Pat Condell on Fitna

Psychic coincidence? I didn't see the last post before making this one.

I am happy to report that Pat Condell has contracted with the Dawkins website to make available a CD of his extraordinary YouTube comments. Here he is talking about Fitna. His elucidation rivals Dawkins or Harris, and he says things they aren't allowed to.

My Work is Done

I swear this guy really should be getting paid for making these videos. I just wish I knew how to make somethng like this, but I wouldn't have the time to do it even if I could.



I checked Rotten Tomatoes. The film really did get a 9% positive review. The comments are absolutely scathing, take a look. So either 91% of reviewers have an anti-religious bias, or the film is absolutely terrible.

Fox News Goes Liberal!

The conspiracy is so vast now that Fox news has put up a review of Ben Stein's "Expelled" ripping him to shreds in true liberal fashion. Some crap about "exaggeration" and "distortion". Hey whatever happened to freedom of speech?

From Fox News:

"Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, "Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck. "

"What the producers of this film would love, love, love is a controversy. That’s because it’s being marketed by the same people who brought us "The Passion of the Christ." They’re hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here, since there’s a visit to a concentration camp and the raised idea — apparently typical of the intelligent design community — that somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the Holocaust. Alas, this is such a warped premise that no one’s biting. "

"The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this. Who cares, really, if "Expelled" is anti-Semitic? It will come and go without much fanfare. "

Me again. I just want to know how this liberal god hating homosexual latte drinker slipped through the cracks at Fox news.

I know that Sean Hannity is a closet homosexual, but really, he must have been paid off bigtime to get this thing written.

Why do people laugh at creationists?

This is a great series on youtube dissecting lies, distortions and misrepresentations of creationists with facts and evidence. This episode (22) addresses Ben Stein and his falsehoods.
Stein says that there has been almost no advancement of evolutionary theory since Darwin. How can any human being POSSIBLY take someone who says that seriously?

These videos are very entertaining and well recommended.

PZ Meyers on Expelled

PZ Meyers one of the more famed science bloggers has made a very simlpe observation about the movie "expelled" (in which he was thanked for participating in the credits, yet promptly expelled from the theater when the produce realized he was there during a public showing).

Meyers writes over at Pharyngula:

The simple falsehood at the heart of Expelled

"I have to make this really, really simple for the "Hitler was an evolutionist" dimwits.
There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight.

If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.

It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out — and many idiots have. Farmers have known it for millennia, when they set aside particularly fruitful seed stock or especially robust farm animals for breeding, and eat the rest. Nazis used this elementary logic when they decided to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Eugenicists used it when they wanted to argue for shifting the distribution of certain properties in a population.

It ain't "Darwinism". It's self-evident, obvious, selbstverständlich, apparent, évidente, transparent. The KKK knows it, farmers know it, dog and horse breeders know it, the Nazis knew it, they didn't need Darwin to spell it out for them. Blaming that on Darwin is awesomely stupid.

Darwin's real contribution, the one that had everyone smacking themselves in the forehead and wondering why they didn't think of it first, was the realization that the natural environment does the killing — that natural selection shapes heredity. The idea of culling populations is not only so easy that a hate-mongering cretin can think of it, but that weather, bacteria, viruses, parasites, predators, etc. have been doing it for eons, with no intelligence required, and that mindless microorganisms have been far greater agents of hereditary change than the worst the Nazis ever accomplished; does Charles Darwin also get the blame for that? Darwin realized that the environment has consequences and can shape the generation-by-generation passage of hereditary traits in populations, and that examination of the natural world reveals that it has been doing exactly that. He realized that ubiquitous forces that are so simple we take them for granted have been quietly and slowly sculpting our heredity since the beginning of life on earth.
When clueless creationists argue that Darwin led to Hitler, or worse, throw away buckets of money making elaborate propaganda films arguing such nonsense, it's worse than inane. It's as if they have completely missed the point of the idea they are damning. "

Yes, these IDers have never been able to make a single valid point without distorting something, which is one of the main things that drew me away from ID. They simply can't come up with a good idea that really challenges the prevailing understanding.

Expelled

I had the pleasure of catching comedian Ben Stein on the Bill Oreilly comedy show last night talking about the Intelligent Design propaganda piece "EXPELLED".

Stein claims (and I absolutely do NOT believe him) that they originally set out to make some sort of movie about the intelligent design versus evolution contraversy, and in the process of researching for the movie he was surprised at how little evidence there was for evolution, and how ideas of intelligent design were not given fair play. In the process, they were able to trick Dawkins and other notable quotables into participating in the movie (which was going under a different name with no apparent agenda at the time of the interviews).

For me, the statement that there is little evidence for evolution is hysterically absurd and impossible to take seriously. Being a former IDer myself who thought evolution may have been directed by a designer, I was very quickly persuaded by evidence to the contrary. I couldn't have been persuaded dragging kicking and screaming away from my faith by something with "very little evidence". Sorry. The evidence is overwhelming.

In my conversion process, I found time and again that the IDers made cases that were easily swatted away by the elite scientists (read "the best scientists in the world in the field"). Even while rooting for the IDers I eventually became embarrassed by them while I watched them get man-handled by people who clearly had better evidence on their side, and much greater numbers. Thus, I was initially persuaded and have since gone on to be solidly persuaded. And who cares about Ben Stein? Why do all these economics professors and lawyers think that *I* should give a hoot what their opinions are on evolution?

Stein gave the example that no species has ever been observed to have evolved. This is like planting grass seeds and staring at the ground for 5 minutes and stating "no grass has ever been observed to grow from grass seed, this is grounds for skepticism. We can see the lawns and the fields and we can see the grass that has been already attached to the seed, but we cannot observe the grass shoots actually coming from the seed after 5 minutes. Somebody MUST have glued them together somehow."

Amazingly he cited dogs and said that no new species of dog has been observed to have been formed. Every breed of dog from the miniature Doberman to the Mastiff are a recent variation of an animal almost identical to today's Wolf from around 12,000 years ago. In just that short amount of time, selective breeding has led to all these amazing variations. Does it take a rocket scientist to see that if you expanded that time period to a million years (100 times that much) or 10 million years (1,000 times that much) it would lead to different species? How stone cold visionless does a person have to be to make Stein's argument?

But the truly chunk blowing part of Steins spewage was the insinuation that Darwin's ideas led *directly* to the atrocities of the Nazis. This is morally and intellectually deplorable, and a silly argument to boot. This would be the equivalent of blaming Jesus' ideas for the Spanish Inquisition. I've never seen anyone dumb enough to do that. But Darwin gets the blame for making the Nazis what they were despite the fact that anti-Semitism was around long before Darwinism. And despite the fact that after all this time since Darwin, tomes upon tomes of new information about genetics and zoology have made the theory of evolution as solidly confirmed as a scientific theory could possibly be. A century and a half of hard work by thousands of people have confirmed that Darwin's basic ideas were correct time and time again. How can someone blame a man for discovering a truth about how nature works? Hitler's distortion of the ideas and atrocities have nothing to do with Charles Darwin's personal ethics (by all accounts he was a very conscientious and ethical man), and especially *nothing* to do with whether our current understanding of Darwinian evolution is true. It is an appeal to emotion, which people who don't have evidence on their side always seem to do.

I think many intelligent people who have little science education and sit on the fence will watch this movie and be particularly embarrassed by this sick tactic (which apparently is one of the main themes of the movie).

The desperation of the ID community is obvious. Losing doesn't phase them, and they prey on the willing ignorance of those they preach to.

Liberal Conspiracy at San Diego Aquarium

I just returned from San Diego, a treacherously lovely city in April.

However, I find I must alert all Republicans, conservative think tanks, and Steven Colbert to the alarming activity of the San Diego Aquarium during an election year. Much to my shock and dismay, the so-called "Aquarium" has, as its main attraction, an extended display on so-called "Global Warming". By "global", I assume they must mean the whole planet, which is absurd because everybody knows it's never warm in the South Pole. As proof of this liberal conspiracy, I was able to smuggle my camera into the museum. Too all conservatives, a warning, you will find the content of the following images deeply disturbing. Caution is advised.

In the picture above, the graph clearly displays a liberal bias, notice the use of the PAST or (as it is called by liberals) "history". Clearly this is a thinly veiled critique of the Iraq War and the liberal obsession with the causes of the war and "accountability". Rather than focus on the future, the liberals continue to dwell on the PAST. The absence of alternative theories, again, betrays the liberal bias of co-called "science". Liberals only know what they are against.

The third and fourth pictures clearly illustrate the common Liberal conspiracy theory that so called "big business" or "industry" is the cause of atmospheric warming, ignoring sunspots, volcanoes and pigs. Notice the flat screen television meant to imply technological sophistication.

The picture at left is a favorite technique of Liberals - the "before and after" pictures. Of course, Liberals don't show the BEFORE the "before and after" pictures, when there were jungles in the Antarctica. Tens of millions of years ago, the Antarctic was a near tropical zone. Evidence that the "globe" is significantly cooler since then is conveniently ignored: such as snow, such as ice, and such as penguins.

My eldest daughter being programmed by a liberal conspiracist. Knowing that children are drawn to TVs instead of fish, the "Aquarium" uses these high tech devices to reprogram our children. Is it a coincidence that this display is being shown during an election year? I think not.


The final picture is an illustration of the Liberal Conspiracists attempt to fool parents into thinking that the highly disturbing content of the so-called "Global Warming" display will be forgotten. The children innocently color in an Octopus at the end of the program. It's not even a real Octopus, like it would be if it were a real Aquarium.

Sunspot activity and Global warming

A picture says a thousand words.

Solar irradiance decreased dramatically from about 1980-1987, while the average global temperature increased. The current level of solar irradiance is roughly what it was 25 years ago, but the average global temperature is about 0.4°C higher.

Almost NOBODY in climate science uses this as a serious piece of evidence against anthropogenic global warming anymore.

The only reason people like Mike would come up with this is because they selectively search for things on the internet in hopes of supporting what they already have decided that they want to believe. Same for evolution. Instead of absorbing the mountains of evidence for it first, these people will selectively search the internet for the handful of people scribbling out their favorite conspiracy theories.

McAmerica

Does the political season ever embarrass the hell out of you?
To be honest, I still think Obama will beat McCain (he's up on him 5% right now), but I am not particularly excited about it because I question his ability to change the major problems. I truly believe, as I've always said, that just because he is tall and has a deep voice, he will attract people, even some republicans who are fed up with Bush. I saw a few of them today at a message board who declared they would vote Obama. I can't see McCain outgunning Obama in the debates. I maintain we are looking at a landslide. If Obama can easily power through the statements of his pastor and the continuous replays of Fox news and talk radio trying to milk it for all its worth with hardly a scratch in the polls, the man can weather anything.

It will be nice to listen to someone giving a speech from the oval office who doesn't send shivers of embarrassment up my spine. It will be nice to have a leader who doesn't strut around like a cowboy, and has a more nuanced sensibility. But how did we ever get to this point? How is it that so many people crave being lied to if the lies tell them what they want to hear? "The surge is working", "global warming is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore and sponsored by the national academy of sciences to get grant money". It gets to the point where it's just not worth listening to anymore. It just amazes me that human beings, being as disinterested in honesty as they are, even got this far with civilization. It surprises me every day that traffic lights direct traffic, and that my paycheck is in the mail every other Friday, and that the salad bar is always well stocked. It always surprises me how everyone pretends to love each other on holidays and then talk behind each others' backs within a week.

Mostly, I hope that Obama unites the country. Conservative talk radio and punditry with it's continuous exaggerations, lies, and hatred of any opinion but it's own has done more to divide and self-destruct this country than any other factor in my opinion. The talk show hosts have mastered the understanding that if you just say something- it becomes true. Politics is not like science where facts and data can trump opinions. In politics just saying something makes it true- "Man made global warming is a hoax, there's no evidence for it", "Obama is a racist", "Liberals hate America" etc... You would be amazed at the sheer volume of citizens who have these ideas ingrained tightly into their being and search desperately for evidence to make them true. They have the AM dial to get it branded into the brains day in and day out as one more straw man argument lures them into accepting a false dichotomy, partitioning off the wild fields of reality into phony caricatured segments which their pea brains can categorize.

I hope that an Obama presidency begins to end this bullshit. I doubt it though.

Elephant Art

From onegoodmove.org
This is amazing.