Saturday, May 26, 2012

Our Wacky World—5/26/2012

Note: ScienceBlogs have been overhauled with WordPress and some old articles are now gone. Sorry for the dead links in past posts but it's beyond my control. Also, most of the pictures in this installment don't link to anything. Sorry.

It's been one year since the Harold Camping letdown. Where are his followers now?
'Another engineer I came to know had spent most of his retirement savings, well over a half-million dollars, taking out full-page newspaper ads and buying an RV that he had custom-painted with doomsday warnings. Even when I pressed, he wasn’t willing to admit any doubts about whether October 21 would really, finally, be it. “How can you say that when you see that all this beautiful information is in the Bible?” he asked me, his voice rising. “How can everything we’ve learned be a lie?”'
Religion Dispatches


"Some church members, who declined to give their names, defended their pastor... Another church member, who declined to give his name..."
CNN

Here's the damn video. Meanwhile...
"Orly Taitz has released her first campaign ad, which is four minutes long and apparently narrated by that chain-smoking woman you might expect to run into at a VFW hall."
Crazier than Pam Geller? You tell me.


The commander of Fort Bliss is an uninformed, uniformed dickhead:
"I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. Soldiers who commit suicide leave their families, their buddies and their units to literally clean up their mess. There is nothing noble about suicide." 
"I am personally fed up with Soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us."
That's what I call supporting the troops. (CNN)

Moving along to our next dickhead...
"Rush Limbaugh was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians yesterday, but the whole affair seemed strangely cloaked in secrecy. The AM talker was ushered into an invite-only ceremony that took place behind closed doors inside the State Capitol's House chambers, "which were locked and guarded by armed members of the Missouri Highway Patrol while the ceremony took place," according to the Kansas City Star.  Democratic lawmakers were banned from the induction."
Media Matters

Guess what happened next?
"Crumbliss said the special security camera is serving a dual purpose. He said the House has been considering installing cameras in the chamber so that it can have live broadcasts of its session. The camera pointed at the Limbaugh statue outside the chamber can serve as a pilot project to test the resolution and quality of its picture, he said."
Bullshit. (Atlanta Journal)


'Listen to his laugh.  It resembles the flat “Ha! Ha! Ha!” that appears in comic-strip dialogue balloons. But worse – far worse – it is mirthless. Mr. Romney expects us to be amused, although he himself is not amused. Freeze the frame, cover the bottom of his face with your hand, and study his eyes. There’s no pleasure there, no amusement. Genuine laughter is triggered only by, and is completely dependent on, shared perception. That’s why we say we “get” a joke. 
'But Mr. Romney is too busy working to share anything – like the vaudevillian tapping so desperately that he’s covered with what performers call “flop sweat.” In rehearsal, I once heard a director say to an overeager actor, “Relax, you’ve got the job.” Now that Mr. Romney seems to have wrapped up the nomination, that counsel may apply here.'
NYmag

"Her distraught parents even called her GP more than 50 times about their daughter's ailing condition over a four-and-a-half month period before her death on January 6 last year. An inquest heard that her GP, Dr Sharad Shripadrao Pandit, accused her parents of "mollycoddling" her. Shockingly, he even claimed her symptoms were brought on because she was 'lovesick'."
Telegraph

"Six roasted fetuses covered with gold for black magic rituals were found in a Bangkok hotel room"
CNN

"We've never really understood the point of preparing to live through the Apocalypse. Isn't the whole point of being a believer during the Rapture is you'll get sucked up to Heaven while the heathens are left behind? Why would you want to stick around surviving anyway? Nonethless [sic], if you're of the inclincation [sic] to expect the world to end in the foreseeable future, we urge you to shop for your survivalist gear anywhere else but [pastor Jim] Bakker's site. Consider the following some tips to surviving the end of the world on a budget."
The Atlantic


There's a movement afoot in the US to make everyone nine months older:
"Clever lawyers might argue, if a person is charged with drinking, or for driving a car while a year under the legal age for such, that the defendant is actually nine months older than their stated age as mandated by the new amendment to their state’s constitution... How many lecherous dirty old men can escape justice by arguing in court that the girl was actually not seventeen but eighteen, after the days of gestation that preceded her live birth are added to her pre-constitutional amendment birth date to produce her true age?"
Blasphemous Blogging


Get ready for "no-kill" farming:
'“We are what we eat” rings even truer now that Chinese researchers discovered that molecules of rice survive the digestion process, enter the blood stream of animals and regulate the expression of mammalian genes. Violence against plants backfires, as it leads to violence against humans and against the environment as a whole, for instance when plants are genetically modified and made resistant to insects, pests or diseases. 
'Positively understood, the project of plant liberation would allow plants to be what they are and to realize their potentialities, often in the context of cross-kingdoms co-evolution. Inasmuch as humans and animals share the vegetal soul with plants, the potentialities of the latter are also ours, though often it is virtually impossible to recognize them as such.'
Dispatches From The Culture Wars


It sounds like there's a reason the cops said they only take cash:
'It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family's money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. "The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money," Williams says. "Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money."'
Huffington Post

'According to a 2010 piece in Fast Company, the trade journal of the breathless bullshit industry, the people behind TED are “creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.” Well! That’s certainly saying… something. (What it’s mostly saying is “This is a Fast Company story about some overhyped Internet thing.”) 
'To even attend a TED conference requires not just a donation of between $7,500 and $125,000, but also a complicated admissions process in which the TED people determine whether you’re TED material; so, as Maura Johnston says, maybe it’s got more in common with Harvard than is initially apparent.
'Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.'
Salon

You know, I've been wondering about TED. They've had some good talks—even Randi has turned up, doing his usual spiel—but I doubt we're going to see Henry Rollins. Or did he already do one? Damned if I know.

"He discovered my post, and things looked like a mildly interesting flame war was going to roast for a while. But then Yomin bizarrely leveled up, and began slinking around the web, making edits to my Wikipedia entry as well as posting on such venues as the RD.net’s old forum, saying things about me that crossed the line from the usual flaming and trolling into actual, legal defamation. I think the child molestation accusation was where I decided enough was enough, and I actually had my attorney file a libel and defamation suit. I later withdrew it on his advice once it was clear just how beyond the pale a personality Yomin was."
The Atheist Experience


Everyone's favorite ex-military chaplin on the gays:
“It is entirely possible — we know from the Bible, for example, when Jesus cast the devil out of Legion, he went into a herd of pigs,” Klingenschmitt said. “So, it is possible for demons or the devil to inhabit or invade animals just the same way they invade humans, and that causes the sin of lust.” 
“So, what you’re saying is, in humans it’s marketing that makes people gay; in animals, it’s the souls of gay humans who have invaded the animals,” Pacman [sic] replied. “That makes them gay?”
Raw Story

"Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing."
CNN

Somewhere, a bantha is weeping