Kooks
pharyngula | August 22, 2006Corruption and wingnut Christianity seem to go hand in hand. Case in point: Vox Day, misogynist Christian freak, is the son of Robert Beale, Minnesota millionaire, founder of both a computer products company and the Minnesota Christian Coalition. The elder Beale is on the lam from The Man for tax evasion.
"He fundamentally believes, and has stuck to his belief since this case started, that the federal income tax is illegal," said Bradford Beale, his son and vice president of Comtrol Corp., the firm that his father founded.
"It was common knowledge at Comtrol," wrote Rank, "that Beale was…
pharyngula | August 21, 2006I've been linked to by WorldNetDaily. Hoo-weee, you should see the sewage in my mailbox now.
pharyngula | August 21, 2006People, people, people. There is far too much attention being paid to a pair of obnoxious trolls in the comments. Ignore them. Do not call them out. Do not pester them with questions. Just let 'em rot.
I'm going to have to start disemvoweling the stuff from Bres Mac Elatha/Robert O'Brien and Jason, as well as the posts that refer to them, if you can't leave them be. I get cranky when I have to start hacking up annoying comments, you know.
pharyngula | August 8, 2006Zeno has this quote from an acolyte of D. James Kennedy, Dr. Paul Jehle, and I have to shake my head in disbelief.
I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian....
I asked a question to my calculus professor: "What makes this course distinctly Christian?" He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before...
He said, "Okay, I'm a Christian you're a Christian."
I said, "That's not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular…
pharyngula | August 4, 2006Lots of sources are telling me about Pat Robertson's sudden acceptance of the fact of global warming. I'm sorry, but it's no cause for rejoicing. He accepts it for the wrong reasons.
This week the heat index, the perceived temperature based on both air temperatures and humidity, reached 115 Fahrenheit in some regions of the U.S. East Coast. The 76-year-old Robertson told viewers that was "the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time."
If there's one broad, overall message I wish everyone would get from this blog and from my teaching, it's that science isn't about…
pharyngula | July 27, 2006Yikes—it's like some kind of horror movie: Inhofe meets Robertson.
Look, Pat, I don't have to tell you about reading the Scriptures, but one of mine that I've always enjoyed is Romans 1, 22 and 23. You quit worshipping God and start worshipping the creation -- the creeping things, the four-legged beasts, the birds and all that. That's their god. That's what they worship.
I'm not a big fan of the Bible, and every time I do dig into it, I find myself disgusted—and this is no exception. I had to look up Romans.
15So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at…
pharyngula | July 27, 2006I keep waiting for the padded ambulance to roll up and men in white coats to leap out, shoot these bozos with a trank gun, wrap them up in a straight jacket, and go howling off to the nearest sanitarium, but no…instead, they get invitations to appear on cable news and babble about the apocalypse. And it's not just the airhead news media…
…Rosenberg is just one of several conservative media figures who have identified and expounded upon the purported signs of the Apocalypse to be found in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. During his appearance on Live From…, Rosenberg claimed that he had been…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006He only has a few radio and television programs, his own university, tens of millions of dollars to throw at his political causes, and a few million voters in his pocket, so Jerry Falwell* is just a marginal nut, right? We can just ignore him when he says things like this:
It is apparent, in light of the rebirth of the State of Israel, that the present day events in the Holy Land may very well serve as a prelude or forerunner to the future Battle of Armageddon and the glorious return of Jesus Christ.
Those rapture freaks who are cheering on the bloodshed in the Middle East certainly don't…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006One of the things you get in blogs that you don't get so much of in science journals is the raving insane obsessed kook—can you believe Tara has to deal with wackos who disbelieve the germ theory of disease?
Of course you do. The people who argue against evolution are just as nutty.
pharyngula | July 24, 2006Ricky Santorum has us scientists down cold.
Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It's a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.
So, you see, scientists are amoral, with nothing to hold them back from pursuing their dreams of unbridled, raging power. I'm sure if we asked Li'l Ricky about atheists, he'd turn pale and tell us all kinds of horror stories.
Atheist scientists, of course, are absolutely the worst. Watch out—…
pharyngula | July 21, 2006Here's what causes global warming: we've been breathing since the Pleistocene ice age ended 165 million years ago.
Isn't it cool how mentioning a specific date and geological epoch make you sound so smart, except when you get them all completely wrong?
pharyngula | July 15, 2006Salon has an interview with "Pete", the blogger who mistook an Onion humor piece for a real article.
Reached by phone at his Virginia home a week after his initial post about the Onion story, Pete said, "You write some article off the cuff and throw it out there and you never know what's going to happen. The next thing I know there are people calling me from all over the world and telling me what an idiot I am!" It was surely the most public of embarrassments, an example of how the intersection of varied voices and ideologies and sensibilities in the brutal wild West of the new, new…
pharyngula | July 15, 2006Praise Jesus!
The Talent Show had to ruin my morning with a revelation: check out this evil thread on Rapture Ready—these kooks are overjoyed at the war and mayhem and death in the Middle East, and treat every catastrophe as a sign of their imminent ascent into heaven.
I too am soooo excited!! I get goose bumps, literally, when I watch what's going on in the M.E.!! And Watcherboy, you were so right when saying it was quite a day yesterday, in the world news, and I add in local news here in the Boston area!! Tunnel ceiling collapsed on a car and killed a woman of faith, and we had the most…
pharyngula | July 14, 2006Phil has a live one: a woman who mangles digital images with Photoshop filters to determine if they are lizardoid aliens. Foolish earthling. Everyone knows Phil is from Zeta Reticuli.
Along similar lines, I once had someone cast a detailed horoscope for me and send it along…apparently, I am one of the most evil baby-raping SOBs on the planet, and the only thing preventing me from oppressing and enslaving and destroying everyone is an excess of sloth and stupidity. These kooks—they say the obvious and pretend it is insight.
pharyngula | July 11, 2006Unbelievable. Whenever I read about these End Times kooks, I wonder what is wrong with people.
For some Christians this means laying the groundwork for Armageddon.
With that goal in mind, mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission: to make every person on Earth aware of Jesus' message. Doing so, they believe, will bring about the end, perhaps within two decades.
The article is full of red heifers and rebuilt temples and urgent conversions to satisfy prophecy and…
pharyngula | July 10, 2006Hard to believe, but check out the source this anti-choicer uses to back up his essay on the callous horror of abortion.
The Onion.
Satire and irony are now officially dead.
The author has a new post up—he still doesn't get it. He's still babbling about the fictional author of the Onion piece getting all those abortions.
It's a marvel. There really are people that stupid out there.
(via Curly Tales of War Pigs)
pharyngula | July 9, 2006I'm not a fan of Adam Corolla by any means, but he just had best interview with Coulter ever. This is a great tactic, and I hope more talk show people follow his example.
pharyngula | July 4, 2006I'm going to go fire up the grill in a little while, so here's something for those of you not yet doing the traditional Fourth of July thing to chew on…a tasty scrap of the kind of email I get.
EVOLUTION IS ENTIRELY
FALLACIOUS.
MEIOSIS CASTRATES
EVOLUTION.KARYOTYPES DISPROVE
EVOLUTION. THE
BASIC MECHANISMS SAID TO BE DRIVING EVOLUTION ARE ENTIRELY INADEQUATE,UTTERLY
INCAPABLE OF PRODUCING NOVEL KARYOTYPES,NOVEL FEATURES,NOVEL
FUNCTIONS.
1)EVOLUTION'S
PHYLOGENIES ARE TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH
KARYOTYPES;
2)THERE IS NO MECHANISM TO GENERATE NOVEL
KARYOTYPES THAT ARE FERTILE(meiosis,homology,…
pharyngula | July 3, 2006This is helpful. Senator Ted Stevens explains how the internet works.
And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Stay with this idea, please, because it is how I'm going to get rich. My plan is to install peristaltic pumps on fiber optic cables, and working on the same principle as…