Kooks
pharyngula | February 8, 2007They invariably get it wrong. This time they've noticed it's cold outside, and they see an news report about colder temperatures in the Antarctic, so they leap to the conclusion that global warming is bunk. Or rather, they always held that conclusion (on faith, no doubt), and are overjoyed to see any scrap of out-of-context evidence that they can play up to bolster their confidence.
pharyngula | February 6, 2007…that someday Michelle Malkin does a dramatic reading of some of my blog articles. Amanda Marcotte has really pushed their buttons, hasn't she?
pharyngula | February 6, 2007Since I was wondering whether WingNutDaily was a satire site, Kevin Beck graces me with an explanation. No, it's not—the unhinged are merely going through a phase of very public meltdown.
What's happening his that huge groups of ignorant or just plain stupid "conservatives" who were already clanking aong at around a 30 on the Global Assessment of Functioning scale before the November elections have decompensated completely in the wake of the voting results, and are now in feces-as-crayons territory.
Yeah, I can believe that.
pharyngula | February 5, 2007Forgive the unlovely image conjured by the title, but it's true: Sylvia Browne is trying to shut down a critical website on the flimsiest of pretenses. It's good to see that she must be feeling some heat.
pharyngula | February 5, 2007I have to ask the question because by all my usual measures of whether something is satire (criteria like excess, and advancement of stupidity that no one in their right mind would espouse), it ought to be regarded as a humor site. Having Pat Boone writing on science, for instance, ought to be a dead giveaway, and now we've got Chuck Norris weighing in on the appropriate qualifications for the presidency. Now if he'd said, "the ability to kick someone in the face while they're standing in front of you," I'd have this pegged as a humor piece. But noooo. His requirements that our president be "…
pharyngula | February 3, 2007You can't imagine how relieved I am to learn that. Somebody tell his publishers that they can stop sending out those royalty checks!
pharyngula | January 31, 2007Don Boys is not happy that Kent Hovind has been sent to jail.
Kent's enemies are painting him as a greedy tax resister when he has said repeatedly that he will pay all the taxes he owes. He could not get any response from the IRS nor did the judge, prosecutor, or anyone else inform him why his ministry was not exempt from taxes as are hundreds of thousands of similar organizations. Therefore, he spends ten years in the Big House. That's where they send killers, traitors, rapists, child molesters, armed robbers, and other Very Bad Guys.
I think that what painted him as a greedy tax resister…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007This odd duck, discovered by Phil, has an amazing theory, which is his:
Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: This is because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people's blood and the biological movement of life. It has been proven that if magnetism, anywhere, exceeds 1,000 gauss, which equals one tenth of a tesla, it affects the ability of the hemoglobin in the blood to carry oxygen to the body's tissues, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.
Interviewer: In other words, the ability to live…
Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: Yes, to live… This means is that when you are in…
pharyngula | January 13, 2007…and he's as much of a fool as you'd expect. Paszkiewicz is theteacher who told his students they deserved to go to hell if they didn't believe in Jesus, among other things, and he has now written a letter to his regional newspaper.
The letter is about as you'd expect. It's a long-winded example of quote-mining the founding fathers to support his continued claim that America is a Christian nation, and also that the courts are being used to strip Christians of their freedom. It's awfully silly stuff.
All I can say is that I don't care that the Jefferson and Washington held religious views—they…
pharyngula | January 12, 2007One other important thing about using ridicule to combat your opponents: you have to be on very solid ground yourself for it to be effective. An excellent case in point is Michael Fumento, a rather deranged lawyer by training with negative experience in science (i.e., paying too much attention to him will cause cortical neurons to wither and die) has chosen to flail against competent science, and he makes a complete fool of himself. Fumento's schtick is to play Chicken Belittle and downplay the importance of public health in favor of privatizing everything, and something that would require…
pharyngula | January 12, 2007And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.
The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He's got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it's a MS Word file that doesn't help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.
It's people like Al Gore, in both the Democratic and Republican parties and any other person on earth (no matter their political affiliation) that continue supporting the liberal…
pharyngula | January 11, 2007I remember Federal Way! It was just up the hill from where I grew up, and although it was never a destination of interest, we would pass through its majestic strip malls on the way to Dash Point or Saltwater State Park. Now Federal Way is in the news as a haven for a few wingnuts. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, but this one does express a point of view I find both novel and incoherent.
They're protesting the showing of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth in the schools up there. I could understand the complaints if they were objecting to the presentation of a partisan campaign film for a…
pharyngula | January 2, 2007Pat Robertson .
In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."
Hang on there. A possible nuclear attack by terrorists? We've heard this possibility discussed before as a justification for torture.…
pharyngula | December 31, 2006I am not going to praise John Derbyshire; some people seem to be impressed because he has penned a dismissal of the ID creationists, but jebus, that ought to be the absolute rock bottom minimum we should expect from rationalists. That he can clear a hurdle set one inch above the ground does not impress me in the slightest.
Furthermore, he couldn't spit it out without saying something stupid.
As it turned out, Judge Jones is a conservative in the right way, the best way: he respects the law, and the plain rules of evidence.
Think about that. Respect for law and evidence is not a property…
pharyngula | December 30, 2006Ed Brayton and Mike Gene have gone over the top in accusing Richard Dawkins of wanting to coerce the religious into giving up their beliefs; as is usual for Ed, he has no problem immediately comparing an atheist to R.J. Rushdooney and calling him a totalitarian, on the basis of a rather poorly written petition that Dawkins signed.
I must say, though, that this petition is certainly strange, and I don't quite see how it could have gotten over a 1000 signatories. I sure don't approve of it, although I can understand the motivation behind it.
In order to encourage free thinking, children should…
pharyngula | December 29, 2006Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he's a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he's written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole 'nother column…
pharyngula | December 26, 2006Admit it—you were curious to know what those ninnies who write B.C. and Mallard Fillmore would do in their Christmas comic strips, weren't you? They were whining about the War on Christmas, of course. Do they even notice when a brutally godless blog like mine guiltlessly says "Merry Christmas!", though? No, of course not.
(via Atrios)
pharyngula | December 21, 2006Why, you might wonder, after taking Mike S. Adams apart in a burst of posts a while back, have I neglected my fellow academic? There's a good reason for that, which you can discover by reading S.Z.'s recitation of his latest column. This is one where he responds to a students poor excuses for failing his course by making lesbian jokes and bragging about killing pigs—a humanitarian's and conservationists's solemn duty, don't you know, especially the part about gut-shooting them and leaving them in the brush to rot.
The simple reason is that he's too contemptible for me to bear, except perhaps…
pharyngula | December 20, 2006Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on 'em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.
So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of…