It’s gone past funny to depressing

Creationists are pathetic and detestable.

The alt text on this comic reads, “Disappointed with myself that I haven’t done a creationism joke in years. Six years is like 0.1 percent of the past.” I sympathize. It’s hard to be funny about creationism because it is such obvious bullshit that I feel like all you need to do is transcribe what they say literally and stand back and go “See? See?” while underlining and circling their own words. They make comedy about creationism redundant.

What’s worse is that creationists are so damn serious about their fairy tales. Look at Stephen Meyer or Ken Ham — they’re so full of themselves and so committed to stating such ridiculous garbage while keeping a straight face. And it’s so sad to see people so adamant about wasting their lives defending the indefensible, and expanding the mythology by compounding the nonsense.

Beware of 60 year old grandmas!

Nahlia Al-Arian

They’re a terrifying force of nature. They’re so scary that their presence is sufficient pretext to marshal a squad of cops to deal with the threat.

The mayor of New York City Eric Adams and the police department have used the claim of outside agitators to justify their use of force in clearing the protestors from Columbia University. Adams pointed to the presence of Nahlia Al-Arian as the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

Who is she? Jeremy Scahill writes about how this 63-year old retired fourth grade teacher and grandmother, whose family is from Gaza and who has lost about 200 of her family and friends in the recent Israeli onslaught there, ended up as the embodiment of ‘outside agitators’ that required such brutal force.

Oh no! And a teacher, too? They’re the worst. She’s got the NY police trembling in their jackboots.

I’ve got one of those grandmas living in my house, and I tell you, sometimes I’d like to call out the National Guard, but I’m too scared.

Do you think medical boards protect us from quacks?

She said, the longer you wear a mask, the more unhealthy you get.

She thinks vaccines wreck chromosomes. For those of you who say you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you: ‘You coerced people into being injected with this gene-modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?

She claims that that there is “some sort of an interface, ‘yet to be defined’ interface, between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers, and that the vaccines have caused thousands of deaths in the U.S.

She also says I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who’ve had these shots, and now they’re magnetized. They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them, and they can stick. Because now we think that there’s a metal piece to that.

She thinks cities are liquifying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.

She has a mission.

In one session, Tenpenny implores God to release the U.S. from the tyranny of the mask, argues America is founded on your word and expresses hope it will return to being one country under God. In another, she refers to vaccines as a bioweapon to damage your children created by satanists who allow Black Lives Matter and antifa activists to operate as a front to drive socialism through the heart of America, which turns into communism.

I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that the state medical board has restored Sherri Tenpenny’s license to practice medicine in the state of Ohio.

Making good things cool

The pressure is enormous. I’m a pretty conventional guy, but all the messaging from the world around me tells me that people like me are terrible, hypocritical, and lack all empathy.

Normie guy feels unsafe when people protest genocide, is relieved to see cops busting heads

I’m still cheering on the protesters, though, and despising the cops. This comic from Mattie Lubchansky is mainly persuading me that I’ll never wear a purple sweater vest.

Then there’s all these strangely hateful people trying to tell me that being LGBTQ is super-cool.

The LGBT flag is like the modern day Jolly Roger. It’s a declaration to the world that you stand against order, civilization, and goodness itself

Look, that tempts me, but the social contagion isn’t influencing me at all. I’m a confirmed, committed heterosexual who finds himself attracted to women, not men, and even if you promised me a whole pirate ship and a chest full of gold doubloons I wouldn’t be able to switch my sexual preferences.

I’m not changing my brain around, but I’m convinced by this kind of media that I should be supporting protesters and LGBT people. They’re the ones doing the sane, cool stuff.

If that isn’t enough ferocity for you, behold…the Gender Ideology Hydra!

Spider gluttony

I was checking out our compost bin, which is swarming with young juvenile spiders, and what jumped out at me was how fat they’re getting. These little spiders are growing fast and are turning into regular whales. This one, I noticed, had a secret stash — they’d corralled a bunch of baby isopods to snack on whenever they felt peckish.

Parasteatoda

Yum. All gathered into one spot, and tender and delicious nibbles, too. No wonder they’re getting so plump.

Personally, I’m feeling well satiated right now. I scheduled one class to turn in their final assignment last night, and another class to turn in their term papers tonight. I’d rather lick isopods off a compost bin lid than read any more student papers.

Bari Weiss created a short, simple label for the worst people in media: “IDW”

It’s been six years since Bari Weiss published that silly New York Times article conjuring the Intellectual Dark Web into existence. I think a lot of us here, at least, instantly recognized that it was PR for a gang of grifters and that Weiss was trying to be the Queen Bee of an imaginary movement. It’s about time we got a retrospective on Weiss’s propaganda flop. Where is the IDW now? How are its heroes doing? The short answer is that they’re thriving, cruising along with growing audiences, because they’ve become the clowns in the circus.

So let’s take a look at the IDW today. Eric Weinstein:

Eric Weinstein, a mathematician who spent years working for right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, gave the IDW its name—which he has described variously as a “half-joke” and also a brilliantly calibrated troll designed to get maximum attention. He’s considered one of the least extreme of the original IDW members.

But both in 2018 and now, Weinstein decries what he calls the “gated institutional narrative” and the irredeemable systemic corruption he believes has infected a vast array of institutions, from academia to the media. He’s convinced that many of these institutions are conspiring to silence himself and his friends (and prevent them from winning Nobel Prizes).

Jordan Peterson:

While Peterson was always prone to hyperbole, he has become increasingly unhinged.

He now says climate activists want to “sacrifice the poor,” compares them to Nazis, and suggests that global elites are using climate change as an excuse to depopulate the planet. He compares this effort to “genocidal societies” with a “utopian vision” which leads to the “mass destruction of millions of people.” He believes Vladimir Putin may well be on the right side of a civilizational battle against wokeness. He describes COVID-19 as a “so-called pandemic” and claims it’s “highly probable” that the vaccines (which he refuses to call “vaccines”) were more dangerous than the disease.

Dave Rubin:

Rubin’s North Star was “civility.” But these days he tweets things like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) is a “dishonest communist cunt,” and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is a “vile jihadist cunt.” Tweeting recently about United States Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Samantha Power, Rubin said, “this bitch can fuck off.”

Ben Shapiro:

Another member of this tribe devoted to civility and rational discourse is the popular conservative podcaster and writer Ben Shapiro. As the right-wing’s angry motormouth one-time wunderkind, he’s remained somewhat consistent—having gone from saying things like, “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue” to things like, “Hamas is running Columbia University.”

Bret Weinstein:

Here are a few of Weinstein’s fascinating insights today: He suspects that the United States is involved in a plot with China and the WHO to create a “turnkey totalitarian planet.” He claims that a “credible estimate” of the number of deaths caused by mRNA vaccines is 17 million. He suggests that China is financing infrastructure in Central America to launch an “undeclared invasion” with a covert army of “military age” men. He’s a big fan of RFK, Jr., who compared public health measures during the pandemic to Nazism and the Holocaust.

Joe Rogan:

To cite just one example, when Weinstein recently suggested on The Joe Rogan Experience that vaccine mandates in the U.S. military were meant to purge ethical and freethinking soldiers and replace them with disloyal and compliant immigrants—a force that would be “capable of acting on behalf of tyranny against Americans”—Rogan didn’t offer any critical comment.

Instead, he said: “Holy shit. Then you have a real coup.”

Candace Owens:

In a 2017 interview with Rubin, Owens said, “I think abortion is really just about population control.” Rubin replied with a characteristically uncritical and incurious follow-up: “That’s some serious red-pill right there.” In 2018, Owens claimed that liberals want to “exterminate blacks via Planned Parenthood, which she would later describe as a “silent genocide.” She said Black conservative politicians are “all called coons” by the media. She declared that “the word ‘racism’ is repeated obsessively by people who wish to enslave black people to the Democratic Party.”

Five months before Weiss published her piece, Owens called for the imprisonment of journalists and political opponents—something that probably should have pricked the ears of a movement which claimed to be unwavering in its defense of free speech and civil discourse.

There are others mentioned, including Christina Hoff Summers, Majid Nawaz, Douglas Murray, etc., but you get the idea. The IDW was a tarnished brand from the outset, and it’s only gotten worse as its members descend into greater madness.

Bari Weiss has an awesome legacy. Let’s hope it catches up to her someday.

May the Fourth proven false by a religious twit!

It’s fun to watch religious conservatives grapple with pop culture, because they really don’t get it. Today is the goofy pseudo-holiday called May the Fourth (it’s not a real holiday, ‘k? It’s a silly riff on the phrase “May the force be with you from Star Wars). The big dumb dorks at Answers in Genesis would like to get in on the fun in the worst possible way. Like a particularly clueless high schooler showing up at the prom to tell everyone dancing is stupid, their way of celebrating a fake holiday is to announce that Star Wars is fake.

We know, guy.

The AiG approach, though, is to “prove” that intelligent aliens don’t exist using theological “logic”. They imagine a group of fictitious aliens finding a Bible.

Let’s consider physical, intelligent beings like Wookies, Klingons, or other “humanlike” beings. Although they definitely make for good entertainment in sci-fi movies and shows, the concept of advanced alien races is theologically problematic. Let me explain using the following (imaginary) scenario, with Chewbacca, Superman, and Spock reading the Bible: can these intelligent aliens be redeemed from the curse? (See Genesis 3 and Romans 8.) In other words, does God’s plan of salvation apply to them?

These imaginary aliens would not think about that at all, any more than you would wonder whether you were going to be rewarded with some kind of paradise if you found some book of mythology. Are you wondering if you’ve been sufficiently “cleared” to earn Scientology’s afterlife? Probably not. Chewbacca is going to be similarly unconcerned about meeting weird-ass Christian criteria. However, AiG’s theology says poor Chewie is either “fallen” or irrelevant.

Romans 8 makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected all creation—not just mankind. So then we have to ask the question: are these high-level sentient aliens fallen? If not, then they’re redundant. God already has the angels (the cherubim, seraphim, etc.). And even if these aliens have never sinned, they would still suffer the effects of sin, suffering under the bondage of corruption—despite having never sinned!

So are they claiming that the Bible accuses the Wookies of Kashyyk of being slammed with the guilt of sin when Eve bit into the apple? Because it doesn’t say that. No human has any knowledge of aliens on other worlds, so it would be really weird if Moses, the putative author of certain books of the Bible, had enumerated all these unrelated alien creatures. So this is a rather stupid assertion. Also, sin is not an actual phenomenon — it’s invective used against certain behaviors, rather than something intrinsic to humans or aliens — so claiming it’s a property of people as well as Wookies is not demonstrable.

As for being irrelevant…that’s an ugly anthropocentric and often racist attitude.

Obviously, it makes no sense to have intelligent beings—who suffer because of Adam’s sin—but cannot be saved! Christ is able to redeem man because he represents man by taking upon himself a second nature—as being fully God and fully man. Christ is the God-man (i.e., he’s not the “God-Klingon” or the “God-Wookie”).

“Obviously” and “it makes no sense” are phrases no fundamentalist/evangelical Christian should ever use. The whole premise of their religion, that a god turned into a man who died and thereby allowed everyone to go to heaven, “obviously” “makes no sense.”

AiG somehow turns this strange twisted logic into proof that aliens don’t exist, because “it makes no sense.”

Simply put, the work of Jesus cannot atone for the sins of advanced alien beings. And so, the idea of intelligent life existing on other planets is completely unbiblical! Actually, these kinds of issues highlight the problem of trying to mix unbiblical ideas into a biblical worldview. I mean, can you imagine a gospel message that begins with: “Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” No, that would obviously trivialize the gospel!

And speaking of the gospel, I should also quickly mention that it’s unbiblical to believe Jesus somehow visited multiple alien worlds, lived there, died for them, rose again . . . and repeated this process on each world. In other words, Jesus dying multiple times is NOT biblical! The Bible makes it very clear that Jesus died once (e.g., Romans 6:10; Hebrews 9:28; 1 Peter 3:18).

There’s an awful lot of bullshit excused as “biblical”, so “unbiblical” is not the condemnation they think it is.

They then leap to rebut an argument no one has made. What about unintelligent life? The argument from sin and salvation wouldn’t apply, so maybe tauntauns could exist? Nope. Any planets orbiting those 1023 stars in the universe must be completely sterile.

…recall from Genesis 1 that God created everything for man’s benefit and enjoyment. In other words, we have dominion over God’s creation (Genesis 1:28), which is also stated in Psalm 8. So the question would be: do we have dominion over those plants and animals on alien worlds? What purpose would they serve for us? So, for this reason alone, I believe it’s unlikely that there’s any non-intelligent life out in the cosmos.

So trillions of dead planets many light years away must have been put there for “man’s benefit and enjoyment.” How does that work, anyway? What benefit do I get from an unreachably distant scorched cinder orbiting Betelgeuse, pray tell? Doesn’t the fact that I don’t, and that I don’t have dominion over distant planets, show that their interpretation of the Bible is already wrong?

I want you to know this was a challenge

A swarm of Parasteatoda have hatched out in my compost bin, and I’ve tried a few times to get decent photos of them, but it’s hard. They’re young and tiny — less than half a millimeter long — and they’re busy, scampering all over to build webs, so shooting them is tough. Also, I’m rusty from a long winter neglecting my camera.

Here’s one being spooky, its cephalothorax in shadow with just the pair of posterior median eyes visible and glowing.

I’ll keep practicing and they’ll keep growing.