I Slept Through the Nuclear War… Again

Long-time readers may remember Yisrayl Hawkins, who predicted that a nuclear war would start on Sep. 12, 2006.

Some of you may be wondering why CNN didn’t mention this rather newsworthy event. Simply put, on that day, Paris Hilton’s parents visited her in prison, so the media couldn’t take time out to report on anything as trivial as millions of people dying at once.

Nuclear Baby

No, really, Hawkins’s excuse is that on that day, the Nuclear Baby™ was conceived.

This nuclear baby was conceived September 12, 2006 and just as with a woman with child, nine months later the delivery is due, which will bring us to June 12, 2007. This nuclear baby will actually kill one-third of man over a fourth part of the earth in and around the great River Euphrates.

(emphasis added)

So far, this baby is over two weeks late, which seems rather impolite.

For whatever reason, his site now says

16 days remaining before the due date for the birth of the Nuclear Baby!

107 days remaining before 4/5 of the Earth’s population is dead because of nuclear war, famine, disease, and other curses of sin.

(for those who don’t do mental time_t arithmetic, that’s Jul. 14 and Oct.13, respectively, so mark your calendars. Or don’t) from which I gather that he found some clarifying passages in the Bible, perhaps in the Book of Excuses. But as far as I can tell, everything on his site still has the old Jun. 12 date.

Now, can I add this to the list of Umpteen Successful Bible Prophecies that fundies like to pass around?

Jo Hovind Update

Kent Hovind’s site reports that his wife Jo will be sentenced tomorrow, Jun. 29, at 9:00 a.m. I guess we’ll see what happens.

No Bong Hits 4 Jesus!

The Bong Hits 4 Jesus case has been decided. The Supreme Court found that the student was in the wrong, 5-4.

Quick recap: in 2002, when the Olympic torch was passing through Juneau, Joseph Frederick’s High School class went across the street to watch. Frederick unfurled a sign that said “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS”. The principal confiscated the sign, and later suspended Frederick, for encouraging students to use drugs.

Obviously, easy cases don’t make it to the Supreme Court, but I thought this one was particularly hairy: yes, the banner was silly. But the First Amendment gives you the right to say silly things. Except that Frederick was a student, and students’ First Amendment rights are limited. Except that this wasn’t done on school property. Except that it was done during a school-sponsored event (effectively a field trip across the street). Except that political speech has strong protection (so that a school with a no-drug policy can’t punish you for arguing that marijuana should be legalized). Except that “Bong hits 4 Jesus” isn’t obviously political speech.

Roberts’s majority opinion says that this isn’t about free speech, but really about advocating drug use. So there you have it.

Update: In other legal news, Court finds missing pants not worth $54M.

AIG’s Creation Museum

I’ve finally written up my visit to the Creation Museum.

Is This Really What Passes for Thinking Among Theologians?

dlighe pointed me at an article in Christianity Today by Alvin Plantinga, The Dawkins Confusion. He seemed to find it interesting, and there are a lot of links to it from the blogosphere, and they seem to agree that it’s a good, solid refutation of Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

To which I can only say, WTF?

Read More

Evolution of Morality

The Post has an interesting article about the origin of morality (HT ). It talks about research showing that various moral impulses are hardwired into our brains by evolution.

This dovetails nicely with another bit of research I stumbled upon recently (but can’t find now) that showed that, when posed with a moral problem, people from all over the world pretty much agree on what the right answer is, though they offer different explanations.

What this suggests is that we dislike stealing because we’re wired that way, and any explanation, be it “It goes against the 8th Commandment” or something involving Rousseau’s social contract, is post-hoc justification of a chosen conclusion.

Read More

Islamic Bicycles

This is for real, as far as I can tell:

Iran plans to make special bicycles designed for women that will be compatible with Islamic regulations and not expose their body movements while riding.

The new bicycle would have a cabin to cover half of a rider’s body, the newspaper Iran quoted project manager Elaheh Sofali as saying.

Jesus and Mo has the perfect T-shirt for this:
Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust

Seriously, what’s these people’s hangup about sex? The cynic in me thinks that if you take a bunch of normal young males and try to get them to suppress the sexual urges bequeathed them by half a billion years’ worth of evolution, of course they’re going to become neurotic and pliant.

These people really need to have a glass of wine, get laid, and just chill out.

Why Name A Newspaper After an Insect?

One question that’s been bugging me (sorry for the pun) is why any newspaper would call itself the “Town Name Bee”. Thankfully, the Sacramento Bee has an explanation (summary: the bee represents industry, as in “busy as a bee”).

Naturally, if I point out that there’s a town in Arkansas called De Queen, you won’t be surprised to learn that its newspaper is De Queen Bee.

Well, That Didn’t Take Long…

Falwell In Hell

Why Everything Good Is Bad for You

Imagine an animal that requires some substance, but that substance is scarce. Say, a mountain goat that needs salt, but lives in mountains where there’s hardly any around, unlike the seashore. In such an environment, it’ll need all the salt it can get, and natural selection will favor those goats that find salt tasty, since they’ll seek it out.

Obviously, it’s possible to have too much salt in one’s body, so ideally there ought to be a biological function that switches off this craving for salt. But in practice, if salt is that scarce, there’s no such thing as too much salt, so the mechanism that switches off salt’s tastiness can be horribly miscalibrated and still not be selected against.

Read More