Kooks
pharyngula | December 19, 2006That crazy pseudoscientific hack, Michael Crichton, has screwed up big time. In a teeny-tiny tantrum against a critic, he made up a character in his latest book with a similar name and background who also happens to be a depraved rapist of infants. Now the obliquely defamed critic makes a measured reply.
I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level--particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child. It's uplifting…
pharyngula | December 14, 2006My readers are a cruel people. They send me links to the strangest things, including this wacky fundagelical rant, exposing me to the bubbling looniness simmering beneath the thin shell of rationality in this country, and making my brain hurt.
So much for the logic of religious atheism. Their problem is really that they don't accept the doctrine of original sin or free will; they want to blame God for our sorrows. It really comes down to that. If there is a God, they think God should force us all to behave correctly, and if God won't, then God must be evil, therefore they won't believe in God…
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Deepak Chopra is still blathering on. I'm afraid that while he can't shut up, I can ignore him, and this will be my last response to his drivel; it's also the last time I'll be linking to the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington's exercise in indiscriminate narcissism is not the direction I want to see liberals taking, and while my voice isn't a significant one, I can at least deny the kook wing of the Left my tiny bit of support.
This time the obsessive small-minded mystic is still whining against science and reason, still railing against his own idiotic imaginings.
But how can anyone…
pharyngula | December 12, 2006What a terrific title: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals! It's from Wingnut Daily, of course, and it's simply one of their kooks taking a germ of fact and amplifying it into a flaming reactionary whimper of fear. He's complaining about soy.
Soybeans do contain compounds called isoflavones that resemble and weakly mimic estrogens. I've read a few papers that discuss their possible effects on human physiology, and they usually fall into the category of "Hmmm...suggestive, no evidence either way yet, needs more study." Our wingnut author seems to have a different source than the…
pharyngula | December 10, 2006Can you stand one more Gene-Ray-level internet crackpot? A reader sent me a link to this guy, Neal Adams, who has this insane "Growing Earth" idea. Forget all the physics and geology you think you knew—this animator and comic book publisher has invented his own solution, and it involves reworking particle physics (there are no electrons!) and making bizarre calculations, all 'demonstrated' with computer animation.
That last link give you another reason to despise this kook: he's responsible for that awful annoying commercial with the big-eyed bee hawking allergy medicine. I hated that stupid…
pharyngula | December 9, 2006A reader sent me a link to this very strange site, and I've been trying to determine whether it's a satire or not. It seems the answer is…not. There's a huge amount of kook screed here.
We get to learn that we Americans are actually living in Cabotia, named after the one true discoverer of North America, John Cabot (oh, and since North and South America are all one connected land mass, he gets to claim both continents.) Pope Pius IX had something to do with Lincoln's assassination, and Kennedy's assassination was the work of a conspiracy by Nelson Rockefeller.
The author is not a fan of…
pharyngula | December 9, 2006This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra's endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I'm sure, though, that he'll find other things to babble about.
In this one, he claims he's going to deal with objections that people have brought up to his previous inanity; he doesn't, really, and the few things he does choose to highlight expose the fact that he hasn't been listening to the criticisms. He only makes four rather incoherent points.
Chopra has claimed that Dawkins believes in a purely random universe,…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006Oh, man: this is classic crank pseudoscience:
The heretofore unknown science of "earthing", patented by Clint Ober, is that your body needs to be earthed so that you can have the earth's antioxidizing flow of free electrons to go through your body and extinguish free radicals.
Earthing Axiom:
The earth's infinite supply of free electrons will neutralize free radicals in your body and will thus help to stave off disease and aging. YOUR BODY WAS DESIGNED TO BE IN CONTACT WITH THE EARTH FOR MANY HOURS PER DAY.
Being connected via our barefeet to the earth appears destined to provide us with many…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006Shorter Deepak Chopra: "I don't know how DNA works, so there must be an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God-field who does."
Wow, but that guy is one long-winded, boring gomer. It sounds like he might be planning to fart out just one more of these stinkers, but I'd thought he'd run out of gas somewhere around part 0.
pharyngula | December 3, 2006Some real estate agent, Bill Wiese, had a bad dream: he thought he was in hell, and that Jesus had put him there so he could see what it was really like, and testify to the people. Alas, some people think this guy's fantasies are reality. That link is to a painful half-hour interview with Sid Roth, a crazy Jew-for-Jesus kind of guy, and they go on and on together, plugging a video you can buy, all about this guy's pathetic dream. I skipped most of it, I'm afraid, and got just enough of a taste to feel nausea.
So this is what happens when you mix up stupid people and religion. It's hell on…
pharyngula | December 2, 2006Sometimes, I get something other than hate mail from creationists—I get crank mail, too. I got a letter recently from Lin Liangtai, asking me to help disseminate information about his amazing paleontological discoveries. He has photos of what he calls a 300 million year old penis, along with other organs.
There are also close-ups of sectioned material: it quickly becomes obvious that anything that has a vaguely circular profile is called a cell, and anything with a reddish tint is called blood, and anything with that elongate anteater look is a penis (they apparently did not practice…
pharyngula | December 2, 2006Can I possibly bear another bucket of gobbledygook from Deepak Chopra? One must soldier on, I suppose, even as Chopra becomes even more vague. I'm going to keep it short, though.
Dawkins, along with other arch materialists, dismiss such a search [for "god"]. Are information fields real, as some theorists believe? Such a field might preserve information the way energy fields preserve energy; in fact, the entire universe may be based upon the evolution of information. (there's not the slightest doubt that the universe has an invisible source outside space and time.) A field that can create…
pharyngula | December 1, 2006This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist 'healer' who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.
You'll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.
pharyngula | November 28, 2006A miracle has occurred in Florida!
The Ten Commandments have appeared at the Dixie County Courthouse.
A six-ton block of granite bearing the Ten Commandments had been installed atop the courthouse steps. Inscribed at the base was the admonition to "Love God and keep his commandments."
The concept of a Ten Commandments monument was endorsed by county commissioners.
A six-ton block of stone just "appeared"? As in "poof"? Were there angelic trumpets, perhaps, or an astonishing bolt of lightning, or an eclipse? I mean, if a miraculous manifestation of the will of the Old Testament god actually…
pharyngula | November 27, 2006Deepak Chopra continues his weird riff on Dawkins The God Delusion with an eruption of New Age babble. This time he says he's going to do a "thought experiment" to disprove materialism. It doesn't.
Think of a yellow flower. Can you see it? Are you sure of the color and the fact that it's a flower and not a fish that you can see? If so, then the experiment has been successful. You have made a major strike at the root of materialism. When you see a flower in your mind, there is no flower inside your brain. That seems simple enough. But where is the flower? There's no picture of it in your…
pharyngula | November 25, 2006Stop him before he assaults his readers' minds again: Chopra babbles about consciousness and the brain. Supposedly, this is a response to something in The God Delusion, but Dawkins really doesn't discuss mechanisms of consciousness much at all (the book is a little bit excessively broad as it is, so I'm relieved he didn't try to throw that bit of the kitchen sink in there). The most appropriate section I could find in the book was this one:
Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of…
pharyngula | November 22, 2006Chopra has put up a third installment in his crusade against the ungodly, and my eyes glaze over. I can't care any more. It's just too stupid to inspire much concern.
His conclusion about sums it up.
Before proceeding with the next step in refuting the anti-God position, let's pause to see what responders think. Do you think a random universe of concrete objects colliding by chance is the right model for creation?
At this point, he's reduced to begging for crumbs of support from the people still reading his drivel, and to making up silly rebuttals to claims no one made. Hey, do you think the…
pharyngula | November 19, 2006There's some loony Indonesian witch doctor trying to put a voodoo curse on GW Bush. While I can sympathize with the sentiment, the method is a stupid waste of time (except, perhaps, that it has gotten the witch doctor in the news, so maybe it's just a high-tech way to drum up business)—and it's not something anyone could take seriously.
Or so I thought, until a link on Alicublog led me to this fairly well known wingnut, Rod Dreher. He starts out with some offensive macho colonialist remarks, punctuated with a description of this well known scene:
One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is…
pharyngula | November 16, 2006Clearly, Bush is not going to drift quietly into oblivion. Majikthise and Feministing report that his administration is appointing a certifiable kook to run the federal program that oversees family planning and reproductive health. His qualifications seem to be that he's fanatical about abstinence, to the point of making stuff up.
At the Annual Abstinence Leadership Conference in Kansas, Keroack defended abstinence (in an aptly titled talk, "If I Only Had a Brain") by claiming that sex causes people to go through oxytocin withdrawal which in turn prevents people from bonding in relationships…
pharyngula | November 16, 2006This story about the wingnut history teacher, David Paszkiewicz, just gets more and more amusing and sad. Lippard has comments from students defending the guy, and while I know that a lot of high school students are immature, these are damning. Kearny High School officials ought to be very concerned that their teacher and students put the place in a very bad light.