Kooks
pharyngula | January 14, 2008I'd be surprised if any of you knew who Louis Savain is — he's a weird little crackpot that I stomped on hard all of 3½ years ago. He claims that the Bible is actually a complete and accurate technical description of the neurological workings of the human brain. It was one of the more memorably loony ideas I've seen come out of religious derangement.
Well, Louis is back. Not here, definitely — a comment from him here would probably fuel one of those thousand-comment atrocities where everyone took turns going stabbity-stab-stab with the crazy newbie — but he is plaguing Stranger Fruit with…
pharyngula | January 8, 2008This is a strange one — some kind of weird political rant. I'm pretty sure this fellow doesn't care much for Hillary Clinton.
RE: Coming witchcraft of Senator Hillary RODHAM CLINTON in politics, also.
Like in the witchery, at her age of 61 years old Senator Hillary RODHAM CLINTON is to become overnight a candidate for a change, pulling a rabbit out of her hat. This can happen only in the witchcraft that she and her husband William J. CLINTON, former President reportedly believe in and practice. This is what comes up in the Google search under words of their names, witchcraft, satanic and/or…
pharyngula | January 1, 2008A weird anti-evolution crank seems to be ramping up his efforts around the blogosphere recently: C. David Parsons has been leaving comments at Florida Citizens for Science, and Wesley Elsberry directly addresses his "conflict driven" views. Parsons has apparently been trying to raise his profile because he has a new book out, and he wants creationists to buy it.
It's being put out by Tate Publishing, which seems to be a vanity press dedicated specifically to bilking Christian authors. If you have $40 and a complete lack of sense, you too can be the proud owner of The Quest for Right: The…
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 26, 2007Ann Coulter is unhappy with Huckabee, but not for his many failings that rational people see as an obstacle—but because he is insufficently critical of evolution. She really wants a presidential candidate to not just deny modern science, but to advocate a platform that proposes to take action in the schools against it.
Asked on CNN's "Larry King Live" Monday night about his beliefs on evolution, Huckabee rushed to assure King that he has no interest in altering textbooks that foist this fraud on innocent schoolchildren.
It's very strange. We've recently seen big-mouthed conservative…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007What the heck is a
zebibah?
The zebibah, Arabic for raisin, is a dark circle of callused skin, or in some cases a protruding bump, between the hairline and the eyebrows. It emerges on the spot where worshipers press their foreheads into the ground during their daily prayers.
I didn't really want to know. I especially didn't want to know that this injury caused by bashing one's head into the floor is considered a signifcant accomplishment.
"The zebibah is a way to show how important religion is for us," said Muhammad al-Bikali, a hairstylist in Cairo, in an interview last month. Mr. Bikali…
pharyngula | December 11, 2007I'm feeling left out. The mathematicians — Mark, Blake, and Tyler — are having so much fun bullseyeing a certain womp rat over there in Creationist Canyon. Yeah, Slimy Sal Cordova has poked his pointy head up and claimed that, somehow, Intelligent Design and Advanced Creation Science (whatever the heck that is) are built on Fourier transforms and Schrödinger's equation. It's a pathetic spectacle — Cordova simply throws up a formula with some Greek symbols in it, waves his hand with a flourish, and says, "A-ha!" After a time of his readers staring blankly at him, he says, "A-ha!" again,…
pharyngula | December 10, 2007But you haven't, have you?
He's still around, and still occasionally trying to get comments past my filters here. He has a blog — Evolution Is Finished, with one article with no real content, and a few comments, mostly by John A. Davison. He's still whining repetitively at ISCID. He was going on and on at a site called OneBlogADay, but that site seems to have disappeared; I hope it didn't implode in disgust at the way it was hijacked by the preening duo of the obtuse JAD and his talking hemorrhoid, VMartin. But just in case you've missed him, he has discovered a brand new outlet, the…
pharyngula | December 8, 2007American River College has, as most colleges do, a student body organization that is elected by the students. They recently had their elections, and got a bit of a surprise: the right-wing Christian group had organized, appealed to the student on the basis of their shared religious beliefs, and swept the election. It also helped that they could call on ethnic identities — Sacramento apparently has had an influx of Slavic immigrants with an odd(er) and often rather nasty form of the Christian cult. These are the Slavic Christian groups that are hysterically homophobic—it's evident on their…
pharyngula | December 5, 2007I shouldn't hog all the kooks — there are plenty to go around.
Any physicists or mathematicians want to tackle this argument against special relativity? His claim seems to be that you can't mix mathematical and physical explanations — you have to see his explanation for Zeno's Paradox to believe it.
How about some archaeologists to appreciate this fine outrage at the "crackpots and ideologues" of biblical archaeology? It seems to be universal that when religious fanatics move into a field, all they can do is demolish it.
pharyngula | December 3, 2007Regular old physical mail, that is, paper with a stamp. Anyone remember Michael Korn? The nut from Colorado who threatened biologists there, and then sent email to everyone at my university offering to meet them for a fistfight out by the flagpole? He sent me a bunch of tracts … and a poem.
Here's the letter and poem.
Dear Professor Myers,
These martyrs uffer enormous pain to uphold the ultimate Truth that you strive mightily to denigrate, deride, and destroy. Yet these simple people seem to have so much more wisdom than a proud American professor, who will inherit the Vale of Tears for all…
pharyngula | November 30, 2007Good news, everyone! In a new encyclical that reveals the papacy is feeling the heat from all those vocal atheists, the pope makes a startling admission:
Reciting arguments made by atheists, he said: "A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God."
Exactly. Good on yer, Ratzi. I knew you'd see the light someday.
The rest of it is pious noise, about what you'd expect from the lunatic leader of a globe-spanning cult of ridiculous mythology,…
pharyngula | November 25, 2007It's easy to forget what a repellent, sniveling little turd-speck Sal Cordova is until one is reminded by a reference on a blog worth reading (it's not as if I read Cordova's ugly little site myself, you know). The occasion this time is that Slimy Sal has just discovered that Joan Roughgarden, the evolutionary biologist who also happens to be a Christian, is a transgendered woman. Oh, the young jackanapes sees many opportunities for hilarity and amusement in this!
She was the daughter of Episcopalian Missionaries and then returned to the Christian faith after many trials in her life. It…
pharyngula | November 25, 2007Because she's a blithering space cadet.
Our conventional way of thinking about the world remains profoundly dualistic.
I don't like dualism. Huffington sounds like she thinks it's a problem too, but we'll soon see she doesn't, really.
The physical and the rational in a supposedly eternal and inexorable battle against the unseen and the spiritual.
The real versus delusion…it's a battle alright. Which side are you going to be on?
In fact, the barriers between these two dimensions -- built by the narrow rationalism of the Enlightenment -- are now being dismantled by modern science and a…
pharyngula | November 23, 2007A Canadian school board has decided to remove Philip Pullman's books from its schools' shelves because people complained that the author is an atheist. This is a remarkable objection, obviously. I mean, we don't see school boards screaming to remove Chuck Colson's books from the shelves because the author is a convicted felon, which seems to me to be a much more serious indicator of moral turpitude than atheism, nor do we see a call to eject books by Ann Coulter because she is incredibly stupid, and is therefore a poor role model for students. It's just atheism that spurs this objection.
I…
pharyngula | November 23, 2007Since George W. Bush no longer owns a baseball team, he can take credit for whoever wins the World Series this year. After all, somebody will win despite his absence.
George W. Bush is a friend of the oil industry who has shown little interest in cultivating research into alternative energy or conservation—therefore, when (or if) someone develops a strategy for providing energy as the oil supply declines, George's heroic boosterism for oil will be remembered as the stimulus for the future.
The Bush administration dallied when Katrina struck, but New Orleans is still there, and George W. Bush…
pharyngula | November 18, 2007Zeno compares Dinesh D'Souza to Mark Twain. This exercise is much like comparing mouse droppings to our upcoming Thanksgiving feast, but I suppose it must be done. Note D'Souza's argument for free will:
I am sitting at my computer with a cup of coffee on my desk. I can reach over and take a sip if I choose; I can knock the coffee mug onto the carpet if I choose; I can just leave the cup alone and let the coffee get cold. Now I ask: Is there anything in the laws of physics that forces me do any of these things? Obviously not.
I had no idea that he was that stupid.
pharyngula | November 12, 2007Hey, you — you look really stupid with your jaw gaping open like that.
That was a little preemptive scorn to get you to prep yourself for this link: it's a fellow complaining about women working as astronauts (and even commanders of the space shuttle!) inspiring little girls to emulate them and ending up throwing pampers and pepper (?) at each other. This part is really disturbing:
Whatever happened to young men looking for a good Christian wife and finding a young woman still clinging to her doll?
It's about finding masculinity in infantilizing women. It's the flip side of the posturing…
pharyngula | November 11, 2007Laugh, everyone! A bunch of the people who reject scientific ideas about global warming, including a certain big fat fish and quite a few right wing blogs, were taken in by a fake paper that claimed that "concerns about manmade global warming are unfounded." If you have even the slightest acquaintance with math, all you have to do is glance at the paper to see that the equations are all gibberish.
Nature has a summary, and an interview with the author of the hoax.
Of course, it's not exactly comparable to the Sokal hoax since this one didn't take in the mainstream climatologists at all…only a…
pharyngula | November 10, 2007The Catholic League is afraid parents might see The Golden Compass…and then buy the books for a Christmas gift. Horrors! You can't give books by atheists on Christmas! Watch the video from Fox News to witness the outrage. Also, I have to love this quote from a Christian who opposes the movie fervently, despite never having seen it or even reading the books. But he has his reasons.
I don't have to read the book, I've never been bitten by a snake either, but I, you know, it's not something that I have to do to know that it's not going to, that it's not necessarily going to be a good thing for…