Bolitaena pygmaea
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
They couldn’t even get the title right: A Meeting of Minds. It’s more like a meeting of the mindless. Ben Stein has had a friendly meeting with that old fraud, Ken Ham, and apparently they were perfect for each other. The sexual tension is palpable in the accompanying photo; the mutual praise flowed like champagne between the two of them, although Ham finally won the prize for high sycophancy.
Expelled is hosted by the brilliant Ben Stein, actor/economist/lawyer/presidential speechwriter/science observer—a 21st-century Einsteinian figure.
Einstein? They’re comparing a 3rd rate actor best known for playing the most boring high school teacher ever to Einstein? I think there must have been a few typos in that article. Here, I fixed them.
Expelled is hosted by the soporific Ben Stein, character actor/failed economist/eyewash huckster/Nixon apologist/creationist—a 21st-century Pecksniffian figure.
Chris Hedges wrote a pretty good book on fundamentalism called American Fascists; at least, I thought it was pretty good, but now I have my doubts about his credibility. He has a new book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, and has an essay that summarizes his position. I could not believe how awful it is — it’s basically a declaration that all atheists are exactly like Pat Robertson, and then it charges in with nothing but venom and accusations to defend his position.
Martin is in a protracted Wikipedia battle with a cult, Falun Gong, that is trying to erase unpleasant aspects of their ideology from the record. I know there are a few dedicated Wikipedians aroung these parts, so you might want to help him out.
Religion can be a force for peace, love, and understanding — at least when it provides an opportunity to beat up on those evil secularists. Turkey is an excellent example of where the creationists want to take us: it’s the one country in the world that beats the US in its level of ignorance about biology, and the Christians and Muslims are happily collaborating to promote theocracy there.
Read the account — that’s our future if the Discovery Institute has its way.
That venerable institution among internet atheists, Reggie Finley, will be interviewing me tonight for Infidel Guy radio. We’re going to talk about this strange propaganda film, Expelled, that’s supposed to come out next month, and I suppose we’ll also discuss creationism in a more generic context as well, and maybe we’ll even talk about real science. Tune in at 8ET.
Let me answer my own question: because he is an appallingly freakish idiot, and always a reliable source for the most amazingly inane claims. Don’t worry, that link takes you to Mark Chu-Carroll’s evisceration of his latest insane rant, that women are intellectual inferiors who can’t teach biology or calculus and are incapable of practicing computer science or art. Vox Day. Can he do any of those things? I think not.
By the way, my wife is director of institutional research at a local college, and my daughter is a computer science major. Women outnumber men in our computer science program and have parity in our biology discipline. It’s amazing how they do those things and know more than I do in their fields with such inferior brains.
Usually, when I read one of these common stories about people denying themselves reasonable medical care for religious reasons (such as the Jehovah Witness’s proscription against blood transfusions, or the Christian Scientist’s insane denial of illness altogether), I find myself siding with the doctor trying to overcome their foolishness, rather than the deluded theists. This one is an exception.
To make it short, a Jehovah’s Witness couple are expecting twins; one of the twins has a circulation defect that prevents pulmonary circulation, meaning it would suffocate to death as soon as it was born and needed to breathe air; they refuse any surgery to correct the problem; doctor gets a court order, operates at birth against the parent’s wishes, and saves the infant.
I think the doctor was way out of line. This is a case in which the parents were fully aware of the situation and knew that the fetus would die at birth, and elected (for screwy reasons, admittedly) to not pursue extraordinary measures to save its life. They had not deluded themselves into believing medical intervention was unnecessary and that magic would heal the child, they had resigned themselves to its death. And until the child has enough self-awareness to actually want to live, I think that is a decision parents have to be allowed to make. If they want that particular baby, they should be allowed to elect to have major surgery, but if they don’t, they should be permitted to allow its condition to run its course, unless the outcome is likely to be survival with serious damage.
The cost of these medical interventions can be prohibitive, and it can be entirely reasonable to decide not to invest money and time into a fetus who has neither autonomy nor unique qualities, nor an individual personality to which the parents have attached their affection. Let them die. Let the parents decide, not a doctor.
The article cites a particularly horrendous case.
In 1990, for example, a woman named Karla Miller went into premature labor at 23 weeks of gestation in Houston. Because a child born that early has a 75 percent chance of death or severe disability, the husband chose not to sign a consent form that would allow resuscitation. But the neonatologist resuscitated the girl, who grew up severely retarded, legally blind, and quadriplegic. The parents sued the hospital for ignoring their wishes, but in 2000 the Texas Supreme Court ruled for the hospital. George Annas, a medical ethicist at Boston University, later attacked the decision in the New England Journal of Medicine, since “the court implies that life is always preferable to death for a newborn . . . no matter how unlikely their survival is without severe disabilities.”
I wonder if that neonatologist has since taken responsibility for the round-the-clock care and various expenses and stresses of that kind of affliction?
I have just walked outside in Morris, Minnesota, and you may not believe this, but there is liquid water falling from the sky. I even spotted an absence of coats, and someone rollerblading. Have I been magically transported to some tropical paradise, like Portland, Oregon?
People in India were told that there was a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary floating in the sky, so about 50 of them suffered burned retinas by staring at the sun. I think we can see that religion definitely attracts stupid people to its ranks.
I sure hope no one tells them that if you hit yourself on the head with a hammer real hard, you’ll see swarms of angels dancing everywhere around you. Or, more likely, that if you mail all your money to a preacher, you’ll get rich. But no one would be that sadistic, would they?
