Sarah Palin is so stupid, it’s terrifying. Here she is preaching to her fellow lunatics about how liberals are soft on terrorists and are out to help our enemies, when we’re supposed to put the “fear of god” in them.
Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.
I think I’m going to be sick. This is why we should never ever vote Republican.
A gun isn’t just a tool, it’s a sex aid for the terminally inadequate. A gun fondler in Georgia wandered about exposing his toy to children.
A Georgia man panicked parents and children at a local park and baseball field by randomly walking around and displaying his gun to anyone he encountered in the parking lot.
According to witnesses who spoke with WSB-TV, the man wandered around the Forsythe County park last Tuesday night showing his gun to strangers, telling them “there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He was right. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The police came, talked to him, he had a permit, so there was absolutely nothing illegal about strutting aimlessly through a park, smugly waving his gun at people.
Maybe there ought to be a law, though. And maybe the NRA should support it, being fans of responsible gun ownership and all that.
Ha ha, I made a funny.
But seriously, people like that will help make a change as more and more voters realized that these gun fanatics are dangerous idiots.
I’ve been Salon-free for a whole week, and then Blake Stacey has to link to the newest tactic in Salon’s courting of the woo demographic. I’m used to the idiot apologists; I can mock the gooey soft religion of the liberal theists; but what they’d done this time is flaunt an incompetent atheist. Yes, it’s an article by an atheist, but it’s so badly written and so waffly and so reliant on stereotypes that I want to just back away slowly and pretend he’s not there.
The author is W.R. Klemm, a neuroscientist who, every time I’ve heard of him previously, has been terribly incoherent. What does this mean?
“Many polls show that most scientists are atheists,” said Dr. W.R. Klemm, a senior professor of neuroscience at the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, in explaining why he created the course. “I think that is unfortunate to say the least.”
I think it just means he’s a full-of-himself contrarian.
His article in Salon is far worse — for one thing, it meanders along forever, saying next to nothing. His premise seems to be that biologists and physicists are “two cultures” (and he cites C.P. Snow!) that don’t get along and don’t understand each other, because physicists are too mathy.
It’s hard for biologists to argue with physicists. Often physicists listen with detached bemusement because biologists can’t explain life with mathematics. Physics could not exist without math. Sometimes I think physicists get too enamored with math. I get the impression that they think that describing and predicting phenomena with equations is the same as explaining why and how such phenomena occur. Take the most famous equation of all, E = mc2. Just what does that equal sign mean? It implies that the variables on each side are the same. But is mass really identical to energy? True, mass can be converted to energy, as atom bombs prove, and energy can even be turned into mass. Still, they are not the same things. Not only are the units of measurement different, but the equation is only descriptive and predictive. It does not explain how mass converts to energy or vice versa.
I am embarrassed. Physicists, I swear, not all biologists are this stupid. Really, we aren’t.
Then, after telling us that he hates it when physicists write about biology, and muddily explaining that the mind has a material, biological basis, and sorta rejecting the silliness of The Spiritual Brain, he proceeds to explain to us that ‘spirit’ might be lurking in physics.
To me, other possibilities for discovering material attributes of “spirit” seem more likely. Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity, dark matter, and dark energy, has already shown that not even physicists understand what “material” is. I will now summarize the more likely possibilities for hidden realities of mind.
And then the neuroscientist writes about physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, dark matter, dark energy, string theory, parallel universes, etc., each with a little potted summary to explain how maybe there is a source for spirits within them. For example, bugger thermodynamics:
Also, what about the energy generated as electrons whip through protein chains in mitochondria? Only some of the energy is trapped in phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate. We assume that all the other energy is lost as heat. How can we be sure relativity is irrelevant to energy capture? Energy is well established as crucial for consciousness.
Oh, jebus. I am so eagerly anticipating the first creationist to come along and tell me that God is fueled by energy losses in biochemical pathways…because relativity. Or that dark energy is diddling our thoughts.
So what about dark energy? To push galaxies apart, it must impart some of its energy to the cluster of stars and planets to give them a push. What must dark energy be doing to us? Obviously, its push is not greater than the gravity that keeps us fixed to earth. But if that energy is absorbed by the galaxy, surely some of it must be absorbed in us. But what could such absorption do? Would such dark energy interact with the regular energy that we know about—like the energy in our brain? Could it act on consciousness?
Hey, and maybe the gravitational perturbations caused by the motion of the planets affects our brains, too, and astrology is true! Could it act on consciousness?
is such a cheap and meaningless question — replace “it” with anything (frying pans, neutrinos, water, fluttering butterflies in the Amazon rain forest, the color orange, cosmic clouds of sentient formaldehyde, whatever) and it’s just as empty and just as thought-provoking as that noise.
I feel like I have to apologize to all the physicists in the world right now. Please, please, please don’t think all neuroscientists are like that. Neuroscience is a field that actually does use a lot of math and biochemistry and physical chemistry and physics, and it doesn’t usually lead to crania full of drivel.
Read about the real goings-on at the Bundy Ranch. Racism is just one of the lunacies on parade. GOOGLE DOCTORS THAT REMOVE MICROCHIPS. The summary:
Welfare negroes, the United Nations, sexually devious lawyers, satan, a Chinese solar farm, microchips, secret-agent NPS, a Muslim-Kenyan president, hippies, illegals. Take your pick.
Also revealing, and very Mormon: Bundy cast himself as a divinely inspired prophet of god who was delivering instructions to his people, instructing them in the prophecies they were supposed to follow, and chastising them for failing.
He goes on to explain that, although they managed to deter the BLM, they failed to do it “within one hour,” as the revelation had prophesied. So when an hour passes, he decides to get in his bulldozer and march on the BLM himself. The dozer gets stuck in the mud and he receives another revelation.
“It come to my mind real plain — the good Lord said, ‘Bundy, it’s not your job, it’s THEIR job.’ So we come back over here and heard that they had brought some cattle back. So I want you to understand,” addressing the crowd, “This is not my job, it’s YOUR job.
It’s a real comic opera. It’s too bad these kinds of clowns have successfully inserted themselves into American politics.
Cliven Bundy, the ignorant, ahistorical, far right wing, Mormon parasite who has been stealing the use of government land for decades, is also a flaming racist.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
I forgot to say he’s also egotistical. This two-bit peckerwood is giving a daily press conference in which he lets his mind ramble through the cobwebs in his skull, as if what he says is important. Could someone ask him about evolution, or climate change, or religion? Because I’m sure his ensuing monologue would be intensely entertaining.
A swarm of teabaggers on Twitter were complaining that the lamestream media just made up this story, and they weren’t going to believe it until there was video…which they said didn’t exist. Whoops.
Wheee! I’m featured on OneNewsNow, the Far Right Christian online ‘news’ organization. It’s the same old thing.
University of Minnesota-Morris Professor Paul Z. Myers has encouraged students to gather up and trash all copies of an independent student newspaper [Not true. I said the university ought to prohibit their racist rag in the same way we would refuse the Ku Klux Klan the right to insult our non-white students on campus] with which he disagrees [Not true. I said we do have conservatives on campus; the basis of my disagreement wasn’t their politics, but the racism of this particular small group of extremists. And also their incompetence.]. The politically radical [Sorry, no. I’m pretty much a rock solid liberal/progressive. Not very radical at all.] professor blogged that the Morris NorthStar student newspaper was a disgrace and has "worn out its welcome and must go."[Correct! When your approach is to hide behind Trayvon Martin’s corpse and accuse university administrators of racism because they aren’t nice enough to white people…you’re not really bright enough or responsible enough to appreciate an education, let alone benefit from it.]
"We ask UMM to publicly condemn these instances of theft and destruction [They did!], investigate what happened [They did! Although I haven’t seen any evidence that this ‘theft’ even occurred; it was a free paper, widely distributed across campus, and all of a sudden, we have known far-right media clowns claiming some were “stolen”. Really? How could you tell?], and prosecute those responsible, [Yes, even if it is a stunt by the students who put out the North Star. So why are you harassing me? I had nothing to do with it.]" Theriot says. "The university must take steps to protect the NorthStar [Not necessarily. They could also banish it from campus as a disruptive, dishonest, and scurrilous pile of shit.] and all other student publications from such viewpoint-based [Is that what Republicans are calling their racism now?] censorship [There is no evidence of censorship! Saying it over and over again doesn’t make it true.] in the future."
While copies of the newspaper were being stolen, trashed, and defaced, ADF attorney David Hacker says the university quietly stood by.[Again: no evidence of theft, except the claim by the North Star. It’s a free paper that students were encouraged to take. What was the university supposed to do, put guards around the distribution racks and yell at anyone who takes a copy?]
It is simply bizarre. The university throughout has repudiated any attempt to destroy the paper; the chancellor sent out a campus-wide email saying so way back in December. They’ve got no case against the university. I used my free speech rights to say that the paper is garbage and that we ought to have some standards and reject the distribution of the libelous, poorly written crap, and yet they’re claiming that there must be an absolute right to free speech everywhere and at all times. They are going to have a hard time making a case that a free paper could be or even was stolen, and they’ve made this patently bogus case against me based on the idiot editor’s claim that there was a sciencey smell
around one of the racks. That’s it. A contrived and implausible claim by a dope with an agenda, and that’s what these right-wingers are leaping upon.
It’s the same dishonest O’Keefeian tactics again. We’re just waiting for someone to ask if these people have any decency at all.
I’ve always wondered when the silly season was. I guess it’s April. I’m getting so much loony email lately that I have to marvel at my inbox — no longer merely a stack of obligations and nagging, it also contains imbedded within it little gems of high weirdness.
For instance, “Tom Hyndman” doesn’t like me. Little clues tell me that this is the same person I recently banned under the pseudonym “Nathan Hull”, who I suspect also went under the name “John Dolan” in an earlier life, and also reminds me of a few other names that have drifted through here, transiently.
Let’s take a look at it. He’s peeved because he was banned, which turns out to be a sign that I’m becoming a dictatorial cult leader. Ho hum.
Do not search for information on getting sand in your genitals. It’s a morass of nonsense out there, with all kinds of bizarre pop culture notions. Most of it seems to be about getting sand in your vagina, which is treated as slogan to mock and trivialize women’s problems, but getting sand under your foreskin…oh, my. That’s no joke. That’s a very serious problem that must be dealt with surgically.
Remember Brian Morris, the Australian circumcision fanatic? One of his talking points is that getting sand in your penis is a major problem for uncircumcised men, and that in particular entire armies have been devastated in the desert by grains of sand getting caught up there, or laid flat in the jungles by all the damp rot and unhygienic conditions. He paints a grisly picture of the uncircumcised penis, and claims that it’s standard military policy to make sure you don’t have one of those dangerous folds of skin. How can you possibly fight if you’ve got a tiny, hideous bit of flesh attached to your penis?
I really had no idea. I may be a flabby old college professor, but apparently because I was born in America in the 1950s, when every boy baby was given cosmetic surgery practically as soon as they were born, I can whip the ass of every anteater boy out there. Good to know.
Morris is rather insistent. He claims that circumcision is a serious medical issue for the military.
In attempting to ridicule the notion that circumcision arose in the Middle East to solve problems caused by ‘sand and dust’, Vernon cites an article by Robert Darby, an anti-circ activist. Darby’s claims stemming from ‘medical records’ ‘he analyzed’ are false. Infections, initiated by the aggravation of dirt and sand, are not uncommon under desert conditions, and have even crippled whole armies of uncircumcised soldiers. It is difficult to achieve sanitation during prolonged battle. To contradict Darby, and thus Vernon, a US Army report by General Patton stated that in World War II 150,000 soldiers were hospitalised for foreskin problems due to inadequate hygiene. To quote: “Time and money could have been saved had prophylactic circumcision been performed before the men were shipped overseas” and “Because keeping the foreskin clean was very difficult in the field, many soldiers with only a minimal tendency toward phimosis were likely to develop balanoposthitis”. The story was similar in Iraq during ‘Desert Storm’ in the early 1990s. In the Vietnam War men requested circumcision to avoid “jungle rot”.
Well, if General George Patton thought it was a serious problem, it must be so. “Old Blood and Guts” wouldn’t be put off by trivia.
Except, well, it turns out that Brian Morris is rather sloppy with the facts.
Attempting to refute my argument he cites “a US Army report by General Patton”, and lists a series of pages that are supposed to back up his claim. But when you actually check those pages you find that they have nothing to do with sand under the foreskin and fail to provide any support for the argument that Morris wishes to make. For a start he gets the details of the book wrong. It is not a “report by General Patton”, but a multi-author volume in the official history of U.S. medical services in World War 2, edited by John F. Patton MD. Secondly, there are only two occurrences of the word sand in the entire volume, neither of which has anything to do with foreskins or circumcision. The volume scarcely deals with the Middle Eastern or North African (desert) combat theatres, but mostly with the South-East Asian and Pacific theatres, characterized by dense jungles and wet, humid conditions that posed many intractable health problems, affecting many parts of the body, not just the penis. But in those conditions sand and dust were not an issue. There is not the slightest support for his hyperbolic claim that “Infections, initiated by the aggravation of dirt and sand, are not uncommon under desert conditions, and have even crippled whole armies of uncircumcised soldiers.”
I’m sure you uncircumcised men are quite pleased to hear this. You don’t need to get the tip lopped off in order to go kill people in the Middle East. And I’ve lost my last possible advantage in a bar fight.
I was just doing a little clean up of the spam queue before I staggered off to bed, and found this one fascinatingly offensive comment that had been flagged for the garbage pile. I have preserved it because it was just so mind-bogglingly oblivious to its own content, but I’ve put it below the fold because it uses language that is normally prohibited around here.
This guy wrote to me back in September, when he was regurgitating creationist rationalizations for the global flood, at the behest of wacky ol’ Walt Brown. He called me again this morning and sent me another missive. On the phone, he sounded a bit miffed that I didn’t immediately remember who the heck he was, but it’s all come back to me now, after reading this.
Dear Dr. Paul Myers,
Like I said, I read your Happy Atheist and regularly read Pharyngula.
RE: Your “Looking for a geophysicist” blog.
What are the facts and what are the beliefs?
1 FACT:
Estimations of the biggest and strongest Supercontinent and all the reservoirs of water under pressure below it Earth possibly had are altogether unheard of.
Its continental landmasses’ three-hundredfold greater concentration of heavy, radioactive elements than our found elsewhere in the Earth aren’t confirmed by observations with measurements to have been in it when the continents yet had all the former connectedness they had (however connected they may have been).
Dr. Bruce Buffett who earned a doctorate in geophysics from Harvard and is now Chairman of Geophysics at Berkeley, considered the no.1 at geophysics research in America).
http://211.144.68.84:9998/91keshi/Public/File/34/485-7398/pdf/485319a.pdf
He has answered my questions and can’t explain why geophysicists never consider that before our planet’s 52,000-mile globe-encircling Mid-Oceanic Range uplifted, fitting like a jigsaw puzzle with specific continental shelf edges, it may have had great reservoirs of water under pressure below a supercontinent, even only one supercontinent in Earth history.
I asked him, “Could not it have thereby had its greatest explosivities of outbursting water and eroded rocks, greatest magnitude earthquake, and super-intense volcanic and earthquake lightnings >1 million amperes whereby electrons shooting through them with >1 MeV produced magnetic pinch effects”?
I hope by the following it will be clear to you what is being proposed as a solution to the problem of Earth’s concentration of heavy, radioactive elements inconsistent with the nebular hypothesis.
Regarding Richard P. Feynman, Ph.D.(physics) Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, (W.W. Norton: New York, NY, 1985), pp. 341, 343:
Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman noted what is: “generally missing in cargo cult science. . . It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. . . put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that disagree with it . . .
. . . give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction. . .
I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity .. bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.”“Earth’s radioactivity was confined to the crust, a few tens of kilometers thick.”
(John D. Stacey, Physics of the Earth, 3rd edition (1992), p. 45)
“Uranium, thorium and potassium are the main elements contributing to natural terrestrial radioactivity.. All three of the radioactive elements are strongly partitioned into the continental crust.”
(J. A. Plant and A. D. Saunders, “The Radioactive Earth,” Radiation Protection Dosimetry, Vol. 68, 1996, p. 25)
“The molten rock oozing from midocean ridges lacks much of the uranium, thorium, and other trace elements that spew from some aboveground volcanoes.”
(Sid Perkins, “New Mantle Model Gets the Water Out,” Science News, Vol. 164, 13 September 2003, p. 174.
Theories of an unsupernatural ultimate origin and formation of Earth call for the agglomeration of its particles thrown together by cosmic winds. They segregated into the core, mantle, and crust by gravity and heat. However, the heaviest naturally occurring elements: uranium and thorium are not nearly as concentrated under the continents and oceanic floors as they would be if the Earth formed from an interstellar medium. . . . If uranium and thorium were among the nuclides that the universe assembled into the Earth, they would be more concentrated toward its deeper parts. At least, they would be expected to have been evenly distributed throughout it. Yet: “90% of uranium and thorium are concentrated in the continents”*;–Earth’s continents are only 0.35% of its mass.*
*Dan F. C. Pribnow, Ph.D.(geophysics), “Radiogenic Heat Production in the Upper Third of Continental Crust from KTB,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 24, 1 February 1997, p. 349.
* “The Earth’s continental crust occupies 41.2% of the surface area but represents only 0.35% of the total mass of our planet.” (Hugh Richard Rollinson, Ph.D.[geochemistry], Early Earth Systems [Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007], p. 134)
“Heat production rate is well correlated to lithology; no significant variation with depth, neither strictly linear nor exponential, is observed over the entire depths of the [two German holes].”
(Christoph Clauser, et al., “The Thermal Regime of the Crystalline Continental Crust: Implications from the KTB, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 102, No. B8, 10 August 1997, p. 18,418)
Germany’s Deep Drilling Project discovered variations in heat-exuding radioactivity related to the rock types, not to depths.
Are there higher concentrations of heavy radionuclei in Earth’s continental crust beneath its fossil-bearing rock layers where the one Supercontinent in its history had comparatively greater intensities of lightnings lightening it via having been more violently quaked or comprised of stronger rock types that generated more frictional electrifications and charge condensations?
“Surface rocks show traces of radioactive materials, and while the quantities thus found are very minute, the aggregate amount is sufficient, if scattered with this density throughout the earth, to suppy, many times over, the present yearly loss of heat. In fact, so much heat could be developed in this way that it has been practically necessary to make the assumption that the radioactive materials are limited in occurence to a surface shell only a few kilometers in thickness” (Leonard R. Ingersoll, et al., Heat Conduction : With Engineering, Geological and Other Applications, revised edition [University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 1954], p. 102)
You wrote on blog saying: “There was no global flood.” I’m not altogether certain of that.
Perhaps almost all of Earth’s fossil-bearing rock layers and all their heavy, radioactive elements bound to lighter elements evidence that it had extraordinary lightnings in enormous sub-Supercontinental water and in a Supercontinent erupting it whereby the seven continents it divided into were entirely and totally overflowed with tsunamies.
Thank You, Rick Keane
Too long? Shorter Rick Keane: Why haven’t geophysicists considered that there was a giant ocean of water beneath the continent(s) that exploded outward with a lot of lightning?
I don’t know. Why haven’t geophysicists consider my theory, that the earth is a giant eukaryotic cell, that continents are rafts of cell surface molecules, and that volcanoes are examples of exocytosis? Huh? Why? They’ll all be so surprised when the planet undergoes mitosis, I tell you what.
I also have a theory that the KT event was actually a sperm fusion event. Ask me more, maybe I’ll spin out a few thousand words with lots of quotes.
It also explains why someone would write to me asking about geophysics.
