He has these blog entries where he writes down these little imaginary conversations with god, who tells poor Kent how wonderful he is and how important his suffering is; in the latest, Hovind insists that he's innocent — of course God agrees — but the real sign of growing insanity is that Satan is now having conversations with him, too.
You have also dared to try to take dinosaurs away from me. I have used dinosaurs for nearly 200 years to teach billions of people that the earth is billions of years old and that God's Word is not…