To quote Michael Shermer, I “investigate paranormal claims, pseudoscience and fringe groups, and cults and claims of all kinds between science and pseudoscience, and non-science, and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old nonsense.”
1. Michael Egnor & the Discovery Institute expose their anti-science bias – I’ve blogged about Egnor before, linking to the blog debate where Steven Novella refuted his every flawed, ridiculous argument in favor of a “soul.” Now he’s jumping on the so-called “ClimateGate” fiasco, where he insists, like so many other denialists, that a whole lot of private, innocuous emails climate scientists is somehow the smoking gun evidence that global warming is false. Of course he doesn’t pinpoint any statements in any of the emails that would lead any rational person to this conclusion. But who needs facts when you’ve got faith? Egnor proves once again how egnorant he can be.
Is that a serious headline?
2. Uganda proposes death penalty to HIV-positive gays – It suddenly becomes very clear why Uganda is known for having the best medical care in the world. Oh wait. No, it doesn’t. The positive news is that this suggests that maybe not all the Neanderthals did die out after all. Though it’s not really fair to blame Uganda. Stupidity this large can only come from one source: the U.S.’s own THE FAMILY. I’m looking at you Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Bart Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts. Can we please lock these psychopaths up now?
4. The first honest homeopathy product? – As you can clearly read on the packaging, homeopaths have developed the first ever non-drowsy sleep aid. May I be the first to congratulate them on this amazing breakthrough. Good job, guys. Good job.
5. The official wine of woo – Age of Autism took some time off from shilling bogus autism treatments for profit to shill some silly wine site called “Wines For Autism.” Now at first the site might seem fine. It’s supporting autism awareness after all. So how bad could it b–oh:
From witnessing my son’s significant progress I have made it my goal to spread awareness of the effectiveness of biomedical interventions while supporting charities that share my beliefs.
In other words, she wishes to promote those who support her particular delusion and no actual scientific organization researching autism will receive a dime. In other words, she’s going to exploit autism pseudoscience to make money.
It’s sort of like my business where I sell used cars and give some of the profits to cancer research (please note: cancer research means those promoting trepanning as an effective cancer treatment). Actually, now that I think about it, this whole story makes me feel like bludgeoning my skull with a large stick so that all that stupid can seep out of my brain.
Okay, porn isn’t directly mentioned in the article but it’s safe to say that the “immorality” being blamed for Indonesia’s problems probably includes porn in addition to just about everything else that’s associated with either pleasure or modernity.
The Indonesian Minister of Communication and Information (yes, that’s actually his title) Tifatul Sembiring knows what’s responsible for all of Indonesia’s recent natural disasters. It’s gotta be all that “immorality.”
Apparently, Sembiring comes from the Bronze Age school of thought that says that bad fortune is caused by angry gods who are punishing us for our immoral behavior:
Communication and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said that there were many television programmes that destroyed morals.
Therefore, the minister said, natural disasters would continue to occur.
His comments came as he addressed a prayer meeting on Friday in Padang, Sumatra, which was hit by a powerful earthquake in late September.
Well maybe that’s your problem, Minister. Maybe you’re praying to the wrong gods. Or maybe you’re praying to the right gods but they’re either modest or simply don’t want to be disturbed with every chicken-shit problem you come across, and so don’t want you to pray to them. Or maybe this is punishment for wearing pants. Ever think of that? Notice how there are no natural disasters happening when you’re not wearing pants. Coincidence?
My favorite part of the BBC news piece is this little gem:
According to the Jakarta Globe, his comments sparked an angry reaction on the internet, particularly among those who followed him on social networking site Twitter.
This guy fears the wrath of ancient, angry boogymen but he’s got Twitter? Well I think we’ve found the culprit right there. No primitive deity can be okay with Twitter.
Yesterday, I blogged about how the Catholic Church was getting away with covering up hundreds of child abuse cases despite investigators’ having no reasonable doubt of their crimes.
The author reveals that she herself was such a victim of sexual harassment, having been propositioned in the confession box by a priest who cited biblical references to “divine kisses.”
Later she was cornered by a lesbian nun at a college where they were teaching. “She would come to my bed in the night and do lewd acts and I could not stop her,” she claims.When she was sent to Bangalore to stay with a priest known for his piety, he lectured her about the need for “physical love” and later assaulted her.
“Back in his room, he tried to fondle me and when I resisted, got up and asked angrily if I had seen a man. When I said no, he stripped himself, ejaculated and forced me to strip,” she writes.
According to Sister Jesme, senior church officials twice tried to admit her into rehabilitation clinics and claimed she had mental problems after she complained about the scale of sexual abuse and the number of illicit affairs between nuns and priests.
And like in Ireland and the rest of the world, this is only the tip of the iceberg with regards to Catholic sex abuse:
The Catholic Church in India is mired in a series of sexual controversies, and has only just begun to recover from the dismissal of a senior bishop who “adopted” an attractive 26-year-old female companion as his “daughter”.
Oh, and the best part comes at the end of the Telegraph article, when one church official is quoted as saying something so delusional and repulsive that it just further proves yesterday’s thesis that Catholic Church is an evil organization that must be destroyed:
Dr Paul Thelekkat, a spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Catholic church said he had some sympathy for sister Jesme, and respected her freedom to express her views, but he believed her claims were trivial. “How far what she says is well-founded I can’t say, but the issues are not very serious. We’re living with human beings in a community and she should realise this is part of human life,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
You said it, Dr Paul Thelekkat. What’s this chick’s problem? Rape is such a trivial matter hardly worth anybody’s attention. It was probably her own fault anyway for being such an attractive temptation. Besides the Bible clearly says women ought to be submit to men.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Catholic Church.
I’ve blogged before about the case of the Catholic-run reform schools in Ireland that were exposed to have covered up many decades of child abuse (here, here, here, and here). And that’s when I guess Ireland concluded that while massive conspiracy to cover up child rape is bad, it’s not nearly as bad as criticizing the organization responsible for said conspiracy and child rape, so they decided naturally to pass blasphemy laws forbidding the insulting of such an institution.
Authorities enjoyed a cosy relationship with the Church and did not enforce the law as four archbishops, obsessed with secrecy and avoiding scandal, protected abusers and reputations at all costs, the report said..
Hundreds of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law.
In a three-year inquiry, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese uncovered a sickening tactic of ”don’t ask, don’t tell” throughout the Church.
”The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities,” it said.
”The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.
”The State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.”
Four archbishops – John Charles McQuaid who died in 1973, Dermot Ryan who died in 1984, Kevin McNamara who died in 1987, and retired Cardinal Desmond Connell – did not hand over information on abusers.
The first files were handed over by the Cardinal in 1995 but even then he had records of complaints against at least 28 priests.
The primary loyalty of bishops and archbishops is to the Church, the report said.
Bishop James Kavanagh, Bishop Dermot O’Mahony, Bishop Laurence Forristal, Bishop Donal Murray and disgraced Bishop Brendan Comiskey, a reformed alcoholic who failed to control paedophile priests when in charge of the Ferns Diocese, all knew about child abuse for many years.
The inquiry, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, said the hierarchy cannot claim they did not know that child sex abuse was a crime.
The facts are these:
While the Dublin Archdiocese inquiry found no evidence of a paedophile ring, some of the most shocking findings included:
One priest admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children;
Another accepted he abused on a fortnightly basis during his 25-year ministry;
One complaint was made against a priest who later admitted abusing at least six other children;
It took police 20 years to decide on a prosecution of one priest.
The inquiry said it uncovered inappropriate contacts between authorities and the Archdiocese.
And that’s just the beginning. There’s so many more examples of Church officials and police officials looking the other way while children were raped and abused at the hands of this organized crime syndocate known to the world as the Catholic Church. Nowhere but the Catholic Church will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
After the recent news of Australian government officials going after Scientology’s tax exempt status and labeling them a criminal organization, the more we learn about the mass child abuse cover-ups by the Catholic Church, the more obvious it becomes that Scientology’s abuses are a drop in the bucket next to that of the Catholic Church. Not only does the U.S. have a moral responsibility to revoke Catholic tax exemption but anyone who continues to support the Church after learning how willing its high-ranking officials are to sacrifice hundreds if not thousands of children to protect the Church’s reputation, should be considered complicit in these crimes. It is no wonder that Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry were so effective in convincing a recent debate audience that the Catholic church is far from a force for good in the world. Every Catholic should be outraged at their church’s hypocrisy as well as its utter lack of humanity and remorse for the unspeakable, unforgivable atrocities it’s committed.
Every sane individual on Earth should be demanding justice for these victims of Catholicism. It shouldn’t just be the atheists calling for action. Every person with even an ounce of compassion should be shouting for the Church leaders to stand trial for their crimes against humanity. Where is the outrage?
1. I’d officially declared tomorrow Defend Evolution Against Literary Terrorists Day (or DEALT Day) but it seems that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron LIED and decided to pass out their vandalized Origin of Species books a day earlier than promised. But I’m still hoping to hear tomorrow that more of them are being handed out at schools because I’d love to chat up the volunteers handing them out.
2. Update on the Iraqi dowsing rods story – About two weeks ago, I wrote about the use of useless dowsing rods by the Iraqi military to detect bombs. Well, the good news is that everyone who’s written about it has helped get the story successfully out there in the mainstream media like the NY Times, The Guardian, the Atlantic, and the Rachel Maddow Show, where it will hopefully garner enough attention to ensure something is done to correct the situation.
A Swedish man claiming to be the Son of God was sentenced to prison for a month for “unlawful driving,” after getting picked up by the cops four separate times without a license over the course of four months.
1. Religion kills another one – Texas executed Khristian Oliver for a murder committed during a burglary:
While deciding whether he should live or die, jurors at his trial consulted copies of the Bible in a highly selective manner by using texts supporting the death penalty, thus calling their impartiality into serious question.Though Christians, they apparently ignored the teaching of Jesus on mercy, forgiveness and rejection of the eye-for-an-eye mentality.
Isn’t it so good knowing that life and death decisions are being made in courtrooms by a ancient Bronze Age mythology book?
“The undisputed record shows that the prayers delivered at the outset of Board meetings from May 29, 2007 through December 15, 2008 referred to Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, or Savior with overwhelming frequency… No non- Christian deities are invoked… These prayers as a whole cannot be considered non- sectarian or civil prayer. They display a preference for Christianity over other religions by the government.”
Their goal is to show that all these evil, godless, liberal stores are just out to steal Christmas and therefore, they should be punished. Of course the reality of it is that the true meaning of Christmas is Capitalism and its patron saint, Santa Claus. So smart stores evolve and embrace inclusive multiculturalism over exclusiveness because they want everyone’s business. So I’ve got a tip for the “Liberty” Counsel: Find a successful business model for selling products (not religions) that involves alienating non-Christian customers, and stores will happily follow that model.
Me, on the other hand–I’m shopping at the stores they marked “Naughty.”
4. China hosting Robot Olympics in 2010 – Automated humanoids (two arms, two legs, no wheels) will compete in traditional athletic events like track and field, javelin throwing, and possibly synchronized swimming, as well as robot-specific events like cleaning things.
1. Cancer Boy is now cancer-free – As Carl Sagan once wrote, science delivers the goods. Many months ago, I blogged about the continuing saga of Daniel Hauser, the boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma whose crazy anti-medical mother kidnapped to keep him from being poisoned by his court-ordered chemotherapy, but who later returned home with him. Unfortunately, while the boy was receiving real medical care, he was also being given bogus “alternative” medicine” products, which pretty much guarantees that the medicine denialists won’t give science the credit its due. But what’s most important is that Daniel Hauser is cancer-free and the chemotherapy didn’t poison him to death like the medicine deniers predicted.
2. An economic collapse didn’t occur today, so the world won’t end on Wednesday! – Cause I know you were all worried that it would. Ever since September, I’d been blogging about the constantly moving doomsday goalpost of one really delusional website. First, it predicted the world would end on September 21st. Then that turned into October 21st. Then October 23rd. But now whoever’s running it is wising up and adding conditions. Yesterday, the prediction was that if an economic collapse occured on November 9th, The Rapture would come on November 11th. Well, the Dow Jones went up over 200 points today, so I guess we’re all safe. Phew! That was a close one.
Habibollah Latifi, Ehsan (Esma’il) Fattahian and Sherko Moarefi have all been sentenced to death for “enmity against God” in unconnected cases over the last two years. They are believed to be on death row in a prison in Sanandaj, the provincial capital of Kordestan.
4. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry definitively and demonstrably defeat the Catholic Church in debate – At the start of the debate, 678 people in the audience thought that the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world while 1102 disagreed and 346 were undecided. But by the end, only 268 thought the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world while 1876 disagreed with only 34 left undecided.
Despite major bombings that have rattled the nation, and fears of rising violence as American troops withdraw, Iraq’s security forces have been relying on a device to detect bombs and weapons that the United States military and technical experts say is useless.
The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.
Hal Bidlack is a well-known member of the skeptical community. Unfortunately, the Iraqi officials are not convinced:
Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.
It doesn’t seem to bother them at all that these dowsing rods have already proven to be a complete failure at detecting bombs:
The suicide bombers who managed to get two tons of explosives into downtown Baghdad on Oct. 25, killing 155 people and destroying three ministries, had to pass at least one checkpoint where the ADE 651 is typically deployed, judging from surveillance videos released by Baghdad’s provincial governor. The American military does not use the devices. “I don’t believe there’s a magic wand that can detect explosives,” said Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., who oversees Iraqi police training for the American military. “If there was, we would all be using it. I have no confidence that these work.”
The Iraqis, however, believe passionately in them. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.
Yeah Major, you care so much about detecting bombs that you’ll happily keep using a bomb-detecting device that you now know doesn’t really work to detect bombs. Genius! Fuckin’ genius!
“I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” General Jabiri said. “I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”
Didn’t Oedipus say the same thing before leading Thebes to ruin? Don’t be so proud of this technological wonder you’ve purchased; it’s insignificant compared to the power of science:
During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman.
“You need more training,” the general said.
Iraqi people, send letters to your government to have Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri test these devices out personally while walking through a mine field. the safety and security of your nation may depend on it.
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.
2. New online game for radical right-wingnuts – The game takes place in 2011 after “Obama’s coup fails.” The game invokes the “New World Order” conspiracy and rewrites history, establishing Lou Dobbs as the “one brave newscaster” who first sounded the alarm bells of the evil Obama/NWO conspiracy and defining the Obama administration as engaging in “Marxist experiments.” Really, guys? On the plus side though, in this hypothetical future history, all the really annoying right-wingnut propagandists like Glenn Beck, Neil Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity have all either been killed or have disappeared. So the future is looking brighter. . .
Well this time they’re totally serious! It turns out I guess that they didn’t carry the one or something because now the world’s going to end on October 21, 2009. And you know this time they’ve got it right because they’ve got such a great track record for predicting these apocalypes.
Like before, I recommend screen capturing this page again, so that you can compare it to what it says on October 22, 2009.
1. Michael Egnor & the Discovery Institute expose their anti-science bias – I’ve blogged about Egnor before, linking to the blog debate where Steven Novella refuted his every flawed, ridiculous argument in favor of a “soul.” Now he’s jumping on the so-called “ClimateGate” fiasco, where he insists, like so many other denialists, that a whole lot of private, innocuous emails climate scientists is somehow the smoking gun evidence that global warming is false. Of course he doesn’t pinpoint any statements in any of the emails that would lead any rational person to this conclusion. But who needs facts when you’ve got faith? Egnor proves once again how egnorant he can be.
3. Ray “The Banana Man” Comfort gave a full interview to the Friendly Atheist – You can read the whole thing in all its idiocy in the link above.
4. The first honest homeopathy product? – As you can clearly read on the packaging, homeopaths have developed the first ever non-drowsy sleep aid. May I be the first to congratulate them on this amazing breakthrough. Good job, guys. Good job.
5. The official wine of woo – Age of Autism took some time off from shilling bogus autism treatments for profit to shill some silly wine site called “Wines For Autism.” Now at first the site might seem fine. It’s supporting autism awareness after all. So how bad could it b–oh:
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During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman.
