Scenes from a move..

Animala: I hate you.

Bing: You are moving to Atlanta with me. You can't possibly hate me.

Animala: I hate myself more.

Bing: I hate you.


HJ




(Update: I want to thank all of you who have linked to my podcast, and to the 2000 hits hits that you have all brought that post about Brannon Howse. The man is a boil and he gets crazier, the more invested in this strange narrative he gets. He still hasn't had the stones to face up to the clear antisemitic roots of his conspiratorial belief. You might share your admiration for his head-burying at info [at] worldviewweekend.com. Keep it clean and legal people. He already thinks he's being persecuted. Don't give him an actual reason to say so.)

Farewell (for a few days)

I knew that this time would come, but I never thought it would come so soon. I am, of course, speaking about the day that I disassembled my computer and packed it for Atlanta. So, because my access to the Webbies will be curtailed and uncertain for a few days (I have not made phone arrangements yet), I thought that I would give y'all (oh, god, I've started talking like them) a heads up.

See you on the flip side:


HJ

AiG's Jason Lisle unironically starts series on logical fallacies...

Dude, it's the series I've been waiting, like, 3 years for. Seriously. It's going to be hard to type up responses when I am completely bathed in Vaseline...no, cosmoline.

Jason Lisle is, what, sort of an astronomer or something? Yeah, my astronomy may not be great, but I teach critical thinking. He is walking into the gaping jaws of the enemy. This is, I imagine, much how it feels to be sitting behind a machine-gun in a well hidden pillbox as an enemy squad approaches in an almost straight line.

"Breeng it on, beetches!!!!" (My cosmoline is in the MG pit.)

I can't wait for Lisle's discussion of circular reasoning! Or arguing from completely shitty premises! Or the ad naziam! Or...oh, just everything!

Ahhhh!

HJ

HJHOP Podcast 11: Brannon Howse and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

It's here.

This is the podcast I want to see go far. I am having a heck of the time with the conversion from Google.docs. A pox on blogger, which in the middle of an edit totally f#@#!$ up everything. Every letter. It was a sight, and I almost had a stroke. So I have put up a temporary transcript that is visually unpleasing, but I am working on an updated version.

Also, I hate all computers everywhere.

Update: Blogger still sucks and thinks I want everything to be Trebuchet. So be it.


Hello. This is Bing.

I want to discuss something that I think is deadly serious, and I really hope that Brannon Howse hears this. I have been studying conspiracy theories for some time now, and recently as I went through a report by Chip Berlet, his Toxic to Democracy, which was recently released by a progressive think-tank that tracks racist groups and conspiracist movements, I was struck by Berlet's description of the similarities between the various editions of the notoriously fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. During a class about American conspiracism, I made a point of taking a week out to talk about this European document because it is one of the most successful and stubborn forgeries in history and was incorporated into the Nazi philosophy and educational curriculum, which even Howse and I can agree had pretty bad consequences. Berlet finds 14 points shared in all the variations of this truly incoherent tome.

1. "Jews are behind a plan for global conquest"
2. "Jews work through Masonic Lodges."
3. "Jews use liberalism to weaken church and state."
4. "Jews control the press"
5. "Jews work through radicals and revolutionaries."
6. "Jews manipulate the economy, especially through banking monopolies and the power of gold.”
7. "Jews issue paper currency not tied to the gold standard.”
8. "Jews promote financial speculation and use of credit.”
9. "Jews replace traditional educational curriculum to discourage independent thinking.”
10. "Jews encourage immorality among Christian youth.”
11. "Jews use intellectuals to confuse people."
12. "Jews control puppet governments through secret alliances and blackmailing public officials."
13. "Jews weaken laws through liberal interpretations."
14. "Jews will suspend civil liberties during an emergency and then make the measures permanent."

The shared features of the various editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion invest Jews with an all-pervasive, insatiable lust for power and an improbable influence over human affairs. It is my contention that the underlying political philosophy behind the Protocols and the image of the world that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion promotes is virtually indistinguishable from that of Brannon Howse. I would go so far as to suggest that Howse's worldview is the direct descendant and heir of the most vicious and destructive antisemitic conspiracy theories.

I want to make it absolutely and emphatically clear that I am not arguing that Brannon Howse is an antisemite. I do believe, on the basis of numerous articles and interviews, that Brannon in fact almost fetishizes Israel. What I am arguing is that the form of his arguments and the underlying philosophy are in almost every respect identical to those endorsed by the anonymous plagiarists responsible for the Protocols. The version of conspiracism that Howse has adopted (and peddles at every opportunity) merely substitutes one scapegoat for another. I intend to prove this in this essay, and I demand that Howse own up to the roots of his beliefs and answer the question: "Why are the same bogus arguments used to demonize the Jews more legitimate when you direct them at other people, Brannon?" I refuse to accept the answer, "Well, because these people really are like that." Such an answer has all the authority of someone saying, "I can't verify the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but that's what Jews are like."

I think that the best proof that Howse's beliefs are merely variations on a theme composed by racist predecessors is to be found in the explanation that they offer for some of Howse's strangely incongruous beliefs. These peculiarities make sense if they are merely inherited and parroted rather than rationally derived. I will refer most often to the writings that Howse showcases at christianworldviewnetwork.com, and his own radio show.

Point 1: Jews are behind a plan for global conquest

Howse is obsessed with "global conquest" in all the manifestations of what he calls globalism. Unlike the usual use of the term, Howse's version of globalism includes worldwide economic, military, political and spiritual unification. Take for instance his selection of "news stories" on a December 2008 episode of WorldviewTubeNewsTopics, "Is World Government Plausible? Kennedy/Obama Medicine" (http://www.worldviewtube.com/video.php/videoid-4348/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse), wherein he highlights a story about plans for a regional mideast security coalition (http://euobserver.com/9/27277), gives a dramatic reading of Gideon Rachman's blog post at the Financial Times "And Now for One World Government" (http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2008/12/and-now-for-a-world-government/), and reads Dick Morris's November blog entry "Bush’ Legacy: European socialism" (http://thehill.com/dick-morris/bushs-legacy-european-socialism-2008-11-18.html), which opens:

"The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union."

Perhaps the most totalizing expression of Howse's obsession with the globalization of, well, everything, comes in a Code Blue Rally speech he gave, listed at worldviewtube.com as "Three Worldviews Merge: Understanding One-World Spirituality" (http://www.worldviewtube.com/video.php/videoid-4244/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse, see time 00:00-1:48).

But who is behind this dastardly series of unifications--who is the scapegoat? On worldviewtimes.com, Cliff Kincaid (who is singled out in the Berlet report), a regular correspondent whose weekly articles have appeared on Brannon's website since at least December of last year (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/bio.php/authorid-353/Cliff%20Kincaid) suspects in his "Who Will Investigate the UN-Vatican Connection?" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-5157/Brannon-Howse/Cliff-Kincaid) that the conspiracy is a little bit Catholic a little bit United Nations, with a subtle hint of Alger Hiss-style communism:

"[T]he Pope explicitly endorsed the Responsibility to Protect, known by the acronym R2P, a doctrine endorsed by the U.N. in 2005 and designed to help the world body assume the powers of a world government. The World Federalist Movement, which has promoted world government, global taxes and a United Nations Army, has cultivated international acceptance of the concept."

Brannon’s friend Jan Markel, a broadcaster with Olive Tree Ministries, also seems to think that the Pope is somehow involved with the New World Order. And even though the description of one of her radio shows on Howse’ site clearly misquotes the Pope (see image), Howse runs the show anyway. In a recent episode, as I reported in an earlier podcast, two successive callers contacted Howse’ show and offered anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, one about “the Black Pope”(a Jesuit conspiracy) and another stressing the ties between Nazi Germany and the Vatican. To Howse’ discredit, he did not attempt to correct them. Here we see that one of the substitutions that is made in this community of conspiracy finds Catholics at fault instead of Jews. How, Brannon, is this any better?

Point 2: Jews work through Masonic Lodges.

When Howse brought Ron Carlson onto his July 5th radio show (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-12912/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse), Howse's concern about the Masons initially confused me (http://www.4shared.com/file/117819922/b5415635/HJHOPPodcast9.html). Indeed, it is the indictment of Masonic lodges that stands as one of the most direct pieces of evidence that directly links Howse's beliefs back to its antisemitic roots. A little background first, and this comes directly from the mouth of Chip Berlet. A few weeks ago, Berlet answered Terry Gross' question, "Who were the Illuminati?" and his answer is an excellent, concise account of the intricacies of the supposed Illuminati/Masonic/Jewish conspiracy (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105531867). [Listen to the audio clip]

I feel it is important to add one more level to the conspiracy. As progressive ideals swept through Europe in the wake of Napoleon's conquests, and the Jews were no longer ghettoized, well, since clearly the Jews benefited from progressive reform, they must have been the ones who orchestrated the French Revolution through the Masons, so went the thought. I feel the need to add one more level to this account. Since the medieval period, Jews have been considered Christ-killing agents of the devil, and the nefarious purposes of the devil-worshiping Jews have been grafted onto Masonic lodges. Recently, the Baptists officially fretted about the presence of Masons in their ranks--I am not aware what the outcome of that deliberation was--but the whole issue stems (initially) from the fears of the Jews who were supposed to be controlling the Masons. In Carlson's version, he has cut out the Jewish/Illuminatus middle man and gone straight to the pagan-Satanist source of all evil.

Freemasonry is a very strange thing for Brannon to worry about, but it makes perfect sense if it is a holdover from the historical roots of his ill-thought out conspiracism.

Brannon, however, has not managed to completely shed his fear of the Illuminati. Once a week, Brannon fills some airtime by phone on Ron Meyer's show, which airs in Mississippi. In his most recent segment on the 23rd of July (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php?EpisodeID=13189&FileID=7109), Brannon discussed the Illuminati and their connection to paganism. Alice Bailey was a spiritualist and proto-new-ager who was a student of Madame Blavatsky, a fraudulent psychic and plagiarist, who was exposed in 1883 by the mostly rigorous British Society for Psychical Research (of which William James was a member) to be little more than a crude parlor magician who nonetheless gathered an immense following (http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/theosophy.html). That Bailey, to whom Howse makes reference, was a student of a fraud makes it unlikely that she ever, as Howse claims, talked to a demon:

[Audio clip: HowseandtheIlluminati]

Howse's attempt to link the Illuminati to paganism is interesting if only for its inaccuracies, as the Illuminati were freethinkers who embraced Enlightenment ideals.

Point 3: Jews use liberalism to weaken church and state

Howse's most recent discovery has been the inflammatory Linda Hinkel, who, as far as I can determine, is barely tethered to reality. Her July 7th "The Treachery of America's Church Leaders" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-5150/Brannon-Howse), in the tradition of paranoid literature like The Protocols, is rambling, nearly incoherent and unified only by an unjustified emotion. As such, she is a fair representative of the tone of Worldview Weekend when it comes to liberals having their filthy ways with Church and State. She scapegoats communists:

What happened to the strict separation of church and state policy? Apparently, the elite Marxists now think it is acceptable to have church members politicking on holy grounds. These elites sure like to exploit this policy to further their destructive ideology. Oh, of course, since the Global Elites are ignoring the laws, why would we expect some holy community organizers to follow them? These radicals hide, lie, cheat, misinform, and deceive because their Alinsky Manifesto dictates that it is only the ends that count, not the means.

Not only are liberals supposed to be operating on the churches, but Howse argues that liberal members of the Church are inviting the liberal devil into their houses of worship. See, for instance, his November 30th, 2006 "Can Butts, Obama, Dybul and Rick Warren Save the World?" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-1313):

Rick Warren's conference is this coming Friday, December 2006 at his church. To this day, I don't have a clue what Pastor Warren thinks can be accomplished by gathering together a group of non-believers that are hostile to Christianity to discuss the world's problems. Promotion of a social gospel will not save one soul.

As you know by now, Rick has invited United States Senator Barack Obama to speak at his church conference. Senator Obama is described by many as left of Hillary Clinton. Now that is really left. You are aware of Obama's radical support of abortion and same-sex marriage aren't you?

Did you know that Rick will also have Mark Dybul at his conference? Ingrid Schlueter writing on her website www.sliceoflaodicea.com describes exactly who Mark Dybul is for those that may not know:

With his gay lover watching, Mark Dybul was recently sworn in by Condoleeza Rice as global AIDS coordinator. Here's the story from the Washington Blade of the swearing in ceremony where Dybul's gay lover Jason held the Bible while Dybul was sworn in as "Ambassador" to AIDS. Now Rick Warren thinks he has answers for Christians at his Global Summit on AIDS and the Church. It is the homosexual rebellion against God's Law that started the AIDS crisis in America over 20 years ago in San Fransisco.

Perhaps it is Howse's definition of authority that leads him to make ill-advised statements about the coming together of global forces; after all, he feels free to quote someone whose position is indistinguishable from that of Fred Phelps.

Point 4-- Jews control the press

In this area, Brannon gives free reign to Cliff Kincaid, who, according to his bio, "serves as editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report." Kincaid finds the media influenced by the shenanigans of liberal masters. For instance, see his January 22nd, "Liberal Media Anxious to Get Geithner Confirmed" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4491/Brannon-Howse/Cliff-Kincaid). In this article, he claims that the headline "Geithner Gets Grilled as Financial Sector Wobbles" (http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Economy/idUSTRE4B70ME20090121) suggests that:

"merely questioning Geithner somehow undermines economic health and a market rebound. [...] Such coverage," he goes on to say, "is designed to panic Senators into approving Geithner, who supposedly knows so much about so many important financial things that his confirmation alone will inspire market confidence and possibly turn the economic situation around. Some of this coverage comes from some of the same media outlets tied to firms getting some of the Wall Street bailout money."

So, the media and the banks are controlled by the same people? Where have I head that before? Oh, yeah. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Again, I ask Howse why this type of logic is more valid when applied to liberals than to Jews?

Kincaid's most recent indictment on WorldviewWeekend.com targeted the late Walter Cronkite, and I encourage you to read the July 19th article, "The Terrible Truth about Walter Cronkite" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com//article.php/articleid-5178/Brannon-Howse/Cliff-Kincaid), wherein he claims:

"The terrible truth is that Walter Cronkite symbolized liberal media bias and used that bias with disastrous consequences for our nation and the world. His latest cause was world government and the destruction of American sovereignty."

Howse more recently merely repeated Kincaid's assertions in his July 24th radio show(http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php?EpisodeID=13205&FileID=7122). Again, the almost incomprehensibly bonkers Linda Henkel, in her "Teachers, Judges, Radical Islam, Acorn, Activists: The Treachery of America's Fifth Columns" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-5119/Brannon-Howse) claims:

“Most of our television, radio, and newspapers have become successful propaganda tools of the Communists, who love to brainwash We the People with their anti-American propaganda. In my family, we've gotten rid of most of these "news" sources in our home and now go to the Internet and to each other for our news. The path to Communism is easy if our minds are under the control of others. Is this why Jay Rockefeller has introduced legislation to tamper with our freedom of speech through the Internet? How ironic that his family began one of the most corrupt foundations in this country –the Rockefeller Foundation –that promotes the New Global Order of Communism by spreading their tax-free monies with stealth to all their totalitarian causes.”

A recent example of Howse's own slamming of the so-called "liberal media" came in a rather ill-informed conversation between Howse and Answers in Genesis founder, Ken Ham. For a breathtaking appropriation of antisemitism as an assault on Christians, their June 12th exchange over the news coverage of the Holocaust shooter James W. Von Brunn cannot be matched. See the description of the show (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-12524/Brannon-Howse/Program-With-Brannon-Howse):

Brannon’ guest is Ken Ham: Topic One: The Holocaust Museum shooter was not a Christian as some liberal media are reporting. The man’ website attacks Jews and Christians and calls Christianity a Jewish birthed religion. The liberal media will not be confused by the facts as many will seek to use these horrible crimes to attempt to portray Christians as a threat to society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Also, in his May 5th love letter to America, "26 Similarities Between America and Nazi Germany," (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4881/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse), Howse says:

Hitler prevented dissenters from using radio to challenge his worldview. Many powerful liberals in America have made clear their intent to reintroduce the "Fairness Doctrine" that would require conservative and religious radio stations to offer equal time to anti-Christian, anti-conservative worldviews.

Howse seems not to process the fact that even if the Fairness Doctrine were reinstated, Christians would be allowed to have their own TV shows and as many of them as they like. How allowing Christians to continue to say whatever they please amounts to preventing dissenters from using radio to challenge a particular worldview Howse never explains.

Point 5: “Jews work through radicals and revolutionaries.”

Howse dedicated some time during his July 14th show to the French book, The Coming Insurrection, a topic I believe he picked up on from professional conspiracist and Obama birth certificate denier Glenn Beck. On his website, Howse describes the book as “nothing less than a manual for domestic terrorism by the far left”(http://www.worldviewradio.com/episas in classic conspiracist form, traditional enemies become either allies or servents to a common master.

Perhaps the most odious example of Howse's assertion that radicals and revolutionaries are being used by liberal masters appears his comments about Public Allies, the group that looked for leaders who were already in places where leaders were needed (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-11967/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse). I take this clip from my May 15th podcast (http://www.clickcaster.com/items/hjhoppod1).

[AUDIO CLIP]

Howse claims that radical welfare mothers, former prisoners, and ex-gang members are going to be used by the Obamas and ACORN to, and he says this later in the broadcast (and you can hear it in my podcast), pit the races against one another. This is simply recasting the Obamas and ACORN in the role of the Jew puppet master, stirring up dissent among the poor. This fear of the poor reminds me of the fears of slave rebellions of Southern plantation owners and the paranoia that the underclass was secretly organizing to revolt. Notice that Howse did not criticize the presence of Harvard graduates in Michelle Obama's first class for Public Allies, but the inclusion of people from the inner city. This thinly veiled reference to poor minorities is no more acceptable than when an antisemite blames "international bankers" for what he believes are the crimes of international Jewry.

Points 6, 7, 8: “Jews manipulate the economy, especially through banking monopolies and the power of gold;” “Jews issue paper currency not tied to the gold standard,”and "Jews promote financial speculation and use of credit.”

I have long wondered why a preacher like Howse is perennially concerned with the economy, the Federal Reserve Bank, and a preference for the gold standard to a floating currency. His amateurish preoccupation with financial matters runs throughout his website. The depressing reality is that bigots have traditionally implicated wealthy Jews with financial manipulation and unscrupulous business practices. Until the modern era, Christians have generally considered loaning on credit a sin. The Jews, as far back as Jesus' rampage through the Temple, have attached no taboo to the practice. When Jewish communities were sequestered and relegated to European ghettos, they established what might be called parallel economies. They had their own social structures and business leaders and, per force of exclusion, encountered less competition with outside businesses. When the ghettos opened up, these wealthy Jews started competing, like good capitalists, with Christians' businesses. This new source of competition was, of course, not really welcome, and many Gentiles painted their new Jewish competitors in racist terms.

More recently, people who either prefer to not think of themselves as racists or who are racists but do not want to appear to be racists, have substituted "international Jews" with "international bankers." In the context of modern conspiracies, it is perhaps impossible to miss the anti-Semitic roots of these particular concerns. This is not to say one may never speak critically about "international business" of any type, even banking, but when one posits a cabal of unreasonably powerful international money-grubbers manipulating world markets because they can, it is hard to avoid that this role was originally was assigned to Jews. Again, I need to stress that I am not saying that Howse is an antisemite. He just applies the perceived social structures described in the Protocols and reassigns responsibility to another agent.

In an article from March 25, 2008 called "Past Presidents Have Warned Us About the Danger and Corruption of a Central Bank (The Federal Reserve)" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-3264/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse), Howse is pretty explicit about his fear of a central banking system in his opening lines:

Few Americans know the truth about the Federal Reserve. The reality is it is no more a part of the federal government than is Federal Express. The Federal Reserve is a private corporation run by private bankers.

Why should you care? Because as President Thomas Jefferson, President Andrew Jackson and President Woodrow Wilson all understood, a private central bank has the power to destroy our lives and steal our freedoms.

OK, so that's not exactly true. The people who are running the Fed are a council of 12 people. 7 of these are appointed by the President. The other ones are rotating regional Reserve Bank chairs. The appointments are staggered and nobody owns it. The composition of the Central Board is such that an appointment spans administrations. They aren't the Rothschilds. The Fed is hardly in the hands of private bankers who work for their own personal gain. We'll meet the Rothschilds in a moment.

Yes, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson opposed the idea of a national bank, but relying on their advice to set modern information-age monetary policy makes as much sense as asking the last century's revolutionary genius Albert Einstein for a haircut. That is to say, it is an appeal to a false authority. At any rate, have you seen Einstein's hair? I mean, really, what were you thinking?

So, what is the Fed and what does it do? I generally take little notice of the day-to-day functioning of the Federal Reserve Bank. Arthur MacEwan, economics professor at U Mass, however, spends a good deal of time worrying about it professionally. In his Spring 2007 Dollars & Sense column (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2007/0507drdollar.html), MacEwan sorts out some of the confusion of right-wing conspiracists with respect to the Federal Reserve. First, he patiently explains that there are a number of powerful sectors in the encomony, for instance, the energy, communication and transportation sectors, so while the Fed is important, it by no means has a monopoly on economic activity. Second, these sectors have competing and often directly contradictory interests; one example MacEwan cites is bankers' desire to be free of government regulation while reaping the benefits of the stability that is brought by regulation. Third, the Fed simply is not omnipotent; it exerts heavy influence over short term lending rates. It has no control over long-term interest rates, which heavily influence major investment planning. MacEwan explains what the Fed does:

The Fed has a variety of functions involving regulation of the banking system, including influencing the amount of money in circulation and interest rates (the price people pay to use other people's money). Of special importance, the Fed can influence the amount of loans that banks issue. When a bank issues a loan, this creates more spending power. This spending power (usually in the form of increasing the amount in the borrower's checking account) is the same thing as more money in circulation. So by influencing banks' loan actions, the Fed influences the money supp government to engage in excessive spending: the government can borrow from the public, but then, because of inflation, can repay in dollars that have less worth.

This fascination of some right-wingers with inflation and the debasement of the currency is ironic because, in fact, the Fed often (although not always) acts in exactly the opposite manner—limiting the growth of the money supply and restricting inflation.

When I came across this column, specifically looking for information about the functioning of the Federal Reserve, I was looking for a baseline understanding of the Federal banking system. But MacEwan gets to where I was going first:

Finally, while I am sure that there are many decent people who see the Fed and the bankers as the source of the world's problems, this view is often part of a larger anti-Semitism. The focus on "Jewish financiers" (the Rothschilds, for example) as the source of our economic and other problems is as old as it is wrong and offensive.

Luckily, Howse's site has never taken issue with the Rothschild family, I mean, except on May 26th of this year, when it printed James Quinn's article, "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4964/Brannon-Howse/James-Quinn). Oh, and another Quinn article, "Grand Illusion-The Federal Reserve" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4717/Brannon-Howse/James-Quinn). In "Ain't no Rest for the Wicked," Quinn says that we can identify the historical roots of the current financial crisis, and he opens the section with a quote from Mayer Amschel Rothschild:

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

Quinn goes on:

When the banking cartel succeeded in creating the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, control of money in the United States was put into the hands of bankers whose sole purpose is to enrich themselves at the expense of the citizens of the country. Their relentless printing of money has resulted in the dollar losing 96% of its value since 1913. The printing of dollars has allowed politicians to spend money today and make unfunded commitments decades into the future. The systematic inflation created by the Federal Reserve is immoral as it impoverishes the middle class and senior citizens for the benefit of bankers, the elite rich and entrenched politicians. Much of the moral decay in our nation can be traced to the manipulation of money in the last 8 decades.

In "The Grand Illusion--The Federal Reserve," Quinn exposes himself really to be a barenaked anti-Semite at heart. He quotes a letter said to be authored by the Rothschilds:

"Those few who can understand the system (check book money and credit) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on it favors, that there will be little opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear it burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."

I was unable to trace the source of the letter to a date earlier than 1933, when it was published by Father Coughlin, a virulent and open antisemite and, in a bitter irony, a founding founder of shock- and hate-radio. I was able to find the quote on page 88 of Coughlin's 1933 The New Deal in Money. In it, Coughlin writes: "In an unfortunate letter which was never intended to fall into hostile hands, the Rothschilds on June 25, 1863, confided the following admission to a firm of bankers by the name of Ikleheimer, resident of 3 Wall Street. In part," Coughlin says, "the letter reads as follows: 'the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.' The quote was picked up by the fascist poet Ezra Pound, who said the lines came from a letter in the 1860s and referred to the Jews staging the American Civil War. I personally find that hard to believe. The murky source of these dubious lines aside (I mean, really, who signs their letters “The Rothschilds?"), there can be no doubt that the anti-Semite Coughlin was the one who injected that phrase into American popular conspiracy culture.

But at least Quinn goes on to see a Jewish conspiracy in the establishment of the Fed, and what is not explicitly stated in "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked" is glaringly obvious in "The Grand Illusion":

The House of Rothschild had been the dominant banking family in Europe for two centuries. They were known for making fortunes during Panics and War. Some claimed that they would cause Panics in order to take advantage of those who panicked. The Panic of 1907 was the used as the reason for creating the Federal Reserve.

There is a logical error here, actually it is a 200-hectare logical error farm, but I'm going to let most of them rot on the vine. Let me pick two. First is that Quinn fails to point out that the Rothschild family were also making oodles of cash during the peace as well. At the same time, the Fed was created in part to alleviate some the risk of having crashes, so Jews pushing for something that would stop profitable panics seems to be something of a charity on their part. How everyone taking their money away from the banks benefits the banks, I won't understand. In this case, yes, Jews are clearly the scapegoats, and Howse should remove this disgusting antisemite from his website.

Howse has often lamented the floating currency and expresses a naive and whimsical nostalgia for the gold standard. While Howse is clearly just a pitchman for this sponsor, it seems to be in line with most of his previous statements:

[AUDIO: HOWSE AND GOLD]

Now wasn't that awful?

As I've said, Howse's interest in banking and gold makes little to no sense on its own. Like his suspicion of Masons, however, its historical antecedents are racist. Let me stress again that I am not asserting that that Howse is a racist; this facet of his worldview, however, in conjunction with these other points, clearly reflects the anti-Semitic sources of the ideology he espouses.

On a separate note, I would like to point out that buying gold now is probably a really, really bad idea. Lots of people who are selling their greatly depreciated stocks and reinvesting in gold, which is (consequentially) vastly overvaluated, are perfectly violating the most basic principle of capitalist investing, "Buy low, sell high." Don’t do it.

Points 9 and 11: “Jews replace traditional educational curriculum to discourage independent thinking;” and "Jews use intellectuals to confuse people"

There is no shortage of evildoers who are waiting to corrupt your children at every opportunity and cast your child's soul into perdition, and Howse probably has reprinted an article about every single one of them. The "corrupter of children" motif is an especially effective appeal to a primal fear that sets off all sorts of evolutionary klaxons and alarms, and therefore it is an attractive target for fear-mongering alarmist ninnies and conspiracy theorists. If you were to ask Howse, "Who wants your children?" I suspect his answer is, "Who doesn't?" The UN, occultists, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, homosexuals, communists and the godless all want to grab hold of your children's minds, at least according to Howse. That the solution of Howse and his ilk is to make sure that children never even encounter these other points of view is, ironically, an example of the type of coersion that they fear from the outside world.

The clear threat to all children, everywhere, comes in a listener email that Howse reads aloud on his July 17th show, when Worldview Weekend columnist Tom DeWeese was his guest (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-13079/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse):

[AUDIO CLIP PRIMARYEDUCATIONCLIPDEWEESE07-16]

In his description of the show you just heard, Howse says: "Students are often asked to stand on one side of the room if they agree with liberal ideas and the other side of the room if they agree with Biblical or conservative ideas." He basis this sweeping statement on an anecdote of a person who was not there. Heck, she could write a gospel, at least by Howse's standards!

The problem with this is that the goals of America 2000 are available on the web (http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/22/f1/db.pdf). I could find no mention of communism, the United Nations, or lopsided debate techniques in the proposed educational strategy. How did this become a totalizing globalist conpiracy in the mind of Brannon Howse? I can only guess. On page 53 of the document, we find the statement: "Working closely with the Governors, we will define new World Class Standards for schools, teachers and students in the five core subjects: math and science, English, history and geography." Did Howse mistake the phrase "new world class standards" for "the standards of the new world order"? I cannot presume to read his mind, but I can read the goals of America 2000, and Howse's characterization of the strategy is dead wrong. For instance, in his June 6, 2006, "U.S.A. Schooling the Communist Way, Part 1" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-2420), Howse says:

It's a prediction I hoped Americans would be wise enough to stop before it came to pass. As the education reporter and often the guest host of Michael Reagan's program I had spend countless hours warning Mike's listeners about Goals 2000, School-to-Work, Outcome-Based Education, HR6, No Child Left Behind, and other federal plans that have the goal of merging education with industrial production, thus turning our schools into vocational centers where students are "trained" rather than educated.

Republicans and Democrats alike are to blame for nailing this tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto into the educational foundation of schools right here in the good old U.S. of A. Lest you think I exaggerate, the tenth principle of the Communist Manifesto states that the goal of schooling for society's children should be the "combination of education with industrial production."

In the next installment, “U.S.A. Schooling the Communist Way, Part 2,” posted 20 days later (http://www.eagleforumofsacramento.com/?p=104), Howse says:

“the fact that so many Americans don't even know this communistic education reform is sweeping our nation is perilous. What is even more alarming are the ones who know it yet believe it is a good thing. Liberal Republicans and Democrats alike have succeeded in achieving the goals that Secular Humanists and Communists have long sought for America's children. And there, as they say, goes the future.

My understanding of education, and please understand that I am only an educator, is that with the arrival of the GI Bill following the Second World War, a new type of student has enrolled at college, and higher education has become much more open. No longer was college something that only the moneyed could aspire to. An older model of higher education, the type that you see in Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, in which students jocky for prestigious positions and editorships of undergraduate journals, yielded to a more practical, work-centered model that the new student population demanded. In all honesty, I suspect that college has, conceptually, become more career-oriented. The fragmentation of the disciplines (I mean, even "English" and "Communication" departments have been cut in two) is another example of this type of specialization, though there are institutional pressures at work as well, not just social and economic pressures. As a result, I would be absolutely stunned if the structures designed to prepare students to move into those institutions had not adjusted to meet those goals.

Back to Linda Hinkel, who, despite her relatively few appearances on Howse's website has had expressed the weirdness of an entire TrilateralCommission's worth of conspiracy theorists. Back in her article, "Teachers, Judges, Radical Islam, Acorn, Activists: The Treachery of America's Fifth Columns" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-5119/Brannon-Howse):

Parents [are] not taking their jobs seriously and fail to give their kids a solid moral compass. Schools have so declined in the last 20 years that it is now clear We the Parents are the best teachers for our children. The Communists would love to steal our parental rights. They encourage us to put our children in government-sponsored daycare and all-day kindergartens. They tell us we ALL need that expensive college education, when the school of hard knocks is all you need for some careers. Because government schools are a successful vehicle to brainwash our children, they are given preferential treatment when school laws are made, while vouchers and charter schools are threats to their monopolistic ambitions. Steal our parental rights and brainwash our children, then the path to Communism will be easy.

When it comes to intellectuals being used to confuse people, I would refer gain to Howse's comparison of modern America and Nazi Germany (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4881/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse), in which he says:

Hitler was fascinated with Friedrich Nietzsche and distributed his writings to his inner circle. Nietzsche promoted Nihilism, the belief that life has no meaning, and he is best known for his position that "God is dead". Nietzsche is presently one of the most widely read authors by American college students.

Despite the fact that this has elements of numerous logical fallacies, including the non-sequitor, poisoning the well, the ad naziam, and the gigantic fib that Nietzsche is one of the most read authors on college campuses (outside of introductory philosophy classes). I have never once ever had to tell a student to put away their copy of Nietzchse and pay attention in class. Or any other book, for that matter. Indeed, in March, the Washington Post reported on college students' reading habits (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030501541.html):

Last year Meyer [author of the Twilight series] sold more books than any other author -- 22 million -- and those copies weren't all bought by middle-schoolers. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. Recently, Meyer and the president held six of the 10 top spots. In January, the most subversive book on the college bestseller list was Our Dumb World, a collection of gags from The Onion. The top title that month was The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling. College kids' favorite nonfiction book was Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, about what makes successful individuals. And the only title that stakes a claim as a real novel for adults was Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, the choice of a million splendid book clubs.

In only one sense could I find anything like agreement with Howse and that would be that if my students were ever confronted with a bit of Nietszche, they would almost certainly be confused.

In the same article comparing America to Nazi Germany, Howse says:

“Private schools were abolished by Hitler and all education placed under Nazi control. There is constant pressure from federal and many state education authorities to require that Christian schools use state-mandated, humanistic textbooks. The Home School Legal Defense Association is fighting numerous battles at any given time to prevent parents from loosing the right to educate their children as they see fit. In August 2008, a federal district court ruled that the state of California university system may choose not to recognize the diplomas-and thereby deny college entrance to-students who attended a school using textbooks that express a Biblical worldview in the areas of history and science (i.e., Christian schools).”

I once ghost wrote the memoir of a Catholic schoolgirl in Nazi Germany, and I once had a Holocaust survivor speak to my class when we were talking about Holocaust deniers (she was in fact a Kindertransport rescue). In both cases, it seems that private schools were not "shut down." I would have to ask for evidence of this. All kids were shunted into Nazi extracurriculars and party loyalists were often given control of the schools, but that is not exactly the same thing. In the memoir I wrote, the Schwesternhaus (convent school) was open long into the war.

Most people agree that is in the interest not only of our constitutional republic, but also of the children themselves, to see that kids receive the best education. That standard, however, has as many definitions as there are citizens. However, one thing that most would endorse would be that an important component of "the best education" is that students learn, either literally or figuratively, at the feet of people who are expert in their subjects, either by reading the best books on the subjects or studying with the best teachers. There is nothing about getting pregnant that makes you qualified to teach an academic subject. Well, "life experience" is often a justification at diploma mills, but we're talking about legitimate educational institutions. Parents need to stop mistaking their capacity to assemble small people rather cheaply with either intelligence or wisdom or expertise. Of Pandas and People is simply not a science textbook, and it would be disingenuous for the UC system to pretend that a student taught from that textbook has had a real biology class. It would be a positive disservice to students to take their tuition money if they were not prepared for college, wouldn't it? Howse then makes the following statement about evolution:

“Calling upon Darwinian evolution, Hitler convinced the German people that purging millions of people was acceptable because of the need to create a pure race; also referred to as eugenics. American students across the board have been educated in Darwinian evolution because the Supreme Court has ruled that creation cannot be taught in our schools-even if both creation and evolution are taught side by side.”

I don't think that a fallacy has been described that accounts for this strange statement. I would call it "a juxtaposition of unrelated ideas." Creationism and evolution, of course, would be as properly paired in a science classroom as sections on the construction of the pyramidshese last two examples? We'll get to them in a second.

Linda Hinkel, who clearly gets her news from either the prestigious Internet or family members, invokes the Academic Boogieman, Saul Alinsky, as an example of the type of public intellectual confusing and misleading others in her article on American "fifth columnists"

The young teachers graduating from the Bill Ayer's teaching schools who are taught to bring political activism into the classrooms. He and his ilk advocate a silent revolution from within by indoctrinating the hearts and souls of our young. So far, he has done a good job of brainwashing our children to embrace the political paradise of Communism propounded by radical Saul Alinsky and others.

She goes on to say:

And the last, but certainly not the least Fifth Column is the college and university environments. At public colleges, anyone from off the street can go sell their activism to these students: pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, pro-radical Islam, pro-homosexual, pro-abortion, and any other activism they want. What a cesspool they have become by polluting the young minds in our country. Freedom of speech is a problem for conservative students in many of these "learning" environments. My advice to prospective parents of college students is that you think very carefully where you drop your precious offspring off. Do not let them hang out at these campuses any longer than is needed to obtain a marketable degree. "Obama's Poison Ivy," by Joan Swirsky is a great article about these irresponsible Ivy League schools that have graduated the incompetents who are currently running our government. These poisonous eggheads were obviously taught to embrace the political paradise of Communism. They learned how to destroy our country in the most efficient ways at their colleges. The Communists know they can take advantage of their students because these young adults have not been appropriately educated in American and world history. Brainwashed students can be taught just about anything, including Communism 101!

Hinkel's fear of...everything...and her demand that we seal children in plastic culture bubbles bespeaks ill of her and any philosophy that could possibly endorse it. Indeed, I have been able to find exactly no examples of anything that one might call a "Bill Ayers teaching school." Also, everyone knows that Communism 101 is an elective. (Linda, that was a joke. Put down the canister of sarin gas and step away from the train station.)

Point 10: “Jews encourage immorality among Christian youth”

Closely aligned with the supposed cabal of naughty liberals who have hijacked the education system are those who are actively subverting the moral purity of the Christian young people, who otherwise would never ever sin at all ever. Linda Hinkel, of course, thinks that the media communists are the ones making kids immoral. Back to her "Teachers, Judges, Radical Islam, Acorn, Activists: The Treachery of America's Fifth Columns” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-5119/Brannon-Howse):

The "fashion" designers and Hollywood "stars" who sell pornographic styles that are more fitting for prostitutes than for our children. The media now dictate to our children that it is fashionable to show it all with tattoos and earrings everywhere. Brainwashing our children weakens family unity, and destroying our families makes the path to Communism easier

To corrupt your older kids, you should look to liberal university professors. For an example of this, see Marsha West's article, “More Dangerous On College Campuses Than You Thought" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-2306), which Howse reran on his website in July of last year:

Soon thousands of teens and twentysomethings will be going off to "institutions of higher learning." Young people who've been raised with moral values will go behind the fortified walls of Babylon, pretty much unarmed. And the barbarians are prepared to chew them up and spit them out.

Barbarians, you say? OK, liberals. Liberals on college campuses want your son and daughter to have the freedom to have sex (hetro or homo), to binge drink, and to do drugs. Most liberals have little or no respect for faith-based parents and their and their annoying moral values.

Before you pack your child's personal possessions into your SUV and whisk him or her off to a secular humanist indoctrination center, read on.

Yes, your students may learn something new in college. No, they don't need instructors' help to sin like crazy. Indeed, most of the faculty I know, by whom I mean "pretty much all of my friends," would rather not be involved with their students' extracurricular decisions. Why? Profound, almost utter disinterest--we think about them all day at school and the last thing we want to do is obsess over them in our free time. Kevin McCullough's principle claim to fame is that he has an opinion, not that he is a source for facts. And, at any rate, a fact without thinking is completely useless. However, I will agree with you that liberals think that they know better than you do what's best for your child. If you are feeding them a steady diet of conspiracy, fear, irrationality, misinformation and hate, I think it is fair to say that most lobotomized sea slugs are better equipped to show your children how the world works. Just because children are yours doesn't make you any better a parent.

Point 12: Jews control puppet governments through secret alliances and blackmailing public officials.

The tactics of coercion and collusion feature heavily in Howse's view of the world. Take two instances of coercion in the America and Nazi Germany article:

Pastors who spoke against Hitler's worldview and his murderous regime found themselves on trial and frequently imprisoned for "Abuse of Pulpit." In America, hate-crime legislation has the potential to criminalize Christians and pastors who speak out against the homosexual agenda.

I should mention here that Howse fails to note that Hitler put everyone on trial who opposed his murderous regime. Of course this is a symptom of his highly selective survey of history.

Hitler controlled the church using intimidation and threats. A half-century ago, U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, promoted a bill that included an amendment to use the Internal Revenue Service to remove the non-profit status of a church that speaks against the election of any specific political candidate.

Well, the reasons for this prohibition is clear. In keeping with the traditional separation of church and state and refusing to fund partisan polticial groups, it is the practice to tax such institutions when they violate their contract with the people, the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. It is hard to pin down who pulls the strings, at least in the terrestrial realm. The UN is often put forward as the ultimate puppet master of governments. Sometimes it seems that Fabian Socialists are seen to be infecting the world with gradualist policies. Sometimes it is the Masons. Sometimes it is the Catholic Church. Sometimes it is Radical Environmentalists. The only shared characteristic of these various evildoers is that they are not buying stuff from Howse's site. They encompass "the entire rest of the world." "If you are not one of us," Howse's worldview cries out, "you are one of them." This completely polarizing, absolutely simplistic and utterly irresponsible and unthinking demonization of everyone else is the ultimate extension of paranoid political conspiracism. A more totalizing view is not possible.

Now, I have held back on this final analysis while writing, but we are getting to the source of all the evil in the world. Who is pulling the strings? Of course it is Satan. The Devil. Lucifer. According to Howse, the devil is placing all of his chess pieces in strategic places around the world, and he is just waiting to strike to bring about the end times. But how does Howse describe this to his listeners?

[Clip HowseWorldDevil]

Ultimately, Howse's view of the world depends on something that he can't prove. Placing blame on the devil for what Howse finds to be the universally unacceptable state of the world has a few direct consequences for him and his listeners. First, it gives his strange movement an excuse not to negotiate with, well, anyone. Why should he? Everyone else, in his view of the world, is in the thrall of the devil or is his willing agent. This unwillingness to engage with others effectively neuters his own movement as a significant political force. By seeing the devil everywhere, instead of inciting curiousity about how the world works and directing energy into productive channels of reform, he and his listeners tilt at windmills. It also, to Howse's mind, allows him to stir up hate without pricking his conscience, and he clearly hates a lot of people. This includes majority of his fellow man who do not worship his god, politicians, elites, Catholics, slightly ridiculous and wishy-washy new agers, teachers, communists, socialists, foreigners, and so on. Howse never goes so far as to suggest this, but put yourself in the head of a conscientious patriot and loyal listener of Howse. If the devil is maneuvering his agents into place all over the world for a coming battle, it seems almost a natural extension for a person who feels persecuted to take matters into his own hands. The problem is that a number of Howse's listeners clearly are paranoid. Take for instance this listener, who recently called in to Howse's show on the 23rd of July.

[Audio Clip Howse'sCaller]

Kip from Sioux Falls is clearly mentally ill. He says that citi-bankers "tilt" things, office supplies, in a definite pattern. This man sees agency where there can be no agency. I have a strong fear that things won't end well for this caller, since he feels that everyone in 3 buildings is part of a coordinated effort. One of the curious and unintentional effects of the rise of social media, including youtube, is that high functioning paranoid schizophrenics can find each other and agree that, yes, everybody they see is out to get them. I encourage you to look up the phrase "gang stalking," on youtube. In the clip that follows, a woman with a handi-cam and basic video editing software goes out and sits in her car, filming people on the street, all of whom, she believes, are stalking her.

[Audio clip: Gang Stalking]

Cheap technology offers us an opportunity to see the world from the point of view of the paranoiac, and it is at once intriguing and heartbreaking. Consider the following woman:

[Audio Clip: RainbowLady]

The rainbow lady is of the two schizophrenics most like Howse's caller, seeing hostile agency where there can be none. I hear that she also believes that condensation trails behind airplanes are actually chemical sprays. Howse does not challenge Kip. Instead, he encourages such conspiracist thinking. Many of these schizophrenics--and I am using the word as a layman--experience harassment because they feel that their stuff has been touched. Not that it has, but they feel that people are moving stuff very slightly in their apartments, opening their mail, and generally making their lives uncomfortable. This sounds almost exactly like the imaginary pattern that Kip is seeing. And Kip is not the only one. I could do an entire podcast series just on the people who call in to Howse's show, the people who he does not correct, and the people to whom he is trying to sell confirmation of their paranoid delusions. I hold Howse responsible in much the same way I would regard a parlor psychic--one who genuinely believes that she is helping someone. He reinforces these unfounded beliefs and directly profits from them. Worse yet is that Kip and people like him who see agency everywhere often feel like they are being tortured and become either self-destructive or lash out. When Howse, who is a symptom of a larger pattern in the media of demonization and scapegoating, over and over identifies the same targets, partial responsibility lies on the shoulders of those who were in a position to do something, yet did nothing. Howse's metaphor of the devil on a leash seems to be appropriate. But instead of absolving god of crimes against man committed by the devil, who is given limited free reign, I would argue that if a dog owner allows their leashed animal to do the biting, the owner, even though he never sunk his own teeth into the victim, is still partly responsible for the damage.

13. " Jews weaken laws through liberal interpretations."

Ah, the endlessly trumpeted and utterly inane screed about activist judges. This is perhaps the most mainstream of the paraniod beliefs that have captivated the extremely unstable religious right. Instead of going into all of the endless ways in which liberal activist judges are supposed to be overturning all things American, I simply refer you to a very abbreviated list of just some of the articles Howse has reprinted that talk about activist judges:

• J. Matt Barber: “Unmasking the ‘Gay’ Agenda” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-3098)
  
• William Federer: “Tyranny of the Atheist Minority” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-3540)
  
• David Barton: “Congress, the Culture and Christian Voting” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4102/Brannon-Howse/David-Barton)
  
• Donald Hank in the improbably titled “Thank God for the ACLU” (http://hjhop.blogspot.com/2007/05/thank-god-for-aclu.html)
  
• Tim Wildmon: “Filibusters –A Life and Death Issue? Absolutely” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/new/article.php/articleid-24/Brannon-Howse/Tim-Wildmon)
  Tom DeWeese: “Protecting the Republic from Federal Judges” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-788/Brannon-Howse/Tom-DeWeese)
  
• Even the Reverand Jesse, well, ok, Patterson in “Black Preachers Worshipping the Wrong Messiah” (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4190)
  

Point 14: Jews will suspend civil liberties during an emergency and then make the measures permanent.

This final point, patient listener, is classic conspiracism. The ones who are really in charge will manufacture crises and will somehow sweep in and take over, having created such chaos that they will somehow make people demand to be taken over for the sake of stability. Howse clearly sees the current recession as an opportunity in his "America and Nazi Germany” article:

Hitler exploited the economic collapse of Germany to take over as dictator and usher in his brand of socialism. America's financial crisis has given liberals in both political parties the opportunity to grow the size of government and implement freedom-robbing socialism at lightning speed.

I would like to point out that Hitler was not a socialist, but don't take my word for it. Take Chip Berlet's! Here he is speaking on Fresh Air about the Holocaust Museum shooter, but the point and strange logic is identical to that of Howse.

[AudioClip: BerletSocialism]

So, this coming seizure of power that will result in the overthrow of American soveriegnty and deliver us all into the hands of the Antichrist...what will it be like? I covered this in my first podcast on May 14th. Howse has just reported that a person from the Census Bureau has taken the GPS coordinates of his home, something that will allow statisticians and demographers to analyze the data collected to craft better social policy, social policy that reflects reality. But Howse interprets the visit differently. He is reading from a blogger's website, describing one possible purpose for this "GPSing":

[Audio Clip: HowseGPSing]

I think that it is just an unfortunate coincidence that Rahm Emmanuel is, as Howse reports, is overseeing this project. Emmanuel's reputation as being crafty and bullish, however, certainly has led many people to conclude that he is the Jewish puppet master behind Obama. So, the UN is going to invade. Howse is a heartbeat away from black helicopters and soldiers in blue helmets dropping down in church parking lots.

Or is he? Sometimes, it seems like our own military should fall under suspicion. Part of the allure of conspiracism is that you can spin multiple nightmare scenarios, This reveals that it is the emotion, not the factual content, of conspiracies that is important. I read from the description of Howse's July 21st radio show (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-13159/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse):

Can we count on the U.S. military to stand up and refuse to go along with tyranny, with unconstitutional orders, to not become a police force against the American people? Will our military refuse to swear allegiance to the United Nations if asked to do so? Description: 1,000 of 4,000 prisoners of war from the Korean War were studied on their return home. As John Stormer writes, "Investigators found that some Americans had broadcast anti-American propaganda, informed on other prisoners, wrote articles, letters and stories praising life under communism, confessed to 'germ warfare' and other atrocities and generally cooperated with their captors in every way." All this happened without "drugs, physical torture, or highly developed hypnotic techniques--just subtle pressures for conformity." The communists brainwashed our POWs with anti-American propaganda written by a communist group in America. Our POWs did not have the knowledge, understanding of history, economics or powers of reason and logic to withstand the pro-communist agenda. If these men of the early 1950s were so easily controlled and brainwashed by the communists outside the U.S. then what about our young soldiers of today that were educated in collectivism, socialism, group think, anti-American history, tolerance and postmodernism right here in our nation's schools?

It is at this point, just the other day, long after I started writing this podcast, that Howse clearly flirts with classic and direct anti-Semitism (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-13159/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse):

[AUDIO CLIP: HOWSE_BANKSTERS]

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Howse's project, it seems to me, is to dull the sense of reason and to set fire to emotions, while adding nothing to listener's knowledge base. Indeed, a large part of his project is to redirect their energies away from political engagement. He is misdirecting the attention of his readers to insubstantial, elusive and unvanquishable enemies, and in doing so, he degrades their ability to respond usefully to the crises of the day and effectively promote their own political views. He is disempowering them and, if you have any doubt visit his online store, clearly profiting from their disempowerment.

Conclusion:

I am issuing a challenge to Brannon Howse—you need to come clean to your listeners and address the dangerous historical parrallels of your worldview. No, I’m not full of myself. Howse loves to issue challenges—he did it to a Focus on the Family spokesperson the other day when he hosted the July 17th episode of Cross-Talk (http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-13105/Brannon-Howse/Crosstalk). I think that if he were a man whose word was worth a flying biscuit and whose pontifications were true he would not be afraid to address the historical roots of his worldview, or to at least explain to me how I am wrong. Otherwise, to paraphrase Brannon’s description of the Focus on the Family representative, I think we would find out Howse is an empty suit who is really nothing more than "a conspiracy guy." I close with another quote from Howse's America and Nazi Germany article, which fairly demands that he account publicly for the anti-Semitic roots of his perverse worldview, and I quote it here in full and without editing:

Please understand that I'm not sensationalizing when making these observations. First Chronicles 12:32 says men of the tribe of Issachar were called wise because they "understood the times and knew what God would have them to do." To help you make your own assessment of the situation, I've distinguished […] the intensity of the tempest that is nearly upon us. And yes, there are obvious comparisons with the growth of Nazism in Germany. I will point them out unabashedly because it's only reasonable to say so if something that looks similar to an earlier, dangerous historical parallel actually is similar. After all, storm warnings, by nature, foretell bad news.

HJ

I'm calling a fatwah on Bill Gates...

I was in the last stages of editing my mega podcast, and the f'n thing crashed. Not happy making for Bing.

GRR. Tomorrow morning, then.

HJ

Want to really depress yourself?

Go to Google.com come and type in the following search string to see what suggestions appear:

quantum physics and

Seriously. There. I have crushed the souls of my physicist readers.

HJ

Improbable ads...

In my gmail account, which is my professional email, the nice electronic screen gnomes who read my email and put advertisements in the sidebar based on the contents of the individual message, saw the word "chat" in a message and decided that this list of services most closely matched my chatting needs:

While I still do not understand the Bob Marley skull pendants, the vampire chat makes me very happy.

HJ

Bing McGhandi: Saviour of Britain

"Never before have so many done so little for the benefit of nobody. Or something."

Boy, not often do I get the chance to completely sodomize someone, geologically speaking. Let me explain. Geology is about as far from my area of expertise as is possible. But I am not a completely deluded moron, so I am capable of, if not actually contributing to the field of geology, at least pointing out people who are dumb as rocks.

And that brings me to today's submission from Answers in Genesis, UK. What follows is the dumbest thing that I have ever seen.

Really. How anyone can take this shit seriously...fuck.

It's called "Durham's Grand Canyon" and it is the product of AiG, UK's Paul Taylor's thundering deficiencies. (Hey, sounds like a band! "Tonight! Paul Taylor and the Thundering Deficiencies open for Butthole Surfers!")

You may remember that I did an episode of the CrAzY cReAtIoNiSt NeWs on Gower Gulch a canyon that was created in 3 days. Turns out, it was loose sediment. You would have thought that the cretinfucks over at AiG would have learned to not, well, talk ever about anything after that embarrassment. But Ken Ham's big mouth is capacious enough for several feet.

Check this out:

Peter Whitfield, a member of the staff from the Houghall Agricultural College, which owns the land, observed the canyon on the morning of Saturday, July 18. He related that he had seen water thundering through the new canyon. His comment about the formation of the canyon in such a short space of time was: “It looks like the Grand Canyon and it shows what mother nature can do.” [...]

Ken Ham has related standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon with an evolutionist who said, “A lot of time and a little bit of water caused this.” He replied, “A little bit of time and a great deal of water caused it.”

It's a wonder the evolutionist did not push Ken Ham in, saying, "Let's see what a little time and a lot of gravity can do." So, what did Whitfield see?

Clearly, Peter Whitfield has never seen the Grand Canyon:

Taylor concludes:

Having seen the power of running water in County Durham, it should not be a problem for anyone to believe that the worldwide global Flood sent by God can explain so many of the geological features that we see.

See those pretty lines? What are they made of?

Shale, granite, limestone, sandstone, quartzite. You have the balls to compare a mud puddle to the Grand Canyon? Dude, what you are describing is the geological equivalent of someone draining the bathtub. You're comparing apples and...fistulas. You did not see the cutting power of running water. You saw supersaturated ground washing away. It's as impressive as the rain cleaning the mud off of my car.

You suck AiG, UK. Really a whole lot and often.

I imagine that when we have nuked ourselves out of existence and the worms evolve intelligence that they too will speak of the time that god came down and smote all of the evil worms in the world during the Great Flood of Durham.

HJ

HJHOP Podcast 10...Not the magnum opus I've been promising!

This is not the one that I want to spread around the universe. Don't get me wrong, feel free to spread this page around the Internet, by all means, including coercion. But this podcast has nothing to do with Brannon Howse, who is the exclusive subject of podcast 11, which is forthcoming. I slap around fool Dave Daubenmire for the crime of ignorance against humanity. It has to do with President Obama's "amazing disappearing birth certificate." I slapped on the opening and closing this morning, and you can sort of hear the abrupt shift in topic. But I don't care. :) (Also, if you repeat to anyone that I used a smiley, I will eat your pets.)

So, enjoy this shortish (30 min) podcast. The one that I am working on today will be much longer.

Sources referenced:

Pass the Salt Ministries
http://ptsalt.com/

Fresh Air with Terry Gross--Interview with Chip Berlet
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105531867

Enjoy! Stay tuned! Send money!

HJ

Good evening. Want to grade my papers for me?

Today I collected final portfolios. They look pretty good. I asked them to put them in magazine format.

Yesterday, we had a luncheon to commemorate the end of the program. It went well, I thought. Following the meal, each student went up and gave a brief speech about the person in the program who helped them the most. I got about three or four mentions, you know, probably because I am selfless giver. One student--who my teaching partner commented was hard to read (not literally, only demeanor-wise)--said that he liked the readings and the topics we discussed. "We talked about gay penguins and disillusionment," he reported. This is true. Another student, toward the end, referred to me and said that "Dr. Bing taught me what a bad writer I really am." (Don't worry, if you heard him say it out loud and in context, you would get the irony.)

I am noticing a newish trend among my students. The pseudo-informality of addressing someone as "Mr. First Name." I think the first time I heard this was from the daughter of one of my colleagues, who called me "Mr. Bing." The next time I noticed someone doing this was over a year ago at a conference in New Orleans, where the desk worker at my hotel who more formally called me, "Mr. Bingtholomew" (because that was the name on the credit card, I imagine). And when I reported on this back to my comrades, someone, I forget who, said that it was a common practice down south, and that a lot of their African American students used that form of address. When my ex-office wife, who took half of the things from my office when she left me, went to Virginia to interview for a job, she mentioned that people were doing the same thing. This summer, I think that the phrase offered the right mix of formality and informality for the friendly professional relationship that we wanted to establish with these students.

I blame Dr. Phil. Dickhead.

Oh, I came to the well-reasoned (heheh) opinion that Henry Louis Gates, in this case, was probably wrong. When the cop got a call of a reported break-in, and Gates seems to have admitted that he had to force open a jammed door, what was he supposed to do? Not check on the situation? And when he got there, I think that Gates went a little ballistic. I read the police report. Generally, police reports are pretty dry documents. I thought the idea that "people were looking" was a sort of lame explanation for disturbing the peace, but it sounds as if there was a tantrum going on. I think that the important thing is that anyone who was in the house when the cop got there would have been asked for ID, and the guy would not have been doing his job if he didn't. Indeed, what the cop was trying to do, ultimately, was protect Gates' property. So, Gates is not a little ungrateful. So he smells racial profiling on the part of the police. Well, this is not like someone getting pulled over or yanked out of a line because of how they looked. If the neighbor did not recognize the people forcing the door open, well, then, this is what happens. Also, it sounded like Gates was more than a little full of his big bad importance, shouting, "Do you know who I am?" Yeah, you're the loud mouthed asshole in the back of the cop car bitching about how tight the handcuffs are. I think of the family member who showed up for divorce court, and whose case was really going his way, when he somehow managed to mouth off to the judge and got 2 days for contempt. I mean, can you really blame the judge for that?

My take. The cop should have walked away and let the little guy fume. I don't exactly know what was gained by either the arrest or Gates' tantrum. This should have been completely resolved with the obligatory showing of ID and a mutual fucking off. Disorderly assholes get arrested for being disorderly assholes, regardless of their race.

And Al Sharpton is still a whore.

Tomorrow morning, I have a bunch of student papers to grade before I go to my final committee meeting, where we will make final recommendations for student placement and assistance. I will then show all of them my ass.

In the meantime, the podcast is coming along ploddingly. I think I made it much better tonight, and I am exactly 5/14ths of the way through it. That's after about 6 hours of work in total. Like I said, I'm writing it out as I record it. There is little doubt in my mind that it will be possibly the best thing that I have done on this website. I am giving this the attention that I would give an academic paper and am documenting my sources thoroughly. I am going to a number of interesting places with this one, and it all about conspiracy. One thing that I would ask my readers to do would be to link to this page when it comes up. I want it to be the thing that comes up on my site when people search for Brannon Howse. I hope to get this out of my system soon so I can concentrate on something else. In earlier ages, people would say that I was "inspired" or something. Nope. Just obsessive-compulsive.

Got to wash my hands. And then walk backwards into my bedroom so I can feed my cat.

HJ

I've been sitting so long, my nuts are getting callouses

Life is what I do when I am not in front of the computer, so, essentially life is me stretching my legs.

I am working on the next podcast, and I am on a roll. The thing is that I am doing two things simultaneously. I want to write it all down and read it and post the commentary with references and links online. I'm going some places that I want to have documented, and this means being slow and deliberate. And this one is probably going to be rather long. I had something about Dave Daubenmire that I was going to put up to hold you over (I know that you are all pining away desperately!), but I seem to have deleted it. Oh, well.

My class is about to end. Yay. I have a couple of days worth of meetings, and then I am splitsville from the school where I have worked for the last decade. It's kind of strange, really. The damnedest thing is that they have cut my library database privileges, which makes researching frustratingly difficult. After a decade of continuous intellectual gluttony, I really feel like I'm blind without my databases. Hopefully my new home will have wondertastic databases! (I'm sure they will.)

I graded so many papers so quickly tonight. The best thing about grading at the end of the semester is that you do not have to put comments on the papers. You just slap a grade on them and then go drink margaritas, or whatever you people do.

I got a sneak peak at some of my course evaluations. I was pleased to get, in the batch I saw, no negative evals and at worst a couple of completely neutral ones. I can swing that. A few days ago Historiann mentioned that she was the type of instructor that students either hated or loved. I think that I get a similar spread of reviews. I am also Mr. Fucking Charming Eccentric in small writing classes. That helps a lot, I think.

Yesterday, for instance, I declared that I had senioritis, that I was going to teach them a couple of card tricks because I no longer cared. That got a laugh. I plucked playing cards out of the air, predicted 5 cards that they pulled at random from a pile using a fair deck, and made a card appear in an envelope across the room. For that last one I used the overhead screen for a dramatic reveal of the card: when it rose, it revealed the card I hard written on the board before class. Then he checked his envelope, which apparently had been stuffed with a card he had drawn at random, and viola! My student then taught me a trick that I am going to go try on Animala right now...

She is such an unpleasable shit.

Time for sleepy-bobos.

I want to give a shout out to Porchy, who found a home! I know that she's going to cut off your balls, but it's best in the long run!

HJ

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrested; Al Sharpton a whore

Look at this man:


Would someone wearing that shirt be breaking into a house? Shit.

OK, the guy's brain generates its own magnetic field, which makes for some kickass party tricks. Nonetheless, sometimes "disorderly conduct" is the right reaction, I think.

I'm going to withhold summary judgment on this one because, really, what the fuck do I know? But I would like to point out that I would very much like to drive Al Sharpton out into the desert, find an abandoned mine shaft, and give him a strong kick in the behind. Don't get me wrong; sometimes the guy brings attention to things that people would rather not look at, but he is Mr. Overexposure. It doesn't matter what the controversy is. If someone mentions race, Al Fucking Sharpton shows up. I remember 10 years ago, Sharpton came to St. Louis to protest lack of action on a bill that required Missouri officials to look to hire minority contractors. I'm all for that. They shut down the highway for about 5 minutes (I believe that they were gebinning the bidding process on the currently ongoing highway expansion). He joined the protesters, saying that there were not enough minorities working on the highway job. The problem was that all of the local minority contractors were already engaged on the airport. It was a sort of explainable discrepancy, at least.

But Al Sharpton is like the left's one-man Westboro Baptist Church. He just attaches himself like a dingleberry to...whatever happens to be going on. Michael Jackson? There's Al. Jena 6? There's Al. A congresswoman repeats "nigger" when she is quoting someone else, there the fuck is Al.

"Furthermore, she opposes English-only policies and supports expanding opportunities for immigrants to learn English and thrive in our economy." Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton criticized Maloney for using the term.

Maloney issued her apology before Sharpton raised objections. He still said he was disappointed and faulted her for not identifying the caller who originally used the word and for not reprimanding the person when the conversation first took place.

"Is this a delayed disgust?" Sharpton asked.

No, you disgust me immediately, you fuckwit. I resent your ongoing policing of the language. Honestly, you would be more useful for the cause of civil rights if you were less of a whore and picked your causes a little more carefully.

HJ

I think that this will be my best podcast...

It's coming.

I was knocked over by something that I was reading recently, which brought to mind the weird political beliefs of Brannon Howse. This is going to be really interesting, and I'm going to do some digging, so this will take a few days. I'm hoping that it will give Brannon a moment of pause when he considers what he's doing and who his associates and friends are. I leave you with a quote from Brannon, a statement that I swear will be relevant to the segment:

"And yes, there are obvious comparisons with the growth of Nazism in Germany. I will point them out unabashedly because it's only reasonable to say so if something that looks similar to an earlier, dangerous historical parallel actually is similar."

I'll let you untangle that quote; his syntax makes me want to vomit.

HJ

To my 167 subscribers...

Who the hell are you? I merely wonder. I mean, this blog, for me, is a filthy masturbatory pleasure, and I have tons of people peeking in the window.

I got that number from Google Reader, by the way. I have no idea how they derive that number.

Joy of joys, PZ Myers is off to Creationist Laff Camp! I would love to go...

Working on the last St. Louis podcast...I just visited 4shared from a computer that is not my own. How irritating! I'm very sorry. I should be beaten around the knees.

HJ

In God They Trust

I got a message from the American Family Association. What do you think about the Freedom From Religion Foundation's efforts to stop "In God We Trust" from being engraved into the new Capitol Visitors Center? They think that it is an attack on Christians. I mean, really. Christians? Alone? Check out what they sent me:

Atheists sue to stop 'In God We Trust' engraving in nation's capitol

Anti-Christian bigotry, like that which took prayer out of schools, is behind an effort to remove National Motto and Pledge of Allegiance...

The House and Senate passed identical resolutions this month directing the Architect of the Capitol to engrave "In God We Trust" and the Pledge in prominent places at the entrance, where 3 million tourists visit the CVC each year.

"In God We Trust" has been the national motto since 1956 and has appeared on U.S. currency since 1957. This is another attempt by the radical left to ban God from the public square. The foundation is also challenging the constitutionality of the National Day of Prayer.

Sign our Petition to Congress expressing your support for the engravings and encourage them to stand fast against anti-Christian bigotry. Don't let the atheists and agnostics censor our nation's rich Judeo-Christian heritage.

It's not just the Christian god that atheists do not trust. (The number of Jews alone Yahweh smote, you know, the Chosen People, leave me no doubt as to what loyalty to that bozo gets you.) We have no trust in the Fuckhead Allah, may boils plague his ass, or any of the extra-chromosomed Hindu gods either. This is not an anti-Christian thing, and the very fact that you mistake it for an attack on Christianity is exactly why we need the engraving to be stopped.

Don't mistake the radical left for atheists, you goons. I would stand fast against anti-Christian bigotry more often if you weren't such fucking bigots. You wouldn't be able to walk down the street without getting pelted with rocks if you had said, "Don't let the Muslims or Jews or Blacks or Mexicans censor..." but atheists, sure, that's fine.


HJ

Ever get a ghost stuck in your butt?

No, I'm not making this up. Karen Stollznow, aka Skepbitch, has a post up about rectal haunting. My favorite cure is pouring alcohol into your butthole to get your ass-ghost drunk. Then he apparently just falls out in a stupor.

Talk about "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame!"

HJ

The New Skeptics' Circle is Up!

Yay!

Go see it at Effort Sisyphus! Always immense fun!

HJ

Skepticism and creationism...

I was going to give Bodie Hodge another thoroughly vicious and utterly deserved intellectual noogie tonight, but I decided, in the spirit of exasperation with irremediable delusion, that I would give the gimp a pass. No matter what he thinks about dinosaur and human cohabitation.

There is no quarter, not even in a church--not even in the Vatican's Panamanian Embassy--for Roger Patterson, however, whose recent "Self-Refuting Skepticism" was smeared across my screen like a "Dirty Protest." It begineth:

Many people in modern society label themselves as skeptics. They publish magazines, participate in various organizations, raise funds to support their causes, and lobby the public through roadside signs, podcasts, and advertisements on buses.

The term "skeptic" is not limited to people who are public about their skeptical approach to life. I suspect that the vast majority of people who apply and value skepticism are completely unaffiliated with one another. Many may not even realize how important their perspective is.

Patterson decides that for the purposes of his discussion of skepticism, he will look at Michael Shermer and the Skeptics Society as a convenient body double for skeptics-in-general. That, in itself, is a risky rhetorical and logical move, so I am completely happy to see Patterson take it. It makes what I'm about to do that much easier.

Skepticism is a humanistic philosophy. Humanists consider man to be the measure of all things. That is, the human mind is considered to be the ultimate standard by which all claims are judged. Humanism is a religious system, the deity of the worldview being man himself. Though the humanists would generally reject the label of religious, they certainly hold their views with zeal and conviction.

There are a lot of problems with definitions here, and they guarantee that even with strict adherence to logical modes of argument, even syllogistic deductive argument, you are going to come to some improbable conclusions. First, are you suggesting that zeal and conviction is all you need in order to be "religious"? This is just a crummy definition of religion, one that broadens the term to almost meaninglessness. For instance, if my nephew had a bacterial infection and was really, really sick, I would damn well be pretty zealous about them getting antibiotics. Therefore, I am clearly worshiping antibiotics. I say with all conviction that men walked on the moon. Therefore, I clearly worship...what? NASA? Not only does Patterson's position really make the word religion meaningless, but he confuses the ideas of religion and philosophy. Religion, that is, the belief in a supernatural deity or deities and the outward manifestations of that belief, and philosophy are not equivalent concepts. Religion is ancient. Philosophy is rather a recent beast, one less than 3,000 years old. Syllogistic thought, as far as we can tell, only arises in the condition of literacy. Religion clearly does not, and the two are therefore completely different barrels of monkeys.

Either way, the idea that a theist would try to discredit a position by describing it as a religion speaks reams about the credibility of their own position and their inability to understand irony.

Of course, a skeptic does not claim that man is the measure of all things, for the simple reason that man, as a skeptical approach to the world readily reveals, so often gets things so spectacularly wrong. Here, Patterson is guilty of the fallacy of the straw man.

Another important element of the humanist religion is naturalism (or, materialism). This belief blindly asserts that nothing beyond nature exists; the physical universe is all that there is. Anything that is supernatural is excluded from this belief system.

This is not exactly true either. Ok, it's actually just flat wrong, but I was trying to be nice and it just wasn't working. If it a skeptic were to take the default position that "there is no supernatural," well, that would be as closed minded as the person who asserted, out of ass, that the Bible contained a true and inerrant description of the creation of the world. Indeed, I would love to find out that there was something out there beyond the natural. How neat would that be?! But I don't yield to my fantasies just because I want them to be true. I am willing to be convinced of something so extraordinary as supernatural phenomena, but I need to see good evidence, not just a collection of Bronze Age stories. Here, I think that Patterson mistakes premises for conclusions; that there is probably no supernatural realm that influences the universe is a conclusion after seeing every assertion of supernatural causality collapse either under the weight of its untestability or its falsification. The supernatural has had such a crummy track record of making testable predictions that are worth a snot that it seems a fairly wise use of our mental resources to direct our powers at things that we can test. If you want to get in on the skeptical game and convert us, all you have to do is show that there is a good reason for us to look at your evidence. You can start by publishing in peer-reviewed science journals. Otherwise, leave a message at the beep and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

A peculiar thing that supernaturalists don't seem to understand is that once something (even a supernatural something) has had a measurable effect on the universe, that effect becomes the proper subject of science. Right?

Patterson now lays into Shermer's "A Skeptical Manifesto." What ensues is a veritable roller coaster of self-contradiction and misrepresentation on the part of Patterson.

To his credit, Dr. Shermer is openly honest about the failure of skepticism as a philosophy.

But what does it mean to be skeptical? Skepticism has a long historical tradition dating back to ancient Greece when Socrates observed: “All I know is that I know nothing.” But this is not a practical position to take.

Shermer rightly concludes that if a skeptic were to apply his philosophy to his own views, he would have to be skeptical of skepticism—a position of absurdity. The very foundation of this belief system is self-refuting.

To avoid the absurdity of his argument, Shermer goes on to qualify his beliefs. He adds the qualifiers of rational and scientific to his belief system. He does this in order to justify his claim that he wishes to promote progress, even though skepticism itself does not hold that goal. Exactly what he means by progress is not explained, but it seems to tie into a later discussion of the evolution of mankind to higher levels. However, he provides no scientific or rational validation for what higher means and why his views should be accepted above other views of progress.

You want to know what Sheremer actually says?

Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, that involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions.

Shermer, you crazy hotel-bombing zealot! You come to the radical conclusion that you might be willing to change your mind? Clearly, Roger, Michael Shermer is an unhinged loon.

Let's talk about some of the other ineffectual whines in the passage from Patterson. First is the obvious statement that Shermer clearly does not agree with Socrates, who had not benefited from the scientific method. In light of this direct contradiction, even within your own quote, I don't know how you can justify asserting that Shermer recognizes the shortcoming of his own position when he directs his criticism at someone else's position (that of Socrates). What he does accept, however, are standards by which we may tentatively (however confidently) accept some things as established facts. And this is where the notion of "progress" comes in. Not being certain about your premises does not preclude the testing of predictions those premises lead to. If the experiments produce results in line with the premises, well, that gives the premises a little more credibility. Also, we now have new knowledge to test. We have made progress by being willing to test whether or not (not "declaring that") our premises are true. We now know something that we did not know before. This is progress. Duh.

Let us first look at the claim that skepticism must be scientific in order to be of value. Though not explicitly stated, the concept of materialism is present in the definition of science given by the Skeptics Society:

a set of mental and behavioral methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.

It is worth noting that this definition is simply given to persuade the reader to accept a particular view. It is not what would be found in textbooks and dictionaries. Redefining terms is simply a tactic of persuasion, not a logical argument.

You sure have a lot of faith. In dictionaries. This is just a bizarre criticism: defining terms is essential to argument, if for no other reason than to make sure everyone is on the same page. In this case, it works because you have a tantrum about the definition (see below). You are doing the same thing when you try to slip your filthy religious finger into "science." But I want to know which dictionary definition of "science" (in the sense of "the hard sciences") includes "supernatural stuff."

Since his definition of science deals with observation, Shermer defines observation as “gathering data through the senses or sensory enhancing technologies.” Although supernatural forces would not normally be experienced by the senses, the Christian rightly takes God to be the ultimate first cause of the things we do experience. This forces us to ask the question, “Why must supernatural explanations be removed from science?”

Because they can't be observed or tested. You presume to take God's existence "rightly." You just assert it, truth or not be damned. See my above very clever comment: "Once something (even a supernatural something) has had a measurable effect on the universe, that effect becomes the proper subject of science." Your position is unfalsifiable. Take for instance the following assertion: "I rightly take a hyperdimensional dachshund named Basil to be the first cause of everything that everyone, especially Christians, experiences." I have the same justification: none whatsoever. To be useful to science I must posit a testable hypothesis about how Basil influences every single experience in the universe. What is the mechanism, Roger? Your position is presumably, "Well, God just wills it to happen." And how does that work? "Well, er." That's right. How would we test that statement, that God is the first cause? I anxiously await your answer at my yahoo account. The user name is littletinyfeardemon.

Dr. Shermer does not provide a reason for the assertion that science can only be based on observations by the senses. If this claim is left as an arbitrary assertion, then there is no logical reason to accept it. Christians should be skeptical of this skeptic’s definition of science.

Horse feathers. He does not say, "science can only based on observations by the senses." There is much in science that is not seen or experienced directly. That's why he uses the words "observed or inferred." Again, this is another straw man, for if you were right, Shermer would have to reject atomic theory and germ theory because he can't see atoms or viruses. I dare you to ask him.

Another problem that this definition presents for the skeptics is that it is inconsistent. On the one hand, Shermer wants to include past events as falling under his definition of science. On the other hand, he wants to have observational confirmation or rejection of everything that is to be considered scientific knowledge. But, of course, past events are not subject to observational rejection or confirmation. Shermer tries to cover up this inconsistency by suggesting that inferences are as legitimate as observations, but provides no support for this view.

OK. Let's look at the results of a rape kit on the fresh corpse of a rape victim. It finds semen on the body with an intact DNA signature. There are defensive wounds and tearing consistent with rape. Are you saying that forensic scientists can't reconstruct what happened and tie the crime to a particular person if they come across his DNA? Because there are over three hundred people who have been exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence who would very much like to kick you in the nuts and laugh while you weep.

Shermer goes on to explain that most biologists would accept evolution as a “fact” in that it is based on “data or conclusions confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement.” Since skeptical science can never ultimately prove anything, the temporary agreement of the community is that evolution happened and will continue to happen. This “fact” must be based on the inferences of past events from observations of things in the present, not observing and testing things form the past. Shermer argues from this “fact” at several points in this article.

Since facts, by definition, are true, this philosophy allows for the provisional acceptance of untrue facts. Many things that were once considered factual are known to be false today. In the absence of an absolute standard to determine truth, skeptics build their foundation on what they must admit could be false in the future—evolution included.

Except, you increasingly hilarious person, it is a system that works and progressively eliminates bad hypotheses. The strength of a science is that it is provisional. It can systematically improve as better evidence comes along. Creationism can't: "God did it." "But the age of the rocks as determined through radioactive decay is... "Shut up. God did it." Faith means believing something in spite of evidence to the contrary (the very existence of "creation science" denies faith--you goofy people). Science progresses by paying attention to the evidence and coming up with ever better and predictive explanations. Its ever decreasing uncertainty is what makes science vastly more useful than religion for understanding the world.

HJ

Walter Cronkite: RIP

I just heard that Walter Cronkite, a reporter, anchor and witness to history whose career is almost unmatched, has died at the age of 92.

I recently received a student paper from a student who, shortly after 9/11 was understandably worried about flying. On a transatlantic flight, he was fretting about being in the air when he heard a familiar voice across the aisle. It turned out that Walter Cronkite was on his flight, and he was talking to his secretary. My student took his irrational comfort in the presence of Cronkite on the flight. He could not dispel the fear that he might die in an airline attack, but he could not conceive that Walter Cronkite would die that way. He found this very calming. An amusing story that probably won't be told elsewhere.

HJ

Gnazi Gnarden Gnomes in Gnermany

From the Beeb:

Germany opens 'Nazi' gnome case

A garden gnome giving the Nazi salute has landed a German artist in trouble with the authorities in Nuremberg.

Is it me, or does it sound like they might allow the artist to plead out if he helps put the garden gnome in the dock at Nuremberg?

HJ

Speech given by Bing on the occasion of his father's 60th birthday...

What follows was delivered by Bing McGhandi on the occasion of his father's 60th birthday. His father is a urologist at Current University, where Bing currently works in the English Department, and is also called "Bing McGhandi." This has always pissed Bing off.

In two weeks, I am moving to Atlanta, GA. When one takes the long view and considers the curious fact of how more than 30 years passed before anyone asked me to say anything nice about my father, it's fair to say that my presence here tonight giving this speech is like missing a 20-foot putt by the width of a blade of grass. While I have repeatedly claimed that I have a job waiting for me at Big Southern University, and I have often told my parents that there is no chance that the Current University English Department would ever consider one of their own graduates for a tenure track position, the reason for my move is much more simple.

I am sick of people sending me emails relating to urology.

I mean, what were you thinking? "Hey, Sweetie," I can hear you saying from behind gigantic mutton chops and over the deafening din of K.C. and the Sunshine Band. "I have an idea. Let's give the baby the same name as me! But that's not the brilliant part! Let's use the same nickname that I use. Sure, we could call him Binger or Bingy or Bingtholomew or Bingster, but that wouldn't be nearly as clever!" As far as I'm concerned, you are only one child named Bing away from being George Foreman crazy.

To be fair, I suppose you could not have anticipated the arrival of email or CU's online email address search. And I can't hold you responsible for the caliber of colleague who would look at two search results for the same name at the same school and decide that he would send the confidential report about a medical student to the Bing McGhandi clearly listed as a graduate student in the English Department. But the fact remains that I have been invited to give more lectures on the prostate than most other members of the Modern Language Association.

I have no choice but to hold you entirely responsible for what the mail man delivers to me. Do you have any idea how demoralizing it is to be 23 and start receiving brochures from the American Association of Retired Persons? Or to arrive home in my crummy Saturn and find a glossy issue of Corvette Magazine, packed from cover to cover with figments of your midlife crisis? I suppose I should be grateful to you for the 50% of the DNA I have been using for the last several decades, but my peculiar inheritance seems largely limited to a propensity for having the same thing for breakfast every single day, a last name that, in the original Polish, means "little son of he who has a lisp," and a prodigious capacity for sweating.

Our Polish cousins have a saying: "Add up your pennies and buy a hen." I have no idea why the Polish are obsessed with acquiring hens, but I think there is a good chance that Polish scientists are hard at work unlocking the motivations behind these animals' propensity for traversing highways.

What I mean to say, of course, is, Dad, I accept your apology.

HJ

Boxes...can't get away from...boxes...

I've been packing.

A few days ago, I was at the local Megamart Club and bought two packages of 12 large boxes. When I unpacked them, they were frickin' huge. Far bigger than I thought they would be. I mean, the only thing that I could possibly pack in them would be a free-standing dining room chair. They are that large. As best I can tell, there is nothing in the universe other than dining room chairs that could possibly fit in them. Mostly what I need is storage for books, and each box would weigh 300 lbs if I packed it with books! So, I was back to get the smaller size today. I did get a better size, but they are still too big for books.

I have a lot of old clothes that I was going to give away. Maybe I'll use them as packing material?

I have lots of loose paper and research and drafts of articles and readings from classes, and packing allows me to start sifting through some of these mammoth piles of scholarship. Lots of old student papers that I have been holding on to. Why? You tell me.

There are some books that I will not pack until the very last day. Those include the conspiracy books that I have and the stuff I am using for my textbook.

Alright, I think I'm missing a cat...Damn.

HJ

Evolution-u Akbar!

This is my hypothesis: Bodie's mother inadvertently kept the afterbirth and gave it a thorough Christian upbringing. Bodie, if this is your baby picture, we have an answer!


Offensive? You bet. Ignorant? Without a doubt. But, then again, I'm not one to take the high road. Seriously. The high road of reason has not worked with the bonkers creationist movement. I am convinced that we must talk down to the level of the asshats at Answers in Genesis, and Bodie's latest literary abortion is the written equivalent the present in the above pan and should, similarly, be treated as a biohazard. I guess that the only difference is that the placenta was at one point useful.

It's called, "The Results of Evolution: Could It Be the Bloodiest Religion Ever?" And the answer is, "No." Good night, everybody!

I thought that went pretty we...what? There's more? Fuck.

Let's do this stupid thang.

Christians are often confronted with the claim that a humanistic worldview will help society become better. Even the first Humanist Manifesto, of which belief in evolution is a subset, declared, “The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently co-operate for the common good.” But can such a statement be true?

I don't know what it is that makes people think that the Humanist Manifesto has any authority among, well, most self-described humanists. I sure never read it. So, that assumption is actually unfounded. And it is preposterous, as well completely and perfectly mockable, to suggest that evolution is a subset of humanism. I can't even begin to see where they are supposed to intersect...evolution is not a belief system, but an observed fact of the world, whether you like it or not. Evolution is what seems to best account for millions of observations of phenomena that have nothing to do with human intention.

For starters, what do the authors mean by “good”? They have no legitimate foundation for such a concept, since one person’s “good” can be another’s “evil.” To have some objective standard, they must borrow from the teachings of God in the Bible.

Exhibit A: "Thou shall not kill."
Exhibit B: A recent tally of God's body count in the Bible equalled 2.3 million for God vs. 10 for Satan, and those are only the ones where there is a number specified. Let's take the estimated number of people around in 2000 BC when the world was drowned in a great big scary flood: 27,000,000. That gives us a tally of nearly 30 million people. Way to go, God! You are a complete psycho!

So, please do not be offended when I tell you to shove your Bible up your ass hard and high.

And, Bodie, notice that there are numerous texts that claim to be the standard for human behavior, and that your choice is not an objective one, merely one that correlates to the culture into which you happen to have been into.

Beyond that, does evolution really teach a future of prosperity?

Wait! Nobody said it did, you sack of severed donkey scrotums! Evolution "teaches" nothing. It allows us to make testable predictions. The humanist manifest may or may not try to teach something. I'll never know because I have other shit to do. But check this stupid shit out. He gives us a graph! Everyone bow down to the almighty table of Scrotie Hodge!

Who/What?	Specific Event and Estimated Dead
Pre-Hitler Germany/Hitler and the Nazis	WWI: 20,000,000 dead, 21,000,000 wounded1 WWII: 72,000,0002 Holocaust: 17,000,000? (estimates range from 7 to 26 million)3
Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin	Bolshevik revolution and Russian Civil War: 15,000,0004
Joseph Stalin	20,000,0005
Mao Zedong	14,000,000–20,000,0006
Pol Pot (Saloth Sar)	750,000–1,700,0007
Abortion*	China estimates 1971–2006: 300,000,0008 Russia estimates 1954–1991: 280,000,0009 U.S. estimates 1928–2007: 26,000,00010 France estimates 1936–2006: 5,749,73111 UK estimates 1958–2006: 6,090,738 12 Germany estimates 1968–2007: 3,699,62413

Wow. I am in almost every way unimpressed. OK, except for the ability to use footnotes in HTML. I never got the hang of that.

I like how he smears WWI and WWII into one big ball of evolution. What fucking historian has ever, fucking EVER asserted that evolution was a cause of the Great War? None. Well, nobody who had a reputation after saying that. Complex networks of alliances that triggered a cascade of declarations of war? Increased militarism and arming in the prewar years? Advances in military weaponry, transportation and mobilization capacity while failing to anticipate the tactical changes necessary to fight a global mechanized war? Fuck 'em. It war de ebilushuns!

Idiot.

I also like how all of the atrocities he uses are committed by filthy foreigners (except for their fetus fetish). There you have it, folks. The hidden nationalistic and racist foundation of American religious conservatism. Way to go, Bodie!


Hitler and the Nazis (sounds like a band: "That's Adolf Hitler looking very relaxed on the vibes..."). I mean, fuck. Again, Bodie, as is his compulsive habit, fails to be capable of distinguishing between the science of evolution and the pseudoscience of eugenics. For this, there is no excuse. Get an education or shut the fuck up.

Stalin, well, he doesn't kill as many people as GOD does. And a large part of that death count is because the RUSSIANS COULD NOT FARM. They ignored the powerful insights of evolution and Mendelian inheritance and embraced Lysenkoism and built their agricultural policy around it. This killed millions and millions of people. People who dissented and said that this was not good science, and "Here, read this Darwin guy" were killed! Stalin himself was the object of worship, not Darwin or evolution.

And I spit on your other numbers because they too are fucking ridiculous. How do you distinguish between "darwinian" atrocities and the everyday atrocities of the last several millenia? Only in our effectiveness in carrying them out, and that only has to do with the misuse of science. It is a fact that, in an age where science is embraced (a consequence of which includes that evolution becomes recognized for what it is, not a cause), vastly increased hordes of basically chimpanzees with heavy artillery kill the ever-living shit out of each other only more effectively than their violent jungle cousins. Wishing that it weren't true does not do a fucking thing for securing world peace. Of course, Bodie presumably prays. That doesn't work either.

I'm done. I have vastly more important things to do than deal with this payaso. Like flick silver dollars absentmindedly at my roommate's ass.

HJ

Good recent NPR broadcast...

A few days ago I downloaded an interview with Chip Berlet on Fresh Air, and then I forgot about it. But never you worry, for I rediscovered it on my iPod. Oh happy day!

Berlet is a professional conspiracy theory analyst. Way to go, guy! Some people get all the neat jobs. His take on recent events and growning conspiracism is quite revealing. He has broadened my perspective on the significance of that recent DOJ report on right-wing extremism, which I have mentioned a few times. Here are some links:

A link to the show.
Berlet's report, Toxic to Democracy, sounds really good. I will be reading it later today.

Gotta teach,

HJ

Damn you, laundry doers!!!

"Whatcha studying?"

The instant someone asks you that question, you know you are hearing from an idiot. To an academic, it's the equivalent of asking an otherwise busy bomb disposal technician, "Hey, you think that thing's gonna explode?"

Seriously, I got back up to my apartment and asked Animala to take off the sign that said, "Talk to me! I'm busy!" She informed me that I was an off-putting moron, leaving me craning my neck and spinning like a dog trying to toss a belligerent chipmunk from its back.

What part of not looking up don't people in my apartment building get? If I wanted to talk to you, I would be living with you. It's that simple. Assume that I hate you. I assume that you hate me. Don't go and spoil my day by proving me wrong!

I was also visited by my wandering schizophrenic neighbor. Ever since his dad told me that the son was schizophrenic, I have started to understand the guy a little better. And his brain is constantly racing, and he can't hear what I'm saying, and has to has to has to get out whatever damned thing pops into his head (and everything pops into his head all at once, it seems). He just makes no sense, and trying to talk to him is like...pissing into a running water hose. Don't try it, it's not as fun as you think.

Today, he was spinning stories about how people could coat water bottles with a substance that made them melt. And I couldn't tell the difference between his jokes and his genuine musings about the subject. I did not hear him enter and he said, "Hi," while I worked on tomorrow's reading. "Hi," I said, feeling my pockets for a cyanide capsule. "Did you like that? I was doing an impression of you saying hi. Did it sound like you?" "Honestly, no." "Hahaha," he said, enjoying the lark. He got his bottled water from the vending machine and that started the thing about bottles. With me he has a couple of topics that he seems to return to compulsively. He talks about his dad and him fighting, he talks about the good ol' days when I would say hi to him when he walked around and around and around the apartment building creeping us out (before he went on his crusade against nails in the parking lot). He talks about air filters. And today, he produced a whole list of things that he is not allowed to do, like go into water deeper than his knees and how he was not allowed to have friends come into the apartment building. "Didja ever notice that?"

"I'm too busy trying to hide from you," I did not say. "Really? I guess," I actually said.

And don't try to jump in. He just doesn't stop. It's a stream of consciousness only...less coherent. Things don't seem to really follow from one to the next like normal conversations trains of thought. His mind is episodic and repetitive. I really do feel sorry for the guy. It's a bad hand he's been dealt and it doesn't kill me not to snub him, though I often wish it would. I don't know if he is really relating to me somehow or...just associates me with someone who is not actively hostile to him (really, for all my posturing here, in real life I'm as kind as a kitten).

And then 10 minutes after my schizophrenic neighbor left, a new guy showed up and wanted to talk. Never saw him before, and before you knew it, I had spent 20 minutes pretending that I was enjoying the discussion of Mr. T. Also, for such a short conversation, he brought up Dungeons and Dragons a real whole lot. This was odd because he mentioned that he did not like Dungeons and Dragons. People confuse me.

Oh, well. Found another plagiarist. Am going to stomp brains tomorrow.

Go and sin no more.

HJ

Homeopathic ER

Again, a huzzah and a shout out to Animala, who wears a size 14 hat, eats loads of fish and moves in mysterious ways. (Pay attention to the signs on the wall.)



HJ

HJHOP Podcast 9

Yo! Bing here with the ninth edition of the HJHOP skeptical summer podcast series. It also happens to be the last of the pantless podcasts. This week, a psychic detective couldn't detect herself out of a wet paper bag, Ken Ham starts picking on the wildlife, and the rhetorical device of hanging up on someone.

Podcasts

• Brannon Howse's July 6th discussion of Masonry (the secret society, not the building material) with Ron Carlson: http://www.worldviewradio.com/episode.php/episodeid-12912/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse
• California Haunts Radio interview with "psychic" "detective" Annette Martin
• Hot Ken Ham on echidna action! (Notice how Ken can't seem to work a chair.)

Musical Interludes

A special mention is due to the oddly appropriate songs that appear. Skeptic Magazine recently released a skeptic's mixed tape, hence songs about thinking and evolution.

• Coco Love Alcorn, "Thinking Cap"
• Alien Ant Farm, "Smooth Criminal"
• Overland, "Evolution Rocks"
• English Beat, "March of the Swivelheads"

Bonus illustrative link especially for Ken Ham

• All 3,000+ publications listed in Google Scholar about the echidna, an animal that we clearly know nothing about. Idiot. Do the minimum amount of work, tool.

HJ

A semester without plagiarism is like a honeymoon without seeping herpes lesions...

You know, I was warming to my students. My prematurely curmudgeonly ways were easing, and my heart expanded to encompass the promise and potential of the upcoming generation.

This, to students, is a sign of weakness.

When a probationary first-year uses the word "fey," I hit the Internet. I'm sorry, but this is not my first goat-fuck. Who do these little people think that they are? I no longer take it personally, but I make the students think that I do. ("If I catch you plagiarizing," I say at the beginning of the semester, "I will crucify you upside-down. Underwater.")

I have been online with my boss discussing this. The case is not so clear cut as it would be with a student already accepted. The problem is that a student who does not pass my class does not get to register for freshman year. So, whereas I can usually indulge my wrath knowing that the kid will suffer usually only minimal consequences (damn it), this time, there is no way around it. If I do what I say I will in my syllabus, college is over for this guy. Not pleasant. Not my problem.

Grr.

HJ

Animala strikes again!

Animala, from whom all things may be stolen because she does not have a website of her own, came across a helluva review of The Secret at Amazon.com, which is about the funniest thing that I have come across in a while. Heehee.

Enjoy it.

HJ

In which Bing makes very clever purchases...

I have a confession. Yesterday, I went out and bought more shit I did not need. I am a complete rapscallion.

These were good purchases, however. First was a Spinal Tap CD. C'mon. It's freaking Spinal Tap. (My favorite lyric: "There wasn't a dry seat in the house.") I bought it mostly for "Stonehenge." When I got to the checkout, finally, they asked me if I wanted to send coffee to the troops. Of course the fuck not. They already have coffee I paid for. Furthermore, I don't want to send them a bag of coffee that they have to grind because the Taliban might hear it. Tactical espresso remains unproven in the field.

Speaking of which, while I was browsing, I came across the Complete Idiot's Guide to Your Military and Veterans' Benefits:
I strongly condemn the Complete Idiot's company for daring to suggest that the men and women who are fighting for our freedoms are incapable of heroically negotiating government bureaucracy. Don't you fucking forget that they dying for your right to say that, and then you have the nerve to say that. How dare you?! You communists.

And that brings me to my second purchase, a total gem. It was in the $5 bargain box at the front as I was leaving (and presumably as I was arriving, though I can't verify that). It is a collection of government shorts called Cold War Hysteria. It is most completely excellent, not because it has 50 military vignettes and poorly acted shorts, but because it is a slice of life...no, because there are 50 of them. I love it! I have learned more about fallout this morning than I have in the last 33 years! Yay! I don't know if Duck and Cover is on there off the top of my head. I hope so, because I use that to illuminate the concept of matching your message to your audience. Basically, it is "the apocalypse for children." Be careful if you get nuked, they say. Flying glass might cut you. Go through the vaporous cloud that was you a millisecond ago, more like. Wow.

So, I'm pretty happy right now. I have several hours of Cold War fun to get to. Jealous much? Muahahahah!

HJ

Oh, the cleverness of me...

This afternoon, after a compulsory nap, I was rip-roarin' and rearin' to start my grading. I gathered my things, headed out the door and set up camp at my favorite coffee shop. I opened my bag, sipped on some Joe and realized that I had not brought a single thing to grade. Apparently, those manila folders were back on my coffee table completely covered by a very slim stapler.

What is it about my universe-scanning procedures that makes things in utterly plain sight absolutely invisible? I'll chalk it up to ADD, but I'm pretty sure that there is at least a heavy dollop of natural stupid.

On a lighter note, I seem to have captured the attention of the Internet with my post "Michael Jackson Dead (Is Michael Jackson Alive?)" The search term, which rivals "Lisa Edelstein Naked" and "Lambert Academic Publishing" is "Is Michael Jackson Alive?" This is because within a few minutes of the announcement of his self-induced kicking of the proverbial bucket (I was online when it came across), I cribbed a line from Our Dumb Century, an Onion anthology. It was "Elvis Presley Dead! (Is Elvis Alive?)." And while I am deeply ashamed of not being actually funny by myself, I think that the record will show that I was prescient about how predictably goofy we collectively are.

Little known fact. The first post-mortem sighting of Elvis was reported at a Burger King in Kalamazoo, MI. You're welcome.

Aside from that, I have some sad news to announce. My office wife has left me for another office, one in Virginia. This is fine, since I have been secretly holding down two offices all year. (Sorry, Dr. Snazz. I was trying to fall in love with our office again, but it was just so unfulfilling.)

I am working up a new podcast slowly. Very slowly. Maybe I'll finish tomorrow.

HJ

Outrageous Statements at Free Republic

I was at work, planted on someone else's couch and waiting for my weekly staff meeting, when the office's rightful occupant called out from her computer: "Miss Obama's Peacenik T-Shirt Sends A Message to G8 Leaders."

"Who said that?" I asked.

"Free Republic."

"Delightful."

A pause. "Oh, my god!" she exclaimed.

"Yeah?"

She then read to me a litany of screeds against Malia Obama, who is all of, what, 9? and wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on it. That whore.

The most frequently recurrent phrases used were: "ghetto," "hippy," "indoctrinated," "radical" (I'll never understand how people can think that not killing people is "radical"), and "classless." I imagine that these are the same racist mouth-breathers who get up in a tizzy when you mention Palin's Springeresque family. I had my colleague send me the link, and I pass it on to you.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2288776/posts

I think that the first thing that you will notice is that they took the thread down.

Notice how there is no reason given. Perhaps there was not a check box for "breathtaking racism and pig ignorance."

I only wish that Google somehow kept a cache file of all those comments...Oh, yeah? No kidding!

http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?2,760293,760781 (Look down a couple of posts. Many thanks to Ithonicfury, who found another copy after Google updated its cache, which wiped the awful comments.)

• I wonder who this thug is with little miss Obama. Some rapper? Did we pick up the tab for him to tag along on the family boondoggle too?

By "thug," of course, they mean "black kid." (On a side note, conspiracist nut Brannon Howse uses "thug" a lot to describe people who are associated with the Obamas. Eyebrowless ass-weasel.)

• Yep looks just like the dope smoking, maggot infested, anti-war hippies from the 60s ... Oh you say that isn’t the message. Sure looked like it.

• Please tell me that this is not a real photo from there and that this is not what we have sent to Europe. What we now are sending the ghetto over to represent us. and if so who the hell is that flea bag who looks to be dragged from the trash dumpster. The t shirt, well if the daughter is now wearing the shirt then this just shows just how classless this family is.

• Shelly: Ooooooooo, Malika, yew is bad wearin dat shirt, stickin it to da man. Grandma: Uh, huh, das right! Shelly: Wait a minute, yo daddy is da man now.

• Looks like a bunch of ghetto thugs. A stain on America..

• These ‘adorable little angels’ sat in Rev Wright’s ‘church’ and were spoon fed hate whitey/hate America for most of their lives. And don’t you believe for a minute they have not overheard the same from the parents. They most likely have been indoctrinated by the parents. [editors note: I am white and I hate you.]

• we;’re being represented by a family of ghetto trash. Could you imagine what the world thinks right now seeing this, why on earth is the kids and mother ion law there and why the hell is that trashy guy there? Who paid for the ghetto to go over there and represent us? Notice how we never say this crap during the election , this now makes me sick and I hope everyone sends this picture out

And this was my favorite, as well as the least introspective comment that I have ever heard:

Please tell me this wasn’t taken over in Moscow.. Unfortunately this is the impression the rest of the world gets of America.

Dude. That is NOT what the world thinks we are about.

I submit this for universal excoriation.

HJ (with a shout out to the Punk Pixie for the lead!)

Animala is back...

Luckily, I was wearing pants.

Anyway, a good day in the trenches, I mean, except for the bizarre and contradictory letters that emanate from the semi-sentient assholes I work for. Un-fucking-fathomable. How these people manage not to drown in their soup is a true mystery. I have, along with the other instructors, decided that probably the safest thing to do is bitch about their flighty incompetence before and after each class. For instance, today I got a memo saying that not only did I need to somehow work in an extra one-minute speech to be completed by all students for presentation on the last day of classes (oh, and that it had to basically be laudatory of the summer program), but that I had to pick two "diverse" students to emcee the entire mastubatory event. I have a meeting tomorrow, and I am the one to protest. Seriously, I wanted to just pick to white guys up there. I mean, that has nothing to do with substance of the program. Just picking minorities "because." Fuck you, I don't do spin.

So, no, I take it back. Shit day at work. My students, however, are doing swimmingly. They seemed to be jazzed about their upcoming writing assignments. They are doing "feature writing" and I decided to have them work in close coordination with one another to develop a topic in 4 essays, one for each person in the group. And they tended to pick things near and dear to my heart: conspiracy theories and cults appeared, as did a local haunted house (Lemp Mansion) and exorcisms (history, theology, skepticism and one that happened in St. Louis).

The one that bugs me is the group who is writing about homosexuality (sub-groups: the theology [yikes], the traditional American family [yikes]...etc). The four of them share their religion, and I told them that they were walking through a minefield, that they needed to remain respectful, and that they should probably keep in mind this podcast, which I had been keeping on my little podthingy, waiting for a chance to use it, somehow. I let them know that I take the research and expertise of 3 tenured university professors very, very seriously, even if they are wrong (which I don't think they are in this case).

Anyway, enough of the plugging the American History Guys, which is available for podcast download at only the finest servers.

Back to my complaining. I am worried about my students being used to promote the program that they are in. I find this disingenuous and more than a little propagandistic. If I am ordered to, I can find a way to play ball, I think. Since the students need to write about what they valued most about the program, I will use the opportunity to teach the classic Roman encomium + twittering (we did twitter-length reviews of songs earlier--great concision exercise!). I mean encomium in the 5th sense of the Wikipedia entry: "prologue, birth and upbringing, acts of the person's life, comparisons used to praise the subject, and an epilogue." The subject? Me. I mean, if you want my students to fake praise, fine. Be ye warned, it will be glaringly fake.

Ok, that would probably never happen. But, hell, wouldn't it be great? 40 students lining up, one after another, praising me. Fantastic! Every narcissist's dream!

Also, it would completely creep out every last parent who was forced to hear a commercial about how great we are. Heheh. Don't mess with me!!!!

Ah, for fun.

HJ

Ongoing goings on...

I think that my apartment building is clearing out, unit by unit. My apartment building is shaped roughly like a U, and since I am on the inside of that U, I face all of the other units that face the courtyard. And very few lights on that side of the building go on at night anymore. I don't know what it is. It's not yet 10:00 PM as I write this, and I have been working at the computer for well over an hour and change, facing out a window the entire time. There is a single window lit on the entire face of the the other side of the building. That's one window out of about 20 units. What, was there some sort of carbon monoxide leak that I haven't heard about?

Anyway, work was work today. My higher ups, dang them all to gosh-darned heck, kindly informed me of a new assignment that is required for all students. A 1-minute talk to be given at the end of the summer semester in front of, well, everyone. Seriously, I should be furious about an administrative assault on my syllabus so late in the term, but the sobering reality is that I have come to expect complete failures on the part of this program. Unbelievable. Am I supposed to grade it? I don't know. Topic? Beats me.

I kind of want to give them an assignment to talk about what a great teacher I am. It's about as snarky a response to incompetence as I have at my disposal. I'm not sure that it means anything, but I have always been a fan of extravagant gestures of questionable significance.

One of my students is writing a review of gospel rap albums. Yay. That's fine and everything, and as we worked in groups and I made the rounds of the class I read her paper. She came up with a line, "So-and-so lets unbelievers know that they do not have to be alone and unhappy." I told her, "You know, most unbelievers are pretty happy, or at least no more miserable than anyone else. Really." I mentioned this not to bitchslap her faith like it needed (she was wearing T-shirt that said "God is a gangsta: 'The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force'"). I put it in the terms of the rhetorical situation, like the professional I am. "You need to consider your audience. What if a happy atheist read this?"

Who knows? Hopefully it was a learning moment for her.

Animala was supposed to return today, but her mother took a tumble right before Animala was supposed to come home. It does not seem as if there is any damage, but she got dizzy after a visit to the supermarket and fell while Animala was pulling the car around. There was a CAT scan and a more or less clean bill of health, I guess. Except for that whole passing out thing.

Oh well. We need to see how that pans out.

HJ

Very good podcast...

Below I am including a link to a very interesting podcast with a lecture by David Aaronovitch, author of Voodoo History, a recent book about conspiracy theory. Actually, I was immensely pleased that he made a lot of the points that I made in a recent, related class I taught. It's nice to have your work validated--I'm clearly on the right track! You can download it here.

HJ

And I thought I wasn't going to have something to say tonight...

I was going to write a little blurb about what a fly-by-night corporation I am currently working for or the groundbreaking definition of rock 'n' roll that my class came up with today, but instead I got a bunch of comments from a barf I can find no use for.

I don't even respect him as a punching bag, he is so far beneath me.

His first comment was to something I wrote...way back in the day...called Dinesh D'Souza: De Dullest Tool in De Shed.

It's comical how you people speak as if you're the enlightened, educated majority.

I'm sorry. I thought that it was clear that I was a member of the enlightened, educated minority.

Nine of ten in the US are believers of one form or another. The tenth is living in his basement, Master's Degree (correspondence) on the wall, feuding with believers on YouTube comment sections over who won an unwinnable debate.

The other nine commit the logical fallacy of the ad populum, the appeal to public opinion. I am reading a book about a huckster in Kansas during the Depression who made his fortune implanting goat testicles into flaccid men. He was wildly popular. Just because a huge number of people liked him didn't make their faith in his abilities completely misplaced. Your belief in a God is completely independent of whether or not there is a god.

As if thinking this life is all there is isn't sad enough, you waste an inordinate amount of time prosyletizing a lost cause.

Would someone please tell that to the fucking Mormons and goddamn Jehovah's Witnesses and evangelical fundamentalists? And if you wouldn't mind fucking yourself on the way out, what the hell do you think you are doing right now?

HJ

If I die, please do not allow Al Sharpton to speak at my memorial service...

That guy is freaking everywhere, and for what purpose I have no idea.

And yes, their daddy was fucking bizarre.

HJ

Was Michael Jackson Raptured?

I know it sounds crazy, but only because it would be. But consider it. What if Michael Jackson was raptured? I'll let you ponder the theological implications of that.

Unfortunately, I did not come across that claim this week. But one of the interesting things about being obsessed with (possessed by?) a particular ideology is how the world takes on a rather goofily whimsical nature. Take for instance Rapture Ready's booster Terry James' "The King is Dead--Again," which appeared at Bible Prophecy Today a few days after Jacko went to the big loony bin in the sky. When MJ kicked it, James reports (quoting a newspaper article), the Internet crashed:

The shocking news of the King of Pop's sudden death yesterday sparked so much Web traffic that Google's news-link Web site had to put a temporary block on "Michael Jackson" search requests. Google's computers incorrectly interpreted the flood of requests as a "denial of service" attack meant to crash the news site. The flood of chatter and tributes did bring down sites across the World Wide Web.

And the first thing that occurs to him is not...Wow Michael Jackson is dead. Rather, it is this:

My phone conversation with Chris the Friday following Jackson’s death and the subsequent Google crash centered around what will happen when millions upon millions suddenly vanish from earth. Specifically, we thought about Todd’s - I believe - Holy Spirit-engendered thinking and planning for the immediate reaction following the Rapture.

Blink. Blink.

When the Rapture of the church (all believers in Christ for salvation) happens, as Todd constantly reminds, the people of the planet will think of one word after the panic subsides a bit and people start searching in earnest for answers: “RAPTURE!”

Blinkity blink. Yaddayaddayaddayadda.

Although I am the least person of technical savvy, especially when it comes to computers and the Internet, I understand enough to know that Todd plans to continue working toward mirror sites, and in other ways, to delay as long as possible the meltdown of the tremendous information about the Rapture and God’s salvation message when the Rapture takes place. More than that, however, is the conviction that the Lord himself will perform whatever miracles necessary to keep Rapture Ready and other websites containing His message of truth open for all who search the Net. I take the Lord at his Word when He said,

“ Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35).

Boy, won't they be surprised when they find out that God only knows how to use a Mac! I often feel the same way about my computer. In fact, I think that my Windows Automatic Updater is about the closest analogue to possession that we have yet devised. What I'm saying is that Bill Gates is the devil. (Of course, in Gates' Bible, John's gospel opens with, "In the beginning was Word for Windows.")

Oh, have you seen the Rapture Index? It's what the website owners unironically describe as:

The prophetic speedometer of end-time activity

Now, they have a little key to interpreting the Index, which now stands at 166:

Rapture Index of 100 and Below:  Slow prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 100 to 130:     Moderate prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 130 to 160:    Heavy prophetic activity
Rapture Index above 160:        Fasten your seat belts 

The problem is that this scale is completely useless. Your velocity is completely irrelevant unless you have an endpoint, a goal. And the distance to the goal is never defined. This has all the markings of a goofy pseudosocialscience. The thing is, we could hit 1000...and so what? Every moment that RR's folks aren't raptured, they can always push back the clock another second. They're like dogs chasing our own backsides; our goal is constantly getting away from us, and the faster we go, the faster it retreats! OK, once I saw my parents' dog catch his own tail, and, boy, he was sorry. Stupid dog.

In the spirit of humanistic charity, however, in improbable event that James is raptured, I volunteer to look after his cats.

HJ

I ripped up a parking ticket today...

You know what? I'm sick of my university's parking policies. Really I am. Parking at universities is uniformly awful, and at my school they make for damn sure that nobody gets within 5 blocks without paying out the nose. It's always been like this. Get a parking ticket, it's 20 bucks or more on the street. If you park somewhere you shouldn't on campus, well, they are like Chuck Yeager "pushing the envelope" of parking fines.

Anyway, I stopped at my office building to pick up some cardboard boxes for my move. I was in the loading zone and I, get this, did not turn on my flashers. I came out after about 40 seconds and the parking swine were there, sticking a 25 dollar ticket onto my windshield. "Heyeyeyeyeyey! No! I'm here. Wait." And this fellow I have known for years who works for the division of traffic control to whom I have always been nice looks at me as if he has never seen me before. "You can appeal."

I'm sick of getting nickeled and dimed by this fucking university. At every corner there has been another charge, another little fee. I looked down at the ticket. On the back, it said that I have 20 days to pay it. Where my name would have been had my car been registered with U Parking, the ticket was blank.

The class I am teaching be will be over in less than 20 days and I will be moving to Atlanta. They are never going to see that car on campus again. I looked at the meter menschen, raised the ticket and tore it up right there. They looked at me as if I had just deliberately jabbed myself in the eye with a fork. It was fucking brilliant.

HJ

HJHOP Podcast 8

In this episode, I look at the Prophet Yahweh, who telepathically conjures UFOs for TV cameras. Also, Brannon Howse embraces the ad hoc fallacy, big time. Lastly, I muse, uh, musingly, on the rhetorical value of not being able to shut your idiot gob, like David Icke can't.

Links, Podcast 8

Podcasts
Interview with the “Prophet Yahweh” on World of the Unknown
Brannon Howse’s interview with John McTernan’s (June 30)
WOTU’s interview with David Icke

Pages
NOAA’s report on the “Perfect Storm”: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/satellite/satelliteseye/cyclones/pfctstorm91/pfctstorm.html
The USGS write-up of the Northridge Earthquake: http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1996/ofr-96-0263/execsum.htm
John McTernan’s website: http://johnmcternan.name/

Music
“Finland” from Spamalot Soundtrack
“Yahweh,” by U2, off of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
“Give Booze a Chance,” by the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, from the BBC Recordings
“Going Native,” by Passengers, off of Original Soundtracks 1

Related Video:




Enjoy!

HJ

Against "connections"

I was going to start a new podcast tonight (not much going on), but I was hit with a rock solid wall of stupid tonight when I went to get quotes from Howse's July 3rd show. He was in full conspiracy mode. Basically, he is saying that Obama's boyhood mentor (I don't know if that is a real relationship--don't care to check, really--I once knew a Benedictine priest, and I'm hardly a monk) somehow recommended the boy Obama to Chicago communists to promote his career and "push him to the presidency." Howse also heard that a guy in Russia overheard (that's the whole strength of his evidence....no, seriously) that the communist world was waiting with baited breath for the black Communist Messiah of the Americas who was being groomed in Chicago.

Well, Trevor Loudon, wot comes from New Zealand, said that there was definitive evidence that there was a link between the Hawaiian Commies (played by Frank Marshall Davis) and Chicago Commies (played by Vernon Jarrett). And he has the documents to prove it. This, he suggests, validates all of the speculation about the vast, intricate program to place Obama high in the ranks of a global communist conspiracy. Thank fuck. I was waiting for something so solid I could put it in an air cannon and shoot it through a syphillitic clown. I mean, these must be some fucking awesome documents, unambiguous correspondence proving this complex, multigenerational conspiracy!

The documents are at New Zeal, Loudon's website, and it is "Obama File #78," a name that will last a lunchtime:

That's it? A letterhead from the 1940s with names and a brief note that two of these people were once on a committee together?

FUCK!

Do you know what this proves, Loudon? That they once sat on a committee together! Holy shit, your life is a misguided waste.

"Connections" is a word that increasingly makes me angry and suspicious of the message. Let me illustrate.

I want to know why Brannon Howse will not just come out and admit that he has been planted by the Catholic Church, and that they were the principle supporters of his failed campaign to amount to anything mayor-like in Collierville. I have the documents. Howse has well-known and unabashed ties (or "connections") to the Bush Administration, and I have the documentation to prove it--hell! It's on Brannon's website!

Well, President was a well-known associate of the Pope, who, as everyone except those asking rhetorical questions knows, is Catholic. My evidence? There are many lines of evidence. Ecce homos!

On more than one occasion, Bush had secrets meetings with the Pope. While they were called "audiences" by the press, we know what was really going on. They were consipring to place Howse in some shithole Tennessee backwater.

But why is Howse working for the Pope, though, when he is also an agent of for radical Muslims? What, you don't believe me? His connections to the White House place him firmly within the orbit of radical Muslims who recruited him to promote their radical Muslim agenda. Hell, he even gave a radical Muslim fighter the Medal of Freedom!

Do you see how crazy obsessions with "connections" lead to ridiculous statements? Until Loudon produces a document that says, "Obama is the communist Golden Child," there is no reason to become a Red Scaredy Cat.

The math at work, I suspect, is fairly straightforward. Let's imagine that everyone knows 100 people that they would say hello to on the street. Each one of those people you would greet knows 100 people. That means that you have a common friend with 10,000 people, right? (Given that social circles accrete around common interests and occupations, the chances that some of those 10000 also appear in your group of 100 probably is not all that bad, right?) Well, what about 2 degrees of separation? Well, each of those 10,000 people you share a friend with knows 100 people too. That's 1,000,000 "connections" right there. Another degree of separation probably puts you in contact with, well, probably every other person in the country somehow. It should be clear that links that look to be really remarkable are rather pedestrain, easily found, and almost uniformly utterly insignificant.

Someone correct my math if I'm wrong, please, but I think that's how it goes.

HJ

Mythbusting, NPR style...

I just thought that I would mention that the most recent edition of On the Media looks at media myths (I almost said "media mythperceptions" but I thought that was overkill--doh!). Refreshingly self-reflective skepticism on the part of the media. Also, good explanations of why a lot of inaccuracies flourish.

Topics include: President Obama being thought of as a "Muslim", Rosa Parks, The Bradley Effect, Genovese-Bystander syndrome, Spitting on Vets, and the incarnations of the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I actually just read the book (The Spitting Image) by the guy who showed that the stories of returning Vietnam vets being spat was basically unsupported by media accounts.

Good stuff all.

HJ

Thanks to Mike from Crooks and Liars for the swell link! If y'all are interested, I look at a number of skeptical issues in my ongoing HJHOP Summer Podcast Series. This week, does the Prophet Yahweh summon UFOs on camera? How should the post hoc fallacy guide American foreign policy? Lastly, why do so many people find David Icke's theory that lizard people actually run the world (he really says this ) so compelling? Because he can't turn off his damned mouth--sheer verbosity as a persuasive element of rhetoric!

Bodie, go cut yo'se'f a switch, boy. It's time for a whuppin.

I appreciate many things about the Creation Museum. That it is in neither St. Louis nor Atlanta for starters. But most of all, it is the comic gold of a misguided, uneducated, staggeringly self-defeating pile of cretinous offal that keeps me slurping greedily at their trough like a...porn star slurping at whatever a porn star slurps.

But most of all, I like Bodie. Hi, Bodie! Bodie's just an average guy. He shows up to work at Jesusland, probably has a cup of coffee with him (he's not a Mormon, after all), and sits down at his desk like the rest of us. I imagine that in social situations, he is a lot like the guy from Office Space. No, not Ron Livingston's character. The guy who is obsessed with his Swingline stapler. Only instead of mumbling the same thing over and over about setting fires, Bodie is babbling about being unable to test evolution or some other ignorant rot.

(I was recently informed by one of my students that "ignorant" is taking on a meaning close to "clever." Somebody let me know when I should start calling Bodie "clever.")

Bodie apparently tried to make himself look better by answering a letter from a bottom feeder. No go. If nothing else, it only added depth to the multilayered stupidity which characterizes Bodies failed attempts at useful discourse.

I'm not going after to the ineffectual tit that Bodie is answering. At least they are, on the whole, more likely to leave the world a little better for their presence when they kick off, unlike Bodie.

I do not intend this as an attack on any of you, I simply wish to comment on many of the flawed accusations you throw at “evolutionary scientists”

Such as? What accusations are you referring to and where are the references?

Fuck you, Bodie. Take a goddamned look at the vast about of data out there on evolution, you soggy contraceptive sponge. Pretending to be scholarly doesn't mean shit when you cite lots of crap. Ask that failure Snelling. However, I never get tired of putting up my list of the idiot claims that AiG has made on its website:

You said that unicorns are real. You claim that the Beowulf story is evidence of human cohabitation with dinosaurs. You say that sometimes religious genocide is OK. You think that the government is training people to talk to aliens. You believe that evolution is a random process, a process of blind chance, which is just factually wrong. You target children because they can't defend themselves and trust you (talk about a cowardly act). You believe if a 2-year old understands it, it must be cutting edge science. You believe that observation and measurement cannot trump "common sense." You believe you do the type of science that you need "faith" to understand instead of, you know, "understanding" to understand. You believe...whatever the fuck this is. You employ the nanny-nanny boo-boo defense. Your ilk does not even try to publish outside of its little circle, and you set up a bogus journal to pretend that you were scholars, THEREBY AVOIDING THE DEBATE YOU CLAIM TO CRAVE. You stare at evolution, describe evolution, and then say, "It's not evolution."

What hope is that you would even benefit from citations, you feeb? Maybe he was just talking down to your level.

Let's get on with the stupid, Bodie. AND FUCKING PAY ATTENTION! I'M NOT GOING THROUGH THESE AGAIN.The writer says, "Evolution is not a belief...it is a fact. Religion is a belief." To this the slackwit replies:

Considering that evolution is a subset of the religion of humanism as clearly outlined in Humanist Manifesto, this puts you in a predicament.

Why do you assume that he subscribes to...whatever the humanist manifesto says? Did he sign it? Did he author it? If that's how you're going to play, I'm just going to call you a Mormon, since the Mormons believe the Bible and you know, more crazy shit, you are clearly a subsect of Mormonism. Idiot.

Evolution is a framework about the past that can never be repeated or tested and must be accepted by interpretation and authority. That is, by all measures, a belief.

Every mutherfukin time a fucking fossil is dug up, it is a fucking test of evo-fucking-lution. Can we replicate the shatter patterns of a brick dropping on the sidewalk from 4 stories up? No. Does that mean that the brick didn't hit the ground? No. Idiot.

Evolutionary belief violates some basic laws of nature.

Ooh, let me call the Nobel committee. Bodie Hodge gets his very own category for shattering all of the laws of the universe. Dick, your conception of information theory is metaphorical at best and ridiculous all the same; it violates no law of entropy; it has been observed. What fucking planet have you been living on? Oh, yeah, Kentucky. Sorry. You equivocate on the meaning of "belief." In one sense it is something that is accepted as true after studying the evidence and asserted until disconfirming evidence comes along. In your sense, it means, "Favorite asshat theory which thrives among idiots, independent of the millions of published observations in dozens of disciplines which you refuse to look at." Can you even name ONE peer-reviewed biology journal that you read on a regular basis? You can't, can you? You have nothing to teach anyone about facts. Idiot.

But note that good science is observable and repeatable—unlike evolution and its historical postulates.

Again. It has been observed. You are a transitional form (one shudders to think on the way to what, however). Idiot.

But for objectiveness to be valid requires a correct worldview with which to interpret empirical facts. There are two worldviews competing here. Science is a useful tool for examining the universe, but humans are not objective.

This is why we take ourselves out of the equation when we do experiments, you vomitious drinker of toilet water. Let's say you throw a dead jackrabbit and a copy of Ken Ham's new book (Why I Like to Do It With Girls) out off of a low bridge at the same time. They will accelerate at the same speed and hit the ground simultaneously, regardless of whether anyone sees or believes it. There is something out there to be measured, something independent of us and completely non-subjective. And...fuck...and! Fuck! Just because humans can misperceive things does not mean that they are misperceiving things when it comes to evolution. Idiot.

Also empiricism (that all knowledge must be obtained by experience), is self refuting. In other words, empiricism can never be proven empirically.

If you don't believe that emprical studies are possible, why do you pretend to do "creation science"? And I hate your definition of empiricism. Idiot.

when the most well acclaimed scientists and associations such as the National Academy of Science is doing nothing to dismantle the foundations of religion.

First, this is the fallacy of appeal to majority.

NO IT ISN'T! THIS USING EXPERT OPINION TO COME TO A IS AN APPEAL TO CREDIBLE AUTHORITY. This makes it more likely to be true than something espoused by a bunch of bathwater toe-lickers. It's not an ad populum. Now, it's not true because they believe it; they happen to subscribe to peer reviewed journals. One of the ways in which we muddle our way toward to probable truth is through looking at who says it and evaluating their expertise to make such a statement. This is why we can trust someone like, Eugenie Scott (call me, Eugenie!)...She has expertise. You have a stupid first name, and that's about it. Idiot.

I'm done.

HJ

It's the July 4th Parade of Imbeciles!

The most disturbing sort of religion is the type that presumes to illuminate, nay, hold the key to politics, that is, all relations between men. Well, the ones that matter. The ones that are legally binding. So, law. Law and religion are volatile chemicals that should never be added to a heated Melting Pot. People will die in the resulting explosion.

And so I find that there is much to be horrified by whenever a religious commentator decides to wax all patriotic and I am usually unapologetically horrified by their "utopian" visions of this country.

But sometimes I experience only amusement and pity.

Like today! Take Bill Wilson, for example. Really. In his July 4th article, "Silence and Treason Against God and Country," Bill accomplishes the rhetorical equivalent of rolling a bumper car. (Should that phrase actually mean something, please let me know.) It's at Bible Prophesy Today, which is unfathomably strange and has very, very low standards. The article begins:

As we stand in the threshold of the annual celebration of our national Liberty, I wonder what firebrand statesman will arise and proclaim to this nation that God's Liberty is perfect liberty and that humanist freedom is akin to slavery.

Oh, sweet Jesus on toast.

Alright. Bill, if you are truly free, please include the phrase "Barack Obama" in your next post. You see, Bill believes that God told him that he should not use the name "Barack Obama" in his posts. Ah, the bizzare and arbitrary limitations of true freedom, eh, Billy? Check out how much freer than you are I am:

Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Hu-fuckin-ssein Obama.

Your turn, free-boy.

Hm.

It's too easy taking swipes at Bill Wilson, due to what I imagine was an unfortunate childhood incident involving carbon monoxide.

More to come!

HJ

Sarah Palin moves into Neverland Ranch!

Sorry. I just wanted to see that headline.

HJ

Linda Henkel is a Michigan-based idiot...

I'm sorry, but I just read one of the worst-thought out screeds in the history of nearly psychotic paranoia. Seriously. And I've taught classes about paranoia! It takes an especially dense loaf of lunacy to get to me these days, jaded ubergenius that I am. But, wow.

Her name is Linda Hinkel, and she's a sparrowfart away from the boobie hatch, at least judging by her article, "Teachers, Judges, Radical Islam, Acorn, Activists: The Treachery of America's Fifth Columns." It could only be, as you would expect of something of such low quality (just wait for my next podcast!), an infected fistula on the asshole that is Brannon Howse's site.

I mean, really.

My dad and father-in-law fought for the freedoms that many of us see slipping away today. From them, I learned American values and a deep love for our country. So much that I have pledged my life, fortune, and sacred honor to defend our Constitution from foreign and domestic terrorists. It will be my death before the legacy of Communism will be left for my children. [...]

You know, I have never endorsed Communism before...but her promise makes me waver! Oh. My. God. She's recruiting for the communists! Linda Henkel is a communist.

On a recent visit to Utah, my parents asked me to find them a Tea Party because they knew I had communicated with our Michigan Tea Party organizers. At the Utah Tea Party meeting I spoke to the gathering of the growing threat of the hate-America crowd. Since then, I've compiled a more complete list of Fifth Columns destroying our country.

Fucking Utah. But, this type of...weirdo talk...was this what was going on at the Teabagging meetings? Jesus. No wonder nobody took you folks seriously at all!

1. That destruction starts, of course, when our Judeo-Christian roots are ignored – in our families, government, schools, and media. Without God, the path to Communism will be easy at the rate we are going.

How is that possible? Is God a capitalist? That hippy Jesus was a total communist when he said to give away everything! Screw private property! There are several communist religious orders, wherein every member shares everything, such as the Benedictines. And the Catholics, they are not exactly known for their crazy-assed liberalism.

2. The young teachers graduating from the Bill Ayer's teaching schools who are taught to bring political activism into the classrooms. He and his ilk advocate a silent revolution from within by indoctrinating the hearts and souls of our young. So far, he has done a good job of brainwashing our children to embrace the political paradise of Communism propounded by radical Saul Alinsky and others.

Fuck. You just string words together. "Bill Ayer's teaching schools." I see no evidence that Ayers has established a school. Anywhere.

3. The men in black destroying our Constitution from the bench. The judiciary is currently stacked heavily for the left and will be heading even further to the left if Sonia Sotomayor and other Leftists gain a majority in the Supreme Court.

Dude. If you were paying attention to, well, the world, you would see that this Supreme Court, which is in all likelihood is not going to shift dramatically with the inevitable confirmation of Sotomayor, has been and will probably continue to be conservative for at least 10 years, given the relative ages of the Justices.

4. The radical Islam groups that are already established in the U.S. complete with Jihad Training Camps. Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota took his oath of office on a Muslim Koran; he is part of an organization that tries to place Muslims everywhere in our government. Shariah law, here we come! Also, the Muslim Student Associations on college campuses are tied to terrorist organizations. Remember the moderate Muslim of Bridges TV who tortured and beheaded his wife? "Honor" killing has now arrived on our soil. While We the People are upset about the radical Muslims in our country, the Communists are hoping we don't notice what they doing. Distract us, and how easy it will be for them to conquer us!

Where is your fucking evidence, you racist tit? How dare you (other than compulsively) make sweeping, idiotic, racist statements like that? Show me your motherfucking evidence that my Muslim students are linked to fucking terrorists, you bigoted idiot. SHOW ME. And who is disproportionately scared of "teh Muzlims"? Strange idiot fucks like yourself, that's who.

Also, you fail to mention that the Koran was owned by Thomas Jefferson. OMG! JEFFERSON WAS A MUSLIM RADICAL!!!! AHHHH!! You freakish retard.

Man.

5. The leaders of minority groups who have divided this country into this or that faction, instead of uniting ALL of us to call ourselves Americans! Divide us into different groups based on our color, culture, or ideology and the path to Communism will be easy.

Check this out. She lapses into a form of conspiracist thought that comes directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the Protocols, the Jews were charged with fomenting division so that they could take over. This is a common trope among conspiracists--that dissent causes a power vacuum into which the evil manipulators will rush in and establish their supremacy. She, however, is unaware of this source of her thinking, and thereby subscribes to the type of logic that brought us some of the most extravagant and inhuman purges in humanity.

6. The homosexual activists who cannot accept the rule of law and are creating division in our society. It is the divide-and-conquer principle of the Communists at work again.

See? I'm not making this shit up! The gays are being used against their knowledge to foment conditions propitious to a communist takeover.

7. The environmentalists that want us to worship their flawed doomsday agenda, instead of God. The green path to Communism allows no other Gods.

Yeah, because China is known for its sterling environmental record. What a fucktard!

8. Lazy Americans who have the time to help our country fight to regain our freedoms but are doing nothing. I realize some Americans are in denial and some have been brainwashed by Leftists to the point of no return.

Notice this type of cult-think: "If you do not see the crazily improbable shit that I do, you are one of them." Also, brainwashing. Seriously. Fucking brainwashing.

9. The Planned Parenthood queens who think aborting children at any stage of pregnancy is okay. I think this is called "dancing with the devil." These death queens are working overtime to divide us into pro-abortion versus pro-life groups. If we focus on this divisive issue, then we will not notice the Communists marching us towards Communism. Think of all those great patriots who were aborted.

Hm. Nobody ever thinks of the serial killers who were aborted. Just saying. But again, dividing and conquering--and not just the fetuses! You are totally stuck in the fucking 1950s.

10. George Soros and his entire group of Communists are destroying our country. China says he is not welcome and France calls him a criminal. He has destroyed countries by playing with their money markets. When our economy just about crashed last fall, Soros was delighted, not only at the money he was making, but also at the prospect of America's collapse. You know your country is in trouble when Soros says the G-20 meeting was "successful." The success was for Soros and his cronies, but not for We the People. He is one of the more wicked anti-Americans on our soil.

Dude. He made his money speculating in currency markets. You don't get any more capitalist than that! It was not as if the writing was not on the wall for the American financial orgy. This cui bono bullshit is ridiculous, and his publicly anticommunist sentiments are easily available to those who care to look for them.

These Communists have infiltrated all the power centers of our freedom-loving society through the Council on Foreign Relations and other secret organizations with hidden agendas. They have infiltrated our government at all levels, including our banking system, corporations, foundations, churches, media, Hollywood, and our schools. These political activists are hoping we will not notice, but guess what? We have noticed and patriots everywhere have only begun to fight!

The Council on Foreign Relations. Everyone knows that's run by the Illuminati!

11. The profit-motivated pharmaceutical and food industries that manage to keep us unhealthy. The pharmaceutical industry engages in Faustian agreements with our medical schools and their leaders. Their "influence" cannot be underestimated. Is this why 200 Harvard Medical students and faculty want an end to the pharmaceutical industry in their classrooms? Are these medical students tired of indoctrination aimed only at drug-based models of disease care? The pharmaceutical industry would never allow alternative health therapies to be taught to medical professionals unless they could control the therapies and the profits. Did you ever wonder why our country is so unhealthy with all that "great" processed food available? We can only imagine where the FDA fits into this "health" paradigm. Conquering an unhealthy, brainwashed citizenry with Communism would be easy.

Well, the FDA question is easy enough. The FDA is responsible both for protecting the food and drug industries as well as advocating for the consumer. This is a conflict of interest and should be rectified. Second. Yes. Pharmaceutical industries have too much influence on doctors and education. At the same time, what disease has alternative medicine made a thing of the past? Furthermore, alternative medicine is almost completely unregulated. Why are we so unhealthy? Because we eat like fucking pigs? Because our portion sizes are so ridiculously large? Because we ingest more calories than we burn? Because we are SO FUCKING GOOD at producing and distributing food in a way that has not been seen in human history?

12. The wealthy foundations in this country, whose leaders are not spending their money in ways their founders intended. All it took was Communist infiltration of these foundations that began with very noble causes to send them in the wrong direction – in the direction of Communism.

EVIDENCE, WHORE! EVIDENCE!

13. The Gamaliel Foundation and their affiliates, which are in 21 states. These affiliates have the same goals as ACORN does, except they work out of churches instead of neighborhoods. It is a group that embraces Communism, too, and, if left unchecked, will destroy our churches. Melanie Phillips, in "A Revolution You Can Believe In," says these snake oil salesmen helped destroy her churches in the UK. Their society is a cesspool, Shariah law is embraced, and their churches stand empty. But Phillips says that we still have time to save our churches and stop these godless destroyers from ripping the 'man on the cross' out of our society.

I wrote a letter to Prime Minister Gordy Brown, asking if Sharia was now the law of the land and he replied. "Didn't you notice that every adult British male now has a beard? Don't ever write to me again, you feckless fuckwit." Screw you, Prime Minister. Goddamn it, Linda, you are fucking ridiculous. A deserving laughing stock. If this had been reported in any major paper, maybe I would not stop and think of you every time I saw a dog turd on the ground. But no. There has not been a single credible news source linking the Gamaliel Foundation to communism in the last month. If you do a Yahoo News search for all available dates, you get 3 hits. 1 does not have a connection at all. One refers to the comments section of a CBS report. One is makes reference to a Google search. Sure, there are 10,000 unreliable sources saying that there is a link, but 10,000 bad sources is, of course, inferior to a single reliable source. Your ignorance is staggering.

14. Most of our television, radio, and newspapers have become successful propaganda tools of the Communists, who love to brainwash We the People with their anti-American propaganda. In my family, we've gotten rid of most of these "news" sources in our home and now go to the Internet and to each other for our news. The path to Communism is easy if our minds are under the control of others. Is this why Jay Rockefeller has introduced legislation to tamper with our freedom of speech through the Internet? How ironic that his family began one of the most corrupt foundations in this country – the Rockefeller Foundation – that promotes the New Global Order of Communism by spreading their tax-free monies with stealth to all their totalitarian causes.

My god. You are completely ignorant. Seriously. You don't even...Your primary source for info is the prestigious internet? Fuck. I mean. Fuck. Oh, and the Rockefeller Foundation is of course controlled by David Icke's Reptillian Overlords, silly.

15. The "fashion" designers and Hollywood "stars" who sell pornographic styles that are more fitting for prostitutes than for our children. The media now dictate to our children that it is fashionable to show it all with tattoos and earrings everywhere. Brainwashing our children weakens family unity, and destroying our families makes the path to Communism easier.

Also, the beat of rock n' roll, especially the Beatles, make children vulnerable to Communist brainwashing. (A charge actually put forward by David Barton in the 60s. He's a fucking idiot too.)

16. Parents who are not taking their jobs seriously and fail to give their kids a solid moral compass. Schools have so declined in the last 20 years that it is now clear We the Parents are the best teachers for our children. The Communists would love to steal our parental rights. They encourage us to put our children in government-sponsored daycare and all-day kindergartens. They tell us we ALL need that expensive college education, when the school of hard knocks is all you need for some careers. Because government schools are a successful vehicle to brainwash our children, they are given preferential treatment when school laws are made, while vouchers and charter schools are threats to their monopolistic ambitions. Steal our parental rights and brainwash our children, then the path to Communism will be easy.

Blink. Blink. Wow. Fuck. Wow. You have no culture. None. No aspirations, well, other than what I hope you choke on.

17. And the last, but certainly not the least Fifth Column is the college and university environments. At public colleges, anyone from off the street can go sell their activism to these students: pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, pro-radical Islam, pro-homosexual, pro-abortion, and any other activism they want. What a cesspool they have become by polluting the young minds in our country. Freedom of speech is a problem for conservative students in many of these "learning" environments. My advice to prospective parents of college students is that you think very carefully where you drop your precious offspring off. Do not let them hang out at these campuses any longer than is needed to obtain a marketable degree.

She actually said this: "Freedom of speech is a problem for conservative students in many of these 'learning' environments." Compare this with the opening sentence of her weird little personal nightmare: "My dad and father-in-law fought for the freedoms that many of us see slipping away today. From them, I learned American values and a deep love for our country."
Big-time fail, twat. And then, she seems to omit that one can find groups who are pro-Israeli , pro-nutty Christian fuckheadedness, and pro-life activists. But we embrace that in the spirit of free inquiry. Hey, but at least you are letting your kids know it is ok to aim low, you ignorant sow.

[...]

The most disturbing thing, I thought, was her bio:

Linda Henkel is a Michigan-based writer, researcher, and activist. She has been published at the Canada Free Press website. As the mother of four children, education issues, including home schooling are a priority for her. She plans to do what it takes so the legacy of totalitarianism is not left for her children.

This bitch is a home schooler?!?! Holy shit! Honestly, my first impulse is to call Child Welfare and Social Services. Fuck. Poor fucking kids.

There was a bit that I edited out where she actually referred to "eggheads." A more 1950s mindset there could not possibly be. What she means is "people who are more educated than her," which includes almost everyone. Seriously. What is with the anti-intellectualism?

A pox on Brannon for this one. This was especially bad. Ouch. It hurts thinking down to these people's level. I mean, you make Ray Comfort look...no. I won't go that far.

HJ

Is there a word for "encouraged and depressed"?

Reading Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason has left me with a slightly uneasy feeling about the current state of affairs, a state which was epitomized in a vigorous discussion that I overheard and eventually had to get in on this evening at a local coffee shop.

I had just settled down with a large coffee (yet another) book about conspiracy theories, when I heard one of the maybe-just-out-of-college-aged workers behind the register say to the other, "I just don't understand how you can believe in creationism." My ears perked up.

What I then witnessed was...an intellectual cripple fight. The girl, who I will call "Red" and the guy, who I will call "Spike" (I judge people by their hairstyles), had one of the least communicative, utterly uninformed discussions that I had ever witnessed.

Neither of them knew what the fuck of which they spoke. It was utterly depressing.

I...can't even describe their depths of the mutual ignorance. She was asking a lot of really interesting questions of Spike, the Bible-believer, however, these would have best remained rhetorical, since her answers were usually almost completely useless.

Bing needed to intervene. I took off my sunglasses so they knew that I was actually paying attention to them; eventually the girl looked at me, and I said, "This is one of the most interesting conversations that I have overheard in a long time!"

"Really? Why?"

"It's nice to see people talking about this in a friendly way. Usually people get so hostile about it."

"Well, hop on in."

You asked for it, toots.

"OK," I said to Spike, "Do you believe that the Bible is literally true?"

"Yes."

"The creation story, Noah and the ark, and everything?"

Affirmative.

"OK," I posed my old standby: "Genesis 1, people are created after the animals. In Genesis 2, people are created before the animals. How is this possible? How can man be literally created both before and after the animals?"

"Well, I think that Genesis 1 is a narrative account of what happened, and Genesis 2 is a poetic account."

"I'd disagree," and I explained how 1 Genesis was set up like a song and was probably originally the product of a non-literate society. When I finished, a smoking hot chick who was waiting for her order gave me a big smile. That gave me a huge...ego.

"So, well, one is poetic and the other is literal. Now if you look at the evidence for the historical truth of the Bible..."

"Wait a sec, but you just said that you said the Bible was literally true. You can't just walk away from the question."

"Er, ah..."

"Ok, so we've established that you are not, then, a biblical literalist."

I think this bothered him. For like a second.

Then I let him lead the conversation into discussion of the historical truth of the Resurrection.

"How do you know it's true?" I asked.

"Well, the accounts line up. And have you heard of Josephus?"

"Yes."

"Well, he confirmed what happened."

"Actually, he only says that he heard, and he's writing long after the fact, that people believe that this Jesus guy rose from the dead. I mean, a local news reporter reporting on, I don't know, dog washing would not stoop to taking hearsay as the basis for a news story."

That bothered him. For like a second.

Now the entire time, Red was jumping in. She was more passionate than informed. Her description of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was...damned unique. She conceded points (out of habit? politeness?) that any self-respecting atheist would not concede. "Yes, you need faith for science." "Well, Einstein believed that there was a god." "Well, I don't think that we'll ever know how life began..."

This dude was all about moral certainty. If Red would have shut her mouth for a second (and she was getting more agitated the entire time), I would have been able to ask him why being certain was such a virtue and then explain how uncertainty leads to inquiry, which leads to discovery, which leads to FUCKING PENICILLIN.

Damn it.

But in the end, the pressure of a fairly steady stream of customers overwhelmed the conversation and broke it up. As I got ready to leave, I asked Spike, "Hey, what was that book you mentioned?" I was getting an "in" to recommend a book to him.

"The Case for the Resurrection, by N.T. Wright."

"Oh, is he the guy at the University of Michigan?"

"Uh, I don't know."

Actually, I didn't know either. I mean, I'm sure someone at Michigan has at some point written about the Resurrection. I just wanted, you know, to give the impression that I was up on the field. Which I guess I kind of am, by normal standards, anyway.

The book he recommends does not exist, but you can get close to it on Wright's website:

The chapter/article starts like this, and remember, this was put to me as the argument for the historical veracity of the Resurrection.

1. Introduction

The question of Jesus’ resurrection continues to haunt the thinking and writing of many scholars. I shall not debate in detail with them here; there are other places for that. I want instead to sketch, in broad strokes, a historical argument about what happened three days after Jesus’ crucifixion.

The question divides into four. First, what did people in the first century, both pagans and Jews, hope for? What did they believe about life after death, and particularly about resurrection? Second, what did the early Christians believe on the same subjects? What did they hope for? Third, what reasons did the early Christians give for their hope and belief, and what did they mean by the key word ‘resurrection’ which they used of Jesus? Finally, what can the historian say by way of comment on this early Christian claim?

The first three questions that Wright asks, while interesting, have no bearing on whether or not a guy named Jesus got over his thoroughly fatal crucifixion. So I skip ahead to the answer of the fourth question.

5. From Story to Event

This brings us, finally, to our fourth question. What can the historian say that will account for the early Christians’ claim that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead, the explanation they themselves offer for their drastic modification of the Jewish hope?

There has been no shortage of hypotheses designed to explain why the early Christians really did believe that Jesus really had been raised from the dead. These come in many shapes and sizes, but most of them feature one of three types of explanation. (1) Jesus did not really die; he somehow survived. (2) The tomb was empty, but nothing else happened. (3) The disciples had visions of Jesus, but without there being an empty tomb.

(1) The first can be disposed of swiftly. Roman soldiers knew how to kill people especially rebel kings. First-century Jews knew the difference between a survivor and someone newly alive.

(2) The second is only a little more complicated. Faced with an empty tomb, but with no other evidence, the disciples would have known the answer; the body had been stolen by someone. These things happened. They were not expecting Jesus to rise again; by itself, an empty tomb would prove as little to them as it would to us.

(3) Visions were frequent and well known — including visions of someone recently dead. We did not have to wait for modem medicine, psychology and pastoral records to tell us that these things happen. Faced with Peter knocking on the door when they thought he was about to be killed, the praying church assumed he had died and was paying them a post-mortem visit; ‘it must be his angel’, they said. Even lifelike visions would not prevent people conducting a funeral, continuing to mourn, and venerating the tomb.

To cut a long story very short: to explain why the early Christians really did believe that Jesus really had been raised from the dead, we must postulate three things: Jesus really had been dead; the tomb really was empty, and it really was his tomb; they really did see, meet and talk with a figure who was not only demonstrably the crucified Jesus but who seemed to be in some ways different — though not in the ways one would have imagined from reading Isaiah, Ezekiel or Daniel.

Can we go beyond this? What then can and must be said?

Please, do tell! And this is where he craps down his pant leg:

If we attempt to argue for the historical truth of the resurrection on standard historical grounds, have we not allowed historical method, perhaps including its hidden Enlightenment roots, to become lord, to set the bounds of what we know, rather than allowing God himself, Jesus himself, and indeed the resurrection itself, to establish not only what we know but how we can know it?

Yes. That's called doing history. What Wright is basically saying is that we must toss out the unsatisfactory historical standards (in this particular case), which are tainted with the legacy of 'teh Enlightmentz". A positively underwhelming argument. But maybe there is something here...

History proceeds, not just by deduction from each individual piece of evidence, but by abduction, by inference to the best explanation. We must not be browbeaten by an over-cautious epistemology. [...]

"Fuck standards." In which case, if I could offer an explanation for the story of the Resurrection that we have that did not depend on postulating an amazingly unprobable event, Wright would embrace it. Cool. How can we get such a strong tradition of Resurrection? Look to cargo cults to see a religion developing into a longstanding tradition in real time. The associated rituals are rooted in a belief that someone who apparently did not exist is going to come back one day. Why can't this have happened in the case of Christianity? This is far more elegant and apparently has the benefit of having a precedent, unlike Resurrection.

The other book that Spike recommended was Tim Keller's The Reason for God. I purposely held back from recommending The God Delusion. He would not have been ready for it and would have rejected it out of hand. Keller's book attempts to be a counter to similar recent defenses of atheism.

I am looking at the reviews of the book right now at Amazon. In the reviews, someone does me the immense favor of listing the arguments against faith that Keller attacks:

In the first seven chapters Keller looks at seven of the most common objections and doubts about Christianity and discerns the alternate beliefs underlying each of them. This section is titled "The Leap of Doubt" and answers these seven common critiques:

1. There can't be just one true religion
2. A good God could not allow suffering
3. Christianity is a straitjacket
4. The church is responsible for so much injustice
5. A loving God would not send people to hell
6. Science has disproved Christianity
7. You can't take the Bible literally

I see straw men lining up here:

1. Atheists don't say that. They say there is no god.
2. That seems to be rather self-explanatory. I might read that chapter, because that connundrum has always reeked to me.
3. No, Christians should be put in straightjackets. Haha. I've not yet heard that as an argument that Xianity is false, so addressing the question is...moot at best, a distraction at worst.
4. So? (Can you hear him warming up the Stalin-Hitler retort?)
5. I might read that one too, for much the same reason as the other. But you still have to establish a god's existence before you start futzing with his nature.
6. No, the argument is "Science has found no evidence for a lot of shit that Christians believe is true." And I can see the argument from ignorance popping up here: "Science can't prove Christianity wrong." Again, so what?
7. There are innumerable contradictions. Are you going to explain away all those?

You know what scares me the most about the book? Not that it seems like it will be a powerful and original defense of Chirstianity that will send me to church, rather, the beginning of the first line of the above review: "In the first seven chapters..." Yeah. Hm. Yeah.

As I left the coffee shop, I gave Spike a slip of paper that had "The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins" written on it. I said, "If you want to argue against evolution, you need to know exactly what it is you are arguing against." "Absolutely," he agreed. I hope he at least looks into it. I'm not too hopeful.

The most disturbing aspect of the whole evening was not Spike's belief, rather Red's inability to coherently argue on behalf of skepticism, intellectual caution and the value and standards of evidence. In hindsight, I should have recommended the book to her--she might read it, enjoy it, and really benefit from it. She needs to be able to articulate her objections and understand the concepts behind the science she is defending.

HJ

Skeptics' Circle 114 is out...

Get there! It's at Homologous Legs and is called "On the Tendency of Skeptics to form Circles; and on the Perpetuation of Circles and Skeptics by Natural Means of Selection"

'Tis most swell.

HJ

Let's see, Wednesday...Yep! Ken Ham's day to piss me off!

But first, my class and I were discussing "writing reviews" today. I was in freestyle mode today, just bouncing along with the discussion. At some point we got onto the subject of album covers and evaluating them against one another. Well, on the overhead projector, I brought up the cover art for Dark Side of the Moon. One girl in the back said, "Oh, I saw that on a t-shirt!"

"Yeah, but you did know that it was an album cover first, right?"

Thunk. <-- That's my head hitting my desk

Oh, Ken Ham. That's right. I was wondering what this bilious aftertaste was, and then I remembered that I had read some more of Ken's drivel tonight.

First, Ken's bitch, Paul Taylor of Idiots in Genesis UK, complains that the UK may be enforcing educational standards. He's bitching about parental rights. Dude, you have no right to fuck up your kids' minds, to keep them in ignorance by force, just because you squeezed them from your genitals. I find it as deeply appalling as I do holding their heads underwater. These are the types of progressive policies that will leave the US at a competitive disadvantage unless we seriously get our shit together. Three cheers for the UK, and a boo-sucks to Paul Taylor!

But mostly what precipitated my goatlessness (for it had been gotten proverbially) was the spurious charge of hypocrisy Ken himself leveled against his better, Richard Dawkins. You see, Dawkins is establishing a camp to teach kids to be independent thinkers and to instill a sort of curiosity not doomed to lead to the loathsome, solipsistic, and masturbatory mental inbreeding of creationism. But Ken takes this personally, as, of course, he should.

Quoth the tit:

After the group of around 70–80 secular paleontologists visited the Creation Museum recently, some comments were made to the press (several media outlets were here that day) concerning the Creation Museum attracting so many children and how terrible this was—that we were educating children this way. [...]

Recently I wrote a blog item about a person who was complaining about the new Creation Museum billboards, stating:

I hate that the Creation Museum has dinosaurs ripping at their billboards, an obvious ploy to attract more kids to brainwash to Christianity.

Yesterday we came across a blog entry by an associate professor of mathematics in Harrisonburg, Virginia,who visited with the group of paleontologists. He blogged:

I have made several visits to the museum, and it has been crowded each time. But even I was taken aback by the mob scene that greeted us. Things were so clogged it was sometimes hard to work your way through the labyrinth of exhibits. Very depressing. Even more depressing was the ubiquity of small children from various camps and schools: Well isn’t that charming. Getting ‘em while their young is a big thing with creationists.

Of course, what he means is that Christians shouldn’t be teaching children—that it needs to be left up to the atheists/evolutionists. If this professor agreed with what we teach, it would be okay to teach children—but he doesn’t agree; so, it is not okay for us to teach children.

Ah, but you see some people are genuinely more qualified than you are to teach. These "secular paleontologists," by which you mean, "real paleontologists"--how the fuck do you know whether or not they are religious, you overgeneralizing...sucker...of...yams?!--are scientists presumably teaching at real universities, not pseudoscientists like Allan L. Gillen, who teaches something that is only superficially like biology at Liberty Novelty University. Surely kids are best served by receiving instruction from the best teachers, right?

It's not our fault that you have condemned yourself to being a huffy lunatic. Really, when are you going to give up on this Jesus guy? (I think it the answer is probably when it stops being profitable.)

HJ