Kooks
pharyngula | April 14, 2008A doddering old fool who shouldn't have been driving in the first place cruised into a car dealership in his cheap little Ford Fiesta, and managed to demolish two Porsches outside the showroom. Total damage: £60,000.
So what does the senile twit say afterwards? You guessed it:
It was a miracle I got out alive and I put it down to the power of prayer and God looking after me.
Why was he praying to wreak havoc on expensive German cars?
pharyngula | April 14, 2008Would you believe that atheists are to blame for the Westboro Baptist Church?
They can't be real Christians. They must be part of an atheist cabal.
Their goal? To undermine churches. To give religion a black eye. To plant in the minds of the young a twisted and evil view of Christianity.
Somebody needs to be introduced to Poe's Law. Besides, everyone knows that crazy religion can't be blamed on the godless … it's actually a conspiracy by squirrels.
pharyngula | April 13, 2008Some of the politicians in the benighted state of Florida want to sell a new license plate.
The Florida Legislature may create a new license plate that features the words ''I Believe'' and the image of a cross in front of a church stained glass window. The measure is moving in both the House and Senate.
Rep. Ed Bullard, a Miami Democrat and a sponsor of the license plate, conceded that ''some people'' may find something wrong with it, but he said it was a license plate for those people who may want something other than a plate that has a manatee or picture of the Challenger space shuttle.…
pharyngula | April 10, 2008Well, it's something. After her crazy tirade against atheists, now Monique Davis has apologized.
…after being on the receiving end of a week's worth of public criticism, Davis called Sherman yesterday to apologize.
Sherman says Davis told him she "took out her frustrations and emotions on me and that she shouldn't have done that." Sherman says Davis' explanation was "reasonable" and that he forgives her.
According to Sherman and State Rep. Jack Franks…Davis claims her outburst was triggered by learning shortly beforehand…that there'd been another Chicago Public School student killed.
Ugh.…
pharyngula | April 10, 2008This loon, Gerry Rzeppa, has made a challenge to Richard Dawkins. All Dawkins has to do is show up on a stage with Rzeppa, listen to him read from his children's book for about ten minutes, and answer one simple question…and Rzeppa will hand over $64,000 (if he even has it). I don't think Dawkins should do it, since it's like taking advantage of the mentally deficient, but then…
I read the book. Yeesh. You'd have to pay me more than that to get me to sit through that Vogon poetry again.
pharyngula | April 8, 2008I can understand that some days you have little time to post — I'm still trying to catch up on work after my long weekend in the west myself — but chumming the waters with Vox Day? Gross, man.
I guess one has to keep the commenters fed, though.
pharyngula | April 5, 2008Oh, but I do rankle Mark Armitage. He has taken to cc'ing me his email to others, all in this bluff, indignant, "me am too a scientist" pose, and it is hilarious. This is probably the last one I'll post here, but I do hope he keeps sending me this stuff — it provides a moment of levity.
Hello there,
How've you been lately? Things have been busy on my end. I'm enjoying my internship though.
Anyhow, I thought you might be interested to see this, if you already haven't. I've long been a reader of PZ Myers' blog (for reasons that I like to call "opponent research") and, although I'm not…
pharyngula | April 3, 2008When the top of your web page is a scattershot series of all-caps links to crazy town.
- Life After Death -
-WHY THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION ENRAGES US!.
WHY ALL EVOLUTIONISTS ARE CRIMINALLY INSANE
FOR GAYS: HOW TO STOP YOUR HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVITY
FOR THE GENTLEMEN: HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE A STUPID MAN
FOR THE LADIES: COMPUTER-GENERATED SLUT PHOTODIAMINES
ARE WOMEN SUPPOSED TO BE "BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT"?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE K _ _ _ HILLARY CLINTON
STRIP SEARCHES ARE ILLEGAL EVERYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES…
pharyngula | April 3, 2008I try to stay away from Dinesh D'Souza's ravings, but when you've got SIWOTI syndrome, the man is like a magnet of wrong. His one saving grace now is that his columns are so bad, I usually can't get through the first paragraph without having to close the window. This one is no exception. One paragraph is all any normal person can take.
The real problem with Darwinism in the public school classroom is that it is often taught in an atheist way.
No, it is not. I'm about as ferocious an atheist as you'll find in a classroom, and I'm at a university where I have more latitude than I would in a…
pharyngula | April 1, 2008You never can tell with Jonah Goldberg — everything he writes tends to be so stupid you're left thinking that he must be joking. He's just finished watching that new propaganda movie, Fitna, which portrays some of the worst atrocities of Islam — beheadings and terrorism and rioting and fatwas, etc. — and what does this bring to his feeble mind? Those awful, evil, odious atheists who put Darwin fish on their cars. After all, chopping heads off people is exactly equivalent to putting a bumper sticker on your Volvo.
I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable…
pharyngula | March 31, 2008Watch out, if you signed up for one of the Expelled showings, you might find your email address shared with more people than you expected.
I think John ought to sell his newfound mailing list — it's jam-packed with the gullible, so it would be rather valuable to the unscrupulous.
In slightly related news, Wired wrote up the latest incident, and did something irritating: they illustrated it with the stupid picture of Stein in short pants. I'm thinking I should break out my shorts and have my knobby knees in a counter-illustration.
pharyngula | March 30, 2008Michael Egnor, that neurosurgeon whose tenuous grip on rationality makes him so popular with the creationists, thinks he has a gotcha moment with some notorious atheist. That rude godless fellow, who is me, said this, which is accurate:
…greater science literacy, which is going to lead to the erosion of religion, and then we'll get this nice positive feedback mechanism going where as religion slowly fades away we'll get more and more science to replace it and that will displace more and more religion which will allow more and more science in and we'll eventually get to the point where…
pharyngula | March 24, 2008I just got word that that pompous pimple, David Berlinski, is going to be at the Maclaurin Institute on the University of Minnesota campus on 17 April. Fortunately for me, I just this morning agreed to do an interview on Second Life on that date, so I have an excuse to avoid the supercilious snot. You might want to quickly find some reason to skip the event — is that your evening to wash your hair? Or take the dog for walkies (it might be worth it to get a dog for just that reason) — because there is no one else affiliated with the Discovery Institute more likely to infuriate you with his…
pharyngula | March 24, 2008
The laughing fellow on the left is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International and atheist. The cranky old man in the robes on the right is Pandit Surinder Sharma, a self-described Tantrik Magician. The scene is in a studio on Indian television, where the magician is trying to kill the atheist with sorcery. Sharma had said he could kill anyone with sympathetic magic inflicted on a doll made of dough, and that he could accomplish this in a mere three minutes … so Edamaruku confidently offered himself as a victim. The old fake went on for hours and failed.
After nearly two hours,…
pharyngula | March 18, 2008A while back, I posted about the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury had unambiguously condemned creationism. While I appreciated the sentiment, I had my doubts about his sincerity, and mentioned that I preferred my religious authorities to say "crazy stupid things". Perhaps the Archbishop reads my blog, because he has obliged.
The Archbishop hit out against the "two extremes" in the range of theories of how the world began in his Holy Week lecture on Faith and Science last night. He said "Science has more to do than is simply covered by these theories."
Creationists believe in the…
pharyngula | March 18, 2008The name Satoshi Kanazawa wasn't familiar to me until I read Cosma Shalizi's lovely needlework on the guy, but then I remembered … I have his book, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, on my shelf. It has a wonderfully provocative title, so I even skimmed a couple of chapters, which sent multiple wtf signals bouncing around in my brain — the premise of the title is the product of statistical shenanigans, and I don't think the authors would recognize a mechanism if it advanced menacingly on them and threatened them with physical dismantlement — so I set it aside and allowed it gather dust…
pharyngula | March 17, 2008Everyone is telling me I ought to read this new piece in Harper's magazine, on the pretensions atheism. James Hrynyshyn has seen it; I don't think I'll bother. It's by David Berlinski, which tells me all I need to know.
I will grant him his due, though. Berlinski is probably the world's greatest expert on pretentiousness, to the point that his name and the word are practically synonyms.
pharyngula | March 16, 2008Remember Sally Kern, the Oklahoma legislator caught on tape babbling about the gay conspiracy? It's worse than it sounded: it seems Kern has a gay son who she has essentially deleted from her public life.
And these are the people who claim ownership of the word "family"…
Here's something even worse than the self-destruction of her own family: Kerns is the sponsor of Oklahoma House Bill 2211, the "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act". You can tell from the title what it is: a bill that would privilege religious opinions over scientific information in public school classrooms. The…
pharyngula | March 15, 2008That's the sentiment Terry of Rapture Ready expressed. Don't believe me? Here's the direct quote:
There are two important statistics to note:
1. Each month about 160,000 people visit Rapture Ready.
2. Every year, the mortality rate claims around 1 percent of the population.
Internet usage by the elderly is somewhat lower than that of the general population, but it still means that hundreds of you people who are reading this right now will not be here the same time next year.
For you folks who become part of the mortality figures in the coming days, I commission you with the same task:…
pharyngula | March 13, 2008Chris Hedges wrote a pretty good book on fundamentalism called American Fascists; at least, I thought it was pretty good, but now I have my doubts about his credibility. He has a new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists, and has an essay that summarizes his position. I could not believe how awful it is — it's basically a declaration that all atheists are exactly like Pat Robertson, and then it charges in with nothing but venom and accusations to defend his position.
Here's a perfect example.
These atheists share a naïve belief with these fundamentalists in our innate goodness and decency. They…