Rapture Insanity Watch

I keep waiting for the padded ambulance to roll up and men in white coats to leap out, shoot these bozos with a trank gun, wrap them up in a straight jacket, and go howling off to the nearest sanitarium, but no…instead, they get invitations to appear on cable news and babble about the apocalypse. And it’s not just the airhead news media…

…Rosenberg is just one of several conservative media figures who have identified and expounded upon the purported signs of the Apocalypse to be found in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. During his appearance on Live From…, Rosenberg claimed that he had been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill, and the CIA to discuss the Rapture and the Middle East, and noted—several times—that the apocalyptic events described in his novels keep coming true.

What’s really frightening is that these people don’t exhibit an ounce of critical thinking, and these ridiculous attitudes are endemic in the people who run our country. I’m waiting for some smart, pragmatic, sensible guy in government or the press to stand up and truncate that famous quote: “You have done enough. Have you no sense?”

(via Atrios)

Just another Christian ranter on the fringe

He only has a few radio and television programs, his own university, tens of millions of dollars to throw at his political causes, and a few million voters in his pocket, so Jerry Falwell* is just a marginal nut, right? We can just ignore him when he says things like this:

It is apparent, in light of the rebirth of the State of Israel, that the present day events in the Holy Land may very well serve as a prelude or forerunner to the future Battle of Armageddon and the glorious return of Jesus Christ.

Those rapture freaks who are cheering on the bloodshed in the Middle East certainly don’t have any real clout…at least, not as much as us influential atheists, I’m sure.

(via DefCon)

*Grade A Demented Fuckwit.

Ignore anything I might have ever said about Dershowitz

How could I have ever said a charitable word about Alan Dershowitz? In penance, I urge you all to read Juan Cole’s dissection of Dershowitz’s grading of civilianity, or if you’d prefer something lighter, try Kung Fu Monkey’s demolition by amusing anecdote.

If anyone were in the mood to revisit my earlier post, you could easily undermine my appreciation of Dershowitz’s argument there by pointing out that it is Alan Dershowitz talking about morality, and I would have to sheepishly admit that he has no credibility on the matter.

Middle East code words

Digby’s argument, that the Bush administration language about the war in the Middle East is loaded with code words to pander to the looney fundamentalist base, isn’t entirely convincing. Just the fact that Rice used a word, “birth-pang,” that Rapture nuts have loaded with all kinds of millennialist meaning doesn’t mean she consciously chose it to make the fundies all giddy.

I admit, though, that the only reason I reject the hypothesis is that this administration has been so incompetent that I suspect they babble this kind of stuff all the time without putting any effort into thinking about it. These guys aren’t geniuses; overestimation of their abilities is something we should leave to their sycophants.

Scientists conclude that Peggy Noonan kills brain cells

Even reading Peggy Noonan through an Attaturk filter is dangerous. I read this little scrap and felt neurons popping throughout my cortex.

During the past week’s heat wave–it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday–I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world’s greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not?

Jebus. Now not only do scientists have to figure out all that complicated data stuff, they have to be able to explain it to one of the stupidest people on earth? That’s an excessive demand.

More stem cell talk

DarkSyde is on the stem cell story, and he uses Neurotopia’s summary of the biology.

I just don’t understand the other side’s argument. Adult stem cells are not a substitute for embryonic stem cells, at least not yet. The anti-stem cell research crowd wants to claim that we don’t need ES cells, that AS cells will do everything we need, but they don’t think it through. If we want to make AS cells that are functionally equivalent to ES cells, we need to understand ES cells—but they want to deny us the ability to look at ES cells. Furthermore, if we could convert an AS cell line to totipotency what we’d have is…millions of cells we could replicate in the lab, each of which has the potential to become a human being. We’d go from a few “snowflakes” to a blizzard. Then what?

A stem cell veto prediction

Despite Brownback’s snowflake stunt and Santorum’s insistence that zygotes are persons, the House stem cell bill, HR810, has passed, as have the two inconsequential smokescreen bills that Santorum tossed up. It’s going to be interesting to hear Bush’s stammered excuses when he vetos it; I’d figure he’d be reluctant to do the veto because it would mean taking undeniable responsibility for an action, something he doesn’t like to do, but then I realized he has another out. He’s going to blame God for telling him to kill the bill.

I predict that he will make some pious excuse like that when he vetoes it. That’s our George: he didn’t do it, it’s not his fault, the buck stops somewhere else, he’s a delegater, not a responsibility-taker.

David Prentice’s shoddy stem cell scholarship

A reader sent me copy of a letter that will be published in Science this week, criticizing the dishonest tactics of the anti-scientific adult stem cell “advocates” (in quotes because they aren’t really science advocates of any kind—they’re only using it as an issue to limit stem cell research.) Anyway, it raises the interesting question of who you’re going to believe: scientists with expertise in the issues under discussion, or a flunky for Sam Brownback and shill for the religious right?

[Read more…]

Hmmm…maybe we should form a vocal voting bloc…

From the insightful Digby comes this insightly insight:

Why do the vast majority secularists vote for the Democrats? Could it possibly be for the same reason that African Americans do? Could it be that the Republican Party is so implicitly or explicitly religiously intolerant that they have no place in it?

They don’t even need to be intolerant, though…just being implicitly and explicitly religious, period, full stop, is sufficiently off-putting. The intolerance is the creamy rich arsenic-laced frosting layered thickly on top of the putrefying fruitcake of superstitious dogma—excuse me if I’d rather not have a taste. I think our interests diverge from those of the religious African Americans because, if Obama is any example, they reject the intolerance but savor the religion.

By the way, take a look at this map of the state-by-state distribution of unbelievers, also from Digby’s post. Typically, “no religion” is the third most popular choice in most states, with a few exceptions (I’m very proud of my home state of Washington.) So why do politicians so studiously avoid courting that common demographic?*

*Rhetorical question…in a winner-take-all game, third place is no place, and it’s not as if the godless form a coherent bloc anyway.