Kooks
pharyngula | September 6, 2007It's early, you're sipping your coffee, you want something odd to pique your interest and make you realize that maybe your boss isn't the biggest screwball on the planet. I'm happy to oblige with a few words of wisdom from a sagacious UK writer.
I would like to suggest that recent arguments from readers should not be about creationism versus evolution.
There is much evidence that humankind was created and then evolved, and that we are in a constant state of evolution.
Created and evolved? Two sentences in, and I'm confused.
The Biblical Adam and Eve story is most likely an allegory about…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007It could have been a much bigger story. A reporter came out to talk to me about that lawsuit a while back, and he had talked with Pivar and many of those involved, and he said he was preparing a fairly substantial write-up … and then after he got back to the Twin Cities, he got a call from Pivar announcing that he had dropped the suit, and so the story got cut way back. Dang. If only Pivar had held off for one more day.
Anyway, you can now read the abbreviated story of the Pivar vs. Seed/Myers lawsuit right now. I guess I got a little snark in, anyway.
One thing that didn't make it into the…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007The managing editor of a small town newspaper in Wisconsin, Rose Eddy, is very upset with certain vicious hate groups, so she made up a list for her staff and announced that they will not be accepting ads or information from them, ever. And then she publicized it, declaring her unimpeachable moral probity in the pages of her newspaper. Here's her list of awful, terrible people who must not appear in print:
The Nazi Party. Bad, very bad. I think this one has been condemned by history well enough.
Al Qaeda. A known terrorist organization that wants to destroy America — the very symbol of…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007People really don't like me very much.
Huh? What did you really mean to say?
Mr Myers
I must say you are certainly a living testimony why we should have an official second language in the United States. Your 1 Sep 07 article "Sometimes, conflict is the only answer" makes about as much sense as the blathering drivel you normally publish on your blogs. Perhaps if you could write it in plain English it would be decipherable.
The last person that sounded almost as intelligent as you was named Jim Jones. He had a few followers that believed what he said and wrote. In fact, they followed him…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007I guess now he'll be able to sit down and have a little chat with Hitler and find out if he really was a godless atheist who got all his ideas from Darwin. I doubt that he'll be able to ask Darwin directly, though — I'm pretty sure they're in very different places.
At least, that would be the case if his beliefs were anywhere near correct. Personally, I think he's erased.
pharyngula | September 5, 2007If I were a passenger, I don't think I would find Nepal Airlines' maintenance procedures at all reassuring.
Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
At least the in-flight meals must be fresh and tasty.
pharyngula | September 4, 2007Especially since some of the creators of these ideas seem to have confused "theory" for "brain fart". The latest example: Zygote Theory!
From the first sentence, you can tell the theory is crap. Anything that makes it's accommodation to the bible a selling point is instantly recognizable as nonsense — the bible is not a scientific text, nor were its authors knowledgeable about biology.
ZYGOTE THEORY explains all the scientific data and fits with the Bible.
A zygote is the first cell of a new individual after a sperm and egg unite. God appears to have done most of His acts of creation of new…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007Ben Stein is making a new movie (Expelled, have you heard of it?) that's supposed to be out in February, but right now he's building the excitement by making television appearances and demonstrating that he is a raving lunatic. Yeah, this is exactly the guy I want as the spokesman for Intelligent Design creationism.
He's defending Larry Craig. It's promisingly incoherent, and here are his arguments, more or less in the order babbled.
He's upset that the police arrested an Idaho senator when they're supposed to be busy chasing Al Quaeda. What is it with these wingnuts? We're supposed to…
pharyngula | August 31, 2007The Pivar story isn't quite dead yet — Chris Mims discovers that one of his blog defenders was a public relations agent. It's not clear if he was employed by Pivar — he has written press releases for Lifecode, though — but if he was, it looks like Pivar has another goon in his employ whose ham-handed efforts backfired on him.
It's so hard to get good minions, lackeys, thugs, and bully-boys nowadays.
pharyngula | August 30, 2007Now the Stuart Pivar Story is on Daily Kos. Even after he dropped the lawsuit, his reputation on the blogosphere is sealed. If he'd never started this duel, it would have been nothing but a few fading memories of a negative review of an obscure book … but by playing games with the law and trying to intimidate others by throwing his money around, he's elevated himself into notoriety.
pharyngula | August 28, 2007This kind of silliness happens with tedious frequency. I get email notifications that I've been signed up to receive tripe from conservative or religious or creationist jerks.
You are now signed up to receive Ann Coulter's weekly column, Newt Gingrich's Winning the Future newsletter, and Robert Novak's Evans-Novak Political Report. On Fridays you'll also receive the Weekly Wrap-Up, containing the top stories of the week from HumanEvents.com.
You shouldn't bother. Most of my email gets shunted through three layers of spam traps, and that kind of spam just gets blown away at first notice. It…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007It probably is: it has just the right amount of ingrown festering obsessiveness. We've all heard of old earth creationism (creationists who agree the Earth is billions of years old, and make arguments about the "days" of the bible representing long ages) and young earth creationism (the bible is strictly and literally true, and the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in precisely 6 24-hour days). Here's a new one called Biblical Reality:
This "Old Earth" brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate…
pharyngula | August 26, 2007Ted Haggard is reduced in his circumstances. He and his family are living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment while he attends classes full time at the University of Phoenix, and he's also helping out in a halfway house for the homeless. It's as if he's taken a vow of poverty and is living the ideal Christian life of charity and giving. Oh, what a good man!
To help him in his good works, he has sent out a letter asking people to give — he sends an address to a Christian charity that he promises will send 90% of the money to the Haggard family and use only 10% for administrative costs. For once,…
pharyngula | August 23, 2007Mr Slime-Snake-Monkey-Mutant himself, Robert Bowie Johnson Jr., has been paying a few visits to scienceblogs — he popped into Stranger Fruit, and paid call on my thread, too. Just once, I wish one of these soundly castigated hoople-heads who come 'round to defend their affronted sanity would actually muster a brief moment's coherence and simple rationality to refute their kookiness, rather confirm it.
pharyngula | August 22, 2007Come February, we are going to be privileged to see a brand new movie that stars Ben Stein and portrays Intelligent Design creationism as the cool rebel oppressed by the stodgy old Darwinist bullies. Did you know that "scientists are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator"? I didn't either. I think a lot of scientists have thought about it and noticed that there is no evidence for such a hypothesis, and have therefore rejected it.
This movie fits with the intelligent design strategy of declaring itself the victim of an unfair exclusion (which isn't true, of…
pharyngula | August 20, 2007People. You cannot use a very silly, poorly defined, done-for-a-hoot internet quiz to make sweeping conclusions about schools of thought. You also can't just raise up your prejudices and point to them as evidence, as in this case:
Based on Wired Magazine's observation that atheists tend to be quarrelsome, socially challenged men, to say nothing of the unpleasant personalities of leading public atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray, one could reasonably hypothesize that there is likely to be a strong correlation between Asperger's and atheism.
Right. So…
pharyngula | August 17, 2007I think that citing Gregg Easterbrook approvingly ought to be a criterion in the Crackpot Index.
pharyngula | August 15, 2007Uh-oh. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is in trouble now: some wrathful priest is cursing them in the name of God and has used the power of imprecatory prayer to ask the Lord to smite them.
Oooooh. There hasn't been any detectable lordly smiting in millennia, or even longer. This could be impressive. You can catch Pastor Wiley Drake on streaming Christian radio tomorrow morning at 9am PST — I'm sure he'll be calling down hellfire in a most entertaining way. I'll be traveling, unfortunately, so someone will have to tune in and report back.
Heh. "Imprecatory prayer." These…
pharyngula | August 10, 2007The wingnuts are still outraged that there is a Muslim in congress and that a Hindu delivered an opening prayer (which was pretty dang lame, anyway). Now look at this silly little man (R-Idaho) ranting about the death of America:
Last month, the U.S. Senate was opened for the first time ever with a Hindu prayer. Although the event generated little outrage on Capitol Hill, Representative Bill Sali (R-Idaho) is one member of Congress who believes the prayer should have never been allowed.
"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of…
pharyngula | August 8, 2007This has been the week that the whiny little twits have risen up to complain about atheism. The latest entry is from Camille Paglia, and many have written to me about it. I'm not going to bother. I've never cared much for Paglia, and Salon's infatuation with her as a columnist is incomprehensible to me — her specialty is haughty pseudo-intellectual blurts of pretension, strung together on the one common thread of her febrile narcissism.
So, sorry, no evisceration of her babblings — there have just been too many of them lately, so all she gets is a curt dismissal.