The Carnival of the Godless is full of new commandments I’m supposed to follow, but that seem to be getting broken at a frenetic pace. We don’t need any more; I have a suggestion for the Christians. Pick one of the good ones in the original 10. Not an easy one, like “Thou shalt loaf about on Sunday,” but one that might actually make a difference in the world. I suggest “Don’t kill.”
You’d think they would have gotten the message by now that they’re doing something wrong.
Another morning, another creationist whine out of the blue. Here’s another letter, and as usual with these well-thought out rants, I’m an afterthought—it’s addressed to Ken Miller, but then the guy figures he might as well clog a few more mailboxes while he’s sending it out.
As is traditional, the formatting is exactly as I received it. What is it with kooks and Comic Sans, anyway? And could they possibly trade in a few bold/italic font changes for an occasional paragraph break?
John Scalzi lives right near the Creation “Museum,” and he refuses to go. Good for him, I say — we’re going to have to start starving Ken Ham soon. On the other hand, if anyone could mock Ham’s Folly effectively, it’s Scalzi … it’s also so much fun to torment him. So his readers are teaming up to compel him to go.
Here’s the deal: Scalzi has a price. If people send him at least $250, which he will turn around and donate to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, he’ll suffer through the cheesy dinosaurs and silly lies, and also write an amusingly snarky summary of the visit. If he gets a thousand dollars or more, he’ll reward everyone a bonus prize or two.
This is brilliant. Rather than sending a scientist to that joke of an exhibit, send a comedian. Laughing at these clowns is the best way to expose them. So go ahead, get on over there and chip in a few bucks, and let’s get an appropriate commentator to review the show.
I really don’t give a damn about Paris Hilton, but doesn’t this just break your heart?
Friends said that she was not eating or sleeping in jail, and that she had been crying a lot. Some reports suggested that this was because she had not been allowed to wax or use moisturiser.
For Ms Hilton, here’s a little song to cheer her up.
Now this is a different categorization of the differences between bold, brave assertive atheists and the spineless, gutless apologists for religious lunacy: we’re “mean”, and they’re “nice”.
When the mean atheists and the nice atheists get together, it’s not so much that it annoys the mean atheists to be asked to play nice. It’s more that they just want to be able to call the nice atheists names like “sniveling milquetoast” and the like. Y’know, while they’re at it. Because when it comes right down to it, the mean atheists just want to have fun. And I respect that.
Yeah, we just want to have fun, like a cat with a mouse. And we do feel obligated to earn those titles assigned to us.
Paying a pittance to old winos to get them to beat each other up for the camera is cheesy enough, but now they’ve sunk even lower: getting sanctimonious old Republican twits to throw punches at Democrats. Tacky, tacky.
Duae Quartunciae (will he ever settle on a name?) has an excellent historical summary of the Answers in Genesis civil war. There’s loads of fun stuff there, including an account of a prior split that involved accusations of witchcraft and “demonic infiltration”, Ken Ham’s pitiful claim that he is currently under “spiritual attack”, and bizarre sleazy shenanigans, largely driven by the nastily ambitious American group led by Ken Ham.
In October of 2005, there was a fateful meeting between AiG-USA and members of the board of the Australian group [now called Creation Ministries Internation, CMI] — but not the management of the Australia group. The Australian board signed a rather startling agreement, in which they give AiG-USA a license to use and modify all the articles on the website, while at the same time holding AiG-Australia liable for any damages that might be claimed arising from such changes. Basically, they handed over complete control of the articles to AiG-USA, took full responsibility for ensuring authors would also consent to this, and accepted full liability for any damages should the original authors object!
It’s got lots of links to the documentation published by both the Australian and American creationist groups. One of the wonderful benefits of this kind of internecine battle, besides the fact that they are eating their own, is that all kinds of useful internal information spills out of the wounds. And now it’s all nicely organized in one place.
The first of three potluck picnics sponsored by one of our regional godless groups is being held Sunday, 10 June, at noon, at Columbia Park—Skatje, my wife Mary, and I are planning on being there. Come on out and join the freethought community in the Twin Cities area!
By the way, it’s weird how we’ve got all of these infidel organizations here — the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists at the University of Minnesota, the Humanists of Minnesota, the Minnesota Atheists, and the Atheists for Human Rights (who in this case aren’t participating in the picnics). The Twin Cities has an embarrassment of riches, while the rural parts of the state are just embarrassingly pious. We have a few students who are going to try and start up a CASH chapter here in Morris next year, and we’ll see how well that goes—if there are any other atheist groups in outstate Minnesota, let me know…and if there are any lonely, isolated atheists scattered here and there (and I know there are), let me know that, too. We should try to build a wider community.
Somebody out there must be able to give me a fix—I keep trying to get this paper, and either my library gives me ambiguous messages about access and a few errors, or the Royal Soc. site balks and tells me that there is system maintenance going on. I can’t even get to the videos. Come on, man, I’m going through withdrawal here. I need a little taste. Please.
Kubodera T, Koyama Y, Mori K (2007) Observations of wild hunting behaviour and bioluminescence of a large deep-sea, eight-armed squid, Taningia danae. Proc Biol Sci 274(1613): 1029-34.
There’s got to be a fellow academic out there who’s willing to help out a squid junkie in need. If you can send me the pdf, I’ll owe you bigtime.
Thanks to Reginald Selkirk, Bob O’H, and Don S., I now have my fix. I’m squirting it into my brain through the eyeballs right now. I may have to go lie down for a while to let the good feelings linger.
This is pretty nifty — putting out a request and getting multiple replies in less than a half hour.
Those nerds over at Marginal Utility have been analyzing some interesting data — the results of the General Social Survey have been released, and you know those guys. Give them a file full of numbers and they go nuts.
