I had no idea Christopher Hitchens was so very, very short

Minuscule, even. Flea-sized. How else am I to interpret Dinesh D’Souza’s challenge that he should pick on someone his own size, meaning D’Souza? I’ve heard D’Souza. He’s a babbling pipsqueak. But now he thinks he is a worthy opponent to confront Hitchens, because all the pastors that Hitchens knocks aside as if wielding the jawbone of an ass are such weak and timid little flowers.

Besides, Hitchens is tough and mean. Pastors are inhbited because of their position. They can’t respond in kind. So Hitchens can call them names but they can’t call him names because they have to show Christian forbearance.

Weird. Check out the Reverend Phelps sometime, or look back at the arrogance and slander of Falwell or Dobson or Robertson. I hate to defend Christians, but good grief…Martin Luther King? William Jennings Bryan? John Brown? Jonathan Edwards? I don’t think we should automatically assume we can simply blame wilting Christian forbearance for their failures before the rhetorical onslaught of Hitchens (or Dawkins or any of the other Furies of Atheism, for that matter), since we know at least some are capable of throwing thunderbolts from the pulpit. Rather, we should find fault with their pathetic arguments, and experience shows that D’Souza is capable of waving around a pathetic argument with all the self-confidence of a clown armed with a bladder on a stick.

Despite his pompous bragging about how he’d be a worthy opponent, I don’t think I’d be that interested in seeing Bambi meet Godzilla again.

A suggestion for some diligent reporter out there

We’re seeing a lot of news about Ken Ham’s creationist lie, this so-called “museum” he has built out in Kentucky. What we’re not seeing from our media is any scrutiny of the finances behind the construction, or behind the evangelical boiler room called “Answers in Genesis”. Has any editor or reporter considered the possibility that there might be something juicier behind the story than “Preacher pretends church is a museum”? Is anyone—dare I say it—investigating this organization?

Their finances are a matter of public record. Everyone talks about how the museum cost $27 million to build, but the fact that their board of directors is sucking down over a million in salaries, benefits, and expenses is ignored. This is a profitable racket they’re running; I don’t think they’ve taken vows of poverty.

Other tidbits would include the seedy and rather acrimonious schism between Ham’s group here in America and the parent sister organization in Australia. Ham really is a kind of underhanded scoundrel and control freak, in addition to being a dishonest creationist fraud.

Anyway, if you want a good angle, stop treating this as a matter of a religious organization making a brave effort against the forces of godless science. It’s not. It’s an exceptionally lucrative business organization profiting off the ignorance of large numbers of people making a major push to increase their influence and income.

The wheels of extortion grind exceedingly slowly

Orac has the latest news on the Tripoli Six, the health care workers who were falsely accused of spreading AIDS in a Libyan hospital and were sentenced to death. The good news is that they aren’t dead yet, the Libyan government is still wheedling for reparations, and they’re showing some signs of backing off from a hard line position. Nothing’s certain, but at least the negotiations are creaking along slowly in the right direction.

“Playing God”

The Newsweek cover story is on recent efforts to create life in the laboratory, and of course they call this “playing God”. Haven’t they got the message yet? “Playing God” is where you do absolutely nothing, take credit for other entities’ work, and don’t even exist — scientists don’t aspire to such a useless status. Besides, creating life is mundane chemistry, no supernatural powers required.

[Read more…]

Who the heck is Mark Mitchell, and how did he acquire that brain damage?

I can almost understand plagiarizing Glenn Greenwald, but what is beyond comprehension is building a blog that seems to be entirely a mass of unattributed, plagiarized content. He’s got sections in the sidebar for “Recent Posts” and “The Latest from Mark Mitchell”, and I thought for a moment that maybe the latter would be his original content, but no, those are plagiarized, too. It’s as if Chauncey Gardiner were to write a blog—a completely empty, uncreative mind is just shuffling scraps from the internet and calling it his work.

And there’s almost no quality control at all — he’s parroting me!

Why people believe in bad ideas

There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it’s an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to ideas like dualism and creationism. For example:

[Read more…]

Beware the frogs

A good way to recover from the fra…fra…frammmm… that topic is to go watch the freaky frogs. If it’s late at night and dark where you are, though, don’t watch them. The first one will creep you out, and the second one will deliver the coup de grace; you won’t be able to get to sleep for fear of the amphibians outside your window.

Never mind me, it’s just the chronic framitis

When ever I try to read about “framing” anymore, I start to twitch and suffer from hysterical blindness, which makes it really hard to blog. Fortunately, Greg Laden has a stronger constitution than I do (either that, or anthropologists have access to exotic drugs that help them overcome), so I’ll just send everyone over there to read that. Don’t tell me what it says, though: ir’ll jost teigger the husertical twrches agian ind I’ll hve to fo lie diwn for aquile. Eck. soasr neb vwiffffleop. Gorsnck.