How can you tell when you’re a kook?

When the top of your web page is a scattershot series of all-caps links to crazy town.

– Life After Death –

-WHY THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION ENRAGES US!.
WHY ALL EVOLUTIONISTS ARE CRIMINALLY INSANE
FOR GAYS: HOW TO STOP YOUR HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVITY
FOR THE GENTLEMEN: HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE A STUPID MAN
FOR THE LADIES: COMPUTER-GENERATED SLUT PHOTODIAMINES
ARE WOMEN SUPPOSED TO BE “BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT”?
———————————————————————————————-
WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE K _ _ _ HILLARY CLINTON
STRIP SEARCHES ARE ILLEGAL EVERYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES

In case you don’t want to read the horrible little site, here’s the executive summary to each point.

  • You will live after death because god said so.
  • Because evolution is FAKE SCIENCE!
  • Because they don’t teach legends of unseen realities. That’s the insane part. He’ll get around to explaining why it’s criminal later.
  • I think his answer is to fantasize a lot about hot men. Dreaming is not a sin!
  • If you like to look at women, if you swear, if you view porn, if you let your wife boss you around, if you are gay.
  • Women wear slutty clothes.
  • Women can do anything they want, as long as they realize men are in charge.
  • Not really! But she better not become president.
  • You have the right to kill a police officer if they try to make you take off your clothes.

Really, people send me these links, and then I have to read them. Some days the blood is oozing out of my ears at the strain.

Quick question for Mankatoites

I’m going to head out the door shortly for my drive down Minnesota back roads to Little House on the Prairie country — if I get there early, is there any place in town that’s good for coffee and wifi? I was planning to find a cheap hotel for the night, too, and leave from there to catch a plane in the morning. Locals, tip me off to any possibilities!

Landlocked midwesterner desires intimate knowledge of passionate molluscs

All right, people, I give up. Everyone has been sending me links to this story about a recent publication — it made the CBC, ScienceDaily, CNN, the Telegraph, and who knows what else — but I haven’t been able to get my hands on the original science article: Huffard CL, Caldwell RL, Boneka F (2008) Mating behavior of Abdopus aculeatus (d’Orbigny 1834) (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae) in the wild. It’s published in Marine Biology, sensibly enough, but out here on the prairie we don’t get much call for tales of kinky tentacle sex in the sea … or, perhaps, it’s all sublimated or hidden away (one does wonder what The Dream of the Soybean Farmer’s Wife might be).

Anyway, I ask this tentatively because every time I’ve asked for papers here I get inundated, but could someone please send me a pdf? I’ll announce it here as soon as I get one.

Hooray! I’ve got a copy already! I think this is what we call instant gratification. Thanks all.

Christian Educators!

Did you know that it is assumed that if you are a Christian and a teacher, that you oppose the teaching of evolution and want to introduce creationism into the classroom?

Did you know that people purporting to represent you will be going before state legislatures and telling your representatives that creationism is the Christian perspective?

Did you know that people are collecting stories about getting slapped down for teaching nonsense in science class, and are telling politicians that it’s because they are Christian?

You know, I think Christianity is awfully foolish anyway, but I’m a goddamned atheist. You don’t care what I think. But I would think the concerted and largely successful effort in our culture to equate Christianity with the idiocy of belief in a 6000 year old world or a god who meddles in trivialities or denying the facts of a natural world would piss you off. Unless it’s true, that is, that you don’t mind having your religious beliefs associated with flaming anti-scientific lunacy.

Maybe you should try squawking a little louder. You could start by writing to David Bracklin and letting him know that stupidity isn’t supposed to be a Christian sacrament.

Unless it is, of course. I wouldn’t know. Atheist, remember? All I know is what I see, the stuff the loudest of you bray out in public, and boy, you Christians sure seem to hate good science.

Mike Behe, friend to evolution

Mike Dunford has a series of articles on a recent California court decision — in brief, Christian homeschoolers tried to sue California universities to force them to accept courses taught with Christianist literalist creationist textbooks as legitimate, college-level science credit, and they lost. They lost hard.

But the really funny part is that the creationists brought in Mike Behe as a friendly witness. Behe was asked to review the creationist textbooks that they used, bad books that anyone can see are misleading, unrepresentative, and ridiculous, and he approved them. The man has no standards and no credibility, and it’s appalling that he is such a man-whore for creationism that he’d approve even young earth creationist, fundamentalist books as reasonable texts for a science class.

But that’s not what the judge in this case ruled on; rather, Behe’s defense of these books was that it was “abusive” to ask students to subscribe to an idea like evolution with which they disagree. Setting aside the obvious point that the whole point of education is to introduce students to a multitude of ideas with which they may or may not agree, the judge pointed out that the books which Behe approved flatly state that Christians must accept creationist conclusions—unlike our biology books, which don’t demand any religious litmus test of their readers—and were therefore perfect examples of exactly the problem he was complaining about.

So, once again — Behe goes down in flames in a court of law, dragging the whole case to perdition with him. He’s like the fire ship of the creationist fleet, always being launched into a headwind. But, to be fair, you can’t just pick on Behe: the problem is that the entire creationist position is so bad, and so stupid, that whoever gets appointed to be the front man for it is going to look like an idiot. Poor sap.