Who knew that being an Oxford professor was such a lousy proxy for being intelligent? Christians do seem to adore John Lennox, the Oxford apologist for Jesus, yet every time I’ve read anything by him, it’s been embarrassingly silly and stupid. You want an example? Here’s ten. Lennox was asked to give rebuttals to ten common atheist arguments, and he blew it each time with a series of inane responses.
I cannot do a facepalm big enough.
After that last post (and now that I’m home from Winnipeg), I discover that Richard Dawkins has joined in the chorus of right-wing loons, like Sarah Palin, accusing Ahmed Mohamed of some kind of nefarious scheme. Dawkins claims that the kid was lying and committing fraud and exaggerating his accomplishment…when last I heard, Mohamed had only said he put together some circuit boards in 20 minutes before school. What did Dawkins imagine, that he’d built his transistors from scratch, etched the circuit boards, and invented The Clock?
That this was some wild Wile E. Coyote scheme, where he’d ordered parts from Acme in a brilliantly convoluted plan to get invited to the White House?
This is nuts.
People are noticing that self-proclaimed leaders of atheism are targeting a 14 year old boy — for being enthusiastic about electronics?
I’m fast learning why “movement” is a synonym for “shit”.
Tomorrow, I’ll be heading off to the River City ReasonFest — it’s not too late for you to sign up!
I’m also going to be freaking out a little bit — I have somehow managed to lose the file for my presentation (I recently did a major cleanup of my drive, and I think I might have accidentally disintegrated it). I’m either going to have to frantically reconstruct it, or repurpose another talk. So come for the surprise! Who knows what I’m going to say this weekend? I might just tapdance on stage.
He has announced that Dr. Mehmet Oz is changing the direction of his show! No more quackery for him!
The entire upcoming season of The Dr. Oz Show — which kicks off Monday, September 14 — will focus on the mind-body connection and feature a partnership with former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD.
In the past, Dr. Oz has come under fire for the advice given on his show. Now, the newly focused program will use medical and other experts whose advice is based in research.
Orac is not impressed. Neither am I. It’ll take a sustained improvement in rigor before I’ll believe it.
Unfortunately, his choice of a topic does not fill me with confidence. I can imagine the frantic meetings to try and hammer out a new direction that has just enough credibility to let them claim they’re being scientific, but still plenty of slop to allow them to continue to pitch snake oil. Green coffee beans don’t have any evidence of medical efficacy, but there’s evidence that if you believe hard enough in green coffee beans they can have a therapeutic effect!
Also, Placebos work!
.
Yesterday, I brought on the wrath of the defenders of Slippery Sam. Sam Harris has an amazing talent: he can say the most awful things, and a horde of helpful apologists will rise up in righteous fury and simultaneously insist that he didn’t really say that, and yeah, he said that, but it only makes sense. And they have a battery of excuses that boil down to another contradiction: you must parse his words very carefully, one by one, and yet also his words must be understood in their greater context. They actually have a lot in common with radical Islamists: the sacred holy texts can only be understood in their original language, and the appropriate way to study them is by rote memorization.
So, in a report literally titled racial profiling, we’re told that it’s not about racial profiling at all; the new line is that it’s about anti-profiling
, that we should be able to look at a group of people and easily rule out on appearance alone a whole bunch of individuals and make security so much easier. So people who look like grandmas and little old Asian ladies and five year old Scandinavian girls are all perfectly safe, would never harm a fly, and we should just wave them through the lines at the security gates. We should just screen youngish to middle-aged men, because old people and women and children are harmless.
See? He’s not about racism at all, it’s all about ageism and sexism. Nothing to see here, folks.
But at the same time, it’s a lie. Practically the first thing he says is this:
We should be honest. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists.
It’s not anti-profiling
at all, whatever that is. He’s got some sort of vaguely undefined search image in his head for what we ought to be looking, and he’s not very clear on what it is, except that it’s suicidal jihadists
, and not Norwegian grandmas. I think it’s something like that guy on the right. I quite agree that if a wild-eyed long-bearded fellow with an AK-47 and an explosive belt shows up at the airport, you shouldn’t let him on the plane. But then, the 9/11 hijackers showed up at the airport clean shaven, nicely dressed in Western clothing, and acted professionally to get aboard. We actually aren’t looking for mad boogey men — we’re looking for rational, determined human beings with evil plans. I don’t know what they look like. I’d rather the people in charge of my safety did not have narrow preconceptions about what they look like. Slippery Sam has bigoted ideas about what they look like, and wants that implemented as policy.
Bill Nye has a new book coming out in November, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World
This has Ken Ham annoyed. Don’t you know that if you look at everything through the lens of the Bible, you don’t have to worry about climate change? He gives a nice succinct summary of his version of climate history.
Originally, the climate was created perfect, but sin changed everything (Genesis 3), and we no longer have a perfect climate. During the global Flood of Noah’s day about 4,350 years ago the climate was radically changed when the surface of the Earth was reshaped by the Flood. The Flood was followed by an Ice Age, which further changed our climate, and climates have gone up and down since. Fluctuations can happen quite quickly and are not cause for grave concern in regard to man’s supposed impact as Bill Nye claims. So when you start with God’s Word, you have an entirely different worldview through which to view climate change and therefore you reach entirely different conclusions about the nature and severity of it. It is true that Bill Nye’s religion of evolutionary naturalism causes him to wrongly interpret climate change. So, in essence, Bill Nye’s new book is indeed a religious book!
I don’t even know what “perfect” climate is.
But I do know he’s wrong. When your “worldview” is based on false facts, it crumbles.
I already knew that acupuncture had failed to show significant effects in clinical trials, but this video also mentions some things about the history of acupuncture in China — it was rejected by Chinese scholars long ago, and was only revived as a tool for propaganda.
The comments on the video are amazing. A lot of people don’t like the guy’s beard, but there is also this sentiment I’ve heard many times before:
Your are such a jerk. You are making fun about thousands of people who just believe in something. Is that so wrong ? Even if its just placebo, who cares ? Just let people be happy. They arent hurt by acupuncture, so just let them do what they want. Because of these videos I dont wanna follow this channel anymore.
Spoken like someone who really doesn’t care about the truth at all. Note that the speaker isn’t taking away anyone’s acupuncture needles…he’s merely saying the facts, that acupuncture is junk science.
The Reason Rally has got a date: 4 June 2016.
Quick! Before the giant wall goes up across the border! You can come to ReasonFest in Winnipeg on 19-20 September. There will be a bunch of great speakers, and me, there, so you should take advantage of this last chance. Before you know it…
James Randi is retiring, and he’s irreplaceable. Apparently the JREF board agrees, and isn’t even going to try — they’ve announced a change in focus for the organization. I presume that means there will be no more Amazing Meetings; they’re going to shift to becoming a grant distributing organization, and are no longer accepting membership applications or donations.
I have mixed feelings about that. TAM was always the best and worst of organized skepticism — early on they had the most inclusive and diverse meetings of any group. Rather than old academics droning on, they had showmanship and enthusiasm, and brought in a younger, livelier audience. I think they inspired a lot of other organizations and influenced the new wave of skeptic and atheist meetings.
But TAM was also a refuge for reactionary skeptics: the ones who despised atheists, who had a bizarrely narrow view of what was acceptable “skepticism” (which didn’t align well with science at all), who actively resented new ideas even as they were courting a younger audience. This was the TAM that hated the idea of openly displaying policies of attendee conduct, preferring secret proceedings, and claimed that there was no harassment of any kind going on, because they clamped down on any news and dishonestly denied any problems.
I’m not going to miss the latter TAM at all. But the former TAM is a real loss. I guess we’ll all have to go to Skepticon instead.
