stupidity
tlambert | July 23, 2009People outside Australia are probably unfamiliar with Piers Akerman, who is an absurdly partisan columnist for Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Tobias Ziegler finds Akerman not only denying the existence of global warming but also the existence of any criticism of Plimer's book and even the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere.
pharyngula | June 26, 2009It's very kind of this home school football league to provide their list of priorities.
I would guess that #3 is very, very far down the list.
pharyngula | June 23, 2009What a deal. For only 99¢, you can get an abridged version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; you can tell it's been abridged because the title has been reduced to Origin of Species. It's also special because it contains a 50 page introduction by Ray Comfort, which tells you everything that the creationists are sure is wrong about the rest of the book. It's like a book with multiple personality disorder — two parts that absolutely hate each other, an intro that is the inane product of one…
tlambert | June 6, 2009
Tim Blair, running the time-worn AGW denialist line "It's the sun" tells us
NASA discovers that the sun makes things warmer.
Blair's link goes to another denialist, Simon Scowl, who adds a dash of "Al Gore is fat" to the argument:
Wait. The Sun Can Make Thing... Warmer? I know, that doesn't sound right to me either. Whatchoo talkin' about, Science? ...
As Al Gore and other people who stand to make a lot of money from global warming scare tactics will tell you, "the science is settled." Unless you drive a hybrid, stumble around in the dark at night, and only eat things you find in your yard…
tlambert | June 2, 2009
Remember when Tim Blair's commenters combined to take on a six year old boy? And lost. Now Blair and his commenters are taking on a Nobel Physics Prize winner. On physics.
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, one of the world's greatest minds, believes painting roofs, roads and pavements white will help contain global warming. Reader Steve H. reviews the Chu plan:
According to a 2004 study by the U.S. Geophysical Union, all constructed so-called "impervious surfaces" (buildings, roads, parking lots, roofs, etc.) in the USA total a combined 112,610 km^2. Which is a bit less than the total area of…
pharyngula | May 11, 2009Baseball. Baseball and god. What could be more important? An now a couple of baseball players are in a snit.
The Cliff Notes version: After hitting a homer off Wilson in the 12th inning of the Giants' 7-5 13-inning victory, Blake was seen on television making the same well known gesture that Wilson makes after every save in tribute to both his Christian faith and his late father.Â
By the time Wilson returned to the clubhouse after securing the win in the 13th, some friends had sent images of Blake to his cell phone, sending him into an agitated state that his teammates instantly had to calm…
pharyngula | May 4, 2009Jenny McCarthy, dangerous quack and ignorant fraud, has just signed a contract with that professional peddler of pablum, Oprah Winfrey, to put on a syndicated talk show, among other media puffery. It's quite a step up. Oprah only spreads a kind of fuzzy mind-rot, but McCarthy actually promotes death and disease.
pharyngula | April 24, 2009Please, someone, tell the priests to go tend to their rituals and quit pretending to ha have any understanding of reality. A new archbishop has tried to use biology to argue for his archaic moral position, and I just want to slap him.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage "are asking for trouble," arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people's moral DNA.
"There's an in-built code of right and wrong that's embedded in the human DNA," Dolan told The Post in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, a week after becoming the New York…
pharyngula | April 24, 2009How did we ever let these clowns run the country for so long?
John Boehner. No comment from me needed, let his own words speak for him.
Appearing on ABC's This Week, the Ohio Republican was asked what to describe the GOP plan to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, "which every major scientific organization said is contributing to climate change."
Boehner replied: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you've got more…
pharyngula | April 3, 2009Television once again throws away its potential with a program featuring a triumvirate of inanity: Larry King lobbing sloppy wet kisses at Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy. I might tune in, even — it seems a shame to miss what must be a rare collision of extreme stupidity.
They also have a poll. Of course.
Do you think autism can be "cured"?
Yes47% 583
No53% 655
Another question: can King, Carrey, and McCarthy be "cured"? It's actually the same question: can any developmental disorder which produces a recognizable pattern of changes in the performance of the brain be cured, and should it?
pharyngula | March 19, 2009Do you feel like you don't pray enough? Are you too busy working, or playing golf, or fornicating to actually take the time out to get down on your knees and praise the invisible man in the sky? Well, there is a service for you: Information Age Prayer. For the low, low price of $3.95 a month, they will run your prayer of choice through a voice synthesizer every day, and allow the computer to speak to god for you. Is a loved one sick? For only $9.95 per month, the computer will beg god to help them 5 times a day! Throw enough money at this service, and you can just skip church altogether, not…
pharyngula | January 16, 2009Hey, hack journalists, have I got a great concept for you! As I'm sure you're aware, editors and the public are constantly hassling you to write about this discovery or that, and it gets tiresome: you don't really know the first thing about the subject, you certainly don't know anything about the context, it requires the hard work of doing some research, and doing research in science involves talking to people who are so much smarter than you that you're left feeling miserable and uncomfortable. You need a template. You want a simple outline that you can use interchangeably with any story,…
pharyngula | December 13, 2008Cruel, cruel readers. Everyone is sending me links to this recent episode of The View, in which four women babble inanely about something or other. In this case, it's evolution. Do you people like to see me suffer? This was horrible.
OK, Whoopi Goldberg is wishy-washy, rather than stupid: she argues for some vague kind of deistic intervention at the big bang, then evolution is the mechanism for creating life. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though…allow me to paraphrase. 'Really cool handbags and shoes have, like, designers, so really cool people must have a designer, too, even greater than Gucci and…
tlambert | December 5, 2008Back in 1996 the Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against The Courier Mail under editor Chris Mitchell for printing a nutty story that historian Manning Clark was an agent of the Soviet Union who had been awarded the Order of Lenin for his services. The Press Council concluded:
The newspaper had too little evidence to assert that Prof Clark was awarded the Order of Lenin - rather there is much evidence to the contrary.
That being so, the Press Council finds that The Courier-Mail was not justified in publishing its key assertion and the conclusions which so strongly flowed from it…
pharyngula | December 4, 2008I have a suspicion that that photo of squid guts in the last post is going to make a few people feel squeamish, and now I'm going to show something even worse: Bill O'Reilly. <cue frantic screams from everyone…"More squid guts! Please! Anything but Billo!">
Of course Billo is outraged at the news from Washington state. How dare they allow atheists to express themselves? This is a Judeo-Christian nation, and only Christians are allowed to have a voice in the public square (Jews, too, as long as they're quiet and willing to pretend that they're pre-Christians).
He urges his listeners to…
pharyngula | November 24, 2008Creationists must live on a different planet. I just summarized this symposium I attended; I posted the schedule last week. In between, Michael Egnor takes this scrap of information and spins out a weird tale. He actually put up a post titled, "Is P.Z. Myers Attending a Conference on Eugenics?". To which one can only mutter, "WTF?"
Here's his "reasoning":
I'm having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn't I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is…
tlambert | November 3, 2008Jennifer Marohasy has posted a list of the "ten worst blog posts". Tamino and Eli Rabett are crowing are crowing because they got number one and two and the best I could do was number six. Cohenite, the guy who compiled the list, had earlier compiled a list of the "ten best climate research papers" that, no fooling, included Chilingar. So you can imagine that his new list is of similar quality and it does not disappoint.
Cohenite says these posts are the ten worst because:
they reveal that at least part of this debate about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not about science, but its…
pharyngula | October 22, 2008And already the War on Christmas nonsense is starting up. Why, I remember they used to wait until after Thanksgiving before they'd put up the Christmas lights and install Santa in the shopping malls and start complaining about how the atheists were out to destroy Christmas, and every year it came earlier and earlier.
I'm a traditionalist. I'm going to wait until mid-December to put up my Christmas tree and subvert the holiday.
pharyngula | October 22, 2008Great. It just gets more and more insane. It seems that while McCain's side knows how to do 'spiritual warfare', Obama has all the witches on his side.
Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr. Norman G. Marvin, M.D. and he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama's family in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to pray against the witchcraft curses attempted by them against John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Dr. Marvin sent me the below e-mail from Flo Ellers. Flo is credentialed with the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington…
pharyngula | October 20, 2008Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It's an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of "authorities", where they make much of their pedigrees (don't blame me, the "Dr. X, Ph.D." is the redundant formula they use on the site.)
Dr. Suzanne Vincent, Ph.D., a neuroanatomist(!) at Oral Roberts University
Dr. Ross Anderson, Ph.D. of The Masters College
Dr. Bedros Daghlian, M.D., a retired doctor
Dr. Ben Scripture, Ph.D. in biology
Dr.…