News From Around The Blogosphere 3.11.10

1. School cancels prom to turn students against gay teen – Constance McMillen was planning to wear a tuxedo and attend the prom with her girlfriend in a small town in Itawamba County, Mississippi. And after the ACLU stopped the school from denying her right to attend the prom the school got even by canceling the whole thing and making the student body know it was McMillen’s fault. And the town’s mayor chimed in, supporting the school. Because that’s just the kind of classy folks they have in Itawamba County, Mississippi.

2. Zimbabwe anti-vax religious sect gets 100 killed - Who needs vaccines when you’ve got prayer? Except, you know, if you actually want people to live.

3. Pope’s exorcist finds the devil isn’t in the details but in the Vatican – Rev. Gabriel Amorth has the silliest resume on Earth. He’s been the chief exorcist for the Vatican for 25 years. His favorite movie? You guessed it. It’s The Exorcist. He alleges to have treated over 70,000 cases of demonic possession and sadly, I have no reason to doubt that claim.

But even the fearless priest becomes still, his voice grave when asked whether the devil can strike inside the Vatican City.

//

“He has tried already. He did it in 1981 by attacking John Paul II by working with those who armed Ali Agca. And also now with the attack on Christmas Eve night when the crazy woman pushed down Benedict XVI.”

. . .

Amorth confesses, “The devil resides in the Vatican.”While admitting that it is hard to prove, he says the consequences of the devil’s work are evident: Cardinals who don’t believe in Jesus, bishops who are linked with the devil. As early 1972 Pope Paul VI talked about the “smoke of Satan” that hovered in the Vatican, but it is more recent events like the pedophilia scandal the church is confronted with and the grisly murder by a Swiss guard of his commander and wife that Amorth uses as evidence of the devil’s presence.

Apparently humans can’t do anything against the Church without it being attributed to the devil.

4. More child abuse for Catholics to downplay – Two ex-Vienna choir boys have come out with accusations that they were raped by Church officials. But remember. It’s really the devil that’s doing it.

5. Robert Kennedy Jr. spreads false, malicious rumor in the Huff Po – The media has wised up to the anti-vaxxers, so the only source willing to take them is the Huffington Post due to its total lack of anything that could even remotely be considered by anyone on planet Earth as journalist standards. So now the anti-vaxxers got their man, RFK Jr. to push their libelous accusations about Dr. Poul Thorsen. Of course not a single word of it has any basis in fact. But then again, when have the anti-vaxxers or the Huffington Post ever care about facts?

But here’s one interesting story posted at the Huff Po:

6. Buying ghosts in a bottle – I have to at least give credit to the scammers for creativity. And it’s nice to see such witty skepticism expressed in the MSNBC clip embedded on the page.

7. PZ Myers eats your god with vegemite:

Steven Harper reignites Crackergate

Almost a year ago, there was quite the controversy that blew up surrounding the taking of communion wafers, briefly chronicled and compiled here (4th story down). Now it seems that controversy over The Holy Trisket has erupted again, this time over the accusation that Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper took the cracker without eating it, and therefore may have kidnapped the Catholic god.

Once again, as PZ Myers so eloquantly stated a year ago, IT’S A FRACKIN CRACKER!

Warring factions on Evolutionary thought cont’d

Last month, I blogged about one of the REAL scientific controversies concerning evolution that has the scientific community split into 2 distinct camps:

When it comes to how Evolutionary Theory is to be publicly discussed, there has for some time been 2 main schools of thought. The former, perhaps best represented by the likes of Doctors Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller, and Barbara Forrest, believes in reassuring the public that Evolution does not conflict with their religions and can co-exist with the belief in a god. Ken Miller furthers this position by being himself a self-avowed Catholic who fully accepts Evolution.

Then there’s the other camp, perhaps best represented by Doctors Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Jerry Coyne, who believe Evolution is necessarily inconsistent with religious beliefs and that its not the role of scientists to sugarcoat the truth by reinforcing the lie that Evolution can co-exist with religious belief. This is the camp that I belong to as well.

Well since then, tensions between the 2 camps have grown tremendously online, particularly on Chris Mooney’s blog, The Intersection, where this rising tension began last month when Mooney criticized an article by Dr. Jerry Coyne.

The conflict became more inflamed when Dr. PZ Myers learned that Mooney singled him out for allegedly furthering the rift between science and religion last year during the Crackergate fiasco (4th story down) and blogged about it as well as not receiving his usual review copy of Mooney’s book. This led Mooney to post his blog response to Myers and probably also prompted this other blog entry discussing the conflict of whether science and religion can co-exist here. But it’s not Mooney or Coyne or Myers, etc who have resumed fighting but the readers of Mooney’s blog. And the comments section of these 2 blogs have fast become a battleground for name-calling, straw men arguments, and just plain irrational behavior, particular on the part of  commenter John Kwok, who illustrates perhaps more than anybody how dogmatic and irrational the scientific-minded can become on this one issue, specifically, in my humble opinion, those on the side insisting that science and religion don’t conflict.

But one thing seems to be clear. This issue isn’t going away on its own. And as atheists become more and more outspoken in American society and as creationists further their political agendas, we’re going to be facing this conflict more and more. And if the scientific community can’t find some kind of common ground, we won’t need creationists because we’ll have done their jobs for them.

News From Around The Blogosphere 01.15.09

Judge says no to atheists’ inaugural prayer challenge - No big surprise there. It was a long-shot.

This comes after news that Lori Lipman Brown will be stepping down from her position at the Secular Coalition for America. Here’s an old clip of her on The O’Reilly Factor:

South Carolina embracing old-school censorship? – The man responsible is Senator Robert Ford. And believe it or not, this douche is a Democrat.

TO AMEND THE CODE OF LAWS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 1976, BY ADDING SECTION 16-15-370 SO AS TO MAKE IT UNLAWFUL TO COMMUNICATE PROFANITY IN A PUBLIC FORUM OR PLACE OF PUBLIC ACCOMMODATION; BY ADDING SECTION 16-15-430 SO AS TO CREATE THE OFFENSE OF DISSEMINATING PROFANITY TO A MINOR AND PROVIDE A PENALTY FOR THE OFFENSE; TO AMEND SECTION 16-15-305, RELATING TO DISSEMINATING OBSCENITY, SO AS TO SPECIFY BOTH ORAL AND WRITTEN PUBLICATIONS; AND TO AMEND SECTION 16-15-375, RELATING TO DEFINITIONS FOR PURPOSES OF MORALITY AND DECENCY OFFENSES AGAINST MINORS, SO AS TO INCLUDE THE OFFENSE OF DISSEMINATING PROFANITY TO A MINOR.

Anyone else feel like they’re trapped in Pleasantville?

Nice guy minister arrested for child porn – I’m so glad these guys have the proper credentials that affords them the complete trust of their neighbors.

Brian Dunning gets to the bottom of 9/11 conspiracy theorists’ favorite claim

The Tissue of Youth – Is human placenta a wonder drug, or is it just another Japanese health fad?

Remember Adolph Hitler Campbell, the toddler with a name the supermarket wouldn’t write on the birthday cake from last month? – Yeah, well it seems he and his siblings have been removed from their Neo-Nazi parents. Maybe daddy shouldn’t have gotten so much media attention by insisting junior’s horrible name get written on the birthday cake. Anywho, this story raises serious questions about when indoctrination alone should be viewed as parental abuse.

The Catholics want to excommunicate PZ -Apparently desecrating a cracker is a worse sin than genocide. Way to keep your priorities straight, Catholics.

Kooks call PZ Myers a “Medium Scumbag” – This was their response to a blog he wrote last year titled How can you tell when you’re a kook? –which reminds me a lot of an old blog of mine titled You might be delusional if. . .

That blog put me on the radar of the David Icke nuts, who then proceeded to make a thread on their forums devoted to making up random assumptions about me based off of their own delusional negative stereotypes of rational people instead of ever making any attempt to just ask me about my position and why I’m so confident that they’re batshit crazy.

And PZ also suggests a good way for the government to save $225 million - Shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. And lots of skeptical bloggers are arguing to cut the earmarks on the  sCAM crap such as Orac and Val Jones.

Krispy Kreme to hand out pro-choice doughnuts on Tuesday – In honor of Inauguration Day, Krispy Kreme is giving away a free doughnut on Tuesday. Though apparently some Christian groups don’t understand the distinction between pro-choice and pro-abortion as The headline of the American Life League’s press release reads:

“Krispy Kreme Celebrates Obama with pro-abortion doughnuts.”

God Tastes Like Chicken – This is the title of a new show playing in NYC:

God Tastes Like Chicken is a mock religious service with faith healing, communion, passion plays, and improv. This information is from the press release: “We take on the excesses of organized religion through blasphemy and comedy. It is a very interactive show, among other things we encourage people to come in religious costumes. We open with two featured comics/artists and Services are followed by sketch groups or emerging acts found right here in the L.E.S. or Williamsburg if we have to.”

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Stone-handling Monkeys: Cultural Evolution? – “For 30 years, scientists have been studying stone-handling behavior in several troops of Japanese macaques to catch a unique glimpse of primate culture. By watching these monkeys acquire and maintain behavioral traditions from generation to generation, the scientists have gained insight into the cultural evolution of humans.”

News From Around The Blogosphere 12.24.08

But Faux News told me atheists hate Christmas? – Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris explain what they’re doing for Christmas.

Michael Egnor of the creationist Discovery Institute returns to attack Steve Novella and Orac - Novella and Egnor have been battling it out for some time on their blogs. Every time this has resulted in Egnor making tired logically fallacious arguments to knock down materialism in order to leave room for his own brand of nonsense. And every time Novella has demolished every one of Egnor’s arguments. Now Egnor is moving onto defending “Alternative Medicine” against both Novella and Orac, both of which in addition to having their own blogs, write for the Science-Based Medicine blog. And once again, Steve Novella knocks down his logical fallacies. Orac also responds here.

Did an angel save this woman’s daughter? – Nope.

Festive medical myths – Some of these overlap with those covered in a video embedded in a previous blog.

Inventive things for atheists to autograph – Some people have had Richard Dawkins sign a banana, of course referencing Ray Comforts infamous “atheist nightmare.” Someone has gotten Matt Stone of South Park to autograph a Bible. And resurrecting Crackergate, someone has gotten PZ Myers to autograph an unconsecrated communion wafer:

Has your Nintendo Wii been beating you up? - Or did you just fall down some stairs?

According to Dr. Dev Mukerjee of Broomfield Hospital: “There has been a 100 percent increase in patients complaining of Wii-itis.” Turns out, Wii-itis is their word for playing so much Wii that you injure yourself. Astonishingly, up to ten people per week are being “hospitalized with injuries caused by playing Nintendo Wii games,” which has forced medical personnel to “issue warnings of the dangers associated with the video game system.”

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Chocolate, Wine, Tea Improve Brain Performance -“According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.

The team from Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74).”

New Type Of Laser Discovered -“A Princeton-led team of researchers has discovered an entirely new mechanism for making common electronic materials emit laser beams. The finding could lead to lasers that operate more efficiently and at higher temperatures than existing devices, and find applications in environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics.”

Unwanted Memories Might Be Erasable – “In a discovery that may one day lead to the ability to erase debilitating painful memories and addictions from the brain, researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center have found that a molecule known to preserve memories – PKMzeta – specifically stores complex, high-quality memories that provide detailed information about an animal’s location, fears, and actions, but does not control the ability to process or express this information. This finding suggests that PKMzeta erasure that is designed to target specific debilitating memories could be effective against the offending memory while sparing the computational function of brain.”

THE FUNNIES:

To all of our friends. . .
and a couple of our enemies:

Happy Saturnalia!
Happy Yule!
Happy Dies Natalis Solis Invicti !
Happy Kwanzaa!
Merry Christmastide! (aka Christmas!)
Happy Festivus!
Happy Chrismakkah!
Happy Monkey!

And to Bill O’Reilly: Happy Chanukkah!

War is Over (if you want it)

News From Around The Blogosphere 10.25.08

WEBSTER COOK UNIMPEACHED! – Screw you Donohue! Crackergate continues on, bitches!

Woman arrested for killing virtual reality husband – Someone’s going to need a Third Life.

San Francisco considers legalizing prostitution

AMERICAN BIGOTRY:

California’s Proposition 8 must be stopped – This is a fundamentalist ballot measure that aims to ban same-sex marriage.

New blog uniting The Skeptologists. . .ALL OF THEM! -

And from that site comes this great entry from Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast addressing the problem of marketing skepticism.

COMMON MYTHS – THE MORE YOU KNOW!

“Don’t drink soda because it will make you acidic!” – Let’s see about that.

SPOOKY!

And in the spirit of Halloween, here’s something SPOOOOOKY!

And here’s is the debunking of the video above, courtesy of Japanese editors:

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

White Rhino Born Using Frozen Sperm – “A world-first: researchers announce the birth of a white rhino after artificial insemination with frozen sperm. The rhino baby, a male, was born at 4:57am in the Budapest Zoo on the 22nd of October 2008. In June 2007, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin artificially inseminated his mother, the rhino cow Lulu, with frozen bull semen.”

-Frozen Bull Semen was the name of my band in college–what are the odd?!

Coffee can shrink women’s breasts – Damn you, Starbucks!!

Eternal sunshine of the mouse mind: scientists have developed a way to erase specific memories in mice while leaving others intact.

THE FUNNIES:

Will the wonders of modern science never cease?

News From Around The Blogosphere 10.17.08

THIS DAY IN GOD:

Bill Donohue’s lame spin on trying to get YouTube to put age requirements on viewing videos of host desecration – Now he’s saying:

“we do not object to making fun of Catholics, or for that matter Catholic beliefs and practices, just so long as they are made in good taste”.

This led PZ Myers to bring up that Webster Cook, the student who unwittingly began Crackergate and was the first victim of Donohue’s wrath, didn’t make fun of Catholics or Catholicism at all. He merely took the Eucharist with him instead of eating it? The only thing tasteless I here was the cracker.

Oh, and for the record, the age-requirement on YouTube is a joke. It asks you if you’re over 18 and any idiot can figure out that they can view the content by simply pressing the button that affirms they are 18. If that’s all it takes to appease Donohue, I wish he’d said so sooner.

Edmond, Oklahoma officials trying to tear down wall between church and state – The Edmond Visual Arts Commission in Edmund, Okla. wanted to spend $3,900 of taxpayer money to put a sculpture of Jesus in front of a Catholic gift shop:

June Cartwright, chair of the commission, told the Associated Press that the sculpture was viewed simply as a piece of art and is not a religious endorsement.

“It’s a piece of artwork,” Cartwright said. “It doesn’t state that it is specifically Jesus. It is whatever you perceive it to be.”

Um, no. That’s Jesus no how much I want it to be Angelina Jolie naked. Fortunately, the mayor has decided not to spend taxpayer money on this. But am I the only one amused by the fact that Jesus is depicted playing with kids when this was to go up in front a Catholic gift shop? Or that the sculpture is titled, “Come Unto Me?” I guess Jesus is a fan of the money shot.

Lately Evolution-deniers have been quite predictably been exploiting the recent statements by lone scientist Steve Jones that humans are no longer evolving. They’re saying see, even the “evolutionists” are admitting that there’s no evidence of human evolution (how they interpreted that from Jones’ actual statement is beyond me), but Jones is a minority opinion on this matter. Here PZ Myers argues why “that is impossible.”

Speaking of PZ, the man rocks! – His blog has got an enormous readership and I contacted him earlier today and asked if he’d plug stopjenny.com and he came through.

sCAM using bogus biomedical boards and bogus medical organizations to sound legitimate – I’m reminded of “Healthy Directions,” the sham medical organization that named “Dr.” Rashid Buttar among the top 50 doctors in the country.

Gnomes return to Argentina – That’s right, Argentinians have reported more sightings of a black-clad, sideways-stepping “midget monster” in a pointy hat. So if you see something that looks kinda like a dog and barks kinda like a dog, you’ll know that it’s really a gnome. I sense some implausibly blurry video coming on. Here’s the earlier video from last March:

And the latest blurry video can be found here.

The future is looking bright without electricity - Flexible sheets of light owe their luminance to compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs may make household lamps obsolete.

ATHEISM DISCRIMINATION:

Conservative columnist Melanie Phillips has figured out cause of all the world’s woes: atheism –

“I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’. . .”

It goes on for the longest run-on sentence in human history. Oh, and she’s also a denier of evolution, the safety of vaccines, and global climate change. The Trifecta!

Actor Mark Wahlberg is reported as being “still rattled” by a 2004 fan-charging incident – Why did actor Mark Wahlberg have a screaming fan pulled off of him by security guards? According to Wahlberg:

“The only thing that was a bit disturbing was she had a pin (badge) on that said ‘God is not real’ and that was upsetting to me. But I still pray for her to this day. Hopefully she’s changed her mind.”

Wahlberg is reported as having a small chapel in his Hollywood mansion.

Pete Stark

The New York Times publishes an article addressing the seeming lack of atheists in politics. Here’s a direct link to the article:

Only one of the 535 members of Congress, Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, publicly identifies as a nontheist, according to the Secular Coalition of America, a lobbying group based in Washington. For that matter, the coalition has existed for only three years and runs with two staff members and an annual budget of about $300,000. As both presidential candidates ardently court religious voters, atheist support is considered so controversial that several Democrats writing on the atheist blog Petty Larseny quipped that the best way to hurt the Republicans was to form a group called Atheists for McCain.

Actually, there are at least 22 members of Congress who admitted to Lori Lipman Brown that they did not believe in a god but only Stark was willing to be outed. But I have to say that that Atheists for McCain would be a great idea if McCain’s candidacy wasn’t sunk already. We’ll have to remember that though for the next election.

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Emotion And Scent Create Lasting Memories – “In a series of experiments with sleeping mice, researchers at the Duke University Medical Center have shown that the part of the brain that processes scents is indeed a key part of forming long-term memories, especially involving other individuals.”

Radical Advances In Optical Technologies? – “A new research field called transformation optics may usher in a host of radical advances including a cloak of invisibility and ultra-powerful microscopes and computers by harnessing nanotechnology and “metamaterials.”

Einstein’s Relativity Survives Neutrino Test – “Physicists working to disprove “Lorentz invariance” — Einstein’s prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they’re turned or how fast they go — won’t get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists.”