Lomborg gets spanked

Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” has always bugged me as a rather shady character. Now Howard Friel started fact-checking Lomborg’s footnotes, and found them to be wanting.

But when Friel began checking Lomborg’s sources, “I found problems,” he says. “As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn’t support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern.” He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel’s conclusion, as per his book’s title, is that Lomborg is “a performance artist disguised as an academic.”

Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.

They don’t really care about the children

About 20 clergy, representing the very best of Christian theology, of course, and various Republicans gathered in Virginia to protest the existence of Planned Parenthood—they want all state funding, about $35,000 a year, stopped. They claim that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization because it provides abortions (which I consider a necessary and brave service, given the violence of anti-choice lunatics) and contraceptives, ignoring the fact that they also provide reproductive health care for women. In a just and rational world, Planned Parenthood would be regarded as a heroic organization, helping to make this a better world.

Not in the minds of these pious zealots, though. Bob Marshall voluntarily exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the protest with a few choice words.

The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children.

In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.

He’s lying. There is no evidence that abortion imposes long term risk of any kind on women or their subsequent children. He’s confusing what he wishes were true with what is actually true.

I despise his imaginary, wrathful, poisonous, child-torturing god. This is what these kinds of Christians hold as just: that an omnipotent monster would wreak vengeance on children for a mother’s actions, and furthermore, that a handicapped child is a punishment for the parents. That’s simply twisted. A suffering child is loved no less by a sane parent, and our hearts are wrenched by the troubles of even our healthiest children. Think about what this dumb wretch has said to every child who is less than perfect in this world (which includes all of us, of course): we are his god’s instrument of torture for our parents. God is the psychopathic bastard who forces failings on us to make our mothers suffer a little more.

God must really hate Bob Marshall’s mother, then, to inflict such a demented fuckwit on her.

You can write to Bob and let him know what you think of his deity. And Virginians — I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, conservative or liberal, but could you please stop putting evil, narrow-minded little pissants like Bob Marshall in positions of power? Let him be an affliction to his own family, and leave the rest of us alone.

A few additions:

Angie the anti-theist is getting an abortion — good for her for being bold enough to put a human face to the issue.

And here’s a weird twist. For all their protestations about equality, somehow they think blacks are a different species?

i-e97e51cd07f9122f78f7d12a299d202c-black_species.jpeg

Is it safe?

This hasn’t been a good week for me. I was flattened by a cold this weekend, and now I’ve been diagnosed with incipient periodontal gum disease, and just got back from a long, long session with the dental hygienist. I was trapped in a chair for two hours for a painfully thorough cleaning: scraping, plating, grinding, needley poking, an evil machine that produced a high-pitched screaming noise and sharp agony in my gums, more whirring gadgets, strange substances, and the constant taste of blood as the oozing filled my mouth. It was the longest stretch of sustained sadism I’ve experienced in, oh, weeks. I got up from the chair at last, shaking, and wobbled out the door. I’ve been warned that I’m going to feel even worse later today.

Don’t worry, though, I didn’t reveal the secret location of the diamonds, nor did I give away the launch codes.

I’ve got another appointment for Thursday. I might break then.

The Don McLeroy of Israel

I’m getting a flood of email from Israel. As one correspondent explains, Israel maintains three kinds of state-supported schools: one kind for the ultra-orthodox, because the state has always fostered freakishly fanatical ignorance among the lunatic subset, and these schools teach no science at all; a fully secular system, particularly in higher education, because Jews have also had a strong scholarly tradition, and Israel depends on material strategies for its survival, and these schools teach science very well; and a general intermediate kind of school where religion may be taught but science is also taught. That situation may be in peril now. Gavriel Avital, the chief scientist in the education ministry, has made a few statements that show he is a lunatic.

“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” Avital said yesterday.

“There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,” he said. “If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I’ll insist that isn’t the case.”

Nobody has explained to me yet how such a putz got appointed in the first place, but this isn’t a good sign. The man is a freakin’ incompetent.

Prior to his appointment, Avital said in a video interview with Machon Meir, a religious-Zionist Jewish studies institute, “Another scientific field that is problematic is biology, or life and environmental sciences. When your doctrine is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution and its implications, you are standing on unreliable foundations – that is, there is no God, there was only something primeval, and then there are certain random developments which led to the apex of all creation, the human being.

“Today I am pleased that more and more scientists engaged in pure science, rather than being employed in the name of an ideology, are reaching the conclusion that the world must have a master. Nothing is given to chance,” he said. “These are my opinions and I won’t deny them just because I was appointed to an Education Ministry position.”

The chorus of outrage is already building among sensible scientists in Israel.

Yehoshua Kolodny, a professor emeritus at Hebrew University who won the Israel Prize for his contributions to the study of earth science, responded furiously to these statements yesterday.

“Denying evolution is like denying science itself,” Kolodny said.

“Evolution is not a theory, but an observation point that anyone can see. Perhaps Dr. Avital did not notice that throughout history, various species existed and then became extinct. In 2009, the entire world celebrated 200 years since the birth of Darwin and 150 years since the publication of his book ‘The Origin of the Species,'” he added.

“When a top scientist ignores these things, it’s a cultural calamity,” Kolodny said. “There are no disagreements among scientists regarding evolution. Catholics and Protestants long ago ended their war against evolution, and Avital is for all intents and purposes joining the radical fringe of evangelicals in the United States.”

I have to disagree with Dr Kolodny on one thing: Catholics and Protestants are still fighting over evolution in the US. Apparently some Jews are simply joining them now, parroting the same drivel that had its origins in fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism.

Still, let’s add a few international voices to that chorus. Write to tluna@education.gov.il and politely suggest that Gavriel Avital is clearly not the right man for the job.

Amazing gibberish

Renew America, the bizarrely, deeply, weirdly conservative web site founded by Alan Keyes, really had to struggle to find someone crazier than Pastor Grant Swank and Fred Hutchison and Bryan Fischer and Wes Vernon (let alone Alan Keyes himself), but they have succeeded. They have Linda Kimball writing for them. She has written the strangest history of evolutionary biology ever — I think she was stoned out of her mind and hallucinating when she made this one up. It’s called “Evolutionism: the dying West’s science of magic and madness“. The title alone is enough to hint at the weirdness within, but just wait until you read where evolution comes from.

Though taught under the guise of empirical science, naturalistic evolution is really a spiritual concept whose taproot stretches back to the dawn of history. It was then, reports ancient Jewish historian Josephus, that Nimrod (Amraphel in the Old Testament) used terror and force to turn the people away from God and toward the worship of irrational nature. Moving forward in time to the Greco-Roman world, evolution serves as the mechanism of soul-transference in metempsychosis and transmigration of souls. In the ancient East, the mystical Upanishads refine evolution and it becomes the mechanism of soul-movement in involutions, emergences, incarnations, and reincarnation. In that both rationalist/materialist/secularism and its’ counterpart Eastern/occult pantheism are modernized nature pseudo-religions, it comes as no surprise that evolution serves as their ‘creation mythos’.

It’s a little surprising that Josephus isn’t regarded as a member of the Greco-Roman world, but I had no idea that I was teaching about metempsychosis and reincarnation. The students are going to be really shocked when I put that on the exam next year.

Kimball’s grip on the history of the last century is no better than her understanding of prior millennia, either.

Today, in addition to original Darwinism — which many scientists have already rejected as useless — there are three other versions of Naturalist evolutionism: neo-Darwinism, punctuated equilibrium, and panspermia, the notion that life was seeded on Earth by highly evolved beings either from another planet, or from another dimension. The latter two versions are favored by powerful Transnational Progressive New Age occult insiders such as Marilyn Ferguson, Robert Muller and Barbara Marx Hubbard as well as by channeling cults who are excitedly ‘receiving revelations’ from discarnate entities calling themselves the Space Brothers, the Council of Nine, Transcended Masters, and more recently, the ancient Ennead of Egypt.

Uh, neo-Darwinism is Darwinism with genetics and population genetics; it’s an evolution of the original theory proposed by Darwin. Punctuated equilibrium is a much narrower subset of evolutionary theory that describes the distribution of observable change in a fossil lineage. It’s nowhere near the same footing or the same scope as neo-Darwinism.

Panspermia isn’t even on the radar.

How come the Space Brothers, the Council of Nine, Transcended Masters, and the ancient Ennead of Egypt never show up at any of the biology conferences I attend (is anyone else confused by the conjunction of “recently” with the ancient Ennead)? And they never publish!

Then there are the conspiracy theories. You knew there had to be conspiracy theories.

Whereas occult pantheism quietly flowed beneath ‘red-colored’ atheist-materialist-communism and Nazism during the twentieth century, that order is quickly reversing. Today, ‘green-colored’ occult pantheist-socialism is brazenly striding onto the world-stage in full public view while materialist-secularism slowly fades to black. Already, zealous High Priests and Priestesses of the occult arts are calling the U.N the world church and the world mind, while other madmen such as David Spangler, demand that everyone submit to a satanic-initiation to qualify for entry to the coming green New World Order.

Back away slowly, everyone. This one needs the tranq gun and the rubber room.

She seems to have confused us godless atheistic materialist evilutionists for a bunch of New Age wackaloons. And her bottom-line message is that we have to prop up good old Christianity, because otherwise the tree-worshipping Satanists are going to take over.

Sunday Sacrilege: The Worst Thing You Can Do to a Patriarch

There is something heretics do that I never anticipated would generate such fury in the godly — an act of heresy so profane, so vile, so revolting that it triggers legal action all across the country and expressions of outrage everywhere. Don’t read through this post: the images below the fold will sear your eyeballs and invoke the wrath of God, just like opening the Ark of the Covenant did in that Indiana Jones movie.

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