stupidity
pharyngula | January 16, 2008Here's your brain on religion: Tom Cruise babbles about scientology. It's depressing schlock — the man is so full of himself, yet all he says are empty platitudes and non-sequiturs and scientology slang. It's the perfect portrayal of a fellow who really isn't very intelligent, but thinks he is.
pharyngula | January 6, 2008So the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. In a rational world, there's a range of options available: stop protecting priests who abuse their position, threaten convicted child-abusing priests with expulsion and excommunication, even revisit this peculiar custom of demanding celibacy for the priesthood. Alas, the Pope has his own very special solution.
Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray "in perpetuity" to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers…
pharyngula | January 2, 2008John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children's Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal…
pharyngula | January 2, 2008He's just got to dive into the Marianas Trench. Quote-mining (badly) my daughter isn't just ugly, it's vile and loathsome and despicable…but that's typical Cordova, now declared Asshole of the Year.
pharyngula | December 26, 2007And it is so apparent on his new blog. The only reason I'll link to it is 1) it's always useful to highlight the awesome inanity of a YEC/ID blog, and 2) to correct a bizarre claim: "Myers is the USA's leading voice for atheism." All that follows is equally wrong and foolish.
pharyngula | December 4, 2007Sherri "the earth is flat" Shepherd advances the atheist cause for us once again by demonstrating just how stupid going to church can make you. This time, it was about history: Jesus came before the Romans and the Greeks, the Greeks threw Christians to the lions, and nothing could have preceded Jesus.
It just goes to show, though, that there is no intelligence minimum for the chattering pundit class.
pharyngula | October 30, 2007Pope Ratzi confirms the bankruptcy of religion for me once again.
Benedict told a gathering of Catholic pharmacists that conscientious objection was a right that must be recognized by the pharmaceutical profession.
"Pharmacists must seek to raise people's awareness so that all human beings are protected from conception to natural death, and so that medicines truly play a therapeutic role," Benedict said.
Benedict said conscientious objector status would "enable them not to collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes such as, for example,…
pharyngula | October 28, 2007Halloween is coming, and you can enjoy the haunted house theme of the 78th Carnival of the Godless.The Quackometer tells us that we've been very naughty boys and girls, and of course it's perfectly natural at this time of year to hang around in the Boneyard. That's nothing, however, I have something far more terrifying to show you.
Yesterday, I naively asked how stupid the Discovery Institute thinks people are. This was a mistake. I suspect the Discovery Institute thinks people are pretty darned stupid. Worse, I'm afraid they might be right.
Both Orac and Mark note the recent series of mind-…
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?
tlambert | September 29, 2007Mark Steyn on the trouble he has with facts:
Incidentally, I stopped writing for the [New York] Times a few years ago because their fanatical "fact-checking" copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge.
I think it's some sort of chemical reaction -- add facts to a Mark Steyn column and it curdles into sludge. Macleans doesn't seem to bother with fact checkers because check this Sten column out:
The other day, an admiring profile of Cate Blanchett ("Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers 'sum up everything that is…
pharyngula | September 20, 2007Facebook has done a stupid thing: they've started deleting photos and accounts of breastfeeding women. Tara is leading the charge here on scienceblogs — this is a ridiculous and demeaning decision, reflecting a mindless prudery on the part of the facebook administrators. Give them hell.
Alas, Tara succumbs to her own biases and cites my breast as an example of offensive photography. Nay, I say, we must regard every expanse of torso as equally lovely. I think I have a few more shots of the masculine mammary in question; to prove my point, if Facebook can't come to their senses, I may have to…
pharyngula | September 19, 2007The Great Wasteland is done. It's hit bottom. I suspect everyone has heard aboutSherri Shepherd, a new co-host on a talk show for stupid women, who doesn't accept the theory of evolution and, by the way, isn't so sure about the shape of the earth, either.
Way to go. Way to reinforce the idea that women are incurious airheads. Way to inform and educate and encourage thinking — hire an idiot to help anchor your program in idiocy.
pharyngula | September 7, 2007Do you know any cell biology? Any biology at all? Then you might want to stop reading now. Here's something to make any competent biology instructor weep.
This is, purportedly, a DIAGRAM OF THE STAGES OF MITOSIS. I dare you to look at it without muttering "What the f…" under your breath, and I wouldn't blame you if you yelled a few cuss words.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR ANYONE STUMBLING ACROSS THIS:The diagram below is BAD. It's completely WRONG. DON'T USE IT.
Can you list everything that is wrong in this picture?
Diagram of the stages of mitosis:
two stage division of a cell, producing gametes and…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007Hollywood is officially bankrupt. Free of all new ideas. Worthless recyclers without an imagination. Why?
They're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the best science fiction movies of all time.
And just to make it that much worse, who is the star? Keanu F. Reeves.
Fortunately, I still have my precious DVD of the original.
tlambert | August 17, 2007If I summarized Glenn Reynold's response to my post on his hyping of a small correction to GISS data, you would not believe me, so I'm quoting the whole thing:
Lamberted! But no Instalanche.
Later: In an update: "Matthew Yglesias links to Tim Lambert, obviously deeming him a reputable source. Hey, this is about politics; not accuracy." Yglesias has been off his game lately.
More: Brad Plumer has been fooled, too.
Yes, Reynolds is enough of an egomaniac to think that I wrote my post because I was hoping to get an Instalanche. In fact, I wrote it to correct his hype. The change meant that…
pharyngula | August 7, 2007Oh, no…not Easterbrook. Haven't I dealt with him sufficiently in the past? He's got along-winded column in which, while quantifying the nudity in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, he also whines about those godless authors that have offended him so much.
Regarding the "Golden Compass" volumes, in them God is a central character -- but is actively evil, obsessed with causing people to suffer. The plotline of the books is that Christianity is a complete fraud and the source of all that is wrong with society; the final "Golden Compass" volume concerns a desperate attempt by the heroic…
tlambert | July 2, 2007Warning: This post concerns an inter-blog fight. Skip unless you find this stuff interesting.
Over at Catallaxy Jason Soon has accused me "of generating a climate of fear about" global warming and "claiming that emergency intervention measures were needed to address it immediately". Apparently I'm doing this because I am one of those "advocates of big government" and I'm also just like Graeme Bird. When challenged to support his claim, he came up with something ridiculously vague:
I recall John had some argument with someone on Tim's site who claimed we were all rooned if economic growth…
pharyngula | June 23, 2007Why, this must be the smartest dog in the universe.
Her husband decided to ask their 4-year-old dog another question, the square root of 25. Micah tapped his paw five times.
To prove this wasn't a fluke, the couple and a friend tossed out more math than teachers during exam time. Micah consistently pawed the correct answers, appearing to solve such problems as square root division, finding the numerators and denominators of fractions, multiplying and dividing, even basic algebra.
"He can calculate problems given in English, Spanish, French and German," Cindy Tuten said.
I know how the dog…
pharyngula | June 23, 2007The situation isn't at all funny—a female volleyball coach was made miserable and discriminated against because of her sexual preferences, and there seems to have been (and probably still is) a nasty culture of male privilege in Fresno State athletics—but this piece of testimony against the associate AD, Randy Welniak, was just icing on the cake.
The one that sticks out was when Randy took me behind closed doors and said he had just learned of a situation where he just found out why Lindy was such a bitch. That he just learned she not only was a lesbian. She was an atheist.
Uh-oh. Multiple…
pharyngula | June 21, 2007Another major paper has a story on Conservapædia. I'm sure Andy is proud of his accomplishment — the truly stupid would be proud of promoting stupidity.
Schlafly, 46, started small, urging his students to post brief -- often one-sentence -- entries on ancient history. He went live with the site in November. In the last six months, it's grown explosively, offering what Schlafly describes as fair, scholarly articles. Many have a distinctly religious-right perspective.
There's some complaining at the end—there's a rival wiki, RationalWiki, that comments on Conservapædia silliness, and some of…