What's "Christian" about it?

The Church as thug

Nothing epitomizes right-wing Catholicism like the media ministry of Church Militant. Its principals (like the amazing Michael Voris) diligently churn out their rigorously medieval perspectives on current events as they fight the evil heresy of modernism. An excellent example of Church Militant's approach to Christianity was poured out on June 30, 2016, in a 40-second clip that fairly brims with vitriol.

In case you have any difficulty with the video, here is a word-for-word transcript:

A 30-year-old Utah man has become the country's first transgender Senate nominee from a major party. Referred to as "Misty Snow," the Mormon from Salt Lake is challenging Sen. Mike Lee for the U.S. Senate seat as the nominee of the Democrat Party. As self-described "conservative" Democrat currently working as a marriage therapist, Snow began acting as a woman in 2014, and believes his identity as a transgender will assist him in the upcoming election. Similarly, another man, thinking he's a woman and also named "Misty," clinched the Democratic nomination for Congress in Colorado Tuesday.

Several items stand out. First of all, spokesperson Christine Niles lays it on with a trowel as she refuses to use the gendered pronouns appropriate to Snow, who is deemed to be merely “acting” as a woman. Also, as a true disciple of the Prince of Peace, Niles makes a point of referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Party,” using a ploy made famous decades ago by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Finally, note how she closes her report, referring to the successful transgender candidate in Colorado as “another man.”

I suppose it's fortunate that the people of Church Militant fancy themselves a beleaguered remnant, standing together bravely for their one-dimensional version of Christ while the forces of Satan assail them from all sides. For one thing, their unremitting nastiness is scarcely likely to swell their ranks. For another, this way they can glory in their martyrdom of being ignored as insignificant.

California scheming

Once again—with feeling

The California primary election is traditionally too late to make a significant difference in the outcome of presidential nomination contests. This year turned out to be yet another damp squib—except this time conspiracy theories have bloomed as never before. In the imaginations of Sen. Sanders' most enthusiastic supporters, dark powers have stolen their hero's “landslide victory.” A Bernie landslide in California? This is a startling conclusion to anyone who watched the election night returns. Clinton declared victory that evening and her edge of half a million votes was a compelling basis for her statement.

This is the point at which pearl-clutching hyperventilation took over. Facebook posts breathlessly insisted that two-thirds of the Sanders vote had been suppressed. Furthermore, a lawsuit had found two and a half million uncounted votes. This amazing discovery had apparently been made by cleverly looking at information posted on the California Secretary of State's public website—the same data the Secretary of State's office has been routinely posting since the year they acquired a website. Unprocessed votes are tracked on the Elections page labeled with Unprocessed ballots status, which is updated at the end of each business day. That's a pretty good level of transparency, which is old news for those of us who have observed several elections in a row, but shocking and head-exploding information for certain members of the Bernie brigade, who cannot come to terms with their candidate's loss.

With fifty-eight counties working individually through provisional and late mail-in ballots, the tallying process in California is reliably slow and tedious. They have thirty days to deliver their final counts to the Secretary of State, whose office posts partial returns as they come in. Quite naturally, therefore, questions have been raised over the practice of declaring a winner on election night. The Secretary of State doesn't ever do this. It's the news media. Well, what do you expect from them? They want a story and they're impatient to get one. In addition, the final vote tally never changes the election night results.

Never? Well, hardly ever. Clinton's election night lead of 472,000 votes made news networks confident about announcing that she had carried California, even if the uncounted votes could theoretically overturn the results. Sanders had been getting approximately 43% of the votes in the Democratic primary. He would need as much as 65% of the uncounted Democratic primary votes to overtake Clinton. The probability of that? Extremely close to zero. First of all, the 2.5 million uncounted ballots were statewide, comprising voters who participated in the Democratic primary, those who participated in the Republican primary, and those who participated in neither. Perhaps as many as 1.5 million were pertinent to the Clinton/Sanders contest. If Sanders got 1.0 million of those and Clinton got 0.5 million, the senator from Vermont would overtake the former senator from New York. Some handicappers think Clinton's margin will shrink from approximately 13 percentage points over Sanders to perhaps something as low as the high single digits, but no one is laying odds that the results of the Democratic primary will actually flip. Well, except for some of Sanders' die-hard supporters, who cannot let go of the impossible dream.

I mentioned that final tallies hardly ever reverse election results. There is one notable case from 2010. It was the race for state attorney general and was “too close to call” on election night. Nevertheless, the Republican nominee seized on his election night lead to declare victory and celebrate the results. The Democrat held her fire and cautioned her supporters to be patient. As the counting progressed, she overtook the Republican and the final count was in her favor, making Kamala Harris the new attorney general of California. I wrote a blog post on this contest before the definitive count was published, successfully predicting her victory based on the county trends. There's nothing similar about the Clinton/Sanders contest to suggest there could be a similar reversal. That race is over except for tweaks in the totals.

Postscript: This year Harris is on the ballot to become Barbara Boxer's successor in the U.S. Senate.

NPR's memory hole

Dr. Google has a remedy

Although we now have more news sources than ever, we don't seem to be getting more information. In their eagerness to contribute to the news glut, media outlets generate increasing amounts of fluffy bits of non-news. It's extremely disappointing to find National Public Radio getting in on the act. On October 15, 2015, NPR's “lead digital reporter” Jessica Taylor posted a shallow item titled New Clinton Spanish Posters: Hillary or Evita? Although Taylor took the trouble to learn that Clinton's staffers disclaimed responsibility for the Spanish-language posters and images appearing in Texas, she used the rest of her short article to muse about resemblances to icons of Eva Peron, Madonna (as Eva Peron), fashion designer Carolina Herrera, and Shepard Fairey's 2008 Hope poster. The mystery of the poster's origin remained unsolved.

Perhaps it was too much trouble to do the minimal amount of research required to uncover something about the poster's origins. The earliest example I found with a quick Google search was in December 2012, when a site called “The Right Perspective” (not exactly friends of Hillary) ran a very similar image (only the background differs) with an article about Clinton's expected presidential campaign. Essentially the same illustration appeared in May of last year on the “Bearing Arms (Guns & Patriots)” site with an opinion piece mocking Clinton's position on gun control.

Who cobbled together the original image? Who switched the background of wavy red and white stripes to a burst of sun rays? These deep questions remain unanswered. The pictures have, of course, spread throughout the Internet, as memes are wont to do. Zazzle has it on posters and other paraphernalia. Politico reports that a copy was posted in Clinton's Brooklyn campaign office, although that falls a bit short of establishing it as officially sanctioned by the campaign, especially given its non-campaign antecedents.

Yes, it's a tiny little non-story. And it's something a “lead” reporter for NPR wastes time on—and not very well.

How the crazy works

Capitalism in Bizarro world

Last month I briefly indulged my nasty habit of scanning the AM radio dial. As usual, the cesspit that is KSFO served up a memorable dollop of right-wing nonsense. The old stalwarts are gone now—Lee Rodgers to eternal silence and Melanie Morgan to the scandal-tainted Move America Forward—but Brian Sussman and Katie Green are doing their best to maintain the morning program's standard of irrational extremism.

Sussman, a weather man who thinks himself competent to pretend to be a climatologist, has apparently fixated on Hillary Clinton the way Cato was obsessed with Carthage. Although I suspect he will be disappointed with the eventual outcome, his overreach inspires a kind of head-shaking awe. Making money is usually honored by the KSFO tribe, but Sussman was willing to make an exception for Clinton's success. When Hillary makes money, it's evil and corrupt (two words you'll never hear Sussman use while discussing the excesses of the banking industry).

In this particular instance, Sussman was offended that Clinton commands top dollar for her speaking engagements:

Sussman: Hillary Clinton. Remember when she addressed the eBay summit? And we had asked this question: what did she make for this 20-minute talk? We literally asked the question. And now we find out: 315,000 dollars from eBay! Katie, that's your money and my money—because we use eBay.

Katie Green: Yeah, it is.

Welcome to the new KSFO theory of capitalism. Since Sussman is a customer of eBay, he shares ownership of the company's money. Sorry, Brian. When you patronize a company, your dollars become theirs, to do with as they please. Even if that means bringing in a nationally-known speaker to amp up attendance at one of their conferences. Your permission is not required.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a correction or clarification. That would be fatal.

The UFO letter

The truth is way out there

Oh, look what I found in the archives! While rifling through a stack of old print-outs (yes, some of them even had perforated tractor-feed margins), I discovered one of my unpublished letters to the editor. We all know what happens to our unsolicited expressions of concern, outrage, agreement, etcetera: nothing, usually. As a rule, unless you're writing to a small local newspaper, your letter to the editor will vanish without a trace. Despite examples like that of one of my mentors, who actually got a letter published in the New York Times, writing to a newspaper is usually a waste of time (although the process of venting might be salubrious).

In this instance, however, my unpublished letter garnered a surprising response from the editor of the Letters section: “I really LOVE this letter. But I'm still not going to publish it. Sorry. We just don't have space for stuff like this.” I was charmed, of course, and regretfully but stoically set my missive aside.

The Internet, however, has plenty of room for “stuff like this”! Therefore today I share with you not only my previously unpublished letter, but the original letter to the editor to which it was a response. The year is 1998:

UFOs are real

Re “The reality of UFOs,” letters, March 1: It is amazing that we are still discussing whether UFOs exist. It has been more than 50 years since the UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., not to mention sightings over the past several hundred years. My own observations and interest go back to 1953, when, with several other skeptics, I co-founded one of the first “flying saucer” groups in the United States. Our club was called Civilian Saucer Intelligence and was based in New York City.

Whether the letter writers are part of the government disinformation coverup, I do not know. I do know, as do millions of others, that UFOs exist.

I recommend that doubters read “The Day After Roswell” by a former Pentagon official, Col. Philip Corso (Ret.). It contains a foreword by Sen. Strom Thurmond. It is doubtful that a man such as Thurmond would lend his name to any hoax.

G.E.H.F.
Sacramento

Upon first reading this letter, I naturally reacted to the writer's use of “skeptic” in a way I found original and amusing. In his mind, “skeptic” obviously meant someone who refused to accept the debunking of flying saucer stories and was ready to embrace the notion of aliens joy-riding their round spacecraft all over the earth. I sat down at my PC keyboard and banged out the following:

Dear Editor: Little suspecting the dramatic events about to transpire, I was minding my own business while reading the Letters to the Editor in Friday's paper (March 27). I found “UFOs are Real” especially fascinating, particularly his speculation that letter writers who scoff at flying saucers might be “part of the government disinformation coverup.” Naturally I was trying to figure out what government disinformation was being covered up.

Of course, I was somewhat distracted by the irritating noise of a helicopter flying overhead. I could tell from the sound that the chopper had those extra-wide blades that are quieter than most. These are great for stealthy night missions, especially when the helicopters are painted the right color.

It was a relief when the chopper noise stopped, but shortly afterward my doorbell rang. On the front porch I found a tall man wearing a dark suit. I couldn't see his eyes because he was wearing opaque sunglasses.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, very politely, in a clipped voice that reminded me a bit of that actor Tommy Lee Jones. “I see that you're reading the Letters section of today's paper. Would you mind if I point out some things about the letter about UFOs?”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, “I was just reading it. What an amazing coincidence!”

The man gave me a tight little smile. “How fortunate,” he said. “Did you notice where the writer referred to 'the' UFO crash at Roswell, even though there are presently three alleged crash locations? Doesn't this suggest that the evidence is a little bit questionable?”

“You got me there,” I admitted, “although you know people found metallized fabric unknown to modern science anywhere on this planet except among balloon manufacturers. That's pretty compelling evidence. And the descriptions of alien bodies match pretty closely the appearance of the test dummies that the Air Force was tossing out of planes in parachute experiments in those years. I think this proves the degree to which aliens are willing to disguise themselves to fool us into thinking they don't exist. And don't forget that millions of people believe in UFOs.”

“Interesting point,” said the man. “Of course, millions believe in Islam while millions of others believe in Christianity. At least one of these groups has to be wrong. And millions of people believe that The X-Files is a documentary. Facts aren't really subject to popularity contests.”

“You got me there,” I admitted, “but how about that book that the writer mentioned? It's by a retired colonel and was endorsed by Sen. Strom Thurmond. That's pretty impressive, you know, with an endorsement by an authority like Thurmond.”

“No disrespect intended, sir, but these days 95-year-old Sen. Thurmond isn't even much of an authority on what day of the week it is. Besides which, he has issued a retraction of his book blurb, which was written because of his acquaintance with the colonel, not because he approved the unseen contents of the book manuscript.”

“You got me there,” I admitted, “but I'm sure that your cool and reasoned explanations must have some flaw in them. It's not as if retired colonels or other UFO enthusiasts would make up stories, delude themselves, fake alien autopsies, or observe bogus anniversaries in Roswell just to make money, acquire fame, or spice up their humdrum lives. I'll have to think about it.”

“Please do,” the man said. “And don't forget to write a letter to present these explanations to the public. As a concerned citizen, it's the least you can do, right?”

“Of course,” I agreed, but when I started to say something more, I noticed that he was suddenly gone. Anyway, I've been thinking about what he said and I've concluded that the man in the dark suit must have been wrong. UFOs must be real, because “The truth is out there.” I know, because popular media, tabloid television, the National Enquirer, and David Duchovny tell me so.

What isn't so

Irrationality at large

“It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so.” —Josh Billings

The local affiliate of Salem Communications broadcasts a short news break just before the hour. Sometimes I tune it in just before punching the button for a more mainstream station's top-of-the-hour newscast. These occasional doses of right-wing media keep me informed on what the nut-case fringe is saying, and it can be enlightening. Recently, while driving to school in the early morning, I tuned in the Salem station and heard its newscaster's report, “The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the Obama administration's healthcare act will cost the nation's economy two-point-three million jobs in the next dozen years.”

It was startling news. My first thought: That's a lie. I was considering the source. By the end of the day, I had discovered the truth. The full implementation of ObamaCare would pick the so-called “job-lock” and free people who had been forced to stay in jobs they hated simply to preserve their health benefits. The CBO estimated that over two million people would be able to give up their second (or third!) jobs, scaling back to something less burdensome without running the risk of losing health insurance. In many cases, it would presumably enable parents to spend more time at home with children, which is something Republicans also support as long as it's merely theoretical.

And, as we have already seen, the GOP will repeat the “job-killing” claim at the top of their lungs all during the 2014 election campaign. Will this be the year that it doesn't work because they've cried “wolf” much too often already? If so, I look forward to their being devoured.

Ignorance is not a mysterious thing. All of us have it in abundance, even as we whittle away at it during our lives. What we have been seeing, however, to a greater degree in recent years than I can recall in previous decades of politician-watching, is the deliberate nurturing of ignorance, the creation of fake knowledge (like an inoculation?) to keep people from absorbing genuine knowledge. The right-wing propagandists have raised this to a high art.

It was just a few years ago that I was in Texas during the summer to visit some friends who had moved from California. The matriarch of the clan was concerned about the state of the national economy and confided her worries to me. Knowing that I had been a legislative staffer in Sacramento and assuming I still had some insight into such matters, she wanted to know if there was any chance that the U.S. Congress would “fix” matters by repealing ObamaCare. “If only they could get rid of it, the national debt problem would be solved!” She really believed that (and had never heard about the CBO analysis that determined ObamaCare would reduce the nation's annual deficits).

She also had Fox News playing in the den during every waking hour. She wasn't uninformed. She was massively misinformed.

Quite recently one of my nieces became one of the president's hapless victims. She wasn't quiet about it. ObamaCare had forced her to change doctors (which, you know, never happened when insurance companies ran the world) and “Becky” was furious:

Becky feeling annoyed

So... I am so disgusted in Obama!!!! My insurance plan disappeared because it was not OBAMA approved. So instead of having basic insurance and paying cash for my dental and vision and paying $300 for my family. So now I am being forced to go to Covered California and pay $250 with the state paying $250 and putting my kids on medical. How does make any sense!!!!!!

After reading her plaintive post on Facebook, I pointed out a little bit of reality (cribbed from my blog post on same):

Your insurance company did not have to cancel your policy. It decided that it wanted to do it despite language in the healthcare act that permits individuals to maintain existing policies. It's in Section 1251 of the Affordable Healthcare Act:

SEC. 1251. PRESERVATION OF RIGHT TO MAINTAIN EXISTING COVERAGE. (a) NO CHANGES TO EXISTING COVERAGE.(1) IN GENERAL.—Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed to require that an individual terminate coverage under a group health plan or health insurance coverage in which such individual was enrolled on the date of enactment of this Act.

What the act did not do, however, was mandate that the insurance companies keep offering the plans people wanted to keep, and many companies have grabbed the chance to cancel lots of policies. They didn't have to. They wanted to. The administration should have anticipated this and blocked it, which would have given some teeth to the president's you-can-keep-it pledge.

I might as well been hollering into a dry well. Some of Becky's Tea Party buddies chimed in. Here’s a couple:

Sadie: I hated him before this - but we had all sorts of trouble getting coverage because of Joeys pre existing condition - even though that wasnt ment to be taken into consideration. Its a joke and a very bad one.

Sadie refused to recognize that the ACA is what made her husband’s pre-existing condition irrelevant. It was all the fault of the hated president, who was daring to occupy the White House while black.

Gertrude: All the people that voted for him owe the rest of us working people an apology !!!

Don't hold your breath, Gertie!

And here’s my niece again, for the big finish!

Becky: To privately cover my family would now cost me $800-$1000 per month with a $4000 deductible. That is ridiculous.

So Becky points out that private health insurance is damned expensive. As much as a thousand per month, with a high deductible. Wow! Instead of like before, when her bare-bones insurance plan cost her $300 (as mentioned above). Now, of course, under Covered California, she’ll pay $250 for a $500 policy. Hurray? No! That's only because she's also getting a $250 subsidy, and that’s (apparently) awful and humiliating! Like welfare!

Sounds like ObamaCare worked to her advantage, although there is the aggravation of having to choose a new primary care physician, since her old doctor was tied to the old plan and (I guess) is not available under the new. But saving $50 each month is sort of good, no? No! It’s communism! (Or something.)

Perhaps I'll get some sympathy when I tell my niece that I had to change health plans in order to keep the doctor I've had for several years as my primary care physician. When she gloats that I, too, am a victim of the Affordable Care Act, I'll mention it occurred before the measure was enacted. I was, instead, a victim of my college district's health insurance providers—back in those days when the insurance companies ran everything and the president had yet to drive us from health-insurance paradise.

A failure of imagination

Non carpe diem

If it weren't Saturday, my reaction would have been different. Cartoonists like Stephan Pastis have confessed that Saturday is where weak comic strips go to die—or at least to be overlooked. If Scott Adams had scheduled the Dilbert strip to run on a Monday, I would have perceived it as the first installment in a promising new story arc, with four sequels to anticipate. Since, however, it appeared in Saturday's newspaper, the strip was evidently considered a dud, or at best a squib with a small pop. Here's the key panel:

Dilbert replies that his pointy-haired boss should not have high expectations for Dilbert's first draft. The reader can now emit a short, dry chuckle and move on. Unless Adams surprises me on Monday, however, this is a missed opportunity. Isn't the creation of content-free responses to awkward questions a significant corporate survival skill? Consider the following hypothetical question, which we can anticipate in general form if not in specific:

Q: What are your plans for NOUN? We can't afford to let our competition get ahead of us on NOUN.

Really, now. How difficult could it be to answer that question? Try this on for size (and impenetrability):

A: I'm glad you asked that. Our planning task force has a subgroup specifically devoted to NOUN and will be rolling out a timeframe for NOUN implementation that will maintain our competitive edge. We have been aware of the importance of NOUN for quite some time and have allocated resources for appraisal of NOUN options from our future projects initiative. We feel that we are ahead of the curve on NOUN and will be able to respond quickly to rival NOUN implementations.

You can't go too far wrong with that, can you?

Q: Are you ready to VERB? Your master plan does not address VERBing anywhere.

You already have the idea now. The answers write themselves:

A: Actually, the master plan has provisions for seizing opportunities for creative departures in new directions, implicitly including VERBing. You may be unaware that [random name] has specialized training in how to VERB and can bring those skills on-line in the near-term to establish our presence in VERBing in a high-profile and significant way. This is especially true because [repeat name] is the nexus of an inter-departmental strategy team that can facilitate cross-division implementation of VERBing options where those options are most appropriately tailored to enhance high achievement relative to our success metrics.

That speaks volumes, no? (No.)

With all of his experience in corporate bureaucracy, Scott Adams could easily have cobbled together a sequence of four superficially responsive non-responses for a series of strips. Alas, it looks like a missed opportunity.

I suppose it would be fun to add a couple of examples with more of an educational orientation, but I used all of those up in our latest accreditation report.

Comics crushed on the wheel of time

Déjà vu with Lucy Van Pelt

In place of the “eternal feminine,” Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip provides us with the “eternal fussbudget.” This week she spoke a truth laden with irony from the funny pages of the newspaper. The irony was new, generated by the fact that Lucy's words were not. Here is the installment from January 2, 2013, where Lucy is fussing about the supposedly “new” year.

The year, of course, is not the only thing that was “used.” For the uninitiated, the giveaway could be found in the label Classic Peanuts, the sign that Charles Schulz may be long gone but his undead comic has been sucked into the endless time-vortex of the modern comics page. Classic Peanuts had plenty of company. Lynn Johnston's For Better or Worse was shocked back into life with a brisk slap of the defibrillator paddles. The rebooted strip went into reruns, recycling the original strips (ostensibly with some modest editorial oversight and emendations by Johnson.)

At least these recycled comic strips are the actual products of the bylined cartoonists. The late Schulz and the retired Johnston really did write those gags and create those drawings. If you're fortunate(?) enough to have The Wizard of Id in your local paper, you'll see that it still carries the bylines of its late creators, Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, although it has long been in the hands of the uncredited Jeff Parker. It's not really a secret, of course, but it's still a little weird that the current Parker prefers to work without attribution. Perhaps he prefers that today's readers blame the original creators for today's pallid and deracinated version.

Johnny Hart's other brain-child, B.C. is similarly being kept alive by a distribution syndicate willing to settle for the imitative work of the creator's descendants. It works, right? Otherwise, we would not be seeing the cavalcade of strips that will not die: Dick Tracy has outlived Chester Gould, Blondie lives forever although Chic Young is gone, Mark Trail continues his trail-blazing without the help of Ed Dodd, Dennis the Menace still bothers Mr. Wilson in the absence of Hank Ketcham, and Frank and Ernest were inherited by the son of Bob Thaves. This is by no means an exhaustive list, even if it is a bit exhausting.

I admit that I usually smile when I see Classic Peanuts, even though I often recall having seen the strip before. The work of Charles Schulz holds up to repeated readings. In fact, it's usually better than the “new” strips cobbled together from the remnants of the work of the original creators. These latter offerings are often vigorless revenants that stalk the comics pages, their Frankensteinian stitches showing. If you listen closely, you can hear their sad pleas: “Brains! Brains!” But those brains are long gone.

Advertising conquers physics

Jewelry and reality

A regional jewelry chain has dug into the vaults to unearth a pair of commercials from a couple of years ago to promote sales of the Tacori line of rings. I understand, of course, that one should not confuse advertising with reality—especially not in the case of fine jewelry, which is traditionally entangled with all of the complications and unnaturally heightened romantic hopes and expectations of love and courtship. It doesn't matter. Every time the “Cupid's Arrow” commercial appears, I sit transfixed in grudging admiration of its blatant disregard for verisimilitude. If you can afford the expense of generating photo-realistic animation, why not use it with a careless disregard of the real-realistic world? Just shove that old camel through the eye of a needle! Rich people haunted by Matthew 19:24 will rejoice.



Just so you know it's no accident, Tacori violates the integrity of solid objects just as light-heartedly in its earlier “Checkmate” commercial. Again I cringe.


No doubt we're supposed to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy the surrealism of these highly transgressive advertisements. No over-thinking. Just go and buy the miraculous jewelry. Or ... are the magical powers inherent in the arrow and the chessmen instead? Or even just the black queen? Oh, the confusion of it all!

Warding off bullets with magic

Armored with irrationality

Ruben Navarrette was outraged by the behavior of some people in the wake of the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut. The syndicated columnist quickly took aim at those who offended his sensibilities: the people who decried America's insane love affair with guns. Navarrette was dismayed by the prompt and vigorous reaction by supporters of more stringent gun-control standards. In his view, they were guilty of not maintaining a sufficiently long period of silence. The NRA, at least, was good enough to duck and cover for an entire week before calling a press conference to double-down on their traditional gun-worshipping insanity.

Navarrette singled out in his column some especially egregious offenders against common decency:

How about giving a horrified and heartbroken nation a chance to mourn and bury the dead? How about showing some respect for the victims you claim to care about? How about giving politics, pet causes and partisan jockeying a rest until we wipe our tears and catch our breath?

Tell that to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who said after the shootings: “If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don't know when is.”

Sorry, Ruben. I agree with Nadler. Completely.

Navarrette points his accusing finger at Nadler and other gun critics and demands, “Have you no decency?”

Go to hell, Ruben.

In his defense, we should perhaps point out that Navarrette is legitimately worried over the state of the nation—although he dismisses Nadler's similar concern. The columnist fears for the safety of his children, as would any responsible parent. His solution? A return to childhood superstition.

I spent Sunday morning looking for answers in a place I hadn't been in a while—a pew of my neighborhood church. The woman next to me wore pain on her face, and didn't smile once during the hour-long service. I held on tight to my kids. During communion*, I asked the priest to bless them. As we walked toward the altar, I whispered, “This is to keep you safe.”

Yeah, Ruben. And a garlic clove dangling from a neck thong will keep vampires away.

---

*Note: Is Navarrette a nominal Catholic? If Navarrette has indeed been absent from his neighborhood church for a while, then he is guilty of the mortal sin of deliberately missing mass and therefore cannot legitimately partake of communion. I have more contempt for pretend-Catholics like Navarrette than those who take seriously the arcane rules of the club they belong to. If you think that communion is real, then you apparently believe in the Church's magical powers. How does that square with flouting the Church's rules except when you feel like going in for a tasteless snack?

Religion: the cure for science

Praying instead of studying?

I'm not sure what Bob Christopher was doing in college during his years as a biology major, but it sure wasn't learning science. Christopher had occasion during today's installment of “People to People” on Christian radio to discuss how learned-up he was about science. Seems, however, that it didn't take. During a program on Christmas titled “Jesus is the Reason,” Christopher fielded a question on evolution from a young man named Shawn, who hails from Waco, Texas. He promptly trotted out the “only a theory” meme:

Shawn: I'm really wondering, though, about evolution. I hear this a lot. I hear, of course, you know, we're descendants of Adam and Eve. You know, just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on evolution.

Bob Christopher: Well, Shawn, my degree in college is a degree in biology, so I spent a lot of time studying the theory of evolution. And that's exactly what it is: it is merely a theory. There's no scientific fact that supports evolution as the way we came into being. There is microevolution, there are small changes that occur within the species, but the species always remains the same. We don't see one species changing into another as evolution would have it. That's just not supported with the facts. But it is a theory. It's an intriguing theory. It's an interesting theory. It held no water until geologists came along and started proposing the idea that the earth was much older than we first believed. Up until the mid 1800s it was just a known fact—or at least everybody believed—the world was no older than six thousand years as far as the age was concerned. But geologists started proposing that quite possibly that it would be older than that, could be millions of years. And without that assertion into the scientific community, the theory of evolution would have died. Why? Because that theory requires time for it to be a reality. So the geologists helped move it along just a little bit and it took root in the scientific community and they've been exploring it and trying to figure it out ever since. But, quite frankly, I think it's a veil that they're using to cover up what they really believe, and what they really believe is that there is no God. And so they're using that veil of evolution to hide that fact.

Who is this “they” that Bob Christopher keeps talking about? This mysterious entity appears to comprise all scientists and teachers of science. Christopher's further remarks do not clarify his meaning. In fact, he concludes his argument with a shocking revelation.

Bob Christopher: And so schools have bought into it hook, line, and sinker, they're teaching it as if it was truth, but it's not truth. It is just a theory. It's a person's theory on how things came into being. It stands in opposition to what the word of God has to say, and as far as science is concerned— I love science. I was, like I said, a science major. I thought the courses I took in college were absolutely fascinating. I was intrigued by every single one of them. But science, if you follow the evidence, I think that evidence is going to lead you right back to God. It has to. God is the author of science. God knows how this world works. God is the very force that holds it together. He understands physics better than our best physicists that are out there. He understands the way the body functions better than any medical doctor, better than any biologist. He knows how our chemicals work inside of us better than any biochemist. He knows us better than anyone else. He knows how this thing works. So any study of science, any real study of science, that looks at the evidence and looks at the facts and lets the evidence and the facts speak for themselves, that person is going to be led to the Creator. And I think more and more scientists, up in the upper echelons of the scientific community are coming to that reality.

Really, Bob? The most prestigious members of the science community are embracing the God hypothesis? You'd think someone would have noticed this trend by now, especially since it entails a dramatic reversal of a highly publicized result from 1998, when it was determined that only 7% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences (is that “upper echelon” enough for you, Bob?) believe in a personal God. The God-botherers within the nation's scientific elite could hold a convention in a phone booth with room left over for the catering staff.

Better do it soon. Phone booths are going the way of the dodo.

Sean Hannity is right!

Extreme right—but in this case also correct

As a rule, I do not listen to Sean Hannity's predictable right-wing blather. He's a Seanny One-Note who harps on Obama's supposed misdeeds and can be readily summarized by “liberals bad, sufficiently crazy conservative nutbags good.” Today, however, he delivered a priceless nugget while self-importantly explaining the universe to his dutifully credulous listeners. Not having subscribed to his podcast (I'm not completely crazy), I may not have captured his words with perfect verbatim fidelity, but this is very, very close:

Perhaps in the future some young people will look back and remember this period of history. I name it for you now: the Era of Radical Extremism.

Couldn't have put it better myself, Sean!

As you might have guessed, he was pontificating on the excesses of the thin-skinned Muslim rioters (and the extremists who used them as cover to attack our embassy in Libya), but the Era of Radical Extremism perfectly characterizes the Tea-Party-drenched cult that is today's Republican Party. Eisenhower would be read out of today's GOP for his boldness in denouncing the military-industrial complex. Goldwater would be repudiated for embracing gay rights. Ronald Reagan would be in danger of getting blacklisted for his signature on a series of tax-increase measures (both in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.), but that would be too inconvenient, so today's Republicans prefer to worship a carefully edited icon of Reagan, the awkward bits of his history consigned to the memory hole.

Thanks for the nice label, Sean. I hope you wear it proudly!

Michael Voris vs. Bill Donohue

O brächten beide sich um! 

Sometimes it is impossible to choose sides. I mean, do we really care whether Mothra defeats Godzilla or vice versa? Does it actually matter whether it's the Wolfman or Frankenstein's monster who emerges victorious? That's the ambivalent feeling I have while observing Michael Voris locked in mortal combat with Bill Donohue. Both men are such perfect exemplars of shallow, sneering sanctimony that Mime's fervent wish from Act II of “Siegfried” comes to mind.

Voris has a well-honed more-Catholic-than-the-pope shtick working for him. He eagerly awaits the imminent Church schism that will drive out the insufficiently devout “cafeteria Catholics” and leave a small but fervent remnant of the ultramontane. Only then will the greatly reduced but greatly purified American branch of the Roman Catholic Church finally be cleansed of the taint of the heresy of Americanism—that vile doctrine of separation of church and state once embraced by the notorious John F. Kennedy but recently denounced by the virtuous Rick Santorum. (Yeah, that's right. There's a segment of modern Catholicism in the United States that regards Santorum as superior to Kennedy.)

Normally Bill Donohue of the Catholic League would not have much to say about Michael Voris. Donohue, after all, is much the greater public figure, a familiar face on television whenever he imagines that the Catholic Church is being unfairly maligned. If anything, Donohue might be inclined to give Voris a condescending little pat on the head (Don't muss the hair, Bill—or whatever that is!) and encourage him to keep up the good work. But recently Voris has been attacking Donohue, and sweet old Uncle Bill can't quite bring himself to ignore it. Those flea bites are getting itchy!

You can almost taste Voris's jealousy of Donohue's high profile as he describes the Catholic League's president as a member of the “Catholic elites”: “you see and hear them everywhere as they appear on and run TV, radio, newspapers, and many magazines.” [Subtext: And all I have is this lousy YouTube channel! And my greatest hit rates occur when Pharyngula readers come to mock me!]

Last week Mr. Donohue appeared on the Lou Dobbs show on Fox News and absolutely ripped honest Catholics who are concerned over the scandal of Obama having been invited by Cardinal Dolan to the Al Smith dinner in New York.

Hint: Voris numbers himself among those “honest Catholics.” This diatribe is just one small segment of a much longer rant titled “Obama and Peasant Catholics,” available on YouTube as part of the ChurchMilitant.TV channel (for all of your right-wing extremist Catholic enjoyment).
 


In response, Donohue deigned to notice Voris's existence, although not by name (perish forbid!). The Catholic League issued a statement attributed to Donohue, here excerpted:

It is customary, though not compulsory, for the New York Archbishop to invite the presidential candidates from the two major political parties to the annual Al Smith Dinner in New York City. This year both candidates will be there. Some are not happy with these choices, especially the decision to invite President Obama. Cardinal Timothy Dolan has not been shy about his criticisms of the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate, yet he decided to rise above the politics of the moment and allow the presidential candidates to partake in this charitable event.

On the August 9 edition of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” (Fox Business Channel), I vigorously defended Cardinal Dolan’s decision. I talked with him earlier that day about this issue and found, unsurprisingly, that the New York Archbishop wasn’t budging in his conviction that the HHS mandate must be fought with every tool we have. His resolve is unflinching. For me, that was the bottom line. But not for others.

If Catholics want to change the culture, they need to engage it.... Acting diplomatically may at times make for a hard swallow. But following protocol is not analogous to prostituting one’s principles.

I hope this makes it clear. If Donohue had any principles, this would not compromise them. Here endeth the lesson.

But I'm sure the noise will continue.

Hey, Idiot! Buy this!

Selling to sociopaths

It's a problem as old as gaming itself. Stay home and just keep playing, or get to work on time so that your coffee-breath boss doesn't ride you like a rented scooter. Who says you have to choose? Your PS/3 stays at home, but the game goes with you. Never stop playing. PlayStation Vita.

Have you seen the charming advertisement? Do you identify with the tragic sufferings of the poor gameplayer who has to decide between soothing recreation and gainful employment? Do you rejoice upon learning of Sony's brilliant solution to the dilemma? With a PlayStation Vita you can keep playing anywhere, even as you're strolling to work! Even as you cross busy intersections with never a care about speeding traffic! Even at your desk after you survive the trip to the office!

No doubt many hot tears of relief and gratitude were spilled when Sony unveiled its “Never stop playing” commercial. Anyone who was in fear of actually getting a life was now miraculously granted a new lease on irrelevance.



But perhaps I overstate the case. Surely you might still be considered relevant by the survivors of the victims of the multi-vehicle pileup at the intersection where you stepped off the curb without looking. These things happen. Hope you didn't lose your place in your game!

Anyway, there are more direct ways to hurt people than stepping into their path. You could get Crackle.com instead. It has an even more devil-may-care approach to the welfare of the unfortunate citizens of reality. With Crackle.com and a smart phone or other portable video device, you can watch commercial-laden movies for free whenever you want. Even while riding a bicycle! As the Crackle.com commercial demonstrates, you can happily bike through the middle of a picnic or outdoor wedding ceremony while your attention is riveted to the screen. Not even nirvana could be better than this! Besides, those people in the park were just being stupid when they failed to take into account the possibility of bike riders under the influence of Crackle. I mean, it's like all their fault!

Crackle marketing has yet to upload the ad celebrating the destruction of a picnic and disruption of a wedding, but an earlier promo spot is just as true to the theme. With Crackle.com on a portable video device, you can conveniently destroy your neighborhood from the comfort of your riding lawnmower. Now who wouldn't want to do that!?

Oh, right. Sane people.

Publicity coup of the century!

Of course, the century is young 

The cover of my novel has now been viewed more than 900,000 times on YouTube. Can one million be far behind? No doubt bestsellerdom is right around the corner!

Or perhaps not. This “publicity coup of the century” is certainly amusing and entertaining, but I fear that it's no guarantee that my book will be eagerly snatched up by titillated YouTube viewers. One is permitted to doubt that YouTube is teeming with readers of the modern novel. However, if only one percent of the viewers were to flock to their bookstores or order my novel on-line ... pause to do the math ... omigawd! ... that's six times the original press run! Let's get started on the second printing! (Yes, small university presses are parsimonious with their initial commitments. I'll bet that movie rights are still pretty cheap right now.)

Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox are two young men from the Sacramento region who in 2006 had the single most popular video on YouTube (with nearly 25 million hits). Their video channels continue to be among YouTube's most widely viewed. Their Smosh.com website offers merchandise, games, and third-party animations, all part of Ian and Anthony's burgeoning entertainment enterprise.

I first stumbled across them because they were local (and, no, neither ever enrolled in one of my classes, so I don't really know them). Their cracked sense of humor may be an order of magnitude (and a full generation) beyond mine, but I started to think of them again while pondering my situation. How does a first-time novelist get some notice for his book if his publisher is a small university press with no advertising budget? Hmm. The obvious answer is free publicity!

It hasn't gone too badly. For example, I got on local TV as a stand-in for Star Trek's William Shatner. (Nope. Not kidding. Go look up serendipity in your dictionary.) The next step, of course, was intergalactic fame. Or, at least, world famousness. That's where Smosh came in, the megahit YouTube channel. I knew that the boys had a recurring feature titled “Mail time with Smosh,” during which they would comb through the booty found in their post office box. Imagine how delightful it would be if Anthony or Ian were to hold my book up in front of their video camera and gush over its excellence!

No, I did not think of this during a drunken stupor. Honest. I don't drink. The idea came to me while I was stone cold sober.

So I sent Smosh a letter touting the glorious features of my book. Strangely enough, I omitted my book's title and mailed the letter anonymously. That's right. It was a teaser.

A week later, I did it again. There were a couple of new items added to the teaser list. Still no title or author name, though. I wanted Anthony and Ian to be aware that there was something to anticipate in their future mail. Given the tonnage of fan mail that Smosh receives, I figured it was worth investing some effort in gaining their attention. Finally, of course, I mailed them the book, including the final version of the teaser list:

Here now! A book full of Anthony & Ian’s favorite things!

• Titties! (on the cover)
• Milk! (passim)
• Bullshit! (p. 78)
• Frontal nudity! (p. 236)
• Purple nurples (two!)! (p. 115)
• Sarcastic Spanish! (p. 251)
• Explosions! (p. 122)
• Collisions! (p. 227)
• The F-word! (pp. 25, 26, 38, 156, 203)
• Penile mutilation! (p. 140)
• Cows! (everywhere—including on the envelope this time!)
• Gay bars [where straight boys secure in their masculinity can go because they’re cool]! (pp. 159-164, 178)
• Lawyers in distress! (every chapter)

The only book in the known universe to contain the sentence “Jesus didn’t like having his dick shortened”!

My efforts were deemed worthy of Smosh's attention. On July 23, 2012, the boys posted another installment of “Mail time with Smosh” on their IanH channel. They devoted 30 seconds out of their six-minute video to my novel. Anthony started the segment (at 1:25) by effusively gushing, “Oh, my God, guys! We got the best book ever! It's a book full of all of our favorite things!” Tongue firmly in cheek, I'm sure, but one has to appreciate the cooperation.

Check it out for yourselves. (Then go out and buy copies of my fabulous Smosh-endorsed book!)

What's next? Well, I can't rightly say. (For one thing, I think the Vatican post office strictly screens the mail.)

Stupidity in spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

Idiots write letters

There's nothing like a successful space mission to set off the smugly ignorant. “Think about the children!” they cry. They wring their moist hands over the millions and billions of dollars that they assume were wastefully blasted into space instead of used for charitable works. This morning's San Francisco Chronicle provided a perfect case in point:

But what about the hungry?

The land rover Curiosity arrives on Mars safely. What a feat!

But $2 billion to find water on a planet when hundreds of children go to bed hungry, when teachers, police and firefighters are dismissed? Where are our priorities?

People might say, “But look what we get from our space travel.” When a child says, “Mommy, I'm hungry,” does her mother say, “I know honey, but isn't it wonderful we have Teflon”? What a country.

RMS-O, San Francisco

Damn! The stupid is strong in this one. Did you catch the “hundreds of children”? The ignorant letter-writer doesn't even appreciate the scope of the problem she is decrying. There are millions of children in the United States alone who lack adequate supplies of food, without even taking into account the more severe problems elsewhere in the world. Totally clueless people should not be giving others advice.

That, however, is not my main point. I want to underscore the stupidity of blaming NASA's budget for our failure to ameliorate social ills. As Isaac Asimov pointed out decades ago, it makes no sense to take money from one worthy cause to fund a different worthy cause when so many unworthy money-pits are right under our noses. The cost of the Curiosity mission was reported at approximately $2.5 billion (which the Associated Press foolishly cited as “budget-busting”). That total amount would barely have covered three days of the misbegotten war in Iraq. And you may recall that war did last a little over three days.

That sheds a slender ray of perspective-giving light on the subject, doesn't it?

In the meantime, quite apart from the exciting prospects of scientific discovery and exploration, Curiosity's budget supported (and supports) teams of engineers, scientists, and technicians. These people are a key component of the nation's tech base and infrastructure. Should we outsource all of their jobs to China or India? Besides, they pay mortgages and feed their children just like everyone else. None of the Curiosity budget dollars were simply blasted into space. They were spent on the ground, adding to the economic contributions of our technological and scientific endeavors.

Let's take up a contribution to shoot the San Francisco letter-writer into space. She'll be right at home in the vacuum.

The great white hope

Darn! Missed again!

San Francisco Chronicle writer Jon Carroll has a quirky way of signing off at the end of  each of his columns. He embeds his e-mail address in a pithy literary quote. Here's an example from Carroll's July 3, 2012, installment:

The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel and not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much nor live so jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Do you recognize the quote? It's from the end of King Lear, which Carroll has long been mining for material. And now it had run out!

Well, that's that. "King Lear," the story of a foolish old man and the terrible price he pays for his folly, is concluded, a sentence at a time with a few omissions, and now we turn somewhere else for our e-mail line at the bottom of the column. But where?

Carroll solicited suggestions from his cherished readers for a new public-domain source of meaty tag-lines. Naturally I hastened to his assistance:

Dear John:

A modest suggestion:

Call me Ishmael – or jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

and perhaps

No need of profane words, however great the jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

then

Cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

and

Does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great jcarroll@sfchronicle.com?

until, finally,

And I only am escaped alone to tell jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

That could keep you in sign-off lines for a good while, no?

Of course, if you were hankering for something more contemporary, I could – in a self-promotional move – kindly offer my new novel, beginning with

Greetings! We who are about to lose salute jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

and ending with

“We have a winner,” he murmured to jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Unfortunately, debut novels by math professors turned writers are too obscure to give your readers the desired literary frisson, so I stick with my recommendation of the great white whale.

“There she blows! there! there! there!”

Nice, huh? A good suggestion mixed in with a judicious dash of self-promotion. Carroll wrote back:

Nice stuff ...

I was excessively pleased, so imagine my reaction when I read Carroll's next column and saw this at the bottom:

There's Melville, of course, and Lewis Carroll, and more Shakespeare, and nursery rhymes and old-timey proverbs, all of them candidates for the words before the e-mail line, which is jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Moby-Dick was uniquely my suggestion, but it didn't matter. However many of us recommended Melville, there he was, leading all the rest. I was most entertained. Alas, it was not to be. Carroll pondered his options during a vacation from column-writing and somehow settled upon the runner-up in his list of candidates. The first column after his return ended thus:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Oh, no! “We're through the looking glass, people!” (Of course, that's an allusion to Oliver Stone's epic fantasy movie JFK.)

Prevaricating priests

More liars for Jesus!

Former Boston mayor and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn was talking to Bob Dunning on “The Bishop's Radio Hour” on Immaculate Heart Radio, bemoaning American Catholicism's loss of political clout and savvy. “We knew how to frame the question,” he said, explaining why Catholics were more successful in the past.

Flynn was specifically addressing the Church's difficulty in responding to the Health and Human Services mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptive services. From his point of view, it was a pity that both Catholics and non-Catholics are so accepting of birth control. Quite apart from indicating the laxity of current Catholic practice, general acceptance of birth control creates a “framing” problem for the U.S. bishops as they attack the HHS mandate on contraceptives:

We don't have that voice that is framing the question the way it should be framed, so just average Catholics picking up the newspaper or listening to the radio and casually hears the conversation or hears the headlines, you know, will be attracted to our point of view. If it's framed in a way of contraception and the bishops are trying to tell the country they can't practice birth control, then they win. There's no question about it. But if we keep it on the issue of religious freedom, first amendment, constitutionally protected human rights, religious rights, we win. So there's the battle. The battle is over terminology.

Of course, it's not Mr. Flynn's job to put things in strictly religious terms. He's a canny old politician, so political advice is what you should expect. Are the bishops listening? It seems that they are. For the benefit of his listeners, Dunning read “Protecting Consciences,” a document from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It spins like a top:

The church does not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all citizens.... Catholics and many other Americans have strongly criticized the recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate requiring almost all private health plans to cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. For the first time in our history, the federal government will force religious institutions to fund and facilitate coverage of a drug or procedure contrary to their moral teaching, and purport to define which religious institutions are “religious enough” to merit an exemption. This is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide such coverage even when it violates our consciences.

What we ask is nothing more than the right to follow our consciences as we live out our teaching.

Truly shocking, isn't it, to see how the cruel and hyper-secular Obama administration is attacking religion freedom and trampling the conscience rights of individuals. No wonder the American bishops are clutching their pearls and reeling in the face of this unprecedented attack.

Because it's convenient for them to do so.

The U.S. bishops are full of shit. They hope that people have forgotten—or never knew—how meekly they rolled over to contraceptive mandates in the past. Sure, there was a bit of whining, but most people are undoubtedly unaware that most states imposed contraceptive mandates on healthcare insurance years ago and U.S. bishops somehow managed to live with it. As the Boston archdiocese incautiously admits, “In more than half of the states, Catholic officials have been living for years with mandates that health insurance plans must cover FDA-approved contraceptives in their prescription drug plans.”

The prelates have a riposte ready for the argument that the HHS mandate is nothing that new. No, no, no! they cry. The state mandates are much less draconian than the HHS version and contain more generous conscience clauses. There is a kernel of truth in the argument. Just enough to make the lie more effective. Here's what the bishops say:

The federal mandate is much stricter than existing state mandates. HHS chose the narrowest state-level religious exemption as the model for its own. That exemption was drafted by the ACLU and exists in only 3 states (New York, California, Oregon).

Oh. So it's not “much stricter” than state mandates. Equally tough mandates already exist in multiple states. You have to love the way the bishops cite only three states, when two of them are California and New York. The mandate and its supposedly too-narrow religious exemption have been in place in California for nearly a decade. The Golden State's Catholic bishops did not feel it necessary to call down thunderbolts from heaven until the mandate went nationwide with the president's healthcare reform. Now, suddenly, it's an abomination from the pit of hell that threatens our precious religious freedom.

The California bishops who miraculously kept their peace about the existing state mandate are now singing from the same page in the political hymnal. Here, for example, is Armando X. Ochoa of the Fresno diocese, roused from his slumber and sounding an anxious call to arms:

[T]he Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so).

The American bishops have lost touch with the commandment against bearing false witness. In their unremitting campaign against birth control, they have devolved into little more than the Catholic auxiliary of right-wing opposition to the president and political propaganda is their second language (if not first). The Church's radio stations lard nearly every program with extreme conservative rhetoric. The Catholic Church in the United States used to have ample cause to look down its patrician nose at the antics of the religious troglodytes at the Moral Majority or Bob Jones University.

Not anymore!

Creationist word salad

What a tosser!

The latest issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research offers its usual collection of antievolution essays and articles. A one-page “research” piece (that's how the page header describes it) by Jeffrey Tomkins offers yet another in a long series of ICR pokes at natural selection, a concept that ICR really seems to think they have on the ropes. Once again, evolution is on the brink of utter demolition. Surely it cannot stand much longer!

It's a good thing that creationists are about as patient in anticipating the demise of evolution as they are in awaiting the return of Jesus Christ. I believe that the one is just as imminent as the other—and I'm sure they agree with me in that statement (if not in my interpretation of it).

Acts & Facts contributor Tomkins boasts a Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson, but apparently failed to grasp the context in which genes operate. He seems to have studied them without managing to recognize them as the mainspring of evolution. Tomkins has, however, a explanation why evolution through natural selection cannot be the creative force responsible for today's diversity of life on planet earth. Brace yourself for this key paragraph from his article:

Environmental stresses and stimuli cannot exercise the creative causation of highly complex pre-coded genetic information that underlies irreducibly complex systems of adaptation. Organismal interaction with the environment involves highly complex and dynamic physiological and genetic responses to a wide range of physical and chemical sensory cues. These environmental cues are perceived by complex systems of cell sensor networks that interact with an organism’s highly engineered genetic system. While adaptation systems are complex and flexible, they are not evolvable on a grand neo-Darwinian scale. They are pre-engineered, pre-programmed, and irreducibly complex in the strictest sense of the term, and they unequivocally imply the infinite intelligence of our Creator God.

Well, that was clear, wasn't it? It takes begging the question to new heights of redundant prose.

Dare we try to unpack some of the word salad that Dr. Tomkins tossed for us? Let's give it a shot by considering specific words and phrases:

• highly complex: the warning shot across the bow!
• pre-coded genetic information: “pre-coded” implies a coder!
• irreducibly complex systems: it's Behe time!
• highly complex: What I tell you three times is true!
• complex systems: so four times is a total clincher!
• highly engineered genetic system: the coder has transmogrified into an engineer now.
• pre-engineered, pre-programmed, and irreducibly complex: the engineer, coder, and Behe in three-part harmony.
• unequivocally imply: no room for doubt!

Are you as persuaded by the author's argument as I am? Yes, that's what I thought.

Boycott Ellen!

In for a Penney, in for a pound

Ellen Degeneres and JC Penney have mortally offended me!

No, I'm not talking about that silly whining from the harpies at One Million Moms (who are no better at counting than they are at living in the 21st century). My objection is to the mathematically inaccurate television ad in which Ellen dons 19th century garb and asks a milliner the price of a hat. When the lady informs her that the hat costs “fourteen pounds and ninety-pence,” Ellen responds with, “Okay, so fifteen pounds.” The lady firmly disagrees, but Ellen persists and finally gets her to admit that the stated price is as good as fifteen pounds.

Not!

The British pound was not divided into 100 pennies (the “new pence” of 1971) until the 20th century. Before that, a pound was divided into 20 shillings, each of which was worth 12 pence. If you do the math, that's 240 pence (old pennies) to the pound. If 19th-century English hat shops had been in the habit of shaving off a penny to make prices look lower, a one-penny reduction in a hat costing 15 pounds would result in a price of 14 pounds, 19 shillings, 11 pence—or £14/19/11 in the notation of the day. My penpal in Birmingham (England) used to send me letters in the 1960s whose stamps were labeled in pence, e.g.,  4d (“d” was reserved to the old penny and was replaced by “p” when the new coinage was introduced).

My trust in Ellen is shattered and I will never again take her advice on matters monetary.