Wheels within wheels

Ben Stein wins another honor. He has been declared the Rosa Parks of Darwin skeptics on the Rosa Parks of Rosa Parks Blogs, which points out amusing and offensive instances of rhetorical hyperbole. The amusing bit here, though, is that he got named this on the basis of an old post by creationist Kevin Wirth which does literally say Ben Stein is the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics, right in the title. I’d seen this before, way back in the old days of the Expelled hoo-ha, but this time I noticed an interesting connection. At the bottom of the article, it has this brief biographical note:

Seattle area writer and Darwin skeptic Kevin Wirth is the publisher and editor of the new book “Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters” by Dr. Jerry Bergman. He has investigated and researched issues related to the persecution of Darwin Doubters since 1982.

Wait, what? Jerry Bergman? That Jerry Bergman, the carbon-is-irreducibly-complex and chemistry-is-a-religion-so-you’ll-get-fired-for-posting-the-periodic-table Jerry Bergman? The crazy Jerry Bergman I debated back in November?

Wow. Kevin Wirth really knows how to pick ’em.

It also reminds me…that debate was recorded by the local creationists, and they said a DVD would be made available; it would have been nice if they’d sent me a copy. They haven’t. The existence of any recording seems to have faded away from their site. I wonder why?

It can’t be embarrassment, because they actually host a pdf by Bergman arguing his bizarre version of irreducible complexity.

…the only way to refute the concept of irreducible complexity is to demonstrate that all objects can be reduced to a fundamental particle and still function properly. If a radio, a functional eye or ear, can be achieved, for example, by a single quark (the particle scientists now believe is irreducible)–or all, of the functions of an intelligent human, including the ability to reproduce with other humans, can be produced by a single quark, they are not irreducibly complex.

Yeah, he’s that nuts. He doesn’t demand that evolutionists produce a mere crocoduck to prove evolution, he wants us to produce a porn film starring talking quarks.

More laughs from the Shorty Awards

Who would have thought something so trivial would generate so much amusement? I told you all to vote on Twitter for DrRachie, because there was a bunch of quacks in the lead. The kook formerly in the #1 position, the “Health Ranger”, has flamed out hysterically. Now the #2 quack, some guy named Mercola, is showing similar signs of cracking.

Dr. Mercola explained the situation himself in a Facebook post, “An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.”

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be able to report back that Mercola is now rocking back and forth in a corner, shouting “She’s a fatty fat fat fattie!”. At least he’s following the same trend of blatantly lying about the position of real skeptics and physicians.

Sometimes, I think we break the crazy people

I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie ‘medicine’. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.

Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.

He is outraged at being bumped out of the running — not only did he get outvoted, but many of the votes for him were declared invalid, since many people just got a twitter account and posted one item, his nomination. He’s lashing out with accusations of conspiracy and fraud and cheating and is planning to sue the contest. He has totally lost it over this trivial affair.

Look, guy, it’s an internet award. For tweeting. Take the big picture and recognize that as far as significance goes, it’s like finding an especially large and fluffy bit of belly button lint.

Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent.

I do have to point out a wonderful example of irony that is going into my collection. He accuses everyone who voted for DrRachie of fraud, and claims that we’ve been making false accusations of quackery against him.

It wasn’t really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries. Their supporters apparently reflect that same lack of ethical behavior. They will apparently do anything to win, even if it means engaging in widespread false accusations and trying to get natural health people removed from the contest altogether.

That’s the background. Now brace yourself: he later posted an article describing what skeptics, that is, you and me, actually believe. He did this by ‘researching’ skeptical web sites, none of which he links to, and none of which he actually provides accurate quotes from, but instead, he invents a list of his interpretations of what they say.

  • Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and “good for your health.”

  • Skeptics believe that fluoride chemicals derived from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants are really good for human health. They’re so good, in fact, that they should be dumped into the water supply so that everyone is forced to drink those chemicals, regardless of their current level of exposure to fluoride from other sources.

  • Skeptics believe that many six-month-old infants need antidepressant drugs. In fact, they believe that people of all ages can be safely given an unlimited number of drugs all at the same time: Antidepressants, cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping drugs and more — simultaneously!

  • Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

  • Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They are opponents of natural childbirth.)

  • Skeptics do not believe in hypnosis. This is especially hilarious since they are all prime examples of people who are easily hypnotized by mainstream influences.

  • Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness. They do not believe in the mind; only in the physical brain. In fact, skeptics believe that they themselves are mindless automatons who have no free will, no soul and no consciousness whatsoever.

  • Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

  • Skeptics believe that pesticides on the crops are safe, genetically modified foods are safe, and that any chemical food additive approved by the FDA is also safe. There is no advantage to buying organic food, they claim.

  • Skeptics believe that water has no role in human health other than basic hydration. Water is inert, they say, and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).

  • Skeptics believe that all the phytochemicals and nutrients found in ALL plants are inert, having absolutely no benefit whatsoever for human health. (The ignorance of this intellectual position is breathtaking…)

The only thing breathtaking in that list is the dishonesty. I don’t believe any of that, except that I will admit that I do hold the hilarious position that dead food does have the same nutritional properties of living food — if nothing else, everything I eat is very quickly dead after I’ve ground it to bits between my teeth and dropped it into the acid bath of my stomach. I don’t believe that I extract nutritional value from carrot souls, after all. The rest, though, is looney tunes. Water is inert? A fantastic solvent with complex physicochemical properties is inert? Wow. And at the same time, we think pesticides have no effect on us? I should mention that one of the things I study is teratology and the effect of environmental contaminants on developing embryos…I’m not sure how I rationalized that work if I think common chemicals do nothing.

Mike Adams is certifiably nuts, and worse, he is “lying and cheating,” “engaging in widespread false accusations,” and lacks “ethical behavior.”. At least he doesn’t have to worry that I’ll sue him for being a dingbat.

Maybe they should send them to the moon, then

I guess we’ve been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I’m sure.

Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.

According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”

I’m trying to imagine an audio speaker that works in a vacuum. And why you would need a moon-ready Bible reader for poor lunar illiterates, anyway.

What really has me stumped, though, is trying to imagine something more useless than sending a bunch of electronic junk to people trying to recover from a disaster.

Kent Hovind: still in jail

Apparently, Kent Hovind filed for an appeal to the Supreme Court based on a claim that he really wasn’t trying to finagle his way past US tax laws by structuring all of his bank withdrawals to be under $10,000, therefore avoiding a trigger that would demand they be reported; it’s unfair to target withdrawals that way, and besides, they were all for his Christian ministry. Hovind also had another ace up his sleeve: he begged his readers to pray for him.

I guess God doesn’t like him: “Mr. Hovind’s appeal for a rehearing before the Supreme Court has been denied.”.

By the way, Kent Hovind is still putting up bizarre dialogs on his CSE blogs. He’s been having conversations with God, dead Egyptian priests, and Christian saints, who all reassure him about how clever and smart and good he is, despite being in prison for tax evasion. It’s pathetic and sad. There has to be a word for this: it’s a kind of mega-sockpuppetry, in which it isn’t just random strangers on the internet mysteriously popping up to back him up — it’s God and the saints and heroes of history who are all appearing as voices in his head to validate him.

Oh, I guess there is a word for that. It’s called “religion”.

(via Nathan Zamprogno)

Mrs. Robinson has some standards

Iris Robinson is an MP in Northern Ireland who has been, umm, frolicking. She was 58; she had been having an adulterous affair with a 19 year old. Eh, that’s a private matter between her and her husband, you’re thinking, and we shouldn’t care about it, as long as it doesn’t affect her performance in her job.

Except…

She’s been using her government connections to funnel money to her boy toy. Lots of money.

He [the young man] said Iris Robinson, now 60, gave him two checks for 25,000 pounds ($40,000) each, but she then asked him for 5,000 pounds ($8,000) back, possibly to donate to the evangelical Protestant church she attends.

Wow. Teen-aged lovers cost $80,000 now? Even with the 10% rebate, that’s way out of my price range.

But wait…she needed the money back to give to her church? That’s a bit hypocritical, I think, unless this is the Church of Free (or Not-So-Free) Love. It’s not though; she actually has a reputation as a conservative freak about sex. She doesn’t like homosexuals at all.

There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children.

There must be sufficient confidence that the community has the best possible protection against such perverts.

…

What I say I base on biblical pronouncements, based on God’s word. I am amazed that people are surprised when I quote from scriptures. It shows the churches either aren’t preaching God’s word or are watering it down.

I cannot think of anything more sickening than a child being abused. It is comparable to the act of homosexuality. I think they are all comparable. I feel totally repulsed by both.

Get that? Consensual homosexual behavior: more vile than raping children! And she isn’t even Catholic.

She may have been boinking a youngster 40 years her junior and barely above the age of consent, but at least she wasn’t cavorting with a peer and an equal with similar backgrounds and interests and the same sexual organs! That would be bad.

Skin-deep Christianity

I was one of those weird kids growing up: nose always in a book, bored by sports, happy to go to school. This was a bit strange because my father had been a broken-nosed lineman on the varsity high school football team, was always playing hooky to go fishing, and once he graduated, went off to a succession of manly muscular jobs, working on the railroad, as a lumberjack, and eventually as an auto mechanic. I think he was perpetually baffled by the bookish nerd he’d fathered, but then, he had six kids and everyone of us ended up different, independent, and stubborn in our own ways. And that was just fine, that’s what good parenting is about — supporting your kids just enough that they can be free to be themselves. My parents did a good job.

When I had kids of my own, I also discovered how hard that is. Children can be wilful little beasts, but they are also desperate for approval. It would have been so easy to raise a family of neurotic, unhappy, but miserably obedient dependents, if only I’d been willing to impose my views on theirs, and withheld love to get my way. As it is, though, I’ve ended up with three kids who’ve each gone off in their own weird direction — sometimes leaving me baffled — but I trust them to know their own minds and be willing to struggle a bit to figure out what works for them, not necessarily what works for me.

So it was with a special revulsion that I read this story of oblivious parents giving their kids home tattoos. They were branding them with their religious identity, inking crosses into their skins, which explains a lot, since smug Christians tend to be completely blind to the freakishness of their obsession, but it wouldn’t make any difference if they’d been atheists punching scarlet “A”s into their childrens’ shoulders — it’s child abuse. It completely misses the point of parenting, which is not the same as indoctrination, and confuses guidance and education with ownership. Here’s what the mother said about it:

“I’m their mother,” Patty Jo Marsh said late Saturday. “Shouldn’t I be able to decide if they get one?”

No.

Children are your responsibility, not your personal sheet of blank paper. They aren’t there for you to scribble on, crumple up, and throw away if you don’t like them. Isn’t it weird how the religious wackjobs can howl about how a fetus is a human being that must be granted the privilege of existence, but once it pops out, it reverts to being a possession, a thing that mommy and daddy can do with as they please?

Jeez, next thing you know they’ll be demanding the right to chop off the ends of the boys’ penises. Or to take a chunk of broken glass to the girls’ clitorises.

Nah, nobody would be that crazy.

Brit Hume, yet another oblivious religious kook

Like the writers at Political Animal, I have regarded the sordid celebrity nonsense surrounding Tiger Woods with complete indifference. He’s rich, he has behaved stupidly, that’s the end of the story, despite all those lurid magazine covers in front of my face at the supermarket checkout line.

But this is something else. Brit Hume, who has always been mindless conservative drone, has crossed a line. Look what he said on Fox News:

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’

Nothing surprising there: Fox News pundits clearly would like to see all of America converted to some form of right-wing Christianity.

I am surprised by one thing, though. Who knew all those other celebrities behaving badly on magazine covers and celebrity news were all non-Christian?

Deeeeeepaaaak!

Deepak Chopra recently gave a talk in which he rattled off all of the amazing assertions below.

The essential nature of the material world is not material; the essential nature of the physical world is not physical; the essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff.

Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition — and we can call it the superstition of materialism — which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding – that perception is in the brain. It’s not in the brain; perception is in consciousness. All our thoughts are in consciousness, all our imagination is in consciousness, all our cognition is in consciousness. Everything that we call reality is in consciousness. Everything! There’s nothing outside consciousness. And no one can find this consciousness. And the reason they can’t find consciousness is because they are looking in the wrong place.

Past, present and future are actually one phenomenon, one picture, one reality, one consciousness.

Every cell instantly knows what is happening in every other cell, in fact, in the whole universe.

I am particularly amused by the topsy-turvy claim that modern science is all superstition, since this talk was given at a funny venue.

Deepak was speaking at an Indian Astrology Conference.

My comment: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaa! Hee hee. HAAAA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ho, ha, ha <choke> ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Hee.

That guy. What a joker. I wish I were dishonest enough that I could make the kind of money he does marketing himself as a clown. He doesn’t understand physics, the brain, consciousness, or cells, yet he can still make big bucks standing up in front of a professional society of frauds and telling them a set of lies that they want to hear.

By the way, parts of India experienced an eclipse on New Years — and the astrologers and priests were full of worries.

But astrologers took the eclipse seriously. “Eclipses do influence people’s lives just the way stars do. Those who came in direct contact of the eclipse between 12.22am and 1.24am should have been careful. But since most of the New Year parties were planned indoors due to the cold weather, there was not much reason to worry,” said Vinay Kumar Dubey, a city based astrologer.

Temples in the city, however, closed early in wake of the eclipse. Mythology says that a lunar eclipse generates negative energy. “It is inauspicious to invoke the deities during an eclipse. The idols are covered by organic materials like grass, neem leaves, vila trees or raw silk shroud to prevent the natural aura from being destroyed,” said a priest at the Hanuman temple on the University Road.

Those were Chopra’s people! Of course, if you read the whole article, you’ll find that India also contains many sensible people who deplored the superstitious nonsense, and saw it as an interesting astronomical phenomenon, and nothing more. I guess in Chopra’s terms, they were the superstitious ones…not the buffoons covering idols with neem leaves.

We’re doomed.

The world will not end in 2012.

Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but you knew that all along. This nonsensical 2012 date for an apocalypse is pure numerology: one of the great cycles of the Mayan calendar comes to an end in that year, but it simply means that if you were a Mayan, you’d flip the page on your calendar then (or start carving a new symbol on your stone tablets). Only a loon would attach so much significance to an arbitary magical date that they would think it implies the world will end.

Harold Camping must be a very sensible person.

“That date has not one stitch of biblical authority,” Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world. “It’s like a fairy tale.”

The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011.

Oops.

Camping is completely bonkers: his calculation is more idiotic numerology.

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals “atonement.” Ten is “completeness.” Seventeen means “heaven.” Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

“Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that’s 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days – the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

Camping has made thes kinds of apocalyptic predictions before — he apparently thought Christ was going to return on 6 September 1994. The amazing thing is that in spite of his record of failure, in spite of the patent inanity of his calculations, the guy has a following and owns 55 radio stations that are spewing out his drivel to a gullible audience.

And that, I think, is perhaps the only legitimate evidence of the imminent demise of the human race.