Kooks
pharyngula | August 11, 2009Ken Ham is spluttering in indignation. It's wonderful. He's really peeved at the ABC News report because it mentioned a detail that is thoroughly trivial, but he claims is wrong. The report describes how animals spread around the world after the Flood on floating islands of matted logs and plants.
We do have replicas of Darwin's Finches in the exhibit on Natural Selection where we discuss genetics and speciation, not God's will!!--and we do talk about floating log mats after the Flood, but certainly nothing about "mankind spread from continent by walking across the floating trunks of trees…
pharyngula | August 11, 2009And it feels good! Ben Stein, that old fraud, was recently fired from his gig as a columnist for the New York Times because he crossed an ethical line: he was shilling for one of those 'free credit report' scammers. Well, that's what the NYT said, but he has written a long whine in which he carefully explains that what he did wasn't unethical at all, and he was actually fired because he offended a cabal of Goldman-Sachs bankers, Obama supporters, and…neo-Darwinists and atheists! I think that last bit was a reference to me.
Watch him blubber.
One final thought. Well, maybe two final thoughts:…
pharyngula | August 5, 2009As I'm sure you've all heard by now, a deranged gunman went on a shooting spree in a fitness club in LA, killing 3 women and injuring 10 before blowing his own scabrous, rotting brains out. The guy was just plain nuts (in a fairly common sort of way, unfortunately), but he also left behind an online diary.
Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not…
pharyngula | August 4, 2009The birthers are getting even more insane. They've trotted out a faked Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, which was predictable and stupid; their media representative, Orly Taitz, had a public meltdown (and seriously, you know you've got credibility problems when your media face is a lunatic like Taitz); and now, best and looniest of all, they're going ape over an exercise in dubious etymology, in which some kook claims the Bible gives the name of the anti-Christ, or Satan: Baraq Ubamah. No, it doesn't actually say that, but if you pick one phrase that was written in Greek and use a Hebrew…
pharyngula | August 3, 2009Spare me the obsessed. Vincent Fleury is still haranguing me over my review of his bad paper. He argues for a simplistic mechanical view of development, saying "Tetrapods are formed by a flow of cells which has a hyperbolic (saddle) point around the navel.
it is not tautological. They form from the navel upwards, and from the navel downwards, with a partial symmetry, quite obvious by the way, once you know it." This is complete nonsense, of course; while cells certainly move in interesting ways, the movement is not sufficient explanation of the phenomena, and it's definitely not true that you…
pharyngula | August 3, 2009Israel has no oil, but some people wish it did, for the worst of reasons. This is an amazing story of a con artist and his willing victims…and nothing is better at leading the sheep to slaughter than religion.
When James Cojanis heard the first rumblings of Armageddon, he was sitting in his San Jose home with the radio tuned to a popular Christian show called The Prophecy Club. Featured that day was a charismatic Texas oilman named Harold "Hayseed" Stephens. Speaking in the rousing cadence of a Southern preacher, he told listeners that "the greatest oil field on Earth is under the southwest…
pharyngula | July 31, 2009Jesus in a pita, Madonna in bird poop, gods speaking through the arrangement of viscera…we're used to ridiculous religious pattern seeking. A reader, Mike Barnes, wrote in to tell me about a scientist who has been playing the same game: Francis Collins sees DNA in stained glass windows.
Collins showed two images--a stained-glass rose window often seen in Christian churches, and an eerily similar graphic that he described as "looking down the barrel" of DNA's double helix.
"I'm not trying to say that there's something inherently religious" in the DNA image, Collins emphasized. "But, I think…
pharyngula | July 29, 2009Joe Biden recently made some remarks in the Wall Street Journal in which he discussed some of Russia's concerns, and he made this casual remark.
"I can see Putin sitting in Moscow saying, 'Jesus Christ, Iran gets the nuclear weapon, who goes first?' Moscow, not Washington."
It's not such an earthshaking idea; I'm sure a European nation has more cause to be concerned about fundamentalist Islam on their doorstep than we do way over here on the other side of the world.
Oh, wait.
What's that? He said what?
He took the Lord's name in vain?
Pffft. So what? People say things like that (and worse!)…
pharyngula | July 24, 2009The other day, I mentioned the silly anti-global-warming argument of Alan Quist: he claims a 16th century map shows Antarctica in accurate detail, revealing that 500 years, the continent was completely ice-free. Therefore, he kookles, the world is currently in a deep freeze and a little warming would be good for us, and entirely tolerable.
John McKay takes a closer look at the old map. Would you believe it's not so accurate after all? That in fact, it's not even close?
pharyngula | July 21, 2009I confess. One of the staple sources of creationist lunacy I document here has always been Texas (with Florida as a close runner-up), which seems to be thickly infested with ignoramuses who get elected to high office. It's the kind of place that inspires the Molly Ivins of the world. Lately, we've been appalled at the idiots the Texas government wants to put in charge of science education, but there's another victim in the gunsights, too: history and social studies. The same abysmal talents that can muck up biology also want to turn social studies into patriotic mulch.
Alas, they can't get…
pharyngula | July 18, 2009An Oxford research fellow, Andrew Parker, has written a bizarre little book claiming that the book of Genesis is entirely compatible with science and evolution…by simply redefining most of the terms in the Bible after the fact to fit. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about: "Let there be light" is a perfect description of the big bang, by "grass" god really meant "cyanobacteria", the appearance of lights in the sky refers to the evolution of animal vision, etc., etc., etc., yadda yadda yadda. It's ridiculous, of course, mere post hoc retrofitting of valid interpretations to a pile of…
pharyngula | July 18, 2009Oh, I believe! What else could this be?
It's the one on the left. The medium: bird poop on a pickup truck.
This is even better than Piss Christ!
pharyngula | July 14, 2009Then you need to turn to the non-scientists for some refreshing expressions of unity. Or not.
A New Age magazine in Minnesota is under new management, and the editor wants to exercise some "quality control": astrology, fairies, life-force energy, and spiritual quests are OK. Channeling and paganism are out. This has annoyed the so-open-minded-their-brains-have-fallen-out crowd.
Other New Age leaders are appalled.
"He is excluding channeling? Yikes. Or pagans? He should not be doing that," said Kathy McGee, editor of the Washington-state-based magazine New Age Retailer.
"New Age is an…
pharyngula | July 11, 2009Hang on; Klinghoffer is bad, but you haven't read the clever reasonings of Nancy Greenwood of Red Deer, Alberta yet. She doesn't like those atheists one bit — she's got a list of 5 horrible facts about atheists (although it could be longer, if she hadn't kindly left off the bits about baby-eating).
Being the hot topic of the day, any discussion of atheism, should include these 'difficult to admit' points:
Firstly, atheists claim that they themselves are god. They claim they have superior knowledge then the rest of us by trying to say that they have better knowledge because of their own…
pharyngula | July 11, 2009There are intelligent true believers, deluded as they are, but there also a few of them out there who will simply take your breath away with statements of such pretentious stupidity that you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning. Case in point: David Klinghoffer. If you're already familiar with him, you won't be surprised at this. He's written an essay in which he takes to task the concept of convergent evolution, as espoused by Ken Miller and Simon Conway Morris. I don't care much for the way Miller and Conway Morris use the idea myself, but Klinghoffer's argument…man. You…
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Fox News really needs to fire this idiot. Look at this clip where Brian Kilmeade is, for some unknown reason, trying to dismiss a study that found that married people were at a lower risk for Alzheimer's disease. I have no knowledge of the study, but his reasons for dismissing its applicability to Americans are bizarre.
BRIAN KILMEADE: We keep marrying other species and other ethnics--
GRETCHEN CARLSON: Are you sure they are not suffering from some of the causes of dementia right now?
BRIAN KILMEADE: The problem is the Swedes have pure genes. They marry other Swedes, that's the rule.…
pharyngula | July 7, 2009All right, commenters, you aren't doing your job. I get enough creationist nonsense in my private email, you are the ones who are supposed to smash the creationist lackwits who are babbling in the comments here. Now one of them, this fellow Grant, is apparently unsatisfied with the drubbing you were supposed to give him, and is now trying to pester me personally by email.
I'm also going to rebuke you Australians — he's one of yours, running some kind of web design studio, where he claims 14 years of experience in "Science". Come on, take this personally and rip into him.
You believe the world…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009I received Chris Mooney's last two books as review copies, before the simple folk could get theirs, and I also gave them positive (and sincere!) reviews. I'd noticed that he's got a new book out, but strangely, I hadn't been sent a copy this time. I was wondering what was up with that, but now Ophelia Benson has read part of the book, and all is explained. He spends part of one chapter singling me out for criticism! Gosh, I guess he felt he wouldn't get a friendly review this time.
The focus of his ire? Crackergate. He regards destroying a sacred symbol to be inflammatory and obnoxious,…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009Do you recall this incoherent tale of incest and racism I got a while back? Like almost 4 months ago? Well, the fellow seems to have just now discovered that we were laughing at him, and has sent me his rebuttal. It's only fair that I post it for you now.
There are people that are well educated and very smart. But they just don't have any common sense.
If God wanted Adam and Eve to have sex and create then there was absolutely no reason to create
the Garden of Eden. He would have given them the power to have sex and create like he did the…
pharyngula | June 27, 2009Oklahoma's bible-thumpingest congresscreature has issued a Proclamation of Morality.
WHEREAS, the people of Oklahoma have a strong tradition of reliance upon the Creator of the Universe; and
WHEREAS, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and
WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery; and
WHEREAS, alarmed that the Government of the United States of America is forsaking the rich Christian heritage…