The Nyikos* Award for List Management goes to…

The managing editor of a small town newspaper in Wisconsin, Rose Eddy, is very upset with certain vicious hate groups, so she made up a list for her staff and announced that they will not be accepting ads or information from them, ever. And then she publicized it, declaring her unimpeachable moral probity in the pages of her newspaper. Here’s her list of awful, terrible people who must not appear in print:

  • The Nazi Party. Bad, very bad. I think this one has been condemned by history well enough.

  • Al Qaeda. A known terrorist organization that wants to destroy America — the very symbol of evil today.

  • The Ayn Rand Institute. Um, well. OK. They are kind of selfish libertarian creepazoids, who seem to be infamously pretentious … but they don’t seem to be quite in the same category as Nazis and fanatical terrorists.

  • People looking for Elvis. What! That’s half of small town America! These people may be mildly wacky, but they’re definitely harmless.

  • The Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Nazis, Al Qaeda, Ayn Rand, Elvis, and atheists. Ms Rose Eddy has a very peculiar pattern of discrimination, I think. How could she have left off mimes, Amway salesmen, and Paris Hilton?

*Obscure Talk.Origins reference. Old hands will remember the list lord.

(via Jeffrey Shallit)

Bill Nye doesn’t use the Bible as a science text? Heretic!

Reality is highly offensive to the godly. Bill Nye has alienated Texas by pointing out a simple fact:

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

Curse you, moon! Every night when you rise, you mock the gods with your false “light”!

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.

Battling giants

Want to see Freeman Dyson and Richard Dawkins butt heads? It begins with a talk Dyson gave to an Edge conference in which Dyson (watch the whole talk) made these comments:

“By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species.”

“With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.”

Dawkins rightly objects. Those are weird claims: the first is, I think, a misreading of Darwin. Darwin says something very different.

[Read more…]

Nice turn of phrase

Next time you hear the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument (almost as common as the why-are-there-still-monkeys argument!), remember this rebuttal:

Creationists seeking to argue against evolution often liken the evolution of complex organisms by natural selection to the building of a DC-10 by a hurricane blowing through a junkyard. Their conclusion? Since such an event is staggeringly unlikely, a special sentient hurricane must have built the plane deliberately.

That’s going to be handy!

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.