The dimness of D’Souza

It’s Monday. You’re tired after your weekend, you aren’t too enthused about getting back to work, and it’s just so dispiriting to have to get back into the grind. What do you need with your coffee? An unsurprising tale of a very stupid person, so that your boss and your coworkers will look like shining beacons of reason by comparision, and you’ll realize your job isn’t so bad after all. You need to hear about Dinesh D’Souza, because you’ll realize that even in the state of sluggish stupor on a Monday morning, you are a thousand times wiser and more perceptive than that crank.

You will especially enjoy the irony of D’Souza declaring that atheists aren’t very bright.

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Right-wing hypocrisy on parade

Richard Mellon Scaife, that horrible little man with an immense fortune who has been propping up institutes loudly supporting right-wing family values, creationism, and gutter-scraping attacks on Democrats, is getting a divorce. Not just any divorce — a train wreck of a divorce, prompted by Scaife’s gallivanting about with a prostitute, and with scads of amusingly petty behavior. And the money involved is impressive.

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife’s exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."

Take him for everything he’s got, lady, and then throw the money away on diamond dog collars, a team of tanned, buff pool boys, and whatever silly overpriced frippery tickles your over-privileged patrician fancy. It’s got to be better than using it to fund the Heritage Foundation.

Isn’t it so typical, though, that a rich old bluenose who thinks he knows best how other people should live their lives doesn’t even try to meet his own standards, and is flaming out spectacularly in such a tawdry scandal?

If it’s got math, it must be true

Earlier, I mentioned this Templeton Foundation ad that showed some people claiming the universe has a purpose, and others validating the silly question by saying maybe it has a purpose. I noted at the time that no one seemed very interested in saying what that particular purpose might be, or more importantly, how they knew what it was, but now someone has provided the answer.

Tristero has used the power of mathematics to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything, all in one simple, easy-to-remember formula that also proves the Christians are right about everything. It’s a little scary, actually — I may have to go in hiding to escape the plague of boils or locusts or frogs or whatever it is that Jehovah will be sending down on me soon.

Student Post: What I learned in skool today…

… well not today. I learned very little today , but generally, here are some interesting things I’ve picked up in class:

-If you sever a cat’s cerbral cortex from its hindbrain it can still walk on a treadmill (in a harness that compensates for the poor feline’s lack of balance). This was the topic of one of PZ’s many tangents.

-One way to inhibit the HIV virus is to make a drug that targets a protein our cells make. The key is to identify a protein the virus needs but that we do not. CYC202, a cyclin-dependant kinase inhibitor, may be one such drug.

-“HIV virus” is redundant, but hey, so is the genetic code.

-If you race flatworms in a maze, grind up the fastest ones, and feed the product to flatworms having yet to try the maze, you might find that they run the maze faster than their non-cannibal counterparts. Of course, you would consider that flatworm may simply be highly nutritious, because you’re a scientist, and that’s what they pay you the big erlenmeyers for.

-Badger culling. That’s right. Badger. Culling. It’s used to decrease badger/cow contact in Great Britain as badgers function as a bovine tuberculosis infection reservoir for cattle.

-EtOH and H20 are miscible. Whew… and to think I almost made myself an acetone martini…

i-0527fbd3810080473469f4ca7b721485-Badger.jpg

Come on down to Ridgedale

You’ve still got time — I’m in the Ridgedale public library, and Hector Avalos is getting ready to give his talk on “How archaeology killed biblical history”…come join the crowd if you’re somewhere in the Twin Cities area.

You’re too late now! I saw several familiar faces at the talk, and there was a huge crowd — Minnesota Atheists has to be growing, because every meeting I go to is larger than the last one. We got a good discussion of the increasingly evident failure of archaeology to back up any of the claims of the Bible. Whereas once upon a time, serious scholars argued that portions of the Bible actually echoed real historical events (and even today, many less informed evangelical/fundamentalist Christians still do), virtually all of it is considered ancient myth-making nowadays. No Exodus. No empire of Israel spanning a big chunk of the Middle East. No Solomonic fortress building. No Solomon. No David. Quite possibly no Jesus, and definitely no primary sources describing his existence. I thought the comparison of Solomon and David to King Arthur quite apt — they were inventions after the fact, legends built up to illustrate beliefs about a past golden age. It was subject matter that is quite different from my usual approach to debunking religion, so it was useful stuff … and I picked up copies of Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and his latest, The End of Biblical Studies(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), so I can do a bit more digging into the details.

Hector Avalos gets up into the Twin Cities now and then (his drive from Iowa is about the same length as mine from Morris), and if you get an opportunity to hear him speak, I recommend it!

We can come up with better ethical principles than any religion

Last night, in my talk, I said that I didn’t think religion was necessarily a force for evil. Then, this morning, I was sent a link to some convoluted religious sophistry that made my lip curl in revulsion. Maybe I was wrong.

The link will take you to an article by Orson Scott Card in which he complains about homosexuals. That probably tells you all you need to know; Card has this reputation for letting his mormonism hang out in the ugliest ways possible.

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