You can’t imagine how relieved I am to learn that. Somebody tell his publishers that they can stop sending out those royalty checks!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You can’t imagine how relieved I am to learn that. Somebody tell his publishers that they can stop sending out those royalty checks!
Don Boys is not happy that Kent Hovind has been sent to jail.
Kent’s enemies are painting him as a greedy tax resister when he has said repeatedly that he will pay all the taxes he owes. He could not get any response from the IRS nor did the judge, prosecutor, or anyone else inform him why his ministry was not exempt from taxes as are hundreds of thousands of similar organizations. Therefore, he spends ten years in the Big House. That’s where they send killers, traitors, rapists, child molesters, armed robbers, and other Very Bad Guys.
I think that what painted him as a greedy tax resister were his own words and actions, Don. He is a greedy tax resister. Oh, and paying back the taxes he owes doesn’t help; if a bank robber is caught, would you suggest letting him go free if he gives all the money back?
The real hysterics in Boys’ article, though, come when he starts listing all the people he thinks ought to be in jail instead of Hovind. Most of his outrage is directed at ‘perverts’ and feminists.
Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, an admitted pervert, confirmed that his Washington apartment had been used as a callboy headquarters by a male prostitute for a year and a half until late 1987. So, Barney’s lover-boy was using his apartment as a callboy ring to make a little money on the side. Barney did not go to jail, did not lose his seat in Congress. I’m not sure if he passed go and collected $200.00. Maybe his lover can tell us that. However, Kent Hovind sits in prison while Barney sits in Congress making laws that we are expected to obey.
What injustice! How can someone who bilks money out of people in the name of god be sent to jail, while people who do things with their genitals that Don Boys doesn’t like get to walk around free, thinking thoughts that agitate Don Boys?
This odd duck, discovered by Phil, has an amazing theory, which is his:
Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: This is because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people’s blood and the biological movement of life. It has been proven that if magnetism, anywhere, exceeds 1,000 gauss, which equals one tenth of a tesla, it affects the ability of the hemoglobin in the blood to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.
Interviewer: In other words, the ability to live…
Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: Yes, to live… This means is that when you are in Mecca, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues is greater than anywhere else in the world.
Now these ideas are crazy enough—magnetic fields can’t have that much of an effect, or as Phil mentions, MRIs would be fatal—but the real topper is why this loon is making the argument: in order to justify changing the world standard time from a Greenwich Mean Time standard to Mecca time. Why the magnetic fields at one place would be an argument for changing an arbitrary standard is unclear. Why this would affect the ability of people at the North and South Poles to make the pilgrimage to Mecca is even murkier. This kook makes the assertions anyway — no non sequitur is too far-fetched for the True Loon, you know.
…and he’s as much of a fool as you’d expect. Paszkiewicz is theteacher who told his students they deserved to go to hell if they didn’t believe in Jesus, among other things, and he has now written a letter to his regional newspaper.
The letter is about as you’d expect. It’s a long-winded example of quote-mining the founding fathers to support his continued claim that America is a Christian nation, and also that the courts are being used to strip Christians of their freedom. It’s awfully silly stuff.
All I can say is that I don’t care that the Jefferson and Washington held religious views—they also held slaves, and we managed to finally purge our country of that odious institution, so what’s one more? And if you are going to take Jefferson’s opinions and make them the model for our new state religion, I might be willing to go along with it, actually…but can you imagine the howls when we start taxing the Catholics and Baptists and make the Unitarians the official established Church of America? It would be hilarious.
Anyway, for what little it’s worth, I’ve put the letter below the fold.
One other important thing about using ridicule to combat your opponents: you have to be on very solid ground yourself for it to be effective. An excellent case in point is Michael Fumento, a rather deranged lawyer by training with negative experience in science (i.e., paying too much attention to him will cause cortical neurons to wither and die) has chosen to flail against competent science, and he makes a complete fool of himself. Fumento’s schtick is to play Chicken Belittle and downplay the importance of public health in favor of privatizing everything, and something that would require coordinated community response, like a potential pandemic, is anathema to him…so he ignores the science and pretends it will never happen. To make his case, I’m amused at his choice of targets: Revere, Mike, and Tim. This is another reason to be pleased to be at Scienceblogs—my peers here raise the ire of the anti-science crazies on both the right and the left. It’s good company!
And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.
The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He’s got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it’s a MS Word file that doesn’t help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.
I remember Federal Way! It was just up the hill from where I grew up, and although it was never a destination of interest, we would pass through its majestic strip malls on the way to Dash Point or Saltwater State Park. Now Federal Way is in the news as a haven for a few wingnuts. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised, but this one does express a point of view I find both novel and incoherent.
They’re protesting the showing of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in the schools up there. I could understand the complaints if they were objecting to the presentation of a partisan campaign film for a presidential candidate (there is a bit too much of that in the movie), but they don’t—they never seem to find that angle troubling. Instead, the vomit all over the science, the part that’s pretty darn good and unobjectionable.
In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007.
“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”
Hang on there. A possible nuclear attack by terrorists? We’ve heard this possibility discussed before as a justification for torture. Robertson knows something. Quick, call Kiefer Sutherland and let the waterboarding begin!
Once he breaks, he’ll lead us to the terrorist mastermind (codename: Lord), and then we can send in a Ranger battalion to take him out.
Later in the article, though, he admits that last year’s prediction of a tsunami striking the US was fulfilled by heavy rain in New England; given that level of slop in his prediction, next year he’ll be able to claim that the nuclear attack prediction was met by that time Dick Cheney had a particularly gassy burrito.
I am not going to praise John Derbyshire; some people seem to be impressed because he has penned a dismissal of the ID creationists, but jebus, that ought to be the absolute rock bottom minimum we should expect from rationalists. That he can clear a hurdle set one inch above the ground does not impress me in the slightest.
Furthermore, he couldn’t spit it out without saying something stupid.
As it turned out, Judge Jones is a conservative in the right way, the best way: he respects the law, and the plain rules of evidence.
Think about that. Respect for law and evidence is not a property exclusive or intrinsic to conservatives. Does he think liberals believe in violating the law and ignoring the evidence (don’t bother to answer; he probably does.) I’m not dazzled by a wingnut who manages to see the obvious but is still burdened with the usual far right nonsense.
(via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)
Ed Brayton and Mike Gene have gone over the top in accusing Richard Dawkins of wanting to coerce the religious into giving up their beliefs; as is usual for Ed, he has no problem immediately comparing an atheist to R.J. Rushdooney and calling him a totalitarian, on the basis of a rather poorly written petition that Dawkins signed.
I must say, though, that this petition is certainly strange, and I don’t quite see how it could have gotten over a 1000 signatories. I sure don’t approve of it, although I can understand the motivation behind it.
In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with other laws, they would then be considered old enough and educated enough to form their own opinion and follow any particular religion (or none at all) through free thought.
