In Which We Jump On the Tebow-Bashing Bandwagon

There are lots of numbers associated with football games. But what do they mean?

A lot was made of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow throwing for 316 yard in last week’s footsball game against the terminally unemployed steel-workers of Pittsburgh. You see, Tebow stood out from other quarterbacks for painting Bible verses on his face, a favorite of his being John 3:16. People imagined there was some connection between the number of yards Tebow threw for and the placement of one of the more important verses in Christianity within one of the later Gospels.

It’s a pretty clear example of selection bias. When something unusual happens which seems to validate a wacky but popular belief, that will stand out in the memories of people holding that belief. We remember the hits and forget the misses. It’s what psychics and astrologers depend on to keep customers. And now this weird sub-section of the divination industry is combining sports, numerology and religion, so I’m going to cash in on it like the rest.

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Last night the Tea Party Patriots of New England beat Tim Tebow and the Broncos by a score of 45-10. I couldn’t find any relevant verses in the Bible. So unsurprisingly I had to turn to the Quran. Here is 45:10 from the Quran:

Before them is Hell, and what they had earned will not avail them at all nor what they had taken besides Allah as allies. And they will have a great punishment.

So it’s pretty clear what Mohammed’s referring to here. Hell obviously symbolizes the Patriots losing to the Broncos. In endorsing Jesus, Tebow had “taken besides Allah as allies.” And this blog post mocking Tebow and his fans is the great punishment predicted by the Prophet Mohammed under the divine guidance of the arch-angel Gabriel.

“GO PATS!”

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Now to dig a little deeper, I’m going to be using the King James Version of NFL statistics and the ESPN reports of the Bible. This is where this kind of work gets fun because there are about as many sports statistics in a game as there are verses in the various alleged holy books. So I can pretty much make the “meaning” of this NFL playoff game be whatever I want.

Tebow completed 9 passes out of 26 attempts. The ninth chapter of Mark in part tells the story of Jesus casting a demon out of a young boy. Here’s Mark 9:26

And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.

Right after this, Jesus takes the boy’s hand and he regains consciousness. So the 26th verse of Mark 9 refers to the low point of the “boy,” i.e. Tebow, just before Jesus fully heals him. So now all Tim Tebow has to do is to have a game where he plays even shittier than he did last night and only completes 9 passes out of 27 attempts, and he’ll be back to how he was before the demon of losing in the playoffs took control of him.

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Patriots QB Tom Brady’s longest completed pass of the game was for 61 yards. And is it just a coincidence that there is such a verse as Exodus 6:1? I DOUBT IT.

Then the LORD said unto Moses, Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.

Here the God character is a metaphor for the INS. The government is telling Moses (Brady) that soon it will crack down on Pharaoh (Tim Tebow) for being an illegal immigrant. As he admitted in that horrible anti-abortion commercial which ran during the Super Bowl, Tebow was “born” in the Philippines. Well, all his documentation is apparently faked, according to my haphazard and irresponsible numerological interpretation of the theological meaning of Tom Brady’s football stats. Remember, you heard it here first.

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Since last night’s game was one of those playoff games where the losers are banned from playing any more games and from talking or thinking about footsball for the rest of the season, this marks the end of playing football games for money for the Broncos until next fall. So we have the complete stats for the Broncos for this season.

Tebow was sacked 33 times this season. And after this disappointing loss for him, he’s gotta feel a little like Job wondering why God could let all these horrible things happen to him, like losing a game he’s paid millions of dollars to play regardless of the outcome. Job 33 is a speech by this young guy named Elihu, who tries to answer Job/Tebow’s whining and bitching. Elihu’s unsatisfied with the counter-arguments made by Job’s buddies, so he busts up the pity party to give them what he sees as the real explanation.

Job, seen here defying God by fixing his television antenna.

Elihu’s speech in Job 33 is basically a foreshadowing of the response the God character gives Job, which is that God is powerful and Job shouldn’t even question him. Shut up Job, you bozo. I MADE you from dirt. Get lost. I work in mysterious ways. That’s what God tells Job ultimately.

And it’s also what we hear from apologists trying to respond to the Problem of Evil. God gets all the credit when things are going well, but when something horrible happens like a flood or earthquake or a Broncos playoff loss, suddenly it’s all “mysterious ways.” When scientists cure polio, the devout thank God. But when a tsunami kills a few thousand people they suddenly embrace a naturalistic worldview where randomness instead of God is at the root of all things.

I’d like that kind of gig – one where all your fuck-ups are always overlooked and you get all the credit for the good stuff others do. It’s nice work if you can get it.

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TWiC #2: Jay-Z and Beyonce’s demon baby will enslave us all

[I meant to write about a few different subjects this week, but got a little carried away with one in particular.]

You’ve probably heard from your jackass co-workers who read the tabloids that Beyonce gave birth to a human child this past week. But were you aware that this baby will one day reduce the human population of Earth to 500 million by instigating wars and spraying poison gas from commercial airplanes? IT IS TRUE.

Jay-Z, left, seen here warming Beyonce up to the idea of the pidder padder of little Antichrist feet. 

First, some background: There have been rumors going back a while that Jay-Z is a member of the Illuminati. The Illuminati actually existed back in the 18th century. It was this group of intellectuals who worked in secret to try to undermine the theocratic monarchies which had been so popular around the world for the past several centuries and replace them with the liberal democracies we enjoy today. Eventually the Illuminati became popular to the point where it could no longer operate in secret and disbanded. Today this is known as the Operation Ivy Effect.

Around this time, America was growing up as the first modern secular republic with its own wars, pubic hair, slaves, lack of confidence around girls, wholesale slaughters of the indigenous populations and all that jazz. So the people who might have joined the Illuminati in times past didn’t have to sneak around in the shadows to talk about why they thought secular values were better than following the divine right of kings. If being able to speak your mind openly in public without too much fear of being burned alive for heresy is winning, then the Illuminati had “won.”

If you take a map of Washington, DC, you can like draw lines through it and stuff.

But the fundamentalist Christians wouldn’t let it go. They had to keep believing that the Illuminati was still out to get them, somehow. So they projected their fear and hatred onto other groups. Freemasons, Catholics, Jesuits, Jews – they were all supposedly new hideouts for the old Illuminati who’s bent on global depopulation so they can control the world. This isn’t the root of all of the kookier conspiracy theories, but it is for a hell of a lot of them.

I’m not really clear on why Jay-Z became the target of the fundamentalists on the grounds that he’s a part of this “New World Order” conspiracy. They seem to think he uses Illuminati symbolism in his music, but that just raises the question of why a secret global takeover conspiracy would risk the cover they’ve supposedly used for the past few centuries just to put some of their symbols on a Jay-Z album. What’s the point of doing that?

I’ve noticed this kind of innuendo in conspiracy-mongering a lot before. The Beatles put backwards messages on Strawberry Fields Forever to tell fans that Paul McCartney is dead. There are messages on the dollar bill. Hollywood used 911 in movies and television because they all knew the government would blow up the World Trade Center buildings on September 11. It’s all absurd on its face, and if they get anywhere near a coherent reason for why they believe the conspirators publicly displayed their plans in this subliminal way, it never makes any fucking sense at all. It’s weird that the conspiracy subculture which thrives so much on narrative can’t seem to come up with a consistent, entertaining story to really explain the reasons for the “symbolism” which only they see.

And it’s no wonder only they see this symbolism. They’re the only ones who want it to be there so badly that they actually try to force it into existence by force of sheer will. Let’s go back to that Jay-Z album cover that put him on the anti-Illuminati types’ blacklist:

I mean, sure, gold is tacky. But demonic? I don’t think I’d go that far. It has some interesting detail in it, but it’s not what I would choose for cover art if I were making an album.

A blogger I picked at random sets me straight and explains some of the symbolism:

Triangles- These are designed as an inner frame in clusters around the album. Triangles are known symbols of the pyramid in the illuminati.

OH GOD NO NOT TRIANGLES! ANYTHING BUT TRIANGLES!

Baphomet- There are four huge symbols of the baphomet in the middle of all four walls of the album. The baphomet is a pagan deity symbol for the occult and satanism.

Here’s Baphomet:

Admittedly I kind of suck when it comes to aesthetics. But I really have no clue what this person is talking about with four Baphomets in the album cover. I see stuff in the places the blogger’s referring to, but I don’t see any goat heads. Later they misidentify tilted stars as “Pentagrams… Very known mason symbols.” They make such stretches in this way that it’s difficult to believe they’re perceiving these “symbols” for any reason other than that they simply want them to be there.

But the best part is in the update:

UPDATE: July 6, 2011- The album cover is ornate solid gold designed by Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci who is the same guy who designed the infamous Jesus is Lord T-shirts that the hip hip artists wear in order to deceive their fans. But it’s obvious whom they serve by this album cover.

That’s right, don’t be fooled, people! You saw the triangles, didn’t you? And the goats? No? Well, you saw the triangles, right? So… yeah! TRIANGLES OMGWTF.

To put the joking aside for a minute, this is how conspiracy believers inoculate themselves from disproof. Any evidence against them must itself be part of the conspiracy. If it turns out the guy who made the ‘Satanic’ album cover is a Christian, then his identity as a Christian is just a cover so he can deceive other Christians. If NIST finds that WTC Building 7 collapsed due to damage from debris and the fires that ensued instead of a controlled demolition, that just proves NIST was in on the 9/11 conspiracy. If some yokels call a press conference to show off their fake Bigfoot corpse and get called out on it, then they must have been part of a government plot to discredit cryptozoology.

Someone’s probably already made this connection before without my seeing it, but all this is a lot like the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s where people got whipped up into such a hysterical fear of Satanic cults kidnapping and murdering children that they started to smear some of the heavy metal and punk bands of the era as stealth Satanists. The only real differences are that this version hasn’t reached the scale of the 1980s one, and Jay-Z doesn’t seem to be adopting an over-the-top Satanic persona to mock his nutty critics while appealing to suburban teenagers who think upside down crosses are cool.

Maybe the non-reaction to the irrational fear of non-fundamentalist Christian rappers is enabling it. Maybe that’s why people feel comfortable with literally demonizing an infant.

Beyonce, seen here performing her hit single All The Single Ladies Must Bow Down Before Baphomet (Or Be Executed By The United Nations Military In A FEMA Internment Camp)

And then you’ve got the ridiculous excuses everyone in that last link parrots: That Ivy Blue means Illuminati’s Very Youngest / Born Living Under Evil. For starters, unless the Rap/R&B division of the Illuminati has developed a reverse aging potion, Ivy isn’t going to be the youngest member of the shady imaginary cabal for very long. Also, Eulb Yvi isn’t Latin for “Lucifer’s Daughter,” or anything else for that matter. It doesn’t mean anything in Latin. Some asshole behind a pulpit just made that up and people without critical thinking skills repeated it because believing it was true made them feel good.

Lastly, so what if they were Satanic members of a secret society bent on destroying theocracy? Satanism’s kind of silly in my opinion, but if the fight’s between secularists and theocrats, I don’t really need to take long to decide which side I’m on.

So to re-cap: The Illuminati doesn’t exist anymore except in the minds of hateful and gullible people who want an enemy. And even if they did, they’d pretty much be the good guys. Also, Jay-Z should start trolling the fuck out of these people by rapping about gun control, providing free abortion and sterilization services at his concerts, and hanging out with anyone named Rothschild. The worst case scenario is that the attempt to embarrass the conspiracy people into re-examining their beliefs backfires, but then Alex Jones has that on-air heart attack we all know is coming while talking about it. And that’s good enough.

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This Week In Crackpottery #1: Witch Hunts, Psychics, AGW Deniers, & Hindu Nationalists

So I had originally thought of calling this regular column This Week In Fucked Up Religious Shit, but a few problems came to mind. For one thing, there are lots of non-religious infuriating, hilarious, or otherwise crazy shit I would have to ignore: psychics, alternative medicine, fringe politics, conspiracy theories, North Korea, and a lot more. Also, I’d eventually collide with the problem of trying to delineate between what does and does not qualify as a religion, which can be tricky at times. I’d rather leave that problem to the IRS.

Anyway, I’m going to try to regularly write about some of the craziest shit that happens throughout the week. When I’m feeling more patient, I’ll try to actually explain how people’s thinking has gone wrong and how we can actually know that, but there will be plenty of mockery too. Sometimes that’s the most appropriate response.

So let’s get to it:

Notorious Nigerian witch-hunter to preach in the US

If you thought religious trolls in America were bad you can take some comfort in that you don’t live in Nigeria, where actual witch hunts are still taking place. I don’t mean some kind of Arthur Miller metaphor for an irrational hysterical atmosphere of false confessions prompted by accusations based on conjecture and hearsay; I mean the HEY LOOK DELMAR THERE’S A WITCH LET’S DONE KILL IT kind of witch hunt.

The good news is that even Houston, Texas doesn’t have a local expert in witch hunting. The bad news is that they’re flying one in to preach at them about the final solution to the witchcraft problem. Her name’s Helen Ukpabio and she’s a “Lady Apostle” at the Liberty Gospel Church. She’s going to be doing something called a “Marathon Deliverance” for 12 days in March.

The poster advertising her visit is lots of fun. For instance, if you have any of the following conditions, please consult your local witch hunter for exorcism and deliverance:

• Having bad dreams
• Financial impotency and difficulties
• Unsuccessful life with disappointments
• Possessed by mermaid spirit and other evil spirits

So whether you’re poor or sometimes disappointed, or you’re possessed by those pesky mermaid spirits (and who isn’t these days?), Ukpabio can help you “receive freedom from the Lord.”

It’s just too bad she’s incapable of offering her victims freedom from herself. See, the witch hunting problem in Nigeria has gotten so bad that some extremely brave humanists have been organizing efforts to educate people on how we know that people like Ukpabio are dangerous and evil and wrong. Stepping Stones Nigeria has been the victim of attacks from Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Church, when members invaded their seminars, beating people up and stealing things.

And true to religious troll form, Ukpabio had the mermaid balls to actually sue SSN for depriving her church of the right to believe in witchcraft. The good news is that Ukpabio apparently believes that when people are presented with the facts about the witch hunting craze, they can’t go on believing in it. The bad news is that that’s just not true, case in point being the fact that she’s preaching the same nonsense here in America in 2011.

Imagine how much cognitive dissonance you’d have to ignore to run an organization devoted to stopping a particular religion (i.e. paganism, animism, or whatever they mean by witchcraft) and then turn around and sue someone else on the false grounds that they’re doing the same thing, which you really are doing.

Hopefully there will be some organized protests against this hateful lying bitch in Houston, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, check out this video she made about How Witchcraft Works. I could only watch a minute or so at a time without pacing around like an inmate in a psych ward that’s running low on medication, so you know, be warned.

Coast to Coast AM’s New Year’s Prediction Show

Former C2C AM host Art Bell, seen here recording a Bauhaus album.

Besides the Twilight Zone marathon, the best thing about New Year’s is how the “psychic” industry clings to the change in calendars in order to make a bunch of predictions for the next 12 months. The problem in writing about this is that these people usually do this on their own websites, which of course they can alter or delete when their predictions fail.

So the good folks at Something Awful are archiving a few of the predictions from one outlet in particular: Everyone’s favorite late-night radio talk show for truckers on massive amounts of amphetamines, Coast to Coast AM. Besides keeping a reliable archive to fact-check when it comes time for next year’s fake psychic circlejerk, it’s a nice case study in how psychics give the superficial appearance of having supernatural powers. Also, they’re pretty funny. For example:

Major earthquake in central/northern California in May.

Fuzzy language is a good way to cover your bases if you’re pretending to have magical powers. What makes an earthquake “major?” It’s not clearly defined anywhere. Of course there is seismic activity all the time all over California. So all you have to do to call this prediction a hit is take all the seismic data, find the day with the most activity during May, and call that a “major” earthquake. Other predictions use a similar approach by referring to “a plane between life and death,” “a major find of buried treasure,” “More tornadoes than usual,” “bad weather,” and a “very large object.”

Some predictions are just mundane and probable, if only because they’re based on things which are already happening. The economy will slowly improve, you say? Wow, what a risky prediction! Even if we all get hit with the coming global super-collapse of all civilization in six months, whoever predicted the economy slowly getting better can still claim accuracy since the economy slowly got better for a few months.

And then some of these predictions contradict each other. Also, they’ll never fucking happen:

Hillary Clinton will win the election over Obama.

Donald Trump will win the election as a third party nominee.

Obama… will cancel the election in November.

Bigfoot will be elected to the presidency.

And some are just incoherent and goofy:

Ron Paul will win the Republican nomination, but it will end up that drag queen RuPaul won through some accident in the vote count.

End of days will become disco nights. Blondie will write the sequel to the Rapture. The three wise men will be some three wise guys.

One domestic and one natural, with one being unnatural, will change the outcome of the election.

Finding a whole new species of human beings.

The Earth will supernova because of nitrogen and helium in the core of the Earth, not molten iron like everyone thinks it is.

So, uh… yeah. Be on the lookout for that stuff, too!

Fox News columnist offering $500 for someone to disrupt a science documentary about climate change

Remember back when Charlie Sheen was a thing and he was bitching and whining about how he only bought hookers because he didn’t know what to do with all his money? Junk science enthusiast and Fox propagandist Steve Milloy doesn’t have that problem. Miloy’s even more passionate about his bad ideas than Charlie Sheen is, so he’s willing to throw money at anyone stupid enough to repeat his nonsense in public.

There’s a screening of a documentary on climate change this Monday, January 9. Milloy wants to pay someone $500 to ask a question for him at the panel afterwards, because he’s way too much of a coward to do it himself. And even though he hasn’t seen the documentary, he knows his question won’t be covered in it. The problem for him is that it won’t be covered in the documentary because his question is stupid:

How long will it take for the 3 x 10²³ drops of water in the Himalayan glaciers to disappear?

What prompts his stupid question is that the press release of the documentary mentions that the Himalayan glaciers are “disappearing.” Well obviously there will be no problem with that at all until EVERY SINGLE DROP of the glaciers has already melted. So there! Checkmate, scientists!

Sri Ram Sena flies Pakistan flag over an Indian government building

In America, far right-wing militia types talk about the government staging false flag operations while calling into Alex Jones’ ham radio show under a pseudonym like “One-Eyed Leroy.” In India, the far right-wing militia types actually do the false flag operations themselves.

Sri Ram Sena is this horrible group of Hindu Nationalists in India. In a lot of ways they’re not too different from Christian Nationalists. I first wrote about them about a y ear ago when they were making the news for attacking women at pubs and threatening to attack unmarried couples celebrating Valentine’s Day in public. They also threatened to kidnap and forcibly marry them as punishment. And they raided their political opponents headquarters.

Along with physically attacking love wherever they see it, they also have a bug up their ass about Muslims. Especially those Muslims in Pakistan. See, there’s a bit of ugly history between the two countries, and some still haven’t let go of the old hostilities. So yada yada yada, now they both have nuclear weapons aimed at each other.

But even mutually assured destruction isn’t bad enough for some people, and that’s where the Sri Ram Sena enters the picture. They were alarmed at how many people don’t seem to care too much about hating Pakistanis anymore, so they hatched this plan to raise the flag of Pakistan over government buildings in India. Police say their goal was to create “communal disharmony” in the area because there is a large Muslim population there.

So people saw the flag, probably assumed it was either a mean-spirited prank or even a sign of an actual invasion of some sort, and threw rocks at their local Muslim prayer hall.

You would think that a really devoted Hindu Nationalist would buy into their own propaganda enough to not think that this kind of shit were necessary. If there really were another India-Pakistan war looming and only Hindu Nationalism could save India, why would anyone need to dishonestly provoke hatred in that way? The whole basis of their worldview is that these fights are ones people really care about and the conflict they dream about really is inevitable.

But that’s the problem with faith. It’s just not good enough of a reason to believe something, and even the most die-hard proponents of it recognize that. Deep down, they have the same doubts as the skeptics. They know the gods / God isn’t really going to smite their enemies, so they’re going to have to do it themselves. And that’s what’s really scary.

Stop the Gellerization of America

Pamela Geller is this nice Muslin lady who runs an anti-Islam organization with its very own website and everything. She likes to warn us real Americans about the Mohammedans when they’re about to do something illegal, like whistle a call to prayer at a stoplight. There’s always some new and exciting way to be afraid of those Moslems.

With Thanksgiving coming, Geller has spent the past week or so wondering what the best way to connect her McCarthyite crusade to the holiday, like most of us have. And that’s how she discovered that your Thanksgiving turkey is really a Trojan Horse which has been brainwashed by the Prophet Mohammed. Check it:

Did you know that the turkey you’re going to enjoy on Thanksgiving Day this Thursday is probably halal? If it’s a Butterball turkey, then it certainly is — whether you like it or not.

Whether you like it or not, people! You cannot change your dead turkey’s religion just by wishing for a postmortem conversion really, really hard! That is unless you’re a Mormon, in which case you can have a weird pagan ceremony where you baptize your dead turkey along with a few Nazi war criminals for good measure. Anyway, this is a shock to Geller’s audience, who probably also believes in The Secret, Atlantis, energy independence, and extended warrantees too.

So why is Geller the only one very concerned about the Muslim turkeys? Sure, maybe it’s not the most important thing in the world. It’s probably only the fourth most important thing in the world. Geller laments how she seems to be the only one freaking out over this:

Where are the PETA clowns and the ridiculous celebs who pose naked on giant billboards for PETA and “animal rights”? They would rather see people die of cancer or AIDS than see animals used in drug testing, but torturous and painful Islamic slaughter is OK.

Yes, where is PETA? See, this is what separates a level-headed rational person like Pamela Geller from those ridiculous celebs and clowns, of which she certainly isn’t one at all, no, no sir. Why doesn’t PETA have an entire section of their website devoted to the cruelty of this halal slaughter practice including an article titled “The Cruelty Behind Muslim Ritual Slaughter” which anyone with two brain cells to rub against each other and a fraction of a second and Google could find? We may never know.

A Day on the Twitter with Bryan Fischer

Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This makes no fucking sense because truth is a quality of a statement which describes its factual accuracy and isn’t a human being which might wear shoes. But he might have been trying to point out how easily it is to make false statements and misrepresent the truth compared to the effort required to correct the lies.

Bryan Fischer is a living case study of this phenomenon. He’s the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, which is the organization which collaborated with Texas Governor Rick Perry in throwing their little rain dance / prayer rally last month. He’s also very active on The Twitter, spending maybe an hour or two every day typing out the most dishonest possible way to attack the gays, Muslims, liberals, moderate Republicans, and bears. That’s actual bears, not big gay dudes. He might be the inspiration for Stephen Colbert’s character’s fear and hatred of the godless killing machines.

“Seriously, you guys.”

For the reasons Twain summed up in the famous quote above, it’s pretty much impossible to refute every single tweet Fischer farts out onto the internet, unless one were to do it as a full-time job. So I thought I’d take his tweets from just one day and counter them. Or maybe just mock them.

Normal people would see this as a total non-sequitur. Not Bryan Fischer! To him, they’re connected. And that’s an elementary school… in Colorado… I think we all know who’s behind this plot:

The article he links to doesn’t say that CAIR essentially endorses him. What it says is that CAIR stated that Perry is “set apart” from other GOP candidates because he has a Muslim friend. He’s apparently the only one who can even say that he’s not bigoted against Muslims because after all some of his best friends are Muslims. And that’s supposed to be some kind of scandal.

This is in no way relevant only to Fischer, but the idea of predicting who the Republican nominee will be at this point is just pointless political masturbation. You can see that just by looking at where we were in the last election cycle at this point.

On September 1, 2007, a Republican candidate named Duncan Hunter won the Texas straw poll with 41% of the vote. Remember Duncan Hunter? Me neither. A few weeks earlier Mitt Romney won a straw poll at the Illinois state fair. Four years minus one day before Fischer twittered this, a television actor and former Senator named Fred Thompson declared his candidacy. I remember being terrified of Thompson for a few weeks after reading this article by Matt Taibbi about him. I was sure Thompson would win the nomination and the general election by appealing to the lucrative ‘dumbfuck’ demographic. But that’s the kind of stupid mistake you make when you speculate this far from the general election.

Law & Order & Failed Campaigns

And what about the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain? Just two months before this point in the election cycle, McCain fired 100 staffers due to severe financial problems. Later that month, his chief strategist and his campaign manager resigned.

If Fischer were twittering around that time he’d have been pompously declaring one of those “frontrunners” the one true candidate for the extreme wing of the conservative Republicans. Probably he’d have gone with Thompson, since they’re around the same age and he would probably have secret buttsecks with Fischer with a lot of discretion.

First of all, the article he’s citing mentions Christians in exactly one paragraph, and it doesn’t mention anything about Muslims starving them to death. What it does say is that there are about 1,000 Christians in all of Somalia, and some Muslims are tracking down and killing the few of them who are Muslim apostates. So Fischer’s lying about the starvation thing, but it’s not like he even needed to do so. What’s actually happening – at least according to the article he cites – should be bad enough for him to complain about. But apparently his persecution complex has an inexhaustible appetite for bullshit.

The actual substance of the article – if it can be said to have any at all – is that the famine in Somalia is not caused by the drought. It’s really al Qaeda’s fault. And of course it’s important to note that global politics can be extremely complicated and there are a lot of factors to consider. It’s not just the drought; Somalia has also for a long time had basically no functioning government. And like their fellow conservatives here in America, fundamentalist Muslims are opposed to humanitarian work when it’s done by the United Nations.

So it’s not entirely inaccurate to say that a large part of the problem in Somalia is that there’s no system of support for poor, starving people, and that part of that problem is due to Islamic militants. But the author here (Rachel Alexander of the unintentionally hilarious Townhall website) wants to disregard the drought and famine altogether so she can wrap up the problem in Somalia in a neat little package and call it al Qaeda. The sub-heading is “Al-Qaeda Affiliate, not Famine, is Responsible for Somalian Genocide” (emphasis mine).

Who is this Left person? Does he mean Lefter Küçükandonyadis, the 1950s Turkish soccer player? Or maybe he means the Greek author Lefteris Hapsiadis. The world may never know.

Of course Fischer’s just using a straw man here. He hears liberals complaining about all the racist things teabaggers do and say and all the racist signs they bring to their rallies and since he doesn’t find the racism too objectionable he concludes that all progressives think all of Obama’s critics are racist.

I can only really speculate here, but Fischer’s probably thinks he’s pointing out some kind of hypocrisy here, and that Salon and Darryl Hannah are equally racist as, oh, I don’t know, the 46% of Mississippi Republicans who think interracial marriage should be outlawed. Fischer lives in Tupelo, MS, by the way.

Well, I have checked and nobody has registered BryanFischer.xxx yet. So let’s get to it, people! He’s pretty much asking for it.

One problem here is that UPS is also unionized. I should know seeing that I actually work there. UPS workers belong to the Teamsters Union, which is probably the most powerful one in the United States – not that that’s saying very much. So if it were the case that unions are responsible for the USPS financial troubles, then UPS would be in even worse shape.

Another really bothersome aspect of this is how he seems to think it’s a terrible idea to have a large majority of an institution’s budget going to “labor costs.” If only they didn’t pay so much for workers to provide goods and services and paid more to the worthless bureaucrats and middle-management parasites, then all of this would have been avoided.

For the details on how the right-wing attack on the USPS is an attack on organized labor, I’d recommend checking out Allison Kilkenny’s recent article in truthout.

You also won’t find anything in the Constitution mentioning an Air Force. We could probably fund more than a few USPSes if we stopped spending such ridiculous amounts of money on planes and drones for the military.

Of course the most egregious part of this one is Fischer’s using the “Got your X right here” formula. So that implies that he’s saying that while grabbing his junk. So not only is he making a highly questionable claim – that he actually has genitalia – he’s forcing us to consider what it looks like, in the highly unlikely event that it exists.

The next rat to be smelled here is that the link he gives goes to the Moonie Times, which I thought hasn’t existed for a while now. Here is how the cult newspaper article starts off:

Jihadists among the Libyan rebels revealed plans last week on the Internet to subvert the post-Moammar Gadhafi government and create an Islamist state, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Hold the presses, people! They have said something on the internet! But even the Moonie Times isn’t dishonest enough to leave it at that:

Some U.S. officials sought to play down the remarks by noting that such Internet postings are not always accurate measures of jihadist plans.

You mean when someone says something on an internet forum, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true? Golly!

Twitter is a pretty great tool for journalists. Not only is it good for networking, but the 140 character limit really helps you be more concise. Never use a long word when a short one will do, that sort of thing. Instead of “boom years of ’93-’00,” he could have said “under Clinton” and saved a few characters.

This one falls into the category of outright lying. There was a Muslim Family Day at that venue, but it turns out it took place on September 4. In a rare moment of a conservative acknowledging objective reality, Fischer later corrected himself:

But by the point the damage had been done. Right-wing blogs ran with it, occasionally bothering to change the wording from “Muslims celebrate on 9/11″ to “Muslims celebrate sometime near 9/11.” Soon these people will start getting offended by any gathering of Muslims in the late summer until winter.

He probably should have also pointed out that Muslim Family Day has been going on since September of 2000, a full year before the 9/11 attacks, so his theory about it being a terrorism party doesn’t really make sense.

But that won’t matter. For guys like this, being proved wrong by the facts won’t change his mind. It’s he cared about the facts, he would have changed his mind about Muslims. If they have a Muslim Family Day on September 11, then it’s grotesque. But if they have a Muslim Family Day on September 4, it’s… still grotesque. To Bryan Fischer, it’s important that the Muslims lose either way.

There were actually a few more of these, but this idiot has eaten up too much of my time already.

5 Ways 9/11 Truthers Are Like Creationists

On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories By Means of Natural Stupidity

Happy 9/11 anniversary everyone! This year is going to be extra special because we have ten fingers and we’ve set up our numerical system based on that arbitrary amount. The news media is going to capitalize on this hard: Fox News has a special on it about how George W. Bush killed Osama bin Laden on September 12 with only night-vision goggles and a sword. MSNBC has one about how we antagonized the Muslim world by locking up “suspected terrorists” indefinitely without charges and invading a few Middle Eastern countries. And the most outrageous of the tragedy opportunists are planning a march in Manhattan to mark the 10 year anniversary of everyone’s favorite act of mass murder.

Well, there’s no way we at The BEAST are going to pass on this moneymaking opportunity, so here are some ways in which everyone’s favorite paranoid conspiracy nuts are like a different group of paranoid conspiracy nuts. Enjoy!

Science via internet petitions

There are a lot of petitions on the internet tubes. It’s rare that they accomplish anything, but usually they at least have a clear purpose. And then you’ve got groups like the Discovery Institute and Patriots Question 9/11.

Back in 2001 the Discovery Institute released a statement titled A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism. It was signed by over 700 scientists (as of 2007) who claimed to be “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”

Patriots Question 9/11 has also been compiling signatures, except each person who signs is supposed to write their own statement. This might be more democratic, but it also kind of defeats the purpose of having a petition in the first place. Everyone’s signing their name to different positions. So we’re talking about a spectrum of beliefs ranging from the somewhat reasonable, “I have significant criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report,” all the way over to collecting-your-piss-in-jars insane, “There were no planes, those were holographs.” They’ve only appeared to have gathered around 3500 signatures worldwide. On the internet.

The first problem with this approach is that you can’t successfully promote a scientific hypothesis by collecting signatures. You win these kinds of arguments by using evidence. And while it’s worthwhile to note when there’s an overwhelming consensus of relevant experts on a matter, these internet petitions use the widest possible definition of “scientist” or “engineer” conceivable. Are you a college freshman who happened to check off Engineering as a major on your admissions paperwork? Great! You qualify as an expert and your crackpot opinions about how George W. Bush done did that there 9/11 and a magical being created itself and then created all life on Earth somehow matters, according to the morons at Patriots Question 9/11 and the DI.

Even if the petition gatherers limited themselves to the relevant experts and emphasized the point that their petitions do not qualify as evidence, they would still fail. According to Denis Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers in their book Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, the 700 signatures gathered by the DI only represents 0.023% of scientists in the world. That means that 99.977% of scientists either have no problem with “Darwinism” or are too embarrassed to associate themselves with the clowns at the Discovery Institute.

Science via Mystery-mongering

Another logical fallacy both groups enjoy using is the appeal to ignorance. Here is how the retarded man-child Ann Coulter reiterates the same creationist PRATT she read in one of Michael Behe’s books:

It is a mathematical impossibility, for example, that all 30 to 40 parts of the cell’s flagellum — forget the 200 parts of the cilium! — could all arise at once by random mutation.

Once you get past the lie (i.e. that it really is mathematically impossible for the bacterial flagellum to evolve), we’re left with a standard God of the Gaps argument: If scientists can’t demonstrate exactly how it evolved, it must have been created. If evolutionary theory fails, then creationist beliefs win by default. It’s a shame that it never seems to work the other way around; that whenever creationist arguments fail, evolution is automatically vindicated.

But what makes this an even worse argument is the fact that empirical experiments have shown how the flagellum and the cilium (!) evolved. As I understand it, what gives these structures the illusion of design is something called interlocking complexity. Interlocking complexity means that you have several components of a structure, each of which appear to be useless on its own relative to the function of the overall structure. But — and this is the important part creationists can’t seem to comprehend — each of the components had a function on its own which was completely divorced from what it would do as a part of a greater whole.

Ken Miller made this point in a much better way than I could in his expert testimony at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case. The creationist Michael Behe used a mousetrap as an analogy for his beliefs about the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, claiming that each part of a mousetrap would be useless on its own and therefore the mousetrap must have been designed by an intelligent agent. Miller pointed out several uses for each part of a mousetrap, including by using a partial mousetrap as a clip for his tie during the proceedings. Even in the world of metaphor the creationists’ arguments end up turning on themselves.

But now I’ve strayed far from the original point, which was that demonstrating that we don’t know something, even if done successfully, can’t possibly prove anything beyond the fact that we don’t know something. It shouldn’t need to be said, but apparently it does. You can’t go directly from “I don’t know X” to “I can explain X with Y theory,” unless you have some evidence to support Y.

My favorite way the appeal to ignorance is used in 9/11 Troofer lore has to do with WTC Building 7 (nevar forget!). Truthers love to point out that the BBC reported its collapse 20 minutes before it actually happened. Even worse, the BBC report in question actually shows the building in the background standing upright and totally not collapsed. So how did the BBC know it was going to happen?

Again, troofers don’t seem to know. It’s a mystery! But obviously the conspiracy must have told the BBC that this was all part of the plan, because, well, whatever. It’s not like they could have discovered the building collapsed without being involved in the conspiracy.

And like the flagellum and cillia, this is yet another supposed mystery conspiracy nuts are trying to exploit which isn’t really much of a mystery at all. Even in the Alex Jones article linked to above, a hint is given as to how things actually went down:

As we have documented before, firefighters, police and first responders were all told to get back from the building because it was about to be brought down.

If you change the last three words to “collapse,” you get a perfect explanation for the BBC’s blunder in this one sentence. There was already significant damage to Building 7. The word of its probable collapse was making the rounds. Chaos and confusion ruled the day. Add in an overzealous BBC news team playing the odds poorly and you get a seemingly prophetic news report.

I know, it’s so sinister, isn’t it?

Whether you’re talking about our genes or our politics, nobody likes the idea of being subject to random forces. We like to be a part of a narrative. It’s comforting to think that we’re part of a deity’s plan. It’s also kind of comforting to think that evil plans are afoot, and we’re part of a team of underdogs who will thwart them. As Michael Shermer likes to point out, we are “story-telling animals.” But the reality of our situation isn’t dependent on those desires and sometimes not knowing something just means that we don’t know.

You don’t have to be racist to be a creationist or a truther, but it can’t hurt

A few years back I went to the Answers in Genesis Creationist “Museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. We kind of rushed through the actual exhibits because we had other priorities, but I do recall looking over this one, which PZ Myers later elaborated upon:

So Babel refers to the famous Tower of Babel story from Genesis where God got butthurt by a giant phallic tower so he divided humanity by language and, apparently, race. Hilariously enough, Ham plans on building a replica of the tower next to his fake museum. And this graphic is supposed to explain the origin of real-life human races based on that mythology.

If you click to embiggen the image above, you’ll see that the “Descendants of Ham” end up in Africa. Ham is one of Noah’s sons who, in Genesis 9, saw his father drunk and naked and so he dealt with the resultant trauma by cursing his own son. I’m sure it all made perfect sense in those days.

The idea that Ham’s descendants were then cursed, where they then traveled to Africa has been used to justify all kinds of awful treatment of those of African descent, including slavery. It was especially common in the 18th and 19th centuries, and remains so among the Mormons. To be fair, Ken Ham and AiG claim to oppose racism. But they still can’t bring themselves to denounce the myths which supported it so strongly for so many centuries.

The racism you can sometimes find in the 9/11 “truth” movement focuses more on Teh J00z. I’d really rather not link to it, but if you do a Google search for “9/11 truth Jews,” one of the results you’ll get on the first page is a YouTube video series called “Lies from the Jews in the 9/11 Truth Movement.” Apparently that refers to the supposed disinformation agents among the Troofers — government agents paid to spread lies about what Troofers believe with the intention of discrediting them. That’s a brand of anti-Semitic paranoia that goes beyond even the beliefs about 9/11 being a “Zionist plot” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion variety.

In that same Google search you’ll find on the front page a blogspot website which in my opinion is just too detailed to be a Poe, despite the 4chan-ish title, “Jews did 9/11.” It repeats all kinds of hateful lies about how Jews working in the WTC buildings were warned not to come to work and were then seen driving around in a van with decals on it celebrating the attacks. One of the articles is a McCarthyite list called “Jews in High Places,” as if being Jewish were like being a convicted child molester or something.

I could easily go on, but you get the picture. And this isn’t to say that every single person who shares these weird beliefs about the origin of species and 9/11 also need to have weird beliefs about race. But when you open the floodgates of irrationality, there’s not much to stop one from accepting all of that garbage.

Phony ‘peer reviewed’ journals

One of the easiest and most effective way of demonstrating the failures of both 9/11 conspiracy theories and evolution denialism is to point out that neither group seems willing to submit their “research” to peer review in a serious publication the way every real scientist does. Here is how U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton described this tendency among creationists in the decision for McLean v Arkansas Board of Education (emphasis mine):

The scientific community consists of individuals and groups, nationally and internationally, who work independently in such varied fields as biology, paleontology, geology, and astronomy. Their work is published and subject to review and testing by their peers. The journals for publication are both numerous and varied. There is, however, not one recognized scientific journal which has published an article espousing the creation science theory described in Section 4(a). Some of the State’s witnesses suggested that the scientific community was “close-minded” on the subject of creationism and that explained the lack of acceptance of the creation science arguments. Yet no witness produced a scientific article for which publication has been refused. Perhaps some members of the scientific community are resistant to new ideas. It is, however, inconceivable that such a loose knit group of independent thinkers in all the varied fields of science could, or would, so effectively censor new scientific thought.

Notice the Judge doesn’t say that the submitted papers to relevant journals have been rejected for good reasons, or that creationists have simply failed to respond to the reasons for which their studies were rejected. Creationists just hadn’t been turning in any studies at all, presumably because they just assume that the peer reviewers really are as close-minded as they themselves are. And not only have they not been turning in their homework, they expect to get an A+ for the assignment. And if they don’t get it, well, they’ll go to court to try to make sure they do.

As you might guess based on the above quote, the creationists lost the McLean case.  And they keep on losing, just like truthers keep losing in the court of public opinion. Since both groups are scared to death of scrutiny and claim to believe that the scientific community is conspiring against them, they make their own fake peer reviewed journals.

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The reason I’m calling these “peer reviewed journals” fake is because both of them are devoted to covering research which comes to a certain conclusion, instead of covering research within a certain field. The creationist one even says as much in the subtitle: “Building the creation model.” It’s not “Discovering the creation model” or “Studying the creation model.” They have to build the creation model on the pages of their little newsletters because the only thing you find in nature is the evolution model.

Just Lying

When ignorance, petitions, and racism fail to convince people of your weird beliefs, you can always just lie to try to make your point. My favorite creationist lie is an extreme example of quote-mining. Here is a selection from On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin creationists love to cite:

“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”

Wow, so Darwin thought the eye couldn’t have evolved… Sounds pretty amazing, right? And it’s right there in his most famous book. If that’s all you know of what Darwin thought about the evolution of the eye, it should be pretty telling. Those evolutionists must be pretty stupid to read that in their science book and still believe in evolution.

You might think something like that unless you read what immediately follows:

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

As you can see, the earlier Darwin quote was taken out of its context. Darwin was originally commenting on the superficial appearance of absurdity in his claim that all complex organs evolved from simpler ones. I have this pet peeve – and religious people seem most guilty of this – claiming that a quote they don’t happen to like was taken “out of context.” Whenever you hear that claim being made, you should ask the person making it what context they are talking about. Because 99 times out of 100, you’ll find that they don’t even know what it means to take a quote out of context. It’s just a kneejerk reaction. Go ahead – tell your religious friend about your favorite cruel and inhumane passage from the Bible or the Koran and ask them what they think about it, and chances are they’ll claim it’s taken out of context. And yet many will have no problem with actually taking Darwin out of context.

My favorite 9/11 Troofer lie is that 7 of the 9/11 hijackers are still alive. The BBC actually reported this on September 23, 2001. It really would be a serious blow to the “official story” if it were actually true. I remember hearing about it and having suspicions of my own.

But if you read to the end of the article, you’ll find a link to an editorial retraction of this story. The BBC cites “confusion” as the reason for their initial error and they denounce the conspiracy theories surrounding their report.

“The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names.”

Back when I was silly enough to argue with these people on internet forums, this issue was brought up. The person I was discussing it with said that the BBC’s later response was a “mainstream media opinion blog,” while her citation – the same one which linked to the correction – was objective reportage. So according to this Troofer, the BBC was totally credible when they were reporting something she happened to like, but suddenly became a part of the world gubbamint’s conspiracy machine of false flag terrorist oppression when they changed their position due to gathering more evidence. And when they say the hijackers were alive, that’s a fact; but when they say they’re dead, that’s just their opinion.

And that wasn’t an isolated incident. When I was searching for those citations, the first result on the Google Machine was for the popular Troofer website WhatReallyHappened.com, which repeats the exact same lie about 7 of the hijackers being alive without any information on the relevant updates from the BBC.

Everyone makes mistakes. Just twice in this very article we’ve got two big mistakes from a news organization as esteemed as the BBC. It happens. But when it does, the right thing to do, the adult thing to do, is to admit it and change your mind accordingly. That’s why people mock creationists and Troofers. They’d rather break than bend. They care more about coming to a conclusion which matches their ideology than one which matches the evidence. So if you’re a member of one of these groups and resent being lumped in with the other, you should remember that you did it to yourself.

My e-mail interview with Betsy Rothstein, the brilliant mind behind FishBowelDC

Subject: WHY AM I BLOCKED?

Josh: Please unblock me immediately. Thanks.

Betsy Rothstein: who are you? Why should I care?

J: Unblock me right now please. Thank you!

B: Listen…asshole. Answer my questions and I might consider it. Anyone who acts like a jerk on the site can and will get blocked and I owe you zero explanation.

J: My name shows up in the email so you know who I am. And you want comments is why you should care. Now please unblock me RIGHT NOW. Thanks!

B: No. I don’t have to do anything. Tell me where you work, who the hell you are. You clearly don’t know how to behave properly.

J: I already told you who I am. Now UNBLOCK ME RIGHT NOW because it is very important that I am able to comment on your blog!

B: look. I don’t care. Go away.

J: I WASN’T ASKING I WAS TELLING.

B: oh really. Go to hell. I’m TELLING you that too.

J: Yeah, whatever, just unblock me right now. Do it to it.

B: You don’t get to order anything.
We don’t want you on the site. Final.

J: Lots of people want lots of things. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you immediately unblock me. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

B: the issue is you have zero rights here. Got it?

J: No. You are incorrect. You will immediately unblock me. Thank you.

J: Look Betty, I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. The truth is that if you review my comments, you’ll find that I’ve been nothing but supportive of your work and have only offered encouragement. I do this because I truly believe you are a candle in the darkness of Washington politics bringing truth and freedom to us all – no matter what everyone else says about you. So I implore you to please unblock me. Thank you for your courteous and quick responses.

Nobody who reads this should be allowed to vote

Let’s all listen to this nice young man explain why only “virtuous” people should be allowed to vote, if we’re even going to bother with that old voting thing anymore. If we keep letting just anybody vote, we’re all going to die of cancer. Or something.

The Simpsons decide not to set off nukes inside the US

So now we can add the writers for the Simpsons to the seemingly endless list of people the 9/11 troofers believe were involved in the implausibly large conspiracy. The NY Observer is reporting on some blog post by a conspiracy theorist who believes that the sort of recent episode about Springfield adopting Big Brother-y surveillance policies hinted at a “false flag” nuclear attack which was supposed to take place last weekend.

These kinds of things are really popular with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, but it’s not always clear what the connections between world politics and pop media actually are supposed to be. This one seems to think that the Simpsons writers are using this foreshadowing as a warning. Because if there’s one group of people you’d expect to know about the imminent nuclear attack the US government was planning to use against itself in order to justify enacting martial law, it’s the writers of The Simpsons.

The other way conspiracy theorists make connections between the TV they watch and their fantasy world they imagine is by claiming clips like this one from 1997 are actually a way the conspirators have of bragging about their future plans. It’s apparently not enough that the conspirators always seem to get away with their evil deeds with nobody but a few of the most unhinged noticing, they have to go one step further by forcing sitcom writers to inject little clues into their jokes just to fuck with the unthinking “sheeple.”

That or, you know, coincidences happen and crazy people latch on to them in order to justify their warped worldview. One or the other, I guess.

Anyway, as you may have noticed, there was no nuclear attack last weekend. Hooray! But now conspiracy theorists need to find some way to reconcile their predictions with the fact that they failed to materialize. One way to do this would be to admit that maybe their predictions were incorrect. Or they could go with the self-aggrandizement route, by claiming that their own rantings exposed the secret plan, which would then need to be called off. And thanks to the vigilance of the “Infowars” crowd, we’ve been spared from martial law another day. AGAIN.

Dennis Markuze / David Mabus

So there’s this guy who spams atheist blogs pretty much full time with these incoherent, repetitive and vaguely violent posts. I’ve gotten a few, and it’s kind of amusing. Less amusing are his death threats occasionally attached to his rantings.

Anyway, he managed to get into an AAI conference where he lives in Montreal. He tried to troll it IRL but failed in doing anything but possibly pulling a fire alarm. And then he ran away without talking to any of the people he obsesses over. Oh, and someone got a picture of him, too. This is what he looks like:

What’s funny about this character is that he gives lie to the idea that the only unhinged lunatics who hate atheists are fundamentalist Baptist types. Mabus seems to tie his theology into this ridiculous mix of postmodernism and Marxism – which is funny since Marx was so clearly himself an atheist.

Juice boxes will make you GAY

Hey everyone! Let’s watch Alex Jones destroy a juice box to discover the thin piece of plastic which is making him hang out at truck stop restrooms every night:

Stewart v. troofers

Most people reading this have probably already heard of the Daily Show / Colbert Report concurrent demos in Washington, DC on October 30. If you haven’t, click on one of the images below.

It’s a great move to set up a demonstration this way because the March To Keep Fear Alive will have this automatic effect of co-opting any counter-demonstrators. The teabaggers have this paranoia about people infiltrating their rallies in order to discredit them. So it’s pretty likely some will try to retaliate against this real or imagined injustice. But that’s where the line between the Colbertesque satirical teabaggers and the sincere ones starts to get a little fuzzy.

I’m not going to this, but if I were I’d have trouble deciding which one of these two events to focus on, if that would even be a decision attendees would need to make. You’ve got the crazy satire marching around, and then you’ve got the sanity rally, probably at or near the Lincoln Memorial. So there will probably be a lot of cross-over of people going from one to the other. So even these hypothetical counter-demonstrators who intentionally stick around the sanity rally to try to discredit it will also be assimilated into the Stewart / Colbert hive mind.

But  the teabaggers aren’t the only target here. If you watch the Daily Show video linked to above, you’ll see that Stewart also goes after the 9/11 troofers by suggesting a “9/11 was an outside job” protest sign. So given their notorious ultrasensitivity, I decided to check what they thought of all this. Here’s what I found on Alex Jones‘ Prison Planet forums:

So these idiots who have been castigating George Bush and Co., also have been pretty good going after Obama’s crew are now equating the LaRouche antics (making everyone they disagree with appear as Hitler) to the majority who don’t believe in government telling the truth.  In my view this is just to hobble the 18-34 crowd that watches these assclowns from doing anything meaningful, like this david icke video advocates:

The same poster later elaborates:

Hey man, if you’re all for killing the momentum of the Tea PArty and 9/11 truth then promote these assclowns all you want. It’s perfectly obvious they’re using their honor to earn a buck and don’t give a damn about anything.

Hey, killing the momentum of the “Tea PArty and 9/11 truth” sounds like a good idea to me. So let’s get on with the promotion of the assclowns.

Later we get this gem:

All he’s doing is training people to tune out and not care.

Apparently if you can’t really care about rationality and reason and sanity. You can only care if you have crazy beliefs about the gubbuhmint’s “false flag” 9/11 attacks. They really think they’re the only ones who care about anything. Anyone who disagrees is just lazy or stupid or complacent. They’re more intellectually isolated than the Bush administration.

Or even the teabaggers, for that matter; even the crazier ones who believe he’s a secret Muslim from Kenya. Presumably, they at least believe that Obama cares about something, even if it’s a secret evil communist plan to destroy America. The troofers won’t even grant outsiders that much.

Today is the last big primary (masturbation) day, everyone!

Unfortunately I’m not supposed to vote today because New York state has something called closed primaries, which means that you have to be registered in the relevant party to vote. So I will be forced to do so using my “name.” The obvious choice for maximum hilarity is the communist / local yokel  Carl Paladino.

Another state with closed primaries today is Delaware. The Republican primary in Delaware for Joe Biden’s Senate seat is between Mike Castle and Christine O’Donnell. Castle is the normal (yet atypical for this year), moderate candidate which the party supports. So he’s a pretty appropriate choice for Biden’s seat since Biden was basically a moderate Republican while in the Senate.

O’Donnell is the teabagger candidate, and she’s against masturbation because of Matthew 5:27-8:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Here’s what O’Donnell said in her own words:

The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.

Please fap to this picture while reading this post, kthx -mgmt.

So it’s pretty clear that’s the verse to which she was referring. It’s the Sermon on the Mount, if you didn’t know. But it’s just too bad that she didn’t continue using the Bible to dictate her politics with the next few verses. Here’s Matthew 5:29-30:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

This… well this might be a tough sell, even for the teabaggers. Or maybe not! Maybe Christine O’Donnell will win the primary tonight, and she will then introduce masturbation (no, not this kind) to the national stage inre: the 2010 mid-term elections. The next thing you know, they’d be running attack ads accusing each other of being too liberal on the issue of Biblical, guilt-induced self-mutilation. That. Would. Be. AWESOME!

And if you’re a Republican politician in Delaware, you better hope that’s what happens or else you might get yourself killed. Tom Ross, the chairman of the Delaware Republican Party, received a death threat via email saying that he deserved “a bullet in the head” for supporting Mike Castle instead of the hilarious anti-masturbation lady. This is definitely NOT TERRORISM though, well, just because.

UPDATE: O’Donnell has pulled it off and beat Mike Castle. She then cleaned up with a sock.

Sharron Angle and education

I really should’ve just devoted this space entirely to covering all of the kooky shit the Republican candidate for US Senate from Nevada Sharron Angle says and does, but now I’m way too far behind to possibly keep up. Each time her name appears in the news, I just think she can’t possibly get any crazier. But then she does.

Earlier in her campaign, Angle was for eliminating the Department of Education. She pretty quickly learned that taking this position (and others like it) was so unpopular that it boosted the campaign of someone as generally loathed as her opponent Harry Reid. So she deleted it from her website and got her lawyers to start yelling at Harry Reid for talking about it.

Her position’s pretty radical, but it’s based on a standard conservative position on federal v. state bureaucracies. From the National Review:

“Look, the Department of Education is a policy machine that sends down one-size-fits-all rules that fit no one,” Angle says. “Education works best when you have all of the stakeholders involved and working toward the same commitment. That happens best at the local level. Anything bureaucratically, administratively, these layers and layers — that just diminishes the involvement of the stakeholder. They feel like their voice isn’t being heard because there is too much of a loud clamor from the top.”

So it’s oversimplified, but that’s basically how conservatives attack federal programs like the DoE. See, it’s not that they’re necessarily against education in general. They just think it would function better if control were held at the state level. Well that’s how they’d like to frame it, at least.

Sharron Angle has a history of handling things at the state level since she’s been a State Senator for Nevada from 1999 through 2005. So we can test whether or not it’s true in her experience that education is best handled at the state level with her own experience in the state legislature. This would be a good way to test whether she actually follows her espoused conservative political philosophy, or if she’s just against any public funding of education be it on the state or federal level.

ThinkProgress did some digging on this matter and found it to be the latter. In 2003, she was part of a vocal minority which temporarily blocked a funding bill to maintain the public schools. Not to spend more on public schools, you see, just enough to keep them functioning. Fortunately for Nevada’s schools, this attempt was later thwarted by the Nevada Supreme Court. But why did the Nevada Supreme Court need to get involved when 2010 Sharron Angle tells us that education funds handled at the state level works so well? Maybe we should ask the 2003 Sharron Angle.

But then again why a Sharron Angle in any time-space continuum want to fund education? More education is just going to make less people inclined to vote for her.

Random notes on Lily Dale

There were a lot of details left out of my recent article on Lilydale which didn’t really fit into the story that well. We wanted to get to the punchline of having the medium identify Taibbi and Randi as spirits around me before boring people with too much of the minutiae, even if some of it was kind of funny/interesting.

Before we even got into Lily Dale, we stopped at the National Spiritualist Association, which was a small one-story building overlooking the Cassadaga Lakes. It was all very scenic. If I were setting up some kind of pyramid scheme targeting gullible hippies, that’s the kind of place I would pick for a headquarters.

We were only inside for a moment before being escorted out by a nice woman named Paula, but that was just because there was some kind of private class going on and not because we stormed in wearing orange jumpsuits while waving dowsing rods around and yelling about how we were picking up very powerful energy vibes of gullibility in this location. That was something we’d talked about doing but laziness and a lack of funding made that impossible.

This is totally a cliché, but every group setting in Lily Dale just reeked of Patchouli. We’ve all known people who might go overboard with that stuff even as potent as it is, but imagine that times a hundred.

The woman doing the warm-up act said that Lily Dale was on one of the only old growth forests in the Northeast, even though there are 210,000 acres of old growth forests in NY state alone.

Just before I got my reading, two young African-American women raised their hands to get a reading by request from a medium. I was under the impression that doing readings “don’t work that way” and that the spirits are very mysterious about how they go about communicating. But the medium complied and told them that they were being visited by their grandmother, who was – GASP – from the South! And what’s even more surprising is that she was very spiritual and liked to sing a lot. Another Indian woman was told that she was visited by relatives from another country who wanted her to hold on to her cultural heritage.

In other words, anything that distinguished someone from the crowd at all was the basis for their reading. Guys, including myself, were told that it was time to advance their career. Younger people were contacted by the old, and vice versa. If the mark looked confused by a medium’s use of a stereotype, then the medium would tell her that this was a long-forgotten ancestor from several generations back. The rest was just random guesses, which is where confirmation bias did its thing.

I had kind of guessed beforehand that the crowd would be mostly female based on footage I’d seen of similar events, but I had really underestimated the proportion – at least on the day we went. It was at least a 95% female audience. And yet still my smoothest “Lllladies” yielded no positive results.

So lastly we were pretty lucky I guess to get a public reading for a couple reasons. One is that there were tons of witnesses – not that we know any of them and could get them to verify what happened, but still. The other is that according to the official Lily Dale website, the cost of a private reading starts at $40. Maybe that would’ve yielded a lot more funny material, but I’ll have to leave that to other skeptics with bigger bank accounts.