Kooks
pharyngula | December 7, 2010Some people just don't get it. Christopher Maloney wants to silence a message he doesn't like on the internet by serving a cease & desist order.
The last time I mentioned Maloney was eight months ago, and even then it was to point and laugh at his page throwing crazy paranoid accusations at me. So now, after eight months of neglect, he has decided to stir the pot and remind everyone that Christopher Maloney is a quack and that he keeps on quacking? That makes no sense.
So, once again, the web will start echoing the Christopher Maloney is a quack message.
It must be handy for a quack to…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010Some Kentuckians are not happy about my comments about their fake Ark-to-be.
Ark
This is a CHRISTIAN NATION if you hooked nosed kikes dont like it then get the hell out. If it were up to me we would have camp agin for you Christ Killing piles of human sh*t. You things are like acid on society you constantly corrode it with your porn, affirmative action, civil rights, fake funny money federal reserve, being totally morally bankrupt,yourselves all of you together are less than pile of dog sh*t. Like CHRIST SAID John 8:44 you are of your father the devil, you are not of God. I will be so…
pharyngula | November 30, 2010You all remember Criswell, right, the amazing prognosticator of Plan 9 From Outer Space? Ray Kurzweil fits the mold: vague predictions, slippery, fuzzy statements, backtracking and excuse-making. The only differences are that Kurzweil is cold-reading technology rather than people's personalities, and like most mediums, he tends to make happy optimistic predictions that sell better than some of the wackier stuff Criswell talked about (there has been no cannibal apocalypse, and Criswell was one of the early kooks to leap on the end-of-the-world in 2012 bandwagon; Kurzweil just prattles about…
pharyngula | November 29, 2010I once gave a lecture in which I summarized Intelligent Design arguments as simply repeating the word complexity a lot. I was wrong; I left out a word. They also use the word "purpose" a lot.
The latest example of the same tired old nonsense comes from Michael Behe, who really is just repeating the same thing he's said many times before — in fact, he's said it so many times that at this point it's clear his brain is not engaged, and this is a reflex action by his typing fingers.
My contention is that 'the purposeful arrangement of parts' to achieve a specific purpose is the criterion that…
pharyngula | November 28, 2010Wayne Laugesen rightly points out that the Catholic church does not have exclusive ownership of pedophilia and child abuse. But then he takes a long leap into lunacy.
Today, sexual abuse of children is clearly out of control in public schools and is even more prevalent in homes. Society needs to stop acting as if it's a problem caused by priests and look to the Catholic Church in the United States for answers. Due in part to public outrage regarding its mistakes and misdeeds of the past, the church appears to have emerged as the one organization with a formula for nearly eradicating sexual…
pharyngula | November 27, 2010All it takes is a little prompting: I write a post titled "The Bible is not a medical text", and next thing you know, someone sends me an email titled "The Vedas are a medical text". It's enough to make a fellow weep.
Dear Sir,
I am PhD Scholar, enrolled with Utkal University of Culture, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India.
The Topic I selected is
"Vedas- A New Critical Analysis with Special reference to Human Body and Health"
The Vedas quotes about NaNo technology, and I have analyzed the details in depth and is available in PDF form. I have proved that supportive therapy to cure cancer and…
pharyngula | November 27, 2010I'd love to visit Mars, especially if I could go with some dolphins. And now, for a mere $1550, I could attend the Dolphins & Teleportation Symposium 2011 and learn how to teleport!
This Workshop will include interspatial communication, quantum merging, E.T contact, teleportation to Mars, swimming in gentle waters with dolphins, sound healing, heart opening, cell activating, soul leadership, your planetary mission, laughter and humor, divine feminine, Geomancy, higher consciousness, the transformation of the ages, sacred wisdom societies, Martian life & artifacts, creating new…
pharyngula | November 26, 2010Minnesota State Representative Tom Hackbarth is a Republican. How can you tell? By his deranged behavior.
A security guard at a St. Paul Planned Parenthood clinic called the cops last week after he spotted a Republican state lawmaker with a loaded gun in the parking lot. But the pol says he was only "checking on" his online girlfriend, who he thought may be on a date with another man -- a claim police have not been able to corroborate because the man did not have a phone number or address for the woman.
Because that's how married (but putatively in the midst of a divorce) Republicans look…
pharyngula | November 23, 2010Would you believe I still get lots of mail from devout Catholics? I still even get these nice heartfelt letters via regular mail from little old Catholic ladies who think their flowery stationery will finally bring me around to the faith. But mainly I get something out of the blue where I can tell someone has stumbled onto one article that has offended them deeply, and they write to berate me for it. They usually don't even bother to tell me what it is that has annoyed them so, not that it really matters.
Article
I am always amazed when I read an article such as yours and have a chance to…
pharyngula | November 17, 2010I know it's a respectable field; kinesiology is the study of human movement, and I've known some who are sensible and well-trained (applied kinesiology, on the other hand, is total bunk). But it's becoming a bit like engineers and the Salem hypothesis — I also run into creationists who proclaim their kinesiology degrees, like the frothing mad Joseph Mastropaolo. I'm beginning to think there must be some deep conceptual hole in the formal educational background of kinesiologists.
Anyway, here's another example: a professor of kinesiology, Phil Bishop has written the most wonderfully…
pharyngula | November 16, 2010After the total votes were added up in the big GMO debate, the Economist scores it 62% against biotechnology, 38% for biotechnology. They also explain that there was a huge turnout and that there was a lot of active campaigning for particular views.
The voting has shifted dramatically during this debate, starting out heavily in favour of the motion, swinging strongly in the other direction (seemingly in response to an organised campaign by anti-GM activists), and then swinging back towards the middle. But in the end the opponents of biotechnology—or, more precisely, the opponents of genetic…
pharyngula | November 9, 2010This is the Republican who wants to be in charge of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, John Shimkus.
We don't have to worry about global warming or pollution or other such merely human problems! God promised that we never have to worry about that again, and he believes in the truth of the literal word of god.
We are so screwed.
(via Juan Cole)
pharyngula | November 9, 2010David Hedrick, a failed Teabagger candidate for congress, has written a children's book that has to be seen to be believed. It's called The Liberal Claus(e): Socialism on a Sleigh, and it's a fable about Santa Claus being deposed in a rigged vote by Barack Obama, who installs his evil cronies Pelosi, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, as some kind of head elves. Then all the elves are forced to join an evil labor union, and they ship free candy canes to all the children to get them to accept their evil regime.
Seriously. If you want a glimpse of the delusional world the teabaggers live in, look at this…
pharyngula | November 9, 2010You can't. Because the reptoids destroyed our network infrastructure with a massive electromagnetic pulse on the 6th of November, and they're all going to be down for at least 6 months.
She starts off looking normal, but the first sign that there might be something amiss is the big cheesy Kinkade painting in the background. By the end, when she's raving about Pleiadeans and Sirians and Bilderbergers, and how she's the mother of every being in the galaxy, you'll be feeling sorry for the poor dear.
She's got a whole youtube channel that is a sad demonstration of an ongoing psychiatric…
pharyngula | November 3, 2010That's not the Insane Clown Posse…it's Ray Comfort again, screwing up once more.
First, he complains about Richard Feynman (I know! Comfort vs. Feynman sounds a bit like Bambi vs. Godzilla), because he didn't give a simple answer to the question about how magnets repel and attract, but actually goes on at length about what are good questions before explaining succinctly that these forces are everywhere, we just take them for granted. It might be annoying if you want a one-sentence answer, but aren't willing to accept "go master Maxwell's equations" as that explanation.
Comfort's explanation…
pharyngula | November 3, 2010I've run into this particular phenomenon many times: the True Believer in some musty ancient mythology tells me that his superstition is true, because it accurately described some relatively modern discovery in science long before secular scientists worked it out. It's always some appallingly stupid interpretation of a vaguely useless piece of text that wouldn't have made any sense until it was retrofitted to modern science. My particular field of developmental biology has been particularly afflicted with this nonsense, thanks to one man, Dr. Keith L. Moore, of the University of Toronto. He's…
pharyngula | November 2, 2010I had no idea. The poor bigot wrote that nasty anti-gay screed that I criticized, and the Examiner decided that his plagiarizing hateful ways were not exactly what they wanted to promote.
He has complained on his blog about how Christians are a persecuted minority, starring Daniel Spratlin as Christ.
You can berate and belittle any Christian or Christian belief you want but if you do it to a Muslim, Jew, homosexual, black person, etc. you are called a vast array of vitriolic names such as bigot, hater, inciter of violence, intolerant, religious nut, etc.
I learned this first hand a couple…
pharyngula | October 31, 2010Kevin Myers is some wackalooney Irish commentator who, as far as I know and as fervently as I hope, is no recent relation to this Myers — the only thing I can commend him on is that he manages to spell his last name correctly. Oh, we do have one other thing in common: we're both atheists. He's an idiot atheist, though, so I wash my hands of him. He recently made this admission while also acknowledging his flaming hypocrisy.
Now what follows is quite hypocritical. For, on the one hand, I simply don't believe in God, because I am intellectually unable to; but on the other, I prefer a society…
pharyngula | October 28, 2010Really, it isn't enough to simply "believe" in evolution: it's more important to understand it and more deeply, to have an intellectual commitment to reason. There's a beautiful example of this principle in Iowa right now.
Iowa allowed gay marriage in the state a while back, and good for them…only now there's a bit of pushback and the offended conservatives are lashing out at the judges responsible. Look at this fallacious reasoning from one opponent of gay marriage.
Randy Crawford of Iowa City said he intends to vote for the removal of the justices because he is concerned about the judiciary…
pharyngula | October 23, 2010Michael Egnor must be fishing for traffic to the graveyard of rotting ideas that the Discovery Institute calls a blog. He claims to honestly want to understand what positive values the New Atheists have, so he posted a quiz for Larry Moran and invited the authors of various blogs — all of which get more traffic and are livelier than his, and also, by the way, allow comments, making his request rather disingenuous.
His questions are so far out of it that I'm not really interested in answering them. It's like a particularly crusty and dogmatic alchemist stirring beneath the cobwebs of his dead…