You can catch Tangled Bank #70 at ¡Viva La Evolución!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
In the race to SICB, GrrlScientist has beat me here to Phoenix, and she had so much further to fly. Now we’re just waiting for that slacker, John Lynch, to show up.
Tired now. Must drink beer.
In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007.
“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”
Hang on there. A possible nuclear attack by terrorists? We’ve heard this possibility discussed before as a justification for torture. Robertson knows something. Quick, call Kiefer Sutherland and let the waterboarding begin!
Once he breaks, he’ll lead us to the terrorist mastermind (codename: Lord), and then we can send in a Ranger battalion to take him out.
Later in the article, though, he admits that last year’s prediction of a tsunami striking the US was fulfilled by heavy rain in New England; given that level of slop in his prediction, next year he’ll be able to claim that the nuclear attack prediction was met by that time Dick Cheney had a particularly gassy burrito.
Global warming. It’s all our fault.
As the world becomes over run with sin more and more souls are sent to stoke the fires of Hell. As the Earth produces more heat our environment becomes more hostile. We must repent in order to stop our polar ice caps from melting.
At least the Muslims are to blame for the tsunamis.
They will be dealt with severely.
Wilkins is wondering when the real criminals will be punished—he’s talking about the abuses of power by the current Republican administration, ranging from the evisceration of civil liberties in our own country to criminal and unjustified foreign wars, with the concomitant loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. I think I can answer that one.
Never.
Bush will leave office with the praise of his sycophants ringing in his ears, and that will include the national media. He will go off to a happy retirement, smirking all the way, and will only ever appear at voluntary events hosted by other criminals who will be anxious to continue applauding him. Personally, I think that at every public event at which he shows his face from now on, people ought to spit on him…and he and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the whole rotten gang ought to be shipped off to an international war crimes trial today. It won’t happen.
One reason is the remarkably timid complacency of the citizenry. We have a president who signs away our liberties, and the people just yawn. This is a nation of sheep, bred to follow authority, no matter how odious or insane. It’s frightening how much reverence for authority people will grant to piddling wankers like Bush, or televangelists, or media figures—these people can do anything, and the public will rush to hush anyone who criticizes.
Another reason is historical. Read this account of what the United States has done in the past—along with the sheep, we are a nation of monsters. John Milton Chivington would have been an exemplary soldier in the War on Terror. But, you see, we don’t learn from history: our kids do not learn about the Sand Creek Massacre in school, and they will not learn about Abu Ghraib and habeas corpus in the future.
Our kids don’t even learn about Nixon, except that he was a president; if they are particularly diligent, they might discover some of the press hagiography about him. That’s it.
There’s a fantasy of America the rich and wise and powerful and gracious and self-sacrificing that has a powerful resonance in this country. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that we can close our eyes and wallow in the myth, and we don’t actually have to try and live up to it…and we haven’t. Ever.
Prepare yourselves, Arizona! John Lynch, GrrlScientist, and I will be wafting into Phoenix tomorrow, and here’s a short version of our busy calendar:
I’ll be leaving Phoenix on Sunday for New York for a few days, and various social events there. It’s busy, busy, busy for the next week!
There’s some pulse-pounding high speed insect racing action going on in this animation, and one excellent dipteran crash, but otherwise, not much resolution to the story, and the nice spider gets shafted.
And I was rooting for the spider.
Here’s a beautiful summary of Grand Canyon geology.
Edge has this annual question, where they ask a lot of smart people something general and provocative, and collect the essays into a webpage. This year, the question is “What are you optimistic about? And why?“
There are a lot of answers, many of them very specific—people are optimistic about the new supercollider, or climate change, or something specific to their discipline—while others are so general that they don’t say much (Humans will survive, somehow!). What I thought interesting, though, is that there was a bit of a trend to one particular kind of answer. Some of the people who answered in this particular way are:
In short, what all of these writers have in common is that they all believe people are going to WAKE UP. They’re going to appreciate evidence and rational thinking and skepticism and generally, science more — they’re going to develop more demanding standards for truth, and they’re going to look at what people tell them more critically.
What a splendid hope! It’s about time we had a new Enlightenment.
I’m not quite so optimistic about the possibility of it actually happening, but I can join in the wishful thinking — yes, these would all be grand changes to see occur. Let’s all work towards making it happen.
