Impeach Obama?

The news that Obama has won a Nobel peace prize was weird — and don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he has done badly at promoting peace, I just don’t think he’s made the kind of exceptional effort that something with the prestige of the Nobel ought to reward — but here’s something much, much crazier: WhirledNutDaily has begun a campaign to impeach Obama. You might be wondering on what grounds they would commit this act…but they don’t seem to have anything specific. I just got email from WND begging for donations for their little crusade, and here’s the best reason they offer, from some wingnut radio personality, Tammy Bruce.

“… ultimately, it comes down to… the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated.”

That ranks right up there with the “he looked at me funny” excuse for starting a fight.

The whole piece is a detestable incitement to take any action necessary to bring down Obama. Look at their ‘reasoning’:

Make no mistake. We’re now in the middle of a bloodless coup –
the takeover of an entire nation by the hate-America crowd – a cold-blooded gang that despises American’s
prosperity, our standing in the world, our trust in God and our generosity and goodness.

    
America is a monument to the triumph of freedom. When Barack Hussein Obama thinks about freedom… he sees a world in which some people, due
to personal initiative and good fortune, will do better than others… live better than others.

    
And in that regard, he is right. But Barack Obama sees that as unfair. Where you see freedom, liberty and the opportunity for
any American to be all that he or she can be, Obama sees greed and bigotry.

    
And, like so many on the far-left before him, going all the way back to Karl Marx, he believes that it’s his mission to promote
“equality of outcome” over
“equality of opportunity”
even if Americans must learn to live in chains to make it happen
(in fact, servitude to the iron will of government will be required).

    
That worldview makes Barack Hussein Obama a very dangerous man and one of the greatest threats to your personal liberty today.

    
That dangerous worldview also explains why he has already gobbled-up major banks and why the government now controls more and
more of our money – yours and mine.

    
And if you wake up one day to discover you’re broke… don’t be surprised…
and while you’re at it, don’t feel bad either because at least everyone will be broke…
destitute… under the iron yoke of government… but everything will be fair
and equal… that’s what extremists, like Obama, mean when they use
the term… "social justice."

    
And he’ll make it happen… he can make it happen… he’s already started to
make it happen.  Barack Hussein Obama is Bernie Madoff with the political power of the presidency at
his disposal.

    
That dangerous worldview explains the sudden and shocking erosion of your freedom to make a living, to run your own business,
whether a Mom-and-Pop grocery store or General Motors.

    
That dangerous worldview explains why his Attorney General, Eric Holder, despises the 2nd Amendment… why, if he had his way,
he would take away our guns, leaving us defenseless against gangs and hoods – and, more to the point, against Obama’s own
shock-troops from
ACORN or SEIU. Remember, it was the healthy and rational fear of government that led to the inclusion of the
2nd Amendment in the Constitution of the United States.

    
And that dangerous worldview explains why Obama intends to take away your freedom to choose your own doctor… your own
treatment. Wherever government controls health care, bureaucrats decide who gets treatments… who gets transplants…
who gets dialysis… who gets costly medication… and who needs to die for the common good.

    
What can we do to stop this monomaniac… this American dictator? There’s only one answer.

    
Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution reads: “The President, Vice President and all civil
officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery,
or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It goes on and on like that — you can just picture the authors frothing at the mouth.

So I guess I’d have to say that maybe a Nobel was a useful counterbalance to the lunacy going on here.

Obama wins a Nobel?

I know this award is heavily politicized, but this is ridiculous: Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. I don’t think Obama’s efforts for peace have been particularly notable — the wars still drag on with no end or even promise of an end in sight, and there has been some sabre-rattling over Iran from his administration lately — but I guess all you have to do is follow after Bush and not blow anything up for a year, and presto, you look like Gandhi.

Oh, well. It’s definitely more appropriate than the award to Kissinger, but that isn’t saying much.

A priest, a rabbi, a Baptist, an Episcopalian, and an imam walk into a bar…

It’s not that funny. Anyway, here is this utterly hideous ‘infographic’ (‘infographic’ is the term they use when they torture information with a useless pile of graphic clutter) which tries to illustrate the changes in the numbers and percentages of various religious beliefs with a photo of a group of representatives of each faith in a bar, with a graph superimposed on each. The bar photo is busy, distracting, and adds nothing but visual noise to the data. However, one thing stands out.

The members of the different faiths are sitting around on bar stools. Guess who represents the godless? A hot tattooed chick…and she’s the bartender.

I wonder if the photographer reads Jesus & Mo?

The goggles! They do nothing!

Ouch. What a painful piece of right-wing kitsch.

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I had no idea that Jesus personally delivered the Constitution, or that it was a religious document.

If you go to the site hosting this…thing, you can mouse around and it will spell out the symbology behind all those figures. I rather like the professor; he’s the one on the far right, near the shadowy figure, Satan.

He tightly holds his “Origin of Species” book by Charles Darwin. This represents the liberal lefts control of our educational system. His smug expression describes the attitude of many of the educational elite. There is no room for God in education. There is contempt for any other viewpoints. Humanism dominates the educational system of America and I believe that is wrong. Notice that he is the only one sitting on the top step. He tries to place himself on an equal footing with God, but he is still nothing next to the intelligence of the Creator.

There’s that smug thing again. It’s hard not to be smug when you see this kind of ham-handed kitsch, you know.

I guess I haven’t made it to the big time yet

Liberty University has this new program to adopt a liberal…and then pray really hard for them. It’s a good idea, since if nothing else, it keeps the rapscallions off the street doing something entirely unproductive. Unfortunately, looking at their list of liberals, most of ’em ain’t. Olympia Snowe? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Hilary Clinton? Barack Obama? They’re moderate to conservative. I’ll give them Barney Frank and Barry Lynn, but even there, they aren’t exactly bomb-throwing radicals out to overthrow the government and replace it with communism, free love, and LSD in the water supply.

And Barry Lynn is a minister. I think that means that hostile prayers are repelled with +5 on his saving throw, so it’s a wasted effort already.

I think they should pray for me. I’m much more deserving, and in their theology, actually need prayer much more. I’m so awful, they’re going to have to gang together a team of a thousand devout Christians, arms locked in prayer, 24 hours a day. I sure hope they get on it soon, because I’m feeling a total absence of the Lord right now.

AAI: Maurice Bisheff

This was definitely the weirdest talk of the meeting so far.

Bisheff was discussing Tom Paine, that fascinating patriot and rabble-rouser of the American Revolution. Atheists love the guy; he wasn’t one of us, since he was a deist, but he was a real firebrand in his opposition to organized religion. I think a historical analysis of this important figure in American history is the kind of thing we ought to encourage in freethought meetings; we aren’t all about finding contradictions in the Bible and going rah-rah for science, you know.

Unfortunately, this was a very academic talk, following the convention of formal papers in many branches of the humanities: he stood up there at the podium and read from a paper. Yikes. He lost a lot of people early, who just walked out of him in boredom, I’m sorry to say. I’m especially sorry since they missed the weird turn it took later.

Bisheff wanted to emphasize that Paine was not an atheist (which was fine, since he wasn’t), and went on to discuss some of his ideas about science, and nature, and god, and the afterlife. Again, not a problem, since he had those ideas…except that Bisheff seemed to want to regard them uncritically, as good ways of looking at the world, and he seemed to be enjoying taking a few potshots at atheists. And I’m sorry, but Paine, as described here, had some wacky beliefs.

He tried to justify some of the ‘spiritual’ views by claiming that they were like the premises of mathematics, lacking an empirical foundation and not susceptible to proof by materialists, because they reside in a plane outside of mere worldly matters. That was annoying enough in its lack of connection to reality, but then he proceeded to tell us about true science and scientists. Apparently, a true scientist of the future (we aren’t ready for this yet) will incorporate the mystical as well as the natural in his vision of the universe.

That woke me up from the snooze of the talk format.

I eventually asked him a few questions. I suggested that science is a rather pragmatic and methodological practice, so I’d like to know how we were to study the mystical. I also told him that while I didn’t disagree that Paine had these spiritual views, it would be truer to the freethought that he endorsed if we did not simply accept the opinions of Tom Paine, but that a critical analysis would be far more interesting.

I got a rather rambling reply back. Apparently Tom Paine was a proponent of transcendental science, whatever that was. Bisheff tried to give an example, and talked about a study of baby babbling that showed that some fraction weren’t actually babbling, but were speaking in the tongue of some ancient Buddhist sect. We just weren’t ready to comprehend this fact, and scientists run away from such a phenomenon that we can’t explain. Yeah, we were somehow talking about reincarnation.

The person next to me wondered if we’d somehow wandered into a Templeton seminar. I have to agree, it was crazy inappropriate. However, I would like to be the first to endorse the award of a posthumous Templeton Prize to Thomas Paine, hero of the American Revolution. It seems only fair.

Faith and Flagella

If you’ve ever read William Dembski, you know he has an infuriating ego and is aggravatingly pompous. If you’ve ever read Dan Brown, you know that he simply can’t write, churning out canned syntax and ridiculous plots. What would you get if someone made an unholy fusion of the two?

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I’m pretty sure that this is one of those chimerae the religious right gets so incensed about, and for once, I agree with them. Kill it. Kill it now. Kill it with fire.

Maybe the media should interview this guy for “interesting” science

Since the mere majesty and grandeur of the natural world are insufficient to provide entertainment, perhaps science coverage in the media should become something like the Weekly World News. Arthur David Horn could be a major media star.

He now advocates the theory that modern man is not the result of a natural process of evolution, but that evolution was artificially aided by reptilian extraterrestrials. The reptilians bred mankind as servants and continue to rule the planet today, Horn said.

Reptilians have manipulated perceptions of world history and hold power over humankind through their influence over an elite and powerful group of humans, known as the Illuminati, Arthur said. Throughout human history, the reptilian beings have been recorded as dragons or gods.

I don’t think that was an example of media quote mangling, either. He was speaking at a meeting called a “Galactic Gathering,” organized by The Institute for the Study of Galactic Civilizations.

A plus on his side: there’s also a nice human interest story there.

The shift in Arthur’s focus came shortly after meeting Lynette, who was then a metaphysical healer, he said. After many conversations over the telephone, Arthur and Lynette finally met face-to-face in July of 1988 when they spent a week in Northern California’s Trinity Mountains searching for Sasquatch, commonly known as Bigfoot.

The couple never spotted the mythic creature, but fell in love, Lynette said. Only a few months later, they were married in the chapel on the CSU campus.

Awww. Woo Love.

Somebody pass his name on to Sharon Begley, who is manufacturing pseudo-controversies this week. She’s defending Lamarckism now, based on some work that suggests a plausible basis for multi-generation responses to the environment, a justification for some of the observations made by Kammerer on toads.

Genes for living on land seem to get “environmentally silenced in early embryos exposed to water,” says Vargas, who combed through Kammerer’s lab notes and whose analysis appears in the Journal of Experimental Zoology. “It has taken a painfully long time to properly acknowledge that environment can influence inheritance,” he told me. “I think academia has discouraged experiments testing environmental modification of inheritance,” because the inheritance of acquired characteristics—Lamarckism—drives the self-appointed evolution police crazy.

They might want to spend more time reading studies and less energy manning the barricades.

Aaaargh! Epigenetics is not Lamarckism! Also, Begley doesn’t seem to understand that the institution of science is extremely conservative, and rightly so: we ‘man the barricades’ because science isn’t like the Huffington Post, letting any wacky idea sail through unchallenged. There is a demand for rigor: show us the data, do the experiments, repeat until you’ve got a case that can’t be shot down by a lone skeptical first year grad student. Postulating reptoids guiding human evolution isn’t going to be credible until someone shoots one and writes a paper about the dissection, and Lamarckism is going to be sneered at until someone does the experiment that shows it.

I don’t think academia has been neglecting this field because of dogma, either. Epigenetics is hot right now (and again, it’s NOT Lamarckism!), and there’s some interesting work going on in the field of eco-devo. I also think that a replication of Kammerer’s work that demonstrated an actual effect would be easily publishable — I’d be interested in reading it, for sure.

We’re all the evolution police. It isn’t as sinister as Begley seems to imply: we just demand a little more evidence than speculation.