Last year, Creation Ministries International announced a new documentary called “Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels” which was supposed to be revolutionary and like no other creationist movie. Did anyone see it? Anyone? I didn’t, but I just ran across some notes on it, so I rummaged around the web to find out what happened.
And it’s about time. Soon is a dishonest hack, one of the climate change deniers who exploited his prestigiously titled position as a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (Oooh! Sciencey!) to claim authority in attacks on more credible climate scientists, and he’s been very popular on the denialist side of things.
Now his own boss is admitting that he violated disclosure principles by failing to reveal his industry connections. You might be wondering what connections, and how much did he get?
Brian Williams got smacked around hard for his confabulation of events, in which he placed himself in a helicopter that was shot at by insurgents (he wasn’t — it was a different helicopter in a group he was flying with). But he at least acknowledged that he was wrong.
Now Bill O’Reilly has been caught in a similar exaggeration. Do you think he backed down? Oh hell no..
Here’s a Catholic priest writing about the problems of Catholicism.
Everywhere from Boston to Minneapolis, Catholic churches have closed or been consolidated into regional clusters. The chief reason is declining Mass attendance.
In New York, Mass attendance has fallen to European levels, around 15 percent on an average Sunday, according to The New York Times. In Boston, it is even lower, around 12 percent.
Nationwide, only 24 percent of Catholics go to Mass on an average Sunday, down from 55 percent in 1965.
Wilkins explains some obvious things about religion that need explaining to an awful lot of people. And I mostly agree.
Here it is. I haven’t watched it, so maybe it sucks.
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Here’s a very useful breakdown of various presidential wanna-be’s position on evolution. There’s a rather sharp distinction between the political parties.
This week, everyone has been sending me a link to that horrible series of photos showing a seal gnawing and dismembering an octopus (no, I will not link to it! I might cry.) So instead I’m showing you a happy movie of a successful octopus gnawing and dismembering a crab.
Man, I hate TED talks. I know there are some good ones, but like anything, 99% of them are crap, and the garbage gets gobbled up with the same fervor as the jewels.
So I get this blurb from a book publisher, promoting a new book coming out about evolution, by some guy whose main claim to fame seems to be that he’s a “TED all-star” (I looked a little deeper: he’s also a businessman who runs a biotech investment company). The email was titled “George Clooney’s wedding isn’t just unfair, it’s unnatural selection”, which set off alarms all over the place — klaxons and those whoop-whoop howling noises I’d hear from the fireboats on Puget Sound. (Actually, every morning my inbox produces a cacophony of bullshit, so this is nothing suprising.)
I was curious, though, so I read it instead of hitting delete.
