He’s baaaack

People keep telling me I ought to read Freakonomics, but something about it keeps tripping my bogosity detector, and I’ve never gotten around to it. Now I’ve got another reason to avoid it: the Freakonomics blog is hosting a particular silly Q&A with someone who has absolutely no credibility on anything: Scott Adams. It reinforces my bias that the authors don’t exercise much judgment.

Scott Adams is about the last person of whom I’d be interested in asking any questions: he wouldn’t answer anything except to say how much smarter he is than any so-called expert, and any hint of actual content in a reply would be quickly denied as nothing but a joke.

Don’t worry, kids, Curry is just making it all up

Lots of people have been sending me this bad article from the Daily Mail, “Human race will ‘split into two different species'”. I don’t quite get it. This is the very same utter nonsense from Oliver Curry that came out at this same time last year.

Is this to be a yearly occurrence now? Every Halloween some newspaper will dredge up this bilge from the London School of Economics and try to horrify us with abominable pseudoscience masquerading as evolutionary biology?

D’Souza vs Hitchens

D’Souza is crowing over his debate with Hitchens — he’s got a YouTube clip on his site that he seems to think exemplifies his triumph. His arguments there are 1) the fine-tuning argument for God, which is pathetic, as Douglas Adams scotched that one long ago, and 2) the usual claim that atheists are the major murderers of the 20th century, which is again silly — blame totalitarian ideologies for that, not philosophical positions on the existence of deities.

But then, D’Souza is running a poll to judge the winner. I think you can all go over there, view the clip, and judge for yourself how to vote. I have to agree that Hitchens wasn’t at his best in the segment D’Souza chose to show, but he is still ten times smarter than the little wingnut pipsqueak.

Why is San Diego on fire?

I would have guessed because it’s very dry and windy, but James Hartline has a less obvious answer.

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don’t care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!” And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of “mom” and “dad” in the text books and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California.

And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-christian California rebels.

Doesn’t God have a baseball team to manage? It would be a better use of his time than these silly destructive temper tantrums.

What did America do to deserve these idiots?

Do we have to wait until he’s elected to impeach him? ‘Cause right now I’d like to see Huckabee kicked off the campaign trail and sent back to repeat grades 6-12.

Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do. In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two. But if there’s going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.

So when he’s faced with two claims, he’ll follow the one that ignores all the evidence and sticks to its guns in the face of all reason? We’ve already had one of those clowns in office, I don’t think we need another one.

Poor baby has issues

Let’s get this out of the way: I really, honestly, truly do not give a good goddamn if Dumbledore is gay. He’s a fictional character, the author is getting a little too freakily obsessive over her characters, and it doesn’t affect me one way or the other how the character swings. So Rowling says he’s gay. Eh. Move on.

It only gets interesting when a certain ID proponent who has weebled on about how delightfully Christian the Harry Potter books are hears that her imaginary character imaginarily experiences arousal over another imaginary character who is, imaginarily, of the same sex as he is. This prompts an immediate long outburst declaring that Dumbledore is NOT Gay! That would conflict with his perception that the books are Christian allegory, and as everyone knows, no true Christian could be gay, just as there are no homosexuals anywhere in Iran.

It’s more fuss over nothing. Dumbledore could have been written up as a flaming ponce who hung out in the Hogsmeade Bathhouse every weekend and did drag cabaret for fun, and you could still read Christian themes into the book, no problem. Of course, the Christian verisimilitude would have been enhanced if Dumbledore had also called the boys in to his office for regular ‘discipline’ sessions of a nature best described in off-canon fanfic, but he seems to have been free of that pedophilic poison that we find rife in ecclesiastical organizations.

In the annals of god-soaked sports hype…

Here’s an article that deserves a prize. It’s wall-to-wall praise-Jebus babble, giving the Lord of the Universe credit for getting the Colorado Rockies baseball team into the World Series—have a puke bucket handy if you actually try to read the whole thing.

“You look at some of the moves we made and didn’t make,” general manager Dan O’Dowd said in the only interview he has given on the subject, long before the Rockies’ remarkable ascension over the past few weeks. “You look at some of the games we’re winning. Those aren’t just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this.”

And that’s just one small piece of the story. The rest is trying to make a long argument that all of the improbabilities mean that the divine must have had a hand in elevating a local sports team to national recognition. It’s amazing. You would think a God would have slightly different priorities.

But then, I suspect I know the truth. The piety of the team and the fans don’t matter in the slightest. God is doing it to spite Andy.

Doesn’t he realize? It’s all about nothing.

Prepare to have your opinion of Jerry Seinfeld diminished. He’s a scientologist, for the dumbest of reasons.

“They have a lot of very good technology. That’s what really appealed to me about it. It’s not faith-based. It’s all technology. And I’m obsessed with technology.”

Scientology and technology? You’ve got to be kidding. The “e-meter” they use is a cheap galvanometer, and their explanation for how it works is biophysical nonsense. If that’s his idea of technology to obsess over, he’s going to really be dazzled when someone shows him a transistor radio.

The dimness of D’Souza

It’s Monday. You’re tired after your weekend, you aren’t too enthused about getting back to work, and it’s just so dispiriting to have to get back into the grind. What do you need with your coffee? An unsurprising tale of a very stupid person, so that your boss and your coworkers will look like shining beacons of reason by comparision, and you’ll realize your job isn’t so bad after all. You need to hear about Dinesh D’Souza, because you’ll realize that even in the state of sluggish stupor on a Monday morning, you are a thousand times wiser and more perceptive than that crank.

You will especially enjoy the irony of D’Souza declaring that atheists aren’t very bright.

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Right-wing hypocrisy on parade

Richard Mellon Scaife, that horrible little man with an immense fortune who has been propping up institutes loudly supporting right-wing family values, creationism, and gutter-scraping attacks on Democrats, is getting a divorce. Not just any divorce — a train wreck of a divorce, prompted by Scaife’s gallivanting about with a prostitute, and with scads of amusingly petty behavior. And the money involved is impressive.

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife’s exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."

Take him for everything he’s got, lady, and then throw the money away on diamond dog collars, a team of tanned, buff pool boys, and whatever silly overpriced frippery tickles your over-privileged patrician fancy. It’s got to be better than using it to fund the Heritage Foundation.

Isn’t it so typical, though, that a rich old bluenose who thinks he knows best how other people should live their lives doesn’t even try to meet his own standards, and is flaming out spectacularly in such a tawdry scandal?