A new video from my favorite Christian apologist.
I bet Zdenny will now tell us how nice it is for someone else to be “waging war” on atheists and how he’s right that we can’t think for ourselves. (It’s easy to make that claim since it’s unfalsifiable — since he’s not getting through the moderation again.)
It is however, not as bad as it could be so that’s a plus.
Today I took my beloved Ginger puppy to see the vet as I suspected something unusual was going on with her eyes. I had noticed a few times in the past couple of months that her eyes sometimes had a strange blue tint, but I always thought it was a trick of the light. Maybe I didn’t even think that, as the observation was so fleeting that it barely even registered in my mind. It wasn’t until I paid a visit to my aunt on the weekend, who has a recently blind dog, that I even realised I’d been seeing the blue tint for so long. Still I ignored it, thinking maybe I was just being paranoid. When I noticed the blue-ness again the next day however, I decided to investigate. I shone a flashlight into her eyes and really studied the milky blueish tint for the first time. I pondered, I researched, I even compared with my friend’s dog’s eyes. I pondered some more. Worry was definitely in the mix somewhere, so I booked the vet appointment, even though I thought (and hoped) that I was just crazy.
Unfortunately, as the vet assured me, I was not crazy and poor Ginger has developed cataracts in both eyes. The vet said that it is in the early stages and it will probably be a couple of years before full blindness sets in, but she also said that it is likely affecting her vision already because it is difficult to see the retina behind the cloudyness. In spite of this, I have yet to see any real signs of vision loss yet.
The good news is that dogs adjust rather well to being blind if the onset is slow, which it is likely to be. We also have an easy floorplan when it comes to her navigating the house; all one level and pretty much a straight line from one room to the next, not a lot of corners. The news is upsetting of course, and in my heart I grieve, but I know that the situation is much more upsetting for me than it is for Ginger. She is still happy and healthy, though a little overweight, and to her nothing has really changed, life is good.
So in honour of my beautiful baby, have some pics 🙂
(click to embiggen)
I’ve been putting off working on this, but it’s been humming in the back of my mind for a while now, not the least reason being that everyone in the blogosphere seems to be talking about it.
The core of the issue at hand is climate change, and the ground that denialists have been gaining over the past 18 months. And the problem I have is, people are far too willing to suggest that every scientist in every country in the world that agrees that anthropogenic climate change is in the process of attempting to perpetrate the greatest conspiracy hoax ever, and has somehow been able to keep hundreds of thousands of people who are “in on it” quiet about the fact that it’s all a hoax, and all this supposedly for “money”.
And yet, there’s far more money in preventing humankind from moving off of petroleum while the oil companies have 99% of the Earths’ oil reserves under their control presently, and have tapped hardly any of it at all. So, conspirators at the top of the oil heap spread anti-science, and those with vested interests in defeating science (e.g., conservatives and religious leaders), as well as those that stand to make a lot of money off the perpetuation of current technology, become the “true believers” of the denialist movement and fight tooth and nail against the general scientific consensus that exists. And many, maybe most, of these people honestly believe that it is more likely that scientists are just trying to destroy the gravy train they’re riding on, than that scientists are presenting the facts in an unbiased manner and it just so happens to threaten said gravy train.
Continue reading “Climate conspiracy”
From one of the most reliable news sources in the world, there’s new and unimpeachable evidence that God created the universe six thousand years ago:
According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.
“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”
“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”
So God DID do it, though much of “it” that he did was largely redundant.
Tawa hallae, a new species of dinosaur discovered in New Mexico, is one of our earlier examples of dinosaurs, at seventeen million years after the earliest known, and is indeed one of the ancestors of the terrible lizard itself, Tyrannosaurus rex.
Most interestingly, it appears to have some hollow bones, a feature shared by dinosaurs’ living descendants, the Aves clade (in other words, birds). This is evidently a relatively big find, filling some of the blanks in the predicted evolution of dinosaurs and subsequently birds. The find also helps detail early migration patterns from Pangaea.
This dinosaur contains characteristics of several lineages that can help in understanding evolution of the various forms of dinosaurs, the scientists said.
It developed on the supercontinent Pangea, in which creatures could move from region to region before Pangea broke apart into the current continents.
Nesbitt added that the find may reinforce the idea that dinosaurs originated in what is now South America and then moved on to other regions.
T. hallae is an early form of theropod, from which the well known T. Rex later developed, as did modern birds.
Indeed, the new find had some hollow bones, as modern birds do, though it had other more lizardlike than birdlike characteristics, according to Nesbitt.
The AP article is syndicated at Yahoo News.
Heh heh. It’s funny ‘coz it’s true.
If you were over at Greg Laden’s blog sometime around June, you might have seen an otherwise innocuous post about the FDA and warning labels on acetaminophen explode into astroturf-central in relatively short order. The people doing the astroturfing had a vested interest, it turns out, in discrediting the FDA: they were working for Swanson Vitamins, and were trying to muddy the waters about the very oversight body that was working to recall one of their cash cows, Zicam. For those of you that don’t know, Zicam is primarily a nasal gel with a lot of zinc, marketed as a “homeopathic” cure for the common cold. There’s some evidence that zinc taken orally might have some effect in shortening colds, but nothing showing that it helps if administered nasally.
Not only is there no evidence that intra-nasal zinc application doesn’t HELP, there’s actually a lot of evidence that it HURTS. And by hurts, I mean it can cause people anosmia — the total inability to smell. Permanently.
The talented Scicurious explains:
You can see here the treatments, and on the left side what they were staining for. In all the cells, they found Adenylyl cyclase 3, beta-tubulin (a protein specific for neurons, and since MOE ARE neurons, you’d look for that), and olfactory market protein. You’re looking for the green stains in all of these. And again, only with Zicam was there a big reduction in detection of these proteins.
This isn’t happy, because this means the cells are just insensitive. It implies that they’re dead.
I hope all those astroturfers feel a terrible pang of guilt that they were arguing for the elimination of the oversight body that generally works against the pharmaceutical companies that bring to market such horrid products. Real people trusted your advice, fuckwits. And real people were, and continue to be, hurt, when you peddle your unscientific “medicine” and fight for looser protections for the public.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXjbMIZzAgs
YEAH! Aced it! Tell me you didn’t cheer at the end. I did!
Hat tip to Cnet, where they have the whole story.
This week has been a bit of a busy one as far as godlessness goes! Here’s a quick round-up of the best stuff on the blogosphere and of what people have tweeted about over the week.
But first, as always, your Cool Atheist of the Week: Sir Ian McKellan, Shakespearean thespian probably best known for the awesomest incarnations of both Gandalf and Magneto ever.
“I was brought up a Christian, low church, and I like the community of churchgoing. That’s rather been replaced for me by the community of people I work with. I like a sense of family, of people working together. But I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.”
— from a January 19, 1996 profile by Tim Appelo found in Mr. Showbiz.
Links below the fold, as usual. What are you, new here?
Continue reading “RCimT: Busy week for us heathens! (updated)”
Get this. You know how Ray Comfort went through all the trouble of creating a new 50-page intro to Origin of Species intended to “show what Darwin was really like”? How he was taken to task for abridging the original book, removing those chapters that challenged his lies the most, then mysteriously forgetting a graph or two in the next revision? Well the hits keep on coming, as Professor Stan Guffey, the guy who wrote a biography on Charles Darwin that Comfort apparently nicked, never gave Comfort permission to use them. That’s right — the only parts of the intro that aren’t spurious and refuted allegations about how Darwin and Hitler were BFFs, the only parts that are actually true, were plagiarized.
Comfort put his introduction on the Web months ago, and several bloggers who monitor anti-evolution efforts noted differences in style between the biography and the rest of the introduction. A brief computer search uncovered the source, and they confronted the author and publisher about the apparent plagiarism months before the book was printed. Guffey says he was never contacted for permission to use the biography. Both the author and publisher declined to comment for this story. Contacted by phone, Bridge-Logos publicist Shawn Myers said it was the first she had heard of matter, so she was unable to respond.
“I am party to a scam,” Guffey says. “The introduction begins with a nice, sweet little biography, then degenerates into intellectually lame, lazy distortions, selective reading of the literature, picking and choosing of facts, and misreadings of the historical record.” He says Comfort “gently moves folks into the notion that they don’t want to read what comes after the introduction. He just wants his 50 pages read, 47 of which are anti-intellectual, dishonest drivel, the first three of which are pretty good because I wrote them.”
And yet Banana Man will probably face no repercussions for it, as Comfort is unlikely to lose his job over it, whereas if the shoe was on the other foot, Guffey could lose his job for stealing something of Comfort’s. Not that you would need to steal something of Comfort’s — just do a Mad Libs and write “Darwin” and “Hitler” and “evil” and “gulags” and “Godless” and “evolution” in the blanks.
