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Your IP address is 184.108.40.206
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|Date: 2007/12/14 02:03:55, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. -Admin]
I know who I'm not voting for:
|Date: 2007/12/16 04:29:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
But feel free to tell everybody how much you agree with me and why. Be open about it.
|Date: 2007/12/18 03:18:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|I would say that anybody who chooses "magnan" for a handle hasn't read much classic science fiction.
|Date: 2007/12/19 03:26:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Sock puppet or just another IDiot?
Personally, I'd love to see the size of that lab! Not to mention the team that runs the experiment for ten million years.
|Date: 2007/12/20 00:08:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the Amazon page for the book:
No problem with these advertisements at all. Definitely all science so far.
|Date: 2007/12/23 08:28:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Amazon.com Sales Rank as of Dec 23: #5,705 in Books
What a difference a day makes. Some of the responses to Gil's posting seem to understand what's going on:
Hedge 12/22/2007 6:44 pm
russ 12/22/2007 7:10 pm
Hedge 12/22/2007 7:45 pm
greyman 12/23/2007 4:26 am
Some, not so much:
Nochange 12/22/2007 7:37 pm
Personally, I think these large swings in ranking are due to the very few sales overall. If you sell one book on Monday and another on Tuesday, that's a 100 percent increase in sales, but not something you'd want to brag about.
|Date: 2007/12/25 14:11:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Curious thing about that blog - it's been up since Dec 17, has accumulated five separate Opening Posts - and Zero replies!
This may be the prototype for all future ID blogs: If you don't allow replies, they can't point out your mistakes.
I just registered and attempted to add a comment to the 21 December, Guillermo Gonzalez: Is Earth an accident... thread.
It tells me in bright red letters that I can't open a new thread while presenting me with the comment box. However, it didn't seem to take my comment. Just in case it winds up in the memory hole, here it is:
|Date: 2007/12/28 00:17:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2007/12/30 18:31:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ronald Meester says here:
No, it doesn't. The NFL theorem says that there is no single search strategy that will work well with all possible search spaces. It has nothing to do with evolution, which works on the search space of DNA, whose hills and valleys are mostly gradual.
Dembski is a tard for saying otherwise and you are a tard for not understanding the theorem any better than Dembski does.
|Date: 2008/01/09 01:06:55, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Barry is not an astronomer:
Not really. We get no better view of the earth orbiting the sun from space than we do on earth. The first real confirmation of the Copernican theory was obtained shortly after WW-II when radars powerful enough to bounce radio waves off of Venus and Mars finally gave us the three dimensional data necessary for us to say, positively, that the earth is orbiting the sun.
Since that day, observations from very distant space probes may have given us further confirmation, but I'm not aware of any being used for such purposes.
Barry has a few other epistemological problems as well:[QUOTE]New data arose (for example, it is now generally accepted that the fossil does not support gradualism in the way Darwin envisioned), and ad hoc adjustments to the theory have been made (e.g., punctuated equilibrium).
|Date: 2008/01/09 01:20:15, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ah crap! Hit the wrong button halfway through writing the above and I don't seem to have an edit button. I meant to say:
Not so, Barry. Punctuated equilibrium occurs through a series of small steps exactly the way Darwin envisioned. P.E. theory says that once a large interbreeding population has been established, new innovations tend to get swamped and have much less chance establishing themselves in the population. Instead, small groups get geographically or reproducively isolated and genetic innovations have a much easier time establishing themselves in those small groups. Eventually the new small groups grow large enough to start showing up in the fossil record and incredulous creationists start declaring "Waterloo for Darwinism".
Perhaps Barry's biggest blunder is this one:
Sorry Barry, but ID is not new, it's an old and tired idea. ID was the reigning paradigm from at least Old Testament times (remember the Garden of Eden fable and the seven days of creation?) until 1859 when Darwin convincingly overthrew it.
Not edited because I can't.
|Date: 2008/01/09 18:33:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DaveT shows why philosophy is harder than it looks:
Dave, "omniscient" means "all-knowing". In other words, if God is truly omniscient, he knows EVERYTHING. If there is anything God doesn't know about the entire universe, past, present or future, then he's not omniscient. If humans have free will such that God doesn't know what we'll do next, then God's not omniscient. In other words, omniscient = no free will, free will = no omniscience. You can't have both.
This is a proof, by argument reductio ad absurdum, that if God is omniscient then humans have no free will. Calvin figured this out centuries ago. Unfortunately, he founded a Christian sect on it.
By the way, "[God would] go crazy if there were absolutly nothing [He] didn't know about the entire universe past, present, and future." would explain a lot about how this universe got so screwed up.
|Date: 2008/01/10 00:11:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/01/11 00:17:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I go to UD and read dumb people.
|Date: 2008/01/12 22:43:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Taken care of.
|Date: 2008/01/14 02:00:47, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Does anybody know where I can get software that compares different texts and tries to figure out which ones are written by the same authors? This type of software doesn't look for plaigiarism so much as it looks for writer's quirks. Things like favorite sentence length, size of paragraphs, favorite expressions and figures of speech and similar. I'd like to go sockpuppet hunting.
P.S. Could I please get an edit icon? Thanks.
|Date: 2008/01/15 08:48:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
After reading the first 37 responses, I make this prediction: Neither Dembski nor Wells is going to get interviewed on the national talking heads show.
Edit to note that I have an edit button now. Thanks!
|Date: 2008/01/17 04:43:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski interviewed at last! Behe and Gonzalez too!
Unfortunately for them, the interview was not for a "national talking heads program", but hey, at least the Pro-ID Spanish website, "Ciencia Alternativa" will talk to them and the IDEA club website will print it.
Waterloo for Darwinism can't be far away now.
|Date: 2008/01/17 04:49:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Somebody may have mentioned this before. If so, I apologize.
What's wrong with this line?
Found at http://www.EvoInfo.org/
|Date: 2008/01/21 01:44:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Observation: Anybody who tells us not to worry because the Permian Extinction only wiped out 90% of life on earth is in Deep Tard. It's not just a matter of life wanting to exist, it has to be able to exist. And, believe it or not, Denyse, you are a (small and obnoxious) part of life. Probably a 90 percenter.
|Date: 2008/01/22 06:10:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I don't know. These guys are trying to be funny and that never seems to work with them. Tard humor is best when it's unconscious.
|Date: 2008/01/23 05:45:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The aptly named "Unlettered and Ordinary" leads with his chin:
Wikipedia on propaganda:
Denyse, of course, is Catholic. For those of you keeping score, that's an Own Goal.
|Date: 2008/01/23 06:20:00, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'm finding this a little difficult to parse. Mrs. O'Leary seems to be trying to make a point about the effectiveness of Our President spending $2.3 million to study prayer:
Try as I might, I just can't see this as being anything other than an argument that prayer is just another placebo (along with a statement that it's not). Well, let's spend another 2.3 million studying Witch Doctors and I'll bet they turn out to be just as effective as prayer too. I score this one as another Own Goal.
|Date: 2008/01/24 03:52:42, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Meanwhile, UrbanMysticDee keeps the Tard flowing:
There's evidence of intelligence everywhere if we could just stop those damned Darwinist scientists from lying to us!
You'll have to go to UD to get the two URLs he specifies, I couldn't get them to transfer. Good examples of ID-Science at both of them, though.
Speaking of lying to us, whatever happened to Dembski's researcher? The last time I tried to get onto his "Stop Lying to Us" blog at www.stoplyingtous.com, it was password controlled. I wonder if he stores his naughty picures there?
|Date: 2008/01/24 06:19:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Thanks to Denyse (who apparently doesn't know how to get the URL for a UD comment) for this tip: Magnan gives us another insite into the ID mind:
"implacably opposed" apparently means "still asking for evidence" in ID-Think.
More on Magnan here.
|Date: 2008/01/24 23:39:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A momentary lapse of honesty?
|Date: 2008/01/25 00:14:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Why on earth should Dawkins, Dennette, Hitchens, Harris or anybody else who's not an IDTard want it? It's a word that describes YOU: "the predisposition of certain individuals and groups, especially those unschooled in Darwinian evolutionary theory, to ascribe objects, events, and structures found in nature to a designing intelligence." Most of us spell "those unschooled in Darwinian evolutionary theory" as "Dembski & Friends". Enjoy your new URL.
P.S. If you go to teleocentric.com, you get a web page saying
|Date: 2008/01/25 05:35:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think the average UDer is more of a Couch-Tard, which means "Should have stood in bed" in Baptiste.
|Date: 2008/01/25 05:39:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Note that Denyse O'Leary's Post-Darwinist blog only gets two stars.
I can't help noticing that every entry in the ID list is over-rated by one to four stars.
|Date: 2008/01/26 07:22:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
For a certain class of people, thinking things out just doesn't pay.
|Date: 2008/01/30 15:19:21, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dream sig:
ID is really creationism in disguise.
ID is religion, not science.
[ID is] not science because it's not testable and makes no predictions.
[ID is] a science-stopper because it says goddidit.
ID's central claims (e.g., IC) have been refuted over and over again.
ID is not represented in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
GilDodgen - Uncommon Descent Blog 01/30/08 "Ignorance: Inspired and Promoted by Mainstream Media" Thread
Props to Salvador Cordova and William Dembski, who taught me everything I know about accurate quote mining.
|Date: 2008/01/30 23:58:00, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dave commands, "Don't Think About Who Designed the Designer!"
Here's the point, Dave: Science says that the life we see surrounding us was produced over a period of several billion years by living organisms evolving through random variation and natural selection. Living organisms, random variation and natural selection can be observed at work today and they left many traces of their past work. ID may disagree with their effectiveness, but nobody can deny they exist.
ID says that all the life we observe today was created by an Intelligent Designer who is much much more complex than anything alive today, except that we can't see Him so we have only your word that He's there and ID hasn't got a clue as to how He came to exist. Furthermore, the only reasons you can give for believing your claim that the Designer exists are your religious beliefs and in the wake of 9/11, religious beliefs carry even less weight than they did on 9/10.
I think banning all thought of how the Designer came to exist was a smart move on your part, assuming that you put avoiding embarassment above finding out how things happened.
|Date: 2008/02/01 02:04:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The buggers just 404'd the entire debate thread! Luckily, I saved it:
Fair use!
|Date: 2008/02/01 03:15:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From Pharyngula - the MP3 is posted:
I must say they have more honesty than UD!
|Date: 2008/02/01 15:55:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Omniscience is a wonderful thing, but it has a dark side. For instance, I know exactly what Ann Coulter looks like nude.
|Date: 2008/02/01 16:26:42, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dejah Thoris. I'd like to think she blew the earth a kiss four point five billion years ago.
|Date: 2008/02/06 07:00:47, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
John A. Davison Jan 23, 2008:
John A. Davison, January 24, 2008 Same Blog:
I love it so.
|Date: 2008/02/08 00:44:15, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
My favorite line from that posting: "...Ben Stein does not spend two hours showing you selective data and then try to convince you that you should believe ID instead of Darwin."
I have to thank Mr. Wagner for leading us to that list of best selling documentaries, though. I particularly recommend #20-Step Into Liquid and #38-Riding Giants. There are some awsomely beautiful shots in each. You won't find two better surfing documentaries.
#46, Koyaanisqatsi, is very good too, in a rather perverse way. The title means something like "Life out of balance" in a southwestern indian dialect and it's supposed to be decrying modern life, but I just thought it was beautiful. It's also moving in spots. Rent it and see if you don't weep as the poor little rocket motor falls and falls and falls to its ultimate destruction.
For DaveTard, I recommend #98, Pumping Iron 2: The Women. Or maybe the original Pumping Iron: Ahnold Flexes His Man Muscles.
|Date: 2008/02/08 03:00:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That article contains a lot of deep tard. I think the good doctor sums it up well in his first line: "Against Stupidity, God Himself Is Helpless". I'll add that stupidity combined with ignorance pretty well cleans God's clock.
Professor Myers comments on Doc Simmons.
|Date: 2008/02/09 10:02:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Yeah, like Willard "Mitt" Romney!
|Date: 2008/02/12 23:47:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Grandma Tard:
It may have been just a bit more important than that, Granny. For example:
Fred Flintstone sees two bears enter a cave.
Fred Flintstone sees one bear leave the cave.
Fred Flintstone thinks: Two Minus One Equals Zero. Cave is safe to enter.
Result: Natural selection wins again. The gene pool loses a defective gene.
|Date: 2008/02/12 23:59:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
And bless our Loving God for also giving chimps math skills:
|Date: 2008/02/15 02:01:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
For some reason, I immediately though of Uncommon Descent, Dr. Dr. Bill, DaveTard and ol' Redwood Up Her Fundament when I read this:
Fecal Transplants
|Date: 2008/02/15 02:22:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I notice that Doc Doc Dempski is unhappy at Richard Dawkins' advance on his next book. Here are some sales figures for you, Bill:
Amazon sales ranks
The Design of Life by Dembski: 4585
The God Delusion by Dawkins: 150
The Selfish Gene by Dawkins: 578
Another interesting factoid - Dembski and Wells' latest book is having its nose wiped by the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Selfish Gene! Dembski's oldest book, The Design Inference, is ten years old. Its sales rank: 879,578. No wonder he's green with jealousy.
Some other Dembski sales ranks:
Intelligent Design (with Michael Ruse): 50,616
Intelligent Design - the Bridge Between Science & Theology: 49,503
The Design Revolution (with Charles Colson): 275,040
Understanding Intelligent Design (with Sean McDowell): 346,149
And remember, Amazon sales ranks are like golf scores and egos. Smaller is better.
|Date: 2008/02/15 03:28:55, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Or, "The winner of the 1977 Kentucky Derby will be Seattle Slew."
|Date: 2008/02/19 23:45:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
But not everything on that site is bogus. Examine the book review at http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/bookreviews/pdf/v17n1.pdf:
Poor Dr. Dr. Dembski. Seventy three years of college and even the people who test parrots for telepathy don't respect him.
|Date: 2008/02/23 20:56:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
More Good Taste from UD:
There's a very slim chance this isn't a case of juvenile bad taste. Many Catholic Saint's Days celebrate the day the saint became a martyr. Maybe he's trying to say Darwin is a saint and martyr. But I think that the odds of Salamanca not being a juvie prick are way over the Universal Probability Boundary.
|Date: 2008/02/25 04:31:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
larrynormanfan wonders: "Is "salamanca" the UD handle of Fred Phelps?"
I was thinking more along the lines of Salvador Cordova. Fits right in with his claims of Darwinian puppy bashing.
And it's a mighty slick handle. Who would ever guess that Salamanca is really Salvador Cordova, protecting his briliant career prospects from the depradations of the evil Darwinist Conspiracy. A clever handle like that fools them every time, but his design-detecting buddies will spot it right away.
|Date: 2008/02/26 02:58:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'z tryin to figure it out. But there are so many May 25s! There's practically one every year!
(From Wikipedia)
1521 - The Diet of Worms ends when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, issues the Edict of Worms, declaring Martin Luther an outlaw.
1738 - A treaty between Pennsylvania and Maryland ends the Conojocular War with settlement of a boundary dispute and exchange of prisoners. Settling any Conojocular War is good. Especially between two American states.
1895 - Playwright, poet and novelist Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and sentenced to serve two years in prison. Arden? Any thoughts?
1925 - Scopes Trial: John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. Quote the CeilingCat: "Ah haas!"
1953 - Nuclear testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its first and only nuclear artillery test. This could be it. Like ID, Nuclear Artillery was Very Bad Idea.
1966 - The first prominent DaZiBao during the Cultural Revolution in China was posted at Peking University.
Ah haas again! Lookup DaZiBao and you find this: "A key trigger in the Cultural Revolution was the publication of a dazibao on May 25, 1966 by Nie Yuanzi (???) and others at Peking University, claiming that the university was controlled by bourgeois anti-revolutionaries." That's Dembski, all right. He's the one who really called the world's Universities on their Christ-denying Corruption™. And look at what happened next: "The poster came to the attention of Mao Zedong, who had it broadcast nationally and published in the People's Daily. Big-character posters were soon ubiquitous, used for everything from sophisticated debate to satirical entertainment to rabid denunciation; being attacked in a big-character poster was enough to end one's career." Yes sir, that's ID in a nutshell. Paste up a few DaZiBaos, drop a dime to Homeland Security and watch your opponants fall! That's got to be the May 25 reference. It's the story of ID.
1887 - Pio of Pietrelcina, Catholic saint born. (d. 1968) Hmm, but Pope John-Paul-George&Ringo was a big fan of Padre Pio and Dembski used to be a Catholic...
1918 - Claude Akins born, American actor (d. 1994) Snif!
1921 - Jack Steinberger born, German-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate This has got to be it. Steinberger is just like Sternberger except he accomplished something.
2006 - Desmond Dekker died, Jamaican ska musician (b. 1941) Oh Nos! CeilingCat very sad, must go mourn. (Dekker sang "The Israelite", early Reggae hit.)
Edited to spell the Pope's name catrectly.
|Date: 2008/02/26 06:35:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Of course, the all time greatest ID invention was Dr. Dr. Salvador O'Dempski's Nuclear Hand Grenade. Which would have worked well, if his arm had just been a little bit stronger...
|Date: 2008/02/26 06:38:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Jeeze, I just read your reference and they mention the nuclear hand grenade! So it's definitely not a myth!
|Date: 2008/02/27 00:41:05, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That was a misprint. He meant to say, "...the tard evidence for design and purpose in the universe and life was overwhelming." Remember that it doesn't take much whelming to overwhelm the average ID theorist's mind.
|Date: 2008/02/27 04:09:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Short answer: No. Long answer: He might get his chance yet, what with McCain showing all the signs of going into a death spiral ... surely Ben would make a good vice presidential choice. His battyness on evolution complements McCain's battyness on Iraq quite nicely. Besides, America is obviously pining for a former Nixon speech writer in the White House or at least in the Naval Observatory grounds.
|Date: 2008/02/29 04:56:14, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Granville Sewell opines:
Good idea! Here's ID's strongest points:
Now that they're off the table ...
|Date: 2008/02/29 05:23:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Is Underwhelming Evidence completely dead? The last twenty three posts were authored by Denise OLeary. Two of them have a single response and one has eight. The rest? Nada. What gives?
Most interesting title for a post: "And so what if Grandma was an ape?", asks the "Toronto-based journalist; grandmother; Roman Catholic Christian." Interestingly, she puts down Chuck Norris with her reply.
|Date: 2008/03/01 20:03:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
gpuccio is always good for a quote:
|Date: 2008/03/04 08:29:26, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Her Agent, Mr. Frits Evenbly, to be specific.
That's quite a web site. I can't load anything but the front page with IE 6.
That's a pretty good bargain, though. For a mere $5000.00, she'll come to your group and whine about how badly she was treated by the accursed knowledge-based reality-sucking world. And her whining will be custom tailored to your group!
I assume that travel expenses are extra.
Personally, I think she's a Crocker.
|Date: 2008/03/04 08:37:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
poachy's got the right idea:
|Date: 2008/03/06 19:53:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I call sockpuppets.
|Date: 2008/03/07 07:14:21, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Mung makes up for years of tard emissions.
|Date: 2008/03/08 23:30:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
In the Uncommon Descent 'Speaking of T-Shirts' thread:
All science so far.
|Date: 2008/03/10 15:18:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse finds a sorta favorable review of The Design of Life. It's in the The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.
Edited to add Denyse's URL.
|Date: 2008/03/11 05:03:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Davetard misses the point - as usual.
BZZZT!! Wrong! The only people who assume the first life was a cell are creationists stating what they believe science believes. And they are wrong.
Even the simplest cell is enormously complex - much too complex to have formed by chance. Cells are the result of a long period of Darwinian evolution adding information a few bits at a time.
This theory is even worse than the theory that the first life was a cell. Where does all of this information come from, Dave? Scientific theories all assume that the first "living thing" was a simple self-reproducing molecule or, at the most, several molecules which manage to reproduce themselves. Low information, either way. Low enough to form by chance in a million years or so.
The reason scientists howl at the idea of the first cell incorporating all of the information to make all forms of life we see today is because that would require a tremendous amount of information and people who propose such ideas never have a way of accounting for this information. Ditto for complex creatures poofing into existence. Where does all that information come from?
Creationism's answer to this question, of course, is Goddidit. Which just leads to the next obvious question: where did God come from? It takes billions of bits of carefully ordered information to make any kind of intelligence powerful enough to make a living thing. When you figure out where God (or The Designer if you insist) got that high information intelligence from, let us know and we'll stop laughing at you long enough to look at your evidence. Until then, carry on. We're enjoying it.
|Date: 2008/03/12 00:42:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The Uncommon Descent official motto:
Original image removed. Thank you, Mr. DNA, for providing a smaller version, which is available below.
Thanks to the Rapid City, S.D. Journal for the picture.
Edited to restore reasonable margins.
|Date: 2008/03/12 00:55:37, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Tracy P Hamilton: "How would you know, Ceiling Cat? Were you there? (see my avatar)"
I'll have you know, Tracy, that I raised that Evil Devil-Cat Kitten from a tiny self-reproducing molecule, barely 100 atoms large, to a fine healthy specimen of a God-Kitten. Then, barely as soon as he opened his eyes and started eating red meat, he turned into a hell raising, furball hacking, litter pan missing, yowling at the mooning bag of furr covered teeth and talons, just like his mother, a 101 atom large self-reproducing molecule that I also created and raised from scratch. That 101st atom may have been unobtanium. I don't remember, due to the drugs. But I should have left it out. And don't ask how she became the mother of my son.
Your avatar depicts the exact moment I kicked that little Cat From Hell out of the house with the admonition, "If you don't like it here, eat mice! And childbirth is going to hurt like hell from now on! Not that you'd care, being a male Devil Cat, but it's going to hurt anyway you little ingrate!"
Last I heard, he'd killed and eaten both of DaveTard's dogs and had DaveTard himself cornered in his bathroom, afraid to come out. Serves them both right.
|Date: 2008/03/12 00:57:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|If anybody can shrink that "Reason is..." picture, please do so.
|Date: 2008/03/12 05:36:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Mr. DNA, that's perfect! Thank you!
Now to edit my original picture...
|Date: 2008/03/12 05:41:56, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Carlsonjok quotes Thomas Jefferson:
Wait! You mean Minerva didn't ...
Well, there goes my religion.
|Date: 2008/03/14 04:50:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
UD's latest attempt at humor:
Nice paint job, though.
Galapagos Finch has to be Dembski.
|Date: 2008/03/17 01:50:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Let's not overlook his very next paragraph:
|Date: 2008/03/17 02:54:04, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Uncommon Descent descends to quoting from a Moonie encylopedia!
In this article, Uncommon Descent brings our attention to an article by Jonathan Wells in the New World Encyclopedia. If you follow the adventures of Jesus Christ, AKA Reverand Moon and his Moonies, "New World" will ring a bell. And, since Jonathan Wells is a high ranking Moonie Clergyman, those bells will be ringing for a reason.
Sure enough, go to the article in question, click on "Menu/Main Page" and then "Vision" at the bottom of the page and Shazam! There it is:
That sharp intake of breath you heard was the entire faculty (minus one) at the Southwest Baptist Seminary and BBQ gasping at the new honors the Reverand Dr. Dr. Dembski has brought to them.
|Date: 2008/03/18 04:47:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A juicy part of the entry:
What I like about Reverand Moon is his modesty. If I was Jesus Christ, I'd be dead.
|Date: 2008/03/19 01:45:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Step 1: Take Prozac
Step 2: Take Prozac again, just in case you forgot the first time.
Step 3: Did you REALLY take that Prozac? Better take it again, just in case.
Step 4: If Reverand Moon is really Jesus and he's here on earth, then the rapture can't be far away, so better take some more Prozac.
Step 5: Better drink a bottle or two of sacramental wine, just in case there's an unexpected Communion service.
Step 6: Take more Prozac to wash the Communion wine down.
Step 7: Finally ready to post on UD
Step 8: What the hell is a GEM of TKI?
|Date: 2008/03/19 02:00:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DLH says:
Ahh... DLH ... I hate to tell you this, but Intelligent Design is supposed to be a brand new scientific theory that's going to finally fix science and put it on the road to a true comprehension of how life came to be. Quoting a twelve hundred years dead Clergyman giving all the credit to God kind of lets the cat out of the bag and might make some people say, "ALL SCIENCE SO FAR!".
|Date: 2008/03/20 00:49:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
erasmus FCD: "DaveTard has blown half of Texas!!!"
Ugh. When we build that fence along the border, let's remember to build it north of DaveTard.
|Date: 2008/03/21 00:53:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oh, this is TOO RICH! On Pharyngula, PZ Meyers writes that he was standing in line to see a preview of Expelled! when a policeman pulled him out of line and told him that he couldn't see the movie. Then a few minutes later he came back and said that he had to leave the premises. So PZ politely complied.
But the idiots let PZ's wife and daughter see the movie, along with their guest: Richard Dawkins!!
|Date: 2008/03/21 01:15:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|As of 1:46 AM (Minnesota Standard Time), there are over 500 comments. The producers of Expelled! obviously gave Dembski the night off and had his Friday meltdown for him, a few hours early.
|Date: 2008/03/21 01:16:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|stevestory, see the above about the tie to UD.
|Date: 2008/03/21 06:26:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
About a month ago, he said all the financal problems were caused by a cabal of short-sellers. Guess that "explanation" is inoperative now.
Go to salon.com and search for "Ben Stein". We're not the only ones who have noticed that he's barking at the moon crazy. Everybody on Wall Street noticed it long ago.
|Date: 2008/03/22 09:44:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's a meltdown and it's an ID meltdown, it just wasn't Dembski's and it just wasn't on a Friday.
|Date: 2008/03/22 09:52:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|If they're really opening on a thousand screens, then there's some serious money behind this movie. Figure $1500-$2000 per print. $1500 times 1000 and you're talking $1.5 million bucks!
|Date: 2008/03/26 01:00:05, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A good Biblical name, too.
From Wiki: Canaan Sodindo Banana (5 March 1936-10 November 2003) served as the first President of Zimbabwe from 18 April, 1980 until 31 December, 1987. A Methodist minister, he held the largely ceremonial office of the presidency while his eventual successor, Robert Mugabe, served as Prime Minister. ... His later life is tainted by charges of sodomy, which he denied and for which he was later imprisoned.
Sodomy charges and imprisonment
The former president's later years were clouded by scandal. In 1997, Rev. Banana was arrested in Zimbabwe on charges of sodomy, following accusations made during the murder trial of his former bodyguard, Jefta Dube.[1] The charges related to accusations that Banana had misused his authority while he was president to coerce numerous men in positions of service (ranging from domestic staff to security guards, and even members of sports teams for whom he had acted as referee) into accepting sexual advances. He was found guilty of 11 charges of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault in 1998. He denied all charges, saying that they were "a mortuary of pathological lies" intended to destroy his political career.[3] He fled to South Africa while on bail before he could be imprisoned, apparently believing Mugabe was planning his death. He returned to Zimbabwe in December 1998, after a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Banana was sentenced on January 18, 1999 to ten years in jail, nine years suspended and he was also defrocked. He served two years in prison before being released in January 2001, and died of cancer in 2003 in London, according to the Zimbabwean High Commissioner. The Guardian Unlimited, however, claims that Banana had travelled to South Africa, where he eventually died, in order to receive appropriate treatment for his cancer.[1] He was buried in Zimbabwe without the full honours expected to be accorded a former head of state.[2] His wife, Janet Banana, sought asylum in Britain in October 2000.[2]
Ray Comfort would die for this man's name.
|Date: 2008/03/28 08:55:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Yeah? Can anybody name a prominent Fascist, present or past, who WASN'T a Christian?
Didn't think so.
Try this: Virtually all Fascists were Christian, but not all Christians are Fascists.
|Date: 2008/04/02 01:57:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski's respect for The Truth:
Right! Don't attempt to sway him with evidence, do it the ID Way - use extortion and intimidation. "Want to feed your family Mr. D'Souza? Then you'd better support ID." Then O'Leary chimes in, "And buy my book!"
|Date: 2008/04/05 21:04:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Great Omnipotent Cat! From hard kicking:
Where to even begin? Ordinarily I'd suggest reading an introductory book on relativity written for laymen. They will tell you that gravitational attraction and electric forces are unable to move faster than the speed of light. In your case though, I think some of your underlying problems will have to be dealt with before any useful knowledge will be allowed into your understanding.
|Date: 2008/04/05 21:07:00, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oh jeeze, I missed this:
Nothing being able to exceed the speed of light is one of the most basic parts of relativity theory, Sal.
|Date: 2008/04/10 00:32:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Young Salvadore Screws Up
Though few will believe it, Salvadore Cordova's scholarship is sometimes less than perfect. An example can be found here:
Hmmm... George R. Price, creationist? A creationist making a major contribution to a subject that he by definition doesn't even believe in? Doesn't sound too likely. Let's look at the wiki article that Salvadore quotes from. Here's a clue, in the first paragraph:
Here's a clue: Type "George Price" into Wikipedia's search box. You get this response:
So young Salvadore made a very common error. Honestly, who doesn't occasionally mistake a Canadian Seventh-Day Adventist Creationist nutbag for a troubled scientist who converts to Christianity and then cuts his throat with a pair of nail scissors when he can't make it work. Any ID scholar could make that kind of mistake.
Edited to bold "CLUE!".
|Date: 2008/04/11 00:09:47, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Here's a perfect test case for the explanitory filter:
Radivoje Lajic: The man who attracts meteorites
It seems that Mr. Lajic, a Bosnian, has had his house hit by meteorites five times. Says Mr. Lajic, "I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate."
So what do you think, Dr. Dr. Dembski? Chance? Law? Or does Some Designer really hate Radivoje's guts?
Mr. Radivoje, in the meantime, has put a "steel girder reinforced roof" on his house.
|Date: 2008/04/15 00:12:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
kairosfocus to leave us?
Are we going to lose kf? What will the world do for jocularity?
|Date: 2008/04/15 04:54:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That's called "Imprecatory Prayer" and it's about as effective as any other kind of prayer.
Look here for a rather disgusting example, directed towards Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He's nice enough to give some Bible verses supporting IP.
A Google search will turn up a few dozen other examples.
Hmm, this looks interesting:(From the above site)
Yes, let us see what he will do.
I wonder if a group of believers praying for God to kill someone would constitute a threat, legally? Would it be the equivalent of trying to hire a hit man? As many people have discovered the hard way, even if the hitman you try to hire turns out not to be a hit man and is really an undercover cop, you're still busted. Could Pastor Wiley get out of trouble by admitting that God doesn't really exist and his whole show is a scam?
Edited to add ruminations on hiring godly hit men.
|Date: 2008/04/15 06:18:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ben Stein Watch
Ben's not JUST a creationist crank. He's also an economist nutjob.
Last paragraph:
|Date: 2008/04/16 01:11:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Some of our younger readers weren't around 20 years ago when the first IBM clones were being made. To make a PC clone, you must have a BIOS chip with code that operates the keyboard, mouse, disk drives and etc exactly like the IBM bios does.
The problem is that you can't look at the IBM BIOS chip for ideas or the entire IBM legal department will jump on your neck for copyright violation.
Here's the solution that several companies came up with and which passed all legal challenges:
First, get TWO teams of programmers. One is allowed to look at / dissassemble the original IBM code. The second group writes your new BIOS code.
Second, the two teams are not allowed to communicate with each other in any way except through a third person who relays questions and answers between them.
Third, the two groups are put in separate rooms. The first group reads the IBM BIOS code and tells the go-between that, for instance, we need a function that is called at address so and so and does this and that. The go-between tells the second group to write some code that is called at address so and so and does this and that. If the second group has any questions, they are given to the go-between who sends them to the first group and relays any answers back to the second group.
EVERYTHING is thoroughly documented!
Finally, repeat until all functions in the IBM BIOS are implemented in your BIOS.
If you do everything above, and document the hell out of the process, you wind up with a BIOS that you can call your own and which even the crack IBM legal team can't stop. We know this because they tried.
The odds that Premise media used the above procedure exceed the Universal Probability Bound.
|Date: 2008/04/17 01:04:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dr. Dr. Bill gets snarky too.
And Gerry Rzeppa gets a little snarky right back:
And ditto for frequent and sustained lying to advance a fraudulent pseudo-science.
|Date: 2008/04/17 06:23:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Going to the movies tomorrow? I am. I'm going to buy a ticket to "Leatherheads", but I just might accidently veer into the wrong theater and see "Expelled".
Just in case, I've printed some of these up:
Want more information on Darwin and Hitler?
(I also include the http:whack whack, but left it off here because the blog software goes ape and destroys the formatting.)
If you use 8 point type and print them two across, you can fit 30 of them on an 8 x 10 sheet of paper. I plan to scatter them like confetti.
Do check out the secularhumanism url. It's an eye-opener for just about everybody. Show it to your Christian friends. And does anybody have any suggestions for other URLs to add?
And now I'm off to Kinkos to use their paper cutter.
|Date: 2008/04/18 02:22:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
We've got a possible kairosfocus sighting in the wild. I count 53 pages. P.Z. points to another post of his which is 18 pages long.
Are there any kairosfocus researchers here who can comment on the wording to see if they're similar? I just can't bring myself to read him - I have a delicate stomach and too much tard inevitably leads to projectile vomiting. I know KF can't do all the stupid html tricks on UD, so we can't compare them.
By the way, does anybody remember the classic cut-n-paste spammer from usenet about 15 years ago? I think his last name was Winter. I used to read usenet threads by just letting them scroll by at 2400 baud and I could always tell when a Winter post was coming because this absolutely solid wall of text would start rising from the bottom of the screen and not a single word made sense. I don't think that was kf, but possibly a relative?
|Date: 2008/04/18 02:28:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I used to have a rugby player for a roommate, long long ago. He was pretty cool. We never had to feed him because Rugby players eat their dead.
|Date: 2008/04/20 14:59:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I saw Expelled at the 3:00 pm matinee yesterday (Saturday). There were a total of 13 people in the theater. This is at a multiplex in a fair sized midwestern city, total population about 3-4 hundred thousand including suburbs. It's playing in three theaters in this town.
I have to give the Expelled producers credit - they started to quote mine in almost the first scene. They have ether P.Z. Meyers or Richard Dawkins saying something to the effect that "Evolution is only the first step in the war." I'm sure everybody in the audience but me thought he was talking about a war on religion. I'm equally sure that he was really talking about right wing religion's war on science.
They do use the "Imagine" song in the film and I also recognized "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum. There were a lot of other songs I didn't recognize. The credits list about a dozen songs and also list somebody in charge of song rights, so they probably licensed them properly.
I'm not familiar enough with the XVIVO animation to say if theirs was a copy of it or original.
Didn't hear enough comments from the audience to judge their reactions. Average age was probably 50+.
It would take a second documentary at least twice as long as Expelled to thoroughly cover the lies and mistakes in that movie. It's the same old story - you can tell a lie in one sentence that requires a two hour lecture to educate the average person enough to appreciate how and why it's wrong.
|Date: 2008/04/21 02:20:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
(Jumps) Are you psychic?
|Date: 2008/04/22 06:20:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Was that the one about the ship that sailed on the lunar dust and sank? I remember that from my childhood - first class SF! I also think it may have been instrumental in convincing creationists that the moon should be covered with hundreds of feet of dust.
|Date: 2008/04/22 06:30:37, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Hector Avalos confirms "Expelled" is a bomb. The bad news is at Box Office Mojo: They took in $1,205,000 Friday, $990,000 Saturday and $775,000 Sunday. That's a loooonnngg way from Faherenheit 911!
Avalos also directs us to the Iowa State Daily for a "close up" look at the debute in Gonzalez's home town.
I wrote this reply to the article, although it hasn't made it through moderation yet:
|Date: 2008/04/22 06:45:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Even worse, he leaves out the number one cause of murderous anti-semitism, a group that was hating Jews 2000 years ago and which has been slaughtering them in wholesale lots for the last thousand years: Christianity. And not just any old Christians, either. A few liberal Christians did oppose the Nazis. Hitler killed about 600 of them. The Conservative Christians were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi party.
ALL of the top Nazis and all of their minions were Christians. Hitler only got into power because the Roman Catholic church dismantled the Catholic Zentrum party in return for money and recognition.
See here for the gory details of Hitler and Christianity's role in his rise.
|Date: 2008/04/23 01:10:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think I see their problem. Somebody stuck an LCD TV screen in front of their lens. And they're looking at the back end of it.
|Date: 2008/04/23 03:50:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Christians usually refer to the "Hebrew Scriptures" as the "Old Testament". Are you denying Scripture? On second thought, don't answer that. Nobody cares.
|Date: 2008/04/23 03:52:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Did anybody else's Gaydar go off as soon as Paul Crouch Jr. started talking? Mark my words, we're going to hear about this boy someday.
|Date: 2008/04/23 23:54:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Rupert Sheldrake told Dempski about that blog. Dembski was just passing the info along as a courtesy to a fellow screwball.
Rupert Sheldrake is "one of the world's most innovative biologists". It says so right here on his own blog. He's the Isaac Newton of ... erm ... morphic fields and morphic resonance. Like Dr. Dr. Dempski, he is not allowed to dine in the Baylor cafeteria.
|Date: 2008/04/24 03:36:50, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Bad news for Expelled
On the other hand, I remember reading an article on a commercial disk copying program back in the eight bit computer era that opened up with a sample from a Walt Disney pirate song and they apparently got away with it.
Still, my advice is to apologize and settle out of court. I think Jesus had some similar advice:
Matthew 5:25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison.
But What Would Jesus Know about that?
|Date: 2008/04/24 03:59:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'll bet his iPOD is filled with songs he has a free speech right to comment on.
|Date: 2008/04/25 02:01:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Charimand Dr. Dr. Bill expounds:
|Date: 2008/04/25 02:16:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dr. Dr. Bill sticks his foot in it again
|Date: 2008/04/28 04:49:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You just can't make this stuff up:
|Date: 2008/05/02 03:48:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Rats! I was going to watch Expelled again tonight, but it closed yesterday.
|Date: 2008/05/03 04:57:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Gerry Rzeppa:
Gerry, if you want an explanation of the nuts and bolts of how characteristics like courage and group loyalty are passed on genetically, you'll need to wait a few years. But if you doubt that such qualities can be bred into an animal, and are therefore material in nature, talk to an animal breeder.
Given recruits who have at least normal amounts of bravery, military trainers go to great lengths to extend the group loyalty most of us are born with to extend to the people in the soldier's unit so a soldier will instinctively sacrifice himself to save his buddies just like a mother will instinctively sacrifice herself to save her child.
You think his surviving was a miracle?
From the article you referenced:
One in ten? You set very low standards for miracles.
Hey, what was your question for Dawkins
|Date: 2008/05/07 06:02:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From here:
The Age of Consent in Iowa was 14 until a few years ago. It's 16 now, but
and therefore
Of course, Mohammed was famous for marrying a thirteen year old - but I'm sure he had her father's permission.
Canadian Journalists might take note that the age of consent for anal sex in Canada is higher than for the regular kind.
|Date: 2008/05/07 06:35:26, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Paul Nelson pimps a book on ID theories going back millenia.
But I thought ID was supposed to be a brand new theory freshly risen to challenge tired old Darwinism. According to Paul, it's a reaaallly old, worn out theory that has been replaced and should be ignored?
[Whispers] Paul, didn't you get the message?
|Date: 2008/05/08 02:37:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
PSALMS 137:9 How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock.
|Date: 2008/05/13 06:27:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Lost in translation:
Denyse on UD: "The Spiritual Brain shortlisted for three Write! Canada awards"
Wow! Three nominations for awards! And national awards too! Pretty impressive.
Denyse on her blog: "According to today's release from The Word Guild, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul is shortlisted in Book-Culture, Book-General Readership, and Book-Leadership/ Theoretical, in the Canadian Christian Writing Awards."
Oops! Nothing to brag about.
|Date: 2008/05/25 16:02:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The Weed of Tard bears bitter fruit.
Sal, you never should have brought Frank Tipler to UD's attention. Now they're all quoting him and ID looks dumber every day.
ATTENTION DAVE REDFORD: There are TWO multiverse theories. The one hawked by David Deutsch is Hugh Everett's "every time there's a quantum event, the universe splits in two" multiverse theory. That's often referred to as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The multiverse theory that might help explain the "fine tuning" problem is the one where new universes split off from this one on occasion, not umpeen gazillion times per femtosecond ala Drs. Everett and Deutsch.
Key difference: In Many Worlds, each universe has the same laws of physics. In Multiverse, each universe has its laws of physics assigned more or less at random and they very radically from universe to universe.
|Date: 2008/05/27 00:04:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Could you quantify that retardation on a scale of zero to Salvador?
|Date: 2008/05/29 01:50:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
More bad news for Dave dept.:
First he's kicked out of the uber-secret inner inner circle and now this.
|Date: 2008/06/01 01:30:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Will somebody pleeeaze go to Rupert Sheldrake's 'scienfic paper' "Testing a Language - Using a Parrot for Telepathy" and take a photo of Table 1 and post it here? You won't be disappointed.
Special thanks to DaveScot for bringing Dr. Sheldrake to my attention and to google for finding this fine piece of ID research. ID science is not solely religious in nature. A lot of it is just whacked.
PS: Denyse, please don't! work with parrots! The world is not quite ready for your data.
|Date: 2008/06/05 00:44:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I like good ol' Norm:
|Date: 2008/06/05 05:23:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse O'Leary suspends comments in order to protect the commenters!
Denyse O'Leary, internationally renowned Toronto Based Journalist and Freedom Fighter has suspended comments on all of her blogs - but only to protect the commenters.
It seems that a writer, Mark Steyn, is being hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for hate speech - he quoted a Muslim saying something that another Muslim took a dislike to and has been hauled before the Commission - which has a 100% conviction rate.
Says Denyse, "This "human rights" situation is the reason I disabled the comboxes at my blogs recently. The galloping rate at which "human rights" commissions will hear cases of people claiming to have been offended by something they read leaves me with little choice. As a writer, I must subject myself to that risk, but cannot ethically subject others - not until or unless these commissions are relieved of most of their current responsibilities - including all responsibility for policing Internet content."
You see, if she wrote something for you, you'd be in ... wait, that's not right. If she allowed you to write something that offended a Muslim, then you'd be in trouble and it would be her ... wait, that's not right either.
You see, if she was to write one of the typically brainless things she is in the habit of writing and you showed why it was brainless and it offended her, she could have you hauled up before the Human Rights Commission. Well, that's closer anyway.
Link - you'll have to scroll down.
As near as I can tell, she wrote this at 9:51 am, June 4th.
Being ever-so-slightly more aware of things than Denyse, Ed Brayton wrote about it on May 27.
edited to correct date
|Date: 2008/06/05 05:44:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The REAL Originator of ID Speaks Up
From an ad on Coliding Universes, a blog by a Famous Toronto Based Journalist:
You see, he thought up the GID ID model, not "the inadequate mostly insignificant and highly criticized Johnson-Dembski-Behe theory (RID) as championed by members of the Discovery Institute." Ditto for those pikers at Wikipedia, too.
You see, GID "contradicts much written there about intelligent design. GID analysis employs an interpretation of the General Theory of Everything (a cosmogony), the GGU-model (General Grand Unification Model)." So there!
ID Science Marches On!
|Date: 2008/06/06 00:01:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
If Dembski showed up at the Baylor cafeteria in a dress, I'd let him in.
|Date: 2008/06/06 00:17:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From comment #2:
Be gentle.
edit: oops, he done did dat.
|Date: 2008/06/06 00:25:04, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Never read O'Leary while eating or drinking:
Anybody know how to get a fishstick out of your sinus cavity?
|Date: 2008/06/06 00:26:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
There are others, but their owners have learned to avoid cameras.
|Date: 2008/06/06 01:06:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jeeze, I missed this right after the apes and human rights comment:
I think she's trying to tell us she didn't evolve.
|Date: 2008/06/09 03:53:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|"I suppose this is one of the reasons ID is despised — it rips to shreds evolution's religious pretensions," says leading ID intellectual William A. Dembski, from his office at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
|Date: 2008/06/09 06:24:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Until he started his own blog, Mike Gene was one of the more obnoxious posters on the ARN site. He supposedly has some knowledge of science, but you would never know it from reading his posts which tend to favor poorly thought out gotchas. One of his favaorite gotchas, in particular, is so bad yet impresses him so much that he included a version of it in his recent book and, of course, it impressed Denyse O'Leary so much that she reprinted it on UD:
Denyse and Mike, listen closely:
Mike and Asa Gray are asking essentially, "What kind of evidence would convince you that Darwinian evolution is wrong and an Intelligent Designer is responsible for life as we see it. To answer this question, let's look at another great revolution in science: What kind of evidence did Einstein present to convince scientists that Newtonian Physics was wrong and that his theory provided a better explanation for how the world works?
Well, to begin with, Einstein had a theory. That is, he had a body of interconnected ideas that collectively accounted for everything that Newton's theory explained and much more.
Secondly, Einstein's theory gave the same answers that Newton's theory gave and did it more accurately. This is called "saving the appearances". A rival theory must explain everything the old theory explained.
Thirdly, Einstein's theory could be used to make predictions that could be compared to actual observations to see if they agreed.
So the answer to Mike's question is: First, ID must present an actual body of theory. Goddidit is not a theory. Second, this body of theory must explain the same things that Newton's theories explained and, preferrably, do it better. Third, the new theory must make predictions that can be tested and they must pass the test.
Now please tell us, Mike or Denyse: What is the body of theories that make up ID? Show us how they can be used to correctly predict life as we see it. And finally, show us how to use the non-existent ID theory to make predictions that can be tested against observations to see if the theory is correct.
This is why Darwin couldn't answer this question to Mike and Denyse's satisfaction. He had just published a very thick book crammed full of theory (variation and natural selection) and data demonstrating his theory. When asked what other theory could account for life as we know it, he couldn't think of any and was reduced to supernatural speculations. And as he said, this was "childish writing".
Things haven't gotten any better for rival theories since 1860. To Darwin's data, we now add copius data from the fossil record, with it's thousands of intermediate species, genetic patterns from interrelated species, molecular biology and tons of additional data.
Creationism hasn't stood still, either. They've changed their name a couple of times.
|Date: 2008/06/13 00:40:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'll say! Young Cordova:
|Date: 2008/06/13 04:17:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Not to mention de^ad. Getting a bit sicko there! Uncommonly de^ad.
|Date: 2008/06/13 04:25:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Then Alexander should take a page out of the Expelled manual and claim fair use.
|Date: 2008/06/14 06:51:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
dvunkannon, a word of advice ... Louis is a very nice man, but if he starts opening a jar of mayonnaise while humming "God Save the Queen", run for your life. (He's English.)
|Date: 2008/06/17 16:24:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Proper use of citations, by William A. Dembski:
By the way, Bill, if a student on a Pell Grant buys a copy of one of your books, are your textbooks then being underwritten by tax dollars?
Also, has any one of your books ever reached a 5th edition?
|Date: 2008/06/18 14:35:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I love this:
IDM = ID Millerites. I like it! Sal, Dr. Dr. D., most of the rest of you: You are IDM advocates. Flee to the mountaintops!
|Date: 2008/06/19 00:06:29, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Frank Beckwith shows why he didn't deserve tenure either:
The only way Gonzales would have gotten tenure would have been if he'd:
A: Come up with some kind of idea for a research project.
B: Convinced granting agencies that the idea was worth funding.
C: Convinced telescope operators that his idea was good enough to get telescope time.
D: Had at least one grad student get his PhD.
Like it or not, that's the way big time astronomy is done nowadays. Since he did none of these things, he was justifiably let go by Iowa and is now comfortably ensconced at Grove City College, whose expectations are hopefully low enough to suit Dr. Gonzales' ID-quality intellect.
And every time Frank Beckwith fills our browsers with poorly researched IDtard, I realize that Baylor was right when they denied him tenure and they never should have gone back on their original decision.
|Date: 2008/06/19 00:21:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/06/20 01:44:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Tracy, I don't dispute the highlighted statement above. If ID was science, it could be taught in science class. And if cows could fly, we could teach Bovine Aerodynamics in aeronautical engineering class. I'm glad that Poor Beckwith finally figured out that ID has no scientific basis and is actually nothing but the firm belief that there is a God and there must be some kind of proof of his existence, somewhere, somehow, someway and let's start by proslytizing the children on this and then we'll see about getting some lab work done if there's time before the Rapture. (Buy my book.)
My general objection to Beckwith is that he seems to be rather a dim bulb. Sure, he figured out that ID is a fraud and he's working on ice being kinda like water, only stiffer, but that's not exactly rocket science. Every article I've ever seen by this guy has holes in its logic big enough to drive a truck through, and in this particular case, he assumes and seems to believe the ID myth that Gonzales was canned for his ID work when the actual case was that he sucked down Iowa's salary and office space for seven years and did exactly squat.
If anybody knows they can't hack their academic job, aren't doing the work required and are sure to be denied tenure, then becoming an ID advocate so they can shout "Discrimination!" and "Martyr!" instead of whimpering "Incompetent!" is probably a good idea, if their morals permit. And if they really are into ID, their morals probably do permit.
I do agree with you, however, that Beckwith is the best legal mind ID has.
|Date: 2008/06/25 06:58:10, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DaveTard looks for a Hi-IQ believer: And discovers Christopher Michael Langan!
This could get interesting. Anybody who was reading ARN a few years ago knows Langan. He managed to get himself and his girlfriend kicked off of ARN - and that ain't easy when you're an IDist!
|Date: 2008/06/26 00:43:15, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I had to post that blurb on Chris Langdon in a hurry this AM so I could get to work on time. Here's a little more background:
A couple of years ago, Dr. Dr. Dembski somehow ran across Chris Langdon. Dr. Dr. Dembski has proven time and time again that he cannot tell the difference between a crank and a genius and he proved it again with Chris. Langdon is the author of the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" or CTMU. The CTMU is "explained" at www.ctmu.org. Here are some random excerpts (from the "CTMU Primer" at the bottom of the page):
If that's not completely clear to you, go to the web site, which has pictures.
Of course, to Dr. Dr. Dembski this made Chris Langdon at least the Albert Einstein of Information Theory and he was quickly inducted into the ISCID and, as Chris's web site states, "The CTMU: A New Kind of Reality Theory was published in the scientific journal, Progress in Complexity, Information and Design. The abstract and full paper can be downloaded here." Ah yes, ID science. What wonders to behold.
Anyhoo, somehow Chris and his then girlfriend, now wife, Gina LoSasso wound up on ARN where, as they say, jocularity thus ensued. It was a marriage made in heaven as one of the world's greatest BSers ran smack into a pack of the ID world's greatest BS ingesters and the rest of us just sat back, munched our popcorn and marveled at the free show.
Besides the CTMU follies, we got an introduction to the "Hi IQ Crowd". These people seem to spend half their time devising and administering (for a hefty fee) IQ tests, which they then use to kick each other out of their Hi IQ clubs. Chris took to that like a duck to water, but despite his incredible IQ he somehow managed to get himself successfully sued, probably in front of a judge who would never get into any of the Hi IQ societies.
We also found out that when the World's Smartest Man is asked to explain his theory, the proper response is, surprisingly, not to explain the theory, but to heap abuse on the questioner.
At one point Dembski got into the act, defending Chris, and I publicly called Langan a fake and the CTMU utter drivel. For some reason, this offended Dr. Dr. D. greatly and he opined that Chris was too a genius and that Dembski could not, absolutely not, make a mistake about it.
Unfortunately, shortly after that first Gina and then Mr. CTMU himself made such utter jerks of themselves that they were banned from ARN. And, as I said, when an ID Believer manages to get banned from ARN, that's headline material!
After that, we didn't hear too much from Chris and company and Dr. Dr. Dembski evidently had his eyes opened enough to stop bringing Mr. Langan up and so peace prevailed - until DaveTard discovered him again, and on Uncommon Descent to boot! Dr. Dr. D. must be delighted.
(The geniuses at ARN somehow scrambled their database a few years ago, so their search function doesn't work for the older threads. If anybody can find any of the threads with Chris, Gina or Dr. Dr. in them, please post the URLs here. I'd like to put them in my digital scrap book.)
|Date: 2008/06/26 00:54:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oh yeah, as DT says in the original article, "Try to keep in mind this guy is an ISCID fellow along with Mike Behe, Bill Dembski, Guiellermo Gonzalez, Forrest Mims, Jay Richards, Phil Skell, Rick Sternberg, and many others in the ID movement."
I'll keep that in mind, Dave.
|Date: 2008/06/26 01:00:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Joel scores a goal against Dave:
|Date: 2008/06/27 00:57:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Thanks for the URLs, Art. 2002. My, how time does fly. I wonder if Bertvan is still alive. She'd be pushing 90 if she is.
I think RBH hit it on the head, regarding Mr. Langdon, in the "Still more" thread: "Chris is entranced with words, to the neglect of reality." and "Sorry, Chris. No content, no science. And that's final."
I've copied those threads and filed them under c:\ID\Tard\Tard\Tard
|Date: 2008/06/27 04:14:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dodgen is a man of some accomplishment. Google 'gil dodgen hang gliding' and you'll find that he was the editor of "Hang Gliding" magazine for a number of years before being forced out for some unmentioned reason. This rather implies that he has successfully hang glided numerous times in his life, yet he is still alive. If DaveTard told me he was going to take up hang gliding, I would buy insurance on his life with myself as the beneficiary and the denizens of this blog would give him one hell of a wake.
|Date: 2008/06/28 02:07:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Nerd Pun of the Week!
|Date: 2008/06/30 02:43:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jesus Christ on a Bicycle! When you are reduced to quoting endorsements from Joel Borofsky ...
The next indignity is being refused service at the Brazos Barbecue.
|Date: 2008/07/09 00:24:42, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/07/09 00:28:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'm not sure I would trust a 'loving' God who, according to ID Theory, individually hand-crafted every fatal disease on earth and made us prone to cancer to boot. Maybe I'd trust him if I was absolutely sure he was dead.
"Do you trust in the Lord God, son?"
"Pump another hundred rounds into him and see if he moves."
|Date: 2008/07/10 05:59:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Young Salvador:
Sal, it doesn't much matter what men do, the reproductive limits are set by women, who can only produce a few children in their lives. Since one man can easily keep dozens of women pregnant and since humans have been polygamist through most of their history (see the Old Testament for details*), we've generally had a lot of surplus men who might as well go f--- each other, because there ain't no wimmen for them.
* Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Deut 25:5, David and Solomon to mention just a few Biblical Polygamists. Maybe Mormonism is the true religion? And let's not even go into concubines.
|Date: 2008/07/10 06:34:50, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
UD has weighed in on the Kwok-Heddle fight. And of course, being UD, they have "settled" the argument by making an Ugly Picture of Kwok.
We can't fight these people, they're much too smart for us. Can anybody name even one science-minded adult who would have thought this one up?
|Date: 2008/07/10 06:36:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|jeannot, I think that's a little too deep for the UD crowd. Stick to the polygamy and maybe bring up Biblical Concubines if their attention flags.
|Date: 2008/07/10 06:47:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
UDers (except Sal, who should look away):
Get a copy of "Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution Of Human Sexuality" by Jared Diamond. Read the chapter on the incredible gymnastics a human fetus has to go through to change what would otherwise develop into a female baby into a male. It's really a mess, with one gene on the Y chromosome causing one hormone to be expressed, which makes some changes to the fetus that causes another hormone to be expressed, which makes some changes to the fetus that causes a third hormone to be expressed, etc, etc, etc.
At the end of all that rigamarole, the female's ovarys are converted into testicles [extra points: find out what the connection is between "testicles" and "testament" and see if you ever look at the Bible the same way again], the clitoris is converted into a penis, I forget what is converted into a prostate gland and half a dozen other female-type thingys are converted into male-type thingys.
And then reflect on this: despite all this Rube Goldberg dinking around, somewhere around 90% of all men end up being attracted to women and vice-versa. Talk about a miracle!
You can call that evidence for Intelligent Design if you want to. It's no worse than your other 'evidence'.
|Date: 2008/07/10 06:54:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
jeannot, one more point (Sal, look away again. You don't want to know this)
I don't think there's a very big genetic componant to homosexuality. I know that if you have an identical twin, and he is gay, your chances of being gay are slightly higher than average, but nowhere near certain. And yet you and your twin have identical DNA.
I lean more towards, "Look at that! Over 90 percent come out attracted to the opposite sex! Amazing!"
|Date: 2008/07/11 00:02:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Thus spake Donohue:
The scene: a deserted factory, surrounded by police cars. Spotlights light up a broken window on the third floor. A voice comes from the window:
Alright, you dirty coppers, listen to me good! Either I get fifty thousand dollars, a helicopter to Brazil and a case of diet coke or ... THE CRACKER GETS IT!!
|Date: 2008/07/11 00:07:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
When will Salvador be outed?
Meth involved?
Winner gets a years subscription to Uncommon Descent. Losers get two year subscriptions.
|Date: 2008/07/13 09:06:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This seems to be standard procedure for all accomplished faith healers. The photogenic who have at least a chance of standing up from their wheelchairs or dropping their crutches are brought up front and the hopeless cases are kept in the back of the room, out of the bright lights and tv cameras. The Amazing Randi wrote an article about attending a faith healer's session once and mentioned the rows of wheelchairs with hopelessly screwed up people in the darkness at the back of the room.
|Date: 2008/07/14 03:32:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
dvunkannon: "Can we invite DDrr.. Dembski, Dave and Denise to somekind of festschrift for the 1000th page of this thread?"
Could this be some sort of a "Dawning of a New Age" moment? ATBC-OUDDT nears its thousandth page and Mike Gene calls it a day and retires from the scene?
Now if Salvador turns up in the arms of a really big guy with tatoos named "Steve" ...
|Date: 2008/07/14 03:40:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Speaking of Dembski and the faith healer, there's one thing that has always bothered me about religion. I first noticed it as a child when I saw a picture of a religious procession somewhere in Europe, Italy I think.
It was a group of village people in their church clothes walking through the streets carrying a platform with the Virgin Mary on it - a 3d figure of her sitting on a chair.
In the procession were several priests, in their fanciest robes, and half of them were wearing big black Buddy Holly style glasses.
And I remember thinking then, "Wait, you're worshipping the greatest power in the universe, a Being that you claim is both all-powerful and all-knowing, a Being you're counting on to heal you while you're on earth and take you away to paradise when you die and you're praying and processing and doing every thing you can think of to make him like you and help you - and he can't even cure your nearsightedness??
Something wrong here.
|Date: 2008/07/15 00:34:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
In the "Healing" thread, Patrick comes through with a great steaming pile-o-tard. He even seems to be talking about himself in the third person.
|Date: 2008/07/16 01:30:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Thanks, I missed that, possibly because of the total lack of quotes or anything else that might lead one to think the words were copied from somewhere else.
Speaking of somewhere else, that's quite a web site. Right now, it's carrying this ad:
I've often wondered if the person who named our species "homo sapiens" might have been having a little joke.
Anyhow, I have a new sig:
Ceiling Cat, ArchCardinal in the Church of Patrick.
|Date: 2008/07/16 01:52:50, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Talk about damning with faint praise! This is actually off topic, but go to Amazon, search for "The Design Matrix" and read the customer reviews. From a favorable review by Glen Yates:
No wonder MikeGene is retiring from the fray.
|Date: 2008/07/16 06:04:42, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Nice takedown. Too bad bad that BarryA will never read it.
|Date: 2008/07/16 06:30:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse finds her twin:
Denyse O'Leary appears to have opened up a fresh new vein of tard. Said tard is named Susan Mazur and she works for something called "Scoop", which is some kind of journalism outfit in New Zealand.
|Date: 2008/07/17 01:09:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think there's a connection between this thread and this one.
It's certainly got to be discouraging. Ten years in the Tard Mines and these are the best of his supporters.
|Date: 2008/07/18 03:55:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski celebrates The American Physical Society coming out against global warming!
Then we follow his link to the original article and find this at the bottom of the page:
|Date: 2008/07/18 05:34:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'd like to inaugurate the second coming of Uncommonly Dense by coining a new phrase, one that so often describes the ID crowd and their ilk:
I just googled for it and got zero hits.
|Date: 2008/07/18 06:53:14, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
We need one of these! Wired magazine reports that the McCain campaign is using software from Versionista to check Obama's official web site every hour or two to "...track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis..."
They show two versions of Obama's web page, before and after some remarks were deleted. This could be BIG for UD watchers! An automated Dembski tracker! I wish I had known about this, I could have volunteered ATBC as a beta tester.
Wired article. Versionista web site.
|Date: 2008/07/20 07:42:10, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
More strangeness:
Here are a few quotes from Einstein on God:
Many more on a similar vein are available at that site. From what I've read, Einstein's "God" was the universe and its laws, with no hint of a conscious Being involved at any point. I don't know what's going on in Flew's head, but I don't think he's firing on all of his cylinders any more.
"Am I just imagining the puppet strings?"
I don't think so.
|Date: 2008/07/20 08:06:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
More Flew weirdness, from the same article:
One other oddity: At the top of the page there's a small box with a picture of Flew and this text in it:
|Date: 2008/07/20 08:18:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Okay, one more on Flew and Biola: Professor Flew, Biola may have lionized you on your visit, but unless you agree one hundred percent with the following Doctrinal Statement, you will never get a job there:
Oh yeah, one more thing. The last winner of the Phillip Johnson award was ... Ben Stein. You're being used, Professor.
|Date: 2008/07/23 04:20:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Which explains a lot.
To his credit, he mentioned the experience on UD here and he did say he thought this particular faker was probably a faker from the beginning. Probably the tatoos.
|Date: 2008/07/24 00:06:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Gotcha beat. He lived 20 minutes south of my home town - in the town my mother was born in. I was in grade school at the time and we innocent little tykes took it really hard.
Typical joke:
"Did you hear about the new book by Ed Gein?"
"No. What's it called?"
"How to get ahead."
It was years later that I found that my parents were checking to see if Mom's mother's grave was one of those desecrated. It wasn't. Nothing interesting ever happens in my family.
Meanwhile, the Gein tradition lives on in Wisconsin.
My favorite line in the above link: "Police say the three men, carrying shovels, a crowbar and a box of condoms..."
|Date: 2008/07/24 00:26:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. -Admin]
So God used to command stoning to death for children who were stubborn, rebellious, drunkards and gluttons, but he's since changed His mind? And this doesn't bother you?
"As for the law against "sassing children" we can assume the children were guilty of far more than that--more like a life committed to debauchery. At least that's what I infer, primarily because the parents, not the state, are the prosecutors, as the passage notes."
Hardly a capitol offense. You're just picking and choosing what parts of the Bible you will believe.
|Date: 2008/07/24 00:43:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. -Admin]
I only watch the females and of those, only the good looking ones. I avert my eyes for the rest, especially Louis.
He's British, you know.
i.e., Not American.
|Date: 2008/07/24 00:52:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. -Admin]
And read to the end of the thread before replying. (ouch)
|Date: 2008/07/29 06:35:21, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Greg was never on the CB.
|Date: 2008/07/30 21:40:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Looks more like The Holy Trilobite to me.
I was at the movies tonight and they were playing previews on a flat panel tv in the lobby. I didn't get the name or the stars, but apparently a movie is coming out soon where The Face of Jesus or The Virgin Mary appears on the side of a garage and hilarity ensues. Can't wait.
|Date: 2008/07/30 21:50:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Bah! Weak beer. If you need a hit of of twenty year old single malt bottled in Tard-Quality Music, go to The Shaggs website and click on the orange tiger-fish or whatever it is at the top of the page. Keep the volume low, keep your finger on the mute button and maybe fill a trusted friend's ears with beeswax and station them beside the power cord with an axe. And for dog's sake, don't wear headphones. The Shaggs are to music as ID is to science, except they mean well.
|Date: 2008/08/04 06:05:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That whole A Simple Gene Origination Calculation thread is an extremely rich vien of tard.
Forget the OP in which the ever reliable PaV expounds tardily, armed only with the abstract of an article. Look instead at the comments:
2) F2XL is sharp enough to wish he/she could read the whole article, but then says, "...the conclusion they came to is a little disturbing… though it depends on what your prior philosophical commitments are on the origin of life as we know it today." Origin of life? WTF?
4) CEC09 pens this classic tardline: "But if 44% percent of the new genes shared by Drosophila species arose by duplication, wouldn't the percentage for a single species be higher?" Then he follows up with, "After all, turning a functional non-gene region into a gene would stop that region from serving its prior function. Are you concerned that this does not jibe with genetic entropy?"
6) PaV returns with "However, this mechanism presupposes that duplicated genes have no function, and are therefore free to neutrally evolve–something which is now being questioned since psuedogenes have been found to be involved in gene regulation." Actually, PaV, duplicated genes have exactly the same function as the gene they were copied from. But if they get zapped by a mutation, the organism doesn't miss them because the original gene is still there, doing it's thing.
7) The ever reliable bFast chimes in with, "The question is not ID vs. Darwin, the question is to what extent did the designer use the darwinian model — or as Behe so aptly put it, where is the edge of evolution?" Actually, bF, God seems to have exactly duplicated the Darwinian model. It's positively uncanny how close He came.
8) matthew_ackerman shows that he is not long for UD by posting an explanation of PaV's error AND mentioning the Panda's Thumb. I doubt if he'll survive to the end of the thread.
9) zephyr then chimes in with a prediction that this paper, which is published in a scientific journal and which has already been commented on at PT "will be entirely and predictably ignored by the Darwinian priesthood." Then he brings up Walter Remine and Haldane's Dilemma and things got all red and noisy and I went and laid down in a dark room till the ringing in my ears faded. And still over a hundred comments to go.
|Date: 2008/08/07 02:48:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the "A Sociologist's Perspective ... " thread
And that's the OP and the first 5 replies. There are 45 others, much the same.
Conclusion: STILL ALL SCIENCE, ALL OF THE TIME!
|Date: 2008/08/08 02:16:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Technology comes to the aid of UD posters.
HT to Newsweek.
|Date: 2008/08/18 20:31:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
O'Leary meditates on the news:
|Date: 2008/08/20 01:58:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From Wikipedia:
|Date: 2008/08/25 01:12:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
David Springer writes
And DaveScot's real name is ... David Scot Springer, I believe? Let's get rid of that pseudonym, DavieBoy!
|Date: 2008/08/26 01:03:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Nobel committee take note:
But Dave has authority on his side:
And he has some ultra-sciency reasoning to back himself up:
|Date: 2008/08/27 06:18:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denese gets to talk about penises.
Actually, I don't think most people are referring to DNA damage when they talk about inheritance of acquired characteristics. That's more along the lines of variation and natural selection. Now back to the penises with you, Denese. Have fun and do forget to write.
|Date: 2008/08/27 06:31:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/08/28 00:24:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Let me go into this topic a little bit more because it always flummoxes anti-evolutionists and most evolutionists aren't too clear on some of the points.
1) There are about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Since there are four possible base pairs, it takes two bits to describe which one is at any particular place. Therefore, there are about six billion bits of information in human DNA.
2) Two to the six billionth power is such a shockingly huge number that no calculator can calculate it. It is far, far greater than the total number of particles in the universe. It spits on Dembski's Universal Probability Bound of 1 in 10 to the 150th power.
3) Because of this, many ID creationists and ordinary creationists believe that the odds of getting any particular human DNA string are one in two to the six billionth power.
4) People who listen to Dembski are especially liable to believe that #3 above is correct.
5) However, people who listen to Dembski are, generally, tards.
6) In real life, we don't try to construct the human genome from scratch in one try, so the 1 in two to the six billionth figure is wrong.
7) Real evolution works generally by zapping one tiny part of the genome*, leaving all of the rest of the DNA intact and thus presumably working, since it enabled the parent(s) to function well enough to reproduce.
8) This means that the one in two to the six billionth figure and Dembski's Universal Probability Bound are useless, along with any changes Dembski may make to his UPB. (He's apparently been raising it lately.)
9) In accordance with #8 above, any enormous number ginned up by a creationist is crap. This is certain to a degree way, way, way inside the UPB. (Roughly about 1 in 1 to the 0th power.)
10) Instead, when a single point mutation occurs, we are concerned with how the five billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, 998 bits of known good DNA will work with the two bits that have changed.
11) Generally speaking, they will work pretty well. Most mutations are neutral.
12) If they don't work well, the offspring dies, usually before it is even born. Throughout human history, about 80-90 percent of all humans born have died before reproducing. A baby born with a bad mutation is just one more.
13) When they do work well, shazam! Evolution has occurred.
14) PAYLOAD: Instead of going through all the possible permutations of a six billion bit number, evolution changes one or two base pairs at a time. Since there are three billion base pairs in the human genome and approximately 6.6 billion humans on earth as of July '08, on average every single base pair in the human genome gets tweaked at least twice every generation if humans average only a single mutation each time they reproduce.
15) So much for the Universal Probability Bound and all the other big numbers the creationists throw around.
* There are other mutations that work on groups of DNA, such as gene duplications, but we can ignore them here. They just make our point a little more convincing.
|Date: 2008/08/28 02:07:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Young Barry puts his head in the noose:
I'd say that's pretty well been acomplished as far as your religious beliefs are concerned.
Then Young bFast steps in it:
Jeeze, bF, I would think that Galileo with his satellites of Jupiter, Newton with his laws of motion and all the other physicists, chemists, biologists and other assorted scientists who have used methodological naturalism to produce, among other things, the computer you're typing that tard on have produced some pretty good evidence that MN works. Certainly, your peevish whinging hasn't disproven it.
Meanwhile, why don't you list a few accomplishments of people who reject MN? I'll bet you could write them down with a crayon and still fit them all on the head of a pin.
ETA Actually, that might not be possible when you look at some of history's major villains. I think it's a safe bet that Hitler, Mao and Stalin all rejected methodological naturalism, especially when applied to their own beliefs.
|Date: 2008/08/29 02:31:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Wesley, that puts a whole new slant on things. 6 billion bits translated into decimal is only a 1 with 1,806,179,974 zeros after it (approximately).
If I remember right, the Bible runs to around 4 million characters, so using DaveScot's trusty Microsoft calculator, we discover that you could write that decimal number down in only 451 and a half Bibles. Waterloo!
|Date: 2008/09/03 05:42:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Turner doesn't even know what theistic evolution is! Here's his definition from The IDiot's Blog
It's to ID's great shame that it doesn't even recognize the definition of DEISM when it hears it and calls it theistic evolution instead.
In the real world, theistic evolution is the belief that God created the world and is using evolution to do the main work of producing the animals and plants that he desires, while restricting Himself to giving evolution an occasional nudge.
Fuller doesn't even understand his own side!
|Date: 2008/09/04 00:42:14, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
My evil brother. We've been fighting over DaveTard's soul for nearly 6000 years. Neither of us remembers why.
|Date: 2008/09/08 00:34:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Courtesy of The Straight Dope: The reDiscovery Institute:
Good stuff.
|Date: 2008/09/09 00:16:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Hope you saved a copy because as of 12:10am CDT, it's 404ed.
|Date: 2008/09/09 01:48:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I can't figure out why they 404'd that thread. It's not extraordinarily dumb, at least by UD standards.
Here's a theory: textual analysis may very well point to LeeBowman being Denyse O'Leary in drag. Notice how you never see the two of them posting at the same time?
|Date: 2008/09/12 21:55:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I love Fuller talking about the play he's written:
|Date: 2008/09/14 12:42:15, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/09/17 02:03:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DaveScot's answer right above that one is pretty good too:
Talk about a recipe for ignorance.
|Date: 2008/09/22 06:47:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
More on School Shooters, especially Harris and Klebold:
It's a review of a book called "Ceremonial Violence". Excerpt:
|Date: 2008/09/23 09:18:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Having trouble with URL formatting. The "Realistic Computation" URL above has a couple of junk characters added to "biology". Edit them out to view the site.
|Date: 2008/09/24 00:36:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Lilly Tomlin (on UD?): "I try to be cynical, but it's so hard to keep up."
|Date: 2008/09/30 00:50:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Which reminds me, John Timmer did an excellent multi-page review of "Explore Evolution" on "ars technica" last week and I forgot to post a link here.
The Link
He rather rips it a new anal orifice. Very good job, John.
|Date: 2008/10/01 01:17:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This may be off topic, but given Dave's interest in climate and weather, I think he should look at this article and I can't post on Uncommonly Dense to tell him.
Dave, check out Do Hurricanes Just Happen? by Jim Splif--er that is Jim Eliff. Some highlights:
I'll let you read the reasons yourself.
Moral: It stands to reason that if God is responsible for creating the hurricanes that have destroyed so much of your home state, he may also be creating the global warming that is going to turn the rest of it into a parched tinderbox. If global warming IS God's will, then we should obviously not be fighting it because we'd be warring against God.
P.S. You may substitute "the Designer" for "God" in any of the above sentences if UD is still in denial.
|Date: 2008/10/01 04:54:04, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I guess DaveTard didn't graduate magna cum laude in spelling or grammer.
In other news, a comment in the same thread reports Kirk Cameron has a movie out - "Fireproof", with a full $500,000 budget. Trivia from the IMDB:
Big question from the film: "But can he attempt to love his wife while avoiding God's love for him?"
I'm betting he will.
|Date: 2008/10/02 00:57:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/10/03 00:41:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Looks like there's been a little editing of DaveTard's post:
|Date: 2008/10/07 06:51:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dr. Dr.:
(Does the Dr. Dr. really understand what "link to it" means? And does he really have a colleague?)
Good stuff, but I don't think BDKnight is long for this world. Meanwhile, I can't help but notice that Dr. Dr. D. is much more impressed by trashtalk than understanding the science he's talking about. An ignorant a**hole is fine with him so long as he's a pro-ID IA.
Edited to add asterisks and spell "fine" correctly.
|Date: 2008/10/08 00:28:26, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Even that is gone now.
|Date: 2008/10/09 06:02:05, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A lot of the best people do it. Here's an article on her accent which turns out to be a mix of Minnesotan, Wisconsonian, Great NorthWestern and a dash of North Dakotan, all processed through the Alaskan accent grinder and flash frozen at the peak of ripeness, then drizzled lightly with Canuck, you betcha.
She can also turn it on and off at will.
|Date: 2008/10/09 06:06:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That day came years ago.
|Date: 2008/10/09 06:08:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jebus! I looked at that page and for one shining second I thought it read, "John A. Davison, Professor Dementis of ..."
Then I focused my tired eyes and it instantly got a lot less interesting.
|Date: 2008/10/16 00:25:56, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jesus Christ on a Bicycle! DaveTard copies an article on Obama and Islam, FtK kinda wonders if it's true and then William Wallace drops in to say, "Oh hai! Let's talk about Obama's US citizenship!" What the hell are they smoking over there?
|Date: 2008/10/17 00:43:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Is there a UD version of Poe's law? Something like "Without a blatant indicator such as a smiley, it is impossible to tell the difference between a UD poster and a parody thereof."?
|Date: 2008/10/23 01:37:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DaveTard tells the truth:
|Date: 2008/10/23 01:52:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
How it was done:
|Date: 2008/10/24 00:07:50, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
tragicmishap is also a Friend of Poe:
Excuse me, traj, but have you read anything by Dembski? His whole schtick is trying to prove that God is the most probable Designer. Haven't you read any of his "...the odds of this pattern forming by chance are 138.7^3456^15 to 1 against" eructions? He's talking to you, boy!
|Date: 2008/10/27 01:18:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's just dawning on them that they're passengers on the S.S. McCain, the ship has rammed into at least a dozen icebergs, it's going down fast, the economy is sinking with it, the credibility of conservatives and Republicans is toast for at least a generation, there are no life boats and Jesus doesn't seem to be answering any prayers lately. Meanwhile, Key UD Administrators are rearranging the deck chairs.
|Date: 2008/10/28 00:42:29, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This book is Hard Tard. Authors: William Dembski and Jonathan Wells. You can't get much lower than that.
"This little book shows that atheism must seek intellectual fulfillment elsewhere decisively demonstrating the need for intelligence in explaining life's origin." "Decisively" defined: Dembski and Wells are satisfied.
"This is the best overview of why traditional origin-of-life research has crashed and burned and why intelligent design is necessary to explain the high-tech engineering inside the cell." I wasn't aware that it had crashed and burned. And "God did it" is not an explanation.
"Author William A. Dembski worked closely as an advisor with the producers of the Spring 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed starring Ben Stein." I assume he was responsible for the Nazi bits.
"How to Be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (Or Not) is the intellectual argument that helped inform significant elements of the movie. This controversial feature-length documentary film about researchers, professors, and academics who claim to have been marginalized, silenced, or threatened with academic expulsion because of their challenges to some or all parts of Darwin's theory of evolution is one of the top twelve highest grossing documentary's of all time." I claim to be good looking and wealthy. Others claim to be victimized by science instead of their substandard intellects. Regarding documentary ranking: In other words, it's the twelfth highest grossing documentary of all time until "Religulous" has had a few more weeks in the theaters.
"It has attracted both praise and controversy in its challenge against Darwinism." Strangely, all of the praise is coming from boneheads who don't understand evolution.
|Date: 2008/10/30 01:26:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
And John McCain is going to win in a landslide.
|Date: 2008/11/01 09:28:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Damn! My mad web skilz turned out to be immaterial and now I can't touch them.
|Date: 2008/11/04 01:51:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This has gotta hurt ...
Of course, this being UD, the headline is:
|Date: 2008/11/04 04:18:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's like UD had an agreement with the intelligent educated world: Be as whacky as you like, spread lies, insults and utterly whacko pseudo-scientific theories far and wide, call homeland security every time a scientists starts to talk a little like an Old Testament prophet, do all of that and we won't mind - IF you keep publishing side-splittingly funny prose. We'll forgive you.
Well, they're not keeping up their end of the bargain.
|Date: 2008/11/05 03:12:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Since UD is still dead (the last two postings have zero replies so far - much duller than average, but it does raise the tone a bit) I thought I'd help Denyse clear up something she said on Mindful Hack:
Denyse, being told something means your conscious mind hears a material voice and extracts material data from it. When you say "immaterial consciousness", you're doing what we non-Toronto based journalists call circular reasoning or ID Think. (See "Begging the question.") Also, "...strong refutation of the conjecture that placebo responses reflect nothing more than report bias." does absolutely nothing to establish a non-material mind. As usual, you don't understand what you're talking about.
Even more to the point, the brain is changing all the time. It's how we learn, among other things. Synapses change for short term memory and neurons grow new links to implement long term memory. If you decide to type some drivel, your brain will change by sending torrents of nerve impulses travelling arount the brain to both implement your thoughts and send your commands to your typing fingers. This is not new to science, but maybe ID is just now hearing about it?
Want to know something else? The computer you're using is changing all the time too. As it's downloading these words, tiny charges in your computer's DRAM are changing at a high rate of speed. Ever once in a while your computer changes the position of the heads in its hard drive. The disk in the hard drive is constantly spinning. The light patterns on your video monitor also change constantly.
There's nothing unusual about a (material) computer program changing a (material) computer. Just as there's nothing unusual about a (material) mind changing a (material) brain. They have to change to operate. If your brain couldn't change, you'd be brain dead. Err..
|Date: 2008/11/06 00:37:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Reading about all the changes at UD - The Bible predicts all of this! Read the signs! This is the End of Tard! We're all going to be Ruptured!
|Date: 2008/11/07 05:59:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
And let's not forget Abraham Lincoln who was the first to observe that whatever a person's height, their legs are always exactly long enough to reach the ground.
Coincidence? Bah! Design!
|Date: 2008/11/07 19:33:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
What kind of UDairies Tard is that?
2 percent or Homo?
|Date: 2008/11/08 14:34:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Use it for Milk Bottle II the next time Davie goes missing.
GREAT picture, by the way!
|Date: 2008/11/10 10:51:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I don't think Mims so much had a pre-existing gripe as he has some hearing comprehension issues and he's very careless about spreading slander. Not quite as bad as Dembksi, though, who actually called Homeland Security if I remember right. (And probably got his name added to the "kooks" list for his troubles. Poor Billy never wins.)
He may have still had a chip on his shoulder regarding the Scientific American issue. He applied for one of the most distinguished jobs at the magazine, one held by the legendary Martin Gardner, at the heigth of the "creation science" flap. When he turned out to be an old-earth creationist, the powers that be at SciAm didn't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by hiring someone from the opposition.
I kind of sympathized with him at the time, but after the Pianka flap, I lost all good feelings towards the jerk. There was no excuse for what he did.
|Date: 2008/11/17 02:45:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
First the Republican Party, then Wall Street, then Conservatism, then Bush, now DaveTard. The end of an era. I'll bet the dinosaurs had days like this.
|Date: 2008/11/17 05:23:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This boggled my mind:
Getting kicked off of UD may actually have been a blessing for DaveTard if it keeps him from seeing stuff like this.
|Date: 2008/11/20 04:50:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You really have to wonder what goes on in Granny Spice's head. On November 15, she gave us a little essay entitled "Farewell fat gene...goodby gay gene...so long, sloppiness gene" in which she reads an essay by Carl Zimmer on recent discoveries in genetics and epigenetics.
In the last few years, we've gone from thinking genes are just the sections of DNA that specify proteins to realizing that the RNA copied from those sections has large chunks cut out of it and thrown away before the protein is made to realizing that the sections can be re-arranged so that one stretch of DNA can make several proteins.
We've also learned that some DNA specifies RNA that is never made into protein at all, but is used for things like manufacturing all sorts of proteins in the ribosome.
Most interesting to me, we've learned that proteins can "clamp on" to DNA and change how it's expressed and that these chemicals are passed down from mother to child as an extra, "epigenetic" component of heredity.
Now to me, this means that we know a hell of a lot more about genetics than when I was a school boy and it's opening up more ways to fight disease and, generally, understand how organisms, including humans, operate. In short, it's a Good Thing and I'm looking forwards to more of it.
Granny Spice's take on all this? "When someone informs you that it (whatever "it" is) is in their genes - so forget asking them to grow up and accept some responsibility..." - show them Zimmer's article!
Well, that last part is indeed good news. Yes, by all means, show them Zimmer's article. It's a great one. But Granny, the fact that we've learned more about how genes work doesn't change anything about what we've learned emperically about how much influence they have on us. The overall figures for genetic influence on human beings are still running at about 40% with individual genes (for hair color for instance, or a defective gene that doesn't make a vital protein) running all the way up to 100%. Nothing has changed here because our knowledge of genetic influence mostly doesn't depend on the details of how genes work. We look at things like how identical twins share traits vs. non-identical twins, study family histories, etc. No real knowledge of the nuts and bolts of genetics is required. In other words, there's no change for how any fat genes, gay genes, sloppy genes or any other genes that may exist affect us. Nothing about how genes affect us has changed just because we've learned more about how genes work.
She does get one thing right in that article, however: "And will somebody please text Lamarck, and tell him he's being rehabilitated?"
Lamarck is being rehabilitated to some extent because we've found that things that happen to a parent can affect the offspring's epigenetics. Zimmer tells us about WWII Netherlanders, who went through a "brutal" famine in 1944. Children conceived during this famine turned out to be missing many of the proteins that clamp onto DNA, presumably because their starving mothers couldn't provide them. And those children's children are also missing those proteins - because their mothers didn't have them to be copied to the next generation. Zimmer doesn't mention it, but one obvious sign of these missing proteins is that the children and grandchildren were noticibly shorter than their starved parents and grandparents. That IS the parent's environment causing physical changes to their offspring. It's not quite what Lamark was talking about, but it's at least close. Congratulations, Granny Spice.
Her performance didn't seem to impress her peers very much, she only got four responses, includng one from Feebish who seems to be a troll. ("Mrs. O'leary")
Sensing that she hadn't made a big enough fool of herself, she returned to Zimmer's article on November 18 with "The difference between mathematics and biology...". There, she invents a new word:
|Date: 2008/11/23 10:16:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Granny Spice on proof, ID style:
|Date: 2008/11/26 04:13:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think we all underestimated the stupidity of Jehu. Look two replies down from Nick's and you find the real source of Jehu's quote:
|Date: 2008/11/26 04:15:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Could somebody who has a sock puppet ask DaveTard how he made that prediction? I for one would like to see the math.
|Date: 2008/12/02 06:58:42, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
tragicmishap is confused about free will:
So, if God says you will think of a pumpkin at 9:35 CST next Thursday, is there any possible way you can NOT think of a pumpkin at that time? Of course not! If you could, then God would be mistaken and hence not omniscient.
In fact, since an omniscient God knew the teensiest nuance of your every thought ten thousand years before you were born and you can't deviate from those pre-ordained thoughts by one iota without making God non-omniscient, you have no free will.
Meanwhile, us atheists are free to think for ourselves.
|Date: 2008/12/04 03:42:10, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DaveTard's way ahead of you:
|Date: 2008/12/04 03:49:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Remember how just a few weeks ago we were all crying in our beer because we thought the UD moderator changes were going to dry up the flow of Tard?
And now, less than a month later, we realize that not only are we living in the Golden Age of Tard but Dembski has come as close as his vastly inflated (but Jesus approved) ego will allow him to admitting that his One Great Idea is a total dog's breakfast.
Dear Santa,
Please save all your presents for the poor people. I've got plenty.
Thank you,
|Date: 2008/12/04 04:59:14, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This Olofsson thread is a very rich vein of tard!
DaveTard, in the opening post:
Dembski in post 169:
DaveTard, one post later:
Conclusion: Dave is not a flagellum.
|Date: 2008/12/05 00:08:04, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/12/05 00:45:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse speaks regarding the Reality-based community's response to "Expelled":
|Date: 2008/12/07 01:14:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
What hell is this? is truly one for the scrapbook. My copy of the OP and first response is safely stored away in c:\UD-WTF to share with future generations.
It's even better right now because her reference to Buggs' original article, http://www.refdag.nl/artikel/1366432/Chimpanzee.html is redirecting to a page conveniently written in Dutch that seems to translate that it's a Reformed Newspaper and it doesn't publish on Sundays.
Science all the way.
|Date: 2008/12/07 06:38:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Rubbing it in department:
|Date: 2008/12/08 01:13:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/12/08 01:29:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Clive asks: "I have to ask, why do people record our comments and post them on that website you linked?"
This question was answered on the opening post of the original Official Uncommonly Dense Thread by stevestory:
The original Uncommon Pissant thread was closed at the 1000 page mark because the blog software was choking on it's length. I suspect we'll fill this thread too and go to at least thread three if you keep UD staggering along.
I'd like to thank you all for being so entertaining.
|Date: 2008/12/08 05:25:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Even the ads on UD are getting exciting again (assuming "exciting" means "containing enough tard to choke a grunion"). Check out the one labeled, "From the Originator of ID theory: Science Declares Our Universe is Intelligently Designed":
It's by a Dr. Robert A. Herrmann, "Professor of Mathematics (ret) U.S. Naval Academy" and it's on "The General Theory of Everything". I can only say, thank goodness, at last we have a general theory of gravity, electromagnetic waves and why ping-pong balls are white and round! I've long felt the need for such a theory.
"In 1979, I originated the mathematical analysis that shows that the production of and alterations in the behavior of any physical-system are intelligently designed. My analysis (the GID-model, GID) is not related, in method, to the inadequate mostly insignificant and highly criticized Johnson-Dembski-Behe theory (RID) as championed by members of the Discovery Institute." So the production of and ALL alterations in the behavior of ANY physical system are intelligently designed. This is obviously leagues ahead of that tired, inadequate and mostly insignificant Johnson-Dembski-Behe stuff.
Denise will like this: "The new paper Thought Control shows that certain mental processes can be influenced by the actions of defined immaterial entities."
"The PDF article The Inherent Dangers Manifested by Certain Belief Systems contains findings that were disseminated to various U. S. Federal government agencies and individual members in 1981." Translated: I mailed examples of my genius to lots of federal agencies and any individuals whose address I could find.
"Originally, the conclusions were "confidential," but on 15 Aug 1981 they were presented at the annual meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation." Translation: Surprisingly few people (none, actually) responded to my important information. So I presented it to the ASA and it's Heddle's problem now.
The Site Index is interesting too. "1. My Biography" is paired with "1A. Speech and Learning Disorders".
Click on "5. The 1996 Templeton Prize Nomination" and you'll see the actual nomination (which was not written by Dr. Herrmann). Scroll down and click on "The official nomination acceptance" and you'll see a photocopy of the letter he got back from the Templeton Foundation thanking him for the nomination and pointing out that it is "very well prepared". This is followed by the person they forwarded the nomination to and a suggestion that further information be sent to this person directly, almost as if they were saying not to bug them with it any more.
And how did the nomination fare? Apparently Dr. Herrmann did not win the Templeton Prize. At least, entry "5a." is titled, "A John Templeton Foundation Expose".
I'm embarassed to say that I haven't yet read, "6. Paul Davies Refuted" or "7. Hugh Ross Errors". I'm saving them for my declining years, when the tard may not flow as freely as it does today and I'm too weak and decrepit to hunt it down.
Looking through the Index and noting such titles as "9A. What is Space Time?", "13. Randomness - A Strong Deception", "14A. A Miracle Producing Mechanism", "15A. What Can Be Known", "16. Your Endangered Mind - Internet Book", "17. Your Endangered Mind - Secular", "19. New Thought Control" and, of course, "25. Evil of the Psychic Movement" and "29. E=mc^2 Not Einstein's Discovery", I am looking forwared to a happy and tard-rich retirement.
I can't end this without congratulating Google on finding exactly the right blog for this ad. No other blog is as likely to appreciate it as UD, although tired, inadequate and mostly insignificant Johnson, Dembski and Behe may beg to differ.
|Date: 2008/12/08 05:39:50, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ceiling Cat
An example: 7:12am on a Saturday morning, your head is throbbing, your mouth tastes of stale beer and vomit and your only desire in life is to go back to sleep until the pain goes away and she chirps, "Oh look honey! I found the handcuffs and the enema syringe!!"
|Date: 2008/12/08 06:13:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This is PERFECT!!!
From Amazon's review of The Design of Life:
I think Denyse got it pretty much correct.
Here are some of the other choices, by the way:
|Date: 2008/12/11 00:06:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Don't forget that Dembski was the Isaac Newton of Information Theory, according to the dust jacket of one of his books.
|Date: 2008/12/11 00:10:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2008/12/11 00:13:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Also, Dr. Dr. D, try running God through your Design Filter.
Is He random? Nope.
Is He law-like? Nope.
Conclusion: God is designed.
If I'm wrong, please show me my error.
(Thanks to RBH for this one.)
|Date: 2008/12/11 05:31:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Right. EF, SC, CSI - it doesn't matter. They're all what philosophers of science call BS.
|Date: 2008/12/11 06:28:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A note in O'Leary's Altruism, evolutionary psychology, and the heroes of Mumbai article says:
|Date: 2008/12/12 00:37:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
According to Nature, a subscription to Chaos, Solitons and Fractals costs a stunning US $4,520 a year!
I'm looking forward to retirement in a couple of years and I was thinking of supplementing my meager retirement income by selling photoshopped nudie pictures of Sarah Palin to unsuspecting Rethuglicans.
But now, I'm wondering if setting up a mildly weird scientific journal might not pay much better.
|Date: 2008/12/12 04:31:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
"AAAS" = American Association that's Almost Sciency"
I think Denyse will buy it.
|Date: 2008/12/14 19:52:47, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Did somebody already spot this steaming bowl of tard?
What are the odds? I mean, just what are the odds that EVERY SINGLE electron IN THE UNIVERSE just happens to have EXACTLY THE SAME mass, charge, spin, etc? How many electrons are there? And protons and neutrons do it too! What are the odds? They have got to be huge!
I'd say the odds have gotta be at least a Dembski* to 1 against. Maybe two. Waterloo!!! Waterloo!!!
I just hope you unfulfilled atheists are satisfied now! If you live west of the Mississippi, you can still make it to evening church services if you drop everything and leave right now. Drive like your souls depended on it! You eastern atheists, sorry, but you're just going to hell.
* In Evangelical and Reformed math, one Dembski is defined as the odds calculated against something by someone who doesn't understand the subject he's calculating. It's a very big number, so big that its exact magnitude doesn't really matter. For historical reasons, the term "Waterloo!!" is usually appended to the results.
|Date: 2008/12/16 04:03:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Young bFast asks an intelligent question
Answer: By restricting itself to things that can be observed.
But then young bFast crashes and burns:
If it were established that a non-supernatural intelligent being brought forth life on earth, we'd all be IDers. But to establish that an intelligent being brought forth life on earth, you'd have to have evidence that we can see and measure.
On again, off again Explanitory Filters that you can't even fit Darwinian evolution into aren't evidence for ID. Especially when they indicate that God was designed.
Saying that the presence of CSI proves ID isn't evidence for ID, since Darwinian Evolution produces CSI.
Oohing and aahhing over bacterial flagellums isn't evidence for ID.
Credulous crap about the so-called Edge of Evolution isn't evidence for ID.
Nothing that Denyse O'Leary has ever misunderstood is evidence for ID.
|Date: 2008/12/18 00:36:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
gpuccio, WAD and all the others IDiots don't understand the most basic fact about evolution: EVERY living creature is already IN the search zone. The search zone gpuccio is talking about consists of the sequences of DNA that will construct and operate a viable creature capable of reproducing the DNA sequence and passing it on to the next generation. Evolution doesn't have to search for the zone, it just has to stay in it.
The strategy it uses to do this is simply to keep the number of changes to the DNA low so you're only searching in the immediate area of the "zone".
gp, here's something to remember: if a critter is alive and capable of producing offspring, it is already inside your search zone.
|Date: 2008/12/18 00:50:29, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'm waiting for all the moderators to ban each other and when the smoke clears, nobody in the known universe can post, UD dies a horrible death, a tard famine scourges the entire world and scores of people on the Uncommonly Dense thread die from tard deprivation.
Personally, I'm stockpiling. My root cellar is full of screen captures from UD.
|Date: 2008/12/19 00:14:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I've heard that double strength heroin dulls the senses enough to blunt the worst of the tard. Trouble is that the effective anti-tard dose is about 93% of the lethal dose. Still, even if you overdose and die, at least you're beyond the reach of tard forever.
|Date: 2008/12/19 00:22:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Or the kids whose mothers killed them so they'd go to a better world.
|Date: 2008/12/21 08:17:21, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Granny Spice:
I think she meant to say:
|Date: 2008/12/22 00:44:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The tard flows freely tonight! On the On False Knowledge thread, Granny Spice dips deep into the Classics department at Fresno State University to ask Professor Bruce Thornton for his thoughts on ... science. In the responses to that thread, Borne shows a rather unhealthy, but probably typical, interest in beastiality. Apparently Hugh Hefner says it's ok, so go ahead, Borne, you have my permission to bonk any beast that catches your fancy, so long as it's voluntary for both of you. And I'd get it in writing, just to be safe.
In comment 4 on the same thread, vividbleau returns from whatever institution has been keeping him and drops this gem of logic on us:
Well, ok, his first post. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt until at least his second post.
Granville Sewell then offers us a Tard Cornucopia, giving us the "thoughts" of David Berlinski in the David Berlinski on Physics and Metaphysics thread. Dr. B. is very concerned with "...the calculated or careless erasure of the line separating disciplined physical inquiry from speculative metaphysics." Apparently, some of the "modern" physicists are behaving in ways that would not please Newton. According to Dr. B., some of the real parvenus of physics, drek like Steven Hawkins, "...feel free to say anything that pops into their heads." The Shame!
In the responses, russ also decries falling standards and notes that, "If the Internal Revenue Service disappeared tomorrow, a great many Americans would no longer pay their taxes." Since there would be nowhere to pay their taxes to, russ is probably right. Score a magnificent victory for UD-Thought.
Mapou, however, makes russ look like an amateur with his response:
In a later response, he clarifies his thoughts:
Now a lot of johnny-come-lately parvenu so-called physicists might think that the tard-pits have been emptied by that last statement, but connoisseurs of Tard know that we can expect lots more than this from UD and once again, they're right. Frost122585 blows Mapou right out of the water with a reply that is so Tardilicious it must be quoted in full:
And happy holidays to you too, Frostie! There's lots more Tard to be mined at UD today, but this holly Darwinist is now fully satiated and only wishes to sleep peacefully and dream of worlds stuck in space-time, unable to move.
|Date: 2008/12/25 12:35:21, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Does anybody remember a guy who used to haunt the usenet religion threads about fifteen years ago whose last name was Winter? He was a Christian who, among other things, denied the Trinity, which raised a few objections on the Christian threads. To "answer" his critics, he had about a million words of blather stored on his hard drive which he would cut and paste into fantastically long posts that make kf look like a piker.
That was in the 2400 baud days and I could just about keep up reading that speed, so I'd let the messages scroll and just read them on the fly. You could always tell when one of Winter's messages was coming up because suddenly this solid block of text would start to rise from the bottom of your screen, like some submarine behemoth rising to lay waste to the world. The sentences filled the entire screen, from left to right, with no paragraphs, indentations or other breaks. Page after page of English-like sentences that made about as much sense as kf.
The overall effect was kf^2 or maybe even kf^3. I think he was eventually banned from just about every thread in usenet. kf may be his little brother. Somebody ask him if his last name used to be Winter. And if not, demand to know why.
|Date: 2008/12/29 07:03:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Could somebody refresh my memory? Who is Steve Fuller?
|Date: 2008/12/30 00:36:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/01/05 20:56:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Wikipedia on Dr. Jerry Bergman, author of "Slaughter of the Dissidents":
Let's see ... YEC, PhD from a diploma mill, hates Jehovah's Witnesses, writes for Answers in Genesis, is a Hitler-Darwin crank, fails to get a legitimate PhD, but a secular college keeps him on the payroll for four more years while he tried and failed to get one, sues that employer claiming religious discrimination, the court finds that his colleagues just couldn't stand him, sues his next academic employer claiming religious discrimination, loses the case and the appeal, "The court ruled that the reason he was let go was because of ethics, namely that he claimed to have credentials in psychology when, in fact, he 'had no psychological credentials.'"
He then writes a book on the terrible discrimination Christians face in today's academia.
This man is perfect for UD!
|Date: 2009/01/07 00:10:10, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Centuries ago, England conducted a vast social experiment. It sent all of its thieves, pickpockets and murderers to Australia and all of its surplus lawyers and religious whackadamia nuts to America.
For over a century, the world's most prominent sociologists, criminologists and philosophers have examined the results and they have now come to a unanimous conclusion:
Australia had first choice.
|Date: 2009/01/08 02:05:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think some of the best reading on UD is in the wacky ads they're running. Here's my current favorite:
I just had to go to the web site and read it for myself.
Turns out they're pushing a book so valuable they're giving it way for free, either on line or in hard copy.
My favorite quote: "People all over the world started to panic and Marshall law had to be implemented virtually worldwide."
I wonder if Dennis is into martial arts.
This is Dembski class literature, all the way. Maybe even O'Leary quality.
|Date: 2009/01/09 15:59:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|They're both non Christian. QED.
|Date: 2009/01/10 15:24:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Steve Fuller
Fuller is more or less right about Newton - sort of. According to Wikipedia, Newton did "...more work on Biblical hermeneutics than the natural science he is remembered for today." (I think that may be a misprint. They probably meant, "Newton wasted more time on Biblical hermeneutics than the natural science he is remembered for today.")
Unfortunately for the UD crowd, Newton was not a "nice" Christian. He specifically denied the Trinity and felt that the Bible had been corrupted. Either belief would have gotten him kicked out of his professorship, had they been known, so he kept them quiet. Come to think of it, his beliefs would have gotten him kicked out of Uncommon Descent, too.
He left a trunk full of religious speculations behind when he died. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, purchased it and later said, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians."
|Date: 2009/01/14 03:04:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski is Illuminated:
Some of the atheists:
Douglas Adams, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Woody Allen, Lance Armstrong, Darren Aronofsky, Isaac Asimov, Dave Barry, Ingmar Bergman, Lewis Black, Richard Branson, Berkeley Breathed, Warren Buffett, George Carlin, John Carmack, Adam Carolla, John Carpenter, Asia Carrera, Fidel Castro, Dick Cavett, Noam Chomsky, Billy Connolly, Francis Crick, David Cronenberg, David Cross, Alan Cumming, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, David Deutsch, Ani DiFranco, Micky Dolenz, Harlan Ellison, Brian Eno, Richard Feynman, Harvey Fierstein, Larry Flynt, Dave Foley, Jodie Foster, Janeane Garofalo, Bill Gates, Bob Geldof, Ricky Gervais, Ira Glass, James Gleick, Robert Heinlein, Nat Hentoff, Katharine Hepburn, Christopher Hitchens, Jamie Hyneman, Eddie Izzard, Penn Jillette, Billy Joel, Angelina Jolie, Wendy Kaminer, Diane Keaton, Ken Keeler, Neil Kinnock, Michael Kinsley, Richard Leakey, Bruce Lee, Tom Lehrer, Tom Leykis, James Lipton, H.P. Lovecraft, John Malkovich, Barry Manilow, Todd McFarlane, Sir Ian McKellen, Arthur Miller, Frank Miller, Marvin Minsky, Julianne Moore, Desmond Morris, Randy Newman, Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Gary Numan, Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Paula Poundstone, Terry Pratchett, James Randi, Ron Reagan Jr., Keanu Reeves, Rick Reynolds, Gene Roddenberry, Joe Rogan, Henry Rollins, Andy Rooney, Salman Rushdie, Bob Simon, Steven Soderbergh, Annika Sorenstam, George Soros, Richard Stallman, Bruce Sterling, Howard Stern, J. Michael Straczynski, Julia Sweeney, Matthew Sweet, Teller, Studs Terkel, Tom Tomorrow, Linus Torvalds, Eddie Vedder, Paul Verhoeven, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Vowell, James Watson, Steven Weinberg, Joss Whedon, Ted Williams, Steve Wozniak and there's a button that shows many more. (Including some unfortunate atheists, like Stalin.)
Reading this list, I find that their main distinguishing characteristic is that they're all a lot smarter than Dr. Dembski, they know more than Dr. Dembski and they've done a hell of a lot more to make the world a better place than Dr. Dembski or anybody in the ID movement will ever do.
|Date: 2009/01/14 03:14:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/01/14 03:58:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I've been re-reading Steve Fuller's ID and the Science of God posts and I finally understand why ID failed so spectacularly at Dover. If this bonehead is the best ID can do for an expert witness, the movement is truly doomed.
In the first entry in this sorry series, we see Fuller recommending The Best of All Possible Worlds by Steven Nadler. Well, it just happens that I have that book - it's currently in the new books section at Borders - and I've read it.
Dr. Fuller, you seem to have a little reading comprehension problem. Read that book again and see if you can't detect its main message: Not even an intellect like Gottfried von Leibniz could overcome Theodicy. The best he could come up with was to claim that this is the best of all possible worlds - without having any explanation for why it's the best and why it couldn't be better, even if made and operated by an all-knowing, all-powerful God.
Look at your own words:
Bingo professor Fuller! Even the densest IDiot (sorry Gil) dimly realises this and tries to steer clear of the topic - except for the uber-dense Dr. Dr. Dembski himself, who is apparently writing a book on Theodicy, which he has hopefully entitled The End of Christianity. You go, guy!
|Date: 2009/01/14 04:22:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I just put MIRO video software on my new webbook and, just for the hell of it, I typed "Expelled" into the search function and up it popped. I took a quick look before deleting it and yep, it's the same horror I saw in the theaters last summer. Yuck!
But the good news is that the same search brought up at least 16 Expelled Debunked episodes and a few other debunks, so the word is getting out.
Now for the pron...
|Date: 2009/01/14 05:38:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oh my ...
I may not be around for a few weeks.
|Date: 2009/01/14 06:00:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Hey, this is kinda off topic, but until you've seen Denyse in Projectile Vomiting II ...
|Date: 2009/01/14 06:18:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|I've never seen a crowd shout, "Put it on!" before.
|Date: 2009/01/17 08:52:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You have to type in the types of pron you're interested in. For example, an ID enthusiast might search for "toronto journalist grandmother pole dance" and you wouldn't hear from him for two or three days.
|Date: 2009/01/21 04:20:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Nils, what these papers show is that despite a degree in Philosophy of Science and ten+ years in the field of ID, Dembski still doesn't understand how evolution works.
He thinks living things are searching for the infinitismal portion of all possible genomes that will construct an organism capable of reproducing. He is wrong!
The fact that Dembski came from parents and has managed to reproduce himself shows that his DNA is already in the sweet spot! ALL living organisms that successfully reproduce are in it. They don't have to search for it, they just have to stay in it. They do this by making only small changes to their genomes when they reproduce.
Tell this to Dr. Dr. Dembski so he can finally stop making a fool of himself.
|Date: 2009/01/23 03:51:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DonaldM is a tard:
Bzzzst! Wrong! Both the theories of geocentrism and heliocentrism required more and more epicycles to make their predictions agree with ever more accurate measurements. The reason they needed more epicycles was because both theories assumed that the planets orbits were circular. Kepler showed their orbits were actually elliptical. Adding more and more epicycles to the supposed circular orbits made them mathematically closer to the actual elliptical orbits in a sort of a Fourier transform.
Once Kepler showed that the orbits were elliptical, all of the epicycles vanished except for one whopper that had to be added to the geocentric theory to account for the sun and planets orbiting the earth instead of the planets and earth orbiting the sun.
But I doubt if DonaldM cares about this because ID is above all that sciency stuff.
|Date: 2009/01/23 03:56:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Hmmm.... I wonder if she's a Vogon?
|Date: 2009/01/26 00:51:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jeezus! I was thinking of Deneyse and suddenly that message came up.
Must ... wash ... in ... fire .........
|Date: 2009/01/27 00:57:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's the kind of thing that would be very cute if children were doing it, but it's rather strange and unpleasant when done by adults.
|Date: 2009/01/28 06:20:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Quote without comment:
|Date: 2009/01/29 00:34:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Even the grammer is bad.
|Date: 2009/01/30 00:52:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/02/02 02:22:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Can I have some of your meds?
|Date: 2009/02/02 02:25:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Never mind.
|Date: 2009/02/04 02:01:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
There's a campaign going on to ban comic sans. Obviously, they don't know about the Uncommonly Dense Thread.
Hat Tip to Weird Earl at The Straight Dope.
|Date: 2009/02/09 16:16:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
How did that turn out? Did the Discovery Institute ever host a lightly moderated discussion of Explore Evolution? I'm betting not.
|Date: 2009/02/13 01:19:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/02/13 03:01:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
For those who haven't heard of G. K. Chesterton, you're in for a real treat. He was quite famous in the early 20th century and he's still well thought of by a certain type of person who doesn't think too well.
My personal response to him has been formed by some very unfortunate writing of his that I ran into early on. Among many other things, Chesterton wrote a series of short stories about a fictional detective, a Catholic priest named Father Brown. (Chesterton was raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism.) The first piece by Chesterton that I ever read was a Father Brown short story titled The Invisible Man. If you haven't read it, go ahead and read it now. I'll wait.
Ok, done? Are you pissed off? Do you feel that Chesterton has lied to you and broken some of the most basic rules of mystery fair play? I sure did and do. Here's why: The story concerns a young English woman who is very afraid of a man named Welkin who is described as having a terrible "squint". The woman describes this squint as, "...one of the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked straight at you, you didn't know where you were yourself, let alone what he was looking at." Pretty noticeable, eh?
Well, Welkin and a man named Smythe want to marry her and they go off to make their fortunes. A year later, "'I heard James Welkin laugh as plainly as I hear you speak,' said the girl, steadily. 'There was nobody there, for I stood just outside the shop at the corner, and could see down both streets at once. I had forgotten how he laughed, though his laugh was as odd as his squint. I had not thought of him for nearly a year. But it's a solemn truth that a few seconds later the first letter came from his rival.'"
So, she hears his laugh, but there's nobody there. "...I stood just outside the shop at the corner, and could see down both streets at once." But there's nobody there. And a few seconds later she somehow receives a letter from Smythe.
Did she ever hear him again? "'Yes. Just when I had finished reading the second letter from Isidore Smythe announcing his success. Just then, I heard Welkin say, `He shan't have you, though.' It was quite plain, as if he were in the room. It is awful, I think I must be mad.'"
Smyth is later holed up in his castle like house, which has only one exit. The exit is guarded by a "...man in shirt sleeves [who] was doing something with a pail", the doorman at the front door, a policeman and a man selling chestnuts. Yet, he is murdered in his house and his body disappears, leaving nothing but a blood stain. All four of the guardians swear that nobody entered or left. Yet Father Brown points out footprints in the snow showing that one man both entered and exited the building.
Father Brown does a bit more cogitating and then "He took three quick strides forward, and put his hand on the shoulder of an ordinary passing postman who had bustled by them unnoticed under the shade of the trees.
"Nobody ever notices postmen somehow," he said thoughtfully; "yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily."
The postman, instead of turning naturally, had ducked and tumbled against the garden fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very ordinary appearance, but as he turned an alarmed face over his shoulder, all three men were fixed with an almost fiendish squint."
Father Brown explains why nobody mentioned that the postman had entered and left the apartment:
"Have you ever noticed this--that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean--or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, `Is anybody staying with you?' the lady doesn't answer `Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,' though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says `There is nobody staying with us,' meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, `Who is staying in the house?' then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly. When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They meant no man whom they could suspect of being your man. A man did go into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him."
This, of course, is rank nonsense. If you're asked if anyone has entered or left a house where a man has just been murdered, you will very definitely mention a postman if he was there. This is not the same situation as the lady saying no one was staying here when she's got a butler standing behind her, it's a situation where the doctor is inquiring about an epidemic. The question is clearly, "Has any human being been in or out of this house." and any half-way intelligent man would have replied, "The postman", especially if the postman had an impossible to ignore squint.
Similarly, if you hear an evil laugh or a threat and you look around and see a postman standing there, especially one with a remarkable squint, you don't ignore him and say nobody was there.
The story is an all-around cheat, from beginning to end and it soured me on Chesterton from the get-go.
Another one of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, .The Secret Garden, is a fine example of the "locked room" genre. A recurring character in the Father Brown series, Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, has a house with only one exit and a garden with a high and unscaleable wall around it, which can only be entered or left through the house. A policeman is guarding the only exit to the house, yet a man is found beheaded in the garden. The murderer turns out to be Valentin himself. And the reason for the murder? The victim was a wealthy philantropist who's looking to give a very large sum of money to a religion. It turns out that Father Brown has persuaded him to give the money to the Catholic Church. "Valentin is an honest man, if being mad for an arguable cause is honesty. But did you never see in that cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, anything, to break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne's crazy millions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did little to alter the balance of things. But Valentin heard a whisper that Brayne, like so many scatter-brained sceptics, was drifting to us; and that was quite a different thing. Brayne would pour supplies into the impoverished and pugnacious Church of France; he would support six Nationalist newspapers like The Guillotine. The battle was already balanced on a point, and the fanatic took flame at the risk. He resolved to destroy the millionaire, and he did it as one would expect the greatest of detectives to commit his only crime." Yeah, right. A man with too much money is going to give some of it to a church with too much money and Valentin murders him to prevent that. He was an atheist, after all. Only a man who was lost in religion would think of a plot like that.
The next piece of Chersterton's writing I came across had him claiming that there had to be natural law because every society ever known has had laws against murder and theft. Apparently it never occurred to Chesterton that there's never been a society full of people who wanted to be robbed or murdered and it's not surprising that they all pass laws against doing what they dont want done to them.
So I'm not too big a fan of G. K. Chesterton. How is he as a proto-ID advocate?
Chesterton's proto-ID article is just another anti-evolution screed, but it gives another example of the way the man thought. It's well worth reading if you'd like to see what a sorry defense of ID a really intelligent and knowledgeable man can produce.
First he "disposes" of the claim that he knows nothing about evolution: "It is true, and it would be equally true if I ventured to throw out the suggestion that the Kaiser has suffered a defeat. If I were to insinuate that the armies of the German Empire were ultimately out-manoeuvred and forced to a surrender, it might be said that I was wholly ignorant of the technical strategy of soldiering, and did not know what half the manoeuvres meant; and this would be perfectly true." Yes, G. K., but you don't need to know the details of soldering to tell that someone who's been overrun by invading armies and forced to surrender has suffered a defeat. But you can't evaluate claims for or against a scientific theory unless you understand the theory. Just ask Dr. Dr. Dembski.
Then he gives the reasons why he knows evolution is wrong anyway: "First of all, there is something that will be very suggestive to anybody with a sense of human nature; I mean the tone of the Darwinians themselves. We may well begin with the first and greatest of the Darwinians. Huxley said, in his later years, that Darwin's suggestion had never been shown to be inconsistent with any new discovery; and anybody acquainted with the atmosphere will be struck by the singular note of negation in that." Now this is where your ignorance is starting to trip you up, G. K. Darwin listed several ways his theory could be disproven. Huxley pointed out in his "later years" that this had not happened. This isn't being negative, Huxley was pointing out that it had been a long time since Darwin's theory was made public, a lot of very powerful and knowledgable people had opposed it and none of them - not one - had found any evidence to disprove it.
"When Huxley began to write, he certainly expected that, by the end of his life, Darwin' suggestion would have been confirmed by a crowd of positive discoveries." Which it was. Remember archaeopteryx? Right down Darwin's alley. Remember Mendelian genetics? It was in the process of being integrated into Darwin's theory when you wrote your piece in 1920.
He complains of Huxley's positive evidence: "The simple and natural thing to do, if you think you can explain biological variations, is to explain the variations where they are most obviously varied. If you were explaining to a child, for instance, you would take things like the horn of the rhinoceros or the hump of the dromedary." One problem, Mr. Chesterton, is that rhino horns and camel humps don't fossilize, so he could hardly use them as evidence for anything. But horse skeltons do fossilize and an excellent series of them was found, showing how horses grew and changed as they evolved. The only thing that has been added to that since is the realization that those fossils are just the surviving relics of a veritible bush of developing proto-horses. They are an excellent example of evolution in action.
Mr. Chesterton can't think of any way a rino horn or bat wing could get started in the first place. "But if you will call up the Darwinian vision, of thousands of intermediary creatures with webbed feet that are not yet wings, their survival will seem incredible. A mouse can run, and survive; and a flitter-mouse can fly, and survive. But a creature that cannot yet fly, and can no longer run, ought obviously to have perished, by the very Darwinian doctrine which has to assume that he survived." But of course, an arboreal mouse-like creature can jump to a more distant tree if it has even a rudimentary flap of skin on its arms - see the flying squirrel for an example. That's a great start on a wing.
Finally, the clincher: "But I will add a third reason of the same more general sort. The Darwinians have this mark of fighters for a lost cause, that they are perpetually appealing to sentiment and to authority. Put your bat or your rhinoceros simply and innocently as a child might put them, before the Darwinian, and he will answer by an appeal to authority. He will probably answer with the names of various German professors; he will not answer with any ordinary English words, explaining the point at issue. God condescended to argue with Job, but the last Darwinian will not condescend to argue with you. He will inform you of your ignorance; he will not enlighten your ignorance."
It's hard to reason with a man who is proudly ignorant of the subject under consideration. They tend not to even recognize a valid argument when it hits them in the face. Chesterton's ignorance was impervious. If he was alive today, he would be a formidable ID proponant.
|Date: 2009/02/17 12:14:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
We've got him up to ten a day now. With an average visit length of 2.01 minutes.
There's some pretty good tard at that site:
|Date: 2009/02/18 03:19:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The sheer monney-grubbing shiftiness of the ID crowd continues to amaze me. Dembski gives column space to "Flannery" to tell about the new book they're bringing out. It's "Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution", which is edited by Michael A. Flannery and has a forward by William A. Dembski. It will be available 'real soon now' from their vanity press.
Then I take a look at the Stranger Fruit blog and discover that this book is a re-issue of Wallace's "World of Life" which is available free on the internet!
And you can not only read it for free, but it comes without Flannery and Dembski's droolings.
Don't buy their book. Read Wallace's book for free.
|Date: 2009/02/19 00:47:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/02/20 02:45:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
carsonjok, any idea who wrote this ID-Tripe?
|Date: 2009/02/20 17:18:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This may explain why you see so few Aztecs nowadays.
|Date: 2009/02/22 06:46:55, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Edited to add Message 18
|Date: 2009/02/23 00:51:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Erasmus, FCD:
(Anybody know how to do that crossed out text trick?)
Edited to use the crossed out text trick. Thanks to all who told me how to use it.
|Date: 2009/02/23 06:03:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski diagnoses ID:
Dembski during a sermon on Darwin's birthday.
|Date: 2009/02/24 06:07:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski Gets Tough!
Surprise, surprise! Dembski has a new book out and he's advertising it on UD. The title is TOUGH-MINDED CHRISTIANITY (All-caps in original) and it's dedicated to John Warwick Montgomery. I love this comment in Dembski's blurb:
Do you dispute that claim Dr. Dr. D.? Then tell us about how JWM used to ban people who asked questions he couldn't answer and brought up facts that showed his theories were mistaken.
Buy your own book!
ETA If you want to see an annoying web site, go to http://www.jwm.christendom.co.uk/
|Date: 2009/02/26 00:48:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Because even 150 years ago, bronze-age religions were starting to run out of steam? Because all of the "evidence" for the existence of God turned out to have natural explanations? Because of the obvious immorality of much of Christianity? Because the foundational beliefs of Christianity (Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, The Fall, The Flood, The Exodus) turned out to be false? Because there were about a hundred different versions of Christianity in existance by then and all of them were absolutely positive that the other 99 were 100% wrong? Because the IQ of humanity has been gradually rising and the more intelligent people were starting to see through religion? Because Christianity is full of idiots? Because Darwin was given a vision of the future and when he read some of the tracts from a Prominent Toronto Based Journalist, he said, "To hell with it, if there were a God, IDiots like her would not exist"?
|Date: 2009/02/26 06:38:10, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/02/27 04:14:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I love the Puddle Logic Thread:
Like you.
|Date: 2009/02/27 06:02:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
gpuccio explains ID research:
ETA Missed this one:
|Date: 2009/02/27 06:15:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I agree with you except that I don't think Wells can be counted amongst those who do or used to know how to do science. He's a Moony pastor who was sent back to college to get a PhD by Reverand Moon Himself* solely so he could attack evolution. To the best of my knowledge, he's never done any independent research beyond working as a member of a post-doc team. And if I remember right, he screwed that up.
*Himself capitalized because Reverand Moon is Jesus Christ, returned to earth. We have His word on that.
|Date: 2009/02/28 05:44:39, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's not publishing that Wells doesn't understand, it's how to do science. He managed to get a PhD in science without ever figuring out what science is. Read anything he's ever written. Not a clue.
|Date: 2009/03/02 15:19:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/03/02 15:30:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
GAs (and evolution) also make small changes so you sample only areas close to known working code. For instance, if a portion of your DNA that affects only a heart valve mutates, the DNA for making your kidneys, lungs, brain, intestines and every thing else in your body remains unchanged, a copy of known good DNA. That makes a successful outcome almost infinitely more likely than picking every single DNA base-pair randomly, which is what Dembski is always calculating.
There's another name for giving up on bad alleys, but I can't remember it right now. (Bad cold, can't think.) Here's an example: if you're using GA to write a chess program and you test a move that gets you checkmated on the next move, you don't test the next move after that.
|Date: 2009/03/03 05:53:43, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That Chuck Johnson thread is pretty good. It gives Denyse a chance to stretch out a bit mentally and really embarass herself.
Going to www.urbandictionary.com and checking their definition of "chuck johnson" is pretty interesting, too:
One point in O'Leary's favor - "formally conservative" is from the definition.
Since the definition also includes "Charles Johnson biggest censorship ass hat 2008", I get the impression that the definitions are written by the readers, without too much editing by the dictionary staff. I'd guess this one was entered by the same person who breathlessly reported it to Denyse.
Maybe we should define a few new words and phrases, such as "Pull a Dembski", defined as "Making a complete fool of yourself and losing all cafeteria rights" or "O'Leary ignorant" for her normal everyday writings and enter them into the Urban Dictionary?
In the "Message just isn't getting through" thread, "jrh" changes the subject a bit:
Meanwhile, in the Oklahoma Daily Reports on Dembski-Ruse debate thread, the fabled R. Martinez offers up his own definition of science:
Just another day in the Tard Patch.
|Date: 2009/03/04 05:12:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Erasmus said, "croikey the real tard is on the Sibley pile."
You missed Arthur Smith:
|Date: 2009/03/04 19:46:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
(Slaps forehead) How could I forget? Him and his acolyte, Adolph Hitler. I think Stalin and Mao were in on it too, along with Obama.
|Date: 2009/03/05 06:49:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A "certain moderator" wins friends and influences people for UD.
From the ASA mailing list, Ted Davis, Mar 4, 2009:
|Date: 2009/03/06 00:12:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You mean Kairosfocus is your nom de tard?
|Date: 2009/03/07 07:34:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Lewis and GCUGreyArea:
No, I think that word was coined in Detroit. I remember the radio commercials for the 1953 Buick Roadmaster, with Tardmatic transmission. As I recall, it didn't matter where you put the transmission selector, as soon as you hit the gas, your arguments drove off a cliff.
|Date: 2009/03/07 07:50:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jeus Christ on a bicycle! I wake up this morning, massively hung over, mouth tasting like the bottom of a birdcage, double vision, a headache from hell and my eyeballs itch and I follow your link to kairosfocus expounding on Kant, Quine and Wikipedia. I'm going back to bed for the rest of the winter.
|Date: 2009/03/08 15:51:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
No one expects the Galilean Inquisition!
|Date: 2009/03/09 00:55:26, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. - Lou FCD]
Ben Stein has a brand new gig:
Fathom Events Entertainment will tell you where you can see this thrilling event. I only have to drive about 67 miles.
Imagined movie:
Ben Stein: We all know who invented Beer. Adolph Hitler, working under the supervision of Charles Darwin. The first brewery ever was built at Auschwitz. And do you know what beer is made from? Jews! Especially members of my family! And the fermenting vats were kept warm in the German winter with waste heat from the furnaces! This is solid proof that science is evil and P. Z. Meyers uses makeup! Beuhler? Isn't that another German name? Beuhler? Don't bottle my family!
|Date: 2009/03/10 00:38:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. - Lou FCD]
1: Because us taxpayers don't want to pay gold for crap loans. The banks want the taxpayers to buy their toxic loans at greatly inflated value. We taxpayers would rather the banks took the loss, thank you.
2: The banks are terrified that somebody will buy the loans - at their actual value. If this happens, they have to mark the rest of their loans down to this new, lower value, which means instant bankruptcy, which in turn means a world wide crash that makes 1929 look like boom times.
In short, the banks want the taxpayers to pay grossly inflated prices for their crap loans and the taxpayers aren't that dumb.
I predict that we'll be seeing the dozen or so largest banks nationalized by the end of the month.
I further predict that Ben Stein won't understand.
|Date: 2009/03/10 00:41:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
When you think of it, less than a decade after Darwin published "Origin of Species", slavery was ended in the US. Makes you kind of proud.
|Date: 2009/03/12 00:57:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/03/12 18:19:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Could somebody who has a puppet on UD please PM me?
|Date: 2009/03/16 05:42:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jeeebus! I go home for a weekend to visit my sweet, saintly mother and I come back and the world is turned upside down, cats are living with dogs and DaveTard is no longer with UD!
Fine business!
And to make it a perfect weekend, I ran into this great Ray Comfort quote:
Edited because I spel gud.
|Date: 2009/03/17 01:02:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
When you're entering new sections of a TARD mine, it's customary to toss in a Bible first. If someone shouts, "Sacrilege! He's defamed God's Holy Word!!" and flies an airliner into a skyscraper, you know the TARD is lethal in that branch of the pit.
|Date: 2009/03/17 01:58:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
But he told you he was doing ID science.
|Date: 2009/03/17 04:39:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You knew it had to happen. Telic Thoughts is now endorsing 9/11 conspiracy theories. There was plenty of redundancy, the floors shouldn't have collapsed, thermite residue, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I wonder if DaveTard will take up residency over there.
|Date: 2009/03/18 01:48:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Think of Weasel as a population of organisms that can just barely reproduce and the "target string" as the environment. Matching a letter in its internal strings is equivalent to manufacturing a mechanism that uses/protects against or otherwise takes advantage of the external environment.
Every time the Weasel program matches another letter in it's internal string to a letter in the target string (or piece of the environment) it is enabled to reproduce a little faster than the other strings. (Or die a little more slowly.)
Also, rewrite the program so it reads the target sequence from an external file. No matter what you put in that file, so long as the file contains only the capital letters from A-Z and spaces, Weasel will quickly home in on it and match one of its internal strings to the target sequence.
|Date: 2009/03/18 01:55:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Chomsky is talking about the structure of grammar, not the individual words or sounds. The ability to understand and use grammar can evolve just like anything else. If a change in your ability to generate and understand grammatical sentences helps you think or communicate more efficiently, you do better in life and pass on your genes more often than the ordinary
|Date: 2009/03/18 01:59:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'll bet five bucks he publishes it unchanged. It's the ID way. "Criticism ignored is criticism refuted."*
*First Book of Tard, Slug 32, BS 5
|Date: 2009/03/18 02:23:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Fixed that for you.
|Date: 2009/03/18 03:11:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This comment is so beautiful I have to pass it along. From the SandWalk
Hat tip to Pharyngula.
|Date: 2009/03/22 02:35:42, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
DaveTard no longer exists, so we are forced to invent him.
|Date: 2009/03/22 23:20:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
There is nothing holding that napkin in place.
Therefore, God.
Therefore, ID.
|Date: 2009/03/22 23:30:18, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jesus is Who.
Therefore, ID.
|Date: 2009/03/23 05:48:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'd like to thank my cousin, who sent me a video of a fifteen year old kid doing a pretty good Johnny Cash imitation and reminded me of this song:
|Date: 2009/03/23 06:58:29, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
O'Leary self diagnoses:
|Date: 2009/03/23 15:58:37, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A character is actually 7 bits, Joe, but that's the least of your problems. Describe cornmeal to me. Use as many characters as you want, but describe it well enough so I can manufacture some cornmeal from your description. Then describe flour. Tard.
|Date: 2009/03/24 00:06:29, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Saint O'Leary brags about how well Expelled is doing:
So go to Amazon and look at what's beating it:
1. Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series
2. Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]
3. Religulous
4. The Secret (Extended Edition)
5. Looney Tunes - Golden Collection
6. A Man Named Peril
7. Planet Earth & The Blue Planet Seas of Life (Collector's edition)
8. Expelled
9. Man on Wire
So the great Expelled documentary is only being beaten by
Two BBC series (written from an evolutionary perspective)
Religulous - an anti-religion documentary
The Secret - A Crank Bonanza written from a sucker's perspective
Looney Tunes - Color Cartoons
A Man Named Peril - a WTF documentary is this?
More Planet Earth.
The great sadness is that Expelled is beating out "Man on Wire", a SUPURB documentary on the man who stretched a tight rope between the two buildings of the Twin Towers and walked it. Everybody go and buy two copies of this documentary right now. Give one copy to your mother and she'll love you for it.
|Date: 2009/03/24 02:19:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
JoeG: "Therefor the minimum information that cake will contain is just over 650 bits if each character is a bit."
Just as the minimum sand in the Sahara is one grain.
|Date: 2009/03/25 00:32:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Why Salvador Cordova is not a student at Baylor University:
Sal, choosing the man who published the Baylor Board of Director's home addresses, phone numbers and private email addresses is not the way to win favor with the university. You would know that if you weren't a tard.
|Date: 2009/03/26 05:56:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse is going on about the brainless mind again. This time she tells the story of a "voluble atheist religion professor" she met at dinner who brought up the well known story of Phineas Gage. He's the guy who got a steel rod shot through his skull in 1845, wiping out his frontal lobes.
It's generally acknowledged that Gage's personality changed radically after this accident, but all of those academics don't fool Denyse. She's found a real life professor, at the University of London, no less, that claims those effects were just temporary and he got much better after a year or two.
Although, strangely, "getting better" meant he went from being a construction foreman and blaster, jobs which require judgement and organization, to shoveling out stables in Chile. But I'm sure that's because he just really loved horses.
I'm beginning to think that the only way we can determine the truth of the non-brain consciousness theory is if some hardy Canadian Volunteer has her brain surgically removed. If we can't detect any change in her personality, we can conclude that Denyse was right all along. And if there is a change in personality, I'm sure it will be for the better.
Win win!!!1!1!11
|Date: 2009/03/26 09:35:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
There is talk of a movie. Meanwhile, every episode is on www.hulu.com.
|Date: 2009/03/27 04:13:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Amazingly, Denyse may have gotten one right this time, although she didn't have to find an English professor to tell her that. Wikipedia says essentially the same thing. Apparently he got only the left part of his frontal lobe destroyed. Given the brain's plasticity and having half of his frontal lobe intact, it's not surprising that he got better.
Now she's off on another rant because somebody correctly pointed out that this doesn't support her dualism in any way and now she's demanding that somebody apologize for ever telling the Gage story as it was told.
Anybody with that strong an interest in confession has something really bothering her conscience.
I'd still like to see her perform the definitive experiment, though. If she was to have her brain surgically removed and it made no difference to her personality, I for one would wholeheartedly apologize and admit she was right. And if there was a change, it would probably be for the better. Win-win!
|Date: 2009/03/27 04:21:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Zack: "The genes and fitness function don't directly communicate!"
Re-write Weasel or any other accurate simulation so that it's two programs. The main program should do the mutations, then when it's comparing a mutation to see if it's in the target, it querys the second program and sends it the mutated character and its position in the string.
The second program looks at that position in the target string and the new character and returns a yes or no answer to whether that character matches the target string at that position.
That should eliminate all the "Weasel cheats because it just copies the search string" arguments. It will never even see the search string.
But it won't stop them, of course, because the arguments are not based on either logic or facts.
|Date: 2009/03/27 04:45:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
FrankH: "That makes the outer party members "know" they're special and all ride the bus together holding hands and singing "Kum by ya" as the driver takes them off of a cliff."
From the Soundtrack: "Kum by ya, my Lord, kum by yaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh...."
|Date: 2009/03/27 23:26:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Found Dembski & Marks category. (Except for the "may ... contain information or ideas of interest" part.)
|Date: 2009/04/07 06:40:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Y'know, I don't want to be thought of as approving DaveTard. He's been a jackass since long before his UD career. Just Google Dave Springer for examples.
But I do have to admit one thing: He kept Slimey Sal off of UD.
Jeeze, I can't stand that asshole!
Bring back DaveTard!!
|Date: 2009/04/10 00:39:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The same day as C. S. Lewis.
|Date: 2009/04/10 05:32:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Slightly off topic, but Bilbo on TardicThoughts gives us an outstanding illustration of what passes for rational thought in today's ID world.
Bilbo is, of course, a 9/11 conspiracy buff. If he believes in a world-wide conspiracy to force evilution down the throats of a long-suffering Christian public, how could he be anything else? He believes that the World Trade Center was really brought down by Thermite. In the first response to the OP, he adds, "And for a hypothetical scenario of how the explosives could have been planted, go here."
"Here" turns out to be a web site that gives this "hypothetical" (ID Speak for what normal people call drooling idiocy) scenario for how the deed was done.
Scroll about half way down this masterpiece and you'll see that all the unknown conspirators had to do was to install:
1,000,000 20"x20"x3/4" ceiling tiles with embedded thin-film explosives and 2-channel wireless micro-detonators.
800,000 12"x12"x3/4" ceiling tile with embedded thin-film explosives and 2-channel wireless micro-detonators.
100 10-lb nano-thermite kicker charges with 2-channel wireless detonators in fire-protective capsule disguised as fire extinguishers.
20 5 gallon buckets of thermate coating compound applied with
2 spray applicators with flexible snake hoses and integrated borescopes.
100 2-channel wireless high-temperature igniters and
240 20-channel 200W RF repeaters with UPS power supplies!
Jeeze, if I'd known it was that easy, I never would have doubted! All you have to do is install 1,800,000 explosive ceiling tiles, each imbedded with a 2 channel receiver and a detonator and 100 ten pound explosive charges disguised as fire extinguishers. Then just paint the steel girders with 100 gallons of thermate compound with two applicators with integrated borescopes, attach 100 wireless two channel high temperature igniters and hide 240 20 watt wireless repeaters.
Apparently these were unknowningly applied by the construction crews back in 1970-1972, who may have been illegal aliens, "... who are naturally disinclined to raise questions about the work."
Then just wait 29 years and set them off. (Use very good batteries!) Or maybe it was done by maintenance crews. "Since the new landlord had just taken over in late July of 2001, it wouldn't seem at all unusual to see some refurbishing, especially as unobtrusive as swapping out [1,800,000] old ceiling tiles."
The actual detonation is triggered from a "...safe distance from the Twin Towers via both high-power directional wireless and an encrypted ethernet channel."
Not explained: what were the airliners for?
And this makes sense to these retards!!!
|Date: 2009/04/13 06:49:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This doesn't help (same reply):
|Date: 2009/04/13 07:03:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Did a thread just go missing on UD? A few hours ago I noticed a note from Joseph under recent comments commenting on "intellectual cowardice". I clicked on it and it took me to comment 301 or so in a thread where Joseph had called a couple of relatively sane people intellectual cowards because they couldn't prove, to his satisfaction, something about nested heirarchies.
His comment was in a reply to one of the moderators who was warning him that he would be moderated if he kept his insults coming.
Now that comment is gone from the "recent comments" box and I can't find the thread.
Also, is it even possible to explain something to somebody who doesn't understand what he's talking about?
|Date: 2009/04/14 03:07:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Thanks, Olegt. I see Clive has removed Joe's comment. The thread presently ends with message 308. By UD standards, Clive has won the argument.
|Date: 2009/04/15 00:11:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think Dembski sums the situation up very nicely in that thread's OP:
|Date: 2009/04/15 00:24:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'm currently reading "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchman. It's about the 14th century and a one line capsule report might be something like, "Be glad you didn't live back then!" Bubonic Plague was only the worst of their problems, along with the 100 years war and other catastrophes.
One page 190, she describes how the invading English army was paid off after an English victory and just left to their own devices in France, with no pay and no way home. Unfortunately, they did pretty well for themselves rampaging and pillaging the population. They pretty well raped, robbed, murdered and burned a good chunk of France back to the stone age.
Ms. Tuchman describes these groups as "Tard-Venus" (always in Bold Face in the book), which means "Late-Comers".
I'm not a philologist and I don't even play one on TV, but I'll bet that phrase is very closely related to "parvenu", which means "a relative newcomer to a socioeconomic class".
Therefore, I'm coining a new word, "tardvenu" (no bolding) which means a newcomer to intellectual activities who rapes, robs, murders, burns and just generally destroys every idea he touches. I think it fits a lot of UD regulars.
|Date: 2009/04/15 06:01:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I wonder if she would be le Tard-Venus or la Tard-Venus?
Or, if she married a man named Leo, would he be a Leo-Tard?
|Date: 2009/04/16 01:43:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/04/16 01:58:55, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The angel in the upper left corner appears to be engaging in projectile vomiting, undoubtedly as a form of worship.
|Date: 2009/04/16 05:43:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Joseph is a TARD:
|Date: 2009/04/17 00:41:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
He would point at the colored part and shout, "See? See? Those are the flames of hell, waiting for you and every other evilutionist if you don't all repent right now!!"
Well, he'd take 35,000 words to say it, but that's the gist anyway.
edited to add: Oh bother, just saw bfish's post.
|Date: 2009/04/19 04:28:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A box of rocks contributes to theology:
Wow! Where to begin? Let's start with that premise: "For all impersonal, unchanging causes that have always existed, none can begin in time." Ok, right at the beginning you forgot impersonal changing causes such as a meta-universe that constantly calves off new universes. Your premise is not complete, so your argument is dead in the first line. FAIL 1!
But there's a deeper problem with your premise: something that exists eternally exists at all times, including now! Do you even understand what you're talking about when you say, "always existed"? Since the existence of impersonal, unchanging causes is stated in your premise, it's rather unfortunate that your argument depends on them not existing! FAIL 2!
Since your argument refutes itself twice in its premise, there's no need to look at the rest of your "reasoning"?
In message 740, StephenB writes:
In blissfull ignorance that the slapping sensation on your inner thighs is caused by running with your tail between your legs.
|Date: 2009/04/20 00:39:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Has O'Leary ever actually denied being a drug addicted child molester who gets sexual pleasure from wearing dirty underwear? And has she ever actually denied being the master planner of 9/11 and doing all of Bush's torturing? After all, we know she's a foreigner. That's all the information we really need, along with her non-denial of the same.
Roll the presses! "Foreign morphodyke with dirty undies shoots up crack while molesting children and torturing decent people for Jesus. Did she also plan 9/11? She refuses to deny the charge! Hanging at 11."
|Date: 2009/04/20 03:21:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
He's back! bornagain77 is back! This time he's going on about the Shroud of Turin.
How's this sound? A death match between kairosfocus and bornagain77? Chain each of them to a keyboard, any posting less than 10,000 words is an automatic forfiture and whoever's still writing when the other contestant has slid to the floor wins.
First prize is a trip to somewhere without internet access.
Second prize is the same.
Do it for the children!
|Date: 2009/04/21 00:40:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Hey, Unpleasant Blowhard, next time you shoot your mouth off, read O'Leary first. Here she is, from the Skepticism in all the wrong places thread:
Do you begin to see why I wrote this?
Has Mrs. O'Leary ever DENIED having dirty undies, shooting up crack, molesting children or torturing for Jesus? HELL NO! And she didn't deny being the mastermind behind 9/11 either. (Although those who have read her realize that she's never going to be the mastermind behind anything except maybe fouling her linen.)
O'Leary's law: No denial = admission of guilt. You go check her underwear and see for yourself.
|Date: 2009/04/22 01:52:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
He would love to have sex, but it takes two.
|Date: 2009/04/22 07:04:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/04/23 03:29:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Poor Denyse just can't win: Slate article on how torture affects the brain:
Isn't Cambridge the university that got conned into publishing Dembski's first book? And didn't the Templeton Foundation once give Dembski a large advance to write a book? And now they're both ganging up on his sweetheart. That must burn.
|Date: 2009/04/23 06:51:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
JAD gets tough!
Message 500:
You'd better watch out, Alan Fox, JAD's on to you!
|Date: 2009/04/24 01:14:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Please post it here if you kept a copy.
|Date: 2009/04/24 01:18:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Marisa Gilbert and Elizabeth Ross aren't bad either.
We should have a Babes of Science vs Babes of UD competition. We get Natalia, Marisa and Elizabeth. UD gets ... 'scuse me, I suddenly don't feel too good.
|Date: 2009/04/24 06:05:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
vjtorley explains God's grace:
Boy, those Canaanites sure were lucky! I guess God killed them just in the nick of time, or they would have done something awful.
This thread is pure gold.
|Date: 2009/04/24 15:53:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/04/24 16:13:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
When Barry started talking about C.S. Lewis and Tao, I wondered WTF? Lewis is about as far from any Tao I've ever heard of as JoeG and clear thinking. A little Googling cleared things up:
C.S. Lewis: Natural Law, the Law in our Hearts.
ET change grammatical error.
|Date: 2009/04/24 19:22:00, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Looks like some deleting got done in the Quote of the Day thread:
|Date: 2009/04/25 00:42:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
O'Leary gets it right:
|Date: 2009/04/27 04:30:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I don't think Gonzalez is doing anything with climate, he's looking for the beginning of the next sunspot cycle, which is late coming.
Our sun has an 11/22 year sunspot cycle in which sunspots numbers start very low (currently none), climb over five and a half years until the surface of the sun is covered with sunspots, then decline back to zero after about eleven years. The sun then repeats that performance, but with the magnetic polarity of the spots reversed to make a 22 year total cycle.
The current cycle has been stuck on "no spots at all" for a long time now and people are wondering when the heck they're going to start reappearing.
Ham radio operators and short wave broadcasters are especially concerned because radiation from a spotty sun beefs up the ionosphere here on earth and that makes for excellent long-range radio transmissions.
Sky gazers are also concerned because the same radiation that beefs up the ionosphere generates some excellent auroras.
|Date: 2009/04/27 04:36:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Hats off to Bradford at Telec Tard. In his "Key Questions: Part 1", he gives a link to an article by Peter S. Williams which includes this quote and the source for the quote:
He gives the source for that quote as, "Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (IVP, 1993), p. 115."
Thank you Bradford and thank you Professor Johnson. The next time UD gets huffy about calling IDers Creationists, I'm going to use it.
|Date: 2009/04/28 04:30:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Yeah, it makes the plane too heavy to take off and everything dies in the crash and fire. Maybe that's what's driving all those animals extinct. Or maybe they'd just rather die than be locked into an aluminum cylinder with the Honorable Grandmother.
Denyse, "plane" = something you fly in. "plain" = what you wanted to say. i.e. on the same level.
|Date: 2009/04/28 06:43:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Here's a little more information on sunspots. Apparently there is something going on because they should be building up by now.
As Wes noted, the sunspots started to come back a year ago. All the ham radio operators were cheering with visions of distant stations blasting from their headphones and now it's gone back to zero.
I hope we're not heading for another Maunder Minimum, which was a long period with no sunspots back in the 17th century. The Maunder Minimum also coincided with the "little ice age". If we are getting another one, it will certainly put the dampers on global warming - for a while.
Unfortunately, when the sun returns to its normal output and the more powerful sunlight hits the earth which will have much more CO2 in its atmosphere by then, we'll get global warming on steroids.
I think the ID position on this is that we'll all be raptured into Jesus' arms by then, so who cares?
|Date: 2009/04/28 06:54:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oh well. "Plain" as in Seringetti Plain - flat surface with all the animals running around on it.
Hey, that would pass muster at UD.
|Date: 2009/04/28 23:32:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You forgot the Dreaded Palin-Jindal Presidental ticket.
"End of the world. Pictures at eleven."
|Date: 2009/05/01 00:40:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's God's work. See SIG below.
|Date: 2009/05/01 00:45:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
There's also a movie, "21 Grams" made on this subject. Stars Sean Penn and IMDB gives it 7.9 stars.
|Date: 2009/05/02 22:57:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Allen MacNeill pins O'Leary's ears back rather impressively in the "Why do evolutionary psychologists exist?" thread.
O'Leary opens with a confused letter on the mind's inherent tendency to spot "agents" (anything with a mind, such as bears, wolves, and other things that go bump in the woods) and then expounds on it at length, proving that she's totally unclear on the concept.
MacNeill sets her straight in replys 3 & 4 and again in 8.
rvb8 (r0b?) joins in on the fun in #5 and Ludwig puts another knife in in post 7.
So far, no reply from O'Leary. Not a good day for Granny Tard.
|Date: 2009/05/04 00:54:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
What does he say about some of the consequences of C being 60 orders of magnitude faster in the past? I'm thinking of things like E=MC2. If energy given off by an atomic process* was suddenly to increase by (60 orders of magnitude) squared, striking a match would incinerate the solar system.
But not to worry, since the nuclear reactions at the center of the sun would have already incinerated the galaxy.
This was brought up years ago when Barry Setterfield first brought up his CDK (c decay) theory. I believe the phrase back then was "nuclear campfires".
As a final comment on the soundness of this science, Salvador Cordova loves the C decay idea. Nuff said!
* I am not a nuclear physicist nor do I play one on TV, but from what I've heard from those who are nuclear physicists, when a chemical reaction gives off heat, the heat ultimately comes from some atomic bonds being formed or broken. This gives the resultant atoms a very tiny bit less mass than the ones that went into the reaction and this tiny mass provides the heat and flames at the rate of E=MC2. So if C increases by 60 magnitudes, don't scratch that match! Or metabolize, for that matter.
|Date: 2009/05/05 01:54:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ooohh! Dr. Dr. Master Dembski is going to be sooo jealous!
|Date: 2009/05/07 00:24:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
In the same thread, Young Salvador Misses the Point:
|Date: 2009/05/07 01:09:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome by John Sanford. Just another wet dream of Salvador's.
From a review:
As I said, another one of Young Salvador's Wet Dreams. Though WTF this has to do with Christ's geneology is still beyond me.
Wait! I missed this review:
Jebus! I keep finding more TARD! From the same review as the last one:
Aaargh! Stop me before I edit again! From one of the one star reviews:
These reviews almost make me want to buy the book. Too bad it's out of stock.
|Date: 2009/05/07 06:39:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse is running her first contest.
That reminds me of an old Beetle Bailey cartoon. The doctor is talking to Beetle. Business is slow, so they're going to have a special. With every two shots, you get a free enema.
|Date: 2009/05/09 16:51:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Reading StephenB softens your brain. It's got me thinking of this:
|Date: 2009/05/09 17:00:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Nils, it's been about six hours since you asked that question. So far we have had five real live biologists, two student biologists and one person who was trained in biology, but works in another field respond to you.
Why don't you ask that same question on Unintended Dullards and listen to the crickets chirp?
I'll give you a bright shiny nickle if you can find even one biologist on UD.
Hell, I'll give you the nickle if you can find one person on UD who doesn't have his head stuck up his rectum.
ETA: What are your credentials?
|Date: 2009/05/10 00:44:03, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Walter ReMine favors us with more "info" on The Biotic Message. This caught my eye:
Is it even possible for common descent to not create a hierarchical nested pattern?
|Date: 2009/05/11 03:14:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Walter ReMine lists three central claims for his Message Theory:
Goal 2 is "To look like the product of one designer (or unified design team acting together as one), and unlike the product of multiple designers acting independently."
Sounds almost like science. Except that I'm reading "Darwin-The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist" by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. (A very good book, by the way.) Here's their description of Darwin's first encounter with a marsupial:
Then he ran into his first web footed, egg laying, duck-billed platypus and soon felt the need for yet a third creator.
All science all the way!
|Date: 2009/05/13 01:13:23, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
They were not ex-hookers and they want to talk to you about their bill, the medical report and who is going to pay for the dead horse.
|Date: 2009/05/14 00:01:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Marduk gets off a good one in the next message:
|Date: 2009/05/14 02:42:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ouch! In the Theistic evolution - etc, etc, etc thread, Alan Fox gets in a zinger!
And then Nakashima twists the knife in the next response:
Better go back into hiding, Barry.
|Date: 2009/05/19 07:05:56, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
UD finally found a perfect sponsor! Just peeked at it and it was showing an ad for DIANETICS.ORG, complete with animated volcano. Refreshed three times and it was still there.
This is perfect! I'm certain that L. Ron Hubbard would have been an IDist.
|Date: 2009/05/20 00:20:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Better yet, think of sea water carried deep underground by plate tectonics and then circulating within the earth, being heated and cooled as it passes hot spots, dissolving all sorts of chemicals from the rocks it's squeezing through and the surfaces of those rocks being full of sites that act as catalysts by holding atoms in place long enough for them to join together.
Then reflect on the fact that living microbes have been found in abundance thousands of meters below the surface and that the microbes down there appear to be more ancient than surface life and the warm tidal pool or ocean looks less and less necessary to create life.
Or, as Dr. Dr. D. would say, "Who PUT those rocks there?"
|Date: 2009/05/21 00:31:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jebus! Allowing four years to get that BA, Dempski spent 19 years in college! Talk about a professional student. No wonder he wound up teaching kids at a summer camp.
Billo: "Christ. Nineteen years of college down the drain. Might as well join the fucking Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary."
|Date: 2009/05/21 07:05:37, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Kairos doesn't know the difference between math and science, either. Why am I not surprised?
|Date: 2009/05/22 00:48:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I dunno, it seems to have at least a few seams of realism in it:
Sounds like a fair assessment of some of the leading ID characters to me. And then there's this sentiment:
The ID ideal is that you respond in their general direction, but don't engage their criticisms. Draw your sweater a little more tightly around you and point out that they don't have as many degrees as you do.
|Date: 2009/05/23 09:19:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I notice that clicking on the "Complexity of the cell-Expelled" video now brings up this message:
It's not illegal if Jesus says to do it.
Also, it's my understanding that O'Leary is attending the Canadian Science Whiners' Association conference where she's delivering the keynote address.
|Date: 2009/05/28 06:17:34, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Bored of the Rings?
|Date: 2009/05/28 06:31:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Fixed that for you.
|Date: 2009/05/28 06:44:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Jesse Kilgore's back! Killed dead by The God Delusion! We. Must. Make. Dawkins. Pay!
|Date: 2009/05/29 00:26:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
UDTers, if you enjoyed "Animal House" and "The National Lampoon" magazine, "Bored of the Rings" was written by the brains behind both of those.
|Date: 2009/05/29 00:38:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This one is right up there with Dembski falling for the Bible Code. A Russian UFO Crank story featured on Fox News. Nowhere but on Uncommon Descent ...
Fellas, let's get serious here. The 1908 Tunguska Event was really Jesus doing the Second Coming, but the Tsar's crack anti-Zeppelin squad mistakenly shot Him down. Why else do you think we haven't been raptured?
|Date: 2009/05/29 06:06:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski spills the beans:
Or, in plain English, "intelligent design" is an old, disproven theory.
|Date: 2009/05/31 23:49:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Don't forget the Ten Commandments:
Two commandments into the Decalogue and we've got a cracker jack Biblical Contradiction PLUS God confesses to murderous jealousy, which is considered a serious character flaw in some parts of the world.
|Date: 2009/06/01 00:13:04, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Damn! I'm reading Society Without God by Phil Zuckerman and I wanted to ask you lots and lots of questions about Sweden. According to Zuckerman, Denmark and Sweden "... are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world."
Yet they seem to be moral, prosperous, generous and generally happy. Zuckerman lived in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city (population 303,318 according to Wikipedia) for 14 months. They had a murder one year.
As a committed Christian, I was going to ask you if you thought you could screw a record like that up, but now that you've told us the truth...
P.S. To be fair, bike theft in Scandinavia is serious and getting worse.
P.P.S. You WILL all enjoy Society Without God!
|Date: 2009/06/01 06:30:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Dembski's written a really, really deep book.
For instance:
Question: As one of the only two people on earth, who would she have asked? Not Adam, he was as ignorant as Eve was.
A possible explanation for the quality of this book can be found on page 7:
|Date: 2009/06/02 00:22:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Google translates that word as "Systembolaget".
|Date: 2009/06/03 01:20:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Just in case Dr.Dr.MS.Whatever Dembski has forgotten, his original response to the "Star Chamber" was to send an email to the entire Baylor Campus stating the committee had delivered an "unqualified affirmation of my own work on intelligent design", that its report "marks the triumph of intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry" and that "dogmatic opponents of design who demanded that the Center be shut down have met their Waterloo. Baylor University is to be commended for remaining strong in the face of intolerant assaults on freedom of thought and expression."
He didn't get canned until he refused to retract the email. But that's just a pathetic level of detail.
|Date: 2009/06/05 03:14:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I wash I culd rite gud.
|Date: 2009/06/05 03:20:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
This was actually posted on 26 May, but it took a while for the projectile vomiting to subside enough so I could post:
Scuse me, I've gotta go and see a man named ...
|Date: 2009/06/08 02:57:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
She's certainly afraid of psychiatrists:
Her proof reading skills have gotten significantly worse lately:
And her basic reading comprehension skills appear to have deteriorated:
O'Leary headline:
Article quoted below that headline:
If you read the other responses in the Hippocratic thread, you'll notice that she's having her head handed to her again, so it's pretty much Situation Normal at the Tard Farm.
|Date: 2009/06/10 00:09:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
As Denyse has said, if they don't deny it, you can print it as a fact. And if you don't interview them, they can't deny it.
Makes life a lot easier for a hack.
|Date: 2009/06/10 05:34:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I ran into this by Pascal Boyer while surfing the net. The article is titled, "How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations" and it's about the mail physicists get from nuts. This rang a bell:
Boyer is the author of, "Religion Explained", still the best book I've read on how religions get started.
|Date: 2009/06/12 03:00:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Solid thinking from O'Leary:
|Date: 2009/06/12 03:08:56, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Same thread as the last one, posting #12:
Same message, after asking CannuckianYankee where he lives:
|Date: 2009/06/12 15:37:05, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You can't make this stuff up.
|Date: 2009/06/17 05:41:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The comments were closed a couple of hours ago, but now one comment has appeared. PaulBurnett brings up the fact that it's published by "Intercollegiate Studies Institute" and that ISI is a right wing organization with little or nothing to do with science.
All science so far!
|Date: 2009/06/17 05:42:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Curses! You can't wake up early enough to get ahead of Bob O'H!
|Date: 2009/06/19 19:21:47, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Those are Cheezy Poofs she's feeding that otter! Could this be why we haven't seen DaveTard lately? Is he so down and out after being kicked off of UD that he's reduced to putting on the ol' otter suit and playing piano in sleazy dives for Cheezy Poofs?
DaveTard is driven away in shame and then an otter appears, playing piano for Cheezy Poofs, possibly on a houseboat? Coincidence? I call Tard!
I know, your first instinct is hyper-skepticism. DaveTard hasn't been within two hundred pounds of getting into an otter suit in a coons age. But have you ever seen a known otter eat Cheezy Poofs?
Bearing in mind the possibility of crash diets, possibly with the use of powerful reducing mushrooms, and Cheezy Poofs being eaten like they were manna from heaven, I think the probability of that "otter" being DaveTard is better than 10^150.
|Date: 2009/06/21 23:52:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
But what about us tardaholics? Have you ever gone cold turkey from a three thread a day tard habit? It's brutal man, brutal.
|Date: 2009/06/23 00:05:00, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think that Francis Bacon had a thing or two to say about that back in the 1500s:
|Date: 2009/06/23 06:24:37, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It's time they killed that thread. It's taking forever to load and when all the waiting is over, all you have is another Thread of Tards.
Hey Gordon, here's an idea: Change your name and don't tell anybody about it. Then nobody can ever out you again.
|Date: 2009/06/24 01:12:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That's was supposed to be chef theoretician, but then his barbeque stand in Brazos went out of business and now nothing matters any more.
|Date: 2009/06/25 00:34:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Saw that book at Borders today and almost bought it. If only the latest collection of "Pearls Before Swine" hadn't caught my eye ...
I may get it next time. Even the Amazon reviews are interesting:
|Date: 2009/06/25 01:17:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Why I love UD:
|Date: 2009/06/27 10:09:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That should be Palm and Tard reading.
|Date: 2009/06/29 02:57:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
bornagain77 explains how SETI can find alien life:
That reminds me of a Peter O'Toole movie from the seventies. Can't remember the title, but this piece of dialog is stuck in my memory: "When did you first realize that you're God?" "When I realized that every time I prayed, I was talking to myself."
|Date: 2009/07/01 01:44:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Gil is going to be a suicide someday. He'll be flying his hang glider and just won't pull out of a dive.
So what "evidence and logic" will Gil serve up?
That sounds more like Tard-Soaked Ad Hominem Straw Men than "evidence and logic" to me.
More like enemies of "evidence and logic".
Dogs and cats living together!
Well, you sure can't help yourself. Don't fly until you've calmed down.
|Date: 2009/07/01 02:29:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The Horror!
"WHO is writing an article for our journal?!?!?!?"
P.S. There's a reason Mario didn't tell you about the conference.
|Date: 2009/07/02 00:16:07, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That kid's wearing an ABBA tee shirt! Must've read the editorial.
|Date: 2009/07/02 00:51:31, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Well, someone once wrote that C.S. Lewis's prime strength as a theologian was his complete ignorance of the previous 100 years of theological developments. This enabled him to say things with a straight face that made real theologians shoot coffee out of their noses, but to his lay listeners it was a blessed return to the good old days.
Chesterton's main strength seems to have been to miss the bleeding obvious. For instance, he thought it was significant that cultures around the world have similar laws. Therefore Jesus. Other people note that there are very few cultures full of people that want to be robbed, therefore laws against robbery. I've already given my opinion on his Father Brown mystery stories.
|Date: 2009/07/02 00:57:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Plus quantum non-locality is not supernatural. I think he's in waaay over his head.
|Date: 2009/07/03 00:17:37, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Your doin it wrong!
|Date: 2009/07/03 22:44:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Damn right he ain't no euro! He likes women, especially Louis's mother.
|Date: 2009/07/14 05:41:06, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Life from Nimbin!
|Date: 2009/07/14 06:12:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I was stumbling around on www.salon.com and came across this article from the last election season: My candidate, myself.
I was struck by the lead paragraph (that's "lede" in Denyse talk):
The article is based on Unskilled and Unaware of It by David Dunning and Justin Kruger.
I know Dunning and Kruger have been covered on this thread before, but it never helps to be reminded of their main points when dealing with Uncommon Dunces:
Could you possibly come up with a better three line description of the inmates at UD?
Testing a bunch of Cornell undergraduates, they got these results:
Hmmm.. KF, Denyse, Granville, Jason, herb, Lamarck, Joseph, Barbie Doll, Cannuck - boy, does that explain a lot!
The author also points out, from her own book, On Being Certain,
I don't want to discourage people who are trying to reason with these 12th percentile people, but man have you got your work set out for you!
|Date: 2009/07/14 06:33:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Does anybody else enjoy watching Cornelius get stomped in the very first reply to his OP?
Even idnet.com.au is less than impressed:
|Date: 2009/07/15 00:27:21, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/07/17 04:39:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Possible Salvador Sock Sighting:
|Date: 2009/07/20 06:57:44, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Gil Dodgen (unwittingly) speaks the truth:
IDers please take note.
|Date: 2009/07/20 07:00:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
herb is a sock:
|Date: 2009/07/22 03:21:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Mapou maps out the cranks
Mapou, of "Nothing Can Move in Spacetime! By Definition!" fame gives us a list of cranks:
Stephen Hawking
Kip Thorne
John A. Wheeler
Richard Feynman
Michio Kaku
John Gribbin
Carl Sagan
John Kramer
J. Richard Gott III
Hans Moravec
David Deutsch
Igor Novikov
John Baez
Ronald Mallett
Jack Sarfatti
Kurt Gödel
Paul Davies
Albert Einstein
If only they would embrace ID.
|Date: 2009/07/27 01:16:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
What would Kairos Mullings write about on his other nine and a half posts?
|Date: 2009/07/27 01:30:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ok, God-Hating Materialist Bastard, what have YOU ever done to entertain the fundamentalist tards? I think we owe the man who sent us Barb a round of hearty "Thank you, Dr. Dembski!"s. Sort of like saying Grace before each meal.
|Date: 2009/07/27 01:52:52, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Step Four: After Barbara Forrest allows herself to be deposed and comes out of it looking like a champion, challenge her to a debate just as if you hadn't turned tail and run away.
Step Five: Get Dave Springer to email the challenge to Barbara Forrest so he can feel like a man too.
|Date: 2009/07/27 03:07:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/07/27 03:31:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denies the Trinity, eh? Burn him.
|Date: 2009/07/27 03:35:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
And while you're at it, explain the vestigial wings on those crickets. You can do that using either ID-thought or YEC-thought.
|Date: 2009/07/28 02:39:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse discovers words of wisdom:
Denyse claims to be a journalist, so she presumably has a powerful urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, lick Dr.Dr. Dembski's shoes and win the group's approval by trashing dissenters.
And she and the Dr.Dr. also belong to a group that historically prefers to burn dissenters.
|Date: 2009/07/28 03:05:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
O'Leary's post just gets better and better. She quotes second hand from an interview with Thomas Bouchard, a pioneer in twin studies. Bouchard states,
I'd like to see Dr.Dr. Dembski say in a graduate seminar at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, "Most of this stuff in our apologetics class is junk."
"Unemployed bloody pulp" would describe his condition quite accurately.
|Date: 2009/07/29 00:54:24, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Haven't heard from k.e. lately. He must have one hell of a hangover.
|Date: 2009/07/30 00:57:12, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A love ewe?
|Date: 2009/07/31 02:27:49, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
That Satirizing Scientism website that Gage recommended contains some serious ... um, I'm not sure what the hell you'd call it. "Tard" doesn't seem to accurately describe it. Childish meanderings maybe? Here's the current entry, under a full color picture of Bugs Bunny. You try to describe it.
Well hell, I'm convinced! Don't know how I ever believed in that evolution stuff. How can we possibly answer powerful, fact-filled presentations like these?
|Date: 2009/07/31 02:44:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I can think of no other explanation for why the Common Ancestry: More on the Infant Grasping Reflex home page is displaying an ad for Charmin toilet paper.
ETA: And it's an ad for Charmin's toilet paper at Wal-Mart.
|Date: 2009/08/03 00:08:09, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I just checked out this post and it looks like he's reading this blog. Bless his widdle heart!
Hey Goober: Jesus has been dead for almost 2000 years. You're being a bit of a sucker, although you have lots of company. You don't need Jesus to know you're more important than a collection of random chemicals. It makes a really BIG difference how those chemicals are arranged. Think of it this way - a lump of coal and the Hope Diamond are both made of pure carbon. Do you think it takes Jesus to realize that the Hope Diamond is somehow worth more than an equal weight of coal?
You're a sentient being, one of the rarest things in the known universe. Don't believe me? Go outside on a clear night and look up. See all that blackness? That's vacuum. No sentient beings there. See that light stuff? Those are nuclear furnaces. No sentient beings there either. 99.999999999999999999 something percent of the universe is, literally, dumb as dirt. You're special, you sentient being you.
You and other beings like you (and lesser beings, like apes and other animals with a mental life) are more important than everything else in the universe. And you don't need Jesus to tell you that. Which is a good thing, because as I said, he's dead.
You seem to be shy and unsure of yourself, maybe with deep seated feelings of inferiority. The deletings and bannings are a dead giveaway. Look at Dr. Dr. Dembski for another example. (And Clive too!)
No problem, you write what you want on Satirizing Scientism and we'll answer you here. We'll help you work your way past your Jesus problem. Ok?
Remember, you're a diamond.
|Date: 2009/08/03 00:14:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Ah.... k.e.. is back ... and in perfect working order.
|Date: 2009/08/03 00:34:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The UDites are adding FCSI to their posts so fast the blogging software can't keep up.
P.S. Click on the "Dover Predictions Made" entry and read the Magic 8 Ball. Classic!
|Date: 2009/08/04 01:23:14, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
O'Leary sets our minds at rest:
Whew! That takes a load off my mind.
|Date: 2009/08/05 00:25:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Nobody expects the full blown inquisition!
|Date: 2009/08/05 23:55:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The stupid - it hurts!
|Date: 2009/08/13 18:54:15, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think Douglas Adams mentioned a similar incident:
|Date: 2009/08/15 01:37:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Paul Giem brings out the science...
|Date: 2009/08/17 13:57:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Gordon almost gets it right:
Closer than most of his tries.
|Date: 2009/08/19 03:56:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse gives Ken Miller a rare compliment:
All right! The Heavens (and Ken Miller) rejoice!! I think she's 100 percent serious here. This is a complement straight from the heart. Way to go, Ken Miller! This may be the only thing that IDists and Sane People agree on: Ken Miller and Michael Behe are not in the same category!!
|Date: 2009/08/20 02:37:56, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It was:
|Date: 2009/08/21 00:32:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|I read somewhere (possibly here at ATBC) that the fastest way to increase your citation count is to publish something with a blatent error in it. I think Dembski's count is going to go way up.
|Date: 2009/08/22 04:10:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Gordon accidently explains a lot:
|Date: 2009/08/24 00:47:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I don't understand this. I checked the first four references and only the first has comments turned off. That's vintage Dembski all right, but why are all the others in that list?
|Date: 2009/08/26 00:39:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the Wikipedia article on Wesley Willis:
Fixed that for you, Wiki.
|Date: 2009/08/26 23:43:40, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
So we had Christianity for almost 1600 years and nothing much happened, then the Enlightenment was kicked off by the re-discovery of ancient Greek writings and science flowered. Do you think it is a coincedence(sic) that everything took off after that? Do you think 1600 = 2000? Are you a Tard? (Trick question. Don't answer that, either it will hurt or you will be a liar.)
|Date: 2009/08/26 23:49:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I see a table full of socks.
|Date: 2009/08/27 05:12:53, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Kairosfocus has outdone himself!
blah blah blah blah
A 29 point manifesto!
|Date: 2009/08/28 03:45:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the Lycan and Dualism thread:
Fits right in with ID.
Later, in same thread:
Jebus! There's another one!
And of course, Kairosfocus can't resist:
The whole thread is a tard mine.
|Date: 2009/08/30 10:19:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
WASTE of BREATH (above):
Anybody know why he's referring to Richard Dawkins as "CRD"?
|Date: 2009/08/30 16:41:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I think I'll start referring to Flaming Gordon Mullings as FGM of TIKI.
|Date: 2009/08/31 06:39:25, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Alfred Russel writes about D'Arcy Thompson and laments the demise of mathematical explanations of biological phenomena.
You might hope that someone would reply with something about evo-devo, but no such luck. Instead, his replies are:
1) DATCG blames it all on the atheists who quote Jefferson but forget to mention that the wall of separation is from a letter to the Danbury Baptists and that Jefferson supported purchasing Bibles for *schools.
2) IRQ Conflict quotes 13 verses from Hosea.
3) Tajimas D. says Thompson's work demonstrates intelligence in biology like Ruelle's and Takens' work demonstrates intelligence in turbulence. That is to say, "not at all."
Looks like two measures of Science all the Way followed by a whiff of sarcasm.
*Edit: I originally put Indians because Jefferson did support sending Missionaries to the long suffering Indians because he thought it would make them easier to rule over. I note that DATCG didn't mention the Jefferson Bible, where Jefferson bought a cheap Bible, cut out all the parts he didn't like or thought were BS (the entire Old Testament and a lot of the New). You can still buy copies of it. It's a very small book.
|Date: 2009/09/01 05:11:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
You should also read A. N. Wilson's biography of C. S. Lewis. That guy had some serious kinks! For instance, Lewis's mother died when Lewis was 10 at which time he was packed off to a rather horrid English boarding school. The headmaster was eventually committed to an insane asylum some years after Lewis and his older brother left. The Lewis family was from Northern Ireland. So there he was, aged 10, suddenly with no mother, a very distant father and in a strange school run by a sadist nut in a foreign country. Not too surprisingly, he got a little bent, emotionally. He spent the rest of his life looking for substitutes for his mother. Wilson also says his "mildly sadistic" tendencies began at that school.
Lewis and his friend, Paddy Moore were in W.W. I together. His friend didn't come back. So Clive Staples moved in with his mother, Jane Moore, and they lived together until Moore was hospitalized in the late 1940s. Wilson makes it clear that the relationship included sex.
They had to be doubly sly about it because at that time young Oxford scholars like him weren't even supposed to be married. Lewis customarily introduced Mrs. Moore as his mother. Lewis himself referred to this episode in his biography: "But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice in this reticence. All I can or need to say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged".
Just to make up for living with a woman 27 years older for decades, near the end of his life he met Joy Gresham, 17 years younger than himself and married her.
If you want to see most of Lewis's effects today, you have to travel to Billy Graham's old alma mater, Wheaton college in Illinois where you may see, amongst many other artifacts, his collection of pipes and liquor decanters. What they make of that at tee-totaling Wheaton I do not know.
|Date: 2009/09/01 07:00:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The McWhorter-Behe interview is back up now: Here.
There's also this explanation from Robert Wright, who is apparently the head honcho at Bloggingheads:
Meanwhile, Shawn Carroll seems to have left Blogginheads in disgust because they let Behe in.
I'm a little disappointed by all this because I thought McWhorter withdrew the video because he made such a complete fool of himself. (Just listen to the video.) I was on the verge of starting a campaign to demand that McWhorter take his medicine and restore the video and now it's out of my hands and with ancilliary damage.
Meanwhile, Uncommon Descent will continue to delete messages and 404 threads while complaining that Behe isn't loved on Blogginheads.
By the way, "diavlog" isn't a misprint.
|Date: 2009/09/02 00:30:56, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
17 years younger than Lewis, not 17 years old. She was a divorced mother of two when they met. (Problems there too, since the Church of England had problems with divorcees remarrying in those days.)
I'd like to say that Lewis was not a Calvinist because he realized that Calvin's doctrine of predestination was a very good reductio-ad-absurdum proof of the non-existence of an omniscient God. As in, if God knows everything then He knows every thought and emotion you will ever have before you know it, making you a helpless puppet rigidly following the path that was laid down for you before you were even born.
But, having read Lewis, I doubt if that thought ever occurred to him. He wasn't a Calvinist because he was a Church of England boy from the word go.
|Date: 2009/09/02 00:35:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Wonderful instrument, the HST. Opened up vast new areas of astronomical research when the HST team proved once and for all that the stars are "...kind of blurry."
Won the "Peer-Reviewed Research in ID" award from the Dembski Spaced Institute.
|Date: 2009/09/02 05:52:32, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Date: 2009/09/02 23:54:28, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Sex and the Single Scientist! Loved that book!
The one on the right in the first picture is also foxy, although she seems to get her sweater sense from Dembski. But on her, it looks good!
Both of these pictures will join my growing selection of science porn.
|Date: 2009/09/03 00:14:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Not to mention that if you take away the valve you've got a two-cycle engine and if you take away the spark plug or the wire you've got a diesel, both internal combustion engines.
But aside from that and a few other mistakes, Cornelius is correct, using the ID definition of correct.
|Date: 2009/09/03 00:22:54, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Is Erasmus, FCD really a Denyse O'Leary sock?
Does anybody else in the world talk that way?
We report, you decide.
|Date: 2009/09/03 04:36:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Potential new ID recruit? The wife of the Japanese Prime Minister elect says, "While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," she explains in the tome she published last year. "It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."
She also knew Tom Cruise in a former incarnation - when he was Japanese.
I think she'd make a great Discovery Institute Fellow. I wonder how she feels about Irreducible Complexity? HIV Denial? Has she ever expressed an interest in the Baylor Cafeteria? I wonder what her position is on Obama's birth certificate? I'm looking for a picture of her in a sweater, talking about Jesus with Denyse O'Leary and Michelle Bachmann.
|Date: 2009/09/10 06:31:16, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Is there anything in the world that Cornelius Hunter doesn't think is religion? Gretta Garbo's aunt Bessie's knees? Maybe a sharp stick in the eye?
|Date: 2009/09/11 20:32:02, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
GEM of Riki-Tiki lives in Jamaica, which has more churches per capita than any other nation on earth. It also has a crime rate that has spiraled so out of control that an Honorary English Ambassador was found beaten and strangled to death in his own home in a wealthy neighborhood a couple of days ago.
His main job as honorary Ambassador was providing council to English crime victims.
Found murdered, Jamaica has highest murder rate in the world.
Beaten and strangled because he was gay.
Perhaps Mr. Gordon should stop preaching to the rest of the world and concentrate on his own gay-bashing, church-going xtians.
|Date: 2009/09/13 15:20:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Joseph in the same thread:
That whooshing sound you heard was Joseph missing the point.
|Date: 2009/09/13 15:32:38, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
God told me KF lives in Jamaica in a dream. Now who you gonna believe? Your fallible human "sources" or something I dreamed God told me?
Consider carefully before you answer lest you and bfish wind up in the ID section of hell, which reeketh with the stench of straw men soaked in the flaming oil of ad hominem, which you just can't ever get out of your clothes.
|Date: 2009/09/14 03:52:33, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Cornelius Hunter is turning into a real asshole.
Then, in the comments section, we find:
I quit reading there. This guy is turning into a Dembski class asshole.
Edit: Typo
|Date: 2009/09/14 06:40:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|Bob O'H was not impressed with those references either.
|Date: 2009/09/15 06:16:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A Tard is Born
niwrad takes a lesson from Donald Rumsfeld:
BillB tries to explain in the only reply so far, but I don't think there's much hope.
|Date: 2009/09/15 06:31:17, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Some days I just love UD
Mapou runs face first into reality:
|Date: 2009/09/16 06:03:35, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Edited to add this:
Cornelius tries some street theater:
Move along, nothing to see here, just keep moving.
|Date: 2009/09/20 23:33:45, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Or at least we shall regard him as such.
|Date: 2009/09/22 06:51:08, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse opens with sort of an article on how atheists are distrusted and hated. Except it's not an article, it's the results of a Google search.
Then she says it's the first step in geting atheists protected by hate crime legislation. Then she says the government has just implemented such legislation, only again her cite is to a Google search and the first article I read from that search (Hate Crime in America: The Debate Continues | NIJ Journal Issue No ...) doesn't mention any recent laws.
Then we get this remarkable sentence:
What The F___!!! O'Leary helped draft a Constitution??!! Of a country? Maybe as a typist.
I call BS on this one a thousand times over with a cherry on top. Denyse is entering the advanced stages of Alzheimers now.
The rest of the message is standard O'Leary blather except that atheists are now equated with Islamic Fascists. Nothing to see here, move along.
|Date: 2009/09/22 23:35:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Yeah, I had lunch too. Now it's all over the desk and floor.
|Date: 2009/09/22 23:50:20, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
How the mind of a Biblical literalist works as described by KairosFocus:
The "provenance" is that the handle has "oxford" embedded in it, the "chain of custody" is an anonymous handle on a whacko blog and there are no obvious signs of fraud to a person who happens to be dead or in a coma. "...so on the Ancient Documents Rule — failing credible explanation otherwise [i.e burden of disproof is now on those who would reject the programs] — it seems on preponderance of evidence these are the right 'original' pgms..."
Life really starts to make sense when you abandon logic and evidence and just start using your God-given Discernment.
|Date: 2009/09/24 00:12:19, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
The Constitutional Scholar explains herself:
Later, in the same thread:
Well, a free plane ride! That makes her a regular Tardus Jefferson. I wonder if she testified for the constitution or against it?
|Date: 2009/09/24 00:54:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the Darrell Falk's Misshapen Theology thread:
All science so far!
|Date: 2009/09/24 01:23:13, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Wow! That Darrell Falk's Misshapen Theology thread is a goldmine of religious tardism. tragic mishap steps up to the plate in messages 16 through 19 and gives a detailed rundown on some of God's greatest evils. He even has a run at Calvinism. And he's supposedly on religion's side. Some samples:
All science so far!
|Date: 2009/09/24 01:40:29, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oh Joy! Same Darell Falk's Misshapen thread:
45,000 words later, KF finishes and (rimshot) Frank Beckwith replies to him! Tardfight!! Get the popcorn!!
|Date: 2009/09/24 04:16:05, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Kirk Cameron and his Darwin project makes it to Salon.com
|Date: 2009/09/30 05:40:11, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
How to argue like an IDiot
Staring the inimitable (and evidently undeniable) niwraD in the "Turing machines, cells and why both are designed" thread:
Well, there you have it! "IC = no evolution". If it looks like it's IC, then it is. End of story. Nothing to see here. Move along. You kids get offa my lawn!
|Date: 2009/10/01 06:56:05, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Corny can't stop itchin the wound!Our boy Cornelius just can't leave Karl Giberson alone:
|Date: 2009/10/02 06:58:14, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I'd like to try, but comments don't seem to be enabled.
I'm pretty sure Weasel 1 is not the program Dawkins used because IIRC he says in the book that he wrote it in Apple BASIC and then re-wrote it in Pascal.
I think that's been mentioned on UD once or twice too, but trust Dembski and company to miss and/or ignore that.
|Date: 2009/10/07 01:33:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Speaking of the "How to become an IDer in two weeks" thread, here are some simplified instructions:
1: Using plenty of lubricant, force the crown of the skull up against your rectum, then, using the 40 pound sledge hammer ...
|Date: 2009/10/07 05:42:27, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Oddly for someone with an Irish name, she is actually a convert to Catholicism. She must have married Irish.
On a similar note, Dembski is a convert to red-neck protestantism. Dembski is currently in bed with the Southern Baptists, but I think that's more for the paycheck and the (very small amount of) prestige he gets from being a faculty member of Southwestern Bible and Barbeque. He'd really give his eye teeth to be able to dine at the Baylor cafeteria.
|Date: 2009/10/08 04:38:41, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
It must suck to be Dembski.
|Date: 2009/10/08 23:30:30, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
In the "Reaping the Whirlwind" thread, absolutist has a little reading comprehension problem:
And the thread actually gets worse from there. I'm developing a visceral loathing for all things UD (and fundamentalism of all stripes.) Immoral perverts.
|Date: 2009/10/09 00:25:22, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
More from the "Reaping the Whirlwind" thread:
William J. Murray is a Deep Tard:
Billy J., have you ever heard of the Golden Rule? You know, the one that starts with, "Do unto others ..."? It was once advocated by a guy named Jesus. I'm sure you at least know that name.
|Date: 2009/10/11 21:14:04, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
|He was banned for our sins.
|Date: 2009/10/18 09:08:36, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
I wonder if this is going to get Dembski in any kind of trouble at Southwestern Bible and Barbeque. That place is totally controlled by the Southern Baptists, its president is Paige Patterson, who was a biggie in the conservative revolt that kicked all the "liberals" out of the various Baptist seminaries and ol' Paige himself fired the only female professor at Southwestern B&B.
And now we find that Dembski apparently doesn't believe that Genesis is inerrant ...
Which means, of course, that God isn't inerrant, since He wrote that particular book ...
|Date: 2009/10/19 01:48:46, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
A hideous color scheme, but a readable one. So many "challenged" bloggers forget such important things as having some kind of contrast, either in brightness or color, between your background and your text.
There's no doubt that this is batshit77's blog, though. I clicked on this ( http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc8z67wz_3g3vnsmcn ) at the extreme end of the blog and found these deathless words:
Aaahhh! That's the Hard Tard and 100% pure ba77! I was going to rate the blog, but "batshit" doesn't seem to be one of the allowable ratings.
|Date: 2009/10/19 23:29:58, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Denyse goes to Waterloo:
Don't read that, Denyse. You know how reality makes you break out in a rash.
|Date: 2009/10/19 23:32:59, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the UD OP:
"Note: Apparently, Bill Dembski is taking care of the award."
Which means you will get your award shortly after Bill delivers that bottle of single malt scotch.
|Date: 2009/10/19 23:40:01, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
From the article:
Translation: Unlike his older brother Rush, David Limbaugh was not blessed with an anal cyst, so he had to join the National Guard to avoid the draft. However, like his older brother, he enthusiastically supported the Vietnam war, just not for himself.
|Date: 2009/10/22 02:08:57, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Revealed! Why Berlinski did not include Toronto in his upcoming speaking tour:
Even a second rate imitation of William F. Buckley jr. has some self respect.
|Date: 2009/10/22 03:56:51, Link
|Author: CeilingCat
Tomorrow's ID headlines today! From the November, 2009 Scientific American:
Waterloo! Waterloo! The idea of evolution is failing and probably won't last until the 21st century!!
Uhm ...
|Date: 2009/10/22 23:01:48, Link
|Author: CeilingCat