I’m innocent, I tells ya!

August 5th, 2008 • idiocy

Does anyone else find it, in the least bit, fishy as hell that Mary-Kate Olsen is requesting immunity from the DEA’s prosecution in discussions regarding Heath Ledger’s death? The reports state she’s told the investigators “everything” she knows. If that were even slightly true, why would she be so adamant about getting immunity for being innocent and forthcoming? Dead men tell no tales but innocent people don’t request immunity for being innocent either.

The gossip blogs have to be loving all of this. It’s like a goldmine of avenue-generating speculation for them.

So what’s this I hear about the Templars wanting to sue the Vatican?

August 4th, 2008 • christianity, idiocy
Tags: christianity, legal

While thumbing through my shared RSS feeds in Google Reader, I came across this little gem: Knights Templar demanding “good name” and assets back from Vatican after 700 years. I’m not joking, this is a real article. Now, the fact that it’s from The Register makes it suspicious enough as they’re not only an IT site, they’re a bunch of wily prankster, treating everyday like April Fool’s Day.

I have a feeling this is another parody article but if it’s not, more power to the Templars! Not so much for sticking it to the Pope but for having the balls to go to court over 700 year old assets that may or may not have actually existed. I’m sure, locked somewhere in a dusty “Eyes only” vault, the Vatican does have some records of what assets they seized from the Order seven centuries ago but good luck getting it out of them. Suing for 100 billion Euros? Which one of them is doing the Dr. Evil pinky-to-mouth expression? There’s a part of me that wants this so very much to be real. A (now vaguely) religious and righteous fraternal Order suing the pants off the (now vaguely) relevant keepers of the coffers.

There’s just so many Monty Python jokes that can, and will, come of this.

Via Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins’ shared news items

Conflated Catholic Confraternity points finger at PZ

July 30th, 2008 • christianity, idiocy
Tags: crackergate

I’ve been mulling over this trite screed all day. I actually held off on posting earlier because I wanted to see what PZ would write. And rip it apart he did. This contrite piece of garbage is full of logical fallacies but they’re well worded, at least.

They’re up in arms trying to get PZ fired for something he did in his down time at home so it’s wholly — well, in this case, physically holey — unrelated to school. Can we all mail bomb write to your contrite brotherhood of buggerers and get you fired for being a gas bag? No and you’re not going to succeed in getting PZ usurped from his post at UM Morris either. The overall buffoonery from this whole ordeal is simply laughable and the lengths at which Bill Donahue and now these deacons and pastors are willing to go just to protect some crackers is amazing. Only if they would put their misplaced time towards something useful, like bringing the troops home or fighting climate change, they might lead happy lives like the rest of us secularists do. They drag out the Bill of Rights and how it offers them religious protection but only when it applies to those non-practitioners who choose to malign it, a point PZ also makes and drives home hard. They do not understand that freedom of speech also protects us non-believers and we’re free to verbally, and written, abuse your religion all we want to. I don’t use this blog as a soapbox against fairy tales any more but I sure as hell do out in public.

Lies and hate speech which incite contempt or violence are not protected under the law. Hence, inscribing Swastikas on Jewish synagogues or publicly burning copies of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Koran, especially by a faculty member of a public university, are just as heinous and just as unconstitutional.

Being wholly ignorant of the law — just how they like it — they trot out the fact that this is a hate-inducing act of slamming a nail through a wafer. You’re right, it certainly was. PZ received a large number of death threats and gigs of hatemail (probably many gigabytes of it). Is this not heinous as well? Or is it OK that fellow God-fearing Catholics were threatening a man with death — and a castration or two — and asking him to desecrate the Qu’ran? Not only is that a faceplam-inducing piece of flaming crap, it’s contradictory. You can defame non-theists all you want but you think there’s some non-existent law that protects you from us doing the same? We’re not lawyers but we’re smarter than you apparently and we know that both sides can start flame wars until the end of time, the non-theist side will just laugh the whole time.

One fails to see the relevance of the desecration of a Catholic sacrament to the science of Biology.

One does fail to see a link that does not exist, no matter how hard you want it to. PZ teaches biology at school, he does whatever he wants to do at home. Just as you do.

A biologist has no business ‘dissing’ any religion, rather, they should be busy teaching the scientific discipline they were hired to teach.

He does and he does it at school. He could be out building a yurt behind his house after work for what it matters but that doesn’t concern this Catholic gathering of buggering windbags. Yurts have nothing to do with biology either but then again, he doesn’t teach yurt building in his genetics classes. The next line of the press release is a real clincher as it says “tolerating” this kind of behavior is “repugnant”. Really? Since when does a secular institution have to not tolerate someone not teaching fairy tales in a science classroom?

This whole ordeal shows how out of touch with reality Bill Donahue and the Catholic Confraternity are.

Dictionaries did not explode in printing presses

July 20th, 2008 • idiocy

This is an IDer’s explanation that God, without question, exists. He states early in the video that the most minute portion of anything in the physical universe is explainable by a mind behind it. So rocks and atoms have minds behind them. Is there a planet of rock people sending their prisoners here for us to see rocks? And apparently, rocks have a moral stance behind them and they’re spiritual. OK, rocks aren’t mentioned explicitly but you can substitute any non-man-made but physical item in the Universe.

Around 2:10 in, this creationist is stating that the human enzyme is proof of God. I want to know how this explains palm trees and Kentucky bluegrass (the grass not the music). He also posits (about 3:40 in) that there are 4 “fundamental questions” in life which only have three answers. So, what happened to that final answer? There’s an imbalanced ratio here.

14 year old girl charged with rape after being raped

June 26th, 2008 • 2 comments idiocy

This one is just maddeningly stupid.

A 14 year old girl in Kansas is charged with rape because the boy who raped her in under 14 years of age. The state law says sex, consensual or not, with anyone under 14 is rape. Despite the fact that the rapist was under 14, he’s now the rapee in this case. How the hell does this make any sense to their police force? I understand law and all its trappings but when, ever, does this make sense? This reminds me of that case in late 2006 of two kids in Utah being charged with raping the other person they consensually had sex with simply because they were underage. Now, they’re labeled as sex offenders because of a voluntary act. Also, how is she being charged with sodomy? That’s an interesting charge to tack on. I suppose more information will come out once it goes to trial.

I’m glad a lawyer (with ethics!) is defending her for free in this absurd case.

God arrested for selling cocaine

June 23rd, 2008 • chatter, idiocy

Just found this from CBS12:

God is arrested near a church for selling cocaine – a man named “God”, that is.

I find that quite funny and ironic. So some bad drug dealer named ‘God’ Lucky Howard got tossed in the hoosegow for selling smack to undercover cops. Neither was he God nor very Lucky today. And arrested near a church, it’s just insult to injury. Now, I wonder if some local yokel is going to sue God for selling him some bad dope? I wonder what his odds would be.

Academic “freedom” bill is closer to law

April 29th, 2008 • 2 comments education, idiocy

Seems Rep. Stroms and her cronies don’t want to stop with their nonsense. Their bill, incorrectly dubbed an “Academic Freedom” bill, is steps from being signed into law according to the Orlando Sentinel. Great! Scopes and Dover don’t mean anything to these people because they’re morons, up and down. I’m glad the proud citizens of Florida voted these idiots into office and keep them there (I didn’t vote them in, I can’t vote in this state…YET). Governor Crist will happily sign this bill into law, I’m sure. Not because he understands what it’s about or why it’s a bad idea but because he’s an idiot too.

One of the supporters of this bill said the House should welcome signing it into law because it’ll bring lawsuits and they — the representatives in the House, many lawyers — will enjoy having lawsuits to fight over. That means they’re aware they’re signing into law a very unstable bill that will end up getting a number of schools sued and they’re OK with that. No, scratch that. They want that to happen.

I’m glad I don’t have children in this state’s school system but at the same time, sad at the same fact. I can’t send my kid to class with a tape recorder to tape all the stupidity that’s sure to come once August gets here and school’s back in full swing. I can just hear all the litigation now and how this bill will probably get repealed in less than two years for causing such a financial strain on both the school systems and the state.

Classmates careening onto my site

April 18th, 2008 • chatter, idiocy

I just checked my Performancing incoming links from yesterday and noticed a search from West Palm and one from Boca. One was related to “what is the human concestor” (concestor to…what? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?) and the other “cladogram of horse to human evolution”. Clearly, two people who haven’t paid an iota of attention in class. One wanted to know the human concestor…of something — it’s Jesus and/or God and/or Magma as confirmed by both Sam and Rob, discussed while talking about the merits of ID junk science — and the other thinks we evolved from horses. That’s why Equus Unicorn went extinct, it turned into Homo sapiens retardensis! While I can’t pick out who these people are in class, I can take my guess on the second one.

On another note, Firefox’s built-in spell check doesn’t recognize the word “sapiens”. How long has this word been a normative descriptor in the English language, since Linneaus?

I love it when fundamentalists do this…

March 29th, 2008 • chatter, idiocy

The hate speech alone ought to give any rational American pause. We don’t tolerate such talk against minorities on the basis of race or sexual preference, so I have to ask why we would tolerate it against Darwin skeptics?

From The ID Report. Yep, us Americans are devoid of racism now thanks to Rosa Parks (erroneously pulled into this op-ed). Nevermind the fact that people are still calling black Americans “niggers” and there’s at least one piece on racism in America on one of the big box news channels everyday. Or that gays are continually discriminated against to this day. I thought they all got liberated from intolerance back in the 70s when disco was still big! No, there are no hate crimes perpetrated against gays today, none at all. I’d make a remark about this author but then I’d get lumped into the “bigoted” group of people who read PZ Myers’s blog. I mean the fact that he states Americans don’t tolerate racism is stuff of pure comedy alone, I don’t even have to make up a punchline, he already did. If you believe Americans don’t tolerate racism or hate on gays, I’m not sure if you know what “rational” means. Or if you actually watch the news. Or talk to anyone.

I do like how the author points out that even if you question evolution based on non-religious rationale, you’re a target for the pro-Darwinist hate machine. I find this incredibly funny seeing as there are people in my Human Evolution class who are agnostic and don’t fully swallow evolution as a viable theory but they’re not being brow-beaten or singled out in class for this. They’re students like the rest of us. My teacher, a staunch Darwinist with a doctorate in primatology, surely isn’t taking these kids out back and beating them up. Americans “don’t tolerate racism” but we sure as hell tolerate a lot of ignorance.

All of this is about the pro-Intelligent Design anti-rationalism (and everything else) movie Expelled. Long story short, it premiered in Minnesota and PZ signed up to attend on a publicly available form and got booted from the movie theater. But his guest, long arm of atheism Richard Dawkins, got in without issue. People supporting Expelled keep saying that PZ was not invited to an “invite only” (was Googlebot invited since it crawled the site?) that was not invite only or that he crashed a private screening to which he was allowed to come since he signed up to do so. But the producer of the movie, who actually singled out both Myers and Dawkins to be interviewed in the movie, “allowed” (read (presumably): “didn’t see the white-haired, tall Doctor whom I hand picked to be in this movie”) Dr. Dawkins to stay. Well, as someone pointed out, if PZ wasn’t invited then weren’t his guests even less invited? Since it’s a private theater (since you pay to go there, it’s technically private property even though it’s open to the public) why weren’t he and his guests wrangled up and sent off to the hoosegow for trespassing? Smells fishy to me if no one was actually invited but only one person was kicked out but a bunch of other non-invited attendees got to stay and hang out.

I think I’ll sign up for a screening here in Boca so I can not get thrown out and then bash the movie because I plan on seeing it anyway for belly laughs. From the sound of all of the Hitler and Nazi propaganda footage, I think these guys are either trying to promote neo-Nazism or have a man-crush on Adolph. “Hitler was a strict Darwinist” is the popular phrase being used right now. No, he actually wasn’t but he was incredibly high on illegal drugs a lot. Hey, that sounds like G.W. Bush except he doesn’t understand Darwinism. Parallels?

I can’t believe I’ve wasted the last hour or so reading this diatribe, as unamazingly biased as it is. For someone who’s “spent the last quarter century investigating and studying this issue [of anti-Darwinist elitism]” (author’s words, not mine) in respects to academia, they’ve apparently never stepped foot inside of a collegiate classroom in those twenty-five years. Surprised? Yeah, neither am I. According to the author, the movie wholly states “freedom of expression is under attack” but of course does not acknowledge the fact that there are schools in America — both secular and religious — that disallow any discussion of evolution and Darwinism. Not only colleges but primary and secondary schools. So if freedom of expression is under attack, why is the counter argument to your eye-opening movie being actively disregarded and decried in states such as Kansas and Texas? Freedom of expression isn’t under attack at all nor was it ever in this regard. Since the antithesis of ID is actively being stifled in the Bible Belt (“under attack” if you will, to use the parlance of the author), how Darwinist elitism is attacking proponents of ID is beyond me. There are portions of the US population that believe in Intelligent Design so how is their freedom of expression (since they can openly express whatever they want) “under attack”? I know the article is biased and entirely one-sided but seeing “arguments” like this really makes one wonder just what did happen to reasoning to allow unresearched and factually incorrect stuff such as this get put out.

The internet happened.

I’m trying to act shocked, really.

February 11th, 2008 • idiocy

This “reporter” thinks girls shouldn’t go to college:

I completely agree, you don’t need to go to college because you already duped some boneheaded editor-in-chief to hire you. You have a job making a mockery of yourself which should give you enough to write about until you marry that rich guy and then he divorces you. Of course, he went to college and realized that he should get a pre-nuptial and the divorce leaves you with nothing.

Via Mindful Ink