Fred Hutchison, Renaissance fool

Please forgive me: you’ve probably all forgotten Fred Hutchison, the incredibly delusional right-wing paragon of hubris, but I’ve got to bring him up again. He wrote one of the more painful diatribes against evolution on Alan Keyes “Renew America” site (yeah, that Alan Keyes; you know we’re deep in crazytown already) which I ripped up a while back. This is a guy who gets everything wrong, and wraps it all up in the most astonishingly pretentious, arrogant tone. Hutchison himself is a CPA. He thinks he has demonstrated that Darwin and Einstein were all wrong.

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Short takes

Never mind me, I’m running around with classes and meetings today…here are a few quick links.

Watch out, Janet Reitman

I’ve followed some of the doings of the Scientology cult, and it wasn’t that long ago that criticizing the Religion That Elron Built would win you a lifetime supply of harrassment; they have long memories. Back in our naive youth, my brother and I made the mistake of taking one of their “tests” when we were on a stroll in Seattle, and that earned my brother years of obnoxious junk mail offering him their path to perfection.

So I was a little surprised that Rolling Stone is willing to wrestle with the brutal beast and has published an article by Janet Reitman on the religion.

It’s not bad. It’s not as hardhitting as the stuff you’ll find on the Operation Clambake site, but heck, it’s in a major publication. I suspect there are lawyers growling in the darkness of Clearwater, FL.

Local lunacy

Where do you think this peculiar practice is going down?

OK, let me get this straight. A bunch of muttonheads are burying idols in their yards thinking it will magically get someone to buy their house, the Strib runs it as a straight story, yet the right wing somehow claims that the mainstream media is hostile to religion? Unbelievable.

Yeah, nice middle-class neighborhoods in suburban Minnesota.

Then there was the guy at the booth behind me at the coffeeshop bragging about how his “system” at the slots in his weekly trips to the casino was paying off, and he was investing all of his winnings in gold and silver. It was very distracting: I had to grit my teeth and restrain myself from turning around and giving the poor old fool a lecture in probability.

Chickens, roads, crossing thereof

If you can only read one thing today, make it Skeptico’s answers to Why did the chicken cross the road?

It’s dead-on funny—read the hypothetical answers from all the skeptics and loons like John Edward and O’Reilly and Icke and many others, which are just perfect—I’m stealing Behe’s answer!

A chicken crossing a road has:

eyes

legs

a road

the other side

If any one of those irreducibly complex parts is missing the chicken will be unable to cross the road, so if it looks, walks (across roads) and clucks like a chicken, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, it’s an intelligently designed chicken. Its legs are molecular machines, literally outboard motors. Look at Mount Rushmore…

And then he takes it up a notch and starts poking fun at his fellow skeptical bloggers. Fantastic!