Wait, this is about tradcaths?

I almost didn’t watch this video because, well, look at the thumbnail. It’s about Lawrence Krauss? No thank you very much. But it’s not about Krauss at all, so it’s OK!

It’s actually all about these wacky Traditional Catholics with more money than sense who cunningly put together a movie, a real movie/documentary, with real scientists cleverly questioned to make statements they could splice together to imply that they supported geocentrism. So it’s about how some kooks fooled Lawrence Krauss!

The highlight for me, though, is when the creators are in a conference with Michael Voris, the whirlpool guy. And best of all, they go to a flat earth conference to tell everyone there that they were nuts to believe the Earth was flat, but they were exactly right to claim that the sun orbits around the Earth. Even fanatical Catholic science deniers laugh at flat-earthers!

Anyway, recommended — there’s also useful information about how pseudoscientists manipulate the truth to support their delusions.

Ever wonder why so many people are running away from organized atheism?

Huh. I’d almost forgotten David Silverman. Maybe I should peek in at what he’s up to nowadays.

AAAAAAAAAAAIEEEE.

Yikes. That’s some Twitter bio. I wouldn’t need to look any further to know that I want nothing to do with him, ever again. I also discovered that there are 54 people who follow him and also follow me — re-evaluate your life choices, people! Although I do suspect that many of our mutuals follow him to keep track of what horror he’s promoting today (similarly, some of them are probably hate-following me).

It’s an ugly world, there in Silverman’s cranium. While claiming “facts over feelings”, he’s also a pandemic denialist.

Right. 300,000 dead is “hype”. Get in line with Alex Jones, Dave.

Would you believe he’s also retweeting Tulsi Gabbard and transphobic YouTubers, and Tim Pool and Jack Posobiec and Mythicist Milwaukee? Of course you would. He now claims he was wrongly cancelled by “Woke” people. It looks to me like he was rightly cancelled by normal decent people who expected ethical behavior from someone representing an organization they had joined. And now he’s making horrible videos with people like Andy Signore to make self-pitying excuses for “men who cheat”.

Yuck. I feel betrayed, too.

I tried imagining this, and then I throwed up

Wow, the naiveté. There was never a time when I thought this would be a good idea.

Imagine a world is ruled by scientists, not by politicians.

I don’t know who the guy on the bottom right is, but I hope he’s embarrassed to have been lumped in with that crowd of people, none of whom have any qualifications in governance.

Also, the bad grammar — this seems to be an image patched together by some guy who has nothing but a twitter account, Physics-astronomy.org, a Facebook page, and an ugly news-aggregator site, Physics-astronomy.org, none of which are affiliated with any organization of physicists, and which seems to be a site that skims off articles on science from other sites and posts them without attribution. It’s the product of a no-talent parasite, in other words, so it’s doubly embarrassing to see that kind of stupid arrogance.

It’s a shame that so many atheists are suckers for this kind of crap.

Ha ha ho ho

I went into the office to pick up my mail, among other things, and look what someone sent me!

Oh, look, it has a cute little reindeer sticker! It’s probably a Christmas card. How sweet!

Although, as I do with all mystery mail, I checked the return address. “Living Way Lytle Creek”…my spider sense is tingling. The back of the card confirmed my expectations.

Everything beneficial that atheism has ever contributed to society is referenced herein…. Does anyone want to guess what’s inside? Go on. I bet you can.

[Read more…]

This exists

You can buy it as a Christmas gift! It’s only $70!

There are other versions. There are a whole lot of these things!

In case you’re wondering what it is, it’s a small Faraday cage for people who are sensitive (they think) to EMF radiation. These are designed for you to place your WiFi router in so that it will stop hosing your house with 2.4-5 gigaherz radiation. Which is the whole point of a WiFi router. So yeah, you go drop $100 on a router so you can browse the internet, and then cage it up in a metal box so you can’t browse the internet. Brilliant!

Another amazing thing: those cages have a significant number of 5-star reviews. I guess they work!

Uh-oh, the young’uns are noticing our incompetence

I guess one of the dangers of teaching a class in critical thinking is that students might lose respect for us old people.

But students have grown annoyed.

“They were uniformly outraged,” Smith says, “because people are investing time and energy into this instead of doing things like stopping the spread of coronavirus or putting in place policies to counter global warming.”

Most are in their late teens and early twenties, having grown up as digital natives.

“They believe they have better skills to fact-check,” he says, citing anecdotes — admittedly not ideal for a science class, but there hasn’t been enough polling, yet, for good data — about middle-aged women falling for QAnon’s co-opted “save the children” slogan. One student’s mother had fallen for it.

While it’s heartening that his students can see what’s going on, Smith is concerned about what it all means for the rest of us.

History is going to remember us boomers as the generation that was so stupid that they fell for that QAnon bullshit. Someday you might be dandling a grandchild on your knee and they’re going to ask what side you were on in the Idiot Wars, and you better have a good and honest answer.