White supremacist shooter at the Holocaust Museum

The rats really are scuttling out of the woodwork: last week, it’s a right-wing anti-abortion hater gunning down a doctor, and this week, we get a white supremacist opening fire in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Fortunately, no one has died in this incident, but a security guard and the gunman were wounded.

They really are afraid and desperate, and violence is all they have left.

(via Greg Laden)

In case you’re wondering about the motives behind this attack, they’re rather obvious.

The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

Von Brunn served six years in prison on federal attempted kidnapping, assault and firearms charges after what he called a “legal, nonviolent citizens arrest” of members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

On his Web site, “Holy Western Empire,” von Brunn said he was “convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge.”

It’s about time the US law enforcement agencies recognized that the real terrorist groups in this country aren’t populated by people with funny arabic names: they’re homegrown, and they’ve got European names like von Brunn and McVeigh and Roeder…and even Terry and O’Reilly.

The guard who was shot, Stephen T. Johns, has died, making von Brunn a murderer.

Chiropractors scrambling to cover their tracks

It looks like an admission of guilt to me. The McTimoney Association, a British chiropractic group, has sent out mail to its members urging them to immediately shut down all of their websites. Why? Because, as a result of the Simon Singh fracas, people are becoming aware that chiropractors are making “claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with … research”, so they’re trying to make the quackery go away fast. (By the way, my ellipsis removed the word “chiropractic”; I would not trust chiropractic research, but they can’t even provide that). It’s a hilarious message — they flat out admit that common claims made on chiropractic websites put them at risk for prosecution.

About time! Now we just need something to trigger American watchdog groups to clamp down on the quacks over here.

(via Phil Plait)

Space science in Minnesota

The Minnesota Planetarium Society has ambitious plans to rebuild and expand a planetarium and space discovery center in Minneapolis, and they’re trying to spread the news and build more support. They are having an event to do this:

Summer Solstice Celebration
Monday, June 22
4:00pm – 8:00 pm
Minneapolis Central Library
300 Nicollet Mall

This event is co-sponsored by the Library Foundation of Hennepin County. Here is your chance to — travel past the Sun out into the universe through the Society’s ExploraDome sky theater, that has been wowing school kids throughout Minnesota — learn something new about astronomy and telescopes from the Minnesota Astronomical Society, and — expose your kids to the world of Astronomy through astronomically-related games. We also hope you’ll take this opportunity to see the future site of the Minnesota Planetarium and learn more about how we can make it a reality.

ExploraDome shows will be held on the half-hour. The dome holds 25 at a time, so reservations are recommended. To reserve your spot, please send your name, phone number and time (by the half-hour) to the sally@mplanetarium.org OR 651-999-7300. The 6:30pm show is a special presentation in Pohlad Hall featuring our planetarium colleagues live from around the world, and is open to all.

Let’s build this!

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Anointy-nointy

They’re doing it again. The raving mad wackaloons are oiling up the hearing rooms for the Sotomayor confirmation. This is called “anointing”, where some true believer thinks it will make a god pay special attention to an event if it is greased up first…which makes me wonder if there can be any point to church services if god is spending all of his time hanging out at the McDonald’s down the road.

Anyway, the sanctimonious twit Rev. Rob Schenck has put up another video of himself wandering through the rooms, slopping oil on doors. He will pray and anointy-nointy, while we will laugh and pointy-pointy.

Coke is for creationist cretins

I don’t drink caffeinated beverages anymore (I gave them up when I converted to Mormonism1) so it’s easy for me to refuse to give Coca Cola any more of my business, but this news may cause more distress to others: Coca Cola is a corporate partner with the Creation “Museum”. Ken Ham can brag about this meaningless exploitation of his suckers “museum” attendees for profit, but I doubt that Coke wants to trumpet this news — it looks like they’re sponsoring stupidity.

I don’t know that there is much point to protesting the association anyway. If Coke pulled out, you know the local Pepsi distributors would jump in to offer a contract, and then Ken Ham would proudly point to their deal as somehow vindicating their existence.

At least now we self-sacrificing, noble, healthier deniers of sugary caffeinated toxins can add a new level of sanctimony to our denunciations of Coca Cola’s consumers by pointing out that they are stooges of creationism, as well.2

(via Bing McGhandi)

1Psych.

2It’s our only pleasure left. When my wife fixes her cup of coffee in the morning, the smell wafts my way and I just want to leap over and swallow her cup, hand, and forearm in one big gulp.

Want to complain to Coca Cola? Go here.

Heaven for sale

Now, for the low, low price of $12.79, you can reserve a spot in heaven for yourself. This is a real business selling tickets, certificates and ID cards that claims to give you a direct line to an afterlife in paradise, with a money-back guarantee. You might think it’s just a gag…but it’s the same thing as Catholic indulgences, so it’s a gag with a little bite.

Oh, and if you don’t like the prospect of eternity in heaven, you can also reserve a spot in hell. That one probably has a stronger seal of theological approval.

They aren’t honest enough to write this

This is an entirely fictional manifesto, but it could be the game plan for a lot of rather devious pro-religion people right now — I could almost imagine it as the mission statement for the Templeton Foundation, for instance.

It is the objective of we, the New Creationists, to undermine not simply evolutionary theory, but science as a whole. It is this form of inquiry which has caused the greatest damage to our version of events. It must be destroyed at all costs.

The primary method for attaining our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground. This means that we are to seek, purely in the eye of the layman public, a position which appears on the surface to be a reasonable compromise. To be sure, we want to tell the world we embrace evolution. We also want to tell the world we embrace a Creator.

We want to hide Our Creator in the nearly impossible to understand gaps of reality. Quantum mechanics will often be our realm, but much more can work. As stated, our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground with the layman public. We need not answer to scientists. Indeed, they are the enemy. What we are to do is wrench the very fruits of these enemies from their empirical hands. We are to show gaps in the understanding of the cell. We are to discuss unknowns in the molecular biology. We are to contort the flaws of physics, cosmology, and astronomy to assist our goals. It is in these places that Our Creator resides. If it’s science, it is imperfect. We shall exploit, even invent, imperfections. All is justified in our goal. Science deserves nothing but lip service; It is the enemy.

Our first step is to put forth an army of Christian scientists. They will not be the supporters of fringe creationism. They shall not espouse views which deny any modern science. However, they shall pure atop all modern science a sense of confusion and remote possibility. That remote possibility shall be where Our Creator resides.

Our goals at this point will rely upon American idiosyncrasies. Tired of divisive politics, Americans seek a Middle Ground. They crave a sense of wishy-washy – it sounds fair. We shall marginalize the New Atheists with paint brushes of extremism. While they full embrace science and all its evils, we shall embrace it only superficially – we shall not fall into the evil of the enemy. We shall appeal to the American sense of fair play. We are the New Creationists.

However, it does have one big problem, and it gets one important issue wrong. These people would never say they hate science or that science is the enemy: rather, they love the idea of science, they just want to redefine it so that their version of science includes Jesus doing miracles.