D. James Kennedy: dead

I guess now he’ll be able to sit down and have a little chat with Hitler and find out if he really was a godless atheist who got all his ideas from Darwin. I doubt that he’ll be able to ask Darwin directly, though — I’m pretty sure they’re in very different places.

At least, that would be the case if his beliefs were anywhere near correct. Personally, I think he’s erased.

Was it one goat for each engine?

If I were a passenger, I don’t think I would find Nepal Airlines’ maintenance procedures at all reassuring.

Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.

At least the in-flight meals must be fresh and tasty.

Any conservative can make an ass of themselves on Fox: Ben Stein gets crazy

Ben Stein is making a new movie (Expelled, have you heard of it?) that’s supposed to be out in February, but right now he’s building the excitement by making television appearances and demonstrating that he is a raving lunatic. Yeah, this is exactly the guy I want as the spokesman for Intelligent Design creationism.

He’s defending Larry Craig. It’s promisingly incoherent, and here are his arguments, more or less in the order babbled.

[Read more…]

Rampaging PR flacks!

The Pivar story isn’t quite dead yet — Chris Mims discovers that one of his blog defenders was a public relations agent. It’s not clear if he was employed by Pivar — he has written press releases for Lifecode, though — but if he was, it looks like Pivar has another goon in his employ whose ham-handed efforts backfired on him.

It’s so hard to get good minions, lackeys, thugs, and bully-boys nowadays.

I’m beginning to feel a bit sorry for the guy

Now the Stuart Pivar Story is on Daily Kos. Even after he dropped the lawsuit, his reputation on the blogosphere is sealed. If he’d never started this duel, it would have been nothing but a few fading memories of a negative review of an obscure book … but by playing games with the law and trying to intimidate others by throwing his money around, he’s elevated himself into notoriety.

Grow up, loons

This kind of silliness happens with tedious frequency. I get email notifications that I’ve been signed up to receive tripe from conservative or religious or creationist jerks.

You are now signed up to receive Ann Coulter’s weekly column, Newt Gingrich’s Winning the Future newsletter, and Robert Novak’s Evans-Novak Political Report. On Fridays you’ll also receive the Weekly Wrap-Up, containing the top stories of the week from HumanEvents.com.

You shouldn’t bother. Most of my email gets shunted through three layers of spam traps, and that kind of spam just gets blown away at first notice. It does mean that some legitimate communications get taken out behind the chemical sheds, too, but the spam dies swiftly and hard nowadays. You can stop wasting your time now.

Is this for real?

It probably is: it has just the right amount of ingrown festering obsessiveness. We’ve all heard of old earth creationism (creationists who agree the Earth is billions of years old, and make arguments about the “days” of the bible representing long ages) and young earth creationism (the bible is strictly and literally true, and the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in precisely 6 24-hour days). Here’s a new one called Biblical Reality:

This "Old Earth" brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate “six 12-hr days of revelation” given to Moses (Genesis 1:2 – 2:3). The pseudo discrepancy between the “sixth day” in Genesis chapter one and in chapter two is explained as chapter two being the beginning of modern mankind (Adam & Eve), and chapter one as being an earlier species of prehistoric mankind in an earlier restoration period, more than 60 million years ago.

Got that? There are two creation accounts in the bible, so he’s going to reconcile them by saying there were two literal creation events, each about a week long, separated by a 60 million year gap. So it’s a kind of hybrid YEC/OEC contrivance.

I don’t think we should worry about it too much. It probably has a following of one.

Oh, no! Poor Ted!

Ted Haggard is reduced in his circumstances. He and his family are living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment while he attends classes full time at the University of Phoenix, and he’s also helping out in a halfway house for the homeless. It’s as if he’s taken a vow of poverty and is living the ideal Christian life of charity and giving. Oh, what a good man!

To help him in his good works, he has sent out a letter asking people to give — he sends an address to a Christian charity that he promises will send 90% of the money to the Haggard family and use only 10% for administrative costs. For once, he’s pushing a charity that doesn’t skim off the cream because he is the recipient of the charity. He also doesn’t mention that he isn’t exactly destitute:

However, he doesn’t mention that when he left the church, New Life Church leaders agreed to pay his salary through 2007 – estimated at about $138,000 annually.

In addition, as Colorado Confidential reported earlier this month, El Paso County Assessor property records show that the Haggard’s still own their 5-bedroom, 3-bath home in Colorado Springs. Sitting on 5.1 acres, its current market value is listed at $715,051.

Once a grifter, always a grifter, I guess.