Governor of Alabama apologizes…sorta

Robert Bentley must have been feeling some political heat. After openly announcing his sectarian bias in a MLK Day speech, Bentley has offered a not-pology.

If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way.

Jebus, but I hate that poor excuse for an apology. It happens all the time; someone says something stupid and wrong, and instead of saying, “I was wrong, I’m sorry and will try to change,” they say, “I’m sorry you were offended by my remarks” — suddenly, the problem lies not in the error of the speaker but in the sensitivity of the listener.

That’s not an apology. It’s a transparent attempt to twist the blame to fall on everyone else but the person who made the mistake.

Even that’s too generous: this wasn’t a mistake. Bentley was honestly and intentionally expressing his views, as he has said, “speaking as an evangelical Christian to fellow Baptists.” The man sincerely believes that his fellow superstitious louts are his special brothers and sisters who he has been elected to serve, and the riff-raff who don’t go to his church are of lesser consideration.

That’s what he needed to apologize for, and correct. He doesn’t need to apologize for people finding offense in his stupidity and bias.

He especially doesn’t need to apologize for that because pandering to a smug majority is what got him elected in the first place.

Episode CLVIII: Don’t blame me!

People keep sending this to me, and I listened to it once — and that was enough. But it keeps piling up in my mailbox! Maybe if I inflict it on the tortuous thread, it will stop.

Although it does have some virtues: technically, it’s well done within the conventions of country music, and the two vocalists are representative of the teabaggers.

(Current totals: 11,720 entries with 1,249,345 comments.)

Oh, look what will be happening in my backyard

A representative from Answers in Genesis will be speaking here in Morris, Minnesota! And none of the scheduled talks conflict with any of my classes! Not that I’ll go to them all — I do have limits on how much BS I can be served before gakking up chunks — but I’ll go to some, and will live-tweet the foolishness and blog up the events afterwards. My introductory biology students will also get some extra credit for attending.

Sunday, February 27, 2011 to Monday, February 28, 2011
Dr. Terry Mortenson

Schedule

Note: Any overlapping times indicate multiple, simultaneous sessions

Sunday, February 27, 2011
9 a.m. All Sunday Sessions will be held at Morris Area Elementary School
9 a.m. Music Worship
10 a.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Creation vs Evolution: Why It Matters
6 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Dinosaurs: Have You Been Brainwashed?
7:30 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Noah’s Flood: Washing Away Millions of Years
Monday, February 28, 2011
11 a.m. All Monday sessions will be held at Hosanna Worship Center
11 a.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson The Seven C’s of History
(Grades K-6)
12:45 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Why and How to Think About Origins
(Grades 7-12)
6 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Origin of Species: Was Darwin Right?
7:30 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Ape-men: the Grand Illusion

More Information

Contact Information

Bart Graves
320-589-2808
bart@mefc.net

Notes

Location for Sunday sessions:
Morris Area Elentary School Concert Hall

151 S. Columbia Ave.
Morris, MN

Location for Monday sessions:
Hosanna Worship Center

46303 State Hwy 28
Morris, MN

This event is a combined ministry of
The Morris Evangelical Free Church
Hosanna Worship Center
Morris Community Church

It’s nice to see the centers of indoctrination into religious stupidity — the Morris Evangelical Free Church, the Hosanna Worship Center, and the Morris Community Church — boldly standing up to admit their participation in crimes against reason. And now you know the kind of folly we face here in rural Minnesota.

A Wakefield poll

As all rational, well-informed people know, Andrew Wakefield has been thoroughly discredited: his poor study that claimed a link between vaccination and autism has not only been debunked, but Wakefield has been found to have committed fraud for personal profit, manipulating the data to get the results that professional litigators wanted him to get.

Wouldn’t you know it, Wakefield is fighting back…by trying to crash an internet poll. Doesn’t he know that the Jedi Masters of poll crashing are all either on the side of science (like me) or the side of chaos (4chan), and that he’s not going to get his way with that approach?

i-b783d76f60a2a26014e029346330ce46-wakefield.jpeg

What a silly question. I don’t think it was a figment of his imagination at all; I think he saw dollar signs being waved by lawyers and intentionally fudged his data to make them happy. I’d think better of him if he were a delusional incompetent, but instead, I now think he was a con artist who traded children’s lives for payola.

Here’s the poll in question. I trust you will act responsibly and destroy it savagely.

Is the vaccine-autism link debunked?

Yes 57.24%

No 42.76%

If you’re a masochist, you might enjoy reading the comments at that link. Wakefield’s True Believers™ are out in force there, making amazing paranoid accusations.

Oops, I think that letter was supposed to be burned

An interesting letter has been unearthed. It reveals that the Vatican was officially instructing its clergy to hide pedophilia cases from civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter demonstrates that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.

“The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican’s intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere,” said Colm O’Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

Yeah, I have serious reservations of a moral character about the Catholic church, that’s for sure.

I am bemused by the threat that if a church dared to invoke civil authorities to protect the children in their charge from rapacious priests, their actions would be overturned by the Vatican. Is that basically saying that if locals do anything other than work with the Vatican to quarantine child-rapers, the Vatican will do whatever they can to put the rapist right back into his position? Sweet. They really don’t care at all about their congregations, do they?

Dueling Halls of Fame

This is an awesome coincidence. The availablity of all those quantifiable metrics extracted by Google Books has fueled the establishment of a Science Hall of Fame, which lists scientists by an objective measure of their fame, the frequency with which they are cited in books. It was announced in Science, where they also introduced a new unit of measure, the milli-Darwin.

To be able to compare scientists to one another, it is helpful to have a standard unit of fame. I proposed one that would make this kind of fame easy to comprehend: the Darwin. It is defined as the average annual frequency that “Charles Darwin” appears in English-language books from the year when he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000. Because it is such a big unit of fame, it has proved more convenient to use one-thousandth of that frequency: the milli-Darwin, abbreviated as mD.

Here’s the list of over 4,000 famous scientists. Some of them aren’t famous for science — Lewis Carroll, for instance — but all are notable people.

So where’s the coincidence? It turns out that on the same day the Science Hall of Fame was announced, a small gang of loons announced the Creation Science Hall of Fame, “Honoring those who honored God’s Word as literally written in Genesis.” There are a few differences between the two halls. The creation science group, unsurprisingly, is begging for money: they want $4 million in donations. Why? They want to build a physical monument somewhere in the neighborhood of the Creation “Museum,” which sounds like a horrible idea to me. It would create a black hole of concentrated stupidity in the heart of Kentucky that might destroy the world!

Another difference is that they aren’t using any kind of objective metric to identify famous creationists — apparently, they just look around and pick someone from the godly pantheon. So far, they’ve got two: Henry Morris and Duane Gish. Two against the 4,000+ in the Science Hall of Fame. Sounds about right, although zero would be a better number.

Also, opening up the door to scrutiny like that just means the scientists will use the Google microscope to examine the creationist nominees. It doesn’t look good. Creationists like to compare Gish to TH Huxley — “Gish has been called ‘creationism’s T.H. Huxley,” says Wikipedia — but now we can actually compare Gish and Huxley. Huxley gets 102mD. Gish gets 5.

No contest. It was very nice of the creationists to step into the arena and get such a drubbing, though.