Martin Wagner has been harassed for some time by a particularly looney theist, a fellow who wrote an astonishingly stupid anti-atheist essay, got ripped on a blog for it, and has ever since whined pathetically at the injustice of being criticized and insulted, and has basically made it his task to be a petty pest.

Possummomma has written about this state of affairs, and now Wagner is planning to take legal action. I don’t know that I entirely approve — I think the kook has done a fine job of discrediting himself — but he has a lawyer and is taking legal advice, and it’s not a bad idea in principle for an atheist to make a stand. Wagner has posted his rationale, and is asking for financial help. Check it out, and donate if you sympathize with his position.

Mr Picknell, at jackaroni1229@yahoo.com, had a little question for me.

From: jackaroni1229@yahoo.com
Subject: Eye for Eye
Date: September 22, 2008 5:27:42 PM CDT
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PZ
Just curious if God has impaled YOUR son on a rusty spike yet?
Jack

Why, no, Jack! He hasn’t.

Let me guess. Catholic? Representing for your faith? I’m sure you make the Pope proud.

Or maybe you’re just a random amoral scumbag.

Maybe he and I are going to have to have a competition to see who gets the nastiest letters. We do get a slightly different perspective on Christianity than most, I think, since our view is of a near-constant flow of letters like this one:

Warning! Uses Christian language!

(Click for larger image)

I’ve got a little stack of similar letters growing on my desk, too. Although, to be fair, most are less scatological abuse, and more whining about how I’m so awfully hateful, but fortunately Jesus will toss me into a lake of fire soon.

Any physics-minded people at Virginia Tech who would like to deal with some crackpots coming to your campus? There is a talk at Virginia Tech this Friday by Bill Lucas on his claimed biblical model for the structure of atoms. It looks like very weird stuff.

CAMPUS BIBLE FELLOWSHIP

INVITES YOUR ORGANIZATION MEMBERS
TO A
CREATION SEMINAR on the

“EXPANDING EARTH: EVIDENCE FOR BIBLICAL CREATION”

PRESENTED BY

DR. BILL LUCAS, B.S., M.S., PH.D in Theoretical Physics

TO BE HELD ON

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2008
AT 7 P.M.
IN SQUIRES STUDENT CENTER, ROOM #341

The presentation in is the form of a PowerPoint using many pictures to explain the new theory of gravity that supports a Biblical view of creation.

There will be opportunity following the presentation for questions and answers.

If you would like to check out the organization that Dr. Lucas works with, you can go to the website: www.commonsensescience.org

You really have to check out that Common Sense Science site — it’s very glib. They claim to have a new model for the structure of matter that involves spinning rings; nowhere do they explain what problems this model solves. I know, I’m not a physicist, so how would I know this isn’t really an exciting and revolutionary new idea? Well, there’s a couple of clues. First and foremost, it claims to be a new idea in physics, but there’s no math anywhere. That is very surprising.

Second, when you rummage around, you won’t find any scientific rationale for anything…but you will find repeated assertions that the model is compatible with Judeo-Christian beliefs. That’s an awfully feeble excuse.

And finally, if you expect their links page to give you some useful external sources to check against, think again. The only external sites mentioned are places like Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, etc. You will not find any credible physics at any of those sites — actually, you won’t find any science of any kind.

And of course, the flier is the clincher. This will be a preachin’ fraud who will try to bedazzle the audience with pseudoscience.

If any of you go, let me know what he says! There could be real entertainment value here. You might also want to get in touch with Freethinkers at Virginia Tech; they’re trying to coordinate some kind of response.

The state of California now issues gender-neutral marriage licenses: they simply register the legal relationship of “Party A” and “Party B”, where the relevant individuals fill out their actual names. That sounds reasonable and straightforward to me — it’s a state-mandated contract.

Wouldn’t you know it, though, there has to be someone offended by it.

In an utterly absurd whine, Rachel Bird and Gideon Codding are stamping their selfish, privileged little feet and bleating that they are soooo upset about this.

And to Bird and Codding, that is unacceptable.

“We are traditionalists – we just want to be called bride and groom,” said Bird, 25, who works part time for her father’s church. “Those words have been used for generations and now they just changed them.”

…

Bird and Codding have refused to complete the new forms, a stand that has already cost them. Because their marriage is not registered with the state, Bird cannot sign up for Codding’s medical benefits or legally take his name. They are now exploring their options, she said.

That is insane. They are voluntarily rejecting benefits that they apparently think are pretty important because they don’t like the impersonal legalese on a state form? Get over it. What are their real reasons? Here’s one: religious wackaloonery.

Bird’s father, Doug Bird, pastor of Roseville’s Abundant Life Fellowship, said he is urging couples not to sign the new marriage forms, and that he is getting some support from congregants and colleagues at local churches.

“I would encourage you to refuse to sign marriage licenses with ‘Party A’ and ‘Party B,’ ” he wrote in a letter that he sent to them. “If ever there was a time for the people of the United States to stand up and let their voices be heard – this is that time.”

Here’s another:

“Those who support (same-sex marriage) say it has no impact on heterosexuals,” said Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute. “This debunks that argument.”

Now that’s reaching. The wingnuts have long been claiming that allowing gays to marry somehow hurts their heterosexual marriages, a claim that is patently silly and false, and now they’ve got two idiots who will voluntarily slap themselves with a penalty so they can claim genuine damages. This is not credible.

They want to be called a bride and groom. OK, they’re a bride and groom. They had a church wedding in which no doubt they were addressed as bride and groom. Now it’s time for them to grow up and stop being petulant children.

By the way, they’ve also been married before and have five kids between them already. I think they can quit playing the nomenclature games — they aren’t in your traditional conservative version of marriage anyway, and they’re simply setting a bad example for their children. But then, they probably want to raise another generation of spoiled monsters with an easily offended sense of privilege.

I have just read the Conservapædia article on me. It is a marvel. Let me single out one jewel of misdirection among many.

In January 2008, Myers participated in a debate with Discovery Institute fellow Geoffrey Simmons on KMMS. He was unable to counter criticisms of the fossil record, in particular the absence of transitional forms in the whale fossil record. Geoffrey was invited back for an hour long talk the next week. PZ Myers now refuses to debate creation scientists.

The first sentence is harmlessly wrong: the station call letters are KKMS. It’s a nice indicator of their quality control, however.

The second sentence is completely wrong. This was the radio debate in which Geoffrey Simmons made claims about the absence of transitionals in the fossil record, was utterly bewildered when I rattled off a long list of well-known species names, and then admitted that he got all his information from an apparently cursory reading of a Scientific American article. Mr Simmons was the one lacking any counters of substance, not me.

I love the next two sentences. Simmons was invited back, Myers wasn’t…ah, the delicious implication that I had flopped, when the truth is that I had embarrassed the Christian radio station’s position by crushing Simmons so thoroughly. And then to state that I no longer debate creationists, as if I’d run from a humiliating defeat! That was a debate in which even the creationist onlookers were averting their eyes and whining that Simmons had been pwnz0red.

Sorry, Conservapædians, if that’s an example of the way you guys slant your articles, I have to laugh.

Andy Schlafly, the blinkered pudyanker at Conservapædia, has been on an impotent crusade against Richard Lenski for some time, and to his own routine self-humiliation. A while back, Schlafly wrote a petty, silly demand to Lenski that he turn over all of his data to the Conservapædians…Lenski wrote back and scorched him. Schlafly kept whining, mewling, and carping for the data (which he wouldn’t know what to do with if he got it, anyway), Lenski slammed him again.

Schlafly, demonstrating the causal relationship between arrogance and incompetence, has done it once more. He wrote to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a letter listing his perceived gripes with the Lenski research, which he expected to be published. It’s a joke. He lists experimental errors that aren’t errors, statistical flaws that don’t exist, and snootily denies their interpretation of the results. And, of course, he whimpers again that the data hasn’t been publicly released. Once again, he openly reveals that he doesn’t understand the research.

The editorial board reviewed his letter and rejected it…no surprise at all. They’re also not likely to publish letters from schizophrenic hobos, random assortments of flyspecks on a sheet of urine-stained toilet paper, or the crayon scribblings of spoiled 3rd grade children who are outraged that the hot-lunch menu is inadequately stocked with pizza. Here is their reply:

A member of the Editorial Board has evaluated the letter and concluded that PNAS cannot publish it for the following reasons:
From what I take to be the underlying issue from the numbered points, Mr. Schlafly’s main concern has to do with the fact that one experiment failed to yield a statistically significant result, and this happened to be the experiment with the largest sample size. Every experiment has limited power to detect a difference of any given magnitude, and so in a series of experiments some may yield non-significant results even when the null hypothesis is false. The non-significant experiment may even be the one with the largest sample size. There is nothing exceptional in this–it is a matter of chance. Nevertheless, from a statistical point of view, it is proper to combine the results of independent experiments, as Blount et al. did correctly in their original paper. If the overall result is significant, as it is in this case, then the whole series of tests is regarded as significant. Mr. Schlafly seems to suggest that experiments differing in sample size cannot be combined in an overall analysis, and if this is what he is suggesting, he is wrong.

I think Letters published in PNAS should raise points that in themselves, or in conjunction with the authors’ response, should be of wide interest to the readership of PNAS or should illuminate some obscure or subtle point. The issues raised by Mr. Schlafly are neither obscure nor subtle, but are part of everyday statistical analysis at a level too elementary to need rehearsal in the pages of PNAS.

Mr. Schlafly’s final comment about release of data is uncalled for. My understanding is that the authors have made the relevant materials available on their web site. This seems to me to meet the requirement that “data collected with public funds belong in the public domain.” If Mr. Schlafly believes that the disclosure is incomplete, that is an issue that needs to be argued with the original funding agency, not with the readers of PNAS.

“The issues raised by Mr. Schlafly are neither obscure nor subtle, but are part of everyday statistical analysis at a level too elementary to need rehearsal in the pages of PNAS.” Oh, snap.

Oh, yeah, and … “he is wrong.”

Ay yi yi

Minnesota’s very own Michele Bachmann starts praising science, but I don’t think that word means what she thinks it means, since she concludes with “science ultimately conforms to god’s truth”.

Pity us. This raving fruitbat is our 6th district congresscreature.