Kooks
pharyngula | September 4, 2010I hate to break the news to him, but he's just so Johnny Snow. I've grated against ol' Wayne a few times before to mock his awful polls, and now I think he has finally snapped, babbling out incoherent mush about how atheists are just like believers, only worse…and he really doesn't like me. I don't think. Hard to tell with mixed messages like this one.
Just as James Dobson and other evangelists cultivate audiences in order to spread their beliefs, so do atheist evangelizers. The bigs are Britons Christopher Hitchens, who is battling cancer, and Richard Dawkins, who turns 70 in March. Myers,…
pharyngula | September 4, 2010A while back, Larry Arnhart wrote an article claiming that evolution supported libertarianism. I was invited to write a reaction essay, which I did, and I argued that evolution supported diversity, and that it was silly and inappropriate to claim it for a single narrow human political movement.
I'd suggest that my criticisms must have stung, because Arnhart has now written a rebuttal to my rebuttal, except that he seems to comprehend neither what I said nor the basics of evolution, so I think everything I wrote sailed right past him on a cloud of confusion. Especially since his response was…
pharyngula | September 2, 2010Here's a swami with his magic breathing advice for coping with throat cancer. How these guys can dispense bogus medical advice and not get lynched by angry cancer patients is a mystery.
At least he looks really goofy when he curls his tongue and breathes. Now if only there were some yogic enchantment that could do something about his creepy squink eye…
pharyngula | September 1, 2010Already, deranged Discovery Institute shill David Klinghoffer is blaming the hostage-taking nut James Lee's actions on Darwinism.
Witness the recent examples of Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn, Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris, Jokela High School shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen. Historical figures who drew inspiration, if indirectly, from Darwinian theory include Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. I've written about this many times before and received much abuse for it, not least when I took up the theme on the…
pharyngula | September 1, 2010A gunman with an explosive device is holding hostages at the Discovery Channel building until they give him what he wants. What does he want? Well, he's nuts, and hispage of demands is loading very slowly, so here's what I was able to extract:
The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:
1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the…
pharyngula | August 30, 2010Barry Arrington is a fellow most of you have probably never heard of, and those of us who have aren't particularly dazzled by him: he's an Intelligent Design creationist and moderator of Bill Dembski's wacky little blog. However, there are some amusing revelations: he made a failed stab at a run for Colorado school board (please keep these wackos' hands off our schools, OK?), and funniest of all, he's the treasurer of MichelePAC, Michele Bachmann's fundraising organization, and just to make it even more appropriate, he's the guy who misspelled dear Michele's name on the FEC filings.
Spelling…
pharyngula | August 22, 2010From John Pavlus:
How to make a Singularity
Step 1: "I wonder if brains are just like computers?"
Step 2: Add peta-thingies/giga-whatzits; say "Moore's Law!" a lot at conferences
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: SINGULARITY!!!11!one
There are other, perhaps somewhat more serious, rebuttals at Rennie's Last Nerve and A Fistful of Science.
Now run along, little obsessive Kurzweilians, there are many other blogs out there that regard your hero with derision, demanding your earnestly clueless rebuttals.
pharyngula | August 21, 2010I don't watch Oprah enough, so I haven't seen much open endorsement of the nonsense behind that unbelievable bestseller, The Secret. There must be a lot of closet believers, though, because that piece of well-whipped frothy BS sold 19 million copies. Now the author has cranked out another, similar excretion: The Power, nicely reviewed in Newsweek. Both have the same premise, that the Universe really, really loves you and wants to give you everything you wish for, if only you concentrate and ask.
The Power is a distillation of the central insight of The Secret: the "law of attraction." It's…
pharyngula | August 21, 2010Ray Kurzweil has responded to my criticisim of futurist fortune-telling. It really just compounds the problems, though, and gullible people who love Ray will think he's answered me, while skeptical people who see through his hocus-pocus will be unimpressed. It's kind of pointless to reply again, but here goes.
His first point is silly.
For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.
I don't care.
I didn't make an issue of his timescale in the first place…
pharyngula | August 20, 2010Franklin Graham has said something stupid again. He has some peculiar ideas about inheritance.
I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name. Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That's what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has…
pharyngula | August 20, 2010Many people don't read the comments here, but you might try in this case: Barney Zwartz himself is replying repeatedly to my criticisms. It's a wonderful demonstration of the First Rule of Holes.
pharyngula | August 20, 2010Greg Abell wrote to me, requesting answers to his questions, which he doesn't ask, and since he caught me in a cranky moment, I felt like answering.
Hello,
I wanted to ask a professional scientist how something can come from nothing?
No, you didn't. You wrote as an excuse to preach at me, and are not asking any sincere questions. You're a phony.If there is no God, you have to prove how this is possible.
Matter had to come from somewhere. Space had to have a beginning. Time also has to originate right?
Ask a physicist. I'm a biologist. It says so right over there under my picture to the…
pharyngula | August 19, 2010Quite the little hissyfit is brewing on the far right. One one side is Joseph Farah, lunatic publisher of the online teabagging journal, World Net Daily, better known as Wing Nut Daily to rational people. Farah organizes something called the "Taking America Back National Conference", in which the not-very-bright half of America gets together to piously discuss how they can complete the total trashing of the country.
On the other side is crazy flaming psycho goon Ann Coulter, who would have been a headliner at the WND conference — she's exactly the kind of nut WND loves. Unfortunately, Coulter…
pharyngula | August 18, 2010Sometimes, my email is a little disturbing.
I AMI AM the "goddamned cracker" sir. This is a personal invitation. I am Karl Duane Anderson. I live at REDACTED in Fargo, North Dakota. If you want to desecrate the Body of Christ, please find out just what it is that you are desecrating. Come to my upstairs apartment and do it to me.
What, a cracker is asking me to come to his apartment and nail him? I'm flattered, sir, but this is not Craig's List, I do not swing that way, and if I did, I would respond better to an invitation to dinner and a movie than to ordering me directly to your…
pharyngula | August 18, 2010A couple of days ago, I showed you that video of a proud Catholic theocrat who believes that democracy is bad for us, and ought to be replaced with a benevolent dictatorship. Zeno has discovered that he noticed all the attention he was given, and his latest video is all about…us!
First, a correction: he didn't really mean that he wanted a dictatorship…he wants the American republic replaced with a Catholic monarchy, instead. Huge difference, I'm sure.
But almost all of his "dialogue" (that's what he calls this, a "dialogue" in quotes) is a whine about how rudely atheists, that is, us,…
pharyngula | August 17, 2010Just the other week, Conservapædia made their page on PZ Myers their featured article for the week; now they've made the Pharyngula blog a target of their cranky ire. Here's their description:
Myers' blog is also listed by the science journal Nature, which also embraces evolutionary pseudoscience, as the best blog by a scientist. Pharyngula is known for its sarcastic and often specious criticism of creation science and intelligent design theory,[3][4] as well as regular postings of photos of cephalopods (often with vulgarly sexual connotations both subtle and blatant).
Isn't it charming…
pharyngula | August 17, 2010There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.
His latest claim is that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain within a decade. By reverse engineer, he means that we'll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He's not just speculating optimistically, though: he's…
pharyngula | August 15, 2010We've been doing politics all wrong. Michael Voris has the answers. The problem with democracy is all these voters with different views on things like abortion and homosexuality, where people who vote for such things are just rotten parasites who want to destroy civilization. So he has two solutions: 1) only allow good Catholics to vote, and 2) ideally, get rid of democracy altogether and instead install a Catholic dictatorship.
Really. He says that. I'm not making it up!
By the way, If you want to know more about life in a Catholic dictatorship, read this letter from Jim Walsh. He's being…
pharyngula | August 11, 2010Newt Gingrich, the man who told his wife he was leaving her as she lay in a hospital bed sick with cancer, has declared that "overturning Prop 8 is an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution and for the majority of people of the United States who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife" on his website. Unfortunately for him, he left comments open, and is on the receiving end of a lot of contempt for his hypocrisy.
My favorite so far is "Which one of your multiple marriages was the most sacred to you?".
I'm also rather peeved that Gingrich's website has the url of newt.org. He…
pharyngula | August 11, 2010Muslims in Saudi Arabia are building a giant clock that resembles Big Ben, but is over six times larger. They want to replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Time as the world standard.
As Mohammed al-Arkubi, manager of one of the hotels in the complex, put it: "Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time. This is the goal."
This is a beautiful example of cargo cult science. Big Ben has nothing to do with establishing GMT — it's just a big clock in London. GMT is entirely about establishing a uniform standard reference time. It was set rather arbitrarily to the time at an…