The stupid, it burns

Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It’s rich soil for stupid over there, and they’ve got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.

I hesitate to mention this one because I know it’s going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a human eye, and carrots are good for your eyes, and just goes downhill from there — tomatoes are red and have chambers, just like the heart, walnuts look like brains, kidney beans look like kidneys, etc.

I think the creator must be a virgin. He also claims that citrus fruits look just like human mammary glands.

Yoko has an opponent

This is actually somewhat interesting, and I’m not going to reject all of it out of hand. The Fair Use Project of Stanford Law School is going to defend the use of Lennon’s song “Imagine” in the movie Expelled.

On the one hand, they are using a very short clip — and I am not a fan of the kind of draconian enforcement of every second of a song that the music industry seems to favor. There are reasonable grounds for fair use of short clips of music … the question is whether this is one of those cases.

On the other hand, I think Premise is horribly dishonest, and this press release is personally obnoxious to me (which is not actionable, of course … it merely diminishes the Fair Use Project’s credibility when they so readily buy into some of the phoniness Premise is pushing.)

The producers of “Expelled” spent two years interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers, and public leaders, including University of Minnesota biology professor P.Z. Myers, who does not support alternative theories of evolution. The clip of “Imagine,” which is audible for approximately 15 seconds, is used in a segment of the documentary in which the film’s narrator and author Ben Stein comments on statements made by Myers and others about the place of religion. In the documentary Stein says: “Dr. Myers would like you to think that he’s being original but he’s merely lifting a page out of John Lennon’s songbook.” This is followed by an audio clip of Lennon’s song “Imagine,” specifically, the lyrics “Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.”

“We included the ‘Imagine’ clip not only to illuminate Ben Stein’s commentary but to criticize the ideas expressed in the song,” says Logan Craft, chairman and executive producer of Premise Media.

There’s a lot to object to there.

  • It is not true that I do not support alternative theories of evolution. I do. However, I expect alternatives to be backed up by evidence; I reject the fact-free, useless nonsense of Intelligent Design, which is not the same as being close-minded, as this P.R. implies.

  • Stein’s commentary is ludicrous. I did not claim originality, so accusing me of doing so is false. Lennon’s song is also not relevant to what I said; I had just said that science erodes religious belief, and that the atheist goal is not the elimination of religion, but a reduction of its impact in secular functions, like government (my infamous comment about ‘knitting’). Imagine says nothing about science, or knitting for that matter. The song actually doesn’t follow from what I was saying.

  • The claim that they were commenting on the ideas in the song is false. This movie was not about how artists are excluding creationists from their discipline, but about scientists. The song doesn’t discuss science or creationism or the academy, any of the themes of the movie. It’s just a pretty and extremely recognizable popular melody; they are using it as background music to a series of images that they want to use to generate a negative emotional response to my argument. They could have used any music and still made the same point.

So, really, what I detest is that, as usual, Premise Media is lying. Their rationalizations are completely bogus.

If they’d been more honest, though, and were simply arguing that, hey, a quick 15 second clip of a popular song ought to be acceptable use, I’d be sympathetic (now maybe an artist with a more personal appreciation of the ownership of an artistic creation would differ…), but they just don’t seem to be able to do that. They’ve got a compulsion to lie and try to claim that they were directly addressing John Lennon’s work, which they most clearly were not doing.

Of course, if they were capable of honesty, their movie wouldn’t exist.

Indulgences

I’ve been neglecting my prayers today — I’ve got all this writing to get done, and I chose to actually sit before my keyboard and move my hands and think with my brain, rather than calling upon the Lord to do my work for me. I’ve actually gotten a fair amount done.

Now comes the part where one might expect some heavenly reward for one’s pious industry, but I don’t believe in that, either. I’m going to have to do something myself … so here I come, Iron Man! We have a late night premiere showing of a first run movie in Morris, so of course I have to go.

It looks like a darned good action movie, too. Popcorn and some good clean late night fun sound like a better event than some po-faced piety at a local church, don’t you think?

Assuming that prayer actually has some power, of course…

I’m confused by the consequences of the Virginia twisters.

Brenda Williams, 43, returned Tuesday to the shopping center where she was buried beneath a collapsed ceiling in a manicure shop during the storm. She was pulled to safety by a stranger, she said.

“I’m not lucky, I’m blessed,” said Williams, who had a 2-inch gash stitched above her left eyebrow and stitches on her right forearm. “I’m fine. I’m here. I’m in the land of the living.”

She retrieved possessions from her car, which was flipped on its roof and destroyed in the parking lot.

Why was Ms Williams praying to be buried beneath a collapsed building, to be gashed and mauled, and to have her car destroyed? I think her insurance company ought to scrutinize her claims very carefully; she’s too danged cheerful, and I suspect she prayed to some thug god to trash her possessions so she could collect on her policy.

A lot of people got hurt with this reckless prayer stuff, you know.

Looking at the photos of the aftermath, I think god must have got his copy of GTA4 early, and he got carried away. Those video games are bad for you, especially if you’ve already got a rather impressionable and infantile personality.

Subversive chemistry

I must urge you to steal buy this book: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). The description makes it sound perfect.

Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry.

Everything you need is readily available, and surprisingly inexpensive. For not all that much more than the cost of a toy chemistry set, you can buy the equipment and chemicals you need to get started doing real chemistry.

…

DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.

Ooooh, I wish this book had been around 15 or 20 years ago, when I could have infected my kids with it. Maybe I’ll have to wait a few years (many years!) and expose a grandkid to it … which will have an added advantage that the parents will have to deal with the messes and smells.

Odd thing, though: I looked through the table of contents, and there’s not one single solitary thing about chemistry prayers. How can the experiments possibly work?

Florida creationists need your prayers

Even after sending out a prayer alert to summon down divine favor for the Florida academic “freedom” bills, the effort to reconcile the two versions and pass something has stalled out in the legislature. They’ve only got two days to get it together! It could die!

It is time to pull out the big guns. The Republican sponsors, the Disco Institute lobbyists, and the creationist supporters of this bill need to immediately embark on a two-day prayer retreat. Just go off to some isolated place, and pray and fast non-stop. It’s the right thing to do.

You didn’t pray hard enough for the Florida license plate

The infamous proposed Christianist license plate for the state of Florida, the one that said “I believe”, is dead. The supportive faith rays emanating from the prayerful public were apparently not strong enough to overcome the ass-suing beams radiating from the likes of the ACLU.

Boy, so far this day of prayer seems to be working out well for us godless, prayer-free heathens. God must be working in his mysterious ways again.

Pray for Robert Beale, too

We have some local scoundrels, who also tend to be entangled in the right-wing Christianist nonsense. One of the notorious kook/thieves in these parts was Robert Beale, a multi-millionaire tax evader who has just been convicted. The story features arcane, desperate legalisms this wacko used to avoid paying taxes — did you know that if you live outside the District of Columbia and U.S. Islands, you are a non-resident alien, according to the Constitution, according to Beale?

This dishonest, greedy sleaze deserves one thing from us: our prayers. On this National Day of Prayer, pray ferociously for Robert Beale.

Pray for Larry Langford

That crazy mayor of Birmingham who dressed up in sackcloth and ashes is in a little trouble right now.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday said it has charged the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, and two of his friends in connection with an undisclosed payment scheme in municipal bond deals.

The SEC said the chairman of Alabama investment bank Blount Parrish & Co made more than $156,000 in undisclosed payments to Mayor Larry Langford related to municipal bond offerings and swap agreements Langford directed on behalf of Jefferson County, Alabama.

It seems to be a general rule: the more outwardly pious you are in public, the more likely you are to be privately unscrupulous and dishonest.

Let us do the Christian thing, though, and give Langford all the help he deserves: pray. Pray real hard.

Happy National Day of Prayer!

Today is actually the National Day of Prayer. Really. Let that sink in for a moment.

We have regional coordinating groups — Minnesota is having events at the Capitol today. Did you know that prayer is “America’s strength and shield”? I didn’t. Our governor has issued a proclamation asking citizens to “open our hearts in thanksgiving”. It’s a weird document. It announces that we have all these problems like poverty and sickness and crime, and then declares that we’ve been strengthened by the “conscience-based actions of people of faith” … I guess we people of reason don’t have consciences, and I think it’s setting the bar awfully low anyway to declare prayer an “action”. It’s more like an inaction, with lame excuses.

The head wackaloon of this year’s National Day of Futility is Shirley Dobson … of those Dobsons, the fundagelically evil kooks behind Focus on the Family. This was supposed to be an ecumenical event, as near as something that celebrates religious idiocy can be ecumenical, but it has since evolved into an exclusively evangelical Christian church service, sponsored by our federal government. Using her vast powers as chair of the national task force, Dobson requires her coordinators to sign this statement of faith.

I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God. I believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, his virgin birth, his sinless life, his miracles, the atoning work of his shed blood, his resurrection and ascension, his intercession and his coming return to power and glory. I believe that those who follow Jesus are family and there should be unity among all who claim his name. I agree that these statements are true in my life.

Hello, Jews and Moslems! Nice to see you’re joining us atheists in rejecting prayer. Oh, you’re not? Well, at least we’ll be able to keep each other company with all the other second-class citizens.

Fuck the National Day of Prayer.

I can scarcely believe my country is officially pandering to such willful stupidity — elevating evangelical kooks to positions of prestige, trumpeting the virtues of sectarian religion, and actually crediting the successes of America to the fact that a subset of deluded, demented fools sit on their asses and beg an invisible man to protect us and help us kill people in foreign countries. What a waste, and what an encouragement of further waste.

I feel like just declaring this the official National Day of Derangement and writing it all off, maybe spit in the soup of people who say grace, or flip off any group I catch trying to do a collective exercise in ritual invocation of nonexistent beings, but the Minnesota Atheists have a more productive idea: they are calling this a National Day of Reason and are setting up to demonstrate in the Minnesota capitol in St Paul today. They actually have a prime position, and all the legislators leaving their workplace to join in the National Day of Inanity will have to troop by them. In my dreams, these politicians would feel a little sense of shame at the foolishness of the official events, but in reality, I’m sure they won’t.