An indie film project is looking for help funding their movie, Standing up to the Experts, which tells the story of the Texas board of education, its excessive power in defining what science is taught, and featuring that blithely incompetent buffoon, Don McLeroy. Here’s a taste.
I’d like to see the whole thing myself. But then, I am a fan of horror movies.
The webcomic Jesus and Mo has won the Riffy Award. Maybe now it will get the hatred, rioting, and violence it so deserves.
Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they’re going to pray for PZ Myers. They’re rather vague about what they’re praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I’m also going to confound their experiment since I’m going to tell everyone to not Pray4PZ, and since their site traffic is so minuscule, I’m going to overwhelm their results.
They also have a post titled “Can PZ Myers be reasoned with?”, which is amusing — I guess the prayer effort wasn’t doing much, so they had to resort to reason, and they even do that ineffectively.
They’ve also got an online poll, and I’m embarrassed to point it out. The subject is me again, it was set up 11 months ago, and it has received ONE vote so far. That’s just sad.
poll: Is PZ Myers the AntiChrist?
No. Obama is. : (0 votes)
No. Pat Robertson is. : (0 votes)
No. Someone else is. : (0 votes)
No. He doesn’t claim to be God. : (1 votes)
100 %
YES! YES! YES! : (0 votes)
I don’t know. : (0 votes)
Other answer: : (0 votes)
There’s a lesson here. I guess I’m not Kim Kardashian, and just dropping my name won’t make you popular and draw in lots of meaningless interest.
Now if one of the Kardashians was on that poll…
Lately I’ve been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They’ve got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I’m not impressed. Here’s a representative example, with the url to yet another horror show removed.
Please read
Abortion is more than a “procedure” and it is rare that a pregnancy causes harm or death to a woman.
Maybe to better understand the murder that abortion truly is, you should study the photos in the link below. It is easy to desensitize yourself and your readers and say it’s just a procedure, and the fetus is just a “bunch of cells,” but again, I ask that you study the photos in the link below, and I hope you are sickened with the real truth- Abortion IS Murder.
URL deleted
Abortion is more about greed and selfishness. There are many many many families that would give anything to do a domestic adoption and offer prenatal care to a woman that did not want to keep/raise her baby.
No one says it better than Mother Teresa.
“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you live as you wish”
I pray that you will take the time to more fully understand what abortion is, and why the option to kill our nation’s babies should not be an option at all.
Sincerely,
Sarah Dillon
Sarah Dillon is an ignorant hysteric, and she’s awesomely stupid. She couldn’t have written a letter better guaranteed to dissuade me from accepting her position.
First, never quote Mother Teresa at me — she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to receive the accolades of the gullible. I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.
Secondly, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I’m a biologist. I’ve guillotined rats. I’ve held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I’ve used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I’ve opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I’ve been elbow deep in blood, I’ve split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I’ve extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.
You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.
The vilest thing in the picture is the moron waving the sign and thinking they’re making an argument.
So it’s almost Valentine’s Day, that schmaltzy holiday dedicated to commercializing love. I was sent a list of science-themed Valentine’s Day cards, and I was shocked and disappointed. They’re all freakin’ physicists! Physicists know nothing of love; they’re like atheists that way. Come on, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Galen, Avicenna, Servetus, Harvey…they’re obvious.
Oh, all right, physicists are all dorks anyway. Go ahead and get your beloved a goofy card with some math nerd on it. I’ll go down to the butcher shop and get mine a token she won’t soon forget.
Sure, I know the meaning of love. It’s muscular. It’s alive. It throbs. And it’s full of blood.
Dan Savage has called on his readers to respond to a poll. Here’s the description:
“A religious right-wing conservative State Senator is trying to make [death-with-dignity] illegal,” writes a reader. “A state senator, along with a couple of anti-choice religious-based organizations, are freeping (artificially inflating the #s by getting out-of-area votes) a poll on a newspaper site in Kalispell, with a plan to get a big headline that they won the poll. Normally I wouldn’t bother with such stuff. But Montana is the smallest of small town politics–and every little thing matters.”
Go here, Sloggers, vote “no.”
I’m always happy to give Dan Savage an assist. This is the poll in question:
Should State Lawmakers Vote to Ban Assisted Suicide?
Yes
40%
No
60%
I don’t usually tell you how to vote. I think you can figure it out.
Gosh. I hope no one looking for Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter accidentally types arkencounters.com.
(Warning! Obnoxious autoplay video! Warning! Dinosaur porn! Warning!)
Stand in awe of the loving grace and harmony that church brings to the community! Here’s a letter one evangelical church sent to a congregant because she’d committed a sin.
They are handing her over to Satan! Worst collection agency ever.
Oh, and her sin was…getting divorced. How dare she break the sacred bond to her lord and master, a man?
That loon Terry Hurlbut is irate that I mocked his “Creationist Hall of Fame” in a post the other day, so he rails against me today. It’s a typical collection of squirrely non-sequiturs, but I’ll address the funniest of them.
But what PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog fails to understand is that the CSHF does not intend to limit its honors to contemporary creation-oriented scientists. He probably believes that because he is under a common misapprehension: that creation science is a new movement, one going no further back than Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood.
As in all things, Terry Hurlbut is mistaken and ignorant. No, I do not fail to understand that; in fact, I expect that. It’s one of creationism’s most common strategems, the adoption of any scientist who lived before Darwin into the ranks of anti-Darwinists. I’m sure Isaac Newton will be inducted into the Creationist Hall of Fame, despite the fact that, brilliant as he was, he was not a biologist, did not consider the problems of biological origins at all deeply, did no work in the field, and didn’t even have an evolutionary theory to argue against.
Creationism is a belief born of ignorance. It depends on a lack of awareness of biological realities and knowledge of the experiments and observations in the discipline (or, alternatively, awareness of this work coupled to a malignant denial). Terry Hurlbut can go ahead and mine the human population a thousand generations back and find plenty of smart and accomplished human beings, and draft them posthumously to be part of his “creationist movement”, but it doesn’t change the fact that the chief criterion for membership in that movement is simply ignorance. Isaac Newton was ignorant of the facts of evolutionary biology, and so was Aristotle, and so was Thog, son of Thag, caveman. Go ahead, sign them all up, they’re as much an intellectual contributor to creationism as they are spiritual members of the Mormon church…but that won’t stop the Mormons from baptizing them anyway.
Still incapable of reading for comprehension, Hurlbut horks up another error.
One final word is in order: the Creation Science Hall of Fame makes no representation that it will have as many inductees as the so-called “Science Hall of Fame” of which PZ Myers is so fond. In harping on the apparent scarcity of CSHF honorees thus far (and forgetting that the CSHF is under construction in cyberspace as well as under development in brick and mortar), Myers commits a classic logical fallacy: argumentum a numeris (argument from numbers), or argumentum a multitudine (argument from the crowd). Instead, the CSHF will compete on quality, not quantity.
Heh. Right. If he read a little more closely, he might have noticed that what I thought worth noting was that the Science Hall of Fame uses an objective measurement of the recognition granted to the scientists in the literature. When those same measurements are made of their creationist heroes, they fail. The Creationist Hall of Fame is going to be populated by clowns who are selected for their adherence to the crazy notion that the Earth is 6000 years old, leavened by a small set of famous scientists who lived before the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. That isn’t quality. That’s lunacy.
By the way, I’m sure Hurlbut will rant some more, but I won’t be replying. He gets paid for traffic to his Examiner site, and he probably simply sees this as an easy way to milk the cash cow, and I won’t be helping him further.
I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high school student to handle anesthesia. He killed a patient by overdosing her on drugs, and is also charged with killing 7 babies in late-term abortions.
Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.
It is entirely appropriate that this monster be shut down and charged with serious crimes against women. This isn’t the first death for which he’s responsible; another woman died of a perforated uterus, others suffered from punctured internal organs, others were left sterile by his botched work. The most shocking news is that this guy has been chopping up poor women since 1979, and that the last time the state actually inspected his facilities was in 1993. Why have people looked the other way and allowed this to continue for 30 years?
He has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy). They haven’t, and they shouldn’t. Much noise is being made about the “horrific” killings, but late term abortions, even the ones done in clean, properly maintained facilities with well-trained personnel, are always necessarily bloody and unpleasant affairs, like most surgeries. The important word there is “necessary”. Late term abortions should be carried out when it is essential for the life and health of the woman, who is the most important participant in these circumstances, and opening the door to accusing doctors who perform necessary operations as murder is a dangerous precedent.
Gosnell committed many crimes. He posed as a qualified practitioner of his art, when he wasn’t. He did not maintain a medical facility in an appropriate manner. He had even less qualified people do life-threatening work. He lied to women about their pregnancies. He mutilated and killed women. He did harm. That should be what generates public outrage, not the fact that he did abortions.
