I’m pretty sure the answer is some variant of “yes,” “of course,” and “what a stupid question,” but the Freethoughtblogs gang will be exploring it on Saturday afternoon, and maybe provide some nuance and depth. You can contribute, too!
To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed that Nigel Farage was planning to campaign for Trump in the US, so I didn’t care that he abruptly decided to leave my country and campaign for himself.
Nigel Farage on Monday announced that he would return to frontline British politics as leader of the Reform party and run for a seat in the election next month, scrapping his previously stated position of skipping the race in order to focus on supporting Donald Trump.
“I’ve changed my mind, it is allowed, you know!” Farage told a hastily arranged press conference. He said he will remain leader for the next five years in order to hold the expected Labour government to account.
Goodbye. Don’t care, you wanker. Fuck off already.
Understandably, though, his prospective constituents in Essex did have strong opinions about his reentry into their business.
Nigel Farage’s surprise campaign for the upcoming British general election got off to a sticky start Tuesday when someone chucked a milkshake in his face.
From this we get the only portrait of Nigel Farage I ever want to see.
Perfection.
I dread finding email in my inbox from someone with a Muslim name nowadays, because I know exactly what it’s going to about. Apparently I am notorious among Islamic fundamentalists because I said that the prophet Mohammed’s account of developmental biology is not accurate, and not at all substantial, so every once in a while someone gets it in their head to prove me wrong, that the Quran is precise, accurate, and complete. It is not, of course.
Here we go again.
Dear Professor PZ Myers,
I hope you are doing well. I am a Muslim medical student, and I recently watched your debate on embryology in Islam from 12 years ago. Unfortunately, the brothers debating you lacked in-depth knowledge of embryology[That’s a poor description to narrow it down. They were all bad, every one. Maybe this one with the appropiately named Nadir?], but I am here to offer a more informed perspective[Doubtful.]
I have written an entire book about embryology in Islam, detailing its basis and nuances. I noticed you are seeking detailed embryological descriptions in the Quran[No, I’m not. The Quran has a pitifully short description, I don’t need a whole book making excuses for it], and I believe you may have overlooked the significant details present in the verses of Surah Al-Muminun or other surah. While I understand you are an atheist and do not believe in God, I hope to provide you with some insights before it is too late[Too late…for what?].
I am willing to share passages from my book with you, completely free of charge, in the spirit of honest inquiry and the pursuit of truth. The first passages I will provide cover:
1. The formation of bones and flesh.
2. The claim that the Quran copied from the works of Galen and Aristotle.Additionally, my book includes other topics such as:
3. Embryology classification at the microscopic level and its correlation with the Quran.
4. Sex determination in the Hadiths of the Prophet and the Quran.
5. Correcting misinterpretations of verses in Chapter 86 of the Quran: Surah At-Tariq (regarding the ejaculated fluid coming from between the backbone and ribs).To start, I will send you the first two topics. All you need to do is read these to conclude that the knowledge contained in the Quran is not primitive and could not have been known by everyone at that time[I’ve read a complete translation of that section — it’s very short — and it’s primitive]. If you continue to claim otherwise, I would appreciate evidence that someone made similar statements as the Prophet did at that time[I feel no obligation to correspond further].
I apologize for not being able to share the entire book now, as it has not yet been released. However, I am happy to provide the first two passages, and if you are interested in more, please let me know and I will see what I can do.
Have a good day.
Best regards,
Are you ready for this? OK, let’s take a look at the excerpt about “bones and flesh”. The Quran claims Allah makes bones first, then clothes them with flesh. Is that what happens?
He’s doing what real journalists ought to do: when Donald Trump states an outright lie, like I never said “lock her up”
, it is the job of real journalists to look up the record and hold him to account. Fox News drones don’t, but is that what we really want to do, is hold up Fox “journalism” as the standard we need to meet?
The problem is that only small children and babies want to be spoon fed the stories they want, and get mad if they’re given the facts that they need, and we have a country full of MAGA babies who want nothing but their pablum.
I feel a bit let down. I consider Mad Max: Fury Road to be one of my favorite movies of all time, so of course I walked into Furiosa with unreasonably high expectation, so of course it was unlikely that it would meet them. It didn’t.
That’s unfair, though. It was still an enjoyable movie. It was just lacking the focus of Fury Road.
The first problem was that the story was too diffuse and chaotic. Fury was a frantic chase, followed by an equally frantic race back, and it covered the events of just a few days. Furiosa covered a tightly telescoped few years in the life of an angry girl/young women, and it ambled between three locations: the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm, and half the time I was wondering why we’re even going to these hell holes. Oh, because they had a trade agreement. George Miller should have learned from George Lucas that that is never an interesting basis for an action movie.
Anya Taylor-Joy was OK as Furiosa, but she didn’t have that steely-eyed determination that Charlize Theron portrayed so well. This Furiosa was a victim of circumstance, and was lacking that rage burning inside her. I also missed Tom Hardy’s Mad Max — he was also a victim of circumstance, but his main role was to witness the events. There was no one like Nux, to surprise you with a spectacular redemption arc. It was a game of ping pong, with Furiosa the ball, and it wasn’t particularly compelling.
You know what I really missed? The music. Fury Road had an intense score to match its hard-driving (see what I did there?) narrative. Furiosa occasionally played memorable bits of that score, but never sustained them. It was choppier, I think to match the plot, which lacked the long scenes where the heroes were driving, driving, driving across the desert while Immortan Joe’s army was madly racing after them.
So I left the theater thinking “that was nice.” I didn’t leave it feeling that it was a good thing I was walking, because I might be a danger on the road if I were driving. Furiosa didn’t inject me with the fury that the previous movie did.
It was still good. It just lacked the adrenaline cocktail I should have been served.
There’s a huge trial going on in this state, regarding $250 million in funds unlawfully diverted from charity for needy children to the pockets of a small number of greedy grifters. It happens even in the land of Minnesota Nice.
The seven defendants — Said Shafii Farah, Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur — were charged in 2022 with wire fraud, money laundering and other charges. They have connections to a Shakopee restaurant, Empire Cuisine & Market.
The seven defendants are among 70 people charged in the broader case, all tied to U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that reimburse schools, day-care facilities and nonprofits for feeding low-income children after school and during the summer.
The seven received more than $40 million in federal reimbursements for 18 million meals distributed at 50 food sites across Minnesota — from Rochester to St. Cloud. Prosecutors allege the defendants ran a “brazen” fraud scheme that created numerous shell companies to launder money, submitted rosters of made-up children’s names and inflated meal claims.
Prosecutors also say some defendants received and gave kickbacks to other people charged in the massive scheme, leading to bribery charges. They said the six men and one woman spent the money lavishly on themselves, including the purchases of a $1 million lakefront Prior Lake property, luxury cars and gold jewelry.
That’s already blatant enough, and thoroughly contemptible. They took advantage of a federal program to feed kids to instead outright steal millions. It’s not just a little skimming, either, but outright pocketing all the money.
But that’s not why I say our crooks are unsophisticated. It’s also their plan to escape justice.
A juror in the Feeding Our Future federal trial was dismissed suddenly Monday morning after a woman showed up at her door Sunday with a bag of $120,000 in cash and offers of a second bag of cash if she votes to acquit the defendants, attorneys said in court.
The 23-year-old juror wasn’t home when the woman showed up, but the unnamed person left the juror’s father-in-law a bag of cash and told him to tell the juror that another bag of cash would be dropped off if she votes to acquit the seven defendants in the fraud case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said.
Yeah, big ol’ bag o’ cash. Nothing subtle about it. There are some real boneheads behind that scheme.
I wonder if the Coen Brothers are itching to make a movie of it? Nah, probably not — too real.
They’ve elected women to run their countries. This is not a guarantee of an improvement (just remember Margaret Thatcher), but it does improve the odds.
Iceland has elected Halla Tomasdottir to the presidency. She’s billed as an “entrepreneur” and “businessperson,” which are not reassuring criteria, but she did say this:
A climate and nature emergency demands urgent, inclusive action, conformity simply won’t unlock the leadership we need. It’s time to transform how we lead, and in a world of low trust we need to get better at co-creating solutions with those impacted. A livable world can best be secured if women, in solidarity with male allies, unite to redefine leadership norms; dismantle barriers; and move toward sustainable, people-first approaches. This demands courageous collaboration. The most important question we must now ask is, how will we choose to lead at a time like no other for humanity?
Promising.
Mexico has elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering, and previously served as an environmental secretary. She promoted education (Yay!) and policing (boo.) Leftist activist and climate scientist, what’s not to like?
I’m feeling even more discouraged by our choices in the US presidential election. Why can’t we have any educated, progressive women on the ballot?
I can’t believe how embarrassed I am for Eric Hovind and John Harris. Eric is, of course, the son of Kent Hovind, which is humiliation enough, and John is the director of Living Waters Europe, so you’d think being shackled to that doofus Ray Comfort would make you reluctant to appear in public, but no, they now appear together in a video that has them capering ludicrously and giggling like maniacs because, oh boy, they’ve got those evolutionists now. They have a knock-’em-dead argument against evolution (it’s always against evolution, because they lack a defensible alternative) that will finally finish off evolution, and it’s so simple they can present it in 5 minutes. Except they don’t. This is a 40 minute video.
Discover “How to Destroy Evolution in 5 Minutes.” Using the lens of mathematics to critically examine the evolutionary timelines from chimp DNA to human DNA renders Evolution, once again, IMPOSSIBLE!
This compelling argument has left evolutionists speechless as they watch their evolutionary science foundation implode.
Join Eric Hovind and John Harris, Director of Living Waters Europe, for an insightful look at one of the most compelling arguments against evolution you will ever hear!
I’m sure they do leave many people speechless. I know I was stunned when I heard it, because it was so appallingly stupid and grossly overhyped. You can skip the first 30 minutes of the video, because it’s just John and Eric patting each other on the back, bragging about how sciencey they are, and rehashing bits of biology 101 (“this is what DNA looks like…”) that are completely irrelevant to their argument, and boasting about how they’ve left people completely convinced that they’ve destroyed science and are now going to church. It’s extremely obnoxious, especially when you get to their actual argument, which is abysmally unimpressive.
It’s Haldane’s Dilemma. It goes in cycles, where very few years some creationist rediscovers this idea, and goes raving looney claiming that they’ve disproven evolution, and then slowly goes quiet as evolutionary biologists look at them funny and then ignore them. It was first brought up by JBS Haldane in 1957. Haldane was a great scientist, not a creationist, and he brought it up as a potential problem in population genetics that needs to be resolved. It was the problem of substitutional load, that for a mutation to go to fixation involved a cost to the population, since replacement of one allele by another involved the virtual death of members of that population over time. So how could we possibly get enough mutations to transform a chimp-like animal into a person, since surely there are a vast number of genetic changes between the two? Haldane didn’t know how many, but must be lots, right?
Very smart people — much smarter than John & Eric, who know nothing about biology or evolution — wrestled with this problem, but the real question was not whether evolution could occur, but where was the error in Haldane’s assumptions or calculations. As molecular biology proceeded onward, undaunted by a theoretical problem, it was discovered that populations were hugely polymorphic, that is, contained a huge reservoir of widespread variation, that was incompatible with Haldane’s Dilemma. Either the premises for the math was wrong, or plants and animals existed in defiance of the natural laws of the universe.
Evolutionary biologists quickly figured out the flaw. Most of that variation is neutral and can accumulate with little cost. Gosh, empirical reality overcomes the theory, especially the relatively primitive theory of the 1950s. Creationists did not get the memo, though, and every few years they bring up Haldane’s calculations as if they were an evolution-stopper, rather than an early step in figuring out the dynamics of population genetics.
You can skip the whole video, though. It’s only appeal is the spectacle of watching two bozos engaged in a 40-minute pratfall. Here’s their ultimate evolution-killing calculation, presented at about the 30 minute mark.
Note that they are bending over backwards to use numbers that will favor evolution, which is why so much of this calculation is nonsense. Humans and chimps differ by 1% of their genome (it’s more like 3%, but OK), which means there are about 30 million base pairs that differ (they neglect the fact that these are two independently evolving lineages so each needs 15 million changes…let’s forget that, since their numbers throughout are so silly.) That means that in 10 million years at the rate of 1 beneficial mutation (an absurd number) every 20 years, the population can accumulate at most 500,000 beneficial mutations. But we need 30 million! Oh noes!
Every lay person will be baffled by the numbers and will be confused. Every evolutionary biologist will look at it in shock and wonder why this idiot is roaming the streets unsupervised.
You won’t be taken aback. You’ll note that the assumption of 30 million (or 100 million, or whatever) beneficial mutations is false, since most of the differences are neutral or nearly so, so we can just throw away the whole estimate. You might also comment on the fact that their formula is very linear, assuming that evolution is a long march forward, steadily adding beneficial mutations progressively to produce us humans, rather than a process of constantly branching diversification. You’ll also acknowledge that sexual recombination allows genes to evolve in parallel and be reshuffled into novel arrangements. Their little demo disproves creationist evolution, which is an entirely different process than biological evolution.
There’s little point in engaging with anyone presenting this level of ignorance and misinformation. Just pat them on the head, give them a lollipop, and encourage them to stay in school.
It’s Pride Month! Or, as the gang at Answers in Genesis would rather call it, shame month. Ken Ham has written a complaint about all the terrible things Christians are now expected to do while under the yoke of The Gays — it’s reminiscent of the bondage of the Hebrews in Egypt. I don’t know how The Christians will cope.
I should qualify that. I don’t think Ken Ham speaks for The Christians, that univocal mob he thinks he leads, but only for a subset that is terminally stupid and believes in the literalness of the Bible — which already marks them as gullible fools, since an oft-retranslated work of a multiplicity of authors can’t be “literal”. Also, like many of his recent editorials, he credits the assistance of AiG’s research team
in writing it. In other words, he didn’t literally write it, but you’re supposed to believe he did.
Today marks the beginning of what has become known as pride month—a 30-day celebration of sexual sin and sinful identities by the media, many corporations, and even cities and towns. As those who believe God’s Word and understand that what these individuals are celebrating is nothing short of bondage and slavery to sin, June can be a discouraging month. But it can also be more than that—it can be a month that tests our commitment to the truth of God’s Word.
You thought my opening paragraph was hyperbole, didn’t you? I must have been exaggerating, suggesting that living during Pride Month was comparable to living in bondage and slavery
. You should learn that these crackers are the most entitled martyrs in America, and they love telling you about their imaginary sufferings. The AiG research team
worked hard to come up with “plausible scenarios” of what could happen to you this month.
Consider these very plausible scenarios that may happen to you this June:
Excuse me, very “plausible scenarios”. You can tell they were shackled by the constraints of reality in this exercise, and while they wanted to tell you about the imagined scenario where Ken was handcuffed to a bed and a large hairy man with a whip and a massive dildo was approaching him, they had to tone it down a bit. For once, their imaginations had to be limited by reality, so this is the worst they could come up with:
• The school you teach at requires educators to put their pronouns in their bios and call students by their preferred pronouns.
The school I teach at does not require that, but they did add an option in the personnel database to specify preferred pronouns. We do have an expectation that our students be treated with courtesy and respect, which may seem like an unnatural obligation to the AiG research team
, but isn’t that demanding to those of us living in the real world. We’re also expected to learn our students names, you know, and that’s harder than learning the few available options for pronouns.
• The company you work for hosts a rainbow-adorned pride-themed family picnic.
Oh no. Family picnics are like a damnation party. Don’t do that. Or if you do, stomp about glowering at everyone in attendance and take one bite of the potato salad before spitting it out and cursing the company to hell. Or is it the bit about adorning the event with rainbows? Like the entrance to Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter?
OK, yeah, that does look hellish.
My university does have a family picnic late in the summer. They don’t call it “pride-themed,” though, because they don’t need to — we’re accepting of all sexual orientations in all events.
• A family member you love, and who professes Christ, changes their social media profile picture to a rainbow filter to be a good “ally.”
<gasp> There are Christians who are supportive of their gay friends? Man, they’re going to be horrified when they learn they have Christian family members who are actually gay. And if taking the least and most negligible action of adding a filter to a social media profile cause the AiG research team
to tremble in fear that they might have to compromise their love of Jesus, imagine if their beloved family member came out as queer, marched in a gay pride parade, voted for gay rights, and married someone of the same sex!
Life must be truly scary for these people if that is their nightmare scenario.
The list goes on of scenarios that may play out during the month of June that hit close to home and that force us as believers to make decisions as we apply our biblical worldview in very practical ways.
Wait. That’s it? The AiG research team
wracked their brains to come up with some hypothetical traumatic consequences of Pride Month, and that’s the worst they could do, so they wind up with that pathetic “list goes on” conclusion? Sure, the list goes on, but most of what the homophobes would come up with would be such patent bullshit that they had to stop.
They then take a stab at answering how they would address those ‘problems,’ but they’re so chickenshit that they can’t even hint at what should be done, so they turn it into a series of questions.
Do we add the pronouns to the bio?
Sure, why not? If you have a clear preference, why not help others address you as you want to be addressed? I put my preferred pronouns in my syllabi and on social media, especially since “PZ” is gender ambiguous.
Do we use the preferred pronouns?
Of course! If someone tells you their name is “John,” it would be discourteous to call them “Fred.” Same thing, if they ask you to use “she/her”. Is this even a question? Does AiG expect their employees to be rude to visitors?
Do we attend the picnic?
If you like picnics, yes. Don’t be afraid of a little rainbow bunting. Personally, I’m more intimidated by the expectation that I’ll have to engage in conversation.
Do we confront our family members about their “allyship”?
Confront
? Finally, the mask slips a little bit. There’s nothing to confront in that scenario, unless you’re a deeply bigoted asshole who wants to yell at a family member you supposedly love. You don’t have to do anything, other than maybe privately agree with them.
When a family member does the opposite, making homophobic statements, I either stop following them or, if it’s particularly egregious, blocking them. I don’t confront, unless maybe they show up at the rainbow picnic or start addressing me with the wrong pronouns. I’d love to know what the AiG research team
or Ken Ham do when their loved ones show more tolerance than they do.
Where do we draw the line? The thought of losing one’s job or being sued in the courts is heart-wrenching for us, but like Daniel, there is a line that we as Christians do not cross.
To this brand of evangelical Christian, I guess being polite or attending a picnic with colorful decorations is tantamount to being martyred in a lion’s den.
I do wonder if the AiG research team
intentionally gave Ken Ham a list of the most feeble conflicts they could imagine as a way to poke fun at the old man, or if they really are such a bunch of puckered sphincters that they actually believe those are mortal offenses.
