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.

The Earth is Cooling!!!

One of my hobbies, as you all know, is listening to right wing talk radio. Especially when they mumble about global warming. Today was an interesting day in the news because there was a gigantic ice shelf which collapsed off of Antarctica that experts attribute to GW (one denier I debate actually said that this was evidence against AGW because the earth was warming more at the poles and not everywhere equally). One scientist predicted that this shelf would break off in 30 years at current warming rates. He said that around 10 years ago. He was too conservative in his estimate by around 20 years.

Another news stories was how Lake Tahoe is expected to change and lose it's crystal blue color due to warming. I pictured Rush Limbaugh at the yearly golf tournement there trying to explain how the Liberals ruined the water.

But the funniest thing I am hearing lately on right wing talk radio is how global warming has stopped, thus disproving the theory of anthropogenic causes. You won't find this claim anywhere other than right wing talk radio and right wing news. Why? Because it's fucking laughable. This winter has in fact been the coldest one in a number of years, partly due to La Nina. What they forget to mention is that it is still something like the 16th warmest winter this century.

But this same shit has happened before. They never learn their lesson and they prey off the ignorance of their listeners. Take a look at the graph below:

The talk radio host I heard today coming home from work was going on and on about the incredible cold snap, and the media conspiracy not to mention it as overwhelming evidence of the failure of global warming theory.

The fact is that the same thing happened in 1982, 1991-1992, 1999-2000 during the period of the most accelerated warming! EVERY TIME the warming came back stronger than ever, as can clearly be seen on the graph.

These fucking people can't even understand basic elementary school trend analysis for Christ's sake. If every year isn't substantially warmer than the one before, that's perfect evidence for them and their beliefs.

Nothing stops these people from misinforming the public. They are just like the creationists (wait, many of them are the creationists). Their hypocrisy knows no limits. And once again, I just can't believe I live in a world full of this many stupid and brainwashed people.

What is Your God Delusion Index?

Link from onegoodmove.org.

I am happy to say I am a normal person. I did have a few points however.

Urban Ninja

Ha, the joke is on all of us desk sitting gen exers who always laughed about how unrealistic our video game heros are. Unbelievable.

Enlightenment 2.0

I finally finished watching all of the beyond belief 2 enlightenment 2.0 video presentations. Wow, there is some really good stuff here. The egos of the presenters are unexaggeratably (I know this is not a word, leave me alone...) immense. There is so much disagreement, and I just love how Sam Harris clarifies everything at the end so succinctly. The man really is the best speaker in the house. After listening to the semi-effette pluralistic goody-two shoesness of people like Jonathan Haidt and David Sloan Wilson, two atheists doing their best to redefine then defend religion, Sam comes out with some zingers that had me laughing out of my chair. He states that Jonathan Haidt, though fully condemning North Korea for it's oppression, will no doubt find a clever way to hold the Islamic societies to different standards. Sam assures us that whatever way Jonathan comes up with doing this, it will be a "masterpiece of political correctness", LOL. Exactly. Secondly, David Sloan Wilson characterizes Sam's writings, builds a strawman and beats the stuffing out of it. Harris stands at the podium and says that Wilson told him privately during the conference that he had never actually read Sam's writing, and quips about how he wish he had been mic'd for the conversation.

I finished watching the conference with this very fascinating Daniel Dennett interview. I hope they do this conference every year and make it available to watch. There are some really fascinating presentations here. This is the best thing I have ever found on the internet of it's kind.

Founders of Christianity were Potheads?

Just read an article on Moses.

An Isreali researcher has just released a paper asserting that Moses was probably high as a kite (and then some) when he heard God recite the ten commandments. He was also, most probably, totally stoked when he saw the burning bush.

The article states that "mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times." This is according to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

"As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics..."

The drug of choice, in those days, was brewed from the bark of acacia trees. The ancient drug apparently contains the "same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic... ayahuasca is prepared."

In another article on the same subject Shannon is quoted as writing:

"In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings... On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being ... many identify this power as God."

Once again, one marvels at the ironies and contradictions at the root of religious belief.

The so-called "War on Drugs", for example, has always been closely tied to the conservative Christian ethos. No doubt, religious believers of all stripes will dismiss Shannon's assertions out of hand. Easier to believe in a sky-god that handed Moses stone tablets than to believe that tribal, religious zealots, several thousand years ago, took psychedelic drugs. Gee, just like now. Think of it, the founder of Christian "morality" could have been a "pothead". A drug induced haze is likely responsible for thousands of years of not just religious war & peace, but all the great works of art, music, literature, sculpture, painting, political writing, etc... even Jesus. Does it get better than that?

One could argue that the war on drugs, if it had been in force in Moses' day, could have stopped Judaism *and* Christianity DEAD in their tracks. Hmmm.... On the other hand, just think of all the Bach Cantatas we would be forced to give up, the architecture, literature and painting... Maybe religion is worth it.

Pass the bong...

There has never been and never will be a successful "war" on drugs.

The Audacity of Hopelessness

About 3-4 years ago I decided that near death experiences and other supposed evidences of life after death are about as likely to be valid as bigfoot or the lochness monster. The reasons I have for believing this are precisely the reasons reasonable people have to disbelieve bigfoot or lochness. After years of outspoken certainty of LAD, many people were baffled at my changing of sides on the issue. The standard claims of "he's crazy", "He's bitter" as reasons for not believing were sent my way.


Several people became fascinated and have become almost pseudo-stalkers such as Michael Gilmore and Lou Famoso who regularly tries to get me to add him to my facebook list (I can't believe the guy even remembers me). These people feel compelled to check up on me, possibly to see if their prayers of me getting struck by a lightening bolt or having a heart attack were answered, and that maybe I can bolster their desperate pleas for hope with a turn around story ("I died and yes Lou, Archangel Michael really does have gigantic gleaming biceps, wow you were right all along!").

As I've said before, my turnaround came not from bitterness, but a close reading of things I had previously avoided or ignored- human nature invented by natural selection, neuropsychology etc.. I came around only kicking and screaming. Although it is impossible to rule out life after death, all of my most powerful arguments for it have been drastically undermined in the past few years by new experimentation (they were already drastically undermined, I just didn't have the knowledge base to understand why).

NDE's, OBE's and alien abductions are almost synonymous by my lights. NDE's are more compelling because they occur near death, but the veridical claims have not been verified despite serious effort, and due to recent inducements of OBEs and feelings of a sensed presence (mainline attributes of NDE's) using brain stimulation and magnetic helmets etc... it is perfectly clear to all but the most insistent people that these feelings are created by manipulation of the brain. There is not an actual presence there, and you are not actually leaving your body.

There seems to me to be very little wiggle room left for the hypothesis that people actually do leave their bodies. After scouring OBE message boards I realized that scores of people were consistently unable to verify *anything* they supposedly saw out of body. They very commonly had overlapping attributes of NDEs (lights, tunnels, sensed presences, joy, bliss, realer than real experiences etc...). So I can infer logically that these experiences are overlapping and intertwined with the NDE. And I think I can infer logically that people almost certainly will never be able to prove that they can see out of body, because they almost certainly can't. A handful of interesting stories and anecdotes are expected. I have known at least two people who are sure they saw bigfoot, for instance.

I suppose also, the older one gets and the more experiences one has the more clear it is that people by and large are simply full of shit (my own natural propensity for gullibility and desire to exaggerate the significance of variance random experiences is also a case to be made for the shallowness of my prior belief). Particularly when they want to or need to believe something which gives them hope. They cry foul at the audacity of hopelessness. It bothers them so much they feel the need to stalk me. And the fact they need to know whether I believe or not is a tell that they really don't believe it strongly themselves.

What makes people happy?

Great story. Tip to onegoodmove.org.

The Banality of Evil

It may have been Eli Wiesel who most forcefully made the connection between banality and evil during the holocaust. Evil doesn't truly show itself in the grand and twisted schemes of an evil genius, but in the workaday and humdrum life of all its ministers.

"Nazi women epitomized the everyday 'banality of evil.' Carrying out traditional women's roles.... they cooperated with war, genocide and terror by ignoring it and helping to create an image that all was well." -- Claudia Koonz, Competition for Women's Lebensraum.'

Even the banalities of the Limbaughs, Coulters and Hannitys of the world pale in comparison to the nameless clockwork figures who ideologically tic and toc inside our government. Consider the EPA and the kinds of ministers George Bush has crammed it with - little ideological drones who punctiliously pursue the dictum of their master.

It has been known for decades that Mercury is a neurotoxin and that it is especially lethal in children. It has poisoned our fish supply and has become so concentrated in the larger sea mammals, such as dolphins and whales, that they are inedible. Period. Even so, this doesn't stop the Japanese from ladling out this toxic brew of Mercury laden flesh, every day, to their school age children. They continue to hunt whales and dolphins for food. Apparently, the much vaunted intelligence of the Japanese only goes so far.

In the United States, under the direction of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the EPA was (and presumably still is) under direct orders to stop all efforts by the States, otherwise known as federalism, to individually regulate mercury pollution. In some cases, the EPA requirements would have allowed plants to put more mercury into the air, not less.

"Many state officials believed under the federal trading program "some plants could go totally unregulated. That was totally unacceptable to many states," Becker said."

"About the same time, Nevada objected to the EPA's wanting to flood its power plants with pollution allowances far beyond the amount mercury the plants actually produced. That approach included a large bloc of allowances to a coal burning plant that had been shut down because of clean air violations."

The science behind the lethality of mercury is demonstrable and unquestioned by any peer-reviewed scientists. Fortunately for the United States and our children, a federal appeals court struck down Bush's big money-friendly approach for mercury reduction. Bizarrely, Bush's plan would have allowed plants with excessive smokestack emissions to buy pollution rights from other plants that foul the air less, effectively making the net change in our mercury pollution - Zero.

Some in the media might snarkily refer to this post as an example of "Bush Derangement Syndrome". If so, then explain to me who staffed the EPA and set their agenda? Explain to me any reasonable rationale for why we should continue to bathe our landscape in mercury?

This is one of the most neurologically toxic metals known to man, yet Bush & Cheney think the "economy" comes first.

Well, whose "economy"?

It's certainly not the "economy" of the children suffering from Mercury poisoning, or their mothers and fathers. It's not the "economy" of the fisherman netting fish that are too poisonous to consume. It's not the "economy" of the states whose rivers & lakes are increasingly too toxic to enjoy.

I think we all know whose "economy" Bush & Cheney are protecting.

Jonah Goldturd

I saw this guy try to hawk his book "Liberal Fascism" on the daily show, and John Stewart made mincemeat of him. Using the words "Nazi" and "Fascist" as adjectives for the group of people who brought us the civil rights movement, is quite a feat of the imagination. There is no question that certain political ideologies can use civil rights concepts in order to strong arm policy, but to conjure up connotations of wartime Italy and Germany is really pathetic. In this segment, Alan Colmes actually goes on the offensive:




Here are the basic points of Goldberg's argument. Note that he goes out of his way to insist that he is not *really* comparing liberals to Hitler et al. Whatever.