He wanted to be a preacher. He was a good Christian. His wife was a true believer, too. Their baby, though, was a godless heathen who never read the bible.
So I’m sure it was perfectly reasonable to put the baby in the microwave and cook her.
And their excuse that Satan made him do it? Quite sensible, I’m sure.
Isn’t faith a wonderful thing?
A number of you wrote in to me to let me know that Hong Kong was considering labeling the Christian bible as indecent—it is full of violence and kinky-freaky sexual behavior, after all. It was also amusing how some people rationalized it.
That weird guy Dave Ng put out a call for bloggers to flaunt their drinking containers. That’s easy, at least.
1. Can you show us your coffee cup?
As if there were just one…
2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
From left to right:
None of those reflect anything about my personality.
3. Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?
No. Drinking coffee is serious business.
3. Can you try to get others to comment on it?
I doubt it. Now everyone will refuse to comment, just to be contrary.
I know everyone is talking about this demented blog supporting Brownback’s candidacy that, among other things, denounces heliocentrism. I honestly can’t decide whether it’s satire or genuine—I’ve met a few people who sincerely believe ideas that stupid. It’s just that they usually lack the technical competence to put a website together.
But then, of course, all you have to do is read Brownback’s official campaign site, or his official blog colony, which is almost as looney, and you have to wonder how crazy an idea would have to be to be rejected by a Republican presidential candidate. After all, Brownback looks like a guy who went into politics because his first career choice went kaput when he failed the balloon animal test at the clown college.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on their opinion page (yeah, boo, crap so runny and putrid you can’t even get rid of it with a shovel, I know) that claims biologists have been actively inflating species numbers as a cheap ploy to gain better support for conservation efforts. I really can’t rebut that any better than Loren Coleman does here:
What is occurring is a classic theoretical battle between lumpers and splitters, not a fight of conservationists vs non-conservationists, not a war of Greens vs non-Greens, although “Species Inflation May Infect Over-Eager Conservationists” appears eager to convince you of that. The splitters are making their points lately, with more scientific evidence for a diversity of species.
“Species” are not like “dollars”—they are far more fluid, and to the biologist, there is no way to rank the value of a beetle against a monkey. This is a classic case of concepts in one discipline being applied in a grossly inappropriate manner to the concepts of another.
I’ll also add that, while it may not be true of some groups that focus on charismatic furry beasts to win popular support, among the scientists who do the work of taxonomy, I don’t see the individual species being used as the coinage of environmental conservation. I see much more focus on habitat preservation, which is really where the action is at if you want to save species.
Ah, but the WSJ editorial page is more likely the province of baraminologists than credible authorities.
That’s not news, I know—you can find Mark Twain complaining about them, too. One of the big problems is that any idiot who may well lack any experience in education, or even any interest in education beyond destroying it, can run for school board and actually get elected. Case in point: Ken Willard, one of the Kansas rubes who tried to get Intelligent Design creationism into the curriculum, has just upped the ante and decided to run for the national presidency of the association of state boards of education. It’s incredible—he’s an insurance executive with no competence and no qualifications other than that he’s a fervent dogmatist who wants his religious beliefs taught, and that he has the backing of the Discovery Institute. The association ought to be deeply embarrassed if he can get in, and he just might do it:
he’s running unopposed.
If this boob can rise to the top, you know there’s something rotten in the system.
South Dakota: very conservative, very Republican, very concerned with women’s reproduction, and none of it in a good way. This story just personifies the worst of South Dakota’s repressive residents perfectly.
A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and legislative pages.
Ted Klaudt, 49, a Republican rancher from Walker, faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking.
Court documents mention five possible victims. Three were foster children between the ages of 15 and 19 who lived with Klaudt’s family. One is a cousin of one of those girls, and the fifth is a friend of Klaudt’s daughter.
In the most disturbing accusation, the girls say Klaudt had them convinced they could earn up to $20,000 by donating their eggs to a fertility clinic. And even though he has no medical training, the girls say Klaudt did all the supposed “exams” and “procedures” himself.
If you feel the urge to go wash compulsively, you’re excused.
But, see, this is one of the virtues of keeping young women ignorant of basic reproductive health. He was able to convince them to let him, a farmer with no medical training, that he needed to give them breast exams and poke around in their reproductive tracts…and they believed him. All those restrictive laws passed by repulsive old Republicans suddenly make sense.
If the South Dakota legislature is sufficiently repelled by this horror story, one way they could make amends is by rushing through some sensible sex education laws.
The Alliance for Science sponsored an essay contest—students were asked to submit an essay on the theme, “Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?”
The winners have been announced, and first prize has gone to Gregory Simonian. Read the whole collection, including the entries from Merve Fejzula, Shobha Topgi, and Linda Zhou — it seems a few high school students are far smarter than the entire gang of evolution deniers at the Discovery Institute.
Now that they’re quite irate about Guillermo Gonzalez failing to get tenure, the gang at the Discovery Institute seems to have forgotten Bill Dembski’s radical plan for dealing with biologists.
If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).
So he’d just get rid of the non-tenured faculty, and banish the rest to a new department with a mocking name. I don’t think these guys can legitimately complain about Gonzalez’s treatment — he was handled far more respectfully than the creationists would deal with us.
Dembski would never become president of any credible university since his plan would destroy the representation of a major discipline on the campus, with concomitant loss of student enrollment, and would utterly demolish the university’s status in graduate and medical schools. It was an insane, stupid thing to suggest then, but it’s an awfully handy counterpoise to the current DI position now.
Among the multitudes who have now seen Flock of Dodos was a woman who recognized one of the faces on the screen, and she wrote Randy Olson with a little anecdote that you might find amusing, and a little bit sweet and charming.
Just watched the film, congratulations to Randy Olson for a well documented
documentary of a topic that deserves greater coverage.Dr. Mike Behe was the first guy I ever dated, at the tender age of 13. We were
bright kids, and Mike tutored me in math. My dad took us on our ‘dates.’ I ended up
in technology, and he took the bio-science route. When my mom called me last year to
let me know that he was at the forefront of Intelligent Design, I was relatively
dumbfounded. Yes, we went to Catholic school, and yes, we were both science geeks,
but his philosophy and purported science and evidence is completely contradictory to
what we mutually pursued as adolescent theory. I am touching a book on my bookshelf
on Paleoanthropology that I know we both digested, and can’t for the life of me
figure out how he got to where he is now. Must be Lehigh College; California helps
you have a broader non-provincial perspective. Tell Mike he needs to get out of the
sticks.
Yes, she gave permission to post this publicly, as long as we didn’t reveal her name; if Dr Behe wants to get in touch with his old sweetie, he should talk to Randy Olson, not me. Personally, I wouldn’t blame Lehigh, which really isn’t that bad of a place—pin the problem on religion, not geography.
If any of my old Sunday School pals want to write in and rebuke me for leaving the church, I’ll post that in fair return. If you want anecdotes from my old girlfriends, though, you’re out of luck—I married the only one who mattered, and she’s not going to have any surprising stories about how I changed, and there will definitely be no accounts about how we tutored each other in biology.
