Nazis cured cancer?

I got some spam this morning from “Natural Health Choice”, which you can guess from the name is not going to be a trustworthy source. And when you click on that link (I don’t recommend it), there’s another sign of fraud: they put up a video with no controls and force you to listen to a whole lot of garbage before they’ll tell you the secret of how to cure cancer, or rather, tell you about the book you can order from them that’ll give you a painless, easy natural cure for cancer with no chemotherapy or surgery.

I didn’t need to listen to it. They give it away at the top of their page: a photo (unlabeled, of course) of Otto Warburg. He apparently discovered a metabolic pathway that is only used by cancer cells, and not healthy cells. It’s a lie. None of their lead-up to promoting the Warburg effect is actually true: no, it’s not a way to trivially cure cancer with your diet. Nothing Warburg figured out has been suppressed.

The one remarkable thing about it is how they’re plugging it. They make a big deal of the fact that it was discovered at a Nazi medical center (wait, that’s a positive thing?), and that the Nazis had a cure for cancer in 1944 and that it was suppressed by the American conquerors. Why? I don’t know. I couldn’t stand listening to it that long to find out. I stopped when they announced that if you follow their special diet,

Pretty soon, a shocked oncologist will tell you, “I don’t believe it. Your cancer just disappeared.”

They also whine that their website is going to be shut down by the mysterious pro-cancer powers-that-be, so you’d better act fast. I don’t think it will be shut down soon enough, not because I like cancer, but because lying con artists who exploit people’s fears with lies and false promises deserve to be crushed and given jail time.

Joint statement from AA and the IHEU

David Silverman of American Atheists and Andrew Copson of the International Humanist and Ethical Union have issued a statement on the raging racism in America. They’re against it.

That these people feel emboldened to march and protest in 2017 in the United States sickens us. Their views are reprehensible, their actions are abhorrent, and they have no place in our civil society. We stand in solidarity with the targets of the hatred espoused by these white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

As many have said, bigotry in America in 2017 isn’t just people in white hoods and robes. It’s people who are our neighbors, coworkers, and even government officials engaged in subtle acts of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and religious hated. It is our obligation as humanists and as citizens of this nation—and indeed the world—to fight this bigotry at every turn.

Silence is not an option. Anyone who does not forcefully and unequivocally condemn the bigotry of these people is complicit in their actions.

Our thoughts and support are with those who have been injured in Charlottesville and the families of the people who lost their lives. We must remember that this violence didn’t start and won’t end in Charlottesville. We must be prepared to confront it across the nation wherever we find it.

I’m glad that they condemn not just the angry men and women with clubs and shields, chanting slogans about Jews, but also the silent complicity of the majority. It’s also interesting because many of the alt-right are atheists or agnostics; Richard Spencer, for example, is openly atheist.

I would say it is definitely a young movement. I’d say that it is predominantly white millennial men. It is not sort of stereotypically conservative in its profile. I’d say that probably it is a more secular population than the country overall. That is, there are a lot of agnostics and atheists or people who are just generally indifferent to religion. And I think that it is a fairly well-educated movement on average, that as I think that probably the model alt-right member has at least some college education.

So we like to argue that religion does not instill any sense of morality in people, and it doesn’t. That claim is supported by the fact that while so many corporate people resigned from Trump’s business advisory council over his fascism that he dissolved it, but no one from his evangelical council (here’s a list of some of the most horrible people in America) have taken a similar step. They’re more interested in praising Trump’s appalling responses.

However, that religious leaders are propping up racism does not mean that all believers are racist, nor does the fact that many racists are atheists mean that the atheist organization leaders are racist; it also does not imply that Nazi atheists are not True™ Atheists. What it means is that there is an additional piece of the puzzle of what makes for a good human being beyond their beliefs about a deity, and that many Christians, Muslims, and Nones are lacking that piece…and that one of the roles of any organization that intends to be a lasting, positive contributor to our society’s well being ought to include ethical principles as an essential component.

Keep in mind that while the religiously indifferent showed up in Charlottesville with clubs and shields and anger, many of the nuclei of resistance were centered around religious institutions in the city. It’s great that American Atheists is speaking out in opposition, but we also need to have atheist representatives who travel to these trouble spots and link arms with the principled clergy. We’ve got lines of men and women in funny robes forming barriers to white nationalists, and we need outspoken atheists who stand in solidarity with them. Otherwise, we cede ethical leadership to the religious.

We also need to own the godless folk within the alt-right. We cannot effectively repudiate them if our first response is to deny the fact that there are a great many deplorable atheists, and if we fail to include a moral dimension in our philosophy.

“it’s afraid!”

A big-mouthed bully is afraid!

Oh, sorry. Wrong video.

That’s Christopher Cantwell, an American Nazi, blubbering in fear because there might be a warrant out for his arrest over the mess in Charlottesville. He claims they have done everything in their power to keep things peaceful, by which he means that they went through all the paperwork for their anti-semitic, anti-black hate march…not that their intent was peaceful.

With a sneer in his voice, he whines about Chelsea Manning.

Chelsea Manning, this tranny fanatic, has a picture of himself — herself — talking about curbstomping Nazis, with a picture of this boot coming down on somebody.

You mean this?

Terrifying. Then, weirdly, he goes on and on about his gun.

If I was a violent guy you would have heard about it by now.

Oh, OK, I guess we would have, guy who has a page on his behavior at the SPLC.

[M]y goal here is to normalize racism, he explained to Hatewatch in one of two interviews for this profile. I’m going to make a commercial enterprise out of saying things that people want to make illegal. I’m going to make a whole fucking bunch of money doing it. Anybody who gets in my way is going to find themselves in a very long list of people who regretted underestimating me.

My proposal, and in all honesty, I’m still working out the details, has been to resort to force. For free men and women to forcefully defend themselves against agents of the State. To kill government agents who would otherwise use force against them, until their jobs simply become so dangerous that they seek other lines of work.

It’s the right thing to be concerned about the immigration, because you see these fucking hordes of unwashed religious fanatics pouring across borders with no resources just thinking that they’re going to collect welfare and fuck our women and fucking breed us put of existence. That makes me want to bash people’s skulls open, I understand.

I’m carrying a pistol, I go to the gym all the time, I’m trying to make myself more capable of violence.

And now he’s terrified, as terrified as the black people, the Hispanic people, the gay people, the transgender people, the Jews, all the people he has tried to terrorize.

Feels good. Cry some more.

And do turn yourself in to the police and clear up your status. I don’t think you’ll have any problems, you’re white.

It’s hard to distinguish two flavors of absurdity, though

This is just odd. From WorldNewsDailyReport, a clickbait fake news site (hence no link), comes a story a lot of people are repeating.

Petersburg, KY | A leading paleontologist claims he has found evidence linking homosexuality and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Anthony Othman, a renowned paleontologist and leading curator at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, firmly believes homosexuality, and not an asteroid colliding with Earth as is commonly believed, was the main cause of the disappearance of the dinosaurs more than 66 million years ago.

His evidence? He claims to have found a group of velociraptors that are all male, and to have selected for homosexuality in iguanas and found they lost all interest in heterosexuality in 3 or 4 generations. All made-up nonsense.

But here’s what I found odd. There are no leading paleontologists working at the Creation “Museum”. There is no one named Anthony Othman working there. The picture at the top of the page is this one, on the left; the one on the right is a photo of creationist Mark Armitage:

So even Answers in Genesis is targeted by fake news!

Also obviously fake because no AiG spokesperson would say the dinosaurs lived 66 million years ago (the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, silly), and while they might hate homosexuality as much as this imaginary guy, they know the dinosaurs disappeared in The Flood, except for the few that were on the big wooden boat, who went extinct when medieval knights hunted them down.

Anjuli Pandavar is no longer part of our network

I have been receiving complaints from readers and other bloggers for months — and recent posts praising Fox News and blaming black Americans for racism were the final straw. We do have an ethos here, laid out plainly.

We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and in addition, we recognize that the nonexistence of deities entails a greater commitment to human values, and in particular, an appreciation of human diversity and equality.

We are for feminism, against racism, for diversity, against inequity.

It’s a general sentiment, but if you can’t meet any of it, you don’t belong here. We’ve been agonizing over rejecting Anjuli Pandavar all summer long, and the consensus of the active members of the FtB community was that her continued presence was a betrayal of our principles.

Way to go, Baltimore

Quietly, in the dead of night, the city of Baltimore took down their confederate monuments. A statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was removed, as well as…

Other statues being removed included the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway and the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place.

Wait — they had a monument to Roger Taney? This Roger Taney?

[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

What took so long, and why was such a slap in the face to American citizens put up in the first place?

They really are bullying cowards

So this is what happens when you confront nazis. They collapse.

Good grief. It’s just kind of a fun idea, being able to say ‘white power’. I love to be offensive, it’s all. What a pathetic child.

And then there’s this: Joe Love flies a Nazi flag from his home. A woman stopped and politely asked him about it; he starts ranting and insulting her. I guess he’s a big man when it’s a woman talking to him, but he changes his tune when a local newspaper contacted him.

Love says he bought the flag several years ago, but that he doesn’t believe in the symbolism Nazis attached to the swastika, the meaning most have of the flag in the decades since World War II.

That used to be a religious symbol in India until Hitler got ahold of it, Love said. A lot of people don’t know that… I agree with the symbol as it started out as a religious symbol. But as far as backing Hitler and being a white supremacist and Hitler, I’m not into that.

Oh, bullshit. Or should I say, chickenshit.

You can count on coal 24/7. You can’t always depend on the sun!

The coming eclipse is a sign of the unreliability of solar power, I guess. Kentuckians are planning to protest.

If you’re planning to visit Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to see the total eclipse of the sun on August 21, 2017, be prepared. Hopkinsville (a.k.a. Eclipseville) is globally recognized to be the epicenter of the eclipse. Hundreds of thousands of spectators will converge on the town to see it. Among them “Kentuckians for Coal” will be in the vanguard protesting the eclipse.

Kentuckians for Coal is an ad-hoc coalition of miners, union officials, family members and coal users created to defend the Kentucky coal industry against encroachment from renewable energy industries and from economic development initiatives aimed at lessening America’s dependence on coal. Kentuckians for Coal stands against the eclipse and those who worship it.

Hopkinsville is actually calling itself “Eclipseville” now, and apparently has a number of reasons to be proud of itself.

Hopkinsville, with a population of 33,000, has two other great claims to fame. One is as the birthplace of the world-renowned psychic Edgar Cayce. He made his home in Hopkinsville, and died there in 1945, after predicting the date of his own death. The other is the notoriously pagan annual celebration of extra-terrestrials, which commemorates a terrifying landing by space aliens in 1955, 62 years ago to the day, known as the Little Green Men Festival.

Awesome. It’s true: a nearby farm was the site of extraterrestrial invasion, or maybe, owls.

The press release takes pains to make Hopkinsville sound hellish for the day of the eclipse.

When more than 250,000 people descend on the town for four days in August, including busloads of Amish from Pennsylvania and rumored Arab royalty, hucksters will peddle overpriced souvenirs as area hotels jack up their room rates by 400%; gas stations run out of gas; and cell phone service crashes due to demand. Traffic jams, a run on available food, an invasion of prostitutes, and rowdy crowds will test the patience of both local residents and the extra law enforcement brought in to maintain order. In addition, there is the serious threat to spectators’ eyesight if they look at the sun without special eclipse-viewing glasses.

It’s going to be full of coal miners, too! Horrible, dirty coal-miners shaking their fists at the sun! I think I’ll pass.

That’s how it’s done

It made me laugh to see Jason Kessler, organizer of the Charlottesville hate march, get heckled so fiercely he had to run away.

Even better is watching the memorials to traitors come down.

It’s classic. Remember how everyone cheered when the statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled, or the gleeful destruction of Saddam’s monuments? Only difference is that these Confederates were the losers who should never have had statues put up in the first place.