I guess Dr Who was a documentary

No wonder Tucker Carlson fell for it — UFOs are like the Tardis.

The attorney told DailyMail.com that one alleged recovery, recounted to him by a supposed crash retrieval program insider, involved a 30ft saucer partially embedded in the earth, with some fantastical properties.

‘They tried to hook a bulldozer to it to pull it out. And it pulled out a shape like a pie slice, almost like it was part of the way it was constructed,’ Sheehan said.

‘When it came loose a couple feet, they stopped immediately. They didn’t want to destroy the integrity of the machine.

‘They had a guy go into it. He got in there, and it was as big as a football stadium. It was freaking him out and started making him feel nauseous, he was so disoriented because it was so gigantic inside.

‘It was the size of a football stadium, while the outside was only about 30 feet in diameter.’

Sheehan said that space was not the only warped dimension around the craft.

‘He staggered back out after being in there a couple of minutes, and outside it was four hours later,’ he said. ‘There was all kinds of time distortion and space distortion.’

Oh yeah. I’m convinced. It was in the Daily Mail!

Ken Ham is right!

I bet you never thought you’d see me writing that, did you? Ham has always insisted on a rigidly applied set of doctrines that may not be questioned — any doubt about any one Christian claim will lead to the whole house of cards collapsing. The Washington Post demonstrates the validity of that argument with this article, The Revolt of Christian Homeschoolers.

It’s about a couple in Virginia, Christina and Aaron Beall, who were brought up in an ultraconservative faith, with all the usual restrictions: women will submit to the man, public schools were evil, contraception was bad (she got pregnant within weeks of getting married.)

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”

What broke their faith was that last bit: the rod. They could not beat their children. And if whupping their kids with a stick was wrong, what else could be wrong about their faith? So they enrolled their daughter in <gasp> public school. She thrived and was happy. And they discovered that their religion had lied to them about schooling.

“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

They kept on learning.

Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.

Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.

The article says they didn’t question Christianity, so they didn’t become godless atheists or anything horrible like that, but they did become significantly more open-minded and are now reading more than the Bible and awful books like Bill Gothard’s or Michael and Debi Pearl’s. Now look at what they’re reading.

Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups.

Poor Ken Ham. He was right that any lapse in dedication to his interpretation of Christianity would lead to apostasy, but he’s probably sitting in a dark corner, hissing and gnashing his teeth and flicking his forked tail if he hears about the Bealls. One family has escaped his grasp!

There’d have to be something wrong with your brain to sign up for a Neuralink trial

Has anybody read The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton? It’s about a man who gets a brain implant to correct his epilepsy, but then it starts triggering increasingly violent crimes. I strongly dislike everything Crichton ever wrote — he was a Luddite who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, while the press and the public fawn over his bad science — but for the first time, I feel like he might have been onto something.

Reportedly, Elon Musk has gotten FDA approval to stick chronic electrodes into people’s brains. Why you’d want anything associated with that incompetent boob permanently wired into your brain is a mystery.

The FDA acknowledged in a statement that the agency cleared Neuralink to use its brain implant and surgical robot for trials on patients but declined to provide more details.

Neuralink and Musk did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The story has triggered my internal Michael Crichton and now I’m wondering what horror will result from this decision.

  • Patients will start murdering people ala The Terminal Man (or Musk’s self-driving software) as Neuralink misfires.
  • Neuralink will catch fire and burn down to the patient’s basicranium.
  • Neuralink will explode when it’s switched on, cratering the patient’s head.
  • Neuralink will attract Nazis who will fill the patient’s brain with bad ideas.
  • Neuralink will do nothing at all, but it will distract the patient from investing in better treatments.

My imagination fails. You’ll have to think of all the likely horrible consequences of getting a Neuralink implant.

Another example of why I despise Christianity

It leads stupid people like Ray Comfort to say things like this:

The Queen of rock ‘n’ roll passed into eternity today. All the money that Tina Turner possessed, all her fame, all her awards, and accolades now mean nothing. The only thing that matters, is “Were her sins forgiven?”

OK, I forgive her sins. Done.

Maybe better questions to ask when someone dies are: “Did they make the world a better place? Did they create beauty? Did they inspire? Did they speak truth to the world?”

Tina Turner gets a yes to each question. Ray Comfort gets a slow, sad shake of the head.

Haw haw haw

Ken Ham was asked if Muslims are going to hell. His answer:

Well, it doesn’t matter if one is a Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Muslim, Methodist, Hindu, Sikh, Orthodox Jew, or any other denomination or religious group—if a person has not repented of sin and received the free gift of salvation offered through the Lord Jesus Christ (being “born again”), they will be separated from God for eternity in a place the Bible calls hell. And sadly, the majority of people will go there as Jesus warned, ‘Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Matthew 7:13).

Shorter Ken Ham: yes.

Please show me how to calculate a “wokeness” index

The loons are just making up numbers now.

Australia is going to “dramatically” increase in its wokeness in the next year, says The University of Austin Founding Fellow Peter Boghossian.

“If Stalin’s Soviet Union was a ten, and Portland Oregon is an eight, Australia is hovering around a three,” he told Sky News host Peta Credlin.

“However, I predicted that number will go up rather dramatically in the next year.”

He only gives Australia a three because the “toxic ideology” hasn’t had time to “metastasize” and “worm its way through the system.”

I’m not clear on how he used “reason to wake the woke,” as he claims, and I have no idea what weird diverticulum of his monstrously bloated colon he pulled those numbers out of. Where I come from, yanking out random numbers and pretending they’re authoritative is frowned upon. Or laughed at. Either response is appropriate here.

The Christian rot is everywhere

Hey, isn’t that Achilles from the movie Troy? I had no idea he was Christian.

I am not at all surprised by the revelation that evangelical Christians think they’re waging a holy war against trans people. Now we have even more evidence, in the email lobbyists write to politicians, with both incessantly claiming that God is on their side.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

The way these people talk to each other…it’s all Bible references and piety, while they’re advocating to increase the suffering of children. For someone like me, who is rather firmly anti-religious, it’s repulsive.

The repeated notes about “blessings” and “prayers,” as well as sign-offs like “God bless you” and “Under His wings,” proliferate throughout the emails, which frequently reference explicit religious motivations for targeting trans people.

“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

They can’t muster a good argument or a rational defense for their behavior, so they resort to claiming Biblical authority. It’s lazy and stupid and done for an evil purpose, and damn the evidence. For the Bible tells me so (which it doesn’t, actually — most of this stuff is interpolation and reading their biases into the text) is all they’ve got.

Emails from 2020 show right-wing lobbyists and politicians rejoicing after Idaho passed two anti-trans bills. One of the bills, which is still being fought by the ACLU, bans trans women and girls from girls’ sports, and is rooted in the myth that trans women have a leg up in sports, though evidence has consistently stated the opposite. “Dear Friends,” wrote Young, the Idaho representative, “I cannot thank you enough for your help and support! It is official—Governor Little signed both H500 and H509 today! Many tears and prayers of gratitude! The fight goes on!” Young sent the email to nearly 30 people, some of whom have also lobbied against abortion, including Deutsch.

It’s the same story with the abortion holy war. It’s all based on emotional biases and ignorance, bolstered by a misreading of their holy book. I bet if we had a trove of email from anti-abortion lobbyists and politicians, it would be full of the same sickening god-talk.

It’s also driven by paranoia and a persecution complex. They actually believe that trans people are an overwhelming powerful force bent on destroying a tiny band of Christian martyrs, so they need to eradicate them first.

“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

“I completely agree that it is Christian Nationalism, although I tend to refer to it as religious extremism,” Shupe said in an email to VICE News. “Christian Nationalists are a danger to the LGBTQ population, and society in general: a genuine threat to people’s lives and safety. They feign compassion while doing everything possible to strip us of our civil rights and ability to safely exist and participate in society.”

Yes! Christianity is the poison in America’s veins. It’s everywhere. It is the Goliath that you find imbedded in every city, every small town, and every little farm across the country.

It’s not the only cause for the prejudice, though. I have to wonder about the atheists who are happily siding with religious extremists to condemn the trans ‘agenda’.

The irony of a creationist moaning about others denying science…

The Republican legislature in Kentucky assembled a set of those inhumane, ignorant anti-trans laws, and handed it to the Democratic governor…who vetoed it. Good work, Governor Andy Beshear!

Kentucky’s Democratic governor issued an election-year veto Friday of a sweeping Republican bill aimed at regulating the lives of transgender youths that includes banning access to gender-affirming health care and restricting the bathrooms they can use.

The bill also bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools and allows teachers to refuse to refer to transgender students by the pronouns they use. It easily passed the GOP-dominated legislature with veto-proof margins, and lawmakers will reconvene next week for the final two days of this year’s session, when they could vote to override the veto.

Gov. Andy Beshear said in a written veto message that the bill allows “too much government interference in personal healthcare issues and rips away the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children.”

In his one-page message, he warned that the bill’s repercussions would include an increase in youth suicides. The governor said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky.”

Wait a minute…Kentucky? Who do I know who lives in Kentucky?

Right. You can guess how he responded.

Another politician showing blatant disregard for young people, for science, for parents and for God’s Word by Vetoing legislation he claims would harm children, but the opposite is true.

Children and young people do not have the maturity to make life altering decisions (that are destructive regardless) advocated by the LGBTQ movement. So sad many will destroy their lives because politicians deny the obvious, there’s only two genders of humans, male and female. Science confirms it as males have a pair of XY chromosomes and females a pair of XX. And of course, God’s word makes it clear:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Does anyone else feel stirrings of rage when a know-nothing, superstitious dogmatist like Ken Ham decides to declare what science has determined, and gets it all wrong, while relying on his authority as a preacher to persuade people to accept his views? No? Just me?

I’m not as irritated when he tries to explain what his version of the Bible says, since I don’t give a good goddamn about the book or his interpretation of it. Although I am confused by his Bible quote.

So God created male and female in his image…how does that work, exactly? Do both men and women look like god? If we’re going to get all literal on this, as Ham prefers to do, does that imply that god is a bipedal primate with ambiguous genitalia, or is he some kind of shape-shifter? Does his god have XX chromosomes, or XY, or some other combination? I don’t really care what the answer is, since I think it’s all bullshit, but you know, Ham claims that God’s word makes it clear, and it’s anything but.

Ham goes on to complain about bathrooms, of course.

What a travesty that this Governor would allow males to use women’s restrooms (and vice versa). By allowing young people to use the bathrooms of their choice is certainly a denial of the sin nature of man and what can happen because of that. Governor Beshear refers to his “faith,”—he needs to refer to the clear teaching of the Word of God on gender! The Governor does not own children, they belong to parents and ultimately to God. And they certainly don’t belong to teachers.

It’s been a long time since I read the Bible, but I have to ask: is there a commandment about men’s and women’s restrooms in there? Personally, I think people should be allowed to use the restroom of their choice, because what they’re going to do in there is to privately relieve themselves, and that’s about it. OK, maybe wash their hands, touch up their makeup, that sort of thing. They are not dens of sin.

Also, the idea that parents “own” kids is offensive. Parents have a responsibility for their children, which is not the same as possession, and society can step in when they fail in, or violate those responsibilities.

Actually, contrary to what Gov Beshear claims, what the Kentucky legislature passed have passed are the strongest bills in the nation protecting kids, parents and teachers! Notice how the media always like to portray such legislation as “anti-trans” instead of “pro-children, pro-family, pro-parents” etc. Media like to use words they think will cause people to believe those passing such legislation are full of hate–which is not the truth at all. Yet, I often see hate from people directed at Christians/conservatives because they won’t comply with the LGBT worldview.

Trans kids exist and should have rights. The primary consequence of those bills is to deny trans kids their autonomy (I know, Ham doesn’t believe children should have that) and cause active harm. They also deny parents their right to fulfill their responsibilities and provide appropriate care to their children.

I will concede that the people behind that legislation might not be full of hate. They’re full of stupidity and selfishness, instead.