Admire this work of art.

That’s beautiful.

As you’ve probably heard, Cardinal Pell is dead and will be buried in the Vatican tomorrow. The news has been strange — I’m not seeing much talk about his child sex abuse history, since he was acquitted, after all. All was forgiven, the Catholic church was relieved to be let off the hook.

On the day of Pell’s acquittal in 2020, Francis offered his morning Mass for all those who suffer from unjust sentences, which he compared to the persecution of Jesus.

Ironic, then, that the latest scandal is the discovery of a memo written by Pell.

Australian Cardinal George Pell was lying in state on Friday, with funeral preparations overshadowed by revelations that he was the author of an anonymous memo that branded Pope Francis’ pontificate a catastrophe.

You don’t expect loyalty from a junkyard dog, do you? He was just a mean-spirited, nasty little man. He was the kind of rabid conservative who hated science and did immense harm to society.

The late Cardinal George Pell left a legacy of climate science denial which – in his later years – became ever more distanced from reality and the position of the Catholic church.

For decades in newspaper columns and speeches, Pell popularised climate denial talking points to dismiss the science of global heating and to brand environmentalists as hysterical and in the grip of a pseudo-religion.

What’s impressive is that Pell was one of the few people who could make a positive contribution to humanity by simply dropping dead.

Dan Phelps sent me a link to a terrible, awful video of the Answers in Genesis astronomers babbling about how the JWST proves the universe is young. I know, that’s just nuts, but what else can you expect from AiG?

Fortunately, Dan provides a description, so I don’t have to watch it. You don’t have to either.

Young Earth Creationist Astronomers Declare Victory for Creationism Because of the Findings of the James Webb Space Telescope

Our favorite Young Earth Creationist (YEC) astronomers have finally discussed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at length. On Wednesday 9/14/22 on Facebook Dr. Danny Faulkner and Rob Webb of AiG, and Dr. Jason Lisle (formerly of AiG, now at the Biblical Science Institute) discuss the early findings of the JWST for a full excruciating hour. See: https://fb.watch/fymizG2T2H/ .

Faulkner and Lisle have PhDs in astronomy. Rob Webb, recently was hired by AiG as a preacher/scientist and has experience in aerospace engineering, helping design several different spacecraft (hence his AiG nickname “Rocket Rob”). Their “discussion” consists mostly of self-congratulation and sundry claims that every new finding supports Young Earth Creationism including having light from galaxies billions of light years away getting to Earth in 6,000 years (a miracle!). Their self congratulations are based on the fact that astronomers are revising their ideas about how quickly galaxies and heavy elements formed in the early universe because of new data from JWST findings. This motley crew seem to be gloating that other astronomers are, gasp!, doing science. Much of the rest is preaching/scripture quoting and, at about 23 minutes in, claiming a nefarious conspiracy of morally questionable “secular astronomers” based on their “worldview.” Most astronomers I know are rather upright citizens. The exceptions know who they are ;-).

About 32 minutes in Drs. Lisle and Faulkner joke about dead Democrats voting in Chicago, and Dr. Lisle claims “dead people vote Left.”

In Dr. Faulkner’s esteemed scientific opinion God only created life on earth, not elsewhere (~36 minutes in). However, he intones, this only includes “physical life like us; I’m not talking about spirit beings like angels and demons, and so forth.” (Is this video from the 13th century?). Then, after a discussion of exoplanets, Dr. Faulkner also tells us that God will destroy stars and galaxies when he creates a “new heavens and a new Earth” (~39 minutes). Golly wow! Thankfully, Dr. Faulkner goes on to rebuff an online questioner who asks about the Flat Earth, giving Biblical and scientific reasons the ancient Bible-based cosmology is wrong. Dr. Faulkner has even written a thick tome about the subject (for sale at the Creation Museum and Ark Park, as well as online). The three gentlemen then discuss Flat Earth Theory and the psychology of the cultish behavior behind it for a bit. They appear oblivious to the irony, that, in spite of their education, promoting a 6,000 year old universe and Earth. When they agreed that it is a “psychological issue,” I stopped the video for a few minutes out of necessity. I couldn’t decide to laugh or cry, so I took a bathroom break.

Near the end (~53 minutes) Dr. Lisle bemoans that mainstream science is ignoring his claim that he predicted the findings of the JWST. He goes on to claim that science itself wouldn’t be possible if the Bible weren’t true. Lisle then posts the inane cartoon below (my screenshot) insulting scientists and intelligent people as well as confusing evolution and cosmology/cosmogony.

The video ends with mentions of books they have for sale and the Creation Museum planetarium.

But, you ask, what about the biologists? We have to turn to the Institute for Creationist Research, which employs the most appallingly awful guy with some credentials in biology, Jeffery Tomkins. I’ve discussed Tomkins several times before, and I’m tired of. He’s incredibly dishonest fellow whose entire expertise is about distorting the scientific evidence in ways that anyone who knows the field sees is wrong, but he throws around technical terms that make lay people think he’s smart. It’s a classic pseudoscientific move.

I am spared the pain of working through Tomkins’ lies by Dan Cardinale, who explains how his arguments about junk DNA are totally bogus.

I mean, how could I not read a story with the title, White nationalist ‘America First’ group plunges into chaos after high-ranking official gets a girlfriend? It’s the most pungent kind of clickbait. It seems Nick Fuentes, that unbelievable cartoon of a man, is in disarray over the fact that one of his employees has done something fairly normal.

The America First movement has plunged into turmoil after its treasurer started a romantic relationship and moved out of the group leader’s basement.

Somehow, I could have guessed someone was going to be living in someone else’s basement somewhere in the story.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes, the right-wing group’s leader and associate of Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, urges his followers to abstain from sex, and he describes himself as an incel, or involuntarily celibate.

This led the nonprofit group’s treasurer Jaden McNeil to resign and call America First a cult, reported The Daily Beast’s “Fever Dreams” podcast.

“[Members act so] racist and ridiculous in public that it ruins people’s lives,” said co-host Kelly Weill on the podcast. “You can’t go and get a normal job after that, so they turn further and further into this movement, which really does function almost like a cult.”

The fact that Gosar and Greene, who have a modicum of power and influence, are entangled with Nick Fuentes, is revealing about the sad state of American politics. How can anyone in the halls of power take this guy seriously?

That last paragraph, though, explains a lot. America First is openly and loudly racist, and its members have openly slapped that stigma on their records. This is how cults start: throw out one absurdity for your followers to accept, watch as the majority walk away, but the ones who stay…give ’em another absurdity. Then another. And another. You’ve got the few so deeply hooked that you can get them to do whatever you want. Tell your followers that you translated the holy book by staring at magic rocks in a hat, and if they swallow that, you can load ’em up into a wagon train and go found a city in the middle of nowhere. Fuentes is such a patently hateful fool that his followers have to be committed to stick by him, not by virtue of the quality of his arguments, but because they’re so stupid that admitting that leads to an exposure of their gullibility.

By the way, this also explains how Michelle Malkin has ended up associated with this group. She’s been making horrible choices for many years — justifying the internment of Asian Americans in WWII just one of them — so of course she has sorted herself to the bottom of the dumpster.