Maher did it again

It’s a fascinating example of motivated reasoning. Bill Maher has been raked over the coals on his irrational, anti-scientific attitude towards vaccines; his own guests have scorned his views on his own show; he’s been confronted repeatedly with the evidence and the rebuttals. He’s got to know by now that there is no rational justification for claiming that vaccines or thimerosal cause autism, or that the drug companies are profiting hugely by including poisons in their vaccines (which makes no sense, even if you do believe in greedy pharmaceutical mega-corporations).

So what does he do? He invites anti-vax crank extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to sit around and commiserate with one another about how they’re called cranks and liars for merely denying the scientific consensus.

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Very dodgy, very beta

Vox-Day

If you’ve ever wondered what Vox Day looks and sounds like when he’s not holding a flaming sword, Futrelle has unearthed a video interview. He’s actually not particularly interesting; he recites tepid versions of the awful things he’s written, and he gives a good impression of a not-very-bright person scuttling around in a corner to avoid getting pinned down.

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I get email…from WND

aliensguy

World Net Daily, that cesspit of far right wing kookiness, often spams me with weird advertisements. As I was about to hit the delete key, the latest one caught my eye: it was about UFOs. UFOs? I knew the site was all about political and religious extremism, but where do flying saucers fit into that picture? So I actually read a little further, and saw a name I recognized: L.A. Marzulli. I met Marzulli! I heard him give a talk! Marzulli is totally bug-boinking batty!

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Now we know who still reads B.C.

I remember reading Johnny Hart’s B.C. back in the late 1960s. It was stale then, relying on feeble non sequiturs and unfunny one-liners, and it just got worse over the years as it became increasingly religious (You want to suck all the joy out of something? Just add Jesus.), and now of course, it’s the classic example of a zombie comic strip, the original creator is dead, and his successors just keep phoning it in.

But someone still reads it: Ken Ham, of course. He was quite amused by this piece of crap.

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What good is a transparent fig leaf?

teachcontroversy

Louisiana is saddled with this absurd “creationism law”, which states that teachers can bring creationism into the public school classroom as part of a “teach the controversy” strategy. Zack Kopplin has been fighting this stupid law, trying to get it repealed, but with no luck so far. One problem is that lawmakers have an excuse to avoid doing anything about it: they try to claim that no one is using it to teach creationism!

The Louisiana State Legislature has voted to keep this law despite repeated challenges, in part because it has a fig leaf: No one has managed to demonstrate what is going on inside Louisiana classrooms. In 2013, as I was testifying before the Louisiana Senate Education Committee in support of a bill to repeal the law, Sen. Conrad Appel, the committee chairman, asked me, “Do you have any evidence of school districts or individual schools that are physically teaching creationism?”

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The flamboyantly cheesy Dr Oz

This article is mainly about the money-making side of Dr Oz’s enterprises, but the accompanying video is stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever watched his show, so the excerpts are surprising: he uses these gimmicky stunts to promote quackery, like people punching through paper signs, exploding balloons, using a hose to wash away the word “fat” — I had no idea it was such a cheap circus.

This is not what scientists do

throne-of-God

Say you’ve discovered something you think is really neat-o. You decide to submit an abstract of your discovery to an unrefereed meeting.

So far, so good. This is something scientists do all the time, and then they get together and discuss and criticize.

Here’s the additional step you take if you’re a crackpot: you buy an advertisement in the Washington Post, announcing that you’ve overthrown all of physics in favor of a Seventh Day Adventist literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, and that pandemonium among big bang cosmologists is soon to come over this discovery, because the world will soon recognize the greatest cover-up ever conceived by physicists.

As a bonus, you also announce that you’ve discovered the location of God’s Throne.

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Searching for love in all the wrong places

keysearch

Greta Christina does a marvelous job of rebuking American Atheists for their presence at CPAC. I agree completely with it. Go read it.

Nick Fish of American Atheists does a very good job of replying. In particular, he tries to put their efforts in a different light.

I want to clarify one thing right out of the gates: American Atheists did not attend CPAC with the purpose of “recruiting” conservatives into the broader atheist community. This is a misconception that I have seen repeated on Twitter, in the blogs, and in person. That this needed be clarified is likely a failure to clearly articulate it on our side. So, we’ll take our licks there.

It is much more accurate to say that we were there to empower atheists who already exist within the conservative community to be more vocal about their opposition to the theocratic elements of Republican Party orthodoxy.

Good try. Falls apart with a moment’s thought.

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