Kooks
pharyngula | April 9, 2011Bryan Fischer (if you know the name, you know lunacy will soon follow) has a plan.
Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur'an, and sharia law, is to commit cultural suicide. We believe in freedom of religion for Muslims like we do for everybody else. But if they insist on clinging to their religion, they will need to exercise their freedom of religion in a Muslim country which shares their values: death for those who leave Islam, the beating of wives…
pharyngula | April 6, 2011Another year goes by, and yet again the Templetonians have failed to throw a million pounds at me. I feel the same way I do when they announce the Powerball lottery winners and my ticket isn't among the winners — of course, I never buy lottery tickets anyway, but that just makes the analogy even more perfect. The word for the seething emotional and intellectual turmoil I'm feeling right now is…"meh."
So this year the Templeton Foundation has made the cunning decision to suborn somebody already sympathetic to their cause and with a respectable scientific reputation: an astronomer who doesn't…
pharyngula | April 4, 2011R. Joseph Hoffmann really doesn't get it. He's written an article that is basically doing nothing but decrying blasphemy on some very strange grounds: that it's stupid and pointless and cowardly. He also compares me and the desecration of a cracker with Terry Jones and the burning of a Koran that led to riots in Afghanistan, differentiating between the two of us in that I was just a petty grandstander, while Terry Jones' intent was to purposely fire up Muslims into violence, and therefore Terry Jones "needs to be charged with and convicted of murder".
Well. I guess the trial would be only a…
pharyngula | March 30, 2011Ray Comfort called in to the Atheist Experience with Matt Dillahunty and Russell Glasser, and now you can watch the little twit twist and writhe and make circular arguments.
pharyngula | March 28, 2011Newt Gingrich is thinking about running for president, and has predicted the future:
I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.
The next election is going to be hilarious, except for the painful face-palming.
pharyngula | March 21, 2011I think I read this in a Dungeons & Dragons manual. It's a magic spell called Agnihotra that puts a shell around you to resist nuclear fallout when an atom bomb goes off, only in this case, it's real…well, as real as the delusions of a freaky Hindu mystic can make it, which isn't very. But at least it's illustrated and explained!
When a nuclear device is detonated, it gives rise to raja-tama predominant vibrations of the Absolute Cosmic Fire element. Discordant subtle sounds accompany these frequencies. These subtle sounds have a subtle harmful effect on the mind and intellect of the…
pharyngula | March 14, 2011You knew the religious folk were going to look at the disaster in Japan and start pointing fingers. This time, though, it wasn't the fault of gays and lesbians, nor was it the sight of jiggling breasts…no, this time, it was the atheists' fault.
Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world, has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis "God's warnings."
"I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people's atheism and materialism," an online Christian press…
pharyngula | March 14, 2011Before you say it, I know I'm giving him attention, too. Cardinal George Pell, the old fool, got lots of press for being a climate denialist, again. After a talk, he denounced the climate scientists for not being scientific, while he, the guy who believes angels and saints and great magic boojums in the sky, knew better because "'I spend a lot of time studying this stuff."
I suspect he's another graduate of Google University.
But Pell is irrelevant. The real question is, why do the newspapers cover his pronouncements in any serious way? The man is comic relief, nothing more.
pharyngula | March 10, 2011How nice. The Journal of Cosmology has published a set of commentaries on that awful 'bacteria in meteorites' paper — they're almost entirely positive, almost fawning. There seems to be a dearth of critical thinking in this field…or it's a filtered list. They have also added a Statement to the article. And oh, what a Statement!
Official Statement The Journal of Cosmology,
Have the Terrorists Won?
Only a few crackpots and charlatans have denounced the Hoover study. NASA's chief scientist was charged with unprofessional conduct for lying publicly about the Journal of Cosmology and the Hoover…
pharyngula | March 8, 2011I cannot resist. Every once in a while, I'll show a bad graphic from the world of molecular biology to one of my classes, and I'll try to extract the significant point from it…but I'll also tell the class that this is one of those places where the stupid scientist ought to have walked over to the fine arts building and asked one of those hip young undergraduates to apply a little design sense to their work. However, that peculiar astrobiology paper had a doozy, and I just have to show it off. Behold. Figure 4.
So…are your eyes hurting as much as mine are? I don't know what it is that figure…
pharyngula | March 8, 2011Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn't been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it's been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs' stupid article on the Huffington Post.
I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington's contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her…
pharyngula | March 8, 2011I received email from one of those astrobiologists, the people behind the Journal of Cosmology, in this case Carl H. Gibson. I was…amused.
Dear Professor Meyers:
I understand you have some problem with our interpretation of Richard Hoover's article proposed for the Journal of Cosmology. I certainly hope you will write up your comments for publication in a peer review, along with the article.
Attached is an article that might interest you on the subject of astrobiology. Have you written anything in this area?
Regards,
Carl
Ah. He understands that I had some problem with Hoover's…
pharyngula | March 6, 2011No.
No, no, no. No no no no no no no no.
No, no.
No.
Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it's not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I've mentioned Cosmology before — it isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn't exist…
pharyngula | March 4, 2011Brooks has this new book out called The Social Animal(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which has pretensions to being all sciencey, which is, I guess, why Salon asked me to review it, because so do I. Only it turned out to not be very sciencey at all, but a lumpy mélange of sciencey anecdotes tied together by a fictional story about two privileged upper middle-class twits named Harold and Erica…a badly written story, by the way, with two characters who were loathsomely tedious. How tedious? Read the excerpt in the New Yorker and find out.
As the scientist went on to talk about the rush he got from…
pharyngula | March 4, 2011He's been back. The sock puppeteer who made up lies about the Gnu Atheists and spread them through a collection of false identities on the internet has been at his old tricks again — the long tawdry story is not something I'm going to go over again, though. Since he has been conjuring up sock puppets again, despite the public embarrassment of being caught red-handed in the past, and despite private rebuke from his faculty superiors, Ophelia Benson has spilled the beans on the lying puke, Wally Smith. You can now read some of the writings he has published under his own name and see exactly…
pharyngula | March 4, 2011You may not have noticed, but a certain insane troll best known for repetitive spam to multiple blogs and fora, and who makes frequent references to Depeche Mode and decapitating certain atheists (including yours truly), has been relatively absent from blog comments for a while. That's because he has discovered Twitter, and is happily spamming that service instead.
If you have noticed — it's become a bit of a joke that if I reply to anyone on twitter, they immediately get a flood of spam from the obsessive crank, so you may have — here's a summary of tools to clean up your twitter feed. You…
pharyngula | March 4, 2011I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct!
Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That's one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article.
Of course, it's only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let's give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with.
It is exactly right. I've had the experience of putting…
pharyngula | March 3, 2011Mr Stangroom has developed an obsession — an obsession with civility. It's an unfortunate condition that leads to tunnel vision, an infatuaion with the superficial, and most alarmingly, an increasing incivility on the part of the proponent of civility. I fear it can only end in an implosion of self-loathing.
He has a philosophy blog in which his latest project is to document instances of incivility among those pesky Gnu Atheists. No one else is deserving of the hall monitor treatment but atheists, I guess, and among those he's been singling out Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne, and most especially…
pharyngula | March 2, 2011Look, when I said this, my point was that it was absurd to use these tactics of asking embryos to testify.
But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It's not testifying. It's twitching. You'd get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.
But wouldn't you know it, the animal rights extremists are now arguing that they should adopt the tactics of the anti-choice…
pharyngula | March 1, 2011I agreed with Doctorow that the recent shutdown of the Westboro loons was a stunt by WBC itself. Now Anonymous has spoken out in an interview with Shirley Phelps-Roper denying any involvement. Here's the hilarious bit, though: midway through the interview, after Phelps-Roper's prolonged ranting and raving, the Anonymous spokesman calmly announces that they were going to shut down one of her sites, right then and there. And he did.
In the immortal lines of Ash: "Good, bad, I'm the one with the gun." Do not tease the guys with the high tech weapon when all you've got to defend yourself is a…