I get email

This is no help at all. I need provocative biology questions, not this physics crap.

But hey, if any physics professors want to hand this off to their students, go ahead, give ’em a laugh.

The prominent Pagan publication called New Scientist states that the “axis of evil” imprinted on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is “posing a threat to standard cosmology.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19425994.000-axis-of-evil-a-cause-for-cosmic-concern.html ) The article continues: “According to the standard model, the universe is isotropic, or much the same everywhere. However, in 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo of Imperial College London noticed a curious pattern in the map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) created by NASA’s WMAP satellite. It seemed to show that some hot and cold spots in the CMB are not distributed randomly, as expected, but are aligned along what Magueijo dubbed the axis of evil.”

The Pagans say concerning the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327245.900-13-more-things-axis-of-evil.htm#.Uqeo0lNi30R ) “WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation”: “In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “axis of evil.” Now why is it called evil? The Pagans answer the question: “The apparent alignment is “evil” because it undermines what we thought we knew about the… universe. Modern cosmology is built on the assumption that the universe is essentially the same in whichever direction we look. If the cosmic radiation has a preferred direction, that assumption may have to go – along with our best theories about cosmic history.” The Pagans then admitted that they are terrorized by the ‘axis of evil’ by saying: “The European Space Agency’s recently launched Planck space telescope might settle the issue when it makes the most sensitive maps yet of the CMB. Until then, the axis of evil continues to terrorise us.”

PS. Results from the WMAP satellite (early 2000s) indicated that when looking at large scales of the universe, the CMB could be partitioned into “hot” and “cold” sections- and this partitioning is aligned with our ecliptic plane and equinoxes. This partitioning and alignment resulted in an axis through the universe which “scientists” dubbed “the axis of evil”- because of the damage it does to their myths. This axis passes right through our tiny portion of the universe. Laurence Krauss commented in 2005:“ But when you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.” (http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-energy-of-empty-space-that-isn-39t-zero )

Most “scientists” brushed the scientific observation off as a fluke of some type, and many myth-theories were created to explain it away. Many awaited the Planck mission. The Planck satellite was looked upon as a referee for these unexpected (and unwelcome) results. The Planck satellite used different sensor technology and an improved scanning pattern to map the CMB. In March 2013, Planck reported back and in fact verified the presence of the signal in even higher definition than before! There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church see www.vaticancatholic.com Geocentrism is absolutely irrefutable.

He followed up with another message an hour later.

Heliocentrism is a myth There is Absolutely No salvation Outside the Church visit www.vaticancatholic.com According to the evolutionist myth called heliocentrism the earth revolves around the sun traveling at speeds of 65,000+ miles is each hour which equates to approximately 20 miles per second while spinning on its axis 2,000 miles per hour. Science disproved heliocentricism centuries ago and decades ago and continues to do so.
Remember: Every experiment designed to measure the speed of the earth through space has always returned a speed of zero just as the Bible claimed all along. All the MMX experiments and related experiments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed prima facie evidence that the Earth wasn’t moving around the sun – and this continued to be the case with every repeat of an MMX-type experiment from 1881 to 1932 when the last one was done. That is science. That is irrefutable. Michelson did the experiment again and again and again because he was absolutely devastated by the results. He did it again with a man named Dayton C. Miller in 1904. Dayton Miller decided to go on his own track and was so devastated that the earth was Geocentric that he did 100,000 experiments with even more sophisticated and sensitive equipment– compared to 36 MMX experiments done by Michelson-Morley: and he got the same results. Dayton earned a doctorate in science from Princeton University in 1890, was president of the American Physical Society during 1925-1926, chairman of the National Research Council’s Division of Physical Sciences from 1927 to 1930, and president of the Acoustical Society of America from 1913 to 1933.

The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment (1925) which is a Sagnac and Morley Michelson (MMX) experiment in one: debunked relativity and heliocentrism. The Sagnac experiment scientifically demonstrated ‘Absolute Motion.’ It debunked Einstein’s “relative motion” myth with his myths of “general and special relativity.” The Sagnac experiment absolutely devastates ‘relativity’ mythology.
Ronald R. Hatch is a recipient of the Johannes Kepler Award from the Institute of Navigation because he was the most significant contributor to the advancement of satellite navigation. He has over 30 years experience in designing navigation systems and has been consulted by government agencies and companies. He authored Escape from Einstein – a work which debunks the relativity myth and other related myths. He brought up the issue of the GPS programming and what NASA does with the old experiments that disprove Einstein’s special myth of relativity and also heliocentrism. Ronald R. Hatch the Director of Navigation Systems engineering and founder of NavCom Technology, Inc had to go and investigate line by line how NASA was constructing the computer data or computer programs- rather- for the positioning satellites. What he found was that NASA -without telling people– preprogrammed the computers of the global positioning satellites to include the Sagnac effect. Sagnac did his experiment in 1913 and established and demonstrated that since motion is absolute – that means it is not relative. It was a very phenomenal experiment because it proved motion was absolute. Believers in Einsteinian mythology cannot get away from this and that is why they have to preprogram their computers for the Sagnac effect of absolute motion without telling anybody – and then they say that the global positioning satellites are working by the special “theory” of relativity. The global positioning satellites disprove the special “theory” of relativity because if those computer programs of the GPS were not preprogrammed for the Sagnac effect – in other words if they were not adjusted for the fact that there was absolute motion – then the GPS wouldn’t work.

Now what they have found between GPS satellites in space – is that they worked in foursomes. They have 3 up in space at any one time and they have the ground station. When a signal is sent from one in-orbit GPS into another GPS in orbit to get the triangulation that is needed: the light beam that goes from west to east travels 50 nanoseconds slower than the light beam traveling from east to west. That may not seem much but if you add up 50 nanoseconds for every beam that is sank from one satellite to another: in a day’s period the typical GPS would be off by 15 miles. They have a certain parameter that they have to fit into and so they have to measure these things in nanoseconds- it’s a pretty intricate calculation- but that’s what they discovered. Now why is that the case? If light always travels at c as Einstein told us then why are these GPS beams coming back at different times – 50 nanoseconds worth? Therefore the GPS has just falsified the special “theory” of relativity. In other words the global positioning satellites are just one big Michelson-Morley experiment or its one big Sagnac Experiment –and they thus adjust the computers based on what Sagnac found in 1913. That’s the story for you. That should make headlines but you won’t find it in headlines of course because the aura around special and general relativity is so great – not only to answer Michelson-Morley experiments but is the absolute foundational basis for all of Pagan cosmology today. Everything you hear about: the big bag, and the expansion, and dark matter, and dark energy, and inflation and all these terms you hear are for one reason only: because everything has to be fit into the tensor equations of Albert Einstein g= 8PiT – that’s the reason why. That all comes from general relativity which is the next step. Special relativity was invented in 1905 to answer the amazing Michelson-Morley experiments – in order to keep the earth moving around the sun and then we begin to see flaws in special relativity and one of the major flaws of course is it doesn’t deal with gravity. If special relativity dealt with uniform motion – that is motion that’s going the same all the time or you are standing still – that’s called an inertial frame. What happens when you are accelerating however, or what happens when you are decelerating, what happens when you meet up with inertial forces like centrifugal force, or Coriolis force, Euler force: well things change. Now you have to have a whole new “theory” and that’s why Einstein had to develop the general “theory” of relativity because he had to answer gravity and inertial forces. Where do these things come from? Well general relativity proposes to give us an answer and it says space is warped, and time is warped by matter, and all kinds of things like that- these are totally unproven too- but that’s just the “theory.” That’s why it’s still called the “theory” of general relativity because none of this has been proven. It has been debunked. There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church see www.vaticancatholic.com

Man, Catholics. They’re still plaguing my inbox.

Megyn Kelly gets DailyShowed and WaPoed

Don’t feel bad for Megyn Kelly. Jon Stewart exposes her stupidity with wonderful thoroughness…

And you might be thinking, “No way can she show up in public without the pointing and laughing,” but keep in mind that she’s a Fox News host. Blithering obliviousness is part of the job description.

Besides, on the same day she got this lovely tongue-bath from the Washington Post. I see that journalistic standards at the WaPo are roughly equivalent to those at the HuffPo.

Tone-deaf Twitter

There are some serious problems with how Twitter handles blocking — in particular, if I block some obnoxious twit, but they post to a hashtag I follow (a conference hashtag, for instance), their messages are still displayed. This is the major reason why the BlockBot emerged — that automated widget that simply refuses to display tweets from a collection of known harassers, so that you can follow it instead of the hashtag — because Twitter won’t do the job.

Now, finally, Twitter gets around to changing the blocking behavior …and makes it worse. It used to be blocking someone also made them unfollow you, which made it very slightly harder for the harassers to stalk you. Apparently, inconveniencing assholes was intolerable to Twitter, so they’ve now changed it so blocking only mutes them, but still allows them to easily follow your every word, flag your tweets, and echo them to their clinging flock of fellow harassers. The harassers are now simply made invisible to the people they want to harass.

Imagine if the police were this helpful, and if you complained about someone and asked for protection, their response would be to magically make them invisible for you.

Why did they do this? I have no idea, except that there must be some assholes on the Twitter staff, which should surprise no one.

It’s probably futile, but there’s a petition asking them to stop making life easier for the jerks. I have no confidence they’ll listen or care, but go ahead, ask Twitter nicely.

Otherwise…hey, world, did you know there’s an available niche for a twitter-like service that also offers reasonable blocking and a little protection for users, and that doesn’t pander to misogynistic scumbags? They really could use some competition.

I found someone who likes the new policy (warning: links to creep pretending to masturbate…and just the description is enough, don’t you think?) That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s who Twitter’s policy panders to.

Twitter has reversed their changes. They’ve got a rather weird explanation for the earlier change, though.

In reverting this change to the block function, users will once again be able to tell that they’ve been blocked. We believe this is not ideal, largely due to the retaliation against blocking users by blocked users (and sometimes their friends) that often occurs. Some users worry just as much about post-blocking retaliation as they do about pre-blocking abuse. Moving forward, we will continue to explore features designed to protect users from abuse and prevent retaliation.

WTF? So I was supposed to worry that harassers I block might retaliate by…what? More online harassment? I assure you, they were going to do that anyway.

Santa is a white man, just like Jesus

Man, they must select Fox News commentators for racism as well as stupidity. Here’s a video of Megyn Kelly indignantly arguing on an important issue: Santa Claus must be white.

She’s offended that someone suggested that we could have a black Santa Claus.

Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa.

Hint to Planet Fox: Santa is a fictitious, imaginary character. There really isn’t a man who appears on Christmas eve to clamber down your chimney, so it’s absurd to argue about his skin color, or gender, or species, or whether its biochemistry is carbon-based. He doesn’t exist. Personally, I prefer to imagine that Santa just snakes a tentacle down a ventilation duct — it gets around the logistical issues neatly, and it also increases efficiency at apartment complexes, since he can multitask.

But Kelly has historical precedent! Here’s her slam-dunk counter-argument.

You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure; that’s a verifiable fact—as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that—but my point is: How do you revise it, in the middle of the legacy of the story, and change Santa from white to black?

So, Megyn Kelly, do you have a picture of Jesus? One from, say, 30 AD? I’d like to see it, since after all you’re so confident that there is verifiable, historical evidence for his existence, as well as his ethnic status as a White Man.

I’d also like to point out that by Christian mythology, Jesus is currently in an incorporeal state, somehow inexplicably oscillating in some incomprehensible quantum-like state with his dad and a ghost. You can tell me exactly how you determined the melanocyte density in his invisible skin right after you explain the Trinity to me.

You must read this twitter exchange about the whiteness of Santa. It just gets weirder and weirder.

Grrr. Stedman.

Bill O’Reilly, as he always does this time of year, was ramping up this War on Christmas nonsense again. He’s peeved at the new billboard display from American Atheists in Times Square.

American Atheists launched a major billboard display on Tuesday that declares Christmas is better without the Christ. The huge 40′x40′ digital billboard is located in Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. Using motion graphics, the billboard proclaims, “Who needs Christ during Christmas?” A hand crosses out the word “Christ” and the word “NOBODY” appears. The display then says “Celebrate the true meaning of Xmas” and offers a series of cheery words: family, friends, charity, food, snow, and more. The commercial ends with a jovial “Happy Holidays!” from American Atheists and displays the organization’s website, atheists.org.“This season is a great time of year for a hundred reasons—none of them having to do with religion,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “This year, start a new tradition: Don’t go to church. You hate it, it’s boring; you probably only go because you feel guilty or obligated. Instead, spend more time with your family and friends—or volunteer. There are better uses of your time and money.”

Ed Brayton jokes that O’Reilly should have invited him on to talk about it — he would have engaged in some merciless needling that would have annoyed the old windbag. It would have been nice, but no, no way was that going to happen; it would have been even better if David Silverman had been invited on…not only more appropriate, but Silverman is good at standing his ground and punching back. But no. O’Reilly brought on…

Chris Stedman.

He was awful. Well, from my perspective he was awful — O’Reilly seemed to think he was just wonderful, since Stedman was largely agreeing with him. O’Reilly showed part of the billboard, the bit where is it says “Who needs Christ during Christmas? Nobody,” and then cut away to O’Reilly asking Stedman what he thought about it. He replied that they were “not contributing to the destigmatization of atheists,” and later he said that he completely agreed, and he wanted “to see more of yes of atheism than the no of atheism.”

I can guess exactly how Silverman would have responded: by pointing out that the primary message of the billboard was the importance of this season as a family holiday, which certainly is the “yes of atheism”. Stedman either didn’t do his homework or was more interested in ingratiating himself with a far right blustering jerk, and decided instead to see if the snow tires on the bus could bounce over a few atheists.

O’Reilly was pulling his usual schtick, claiming that atheists are bitter, that they sue schools if they have the temerity to let a kid sing a Christmas carol, and whining that Macy’s department store brought in a Santa Claus and didn’t announce that it was Christmas. Why can’t those atheists just leave Christmas alone, he begged.

Most of these claims of atheists hating Christmas are lies, and the criticisms groups like the FFRF levy against schools and other state institutions aren’t that kids shouldn’t be allowed to pray or sing hymns if they want, but that these schools cannot selectively privilege only the Christian religion. Stedman was totally ineffective.

Further, when O’Reilly says “What I’m seeing here is an amazing amount of anger from atheists” and “I don’t really know what they are angry about”, when the angry ranter here is O’Reilly and the atheists aren’t expressing any anger at all, Stedman feebly goes along with it and agrees with the stupid host. I guess he’s hoping for a repeat invitation.

If Stedman and the Harvard Humanists want to put up a friendly, cheerful, unchallenging milquetoast sign, they are welcome to do so, and I won’t have a problem with it. I do have a big problem when a representative of the Harvard Humanists goes on the air to deny the righteous, forthright words of a less weasely organization, and when they are so ineffectual that they can’t even raise a word of rebuttal against the BS Bill O’Reilly lays on so thickly — familiar, tired BS that anyone going on the show ought to be prepared to slap down. It’s not as if he ambushed Stedman with a weird new claim.

Stedman is too feeble, and maybe Ed Brayton would be a touch too acerbic. If they can’t get Silverman to go on, may I recommend Rob Boston, instead? He wouldn’t let the bogosity fly by with a smile and a laugh. Anyone but Stedman.

I think I want these kids to handle O’Reilly.

O’Reilly and Stossel are really getting into the true spirit of Christmas

It’s all about kicking the freeloaders to the curb. O’Reilly only gives money to charities that hand the cash over directly to kids (what?), and Stossel demonstrates that panhandlers are all freeloaders because kind people would even give him money, a sure sign of moral bankruptcy.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

The good news is that John Stossel was so gleeful at getting $11 by sitting on a street corner, waving a cup, that he’s going to grow a beard to match his mustache, give up the journamalism he has been practicing, and squat on the street for his tax free income until he dies. It’s a big win for him: there’s more dignity in that than working for Fox News.

(via Kick!)

Secular Humanists want to abort the Christ child so they can snort drugs and have gay sex on its corpse!

I think we’re all tired of the War on Christmas. The atheists have won; it’s officially a secular, federal holiday, the capitalists promote it as a consumerist orgy of mass consumption, most people see it as a nice time of year to get together with friends and family, and this Jesus guy, as always, is superfluous. But like the Japanese soldiers occasionally found holed up on remote Pacific islands, there’s Bill O’Reilly, dug in and flailing. Apparently, we have some grand plan to destroy Christmas so we can win entitlements and get gay married and have lots of abortions.

Give it up, O’Reilly. You’re just sounding increasingly deranged. War’s over.

I quite like this sentiment:

If-someone-wishes-you

But of course, Bill O’Reilly would see that as oppressive and atheistic, because it doesn’t elevate his “Judeo-Christian” values to an exalted position.

Just to spite O’Reilly, this year I’m going to have two Christmases, one with the youngest daughter and middle son in Boulder, and another with the oldest son in St Cloud. Nyah.

Another attempt to rationalize religion by equating it with philosophy

Salon has published another of those articles — you know, the ones where some clueless ignoramus presents his biased interpretation of what atheism means and then proceeds to flog the New Atheists for their imagined sins. This time, it’s Sean McElwee bashing away at What Hitchens got wrong: Abolishing religion won’t fix anything. And here’s his premise:

The fundamental error in the “New Atheist” dogma is one of logic. The basic premise is something like this:

1. The cause of all human suffering is irrationality

2. Religion is irrational

3. Religion is the cause of all human suffering

The “New Atheist” argument gives religion far, far too much credit for its ability to mold institutions and shape politics, committing the classic logical error of post hoc ergo propter hoc  — mistaking a cause for its effect.

Tellingly, he can’t quote any prominent New Atheist say any such thing — or for that matter, any atheist at all — but he does quote a reporter from the Independent, Bernard Lewis, and Terry Eagleton on the wickedness of Hitchens, and of course Hitchens himself was rather bellicose and I concede that he might have promoted some hyperbole…but I don’t know of any specific quotes, and certainly no one I know follows that illogical chain of reasoning above.

I’d also agree that abolishing religion (wait, does any reasonable atheist propose abolishing religion?) would not fix everything, but educating people away from irrationality would certainly fix some things. We have a more moderate vision of the affliction that is religion than McElwee credits us with, but at least we can still recognize some legitimate distinctions, unlike him.

The impulse to destroy religion will ultimately fail. Religion is little different from Continental philosophy or literature (which may explain the hatred of Lacan and Derrida among Analytic philosophers). It is an attempt to explain the deprivations of being human and what it means to live a good life. Banish Christ and Muhammad and you may end up with religions surrounding the works of Zizek and Sloterdijk (there is already a Journal of Zizek Studies, maybe soon a seminary?). Humans will always try to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and science will never be able to tell them what it is. This, ultimately is the meaning of religion, and “secular religions” like philosophy and literature are little different in this sense than theology. Certainly German philosophy was distorted by madmen just as Christianity has been in the past, but atheists fool themselves if they try to differentiate the two.

So religion is just like philosophy and literature, and philosophy and literature are just instances of this peculiarly vague monstrous amalgam McElwee wants to call “religion”? Do science, philosophy, and literature have at their heart an unevidenced concept that defies everything we know of reality, an elaborate and ultimately nonsensical premise around which theologians build intricate fantasies that contradict one another and all human experience?

The man libels philosophy and literature, and puffs up myths and lies with a credibility they do not deserve. For shame.

#HeavenAndBack

So I watched this show with Anderson Cooper’s name on it; he didn’t bother to show up, so maybe he has some sense of shame. It was dreadful. It was three anecdotes about people who had experienced serious trauma, and then invented lovely narratives about a happy afterlife to make themselves feel better, or to justify their prior religious beliefs. There was no fact-checking. It was just these three women getting interviewed and telling unverifiable accounts of events that happened while they were unconscious.

First woman: She claims to have “died” in a kayaking accident in Chile. Her kayak was pinned underwater by a rock; she describes all of her sensations, including her legs breaking when her friends dislodged the boat and she was torn free by the current. Her friends were frantic, yet she’s happy to claim that they accurately described the passage of time, and that she was under water and deprived of oxygen for 30 minutes. She said she “gave herself up to god”, was visiting spirits/angels/whatever while resuscitation was attempted, and that she had a conversation with Jesus who told her she had to go back to take care of her husband. Her husband was later diagnosed with lung cancer. Thanks, Jesus! Also, she’s flogging a book

Verdict: completely unverified account of a “death”. This was a religious woman who experienced a serious trauma, and who had also experienced the death of a child and wanted to believe that there was a purpose to life. It was a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

CNN’s verdict: “Amazing”. Not one word of doubt about anything in the account.

Christian Mingles is advertising on this show, of course.

Second woman: Child growing up in Hong Kong, of Indian descent. A friend dies of cancer, and she becomes paranoid; she later is diagnosed herself with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She deteriorates under treatment, and later lapses into a coma. Claims to have heard doctors talking while she was in a coma, and that they said she was going to die within 24 hours. She was, she said, “in another world” where she felt peace, and her dead friends were all there. Dead people told her to go back and live, so she did.

She recovered consciousness, cancer goes into remission, she’s still alive. In fact, nothing in her account said she died at all.

Verdict: A lot of story telling and confabulation. Nothing remarkable in the story at all; Hodgkin’s has a roughly 80+% 5 year survival rate, and she was apparently getting good medical care.

CNN’s verdict: Accepted every bit of it without reservation. No attempt to verify any of the claimed facts, not that there was anything particularly unusual about it.

Third woman: Has a son with a serious heart condition. He and his mother engaged in a fair bit of Jesus talk. One day he collapses and is hospitalized, and claims to see a bright light and an angel. Later he collapses at his school again, and claims to have been in a good place and not wanting to come back. But “he came back for a reason”. The family does a lot of praying and bible reading. Then the son dies on Christmas day. He doesn’t come back.

Verdict: Absolutely nothing remarkable or unexplainable. No evidence of much of anything presented.

CNN’s verdict: Ends with a clip of a video of the dead boy holding up a sign saying he believes in god and angels.

Overall assessment: Gullible dreck, lots of fantasizing, no evidence presented of much of anything, and no critical thinking from the reporters at all. A disgrace.

I didn’t believe a word of it. There’s only one comment on the show website, and Randy didn’t believe it, either, but for rather different reasons.

This is all a liar, heaven is a holy place and those that Enter must be born again of the water and of the spirit, those that have excepted Jesus as their personal savior and have been born again of the baptism of the Holy Ghost will make it in.

I despair.