Carl Zimmer tells us that there are going to be showings of Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos all across the country next week—do you know where your nearest exhibition will be going on? Here it is for us Minnesota people, along with a little rebuttal of a Discovery Institute hissy fit:
So Scott Adams shouldn’t be too irritated at this amusing depiction of his mental state.
Here’s a peek at a work in progress: it’s got two kinds of cephalopods, Stethacanthus, and crinoids front and center. Delicious.
Take a look at this promising poll at Daily Kos. This informal and unscientific survey of the netroots seems to be showing that a third of the readers are utterly godless, and that if you toss in the agnostics, freethinkers have got a clear majority. I anxiously await the hysterics from the wingnuts, who will be horrified at all the heretics and apostates and damned infidels lurking on the Left, with their forked tails twitching and their horns filed to sharp, pointy tips.
Maybe we need to start agitating for a godless caucus at Yearly Kos—or even a panel on standing up for secularism, and how this is a good result.
Smarmy Sal Cordova, the Eddie Haskell of the Intelligent Design movement, is at it again, with a post in which he pretends to be competent at information theory. It is with great delight that I watch Tyler DiPietro and Mark Chu-Carroll hand his ass back to him. I know full well the creationist clowns are utterly ignorant of biology; it’s interestingly consistent to see that they also know nothing about astronomy and mathematics, and as the Dover trial showed, they’re complete boobs about the law. What exactly are they supposed to be good at again?
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.
…that someday Michelle Malkin does a dramatic reading of some of my blog articles. Amanda Marcotte has really pushed their buttons, hasn’t she?
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 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.
