Belated Anniversary

Why, how remiss of me. I've missed the anniversary. (Getting an education will do that to you.) Happy "Death of Evolution Day," William Dembski. How the years do fly by.

Seven years to make my own scholarly paper invalid.

Expelled Exposed

Welcome to the blogroll: Expelled Exposed, a response to the "documentary," now tentatively scheduled to come out on April 11 -- nine days after the anniversary of another anti-evolutionist's prediction.

To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won't matter in a decade.

By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead.

The mathematician turned Darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he thinks the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won't be able to supply the answers.

"I see this all disintegrating very quickly," he said.

This appeared in a Kentucky newspaper on April 2, 2006, one day after National Atheist Day. *Snigger* (Not gullible, are you?)

UPDATED: I needed a laugh. Thank you, Leonard Pierce:

(For pure delusional self-pity, it's hard to beat the Expelled movie blog; their latest entry claims that, since those meddlesome Washington bureaucrats combined Lincoln and Washington's birthdays into President's Day, "Darwin Day has now supplanted Lincoln's birthday in the public imagination"! Yes, who can forget those long Darwin Day weekends, when the family gathers around a copy of Origin of Species and makes a little wooden model of the Galapagos Islands before setting out for a big trip to the mall for one of the many Darwin Day sales?)

Me, I always got a new dress for Darwin Day, and enjoyed the hunt for new mutated eggs!

The Designer Really Oughta Open a Restaurant

(Things I post because I can’t find a complete and unedited version of Genet’s Chant d’Amor on the Web):

Day No. 1:
And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”
“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”
“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

Day No. 2:
“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.
“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”
“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”
“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”
“But—brown?” Buddha asked.
“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”
“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”

Day No. 3:
“Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.”
“It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly.
“Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ”
“But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?”
“I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God.
“It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively.
“Thank you,” said the Lord God.

Day No. 4:
“One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.”
“Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.
“Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.”
“Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.”
“I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?”
“Shut up,” said Buddha.
“You shut up,” said the Lord God.
“It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”

Continued...

“Shouts & Murmurs -Intelligent Design” by Paul Rudnick The New Yorker, September 25, 2005.

Now from the Wedge Strategy:

GOALS
Governing Goals
To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.

Five Year Goals
To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.

Twenty Year Goals
To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its innuence in the fine arts.

To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

Now, come on. Does any one idea “permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life” and is our diverse and pluralistic religious, cultural, moral and political life to be “permeated” by intelligent design forever?

“To see its influence in the fine arts,” bwahaha. Good luck with that, peasants. If there’s anything the fine arts cannot tolerate, it’s dogmatism and puritianicism of any stripe.

They just don’t get it, do they?

UPDATED: Whereas the true meaning of life is to be found written on refrigerator magnets!

Funny, non-sappy video on You Tube (by someone who knows how to write music):

Note this commenter's remarks:

Reading comments i noticed that creationists sound rather childish and less educated than those arguing against them. Creationists use biblical fables, simple, abstract concepts of love and very low level baseless claims (like the comment below mine) and get responses that they probably cannot comprehend, supported by logic, scientific theories and big words.

Good luck with the art world!

SECOND UPDATE: Oh, please! Now William Kristol in today's New York Times yokes art into the service of propaganda with his column, "Democrats Should Read Kipling." Sir, I have read Rudyard Kipling, being that he was second to Edgar Allen Poe in my list of favorite authors. While it's true that Kipling identified with the colonizers rather than the colonized, Mr. Kristol, in your simplistic characterization of Republicans as the beleaguered ruling class and the Democrats as the “opposition,” you reveal your sad lack of knowledge of history and even more tenuous grasp of literature. Kipling understood as you do not that the relationship between the empowered and the disenfranchised is never so simplistic as you make out. You, sir, are also no literary critic.

Read the train wreck of a column if you want. Scott Horton has, and he summed up my sentiments precisely:

George Orwell, my favorite essayist, described reading Kipling’s poetry as “a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life.” That, I have to admit, is much the attitude I have towards Bill Kristol’s New York Times columns. They’re so bad, so predictable, so thoroughly clichéd that it’s a sort of malicious treat to read them. And today’s exercise, “Democrats Should Read Kipling,” which offers us Rudyard Kipling supposedly through the optic of Kristol reading Orwell, is a veritable stale Milk Dud. It’s too bad to resist.

Creationists (Kristol is also an apologist for intelligent design) just can't create.

The Amazing Criswell Predicts!

Does anybody remember Plan Nine from Outer Space? That hilarious cult film by Ed Wood which tries so hard to scare its audience, but collapses under its own unintentional hilarity and absurdity? Well, that's precisely what I think about creationists - trying so hard to be someone they're not, trying to look like scientists and making fools of themselves, inspiring laughter (of the wrong kind), yet enabled by breathless, credulous reporters and cable news show talking heads employed by a mass media market that itself is increasingly clueless and oafish in this era of blogs and YouTube.

Plan Nine from Outer Space had as its special guest star the Amazing Criswell, a radio announcer who delivers these gems of wisdom at the beginning of the film:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Man, that's deep! But deeper still is Dembski's crystal balls - I mean, his courageous call for scientific predictions of intelligent design theory!

My friends...

Can your heart stand...

the shocking facts...

of...

quote-miners from outer space?

(Shimmies to Afarensis)

In the meantime, here are my perfectly hum-drum predictions for intelligent design theory and beyond:

1. "Darwinism" predicts that intelligent design will be put out to pasture and that the upcoming gaggle of (truly young instead of faux-young) creationists will continue to start from scratch and cite only contemporary "Darwinists" and each other for their crackpot ideas, just as this group at UD does, with little or no citation of Gish, Henry Morris, Muncaster, Buckna, John Klotz, and all the other "dignitaries" of creationism that few people remember because they make no lasting contribution.

2. The names above will only be remembered by the "Darwinists" in their books and papers for the same reason. (Who remembers Immanuel Velikovsky today?)

3. Creationism will continue to contribute zippity-doo-dah to science.

4. Future creationists will blame "global warming denial" on "Darwinists," just as they do today with eugenics.

The Great Criswell has spoken. Who was that veiled man? Where?

What color is his/her underwear?

UPDATED: If you want to see refrigerator repairmen (they're always men, creationism is a good old boys club) pretending to be scientists, follow this link.

"[Richard] Owen says my book will be forgotten in ten years." -Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 1860.

Tickle Bill

Hey! They stole my idea!

You know, that's just naughty.

@ In an ID World via RedStateRabble.

Evolution Dead in Nine Years

It's a date.

This is going to be the longest boxing match in history!

Good thing I have a long memory, growing up during the Little Rock trial and all. (Yes, I know it's un-American to remember things and to place them in an intellectual context, but you're looking at someone who opposed funding Saddam Hussein back in 1982, a few years before her hard-drinking, class-disrupting, we-don't-like-no-nerds classmates joined the military "for the discipline" and just barely managed to avoid getting their asses shipped to Iraq for the first war.)


Who knew that lifting all those books is just like doing push-ups! Drop and give me Welty, soldier! ;-)

Oh, did I mention that "evolution is dead"?


"Dying" and "dead." Evolution sho' is confusin'! These guys should get their stories straight. Then maybe they can show us all their medical cures and neato gizmos that intelligent design promises us. ID is science, remember - and they've only been at it since 1991! "By their fruits shall ye know them."

Darwin Didn't Believe This!

William Dembski, at his blog, falsely attributes to Charles Darwin this nefarious quote from The Descent of Man:

The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ’struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults."

Charles Darwin was quoting other people.

In order to refute their racist arguments.

Have you no shame, William Dembski? How many lies are you willing to tell? You know better. What is your point? How is this justified at all?

Truly having an open mind does not mean keeping a defunct argument open forever. It means looking at the evidence and then drawing some conclusions.

I think we can safely draw the conclusion that the intelligent design movement has run out of ideas and must resort to these easily-refuted tricks to shock its Frankenstein monster again. But can Dembski shock his patchwork creation for the next nine years? (See left.)

UPDATED: On "cursing the light."

(Shimmies to RedStateRabble and Pharyngula)

UPDATED: Now William Dembski says:

I was well aware of the context [of the quote by another attributed to Darwin]. But if I make the context clear, PvM and his fellows will find something else to attack. Better to give them what appears a minor slip-up, let them attack that, and then show how they’re acting in bad faith because they have ignored the gist.

Believe it or not, it really helps that the other side thinks we’re such morons... [This is] a fact, one that can be exploited.

Oh, boy! Something that can be exploited - you being considered a moron! Only you, Bill. You know what? I don't think you're a moron. I think you're an opportunist.

And as for the "Have you no shame?" question, you just answered it. Thanks.

Newest Addition to Blogroll and a Summary

UPDATED: Yikes! Sometimes it gets downright weird at Uncommon Descent: "I can't wait to see all those other folks rot in hell."

Doug, honey, I don't believe James Cameron's Lost Tomb of Jesus crap either. Okay? And as for wishing all those other folks to rot in hell, well - don't wish your time away, huh?

And what do you think about the crap "documentary" by this Cameron?

SECOND UPDATE: James Cameron's Lost Tomb of Jesus is fiction. And so is intelligent design. If you criticize one, criticize them both.
---
It's high time that I added Ed Brayton to the blogroll. I visit Ed's blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, all the time.

Ed has the latest on the spat between William Dembski and the Templeton Foundation. This is getting interesting, because it seems that some of the charges that Dembski leveled at the foundation are true. The foundation's spokesperson claims that Dembski was paid $100,000 to write a book on theology; however, Dembski's claim that it was to write a "pro-ID" book appear to be borne out by the facts. (I know, I know, ID is theology, but let's just set that aside for a wee bit.)

(We're just pretending that the two aren't the same for the moment. That's called...wait for it...playing devil's advocate.)

However, all this points to is more whining and scab-picking by Dembski about past slights, real or imagined. Still smarting more than a year later by the resounding defeat for intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, he launched a vitriolic campaign to smear the presiding judge in the case, Judge Jones (a Republican appointed to the bench by none other than President George W. Bush), accusing the judge of having lifted his decision from the plaintiffs' paperwork (which is routine, people, it's done all the time).

Let's just gingerly add that somebody got listed in Time Magazine's TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World, and it certainly wasn't Bill Dembski.

This culminated in an incredibly puerile flash animation (now scrubbed of the fart noises - see it here) that portrayed Jones as the puppet of...lemme get this straight...reputable scientists and academics, among them Richard Dawkins, Wesley Elsberry, Barbara Forrest (who testified against intelligent design at the Dover trial, and who has the affrontery of being a woman), and Eugenie Scott, among others. Wow. These people can put their words in my mouth any time!

Dare we say that the farting animation, er, backfired in a major way, resulting in some personal humiliation for Dembski (in which I gleefully participated, but RedStateRabble gets the credit), one really good smackdown (nice one, Ken!), and some fancy backtracking. (I liked the farts--the only thing I liked about the animation was the farts. Dembski should have left the farts in and gotten rid of everything else.)

So if there's something to this Templeton "scandal," that's interesting, but not surprising. No, considering the kind of year Dembski has had since the Dover trial (in the shitter, basically) it's not really very surprising that the Templeton Foundation, after showing initial hope and interest, would run away from the intelligent design movement like, well, someone from a small room with a farting roommate. You know, come to think of it, that really makes Dembski look bad once more.

If you really want to keep up with the shenanigans of the intelligent design woo wizards like Dembski, O'Leary et al., go to After the Bar Closes and click on the "Official Uncommonly Dense Discussion Thread" devoted to the inane blog by Dembski, "Uncommon Descent." Please note that this link starts at the beginning of this incredibly long discussion - you may want to click at the end to get your feet wet and then go back to enjoy the past yucks. December 2006 was a good month, really prime for belly laughs. (I wrote them a poem and everything!)

Right now Uncommon Descent is pretty boring, due to Dembski's whining, but I'm hoping that he'll snap out of it soon - he usually does. As with me, the dark clouds gather, but his have internal thunderbolts. Holy crap, you think I'm angry? You think I'm tempestuous? You think I have my moments? You should check out this guy! It's those quiet ones that you always have to look out for, and he looks like some harmless, small-town undertaker - but then he rails against the "materialist conspiracy," and rants that if he were the dean of a major university (he's not, which is another sore point with him, so tred lightly there - yeesh!) he'd dismiss half the professors in the biology department (since it's not really a science, you know - just "stamp collecting") and rename it the "nature appreciation unit." Yeah, he's a lunatic. A loveable lunatic!

Sometimes.

So here's to hoping that he'll quit sulking and contribute more laughs to the world. Just like this guy. Hallelujah! And welcome, Ed, to my blogroll (now a scroll almost as long as evolution itself). *Shimmy!*

Dembski's Seminary Enforces "Suffer Not a Woman to Teach"

UPDATED: Hey, nobody asked me about the Baudelaire remark. Is that because everyone gets it? It's a joke about a French film. Can you guess which one? (One of my favs.)
---
This is a strange and outrageous story. I am linking to an overtly religious, dissident Baptist blog Grace and Truth to You because of the level of detail that it offers about the case.

In essence, a female professor of Hebrew, Sheri Klouda, was hired at Southwestern Theological Seminary, the same Bible school at which William Dembski teaches, around a year before the hiring of the current president, Paige Patterson. She was suddenly told that she would be dismissed due to my &%#@! favorite biblical passage of all time, I Timothy 2:12: "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silent."

Such bullshit in this day and age I cannot believe. Just another example of the Christian Taliban howling and pounding the tables over nothing. And is a mother not supposed to teach her son anything? Just how erratically can the fundy clown car drive? The good news is, even among conservative Baptists a lot of men are calling this for what it is--gender discrimination.

Let me tell you something. If it weren't for women, the damn churches would close. Women do all the work while men strut their stuff at the pulpit. I've seen it. Women let them get away with that because they tend to see preachers as sexy (I'm not kidding, it happens all the time), but it is high time that women walk away from church if they cannot speak in it.

How do you say "Tell it to the air, Baudelaire" in Hebrew?

Zing! Part Two

Shalini replies to William Dembski, and how. Ouch! That's gotta hurt.

I just discovered Shalini's blog, Scientia Natura: Evolution And Rationality and I gotta say, why didn't I notice her before? Everyone go visit and say hello. Awesome blog!

End of the Year Post: Stories

Interesting short paper by Dembski, written six years ago. (I feel rather guilty having accused him of selling snake oil (though he is), because after reading more of his stuff it's become apparent to me that he really does believe what he says.)

But I'm a writer, too. I've decided to post one of my short stories, and everyone should be able to view it now, which I'm waiting to hear back from a publisher about. It's based on real events; the agate mentioned in it exists and is in a safe place.

UPDATED: AJ linked to my post.

End of the Year Post: Sexiest Man Living!

According to Salon.com (this is old, but a goodie) it's Richard Dawkins! Sorry, Bill. But you sure make a cute Cowardly Lion.

(Shimmy plums and snake arms to Pharyngula and RedStateRabble. And to Bill.)

P.S. Fix that linky! Ahhhh!