stupidity
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 21, 2006If you were appalled at the cavalier cops, here's another story to make you sneer with disgust. Jaquandor reports on a couple of kids who pulled a stupid prank that nearly killed a couple of teenagers (one had a broken neck and brain damage, and has been through 10 surgeries), and the judge gave them a couple of light sentences, and worst of all, delayed the start of their sentences…until the end of football season.
That's right, they're high school football players. It would be unduly harsh to prevent them from playing football, you know. And besides, the members of the football team must…
retrospectacle | August 17, 2006From Montgomery Gentry's website (Hat tip to jc):
Troy is accused of conspiring with a professional hunting guide to improperly fill out a hunting tag. To back up this charge, the indictment claims that Troy shot a tamed bear in a cage, then made a video to appear that he did not shoot the bear in a cage, but in the wild. These claims are wildly inaccurate.
The bear in question was never in a cage or pen; not when it was killed or at anytime prior to that. This wild bear occupied its own habitat (consisting of several acres of woodlands) on a game preserve owned by the codefendant.…
retrospectacle | August 17, 2006Humans can really piss me off sometimes. For example, Jake over at Pure Pedantry blogged about how some really short-sighted, selfish people are stripping slippery elms of their bark, which inevitably kills them, to sell as "medicine."
Well perhaps I can even top that:
A "country star" Troy Lee Gentry purchased a tame black bear named "Cubby" for the sole purpose of killing it in a small pen. Then, he tried to cover up the slaying as killed in the wild.
Authorities allege that Gentry purchased the bear from Greenly, a wildlife photographer and hunting guide, then killed it with a bow and…
pharyngula | August 11, 2006An Alabama church collapses on a Thursday night; fortunately no one was hurt. As we've come to expect, a god gets credit, never mind that maybe a truly beneficent god would have prevented the collapse in the first place.
"Thank God nobody was hurt," Pastor Jeff Carroll said. "He chose to let it come down on a Thursday evening when nobody was there."
This story has an additional twist, though. Why did the church collapse?
The congregation and volunteers designed and built the new church apparently without filing plans or gaining approval from local or state entities. Carroll, himself a…
tlambert | August 1, 2005I wrote earlier about an extraordinarily biased survey conducted by Spiked where they asked scientists what they would teach the world about science if they could pick just one thing. I just noticedthis gem of an answer by Stanley Feldman:
I would also teach the world that energy used is proportional to mass times distance. Over a mile, a heavy train coach will use more energy than a light coach. A bus is not necessarily more efficient than a car, unless there is only one passenger in the car and the bus is full. A bicycle is less efficient than walking, as it increases the mass to be…