Dangerous criminal safely behind bars at last

Man, this Keith Henson character is a fearsome dude. He was convicted of a crime, fled the state, has been on the lam for 6 years, and was finally caught and thrown in jail, with bail initially set at half a million dollars. What heinous act won him such a nefarious reputation?

He posted a joke on usenet. A joke that made fun of a religion.

Henson was convicted in 2001 under a California law (Sec. 422.6) that criminalizes any threat to interfere with someone else’s “free exercise” of religion. One Usenet post that was introduced at his trial included jokes about sending a “Tom Cruise” missile against a Scientology compound (the actor is a prominent Scientologist). Picketing Scientology buildings and other “odd behavior” were also part of the charges, Deputy District Attorney Robert Schwarz said at the time.

We’re in a sad state when making a joke about a religion is regarded as interference with free exercise of that religion. Especially when the religion itself is a colossal joke.

Although one could also argue that it is no joke that Scientology is populated with such scumbag losers, and has successfully convinced the apparatus of the state to do their dirty work for them.

This explanation has merit; tell me more

Since I was wondering whether WingNutDaily was a satire site, Kevin Beck graces me with an explanation. No, it’s not—the unhinged are merely going through a phase of very public meltdown.

What’s happening his that huge groups of ignorant or just plain stupid “conservatives” who were already clanking aong at around a 30 on the Global Assessment of Functioning scale before the November elections have decompensated completely in the wake of the voting results, and are now in feces-as-crayons territory.

Yeah, I can believe that.

I had no idea CNN had gotten this bad

I mentioned that ghastly CNN hit piece on atheists the other day; I just saw it myself, and it’s far, far worse than I had imagined. You can see the whole thing with a transcript, too, and you should be appalled.

It starts off reasonably enough with a segment on a family of atheists who were ostracized in a small town; then it closes with some young Republican-looking talking head who babbles about how atheists bring it on themselves, and we should blame all the militant atheists for the fact that people feel compelled to shun those who don’t believe as they do. It was a weird blame-the-victim moment.

Then there’s the panel afterwards. Others have mentioned the odd omission of any atheists from the discussion, but I was also flabbergasted at the question they were debating, which was displayed in big letters on a board behind them:

Why do atheists inspire such hatred?

Whoa. Hey, Debbie Schlussel, how would you feel if a panel of Christians and Muslims met to discuss “Why do Jews inspire such hatred?”, and they decided that the problem is that Jews need to shut up and quit mentioning their beliefs in public? It’s probably silly to ask that of Schlussel who seems to be vapidity personified, but that’s really what the panel was about, with two (one was not sympathetic, but at least realized that atheists have the same rights he does) Christian twits telling us that atheists ought to shut up (literally) and that we ought to have prayers in school to restore morality.

It convinced me of a couple of things. I apparently have not been militant enough, and am going to have to work harder at aggressively promoting godlessness. And I’m adding CNN to my list of news agencies to ignore, along with Fox.

Update: I might just watch it tonight. They’re repeating the episode, this time with Richard Dawkins afterwards.

Killer orgasms?

Sometimes I do get strange requests in email. For instance, I was asked if the claim in this article was true:

When an orgasm has been achieved through sex, you can measure theta waves. These are also said to cause the “running high” feeling of euphoria experienced sometimes by marathon runners. If theta waves are taken as a criterion, the entire brain emits theta waves when women reach an orgasm that are close on 10 times stronger than when men climax. So, if theta waves are an indication of an orgasm’s strength, then women experience an orgasm that is physically impossible for men to go through. Putting it a little crudely, if the intensity of a woman’s orgasm was played through a man’s brain, there’s a danger that the shock to his system would kill him. That risk makes it impossible to experiment on a man at the moment.

[Read more…]

Correcting some misapprehensions…

Some people have taken blogroll amnesty day the wrong way—or perhaps it has been used in the wrong way. Jon Swift registers the impression that this was an undemocratic purge that simply re-enthroned the same old elites and tossed the little guys on the scrapheap.

But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself [Atrios]. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. “Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they’re hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list,” he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus’ General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling. Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. “It sucks and it feels bad,” he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios’ Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.

Uh-oh. This is precisely the antithesis of why I thought the amnesty was a good idea: we shouldn’t take the A-listers for granted and just put them on the list because everyone else does, but should instead critically evaluate all of them. I like Atrios’s site, for instance, and browse it regularly because he seems to be an excellent and responsive weathervane for issues that might be of interest to me…but it’s all those smaller sites that put a little more care into more substantive or quirkier posts that I appreciate more.

For instance, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo thought I’d dropped him in the revamp. No way, man—that’s a much more fun site to read on lefty political issues than what Atrios does. Besides, I’ve got the t-shirt. I think that means we’re in a committed relationship at this point. Oh, and Skippy, I’ve never been on Atrios’s or Kos’s blogrolls myself—we’re just going to have to settle for each other.

I should also explain that Jon Swift has the wrong impression of my blogroll policy. It isn’t quite as brutal as he supposes; I’m extremely liberal about adding new blogs to it, and although I do drop blogs that are abandoned by their owners for a month or more, I’m also quick to add brand new ones that I find, and do so on at least a weekly basis. That’s how my complete blogroll has grown to 405 blogs at last count (and which I could never handle without my NetNewsWire to manage everything).

I have and always will consider linking to be a way to break out of stale hierarchies, and I hope no one gets the idea that I would want to use them to lock out fresh ideas.

Evolution is bad, so stars can’t possibly evolve

It isn’t just biology that creationists like to mangle—watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of “stellar evolution”. She trots out the whole menagerie of creationist canards in a bizarre attempt to defend the wacky Walt Brown and dismiss whole chunks of physics and astronomy.

It just goes to show that there’s something about the word “evolution” that unhinges these kooks. Everyone does know that biological evolution and stellar evolution are completely unrelated processes that don’t share any mechanisms, right?

Is WingNutDaily actually a parody site?

I have to ask the question because by all my usual measures of whether something is satire (criteria like excess, and advancement of stupidity that no one in their right mind would espouse), it ought to be regarded as a humor site. Having Pat Boone writing on science, for instance, ought to be a dead giveaway, and now we’ve got Chuck Norris weighing in on the appropriate qualifications for the presidency. Now if he’d said, “the ability to kick someone in the face while they’re standing in front of you,” I’d have this pegged as a humor piece. But noooo. His requirements that our president be “wise” and a “good Christian”, pedestrian and merely brainless ideas.

Where he makes me wonder, though, is that in weighing those two values, he comes up with one good candidate: one individual who personifies wisdom and Christian values.

Newt Gingrich.

I think he was trying to match The Onion.