How about leaving a student who exposed his history teacher’s classroom preaching, and he certainly is isolated in that backwards little town…so let him know the whole world appreciates him!
We know that spammers cobble up chunks of text by skimming various sources, such as religious tracts, but a reader has discovered that they also pull random text from newspapers. My name has appeared in spam!
That’s from a Star Tribune article that quoted me—now I’m wondering what the spammer was trying to sell under my name.
Despite the fact that the scientific evidence supports their innocence, the kangaroo court in Libya has found the six medical workers guilty of intentionally infecting children with AIDS. The mob, at least, is happy.
“For the second time, justice has spoken out with a ruling against those criminals and the punishment they deserve, because they violated their obligations and sold their consciences to the devil,” Abdullah Maghrebi, the father of one infected child, told the BBC.
I can sympathize with a father with a sick child, but in this case, may he continue to live in his devil-haunted world, and may no modern medical care ever come again to his entire pariah nation. No medicine, no vaccinations, no surgeons—leeches and lancets and the usual contrivances of the pre-eighteenth century world should be all they get. That is my curse on Libya. The sad thing is that many of these deluded fools would consider it a blessing.
There’s just no way around it any more. IF:
There’s nothing at all wrong with that, of course, and you should just stop living a lie and come out with it.
We should have known, I think. The bright lights, the adoring audiences, the singing, the showmanship…being a pastor at one of these fundie megachurches is just like having a hit show on Broadway.
After Dembski sent out that request for more contributions to his petty flash animation, Ken Miller offers him more than he asked for: a nice assortment of the most embarrasssing moments for the creationists at the Dover trial. No response from Dembski yet; aren’t you all looking forward to it?
Gosh, but it looks exciting.
(It really did arrive in my mailbox … inside the pages of Mad magazine.)
Brian Flemming posts an interesting quote from Sam Harris:
I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy, almost single-handedly it seems, eroded the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s by joining them and then leaking all of their secret passwords and goofy lingo to the people who were writing “The Adventures of Superman” radio show. Week after week, there were episodes of Superman fighting the Klan, and the real Klan’s mumbo jumbo was put out all over the airwaves for people to laugh at. Kids were playing Superman vs. the Klan on their front lawns. The Klan was humiliated by this, and was made to look foolish; and we went from a world in which the Klan was a legitimate organization with tens of millions of members – many of whom were senators, and even one president – to a world in which there are now something like 5,000 Klansmen. It’s basically a defunct organization.
Is anybody else feeling like the Discovery Institute is voluntarily putting on the big red nose and the clown shoes without our help, lately?
The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I’ve already answered, so I thought I’d just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:
What’s a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.
Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the Left Behind series, have made disparaging comments about violent video games. Now that they’ve got a violent video game based on their novels, though, they’re saying “It’s not more violent than the Old Testament.” Set the bar low, will ya?
(A “Christian hypocrisy alert” isn’t exactly breaking news, is it?)
I am such a trendsetter. First I pick up on the Paszkiewicz story weeks before the NY Times, and now another creationist I took a shot at, Julie Haberle, is written up in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ms Haberle is responsible for a set of anti-evolution billboards going up in the region, and she does not come off very well. Here are a few quotes from her that expose her shortcomings.
Julie Haberle, 55, said she once believed creationism “was absolutely nuts” and has over the past nine years come to the contradictory conclusion that “evolution is just silly.”
“I’m just a hack.”
“I’m not a biblical scholar and don’t pretend to have one original thought on the site.”
Contradictory hack without a single original thought? Couldn’t have said it better myself. Oh, and speaking of me, I’m quoted, too—and look, Ma, I’m famous!
“It’s kind of standard creationism stuff,” said Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and one of the nation’s most ardent critics of intelligent design. “It’s not a serious site — it’s just chunks of arguments strung together.”
Before I get too cocky, though, the article also notes that the billboards are cheap: somewhere shy of $10,000 each. That’s cheap? I think each one greatly exceeds the entire yearly budget of MnCSE.
Greg Laden, another ardent critic of ID and UM professor who was quoted, has also commented on this article.
