The Teabaggers are divine

According to their sacred literature, anyway. Would you believe this collection of angry ignorant kooks whining about their taxes in local American politics is actually written up in the Bible? Yeah, this is the fourth Tea Party movement: the first was after the death of Solomon, the second was led by Jesus Christ himself, the third was the Boston event, and the fourth was begun by a ranting overprivileged ass on the Chicago stock exchange, which makes Rick Santelli some kind of prophet, apparently.

Man, these guys are lunatics. American politics is more than a little embarrassing for Americans.

Oh, thank you, Oprah!

We’ve all been sitting around wondering what big questions would ever completely stymie science — we’ve been just knocking ’em down right and left, and scientists have been completely baffled about what good question they could possibly ask next. We’ve all had serious concerns that maybe we were all done, and we’d have to go work for a living or something terrible like that.

But we’ve been saved by Oprah. She, or rather the scientifically deep team of scientific and philosophical experts on her staff, have come up with a challenging list of Humongous Questions that we’ll have to address in our next grant proposals. Here they are, Six Questions Science Can’t Answer.

  • Padre Pio’s Stigmata! Old dead Italian priest would poke himself to make himself bleed every day, and people worshipped him like Jesus!

  • Hindu statues drink milk! When offered sips of milk, statues of Ganesha are claimed to have drunk it, and people believed it!

  • Mosque didn’t fall down! Old mosque in city damaged by tsunami failed to collapse; populace dumbfounded and consternated!

Well golly gee. I am sorta puzzled…not by the questions, which are trivial and stupid, but by the fact that the authors, Jennifer Margulis and Meredith Bryan, managed to find gainful employment as writers and that CNN thought this crap was worth publishing. More Mysteries! That Science Can’t Answer!

But wait! I’m sure at this point, Jennifer and Meredith — hang on, I need a cutesy name for this couple…Jennidith! — Jennidith looked at their list of big questions and pondered. They’d hit up a couple of the Big Religions, and they were probably thinking that they could have gone on in this vein for a while. After all, they haven’t said anything about Judaism or Buddhism yet (maybe, “Why is a Catholic girl like Madonna suddenly so Jewish?” or “How will you explain what the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated as in his next life?”), but they were unsatisfied. These questions didn’t sound very sciencey. They weren’t even sciencish.

So they puzzled and they pondered and they contemplated, and they thought of some big science-like questions that had nothing at all to do with the first three questions, but kind of looked like questions a really smart person might ask, and since they didn’t know the answers, they must be the big questions we should shoo the scientists off to find out.

  • How did the universe begin? Like, planetariums are really awesome. Especially during Laser Floyd.

  • Do aliens exist? We’re not crazy to believe in space aliens, and we found a scientist who says there are other planets out there for them!

  • How many species live on earth? So many of those species are really, really small, so they must be hard to count!

I’d say more, but right now I’m just looking at Jennidith, shaking my head sadly, and wondering if maybe there isn’t somewhere else I’d rather be. Somewhere else with beer, maybe. And maybe with grown-ups who can talk intelligently. Because Jennidith, poor Jennidith, is an airhead.

They shouldn’t feel too bad, though. You can’t even imagine what I think of Oprah!

A victory in Louisiana

This is fabulous news: the Louisiana school system has been wrestling with a proposal from the Louisiana Family Forum (you know the rule: the word “family” in their title means they’re anything but) which would have had the schools using science textbooks with absurd warning labels and watered down content. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has seen the light, however, and voted 6 to 1 in favor of using quality textbooks for the kids of Louisiana. It’s an all-around win for everyone.

The Louisiana Patriarchy Forum is not happy. They are venting their frustration a bit with a ridiculous poll — go make them cry some more.

Do you support BESE’s decision today to approve a list of Biology textbooks with known false and inaccurate information?

YES
29%
NO
71%

Just remember, to a creationist “false and inaccurate” refers to any piece of evidence that shows how bogus their superstitions are, and vote accordingly.

I get mail

Some people just don’t get it. Christopher Maloney wants to silence a message he doesn’t like on the internet by serving a cease & desist order.

i-3791fdd21446db837462e4cc983cf808-maloney.jpg

The last time I mentioned Maloney was eight months ago, and even then it was to point and laugh at his page throwing crazy paranoid accusations at me. So now, after eight months of neglect, he has decided to stir the pot and remind everyone that Christopher Maloney is a quack and that he keeps on quacking? That makes no sense.

So, once again, the web will start echoing the Christopher Maloney is a quack message.

It must be handy for a quack to marry a lawyer, but I don’t think she’s giving him good advice in this case. You might as well serve a writ on the tides to stop flowing as ask the internet to erase a piece of its data—your best bet is to allow it to take its course and hope that the wavelet that disturbs you gets lost in the incessant volume.

There are people meaner than I am

I got a surprising amount of criticism of my review of the arsenic-eating bacteria paper — some people thought I was too harsh and too skeptical and too cynical. Haven’t those people ever sat through a grad school journal club? We’re trained to eviscerate even the best papers, and I actually had to restrain myself a lot.

Anyway, I’m a pussycat. You want thorough skepticism, read Rosie Redfield’s drawing and quartering of the paper, which rips into the hasty methodology of the work. Man, after that, the body ain’t even twitching any more, and they’re going to have to clean up the pieces with a wet-vac. It’s beautiful.

Let’s poll the readers and see if it’s OK to kill children with neglect

It’s another of those horrible stories of an ignorant fundie family with a sick child who could be easily cured by modern medicines, but they chose to treat him with the uselessness of prayer…and guess what happens? They’re now the proud parents of a corpse.

The media doesn’t help. They give a voice to all the frauds saying things like, “Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs” and “The result was not what they wanted because our faith is imperfect at times. But God is perfect.” And then they go further and create a stupid poll for specious validation of the majority view.

Do you believe in the power of prayer to heal?

Yes 7.1%
Yes, but in conjunction with medicine 54.8%
No 38.1%
Don’t know 0%

That “Yes, but in conjunction with medicine” is such a common cop-out. This is what the apologists for religion do: let the stuff that works give cover for the lies they spew that do nothing and do harm. And they’re just as wicked as the ones who flatly say yes.

While we’re busy playing in the Creationist Theme Park…

…take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I’ve seen on the American future.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

That hasn’t even gotten to the predictions yet. That’s a description of our current status.

You know, in ten years the Chinese tourists will be flocking to the bargains and sights of an economy in the toilet, and they will be booking tours to the Ark Encounter. And they will point and laugh and laugh and laugh. While proud Kentuckians will be scrabbling to sell them cheap plastic souvenirs in their new, low-paying jobs in the service industries.

I’m sure Ken Ham is grateful

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG’s latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV’s evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It’s something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin’ Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can’t even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of “he said, she said” journalism and didn’t even bother to contact a scientist to get the “other” side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don’t have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?