Kooks
pharyngula | November 15, 2006Chopra.
Deepak Chopra is a fraud who probably makes at least ten times my salary, who gets invited onto talk shows and news programs to spout his opinions, whose books are read by millions as if they actually provide any insight…and the guy has the brains of a turnip. It's just sad. Have you no shame, Ariana Huffington?
His latest attempt to explain himself (an effort which is to reason as cat-strangling is to art) is a poor critique of Dawkins' The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It promises to be part one. When I was in my twenties, I had a very difficult extraction of my wisdom teeth…
pharyngula | November 15, 2006When asked what her aspirations for her new term in congress might be, Michele Bachmann's answer was:
"My No. 1 goal is to not go to jail," Bachmann said, chuckling.
I think that's nice. Set impossible standards for yourself, Michele, so that when you fail, you can at least say you tried.
pharyngula | November 13, 2006This fairly typical scrap of creationist email made me smirk. Please, if you're going to be sarcastic and tell me how stupid I am, don't make the first word of your diatribe grammatically incorrect.
your soo smart... I wish I was as smart as you
Oh you are soo much smarter than everyone else. That's odd being that your ancestors were monkeys. Too bad you are going to drown soon when mankind melts the polar ice caps. I guess you would have done just as well if we would have used your embryo for research and the rest of us would be much better off too. What a stupid arrogant know-it-all…
pharyngula | November 8, 2006Minnesota elected a Muslim, Keith Ellison to the US House of Representatives. If he'd made his religion an issue, I'd be unhappy about this (just as I am about any other pious politician), but he didn't—even though his opposition did—so I'm not perturbed. He seems to be advocating the right stuff.
Ellison said his race and religion weren't as important as issues such as Iraq and health insurance for all. "We still have 43 million American uninsured. This is a problem for everyone in the United States," he said.
He advocates an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq along with strongly liberal…
pharyngula | November 5, 2006I'm still getting flamage from Dr Mike S. Adams' fans. This one just happened to tickle me, for some reason. I wonder if I can get that title engraved on my office door?
YOUR WEB TREATMENT OF DR. ADAMS WAS DISCUSTING...
OBVIOUSLY, YOUR REAL TITLE SHOULD BE "ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION"! TYPICAL OF "HIGHER????" EDUCATION.
I think the funniest part of this all-caps, misspelled, strangely punctuated rant and sneer at "HIGHER????" EDUCATION is that the guy's signature proudly says, "Employee of University of Wisconsin".
pharyngula | November 2, 2006Well, I thought I was done with Mike S. Adams, but I keep getting sucked back in. I was asked by the University Register, our weekly campus newspaper, to submit an editorial on Adams' talk last week. "Sure," I said, and whipped out eleven hundred words. You can read them in situ in the online edition of the Register, or you can look below the fold.
Talk by Mike S. Adams lacked that certain je ne sais quois
I attended part of Mike S. Adams' talk last Thursday. I have to say that I was very disappointed.
He spent on hour telling us about his victimhood—that he has been continually oppressed by…
pharyngula | October 31, 2006If you're a fan of mangled philosophy and patent falsehoods, you really must read the Biblical view of science. It's crazily disconnected from anything close to describing how science actually works.
What then is the Biblical view of science? Science enables us to fulfill the mandate of Genesis 1:28: "Then God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.' " Science gives us directions for doing things, or "…
pharyngula | October 30, 2006Mike Adams latest column is all about his UMM visit…although, actually, it's more of a whine about me.
Dr. P.Z. Myer did, in fact, make my talk Thursday night and something very strange happened: He, too, experienced a sudden and dramatic change in his level of courage during the course of the speech.
During the question and answer session, Professor Myer simply leaned against a door post with his arms crossed and said nothing. He just stared at me blankly and stood motionless in the same place where he was standing for the last twenty minutes of the speech. During the "Q & A", I looked…
pharyngula | October 26, 2006I did manage to get to Mike S. Adams' talk here at UMM. It was a packed room (not our biggest lecture room here, but it was filled to capacity) and I arrived late, so I had to stand outside the door to listen in. Kudos to our students, who were polite and attentive, and let him blather on without interruption.
Adams is a slick, fast-talking, folksy guy, and he made the audience laugh quite a bit. He had to talk fast, though, to keep his story from sinking beneath the weight of its improbabilities, and I do wonder how many of our students actually caught on to his inconsistencies.
To summarize…
pharyngula | October 21, 2006A candidate for state superintendent of eduction in Oklahoma has finally figured out what those things called "textbooks" are for: they're good body armor. His solution to school violence is to explain to kids how they can use a supply of old textbooks to stop bullets.
He is a Republican, of course.
He has a video of himself firing an arsenal at various books. It's brilliant: he's going to appeal to all the gun-nut voters, all the voters who hate books, and every idiot in Oklahoma. That's a big slice of the population.
One flaw: true Republican patriots might wonder why he isn't shipping all…
pharyngula | October 18, 2006Human X (left) and Y (right) chromosomes
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it's gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can't believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week's worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly piece…
pharyngula | October 10, 2006Steve Sailer, of course.
While I'm out of town, my introductory biology students are getting a lecture on species concepts and systematics from one of my colleagues, and it fits in perfectly with that link, too. In my absence even, freshman college students are smarter and better informed than Sailer.
pharyngula | October 6, 2006Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I've tussled with his weird arguments before, and now he's flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his profound ignorance of biology, in something titled The Trouble With Genes. Chopra is a doctor, supposedly, but every time I read something by him that touches on biology, he sounds as ignorant as your average creationist. He also writes incredibly poorly, bumbling his way forward with a succession of unlikely and…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006The Twin Cities wereinfested with a rather noxious parasite this week: Dobson and his crew of holy bible-thumpers. I know the Minnesota Atheists were out protesting, but Eva and Avidor actually attended the event, and came back with videos. So, if you really want to see Gary Bauer again, or watch the crowds swoon over James Dobson, Lloyletta has the YouTube links.
pharyngula | September 20, 2006Why do we put up with these insane people? This is painful to listen to: it's an NPR interview with John Hagee, and he goes on and on about his weird biblical prophecies that soon (maybe in the next hour!) the Rapture is going to occur, war will break out with Russia and Islam against Israel, and God will make an abrupt magical appearance that will prove his existence. It's got excerpts from his looney-tunes sermons. We get to hear that "All Moslems have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews." And what about Hurricane Katrina? "New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God…all of…
pharyngula | September 12, 2006Give all the fundamentalist Christians a copy of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, then sit back and wait for them to kill each other. I'm amused that the article calls it a "theological argument": the guy gets upset at the movie, sees his wife, calls her evil, and tries to strangle her. Yep, that's a "theological argument" in a nutshell.
(via Andrew Brown)
pharyngula | August 31, 2006The Vatican has a chief exorcist. There is an International Association of Exorcists. They believe Hitler was possessed by a demon and tried a long-distance exorcism. Oh, and Harry Potter is evil.
Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Stalin were possessed by the Devil, the Vatican's chief exorcist has claimed.
Father Gabriele Amorth who is Pope Benedict XVI's 'caster out of demons' made his comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.
Father Amorth said: "Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations."
Shouldn't people be ashamed…
pharyngula | August 28, 2006Wow, it's only Monday, but I think it'll be awfully unlikely that we see anyone limbo under the bar of sucky vileness set by Sylvia Browne this week. Watch her lie to a grieving woman. It'll make you want to take a loofah to your eyeballs.
Oh, wait…am I being stupid in my certainty that Browne is a despicable con artist?
pharyngula | August 28, 2006The Florida Baptist Witness got various candidates for office to answer a few questions. They're bad questions, almost entirely focused on the issues of the religious right, but Katherine Harris clasped them to her bosom and ran with them. It's actually kind of creepy.
The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or a lawyer, but in government and we have to have elected officials in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the…
pharyngula | August 26, 2006Perhaps this is redundant, since Jon Swift has already taken care of it, but how could I possibly resist an article titled "The Death of Science," posted on a "Blogs for Bush" site? It's got wingnuts, it's got irony, it's got dizzyingly inane interpretations of science. It's like everything that's wrong with the Bush approach to science, all in one short article.
What reasons could a blinkered Bush supporter with a petrified brain and no background in science possibly advance to support the claim that science is dead?
A lot of different factors - but the main thing was that science could…