Kooks
pharyngula | February 11, 2010I'm sorry to inflict this on you, and it's OK if you decide not to torture your brain watching it. This is Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner for the discovery of PCR, giving a talk. It's long and rambling, and at various points he endorses global warming denialism and HIV denialism, but somehow thinks maybe there is something to astrology. It's a terrible, awful, embarrassingly bad talk from a prestigious kook. Mullis has one point of pride with me: when anyone asks me to name a book by a legitimate, successful scientist that demonstrates that even smart people can be awesomely stupid, Mullis's…
pharyngula | February 6, 2010I've often noticed a tendency for some people to host a whole gnarly syndrome of denialist symptoms: some people are creationists+HIV denialists+global warming denialists+ant-vaxers+whatever. They stand out in the crowd as hyper-intense paragons of idiocy; I often wonder how they get around at all, since the power of their disbelief is so strong that they probably deny their shoelaces as soon as they get up in the morning, yet at the same time they believe a magic man in the sky will soon make them float up into the air to a rapturous eternal congress of their fellow reality deniers.
I've…
pharyngula | February 3, 2010A witness has described the efforts of scientologists to "help" the people of Haiti. They would have done far more if they'd stayed home.
pharyngula | January 31, 2010There is a nest of creationist fruit loops scattered across Wisconsin, and they do try to get on school boards. The latest is David Weigand, a candidate for the board of education in the West Bend school district. Seriously, do not vote for this kook. Here's his statement on evolution.
WITH REGARD TO TEACHING EVOLUTION OR CREATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
In a nutshell, this is what I believe:
1. Origin studies, (whether Creation or evolution) and the idea of "millions of years" does not belong in the science classroom because these are not testable, repeatable or observable; they are…
pharyngula | January 28, 2010Ben Stein wins another honor. He has been declared the Rosa Parks of Darwin skeptics on the Rosa Parks of Rosa Parks Blogs, which points out amusing and offensive instances of rhetorical hyperbole. The amusing bit here, though, is that he got named this on the basis of an old post by creationist Kevin Wirth which does literally say Ben Stein is the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics, right in the title. I'd seen this before, way back in the old days of the Expelled hoo-ha, but this time I noticed an interesting connection. At the bottom of the article, it has this brief biographical note:
Seattle…
pharyngula | January 25, 2010Who would have thought something so trivial would generate so much amusement? I told you all to vote on Twitter for DrRachie, because there was a bunch of quacks in the lead. The kook formerly in the #1 position, the "Health Ranger", has flamed out hysterically. Now the #2 quack, some guy named Mercola, is showing similar signs of cracking.
Dr. Mercola explained the situation himself in a Facebook post, "An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-…
pharyngula | January 24, 2010I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie 'medicine'. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.
Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.
He is outraged at being…
pharyngula | January 18, 2010I guess we've been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I'm sure.
Called the "Proclaimer," the audio Bible delivers "digital quality" and is designed for "poor and illiterate people", the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.
According to their website, the Proclaimer is "self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or ... even on the moon!"
I'm trying to imagine an audio speaker that works in a vacuum. And why you would need…
pharyngula | January 12, 2010Apparently, Kent Hovind filed for an appeal to the Supreme Court based on a claim that he really wasn't trying to finagle his way past US tax laws by structuring all of his bank withdrawals to be under $10,000, therefore avoiding a trigger that would demand they be reported; it's unfair to target withdrawals that way, and besides, they were all for his Christian ministry. Hovind also had another ace up his sleeve: he begged his readers to pray for him.
I guess God doesn't like him: "Mr. Hovind's appeal for a rehearing before the Supreme Court has been denied.".
By the way, Kent Hovind is…
pharyngula | January 8, 2010Iris Robinson is an MP in Northern Ireland who has been, umm, frolicking. She was 58; she had been having an adulterous affair with a 19 year old. Eh, that's a private matter between her and her husband, you're thinking, and we shouldn't care about it, as long as it doesn't affect her performance in her job.
Except…
She's been using her government connections to funnel money to her boy toy. Lots of money.
He [the young man] said Iris Robinson, now 60, gave him two checks for 25,000 pounds ($40,000) each, but she then asked him for 5,000 pounds ($8,000) back, possibly to donate to the…
pharyngula | January 8, 2010I was one of those weird kids growing up: nose always in a book, bored by sports, happy to go to school. This was a bit strange because my father had been a broken-nosed lineman on the varsity high school football team, was always playing hooky to go fishing, and once he graduated, went off to a succession of manly muscular jobs, working on the railroad, as a lumberjack, and eventually as an auto mechanic. I think he was perpetually baffled by the bookish nerd he'd fathered, but then, he had six kids and everyone of us ended up different, independent, and stubborn in our own ways. And that…
pharyngula | January 3, 2010Like the writers at Political Animal, I have regarded the sordid celebrity nonsense surrounding Tiger Woods with complete indifference. He's rich, he has behaved stupidly, that's the end of the story, despite all those lurid magazine covers in front of my face at the supermarket checkout line.
But this is something else. Brit Hume, who has always been mindless conservative drone, has crossed a line. Look what he said on Fox News:
The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and…
pharyngula | January 2, 2010Deepak Chopra recently gave a talk in which he rattled off all of the amazing assertions below.
The essential nature of the material world is not material; the essential nature of the physical world is not physical; the essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff.
Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition -- and we can call it the superstition of materialism -- which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding  that perception is in the brain. It's not in the brain;…
pharyngula | January 2, 2010The world will not end in 2012.
Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012.
Yeah, it's ridiculous, but you knew that all along. This nonsensical 2012 date for an apocalypse is pure numerology: one of the great cycles of the Mayan calendar comes to an end in that year, but it simply means that if you were a Mayan, you'd flip the page on your calendar then (or start carving a new symbol on your stone tablets). Only a loon would attach so much significance to an arbitary magical date that they would think it implies the world…
pharyngula | December 30, 2009Zeno has posted the complete text of a long creationist screed published in the Sacramento Bee. It's got everything: the second law of thermodynamics, the fallacy of the excluded middle, the 'law' of biogenesis, mysterious barriers between species, and of course, the Imminent Death of Darwinism. It's tediously familiar, and you've probably heard it all many times before. Only two things make it interesting.
It was published in 1981, and it's mostly indistinguishable from creationist rhetoric in 2009. Which is rather depressing, if you think about it.
The author is someone who also defends…
pharyngula | December 29, 2009These religious conservatives are certifiably nuts.
Rep. Henry Brown of South Carolina and 74 Republican co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives actually wants Congress to pass a resolution condemning people for saying "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas."
Seriously? Yeah, seriously. Brown thinks we're "diminishing the value of Christmas" by not making it mandatory for everyone to praise it. What next? Shall we declare every Christmas season (beginning the day after Halloween, of course) a required event, with all citizens lining up at the local mall every day to stand in…
pharyngula | December 28, 2009Rick Warren regularly scribbles up these cloying little messages he calls the Daily Hope — and rather than hope, they offer nothing but trite platitudes and unfounded certainty about a godly purpose that I find extremely discouraging. How can people find this lying tripe uplifting?
God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA recipe that created you. David praised God for this incredible personal attention to detail God gave in designing each of us: "You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me…
pharyngula | December 23, 2009There is a sign among the various holiday displays at the Illinois state capitol, set there by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
I like it, but then I would. Somebody else didn't like it, which is his right, of course…but what he doesn't have the right to do is to try and tear the sign down. William Kelly, who is also a candidate for state comptroller (he got his…
pharyngula | December 21, 2009People are already talking about Garrison Keillor's ghastly opinion piece, the one that basically revels in anti-semitism and preaches that only a select few are allowed to enjoy Christmas.
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those…
pharyngula | December 20, 2009Every time a religious nitwit says something stupid, you turn around and another one has topped him. The head of the Catholic Church in Australia, Cardinal Pell, endorses cancer quackery.
"Yes obviously (cancer can be cured by prayer)," Cardinal Pell told ABC Television on Monday.
"And there are quite a number of examples in the books."
Cardinal Pell says that won't give sick people a false sense of security because they realise cure by prayer is a "very long shot".
Obviously?
Obviously?
Obviously not. There are no mechanisms, there are no data, only biased anecdotes from pious…