I get email

I’m not going to post this email I received, simply because it is insanely long, 15,000 words of random caps and peculiar color changes. Just to give you a taste, this is the subject line:

Subject: SCIENCE, AND THEOLOGY {{ Cogent Word for the 100’s of new ears in Science and theology we contacted/called last week around earth }} CHIMERISM, deaths/Wolbachias/satans attack upon Adams Society, ULtra Microbic Life Force/death Force — How does the Harlot called death ride Adams children and cause death and aging??? Listing below — {{ A Brief Word on obamas Buffet taxes, and Word that all most pay their share, Very well stated }} The Holyone has been Shaking Greece trying to tell Germany and all do not feed them any more — Eleanor Mondale and Kara Kennedy Esq; Die at Fifty one, but hours from each other — His Quakes now become stronger to Oklahoma and Canada —- SCIENCE allowed Gamers to finish their Research — “i” gather those of increased knowledge and wisdom…Death and aging now end…..It has begun…Bring home your Missions…Dubai city is soon no longer…..

What I did want to share, though, is that this one is illustrated. Along with the author’s claim that he’s the prophet specifically sent to gather the 144,000 people who get to go to heaven, he included a lovely illustration of his lord and master, Jesus, who just happens to look rather European.

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Green eyes, really? And not even a hint of a tan? Is it cloudy all the time in heaven or something?

But the other interesting thing about it is that the author has apparently been looking for science images to bolster his credibility, somehow. The amusing part is that he replaces the scientific caption with his own…it sorta changes the impact of the picture. This one, for instance, looks to me like some photomicrographs of developing Arabidopsis — it becomes something more nefarious when filtered through the twisted mind of my correspondent.

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{{ One of the many biological machines, developed by the unclean spirit called death/aging/satan!!! It is not the machine you look upon, it being so small and microbic, it is the ultra microbic spirit that is navigating the machine, hidden within!!! The image is of Leaven/yeast/decomposer society/death }}

His other obsession is with chimeras, which he seems to think are truly evil. I think he seized upon the image below because it says “merge”, when all it really is is a digital merge of confocal images viewed at a couple of different wavelengths.

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When both man and woman are conceived they are female, then the Fathers genome sent through time through each child born since Adam, makes the change of Female to Male, both being first given female organs, then the testosterone levels, with but a few more changes, and done, Man is born from God and Woman!!! But as shown in the first book of the Bible, and the Last, Woman the Daughter of Eve/ADAM is under greater attack!!!

I like this one best, though. It ought to be titles “SCIENCE OFFENDING GOD!”

{{ Stem Cells of Life, as much as we tried, we could not locate an image of a Chimera, but the image below, is of Science trying hard to offend God by making a chimera of Human and animal embryos!!! And is how “i” believe Wolbachia/myco-controlled phages and viruses are able to breech the segregated world of the Givers of Life, the Stem Cells of Gods Sons Spirit }}
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Chimeras, “i” myself have been searching for the way Wolbachia/myco-bacterial phage spirits have altered Gods Children of Adams genomes!!! Interestingly, when “i” settled on Chimeras, and went into the internet, and merely typed in Chimeras, very little arose truly, yet some very interesting theories were exposed, they being Wrong, yet showed they were trying to awake too deaths/aging attack upon mankind/Adamskind!!!

It goes downhill from there. The rest is ranting about Obama, sodomites, droughts and hurricanes, larded with lots of bible quotes…the usual pedestrian stuff I find in my mailbox.

(Also on FtB)

What is wrong with these animal rights organizations?

There is a severe and disturbing disconnect in the minds of the fanatics behind the animal rights groups. First there’s NIO, harassing and threatening students. Now look at what PETA is up to: they plan to launch a porn site to benefit their cause.

The nonprofit organization, whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women’s rights groups, said it hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.

“We’re hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn’t anticipate seeing when they went to the PETA triple-X site,” said Lindsay Rajt, PETA’s associate director of campaigns.

I am trying to visualize the kind of people who would be drawn to a site featuring naked women and tortured animals…and no, those aren’t the people I’d want to associate with. It sounds like it might be popular with serial killers, anyway. Is that the audience they want?

And then there’s this:

PETA has been accused of campaigning for animal rights at the cost of exploiting women. A Facebook group, Real Women Against PETA, was launched after the organization paid for a billboard showing an obese woman with the message: “Save the Whales. Lose the Blubber. Go Vegetarian.”

They are sending a consistent message, at least. They love kittens. They hate women.

(Also on FtB)

Say something kind to Ashley Marie Chavez-Rubertt

She’s an up and coming scientist, a young biology student at the University of Florida, and she has been targeted by the animal rights radicals and human-hating monsters at NIO for harassment as a “career animal mutilator”. They’ve posted links to her email address and facebook on a page that conveniently also provides a diagram on how to make a molotov cocktail. They also declare that “She has now forfeited all of the rights that she denies her victims”. Her crime seems to be that she actually listened to NIO, thought about their position and hers, and disagreed with them:

Your website seems to indicate otherwise — look, I can appreciate what you do and I appreciate the fact you have your own opinions. Really, we need more opinionated people in the world. The fact of the matter is I myself have examined the evidence and I have already made a decision for myself.

For this, she’s targeted for “Phase II”, whatever that is. I don’t want to know.

They’ve posted contact information for her, but I hope she’s sensible and just shuts down that email account. These people are rabid fanatics, terrorists plain and simple.

(Also on FtB)

Not like a worm?

Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It’s boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote up a bit about the molecular genetics of whale evolution. Whales have become one of the best examples of macroevolutionary transitions in the fossil record, all in roughly the last 30 years — which gives us a minimal estimate of how out of date Ann Coulter’s sources are.

But then she writes this, which is not only wrong, but self-refuting.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted – without evidence – that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, “the dog ate our fossils” excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery the New York Times called “among the most spectacular in this century,” Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures – precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence – it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of 5 million to 10 million years.

It’s so weird to read that: yes, people have been predicting that the precursors to the Cambrian fauna would have been small and soft-bodied (what else would you expect), and that they would be difficult to fossilize…but not impossible, and further, scientists have been out finding these fossils. Somehow this is a refutation of evolution? What we’re seeing is exactly what evolution predicted!

What we have is a good record of small shelly fossils and trace fossils from the pre-Cambrian — before there were fully armored trilobites, there were arthropod-like creatures with partial armor that decayed into scattered small fragments of shell after death, and before that there were entirely soft-bodied, unarmored creatures that left only trackways and burrows. Even in this period Coulter wants to call abrupt, we find evidence of gradual transitions in animal forms.

And then to claim that there is an absence of transitional forms because all that was found were worms! Um, if you take an animal with an armored exoskeleton or bones, and you catch it before the hard skeleton had evolved, exactly what do you think it would look like? Like a worm.

As evolution predicted. As the evidence shows.

I can’t even guess what Ann Coulter was expecting a pre-Cambrian animal to look like. Not like a worm, apparently…but like what?

(Also on FtB)

Coulter revisited

Ann Coulter is a horrible, ignorant person who once wrote a whole book accusing liberals of being Godless, as if that were an insult, and advancing arguments against evolution that made the standard noisy creationist look like a veritable scholar. I looked at her arguments, and I made a public challenge back in 2006 for any defenders to pick one paragraph from the book and we’d discuss it in detail — there have been no takers, not one person willing to stand up and support in detail any claim she had made. She also made some amazingly inane arguments: did you know that one strike against evolution is that the people who study it are mere biologists, which is not really a science, and that there are more women working in biology than, say, physics?

I was tearing into her quite regularly for a while there after that book came out. She was such an easy target.

But no matter. I’m acutely envious of Carl Zimmer, who Coulter regards as a giant flatulent raccoon. Man, I would love to have that on my résumé. Alas, Coulter has no idea who I am, so I’m not going to get that recognition.

By the way, the Coulter challenge is still open, and has been for five years. All anyone has to do is pick one paragraph, any paragraph, from her evolution chapters in Godless, and post it with a defense of its accuracy. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? She wrote this whole book, I’m letting you pick the very best, most solid, strongest argument against evolution from it and present it here to stump us all. It’s strange that no one has managed to do that in all this time.

(By the way, as is usual whenever I mention Coulter, there will be petty people who will sneer at her appearance or make ugly remarks about her sexuality. Do not do that. I will cut you.)

(Also on FtB)

Time to institutionalize Dennis Markuze

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages.

You know what? This is wrong. I shouldn’t have to do this. Over the years — I’ve been getting these threats from Markuze since 1993 — it’s gradually grown from an occasional deranged message on usenet to part of my daily routine, where I’m dealing with hundreds of ranty messages every day from one disturbed individual in Montreal, Canada. And I’m not even his sole target: he has a hate-on for Shermer, Randi, and Dawkins, and this is all he does with his life: he sits in his bedroom in his parent’s house and sends out shrill, incoherent messages to the world, all day long.

I have reported him to the police. I have seen these complaints climb the ladder from the local department, to the FBI, to the RCMP, to the Montreal City Police, where they promptly fizzle out. The police don’t care. The word I’ve gotten back is that they aren’t going to do a thing until he snaps and starts killing people. A little late, don’t you think?

As a target for over almost twenty years, I’ve been watching this guy escalate — his hate messages have gotten crazier, more vicious, and more frequent. He’s a psychological cripple who wastes his life in this “project” to howl stupidly at the world; he’s on a clear trajectory of more and more demands for people to recognize him, and he’s not going to ever get any respect from anyone.

I am not a psychologist, but anyone who writes those disconnected rambling death threats, and does nothing else all day long, is mentally disturbed. Something is wrong in his head. I’m not the only one to notice.

The only people who don’t seem to notice are the Montreal city police.

If you’re on Twitter, one thing you can do is, when you receive one of his spam messages, retweet it, but delete all the names on it (because I don’t need more!) and add one: @SPVM. Give the Montreal police a sample of the noise coming out of their city that we’re drowning in.

There is now a petition demanding that the Montreal city police take his threats seriously. Sign it, please. I want at least ten thousand names from around the world on it.

I don’t have any confidence at all in them: they’ve had this deranged man making death threats on their watch for over a decade, and have done nothing. I don’t think the petition will do a thing.

What I want is a public record of the criminal neglect of that police department, so that when Markuze does have his little psychotic break and harms someone, probably some innocent, they won’t be able to deny that they were warned, that there was a world-wide outcry, that hordes of people thousands of miles away could see all this coming, and the incompetents in Montreal sat on their hands and did nothing.

(Also on FtB)

Newt Gingrich redefines what it means to be pathetic

Newt Gingrich has 1,325,842 followers on twitter.

Who cares, you might be asking. The criteria for being popular on twitter are rather different than the criteria for being a competent statesman; if twitter mattered in that way, Ashton Kucher would be president. It’s irrelevant. But Gingrich is unhappy because his vast appeal is unappreciated by the media: “I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn’t count because if it counted I’d still be a candidate; since I can’t be a candidate that can’t count.”

Wow. Gingrich believes having lots of twitter followers gives him credibility? That’s pathetic.

But wait, that’s not pathetic. This is pathetic: he bought most of those followers!

About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various “follow agencies,” another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt’s profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn’t follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn’t it?

That’s just sad.

(Pssst. By the way, to the hundred thousand readers who aren’t my sockpuppets: I’ll get the paychecks to you later. We’re having a little cash flow problem, what with the transition to a new site and all that.)

What the f&#* is wrong with Chris Hedges?

Hedges has been totally nuts for the last few years: he’s got this crazy irrational hysteria about atheists that makes him utterly unhinged whenever he writes about us. His latest is of a piece with his mania:

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

What? Muslims riot over cartoons, Breivik massacres young people in the name of reactionary Christian nationalism, and Hedges blames the atheists? Madness. Pure madness.

Don’t read Hedges. Read Sam Harris, who as calmly as is possible when you’ve been slimed by a lunatic, tears Hedges to pieces. It’s a lovely read.

I disagree with him, slightly, on one point. Harris is concerned about a jihadist regime getting their hands on nuclear weapons, because they will lack the ethical restraint to hold back from using them. I have another worry: a crusading regime in the US military. Our men and women who are trained to use nuclear weapons are getting instructions…from Christians.

Reports show the mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which takes place during a missile officer’s first week in training, is led by Air Force chaplains and includes a discussion on St. Augustine’s Christian “Just War Theory.” Also included in the PowerPoint presentation is a slide containing a passage from the Book of Revelation that attempts to explain how Jesus Christ, as the “mighty warrior,” believed war to be “just.”

The presentation goes on to say that there are “many examples of believers [who] engaged in wars in [the] Old Testament” in a “righteous way” and notes there is “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”

Now that’s chilling. Perhaps Hedges should take note that it isn’t atheists telling soldiers that it is just to annihilate your enemy by all means possible.

More right-wing distortions of Breivik’s ideology

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show did a marvelous job of showing how right-wingers were desperately straining to get out from under the taint of Breivik’s clearly extremist nationalist/rightist/Christian/anti-Muslim ideology. They’re clearly in denial.

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But here’s another case. The Discovery Institute, under the name of that wretched ‘scholar’ John West, has gone through Breivik’s manifesto and somehow come to the conclusion that the reason he went on a killing spree was — I bet you can guess — Darwinism. How? Because Breivik was not the familiar anti-science fundamentalist Christian that we are so familiar with here in the US, he was moderate in his piety and wedded it to an acceptance of modern science and a vicious hatred of Muslims…and contra West, it wasn’t science that compelled him to kill, it was xenophobia and nationalism and apparently, an inhuman lack of empathy.

Nick Matzke does an excellent job of showing that a warped Christianity provided a more significant rationale for his actions than did ‘Darwinism’.

I’d add one more thing. West’s hobby horse is eugenics, and Breivik did endorse a nasty interpretation of eugenics in his tirade. However, you can’t use that to tar modern science with guilt for his crimes; we aren’t going to be saying, “Oh, Breivik was right in this one thing,” because only fringe characters within science endorse killing undesirables as he did; this guy was no friend of science. West cites one fellow, Lee Silver, who does promote the idea that emerging technologies in molecular genetics will allow people to voluntarily modify the DNA of their children; this has absolutely nothing to do with culling or ejecting whole ethnic groups as inferior, and I’m sure Silver would condemn that interpretation of his work.

I was amused to see that Breivik is a fan of Joseph Farah and World Net Daily. Now there’s a connection West was afraid to draw.

Jennifer Fulwiler responds

How fun! Fulwiler noticed that her claim to have five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists actually didn’t, you know, make sense to any atheists, me included, so she’s now trying hard to rationalize it. She has a new post talking about reasoning with atheists that is even more confused and hilarious than the last. Here’s her first excuse:

I evidently did not make it clear enough that all of my examples were meant only to illustrate the intellectual consistency within Catholicism, and therefore assumed that you would be in a discussion with an atheist who would stipulate belief in God for the sake of argument.

So first, find an atheist who’s willing to pretend that she believes in a god. Then, while she’s pretending with all of her might, maybe her brain will be addled enough to accept the load of swill that follows. Brilliant! I have another suggestion: 1) find an atheist who is tripping balls on ‘shrooms, 2) whack them hard enough on the head to give them a concussion, and 3) proselytize! Jesus wins!

Of course, even if she does find an atheist willing to sit down with her and grant her one premise, that a god exists, the rest of her arguments still don’t work. “OK, you’ve granted that a god exists. Now, shouldn’t you be really impressed with the sinless, perfect, virginal woman who gave birth to him, just like a Catholic?” Uh, no. That’s a whole boatload of weird Catholic dogma you just dumped on me, in addition to the general premise.

Another part of her rationale is to displace the blame. You see, it’s not her fault that she can’t get through to me, it’s mine.

Myers and atheists like him are trapped in a prison of reason.

The title of her post is “reasoning with atheists,” but you see, the whole problem is that when you’re reasoning with atheists, they expect you to use reason. The bastards!

Finally, there’s some of the usual fol-de-rol about Love. God is like Love, you see, and just as you can’t reason someone into understanding love, you can’t reason them into believing in a god. She doesn’t seem to appreciate the difference, though: I can find evidence of love from some people, and evidence of a lack of love from other people. I don’t blindly charge up and announce my love for someone without signs of reciprocation, and any love I might feel for someone will wither in the absence of such signs. If she’s actually raising her kids teaching them that love is just like their faith in a Catholic god, I feel very sorry for them: they’re going to grow up to be disappointed fantasists and stalkerish weirdos.

The next post from Fulwiler is going to have to be something like “Winning hearts for Jesus with ‘shrooms and a ball-peen hammer”, ’cause that’s the only way she’s going to persuade an atheist with the drivel she’s churning out.