“Atheist Fundamentalists”

Number one on my list of dead-giveaways that I’m dealing with a moron of the first order: when they start whining about “atheist fundamentalists”, comparing a Richard Dawkins to a Pat Robertson, or babbling about how those atheists are just as fanatical and wicked as the fundagelical zealots. When people start in on that line of unreason, all they’re doing is trying to tar atheists with the taint of the wretched works of the Taliban or the American theocrats, without actually addressing any comparisons of substance.

At least one writer at The Economist recognizes the absurdity of the false equivalence. The article would be very good if it hadn’t fallen for number two on my list of peeves: the old “Hitler was an atheist” canard. No, he wasn’t. He was Catholic, leading a largely Catholic country. Not only can’t you blame atheism for the Nazis, but even if he had been an atheist, it would be as ridiculous to fault atheism for his crimes as it would be to accuse Catholicism of being an explicitly genocidal cult bent on world domination by military conquest.

The writer does have a few criticisms of atheists: he says we can be smug and annoying. That’s a fair cop. When you’re an advocate for what is right among the milling herd of gullible, superstitious jebus-worshippers, though, I think a little smugness is warranted.

A misdirected life’s goal

I’d never heard of Roger W. Babson before, but maybe some of you at east coast colleges have seen one of his monuments. He was an eccentric millionaire who founded the Gravity Research Foundation and donated money for anti-gravity research. He gave money to colleges that would accept one of his granite monuments to “remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled.” It was his obsession. Apparently, his concern traces back to one event:

Babson, born in 1875, was a self-made millionaire who founded three colleges and once ran for the U.S. presidency as the candidate of the Prohibition Party. He became obsessed with gravity at the age of 18 when his younger sister, Edith, drowned in Massachusetts’ Annisquam River.

“She was unable to fight gravity,” Babson later wrote, “which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom.”

The fool! It wasn’t gravity that was the enemy, he needed to fund anti-viscosity research!

So predictable…

When I read this opening to an article about a Republican politician, I knew instantly exactly where it was going.

Meet Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley. He’s a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is “a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school.” (Check out the religious imagery on the site — the sun poking through clouds, as if manifesting God’s presence — which of course shows Stanley’s deeply pious nature.)

Can you? Take a guess, then look below the fold.

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Zerg the Creation “Museum”!

Did I say 101 atheists were going to the Creation “Museum” four days ago? The updated number is currently at 201, and the Secular Student Alliance is keeping registration open for a while, so you can still get in. This is going to be great — be sure to wear some kind of distinguishingly godless clothing, because I think we’ll want a few photos of the place swamped with atheists.

Just the numbers alone are going to make this a great event. Join the mob!

Please stop electing Fool Harkin, Iowa

Tom Harkin is up to his usual tricks: he wants to expand the role of ‘alternative therapies’ by allowing them to be covered by insurance. The quacks are cheering him on, too — every naturopath, homeopath, acupuncturist, crystal healer, shaman, meditator, and iridologist wants their slice of that great big health insurance pie. It’s a disgrace. Strangely, the insurance companies aren’t complaining. This comment explains that, though.

Harvey Kaltsas, president emeritus of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, said the country could save billions of dollars by shifting care for a number of conditions away from pharmaceutical treatment and toward acupuncture. Kaltsas said the number of licensed practitioners has grown to 20,000 from just 300 in 1971, indicating that many people are sold on the practice’s effectiveness.

I think that last word should be stricken out and replaced with the more appropriate term, “profitability”.

The country could also save billions of dollars if, instead of treating cancer with chemotherapy and surgery and all those expensive Big Medicine remedies, they instead used my personal tickle therapy cure — the only expenses are the cost of feathers and my personal time, at $500 an hour. It is so much cheaper than those overpriced medicines! And instead of putting the patient in a state that requires months or years of sustained expense, and years and years of regular doctor’s visits and diagnostic examinations, my therapy is fast — depending on how far the cancer had progressed, I only need to be employed for weeks or months…and then no more medical expenses at all. Ever. I can guarantee it.

The insurance companies should love me.

Destroying beauty because you can afford it

The bluefin tuna is being grossly overfished, and is on its way to extinction. The reason? Fishermen can sell a single bluefin for $173,000. At first thought, you might feel like blaming the greedy fishermen (and I think there is some fault there), but here’s an article that assigns the blame more appropriately: fault the rich assholes who regard paying an obscene price for a small bite to be part of the cachet of the fish.

“People believe in their hearts that a piece of raw fish is worth $600. And one of the main reasons that it’s worth $600 is because you can’t afford it and I can’t, but they can. That makes it very special, and it makes people who eat it special.

“Any kind of luxury goods largely come from that sort of statement: I can afford it, and you can’t. I’ll drive a Maserati, even if I can’t drive it faster than 65 miles per hour in most of the United States. I can afford a $280,000 car, and you’re stuck with a Dodge Neon. I can fly private jet, drive a Maserati, do anything I bloody well please, including having a $600 piece of fish. And you can’t.”

And this is the brutal truth: bluefin, which beyond their intrinsic value as living creatures happen to be one of the universe’s more majestic species, a Platonic ideal of oceanic speed and grace, aren’t being extinguished by our greed. They’re being sacrificed to our vanity, pretension, and ostentation — the most pathetic of our vices.

Keep that in mind, rich assholes of the world. When you throw down huge amounts of cash for luxury items, the rest of us aren’t watching you admiringly. We think you’re vain and pretentious and, well, revolting, in the most pathetic sense of the word.

Kooks don’t need evidence

The other day, I mentioned the silly anti-global-warming argument of Alan Quist: he claims a 16th century map shows Antarctica in accurate detail, revealing that 500 years, the continent was completely ice-free. Therefore, he kookles, the world is currently in a deep freeze and a little warming would be good for us, and entirely tolerable.

John McKay takes a closer look at the old map. Would you believe it’s not so accurate after all? That in fact, it’s not even close?

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An amusingly suspicious “paper”

There is a site called ScienceBlog, at scienceblog.com. Note that it is a little different from scienceblogs.com — it lacks the “s”. There are a few other differences, too: it’s a site that simply reprints press releases. Send ’em anything, and they’ll spit it back up on the web for you.

One such example is a press release titled Life on Earth came from other planets. It purports to be a summary of a peer-reviewed, published research paper.

This one:

“Life on Earth Came From Other Planets,” by R. Joseph, Ph.D. Cosmology, Vol 1. 2009.

There are a few funny things about this article. The journal Cosmology doesn’t seem to exist. Then notice “Vol. 1″…this is the inaugural issue. It contains a grand total of one (1) paper, the aforementioned article by Rhawn Joseph.

Wait! It does exist! The “journal” exists as a web page only; go ahead, here’s Cosmology, 2009, Vol 1, pages 00000. You can read the whole article, which you know was peer reviewed, because it says so in the upper left corner: “Peer Reviewed”.

Guess who the web page can be traced to? Rhawn Joseph.

I think you begin to see a pattern here. If you can’t get your crappy paper published in a legitimate journal, invent one!

The comments at scienceblog.com are hilarious, too. To his credit, the author of the site, Fred Bortz, shows up to offer objections to the weird quality of the submission; someone named Joy Haiyan Wu, who works with Rhawn, pops up a few times to complain and threaten legal action. A comment by Christopher Coffee pretty much nails the phoniness of the whole effort.

What about the paper itself? Complete garbage. It presents nothing new, makes exaggerated claims about the likelihood of bacterial life surviving in space for hundreds of millions of years (it wouldn’t), makes grand claims of revolutionizing our understanding of the origins of life, and offers nothing other than rehashed claims and denial of legitimate scientific hypotheses. You can get a taste of how poor this paper is from just the conclusion.

Life on Earth appeared while this planet was still forming. There is no proof life can be created from non-life. As only life can produce life, only panspermia is a viable scientific explanation as to the origin of Earthly life. The first life forms to appear on Earth were produced by other living creatures who were likely encased in debris ejected by the parent star nearly 5 billion years ago.

Well, life had to have come from non-life at some point, logically speaking. The claim that only life can produce life clearly had to have been wrong at some point, and panspermia doesn’t get around the fundamental problem: where did the life at that distant exploding star come from?

I haven’t even mentioned yet that the writing is incoherent and poorly organized, the paper is full of typos, and although it contains many citations, the references have been left off…and instead we get a repetition of ten ads flogging Rhawn Joseph’s self-published book.

I look forward to issue 2 of volume 1 of Cosmology. Perhaps it will have another paper by Rhawn Joseph?