The War on Science
retrospectacle | August 10, 2006John over at Stranger Fruit has posted an infogram from Science, which ranks 34 countries acceptance of evolution. I have hijacked it below:
John notes that only Turkey has beaten us in evolutionary ignornace. But I immediately was struck by how similar this list looks to one I posted about last week regarding the happiest countries in the world! To summarize:
The 20 happiest nations in the World are:
1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Costa Rica
14. Malta
15. The Netherlands
16.…
tlambert | August 7, 2006In January Chris Mitchell, editor in chief of The Australian, was named one of the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have done the most to mislead Australians about climate change:
As an illustration of how news values now take second place to ideology, The Australian in January ran an anonymous anti-greenhouse news story - note, not an opinion piece - by someone identified as a 'special correspondent' employed by the fossil fuel lobby.
Now David Tiley has uncovered The Australian's latest effort.
Here's how they describe their latest hire:
Matthew Warren returns to The Australian as…
retrospectacle | August 1, 2006
I'm sure you've all heard of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), right? Sure, its the cute flying pasta plate that's trying to stick it to organized religion. FSM is a farcical "religion" created by a 24 year old guy named Bobby Henderson in 2005, based on the idea that a flying....er....spaghetti thingamajig created the world. I too had *heard* about it, but little did I realize how truly awesome the FSM was. Praise pasta!
So, what do "Pastafarians" believe?? (from wikipedia)
- An invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe, starting with a…
retrospectacle | July 31, 2006One more reason NOT to go to Kentucky (as if I needed another one?).....
A 25 million dollar "creationist" museum, which depicts people walking around with dinos.
Mark Looy, a vice president at Answers in Genesis, said the museum has received at least $21 million in private donations. He said two anonymous donors have given $1 million, and he expects the museum to be debt-free when it opens next May.
John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science,…
retrospectacle | July 27, 2006A comment I got today. Warning! The below ranting is extremely assinine and/or stupifying!!!!!
I dare you to post this 'truth' and exposure of your criminal intentions: You, like Adolph Hitler, and like Bin-Laden's suicide pilots, have been implanted with foreign thought forms by psychiatrists, and are a puppet of the forces of ev il. Your sense of a Supreme Being has been wiped out; replaced with a self-involved, blind lust for craven power. Lost on you is the ultimate truth that responsibility for self, always including the greater good for others, is what makes us able to be tru ly great…
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006"These boys and girls are not spare parts," he said of the children in the audience. "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells."
Yeah, so what? So does a tumor.
Bush said, "If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would, for the first time in our history, be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos, and I'm not going to allow it."
We're already compelled to fund a war that has killed over 3,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. These are…
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006One veto, as promised.
I'm too disgusted to write anything else right now.
tlambert | July 19, 2006Last month the National Research Council report on climate reconstructions released its report and basically vindicated the hockey stick. This was widely reported in the media. But not in The Australian. I did a search through the archives of The Australian to see what they had published about the study. They did not report anything when the hockey stick study was published or when it was included in the TAR or publish anything supportive of it. They have, however, published several stories on how it was wrong or fraudulent.
For example, Soon and Sallie Baliunas' badly flawed paper was…
retrospectacle | July 7, 2006
They forgot "Lack of ears: disappeared thorough lack of use" and "Smaller than average brain: since the world is only 2000 years old, much less information needs to be stored." Heh.
retrospectacle | June 14, 2006In the latest effort by the Southern Baptist Convention to challenge evolution (and homosexuality), a motion was brought before the leaders to form a strategy to remove children from the public school system. This "exit strategy" was proposed by Roger Moran of MO and pro-intelligent design author Bruce Shortt, as a response to the concerns that public schools are not exerting a "godly influence" and are teaching that the "homosexual lifestyle is acceptable." Thankfully, the motion was NOT supported by the SBC, nor was a similar motion that was rejected 2 years ago.
"We are commanded…
tlambert | August 10, 2005(Via Irant). Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson launched the Australian Science Festival with this:
Intelligent design, which is damned by critics as a front for biblical Creationism, argues that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved purely through Darwin's theory of natural selection. Dr Nelson said yesterday he had met Campus Crusade for Christ, the Australian advocates of intelligent design, or ID, and watched their DVD presentation, called Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
He told the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday that he would oppose replacing evolution with ID in…