Kooks
pharyngula | April 20, 2010Somebody was a little peevish that I slammed a woo-wooish poll. It's not much of a note, but for some reason Mr Spagnuolo's complete obliviousness tickled me.
I read your article about the lost girl and the man that gave credit to God for helping him to find her. You Sir, are a dick. Your arrogance has made you blind to the point where you take pot-shots at things your 'scientific' mind can't even begin to comprehend. Quit being a dick.
-Chris Spagnuolo
I can't. It's who I am.
I think, though, that I am able to comprehend some guy finding a lost girl in a swamp by chance. Mr Spagnuolo can't…
pharyngula | April 19, 2010You all recall Ardipithecus ramidus, the very cool 4.4 million year old fossil that showed that bipedalism was very old. It's a great fossil, a revealing story, and worth the attention it was given.
Amazingly, someone has now had an actual conversation with Ardipithecus. You may be wondering how; so am I. Well, not actually — I have a pretty good idea how this fellow could be chatting with a 4 million year old fossil. He's nuts.
Kent Hovind, who many of us are enjoying the sensation of seeing him slip from our memories as he cools his heels in prison for tax fraud, occasionally writes these…
pharyngula | April 19, 2010So it really does cause earthquakes!
"Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader.
Suddenly, I feel exposed and embarrassed — not much action going on in Minnesota, I guess, while California and Japan are getting jiggy all the time. And oh boy, Iceland — was everyone getting wild there, or what?
pharyngula | April 18, 2010A lot of people sent me links to that really dope Insane Clown Posse video where they expressed wonder at how magnets work and cussed out the scientists for lying to them, but I ignored you all, because when I said "dope", I meant it literally. It was a pair of poseurs exposing their ignorance.
Don't go looking for it. It's just too awful. Instead, appreciate this lovely parody from Saturday Night Live.
pharyngula | April 17, 2010The Huffington Post now has a post up from some guy named Rory Fitzgerald reacting to the suggestion that the Pope be arrested for crimes and conspiracies of his organization by urging that Richard Dawkins be arrested for "atheist crimes"…such as those committed by the Nazis and Stalinists. I had no idea that Adolf Hitler was a member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation! You learn something new every day.
But, you know, he's right. If RDF staffers were running a child-porn ring, and Dawkins was moaning "Oh, this will ruin the reputation of my foundation, I must do what I can to hide these…
pharyngula | April 15, 2010When anyone other than a particle physicist talks about "quantum", it is almost always a magic word used to project a pseudoscientific aura onto sheer raving lunacy. "Quantum" as a prefix is almost universally used to signify that the noun it modifies is about to be made crazy stupid. So you know when you see something called the Quantum Bible, it's not going to be refined, elegant, coherent, or intelligent.
Here are the first bits of this rewritten version of the Bible. I'm being kind and sparing you the associated annotations, which are even longer than the text.
1 And behold the Great…
pharyngula | April 14, 2010It looks like Michael De Dora is calling me out. The wishy-washy, sloppy-thinking director of the NY CFI, whose main claim to fame lately is a series of blog articles notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists, is now taking me to task for my post arguing that the Tennessee case of a creationist objecting to a textbook calling creationism "the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days" was a) an example of a true twit peddling ignorance, and b) that the textbook phrasing was accurate and…
pharyngula | April 14, 2010He seems very surprised. I guess it's something he's never experienced before.
Chopra has a little story to tell. It seems colobus monkeys have discovered that eating charcoal absorbs some of the irritating toxins in their diet, so the monkeys have been chowing down on the stuff for several generations. This is cool and clever, but not at all surprising — organisms adapt and take advantage of their environment all the time. But Chopra being Chopra has to put a very weird spin on it.
He argues that the behavior isn't genetic, because it's too recent — not quite right, novel mutations have to…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010Michael Behe is a professor at Lehigh University. He's also a crank, marginalized and mocked and belittled in academia, and regarded as an ignorant ideologue. But he's still holding his position and he's still allowed to express himself. That's the principled position we hold in academia — he's allowed to speak even stupidly, and we're allowed to fire back.
That's not the way creationists work, though. Bruce Waltke is apparently a respected Old Testament scholar who used to work at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Not any more, though. He made the mistake of speaking in a BioLogos-sponsored…
pharyngula | April 11, 2010I've been getting a few odd, cryptic messages on twitter from someone calling himself @spiritualgenome. I looked him up to figure out what the heck he was babbling about, and found his web page. Turns out he's a crop circle nut, and you might find a few minutes amusement in his delusions.
Fascinating new discoveries by Russian molecular biologists have revealed that DNA has a mysterious resonance that has been termed the Phantom-DNA Effect. In addition these Russian researchers have found that DNA reacts to voice activated laser light when it is set at the specific frequency of the DNA itself…
pharyngula | April 6, 2010I've just won an award. I hope there's cash, or at least a gaudy trophy, to go with it.
pharyngula | April 6, 2010People send me stuff via email, and I browse through it all in the early morning, before I go offline and get to work, and that means I often wake up to some of the most disgusting, revolting, horrible messages: death threats, angry letters, and all kinds of interesting insults. But sometimes the worst comes from people who are on my side, like this message that really ruined my breakfast. It's from a Catholic anti-choice site, full of prim certainties about gods and babies and your reproductive organs, and it has this…this…letter to a young girl, written by Alice von Hildebrand.
Be prepared…
pharyngula | April 5, 2010I'm a fan of the Texas Freedom Network — they are fighting the good fight in the heart of one of the craziest states in the country — but they just made a big mistake. They are celebrating their 15th anniversary by bringing in a big-name speaker…Arianna Huffington. Jebus. One of the worst purveyors of pseudo-science, quackery, and New Age clown-noise on the internet. It reminds me a bit of Bill Maher winning an award from AAI…except that in this case, Huffington hasn't made any contribution to the promotion of science.
Don't buy a ticket. Don't endorse that loon.
TFN does good work, though:…
pharyngula | April 5, 2010It wasn't God, a least. It was Deepak Chopra.
Had a powerful meditation just now - caused an earthquake in Southern California.
Was meditation on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that
Some people were upset at my remarks re earthquake. Sorry about that. I was actually meditating when it happenned and thougt" Whoaaa!"
What a buffoon.
I think I'll go eat a burrito and see if I can cause a mudslide in California a little later. Followed by a typhoon. Maybe if I add extra hot sauce I can also trigger some fires.
pharyngula | April 4, 2010It's tough being Denyse O'Leary. She's one of the loudest voices for Intelligent Design on the net, and she has to perpetually struggle with her own ignorance in order to come up with new excuses to deny evolution, and all she ever accomplishes is to briefly dazzle us with her incompetence. She has come up with two new problems with evolution lately. Brace yourselves, put your coffee down, and swallow before you read them. I'll will not be held accountable for damaged keyboards!
How about this? Macroevolution is about changes in form and size, which kittens do routinely as they grow up.…
pharyngula | April 4, 2010I know many of you are occupied with batting around an obtuse creationist named JohnHamilton, but if you need a break, there's a nice post here that has drawn out a couple of scientologists. They're actually trying to defend the fantasies of L. Ron Hubbard as "science"!
Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a correct prediction, or reliably-predictable type of outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled technique, technology, or practice, from…
pharyngula | March 30, 2010Good news: the Large Hadron Collider is operational, and has fired two particles together with a force of 7 trillion electron volts…and it's only the beginning, since they're going to ramp up the power gradually. It's too bad Michio Kaku had to muck it up with a lot of nonsense.
"This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 - what happened in the beginning," physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press.
"This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe."
Please, no. Genesis has zero correspondence to reality.…
pharyngula | March 29, 2010The FBI is cracking down on a Christian militia group that has been threatening to assassinate police officers and overthrow the government. There are nuts like this scattered all over the place; they collect guns, dress up in military gear, and play war games in the woods. They have no chance of succeeding in their aims, but are so delusional the believe they are the vanguard of a coming revolution. Why? Because God tells them so. These fanatics are typically deeply immersed in Christian End Times mythology.
Read their statement about their aims. They are "Preparing for the end time battles…
pharyngula | March 28, 2010One can acquire all kinds of interesting "scientific" perspectives on the interwebs. For instance, Professor Pallacken Abdul Wahid of Kerala Agricultural University has written a fascinating demolition of genetics and genomics for SciTopics ("Research summaries by experts!" Sponsored by Elsevier!) titled Phenomena of life and death explained based on a computer model of organism in the light of the Quran and the Bible.
Take a moment to bask in the wondrous promise of that title before diving into the link. And have no fear, your every hope of delightful wackaloonery will be fulfilled!
What…
pharyngula | March 28, 2010
It happens now and then that some gibbering loon makes a persistent appearance somewhere on the blog, and the ensuing wrangle goes on and on and on. We've had just such an occurrence on this thread, which is bloating up to almost 700 comments now. Graeme Bird is an Australian wanna-be politician of the crank variety, a global warming denialist,
anti-vaxer,
anti-evolutionist and fan of ID,
birther,
truther, and like your typical obsessive kook, he just can't let it go, even though he's getting laughed at rather cruelly (and deservedly).
Anyway, the thread is getting too long and with no…